The Waiting Time (21 page)

She slept, so peaceful, so gentle, her shoes kicked off, her feet on the seat and the weight of her body against the carriage wall.

The light showed him the frozen ice at the rim of the lakes beside the track and once he caught the eyes of a deer startled by the approach of the train. They went through the small towns and villages where there were illuminated advertising hoardings for new cars and new supermarkets and new soft drinks from America. They went past an old barracks of the Soviet Army, light and shadow from the train meandering over the vandalized buildings where once the big tanks had been serviced. It was Mantle’s nature to look out over the barracks. In the days when he had been stationed in Germany, days that were twenty years gone, on a few occasions he had been tasked to take the British military train from Helmstedt to Berlin. Every time it ran, most days of the week, an I Corps sergeant had travelled on it. From the West, across the Soviet zone, to West Berlin. An hour in West Berlin, then back on the train across the Soviet zone, through Potsdam and Brandenberg and Genthin and Magdeburg, peering over the walls and through the trees at Soviet camps, at tanks, at artillery, trying to spot cap badges that would say a new unit had arrived. Pitiful, small beer. He now rated the work of I Corps, scratching for information on the military enemy hidden behind the great fence of wire, mines and watch-towers, as pathetic.

She slept without care.

The train rolled on the track. Cattle trucks had come this way. They went by the town of Furstenberg, sandwiched between lakes, ringed by forests of straight pine. Going slower, pulled by steam, the cattle trucks had come, doors bolted. Would there, then, have been young people on the blacked-out platform at Furstenberg, waiting for a train north, or a train to Berlin, who had watched the cattle trucks slink noisily by, smelt the bodies and heard the cries? Would there, now, be old people on the bright platform at Furstenberg, waiting for a train to Rostock, or a train south, who remembered the roll of the cattle trucks, the smell and the cries? Past Furstenberg, as the train gathered speed, he saw the small narrow branch line disappear into the web net of the forest. The branch line had carried cattle trucks to Ravensbruck.

She slept beside him, as if his history was not important to her. He let her sleep.

West of the city, from the Reutershagen district, a narrow, unlit road straddled open ground and ran towards a wooded area of birch trees. Klaus Hoffmann had sited the pit and dug it seven years and four months before. In darkness, using only a small- beam pencil torch to guide him, he blundered and stumbled away from his car towards the dark outline of the trees. He carried with him a short-handled spade, kept in the boot of his car every winter as precaution against being marooned in blizzards. He remembered the track and the line of the trees ahead. He had taken trouble that night to site the pit. The path meandered close to a ditch. He had to stay on the path until he reached the line of trees, then backtrack for twelve long paces, a dozen metres.

Standing on that point, his feet either side of the scraped mark, he must search with the torch beam for the shattered tree across the drainage ditch. The bearing he must find was eighteen paces from the mark towards a direct line with the shattered tree. There was ice on the ditch. He tried to jump it but one leg fell short and the ice gave, cracked like a pistol shot beneath him. Frozen ditch water up to his knee, soaking his trouser leg and his sock, ifiling his shoe. Klaus Hoffmann swore. He pulled himself, heaved his body, scrabbling at the grass fronds, up the bank of the ditch. He made the measurement. His shoe squelched.

The night, over seven years before, that the mob had come into the building on August-Bebel Strasse, was the night he had come and made the siting and dug the pit. He breathed hard. He rammed the blade of his spade down into the earth. He dug, and failed to find the rubbish bin. He took another pace, on the same line, dug again and failed again. He dug the third time, his foot cold and sodden. The blade of the spade hit the buried plastic cover of the bin. It was near to an hour after he had left his car that Hoffmann lifted the top from the bin. As he had left it, the guns and the files were wrapped in greased paper and in sealed plastic bags. Wrapped against the wet were three Kalashnikov rifles, the magazines and bullets in smaller plastic bags knotted at the throat, hand grenades and gas canisters, four pistols and more ammunition, and the two shopping bags that held the files. He took the Makharov pistols and the ammunition. He searched for the names on the files, as he had been told to, and selected those that were required. He closed the rubbish bin, covered it again and stamped down with his cold numbed foot on the earth. He tore up grass, yellowed in his torch beam, and scattered it over the scar on the ground.

She moved. She did not open her eyes. She swung, so casual, still sleeping, away from the compartment wall. For a moment her body, her head, wavered upright, then she slumped, her head against his shoulder and her body against his arm.

He could not move. If he moved he would wake her. He thought it would be criminal to wake her.

The short spread of her hair was splayed against his collarbone. She slept on and the train gathered pace, its motion rocking her head on his shoulder. Josh Mantle felt a great tenderness towards her. He could have woken her, thanked her, because in sleeping against him he thought she showed her trust. . . Coming back from the specialist, after the diagnosis, as he had driven the car, Libby had rested her head against his shoulder and closed her eyes, and that, too, had been a gesture of trust. His arm was numb but he did not dare to shift it, to risk disturbing her sleep. She breathed smoothly. There was no panic in her breath, no nightmare. He saw the cleanness of her face, clear skin. He smelt the chilli sauce. He could not imagine living with himself if he had abandoned her. He was old enough to be her father. He felt as if it were demanded of him that he should protect her.

She slept. His arm ached. Her head was on his shoulder.

Coming fast off the autobahn, on to the slip-road, Gunther Peters saw the parked car. He flashed his lights. The headlamps lit the face of the
Haupt man,
whom he had not seen since the collapse of the regime. He pulled in his small Volvo behind the BMW. He was given the description, height, weight, build and hair colour, told what he should look for, and told at what time he should leave the slip-road and come to the meeting place.

The
Han ptman
was gone, driving away into the night. Peters settled low in his car, and watched and waited.

There had been an Armenian who had taken money up front for the supply of spare engine parts for Mercedes cars, and not delivered, and the Armenian’s body was now deep in an earth-fill site where rubble from the rebuilding of Leipzig was dumped. There had been a businessman from Stuttgart who had claimed to have the right contact in the Ukraine for the supply of infantry weapons, mortars, machine guns and wheeled 105mm howitzers, and there had been a suspicion that he doubled with the BfV; he had gone, weighted, into the Rhine river at Bingen, west of Wiesbaden. The Armenian, before he had died, without his fingernails and with a pain-shaking hand, had written the account number at the Zurich bank and the letter of authorization for its transfer. The businessman, before he had gone, alive, gagged, into the river, had spelled out in staccato gasps the limited information he had passed to the agency.

He watched the cars come past him on the slip-road. He thought the
Hauptmcrn a
fool to have killed the kid, the spy, before interrogation. Now the history of that night was churned up again, debris left on a beach, stones turned over by a plough. If he was threatened, he killed.

He watched for the face of the young woman who had been described for him by Hauptman Krause, a fool.

He checked his watch.

The feeling in his arm, against which she slept, had died. His shoulder was warmed by her head.

He felt almost a sense of fear because she slept against him as if she gave him her trust, and yet ahead of him was the earning of the trust.

He eased into the seat beside her.

‘You are late.’

‘I came when I could.’

‘You have missed most of the game.’

‘I came as soon as it was possible.’

‘If she wins this game she has the match.’

She sat high in the stand beside her husband. If Christina survived to the final for under fifteens of MecklenburgVorporren, and won, she would go to the under-fifteens all-Germany championship at Munich. The coach said that Christina had the ability. The club where the coach worked was a thousand Deutschmarks a year. The coach’s time was priced at seventy-five DMs an hour. When they had paid for the membership, the entry and his time, Ernst Raub had written the cheque. Without the cheque from Raub, her daughter would not be playing in the championship for under fifteens of Mecklenberg-Volpommern. She served for the match in the first round of the championship.

‘The problem, it is still there?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘The woman, has she come to Rostock?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘What do you know?’

‘It is about the collection of evidence.’

‘You told me that all the files were destroyed. What evidence?’

‘There were witnesses, that is the problem. The ifies were destroyed, I do not know if she can find the witnesses.’

‘What will you do?’

‘I have to finish with the problem before I go to America.’

Their voices murmured. They watched their daughter below. They applauded the point that was won. Eva heard the quiet, cold certainty of her husband’s voice.

‘If you cannot...?’

‘Cannot what?’

‘If you cannot finish with the problem before you go to America . . . ?‘

‘If I cannot finish with the problem, if she finds the witnesses, if the witnesses talk to her, then I am named. .

‘Then?’

‘I am arrested. I am tried, am convicted. I would go to prison.’

‘You will fight?’

The past clung to her. The past was Pyotr Rykov. And the past was also her husband coming home in the night with the wet salt smell on his clothes and the sand on his shoes and undressing in silence. The past was poverty, boredom, when she had been unemployed because the FDGB had closed down as an irrelevance, and it was four years of him struggling to find work. The past was him seeing the picture in the newspaper of a Russian general, and behind the General had been Pyotr Rykov, and driving to Cologne to offer himself, and coming back with Raub and the young Jew, and the move into the new refurbished home in the
Altstadt
near to the Petrikirche and the new clothes and the new furnishings. The past was ghosts. . . The overhead smash shot, the victory, their daughter leaping in celebration on the court with arms and racquet raised . . . All in the past if a young woman came to Rostock, searched for, and found, witnesses.

‘You ask me if I will fight. Yes, I will fight.’

He was gone from the seat beside her.

The train slowed. He broke the dream. They had gone through Maichin and were past Teterow. He moved his arm, edged it from behind her body. The train lurched on its brakes. Her eyes opened, blinked, stayed open. Her face was close to his. She didn’t shift her body from against his.

‘How long have I been there?’

‘A bit less than an hour.’

‘Enjoy it, did you?’

Josh said quietly, ‘I didn’t want to wake you.’

‘Got a thrill? Grope me, did you?’

He thought trust was beautiful and precious, and that he was old and stupid. He jerked up off the seat. He pulled her rucksack and his own bag down from the overhead rack. He did not care to look at her. He did not know which of her was real. The train was slowing, crawling. He did not know which of her was the core, when she was asleep and lovely, when she sneered and was ugly. Was he trusted, was he a convenience? Out of the window, slipping by, were small homes.

‘Is this Rostock?’

‘This is Laage, about fifteen miles from Rostock.’

‘Why’d you wake me?’

He felt the anger and tossed the weight of the rucksack onto her legs.

‘Do the obvious and that’s the way to get hurt. The obvious ways to reach Rostock are by the autobahn or through the railway station. This is the last stop before Rostock, so we get off.’

‘No call to be so bloody grumpy. I just asked.’

The train stopped.

She shrugged away from him, heaved the rucksack onto her shoulders and avoided his help. They went down the corridor, past the Scouts, quiet now and sleeping.

They walked out of the empty station and waited across the road at the deserted shelter for the bus to Rostock.

* * *

He had driven to a petrol station where there was a photocopier and reproduced the file, a dozen pages given him by Hoffmann, the reports of an
Inoffizielle Mitarbeiter,
codename Wilhelm, on the community in which he worked. In the payphone, he had called the directory for telephone numbers, and then the number of the TM, codename Wilhelm. He had pretended he was trying to reach another man with an offer for double-glazed windows, had checked the address, and apologized for the disturbance.