Like a dividing ribbon the autobahn lay ahead.
Down the autobahn the car would come for the rendezvous and the pick-up of Otto Guttmann. Jumping the fences early, Johnny, light years till then. Not true, three and a half days. Not even worth thinking about .
. . God, they'd kept that in short supply, they'd hoarded and they'd played the miser with Johnny's available time. But that was the plan, to press forward and sweep the target up in a rush, above all and above everything deny him the opportunity for reflection and consideration.
Sounded good at Holmbury, but stretched and creaking beside the Magdeburg intersection of the autobahn.
The autobahn bridge of grey, weathered cement straddled the road.
There was a steady surge of traffic above him. Mercedes and Opels and Audis and VWs and the throbbing articulated lorries plying the isthmus strip between West Germany and West Berlin, drivers with documents and permit for transit through the DDR. Johnny looked quickly over his shoulder. And that was wrong, out of character for his cover. Suppress it, Johnny, shut it down. He walked under the bridge and saw the sharply curving slipway to the autobahn down which a car coming from Berlin would travel and beside it the bushes that were leafy and would offer concealment. There were no houses on the far side of the city to the autobahn, no factories, only a gravel works more than 300 metres farther beyond the bridge. An unseen place, a covert place, and here the car would come and take its load and spin its wheels and be away again within seconds back onto the racing circuit of the autobahn. A deviation of less than half a minute . . . That's the plan, Johnny. That's what Charles Mawby and his dark suit and his club tie have been sweating on.
Not Johnny's problem, not his concern how fast a car swivels and how quickly the driver guns an engine back onto the autobahn. Johnny's concern was the bringing of an old man and his daughter to this seedy patch of undergrowth where the cover was draped with old newspapers and the ground littered with beer bottles and household rubbish. Christ, that was enough, wasn't it?
Johnny walked on. Putting the briefings of Smithson into pictures.
He went through the gateway of the Barleber See camping site. Past the administration building, past the rows of planted tents, past the yellow sand of the lakeside beach, past the children that played with buckets and spades, past the men and women that walked listless in their swimming clothes. Jesus, and what sort of a holiday was this ? A fortnight beside a flyblown lake 3 miles down the road from the power station or the chemical works or the railway engine repair yard. He reached a wide patio where the tables were shaded by multi-coloured umbrellas. Take more than that, Johnny, to swing the Barleber See camp site into life.
A bar here. The prospect of a large beer, the chance to case his boots loose. And it would be the train back after the beer.
Smithson had done his homework. The pick-up place was good, right for concealment. The camping place was good, right for whiling away the hours till he was ready to head for the autobahn slip road. Have to give Smithson a pat when he saw him. Johnny rummaged in his pocket for coins, paid for the lukewarm beer and ambled to the comfort of a chair.
It had been a good morning.
Well, good as far as it went . . . and how far was that? Everything was gloss before the contact was forged. One step at a time, Johnny. He would see Guttmann tonight at the hotel. Not to talk to, of course, but to look at and evaluate.
One step at a time.
The desk in front of Valeri Sharygin was cleared, all the work finished that must be completed before his departure to New York. From his office in the headquarters building he carried the single sheet of typed paper down the stairs to Transmission section and the bank of telex machines and operators. He still smarted from the apathy of the KGB
colonel to whom he had explained that day the unanswered queries in the case of Willi Guttmann and a yacht out on a foul afternoon on the Lake of Geneva. Down many flights of stairs, along many corridors, and with each step and stride Sharygin's annoyance increased; he might have been with his children, at his home with his wife, he had no need to expose himself to a superior officer's sarcasm and poorly disguised scepticism. But the body of young Guttmann had still not been found, and without the corpse an area of ill- defined suspicion was entitled to remain. The matter remained in Valeri Sharygin's mind, irritating and margin- ally obsessive.
With faltering enthusiasm he had asked his colonel whether KGB in Germany could ascertain with certainty from surveillance of Doctor Otto Guttmann whether he, at least, believed in the death by drowning of his son. He had been told peremptorily that manpower in Berlin did not run to such poorly substantiated luxuries.
He had suggested that GRU might complete the investigation, and been slapped down for the suggestion that military intelligence should take on the spade work of KGB.
He had followed the one course left open to him.
The Schutzpolizei in Magdeburg would follow without question a directive from Moscow. They alone were lowly enough in the ladder of east bloc security to accept instruction from a major in KGB. And he did not ask much of them, only the confirmation that would dash his diminishing caution in this matter.
The message that he brought to Transmission section was addressed to Doctor Gunther Spitzer, Schutzpolizeipresi- dent of the city in which Otto Guttmann and his daughter now took their holiday.
The noise of the argument billowed from the shop onto the street pavement.
Erica Guttmann was window gazing and easily distracted. She cocked her head and sought the source of the shouting. The radio and television shop was in front of her. She was in no hurry, had nowhere to go, and the baying carried the prospect of amusement. Through the opened doorway she saw the crowd gathered at the shop counter - gesturing hands confronting the assistant at the record counter. The shop would only just have opened from the lunchtime closing and the young people would have lined up patiently outside for the new delivery of records and found when they were admitted that there were none for them. A mirthless grin dappled her face. Pathetic . . . Not teenagers, these ones, but boys and girls in their twenties with their tempers roused because they could not buy music with the money they had saved. Then the crowd was surging.
Up to a hundred and sprinting from the shop, stampeding across the Julius-Bremer Strasse towards the Centrum. She crossed after them, caught by the silly excitement of the rush. Into the Centrum, avoiding the counters of clothes and cosmetics and china, off into the depths of the shop. The newcomers joined the already formed twin queues that shuffled towards a wooden trestle table where piles of long playing records were stacked. She saw the pleasure of those who examined with a kind of love the sleeve of the record they took away.
No choice for them, only the one label, and one copy for each customer. Something discarded by the West and dumped, and picked on here with a humiliating excitement. She idled closer to the trestle table.
The name of the artist was Nana Mouskouri. Erica pulled a face, she had never heard of this woman, of this singer. But then Erica Guttmann was no longer a child, she had no feelings for the moods of the queue beside her. She would never have stood in line to buy a record. She would never have screamed if it were denied her, she would never have sulked if she had gone home without the prized possession.
There was no accommodation for such trivia in the life of Erica Guttmann.
The contented mood in which she had dawdled in front of the shop windows was destroyed.
Time to turn for the hotel because she had with docility accepted her father's wish that they should go to the Dom before dinner, another concert, another recital. And then they would meet Renate and her friend in the hotel restaurant. Renate with her man, Renate satisfied by a security policeman with a claw. She had been surprised, perhaps annoyed when it had been suggested that this Spitzer wanted to meet her father.
She had no long playing record and she had no lover. She had an old man that she must care for, and company for dinner that was unatt
ractive.
Erica's foot stamped the pavement as she marched back to the hotel.
And it was hot and the stains from her exertion were visible at the armpits of her blouse.
Adam Percy had taken the Berlin flight. From Tegel airport he telephoned Mawby and arranged a meeting in a cafe on the Kurfusten-Damm.
Over afternoon tea in the sunshine he reported that he had spoken that morning to Hermann Lentzer, that he was assured that no difficulties had arisen and that Lentzer himself would be driving to Berlin from West Germany and arriving in the late morning of Saturday.
'Cutting it a bit fine, isn't he?'
'That's the way he wants it,' said Percy, 'so that's the way it has to be, I suppose. He does the trip pretty frequently.'
'The car, the driver, the second man to handle the pass- ports . . . ?'
'I'm afraid he wasn't very specific.' Percy sipped gingerly at the warm cup. 'All he did was to tell me that everything was in hand. That's his style.'
'He's an uncommunicative swine.'
'Has to be if he's to survive in that business, and he's a survivor.'
Percy would stay now in West Berlin.
The dispositions were complete. The team was in place. A chance to catch their breath before the whirlpool broke over them at the end of the week.
'Everything all right at this end ?' Percy asked.
'Couldn't be better.'
'And the Magdeburg end?'
'Carter saw our lad onto the train, said he was in fine shape.'
'Good,' said Percy, and there was a heavy flatness in his voice.
He believes in nothing, this one, thought Mawby. Almost a degree of insolence, Mawby reckoned and he'd have some- thing to say when he was back at Century House next week.
With her key Jutte Hamburg let herself into the flat. A long day in the engineering faculty behind her, a long night in Iter room ahead.
Examinations at the end of the month.. Even for second year students at the Humboldt there were examinations that had to be passed. And necessary for her to make a good show because her father was the Director of a Kombinat and much was expected.
'Jutte?' The voice spread from the living room. 'Is that you, Jutte?'
'Yes, Mother. It is me.'
'A young man was here. He came with a letter for you.'
'Who was he?' she said indifferently, hooked her plastic coat on the stand in the hall.
'A young man from the Border Guard. He said he was a friend of that boy Becker that you see.'
'He brought a letter?' Jutte dropped the bag of books onto the floor, ran into the living room.
' I put it on your bed. You did not tell me that you were still seeing the boy.' Frau Hamburg sat in front of the television with a tray and teapot and a plate of cucumber sandwiches. Between mouthfuls, she spoke.
'Your father would not be pleased to hear that you still see Becker. Your father says the boy is nothing, that he has no career. His family is nothing, not even prominent in the Party in the quarter where they live .
..'
'He pesters me a bit, there is nothing more than that. He was at a camp a few weeks back, I cannot help who else is there.' The trembling gripped her, trickled through her legs, kissed the coolness of her arms. She turned away, hid her face from her mother.
'Your father will be pleased to know that.'
'There is nothing for him to know.'
'Have you much work tonight?' Her mother asked the question in sorrow. She was from a former generation where girls did not concern themselves with engineering. A pretty girl she had wanted for her only child, someone whom she could pet and beautify and take credit from, not a daughter that slaved at a drawing board and wore stained overalls in the Humboldt's workshops.
'Enough to last me three evenings, and there'll be more tomorrow.'Jutte grimaced.
A fat bitch with a fat arse and a fat pompous husband to sleep beside.
God, how they'd scream and howl, the pair of them, if they knew that Ulf who is nothing and has no career had spilled himself on their precious sheets. They'd rip them and burn them, and the noise would lift the roof, and the shrieks would bring the neighbours running.
'When is Father coming home ?'
'Soon ... he rang me at lunchtime, he has to go to the Council of State to meet with the Trade Secretariat. The Secretary is going to London tomorrow. Your father is one of a select few who are required to advise him on certain contracts that may be offered. Your father is well thought of by the Secretary . . . perhaps on another occasion he may even accompany a delegation.' The woman bled with pride.
' I'll go to my room, it's better I start the work before supper.'
It was the one virtue of the burden of study that she brought home that the books freed Jutte from the punishment of attending the living room seminars of the evening when her mother theatrically fed her father the cues for him to relate the anecdotes of his contacts with the high and mighty of the Central Committee and the Politburo.
She had a small room in the flat, barely large enough for the bed and her table and chair and the chest for her clothes and the hanging wardrobe for her dresses and coats. A sleeping and working place only, a room where she came as a stranger and a visitor. Not home, not her own, because her mother would root through the drawers for evidence of her life outside the flat. Not even her own pictures on the wall, those instead that her mother had wished on her. The framed photograph of Jutte in the dress of the FDJ at camp in the centre of a group of happy and toothy girls, and beside it the picture of her amongst a thousand others marching on a May Day on Unter den Linden in front of the Memorial to the Victims of Fascism and Militarism.
Jutte held the envelope and ran her fingers on the sealed flap. It had not been opened and refastened. She ripped the envelope apart and read the words written in Ulfs writing.
Had she really meant it? On the platform at Schone- weide, had it been just to tease him because he was frightened that he would lose his train, and the discipline of the military overwhelmed him? But her uncle in Hamburg had told her of a home that waited for her, and a job and a future. Her uncle in Hamburg had said that it was necessary for one in the group to have an intimacy with the border sector that would be crossed. Her uncle in Hamburg had said it could be achieved, and that was before she had met Ulf. That was not the reason that she had lain on the bed beneath the boy, and splayed her legs and caught him with her arms . . . That was not the reason. There were many boys she could have gone with. Why Ulf? Why the frontier guard? Why was her boy, the one she had chosen, the one who would know the sector at Walbeck?
She had told Ulf what she wanted of him, and he had done it. She had told him where she wanted to be taken, and he would guide her. She had taunted his courage, now she must prove her own.
'Jutte,' the voice whined behind her closed door.
'Yes, Mother,' she said brightly.
'What does the boy say in his letter?'
'Only that he will soon be coming back to Berlin in a few weeks' time and he asks if he can see me.'
'It is kinder if you write and are frank with him, tell him there is no chance of you meeting again.'
'I will write to him next week, soon enough then. And Mother. . .'
'Yes, Jutte ?'
'I really have to work tonight. I have some difficult things to do. I have to be quiet.'
There were apologies and the scraping retreat of the slip- pered feet.
Shit, that would make her miserable. Back to her tea bags and cream cakes and not knowing what was in the letter. That would wound the cow. Jutte opened a book on her desk, took her writing pad from her bag
. . . What would they do to them, her parents, when Ulf had taken her across? How great would be the shame, how far would be the tumbling fall of disgrace? Perhaps her father would lose his job, certainly the prospects of promotion to the permanent staff of the Secretariat.
Influence gone, friends gone, because who would want to be the confidant of a man
whose child had won such disgrace ? Jutte would drag them down, down so that they suffocated in their humiliation.
The book lay unread.
She wondered how they would make the journey from this place called Suplingen, how they would cross. It could not be difficult or Ulf would not have written to her. There could not be great danger. She sat very still in the evening light of her room and tried to read and failed until the room dripped darkness and she heard the voices that heralded her father's return and the syrup of her mother's welcome.
It could not be difficult or Ulf would not have written to her.
He was at the Stettiner Hof, a small and vintage hotel. . . His wife would have liked to have stayed here on holiday, Carter thought . . . Low ceilings, dark woodwork, stairs that creaked in age. Not a bad room, simple and functional with a bathroom across the landing. But he'd mixed his seasons, muddled his habits and the evening had come and he was wide awake, and not hungry either because he'd eaten a big meal at 3 served by the proprietor's wife in the empty dining room.
The afternoon had been wasted with a stroll out onto the medieval Holzberg that sloped, cobbled, down the hill, in rounded by the timber and plaster houses that were made for postcards and holiday photographs, nothing to impress Henry Carter.
With evening there was at last some purpose to Henry Carter's day. He took a taxi from the Stetdner Hof to the NAAFI Roadhaus. That was what he had been told that he must ask for, not that he was searching for a cup of tea or a hamburger or a plate of chips.
Two kilometres short of Checkpoint Alpha the Roadhaus offered the British armed forces a last staging post before the drive along the autobahn through East Germany to their garrisons in West Berlin, access guaranteed by the four power post-war agreement. There was a Military Police unit stationed here, secure communications by radio and telephone and telex, and repair and towing facilities for service personnel luckless enough to blow a gasket or overheat an engine on the autobahn.
The Contract Page 20
