The Waiting Time (26 page)

Behind them, Josh, in his mind, could see the boy who was wounded and exhausted and running at the limit of his strength. It was the last house before the square, well-built with a good garden to the front of pruned roses.

‘Artur Schwarz was a senior engineer on the railway working from Bad Doberan and responsible for the line between Rostock and Wismar. His was the last house that the boy came to. Schwarz saw him from an upper window, drew the curtain and turned his back on him. The rumour was spread that he was an informer. His wife was beaten by the Stasi at a protest at the environmental damage caused by the chemical works at Neubokow. He was blamed for the beating of his wife. He works now as a common labourer on a farm near to Starkow, which is between Ribnitz-Damgarten and Stralsund.’

They were in the square. On three sides around them were low two-storey blocks of cheap-built homes. The grass was yellowed grey and sprinkled with the old leaves that the wind curled. They stood among the washing lines and the parked cars that scarred the grass to mud. Josh stood back from them. It came stark to him. They had walked the route of Hans Becker’s flight, and he had not seen a man or a woman or a child. Did they hide? Did they crawl behind closed doors? Did they not dare to look down from their windows? He felt the weight of the fear. . . The pastor stood and looked around him as if he stretched far into his memory and then he moved a single short pace to his left, to be exact.

‘Willi Muller was then just a boy. His father had a fishing boat. His father’s life was the fishing in the
Ostsee.
He took the trawler out for them, when they pulled the boy from the sea. He was with them when they killed the boy, here, at this place, where I stand. He took the trawler out again when they put the weighted body of the boy in the sea. All of the fishing people of Rerik know where the body was put into the Salzhaff, without charity and without decency, and they never run their nets there because they have the dread that they would bring up the body and the past. There was a family meeting. His father had been told that he would lose the boat if the son did not go away and swear to stay silent. He went to Warnemunde and took work as a deckhand on a herring boat. If he were to return he would have to confront his father’s bargain. He would be ashamed of his father and ashamed of himself. He has never returned, and never will.’

The pastor took Tracy’s hand and ducked his head, chin against his chest. His eyes were closed. The quiet was all around them.

Tracy let his hand fall free. ‘Thank you.’

‘Let me tell you, if a man is sentenced to death then he has an hour, a day, a week, to gather his integrity. If a man is sentenced to prison then he has a month, a year, to find a true dignity. Where is the integrity and true dignity of a man denounced as a paedophile, accused as a thief, rumoured as an informer against his wife, suffering shame for his father and himself? They were more intelligent than the Gestapo — they did not leave a trail of martyrs behind them. They destroyed but they did not permit their victims to hold the small light of dignity and integrity.’

Tracy stood her full height. She put her hand on the pastor’s shoulder and her lips brushed against his cold, lined cheek. Josh shook his limp hand, and said, ‘I wish you well.’

‘You should not take loosely the responsibility. There is little left for these men and the little left them is what you now hold in your hand. You should be careful with your responsibility. He was a brave boy. I saw his bravery.’

Mantle took Tracy’s arm. He led her away from the pastor and out of the deserted square. He understood. The wet blinked in his eyes.

They sat in the car and ate the sandwiches he had bought for both of them. He had gone as far down the coast as it was possible to drive, a kilometre beyond the last of Rerik’s houses. She gulped the bread slices, filled with sliced sausage and salad. He had parked the car so that it faced out over the Salzhaff and across to the trees masking the buildings on the peninsula.

Josh said what he felt he needed to say.

‘It’s where you were, yes, when the flares were going up, when you could see the tracers, when the trawler came in. I tell you, Tracy, when you couldn’t intervene, when you had to back out, that must have been worse than anything I can imagine. To leave him, to have to get back to Berlin for that bloody midnight curfew, that is a definition of hell.’

She choked. A piece of sausage fell to her lap. He thought it would help her to cry. She would never have cried before on a man’s shoulder.

‘To drive away from it, with the bastards after him, him running, for the bloody curfew. What was his car? A wretched little Trabant? Nothing you could have done for him. To have to drive back alone, not knowing. . . God...’

The tears streamed on her face, made rivers on her clean scrubbed cheeks. He groped in his pocket for his handkerchief.

‘I want to see him in court, Tracy, begging, and sentenced. It is more hideous than anything my imagination is capable of.’

He wiped her eyes and her cheeks. She stared straight ahead at the dark water. He gunned the engine.

‘Come on, girl. We’re going, together, to hack it.’

He swung the car off the grass, onto the road. He drove through the back lanes of the town, towards the myriad side roads that would keep them safe on the journey back to Rostock.

Clumsy, awkward, he had made his commitment. In the morning they would begin their search for the witnesses.

He came in the darkness into the town. It would have been good for him to have been in the town all through the day, but not possible. Dieter Krause did not possess the resources of manpower to have watched Rerik through the day and the early evening. The old goat would tell him if they had been to Rerik. The old goat would know who had come, who had asked, as he had always known, and would tell as always. He drove down the hill, the central road of the town, towards the sea. The road was deserted.

Not a soul alive on the road, not a car, no one walking the pavement, not a curtain undrawn or a door open. He could remember it and yet he could not place the image of the memory. He drove towards the shoreline, then swung left and drifted the car past the piers. He could see the roll of the fishing boats in his lights. He came to the small, darkened bungalow. Only the wind for him to hear, and the rustle of the sea on shingle and the flap of tossed paper.

He stepped from his car. He opened the gate and walked up the path. The street lamp threw enough light for him to see the paper that was nailed to the woodwork of the door. He snatched from the nail the pages of a file identifying an
Inoffizielle Mitarbeiter.
He ripped at the pages with fury. It was the first time that Dieter Krause had ever known the fear to be broken. He tossed the torn pages up into the wind and they scattered from the light to the darkness.

In his car, as he left the town, drove away from the sea and the pier where the trawlers were tied and the church, he placed the memory. That night, he remembered, after the chase and the shooting and the taking of the body out on to the Salzhaff, it was as though the town had emptied.

The policeman lit the cigarette for the lorry driver. There was no smell of alcohol on his breath but it would be tested. The lorry with the trailerload of steel construction girders being transported from Rostock to Wismar had been recently checked by a garage, but that would be verified. It was slewed onto the grass at the side of the road, but the radiator grille was barely marked. More policemen and men from the fire brigade were setting up lights around the wreckage of the car. The ambulance men sat in their parked vehicle, relaxed, because there was no need for their intervention. The policeman, newly posted to Rostock from Kassel in the West, went to the second vehicle involved in the accident. It was difficult to recognize it as a scarlet Wartburg car. It was mangled, concertinaed, crushed. He shone his torch into the interior. Their faces, extraordinarily, were unmarked. Their bodies, an old man’s and an old woman’s, were pressed back against two aged leather suitcases that had burst at the impact. The fire-brigade men were preparing the cutting equipment that would be necessary to recover the bodies. From reporting the registration of the scarlet Wartburg, from his radio, the policeman knew their names, that the man was a retired pastor of the Evangelical Church, that they were resident in Rerik on the coast. Tiredness, a heart attack, the glare of the oncoming lights of the lorry were equal possibilities, the shit engineering standards in the building of East German cars was most likely, but there was nothing of fact to tell the policeman why the Wartburg had come over the central white line of the road and into the path of a lorry carrying forty tonnes of steel girders.

‘You’re quiet, Josh.’

‘Just thinking.’

‘Thinking about what?’

‘What he said about responsibility, Tracy. About the responsibility we have to those four men.’

She snorted. ‘You think too much.’

‘For each of them we are a hand grenade rolled across the floor of a room, into their lives.’

‘That is crap.’

‘Tracy, listen, you have to know about the responsibility.’

‘You were better quiet, Josh.’

She never opened her eyes. Her head was against the back of the seat, as if responsibility was not important to her. He drove back into Rostock. The beginning ended that night. In the morning, the end would start. He did not know where it would lead and his mind tossed with the burden of his own responsibility.

Siehl listened.

‘We try to avoid the use of extreme measures. We aim not to use extreme measures.’ Dieter Krause rapped his knuckles on the table. ‘We employ extreme measures only if the alternative is the Moabit gaol.’ He stared each man in the face. ‘She has nothing without a statement from one of them. If it seems likely she will gain a statement then we must take extreme measures.’

Josef Siehi, now forty years of age, believed himself to be a victim, a casualty. He had supported the old regime and never doubted the legitimacy of the Party. He had accepted his orders, placed bugs, met the informers, interrogated men and women, followed targets in careful surveillance, had broken up the meetings of the environmentalists. He had only done what he was told to do. If he had been ordered to fire on the mobs in the last hours of the regime, then he would have done so, and he did not understand why the order had not been given. He lived now high in a block on the Hohenschonhausen complex of Berlin with the new filth around him. He had been driven from his apartment in Rostock by scum who did not realize that he had dedicated his life to their betterment through the socialist ideal. In Hohenschonhausen, he was surrounded by drugs and thieving and vandalism. He had been married twice before, divorced twice before, and the woman with whom he lived shared his aptitude for complaint. Each night, back from work, skinny and sallow, poor and bitter, he and the woman shared complaint about the new life, the new indiscipline, the new hardship. He worked as a security guard on a building site for the new Sony tower. He had been an
Unterleutnant,
he had twice in Rostock been personally commended by Generalleutnant Mittag, and now he was a security guard on a building site . . . He had been given, once a month, the duty of supervising the cell block at Rostock. Always correct, of course, but harsh in his administration of the prisoners. His nightmare, the role reversal, that he should be a prisoner in a cell block. On the night of 21 February 1988 he had been ordered from his desk by Hauptman Dieter Krause, he had driven one of the cars. He had dragged the body back to the trawler, he had roped the lobster pots to the body. He stood to live the nightmare, to be locked in a cell as a prisoner.

They left Krause. By dawn, Siehl would be in Peenemunde and Hoffmann would be in Lichtenshagen and Fischer would be on the road from Ribnitz-Damgarten to Stralsund and Peters would be in Warnemunde. They would all be in place at first light.

It was the last point of the last match of the evening.

Eva Krause sat in her seat with her fists clenched. She was breathing hard. Her daughter served for the match . . . Ace . The opponent never moved. The service ball thudded from the court into the back netting. Her daughter stood proud on the base line with her arms, her racquet, raised. The opponent was a gawky, gangling girl, limbs too long for her body, and for a moment she hung her head, then trotted to the net, held out her hand and waited. She wore an old costume, handed down, and held a racquet that was reinforced with binding tape. Eva stood and clapped, forgot for the moment that the seat beside her was empty, and watched her daughter, who savoured the applause and took her time before advancing to the net. The handshake was cursory. Christina Krause did not even look at her opponent as she shook the hand offered to her but gazed around her as if to enjoy the triumph.

Eva gathered up her daughter’s tracksuit and the spare racquets. She was pushing them into a bag.

He came from behind her.

‘You are Frau Krause? It is your daughter that has defeated my daughter?’

She nodded.

He was tall, as his daughter was. He had sparse hair, prematurely grey, uncombed. He wore trousers without creases and old trainer shoes. The elbows of his coat had been ripped and were sewn, and the cuffs were frayed.

‘You should be very proud, Frau Krause, of your daughter’s ability. She looks to be well coached. It is a beautiful outfit she wears. There is great power in that racquet, yes, but expensive. I
was here last night, Frau Krause, to see my Edelbert play and I stayed to see the girl who would be her next opponent. The man who came to join you, last night, that was your husband?’