The Waiting Time (23 page)

The breakwater ran two hundred metres into the sea.

The base of it was huge quarried rocks, some as big as a saloon car, cut rough and jagged edged. To the west was the sand beach, scattered with debris seaweed, ice and snow packed solid at the tideline. To the east was the channel for the fishing boats of Warnemunde, and the river passage running the few kilometres to Rostock and the shipyards.

More snow, more ice had gathered in the rocks of the breakwater. It would melt in the next month, but the bitter Baltic wind and the harsh frost nights would keep it in place for the next few weeks.

There was a concrete walkway on top of the rocks and a single strand of metal tubing made a barrier to save the unwary from being blown by the gale, or slipping on the ice, and falling onto the rocks, onto the snow and ice, into the pounding sea that smashed on the breakwater.

At the end was a squat lighthouse, paint peeled by the force of the winter’s sea spray, daubed with the names of the summer’s tourists. There was no fence around the base of the lighthouse, only a low wall less than half a metre in height. Below it the rocks fell sheer to the foaming motion of the water.

The sleet in the wind had driven visitors from the breakwater. Years ago, before the day of ‘reassociation’, before the day that the crowd had pushed and elbowed their way into the headquarters of the Staatssicherheitsdienst on August-Bebel Strasse, there had always been people standing on the breakwater, whatever the weather, huddled close to the curved wall of the lighthouse, to watch the big ferries sail for Sweden, Denmark, Norway, and to dream.

The low cloud, carrying the stinging sleet, made a short, grey horizon.

The breakwater and the base of the lighthouse were deserted, empty, but for one small splash of colour.

They stood at the south end of the breakwater, bent forward against the wind. They narrowed their eyes against the driven sleet.

Fischer said, ‘We should wait for him, we should not take action until he is here.’

Peters jabbed a finger into the taxi driver’s arm. ‘We don’t wait for Krause — you guarantee me a better place and a better time, do you? Can you?’

The year after the anti-Fascist barrier had come down, in the Sicilian town of Agrigento, Gunther Peters had been given advice by an old man with a weathered walnut face. Never, in a matter of importance, hesitate in the taking of action. He had accepted the advice, and the proof was in his wealth held in numbered accounts in Lichtenstein and in the British-administered Channel Islands, in Gibraltar, in the investment companies based on the Caymans, and none of that wealth was flaunted. He moved money for the Sicilians. He moved cars, stolen in Germany, for the Russians and the Ukrainians. He moved weapons, bought at a knock-down price in Russia, for the Chechens, the Kurds and the Palestinians. He forswore a top-of-the-range car, gold necklaces and gold bracelets, a penthouse apartment in one of the new blocks in Leipzig, following more of the advice of the man from Agrigento. It was his belief that he figured on no police computer. On the night of 21 November 1988, clearing his desk, about to go to his home, Hauptman Krause had seen him. Krause, running, had seen him, shouted, given the order. He had been in the car before he had even known the cause of the emergency. It was he who had first caught up with the kid, the spy, grabbed him and flung him down to the ground and held him in the moment after the kid, the spy, had lashed with a boot into the balls of the
Ha
u
ptman.
He had his freedom to lose, and his anonymity, and the wealth that he did not use, and his power.

Two hundred metres from them, away up the length of the deserted breakwater, was the young woman.

Peters jabbed again with his finger. ‘You are chicken shit. I do it myself.’

He went forward. Hoffmann ran, bent against the wind, to be alongside Peters. The young woman sat on the low wall at the base of the lighthouse and her legs were above the foam of the sea. Sieh
l
, his hand protecting his face from the sleet, hurried to catch them. The young woman threw, one at a time, the bright flowers into the rising, falling, pounding spray below her feet. Fischer looked a last time behind him, as if hoping to see the
Hauptman,
and scurried to reach them. The young woman, above the rocks, above the sea, gazed down and did not look up.

They made a line and walked with purpose towards the lighthouse, and the spray rose around them from the rocks and the ice.

He came to the start of the breakwater. He peered the length of it, searched for her.

He had driven from Rostock, a fast four-lane road, bypassed the housing blocks on flat, windscaped ground, and the shipyards with the idle cranes.

He had checked the beach, looked as far as he could see, and the sleet in the wind had dampened his trousers and soaked his shoes.

He blinked. She was a small, blurred figure. He saw her and the colour of her flowers. She would be wet through because she was a lunatic to have gone in that weather to the end of the breakwater. He was old enough to be her father, feeling the responsibility of a parent for a child. He began to walk briskly, into the sleet wind, along the breakwater. Half-way, the spray wall climbed and fell, and he was aware of the men.

Josh saw four men.

They made a line across the width of the breakwater’s pathway. They were in front of him, and he had not noticed them, only her. It was where she had been with the boy, giving her love, frightened, kissing the boy and holding him. He saw them, the two of them, loving and kissing and holding. He seemed to see the boy, clear images, rattling through as if shown on a fast- changing projector, swimming and bleeding and staying afloat, sinking and rising again, and hands reaching for him from over the side of a small trawler.

Four men moving forward, striding in step. It was a cordon line. There could be only one purpose for it. Either side of them was deep water, and rocks and ice with snow. Holy Christ.. . His old, slow, numbed mind churned. So bloody obvious. He started to run.

She did not seem to see them. She was looking down into the breaking waves at her flowers.

He ran, and the wind caught him. The sleet cut at his face and blinded him, the spray fell on him and drenched him. He slipped as he ran, legs splayed by an iced footfall, and he fell, his trouser knee ripped. He pushed himself up and ran again.

They were across the breakwater’s pathway and closing on her. He could not have shouted to her, not while he ran and sucked for breath. He saw the sea, rising and falling and hostile, and the rocks, hard and jagged and cruel. The four men would have turned if they had heard him, but he came into the wind and the sleet and the crash sound of the sea on the rocks.

Josh ran. As he ran he ripped down the zipper of his coat, which billowed out, a sail against the wind and the sleet, slowed him. He sobbed for breath. He reached with cold dead fingers inside his jacket, to the inner pocket. It was the only fucking answer in his head. He was near to them and they were unaware of him.

He dragged the gold-plate fountain pen from the inner pocket, the pen that Libby had given him, their last Christmas, held it in his fist. He could see the backs of their necks.

She looked down at the sea. There was one flower left in her hand and she threw it to a wave crest.

He came behind them. He chose the one with the black hair falling on the collar of his coat, the one with the longest hair. He grabbed it. He rammed the metal, gold-plated end of the pen against the nape of the man’s neck, pulled him back, in one movement. The line broke, they were turning on him, swinging to him. He was behind the man. They could not see the end of the pen, cold metal, against the man’s neck.

Josh shouted, good German, ‘Get back or I shoot. I shoot to kill.’ He felt the tremble-shiver of the man’s fear. The three faced him. He must dominate and fast. He must use the shock of the three and the fear of the one.

He hissed, ‘Tell them, bastard, they back off or I shoot. Tell them.’

She was forty paces from him. She stared at him, at the men. He yelled against the wind, fought for breath for his voice: ‘Tracy, come to me. Come on.’

The man croaked, pleaded, to the three.

‘I shoot, bastard, I shoot through your fucking spine.’

One, the youngest, with a cold face, thin lips, took a half pace forward. The man Josh held shook and cried, and the two older men grabbed the youngest, held each of his arms.

Josh shouted at the wind, at the spray, at the sleet, at the cloud where it merged with the wave caps behind her: ‘Come to me, Tracy. Move!’

God, and she was so bloody slow, pushing herself up as if she did not understand.

He hissed again, into the ear of the man he held. ‘They interfere with her, they stop her, you are dead. Tell them.’

The youngest was trying to break free and his hands flailed towards the inside of his coat. The two older men hung grimly to his arms. She reached them.

‘Come on past. Then run.’

She went by them, past him and the man he held.

‘Run.’ He shouted again, at the three: ‘Stay your ground, stand where you are.’

Josh backed away, hanging on to the hair, pressing the metal end of the pen deep into the flesh, smelling the lotion on the man’s body, and the scent of sweat.

He backed, in steady movements, to prove control, twenty-five, thirty metres from them. There was only the rail beside them and then the rocks, the ice and the sea. He thought the man’s legs gave out on him and he had to hold him up by the hair. The man screamed. He manoeuvred him to the side of the pathway, and pitched him over the rail. Over the rail and onto the rock. His hand caught at a rock edge and Josh stamped hard, frozen sodden shoe, on it. The man slipped on the rock, on the ice, towards the water.

Josh ran until he caught her and grabbed her arm. He turned once. They were on the rocks, three of them, holding hands to make a chain, trying to pull the man back from the sea and the spray.

He ran with her until the breath died in him.

Krause had come.

Hoffmann was soaked, incoherent. ‘He would have shot me. Peters would have had him shoot me.’

Fischer, shaking, blurted, ‘I said that we should wait for you.’

Krause had gazed at the waves and the rocks, through the sleet, and at the small colour points of flowers in the water.

Siehl, shivering, whispering: ‘There was nothing we could do, we did the best that was possible.’

Peters, defiant, storming: ‘We had the chance. If through losing the chance it goes against us, then remember it was me who was prevented from taking the chance.’

Krause felt the cold strip his flesh and walked back up the pathway of the breakwater.

* * *

‘You were aged twenty, serving in a signals unit based in Heidelberg. It was forty years ago. You were that rare American who reckoned he had principles. You defected, took the big step and crossed the line, and you never knew how to retrace the step.’

Albert Perkins had driven into the Toitenwinkel district. The blocks of homes, with stained and weathered concrete outer walls, were sandwiched between the
Autobahn
and the railway line on one side, and bog marsh on the other. The damp was on the outer and inner walls of the stairway. The apartment, also wet, was a bedroom, a sitting room with a kitchen corner, a bathroom where he couldn’t have swung a cat with an outstretched arm. He had found the American. He had been told that the American would amuse him.

‘Famous for fifteen minutes, and that was forty years ago. One news conference and photocall. One debrief where you coughed out all you knew, and that was not much because a private first class, conscript, twenty years old, knew sweet damn all of anything classified that mattered. You’d have become like those Catholic Church converts, so sincere, so fervent and so boring. You embraced this awful quasi country like it was God’s gift to social engineering.’

There was no sign of a woman in the apartment on the sixth floor. The room was bare, bleak. The ashtrays were filled. There were books on the table, on shelves, on the floor.

‘It’s one thing to believe at the age of twenty in the interests of world peace being best served by the balance of military power, but at the age of twenty years plus fifteen minutes they’d squeezed out everything you knew about signals in Heidelberg. You had to start to make a new life here. Bright lad, graduate material if you’d been able to go home, but you couldn’t. Educated here, yes? Learned German, learned Russian, became more native than the natives. You were given a teaching post at the university in Rostock. What did you teach — English literature, American history? Found a little place, and convinced yourself you were a champion of peace, and that two Germanys would last forever.’

A
lbert Perkins had kept his coat on. The American sat in an old armchair. He had a small body. His legs seemed scrawny thin in his shapeless grey trousers. He hunched his shoulders forward and rubbed his hands incessantly as if that were the way to warm them. His head was big, the scalp shaven, and the veins ran riot patterns in his cheeks. He had thick pebble spectacles and one arm was held to the lens frame by Elastoplast. He smoked acrid cigarettes. Perkins bored on, never hurried himself to get to the point.