The Waiting Time (12 page)

Krause said, pleasantly, ‘You had a good journey yesterday, Julius?’

He had discarded his jacket, unbuttoned his collar, loosened his tie. The clothes had been paid for with BfV funds. The organization owned him, dressed him, fed him and put the roof over his family’s heads. Goldstein poured the whisky. Raub studied the script and pencilled minute adjustments on it. Sprawled comfortably in his chair, Krause took the whisky and smiled to Goldstein as if he were a servant.

‘The aircraft did not crash so it could be described as a good journey.’

‘Doktor Raub said yesterday you were in Berlin. In Normannen Strasse? How is it there?’

‘Like any other piece of shitty socialist architecture, but still standing.’

‘I presume you visited the archive.’

‘I did.’

‘And I presume you searched for evidence of a criminal act by myself in violation of human rights.’

‘I did.’

‘And you found nothing.. . nothing. . nothing.’ He rapped his glass on the table, in emphasis.

He rang the bell for the third time. The bastards had checked that he worked late in the office. He kept his finger on the bell until the light came on, sliced between the drawn curtains of the upper window. First Wilkins, then Greatorex and Protheroe, had telephoned him on the direct line with some damn feeble query about the morning. He heard her coming down the stairs. They’d be asleep now in their homes in Gerrards Cross, Beaconsfield and the Chalfonts.

A nervous voice: ‘Who is it?’

He called softly, ‘It’s Josh Mantle. I need to speak. Would you let me in, please?’

A lock was turned. The door with the nailed plywood panel was opened.

‘I’m afraid I need some help, just couldn’t get away earlier.’

She led him into the kitchen. The cat was asleep in a cardboard box on the floor. She went to the cooker, lit the gas ring, put the kettle on it. He smiled. ‘Too right, I could murder for a cup of tea.’

She stood by the gas ring, as if to take the heat from it.

‘Mrs Barnes, what I agreed to . . . Go to Berlin, yes. Bring back Tracy, yes . . . But I didn’t stop to reckon. Where do I find her? Where do I start to look?’

Disappointment creased her face, worried at the wrinkle lines. He thought she was the sort of person to whom promises were made, broken.

‘Did Tracy have an address book?’

‘Not here.’

‘Did she have a particular friend in the Corps, someone she’d have confided in?’

‘Not mentioned to me.’

‘Are there letters from anyone in the Corps?’

‘Not letters.’

‘I don’t know where to look.’

‘There wasn’t letters. There was a Christmas card, years back.’

‘Who was the card from, Mrs Barnes?’

‘From her commanding officer in Berlin. He sent her a card the first Christmas after she came back from Berlin.’

‘You don’t have that card, Mrs Barnes...?’

She left the kitchen. He drummed his fingers on the table and the cat stared at him. He went to the cupboard on the wall and took two mugs. If he did not know where to look, there was no point in travelling to Berlin. The kettle whistled. He rehearsed what he would tell her. He did not think she would complain that he had promised: she looked to him as though she had lived a life of disappointment. He wondered where her husband was, Tracy’s father. Dead or walked out? He would extricate himself from his promise and he would tell the bastards, Greatorex and Wilkins and Protheroe, that it had all been a mistake. He made the tea. They’d smirk, pull long faces, tell him it was for the best, that it wasn’t the sort of business the firm went running after.

She laid the bundle in front of him. The Christmas cards were held together with an old elastic band. They were all cheap, except one: pheasants in snow on expensive paper. The Special Branch searchers had missed the collection of Christmas cards.

To Tracy and family,

With all seasonal good wishes,

Col. Harry Kirby DSO.. . and Frances...

The Bothy, School Lane, Sutton Mandeville, Wilts.

‘He just sent it the once. Just the first year after she’d come back from Berlin, after he’d retired. Didn’t send one the next year. Is that any good?’

Yes, he would have owed her a card. She might have won the Colonel — her ‘Sunray’ — his medal.

‘That’ll do me fine, Mrs Barnes. That gives me as good a start point as I could have hoped for.’

She had hung back, and Hansie’s father had talked with the man, Joachim — low voices as if the danger still confronted them — at the door of the apartment.

Most of the bulbs of the block were gone. They had passed drunks, young men, and her foot had struck a syringe. The lift had broken and they had climbed eleven ffights of stairs. She had hung back, not interfered. As if she had brought him determination, Hansie’s father whispered at the man, Joachim, and jabbed at his chest with the crown of his old stick. The man, Joachim, spoke, and fear lit his face. He turned away, slammed the door on them, and the lock was turned.

When they were in the darkness outside, Hansie’s father said, ‘Perhaps, Tracy, now that you have seen the fear, you do believe me. There were one hundred thousand of them, they did not disappear. They are here, around you, on the street with you, close to you. They have the network and the organization, and the power — why my friend Joachim still has the fear. I tell you, Tracy, if you threaten them, they will take you between their fingers and break you as if you were a dried branch. It is the way that they know, their old way. There are two thousand people working on the administration of the files. This week she does the night shift.’

The wind caught them. They stood on the pavement near the tunnel down to the U-Bahn of Magdalenen Strasse. The great tower blocks before them diverted the wind into chilling corridors. She held his arm and gripped the threadbare sleeve of his coat. They waited outside the entrance to the old headquarters of the Staatssicherheitsdienst. Past midnight. A trickle of men and women, huddled in heavy coats, scurried towards the U-Bahn tunnel.

The woman was wrapped tight in scarves and a woollen hat and gloves. The light hit the heavy spectacles on her face.

‘Joachim and I, we thought once that Hans and Hildegard would come together. It was before we knew of you, Tracy.’

Tracy said, ‘Then tell her it’s for love, and twist her arm till it hurts, till she screams.’

He sat on his folded coat. The darkness was around him. His fingers brushed the earth in front of his feet. He could feel the strong stub stems of the daffodils that he had planted the last summer and he touched them with a reverence. He only ever came to the grave at night.

‘What I’m saying, I was a lamb to the slaughter. The money was the final straw. I mean, she must have got the money from her savings tin, pitifully little, and she’s trying to give it me. No, Libby, I couldn’t have come and told you about it, about taking her money or about turning my back on her. You’d have given me a grade-one rollicking. I always do that, Libby, wonder whether you’ll give me a rollicking or that little tap of the hand, approval. Yes, well, you’ll need to know about our Tracy, our Corporal Tracy Barnes. . . She’s opposites, you understand. She’s sweetness and vilely rude. Sour, cheeky and funny. You like her, you detest her. She makes you feel important, she rubbishes you. Tough as an old boot, small and vulnerable. She is utterly sensible, she is lunatic. It’s because of what happened to her, what she lost, that she can be so hideous. I won’t get any thanks from her but, you have to understand, I don’t have the chance, not any more, to do many things that are worth doing, and she’s worth crawling on a limb for. I’m going to Berlin, Libby, to try to bring her home. She has travelled to Berlin to find evidence against the man who killed her boy, but the man is protected.

It’s like she’s putting her hand into a snake’s hole. Don’t worry, I’m not about to embark on anything idiotic. I’m going to Berlin to find her and to frogmarch her to the airport. I’m going to bring her home. She taunted me, Libby, she asked me if I compromised

And something else, the only thing we have in common, her and me. The person we loved was taken from us. Before you ask, she’s not at all beautiful, not even very pretty, so don’t get any dumb ideas. . . Goodnight, watch for me...’

He wiped his eyes, once, hard. An owl was hooting in a tree nearby. He picked up his coat. The time he spent at the cemetery, alone, was precious to Josh Mantle. He started to grope his way towards the wall where his car was parked.

In the half light of dawn, a smear of red sun behind the trees, the man stood on the lawn and the terrier yapped and jumped against him until he threw the tennis ball. The man’s silver hair was unbrushed and wild on his head and fell over the darkened lenses of his spectacles. He was unshaven and he wore his pyjamas, slippers and dressing gown. Josh Mantle watched from the gate on the road at the edge of the village. The dog chased the ball, caught it in the air as it bounced, and ran back towards the man. Josh learned from what he watched. The dog was close to the man and the man bent down but could not take the ball until the dog brought it right to his hand.

Josh took his driving licence from his wallet, held it in the palm of his hand and pushed open the gate.

He went up a narrow gravel path. The scrape of his footfall alerted the man and the dog ran barking towards him.

‘Colonel Kirby? Sorry to trouble you so early. I’m Josh Mantle, SIB of the Royal Military Police. .

He held up the driving licence as identification.

‘I wouldn’t have come if it wasn’t important. It is correct that in Berlin you were the commanding officer of Corporal Tracy Barnes?’

The frown, like a shadow, slipped on the man’s forehead, and Josh again held up the driving licence.

‘You’d better come in.’

He was led into a conservatory. Kirby apologized, his wife was away, place a bit of a mess.

The man was alone. Mantle knew he could play the proper bastard. ‘We’re running an investigation into the involvement of Corporal Tracy Barnes, Berlin ‘eighty-eight, with a field agent, Hans Becker.’

Straight in, brisk, with authority, as if he had the right to know. The man seemed to shrivel.

‘It was a long time ago. It’s history, finished. Who cares?’

‘Please, just answer my questions.’

‘It’ll do no good, should be allowed to sleep. Who needs to know?’

But he talked.. . and Josh let him.

‘I’ll call her Tracy — you don’t mind if I do? — she was a part of my family. She was just past her twenty-first when she came to Berlin, the youngest in the unit. She was,
de facto,
my PA. Always smart, always efficient, good typing and shorthand, buckled down in the evenings to learn good German. I don’t think she’d done that well at school but she had the commitment we wanted. She’d work away quietly in the corner and didn’t interrupt. I’d hardly be aware of her. There weren’t any boyfriends, no tantrums, no sulks — she was a joy to have. If I had to work late, she was there — early start, the same, no problem . . . Tell you the truth, there were plenty of sergeants who tried to get off with her, single and married, and they hadn’t a prayer. I didn’t complain, she was the best worker I ever had in the military. I said she was a part of our family — she used to help my wife when we had dinner parties, and was paid for it, she used to come in and babysit when we were out. She had nothing else to do and we felt we were really rather doing her a favour, but we became almost dependent on her. Is she in trouble?

I had a good staff sergeant. We used to go over to East Berlin, once or twice a week, as permitted under the Four Power Agreement and it was important to take advantage of the access. We didn’t learn much and were always followed by the Stasi, but we did it. We’d walk around, lean on road bridges and watch for military convoys, look for new cap badges of Soviet troops, pretty mundane but that was the work of I Corps. But one time in December ‘eighty-seven, on Leipzig Strasse, the sergeant was bumped. The tail was on the other side of the street, quite wide there. He was bumped by a young man. Actually, he was another hundred metres up the street before he realized that an envelope had been palmed into his pocket. He brought it back, came straight to me and gave it to me. That was Hans Becker’s first contact.

‘Most of our work in Berlin was debriefing those who had either escaped, youngsters, or been allowed out, the elderly. The Stasi were always trying to plant their own people into our system, to learn about our procedures and to feed us disinformation. I don’t deny it, we were truly excited that evening. What we usually handled was so low-grade — what passes were needed for what area of East Germany, where were the passes issued, what colour were they, who signed them. This had the potential of being way ahead of the dross, and it didn’t seem like a plant. The letter said that a meeting should take place in Alexanderplatz, that a named song should be played over the forces’ radio the evening before; the song was “The Londonderry Air”, pretty mournful stuff. I lost sleep over it — it was the staff sergeant’s suggestion — but we sent Tracy over. She didn’t know, but I sent three Welsh Guards NCOs to have her within sight. I thought she had the ability — she was the only one of us who didn’t look like a soldier. I asked a hell of a lot of a girl of that age, but she always seemed so capable.

‘We called it Operation Catwalk. She was Traveller. So damn difficult to find a codename. When she was looking after the children she used to read to them, and Walter de la Mare — particularly his “Traveller” — was a favourite for my elder daughter.

‘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 had 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?’