The Waiting Time

Chapter Thirteen

Josh drove.

They had come over the heavy wood bridge at Wolgast, crossed the wide Peene-Strom. He had driven for an hour and a half east from Rostock. She checked the map. She told him where to turn off the big highway that headed for the Polish border.

Until then the talk had been desultory, as if both were too bruised from the day and the night before. But when the forest closed around the road, high, dense pines, straight, towering trees that hid the light, Mantle told her the history of the place.

‘On the night of the seventeenth of August nineteen forty- three, five hundred and ninety-six aircraft were sent here, everything that could fly from the bomber bases in the east of England. The target was Peenemunde where there was the programme for the development of the V2 rocket. There was a clear moon, a rotten night to come. If the target of Peenemunde had not been so critical, they wouldn’t have been asked to fly on a night like that. They were told that if they didn’t crack the target then they’d have to come back and do it all again, face the air defence again, and keep coming back till they’d cracked it. There were three target areas at Peenemunde, pushed up close to each other. The strike had to be really exact.’

‘How do you know all this?’

‘I read about it. The pilots of the bombers, of course, had never heard of Peenemunde. They weren’t told what was on the ground, just that it was important. There was a firestorm, the casualties were horrendous. But the bomber crews took bad casualties as well, because of the moon, lost forty-nine aircraft over the target and on the way back.’

‘Is that how you spend your evenings, reading about what’s gone?’

‘I read history because it’s important to me. The target area was comprehensively hit. The best of the German rocket scientists were here, and they were creating what was to be the best weapon of the war. Even though the target was pulped, the science survived. The scientists, after nineteen forty-five, were snatched by the Russians and the Americans. Neal Armstrong’s walk came from here, and Apollo and Challenger and the shuttle, and Gagarin and the space stations. It’s all about Peenemunde.’

Tracy said, distantly, ‘Did your wife leave you because you lectured her on what’s gone?’

He said, quietly, ‘I can’t help what drives me. Out of history comes everything. Codes, morals, ethics, they’re all learned from history. Why we’re here today, why we have to be here, is because of the need to learn the lessons of history.’

‘You were better quiet, better when you didn’t lecture.’

‘Please, Tracy, listen. History breeds principles. The history of Peenemunde is about fantastic scientific achievement, but it’s also about slave-labour compounds and about starvation and about men working until they died of exhaustion. That was wrong. The people who were here then, they closed their eyes to what was wrong, believed the wrong – slave labour – did not matter. They wanted to ignore principles, but principles are the core of life.’

‘Did she have to listen to your lectures before she left?’

‘You come to Peenemunde, Tracy, and you learn what was wrong, you learn about when principles were ignored. To get the rockets to London, to develop the science to put a man on the moon, slave labourers died of starvation and exhaustion. It’s the same story. It’s why I’m here. It was wrong to shoot Hans Becker. That is a principle and I try to live by it.’

‘Me, I only want to see the bastard hammered.’

‘You have to know why. You have to hold the principle as faith.’

She closed her eyes and turned away. They went through Trassenheide and Karlshagen, and he saw the cemetery with the exact lines of the stones, and he came to Peenemunde where the bombers had flown. Without principles his life would have been emptied.

‘I talk,’ Josh said, cold. ‘We are quite close. There won’t be any more lectures or much more history… I talk and you write it down.’

The man walked away, his hands thrust deep in the pockets of his old coat, and was lost among the first tourists of the day.

Heinz Gerber had been sweeping the roadway that led past the scale-sized model of the Vergeltungswaffe 2, past the old Me 163, the MiG-21 and the MiG-23 on their concrete stands. It was his job, each day, to sweep the roadway from the Feld Salon Wagen that had been used by the former ministers and generals, and which was now a cafe, and clear the rubbish and wrappings all the length of the roadway to the harbour where the Type P21 gunboat was moored. He was qualified to sweep the roadway because he had once been in charge of the refuse collection of a small town. The people he worked with did not know of his former life. It was his nightmare, lived alone in the dark hours of the single room he rented in Karlshagen, that it should be known he was a man accused of thieving precious money from his church.. He could never go back. There had been silence in the street when he had left his home. They had all believed it, that he had stolen from the church box, because it was what they had been told.

When he had first come to Peenemunde it had been to clean and scrub the sleeping quarters of the conscript soldiers of the military base. When they had left, he had been given the work of sweeping and brushing the roadway of the new museum.

He had finished the work, brushed the small heap of paper, dirt and wrappings on to his shovel. He had tipped the heap into his wheelbarrow. The roadway behind him was cleaned. He had left the wheelbarrow there, near to the model of the Vergeltungswaffe 2, with the brush and shovel laid neatly on it. He loved his work. He had gone to the store shed, near to the models of the SA2B and SA5 ground-to-air missiles, and lifted a coil of rope down from a nail. He loved to work with his brush and shovel and wheelbarrow, and he did not care whether the heat stifled him or whether it rained or whether the snow came.

He walked out, past the big Soviet troop-carrying helicopter, towards the pine forest and the path he took each day to and from his single room in Karlshagen. He loved the daylight: the nightmare only came with the darkness. He carried the rope into the forest, where the light was shut out by the high canopy.

Josef Siehl watched them pay the woman at the kiosk and take the tickets. He recognized her because he had seen her sit beside the lighthouse on the breakwater and throw flowers into the sea. He watched from his car. He recognized the man who had held the Leutnant and threatened to kill him, and he had believed the man. He watched them speak to the woman in the kiosk, who shrugged and pointed towards the roadway and the aircraft and the models of the rockets.

The brevity of her note was typical of Olive Harris.

An hour before the meeting she had circulated it to the personal assistant of the deputy director general, with copies to the assistant deputy director and to Fleming of German Desk. She had sat at her desk late into the previous evening, and she had come again early to Vauxhall Bridge Cross to check the note and make some, few, slight revisions to the text. Olive Harris succeeded, in a man’s world, by the clarity of her thought and by the instant dismissal of what she regarded as unnecessary.

She explained the concept of her plan.

‘The so-called seekers after truth – the young woman, Barnes, and the man who has tagged on to her, Mantle – they are unimportant. She is directed by sentimentality, he is governed by naive notions of retribution. They are a minor sideshow and should be ignored.’

The deputy director had come down from his quarters high in the building to the office suite of the assistant deputy director. He listened without comment, his angled chin supported by his fists, his elbows on the table. It would be his decision.

‘Krause is irrelevant. He is a small-time bit player. Whether he committed murder in cold blood is of no concern to us.’

The coffee provided by the assistant deputy director remained untouched, the biscuits uneaten. He would never interrupt Olive Harris and would seldom contradict her.

‘The carping between the German agencies, BfV and BND, and ourselves on the issue of influence in Washington is frankly demeaning. It may be sustainable by dwarf-sized minds. If we seek a position of supremacy then we should justify that position by achievement, not by whining.’

Fleming sat beside her. He had sniffed when she had sat down and he reckoned that she wore no scent.

‘But Perkins, plodding in Rostock, has provided us with the ammunition for sniping at a target of consequence. The situation

– we have the growing restlessness of the Russian military, we have a defence minister being kicked towards action, we have a minister gaining increasing popularity from the officer corps of the military, we have the ever present frustration of the military for the current civilian leadership. That is the situation. Behind the minister, with obvious and dominant influence over him, is Colonel Pyotr Rykov. He is a target of consequence. Do they want – in Downing Street, in the White House, the Elysee, in the Quirinale – a military government in Russia? Do they hell. They prefer civilian corruption, political inefficiency, the chaos we have at present. I want those video-tapes for myself. I have explained how they should be used, because they provide us with the opportunity to target Colonel Pyotr Rykov.’

She looked each of them, in turn, in the eye. Fleming looked away. The assistant deputy director dropped his head. It would be the deputy director’s decision.

‘Thank you, Olive. It can be assumed that you’re known in Moscow?’

She said, scornful, ‘Of course I’m known.’

‘It can be assumed that you would be recognized?’

She said, proud, ‘Of course I would be recognized.’

Then, on a misty dank morning, in the cream and green building that dominated the southern bank of the Thames river, they diverted attention from the former Hauptman Dieter Krause to Colonel Pyotr Rykov. It was done with effortless ease.

The meeting broke.

Fleming walked back to his office. He felt crushed and knew it was because he had not spoken out.

The woman in the kiosk had said that they would find Heinz Gerber sweeping the roadway. There was no one sweeping the roadway. They had waited by the abandoned wheelbarrow.

The man who painted the aircraft had said that Heinz Gerber might have gone for his Pinkel pause, and explained how long in each hour it was permitted to go to the lavatory. They had stood outside the toilet block at the front of the power station.

‘Where the bloody hell is he?’

‘I don’t know – how would I know?’

‘If you hadn’t spent so bloody long jerking off with all that crap about principles, boring the arse off me-’

‘I want to find him, Tracy, as much as you want to find him – maybe more. And your foul little mouth won’t help me to find him.’

She sagged. ‘Where is he, Josh, please?’

‘We just have to look again.’

Albert Perkins walked from the bank near his hotel back into the old walled city. The street, leading up from the mighty shape of the Marienkirche, was filled with old men and old women. Little slipped by the eyes of the intelligence officer from Vauxhall Bridge Cross. He thought that the faces of the older men and women showed the despair that came from a lifetime of sustained defeat. The oldest men would have gone from these streets to the battlefields of Stalingrad and Kursk and north Africa and France, and defeat. The oldest women would have seen the Red Army come, and the Stasi and the apparatchiks of the Party, and would have hugged their thoughts to their chests, and known the fear that was defeat.

The shop was empty, again. He walked inside.

He was led to the back. The former Oberstleutnant unlocked the heavy door and led him down the steps into the museum cellar.

‘You have the money?’

‘You wish to check?’

Each of the video-cassettes was inserted into the player and the first thirty seconds of each was shown on the screen… More than a flight of fancy for Albert Perkins. God’s truth, they had kept him awake and aroused and tossing. They were wrapped in brown paper and put in a plastic supermarket bag. He handed over the envelope and watched the man count the money, hundred-DM notes, interminably slowly, with concentration. Perkins’s eyes meandered. It was the weathered log that intrigued him most, with the peeled bark. If it had been by his feet, in Bushy Park close to his home, if the grass had grown around it, he did not believe he would have noticed it.

There was a chuckle behind him. ‘It is good, yes? I think you copied it, I think you used a copy in Ireland. I think we were the first. I think we were the best, yes?’

Perkins smiled, so friendly. ‘You were the best, yes, which is why you now sell Japanese cameras that cannot be paid for.’

The former Oberstleutnant grinned cheerfully. ‘I do not take offence. The world changes, we adapt or we die. I do not complain. You should know I have a great pride in the quality of material on those three tapes. I went, a year before the end, to Leipzig to help with their surveillance techniques. It was two days before the Christmas of nineteen eighty-eight. There was a party that night and I showed my material. I received a standing ovation, I was applauded for its quality. Why do you wish to hurt them?’

‘Hurt who?’

‘When you buy a ten-year-old film of Frau Krause fucking with a Russian officer, then you go into the gutter to hurt either Frau Krause or the Russian officer. What have they done to you that they deserve to be hurt?’

Perkins turned away. He climbed the steps out of the cellar, he crossed the shop, he did not wish the man a good day. He walked out onto the street.

A week before, seven clear days, if he had been told that he could go to Peenemunde, Josh Mantle would have hugged the man who gave him the invitation. It should have been the place where the bare pages of books took life. He would have yearned, seven clear days before, to walk in that place of history.

It was the fourth time that they had tracked the length and breadth of the museum area.

He no longer cared for the history.

He had been through the smaller museum that housed the wartime exhibits – and his eyes had not caught the photographs of the V2 development, or the encased slave-labourer’s uniform that dressed a dummy, or the little personal possessions of the test pilots who had flown the Me 163 jet prototypes, or the artist’s impression of the Lancaster bombers over Peenemunde.

The wheelbarrow was still in the roadway, filled, with the brush and shovel placed carefully on the rubbish.

He had scrutinized the tourists on the benches and at the picnic tables beside the aircraft on their stands. He had gone into the graveyard area of the helicopters that needed renovation before they could be displayed. He had walked among the missiles. He had been through the power station building that proclaimed the site as the ‘Gateway to Outer Space’ where the displays boasted ‘Peenemunde to Canaveral’.

A man with a wet cloth cleaned pictures on the stairs. He had wiped the portrait photograph of Walter Dornberger, then soaked his rag, squeezed the moisture from it and started on the portrait of Wernher von Braun. Josh hadn’t seen him before.

Did the man know where Heinz Gerber could be found? He would be sweeping the roadway. No, not in the roadway, Josh told him, and not in the lavatory, not anywhere.

The face of the slow, dull man shook, as if he were puzzled that he had forgotten. Methodically he rubbed at the glass over the portrait of Werhner von Braun. ‘I remember… He was the start. Doktor von Braun was the beginning of everything the Americans have done. All of their rockets start with what Doktor von Braun created here… I remember. He was going to the path. I think he was going home. I remember that I wondered why he was going home. He goes home on the path through the forest.’

‘I am so sorry to trouble you. You are very gracious, Doktor.

A man yesterday fell to his death from the roof of a block in Lichtenhagen – one of those awful places built by the old regime, a desert of concrete. I would not have thought the matter involved the BfV, except that two foreigners had visited the apartment in which the fatality lived, British foreigners. That is peculiar because Lichtenhagen is an extraordinary place for foreigners to visit. He was a retired school-teacher from Rerik, which is west along the coast, but was now living in Lichtenhagen.’

He was young for the job. All through the morning he had hesitated from making the call. If he had stayed in Dortmund, he would have been, with his experience and seniority, the third man in the chain of command. He had gone east, joined the migration flood of Wessis, gone on the fast run of promotion and extra salary, taken the position of police chief for the city of Rostock. AU morning the report had been on his desk and he had hesitated before ringing a senior official of the BfV in Cologne. With greater age and greater experience he would either have made the call two hours before or dumped the report in his Out tray. His deputies were all Ossis, men of greater age and greater experience, and all had been passed over for the job of police chief for the city. He rarely asked them for advice: to have done so would have seemed to confirm their prejudice against him.

‘There is a problem with descriptions. The tenants of the apartment are elderly, one handicapped, one sighted, they were the uncle and aunt of the fatality. Neither can offer descriptions beyond that one was a man and one a woman. No, no, there is no evidence of homicide. There is no evidence of a crime… I forget it? I confirm your suggestion and apologize, Doktor, for wasting your time.’

The forest closed around them. They walked on the pine-needle path in the gloom. Only the cold drifted down from the canopy.

Among the pencil-straight trees were the stunted, angled shapes of broken concrete. He thought it was the true museum, not the museum in the sunlight fashioned for the tourists. The true museum was the cracked and disintegrated shapes of concrete that had been the buildings of the experimental-rocket works, where the scientists had been and the Polish labourers, where the bombs of concentrated explosive had fallen. The concrete shapes were covered with lichen. The needles had gathered on them and softened the angles of their destruction. The craters had survived half a century of the dark gloom below the forest canopy. Impossible for Josh, who had read the books, not to imagine the carnage hell of those who had run in their terror where he now walked, when the forest had burned and the buildings had come down as the bombs had fallen. She came easily behind him, light feet on the cushion of needles. They walked past the great facade of a building that had been taken by the pines. Only the facade survived, still fire-blackened. The pines were the roof and the interior of the building. It was the true history.

He saw the hanging body.

Josh stopped. He stared at it. She cannoned into his back. Tracy had not seen the body. He held her close against him.

There was no wind in the forest, under the canopy. The rope was over a branch and knotted. The hanging body rotated so slowly. He saw the back of the man and the collapsed shoulders, his side and the outstretched arms, the stain at his groin. He closed his eyes. The man had climbed the tree, struggled to gain the necessary height, clawed his way up the rough, scaled bark of the tree. He had climbed to the first branch that he would have judged could take the weight of the rope under strain, tied the rope to the branch and slipped the noose over his head. He thought of the man for whom the terror of living was greater than the fear of death.

He opened his eyes. He held her as she shook in his arms. He kept her head, her neck, against his chest.

The man’s shoes were on the path, had been kicked off. He saw the worn, holed socks of the man. He judged the terror that had been brought to the last moments of the life of Heinz Gerber.

‘Good to see you, young man, and how is Berlin?’

‘Cold, Mr Perkins, very cold. I’m sorry, I’m very pushed for time on the schedule they’ve set me. Have you the package?’

It gave Albert Perkins perverse pleasure to hand to Rogers, when the kindergarten kid was fresh from the Portsmouth recruit courses, a frayed supermarket bag containing a package loosely wrapped in brown paper. They were in the car park, broad daylight, in front of the hotel.

‘That’s the package. Going this evening, is it?’ He grinned. ‘If they get their eyes on that lot tonight, in London, when they get home their women can expect a pretty fearful time.’

He saw the confusion on the young man’s face. ‘London?’

‘London, yes, that’s where it’s going.’

He saw the flush on the young man’s face. ‘Weren’t you told, Mr Perkins, what was happening?’

‘Where’s it going, if not to London?’

He saw the young man flinch, blink, then summon the courage. ‘If you’d needed to know, Mr Perkins, I’m sure they’d have told you. I’d better get on, sorry.’

Young Rogers, kindergarten kid, ran to his car and he clutched the supermarket bag to his chest. Perkins’s breath spurted, steamed in his face.

The car of the kindergarten kid accelerated away, out of the car park.

Dieter Krause, in his car in the parking area outside the tennis hall, heard the news bulletin.

The radio said that, in Gustrow, a hostel for eastern foreigners had been firebombed; in Wismar, the chemical factory was to close with the loss of 371 jobs; in Schwerin, the tourist authority for Mecklenburg-Vorporren reported that advance bookings for the summer were down on the previous year…

The police chief, driving in his chauffeured car to his new home in the Altstadt, heard the news bulletin. In Rostock, the transfer of the reserve-team striker to Werder Bremen was confirmed with a fee of one million DMs; in Peenemunde, a former Rathaus official from Rerik had been found hanged in the forest near to the space-exploration museum…

Albert Perkins, in his hotel room, in shock, lying dressed on his bed, heard the news bulletin.

‘Where is Siehl?’

Fischer said, ‘He waited for you. He waited a long time for you.

Peters said, ‘I told him not to bother to wait longer. I told him that watching your bitch daughter play tennis was more important to you.’

The match had gone on. Christina had lost the first set before he had reached the stand and sat beside his wife. Christina, rampant, hugging him, at the end had said that she would not have won if he had not been there to watch her and she had babbled about the racquets that she should be brought from Washington. When Christina had gone to shower and change, Eva had asked him… No, the problem was not solved. No, the problem continued. She had stared ahead of her in the emptying stand and bitten at her lips. Her fingers had worried on the new bracelet of gold chain on her wrist.

Peters said, ‘The bastard quit on us.’

It was the first time in the three years that his career had so far run that young Henry Rogers had felt true involvement in a mission of importance. Everything before had been analysis and the interminable work at the computer screen. His pride mingled with apprehension. He had followed, most exactly, the detailed instructions he had received from Mrs Olive Harris in London.

He stood on the north side of the Unter den Linden.

The man, in front of him, crossed the wide street, went to the south side, walked towards the floodlit grey granite facade of the Russian embassy. Mrs Harris would have known of the man, Rogers assumed, from Mr Perkins’s daily situation reports. He had been to the apartment near to the Spittelmarkt and paid the wizened little man who stank of cats the sum of one thousand American dollars. He had given him, as the instructions of Mrs Harris had demanded, an airline ticket to Zurich, valid for the last flight of the evening with open-dated return, and had driven him to the Unter den Linden. He had written a Russian name, from Mrs Harris’s instructions, on the brown paper of the package, and handed it to him.

In the bright flush of the embassy’s security lights, he watched the man ring the bell at the heavy door.

He fished in his pocket for his car keys. He watched the man cross the Unter den Linden, scurrying to avoid the cars, not waiting for the pedestrian lights. It would be only a twenty- minute drive to the Tempelhof airport. He felt pride at his achievement in carrying out Mrs Olive Harris’s meticulous instructions, and he lost the apprehension of failure. He did not know his part in the destruction of a target of consequence.

Josh would have said, normal times, that he could accept silence.

He lay on the mattress and the blankets were tight around him. He lay on his side and faced the wall. He could smell the damp of the wretched little room they shared. The party of seamen from Sweden, Denmark, Norway, wherever, must have sailed that day. Down below, in the reception of the pension, his key and her key would be the only ones missing from the hooks. He could hear her breathing behind him, and he did not know whether she slept or whether she lay awake, and he did not know whether images of the body, the shoes, the terror of the man obsessed her as they knifed him.

He had held her close, tight, against him all the way back down the path through the forest. The moment that they had broken clear from the dull light and the sun had fallen on them, she had shouldered herself free of his arms, pulled away from him.

In the faint night light of the room he saw her hand hanging careless at the side of her bed, near to his face.

‘Are you awake, Tracy?’

‘Trying to sleep.’

‘You know that if we fight, Tracy, we fail.’

‘I didn’t ask you to be here… and I didn’t ask for lectures.’

‘Do you know how much you hurt, Tracy? Does it bother you?’ She murmured, savage, ‘God, are you going to moan again, again? Is that why your wife left you?’

Josh pushed himself up. He sat against the wall. He heaved the blankets around him.

‘We’ll start there. That’s as good a place as anywhere. Don’t interrupt me. Don’t open your horrid little mouth… I was out of the Army. I was a social worker. I worked with kids for three years. Can I say it, so it’s on the record? They were thieves and vandals and joyriders and none of them had the quality of viciousness that you parade, that you find so easy to justify.’

He heard her breathing sweet and regular. He saw the outline of her body and her hand careless beside his face.

‘There was a boy, Darren. He was on the pills. He thieved to get the money for the pills. I quite liked the kid, I thought I could break him off them. He thieved from this house, big place, smart road in the Chalfonts, he was all dosed up when he went in and he didn’t do the necessary with the alarm. The police picked him up outside the house. He was in the cells when I saw him and he was going back, as night follows day, to Feltham Young Offenders’, and he was sitting on the bunk bed and the tears were streaming down his face. I thought he was worth the effort, and the custody sergeant told me I was an idiot. I went to the house he’d broken into. She was Libby Frobisher, stinking rich, divorced, and I told her about Darren and what the custody sergeant had said and that the kid was in the cells and weeping his heart out. She withdrew the charges. The kid, Darren, walked free. I drove him round to see the woman and made him stand in front of her and apologize and mean it.’

He did not know whether she slept or whether she listened.

‘She rang me a month later, she wanted to know what had happened to the kid. She said I should come round, have a drink, tell her. Six weeks later we were married. I was fifty-one years old and she was the first woman I had loved. There was only her accountant and her solicitor at the wedding and they thought I was into her life for the easy ride. I made her – insisted on it

– write a will where nothing was left to me. Until I met her, I was not a man who cried or laughed or knew happiness or understood pain. I learned them all from her. For a year I knew happiness, and then she found the lump.’

Josh reached out and took her hand.

‘For half a year I cried and understood pain. She went through the treatment. She died.’

He brushed his lips against her hand and opened his fingers and allowed her hand to drop back, careless, beside the bed.

‘I tell her about you each day. I went to see her the day I left to come to find you. I told her then that you put your hand into a snake’s hole, that you weren’t beautiful, weren’t even very pretty. I told her about the killing of Hans Becker, your boy, and that the only thing we had in common was that we had both had the person we loved taken from us… I tell her, each day, how we’re doing. I tell her that we’re frightened, that we don’t know where it’s leading us.’

He thought she slept. He saw the calm stillness of the profile of her face.

‘I tell her that, thank God, tomorrow is always another day.’