The Waiting Time (38 page)

‘If the politicians can determine who is to be prosecuted, and who is not, then they have destroyed a cornerstone of democracy. You say, Doktor Perkins, that tomorrow is the critical day in this matter. I wish to help. I wish to do something in the name of that officer who was my guest at dinner in Berlin. Tomorrow you are welcome to sit with us.’

Albert Perkins went on his way, out into the night.

* * *

‘I think
it
is necessary that you lose him, for a month, for two months. I think he is damaged.’

The three video-cassettes, copies from the originals, had been couriered from the Lubyanka to the minister. He had watched the first fifteen minutes of the first cassette, then turned away, his face a lined, wearied portrait of pain. The General of military intelligence, GRU, his friend, had switched off the video player.

The General said, ‘He climbed too fast. He is a shooting star, brilliant in the night sky but burning out fast as it falls. He takes to bed with him the wife of a Stasi officer. That Stasi officer is now a prize exhibit of the Germans and talks to whoever will listen of his knowledge of Pyotr Rykov. Did the German share his wife with Pyotr Rykov? Was there compliance? If there was compliance where does it end? Or does it continue? Is he still linked with the German who calls him his closest friend? You would trust Rykov with your life, and I believe I would, but the cassettes ask questions that we cannot answer. If you protect him you make yourself vulnerable. He has damaged himself but he should not be permitted to damage you. You should lose him. If there is nothing else to compromise him, in a month or two months, you might call him back, with discretion. You should not seek to help him, if there is anything else. For now, you must distance yourself from him. It must not be you who is vulnerable.’

They cruised on the wide street.

Olive Harris was tolerably rested. She had read the local file and thought it inadequate. She had eaten, alone, in the staff canteen, apart from the security men and the night-duty secretaries and the communications team who worked late. The food had been indifferent.

They passed the surveillance car. She was pleased to see it in place. The city, until the moment she saw the car, had seemed disappointing. It was without threat, until she saw the car with the misted windows and the fumes spilling grey-white into the night air and the glow of the cigarettes. She had thrived on that feeling of threat and danger, half a career ago, when she had been here before and run agents and sidled to the dead letter boxes and played games with the tails. In London, she missed, more than anything else, that feeling. In London, in her small personal office, on the train and the bus that took her to and from work, she made a fantasy each day of threat and danger, as if to fill a void. They were ahead of the surveillance car and he murmured the number of the floor on which the target lived. Theie were three windows. Two were darkened; in the third a dull light speared the gap in the curtains. It was a shabby little block of apartments, which told her something of the target man. He was pulling away, one run down the street only. It was all in her mind, the street door, the width of the pavement, where they would stop in the morning and the position of the surveillance car. She eased back in her seat.

‘May I, Mrs Harris, ask a question of you?’

‘You can try.’

He stared straight ahead, eyes on the road, and his voice was clipped. ‘I’m just wondering what Rykov has done to us that he deserves our targeting him? That’s my question.’

‘For God’s sake, have you a problem?’

His voice was quiet and without emotion, and she thought he had stored the question through the day. ‘It’s pretty straightforward. What has Rykov done to deserve the action we are taking against him?’

‘Where are you starting from?’

‘Starting from? I’ve never met Rykov. I’ve only watched him from a distance and evaluated him. I listen to what people say about him. Actually, Mrs Harris, I’ve not heard a bad word said of him. He’s a patriot. He’s a man who cares about his country. You saw that grubby little apartment block — that’s not the home of a man on the make. With his position, his connections, he could live in style, snout in the trough, hand in the till, running rackets. What’s evil in this country is the degree of corruption and criminality. He’s not corrupt, he’s not criminal. That’s where I’m starting from. Why are we mounting a hostile operation against Pyotr Rykov?’

She said, tried to cut him down, ‘Been here a long time, haven’t you, David? Started to get to you? Going native, are you?’

He said, without anger, ‘I quite understand, Mrs Harris, if you are not willing to answer my question. I think he’s a good man. I think he’s a brave man. Of course, Mrs Harris, you have no obligation whatsoever to answer my question. I think also he was doomed before you came here. I think what he has fought against here would have beaten him anyway within a few months. He’d know that. Without you, in a few months or a couple of years at maximum, beaten, he’d have been pushed aside, shoved off to some mission in Ulan Bator or some crap job in Transbaikal, put out to grass. But that’s not your game, Mrs Harris. Your game is the immediate destruction of a fine man. You won’t mind me saying it, Mrs Harris, but I find your game distasteful and immoral. Well, here we are. I’ll see you in the morning.’

He stopped the car. The policeman at the embassy gates eyed them.

‘Not just gone native, gone squeamish.’

‘If you say so, Mrs Harris. You do know what will happen to him — yes, you’d know that. . . Sleep well, Mrs Harris.’

The wind on the street buffeted her. She gathered her coat around her and ran across the pavement on clattering heels, through the gates towards the lights and the warmth of the doorway.

‘What do you do, Josh, afterwards?’

She sat cross-legged on her bed. The carton of chips was on the blanket beside her hips, an opened can of Pepsi between her bare feet, and the cardboard tray for the pizza was on her lap.

‘There’s a bit has to happen yet.’

‘You said it, Josh, wasn’t me that said it. It was you said it had turned.’

‘Guilty, I said it. Probably shouldn’t have. When you’ve been kicked — we’ve been kicked — you need a light to walk towards. Just have to hope that was our light.’

He was hunched down on his mattress beside the door. He wore a clean white shirt that was already specked with leaked chilli sauce from his hamburger. He had already brushed the mud off his blazer jacket, as if it were important to him that he should smarten himself for a dinner of a hamburger with a young woman who had chosen pizza, fries and Pepsi.

‘Tomorrow it’s over — win, lose or draw,’ Josh said. ‘I shouldn’t dare to, but I believe it turned for us this evening. What you’ve waited for, nine years, tomorrow it’s over.’

‘What do we do tomorrow, when he comes in?’

Josh hung his head. He held the remnant of the hamburger. ‘Don’t know...’

She grinned, not cruel. She mocked so gently. ‘But you always krLow what to do, Josh.’

‘Not this time.’

She ate the last of her fries, crumpled the carton, threw it at the rubbish bin, then wiped her mouth on her sleeve. The empty rooms of the
pension
below them, were cemetery quiet, with only the far murmur of the streets’ traffic.

‘Why did you go into the water, Josh?’

He blinked. He chewed the last mouthful. With a clean handkerchief he dabbed the sauce from his shirt. ‘Because of you, because of him, because of where your love for him has taken you, because of what you’ve given me . . . because you have shown me a road of honesty and truth and courage. I try to live on a creed of principles, and of course I fail. I try to be, and I can never achieve it, my own man. You gave me the strength, Tracy, to go into the water. I owed it to you.’

‘What will you do, afterwards?’

He spoke slowly, thoughtfully. ‘I go back. I have a couple of rooms on the top floor of this house — not too far from your mother’s street — and I’ll dump my bag. It will be precisely and exactly as I left it. I’ll load up my dirty washing and go down the stairs and if I meet anyone they’ll nod to me, but they won’t have noticed I’ve been away. The woman at the launderette wifi see my stuff through. I’ll walk over to the high street, the office of Greatorex, Wilkins & Protheroe, and I’ll look contrite and I’ll say it won’t happen again and I’ll grovel for my job. They’ll puff a bit, there’ll be a deal of talk about last chances and ingratitude, and there will be a pile of work about a mile high on my desk. At the end of the day I’ll go home past the launderette. In the evening, when it’s dark, private, I’ll go and talk to my wife and tell her about it. Back home, I’ll do my ironing, and I’ll go to bed and read a book, and I’ll sleep. Next morning, back to work — the magistrates’ courts, police interview rooms, the Britwell Estate,
and the morning after, and the morning after that. That’s it, that’s afterwards.’

‘It’s not much, Josh.’

He pushed himself up. The rueful smile played at his mouth... It wasn’t much, it was sweet bugger all, but it was the truth of afterwards. The memories would be precious, and he would tell Libby, in the dark of the night, of his memories before he went back to the lonely solitariness of the rooms on the top floor of the house behind the London Road. He picked up her chips carton and her pizza tray and put them in the bin with her Pepsi can. He loosed his tie, pulled it from his collar and unbuttoned his shirt.

‘I’m sorry, Tracy, I’m dead on my feet, and I’m bloody poor company.’

She sat cross-legged on her bed and watched him.

‘It is policy and it is principle. When they go together it is when we walk with honour. When they are apart, conflict, then we crawl on our guts, in confusion.’

Julius Goldstein threw clothes from the drawers and wardrobe on to the floor. She walked the room and smoked. What she smoked, Moroccan stuff, was enough to have him thrown out of the BfV without question. They lived together in the Kreuzberg district of Berlin, in her apartment, alongside the immigrants, the students, the artisans and painters, because his girl said it was a stimulating place for her work. The apartment was her studio. She worked big canvases with oils and next year, maybe, she would sell one.

‘When they walk together, policy and principle, then I am happy and I applaud. This time they don’t, this time they fight, so we are in shit. The policy is easy. We have a man who gives us status. We take the man to America and feed off the status of the man. We are maggots, we wriggle around and we are happy little maggots, and the Americans love us and give us more status, and we are happier.’

He loved her, part for her mind and part for her body. She wore only her knickers and her roll-neck sweater, the bed was, as always, unmade, and her canvases were propped around the walls. She came from a big-shot family, industrials, from Frankfurt, and she didn’t have to live in a dump in Kreuzberg, and she didn’t have to live with a Jew. He was a token of fair- mindedness at BfV, and a token of her goddamn obstinacy. He didn’t know, didn’t ask, but he thought she might screw around while he was away. He began to throw the clothes, haphazard, into the bag.

‘The principle is not easy. It is full of shit. Our valued asset is guilty, unprovable but guilty, of murder. Never mind that he is an arrogant fuck-pig, he is a killer. We protect him, don’t investigate him.’

He had no dinner suit. For the Pentagon speech, and at dinner afterwards, he would wear a crumpled jacket and an open shirt. He believed he was safe from censure, whatever he wore, because he was the token Jew. His passport and the sachet of travellers’ cheques were on the table with her paint tubes and rags.

‘He should be investigated, prosecuted, locked up. All right, I am a Jew, but I don’t have the heavy thing. I am not obsessed with the camps, but. . . I go and buy a lottery ticket from an old man in a kiosk and he smiles so kindly at me — was he on the trains that took my grandparents to the camps? Was he in the camps’ watch-towers when my grandparents came off the train? I don’t know. I only know that the guilty were protected then. I see any old man who smiles at me and I have no trust for his smile. It is the same now — there can never be trust unless the guilty are prosecuted. Same then, same now, conflict of policy and principle, and it makes for a shit time.’

She stubbed out the joint of Moroccan stuff. She pulled on paint-smeared jeans. They liked a little Vietnamese place on the Mehring Damm. They’d eat there, and then he would drive to Rostock. That conflict, policy and principle, would be decided the next day.

‘I detest him. He is the same man that killed my grandparents. The same man . . . I try to be, first, a German, but for me it is impossible. I try to do my German duty and to obey my German orders, but it is impossible. Before I am a German, first I am a Jew. I detest him, and I will never forgive him and never forget what he has done. I am a Jew, I walk in the shadow of such a

man. It does not mean that I am obsessed, as are my father and my mother, but it is inevitable. It is what I cannot escape from. I cannot forgive, as a Jew, and I cannot forget. Let’s go. .

He went past the lines of the unlit windows.

He had taken them back from the tennis, after the applause. His daughter had punched the air in victory and the coach had come to congratulate him and Eva. The final of the under-fifteen tournament, girls, for Mecklenberg-Vorporren, would be played the next evening. He had driven them home in his wife’s car and left them.