The Waiting Time

Chapter Eleven

Right now… What would you be doing…?’

‘What do you mean?’ She lay on the bed, on her stomach, chin resting against her fists.

‘What would you be doing, if this hadn’t happened?’

‘Does it matter what I’d be doing?’

He was on the hard chair, bent forward and polishing his shoes. ‘Of course it doesn’t matter. I was just making conversation – you know, communication. But if you don’t want to tell me, if it’s a secret..

Josh had slept poorly. He’d had a wretched night on the mattress against the door. Each time he’d been awake, each time he’d drifted back to consciousness from the dreams, images, moments of half memory, he had heard the sweet regular breathing of Tracy. She had slept, an innocent, a child, beside him while he had been tossed by the image of the young Guatemalan soldier with the ropes round his ankles and his wrists and the blood dribbling from his nose and from his lips.

He slipped his feet into the polished shoes, began to lace them. The top buttons of her pyjama jacket were unfastened. He could see the hang of her breasts. His fingers fumbled with the laces.

She would have wanted him to see the hang of her breasts. He felt the blood rush through him. She rolled over on to her back and stared at the ceiling and the single burning bulb under the plastic shade. He could see the outline of her breasts and the drop of her waist and the rise of her hips.

She glanced at her watch. She said, ‘About this time, I’d have been heading down to G/3…’

‘A bit early.’

I like to get in early. Got G/329 to myself if I’m in early. The rest of them are filling their faces at breakfast then… Check the messages in overnight on the printer, do the decipher if it’s necessary. Sort out the Major’s day, can’t wipe his bum unless it’s down on his schedule. Put the Captain’s programme in place, useless and idle sod… Sorry, shouldn’t talk like that of officers, ‘cos you were an officer… Best time of the day, early, before the Major and the Captain come in. Sort everything out so it’s tidy, so there aren’t surprises..

‘Why didn’t you get to sergeant?’

‘Is that your business?’

‘No, it’s not my business…’

He frowned. He didn’t understand why she kept him far away, beyond arm’s length. He thought she believed her privacy was her strength.

‘Are you just going to sit there and watch me dress?’

He muttered something about needing to get to the bathroom. He folded away his bedclothes, took the mattress from across the door and dragged it down the short length of the corridor. He unlocked his own door and dumped the mattress on his own bed with the folded sheets and blankets and the pillow.

Josh went back into her room and said coldly, ‘We leave it about another half-hour, then we go. Time for him to be up, about… I talk, I ask the questions. It’ll be time for a bit of sensitivity. You write down everything he says, down to the last word, and he signs each page of the transcript…’

She was dressed. He had never known a young woman who took so little care of her appearance, no make-up, no comb or brush through her hair, no effort in style. She wore her jeans and the shapeless heavy sweater and she picked her anorak off the floor. He handed her a notepad and two ballpoint pens and she pocketed them.

He let himself out of the apartment on the tenth floor of the block. Jorg Brandt suffered claustrophobia so he did not try to use the lift. He left the apartment high in the block early each morning to go to the home of the Schultz children. Each morning he left behind him his uncle, who sat in the chair by the window, and his aunt, who groped around in the half-light of the room. His uncle, confined all day to the chair, and his aunt, who suffered severe and untreated cataracts, were the only people he had known those many years ago who would have accepted under their roof a man denounced as an abuser of children and who had been evicted from his home and abandoned by his family.

The agony of leaving the apartment did not end when Jorg Brandt reached the block’s litter-strewn, paint-daubed hallway. He also suffered from agoraphobia. He shuffled on his stick as close to the walls of the apartment blocks as was possible. Sometimes, if the kids were going to school, if they saw him, they would jeer at him. A long time ago he had been the headteacher and a man respected for both kindness and discipline. This time of the morning, early, was the most precious in his day as he made his way amongst the apartment blocks to the Schultz home.

He went slowly and sometimes he stopped as the clammy fear of the open spaces between the blocks gripped him. He would stand then, the perspiration running on his locked legs; the agony was the struggle to overcome the phobia. This was the daily nightmare of Jorg Brandt. The nightmare after darkness gathered around the tower blocks of Lichtenhagen was the memory of what he had seen when the young man had come bleeding to his door and had pleaded for help. With the nightmare, each evening when the small bed was unfolded in the corner of the living room of the apartment, were the memories of the denunciation and the impact of a stone thrown at him from behind by a child as he left. The rabbits were the only peace Jorg Brandt knew.

The Lichtenhagen housing complex was built on flat land between the bog wilderness to the west and the An der Stadtautobahn linking Rostock to Warnemunde. The front facades of the blocks were of brick with small balconies, the sides were featureless concrete and the backs were pocked with small windows. If it had not been for the Schultz family’s rabbits he would never, day or night, have left the apartment. The hostel had been six floors below the apartment of his uncle and aunt. They had been trapped for two days in their apartment when the crowds had gathered to burn out the foreigners from the hostel. The skinheads and the neo-Nazis and the people of Lichtenhagen and the neighbours from the block had bombarded it with petrol bombs to drive out the immigrants. They had been trapped for two days in the apartment that was his refuge.

At the broken perimeter fence around the housing complex was a cluster of houses with small gardens. Jorg Brandt came each day to the Schultz family garden to feed their children’s rabbits and to escape the memory of the boy at his door and the sight of the men who had chased him. He cleaned out the rabbits’ hutches, and in those few minutes he forgot the nightmare of his denunciation. They were fine rabbits, black and white and heavy with flopped ears. He told the rabbits the same stories each day, of Rerik and of his home, and of what he had seen from an upper window.

Klaus Hoffmann watched the door of the apartment through the c]osed window of his car, and he shouted in growing fury into his mobile telephone.

‘… You don’t have to cry, weeping doesn’t help. You tell them to go screw themselves. I bought that house. I paid 700,000 DMs for that property… I don’t give a fuck what they say… I bought the house in good faith… No, you listen – see if I care if a smartarse man comes from Stuttgart and claims his grandfather ran from Wandlitz in 1945, that the Communists had no legal authority to expropriate the freehold of his home. I paid in good faith, it is my home…’

A family had been evacuated from Berlin as the Red Army closed on the city. A house had been locked, in the spring of 1945, abandoned and taken by the Party to become the residence, for thirty-eight years, of a senior official in the department of economic planning. When the Wall had come down, the official had produced papers of ownership for Klaus Hoffmann and had sold the property. Hoffmann had paid cash. It was said that two million properties in the East were subject to ownership claims by the grandchildren of original residents, and the courts backed them with restitution orders.

‘What do you mean, he has documents? What shit court in Berlin? See if I care about a “restitution order”… They were all bastard Nazis in Wandlitz… When? I’ll come back when I can, as soon as possible…’

He cut the call, and the sound of his wife weeping. He watched the door of the apartment block. The house in Wandlitz for which he had paid 700,000 DMs was collateral for his business. It was the new fear in a district such as Wandlitz, the big car with Wessi plates. Smart bastards from Frankfurt and Cologne and Hamburg searched the streets of districts such as Wandlitz for the homes of Nazi grandparents, and the lawyers came with them.

He watched for the girl with the russet-copper hair, and for the man who had thrown him onto the rocks and into the sea.

It was without thinking, but Josh had slipped into the old habit. He was the officer, she was the corporal. The glove fitted. In the car he talked to her as though he were an officer explaining procedure to a corporal.

‘We go the long way round, we do nothing that is obvious. They have lost us so they can only stake out the places that they believe we will come to. They know we have to come for the witnesses. You understand that, Tracy?’

‘Yes, “sir”.’

‘There’s no call for impertinence.’

‘No,

‘And you can cut the bloody “sir” nonsense…’

‘Is it because you’re frightened?’

‘Is what…?’

‘That you’re so bloody pompous.’

She was grinning at him. She’d read him; he was frightened. He didrL’t think she was. He thought that under the mischief, behind the grin, an excitement bounced in her. He wished it were the same with him.

‘Can we start again?’

‘Be a good idea.’

‘Without “sir” and without “corporal”?’

‘Shoot, Josh.’

‘We watch the backs and we watch the sides. It’s where the bastards know we have to come.’

‘I worked that much out.’

‘I do the talking…’

‘I’d have been here, come here, whether you’d been with me or not. I’d have done the talking.’

‘I really think it’s better, Tracy, if you leave the talking to me.’

She shrugged.

The estate stretched away to the right of them, and beyond the estate was the main road, the obvious route into Lichtenhagen. It was hard for Josh to accept that he didn’t matter, that his experience didn’t count, and that the streetwise craft of a lifetime was unimportant to her. He was frightened, he didn’t know what they would find. He carried no weapon, not a screwdriver, not a hammer. He felt, the truth of it, so bloody, God Almighty, involved.

He drove into the estate… Of course, they would be watching. He had planned the route in so that when he reached Lichtenhagen, he would not be going slow and looking for the block as any stranger might have been. He didn’t know how the man, Brandt, would be. He could be hostile, could be servile, could be co-operative. He looked for a man, or two men, sitting in a car. There were old Audis and Volvos and Renaults parked up outside the block, and there were older Trabants and Wartburgs. He looked for a car with steamed windows, for an engine spiralling exhaust fumes.

‘When we go out, go fast, direct.’

‘Back at it again – yes, “sir”.’

‘For Christ’s sake…’

‘Listen, I’m not your bloody corporal.’

She was out of the car and walking away towards a darkened alley at the corner of the block. He didn’t lock the car, thought it sensible not to. He hurried to catch her in the dirty, paintdaubed alley. It was where the graffiti smearers worked and over grotesque faces had been sprayed the slogans. Nazis Raus. Stoppt Den Nazi-Terror. The inner garden of the square was strewn with wind-whipped paper. It seemed to Josh, and he knew Slough and a dozen barracks towns, a place without hope. He had caught up with her. He took her arm as if to propel her forward, faster, across the garden square, and she shrugged his hand off. He went to the back entrance, where the communal rubbish bins, stinking, were stored. There was a hallway, and an elevator. He pointed to the stairs. After six flights Josh stopped. Tracy strode on ahead of him and waited for him on the landing. He went past her and paused by the door. He breathed hard and then hammered on the door.

‘I talk,’ he hissed at Tracy.

He looked around him. He looked for discarded chewing-gum wrappers and for a little heap of cigarette ends stamped out on the concrete floor in front of the door, left by men who watched and waited. He heard the scrape of slippers behind the door and the turning of a key. The door opened. He saw a small woman, bent with age, dress hanging loose on her body under a heavy wool cardigan. He saw the opaque glaze of her eyes. He saw, past her low shoulder, an old man hunched in a chair by the window.

Josh said, gently, ‘My name is Josh Mantle. I’ve come from England. I’ve come to see Jorg Brandt…’

The small woman gazed, unseeing, past him, through him.

‘I’ve come with a young lady who wishes to meet with Jorg Brandt, your nephew.’

‘He’s not here, the idiot is not here.’

‘Will he be back soon?’

A whistle sang in the voice, through mucus. ‘Nobody wants to see the idiot. Why do you come to see him?’

Josh said softly, ‘It’s about what happened a long time ago.’

The voice reeded from the chair by the window in contempt. ‘He’s not here, the idiot goes each morning to feed rabbits.’

‘When, sir, wifi he return?’

‘Perhaps he is an hour, perhaps less than an hour. How long does it take for a grown man to feed rabbits?’

‘May we wait for your nephew?’

The old man sat at a grimed window, in a threadbare chair. His life, handicapped, would revolve around what he saw from the window. The old woman saw nothing.

The smell of the room hit Josh and he choked. ‘We’ll wait outside for him. We don’t wish to disturb you. We’ll wait by the elevator…’

‘He does not use the elevator.’ The voice of the old man cackled in derision. ‘The idiot is afraid of the elevator. The idiot is afraid of the stairs, but less afraid of the stairs than the elevator. The idiot is afraid of everything except the rabbits.’

Josh leaned against the wall in the hallway. He thought of what the pastor had said. The woman shuffled from the door back into the room. The pastor had spoken of the dignity and integrity of a man sentenced to a prison cell. Tracy squatted down on to the dirt of the floor, back against the wall.

‘Are you OK?’

She looked up at him. ‘Of course I’m OK.’

They waited.

He was parking his car when the local news bulletin began.

Albert Perkins eased into the space. The rain had started and perhaps there would be sleet or snow later… The owners of the shipyard voiced concern at its future profitability…

He had made his telephone calls. His wife had complained that the man who did the garden was hiking his prices. Basil in his repair yard had babbled that Fulham had won 2-0, a goal in each half… The mayor of Rostock feared that further redundancies were necessary among the city’s employees, already slashed to a third of what they had been…

He had eaten a good breakfast, and driven south on the autobahn from Rostock Sud to this bleak and functional collection of shoebox offices. Down the road, beyond the trees, was the new prison. The old fence remained around the shoebox offices. The administration centre of the Stasi had moved here as AugustBebel Strasse had become too cramped… Two muggings on the S-Bahn the previous night on the line between Rostock-Bramow and Evershagen…

Near to him a bus had parked and he saw the schoolchildren jump from the bus and run to escape the rain… An elderly couple, a retired pastor and his wife, travelling from Rerik on the Wismar road had collided with a lorry, both dead…

He switched off his radio.

He followed the schoolchildren towards the nearest of the shoebox offices. The files of the Staatssicherheitsdienst of Rostock were kept here in the care of the federal authority. He hurried against the spitting rain towards the doorway. He told the guards that he was a research academic from Britain and needed to find the curator of the archive. He was directed upstairs, the third floor. The children were ahead of him, babbling, as if the shoebox was a place of fun. He gave his name to a secretary on the third floor and was told that the curator would not be available for several minutes. Would he care to inspect the museum while he waited? He joined the schoolchildren as they clustered round a guide. The museum was only three rooms, a token, but the walls were closely covered with mounted and photocopied Stasi documents and the rooms were edged with glass-top cabinets displaying Stasi equipment. ‘Go on, sir,’ Perkins murmured, ‘show the little beggars what it was all about.’

The guide told the schoolchildren, ‘We have here what we believe to be the most shocking case of informing in the Stasi time at Rostock. A young woman from a Party family, so she would have been brought up without religion, but she enrolled as a theology student at a college in the city. She went to the college with the express intention of informing on the other students, on the lecturers and pastors, on their families. She was given the codename of Gisela. During the 1980s she submitted more than three thousand pages of reports to her Stasi handler. The betrayal was for money. She was paid five hundred eastMarks each month by the Stasi, nearly as much as a skilled worker in the Neptun yard, and after her graduation she was paid by the Church. She was dedicated, motivated solely by greed, and because of her avarice there were many who were sent to gaol. But after 1990, after her actions were revealed, it was decided by the Federal government that such people were not criminals and we were not authorized to release even her name. She still lives in Rostock…’

The guide moved on. The class teacher, an earnest young woman with her hair tied loosely in a ponytail, shepherded the schoolchildren to the next room. Some wrote copious notes, some merely jotted headlines, and one gazed out of the window in blatant boredom. She was a pretty girl, tall and athletic, haughty-faced. Perkins was close to her and saw that the paper on her notepad was blank.

The Stasi office in Rostock was the biggest Bezirksverwaltung in the old DDR. Because of the long state border of the Baltic coast there were many who attempted to escape into the international sea lanes. It was extremely difficult for them to gain access to proper boats, most took to the water at night on rafts they had made or on children’s inflatable sunbeds. In their search for freedom they paid a heavy price. We know of at least seventy- seven persons who were drowned in the attempt to flee the oppression of the DDR. Their bodies were washed up on these shores, on those of the Federal Republic, on Danish beaches. We believe there were many more whose bodies were never found. There were more persons drowned, many of them young, a few of them as young as yourselves, than were shot on the Wall in Berlin or the inner-German border fences. Your generation should remember their courage – they were a witness to the bankruptcy of the state and its Stasi servants…’

‘Doktor Perkins…?’

‘That’s me.’

‘I am the curator, the director. I understand you are from England and interested in research..

He was leaning against the wall. Tracy, on the floor, sat close to his feet. He heard the reedy voice of the uncle through the open door, ‘He is coming, the idiot is coming back from feeding his rabbits.’

Josh started away from the wall. In his mind he had rehearsed the questions. He heard the groan of the window being opened. The wind came through and caught a newspaper on the table, battering it out through the opened door until it wrapped against Josh’s leg. He heard the shout.

‘Brandt, there are people here to see you. Hurry, idiot.’

He heard the cackled laughter from through the open door. Josh thought that only the old knew how to be truly cruel.

Tracy looked up at him. ‘What do we do?’

Klaus Hoffmann heard the shout.

He pressed the button to open the misted window on the front passenger door. He leaned forward and saw the tight, smirking face at the high window. He looked in the mirror. A man came towards his car, hesitant, hugging against the walls of the block as if they were safety, reliant on the support of a stick. It was what he had come for. He saw the man’s anguish as he struggled to cross the empty road. They would have come in at the back. It was what Klaus Hoffmann had waited for. He felt the bile rising in his throat.

‘What do we do? Well, we don’t take him inside there, we don’t talk to him in front of that vicious bastard. Go and meet him, take him somewhere. Have you a better idea?’

He heard the clatter, far below, of elevator doors opening.

She shrugged. ‘That’s OK.’

He heard the rumble of the doors closing. The sound echoed up to him. Josh led down the flights of stairs, taking them two at a time. The strategy was to go gently, go slowly with the poor devil because he was sick. They were on the third flight from the ground when the elevator climbed past them. He thought Brandt would have managed three flights by now. He ran down the last flights and burst into the ground-floor hallway. The elevator moaned high above him. The fear caught at him. He looked out through the doors, into the road and saw the back of the man as he reached his car. The car’s windows were misted and the engine spurted exhaust fumes. The man turned and leaned his elbows on the roof of the car. God Almighty. Josh recognized the man he had pushed down on to the rocks.

He looked at the elevator doors and above, the numbers of the floors. The light came on for the seventh floor, then the eighth. He didn’t tell her, didn’t try to. The sense, disorganized in his mind, was of catastrophe. A woman with shopping bags was pressing, in irritation, at the call button of the elevator.

He bullocked past Tracy and launched himself at the stairs. He charged up the first flight. She was coming after him. He heaved for breath. At the seventh-floor landing, running past the elevator doors, he saw the light slip from the tenth floor to the eleventh. His legs were leaden. She was coming after him, easily. The light had gone from the eleventh, the last light was for the roof. He fell. His feet slipped back and hit the edge of a step, caught the bone of his shin. The pain shimmered through Josh’s body, and he struggled up the last flight of stairs. The elevator door was open, the elevator empty. The door for the low shed structure housing the elevator shaft and the stairwell hung free and rapped in the wind.

Josh stepped, panting, on to the roof of the block, and saw Jorg Brandt out on the roof, away from the shed structure. He stood as if marooned on the puddled asphalt.

He saw the terror on his face.

His coat billowed in the wind and the force of the wind seemed to drag him further from Josh. Brandt edged backwards as if the control over his legs was gone, lost.

There was no rail at the edge of the roof and no wall. Josh saw, behind the man, the town of Warnemunde laid out as a model would have been, the shipyards, the beach, the sea stretched limitless to the cloud horizon. The man dropped his stick, as if the hand which held it was lifeless.

Josh pushed away from the door. He thought Tracy was behind him and moved forward.

‘You have nothing to fear from me, Herr Brandt. I’ve come to help you…’

The man who had been a schoolteacher edged a pace back.

‘Please, Herr Brandt, just come to me. If you cannot come to me just sit down, let me reach you. Please… They cannot get to you, Herr Brandt. When you are with me then they cannot harm you, I promise.’

The man who had been denounced as a paedophile wavered and lurched back.

Josh shouted into the wind, ‘I have come, Herr Brandt, to free you from them. They have no power over you. Their ability to hurt is gone, believe me.’

The man who had been rejected by his family, evicted, destroyed, was at the edge of the asphalt roof.

‘They are finished, Herr Brandt. They are gone, they are history.’

Josh’s voice died. He saw the slow smile settle on the man’s face, as if from turmoil a last peace had been found. Josh crouched and had no more words. The smile was calm. Josh wanted to close his eyes and could not.

The man, Jorg Brandt, turned. It was so quick, two paces, as he stepped off the roof of the block.

Josh stared at the space where Brandt had been. There was no scream. He shook, and wished he could have wept. Tracy walked past him to where the stick lay and kicked it hard and it rolled and teetered close to the edge of the roof.

She faced him. ‘Are you going to stay here all day or are you going to shift?’

He felt so small and so weak and so much a failure. He wanted her comfort.

‘I couldn’t reach him…’

Tracy said, brutal, ‘You were never going to reach him. He would never have let you. The bastard was too yellow ever to have let you reach him.’

She was gone. When they reached the ground floor she did not hesitate. She did not go to see the body, or to join the small knot of a crowd that gathered. He watched the car with the misted windows pull away. They went out into the back, into the inner garden of the square.

She said, without looking at him, ‘You don’t have to blame yourself. It’s him that’s to blame. He was a coward.’

His fist clenched. He could have hit her. They reached the car and he threw her the car keys. They were already on the road when the ambulance passed them, siren wailing.

He had the section and he had the name.

Even by the standards of Albert Perkins, a quality practitioner, heavy flannel bullshit had been needed to win the interest of the curator of the archive – an international affairs research unit, funded by a Cambridge college, a centre of excellence, an acknowledgement that the Rostock archive at DummerstorfWaldeck was the most helpful in all the former DDR. He had the section that dealt with surveillance filming, and now the name of the former Oberstleutnant who had headed the section in the late 1980s. He left a note of thanks, on the desk they had offered him, for the curator. He slipped away down the corridor. The tour of the schoolchildren continued. He saw the earnest teacher and the youngsters who took notes, and the one girl who did not care to hide her disinterest.

‘Those who collaborated with the Stasi have built a great lie. These weak and manipulated people tell the lie now that it was not possible to refuse the Stasi. They try to explain their betrayal of friends and family by spreading the lie. There were enough who refused to kill the lie. It should never be sufficient again in Germany for a man or woman to claim that he or she merely obeyed orders…’

She came to the door. She had already laid out her daughter’s kit on the bed, laundered and ironed.

Christina was lying on the bed in her tennis costume. She had the phones of her stereo in her ears.

‘You’re resting..

‘Trying to.’

‘What sort of day did you have?’

‘Boring.’

‘What was boring?’

‘It was compulsory, because of the new teacher. We had to go to Dummerstorf-Waldeck, to a boring museum.’

‘What museum?’

‘The Stasi museum. The new teacher is from Hamburg. She says we have to know about the past. The past is boring. I missed tennis practice. The past is gone, why do we have to know the past?’

‘What were you told about the Stasi?’

‘We were told what they’d done. It was boring, it has no relevance to today. I’m not to blame for what happened before. It has nothing to do with me. I don’t have any guilt. The new teacher asked us whether any of our parents had been victims of the Stasi.’

‘What did you tell her, Christina?’

‘That I didn’t know. That I’d never heard you or Poppa talk of the Stasi. The man who took us round the museum, he said the Stasi suffocated under the paper they made. They spent all their time writing reports, so they had no time to read their reports, all they did was write them. That was why they did not know the revolution was coming until it was too late. They sounded to me to be stupid and boring. Momma… I need to rest.’

His car took him from the Kremlin gate.

The minister had told the cabinet meeting that the armed forces were short of funds to the extent of one hundred trillion roubles – Pyotr Rykov had given him the figure, and made the exchange calculation for his minister – twenty billion American dollars. The minister had told the politicians that a minimum of 100,000 troops lived in sub-human conditions of poverty – Pyotr Rykov had provided him with the statistic and the fact that soldiers sold their equipment into the black market so that they should not starve.

He always sat in the front passenger seat, beside the driver.

He would trust his driver with his life, with his secrets, with his future. He had clung to his driver because the grizzled elder man, long past the date of retirement, had been a true friend from the second tour in Afghanistan and through the German posting, and during the years at Siberia Military District. He had brought him to Moscow. Pyotr Rykov had always shared his inner thoughts, confidences, with his stoic quiet driver. ‘It’s the funding, or it is mutinies..

A frown slowly gouged at the forehead of his driver.

‘Either the funds are provided or the Army disintegrates..

The driver squinted from the wet, icy road ahead up to his mirror.

‘We cannot, will not, tolerate the destruction of the Army.’

It was the fourth time the driver had checked the mirror, and in response he had slowed for a kilometre, then speeded for a kilometre, and repeated the process.

‘Without the strength of the Army, if the Army is neutered, then the Motherland collapses.’

The driver gave no warning but swung the wheel from the main highway and cut into a side street that was half filled with the stalls of a vegetable market, scattering men and women.

‘Either they make the funding available or the Army, to save itself, must take decisive action..

The driver pulled out of the side street and accelerated into a two-lane road. His eyes flickered again towards his mirror and his frown deepened.

‘There is money for the politicians and for their elections, there is money for bribery and corruption, there is money for schemes to win votes to keep the pigs at the trough…’

The car crawled. Pyotr Rykov glanced at his driver, and finally noticed the anxiety. He swung round in his seat, stretching the belt taut, and saw the car that followed them. Two men in the front of the car, a man in the back.

‘How long?’

The driver said, grimly, ‘The whole of the journey.’

‘All of the way?’

‘Fast when we go fast, slow when we are slow.’

‘Not before today?’

‘I would have told you, Colonel.’

‘Who are they, the shit fuckers?’

He regarded his driver as a mine of information. His driver sat each day at a centre of learning, as he many times had joked, in the car parks of the ministry or the Kremlin, the foreign embassies or the city’s major military barracks, talking with the other drivers. They were the men who knew the pulse and movement of Moscow. They were the men who recognized first the shifting motions of power.

‘They change nothing but the name. It is a new name but the old way. When the KGB wishes to intimidate then it drives close. It lets you see them, lets the anxiety build, lets you know they are close and merely await the final order.’

‘You have no doubt?’

‘They want to be seen.’

He reached between his legs and pressed the combination numbers of his briefcase lock. He took his service pistol from the briefcase and checked the magazine and the safety. He slid it into his waist, cold metal against his skin.

‘Stop.’

His driver braked. The black car with the three men inside stopped a dozen paces behind them.

‘Pull away.’

They eased away from the curb. The black car with the three men inside followed behind them.

‘What do I do, friend?’

‘It is what you have already done. You have bred enemies.’

The fear winnowed in Pyotr Rykov’s mind. It was the fear he had known when he had walked in the villages of Afghanistan, when he had been in the street markets and bazaars of Jalalabad and Herat, when the threat was always behind him.

‘I am protected.’

The driver smiled mirthlessly. ‘In Russia, through this century, Colonel, men have believed they were protected.’

‘I am protected by the minister.’

‘The minister is not in the Kremlin, Colonel. They are in the Kremlin.’

‘They can flick themselves.’

‘It is a warning. They will watch to see how you respond to the warning.’

They reached the apartment. The apartment was in an old building in a wide street. He stood for a moment on the pavement and the black car accelerated away. None of the three men looked as they passed. He told his driver at what time he should be collected after lunch. He was alone, and exposed.

‘I wouldn’t have believed it of you, Phlegm – diffidence sits uneasily with you.’

They lunched in the judge’s chambers. A manservant waited at the table. No guests, only the judge and Fleming of German Desk.

‘It’s not a state of affairs I enjoy, Beakie.’

‘Do I have to spread the towel on my shoulder again, or is it time for confidences? Is it about that business, the young woman and the Stasi thug?’

In the good old days, the lamented old days that were gone, there would have been brandy with the coffee. Not any more. Fleming refilled his glass of gassed water.

‘How long have you got?’

‘Not more than ten minutes. Bounce it at me.’

Fleming said, ‘It is extraordinary, certainly beyond my experience. We are not in control, but we have what we regard as important policy riding on it – yet, we are reduced to watching. Our allies, the Germans, equally have policy at stake and they, too, are not in control. Our two policies are set against each other. We’re like two commanders, each on our respective high ground, looking down into a valley. That valley, into which we respectively look, was once a super-power confrontation zone – not any more. The valley, the battlefield of our policies that conflict, is the city of Rostock and the small communities around Rostock. It’s a minor provincial city, stultifyingly dull. In that valley are our respective shock troops – don’t laugh – engaged in combat to the death. On their side is Hauptman Krause, and any allies he can muster. On our side is an abject failure of a man and a junior NCO, a young woman. Either of us, on the high ground above the valley, can lose the policy we seek to achieve but neither of us can intervene. It is as if the valley were covered by the fog of war. I’ve never felt so helpless about something that matters to me. I assume my opposite number in Cologne feels precisely the same way. We must wait for that fog to clear to see who holds the valley, who are the casualties. Good to get it off my chest, Beakie, thank you. It’s a unique experience for me to feel so helpless. You’d better get back to that bloody court-room.’