The Waiting Time (36 page)

and crabbed and bowed. Accept failure, accept you’re beaten, accept that you have humanity, and begin to live again. Your way, staying, killing another man, taking that responsibility, is to turn your back on everything precious. Love is precious, and fun and happiness — God, Tracy, they are worth reaching for — it’s what your Hansie would have wanted. Me, I’m bloody well finished, won’t ever be love again in my life, but, listen, you have youth. I plead with you to listen. Don’t let what happened destroy you. You can be in London this evening and maybe you will have given a man his life.’

She pulled up onto the hard shoulder. Ahead the road split between the slip-road for the autobahn and Berlin and the route straight ahead, under the bridge carrying the autobahn, to Rostock and Warnemunde.

‘A man, a woman, can be frightened, Tracy, and not be ashamed. Being frightened isn’t weakness. Admit it, Tracy, you’re driven by fear — why you’re so bloody cruel. Too frightened of failure to tell Hans Becker that he should refuse the Rostock job and walk away from it. Too frightened of falling off your little pedestal at Brigade to tell Hans Becker to quit on the Rostock job. And, Tracy, too frightened to do anything but crouch in cover and watch as they dragged Hans Becker off that boat, before he ran . . . But, Tracy, you have no call for shame. People push agents beyond the limit because that’s their bloody job. People hide in cover and don’t intervene because that’s their survival route. You don’t have cause for guilt, believe me. It’s just that you’re the same as all the rest of us, frightened. You’ve done what you could, and more. Please, come back to Berlin...’

She reached across him, unfastened the door beside him and pushed it wide open. She loosed his seat-belt. On the autobahn the traffic thundered by, going south for Berlin. There were kids on the slip-road, with their rucksacks beside them, holding pieces of cardboard on which they had scrawled the names of the cities of Berlin and Düsseldorf and Leipzig and Schwerin and Hamburg.

Josh asked, ‘Is that it?’

‘You wanted an answer. That’s it.’

‘Then your answer is selfish, conceited, egocentric.’

She said quietly, ‘You never listen, and you understand nothing. I will say it again, the last time, I don’t quit.’

He could get out of the car. He could hitch a ride into Rostock and collect his bag from the room at the
pension,
and take the train to Berlin. He could sit on an aircraft flying high in the evening darkness, and know that she searched in the fishing harbour at Warnemunde for a trawler’s deck-hand. He pulled the door shut. He fastened his seat-belt.

Her hands rested loose on the wheel. He saw the jut of her chin.

He took her hand from the wheel. He was his own man. He kissed her fingers as he had in the night when he had thought she slept. It was his own decision. She stared ahead.

‘Thank you,’ she said, small voice. ‘Thank you for staying.’

He said, gruff, ‘Time we were getting on, light’s going.’

She took the car off the hard shoulder, past the slip-road, under the bridge, towards Rostock and the fishing harbour at Warnemunde.

‘I couldn’t, if I left you, live with myself.’

Albert Perkins felt, from his telephoned harangue of his superior, Mr Fleming, a slightly light-headed excitement, and that was as rare to him as had been his loss of temper. He walked the length of Kropeliner Strasse. He imagined, and took a certain pleasure from it, that through the day his superior would have been badgering Violet to use her supremely oiled inter-office communication lines to arrange a meeting, one to one, for Fleming with the ADD, on high. He paused outside the camera shop. The window was empty. The stock of Japanese cameras was gone. He laughed out loud. Done a runner with a vanload of stock and a bagful of banknotes. Good that one bastard had won. Who else would win? The slight young woman with the copper- gold hair? Dreary old Mantle? The former
Hauptman?
One of them must win. .

He walked briskly, a sharp stride, past the low arches of the old gateway at the
Altmarkt
and headed for the Rostock police headquarters. He was thinking that it could, of course, be himself who would win.

* * *

In the embassy on the Sofiyskaya Embankment, in a small room on a high floor, Olive Harris dozed.

She felt at ease, the matter was in place, her schedule was organized. She would rest until the middle evening.

She was grateful that she would not have to refuse the ambassador’s invitation to dine. Ambassadors seldom issued dinner invitations to travelling guests from the Service. They regarded the presence in the embassy of the likes of Olive Harris as pure potential for broken fences and expulsions. She did not expect, or wish, to meet with the ambassador during her short visit to his territory, but he would know she had arrived and he would be fearful of what she might achieve and what rocks might fall later on him.

She disliked being so far from home. Few at Vauxhall Bridge Cross would have believed it, but she missed sleeping with her husband close to her. She would be home the next evening, when the business was done. The local file on Pyotr Rykov, unread, was beside her on the bed. Where she lay, on her side, catnapping, she could see the small photograph frame she always carried away with her, the picture of her husband and her children. It would be a triumph, and the pity was that they, most precious to her, would never know of it.

‘Have another, why not? I always feel that sherry soothes . . . Fly it by me again, the basis of Perkins’s tantrum...’

The assistant deputy director filled Fleming’s glass.

The wickedness of sherry, it’s never too early. I always feel like a guilty schoolboy if it’s gin before six, but any time after five seems decent for sherry. Perkins may be totally disreputable but he is a damn good officer and it would be sad for him to harbour grievances.’

The afternoon had slipped away and the street lights across the river played on the water far below the office.

Fleming said, ‘The usual thing, disjointed nose. The feeling that the dragon woman has hijacked his act, that Moscow Desk is walking over German Desk.’

‘I wouldn’t want a niggle, not about something essentially trivial. . . Now, don’t get me wrong — I’m not in the business of buying off Perkins’s temper, but he’s well due for a step up the ladder.’

‘Always the tried and trusted way, a Special Responsibility peg to hang his coat on.’

‘Special Responsibility for Iran matters in Europe, right up his street.’

Fleming smiled. ‘Go up a grade with that, wouldn’t he? It’s rather a good sherry. Go to grade seven, wouldn’t he?’

He tapped slender fingers on his desk calculator. ‘God, how did we ever do without them? An additional annual increment of, what? £4597.78 should straighten out his nose. I’ve been discussing reorganizations with the DD and we’re thinking about a European Desks supervisory grade, sort of pulling the strings together. This little spat would not have boiled if one man had been in the co-ordinating seat. Your name’s been pencilled in, would be a grade six position.’

‘Just a pencil, not ink?’

‘Early days . . .‘ The ADD refilled Fleming’s glass, and smiled. ‘Well, that’s that, then. Let me just confirm — Perkins, he’s not on a principle kick? It’s merely that Olive elbowed him off centre stage?’

Fleming chuckled. ‘Principle? Perkins wouldn’t know what it means, certainly wouldn’t know how to spell it. I’ll tell him what’s been decided. It’s just about played out over there, and he can see it through, can start his new position on Monday.’

‘First class. You’ve reassured me — I’d have thought we had a real problem if it was the principle thing. It will be a good day tomorrow, I’ve that feeling.’

He had brought the bottle of Scotch whisky and a carton of Marlboro cigarettes. That a degree, small, of civility was shown him was because of the whisky and the cigarettes.

They queued to complain.

‘We’re treated as if we were without value. We’re treated as trash. This garrison camp, and every camp you might care to visit, Colonel, is like a dumping ground for rubbish.’

A long-standing commitment, it had been in his diary for seven months that on this day he should travel to Kubishev and watch the annual showpiece exercise of a motorized rifle division of the strategic reserve based at Volga Military Headquarters. What he had witnessed, in Rykov’s opinion, was a complete and unprofessional shambles.

‘You saw, Colonel, a divisional scale live firing exercise. You would have asked yourself, Colonel, where was the artillery. The absence of the artillery was not because they had no shells to shoot — they did not have shells but they could have gone along for the walk without shells as women who push prams. The regiment of artillery was not present, Colonel, because they were in the fields picking cabbages. If they do not pick their own cabbages they starve.’

He had stood in a bitter wind on a viewing platform and could have wept at what he saw. He had asked the General commanding the division what message should be carried back to the minister in Moscow, and the response of the General had been to gather a group of officers into a small room off the mess. The whisky had been put on the table and the carton of cigarettes had been ripped open. What hurt most was that each of the officers, the most senior to the most junior, spoke as if he believed that Pyotr Rykov had the power to change a situation of desperation. It was as if a message had been telegraphed ahead of him, that he was a man of unrivalled importance.

‘It was a live fire exercise, Colonel, an exercise for the division in manoeuvre, Colonel, but the tanks were static. Why? Because, Colonel, we had enough fuel to send the armoured personnel carriers forward with the infantry, but the tanks use more fuel. We do not, Colonel, have sufficient fuel for the armoured personnel carriers and for the tanks. What is the point of a divisional exercise where the tanks do not move?’

There was a small paraffin heater. He was their guest, and he had brought whisky and a carton of cigarettes, and was given the place of honour closest to the heater. Even the small warmth that it threw was insufficient to stop the shivering tremble in his legs. He thought them proud men. Some wore the ribbons for gallantry in Afghanistan, as he did, and some wore more ribbons for bravery in the pointless farce of Chechnya.

‘When the division attacks, Colonel, there should be supporting fire from the mortar units and from the RPG-7 and the Schmel and Falanga missile units. There was none. May I tell you why they did not fire, Colonel? There are no mortar bombs and no rocket- propelled grenades and no ground-to-ground missiles in the division’s arsenal store. We have sold them, Colonel. The divisional commander ordered it, and I arranged it. Perhaps, now, they are in Palestine or in Somalia or in Iraq, I do not know and I do not care. They were sold so that the division could buy heating oil, so that our soldiers did not die of hypothermia in the winter. I offer no apology, because that is what we are reduced to.’

He had written the statement of concern for his minister, given at a news conference. He listened. He had not known the half of the Army’s despair. It would have been better than anything his minister could have uttered if he had brought these officers to Moscow, given them a bottle of Scotch whisky and then wheeled them in front of the television cameras to speak to their countrymen. The Army had been the strength of Russia, her defence, and now it was humiliated. Pyotr Rykov felt the sting of the shame.

‘We sell, Colonel, to anyone who can pay. If the man who can pay is a criminal, then so be it. Where did the weapons of the Chechen bandits come from, Colonel? Why did they always have adequate reserves of ammunition when they fought us? They had our weapons, Colonel, they had our munitions. Our own weapons and our own munitions, sold to those shit bastards, killed our own troops.’

He was humbled by their belief in him. There was an Antonov transport waiting at the airfield for him. The ground crew, on the apron spraying the de-icing fluid on the wings, could wait. They believed him all-powerful and able to fashion change. He did not interrupt. He did not tell them, look into each of their faces and tell them, that he was now a target for surveillance, or that his driver, waiting for the arrival of the Antonov at Moscow Military, had told him that they waited to see how he responded to a given warning. He did not tell them of the fear that had settled at his back, lain on his stomach, the same fear he had known in the street markets and bazaars of Jalalabad and Herat.

‘My own unit, Colonel, in the exercise today, performed poorly. I can admit that. It performed poorly because it is short of officers. On paper I have under my command forty-seven officers. In the exercise, today, I was deprived of the use of fourteen. They were at work, Colonel. They are attempting to feed their families. They are many things — market traders, salesmen, security guards, taxi drivers — but they are not, any more, soldiers. In addition, adding to my shortage, three of my officers, in the last eight months, have shot themselves because of their sense of humiliation at the state to which the Army is reduced. Do they care in Moscow, Colonel, what they do to the Army?’

Outside the door of the small room off the mess was an armed corporal of the Mifitary Police. Invitation to the room was personally given by the divisional commanding officer. At Kubishev, old practices in new times, there remained the political officers. They would be in their heavy coats with their vodka at the bar of the mess. They would know that Pyotr Rykov listened to chosen officers, and they would report that. It would be known in Moscow before the morning how Pyotr Rykov responded to a warning.