The Waiting Time

Chapter Fifteen

‘Good, they brought you coffee. I apologize for the delay. I have tried to make a judgement on the accusation you have made, Herr Mantle. I hope the coffee was satisfactory.’

He had been taken to an interview room. The detective was young, fresh-faced, and dressed neatly but casually. He had sat across the bare table from him and written notes as Josh had blurted an accusation of criminal conspiracy and murder. He had not interrupted, not passed comment, and Josh had stumbled through a brief, chaotic version of the deaths. The detective would have registered the filth on his clothes and the exhaustion on his face. He had then been left in the interview room for five minutes short of an hour, alone in the bare room with the whitewashed walls and the wood table and the hard chairs and the concrete floor and the electric fire. He knew that he had wasted their time and his own. He had heard the voice, away behind the closed door, of the detective on the telephone.

Finally the detective eased into the chair opposite him.

‘You have mentioned, Herr Mantle, three situations. I have only a short digest of the facts involving the first two of those matters, but the third is more clear.’

The detective spoke slowly and was careful with his pronunciation, as if he believed that he spoke to an idiot who needed patient calming.

‘I have spoken with Rostock. You are correct, a man fell to his death, but the man, unfortunately, had a previous history of mental disturbance. I have to tell you, Herr Mantle, there are many sad people in our Eastern German society who have been severely traumatized by the pressures of “reassociation”. They have seen the pillars of their lives removed, cradle to grave dependency on the state, and are unable to adapt. It is unfortunate.’

The detective turned the page of his notebook.

‘I have also spoken with Wolgast, where the police deal with matters affecting Peenemunde. Again, you are correct, a man hanged himself. For my generation, Herr Mantle, there are only advantages and opportunities to be taken from “reassociation” and a higher standard of living. Older people, I regret, find the self-reliance of the new society most stressful. That generation has no knowledge of pensions, social-security payments, the new costs of a capitalist society. This individual, we understand, had allowed himself to fall heavily into debt. For that reason he took his life. Many gain from the modern greater Germany, but there are casualties.’

The detective closed his notebook.

‘And you have referred to a death two years ago on a farm at Starkow. I have spoken to the relevant local authorities. The deceased, it seems, was an elderly agricultural worker who chose to live in a conversion of a cowshed. He did not know how to look after himself, he had poor habits of personal hygiene. The conditions he chose to exist in were, to be very frank, similar to those of the animals he cared for. He died of pneumonia. There was a full investigation at the time by the health specialists, and it was found that no one, other than himself, could be blamed for his premature death. I cannot tell you why he made that choice, to live in filth and cold, but I can say that many of the older generation in the East have suffered from mental collapse. It is tragic, but..

Josh stood. He knew that she would laugh at him.

‘I have to tell you that there have been three deaths, but that there is absolutely no evidence of murder.’

He turned towards the door. She would laugh in his face.

‘You spoke of the Staatssicherheitsdienst. I am afraid that I did not understand you. There is no Stasi now in Germany. The Stasi was dismantled in nineteen ninety, it does not now exist.’

He walked out of the room.

‘Please, Herr Mantle, how does a foreigner become interested in these matters?’

He went down the corridor towards the light and the street. By the reception desk, he saw the grin as the policeman looked up from his newspaper. The officer would have heard that a foreigner, dirty as a vagrant, talked of the Stasi and murder. He blinked, the sun shone on the street.

He looked for her.

Dieter Krause rode in the cab of the recovery truck.

He had used his telephone, sitting against the trunk of a poplar tree, and had waited. When the recovery truck had come, he had supervised the hooking of the cable rope to the chassis fender of his BMW, giving orders as he used to give them. The mechanics had said that they thought the car might be serviceable, that they would need to lift it onto the ramp at their garage for checking.

The car had been his pride. The car was, to Dieter Krause, the symbol that he had reached the new stature. The car told him, shouted at him, that he was accepted by the people in Cologne. He could have, perhaps should have, abandoned it. If he had abandoned the new car then he would, also, have abandoned the symbol of the new life. The sides were scraped and dented, the paint had been torn away. The river water had poured from the engine when the cable had dragged the car clear. The engine had started – coughed, choked, belched – started, and then died. The men had said that maybe his car could be rescued from the breaker’s yard, and maybe not. There was always, they’d said, the possibility of electrical failure and fire after a car’s engine had been in the water.

If he had not brought the car back to Rostock, Dieter Krause would have accepted failure, defeat… He had seen her face when he had rammed the tail of her car, and as he had accelerated past her to drive her off the road. He had seen the strength and determination in her face and there had been the moment, so short, that she had turned to him and seemed to laugh.

He sat in the cab of the recovery vehicle as it trundled towards Rostock. By his feet was the coat she had thrown across his windscreen.

He had walked up the street and couldn’t find her.

The car was where she had parked it, near the police station, but empty and locked.

The panic swirled in him. He had turned again to retrace his steps, and he saw her.

She was on a bench, a filthy, mud-encrusted urchin in the sunlight. He must have passed her when he had gone up the street, and she had not called out to him. She had let him walk, search, and let the panic rise in him. She was grinning. The sun fell on her face and on her hair. He stamped towards her.

His voice was shrill. ‘Don’t say it. Don’t, please, give the smug “1 told you”, just don’t. It seems the new Germany is stuffed to the nose with mental disturbance, with debt, with good old decent tragedy. Didn’t you know it? Trauma caused a man to jump off a roof, debt caused a man to hang himself, tragedy caused a man to live in cow-shit and catch pneumonia. Of course, no one is to blame. Isn’t that sad? And, surprise, there is no Stasi. I’m at the end…’

She pushed herself up. He did not know whether she despised or pitied him.

Josh was turning away. He saw the man, half view, at the edge of his vision. The man stood near to the side of the bench. He had not noticed him before, only seen Tracy on the bench with the sunlight on her. The man had his back to them. The man wore smart jeans, was heavy-built, wore a full leather jacket. It was the uniform, what they’d worn on the breakwater, and worn going to the steamed car on the Lichtenhagen estate. The man was a dozen paces away and his back was to them.

Josh hissed, ‘How long has he been…?’

‘Who?’

He shook. ‘That bastard. How long…?’

‘No idea.’ She didn’t seem to care.

They were all around. They watched him, played with him. He was exhausted and panicked. The aggression drove him forward, they’d no fear of him, anger fuelled him. One arm straightening to turn the bastard, one fist drawn back and clenched to punch the bastard, and if he went down there was the mud-caked shoe to kick him. He caught the shoulder of the leather jacket and spun the man. He saw the shock. He saw the baby the man held. The man cringed away. Josh loosed the hold on the leather jacket, and reeled away, mouthing apologies.

He stumbled back down the street towards the car. He would say it, did not know when he would dare to say it to her. He was at the end…

‘I dislike him because he is coarse and vulgar, and he is arrogant, but not because of what he did in the past. I dislike him because I do not believe he is properly a German as you and I are Germans, not because he shot an agent of the British. I have my job, I must do my job, I must suffer in his company.’

Ernst Raub packed his suitcase and his wife passed him, from the wardrobe and the chest, the clothes he would take. The plan that was now discarded by the senior official of the BfV had been for him to meet the man he disliked in Frankfurt for the ifight to Washington. He was directed now to go to Rostock, and there were precise instructions as to what was expected of him in the Baltic city before escorting Krause to Berlin and the connecting ffight to Frankfurt for the link to Washington. He packed carefully.

‘It is unimportant to me, what he did in the past. Julius, my little comrade, he sees Krause as the incarnation of the Gestapo, detests him. Little Julius wraps himself in the past, so selfrighteous, so sickening. Not me… There are too many who seek to blame us for the past. In the old past, my grandfather, a policeman in Munich, would have helped with the round-up of Jews, gypsies, Communists. He would have been on the detail that took them with their bags to the railway station. Does that mean I do not love the memory of my grandfather, that I will not permit our children to go to his grave, when we travel to Munich, and lay flowers on it? I heard it said that there were gypsies, men, women and children, once at Munich who tried to break away and flee from the platform as they were driven towards the rail trucks, and the police shot them. I have no idea whether my grandfather was there, whether he fired, because in his life I never asked him. We cannot, should not, any more be required to carry the burden of the old past.’

He folded his dinner jacket into the suitcase, and she passed him his dress shirt. He smoothed it carefully. It was for the dinner at the Pentagon, and the following evening they would be the guests of the Rand Corporation. And then she gave him his preknotted black tie.

‘What did your grandfather do in the old past? He was at Krupp in the Ruhr, he had a good position in management. At Krupp, the production was maintained, in the last eighteen months, by slave labour. Did your grandfather take responsibility for the slave labour? You did not decline to send him an invitation to our wedding. By us he was treated like any other grandfather, given our love and our welcome on the day of our marriage, because the past should be forgotten…’

They would eat together that night as a family. The excursion with the children, the next day, on the river, was cancelled. He would be gone early, while the children slept.

‘If I do not accept the guilt of your grandfather and my grandfather in the old past, then I cannot accept the guilt of Dieter Krause for what he did in the new past. He shot a young man – it is not confirmed to me but I believe it – shot an agent in cold blood. I believe, but it is not confirmed to me, that my grandfather fired on gypsy children at the railway station in Munich and that your grandfather used slave labour to maintain the armaments output from Krupp. If I do not have to carry the burden of guilt from the old past then I don’t carry that burden from the new past.’

He closed the suitcase, pressed it shut, fastened the small padlock to the central leather strap.

‘It is my job to disregard the past. It is policy that I protect him from guilt… and he is, forgive me, my dear, a total piece of shit.’

They were close to Rostock.

Ahead of them was the junction, Rostock-Ost, for the Autobahn to Berlin, anywhere. If she drove under the Autobahn, it was the road north to Warnemunde and the fishing harbour. He had to dare to say it to her. He searched for the courage.

She drove, didn’t look at him. It had been an agony to Josh, with him all the way from the police station at Ribnitz-Damgarten.

‘Tracy…’

‘Come alive, have you?’

‘I have to say it…’

‘Say what you’ve got to say, spit it out.’

‘Tracy, I cannot live, not any more, with the responsibility.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘We should go to Berlin. If we hadn’t come those men would be alive. That is responsibility, and it crushes me. We should go to Berlin, the airport, and take the next ffight out. The alternative is too much for me.’

Her lip curled. ‘If you forgot, he murdered my Hansie in cold blood.’

‘It is men’s lives, and I can’t carry that weight, Tracy, not any more. There is a man at Warnemunde, like he’s waiting for us, Tracy, and we are bringing him his death, bloody wrapped up in ribbons and shiny paper.’

‘Quit, if that’s what you want. I’m staying.’

He had no power over her. He was familiar with issuing an order, and that order being obeyed.

‘We should go to the airport, to Berlin. Believe me – for God’s sake, listen to me. Listen, forget about the poor bloody wretches that you and I have intruded upon and hammered and broken. Think about yourself, Tracy. We can be in London tonight. You have nothing to be ashamed of. You did what you could. You tried. You cared when nobody else cared. You lost and you can be proud, you can walk tall with yourself. You stay, and you carry the responsibility. What will that have done to you, Tracy? If you win, if. have you thought how it will leave you? That responsibility, those lives taken, it will leave you old and crabbed and bowed. Accept failure, accept you’re beaten, accept that you have humanity, and begin to live again. Your way, staying, killing another man, taking that responsibility, is to turn your back on everything precious. Love is precious, and fun and happiness – God, Tracy, they are worth reaching for – it’s what your Hansie would have wanted. Me, I’m bloody well finished, won’t ever be love again in my life, but, listen, you have youth. I plead with you to listen. Don’t let what happened destroy you. You can be in London this evening and maybe you will have given a man his life.’

She pulled up onto the hard shoulder. Ahead the road split between the slip-road for the autobahn and Berlin and the route straight ahead, under the bridge carrying the autobahn, to Rostock and Warnemunde.

‘A man, a woman, can be frightened, Tracy, and not be ashamed. Being frightened isn’t weakness. Admit it, Tracy, you’re driven by fear – why you’re so bloody cruel. Too frightened of failure to tell Hans Becker that he should refuse the Rostock job and walk away from it. Too frightened of falling off your little pedestal at Brigade to tell Hans Becker to quit on the Rostock job. And, Tracy, too frightened to do anything but crouch in cover and watch as they dragged Hans Becker off that boat, before he ran… But, Tracy, you have no call for shame. People push agents beyond the limit because that’s their bloody job. People hide in cover and don’t intervene because that’s their survival route. You don’t have cause for guilt, believe me. It’s just that you’re the same as all the rest of us, frightened. You’ve done what you could, and more. Please, come back to Berlin…’

She reached across him, unfastened the door beside him and pushed it wide open. She loosed his seat-belt. On the autobahn the traffic thundered by, going south for Berlin. There were kids on the slip-road, with their rucksacks beside them, holding pieces of cardboard on which they had scrawled the names of the cities of Berlin and Dusseldorf and Leipzig and Schwerin and Hamburg.

Josh asked, ‘Is that it?’

‘You wanted an answer. That’s it.’

‘Then your answer is selfish, conceited, egocentric.’

She said quietly, ‘You never listen, and you understand nothing. I will say it again, the last time, I don’t quit.’

He could get out of the car. He could hitch a ride into Rostock and collect his bag from the room at the pension, and take the train to Berlin. He could sit on an aircraft flying high in the evening darkness, and know that she searched in the fishing harbour at Warnemunde for a trawler’s deck-hand. He pulled the door shut. He fastened his seat-belt.

Her hands rested loose on the wheel. He saw the jut of her chin.

He took her hand from the wheel. He was his own man. He kissed her fingers as he had in the night when he had thought she slept. It was his own decision. She stared ahead.

‘Thank you,’ she said, small voice. ‘Thank you for staying.’

He said, gruff, ‘Time we were getting on, light’s going.’

She took the car off the hard shoulder, past the slip-road, under the bridge, towards Rostock and the fishing harbour at Warnemunde.

‘I couldn’t, if I left you, live with myself.’

Albert Perkins felt, from his telephoned harangue of his superior, Mr Fleming, a slightly light-headed excitement, and that was as rare to him as had been his loss of temper. He walked the length of Kropeliner Strasse. He imagined, and took a certain pleasure from it, that through the day his superior would have been badgering Violet to use her supremely oiled inter-office communication lines to arrange a meeting, one to one, for Fleming with the ADD, on high. He paused outside the camera shop. The window was empty. The stock of Japanese cameras was gone. He laughed out loud. Done a runner with a vanload of stock and a bagful of banknotes. Good that one bastard had won. Who else would win? The slight young woman with the copper- gold hair? Dreary old Mantle? The former Hauptman? One of them must win..

He walked briskly, a sharp stride, past the low arches of the old gateway at the Altmarkt and headed for the Rostock police headquarters. He was thinking that it could, of course, be himself who would win.

In the embassy on the Sofiyskaya Embankment, in a small room on a high floor, Olive Harris dozed.

She felt at ease, the matter was in place, her schedule was organized. She would rest until the middle evening.

She was grateful that she would not have to refuse the ambassador’s invitation to dine. Ambassadors seldom issued dinner invitations to travelling guests from the Service. They regarded the presence in the embassy of the likes of Olive Harris as pure potential for broken fences and expulsions. She did not expect, or wish, to meet with the ambassador during her short visit to his territory, but he would know she had arrived and he would be fearful of what she might achieve and what rocks might fall later on him.

She disliked being so far from home. Few at Vauxhall Bridge Cross would have believed it, but she missed sleeping with her husband close to her. She would be home the next evening, when the business was done. The local file on Pyotr Rykov, unread, was beside her on the bed. Where she lay, on her side, catnapping, she could see the small photograph frame she always carried away with her, the picture of her husband and her children. It would be a triumph, and the pity was that they, most precious to her, would never know of it.

‘Have another, why not? I always feel that sherry soothes… Fly it by me again, the basis of Perkins’s tantrum…’

The assistant deputy director filled Fleming’s glass.

The wickedness of sherry, it’s never too early. I always feel like a guilty schoolboy if it’s gin before six, but any time after five seems decent for sherry. Perkins may be totally disreputable but he is a damn good officer and it would be sad for him to harbour grievances.’

The afternoon had slipped away and the street lights across the river played on the water far below the office.

Fleming said, ‘The usual thing, disjointed nose. The feeling that the dragon woman has hijacked his act, that Moscow Desk is walking over German Desk.’

‘I wouldn’t want a niggle, not about something essentially trivial… Now, don’t get me wrong – I’m not in the business of buying off Perkins’s temper, but he’s well due for a step up the ladder.’

‘Always the tried and trusted way, a Special Responsibility peg to hang his coat on.’

‘Special Responsibility for Iran matters in Europe, right up his street.’

Fleming smiled. ‘Go up a grade with that, wouldn’t he? It’s rather a good sherry. Go to grade seven, wouldn’t he?’

He tapped slender fingers on his desk calculator. ‘God, how did we ever do without them? An additional annual increment of, what? ?4597.78 should straighten out his nose. I’ve been discussing reorganizations with the DD and we’re thinking about a European Desks supervisory grade, sort of pulling the strings together. This little spat would not have boiled if one man had been in the co-ordinating seat. Your name’s been pencilled in, would be a grade six position.’

‘Just a pencil, not ink?’

‘Early days…‘ The ADD refilled Fleming’s glass, and smiled. ‘Well, that’s that, then. Let me just confirm – Perkins, he’s not on a principle kick? It’s merely that Olive elbowed him off centre stage?’

Fleming chuckled. ‘Principle? Perkins wouldn’t know what it means, certainly wouldn’t know how to spell it. I’ll tell him what’s been decided. It’s just about played out over there, and he can see it through, can start his new position on Monday.’

‘First class. You’ve reassured me – I’d have thought we had a real problem if it was the principle thing. It will be a good day tomorrow, I’ve that feeling.’

He had brought the bottle of Scotch whisky and a carton of Marlboro cigarettes. That a degree, small, of civility was shown him was because of the whisky and the cigarettes.

They queued to complain.

‘We’re treated as if we were without value. We’re treated as trash. This garrison camp, and every camp you might care to visit, Colonel, is like a dumping ground for rubbish.’

A long-standing commitment, it had been in his diary for seven months that on this day he should travel to Kubishev and watch the annual showpiece exercise of a motorized rifle division of the strategic reserve based at Volga Military Headquarters. What he had witnessed, in Rykov’s opinion, was a complete and unprofessional shambles.

‘You saw, Colonel, a divisional scale live firing exercise. You would have asked yourself, Colonel, where was the artillery. The absence of the artillery was not because they had no shells to shoot – they did not have shells but they could have gone along for the walk without shells as women who push prams. The regiment of artillery was not present, Colonel, because they were in the fields picking cabbages. If they do not pick their own cabbages they starve.’

He had stood in a bitter wind on a viewing platform and could have wept at what he saw. He had asked the General commanding the division what message should be carried back to the minister in Moscow, and the response of the General had been to gather a group of officers into a small room off the mess. The whisky had been put on the table and the carton of cigarettes had been ripped open. What hurt most was that each of the officers, the most senior to the most junior, spoke as if he believed that Pyotr Rykov had the power to change a situation of desperation. It was as if a message had been telegraphed ahead of him, that he was a man of unrivalled importance.

‘It was a live fire exercise, Colonel, an exercise for the division in manoeuvre, Colonel, but the tanks were static. Why? Because, Colonel, we had enough fuel to send the armoured personnel carriers forward with the infantry, but the tanks use more fuel. We do not, Colonel, have sufficient fuel for the armoured personnel carriers and for the tanks. What is the point of a divisional exercise where the tanks do not move?’

There was a small paraffin heater. He was their guest, and he had brought whisky and a carton of cigarettes, and was given the place of honour closest to the heater. Even the small warmth that it threw was insufficient to stop the shivering tremble in his legs. He thought them proud men. Some wore the ribbons for gallantry in Afghanistan, as he did, and some wore more ribbons for bravery in the pointless farce of Chechnya.

‘When the division attacks, Colonel, there should be supporting fire from the mortar units and from the RPG-7 and the Schmel and Falanga missile units. There was none. May I tell you why they did not fire, Colonel? There are no mortar bombs and no rocket- propelled grenades and no ground-to-ground missiles in the division’s arsenal store. We have sold them, Colonel. The divisional commander ordered it, and I arranged it. Perhaps, now, they are in Palestine or in Somalia or in Iraq, I do not know and I do not care. They were sold so that the division could buy heating oil, so that our soldiers did not die of hypothermia in the winter. I offer no apology, because that is what we are reduced to.’

He had written the statement of concern for his minister, given at a news conference. He listened. He had not known the half of the Army’s despair. It would have been better than anything his minister could have uttered if he had brought these officers to Moscow, given them a bottle of Scotch whisky and then wheeled them in front of the television cameras to speak to their countrymen. The Army had been the strength of Russia, her defence, and now it was humiliated. Pyotr Rykov felt the sting of the shame.

‘We sell, Colonel, to anyone who can pay. If the man who can pay is a criminal, then so be it. Where did the weapons of the Chechen bandits come from, Colonel? Why did they always have adequate reserves of ammunition when they fought us? They had our weapons, Colonel, they had our munitions. Our own weapons and our own munitions, sold to those shit bastards, killed our own troops.’

He was humbled by their belief in him. There was an Antonov transport waiting at the airfield for him. The ground crew, on the apron spraying the de-icing fluid on the wings, could wait. They believed him all-powerful and able to fashion change. He did not interrupt. He did not tell them, look into each of their faces and tell them, that he was now a target for surveillance, or that his driver, waiting for the arrival of the Antonov at Moscow Military, had told him that they waited to see how he responded to a given warning. He did not tell them of the fear that had settled at his back, lain on his stomach, the same fear he had known in the street markets and bazaars of Jalalabad and Herat.

‘My own unit, Colonel, in the exercise today, performed poorly. I can admit that. It performed poorly because it is short of officers. On paper I have under my command forty-seven officers. In the exercise, today, I was deprived of the use of fourteen. They were at work, Colonel. They are attempting to feed their families. They are many things – market traders, salesmen, security guards, taxi drivers – but they are not, any more, soldiers. In addition, adding to my shortage, three of my officers, in the last eight months, have shot themselves because of their sense of humiliation at the state to which the Army is reduced. Do they care in Moscow, Colonel, what they do to the Army?’

Outside the door of the small room off the mess was an armed corporal of the Mifitary Police. Invitation to the room was personally given by the divisional commanding officer. At Kubishev, old practices in new times, there remained the political officers. They would be in their heavy coats with their vodka at the bar of the mess. They would know that Pyotr Rykov listened to chosen officers, and they would report that. It would be known in Moscow before the morning how Pyotr Rykov responded to a warning.

‘I read, Colonel, that when I was a captain we were the equal of the Americans in military technology and we were superior to the British and the French. I was a captain ten years ago. Where are we now? It is not just that we are behind the Americans, we are out of sight. We are no longer on the same playing field. We are the Army of a republic that grows bananas.’

The whisky was finished. The ashtrays were filled. He stayed silent. If he had interrupted, Pyotr Rykov could have told these men that their arsenals were empty, their weapons obsolete and their troops starved because of the cancer of corruption that had eaten at the body of the state. With the cold and the whisky and the cigarette smoke a great tiredness came to Pyotr Rykov. They told him what he already knew, and what they added was only the passion of detail.

‘I do not believe, Colonel, that the Army will mutiny. It has lost even the cohesive organization to take such dramatic action. It will melt away, it will go home, it will cease to exist, it will be snow in sunlight.’

The paraffin heater spluttered, gurgled, coughed, and went out. They did not attack him. If any of them had accused him of complicity in the catastrophe, the litany would have been easier for him to accept.

It was their trust that weighed him down.

He could fly back to Moscow through the night and be at his desk in the morning. He could seek out his minister and report that the division at Kubishev was guilty of gross defeatism, and he could walk away from the trust. But they knew he would not betray them. He stood and rubbed his hands together for warmth. They pushed around him.

‘Colonel, you have the influence to force through change. How long before we see that change?’

‘When does that cesspit in Moscow get cleared out, Colonel?’

‘They say, Colonel, that you control the minister. They say you are not afraid to fight the enemies of the Army. What do you offer us?’

Finally, Pyotr Rykov said, ‘I offer you my respect. I offer you my guarantee that each word you have said will be reported to my minister. I offer you my promise that the scum who betray the Army will not sleep easily. Trust me..

He walked out into the night to the car that would take him to the airfield. The evening frost glinted under moonlight.

They drove into the small community of Warnemunde. It was the last throw, the last chance. They were quiet in the car and they harboured their own thoughts. It was the same small community, pretty and tidy, where he had saved her from the sea crashing over the rocks of the breakwater and the same small community to which she had come with her boy, so many years before, to build the boy’s strength and to give him courage. If he touched her, as he believed he did, then she would now be thinking, quiet in her mind, of when she had come here with her boy. He loved her as she had loved her boy…

She drove past the police station. The shops had closed for the evening. It was too cold, too early in the year, for tourists, and the pavements were empty, the building sites of the new holiday hotels silent. She parked at the railway station, from which the S-Bahn trains ran to Rostock, in shadow, the furthest place she could find from the lights. The wind came harsh off the sea channel and across the quayside and tore at them. He had told her where she should park and for once there was no trace of scorn at her lips. He had found again his strength, because she had thanked him, and she was beside him, walking from the car, elf small and tired, and he thought she now depended on him.

She slipped her hand onto his elbow, and they walked together towards the bridge over the smaller channel.

On the plank bridge, flanked on the far side by the old houses of Warnemunde that were now painted, chic and the homes of new money, and on the near side by the fish harbour where the boats were, they stopped.

The fleet, tied up with heavy ropes, was of small boats all painted in a uniform red from bow to stern with a white flash running their length above the water-line and with white wheel- houses. Men in dark heavy coats and boots worked on the decks by the light of small arc lamps high on posts above the quay. They coiled ropes, scrubbed decks and stowed nets.

Beside the moored boats, above them, was the drab concrete of the quayside. From small stalls on the quay, gross large women, swaddled in stained aprons, sold raw herring-fillet strips and bread, or shredded crab and bread, or smoked fish and bread, or pickled onions and raw fish and smoked fish and bread, and pits beer. They did poor trade because the men were still at the boats and the tourists had not yet come.

Along the quay and the stalls was a concrete shed, bright- lit, and in it were men and women, old and young, gutting the fish catch, which the kids brought them from the boats, on wide bench tables. Cats howled by their booted feet, screamed for carcasses. Beyond the brightness and movement in the shed was the dull greyness of the quay, and beyond the quay was the blackness of the water.

Josh took her hand, where it rested on his elbow. He squeezed it, held it tight.

They walked down the ramp towards the quayside, the boats and the gutting shed. A man lumbered towards them, a rolled wool cap on his head, a beard darkening his face and a loose dark coat on his body, carrying a box of gutted fish and powder ice.

‘Excuse me, mein Freund, where do I find the boat on which Willi Muller works?’

The man did not look up, paused bent under the weight of the box, and jerked his head backwards, directed them towards the long line of boats moored to the quayside and riding on the blackness of the water. The pastor had said that Willi Muller would now be twenty-four. They went by the end of the gutting shed and he could see no young man, dressed in the dark clothes and boots of a fisherman, with a box of fish or a bucket of powder ice, among the white-coated and white-aproned men and women at the work benches.

He came to a stall. Moths bounced in the wind around a naked bulb hanging above the raw fish fillets and the smoked fish fillets and the bread.

‘Excuse me, meine Frau, where do I find the boat of Willi Muller?’

The woman buttered bread and she did not look up from her work. She made the gesture with the knife, away down the quay, away towards the darkness at its end. They walked past stalls, past small unused tables, past men working on their boats, past the kids who carried the fish catch from the boats to the gutting shed.

A man worked at the repair of his net, fast gnarled hands made good a rip. He leaned against his wheelhouse and the net was gathered up across his knees. Josh asked, again, for Willi Muller. The man flashed his face, away, towards the far end of the quayside, towards two boats, empty, in the last fall of the light. He held her hand, crushed it… Step quickening, stride lengthening, holding her hand and dragging her behind him… Past the boats that were empty, towards the boat that was a rocking shadow shape beyond the point where the light failed. It was the last chance.

Nothing moved on the boat but the slow tossing of the mast and the waving of rigging in the wind. He stood on the quay, his body thrown against the wheelhouse, giant-sized, by the high arc lights far behind him, grey black on grey white. He looked the length of the boat, over stowed netting, coiled rope and stacked boxes. She jerked his arm, she pointed. He looked down into the blackness of the water.

He saw the darkened figure floating there. The figure moved so slowly, so gently, half submerged against the angled bow of the trawler. It wore the dark coat of the fishermen on their boats behind him.

Josh screamed out loud.

The figure rose and fell on the swell of the channel.

He screamed because it had been the last chance, because it had all been for nothing…