‘She was a pig in shit — excuse me, a duck in water. Very matter of fact, very calm, took it in her stride. The first time she went over we had back-up and I was down at the Wall. The last time she just slipped out of Brigade, could have been going shopping. She took equipment and material over to him, she had memorized my instructions as to what we needed. We’d give him a few weeks to follow the instructions, then we’d play this song on the radio and they’d meet again the next day. My wife spotted it - not much can be hidden from her. My wife said that something had happened to that “plain little thing”. My wife said it was love. Tracy had become a woman, gone confident, more mature — there was another side to her, harder, sharper, quite a savage joker, and then skittish, you know what I mean. We had a good little section that dealt with forged papers. They’d done an excellent job fitting Tracy with a student’s pass into the East for the library at the Humboldt, and they did the necessary for getting him over, once, to meet us. You only had to see them together to know that it was love. I should have stopped it then, should have killed our involvement. We were forbidden to run agents, it was thought we weren’t capable. Should have been handed over to the civilians. We dressed his reports up as debrief material — that’s the way we slid it into the system. We were getting the applause, I wasn’t going to pass it up. I saw them together and I could see there was heavy emotional entanglement, and I should have killed it.
‘The Baltic was a key, critical zone. All the assumptions were that they would attack, if it came to war, through amphibious forces. We would have tried a counter-strike, which would have meant blitzing the Soviet air defence up there. There was a major concentration of air defence at Wustrow, near Rostock. Prize intelligence was to be able to read their counter-measures. I sent him to Wustrow with the electronics to read the radar. She took it to him and off he went. I was stretching him, too far perhaps. He worked in the marshalling yards at the Lichtenberg rail junction in Berlin and could tell us what tanks were being moved, what units were coming West through the yard, but this was at a different level. I was away that day — a conference or something.
‘It was almost a year to the day since he’d bumped my staff sergeant. A quite normal morning. I was in early. Tracy was already at her desk. I asked her if it had gone well, the previous day’s rendezvous, she said it had been routine. Would have been about lunch-time that the first reports came through. Our Siglnt at Lübeck had picked up heavy Soviet radio traffic from the Wustrow base, indications of a manhunt. Then we had reports via Denmark. One of their ferries, out at sea, had seen flares over the Wustrow area. . . I knew it had gone wrong. I broke it to her, in my office, in private, asked her if she wanted to cut away and get back to her quarters. I thought that was fair. She stayed put, went on with her work. She was very strong. Must have been ghastly for her, the uncertainty. The next month, and the month after, we had that song played on the radio. I didn’t send her over, I went myself. He didn’t show. What was important, the meeting point was not under particular surveillance by the Stasi. That told me that he hadn’t been captured and hadn’t talked. The assumption was that he was dead, drowned or killed. I pushed him forward, I was responsible. Do you think I don’t know that? Do you think I carry that burden with ease? I was five years in Berlin and in that time he was the only worthwhile source I had. The rest was rubbish, juvenile games. This was real, and it cost a young man, Tracy’s young man, his life. For God’s sake, what help is it to dredge in the past?’
‘Where did he live?’
‘With his parents on Saarbrucker Strasse. The staff sergeant checked it to see that we weren’t being conned. Apartment nine, third floor, number twelve on Saarbrucker Strasse . . . She’s a lovely girl, very kind, very gentle, my children worshipped her. Who’s helped by opening the dirty side of history?’
Josh let himself out of the house and walked to his car.
She lay in the bed.
It was as she remembered it. It was narrow, made of heavy wood. She lay naked under the old blankets and she could hear his mother moving behind the thin wood partition. Once, a long time before, in Hansie’s bed, there had been no sound from the other two rooms of the apartment, the shop closed and his mother and father away at his uncle’s home in Erfurt. Her skin was warmed by the roughness of the sheets and by the weight of the blankets. She had loved Hansie in the darkness of alleyways, in the shadow of deep doorways, but once, when his mother and father were away, he had brought her to the apartment. Crawling on her, climbing above her, loving her. She stretched up her arms, as if she reached for him, as she had reached for him. She held the void, clasped it, sought again to find the love. She had brought the condoms from the lavatory (female) at Brigade
She had thought she gave him courage. They had left separately before daylight, walked on Saarbrucker Strasse in different directions and met at the Trabant car. They had gone in the car to Rostock...
She remembered the small chest. After they had made love in his bed, he had taken the dark clothes from the drawers of the chest, because she had told him he should wear deep browns, blacks and hard greys that night, and as he had dressed she had reached from the bed, naked, into her bag, which held the electronic monitoring equipment to check that she had the camouflage cream for his face and his hands, for the night.
She remembered the dressing gown, hanging on the back of the door, and protruding from under it, slung on the same hook, were his competition swimming goggles. He had a foot problem, right foot, needed a built-up shoe. He could run only with difficulty, was handicapped sufficiently to avoid military service, but he could swim well enough to believe that he could cross the wide water of the Salzhaff.
He had been the only boy into whose bed she had gone naked. She lay and reached for him, to hold him, to smell the sweet sweat of him, to feel him, and her fingers groped at nothing.
In the morning he had done the court, had sat alongside Mr Protheroe and fed him the relevant papers, like a loader at a shoot. He was necessary but unequal.
He had thought that ‘Sunray’, alone in his garden, would have crumpled under the weight of the responsibility that had won him his medal.
In the early evening, as the partners shrugged into their coats and locked the doors of their offices, he cleared his desk.
‘Goodnight, Mr Greatorex, I’ll see you the day after tomorrow, first thing.’
* * *
‘Why do you do this?’
She had come on the U-Bahn. At the top of the tunnel steps she had been met by the woman, Hildegard. A hesitation. The woman looked away, to the snow-brushed pavement, to the high lights and the flat roofs of the tower blocks.
She said, ‘You met my father. To you, a stranger, he would appear as any other older man. You came to our home and to you, a stranger, it would have seemed like any other home. He was a poet. He tried to write the poetry of satire, the target of his satire was the regime. Perhaps he was not sufficiently clever. He did not practise self-censorship with expertise. The writers met and discussed their work in the privacy of their homes. They were all friends and he did not believe he could be betrayed from inside the circle. My father complained to his friends, inside the circle, of the denial of his right to publication. You understand, not an angry complaint just grumbling. He was taken by the Stasi, brought here, interrogated, he was charged with “behaviour hostile to the state and characteristic of class warfare”. Do you understand that? He was sent to the prison at Cottbus for two years. When he came out it was impossible for him to find work other than as a road labourer, and he had been a teacher, an intellectual. My mother was dismissed from her job in a ministry. She took the work in a hospital of standing ten hours a day in an elevator and pressing the buttons for the elevator to go up or down. I had no chance of going to the university. The Wall came down. We were promised the new dawn. My father was in Lenin Allee. He told me that day it was raining. A car came past him and splashed the water over his legs, a big BMW. It was driven by the man who h
ad interrogated him. My father is the loser, he is now in a ghetto of failure. He is too old to go back to teaching, too old to work as a labourer on the road, and the man who destroyed him is driving in the warmth of a BMW car.’
Tracy said, ‘Why are you doing this?’
The woman looked at Tracy Barnes through her thick spectacles, and her eyes were distorted by the lenses. ‘Because I loved him, because we worked together in the railyard, because he brought light and laughter to me, because his father says they killed him, because you have come to find the evidence.’
The woman gave Tracy a pair of narrow steel-rimmed spectacles, and a scarf to wear over her hair. She was handed a plastic-coated ID card, and she saw that the photograph on the card was that of a woman with dark hair and narrow steel- rimmed spectacles.
There was a policeman in the shadows, shivering and stamping his feet, and the woman called cheerfully to him. It was a modern fortress complex, great buildings around a wide central open space. They went down a ramp to a steel door, well lit and covered by a security camera, and the windows beside the door were protected by metal bars. The woman rang the bell and held up her card in front of the camera and Tracy copied her. She had memorized the name on the ID. Inside at a desk, behind plate glass, there were two guards. She did what the woman did, and showed the card, scrawled the name, the signature, the time, as the woman had. The woman had moved away from her, to the other end of the desk, and she talked animatedly with the guards, distracted them, then went fast towards the inner door of plate steel. Tracy followed. The door was opened from the desk.
In the corridor beyond, the door slid shut behind them.
‘We have six hours,’ the woman said briskly. ‘Maybe there are a hundred million sheets of paper, maybe there are ten million card indexes.’
They went down narrow concrete stairs, poorly lit.
‘Maybe there are a million photographs — I do not know how many kilometres of audio-tape. Everything was filed. They kept, believe me, in many thousands of sealed glass jars the smells of their victims, they stole their socks and their underwear and put them in jars so that later if dogs had to search for those people they would have their smells. Most of all, there is the paper. The dictatorship of today does not need to shoot people, or gas them, or hang them. They do not have blood on their hands, but ink.’
They were at the bottom floor. Ahead was a door of reinforced steel, set with additional bars, opened by a lever.
‘You must have names and dates and places. You have that? If you do not then we search for a coin on the ocean floor.’
Tracy said, ‘Hauptman Dieter Krause, counter-espionage at Rostock, killed Hans Becker at Rerik, near to the Soviet base at Wustrow, on the evening of the twenty-first of November nineteen eighty-eight.’
The woman wrenched down the lever. The cavern ran as far as Tracy could see. As far as she could see were the metal racks on which were stacked the files. Cardboard file covers neatly tied with string, bound with elastic, as far as she could see. The racks were from the floors to the ceilings, and they had come down two flights of stairs.
‘A man was here two days ago, from the Office of the Protection of the State. He had the name of Dieter Krause from Rostock. He looked for evidence of a criminal act against human rights. He did not know of Hans. He had the name of a Soviet officer. He did not have the location of Rerik. He had the officer stationed at Wustrow. He did not have the date. He walked in fog
There was a part of the Krause file that was missing, and a part of the Wustrow file that had been taken out. He did not find what he looked for. He was here a whole day, with three assistants. I have to tell you that—’
‘How long do we have?’
‘We have a few minutes less than six hours, and only the one chance.’
The last flights were leaving Heathrow. Josh Mantle hurried to the check-in. The ffight for Berlin was closing. He was in the queue when he heard the voice behind him, ‘Hello, Mantle, cuttingitfine...’
He spun.
‘... but I didn’t expect to see you here. I’d have thought — your track record — you’d have realized this was heavy going and backed off, like you did before.’
‘What do you know of me?’
‘Not much short of everything.’ Perkins was smiling.
‘I’ve never seen you before the gate at Templer.’
‘Quite a crowd of folk never looked hard enough behind them, never saw me. Bad business that, Belize, would have thought a chap like you would have showed a bit more spine.’
‘Who are you?’
‘A government servant, man and boy. I walk the streets with a shovel so that the pretty people don’t get shit on their shoes. You were a piece of shit in Belize that I cleared up. Never seemed to find the time to introduce myself. . . Better stir a bit, if you want to get to Berlin tonight. It is Berlin, isn’t it? Chasing after the little corporal, are we?’
‘Where are you going?’
‘As if you need to know. Cologne. Off to see our gracious friends and respected allies.’
The queue lurched forward.
‘About her? About Miss Barnes?’
‘She’s on my Action This Day agenda. You’re very sharp tonight, Mantle.’
‘Running sneaky messages, piling up the odds. That’s work for a proud man.’
The smile had become the grin. ‘You used to be bright in the old days, as I recall, when you knew how to back out.’
‘You’re starting to feel like a boil in my arse. A damn nuisance, but I can ignore it. If anything happens to her, before I get to her, through your hand, I’ll...’
The smile, which had been the grin, had become the sneer. ‘Bit old for her, aren’t you?’
The check-in girl had her hand out for Mantle’s ticket. He passed it across the counter. He spun again.
‘... I’ll put your teeth through the back of your neck.’
The smile, the grin, the sneer had gone. ‘My advice, Mantle. You shouldn’t go to Rostock with a boil in your arse. Very painful if your backside were kicked — and in Rostock it will get kicked, hard.’
‘Rostock is not a part of it, so fuck you. I’m going to Berlin to bring her home.’
‘Of course . . . Oh, and the name is Perkins, Albert Perkins, by the way, a shoveller of shit for Her Majesty’s government. Don’t forget the name and have a good flight.’
He was given his ticket, his boarding card. When he came away from the counter, his overnight bag slung on his shoulder, Perkins was gone.
He walked towards Departures.
They had both gone to Belize. Captain Ewart-Harries and Sergeant Mantle, the Intelligence Corps presence. Supposed to know their job, supposed to predict whether the Guatemalan military were about to invade. The officer had school Spanish and Mantle had been on a phrase book. Hustling through Jane’s Fighting books for the strength of the Guatemalan Army, its elite units, its equipment. The Brigadier with his gunners and his infantry demanding an answer, and the Group Captain with his Harrier force. Were the Guatemalans coming? Would they come in force with tanks? Would they probe with reconnaissance units? Who knew more than damn all about the goddamn Guatemalan Army? Every morning at the Brigadier’s session, the pressure was growing. Answers, where were the answers? Outside Belize City was a heap of jungle; in the heap of jungle was a mapmaker’s line; behind the line was more jungle and the territory of Guatemala. He didn’t know, and Ewart-Harries didn’t know, what the Guatemalan military had under the triple canopy of the jungle. A patrol on the mapmaker’s line had brought the kid in. The patrol’s contact had been with three men of the Kaibil battalion, special forces. The patrol had killed two out of three. It had a survivor, neatly tied up and blindfolded, for interrogation. Interrogation was I Corps work. A helicopter ride, from the RAF strip, into the jungle. The prisoner was in a logging shed, no witnesses outside the patrol. The prisoner was just a ‘Guat’, and the Brigadier was demanding answers. . . Ewart-Harries had called the bet with
Mantle for a hundred American dollars to be paid to whichever of them broke the Guat first. . . As if he was a football, a punchbag, taking it in three-hour shifts to work on him. Three hours was the limit for each of them because of the goddamn mosquitoes and the goddamn heat. Going into each shift with the adrenaline pumped at the prospect of an American hundred-dollar bill, coming out and reckoning that Ewart-Harries would win in that session. No gag on the kid, the Guat, because they had to be able to hear the answer when they broke him. Christ, the kid had screamed. Coming out of the logging shed and seeing the contempt of the squaddies who kept a perimeter defence line. Caught in a frenzy because it was just a game, and the kid was just a Guat. The third day, and the kid had died. He had stopped screaming and died in a Ewart-Harries session, and the bet was void.
He walked down the pier to the aircraft.
One of the patrol had gone to the battalion padre. There had been an internal inquiry. If it had ended as a court-martial, the killing of a Guat, then it would have gone public and the Guatemalan government and military would have had a field day of propaganda. As the officer, Ewart-Harries could have fallen out of sight if his sergeant had testified against him. But the sergeant had stayed quiet, as if it should be kept in the family, had refused to give evidence against his officer. A deal done. . He had been transferred from I Corps to the Special Investigation Branch of the Royal Military Police with no filth on his record. lain Ewart-Harries, with copybook references, had gone to civilian life.
He had not stood up to be counted, he had walked away, he had not shouted from the Guat’s corner. . . It was a part of Josh’s history, the day that he had compromised.
Josh Mantle flew to Berlin.
Under the beat of the air-conditioner, Tracy sat cross-legged on the floor between the racks. Untying the string, unfastening the elastic, skipping at the reports filed in the month of November 1988 by Hauptman Dieter Krause. Retying the string, handing the files back to the woman. Reports on environmental campaigners, on three Rostock athletes selected to travel for warm-weather training in Cuba, on the Rostock family of a drowned escaper washed up on the Baltic coast, on anti-social behaviour in the science faculty at Rostock. No report in the ifies for the dates of 21, 22 and 23 November, the only dates in the month that the busy bastard had not filed reports. She beavered at the paper, and the despair grew as the night hours slipped.
The Waiting Time Page 11
