The Waiting Time (42 page)

She walked from the car. When she crossed the road she made certain that she looked up the street towards the surveillance car. They should see her face clearly from it, and her greying hair that was gathered in a clip above the nape of her neck.

He looked once more at his watch. She was sufficiently close to him to see the annoyance on his face. It was always a precious moment, exciting to her, when the face of a target replaced a photograph’s image.

She walked forward slowly, looked furtively behind her, then hurried towards him. He was trying to wave down a taxi but it swept past.

She reached him. Olive Harris stood in front of Colonel Pyotr Rykov. She spoke to him. She stood at the angle which guaranteed that the long lens in the surveillance car would have a sharp view of her face. She asked him about the weather and about the price of heating oil, and saw his bewilderment. She took his hand, and saw his confusion. For a moment she held his hand . . . She spun on her heel and did not look back at him. She was in full view of the long lens in the surveillance car. She dropped her head, and held her arm up and over her face, as if to shield it from any long lens. She swept open the door of the car.

The station chief sat stolid beside her and stared ahead. She slammed the door shut.

‘Well, come on, get a move on. Don’t hang about.’

He recited quietly,
‘Nescio quis teneros oculus mi/u fascinat agnos.
..‘

‘What the hell’s that?’

The station chief drove away. He said, ‘I could see it in the mirror, the camera was up, they’d have banged off best part of a roll . . . It’s Virgil, from his
Bucolics,
it’s the evil eye that has the power to bewitch lambs. It’s evil destroying innocence . . . The airport, Mrs Harris?’

She brushed the snow off her shoulders and off her hair. He had gone three blocks when he reached into his jacket pocket and took out a gummed-down envelope with no name and no address on it. He handed it to Olive Harris.

‘It’s my resignation letter. Please, be so good as to deliver it to the head man. Of course, I’ll be expelled after this little charade, but I’d like my letter in first. I have to believe, Mrs Harris, that we’re all answerable for our actions. One day. I hope, one day, you feel true shame. The airport, right?’

She put the envelope in her bag. She looked out at the streets of the Moscow morning. She wanted to see them, remember them, because she would never return.

He was unannounced.

A marine guard escorted him from the hail, up in the elevator, along the corridor, past another marine and through the bombproof door, to the rooms used by the Agency.

‘What the hell’s with you?’

‘I’ve seen, Brad, what I call the evil eye. Sorry, it’s not the time for riddles, sorry . . I feel rather sick, and I’d quite like to hit someone. You have the resources, we do not, so I’m here with the begging bowl. The evil eye — sorry, again, sorry — has fallen on Rykov. We expect, don’t ask me details, that Pyotr Rykov, in the next few hours, will be arrested.’

‘You kidding? You know that? How the hell do you know that?’

‘We’d like to know when it happens — your resources are so much better.’

‘What’s the charge?’ the Agency man asked, distant. ‘If Rykov is arrested, what’s the charge?’

‘Espionage.’

‘Are you saying he’s your man? Holy shit! That’s not true. Not your man?’

‘We’d like to be told, like your resources, to watch for it. I’ll be out of here in a day or so, and we won’t meet again. I don’t wish to evade responsibility. Yes, we’ve done that.’

He could not look into the eye of the man who had been his colleague. He shuffled for the door. He would go home and he would tell his wife that the children’s things should be packed, that they were going home, that the future was uncharted. He would tell his wife that he had not been able to look into the eye of an honourable man.

The marine, waiting outside the door, escorted him back to the embassy hallway.

‘Where is he, Frau Krause?’

They had come to the house in the
Altst-adt.
Raub had rung the bell beside the door. The house was luxury compared to the home he could afford in Cologne. Goldstein had banged with his fist on the door’s panels. No answer, and they had gone to the window. She had been sitting in the chair facing the television. Raub had called through the window glass and Goldstein had rapped it, but she had not moved from the chair. The door had been unlocked. They had entered without invitation and gone into the living room.

‘It is important, Frau Krause, that you tell us where is your husband.’

The light material of the robe had fallen away from her legs and sagged on her chest. She faced the television. Raub flushed. Goldstein stared at the clean shape of her legs under the silk smooth nightdress and the darkness at her groin and the hang of her breasts. She stared at the snowstorm television picture. Goldstein thought a video had played on the television and reached its end.

Raub said, ‘It is critical for your husband’s future and your future, Frau Krause, that you tell us where we may find him.’

Her eyes were pale, without lustre. Her hands moved, clasping and unclasping. On the carpet was a photograph album with blank pages. She did not acknowledge the questions. Torn scraps of photographs were on the floor, ripped too small for Goldstein to recognize their content. She did not look at Raub. He went to the television and turned it off. She still stared at the screen.

Raub barked, ‘It gives me no pleasure, Frau Krause . . . but, then, I have no pleasure in working with your husband. I despise your husband. I work with your husband because that is my duty

Now, Frau Krause, it gives me less pleasure to remind you that we own you. We own everything of you and your husband. Where is he?’

The blood ran in Raub’s cheeks.

‘You are nothing, Frau Krause, without us. You are back in the gutter with the other Stasi scum dirt without us. Without us he is driving taxis, sweeping streets, se
ll
ing insurance on commission, guarding building sites at night. Where has he gone?’

With slow, deliberate movements she eased two rings from her fingers — Goldstein remembered paying for the rings that Krause had chosen - and they sparkled in the palm of her hand. She unhooked the clasp of the gold bracelet — Raub had paid for the bracelet when he had first come to debrief Krause in Rostock — and it folded into the palm of her hand. She fiddled with the fastening of the strap of her wrist-watch — Raub and Goldstein had both been with her, on the orders of the senior official in Cologne, to buy the watch as a mark of his appreciation at the end of the first month of the debrief — and she let it fall into the palm of her hand.

‘The last time, Frau Krause, or it goes badly for you, or your attitude is reported, or you go back where you belong in the gutter. Where is he?’

She threw the two rings and the bracelet and the wrist-watch with the gold strap on to the floor, near Raub’s feet. She never looked at him. Goldstein knelt and pocketed them. He was close to the photograph scraps. He recognized the face. It would be magnified behind the jewel in Washington, as it had been behind the jewel at the barracks in England. He thought the life was gone from her eyes.

They went out into the street. Raub followed Goldstein. He left the street door wide open. They hurried against the wind towards the car.

‘Heh, Ernst, if — hey, if — we get the shit bastard to America, what then?’

‘Dumped.’

‘Hey, Ernst, but he thinks he comes on the payroll, he thinks he’s permanent.’

‘Dumped, when he is no longer of use. Dumped.’

They had sat in the room all through the morning.

Earlier, when she had woken, the sound of the vacuum cleaner had seeped up the stairs, along their corridor and through their door.

She had gone to the bathroom, then dressed without shyness in front of him. She had talked, a long time back, through her plan and he had nodded his agreement. He was a man more comfortable when he was alone and he did not believe in talk that was not necessary. With their own silence, with their own thoughts, they killed the morning. They would talk afterwards, when it was finished. He had sat all morning with the pistol in his hand and she had sat on the bed and picked imagined dirt from under her fingernails.

Josh stood. He broke the silence.

‘You ready?’

‘Ready.’

He picked up his grip bag and reached for her rucksack. She shook her head. He carried his bag out of the room and she hitched her rucksack onto her shoulder. They went down the stairs. She murmured her anthem song. He thought she murmured its words to give herself strength. Afterwards, he would hug her. He would kiss her, if they were not on trolleys in the morgue...

The man who had the overcoat and the oil-slicked hair counted their money, note by note. He leered at them as he hung the two keys on the hooks behind him, and he wished them a good day.

They went out through the doors of the
pension
and the sleet storm hit them.

They hurried to the car.

Josh drove.

She was small, quiet, beside him and it was hard for him to believe in her strength. He felt a humility. Her strength was love. He had, as he drove, a sense of pride that she shared her love with him at the time when there was no going back. He would fight for that love, and shoot for it, and kill to deserve that love.

Peters smoked.

The smoke, acrid, from his cigarettes, carried on the wind gusts, was in Dieter Krause’s nostrils.

The gutting shed was idle and the fleet, excepting WAR
79,
was in the safe harbour. The storm winds came from the sea. The stalls were shuttered against the wind, which shook the plank sides and rattled the wood awnings. They could see the length of the quayside and there was one space for one boat. Peters looked for the young woman and the older man. . . Krause looked out to sea. The white sleet gathered on his coat, clung to his eyebrows and hung on the stubble bristle at the edges of his beard.

From behind, without warning, his shoulder was slapped, hard.

‘Eh, Dieter, you look like you’re dead.’ Peters laughed. They were no longer the
Hauptman
and the
Feidwebel.
They were equals. They had shaken hands on a partnership. ‘You look like you’re fucking dead . . . Wrong, Dieter, they should look, when they come, like they’re fucking dead.’

Krause stared up the length of the quayside. He waited, the old Makharov pistol in his belt.

He had spoken to Mr Fleming.

Albert Perkins presented himself at the reception desk of police headquarters.

Fleming had told him, on Secure, tangled in the wires, sitting on his bed, of the Special Responsibility peg and the elevation to grade seven. He had walked, almost a jaunty step, from the hotel.

He was escorted to the control and communications area and saw them. They had been given a table to sit at across the area from the bank of screens and the radio input equipment.

‘Morning, Doktor Raub, and good morning to you, Julius. A pleasure to see you again.’

Albert Perkins basked in a sense of mischief.

‘Come to escort your vile man across the ocean, I see. But you are here and he is not, which tells me that you don’t have control. Exasperating, yes, when control is lost?’

He walked towards them. He pulled up an additional chair and sat himself at their table.

‘To us, you understand, this is a sideshow. Because you’re way off the top table this is important to you — not to us. We already sit at the top table. Actually, I feel considerable sympathy for you, this being so important to you.’

The mischief gave Albert Perkins satisfaction.

He doubted that he would ever again in his professional life achieve such an opportunity for baiting. It would be his last throw for the recall of the good days, the old days, when the Service had stature over the BfV.

He sat comfortably in his chair and smiled kind warmth at the suppressed hostility of Raub and the undisguised dislike of Goldstein. The chance would not come again, and he milked it.

‘Forgive me if I bore you but, because it is only a sideshow to us, I feel rather relaxed today. You don’t seem to me, Doktor Raub, to be relaxed — nor you, Julius. You don’t seem to be taking today in your stride. How many bodies is it now, scattered around the countryside? It’s the messy old business of evidence, yes? If evidence is produced, if evidence of murder is laid before you, then there’s no way out. Evidence, in open court, of your involvement with a murderer would be a nasty pill to swallow. So, we’re just going to have to sit back and see what happens, what that young woman achieves, yes?’

It was, and Albert Perkins recognized and enjoyed it, a virtuoso performance in insult.

‘I meant, sincerely, the sympathy. You are dogged by the past. You have made a great nation, a nation of engineers and technicians, musicians and artists, but it is never enough to turn away the past. You are never at ease because wretched little people like me will not allow you to forget the past. Always you are condemned to carry blame for the past. The past is the bad
Pfennig
in your pocket, Doktor Raub, and I expect young Julius doesn’t spare you with blame for the past. So unfair . . . Right now, what I would really appreciate is a cup of coffee.’