The Waiting Time

Chapter Six

What the hell…?’

Josh tried to smile. He was wrecked, chilled, unshaven. He pushed off the wall and swayed.

‘What the hell are you doing here?’

It should have been a big speech, heavy with the older man’s wisdom, the world of experience, the lifetime of gathered knowledge. He stretched his spine, tried to stand upright. He knew that he should demonstrate, crystal clear, his authority. He scraped the snow covering off his coat.

He croaked, feeble, ‘I didn’t want to wake them.’

‘That’s not an answer. Why are you here?’

He said, quiet, ‘I came to bring you home.’

There was an impish light in her eyes. She stood with her hands on her hips. ‘Who bought your ticket?’

‘Your mother wanted you brought home. I paid for the ticket.’

She laughed in his face. ‘Bad luck. Bad luck, Mr Mantle, because you wasted your money.’

‘Now, you hear me…’

The big speech was beyond reach. He could have made the speech if she had stood contrite in front of him, if the relief that he had come as deliverer had been on her face. But the laughter caught her face, her mouth and her eyes. She made a mockery of his effort to summon the big words. She had come close to him and her gloved hand smacked the wet snow from his chin and his forehead. hear me, young woman.’ He tried to speak with the stern tone that he would have used to a sullen kid caught out vandalizing. ‘You should go back inside, get your bag, five minutes, I’m waiting here…’

Her fingers caught at his cheek and pinched hard.

‘… I’m waiting here for you. Five minutes and we leave for the airport. You’re going home, with me, first flight.’

‘You were an officer…’

‘The first flight back to your mother.’

‘Can see you were an officer.’

‘Back where you belong.’

‘When they talk balls, officers always shout.’

The anger surged in him. He pushed away her hand. ‘Listen to me. You are rude, you are impertinent. Learn to be grateful when people go out of their way to help you. What you are trying to do is beyond the capability of a single person acting without resources. Join the real world.’

‘Of course I’m capable – I’m trained.’

‘You were just a typist, a clerk. You are not equipped-’

‘I got the names.’

‘What names?’

‘I couldn’t just go up there, to Rostock and Rerik, blunder about, bang on doors. No bugger would speak to me then. I had to have the names.’

He felt old, and her laughter mesmerized him. The smile played on her mouth. She pulled off her gloves and unzipped her coat. The smile still played at her mouth, mocking. She reached under her sweater, pushed it up. He saw her navel and the narrowness of her waist and the white skin. She pushed her hand up under her sweater, and he saw, a moment, the material of her bra, a flash. She taunted him. She held the piece of paper.

‘There were four eye-witnesses, I have their names. They thought they’d stripped the file, but they missed one sheet of paper. I’ve been in the archive. Not bad for a clerk.’

Josh Mantle sagged back against the wall. A refuse cart turned the corner into Saarbrucker Strasse. He felt a black gloom of inevitability. He felt the suction force puffing him towards deep currents and fire. The cart came slowly down the street, spraying water on the pavement, rotating brushes cleaning the gutter. She waved the paper in front of his face.

He said, weak, ‘You should let me take you home.’

‘You go on your own,’ she said. She folded the paper, neat movements, slipped it into the inside pocket of her anorak.

‘So, you get the bloody speech,’ he said. ‘The speech is, I will stand in front of you, behind you, right side of you, left side. When they come for you, as they will, they will have to flatten me first. Don’t expect the speech again.’

The cart came by them. The water sluiced across the pavement, against her legs. She stood her ground and the water dripped off her.

She said, calm, ‘I don’t need you holding my hand, trailing after my skirt. You want to come, please yourself. I don’t need you.’

‘Where is he?’

Goldstein forced the palm of his hand across his forehead as if to drive out the throbbing ache. ‘He said he was waiting for a telephone call to be returned.’

Raub snapped, ‘Does he think the plane waits for him?’

‘He knows the time of the flight because I told him the time. He said he was waiting for a telephone call, then he had to make some calls.’

Raub revved the engine and exploded fumes into the frosted dawn air. ‘To whom?’

The ache needled his brain. He knew he had talked into the early morning, could not remember what he had talked of. He could remember lurching to his feet, and remember the realization that the Englishman had been ice sober. But he could not remember what he had said. Goldstein snarled, ‘Doktor Raub, I do not know because I did not ask. I just follow after that shit because that is what I am paid to do. He used his mobile phone, digital, so I am not able to check his calls.’

When Krause came, he did not apologize. Goldstein scrambled out into the dawn air to open the door for him, because he was paid to do so. Krause settled in the back of the car.

‘I cannot tell you, Fraulein, the names of the personalities involved, nor can I tell you the tactics they will use. What I do tell you, Fraulein, those personalities and their tactics are directed at one target. The target is Hauptman Dieter Krause.’

The authorities allowed her to wear her own clothes. Albert Perkins thought her older than himself by four or five years. It was difficult to be exact about her age because her complexion was washed out pallid from thirteen months in the cells. She sat stolid before him in a plain grey-green blouse and a plain grey-blue skirt and plain grey ankle socks inside canvas sandals.

‘What you should know, Fraulein, is that I seek specific information that will harm, damage, hurt Hauptman Dieter Krause. The damage to him may not come from you. Perhaps you will give me another name. I want you to believe Fraulein, that in this matter I will walk a long road.’

She was a grey mouse. They were always called the ‘grey mice’. She had been a secretary at the foreign ministry in Bonn. She would have been, in 1978, as plain and physically uninteresting as she was today. The grey mice had been in the foreign ministry and the defence ministry and the Chancellor’s office in Bonn, in the NATO offices and in the Supreme Headquarters, Allied Powers Europe, in Paris and Washington and, damn sure, in London. They were the spinsters, the plain, uninteresting women fearful of living out their lives alone. They were the women who believed love had gone by them. The grey mice were sought out by intelligence officers.

‘You would have been warned, Fraulein, as to the dangers of an association with an East German. But he didn’t come in those clothes, did he? Younger than you, good-looking, flattering and considerate. What was he? An academic, import-export? Doesn’t matter… He told you it was love. And after he’d done the love bit, he asked for those little pieces of unconnected information?

By screwing you, Fraulein, he would have advanced his career, he’d have been promoted. I aim to bury him, but I need help.’

For all those years, after the Wall had come down, the little grey mouse would have sat at her desk in the foreign ministry and wondered, as they all did, how long the secret would be kept. Had the ifie gone to Moscow? Had the file been sold on for hard currency to the Americans? Had the file stayed in the archive for the eventual and inevitable opening by the researchers? God, and the little grey mouse must have sweated, sweated in her heart and her mind and down between her legs. Six years of sweat, waiting for the BfV to come to her desk.

‘Last year, wasn’t it, Fraulein, that he turned up in Cologne and offered himself as a source? First he had to establish his credibility. Told them all about you. Closed court for the part when he testified against you, yes, Fraulein? After he’d testified, his new friends would have taken him for a damn good meal, and you were given ten years. You were a traitor, he was just carrying out the terms of his job description. You betrayed your country, he screwed you and talked of love, which was all part of a good day’s work. Life is unfair, Fraulein, and I’m giving you the chance to make life more fair.’

She spoke quietly.

Albert Perkins had heard that corruption was more widespread in the new greater Germany than ever before. He had slipped a thousand American dollars into the palm of the gaol’s assistant deputy director, arrangements made by the embassy staffer, after the boy, Goldstein, had finally spilled the necessary and been expelled into the night.

She spoke of the agent to whom she had been handed after Dieter Krause had gone back to Berlin, drunk, in her bed, boasting of his next posting, in the office of the minister at Normannen Strasse. She spoke of the second agent who had told her that Dieter Krause was too clever for his own good, too arrogant, was being sent to Rostock to kick his heels and scratch his arse.

He’d write a report on the new corruption, something for a wet winter day at Vauxhall Bridge Cross… After he left her, after the cell door shut on her, as he was escorted down the corridor, Albert Perkins made a note on his memory pad to have an embassy staffer send her a box of chocolates.

The cold was in him. He lay hunched with his knees up, and the voices were above him.

He was in the cemetery, the worst day and the worst night, a day of chill rain and a night of bitter sleet. Many times in many months he had walked by the cemetery. Once, an evening, he had taken the courage and gone into the cemetery and sat wet by the earth in darkness, he had slept… He had told Libby, insisted on it, that he was not to be mentioned in her will, demanded it of her. He had not married her for her wealth, he had married her for love. After the sickness and the treatment, the death and the funeral, he had walked past the cemetery then gone to find a hedge or a shed for sleep… The voices were above him, ‘A disgrace, Officer, a fit and healthy man, should be working – can’t have rubbish like that, Officer, sleeping in a graveyard, a place where people come in grief. Get him out of here, Officer, get that filthy creature out. Disgusting, Officer, when a grown man loses his sense of pride, sinks so low.’ The policeman had pulled him up. The women had watched him with contempt as he had been taken to the car, the policeman’s hand tight in his damp coat sleeve. He had been driven to the police station, had stood in front of the custody sergeant and been read the charge of vagrancy, and the senior partner had crossed the lobby with a chief inspector and recognized him.

‘There are four names. Four men were evicted by the Stasi from Rerik village. Hildegard explained it. They would have identified eye-witnesses, they would have destroyed them, then evicted them. Hildegard said it was what they did to people. I have those names. The names are everything. I get to those people, I get sworn statements, affidavits, I have evidence.’

He was on the wide chair of old and worn leather and a blanket had been laid over him. His movement alerted her.

‘You’ve been asleep for three hours,’ she said dismissively. ‘You snored and you smell. These are Hansie’s parents.’

She was at the table, wolfing alternately from bread on a plate and cereal in a bowl. He tried to smile at the elderly couple and he thought their faces were as old and worn as the leather of the chair. The room had been dark when he had come into it: they had been still asleep.

Tracy said, mouth full, ‘I told them that you’d come after me, had leeched on to me. I told them that I hadn’t thought out how to lose you yet, but I’d work on it.’

Josh crawled from the chair. He stood, stretched. The mother pointed to the food and he shook his head. She tried the coffee pot, and he nodded.

Tracy bored on, ‘They can’t ignore sworn statements, affidavits. However important the bastard is, they have to respond to evidence.’

He massaged the joints of his knees and his hips, and wondered how many times she had said it.

She had not convinced the old man, Hans Becker’s father: ‘You do not understand, there has to be will. There is no will in the new Germany to examine old crimes.’

The parents had lost a son, were victims of the past. He looked around the humble, sparse furnished room, and could not see anything that the present had brought them, still victims. He wondered how it would benefit them if they could go to the court and see a former Stasi officer tried, convicted and taken down. In a crappy world where there was no will then old victims, in the passing of time, were new victims.

He watched the mother. He thought she would have wanted to slap her old hand across Tracy Barnes’s mouth. She had been in their past lives, made the misery, gone, and come back.

‘They can’t buck the process of law, they can’t block evidence.’

He stood by the window. The frame needed paint. He saw the car turn into Saarbrucker Strasse, a big smart car, black, and it crawled up the street, as if the driver and his two passengers checked the numbers at the doors. It stopped in the street, opposite the window in which he stood.

‘You wait.’ Krause pushed up out of the car, slammed the door after him.

Raub stared ahead through the windscreen. He despised the East. Everything in the East was rotten. Half a century after the battle for Berlin, and still the stonework on Saarbrucker Strasse showed the damage of bomb shrapnel and artillery fragmentation. Maybe the whole East of the city should be flattened. Maybe it would have been better if the Wall had stayed up. Maybe…

‘What is he doing?’

Raub turned. He looked past Goldstein. Krause, the jewel, the one they smarmed to please, the bastard, had crossed the street and was at the door of the block, checking the names written with the bells.

‘He is doing what he is expert at… to warn, to threaten, to intimidate, to identify.’

‘Then we are involved. If we are involved then we are responsible.’

‘Only today, not after today.’

The life of Ernst Raub was well planned. There was no possibility of involvement hazarding the steady promotion climb that was so precious to him. He understood, because he was from a police family, the small division between legality and illegality, between involvement and clean hands. His grandfather, through involvement, was a failure – a policeman in Munich through the Nazi years, tainted with association, never promoted after 1945. His father, through involvement, was destroyed – a policeman in Munich with the marksmen’s group assigned to the shoot- out with the Palestinians at the Furstenfeldbruck airbase when they had lost the Israelis, never promoted after 1972. Raub had broken the hold of the family, gone to university, joined the BfV, stepped away from his family because to him they represented shame and failure.

‘There is nothing he can do here. And we have no responsibility, we are not involved, when he goes to Rostock…’

He saw Krause, through the misted window, press his finger on the bell.

The peal of the bell silenced her. The old man looked at the old woman.

Josh snapped his fingers for her attention. She looked at him, caught the tension lines in his face. She came to the window. He pointed to the car, to the two men in the front, and to the man who stood on the pavement. She would have seen his face, his carefully trimmed beard, and maybe the scar lines on his face.

The bell rang, incessant, in the room.

She said, distant, ‘It’s Dieter Krause.’

Josh raked the room. There was no back-exit fire escape, and no access hatch from the ceiling in the roof. There was a window out of the kitchen – to God knew where. So hard to think… The bell howled at him.

He snatched up his bag and looped the strap over his head. He ran into the kitchen. She took the cue from him. He was wrenching open the window. She was heaving the rucksack straps over her shoulders. The wind blistered the outside wall at the back of the block. He looked down at a closed yard, with rubbish bins, lines for drying washing, three floors down. A narrow platform of stone below the window ran the length of the back of the block. He took a huge, deep breath. She was behind him, close to him. The width of the stone platform was the length of his shoe. He looked into her eyes and saw fear and bloodyminded determination. He had done a course, a long time ago, too many years ago, rock-climbing, ropes, instructors and full safety equipment. ‘Never look down, old cocker,’ the instructor had said. He jerked his head up so that he no longer saw the rubbish bins in the yard and the washing lines. For a moment, Josh Mantle hesitated, then swung his legs out through the window. The wall against him was rough stone set with patches of cement that would have been used to repair the old bomb and artillery damage. The bell behind him rang, and the wind sang against him. He edged away from the window.

‘Tell them not to open the door, tell them we need time. Time is critical to us. Don’t look down.’

She came after him through the window. He reached to take her hand and she held it so tight that he cursed. He felt her fingers, stiff, free him. He edged away from the kitchen window and faced the wall. His hands splayed as he tried to find security from the wall, to balance himself. He crabbed sideways along the platform. He heard the pant-whistle of her breath behind him.

He felt the bite of the wind because he had forgotten his coat, as she had forgotten her anorak, and he remembered what she had put into its pocket.

There was a drainpipe ahead of him, his target.

He saw where the paint had peeled off it and where the screws that fastened it to the wall had come away. Some years, the drainpipe would have been blocked and the rain would have run down the stonework of the wall beside it. He saw where the mortar between the stones, near the pipe, had cracked or fallen out, and more corrosion from the filth in the rain. There was no turning back. The pipe was inches from his fingers. They brushed against its chipped paint. One more step. The wind gusted. He rocked. One hand against the stone of the wall and finding every crevice and every ridge, one hand touching the drainpipe. He felt the slip below his foot.

The stone hit the concrete of the yard below and broke apart on impact.

He looked back. One stone had gone. Like a gap in teeth. He wanted to talk to her, help her, give her strength, and his voice was stifled dead in his throat. She must step across the gap. He was committed to her. He had made his bloody promise to her. He held the drainpipe with one hand, and grasped her wrist with the other. He steadied her over the space in the stone platform. He brought her wrist to the drainpipe, put her fingers on it. There was terror in her eyes. He looked up. The drainpipe passed the window of the floor above, then the guttering, then the sloping tiled roof above.

He croaked, ‘Can you do it?’

‘You’ve all the ideas. Any alternatives?’

‘I don’t know how secure the drainpipe is.’

‘Well, you go first, then we’ll bloody well find out.’

She loathed him, he thought, because he had made her show her fear. He loathed her, he thought, because she would not let him help her conquer the fear.

He depended on the fastening of the screws that held the drainpipe to the wall and climbed. His shoes found the smallest indents in the stone. His fingers ached to breaking point. He lay on the tiles and his shoes found a hold in the old gutter. His breath came in sharp pants. There was lichen and moss on the tiles, in the gutter.

‘Do I bloody stay down here? Are you having your bloody afternoon sleep up there?’

He was old, stupid, fucked-up – had to have been to have committed himself to her. He wedged his knee and his thigh into the gutter. One hand to push into the gap of a broken tile and try to find a secure hold, one hand to reach for her. He felt her fingers in his, and pulled. He heaved her over the gutter and onto the tiles.

They crawled over them. The lichen and the moss gave them grip. There was the sound of loud, raucous music.

Going slowly, stopping, assessing where the grip was best, where the tiles were damp, treacherous. He pointed to the end of the roof, to the top of a rusted straight ladder.

They were above the window the music came from. He heard the whip crack of a tile breaking behind him and turned. There was something manic in her face. She was standing, swaying to the beat of the music, hips gyrating. She had come through the barrier of fear. She mocked him. Her hips moved as if she was a strip-show dancer.

He went down the ladder and didn’t stop to help her. It led to a flat roof. Another ladder at the far end. He heard her coming after him but did not turn to face her. The second ladder, in good condition, came down into the yard of a motor-repair business. He walked briskly towards the open gate, through the graveyard of Trabants and Wartburgs with the wheels off, bonnets up, interiors ripped out, past the mechanics. His chest heaved. She ran behind him, to catch him. They stood on the pavement.

Josh said, grim, as if it hurt, ‘You’ve made a mistake, a bad mistake.’

She caught his eyes, blazed at him, ‘Have I? What mistake have I made?’

‘He’ll break in there.’

‘So he breaks in.’

‘You left your coat.’

‘So I buy another coat.’

‘You left your coat for him to find, and I left mine. But in your coat were the names, your precious eye-witnesses. Your coat tells him you were there, the names tell him where you’re going.’

‘Does it?’ The laughter sparkled in her eyes.

‘That was your mistake.’

‘Was it?’ Her shoulders shook gently with the laughter.

‘It’s bloody serious.’

She took his hand. She gazed into his face. She held his hand across her breast. She ran her tongue over her lips. She forced his hand against the warmth and softness of her breast. She squeezed it tighter on the softness and warmth, and he felt the folded paper.

‘Put it there when you were asleep. Needed your sleep, didn’t you? I didn’t have to sleep.’

‘Well done, you did well.’

‘You didn’t do bad – for an antique.’

They ran towards Prenzlauer, for the labyrinth of streets and the shelter of the tower blocks between Moll Strasse and Karl Marz Allee.

‘When do we go to Rostock? Do we get a car? Car is fastest. Do we go now to Rostock?’

‘Shut up, can’t you?’ Josh panted. ‘Shut your bloody little mouth so that I can think.’

They ran to be clear of Saarbrucker Strasse, until they could run no more.

They had watched him ring the bell, walk back, look up, go again to the bell and keep his finger on it. They had watched him as he had stood clear of the street door, raised his foot, hit the door with the sole of his shoe. Raub had gasped. The door had swung open. Goldstein had thought that the door of his grandfather’s home would have been kicked in.

They had sat in the car in silence and waited.

The engine ran, the heater blew warm air on them.

He came back through the door. His face was ashen.

He walked towards the car and opened the back door, reached inside for his briefcase. They saw the blood on his knuckles.

Raub blurted, ‘You have not committed, Doktor Krause, an illegal act?’

Goldstein whispered, hoarse, ‘Did you not find her, Doktor Krause, or have you missed her?’

‘An illegal act, in our company, is quite forbidden.’

‘Is she running ahead of you, to Rostock?’

The face was set, savage. He took the briefcase, slammed the door behind him. He walked away. They watched in the mirror. He was walking towards the junction of Saarbrucker Strasse and Prenzlauer and he had the mobile phone at his ear.

They ran from the car and up the three flights of stairs. The door was open, angled because one hinge was broken free, and there was a smashed chair on the floor, as if it had been used to barricade the door. The food on the table was scattered. There were two coats thrown down on the rug in the centre of the room, a man’s and a woman’s, and all the pockets of each of the coats were pulled out. There was a photograph on the floor and the wreckage of a frame. The photograph had been torn to many pieces. They stood, rock still, in the centre of the room. The quiet as around them. The far door was open. In the kitchen, the window was open. Goldstein understood and leaned out. He was high above a concrete yard, above the washing lines, and he saw a smashed stone. He looked along the narrow platform below the window and saw the void from which the stone had fallen. He would not have done it, could not have gone along the stone platform. He stared down. His body shook with trembling. There was a man’s coat, she was not alone. If she had gone along that stone platform then she must have had the smell in her nose of evidence.

‘Get to the car. Telephone for the ambulance.’

They were behind the door. Their last refuge had been the space between the door and the refrigerator. Raub was bent over them. They held each other, their hands were together. Blood trickled down their faces.

Goldstein ran for the stairs and the telephone. Raub was close behind him with the two coats that had been on the rug. He did not give his name to the ambulance Kontrol.

They drove away.

Goldstein understood that they should be gone before the ambulance came, that they should not be involved in illegality.

Albert Perkins came off the telephone, the secure line, to London. He sat at the desk of the station head, used the man’s chair. He could be a pig when he wanted to. What the station heads posted abroad all detested was to have a man in from Vauxhall Bridge Cross who camped in their space, used it as if it were his own. At the station head’s desk, Albert Perkins riffled in the drawer and found the Sellotape roll. He sealed the two envelopes, the one containing the Iranian material, the other holding his report on progress concerning the matter of Tracy Barnes/Joshua F. Mantle. The station heads, in Albert Perkins’s experience, were from independent schools and good colleges at the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. They had come along well-oiled tracks, of connection and recommendation, to employment with the Secret Intelligence Service. They would detest him as a vulgar little man, a former tea-boy and one-time Library clerk, nightschool educated, without pedigree… but the vulgar little man had scrambled his unlikely way up the promotion ladder and was now a London deputy desk head and, with tolerable satisfaction, had the rank on overseas staffers, and they’d not be permitted, ever, to forget it.

He smiled his superiority. ‘Just get them off to London, please, first courier you’ve got travelling over. That young fellow, the one straight out of kindergarten, I’ll need him up in Berlin. May have to sit on his hands for a few days, but I’ll have him there. Oh, yes, and I’ll need a Berlin flight soonest, hire car as well at the other end. You won’t forget those chocolates I mentioned, not too expensive. By the by, don’t go worrying about your Iran file, topping it up, it’s all in here. There’s a good chap.’

They were in the soundproofed bunker on the second floor of the embassy in Bonn. It was assumed that the steel-lined walls of the room would deflect the listening equipment that was presumably used by the BfV. It was always right to assume that respected allies employed their state-of-the-art electronics to eavesdrop on valued friends. Old Trotsky had known the truth of it, had said an ally had to be watched like an enemy. The station head, flushed, did the bidding, went to the outer office to instruct the station manager to arrange the courier, confirm a flight and a hire car, and to tell young Rogers, who was ‘straight from kindergarten’ with a first-class honours in ancient history and who was the second son of a brigadier general, that he was off to Berlin, open-ended. Albert Perkins finished the coffee that had been brought to him. He walked at a leisured pace to the door.

‘What you’re going to do – I’ve worked very hard for good contact relations here, are you going to wreck them?’

He smiled at the station head. ‘By the time I’ve finished here, your German friends, my German allies, will spit on the ground I’ve walked on.’

Asked with steeled dislike, ‘Am I privy – am I allowed to be told how long you’re in Berlin?’

‘Berlin is just transit. It’s Rostock where it’s at. I’ll be there.’

Dieter Krause drove fast. He had taken the autobahn 55.

He drove his own car, the BMW 7 series, that they had given him. It was six days since he had flown out from Tempelhof to London and in seven days he was booked on the flight to Washington. There was no speed restriction on the autobahn and he drove faster than 160 kilometres per hour, hammering in the outside lane. In those six days his world had fractured; within the next seven the fracture could be stressed to collapse point.

He went north. The autobahn would take him around the towns of Oranienburg and Neuruppin, it would skirt Wittstock, go past the Plauer See and the Insel See, where he had fished with Pyotr Rykov. It would bypass Gustrow where their families had camped at weekends, and Laage. He was going home, going to face the crisis in his world, going back to Rostock.

They called him as he drove, telephoned his mobile, as he had said they should.

He had the small scrap of notepaper on the seat beside him, with the names.

North of Neuruppin, the mobile rang – Klaus Hoffmann, aged thirty-six, formerly a Leutnant.

Klaus Hoffmann did not complain of ‘reassociation’. The merging of the two Germanys had been kind to him. He had served twelve years in the MfS, was fluent in Russian, English and Czech. He would have described himself as a pragmatist. The old life had offered opportunities, the new life offered further opportunities. He sold property, acting as a broker for Western companies and international corporations that looked to locate in the East. He had understood the old system and exploited it, he had mastered the new system and made it work for him. He was flaxen-haired, athletic, and tanned from his most recent visit to the Tunisian resorts. He could offer the companies and corporations a detailed knowledge of the necessary procedures to slice through bureaucracy in the matter of planning applications and in the business of gaining federal government grant-aid. He wavered in his business close to the line drawn by the law, crossed it, recrossed and crossed it again. He had knowledge of so many officials: he could provide introductions to those who might be slipped a small brown envelope and he could threaten those who would crumble at the prospect of the unveiling of dirt. Through bribery, through blackmail, he won access to those whose signatures were needed to approve planning permission and to grant funds. He had been taught well in the MfS. He had a fine house in the Wandlitz area of Berlin, once occupied by a senior economic planner. The old wife had gone, a believer in the regime that was washed out, a new wife had been acquired. He had the Mercedes, and investments in the overseas markets and in the safer German companies… What he had built was at risk. On the night of 21 February 1988, on attachment from Magdeburg to Rostock, working late, he had been called out by Hauptman Dieter Krause to a shit place on the coast. The kid, the spy, had been on the ground: he had kicked the head of the kid, the spy, he had helped to drag the body back to the trawler and he had helped to weight it. He stood to lose the good life. He confirmed by his car phone that he was coming to Rostock.

Near to Wittstock, Josef Siehl, who had held the rank of Unterleutnant, rang at last.

Josef Siehi, on the telephone, complained that it had not been straightforward for him to take time off work, he had had to beg his supervisor. Always, he complained. He had stopped at a filling station and used a public telephone to confirm that he was driving to Rostock.

Past the Insel See, the call came from Ulf Fischer, who had never been promoted beyond Feidwebel.

Ulf Fischer, waiting for a fare on Lange Strasse, telephoned Hauptman Dieter Krause from his taxi. It was a good place to wait, near to the Radisson Hotel, which was the best in Rostock, and close to the shops of Kropeliner Strasse. A good place to wait, but the waiting was long, few enough fares to be had from the near empty hotel and shops. He telephoned from his taxi to say that he would be at the rendezvous.

South of Laage, Gunther Peters, once a junior and unnoticed Feidwebel, finally called.

Gunther Peters telephoned from his car, ordinary and not ostentatious. He hoped to be on time at the rendezvous, but he was coming from Leipzig and the radio said there would be road works near to Potsdam. He lived in the seat of his ordinary and unostentatious Volvo car. He was a minimum of ten kilos overweight, aged thirty-eight now, and he was pasty pale. He did not run when he could walk. On the telephone he said at what time he hoped to reach Rostock.

Dieter Krause drove on, powering the big car, towards the city that was his home. They were all vulnerable. Each of them was as vulnerable and at risk as himself. Because they were vulnerable and at risk, they would all come that afternoon to the rendezvous in Rostock, as their Hauptman had ordered.

‘Why?’

They were beside the old Wall, spattered with ugly graffiti scrawl and with technicolour paint sprays. A short stretch had been left for the scrawlers and the sprayers.

‘Because I say so.’

They had walked for more than an hour. He never turned to her, as if he knew that she would follow him.

‘Why are we here?’

‘Because I say so.’

Across the road from the section of Wall, narrow concrete slabs topped by a heavy rubber moon, smooth and of too great a diameter to reach over, was a small circular window with a recessed metal grille, set in the facade of an old building. White and gold lilies were fastened to it. He read the name and the dates that were carved in the stone above the window: Harro Schulze-Boysen, 2.9.1909-22.12.1942. He stood in front of the flowers, gazed at them.

‘Why are we here?’

‘We are here so that we know why we are going to Rostock.’

She snorted. ‘That’s just ridiculous. You think I don’t know why?’

He said, staring up at the memorial, ‘There has to be a reason for going. When I’ve told you the reason, we will go to Rostock.’