The Waiting Time (2 page)

They trailed behind.

The Colonel led, and congratulated and complimented the star attraction. The minders walked alongside their man, smug with satisfaction.

Perry Johnson let them go ahead, Ben Christie stayed with his major. The evening rain blustered against them. He knew the old boy was about to launch, felt sort of sorry for him, stayed with him to offer a shoulder and an ear. It had gone well, standing ovation. Only a taster, though, and the Americans were bigger players — they’d get more when the man went to Washington. But, for all that, it was a taster, Ben could recognize quality material, the like of which seldom came their way, and it was German. The three warrant officers and the two sergeants, who had attended the briefing, held umbrellas over the guest and the Colonel, the Brigadier and the civil servants who were down from London. It was ritual to take an honoured visitor to the officers’ mess at the end of the day.

They weren’t twenty-five paces from B block, not even within two hundred yards of the mess, before poor old Perry, the dinosaur, began to flush it out of his system.

‘Look at him, so damn full of himself. Forget the past, all cuddle up together . . . I’d trust him as far as I could kick him They were insidious, they were revolting. I used to lie awake at night when I was in Berlin, couldn’t damn sleep because of them. Pushing, probing, testing us, every day, every week, every month. Had their creatures down at the gate at Brigade to photograph us going in and out, take our number-plates. Used to pay the refuse people to drop off camp rubbish then cart it to Left Luggage at the S-Bahn, and they’d take it back through the Wall, sift every last scrap of paper we threw out, notepaper headings, telephone numbers, signatures and rank. Had to employ West Berliners, German nationals, some very decent people, but imperative that we regarded them all as potential corrupted traitors, good women in Library or just cleaning your quarters, had to treat each of them as filth. Throwing “defectors” at us, dropping “refugees” into our laps, hoping to twist us up, bugger us about. Met some fine and courageous people but had to treat them like lying shit. Used to go across, guaranteed access under the Four Power Agreement, they’d watch you. You were alone, out of your car, dark, four thugs on you and a beating you’d remember a month . . . Cold bastards. I tell you, I like moral people, I can cope with immoral people if I have to. What I find evil is “amorality”, no standards and no principles, that was them. You work up against the Stasi and you get to suspect the man, German or British, who sits next to you in the mess, in the canteen. Perpetually on guard . . . but it doesn’t matter now because we’re all bloody chums . . . You didn’t get to Germany in the good old days — Belfast, wasn’t it? Nothing wrong with Belfast, but the heartbeat of the Corps was Germany. ‘Straightforward enough life, whether in the Zone or Berlin — us confronting an enemy. The threat, of course, was the Soviet military, but the real enemy was the Ministerium für Staatssicherheit, shorthand was Stasi. Stasi were the secret police of the former DDR. They came out of the heritage of the Gestapo and out of the training camps of the KGB. In intelligence-gathering, in counter-espionage, they were brilliant and ruthless. They ran the Bonn government ragged, they gave us a hell of a headache. They were the cream. . . Don’t think I’m sentimental. They didn’t play by our rules, nothing Queensberry. Their rules were intimidation, corruption, fear, the manipulation of the individual, the destruction of the human personality. Turn a man against his friend, a woman against her husband, a child against parents, no scruples. They bred psychological terror, their speciality, and if that failed they fell back on the familiar thuggery of basement torture, isolation cells and killings. That the clapped-out, no-hope East Germany survived for more than two summers was because of the Stasi. They kept that regime of geriatrics on its feet for forty-five years. .

‘Led you a bit of a dance, did they, Perry?’

‘Don’t short-change me, young man. . . It sticks in my throat, a bone in the gullet, socializing with “new” friends. There’s a generation in Germany that’s been scarred by the Stasi. There’s blood on their hands. What do I sound like? An emotional old fart? Probably am . . . So, the Wall came tumbling down and a hundred thousand full-time Stasi just disappeared off the face of the earth, bar a very few. A few had something to offer the arisen greater German empire. Counter-espionage in Rostock, in bed with the Soviet military. Of course this bastard has something to offer.’

They followed the group into the mess. The warrant officers and sergeants peeled away from forbidden territory. From the end of the wide corridor, came the baying of laughter and voices spilling from the bar. They shook their coats. Not like the mess of the cavalry or artillery or the engineers, no battle paintings, no hanging portraits of men decorated for bravery, nothing to identify past success. The Colonel, the guest and the guest’s minders had gone towards the window, with the Brigadier from London and the civil servants.

A big voice: ‘Perry, be a good chap, tunnel through that lot. I know what we want.’

Perry Johnson, poor bugger, pleased that ridiculous name was used, went to his colonel, took the drinks order, looked helplessly at the crowd competing for the single bar steward. He copped out, came to Ben Christie. ‘It’s like a bloody bingo night. Why’s there only one chap on? Get Barnes down here.’

Christie turned and hurried for the door. He heard Perry call out that reinforcements were on the way, stupid bugger.

He ran in the rain past F and H blocks, past the dreary little Portakabins. He ran down the corridor to G/3/29.

She was at her desk. It was cleared. There was a neat pile of letters to be signed, there was a note of telephone calls incoming and outgoing. His dog was sitting beside her knee with the wrapping paper of a biscuit packet under its paws.

‘All right, Corporal? No crises? Went on a bit...’

She shrugged, not her business if it went on all night. Why should there be crises?

‘Please, they’re short of bodies in the mess. Major Johnson would be very grateful...’

She was expressionless. ‘Been waiting for you, thought you might.’

‘Nelson been good? Sorry...’

She was standing, gathering her coat off the hook, then smoothing her hair. ‘Stay there, big boy. Course he’s been good.’

She locked the outer door, went after him.

‘Sorry. . . How did you know that we’d want you?’

They were out into the evening rain.

She said flatly, ‘Administration’s got the audit team in, they’re mob-handed. There’s Major Walsh’s leaving bash — free drinks bring them out of their holes. The mess corporal, the spotty one, he’s got flu. Penny’s on holiday...’

He grinned. ‘Be a black day, the darkest, Corporal, if promotion ever claimed you.’

‘Just try to do my job. How did it go?’

The beginning of her day had followed the same precise routine as every working morning. It was sixteen minutes past seven when Corporal Tracy Barnes had unlocked the outer door to building G/3, gone down the empty corridor and used a second key to let herself into Room 29. She was always in G/3/29 before twenty past seven. The rest of them, Major Johnson, Captain Christie, the warrant officers, sergeants and clerks, would drift into G/3 before nine. She valued that time to herself: she always said it gave her the chance to get on top of each day.

She had put the kettle on. With her third key, and her knowledge of the combination, she’d opened the safe. She kept the coffee in it, the tea, biscuits and apples. The rooms of G/3 were the home of the unit of the Intelligence Corps at Templer Barracks, Ashford in Kent, dealing solely with the subject matter of RUSSIAN FEDERATION/MILITARY/ANALYSIS, and they were the kingdom of Corporal Tracy Barnes. The kettle had boiled. She had crunched the biscuits and bitten at an apple. It was her place. She could put her hand on any sheet of paper, any map, any photograph in the wall of steel-plate filing cabinets, padlocked in the Major’s office, the Captain’s office and in the cubbyhole space between them where she worked. She could flit her way through the banks of information held in the G/3 computers that linked Templer Barracks with the London offices of the Chief of Defence Intelligence and the new Bedfordshire base at Chicksands. She knew every code that must be dialed in for the secure fax transmissions. They told her, Major Johnson and Captain Christie, that she was indispensable .

A drip of water had gathered on the ceiling beside the fluorescent strip light, fallen and spattered on the linoleum floor.

‘Fucking hell,’ she’d said. ‘That’s the fucking limit.’

The roof always leaked when the rain came from the east. She’d seen another drip forming and the rain hammered harder on the windows. She’d been locking the safe — the safe must always be locked when the section was unattended — she had been about to go down the corridor to the wash-house for the mop and bucket, when the telephone had rung. The start of her day.

Outside the office, in the rain and the gloom, walking, it was so good to talk to her. Sensible, rational — just a conversation without officers’ pips and corporals’ stripes. The rain was on the gold of Tracy Barnes’s hair and the highlights made jewels there.

‘Slow to start, thanks to the Colonel. We had to sit through his lecture on the Russian military threat, chaos and anarchy there, massive conventional and nuclear strength but with no political leadership to control the trigger finger. Seemed a bit remote — am I supposed to tell you?’

‘Please yourself.’

‘It’s a profile of a Russian who’s the Rasputin of the defence minister — he was chummy with a Stasi chap back in the good old Cold War days. Seems that today the minister doesn’t blow his nose or wipe his backside without the say-so of his staff officer — he’s Rykov, Pyotr Rykov, ex-para in Afghanistan and ex-CO of a missile base in former East Germany, and you could write on a postcard what we have on him. Our larder’s bare, and the Germans come over with Rykov’s chum, parade him as quality bloodstock — Rykov’s motivation, Rykov’s ambition. If the military were to take over in Russia then this Rykov would be half a pace behind his minister and whispering in his little ear. The truth — may hurt to say it — the German chum was a high grade Humlnt source, the best I’ve ever heard. . . Perry’s suffering, thinks we’re supping with Lucifer. You’d know about the Stasi — you were in Berlin, yes?’

‘As a kid, first posting, just clerking . . . Jolly news for you, Captain. They’ve put you on a crash Serbo-Croat course, means you’re booked for Bosnia. Mrs Christie’ll be well excited, eh? I mean, she’ll have to look after the dog.’

‘Bloody hell.’

‘It’s on your desk.’

They reached the mess block outer door. He forgot himself. He opened the heavy door for her to go through first.

She stayed put. He flushed. Bloody officer and bloody noncommissioned junior rank. He went through and she followed. Coats dumped on a chair in the corridor. They hit the noise.

Perry Johnson boomed, ‘Thanks, Ben. They’re dying of thirst and restless — Corporal, the order is three Glenlivets, ice and lemonade for our guests, seven gin tonics, two orange juice, one with ice, five beers. You’ll need a tray.’

A wry smile on her face, at the edge of impertinence. ‘Whose tab, Major? On yours?’

She was gone. Ben watched her. He thought she kicked Captain Wilson’s shin. Definite, she elbowed Captain Dawson. He saw her reach past Major Donoghue’s back and rap his right shoulder and when he turned right she’d wriggled past his left hip. She was at the front, arms on the bar and stretching.

She caught the steward’s arm, held it. Ben could have clapped her. No mucking, she was brilliant. He blinked. An officer and a corporal, a married officer and a single corporal, it would ruin him and ruin her. . . Yugoslavia. The guys who went there said it was seriously awful, said Belfast was a cake-run compared to a year in Sarajevo, Vitez, Tuzia . . . Shit. He’d ring Trish that night

Shit. . . She was tiny behind the bulk of the tray. He thought that if he tried to help her he’d just get in the way . . . There’d be all the usual tears with Trish . . . Must have been her shoe, but Major Donoghue was backing off, and the shoe again because Captain Wilson was giving her space . . . and Irish would be screaming when he started up about her having to look after the bloody dog.. . She headed for Perry.

The Colonel and a civil servant flanked the German. The German had his back to them. Hands groped to snatch the glasses off her tray. She was only a corporal so she wasn’t thanked, and they wouldn’t need her again. Major Walsh’s ‘happy hour’ would be finished in ten minutes, and his bar tab closed, be space then. He saw the two minders take their drinks, and then the Colonel. Only one drink on the tray, the last Glenlivet, ice and lemon. The Colonel touched the German’s arm. Tracy was dwarfed behind the German’s back. He turned, mid-conversation, smiling.

Ben saw them both, the German and Corporal Tracy Barnes.

Her face frozen, her eyes narrowed.

The German reached for the glass, smiling with graciousness.

And the ice of her face cracked, hatred. Her eyes blazed, loathing.

The glass came up into his face and the tray with it.

The German reeled.

The Colonel, the minders and the civil servants were statue still.

Corporal Tracy Barnes launched herself at the German, and he went down onto the mess-bar carpet.

Her body, on top of his, was a blur of kicking and kneeing, elbowing, punching and scratching.

Hissed, a she-cat’s venom, ‘You bloody bastard murderer!’

Ben Christie watched. Her skirt had ridden up as she swung her knee, again and again, into his privates. She had the hair of his beard in her fingers and smashed his head, again and again, down onto the carpet floor.

Shrieked, a woman’s cry for retribution, ‘Bloody killed him, you bastard!’

Blood on her hands, blood in her nails, and the German screamed and was defenceless. Her thumb and forefinger stabbed at his closed eyes.

Howled, the triumph of revenge, ‘How’d you like it? Bloody bastard murderer! What’s it like?’

Only her voice, her voice alone in the silence. The minders reacted first.

A chopping blow to the back of her neck, a kick in her ribs. The minders dragged her clear, threw her aside.

The German was bleeding, gasping, cringing in shock.

· He heard Johnson’s shout, hoarse: ‘Get her out, Christie. Get the bitch under lock and key.’

Their fists clenched, standing over their man, coiled, were the minders.

· . He had started his day shitty cold and shitty tired.

****

Julius Goldstein knew of nowhere more miserable than a commercial airport in winter as the passengers arrived for the first flights of the day. They had flowed past him, business people and civil servants, either half asleep or half dressed, either with shaving cuts on their throats or with their lipstick smeared, and they brought with them the shitty cold and shook the snow patterns off their legs and shoulders.

He had gazed out into the orange-illuminated darkness, and each car and taxi showed up the fierceness of the cavorting snow shower. Of course the bastard was late. It was the style of the bastard always to be late. He had managed to be punctual, and Raub had reached Tempelhof on time, but the bastard was late. He was tired because the alarm had gone in the small room at the back of his parents’ home at four. No need for his mother — and him aged twenty-nine — to have risen and put on a thick housecoat and made him hot coffee, but she had. And his father had come downstairs into the cold of the kitchen and sat slumped at the table without conversation, but had been there. His mother had made the coffee arid his father had sat close to him because they continually needed to demonstrate, he believed, their pride in their son’s achievement. The source of their pride, acknowledged with coffee and with a silent presence at the kitchen table, was that their son was a junior official in the Office for the Protection of the Constitution. Not bad for a little Jew boy — maybe just a token to beef up the statistics of government employment for Jews, but he had made it there and they oozed pride. One night only in Helmstedt with his parents, giving them pleasure, and the cost to Julius Goldstein was that he had been on the autobahn at four thirty, hammering on the gritted roadway to Berlin and Tempeihof, driving at stupid speed to be certain that he was not late. His mother had said that he would be cold, and had fussed around him, had tried to press on him his father’s scarf from the hook on the kitchen door. He did not wear a scarf, or a tie, and his shirt of midnight blue was unbuttoned at the neck so that the gold Star of David hanging from a slight gold chain was clearly visible. He did not go to the synagogue. He had been only once to Israel, seven years before, and had loathed it. He wore the chain and the Star of David as his own personal small gesture towards the past. It made them squirm in the offices in Cologne.

Raub had stood beside him and whistled his annoyance through his teeth, so Goldstein had smiled as if there was no problem with the bastard being late. Raub wore an overcoat of mahogany brown, a silk scarf, a striped suit and a white shirt, and Goldstein had known what Raub would wear so he had dressed in casual outdoor shoes, designer jeans, an anorak and an open shirt. Raub had worn a tie, Goldstein had worn the Star of David. Raub had carried a polished leather attaché case, Goldstein had a canvas bag hooked over his shoulder. They were calling the flight, the last call. Raub had the tickets and the boarding passes.

The taxi had come to a halt in front of the glass doors, where it was forbidden to stop, the driver reaching back for his fare, his face lit with pleasure. It would be a good tip because it wouldn’t be the bastard’s own money, because it would go down on the expenses and for this bastard, high priority, expenses were a deep
black hole. The bastard was out of the car, striding the few paces to the glass doors, which had swept open for him, and Goldstein had shuddered again as the cold caught him and the snow flurry settled on his face and his arms.

Goldstein and Raub were the minders from the BfV: they were the escort from the counter-espionage organization.

He was a big man, as tall as Raub and taller than Goldstein, with broad shoulders. He kept his back straight, as if he had stood on a parade-ground and commanded lesser men, and held his head high. His fair hair was neatly combed, his beard carefully trimmed. He had moved between his minders with the effortless step of arrogance, and Goldstein thought it a class act. They had gone straight to the head of the queue, paused long enough at the desk for Raub and Goldstein to flash their passports and identification cards at the girl. Hadn’t waited for her permission, had gone on through. He never hurried. They had followed the lights and the indicator boards. They had taken the first flight of the day from Berlin Tempelhof to London Heathrow...

Ernst Raub would have liked to say, ‘It’s not Interfiug, Doktor Krause. It’s not Aeroflot. There are two knives. . .‘ He had said, ‘For an airline breakfast, the egg is very good.’

It was the nature of his job to be polite to the man, but he despised him. He thought the man ate like a pig.

He would have liked to say, ‘With two knives you can use one for the scrambled egg and one for the roll and the marmalade . .

He had said, ‘Personally, I would prefer jam, summer fruits, to marmalade, but the marmalade is acceptable.’

They sat in business class. Goldstein, appallingly dressed, was by the window, then Krause. Ernst Raub was across the aisle, but after the stewardess had passed, he leaned towards the man.

He would have liked to say, ‘There are always two knives on Lufthansa, standard or business. Were they short of knives on Interfiug and Aeroflot?’ He had said, ‘Always so much better when you have breakfast inside you. Then you can face the world.’

They were so ignorant, these people, so lacking in sophistica tion. Ernst Raub had a friend in Cologne, Army but on attachment to BfV, who told him that when people like Krause
had been inducted to the Bundeswehr Inner Leadership Academy they were so naïve that they did not know how to use a bank, how to buy insurance, did not know how to choose a bottle of wine for dinner. In Cologne, over a beer and a barbecue with his family and his friend’s family, he used to shake with laughter when he was told how pathetic were these people.

He had leaned back in his seat, the aircraft was steady and cruising above the storm turbulence, closed his eyes. He had scratched at the sunburn on his face, but the peeling skin on his shoulders was worse, aggravated by the new shirt he wore. Two good weeks with his wife, the boys looked after by her parents, in the Seychelles . . . but fewer Germans there than when they had holidayed on the islands six years before, because too much money was leaking out of western Germany and into the swamp pit of eastern Germany, too much money going to these people who did not know how to work, and did not know how to use a different knife for their egg and for their roll and marmalade

· · · Ernst Raub could not criticize the man, must only sweeten him. Ernst Raub, sixteen years with the Office for the Protection of the State, had gone too many times into the buildings of the Bonn ministries to seal offices and desks, filing cabinets, computers and bank accounts, to lead away junior officials to the interrogation rooms, to recite the charge of espionage to a grey- faced, trembling wretch. He had heard, too many times, the sobbed and stuttered confessions and the names, too many times, of those who had compromised and ruined those junior officials, the wretches. It demeaned him to escort and mind Doktor Krause, but the man must be sweet-talked, the man was a nugget of gold.

There were no formalities at London Heathrow. They were taken off the flight before the other passengers and down an open staircase onto the apron area where two unmarked cars had waited for them. .

In abject misery, Major Perry Johnson walked in the rain, desolate, to the guardhouse.

Each image, sharp in his mind, was worse than the one gone before.

****