The Waiting Time (20 page)

He spun. The movement of turning, fast, buffeted Josh Mantle into a woman standing behind him, pressing close to him in the queue. He had been far away, his mind, in the last moments before the voice had cut into his consciousness, in the office in the high street of Slough — the morning, the partners, his desk empty, the papers for the day’s court appearances not laid neatly out. It took him time, two seconds or three, to locate the voice.

‘Thought you’d be here. The obvious way would have been to hire a car ten hours ago and get straight up there, or to take the first train. Good thinking, Mantle, and what I’d anticipated.’

The old railway station had been cleaned. There was a polished floor, flowers in pots, new counters and computers for issuing tickets, fast-food stalls, newspaper and magazine stands. Progress had reached the railway station of Berlin/Lichtenberg, so that a veneer covered the past and obliterated history.

‘Always best to make your own agenda, not to let the opposition set it for you. Smart thinking...’

Perkins was close up to him.

He had looked right by Perkins. He focused. The pale, drawn face, the thin moustache, the evening stubble greying on the cheeks, the half-drawn cold smile, and the eyes that twinided bright from the reflection of the strip lights. There was a young man behind Perkins, but hanging back as if he were not a willing player in the game. He felt a loathing for Albert Perkins. In the queue, behind his back, Tracy would have turned, would be watching him, judging him.

‘You called them “gracious friends and respected allies”, and told them were to find me. You fucking nearly killed us. You are disgusting.’

‘Steady on, Mantle. No call to be wound up, stay calm. Tell him that, Tracy, shouldn’t ever lose your calm . . . Actually, I’m not with the hare and I’m not with the hounds. Done my bit in the market-place, very satisfactorily. I’m here to watch the chase.’

‘Get off my back.’

The queue shuffled forward a pace.

Perkins said, ‘I’ve warned you once, but I’ll warn you again, the last time. You go to Rostock and you will upset people. For those people there is a great deal at stake. For Hauptman Krause — by the by, Tracy, his scars are knitting quite well — at stake is his future. He’s in from the cold, the future looks comfortable, there’s no shortage of federal money in his wallet. Don’t think he’s going to hand that over, without a fight, for ten years in the Moabit gaol. His former underlings — they’ll be verminous — will have built new lives, too, and if Krause goes to the Moabit gaol then they go with him, as accessories to murder, and they won’t take kindly to it. There’s the BfV, my esteemed colleagues, who reckon that Hauptman Krause is their invitation card to top- table intelligence evaluation, and they’ll tell you that for too many years we and the Yankees have treated them as kitchen staff. They’ll not be pleased to see him wiped away. They will close their eyes and turn their backs on little matters of illegality. It will get bad up there in Rostock.’

The queue slouched forward another pace. Josh didn’t turn to face her, he did not look to see the effect on Tracy Barnes of Albert Perkins’s poisonous tone.

Perkins said, ‘You should know, the man I report to, he asked me what would happen if you, Tracy, were damn fool enough to go to Rostock. Only my opinion, I told him that first they’d warn you, very clear, no misunderstanding, and if you persisted they would rough you — that’s a quick ride to hospital Casualty — and if you still went forward and threatened them and it’s their freedom or your life, they’ll kill you. I hope you listen to the radio, you always should when you’re abroad, keeps you in touch. It only made two or three lines. An elderly couple beaten up in their home on Saarbrucker Strasse, unknown assailant, unknown motive. That’ll be the warning. After the warning they’ll go more physical, then they’ll kill. You go to Rostock and you’re on your own.’

Her voice, behind him, was clear, matter-of-fact.

‘Two persons, adults, one way, to Rostock.’

He saw the slow smile, so bloody cold, break at Perkins’s mouth.

He turned towards Tracy. She was shovelling banknotes out of her purse, and the computer was spitting out the printed ticket. Her face was quite set. He did not know whether Perkins had frightened her, or whether she hadn’t even bothered to listen.

Through the late afternoon, through the evening, Dieter Krause sat in his car and watched the slip-road. It was at Rostock
Sud,
the most direct turn-off from the autobahn into the city. Of course, they could have come off at the Dummerstorf-Waldeck slip-road up the autobahn, or they could have driven on to the Rostock
Ost
turn-off, but this was the best place for him to wait. He had the heater on in the car. In between the cigarettes he took a strip of gum and chewed incessantly, and every few minutes he used his sleeve to wipe the car’s windscreen. He looked for a hire car — a Ford, an Opel or an Audi. There were high lights over the slip-road, bright enough for orange day. He would recognize her, but he had no face, no build, no features for the man travelling with her. He would know her if he saw her, her face had been close to him. He could recall each bone and each muscle of her face. He watched the cars brake, swerve and slow as they came off the autobahn and onto the slip-road. When he had headed the section on the second floor at August-Bebel Strasse, when he had targeted environmentalist shit or the crap people with religion,
then he would have had the authority to call out twenty men for a surveillance operation of such priority. He was disciplined. He studied each car for Berlin plates, and every woman in those cars. He looked for the gold of her hair and the small face and the bright eyes. The cigarette, the latest, was stubbed out, and he took the gum again from the dashboard beside the radio where he stuck it each time he smoked.

In the apartment on Saarbrucker Strasse, when the old people had found their last hiding place behind the kitchen door, when he had beaten them in his frustration, the wind and the cold had come through the opened window. He had seen the platform of stone and the distance of the platform between the window and the drainpipe, and he had looked down to the concrete of the yard. If she had gone along that platform to the drainpipe, so high above the concrete, then she was hard. If she was hard, then, certainty, she would come to Rostock. The headlights of each car, each truck and lorry, speared into his face, dulling his sight, as he searched for her.

‘What confuses me, Mr Perkins, you warned him and you spelled out the dangers of the course he was following.’

‘How is that confusing, young fellow?’

‘Frankly, Mr Perkins, I don’t see what more you could have done to persuade him to pack up and go home.’

‘Are you so very naïve?’

‘The policy objective, Mr Perkins, is fulfilled by him going, but you were telling him to quit, walk away.’

‘That’s the nature of the beast. The beast is embittered, contrary, hostile. You tell the beast to go back and he will go forward, tell him to go right and he will go left, tell him the colour is black and he will say it is white. Tell him not to go...’

‘Then you manipulate him?’

‘Quite right. You can always get an idiot to dance like a marionette. Part of the job is jerking the strings, you’ll learn that

He’s predictable. But you’re wrong to focus on old Mantle. It’s the young woman who’s interesting.’

‘Is it real, the danger?’

‘Oh, yes, very real. As real as the minimal enthusiasm there will be from our friends and allies to accept evidence unless it’s served up
cordon bleu.
What have they done about the Stasi crimes? Listen, Erich Mielke was minister for state security for more than forty years, responsible for the psychological destruction of thousands of lives, responsible for the taking of hundreds of lives, and he was given six years’ imprisonment for killing two policemen at an anti-Nazi demonstration in nineteen thirty-one, believe it. Nothing, for their convenience, in his time as head of that despicable organization, was deemed criminal so they raked back sixty-six years, a farce. Hans Modrow was the last Communist prime minister, sat for years at the Politburo meetings that legalized repression, and his only crime was falsifying voting results, suspended sentence. A Stasi major presented the Carlos terrorist group with the bomb detonated at the Maison de France in West Berlin, three deaths, three persons murdered, as a direct result, and he was given six years, out by now. A hundred victims shot trying to scale the Wall, two border guards given decent sentences for firing at point-blank range on unarmed youngsters, nine suspended sentences so they walked free, thirteen acquitted. There was murder, unpunished, assassination squads roaming abroad and unpunished, wholesale theft of monies sent to relatives living in the East, unpunished, torture in the Stasi cells, unpunished. They don’t want to know who was guilty, they want it forgotten. If she is awkward and if she threatens, then it gets dangerous.’

He left the boy from kindergarten at the outer door of the hotel. He wouldn’t see him in the morning, would be off early. He wanted to walk around Savignyplatz, to be on his own, to sit in a café late in the evening and hear the talk around him, as he had walked and sat long ago when Berlin had belonged to him.

In his taxi, the ‘Free’ light off, Ulf Fischer watched the forecourt of the Rostock
Hauptbcihnhof.

Twice, passengers off the trains had sworn at him because he would not take them. It was a hard life, driving a taxi in Rostock, and it hurt to turn away money. It was not his own taxi, and when he had paid for its hire, and the hire of the radio, and the fuel and the insurance, there was little enough left at the end of each week. He was a warm man, though, not greatly intelligent but cheerful. Once or twice a month, he was a professional mourner. The ethic of the family had broken down in the new Germany - money ruled, old people died alone. They needed, the old-and-alone dead, a small show of affection at their funeral. He made an oration at such people’s funerals, spoke well of them when no one else did. It brought a little more money into his life — as did the earnings of his wife, who went five evenings a week to clean trains at the
Hauptbahnhof
— but too little to hold the love of their two sons. His boys were beyond his control, without discipline, were in love with the American culture. In his plodding way, the way that he had learned from twenty-seven years in the MfS, he tried to merge into the new life, but he had wept the night that the mob had broken into the Rostock barracks building.

He had been the driver for Hauptman Dieter Krause. On the night of 21 November 1988, he had driven the
Hauptman
to Rerik, at panic speed. He had been the driver and confidant of Dieter Krause, he had done shopping for Eva Krause when her work at the shipyard did not allow her time and when the
Hauptman
was tied to his desk, he had been like an uncle to the little child, Christina. That night, his boot had been across the throat of the kid, the spy, to steady the head and make it an easier shot for the
Hauptman.
He had last seen Hauptman Krause in Rostock nine months before, and the
Hauptman
had walked past him and not seemed to recognize him, but there must have been some reason for it.

He had been at the station since the late afternoon, and all through the evening. He knew the times of the trains arriving from Berlin/Lichtenberg, and when each train was due he left his taxi and went to stand at the steps to the tunnel from the platform so that he could see the faces that passed him. He had been given a good description of the face that he watched for. Hauptman Krause had always been careful with detail. There would be a man with her, and Hauptman Krause had told him that the man would be about 1.85 metres tall and might weigh about 90 kilos. The
Hauptman
had found the man’s coat and made his estimates from it. It was English made. Later, after the last train had come, if the young woman and the man were not on the train, he would go to the meeting that the
Hauptman
had called. He still did not understand why the
Hauptman
had walked past him those months before on Lange Strasse.

There was a rap on the passenger window.

He saw the skinny, poor face of Unterleutnant Siehi. He unlocked the door for the
Unterleutnant
to join him. It was necessary, in these days, to lock the taxi’s doors while it was parked at the kerb, because of the violence of the new bastard undisciplined skinheads of the city. They shook hands formally. In the taxi, the
Linterleutnant
ate a sausage with chill from a small polystyrene tray with a plastic fork. It was not possible for Ulf Fischer, the
Feidwebel,
to tell Josef Siehl, the
Unterleutnant,
that he did not permit food to be eaten in his taxi. The next train from Berlin would be arriving in six minutes, and two hours after that the last train of the night would arrive.

She slept.

The train clattered north in the darkness. They were alone in the compartment. Ahead, in other compartments, were the Scouts with their adults, singing lilting songs in treble voices. Behind them the compartments were used by drab elderly people, their small cheap suitcases on the floor by their feet. He had the window blind up, and when the train slowed, the light from the carriage spewed over the snow-specked ground beside the track.