The Waiting Time (30 page)

She was off him. He was limp. She wiped a tissue between her legs. They didn’t kiss. They dressed fast, as if he had to get back to commanding a missile and radar unit and she was headed for her office or for a meeting or for collecting the child from the minder. The room was empty and the film ended. ‘Twenty-five thousand DMs, cash.’

‘Twenty-five thousand, cash, for three tapes, agreed.’

Albert Perkins stood in the street. Behind him the man pulled down the shutters, obscured the window of unsold Japanese cameras.

The cold of the evening settled on him after the heat and warmth of the cellar. It was always a mistake for a man to insert himself into forbidden territory, he reflected, but Albert Perkins never ceased to be amazed at how many men jeopardized their future in sweaty copulation.

He murmured, ‘Might have been good at the time, Colonel Rykov, might have been brilliant, but did you ever consider that you might live to regret it. Did you?’

He left his apartment in the early evening to go back to his desk in the ministry. His wife, Irma, had watched him change. Pyotr Rykov crossed the pavement with a firm step, and the driver hurried from the car to open the door for him. His wife had watched him take the best, most recently acquired, uniform from the wardrobe and change into it, and she had not asked him why, that evening, he chose to wear his best uniform and why he went back to his desk. He paused at the open door. His minister would have left the building, and the aides and clerks from the outer offices. It was, to Pyotr Rykov, an act of necessary defiance. Down the road, misted windows, was a stationary black car. It was important to Pyotr Rykov that he should not believe he was intimidated.

She braked sharply outside the
pension.
He had not spoken all the time she had driven back to Rostock.

She turned to him. ‘All right, you want to bloody sulk, but do it on your own. Piss off.’

He looked into her face, contorted and ugly. Josh said, slow and deliberate, ‘I don’t find this easy, but I’ll say it because it has to be said. Today you have been more cruel and more vicious than any woman I have ever known. Beside that, you can be more gentle and more caring, and I include my wife, than any woman I have ever known. Tracy, I do not understand the depth of the scar...’

She said, cold, ‘I lost the boy I loved. Isn’t that enough for you, “sir”?’

‘No, not enough.’

She spat, ‘He was murdered.’

‘Not enough. People cope, they’re hurt but they live with it.’

‘What do you want?’

‘I want the truth. I want to know the truth so that I can help you cut out that viciousness and cruelty before it destroys a very worthwhile person — you, Tracy.’

‘Loving a boy who’s murdered, that’s not enough to scar?’

He shook his head. The traffic went by them. ‘No, sorry, not enough.’

‘If I told you that I was going to have his baby, Hans’s baby... that it was when I loved him in the early morning before we went to Rostock, and I didn’t use anything, when he needed all the courage I could give him. . . If I told you that two months after he was murdered I found that I was carrying his baby, that I went to a place in Kreuzberg, just a stenographer so I couldn’t afford a clinic, and had the baby aborted, and that Hans’s daughter would now be nine years old, that there isn’t a day when I don’t live with the guilt.. . Would that be enough?’

Josh shook.

His laundry was back in his room.

He caught the radio news — statistics released from the finance ministry put the cost of seven years of unification at a thousand biffion DMs, he made the calculation in his mind, 418,410,040,000 pounds sterling. . . He put the laundered clothes in the drawers of his room.

On the radio news — the chief executive of a chemical plant at Dortmund warned that labour costs now ran at 44DMs an hour in Germany, and at 3.36DMs in the Czech Republic. . . He tried to call his wife. There was no answer.

A statement from the
Rathaus
predicted there could be no further funding for the infrastructure development of Rostock.

He brushed his teeth, washed his hands, changed his shirt and pondered on what he would say to Mr Fleming. He sat in his chair and made notes, because it was, in his opinion, always best to know clearly what to say.

In the Lichtenhagen suburb of Rostock a former schoolteacher from Rerik had fallen to his death from the roof of an apartment block...

He reached for the telephone and unscrewed the cover of the voice box and the ear piece and fastened the coiled wires that ran from a small plastic box. It was one of the better devices, originating from the Technical Section at Vauxhall Bridge Cross. It had been tested, as they said, to destruction and the guarantee was given by the engineers responsible that the equipment made a call proof against a tap.

He dialled the number for the head of German Desk in London. He remembered talking with an Israeli officer a few years before, when relations had been tolerable. French officers and Americans from the Agency and the Israeli of the Mossad section in the London embassy had been hosted by British officers for a weekend at that awful country place down in Surrey. Disgusting food, an old house that was an icebox, and a weekend to discuss the movement of nuclear materials from the Eastern Bloc through Germany and onwards to Iraq, Iran, Libya, wherever . . . Late on the Saturday night, with a shared whisky bottle, the Israeli had made his confessional to Albert Perkins. A Jordanian airforce pilot, young, was being trained under contract by the Germans. A lonely man, far from home. The Israeli officer, tongue loosened by the whisky, had said he controlled the targeting of the trainee pilot. The usual story, an introduction to a female agent, an isolated man finding sex and comfort, his entrapment. The pilot had completed his course, had gone home, and the contact had been renewed, and the threat of disclosure had been made. The pilot’s cousin ran Jordanian vegetables and fruit, every week, across the Allenby Bridge, to the market at Jerusalem. The produce was never stopped, never checked, and his business flourished. The cousin carried, with the vegetables and fruit, reports on the Jordanian airforce and its Iraqi ally to the Mossad. Couldn’t last, such business had only a short shelf life. The pilot and his cousin were arrested in Amman. They were tried for espionage, and hanged. The Israeli’s confessional, slurred through the whisky fumes, was poignant still to Albert Perkins. On the morning of the executions, the morning the pilot and his cousin had been frogmarched to the noose, there had been no remorse in the Mossad offices in Tel Aviv. They were casualties of the game . . . A retired pastor from Rerik was dead, with his wife, from a collision on the road. Now a former schoolmaster was dead, a fall from a high building. . . He had created the situation and made the casualties of the game. Albert Perkins, waiting for the connection, wondered if ever he would feel remorse.

‘Evening, Mr Fleming, Albert here. . . Yes, thank you, it’s been a good day, very good actually...’

Josh sat on the bare mattress with the pillow beside him and the folded bed clothes. Of course, she would have gone alone to the house in Kreuzberg. A woman would have used pills or alcohol or needles. A minimum of recovery time. She would have gone alone, unsteady and shaken, back to Brigade and her room. His head was in his hands. He thought that she had the right to be scarred, and the right to viciousness and cruelty. He had prized the story from her and he felt a cringing shame.

He vomited over his trousers. The tears streamed down Klaus Hoffmann’s cheeks. He coughed the sick from his throat and it fell over the steering wheel on his car and onto his trousers. He was parked up to the west of the city, alone in his car on a farm track, vomit spewed on his trousers.

‘That’s good Albert, that’s well done . . .‘ Praise always went a long way, Fleming reckoned, with a dogged foot soldier of the Service. And a joke was useful.’. . . My advice, Albert, after what you’ve had to sit through, take a cold shower...’

He had written the note on his pad. There were three cassettes on offer. The sale price of the cassettes was, the calculation given him by Perkins, sterling pounds 10,460. He wrote now the names of those who would be needed to authorize a payment of that size, and the names of those who would wish to consider the potentials of the direction in which the matter now ran. And he wrote the name of Dieter Krause and his pen scratched three lines under the name.

Oh, and, Albert, shouldn’t have forgotten them. What news of our intrepid pair . . . I see. Yes, I have that . . . A pastor and a schoolteacher, from Rerik — you don’t have the connection?.. . I see . . . Well, we have to hope for them, don’t we, that they stay sensible, yes?. . . Forgive me, Albert, but I need to push on if I’m to get the authorization. It’s about the time that people go home.. . I’ll call you in the morning.’

It was so peaceful on the river below, and so quiet behind the double glazing around him in his room. He found it difficult, in the peace and the quiet, to imagine, in distant Germany, a small car impacting against the radiator of a heavy goods lorry and a man spiralling down to his death from a great height. . . It was a question of policy. Policy ruled, policy did not permit imagination.

‘Violet, a moment, please...’

He called through the door. She had her coat on, a scarf round her head, and carried her collapsed umbrella and a shopping bag. He didn’t have to apologize. It was not necessary to apologize for destroying Violet’s carefully constructed timetable. It was general talk that she lived alone, had no life outside the Service. He knew the way to soften her.

‘Albert’s done well . . . I need a meeting in an hour. I’ll want the assistant deputy director, someone from Resources, Russia Desk should come and American Desk, and someone to take a note . . . would you emphasize priority, it doesn’t wait till the morning. . . Albert’s done very well.’

She turned away. Already she was awkwardly shrugging out of her coat, then loosening her scarf. They’d have made a good item, the dogged Albert Perkins and the ever dependable Violet. They’d probably have found a little space in the building to bunk up so they’d never have had to leave Vauxhall Bridge Cross, two devoted servants of the Service, perpetually on call for times of priority.

‘Oh, and please . . . Dig me what we’ve stored on Dieter Krause, former MfS, Rostock, so I can have a fast hack at the guts of the brute’s life .

KRAUSE, Dieter Friedrich.

Born: 11.9.1952, at Hessenburg (n.e. of Rostock). Father was horticultural worker, amputee from Normandy 1944. One sister, Petra, born 1954. Mother was horticultural produce packer. Unremarkable childhood. Joined FDJ in 1966.

It was not the influence of his father. His father, without a right leg, was a survivor. His father came through the Nazi childhood, the wound, the arrival of the Red Army, the coming of the Communist regime. His father, the survivor, was
bray,
believed in obedience and correctness towards power. The influence on the child, Dieter, came from the man he called his uncle. The uncle, too, was a survivor and spoke with the guttural accent of an ethnic German from northern Yugoslavia, and had been three years in Tito’s post war prison camps. The uncle taught the child, Dieter, aged twelve, the twin arts of survival and advancement as he had learned them in the prison camp near to Novi Sad. He had also taught young Dieter to understand the mind and character of the Slav Russian without which the distant friendship could not have been bred. He informed, after his first FDJ summer camp, on the other children, on the brigade leader, on what the other children said about their parents. He was given coarse chocolate, and made a unit leader. He had a handler, he was noticed, he tasted power . . And he had learned to fear the loss of power...

Volunteer to Border Guard, 1970. Volunteer for additional six months service. Doctorate of Law, University of Potsdam (MfS sponsorship). Joined MfS, 1976, Normannen Strasse HQ, Berlin. KGB fast track promotion course, Moscow, 1979. Bonn, (importexport cover) 1980. Posted to Rostock, 1981, rank
Unterlea tnant.
Married Eva (née Schultz), FDGB organizer at Neptun shipyard, Rostock, 1981.

On the horticultural farm, a friend of his sister, the daughter of workers in the tomato houses, was Annelore. He had promised, dishevelled, wet, naked, that he would love Annelore all of his life. When he had gone to join the Border Guard, Annelore had come with him on the bus to Rostock, and walked with him onto the platform of the
Hauptbalrnhof,
and waved to him until the train had curved away on the tracks. Sex in the seed store with Annelore when he had returned on leave from the Magdeburg sector. Sex in his mother’s bed, through long afternoons, with Annelore when he had come back for the vacations from the university at Potsdam. There were many girls he could have fucked, sucked, stroked, in Potsdam and when he was posted to Normannen Strasse, but he had stayed faithful to his Annelore. And he had come back to Rostock, and they were to be married. It had been a summer’s evening when he was ordered to the office in August-Bebel Strasse of the
major
who headed the internal security
Abteilung.
Annelore was not suitable. Annelore’s cousin was associated with an environmental action group. Annelore, if he wished for a career in the MfS, should be dismissed from his life . . . He had written to her that evening, four lines . . . He had been introduced the next month to a quite pretty FDGB organizer. He had chased the power, clung to it. He would not lose the power.