The Waiting Time

Chapter Twelve

…Because he was a coward..

He walked on. Josh Mantle had never in his life hit a woman. He walked fast, tried to leave her behind him. He wished he had hit her. If he had turned to look behind him then he would no longer have seen the low buildings of Warnemunde and the breakwater going out into the water and the squat lighthouse.

‘Josh, you are being ridiculous. It wasn’t your fault. He couldn’t face it, he was a coward..

There were low scrub trees at the top of the beach beyond the bent grass of the dunes. He walked beside the last strips of the winter’s grey-brown ice and close to the grey-green sea that came white-flecked to the ice line. His head was down, his chin was on his chest. Sometimes he closed his eyes, squeezed them shut, but he could not lose the image of the man, or escape the terror of Jorg Brandt.

‘Josh, will you stop, will you listen… You don’t blame yourself, you blame him. He was a coward.’

He saw only the terror of the man, not that last moment of peace on his features.

But for the hectoring voice behind him, Josh was alone.

He sought a solitude. He was, had always been, his own man. He had been his own man when they had brought him home from the school in Penang to the stinking heat, wet, insect-ridden home, and his father had sat with the whisky bottle and told him that the ‘fucking slit-eyes’ had shot his mother, and had then left him alone and gone with the rest of them to wreck the Chinese quarter. His own man at barracks schools, and at the Apprentice College, alone on the train with the small suitcase, alone in the classrooms and in the dormitory. He had been, for ever, alone. He had been his own man, alone, in the I Corps postings…

Except the once when he had followed his captain and the Guatemalan had died, and he had compromised. and in the Special Investigation Branch, alone in the mess at Tidworth when he had demanded that a thief be prosecuted and branded; alone in the bar of the mess half an hour after the call for free drinks to see him on his way, after the second in command had made the speech, perfunctorily, and dumped the cheap carriage clock on his lap. His own man on the streets, alone…

Except for the meeting with Libby and marrying Libby, and better that he had been his own man, alone, because she was taken from him and the pain of it was his cross.

Each crisis that came to Josh Mantle’s life battered a message to him: better to be his own man, better to be alone.

‘Are you going to stop? I can’t help it if he was a bloody coward.’

He pounded the beach, empty ahead of him, because he yearned to be alone. If he had been alone, if she had not been behind him, if there had been no witness, if there had been only the company of the sand and the sea and the grey black clouds and the wind, then he would have gone down on to his knees. He would have talked to his Libby, would have told her everything…

‘Look at me. Bloody well look.’

He stopped.

‘Come on, look at me.’

He did not kneel.

‘Do it, Josh, turn round. Look.’

He did not know how he should escape from her. He had walked an hour and a half on the beach, round headlands, and she tracked him. He could not escape from her. As if she held him, Josh turned.

Her coat was furthest back, discarded by the ice line, a speck. He saw her sweater, left on the sand and lying across the track of their footprints. Her blouse and her bra were caught by the wind and rolled towards the grass of the dunes. Her shoes were behind her, abandoned, and her socks.

She hopped on one foot, she kicked off her jeans. He had turned as she had known he would. She threw her jeans away from her, over the bare white skin of her shoulder. She wore only her knickers. Her legs were a little apart and she stood defiant with her fingers at her hips, resting on the waistband of her knickers. She challenged him. She would strip to nothing if he did not come to her, as she ordered him to. He could not turn away. The gale came off the sea and ruffled the clothes scattered behind her and caught her hair and beat at her nakedness. He wore, against his chest, a vest and a shirt and a pullover and a jacket and his outer coat, and Josh still shivered. She did not flinch in the cold of the wind.

‘Come… Come here, Josh.’

He started to walk towards her. She stood on the beach, so still. His eyes never left her. His eyes searched across the nakedness of her body. He unzipped the fastener of his coat, peeled it from his chest and shoulders. He saw each line on her skin, each spot and blemish and mole. She held out her arms. He saw the straggling hair in the pits of her arms. He slotted the sleeves of his coat over her arms and he stood in front of her and fastened the zip, and then he buttoned the coat over the zip. He retraced their foot- marks in the sand, picked up her trousers, then hei shoes and her socks. He shook the sand from her bra and her blouse, from her sweater and her coat.

He dropped the clothes at her feet. ‘Get dressed.’

‘I’ll get dressed when you’ve spat it out of your system, Josh.’

He looked into her face. He wanted to hold her and warm her. There was no scorn in her face, only the innocence.

‘You never, ever again call a man a coward. You call a man a coward and you strip him bare. To call a man a coward is to make a judgement on him. It is the worst of arrogance to believe yourself qualified to call a man a coward. He would have been soaked from the sea, bloodstained, he would have been in shadow, incoherent, but you say that the man who slammed the door on him was a coward. Your Hans was a goddamn problem. We all do it, every day, I do it, you, everybody, we cross over the street to avoid a problem. Jorg Brandt suffered, he didn’t have the memories of love that you had, but you call him a coward.’

‘Should have stayed at home, should I?’

‘Just get dressed.’

‘Don’t fucking lecture me.’

‘I walked away from you because otherwise I would have hit you.’

She tore his coat off. She crouched over her own clothes. ‘Your wife, when she left you, did you hit her?’

He rocked.

‘When she left you, did you lecture her?’

He clasped his hands together so they should not be free to strike her.

Josh said, ‘I’ll see you at the car. You should get dressed.’ He went back, away, along the beach.

Albert Perkins walked on Kropeliner Strasse in search of a former Oberstleutnant. He was inside the old city walls. The street was a pedestrian precinct, at the core of Rostock. There was, he thought, an air of prosperity about Kropeliner Strasse, new paint, new shopfronts, new pavings, but he knew the prosperity was a mirage because the interiors of the shops were empty. Women queued to be served at the fruit and vegetable stalls and kids lounged by the fast food outlets, but the boutiques and the hardware stores and the interior furnishing businesses were empty. There were people at the well stocked window of the camera shop, but inside the shop was empty. He looked through the window, past the shelves of cameras and lenses and tripods and binoculars and bags, and he saw a middle-aged man and a girl who sat languid and under-employed.

He pushed open the door.

The smile of welcome lit the man’s face. He was a customer, an event. The girl straightened. Albert Perkins wandered to the far end of the shop and the man, predictable, followed him. He had led the man out of earshot from the girl. There were times when Albert Perkins lied with the best of them, and times when he discarded untruths for frankness.

‘Good afternoon. I am a busy man, and I am sure you would like to be a busy man… You were the Oberstleutnant heading the Abteilung responsible for covert surveillance filming. I come as a trader. If you have what I want then I will pay for it. Life, as I always say, is a market-place. You don’t need my name, nor do you need to know the organization that I represent, and if the merchandise is satisfactory then I pay for discretion. There was a Hauptman Krause at August-Bebel Strasse. The wife of Hauptman Krause was Eva, and the lovely Eva enjoyed the favours of a Soviet officer, a Major Rykov. An Inoffizielle Mitarbeiter, overwhelmed by his ideological duty, reported these sessions in the art of copulation to a handler. The bed play was filmed. Now, if I am not to be disappointed and you are to be paid, those ifims will have been preserved. I wish to buy the films of Eva Krause coupling with Major Rykov.’

The man, the former Oberstleutnant, chuckled. The mirth ripped his face. ‘People want only, today, what is new. I could fill my shelves with cameras, lenses, produced in the old DDR, and people will walk past them. They demand only what is new, which they cannot afford to pay for.’

‘No money orders, no travellers’ cheques, banknotes in the hand – if you have the film I want to buy.’

The man waved to the girl, she should mind the shop. She was unlikely to be trampled by a stampede. He had keys on a chain and he walked through to where the stock was piled in boxes. Albert Perkins was pleased to see the quantity of the boxes, unpacked, as he had been pleased to see the quantity of cameras and lenses on the shelves. He thought the account books would make stark reading. The man unlocked a steel-plated door at the back of the shop. He led Albert Perkins down gloomy old stone steps.

The cellar was a small shrine dedicated to the past. The present and the future were at street level, where the Japanese cameras and lenses were displayed, and kept out by two sets of double- locked doors and a poorly lit stone staircase. Heavy timbers had been brought in, old wood, and were used as props between the floor and the ceiling, and Albert Perkins thought the cellar must have once been a shelter against the bombing. There was a good armchair on a square of good carpet. The man gestured that he should sit. In front of the chair was a television set, large screen, and under the television was a video player. He sat. The man ignored a shelf of video-cassettes and knelt in front of a wall safe and used his body to prevent Perkins seeing the combination he used. The exhibits, for the shrine, were on a shelf behind the television, and each was labelled as if the pride still lived.

There was a camera the size of a matchbox, what the ‘grey mouse’ would have used for the photography of documents; an attache case, and it took the trained eye of Albert Perkins to see the pinhead hole in the end of it; a cooler bag, and he saw the brightness of the lens set where a stud should have been for the holding strap, good for the beach in summer; tape recorders for audio surveillance; button-sized microphones for a man to wear on his chest; long directional microphones for distance; a length of log, the bark peeling from dried-out age, and he frowned because he could not see the lens; electric wall fittings and plugs for hotel rooms, in which a microphone or a camera could be hidden… The safe door was shut. The man had lifted out three video-cassettes.

He said, briskly, ‘Could you, please, my friend, stand up.’

Albert Perkins stood. The man came behind him and quickly, with expertise, frisked him. The man tapped with the palms of his hands at the collar and the chest and the upper arms and the waist and in his groin and at his ankles. Albert Perkins had never carried a firearm. Firearms were for the cowboys in Ireland. It was a good search, professional.

The man said, ‘Please, sit down.’

A video was placed in the cassette player. The television was switched on.

Monochrome… A cramped, tight bedroom, filled with the width of the bed, and the angle wide enough to show the wallpaper above the bed. She was a good-looking woman. Agony and ecstasy on her face. She had a strong body.

Perkins watched. The warmth came through him.

‘Fifty thousand DMs…’

‘Fifteen thousand.’

She was on her back. Sharp focus. He was on her. Her knees high and tight against his hips. His hands on her shoulders and his back arched.

‘Forty-five thousand DMs.’

‘Twenty, top.’

She squirmed under him, she lifted her ankles and closed them round him. It wasn’t the sex that he knew, what Helen allowed on his birthday or her birthday, or on their anniversary, or when, rarely, she had drunk too much. She rolled him. ‘Forty thousand DMs, that is final.’

‘Twenty-five thousand is where I finish.’

He saw Rykov’s face. His mouth was open, as if he gasped. He was on his back. She rode him, bucked on him as if he were a steer and her breasts bounced and she seemed to cry her rioting pleasure to the ceiling.

‘Thirty-five thousand DMs, and that is my absolutely final-’

‘I said twenty-five thousand was where I finished.’

‘You have seen five minutes, it is a three-hour tape, and there are two more tapes..

‘Twenty-five thousand, cash.’

His eyes never left the screen. He wondered whether the old bastard had stayed home on the day the Oberstleutnant had come to instal the camera, or whether he had merely left the keys under the mat. She sat across him and she stroked the hairs of his stomach and his chest and he cupped her breasts. There wasn’t shyness between them, and the old bastard had said it wasn’t love.

‘Thirty thousand DMs, that is quite absolutely the final-’

‘Twenty-five thousand – be a shame to go to insolvency when you’ve worked so hard to build your business.’

She was off him. He was limp. She wiped a tissue between her legs. They didn’t kiss. They dressed fast, as if he had to get back to commanding a missile and radar unit and she was headed for her office or for a meeting or for collecting the child from the minder. The room was empty and the film ended. ‘Twenty-five thousand DMs, cash.’

‘Twenty-five thousand, cash, for three tapes, agreed.’

Albert Perkins stood in the street. Behind him the man pulled down the shutters, obscured the window of unsold Japanese cameras.

The cold of the evening settled on him after the heat and warmth of the cellar. It was always a mistake for a man to insert himself into forbidden territory, he reflected, but Albert Perkins never ceased to be amazed at how many men jeopardized their future in sweaty copulation.

He murmured, ‘Might have been good at the time, Colonel Rykov, might have been brilliant, but did you ever consider that you might live to regret it. Did you?’

He left his apartment in the early evening to go back to his desk in the ministry. His wife, Irma, had watched him change. Pyotr Rykov crossed the pavement with a firm step, and the driver hurried from the car to open the door for him. His wife had watched him take the best, most recently acquired, uniform from the wardrobe and change into it, and she had not asked him why, that evening, he chose to wear his best uniform and why he went back to his desk. He paused at the open door. His minister would have left the building, and the aides and clerks from the outer offices. It was, to Pyotr Rykov, an act of necessary defiance. Down the road, misted windows, was a stationary black car. It was important to Pyotr Rykov that he should not believe he was intimidated.

She braked sharply outside the pension. He had not spoken all the time she had driven back to Rostock.

She turned to him. ‘All right, you want to bloody sulk, but do it on your own. Piss off.’

He looked into her face, contorted and ugly. Josh said, slow and deliberate, ‘I don’t find this easy, but I’ll say it because it has to be said. Today you have been more cruel and more vicious than any woman I have ever known. Beside that, you can be more gentle and more caring, and I include my wife, than any woman I have ever known. Tracy, I do not understand the depth of the scar…’

She said, cold, ‘I lost the boy I loved. Isn’t that enough for you, “sir”?’

‘No, not enough.’

She spat, ‘He was murdered.’

‘Not enough. People cope, they’re hurt but they live with it.’

‘What do you want?’

‘I want the truth. I want to know the truth so that I can help you cut out that viciousness and cruelty before it destroys a very worthwhile person – you, Tracy.’

‘Loving a boy who’s murdered, that’s not enough to scar?’

He shook his head. The traffic went by them. ‘No, sorry, not enough.’

‘If I told you that I was going to have his baby, Hans’s baby… that it was when I loved him in the early morning before we went to Rostock, and I didn’t use anything, when he needed all the courage I could give him… If I told you that two months after he was murdered I found that I was carrying his baby, that I went to a place in Kreuzberg, just a stenographer so I couldn’t afford a clinic, and had the baby aborted, and that Hans’s daughter would now be nine years old, that there isn’t a day when I don’t live with the guilt… Would that be enough?’

Josh shook.

His laundry was back in his room.

He caught the radio news – statistics released from the finance ministry put the cost of seven years of unification at a thousand biffion DMs, he made the calculation in his mind, 418,410,040,000 pounds sterling… He put the laundered clothes in the drawers of his room.

On the radio news – the chief executive of a chemical plant at Dortmund warned that labour costs now ran at 44DMs an hour in Germany, and at 3.36DMs in the Czech Republic… He tried to call his wife. There was no answer.

A statement from the Rathaus predicted there could be no further funding for the infrastructure development of Rostock.

He brushed his teeth, washed his hands, changed his shirt and pondered on what he would say to Mr Fleming. He sat in his chair and made notes, because it was, in his opinion, always best to know clearly what to say.

In the Lichtenhagen suburb of Rostock a former schoolteacher from Rerik had fallen to his death from the roof of an apartment block…

He reached for the telephone and unscrewed the cover of the voice box and the ear piece and fastened the coiled wires that ran from a small plastic box. It was one of the better devices, originating from the Technical Section at Vauxhall Bridge Cross. It had been tested, as they said, to destruction and the guarantee was given by the engineers responsible that the equipment made a call proof against a tap.

He dialled the number for the head of German Desk in London. He remembered talking with an Israeli officer a few years before, when relations had been tolerable. French officers and Americans from the Agency and the Israeli of the Mossad section in the London embassy had been hosted by British officers for a weekend at that awful country place down in Surrey. Disgusting food, an old house that was an icebox, and a weekend to discuss the movement of nuclear materials from the Eastern Bloc through Germany and onwards to Iraq, Iran, Libya, wherever… Late on the Saturday night, with a shared whisky bottle, the Israeli had made his confessional to Albert Perkins. A Jordanian airforce pilot, young, was being trained under contract by the Germans. A lonely man, far from home. The Israeli officer, tongue loosened by the whisky, had said he controlled the targeting of the trainee pilot. The usual story, an introduction to a female agent, an isolated man finding sex and comfort, his entrapment. The pilot had completed his course, had gone home, and the contact had been renewed, and the threat of disclosure had been made. The pilot’s cousin ran Jordanian vegetables and fruit, every week, across the Allenby Bridge, to the market at Jerusalem. The produce was never stopped, never checked, and his business flourished. The cousin carried, with the vegetables and fruit, reports on the Jordanian airforce and its Iraqi ally to the Mossad. Couldn’t last, such business had only a short shelf life. The pilot and his cousin were arrested in Amman. They were tried for espionage, and hanged. The Israeli’s confessional, slurred through the whisky fumes, was poignant still to Albert Perkins. On the morning of the executions, the morning the pilot and his cousin had been frogmarched to the noose, there had been no remorse in the Mossad offices in Tel Aviv. They were casualties of the game… A retired pastor from Rerik was dead, with his wife, from a collision on the road. Now a former schoolmaster was dead, a fall from a high building. .. He had created the situation and made the casualties of the game. Albert Perkins, waiting for the connection, wondered if ever he would feel remorse.

‘Evening, Mr Fleming, Albert here… Yes, thank you, it’s been a good day, very good actually…’

Josh sat on the bare mattress with the pillow beside him and the folded bed clothes. Of course, she would have gone alone to the house in Kreuzberg. A woman would have used pills or alcohol or needles. A minimum of recovery time. She would have gone alone, unsteady and shaken, back to Brigade and her room. His head was in his hands. He thought that she had the right to be scarred, and the right to viciousness and cruelty. He had prized the story from her and he felt a cringing shame.

He vomited over his trousers. The tears streamed down Klaus Hoffmann’s cheeks. He coughed the sick from his throat and it fell over the steering wheel on his car and onto his trousers. He was parked up to the west of the city, alone in his car on a farm track, vomit spewed on his trousers.

‘That’s good Albert, that’s well done…‘ Praise always went a long way, Fleming reckoned, with a dogged foot soldier of the Service. And a joke was useful.’… My advice, Albert, after what you’ve had to sit through, take a cold shower…’

He had written the note on his pad. There were three cassettes on offer. The sale price of the cassettes was, the calculation given him by Perkins, sterling pounds 10,460. He wrote now the names of those who would be needed to authorize a payment of that size, and the names of those who would wish to consider the potentials of the direction in which the matter now ran. And he wrote the name of Dieter Krause and his pen scratched three lines under the name.

Oh, and, Albert, shouldn’t have forgotten them. What news of our intrepid pair… I see. Yes, I have that… A pastor and a schoolteacher, from Rerik – you don’t have the connection?… I see. .. Well, we have to hope for them, don’t we, that they stay sensible, yes?… Forgive me, Albert, but I need to push on if I’m to get the authorization. It’s about the time that people go home… I’ll call you in the morning.’

It was so peaceful on the river below, and so quiet behind the double glazing around him in his room. He found it difficult, in the peace and the quiet, to imagine, in distant Germany, a small car impacting against the radiator of a heavy goods lorry and a man spiralling down to his death from a great height… It was a question of policy. Policy ruled, policy did not permit imagination.

‘Violet, a moment, please…’

He called through the door. She had her coat on, a scarf round her head, and carried her collapsed umbrella and a shopping bag. He didn’t have to apologize. It was not necessary to apologize for destroying Violet’s carefully constructed timetable. It was general talk that she lived alone, had no life outside the Service. He knew the way to soften her.

‘Albert’s done well… I need a meeting in an hour. I’ll want the assistant deputy director, someone from Resources, Russia Desk should come and American Desk, and someone to take a note… would you emphasize priority, it doesn’t wait till the morning… Albert’s done very well.’

She turned away. Already she was awkwardly shrugging out of her coat, then loosening her scarf. They’d have made a good item, the dogged Albert Perkins and the ever dependable Violet. They’d probably have found a little space in the building to bunk up so they’d never have had to leave Vauxhall Bridge Cross, two devoted servants of the Service, perpetually on call for times of priority.

‘Oh, and please… Dig me what we’ve stored on Dieter Krause, former MfS, Rostock, so I can have a fast hack at the guts of the brute’s life.

KRAUSE, Dieter Friedrich.

Born: 11.9.1952, at Hessenburg (n.e. of Rostock). Father was horticultural worker, amputee from Normandy 1944. One sister, Petra, born 1954. Mother was horticultural produce packer. Unremarkable childhood. Joined FDJ in 1966.

It was not the influence of his father. His father, without a right leg, was a survivor. His father came through the Nazi childhood, the wound, the arrival of the Red Army, the coming of the Communist regime. His father, the survivor, was bray, believed in obedience and correctness towards power. The influence on the child, Dieter, came from the man he called his uncle. The uncle, too, was a survivor and spoke with the guttural accent of an ethnic German from northern Yugoslavia, and had been three years in Tito’s post war prison camps. The uncle taught the child, Dieter, aged twelve, the twin arts of survival and advancement as he had learned them in the prison camp near to Novi Sad. He had also taught young Dieter to understand the mind and character of the Slav Russian without which the distant friendship could not have been bred. He informed, after his first FDJ summer camp, on the other children, on the brigade leader, on what the other children said about their parents. He was given coarse chocolate, and made a unit leader. He had a handler, he was noticed, he tasted power.. And he had learned to fear the loss of power…

Volunteer to Border Guard, 1970. Volunteer for additional six months service. Doctorate of Law, University of Potsdam (MfS sponsorship). Joined MfS, 1976, Normannen Strasse HQ, Berlin. KGB fast track promotion course, Moscow, 1979. Bonn, (importexport cover) 1980. Posted to Rostock, 1981, rank Unterlea tnant. Married Eva (nee Schultz), FDGB organizer at Neptun shipyard, Rostock, 1981.

On the horticultural farm, a friend of his sister, the daughter of workers in the tomato houses, was Annelore. He had promised, dishevelled, wet, naked, that he would love Annelore all of his life. When he had gone to join the Border Guard, Annelore had come with him on the bus to Rostock, and walked with him onto the platform of the Hauptbalrnhof, and waved to him until the train had curved away on the tracks. Sex in the seed store with Annelore when he had returned on leave from the Magdeburg sector. Sex in his mother’s bed, through long afternoons, with Annelore when he had come back for the vacations from the university at Potsdam. There were many girls he could have fucked, sucked, stroked, in Potsdam and when he was posted to Normannen Strasse, but he had stayed faithful to his Annelore. And he had come back to Rostock, and they were to be married. It had been a summer’s evening when he was ordered to the office in August-Bebel Strasse of the major who headed the internal security Abteilung. Annelore was not suitable. Annelore’s cousin was associated with an environmental action group. Annelore, if he wished for a career in the MfS, should be dismissed from his life… He had written to her that evening, four lines… He had been introduced the next month to a quite pretty FDGB organizer. He had chased the power, clung to it. He would not lose the power.

Promoted to Oberstleutnant 1984, transfer to CounterEspionage. 1986, authorization for ‘friendship’ with Major Pyotr Rykov, Wustrow Base, w. of Rostock. Promoted to Hauptman 1987. Following incursion of UK agent, Hans Becker, to Wustrow Base (run, non-authorized, by I Corps, west Berlin) shot agent dead after capture – 21.11.1988.

There had been sufficient light for him to see the way that the back of the boy’s head, against the dirt and the grass of the square, had exploded. Before they had dragged the boy away, they had all knelt on the ground and picked in the earth for the tissue of the boy’s brain and for the fragments of skull bone. Earth was kicked over the blood… He had had the pain in his groin, and he had not felt bad then at shooting the boy or dropping the body into the night sea… He had felt the pain, the next day, when he had been called to the office of the minister, Mielke. Made to wait in the outer corridor, eyed with contempt by officers who used the corridor and the secretaries at their typewriters in the outer office. Marched into the inner office, as if he were a prisoner. Standing, the ache still in his groin, blurting answers to the questions of the old man. Then the monologue of abuse from Mielke. Through the cigarette smoke, he was an incompetent cunt. He had shivered as the smoke had played at his nose, trembled, because he had thought he had lost his power…

Believed to have sanitized personal MfS file, and Becker file, Dec. 1989. Unemployed. 1992, worked in Rostock bank (four months), dismissed. Unemployed. 1995, hardware salesman (on commission). 1996, offered himself to BfV, Cologne.

He had sat for two hours in the public hallway of the BfV complex. He had himself typed the letter he had handed in at the desk, and with the letter had been the torn out photograph from the newspaper. He had sat there for two hours, a man forgotten, without status. A secretary, a plump and grey haired woman so similar to the one he had slept with in Bonn so many years before, had come to the public hallway and given him a security pass and escorted him to the elevator. The faces had been suspicious and sober. He had talked of his friendship with Pyotr Rykov as the spools of a tape recorder turned. He had given the name of a secretary in the Foreign Ministry, and many years before the woman had played her fingers in the hair of his chest and whispered love. They had changed the tape three times… A week later he had been called back to Cologne, escorted with deference to the room of a senior official. There had been sandwiches of Scotch smoked salmon and white wine from the Rhine. He had been welcomed, his power had returned. He remembered the sick feeling of relief as he had driven back again to Rostock. On the autobahn he had made the pledge to himself, over and over, repeated and repeated, that he would never, a second time, lose the power…

·. Thank you, Fleming, very concisely put. I feel all of us now know Dieter Krause, share his skin with him…’

It was a short meeting and would produce, as the assistant deputy director was to inform the deputy director, Olive’s finest hour.

To draw it together – Albert Perkins, in Rostock, provides us with back-up should the pair, Mantle and Barnes, fail to provide evidence of murder against Krause. The indication, as of this moment, they are not close to that evidence. The back-up, the cuckolding of Krause by Rykov, could be used to discredit Krause’s address in Washington next week… of course he knew, he was a ranking intelligence officer, he would have known. Vindictive, bitter, humiliated, spreading lies… Not much of a back-up, but perhaps enough to throw doubt on his veracity. Is the back-up, a salacious film, worth that amount of money?’ The assistant deputy director was due at the ballet and would have to join his wife after the performance had started.

‘I can push it through the books, no problem, bounce it out of any number of budgets. But, it’s more than half a year’s salary for a junior executive officer. Personally, I’d say there’s better things to spend our money on.’ The woman from Resources was anxious to be home to relieve the child minder of responsibility. It was the third successive evening that she had telephoned to beg the girl to stay the extra hour.

‘If you believe a little extramarital on the part of his wife with Rykov is going to faze our American friends, then you are on another planet. I see no reason, none at all, why such nonsense would diminish Krause’s standing in Washington. They’re all at it there, screwing like rabbits. Sorry, but the money would be wasted.’ From North America Desk.

‘My own view, it would be cheaper for Perkins to get his kicks down in Soho, give him a bunch of luncheon vouchers and pack him off to get an eyeful if it’s films he needs. I vote against.’ The head of Russia Desk was due to collect his serviced car from the garage, and if he were not there in 25 minutes the garage would have closed.

‘Sorry, Fleming, but that’s the verdict of colleagues. Perkins shouldn’t take it personally, it’s been good ferreting. Thank you all for your time.’

The assistant deputy director shovelled his papers into his briefcase. Fleming stood grimly. The head of Russia Desk scraped back his chair. The stenographer folded away her pad. Resources was half way to the door. The head of North America Desk smiled sheepishly at Fleming… and Olive Harris still sat and she rapped her pencil hard on the table.

‘I’ll take them,’ she said. ‘I’ll take those videos because they’re cheap at the price.. I find it sad and extraordinary that none of you recognize their value.’

He heard her footfall, and the knock.

‘Josh.’

‘Yes.’

‘Have you been having a good cry?’

‘Actually..

‘It wasn’t true, Josh, not a word of it, but it was what you wanted to hear. Right? You wanted a bloody good sob story, and I gave it you. I am what I am, Josh, take it or leave it. What you see, Josh, is what you get. You fell for it, Josh, all gift wrapped. So, don’t try again to package me, put me in a little slot where you can get all bloody sentimental. There was no baby, Josh and no abortion. Because they killed Hans Becker, and that’s going to have to be good enough for you, I’m going after those bastards. And, I’m hungry…’

He heard her go back to her room.

He had watched Christina’s victory. He had kissed her, had congratulated her, had left Eva to take her home.

Dieter Krause was not more than five minutes late at the meeting in the cafe on Augusten Strasse. Siehl was there, and Fischer, and Peters. They smoked and drank beer. They had all heard on the radio that a man had fallen to his death in Lichtenhagen. He had tried, himself, a dozen times to ring the mobile telephone of the former Leutnant.

He sat with his back to the door, and had not heard the door. He turned because of the smell. It was a moment, in the half-lit corner of the cafe, before he recognized Hoffmann.

Klaus Hoffmann’s hair was messed across his forehead. His eyes were reddened, those of a man who has wept without control. The vomit stains were on his jacket and across the thighs of his trousers.

‘You smell like a fucking pigsty,’ Peters said.

‘Where have you been, Klaus?’ he asked. There was, in that second of time, a hesitation in Dieter Krause.

Hoffmann said, a distant voice. ‘I walked. You see, friends, I saw him fall. It was not I that pushed him. I spoke to him, a few words, as he went into the block. I knew it was him because his name was called from the apartment, there were people to see him. He broke away from me and took the elevator. I saw him on the roof… I have to go home because people have come from the West and attempt to claim our house… The man who threw me onto the rocks from the breakwater, he tried to reach Brandt on the roof. They have come from the West and have an order from the court for the restitution of the property that their grandfather abandoned in 1945. When I spoke to him at the door of the block he had such terror. I told him that we watched him. I made the terror real for him. I did not know we could make such fear, still… They have come to take my house and I am going, now, home to Berlin…’

Dieter Krause said, chill, ‘You walk away from us, Klaus, and you are walking to the Moabit gaol.’

Klaus Hoffmann’s manic laugh rang through the room. ‘Still, the threats, as if you believe that nothing has changed. Too much has changed. I walked and wept and was sick because I realized what had changed… Then, I had an order. Then, I could hide myself behind the instruction of my Hauptman. Then, I could say I was doing my duty as told me by my superior… Now, I have no order and no instruction and no duty, and I am going to my home in Berlin.’

He turned on his heel. He took his smell into the street. He left them, stunned and silent, behind him.

Only when the black shadows came to the streets had Josh left his room to get fast food for the two of them.

He had taken the food and his bedding to her room.

They had not spoken as they had eaten, nor as he had made his bed up.

He lay on his back in the darkness and stared towards the ceiling he could not see.

‘For God’s sake, Josh…‘ The night sounds of the city murmured through the window, through the curtains. He lay on his back with his head in his locked hands.

‘For Christ’s sake, Josh – so, the man fell..

He watched the man go over the edge of the roof.

‘So, you wouldn’t talk to me and walk with me, and I made you by stripping…’

He watched her body hit by the wind on the beach.

‘So, tomorrow is another day, maybe tomorrow we get lucky.’ Josh said, quietly, ‘You have to earn luck.’

‘Have we? Have we earned it?’

‘Not yet,’ Josh said.