The Waiting Time

Chapter Five

In the half light of dawn, a smear of red sun behind the trees, the man stood on the lawn and the terrier yapped and jumped against him until he threw the tennis ball. The man’s silver hair was unbrushed and wild on his head and fell over the darkened lenses of his spectacles. He was unshaven and he wore his pyjamas, slippers and dressing gown. Josh Mantle watched from the gate on the road at the edge of the village. The dog chased the ball, caught it in the air as it bounced, and ran back towards the man. Josh learned from what he watched. The dog was close to the man and the man bent down but could not take the ball until the dog brought it right to his hand.

Josh took his driving licence from his wallet, held it in the palm of his hand and pushed open the gate.

He went up a narrow gravel path. The scrape of his footfall alerted the man and the dog ran barking towards him.

‘Colonel Kirby? Sorry to trouble you so early. I’m Josh Mantle, SIB of the Royal Military Police..

He held up the driving licence as identification.

‘I wouldn’t have come if it wasn’t important. It is correct that in Berlin you were the commanding officer of Corporal Tracy Barnes?’

The frown, like a shadow, slipped on the man’s forehead, and Josh again held up the driving licence.

‘You’d better come in.’

He was led into a conservatory. Kirby apologized, his wife was away, place a bit of a mess.

The man was alone. Mantle knew he could play the proper bastard. ‘We’re running an investigation into the involvement of Corporal Tracy Barnes, Berlin ‘eighty-eight, with a field agent, Hans Becker.’

Straight in, brisk, with authority, as if he had the right to know. The man seemed to shrivel.

‘It was a long time ago. It’s history, finished. Who cares?’

‘Please, just answer my questions.’

‘It’ll do no good, should be allowed to sleep. Who needs to know?’

But he talked… and Josh let him.

‘I’ll call her Tracy – you don’t mind if I do? – she was a part of my family. She was just past her twenty-first when she came to Berlin, the youngest in the unit. She was, de facto, my PA. Always smart, always efficient, good typing and shorthand, buckled down in the evenings to learn good German. I don’t think she’d done that well at school but she had the commitment we wanted. She’d work away quietly in the corner and didn’t interrupt. I’d hardly be aware of her. There weren’t any boyfriends, no tantrums, no sulks – she was a joy to have. If I had to work late, she was there – early start, the same, no problem… Tell you the truth, there were plenty of sergeants who tried to get off with her, single and married, and they hadn’t a prayer. I didn’t complain, she was the best worker I ever had in the military. I said she was a part of our family – she used to help my wife when we had dinner parties, and was paid for it, she used to come in and babysit when we were out. She had nothing else to do and we felt we were really rather doing her a favour, but we became almost dependent on her. Is she in trouble?

I had a good staff sergeant. We used to go over to East Berlin, once or twice a week, as permitted under the Four Power Agreement and it was important to take advantage of the access. We didn’t learn much and were always followed by the Stasi, but we did it. We’d walk around, lean on road bridges and watch for military convoys, look for new cap badges of Soviet troops, pretty mundane but that was the work of I Corps. But one time in December ‘eighty-seven, on Leipzig Strasse, the sergeant was bumped. The tail was on the other side of the street, quite wide there. He was bumped by a young man. Actually, he was another hundred metres up the street before he realized that an envelope had been palmed into his pocket. He brought it back, came straight to me and gave it to me. That was Hans Becker’s first contact.

‘Most of our work in Berlin was debriefing those who had either escaped, youngsters, or been allowed out, the elderly. The Stasi were always trying to plant their own people into our system, to learn about our procedures and to feed us disinformation. I don’t deny it, we were truly excited that evening. What we usually handled was so low-grade – what passes were needed for what area of East Germany, where were the passes issued, what colour were they, who signed them. This had the potential of being way ahead of the dross, and it didn’t seem like a plant. The letter said that a meeting should take place in Alexanderplatz, that a named song should be played over the forces’ radio the evening before; the song was “The Londonderry Air”, pretty mournful stuff. I lost sleep over it – it was the staff sergeant’s suggestion – but we sent Tracy over. She didn’t know, but I sent three Welsh Guards NCOs to have her within sight. I thought she had the ability – she was the only one of us who didn’t look like a soldier. I asked a hell of a lot of a girl of that age, but she always seemed so capable.

‘We called it Operation Catwalk. She was Traveller. So damn difficult to find a codename. When she was looking after the children she used to read to them, and Walter de la Mare – particularly his “Traveller” – was a favourite for my elder daughter.

‘She was a pig in shit – excuse me, a duck in water. Very matter of fact, very calm, took it in her stride. The first time she went over we had back-up and I was down at the Wall. The last time she just slipped out of Brigade, could have been going shopping. She took equipment and material over to him, she had memorized my instructions as to what we needed. We’d give him a few weeks to follow the instructions, then we’d play this song on the radio and they’d meet again the next day. My wife spotted it – not much can be hidden from her. My wife said that something had happened to that “plain little thing”. My wife said it was love. Tracy had become a woman, gone confident, more mature – there was another side to her, harder, sharper, quite a savage joker, and then skittish, you know what I mean. We had a good little section that dealt with forged papers. They’d done an excellent job fitting Tracy with a student’s pass into the East for the library at the Humboldt, and they did the necessary for getting him over, once, to meet us. You only had to see them together to know that it was love. I should have stopped it then, should have killed our involvement. We were forbidden to run agents, it was thought we weren’t capable. Should have been handed over to the civilians. We dressed his reports up as debrief material – that’s the way we slid it into the system. We were getting the applause, I wasn’t going to pass it up. I saw them together and I could see there was heavy emotional entanglement, and I should have killed it.

‘The Baltic was a key, critical zone. All the assumptions were that they would attack, if it came to war, through amphibious forces. We would have tried a counter-strike, which would have meant blitzing the Soviet air defence up there. There was a major concentration of air defence at Wustrow, near Rostock. Prize intelligence was to be able to read their counter-measures. I sent him to Wustrow with the electronics to read the radar. She took it to him and off he went. I was stretching him, too far perhaps. He worked in the marshalling yards at the Lichtenberg rail junction in Berlin and could tell us what tanks were being moved, what units were coming West through the yard, but this was at a different level. I was away that day – a conference or something.

‘It was almost a year to the day since he’d bumped my staff sergeant. A quite normal morning. I was in early. Tracy was already at her desk. I asked her if it had gone well, the previous day’s rendezvous, she said it had been routine. Would have been about lunch-time that the first reports came through. Our Siglnt at Lubeck had picked up heavy Soviet radio traffic from the Wustrow base, indications of a manhunt. Then we had reports via Denmark. One of their ferries, out at sea, had seen flares over the Wustrow area… I knew it had gone wrong. I broke it to her, in my office, in private, asked her if she wanted to cut away and get back to her quarters. I thought that was fair. She stayed put, went on with her work. She was very strong. Must have been ghastly for her, the uncertainty. The next month, and the month after, we had that song played on the radio. I didn’t send her over, I went myself. He didn’t show. What was important, the meeting point was not under particular surveillance by the Stasi. That told me that he hadn’t been captured and hadn’t talked. The assumption was that he was dead, drowned or killed. I pushed him forward, I was responsible. Do you think I don’t know that? Do you think I carry that burden with ease? I was five years in Berlin and in that time he was the only worthwhile source I had. The rest was rubbish, juvenile games. This was real, and it cost a young man, Tracy’s young man, his life. For God’s sake, what help is it to dredge in the past?’

‘Where did he live?’

‘With his parents on Saarbrucker Strasse. The staff sergeant checked it to see that we weren’t being conned. Apartment nine, third floor, number twelve on Saarbrucker Strasse… She’s a lovely girl, very kind, very gentle, my children worshipped her. Who’s helped by opening the dirty side of history?’

Josh let himself out of the house and walked to his car.

She lay in the bed.

It was as she remembered it. It was narrow, made of heavy wood. She lay naked under the old blankets and she could hear his mother moving behind the thin wood partition. Once, a long time before, in Hansie’s bed, there had been no sound from the other two rooms of the apartment, the shop closed and his mother and father away at his uncle’s home in Erfurt. Her skin was warmed by the roughness of the sheets and by the weight of the blankets. She had loved Hansie in the darkness of alleyways, in the shadow of deep doorways, but once, when his mother and father were away, he had brought her to the apartment. Crawling on her, climbing above her, loving her. She stretched up her arms, as if she reached for him, as she had reached for him. She held the void, clasped it, sought again to find the love. She had brought the condoms from the lavatory (female) at Brigade

She had thought she gave him courage. They had left separately before daylight, walked on Saarbrucker Strasse in different directions and met at the Trabant car. They had gone in the car to Rostock…

She remembered the small chest. After they had made love in his bed, he had taken the dark clothes from the drawers of the chest, because she had told him he should wear deep browns, blacks and hard greys that night, and as he had dressed she had reached from the bed, naked, into her bag, which held the electronic monitoring equipment to check that she had the camouflage cream for his face and his hands, for the night.

She remembered the dressing gown, hanging on the back of the door, and protruding from under it, slung on the same hook, were his competition swimming goggles. He had a foot problem, right foot, needed a built-up shoe. He could run only with difficulty, was handicapped sufficiently to avoid military service, but he could swim well enough to believe that he could cross the wide water of the Salzhaff.

He had been the only boy into whose bed she had gone naked. She lay and reached for him, to hold him, to smell the sweet sweat of him, to feel him, and her fingers groped at nothing.

In the morning he had done the court, had sat alongside Mr Protheroe and fed him the relevant papers, like a loader at a shoot. He was necessary but unequal.

He had thought that ‘Sunray’, alone in his garden, would have crumpled under the weight of the responsibility that had won him his medal.

In the early evening, as the partners shrugged into their coats and locked the doors of their offices, he cleared his desk.

‘Goodnight, Mr Greatorex, I’ll see you the day after tomorrow, first thing.’

‘Why do you do this?’

She had come on the U-Bahn. At the top of the tunnel steps she had been met by the woman, Hildegard. A hesitation. The woman looked away, to the snow-brushed pavement, to the high lights and the flat roofs of the tower blocks.

She said, ‘You met my father. To you, a stranger, he would appear as any other older man. You came to our home and to you, a stranger, it would have seemed like any other home. He was a poet. He tried to write the poetry of satire, the target of his satire was the regime. Perhaps he was not sufficiently clever. He did not practise self-censorship with expertise. The writers met and discussed their work in the privacy of their homes. They were all friends and he did not believe he could be betrayed from inside the circle. My father complained to his friends, inside the circle, of the denial of his right to publication. You understand, not an angry complaint just grumbling. He was taken by the Stasi, brought here, interrogated, he was charged with “behaviour hostile to the state and characteristic of class warfare”. Do you understand that? He was sent to the prison at Cottbus for two years. When he came out it was impossible for him to find work other than as a road labourer, and he had been a teacher, an intellectual. My mother was dismissed from her job in a ministry. She took the work in a hospital of standing ten hours a day in an elevator and pressing the buttons for the elevator to go up or down. I had no chance of going to the university. The Wall came down. We were promised the new dawn. My father was in Lenin Allee. He told me that day it was raining. A car came past him and splashed the water over his legs, a big BMW. It was driven by the man who had interrogated him. My father is the loser, he is now in a ghetto of failure. He is too old to go back to teaching, too old to work as a labourer on the road, and the man who destroyed him is driving in the warmth of a BMW car.’

Tracy said, ‘Why are you doing this?’

The woman looked at Tracy Barnes through her thick spectacles, and her eyes were distorted by the lenses. ‘Because I loved him, because we worked together in the railyard, because he brought light and laughter to me, because his father says they killed him, because you have come to find the evidence.’

The woman gave Tracy a pair of narrow steel-rimmed spectacles, and a scarf to wear over her hair. She was handed a plastic-coated ID card, and she saw that the photograph on the card was that of a woman with dark hair and narrow steel- rimmed spectacles.

There was a policeman in the shadows, shivering and stamping his feet, and the woman called cheerfully to him. It was a modern fortress complex, great buildings around a wide central open space. They went down a ramp to a steel door, well lit and covered by a security camera, and the windows beside the door were protected by metal bars. The woman rang the bell and held up her card in front of the camera and Tracy copied her. She had memorized the name on the ID. Inside at a desk, behind plate glass, there were two guards. She did what the woman did, and showed the card, scrawled the name, the signature, the time, as the woman had. The woman had moved away from her, to the other end of the desk, and she talked animatedly with the guards, distracted them, then went fast towards the inner door of plate steel. Tracy followed. The door was opened from the desk.

In the corridor beyond, the door slid shut behind them.

‘We have six hours,’ the woman said briskly. ‘Maybe there are a hundred million sheets of paper, maybe there are ten million card indexes.’

They went down narrow concrete stairs, poorly lit.

‘Maybe there are a million photographs – I do not know how many kilometres of audio-tape. Everything was filed. They kept, believe me, in many thousands of sealed glass jars the smells of their victims, they stole their socks and their underwear and put them in jars so that later if dogs had to search for those people they would have their smells. Most of all, there is the paper. The dictatorship of today does not need to shoot people, or gas them, or hang them. They do not have blood on their hands, but ink.’

They were at the bottom floor. Ahead was a door of reinforced steel, set with additional bars, opened by a lever.

‘You must have names and dates and places. You have that? If you do not then we search for a coin on the ocean floor.’

Tracy said, ‘Hauptman Dieter Krause, counter-espionage at Rostock, killed Hans Becker at Rerik, near to the Soviet base at Wustrow, on the evening of the twenty-first of November nineteen eighty-eight.’

The woman wrenched down the lever. The cavern ran as far as Tracy could see. As far as she could see were the metal racks on which were stacked the files. Cardboard file covers neatly tied with string, bound with elastic, as far as she could see. The racks were from the floors to the ceilings, and they had come down two flights of stairs.

‘A man was here two days ago, from the Office of the Protection of the State. He had the name of Dieter Krause from Rostock. He looked for evidence of a criminal act against human rights. He did not know of Hans. He had the name of a Soviet officer. He did not have the location of Rerik. He had the officer stationed at Wustrow. He did not have the date. He walked in fog

There was a part of the Krause file that was missing, and a part of the Wustrow file that had been taken out. He did not find what he looked for. He was here a whole day, with three assistants. I have to tell you that-’

‘How long do we have?’

‘We have a few minutes less than six hours, and only the one chance.’

The last flights were leaving Heathrow. Josh Mantle hurried to the check-in. The ffight for Berlin was closing. He was in the queue when he heard the voice behind him, ‘Hello, Mantle, cuttingitfine…’

He spun.

‘… but I didn’t expect to see you here. I’d have thought – your track record – you’d have realized this was heavy going and backed off, like you did before.’

‘What do you know of me?’

‘Not much short of everything.’ Perkins was smiling.

‘I’ve never seen you before the gate at Templer.’

‘Quite a crowd of folk never looked hard enough behind them, never saw me. Bad business that, Belize, would have thought a chap like you would have showed a bit more spine.’

‘Who are you?’

‘A government servant, man and boy. I walk the streets with a shovel so that the pretty people don’t get shit on their shoes. You were a piece of shit in Belize that I cleared up. Never seemed to find the time to introduce myself… Better stir a bit, if you want to get to Berlin tonight. It is Berlin, isn’t it? Chasing after the little corporal, are we?’

‘Where are you going?’

‘As if you need to know. Cologne. Off to see our gracious friends and respected allies.’

The queue lurched forward.

‘About her? About Miss Barnes?’

‘She’s on my Action This Day agenda. You’re very sharp tonight, Mantle.’

‘Running sneaky messages, piling up the odds. That’s work for a proud man.’

The smile had become the grin. ‘You used to be bright in the old days, as I recall, when you knew how to back out.’

‘You’re starting to feel like a boil in my arse. A damn nuisance, but I can ignore it. If anything happens to her, before I get to her, through your hand, I’ll…’

The smile, which had been the grin, had become the sneer. ‘Bit old for her, aren’t you?’

The check-in girl had her hand out for Mantle’s ticket. He passed it across the counter. He spun again.

‘… I’ll put your teeth through the back of your neck.’

The smile, the grin, the sneer had gone. ‘My advice, Mantle. You shouldn’t go to Rostock with a boil in your arse. Very painful if your backside were kicked – and in Rostock it will get kicked, hard.’

‘Rostock is not a part of it, so fuck you. I’m going to Berlin to bring her home.’

‘Of course… Oh, and the name is Perkins, Albert Perkins, by the way, a shoveller of shit for Her Majesty’s government. Don’t forget the name and have a good flight.’

He was given his ticket, his boarding card. When he came away from the counter, his overnight bag slung on his shoulder, Perkins was gone.

He walked towards Departures.

They had both gone to Belize. Captain Ewart-Harries and Sergeant Mantle, the Intelligence Corps presence. Supposed to know their job, supposed to predict whether the Guatemalan military were about to invade. The officer had school Spanish and Mantle had been on a phrase book. Hustling through Jane’s Fighting books for the strength of the Guatemalan Army, its elite units, its equipment. The Brigadier with his gunners and his infantry demanding an answer, and the Group Captain with his Harrier force. Were the Guatemalans coming? Would they come in force with tanks? Would they probe with reconnaissance units? Who knew more than damn all about the goddamn Guatemalan Army? Every morning at the Brigadier’s session, the pressure was growing. Answers, where were the answers? Outside Belize City was a heap of jungle; in the heap of jungle was a mapmaker’s line; behind the line was more jungle and the territory of Guatemala. He didn’t know, and Ewart-Harries didn’t know, what the Guatemalan military had under the triple canopy of the jungle. A patrol on the mapmaker’s line had brought the kid in. The patrol’s contact had been with three men of the Kaibil battalion, special forces. The patrol had killed two out of three. It had a survivor, neatly tied up and blindfolded, for interrogation. Interrogation was I Corps work. A helicopter ride, from the RAF strip, into the jungle. The prisoner was in a logging shed, no witnesses outside the patrol. The prisoner was just a ‘Guat’, and the Brigadier was demanding answers… Ewart-Harries had called the bet with Mantle for a hundred American dollars to be paid to whichever of them broke the Guat first… As if he was a football, a punchbag, taking it in three-hour shifts to work on him. Three hours was the limit for each of them because of the goddamn mosquitoes and the goddamn heat. Going into each shift with the adrenaline pumped at the prospect of an American hundred-dollar bill, coming out and reckoning that Ewart-Harries would win in that session. No gag on the kid, the Guat, because they had to be able to hear the answer when they broke him. Christ, the kid had screamed. Coming out of the logging shed and seeing the contempt of the squaddies who kept a perimeter defence line. Caught in a frenzy because it was just a game, and the kid was just a Guat. The third day, and the kid had died. He had stopped screaming and died in a Ewart-Harries session, and the bet was void.

He walked down the pier to the aircraft.

One of the patrol had gone to the battalion padre. There had been an internal inquiry. If it had ended as a court-martial, the killing of a Guat, then it would have gone public and the Guatemalan government and military would have had a field day of propaganda. As the officer, Ewart-Harries could have fallen out of sight if his sergeant had testified against him. But the sergeant had stayed quiet, as if it should be kept in the family, had refused to give evidence against his officer. A deal done.. He had been transferred from I Corps to the Special Investigation Branch of the Royal Military Police with no filth on his record. lain Ewart-Harries, with copybook references, had gone to civilian life.

He had not stood up to be counted, he had walked away, he had not shouted from the Guat’s corner… It was a part of Josh’s history, the day that he had compromised.

Josh Mantle flew to Berlin.

Under the beat of the air-conditioner, Tracy sat cross-legged on the floor between the racks. Untying the string, unfastening the elastic, skipping at the reports filed in the month of November 1988 by Hauptman Dieter Krause. Retying the string, handing the files back to the woman. Reports on environmental campaigners, on three Rostock athletes selected to travel for warm-weather training in Cuba, on the Rostock family of a drowned escaper washed up on the Baltic coast, on anti-social behaviour in the science faculty at Rostock. No report in the ifies for the dates of 21, 22 and 23 November, the only dates in the month that the busy bastard had not filed reports. She beavered at the paper, and the despair grew as the night hours slipped.

He was a trader. To Albert Perkins, all trade was acceptable. When he came to the trading stall, Albert Perkins was without inhibition. Among the street stalls, Albert Perkins, with quality knowledge of the German language, spoke only in English.

‘She is in Germany, seeking evidence. We, of course, in respect of a friend and ally will not help her to gain that evidence. We know where she will have gone. We know her start point. We believe you are short of that information. We believe, also, that should she find that evidence before your prize pig goes to market, before Hauptman Krause goes to Washington, then you will have no option but to slit his throat and hang him up for butchery, charge him, convict him, and wave him goodbye…’

The senior official’s cigarette smoke wafted between them. They were alone, two easy chairs used. There was whisky in a decanter on the low table between them, untouched. Neither man, when trading, would risk alcohol, would give advantage.

‘That we are prepared to offer you that information, where you could find her, should be taken by you as a mark of respect on our side for a friend and ally. Friendships, alliances, thrive on mutual respect, and we would be grateful for reciprocity – sorry, we barter. .

His voice was sweet, silky reasonableness. The senior official drew hard on the cigarette. The night air came through the window, opened on Perkins’s insistence.

‘The little matter we request in return… Iranian material, your dossier on Mi Fallahian. You have, last figures I saw, earnings of two point four billion American dollars from equipment supplied to Iran. I want the names of those German companies involved and their British collaborators… I want details on all commercial transactions by German companies for equipment sent to Iran that could be utilized in the production of atomic, chemical and biological weapons. I want the surveillance files on all members of the Iranian diplomatic mission in Bonn who have travelled to Britain in the last two years.’

The senior official stiffened. He stubbed out the cigarette and in the same movement was reaching for another, lighting it.

‘Did you actually entertain Ali Fallahian in this office? Did you feel the need to wash your hands afterwards, lot of blood on his fists? Must have been a jolly little occasion, entertaining the minister for information and security. Did you discuss the Lockerbie atrocity? I expect you did. I expect he thanked you, as a friend and ally, for refusing us access to those hoods on the Iranian payroll who organized the Frankfurt transfer of the bomb on to Pan-Am 103. Let them go now, haven’t you, slipped them beyond reach? I’ve told you what I want, I know what you want. Do we trade?’

The senior official paused. He held his hands together, over his mouth and his nose as if in prayer. Perkins assumed that he would be travelling to Washington on the back of Hauptman Krause, would take the opportunity to drive to Langley, to meet with the principals of the National Security Council, would be ushered to the big offices of the Pentagon. Another cigarette, half smoked, was discarded. Cancellation would be a bitter pill, would take more than prayer to flush it down.

The senior official went to his desk, telephoned, spoke in a low voice. Perkins heard the murmur of Mi Fallahian’s name. He returned to his chair and reached forward to pour the whisky. They both drank, equal measures. The trading had been agreed.

They muttered pleasantries for fifteen minutes.

A young woman brought in the papers, fresh from the computer onto the printer. The senior official passed them to Perkins. He scanned them. He was satisfied and dropped them into his briefcase. The senior official, at the door, gestured for Krause to join them.

To Perkins, the scratches seemed, in those few days, to have healed well. The minders stood back against the wall. The Jewish minder interested him. He would be the token, the symbol of political correctness. He smiled up at Krause and for the first time spoke in German. ‘So pleased to note your fast recovery, Hauptman. You were attacked by Corporal Tracy Barnes. You won’t need a photograph of her, I’m sure you remember her well. She alleged that you murdered in cold blood, Hauptman, a British agent named Hans Becker at Wustrow on the twenty-first of November nineteen eighty-eight. Corporal Barnes was a girlfriend of Becker. I interrogated her, several sessions. I emphasized to her that should she provide me with evidence of your criminal act then I would use the full influence, not inconsiderable, of the Secret Intelligence Service to see you brought to justice. She has come to Germany, my assessment, to hunt for that evidence. I have no idea whether she knows where to hunt or not, but I assure you that she is a quite remarkable and stubborn young woman. I wouldn’t want her hurt, Hauptman, I would take that badly. My opinion, she will begin her hunt for evidence against you from the home of Hans Becker’s parents. If you wish to look for her then you should start in Berlin at apartment nine, third floor, number twelve, Saarbrucker Strasse…’

They found no files for Krause, or the Wustrow base, or Rerik for 21, 22 and 23 November. The files for those dates in 1988 were missing. The paper bounced before her eyes, seemed to trick, deceive her.

‘We have searched, we have to accept it. They are not here.’

Tracy could have screamed in frustration. They had worked in the bottom basement, then the middle basement, then the top basement.

The woman droned, ‘If you had not involved him, not recruited him, if you had not trapped him, then he would be alive. You came…’

Tracy sat on the floor of the top basement, the Wustrow files around her, the cold mischief in her eyes. ‘You should know that he never mentioned you, he never used your name. When he was with me I doubt that he remembered your name. He made his statement, many did not. Did you?’

The woman sagged. Tracy said they should look two weeks further ahead in the files, into the middle of the month of December 1988. The woman quietly passed new files to be untied and unfastened. The night drifted.

The taxi had dropped him off at an hotel on the Unter den Linden. He had walked straight across the foyer and found a fire door, pushed the bar and gone out.

Past midnight, long past, and Josh walked slowly up the big street. He checked his map. On the empty road, it would have been easy for him to spot a dawdling car or foot surveillance. He stood at the end of Saarbrucker Strasse. He saw the building. The front, caught by dimmed lights, was scarred from bombs or artillery. That registered with him. The past should be known about: it was right to learn from the past. The third-floor windows were darkened.

He thought it wrong to wake them.

He settled down on the pavement beside the step of the building. Light snow was falling. He was back tight against the wall to keep the wind from him. After Libby had died, after he had gone derelict and dossed and boozed, he had learned to sleep on pavements. He huddled in the shadow beside the step, and waited for the morning.

Her throat was dry from the air-conditioning, her eyes ached and watered. The typed lines on the paper were blurred, merged. The woman stood beside her and bent to pick up the last of the files to place them back on the racks.

‘What can we do?’

Tracy squatted on the cold concrete of the basement’s bottom floor. Her head was down.

A small voice: ‘How long do we have?’

‘The early shift comes at five. Before that we have to be gone. We have forty-one minutes. What is the point of having forty-one minutes if we do not know where to look?’

She tried to call him back, the wide smile on his face as he had made love to her, and the pain on his face as they had dragged him off the trawler boat. She sat very still. She gazed at the rough floor of concrete and at the files stretching on their racks as far as she could see. Nobody had cared, as nobody cared now.

‘In Rerik, if he had run, if they had hunted him, if people had seen him..

‘If people had seen him they would have held their silence.’

Dogged. Clinging to the wide smile, so tired, and the pain. ‘If the Stasi had known that people had seen him…’

‘Their silence would have been gained by intimidation.’

‘What would have been done to eye-witnesses?’

‘Threats, then moved out of their community.’

Tracy hissed, ‘How long afterwards?’

‘Three weeks, there was bureaucracy, four weeks, after they had been destroyed, five weeks… If there had been eyewitnesses they would have sent them out of Rerik.’

Tracy jack-knifed to her feet. They ran between the racks of files for the stairs, for the middle basement floor.

He had the boy drunk, slumped in the chair at the back of the hotel bar, in shadow. He made the sign to the waiter. Another vodka, double, with ice and tonic for the Jewish boy who had driven him to the hotel, another mineral water with ice for himself. The boy, Goldstein, thought he drank vodka, matched him. Perkins was always patient when sober and listening to a drunk who interested him.

‘I joined because I wanted to confront the new Nazis. You live as a Jew in this country, you want to be German and not a Jew, it is impossible… They are neurotic about the past, that the past can come again… They try to erase the twelve years of Nazi rule. Ask any old man what he did between nineteen thirty-three and nineteen forty-five, he does not answer.. They do not trust themselves, they censor the books and films, they need to ban Mein Kampf. They take the power from us, Office of the Protection of the State, because of fear that the old abuse of legal process will come again… Yet they cry for authority, regulation, as they had it before – no lawn-mower in the afternoon, no children shouting, brought to the court for taking a shower late at night which disturbs neighbours, cannot wash a car on a Sunday, cannot touch vegetables in a public market. You know where my parents met? In Auschwitz. They were six years old, both of them. They survived. Their parents, my grandparents, did not. My father is put on TV each anniversary of the Holocaust. They want to suffer, hear him talk. My father says the same thing for the TV each year. “Our parents just climbed the fence so that they would be shot… I never had a childhood, I never learned to play

· · · At six years old I was as hard as granite stone.” They have purged their conscience because they have watched and listened to the TV, and they can forget… My father has invitations to go to dinner as far away as Hannover, because it is exciting for a hostess to have a Jew from the camps at her table. I thought it was my duty to show that I was not a parrot in a cage, that I was a German. I thought that I could be a good German if I worked against the new Nazis.’

The boy gulped at his drink. Perkins sipped the mineral water, and prompted, ‘But there are two colours of Fascism. There is the black of the Nazis, there is the red of the Communists. Black or red Fascism, any difference?’

‘You know, Perkins, there was an American writer, nineteen forty-five, walked round Germany, never could find a Nazi, the Nazis were always in the next vifiage. People she met told her how they’d suffered. The way she heard it, there was never a Nazi in Germany. Today, you meet a little old man – will he tell you he stood in a watch-tower guarding the camps? Wifi he tell you he coupled the cattle trucks going to the camps? Somebody did, and they’re now little old men and denying it… That’s good, Perkins, red and black Fascism, the same. You go East, you see the crowds outside the hostels with petrol bombs, where the Romanians are, the Poles, the Vietnamese, old Fascists and new Fascists, the same hatred just new Jews for them to hate. Try to find, in the East, an informer of the shit Stasi. Better, try to find an officer of the shit Stasi. Like they didn’t exist..

Perkins nudged him again. ‘You’d know an officer of the shit Stasi, you’re alongside one.’

‘The young woman…’

‘Don’t worry yourself about her.’

‘What you’ve done to her…’

Perkins said soothingly, ‘She’s fine, she can look after herself. About that shit Stasi officer..

Albert Perkins traded. Seven double vodkas to Julius Goldstein for a plate of scum from the ifie of Hauptman Dieter Krause. Damn good trading.

‘I was with that shit, minding him at the trial, a little “grey mouse”, foreign ministry. She was pathetic…’

The third week in December, nothing. The files were heaped around Tracy’s feet, ripped open, grasped at. The second week in December, nothing. She pushed files away from her, grabbed at more.

The woman glanced at her watch, shrugged, passed the ifies for the third week of December as she placed the others back on the racks. Again, the look at the watch. Tracy scattered the pages of the file as she read, discarded, read.

Who had slept with whom. Who was denounced as being negatively disposed towards socialism. Who was to be taken from the community…

The woman reached down to pull Tracy up. Her finger rapped the face of her watch.

Tracy squealed.

She read the names. Brandt, Gerber, Schwarz, Muller.

Her squeal echoed between the racks of files. Brandt, Jorg (school-teacher).

There had been four pages on the instruction order. The fourth page had been missed. Gerber, Heinz (town hall, refuse disposal dept).

Three pages taken from the file, one page unnoticed.

Schwarz, Artur (senior engineer, railways, Bad Doberan).

One page left in the ifie by the fucking bastards. Muller, Willi (trawler deck-hand).

Tracy held the sheet of paper above her head. She jumped, leaped, danced. Twenty-seven days after the killing of Hans Becker, four men had been forced or sent out of the small community of Rerik. She grasped the paper. She thrust it under her sweater and buried it against her breast. Together they tidied the floor, put the last file together, as they had found it, but for one sheet of paper. They ran up the concrete steps.

They showed their cards and scribbled their initials on the check-out list.

Between the high buildings was the first smear of light. They passed the early shift, coming in cars, on scooters and bicycles, walking.

The woman panted, ‘You did not mean that? He never remembered my name?’

‘You want the truth?’

‘I have to know the truth.’

Tracy gazed into her eyes, into the tears. She said, with sincerity and honesty, to the woman’s eyes, ‘Of course he loved you. If he had lived he would have married you. We were only a partnership for an operation of espionage, nothing physical and nothing emotional. He would have lived his life with you…’

‘That is the truth?’ The woman hugged Tracy, held her. ‘Could I look into your face and lie to you?’

She ran down the steps of the tunnel to the U-Bahn station.

The telephone rang on the counter. The cafe owner picked it up.

‘Yes… Yes, I can make such contact. Your name?’

He wiped the lead of the pencil on his tongue. He wrote the name he was given.

‘Yes, I have that. Krause, Dieter, Hauptman, of the Rostock Bezirksverwaltungen… Those you wish to contact, their names. All in Rostock, yes, in November nineteen eighty-eight. Please, the names…’

He wrote the names that were given him.

‘You should ring again. One hour will be sufficient.’

The owner replaced the telephone. His cafe was a meeting place early in the morning for the frustrated, insecure and vulnerable old men. They came down the steps from the tower blocks of Marzahn to his cafe at the same time each day as they had once gone to Normannen Strasse. They wore the same jackets of imitation leather. They were the veterans of the Staatssicherheitsdienst, too elderly and traumatized to find new employment. The state they had protected was gone. They had been the sword and the shield of the state, and they had been betrayed. They gathered in the cafe each morning to drink coffee, to buy a litre of milk to put in a plastic bag, to talk, to read the day’s edition of Neues Deutschland, to complain, to dream. The owner’s son threaded between them with the note-paper in his hand. The cafe was a cut-off point for what they knew as the insider network. The former men of the organization hung together in informal contact – better, the grey humour went, to hang together than separately.

There were sixty thousand apartments in Marzahn; a hundred and sixty thousand people lived there. In one apartment, a man had the computer that could summon up the names, addresses and telephone numbers of the former officers of the Staatssicherheitsdienst. The owner’s son would be back at the cafe with the telephone numbers within the hour.

He heard her voice, a song. He blinked awake. He smeared the snow off his face and the ice from his eye- brows. He saw her.

The cold was in his muscles, his bones, his throat. He struggled for the strength to push himself up from where he had slept against the step. She was dancing as she came, skipping like a happy child.

He staggered to his feet. He leaned against the wall beside the door. She stopped and stared.