The Waiting Time (39 page)
Authors: Gerald Seymour
Tags: #Mystery & Detective - General, #Fiction - Espionage, #Fiction, #Mystery fiction, #Thriller, #Large print books, #Large type books, #Large Print, #Intrigue, #Espionage
Dieter Krause did what he had never done before: he sidled, walked slowly, past the unlit windows of the big block of red brick and dun concrete on August-Bebel Strasse.
He had never before felt the need to catch at the past. It was, to him, an act of weakness. His window had been on the second floor, the fifteenth window to the right of the main door. The building was now a district court for family and commercial affairs. There was a light in the hallway, behind the main door, but the windows of the second floor were darkened.
He lingered. He stared up. On a Tuesday night, nine years before, the panic call had been switched through to the room on the second floor. Eva had said she was working late that night at the shipyard. If she had not said that she would be working late, he would have been at home when the panic call had come through and the Duty Desk would have handled it, and there would have been delay in finding him. If there had been delay in finding him, if he had been later at the seashore at Rerik then, perhaps, the boy would have drowned in the Salzhaff or, perhaps, the boy would have been taken from the water by the Soviets or, perhaps, the boy would have come ashore and staggered away into the night, but the past could not be altered
The telephone had carried the call, a shrill bell of panic, into his office as he had been slipping on his coat, and he had answered it. .
He gazed up at the window, on the second floor, fifteenth on the right from the main door.
He was the prisoner of the building on August-Bebel Strasse.
If he had not interrupted the shrill call of the telephone so long ago...
Josh lay on his back, the mattress on the floor hard under him.
He tried to think it through and make a plan for the morning, when the trawler boat returned to Warnemunde.
He heard her turning in her bed, and he knew she could not sleep.
There must be a plan for the morning, but he could not make the plan because his mind was cluttered with the day gone by, and the day before that, and the day before that. She heaved on the bed beside him, sighed, grunted as if a decision were made. Her blankets and sheets were pushed back, and he sensed the warmth of her foot close to his head. Her hands lifted the blankets that were tight around him. She snuggled against him, the heat of her body was with him, raw heat. He lay on his back and he clenched his hands tight together.
‘Is it wrong? It can’t be wrong.’
‘I don’t know whether it’s wrong or whether it’s right.’
‘You think of her?’
‘Only the bloody bad times. Only the times I was foul and shouldn’t have been, like it’s guilt. Calling back the good times gets harder.’
The warmth of her was against him. ‘She doesn’t own you, Josh, not now.’
His fingers were locked, entwined, hard as he could hold them. ‘She is all that I have to hold to.’
‘What you said, about afterwards, it doesn’t have to be that.’
Josh said, ‘Her funeral, I can remember it. It’s like it was an hour ago. There was the vicar, the box, the men who carried the box, the solicitor and the accountant, and there was me. We had two hymns and only the vicar sang. They carried the box out and put it in the ground and there was a man behind me with a long-handled shovel and a cigarette cupped in his palm. I wasn’t supposed to see the cigarette. I didn’t want to go, to leave the box, but he coughed, like he was te
ll
ing me that it happened every day and he’d a bloody schedule to keep to, and would I, please, let him get on? The vicar knew the schedule, he shifted me.’
‘Your wife was lucky to have a proper prayer said over her, luckier than my Hans...’
His hands broke apart. He stretched out and she wriggled over his arm. Her head was on his shoulder.
‘It was the little that I knew about love, and it was the little that you knew, Tracy, about love.’
‘You’re making bloody speeches, Josh.’
‘Sorry.’
‘It can be better, afterwards...’
He held her. He felt a fear of her. The fear was that she would laugh at his clumsy love of her. He held her, small, against him. He heard the chuckle murmur from her, and she kissed his neck below his ear and her fingers unfastened the buttons of his pyjama top. He clung to her. He found the small shape, squashed against his chest, of her breasts where the fingers of the boy had been, and the boy was the past, and he believed himself to be the future. The blankets climbed above them. She kissed his mouth and seemed to take from him the oiled salt stench of the water and the cold. He whispered, apologized, that he did not have anything. She whispered, cheerful, that it did not matter. They loved in quiet deep desperation. She was, to him, a child, and his hands moved with gentleness down from the smoothness of her stomach, and he no longer thought of the boy. She was the love light in his life. She gripped, narrow, muscled, small legs, around the width of his hips and across the breadth of his back. Her nails raked his back. He was deep within her. The sweat warmth of his stomach and her stomach shut away the cold. It was love, it was beauty, it was together. She shouted his name . . . his name, not the boy’s name . . . He had reached her and touched her . . . He felt a great slow growing sense of pride, because they were together, because they shared love.
‘You are brilliant, you know that? Not just now, all the time, you are fantastic.’
He came off her, out of her. She lay with her wet warmth on him.
‘Thank you, Knautschke, for giving me happiness, thank you little hippopotamus for coming out of the mud.’
She giggled, ‘Daft bugger.’
She broke his hold. Her thigh was across his waist and her heel massaged between his legs. She leaned across him, her breasts hung fluttering on his chest.
‘What’s afterwards, Josh, for us? Not the crap you told me. What’s afterwards, Josh, for you and me?’
Chapter Seventeen
She lay on him, snuggled on him. The clock on the Marienkirche chimed midnight, big bells. He wanted, desperate for it, the warmth of her to last.
‘There is an afterwards, for us, for you and for me?’
‘It’s what I’m saying.’
He lay on his back on the mattress and he held her tight against him and his fingers played patterns on the small of her back, and her fingers made tangles with the hairs of his chest. To be his own man was to protect himself. He wanted to trust in the afterwards, to believe that it was not a fraud. He had seen it so many times before in the camps in Germany and the camps in the UK, men under stress and women under stress coupling together for strength and deluding themselves that there was an afterwards when the stress time had passed. He had seen the hurt that was left, two people broken, because the stress time was gone and there was no reality of afterwards. She had told him that before he went on the last bad one, the last bad mission, she had loved the boy to give him strength.
‘Is it enough, Tracy, after what we’ve shared, to make an afterwards?’
She kissed him. ‘It is for me, yes.’
He jerked, pushed himself up on his elbows.
She had offered him the prize, the trophy to be won.
He leaned against the cold damp of the wall and he took her face in his hands. He held her cheeks, gripped them, and against his hands was the smoothed narrowness of her neck.
‘I can’t talk about it.’
‘Afterwards is babies, Josh.’
‘I shouldn’t talk about it, because it isn’t finished.’
‘And puppies, Josh, little black bastards, peeing. . . And a place that’s our own, babies and puppies and fields...’
‘If I don’t have a plan then we lose.’
‘And no people, just a home and babies and puppies and fields...’
‘I love you, Tracy. I’m so thankful to you. I want it, your afterwards, I want to be with you for it. Can you understand? I’m so frightened. I don’t have a plan, I can’t think. . . I don’t delude myself, Tracy. If we don’t win tomorrow, there is no afterwards. Loving you, loving me, and I didn’t think it possible that I would find happiness again, find what you’ve given me, but it doesn’t count tomorrow. Have to think, can’t, have to have a plan...’
She slipped off him. The warmth was gone.
Her bed creaked, took her weight.
He tried to think, tried to make the plan. He could not find it and ebbed towards sleep.
‘Did she win?’
‘She won.’
‘You were proud of her?’
‘I was.’
‘Would she be proud of you, Hauptman?’
Gunther Peters oiled his smile. Only the two of them that night in the little annexe corner of the café. Peters let his hand, long thin fingers, rest on the fist of Dieter Krause, and asked his questions with a familiarity, as if the old ranking of
Hauptman
and
Feidwebel
was no longer of importance, as if they were equals. Peters’ fingers held tight on Krause’s fist.
He hesitated, uncertain. ‘I don’t know.’
‘A man is privileged when his daughter is proud of what he does.’
‘That is shit.’
‘I have had several days to think, Hauptman.’ Peters rolled the word on his tongue. He mocked. ‘Over the last several days I have thought of the future...’
‘Tomorrow it is finished, tomorrow is the end of the future.’
‘Tomorrow I go home, Hauptman? Tomorrow, after it is finished, I go home and you pretend I never came? You go to America, you are the big-shot man, you are free to fuck with your new friends, and I go home and you forget me? You don’t believe that, Hauptman, you cannot believe that.’
Krause tried to break the hold of the fingers on his fist. ‘We came together in common purpose and you go when the matter of common purpose is finished.’
‘I come at a price, Hauptman.’
Krause gazed into the eyes of the former
Feidwebel.
Peters had been just a face in the corridors, another junior who had snapped smartly to heel-clicking attention each time they passed, just a face sitting at a desk and the order had been shouted through the open door. They had been chosen, grabbed, commandeered, at random. He gazed into the face and the fingers relaxed on his fist.
‘What is the price?’ Krause growled.
‘That is not gracious, Hauptman, that is not generous.’
‘Tell me what is the price.’
‘I come from Leipzig. I leave my affairs, I cancel a business opportunity. I stay, I don’t run, I stand with you.’
‘What is your price?’
‘You give me orders and I obey them. You involve me, I do not complain. . . and then you wish to forget me, as you would drop the wrapping of a cigarette packet.’
‘What is the goddamn price?’
‘I can do as Hoffmann did, as Siehl and Fischer did. I can walk away. I was only a simple
Feidwebel,
I was carrying out the orders of my superior officer. That is the usual defence, yes? It does not suit me but it is an option. I can go to my car, I can be on the road, I can reach Leipzig by the morning, if a price is not paid.’
‘Tell me the price.’ Sweat beaded on the forehead of Dieter Krause
‘You have new friends?’
‘I have.’
‘Your new friends have influence?’
‘They have influence.’
‘They value you?’
‘What is the fucking price?’
‘Do you want to be alone tomorrow, Hauptman, when the trawler boat comes in? Can you do it yourself, Hauptman, remove the problem? You want to go to America with the problem behind you?’
‘Name the price.’
He talked softly, silky smoothly. ‘You have new friends with influence who value you. They would protect you. You are the ideal partner for me.’
‘Partner in what?’
‘I put cars out of the country, I put munitions into the country. I move money into Germany and out of Germany, and your new friends, if you were my partner, would protect me.’
‘That is criminal activity.’
‘What is it you do now?’ He laughed quietly. His laughter was without noise, without mirth. ‘Without me beside you tomorrow you fail. If you fail you go to the Moabit gaol. That is the price.’
He was trapped. He squirmed. The rat eyes faced him, and the thin fingers were held out to him. He would be, in the Moabit gaol, with the scum and the filth and the addicts and the foreign pimps. He thought he plunged over a cliff and fell, and fell.
Krause took the hand that was offered to him.
There had been no car to meet him at Moscow Military Headquarters.
He had rung the drivers’ pool office at Defence, and he had won no sense out of an idiot: the idiot did not know why he was not met at Moscow Military. He had telephoned his driver’s home and the call had rung out unanswered.
Pyotr Rykov had hitched a lift into the city. A drunk sergeant, veering over the roads, losing himself, had taken him near to his home.
He had walked on the street past the surveillance car, and each of the three men in the car, smoking behind the misted windows, had looked at him without expression.
Pyotr Rykov banged the door shut after him, and woke Irma. She said, sleepy
in
her bed, that the telephone did not work and would he have it fixed in the morning.