The Waiting Time (41 page)

‘Did you feel bad about it?’

‘I felt good.’

‘When you shot at him, did you hate the kid?’

‘It didn’t seem important, didn’t matter.’

She took off her coat and gave him the pouch with the handcuffs and the key. He was back down on his mattress and he pulled the blankets over him. She was throwing her clothes onto the floor. He put the pistol under his pillow. She stood beside his mattress, bare-skinned. She stood above him and he looked up at her thighs and her hair and the tuck of her waist and the hang of her breasts, lit and shadowed by the lamp bulb beside her bed.

Josh said, ‘Afterwards begins when tomorrow is finished. Go to your own bed.’

She searched on the floor for her pyjamas. She switched off the light.

‘Josh.’

‘Yes.’

‘I’ll tell you the plan in the morning.’

‘Do that,’ he grunted.

‘Josh . .

‘Go to sleep.’

‘Josh, do you hate him? Do you hate Dieter Krause?’

The hard shape of the pistol was sharp through the pillow and gouged at the flesh of his face.

He said, soft, ‘The kid had bright eyes. I can see his eyes. He was only a target. It’s what Dieter Krause is, only a target.’

The dawn came onto the old streets and old timbered buildings that the Hanseatic trading merchants had known half a millennium before, and onto the new streets and new concrete blocks that the Communists had planned a quarter of a century before, and onto the bright paintwork of the businesses of the newest gauleiter that sold Japanese cameras and cars and television sets. The dawn came to the city of Rostock.

It blew the mist and painted a grey pastel over the dock cranes that lined the Unterwarnow channel and the shipyards up the sea, way towards Warnemunde and the cold Baltic emptiness. The dustcarts roamed the streets, and those with work huddled in the carriages of the S-Bahn trains, drove iced-up cars and scurried on the bitter pavements.

The cold came across the flatlands from the Polish border and across the tossed sea from Finland and the Arctic waste. It was the same grey dawn that the city had known when the occupying armies had tramped through the old streets and through the new streets, that had followed the night raids of the bombers, that had come after the announcements of the closure of the shipyards and the docks.

The city was listless to suffering. The kids were pitched through their front doors to find their way to school. The city was indifferent to violence. The oldest went for comfort in prayer to the Marienkirche and the Nikolaikirche and the Petrikirche. The youngest went in search of work and hope. The newest culture of the city was self and survival. The people of the city, as the grey dawn came, lived lives dictated by the past. The past lived in Rostock.

On the radio, the announcer said that another low pressure trough approached fast from the north and the west, that after a dull dry morning there would be rain showers followed by sleet showers followed by persistent snow showers.

That day, unremarkable, ushered in by a chill grey dawn, the city and the flatlands around it, and the sand dunes and the deep tossed waters of the Baltic, would again be a battlefield, and there would be few who would recognize the combat.

The radio announcer wished his listeners a happy and successful day.

Chapter Eighteen

He sat very still.

He had drawn back the curtain and a dreary light seeped into the room. He sat on the hard chair and he held in his hands the Waither PPK pistol. He had stripped it and cleaned the working parts with the duster that he kept with his shoe-polish tins, and reassembled it. He held the pistol tight in his hands as if the feel of it would give him strength. He had taken each of the bullets from the magazine and then he had reloaded it because it was his experience that the breech mechanism of the Walther PPK could jam if the rounds were left too long in the magazine.

He sat on the hard chair and looked down the length of her bed. He could see only the red autumn of her hair. She lay on her side and the bedclothes were close around her. Beside him was his grip bag and her rucksack, packed. It would be finished before tonight. After he had buffed his shoes, especial attention to the toe-caps, and after he had cleaned the working parts of the pistol and reassembled it, he had put the duster into the cloth sack, closed his grip bag and locked it. He had started, then, on her clothes. They had been scattered, haphazardly, on the rug and on the linoleum, and he had handled each item of her clothing with care as if it were precious. On the dressing table, neatly folded, were a sweater for her, a T-shirt with a Mickey Mouse motif, the bra she had worn the day before, the last of her clean knickers, the final pair of unused socks and the best of her jeans. He had left her wash-bag on top of her filled rucksack for when she woke, and her anorak. He had cleaned the room with his handkerchief, wiped each surface, sanitized the room. At the end of the morning, they would go, leave the room, and it would be as if they had never been there. His mattress and the pillow and blankets were already in the room next door, and the bed was made. He wore the good suit he had brought with him, a clean white shirt, the green tie and the polished black shoes. He had shaved with care so that he did not cut himself and had used a fresh blade. He had combed his hair and left an exact parting. It had seemed important to him. He sat and watched her and held the pistol. He did not understand how, at the dawn of the last day, she could sleep in such peace and calm . . . but he understood so little of her. He loved her, and knew nothing of her. The pistol was gripped in his hands, and the light of the last day settled on her hair.

‘Aren’t you going to shave today?’

He had come home late in the night. They had lain in the bed, separated. Sometimes, early in the morning, he went downstairs and brought her a cup of decaffeinated coffee, and sometimes a grapefruit juice, not that morning. He had dressed, he had shouted for Christina and told her it was time for her to be up. He was wearing the trousers he had used the day before, dirty and dried out from scrambling up the river’s bank, and the same shirt.

He reached up and lifted down from the top of the wardrobe the suitcase, good leather, which they had bought him for his journey to England, and dumped it on the bed. He thought it necessary that he should pack it now. He did not know when the day would be finished, or how it would finish. She kicked her legs out of the bed.

She sneered, as she left the room, ‘Are you going to take the appearance, on your last-chance day, of a refugee migrant?’

All the clothes that he packed in the suitcase were new, and the shoes. They had chosen everything that he packed, walked in the stores with him and told him what was suitable. Raub had cleared his old wardrobe and drawers, Goldstein had taken the old suits, shirts, ties and shoes to a charity shop on Doberaner Strasse. The schedule was in his mind — what he would wear when they came off the plane at Washington, what he would wear at the Pentagon and at the Agency and at the Rand Corporation. He packed the suitcase. He heard Christina’s radio playing loud, and he heard her in the bathroom. Raub had shown him, with the superior grimace, how he should pack so that his new shirts were not creased in the case. He closed it and fastened the combination lock.

He took the Makharov pistol from the drawer beside the bed, put the spare magazine in his coat pocket, checked the safety, and armed the weapon so that the first bullet was in the breech. He carried his case down the stairs. He remembered, when he was in the hallway putting the case down by the street door, that he had not picked up the photograph of Eva and Christina in the silver- plate frame from beside the bed, but he did not go back up the stairs for it. He went into the living room.

The lightness of the robe and the sheer silk of the nightdress lay on her legs and on her breasts and on her hips. She had the old photograph album in her hands. There was little enough in the new house of their old life, but the album with the frayed and disintegrating cover was from the past. He walked behind her and rested his hands on her shoulders. She turned the pages of the album for him as if to taunt him . . . Dieter Krause and the wife of Dieter Krause and Pyotr Rykov and the wife of Pyotr Rykov, in the kitchen of the commanding officer’s house on the base with bottles on the table and the used plates, glasses raised. She turned the page. At the picnic site on the south side of the Malchiner See, the men in shorts and the women in swim costumes, and he did not have his arm around Irma Rykov and she had her arm around Pyotr Rykov, and they were laughing... Another page. His fingers were hard on the bones of her shoulders . . . Pyotr Rykov standing behind her, close, and she held the fishing rod, he guided her cast of the lure, and they were laughing . . . His fingers ground at the bones of her shoulders, but she did not cry out . . . Pyotr Rykov in his best dress uniform with his arm around Eva Krause, and they were laughing at the man who held the camera. . . He held her so that he would hurt her. She looked up at him and she taunted him.

‘He was your friend.’

He loosed his fingers from her shoulders. He scraped the photograph, Pyotr Rykov with his arm around Eva Krause, from the album, tore it into small pieces and dropped them on the new carpet.

‘You boast that he was your best friend . . . and you betray him.’

He destroyed the photographs. He tore to tiny broken pieces the images of his wife and Pyotr Rykov as they laughed.

‘You take him on the street. You are like a pimp with a whore. You sell him.’

What he had done was for her. Krause laid the album with the empty pages back on her lap. From the first day he had always told himself, he had gone to Cologne for her, and made his statement. He went to the wooden cabinet beside the television set for which he had the only key. He took the video-cassette, knelt and slotted it into the recorder. He switched on the recorder and the television. He would say to himself, and he would believe the lie, that everything he had done was for her.

He stood, again, behind her, his hands heavy on her shoulders, and watched, as the old clothes were ripped from her body, her kneeling in front of his friend, her loosening the belt and trousers of his best friend, her taking Pyotr Rykov in her mouth. . . She did not fight him. She did not turn away her head or close her eyes.

The week after he had shot dead Hans Becker in the small square near the church at Rerik, he had been called into the office of the
Generalleutnant
in the building on August-Bebel Strasse and he had been given the video-cassette. He left her watching the monochrome images of loving and laughter.

He told Christina that her mother was not well and should not be disturbed. He drove his daughter to school, and they talked in the car about the tennis match in the evening.

* * *

The station chief drove.

She had dressed herself that morning with particular consideration. Olive Harris had left in her bag, stowed in the locked boot of the station chief’s car, her scarf and the hat that was a memento of her previous times in Moscow. They would have obscured her face and the profile of her head, would have hindered recognition of her features. It was her style to leave utile to chance.

A light snow squall fell on the street. She peered between the wipers, recognizing what she had reconnoitred the night before. The shops were still shuttered but the first queues of the day had formed. The first market stalls were being set up and the vegetables laid out. She made the gesture for the station chief to slow. The shift duty of the watchers was changing. They should allow the new surveillance team time to settle and absorb. Two hundred metres down the straight street, blurred by the snow squall, was the old apartment block that she recognized where the target of consequence lived. They had not spoken that morning. He had been waiting in the hallway of the embassy for her. She had no need to speak to him. If the fool cared to sulk... They drove past the new surveillance car, three men, and the front passenger had a camera slung loose on a strap hanging from his neck. She pointed to where he should park ahead of the car, splitting the distance between the surveillance position and the street door of the apartment. The car would have a clear line of sight on them.

They waited. She had expected that a ministry car would be outside the street door. She had the photograph of him. He would be wearing uniform. She had no doubt that she would recognize him.

She checked again, for the third time, that her ticket and British Council diplomatic passport were in her bag. He gripped her arm, his face was cold and hostile, and he pointed. It annoyed Olive Harris that she had been looking in her bag and had needed to be alerted.

He was on the pavement. Quite small, but heavy in the Army greatcoat. His cap seemed to her too big for him and was low on his head. There was a woman with him, wrapped well against the cold: she carried two large shopping bags and a piece of paper. In between looking up and down the street for his driver, he checked the paper with her.. . God, how pathetic, a ranking colonel close to the greatest power in the Russian state was looking over his wife’s shopping list, pitiful . . . He kissed her cheek, awkwardly because of the depth of the peak of his cap, and she walked away.

Olive Harris felt no emotion. She checked that her bag was fastened. She sensed, beside her, the contempt of the station chief, but when she was back in London she would bury him, deep, so he squealed. Colonel Pyotr Rykov was isolated, alone, on the pavement in front of the street door.