The Waiting Time (32 page)

‘I talk,’ Josh said, cold. ‘We are quite close. There won’t be any more lectures or much more history . . . I talk and you write it down.’

The man walked away, his hands thrust deep in the pockets of his old coat, and was lost among the first tourists of the day.

Heinz Gerber had been sweeping the roadway that led past the scale-sized model of the Vergeltungswaffe 2, past the old Me 163, the MiG-21 and the MiG-23 on their concrete stands. It was his job, each day, to sweep the roadway from the
Feld Salon Wagen
that had been used by the former ministers and generals, and which was now a café, and clear the rubbish and wrappings all the length of the roadway to the harbour where the Type P21 gunboat was moored. He was qualified to sweep the roadway because he had once been in charge of the refuse collection of a small town. The people he worked with did not know of his former life. It was his nightmare, lived alone in the dark hours of the single room he rented in Karlshagen, that it should be known he was a man accused of thieving precious money from his church . . He could never go back. There had been silence in the street when he had left his home. They had all believed it, that he had stolen from the church box, because it was what they had been told.

When he had first come to Peenemunde it had been to clean and scrub the sleeping quarters of the conscript soldiers of the military base. When they had left, he had been given the work of sweeping and brushing the roadway of the new museum.

He had finished the work, brushed the small heap of paper, dirt and wrappings on to his shovel. He had tipped the heap into his wheelbarrow. The roadway behind him was cleaned. He had left the wheelbarrow there, near to the model of the Vergeltungswaffe 2, with the brush and shovel laid neatly on it. He loved his work. He had gone to the store shed, near to the models of the SA2B and SA5 ground-to-air missiles, and lifted a coil of rope down from a nail. He loved to work with his brush and shovel and wheelbarrow, and he did not care whether the heat stifled him or whether it rained or whether the snow came.

He walked out, past the big Soviet troop-carrying helicopter, towards the pine forest and the path he took each day to and from his single room in Karlshagen. He loved the daylight: the nightmare only came with the darkness. He carried the rope into the forest, where the light was shut out by the high canopy.

Josef Siehl watched them pay the woman at the kiosk and take the tickets. He recognized her because he had seen her sit beside the lighthouse on the breakwater and throw flowers into the sea. He watched from his car. He recognized the man who had held the
Leutnant
and threatened to kill him, and he had believed the man. He watched them speak to the woman in the kiosk, who shrugged and pointed towards the roadway and the aircraft and the models of the rockets.

The brevity of her note was typical of Olive Harris.

An hour before the meeting she had circulated it to the personal assistant of the deputy director general, with copies to the assistant deputy director and to Fleming of German Desk. She had sat at her desk late into the previous evening, and she had come again early to Vauxhall Bridge Cross to check the note and make some, few, slight revisions to the text. Olive Harris succeeded, in a man’s world, by the clarity of her thought and by the instant dismissal of what she regarded as unnecessary.

She explained the concept of her plan.

‘The so-called seekers after truth — the young woman, Barnes, and the man who has tagged on to her, Mantle — they are unimportant. She is directed by sentimentality, he is governed by naïve notions of retribution. They are a minor sideshow and should be ignored.’

The deputy director had come down from his quarters high in the building to the office suite of the assistant deputy director. He listened without comment, his angled chin supported by his fists, his elbows on the table. It would be his decision.

‘Krause is irrelevant. He is a small-time bit player. Whether he committed murder in cold blood is of no concern to us.’

The coffee provided by the assistant deputy director remained untouched, the biscuits uneaten. He would never interrupt Olive Harris and would seldom contradict her.

‘The carping between the German agencies, BfV and BND, and ourselves on the issue of influence in Washington is frankly demeaning. It may be sustainable by dwarf-sized minds. If we seek a position of supremacy then we should justify that position by achievement, not by whining.’

Fleming sat beside her. He had sniffed when she had sat down and he reckoned that she wore no scent.

‘But Perkins, plodding in Rostock, has provided us with the ammunition for sniping at a target of consequence. The situation

— we have the growing restlessness of the Russian military, we have a defence minister being kicked towards action, we have a minister gaining increasing popularity from the officer corps of the military, we have the ever present frustration of the military for the current civilian leadership. That is the situation. Behind the minister, with obvious and dominant influence over him, is Colonel Pyotr Rykov. He is a target of consequence. Do they want — in Downing Street, in the White House, the Elysee, in the Quirinale — a military government in Russia? Do they hell. They prefer civilian corruption, political inefficiency, the chaos we have at present. I want those video-tapes for myself. I have explained how they should be used, because they provide us with the opportunity to target Colonel Pyotr Rykov.’

She looked each of them, in turn, in the eye. Fleming looked away. The assistant deputy director dropped his head. It would be the deputy director’s decision.

‘Thank you, Olive. It can be assumed that you’re known in Moscow?’

She said, scornful, ‘Of course I’m known.’

‘It can be assumed that you would be recognized?’

She said, proud, ‘Of course I would be recognized.’

Then, on a misty dank morning, in the cream and green building that dominated the southern bank of the Thames river, they diverted attention from the former Hauptman Dieter Krause to Colonel Pyotr Rykov. It was done with effortless ease.

The meeting broke.

Fleming walked back to his office. He felt crushed and knew it was because he had not spoken out.

The woman in the kiosk had said that they would find Heinz Gerber sweeping the roadway. There was no one sweeping the roadway. They had waited by the abandoned wheelbarrow.

The man who painted the aircraft had said that Heinz Gerber might have gone for his
Pinkel pause,
and explained how long in each hour it was permitted to go to the lavatory. They had stood outside the toilet block at the front of the power station.

‘Where the bloody hell is he?’

‘I don’t know — how would I know?’

‘If you hadn’t spent so bloody long jerking off with all that crap about principles, boring the arse off me—’

‘I want to find him, Tracy, as much as you want to find him — maybe more. And your foul little mouth won’t help me to find him.’

She sagged. ‘Where is he, Josh, please?’

‘We just have to look again.’

Albert Perkins walked from the bank near his hotel back into the old walled city. The street, leading up from the mighty shape of the Marienkirche, was filled with old men and old women. Little slipped by the eyes of the intelligence officer from Vauxhall Bridge Cross. He thought that the faces of the older men and women showed the despair that came from a lifetime of sustained defeat. The oldest men would have gone from these streets to the battlefields of Stalingrad and Kürsk and north Africa and France, and defeat. The oldest women would have seen the Red Army come, and the Stasi and the
apparatchiks
of the Party, and would have hugged their thoughts to their chests, and known the fear that was defeat.

The shop was empty, again. He walked inside.

He was led to the back. The former
Oberstleutnant
unlocked the heavy door and led him down the steps into the museum cellar.

‘You have the money?’

‘You wish to check?’

Each of the video-cassettes was inserted into the player and the first thirty seconds of each was shown on the screen. . . More than a flight of fancy for Albert Perkins. God’s truth, they had kept him awake and aroused and tossing. They were wrapped in brown paper and put in a plastic supermarket bag. He handed over the envelope and watched the man count the money, hundred-DM notes, interminably slowly, with concentration. Perkins’s eyes meandered. It was the weathered log that intrigued him most, with the peeled bark. If it had been by his feet, in Bushy Park close to his home, if the grass had grown around it, he did not believe he would have noticed it.

There was a chuckle behind him. ‘It is good, yes? I think you copied it, I think you used a copy in Ireland. I think we were the first. I think we were the best, yes?’

Perkins smiled, so friendly. ‘You were the best, yes, which is why you now sell Japanese cameras that cannot be paid for.’

The former
Oberstleutnant
grinned cheerfully. ‘I do not take offence. The world changes, we adapt or we die. I do not complain. You should know I have a great pride in the quality of material on those three tapes. I went, a year before the end, to Leipzig to help with their surveillance techniques. It was two days before the Christmas of nineteen eighty-eight. There was a party that night and I showed my material. I received a standing ovation, I was applauded for its quality. Why do you wish to hurt them?’

‘Hurt who?’

‘When you buy a ten-year-old film of Frau Krause fucking with a Russian officer, then you go into the gutter to hurt either Frau Krause or the Russian officer. What have they done to you that they deserve to be hurt?’

Perkins turned away. He climbed the steps out of the cellar, he crossed the shop, he did not wish the man a good day. He walked out onto the street.

A week before, seven clear days, if he had been told that he could go to Peenemunde, Josh Mantle would have hugged the man who gave him the invitation. It should have been the place where the bare pages of books took life. He would have yearned, seven clear days before, to walk in that place of history.

It was the fourth time that they had tracked the length and breadth of the museum area.

He no longer cared for the history.

He had been through the smaller museum that housed the wartime exhibits — and his eyes had not caught the photographs of the V2 development, or the encased slave-labourer’s uniform that dressed a dummy, or the little personal possessions of the test pilots who had flown the Me 163 jet prototypes, or the artist’s impression of the Lancaster bombers over Peenemunde.

The wheelbarrow was still in the roadway, filled, with the brush and shovel placed carefully on the rubbish.

He had scrutinized the tourists on the benches and at the picnic tables beside the aircraft on their stands. He had gone into the graveyard area of the helicopters that needed renovation before they could be displayed. He had walked among the missiles. He had been through the power station building that proclaimed the site as the ‘Gateway to Outer Space’ where the displays boasted ‘Peenemunde to Canaveral’.

A man with a wet cloth cleaned pictures on the stairs. He had wiped the portrait photograph of Walter Dornberger, then soaked his rag, squeezed the moisture from it and started on the portrait of Wernher von Braun. Josh hadn’t seen him before.

Did the man know where Heinz Gerber could be found? He would be sweeping the roadway. No, not in the roadway, Josh told him, and not in the lavatory, not anywhere.

The face of the slow, dull man shook, as if he were puzzled that he had forgotten. Methodically he rubbed at the glass over the portrait of Werhner von Braun. ‘I remember . . . He was the start. Doktor von Braun was the beginning of everything the Americans have done. All of their rockets start with what Doktor von Braun created here. . . I remember. He was going to the path. I think he was going home. I remember that I wondered why he was going home. He goes home on the path through the forest.’

‘I am so sorry to trouble you. You are very gracious, Doktor.

A man yesterday fell to his death from the roof of a block in Lichtenhagen — one of those awful places built by the old regime, a desert of concrete. I would not have thought the matter involved the BfV, except that two foreigners had visited the apartment in which the fatality lived, British foreigners. That is peculiar because Lichtenhagen is an extraordinary place for foreigners to visit. He was a retired school-teacher from Rerik, which is west along the coast, but was now living in Lichtenhagen.’

He was young for the job. All through the morning he had hesitated from making the call. If he had stayed in Dortmund, he would have been, with his experience and seniority, the third man in the chain of command. He had gone east, joined the migration flood of
Wessis,
gone on the fast run of promotion and extra salary, taken the position of police chief for the city of Rostock. AU morning the report had been on his desk and he had hesitated before ringing a senior official of the BfV in Cologne. With greater age and greater experience he would either have made the call two hours before or dumped the report in his Out tray. His deputies were all
Ossis,
men of greater age and greater experience, and all had been passed over for the job of police chief for the city. He rarely asked them for advice: to have done so would have seemed to confirm their prejudice against him.