The Waiting Time

Chapter Seven

SO, who was he?’

‘Harro Schulze-Boysen was a member of the Rote Kappelle, the Red Orchestra. The Communists were against the Nazis, therefore they all became Communists. They spied for the Communists, for ideology. When they were arrested by the Gestapo they were brought here. Schuize-Boysen was brought here.’

‘That’s history.’

‘They were in “protective custody”. At the end there was “special treatment”, days on end of torture. Finally, execution.’

‘What is it to me?’

She stood beside him, small and playing bored. He faced the open space, large enough for three, four football pitches. There was a raised mound in the centre of the space, surrounded by sparse grass tufted yellow in the carpet of frozen snow. On the far side of the mound were birch trees, gaunt from the winter.

‘What can you hear, Tracy? Sorry, let me do that again. What can you not hear?’

‘That’s a stupid bloody question.’

‘You can hear traffic. We’re in the centre of a city, of course there’s traffic noise. There are no birds. Spring’s coming, birds are nesting. It’s big ground here, it’s where the birds should be, but there aren’t any birds. You can’t hear birdsong. It was called Prinz Albrecht Strasse. It’s where the Gestapo had their main Berlin office. It’s where Himmler worked, and Heydrich and Eichmann. It’s where they brought people who stood up, who shouted, who did not compromise. It’s when you feel the history in this country, when you can’t hear the song of birds.’

The place held him. He wanted to share the feeling of it. Gently, Josh took her arm and turned her round. She was scowling, as if she was tired and cold, as if she had no interest.

They faced the Wall. Below it, half excavated, was a sunken entrance wide enough to have taken a single car or truck. Either side of the entrance were the back walls and side walls of small, compartment rooms.

‘They were driven through that entrance. They would have been sweating with fear in the back of lorries and lying in shit and piss and vomit. The small rooms were the holding cells. The people were taken from those cells up into the main building, the top floors, for torture. They were brought back to the cells. They would have sat there, on the stone floors and they would have prayed, cried, for the release of death. They were not there by accident, Tracy. They chose to be there. They made the decision to stand up and to shout, not to compromise. They were ordinary people, from trade unions, from the civil service, from the ranks of junior officers, from the Church. For every man or woman in those cells there were nine hundred and ninety-nine men and women who did not stand up, did not shout, who compromised. If you were in the crowd, Tracy, if your mother and father were in the nine hundred and ninety-nine, would you want it raked over? Would you? You want the bulldozers out. You want it covered over. You want it hidden. Look up, damn you, look up at the Wall.’

He had his fist under her chin. He wrenched her head up so that she had to look above the cell block to the Wall.

‘Just as this place killed people, so did the Wall. Behind the Wall, again, history gestating, were those who had the compulsion to stand up and to shout, who would not compromise. Behind that Wall were more cells, more interrogators, more torturers, more executioners working in yards at night. Again, the one in a thousand stood up, shouted, did not compromise. The nine hundred and ninety-nine don’t want to know, don’t want reminding, don’t want the shame paraded. They want history buried, covered up. Look at the Wall. It’s a place for scumbags to scrawl inane messages. Shouldn’t it be a memorial? Look at the chippings, where bits have been hacked off for sale to tourists like it’s damn moon rock, but cheaper. There are places either side of this Wall where the birds don’t sing.’

He loosed her chin. He walked to the crude steps set into the side of the mound.

On the top was a viewing platform. He leaned on the rail of weathered wood. She was beside him, and quiet.

‘What we’re standing on was rubble from the bombing, bad in the February of nineteen forty-five. Prisoners were still held here in the last days, when there was no water, no electricity, but the torture functioned and the killings. Then, it was over. Was there contrition? They covered up the rubble, made the place invisible, hid it from sight. I’m getting there, Tracy. They did not want the past examined. This place was covered with buildings. How many men and women worked here, signed the papers, allocated the cells, organized the shifts of the interrogators, signed the chits for the bullets and the ropes? How many? There was no will. The men and women who worked here went free. History was wiped away. The tens of thousands who compromised did not want the history exposed. There was no will then, there is no will now.’

He gripped the rail hard. He wondered if he had reached her. He looked out over the dead space and the dead grass and the dead trees and the dead Wall.

‘They did not have to stand, shout, not compromise, the people who were brought here. They had such courage. They were brought here because of what they believed. Each of them, he, she, could not go on the road of the nine hundred and ninetynine. They are worth remembering. Am I being stupid or sentimental? They were ordinary people. They were Germans in the Nazi times, they were Germans in the Stasi times. They were the same ordinary people as those in Srebrenica, in the Palestine refugee camps, Kurds. They scream to be remembered with honour. That is why we are going to Rostock, so that history is not bulldozed. Hans Becker was ordinary, and he should be remembered.’

‘Have you finished?’

‘Don’t you want to talk about what I’ve said?’

‘It’s a bloody miserable place and I want to get the hell out of it.’

She seemed to shiver. He did not know whether he had reached her or whether it was just the wind across the dead space catching her.

‘Come on.’

‘Is it Rostock now?’

‘We go to Rostock late tonight.’

‘Where do we go now?’

‘I’ve a name for you. It’s a male name, but it will do for you, just right.’

He had annoyed her and her eyes blazed at him. ‘I’m cold, I’m tired, my rucksack weighs a fucking ton. I don’t need you.’

‘You need me, Tracy. You may be too stupid to realize it. You need me. I brought you here so that you could get into your dumb little brain the importance of what you are doing, and the opposition you will face.’

She was tiny beside him. He could have slipped the straps of the rucksack off her back. He could have carried it for her, but he was damned if he would offer to. They would be expecting him back that evening, and in the office in the morning, and the paper would be piling on his desk. He did not know when it would be finished, but he thought it would go hard before it was. Without history, she couldn’t realize how hard it would go.

‘What’s this fucking talk about a name?’

‘We’re going to the zoo. You’ll find your name there.’

The manager remembered him – a sweet moment for Albert Perkins – and gushed a greeting.

‘Doktor Perkins, how excellent. The usual room, of course?’

‘Mr Perkins – I’m not a doctor.’

‘Everyone in Germany, Herr Perkins, is a doctor, or they are a Turk sweeping the streets.’ The manager dropped his voice, mock conspiracy, grinning. ‘Or they are an ossi, a new brother from the East – and you have a colleague.’

‘I have brought Doktor Rogers with me. He’ll be here a few days. For me it’s just one night.’

He looked around the small reception area. Spotless with fresh paint and clean. The hotel was unpretentious, quiet, discreet. It was three years since he had last stayed there. It was in a street of Savignyplatz at the heart of the old cafe area of West Berlin. At the hotel off Savignyplatz he had been able to find, in the old days, the anonymity that was valuable to his work, and the inexpensive restaurants that did not challenge his per diem expenses allowance. He thought the boy from the kindergarten, Rogers, would have expected to stay in a Holiday Inn or a Hyatt, would have expected porterage and a modern room, stereotyped in design. He’d not get it here. Perkins tramped up the stairs to the first floor, his usual room, the view over a yard and a car park and over the back of another block. Rogers came after him.

He said, ‘What’s the plan, Mr Perkins?’

‘I unpack, I make a few phone calls, we collect the hire car. We go visiting.’

‘It’s just, Mr Perkins, that I don’t really krLow what it’s about.’

Perkins went sharply to the door, closed it. He drew the curtains at the window and turned on the bedside radio before taking the slim file from his briefcase. He tossed it casually at the young man.

Perkins rang a number from his personal directory, a number from way back. He murmured into the telephone, against the music from the radio.

‘Mr Perkins, am I being an idiot? I understand the position of Corporal Barnes. I understand why we’re targeting Krause. What I don’t understand is the reason that Mantle has involved himself.’

‘You’ve the file.’

‘Doesn’t help me, Mr Perkins, doesn’t tell me why he’s pushed his nose in.’

‘Read the file – read it to me.’

The life of Joshua Frederick Mantle, as known to Albert Perkins, was a single sheet of paper. The boy from kindergarten, Rogers, had a good voice, well-articulated, quiet against the music.

Born: 27 March 1942. Parents: Frederick Mantle and Emily Mantle (nee Wilson). FM served Royal Engineers, Military Medal in North Africa, twice promoted to Sgt and twice demoted for persistent alcohol abuse. Served post-war in Catterick, Plymouth, Coichester, Palestine and Malaya. EM shot dead by CCT (Chinese Communist Terrorist) in Penang, 1953.

Perkins said, ‘The ifie always tells the story, rare when it doesn’t. His father was a drunk with a career saved by one daft moment with a bazooka. The child had little contact with his father, his mother was everything. She was shot dead in a street market in Penang. The night she was killed, his father wasn’t in the barracks comforting his son, he was pissed and out wrecking the Chinese quarter with his mates. It would have been, aged eleven years, the end of his childhood.’

Education: Army schools, Army Apprentice College (Chepstow).

‘There were no relations to dump him on so he was carted round his father’s postings. One school after another, no permanence and no stability. A lonely and self-contained teenager. Would have thought he was unloved, would have been damn sure he was unwanted. Went to the Apprentice College as soon as he was old enough to be taken in. His father came out of the Army in nineteen sixty and headed for South Africa, his latest woman in tow. Mantle told a man I spoke to that he never heard from him again. The last time he saw his father, in a pub at Chepstow, the old bugger was in his cups and yakking on about building pontoon bridges, under fire, over the gullies, in front of the tanks in the desert. The truth is his father dug latrine pits and plumbed in the field showers, but just had the one glory moment with the bazooka. The Army, his own service, was the only horizon he had as a youngster.’

Army career: Joined I Corps as clerk, 1961. Stationed at

Templer, Ashford. Aden, 1966/1967. Osnabruck (Germany)

1972/1975. Staff Sergeant 1981. Belize 1982. Transferred out of I

Corps.

‘He started at the bottom of the heap. Not particularly sharp, but dedicated. He was pretty typical. Had made corporal by the time he went to Aden, based at the Mansoura gaol where the FLOSY and NLF guerrillas were held. Would have done a bit of native bashing in the interrogation sessions, would have been able to justify it. Then to Quebec barracks in Osnabruck. He was pushing paper with the rest of them, waste of time, analysing the Soviet order of battle. Quite a shy man, I was told, made his work everything. I don’t think there was anything in his life but his work. What he owned fitted into the suitcase under his bed. He went to Belize with an officer… A prisoner being interrogated died. A soldier reported the death to his unit padre. There was an inquiry. I was sent to minimize the fall-out. If Mantle had made a statement indicting his officer, who had tortured a prisoner to death, then the officer was gone and we were knee deep in propaganda shit. He didn’t, he was sensible, kept his mouth shut. .. Frankly, at that time I reckoned he hadn’t the bottle. He’s regretted that act of compromise ever since. We bought him off with a transfer and a commission. He left I Corps as a changed man.’

Joined SIB, Royal Military Police. Commissioned 1984, rank of

Captain. Served RMP Hounslow HQ and Tidworth Garrison.

Left Army in 1989.

‘He went into Special Investigation Branch. He was chasing squaddies for petty pilfering, for being drunk louts on Saturday nights, for flogging equipment out of the stores. They made him up to a commission. He would have been a cuckoo in the mess, too old for his junior rank, never works. I saw him at Tidworth camp… I was told he was very cold and very bitter, poor company. Actually, he was ostracized, ignored like he didn’t exist. There had been a touch of a scandal the month before, a major who was popular had a finger pointed for pocketing a very small amount of money. Mantle had played it by the book, and the regiment involved thought it should have been handled internally. Mantle went for prosecution. He’d gained that awful bloody sense of duty that afflicts bitter men, everything lined up against him. When the downsizing started at the end of the Cold War, he was top of the list.’

Civilian occupation: Social Worker 1990/1994. Unemployed 199411996. Solicitor’s clerk, qualifying as Legal Executive, 1996…

‘He came out. He would have been a lost man. He would have thought that the Army had rejected him, and he’d have been right. He worked with juvenile offenders, car thieves, yobs, but to him they’d have been disadvantaged by the system. A police officer in Thames Valley told me about him. Then he was married, a very wealthy woman. She died. Don’t expect me to score points. He would have crumpled. He went right off the rails, went downhill, lived rough… He was lifted out of the gutter by the solicitors who had handled his late wife’s affairs. Outwardly he’ll have pulled himself together. Inwardly he’ll have blamed the world, every symbol of authority, for what has happened to him.’

Status: Married Elizabeth (Libby) Harris (nee Thompson), divorcee, 1994. No children. Died 1996.

‘That was bad luck. Up to then, his marriage, he’d seemed like one of those men who just couldn’t make it with women. No girl-friends before. One plunge, and again the failure. He has no one to love, and no one to love him. At his age, now, he’s left on the shelf. As a substitute, he will attach himself to any cause and to any unfortunate that happens along…’

The city had been the gateway to the world. But the gate of Rostock was now rotten and decayed. In medieval times, under the same grey-black clouds of late winter, Rostock had been the trading gateway to the Baltic but the Hanseatic League had fallen apart under the spite of war and been rebuilt. It had been destroyed again by the grey-orange tongues of flame in the fire of three centuries ago.

The great churches and the university and the timbered homes of merchants had risen again in Rostock and then collapsed, lost, under the incendiaries of the bombers flown from Britain to target the shipyards and the submarine pens beside the grey blue of the sea.

The Soviet Army had come. On the coat tails of the Soviets had been the Party, the German Communists, the Stasi and the lorry convoys bringing the grey dull concrete for rebuilding the shipyards. Rostock was once more the gateway.

All crashed down again, as surely as if the bombers had returned to the city sprinkled with grey-white snow. The bureaucrats and business men had travelled from Bonn in the wake of ‘re-association’, from Kiel and Hamburg and Bremen. They spoke of ‘self-determined democratic renewal’, and for every ten jobs in the shipyards they took nine men and threw them on the refuse tip of unemployment. In the grey, tired and suffering city, fragile hope again fell, as it had through history.

Each morning of late winter the grey-brown mist was settled on the Warnow river that split old Rostock from new Rostock. The city, the people of Rostock, suffered again, sullen and hostile to the disasters brought by strangers, as they had been through history.

Under the cloud bank, by the sea, in the mist, spattered with snow, the city struggled for survival.

The city, Rostock, its people, would fight to hold the little they had. Each man for himself in the grey cold jungle. It was a bad place for strangers who came to throttle the little that was left, as it had always been.

She heard the key in the door. He had been gone a week. He had not telephoned her.

She sat in the comfortable chair, new, and watched the television, new, and slipped her feet into her shoes, new. The programme on the television was a game show, new, imported from America. She switched the programme off with the remote control, new… Everything around Eva Krause was new. The house in the refurbished terrace beside the Petrikirche was new for her.

In their generosity, they had allowed her to choose her new clothes and had provided the money, but everything else around her had been chosen by them, by the man from Munich and by the little Jewish shit, as if Dieter and Eva Krause were not permanent but only on trial. If Dieter failed in what they wanted of him, a removal van would come and carry away everything that was new and provide it for the next manipulated man and his family, and the house would be closed to them, locks changed.

Eva Krause stood. She smoothed her dress and touched the styling of her hair. She tidied the magazines.

He came into the living room. They had been married for fifteen years, the wedding a week after she had passed her vetting, after he had been told she was suitable. She gazed at his face. He had been told that, as a full-time official of the Freier Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund in the shipyard, she was acceptable as the wife of a Stasi officer. He came across the room. She saw the tiredness, and she saw the scars. He bent to kiss her and the thickness of his trimmed beard brushed her chin.

She twisted her face away so that his lips, beside the raked scars, touched her cheek and not her mouth. They had been equals, she in the trade union office at the shipyard, he at the headquarters of the Staatssicherheitsdienst on August-Bebel Strasse; they were not equal now because there was no job for a trade unionist in the castrated shipyard. She had only the money that he gave her, that they gave him. The scars were alive, knitting angrily, raw dark red. Now that she no longer had a position of importance, she had the time to manicure her nails. She understood the scratch scars on his face, either side of his mouth. Her nails used to be pared short: now she had the time to grow them, shape them.

‘A good trip, a good journey?’

He would not try to kiss her again. He looked into her eyes.

‘You were made welcome, you met new friends?’

His eyes seemed to yearn for her, not wanting love but comfort. ‘The one who made you welcome, why did she scratch your face, Dieter? Was that part of the entertainment provided for an honoured guest? But did the young woman not like you, Dieter?’

He turned from her. He had the palms of his hands against the wall beside the oil painting of the nude bathers on the beach at Rugen Island. They would mark the clean paint.

She no longer taunted. She spat the accusation: ‘Is that the life when you go with them? Do they find you whores? Were you too clumsy for the bitch? Did you come too early for her? Couldn’t you do it for her? Does the Jew have a whore? Does Raub? Or is it only Doktor Krause who must be amused when he goes to talk of Pyotr Rykov, his friend? How will it be when you come back from America? Will you be more marked?’

He lifted his head. He shouted to the ceiling, ‘You do not understand.’

‘I understand that some whore, a bitch, has scratched your face.

Did you pay extra for that? Did they pay extra? Do we have, from

England, presents to compensate for your time with a whore?

What, Dieter, with their generosity, have you brought us?’

‘There was no whore. I have brought you nothing.’

‘Nothing? No rubbish from duty free, no trinket from the airport, nothing? Could you not go to the shops because you were too busy with whores? You promised Christina -,

‘If you let me tell you-’

‘- promised Christina the new racquet. For tonight – the tournament starts tonight. You promised.’

He took her shoulder, he forced her down into her chair. She was strong. He pushed her down and told her of the way it had been, of the young woman soldier and the rake of her nails. She held his hand tight.

‘Why?’

‘Because of what happened a long time ago.’

Eva Krause listened. In the apartment on Augusten Strasse, behind the headquarters at August-Bebel Strasse, they never talked of his work. It was not accepted that an officer of the Stasi should talk with his wife of his day, of his problems, his successes. But now he told her that a long time ago a spy had been killed at Rerik and that the woman soldier had attacked him because of the spy who had been killed. ‘People have come now to look for evidence. I apologize, I have to go out.’

‘Where? What evidence? Where do you go? Christina’s match

Who are the people? What is there to find?’

He broke the hold of her hand, left her. She felt as if a darkness closed in on her. She heard the cough of the engine of the big car driving away from the house which had been provided for them.

She sat in the dim light of the room. She thought, for something to cling to, of Pyotr Rykov.

The minister spoke on the telephone.

‘Don’t interrupt me. Don’t threaten me. I have the facts. On my staff is Colonel Rykov. Colonel Rykov tells me that thugs answering to you have arrested a Major Ivanov who serves in the Pechenga garrison in the St Petersburg military district. I am informed by Colonel Rykov, in whom I have total and absolute confidence, that Major Ivanov was pulled from his car this morning by your criminal thugs in connection with a falsified charge of defamation. You will hear what I have to say.’

The minister talked to the General who headed Directorate Z of the Federal Counter-Intelligence Service. Before ‘reconstruction’ the General had headed the Second Chief Directorate of the KGB. Pyotr Rykov had rehearsed his minister well: it was not necessary for him to prompt.

‘The alleged defamation was obtained by the illegal use of a telephone intercept on the home line of Major Ivanov. Hear me, you bastard, never again do you order a telephone intercept on a serving Army officer. You claim that, in talking to his father, Major Ivanov – who is a hero of Afghanistan and who did not stay at home like the shit that your thugs are, who served his country with distinction in combat – referred to the State President as ‘that obese cunt who is in the coat pocket of the Mafia’. Hear me. Within one hour, Major Ivanov is to be returned to his garrison camp at Pechenga, a free man. I believe your people to be stupid and also cowards. If, within one hour, Major Ivanov has not been returned to his camp then he will be taken from your custody by a unit of the Zenith team. I promise you – I honour promises – such action by Special Forces would result, inevitably, in your thugs at Pechenga requiring the attention of nurses or a mortician.’

The Major was a good and valued friend of Pyotr Rykov, had acted as second-in-command of his paratroop company at Herat. And the Major had spoken the truth to his father: the Mafia owned the politicians; without the politicians the Mafia could be crushed by the fist of the military. The Federal CounterInteffigence Service was the tool of the politicians, the bumboy of the Mafia. Politicians, the Federal Counter-Intelligence Service, the Mafia, all were cancers of corruption eating at the strength of Mother Russia.

‘Major Ivanov, on his return to barracks, should confirm his freedom by telephone to Colonel Rykov. One hour.’

The minister put down the telephone.

‘It was as you wanted?’

‘Better than I wanted it. Rumour moves, whispers speak, word travels. In three days, perhaps a week, it will be known in every camp, garrison and base that you stood down those bastards. You will have earned the loyalty, unquestioning, of the corps of officers. That is important for the future.’

‘And earned enmity.’

‘You have the power.’

The minister put his hand on the arm of Pyotr Rykov, gripped it tight. ‘I have the power to confront enemies. Do you? Be careful

·. Be careful of that enmity.’

He did not think he had reached her on the dead space of the old Prinz Albrecht Strasse, and he was bewildered. It was not possible, to Josh Mantle, that a person could not be moved by the imagining of the fear, the bravery, the isolation, the courage and the hopelessness of those brought there. He had walked her by the entrance to the courtyard of the old war ministry building where Klaus von Stauffenberg of the ‘44 bomb plot against the Fuhrer had been executed, and had not spoken of the place and the history. He could not face again the realization, after the pouring out of his emotion, that he could not reach her.

He could not reach her because he did not understand her.

They walked. They were on the wide pavements of the Kurfurstendamm. Just another European city, where history was no longer required, where history was bulldozed. They were among the great blocks of glass and steel, among the hotels of luxury. The past was contaminated, so the past was shut out. Perhaps he was trapped by history, neurotic in his allegiance to the past, perhaps he should have gone home, alone, on the eve- fling flight to be at the papers on his desk in the morning. But he was trapped by the history, by her.

Perkins drove. What he liked about the boy fresh out of kindergarten, Rogers, was that he didn’t talk. He disliked talk for the sake of it. The quiet in the car helped him to wallow in the nostalgia. He had known Berlin as closely as he knew the back of his hand, the wrinkles on his face, as he knew the hairs of his trimmed moustache. It had been his city, on both sides of the Wall. He had the address. He thought he kept good time. The nostalgia flowed, like the good days gone… Spittelmarkt was devastated, whole blocks destroyed. Bulldozers and lorries dispersing rubble, as if it was his image of 1945 all over again. A few isolated buildings were left, dark and smoke-grimed, like lost teeth in an old mouth, waiting for the demolition men. He squinted in the gloom to see the number of the block he wanted. He pulled up. The air was choked thick with dust from the lorries and the pile hammers.

You’ll wait for me. While you’re waiting, get me the times of the last trains this evening from Berlin/Lichtenberg, to Rostock.’

He paid for the two tickets.

The light was sliding, throwing the big shadows across the far trees of the Tiergarten.

He had made a child of her.

When she sneered she was foul. Happy, young, without care, to Josh Mantle she was captivating. He gave her the book, let her skim it for the map. He wondered when she had last been in a zoo park. She made a grimace at the unblinking amber eyes of the brown fishing owl. She stood in awe to gaze at the bulk of the American black bear. She watched and squealed as the keeper, final feed of the day, threw fish for the leaping sea lions and was cascade-splashed. She grabbed his arm to point to him where the jaguar slept. As if without thinking, natural, she had taken his hand and squeezed it, excitement, when she saw the panda. It was the end of the day. The crocodile columns of schoolchildren were being marshalled by their teachers, the zoo park was emptying. She hurried him, seemed frightened that it would be closed before she had seen everything. He wondered about her childhood.

She faced him and giggled, the child. ‘But you haven’t told me

– which of them has the name you want to give to me?’

A hooter sounded. The zoo park was closing. He checked the map he had given her. He strode forward.

‘Have you ever seen them, for real, the animals?’

‘Once.’ His guard had slipped.

‘Where?’

‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘Africa, India, America, where?’

‘It’s not important.’

The lump, the specialist’s diagnosis, the holiday, the first failed treatment. A week’s holiday with Libby in the Tanzanian game park at Serengeti, sandwiched between diagnosis and treatment.

He had drained the excitement from Tracy, as if she recognized that he did not trust her with confidences. He could have kicked himself, so savagely, for having let his guard slip, for having broken her mood of child’s happiness.

She no longer held his hand and sulked beside him.

He took her to the hippopotamus house. The keeper eyed them, as if they were too late in the afternoon. The heat in the glass-sided house brought out the sweat in them. The creatures were in a wide pool topped with green slime and the stench of their excrement was sucked to his nose. There were limp-leafed plants in tubs beside the pool, to give it a fraudulent impression of African water, where he had been with Libby before the treatment started, and when they had known it was short time, borrowed time.

‘You’d better tell me,’ she said. ‘What’s my bloody name?’

It was ten years since he had been in the zoo park. He’d assumed that the hippopotamus was dead and commemorated.

‘I’m sorry, I was married then. I went with my wife to Africa, just once. I’m sorry that I was foul with you. The memory hurts..

She said, sour, ‘Don’t mind me. I’m only a bloody clerk.’

He pointed to the tooth. It was in a cabinet on the wall. An immense curving tooth was all that commemorated the animal.

He smiled, weak. ‘More history, Tracy. Don’t interrupt me, I’m not in the mood. I wanted somewhere good for you while we used time. The history. The zoo park was one of the last battlegrounds for Berlin in nineteen forty-five. It was the final line protecting the bunker where Hitler was. There were young guys in trenches, kids, fighting till they’d no more ammunition. There had been bombing as well, but the real killing was in the close- quarters fighting. There were five thousand creatures when the battle started, and ninety-one still alive when the final line broke. There was this big hippopotamus, monstrously big – he weighed several tons. When the shooting stopped and the smoke cleared, he came up to the surface of his pool. All through the battle he’d been down at the bottom in the mud. He was starved, thin, if you can imagine it. He was called Knautschke. He was a survivor. He stayed down in the mud, underwater, while there was all the shit and chaos up above. He became famous, a symbol of the spirit of isolated Berlin. He waited for the right time, the good time, then he came up from the mud…’

She pulled a face, mock grotesque. ‘I’m Knautschke?’

‘Right.’

‘I’m a big hideous bastard with a tooth a foot long, stinking of shit and mud, with a mouth you’d drive a bus into? Is there any more history?’

‘No.’

‘Can we go to Rostock now?’

‘Yes.’

A wizened little man, with a cat that stank on his lap, in an uncleaned room, faced Albert Perkins.

‘A thousand American dollars, yes? You have to understand, Doktor Perkins, that these are hard times for persons such as myself. I am an expert on matters of security, on the gaining and analysis of information, on the administration of any large corporate body – I cannot find work, Doktor Perkins. You would imagine that a person with my skills would not face a problem of poverty. Many of my illustrious colleagues, they have not faced a problem as I have, but they did not operate from inside the personal office of the minister. I think I am a very few years older than yourself, Doktor Perkins, but I am in the graveyard of life. You hear much talk of victims of the old regime. I myself am a victim. You agree, a thousand American dollars? I thank you, Doktor Perkins. I believe you are a very sympathetic and understanding gentleman. Cash, yes?

‘Hauptman Dieter Krause? It is right that you should know why I talk of him, not only because you pay me one thousand American dollars in cash, why I talk frankly of him. I had no feeling for that woman, she was a fuck, she was information, it was mechanical, it was a good source. But, believe me, I refused the offer to go to Bonn and give evidence against her. They came here, the supercilious pigs of the BfV, to ask that I travel to Bonn as a state witness. I refused them. I have my pride. My pride told me that, by expertise, we had destroyed the security of the West’s government. To us, they were donkeys, rubbish, quite lacking in the imagination necessary for intelligence officers. They wanted me to help to clear their garbage, and I refused. Krause offered himself, named the woman, sent her to prison, to ingratiate himself. The killing was on the twenty-first of November nineteen eighty-eight, Doktor Perkins. I have a very clear memory for dates and places and situations.

‘I was the personal assistant to the minister, I was in his office in Haus 1 at Normannen Strasse. The report had reached Mielke when he arrived at his desk the following morning. A spy intercepted and killed, and no opportunity for questioning the spy. Krause was summoned to Berlin. He came that afternoon. He was an arrogant bastard, but not when I met him in the corridor outside the minister’s office. I can picture him. I walked him through the outer offices, to the presence of Erich Mielke and I thought he might break his bladder on the carpet.

‘The old man saw him, and told him that he was stupid enough, if he killed a spy before questioning, to push his prick up his own arse. He cringed in front of Mielke’s desk and I thought he might cry… You would want to know, there were four men with him when he killed the spy. They were Leutnant Hoffman and Unterleutnant Siehl and Feidwebel Fischer and Feldwebel Peters… He told his story and he was dismissed by Mielke and I thought he might run clean out of the old man’s office. He was a suspicious old goat, Mielke, he demanded to know more of Krause. Had he killed the spy through incompetence, or killed him before he could be questioned? That was the way old Mielke’s mind worked. He had me examine the file on Krause. There was a particular aspect of the file, gone now, I am sure – Krause was here in the last hours, in Berlin, with many others doing the same work, cleaning their files – and the ifie dealt with the IMs of Krause. I direct you towards one Inoffizielle Mitarbeiter, who had a position at the university in Rostock. He reported to Krause on his academic colleagues. To another officer, he reported on Hauptman Krause’s wife, was given for that work a different codename, and Krause would not have known of that file. I see you smile, Doktor Perkins. We were very thorough. We were the best… I shall write you the name of that TM. He will still be there, he cannot leave the city. If you want amusement at the expense of Hauptman Krause, and I think you would be most amused, then you should go to see that man and hear about Krause’s wife when you travel to Rostock.’

The thin hands grasped the banknotes, the fingers flicked them and counted. The pen was given him, the receipt for a thousand American dollars in cash was already made out, and he signed for it.

Josh had bought her the food, a takeaway burger and fries. Tracy had paid for the taxi in the bloody shivering cold, on the pavement outside the station.

When she had eaten the food on the street in the old west of the city, when they had waved down the taxi, when the taxi had dropped them at Berlin/Lichtenberg, Josh had checked they were not followed, or watched.

They joined the queue at the ticket counter.

He parked the car in a side street, two hundred metres from the station. He snapped his fingers for Rogers to walk beside him.

‘Just a few things that you should take on board, young fellow. This isn’t the Great Game. Don’t expect to spend your life creeping up the Beka’a Valley, or cuddling with Yemeni tribesmen. It’s idiots, not us, who do the graft. We send them off through the wire, across frontiers and through the mines. We don’t go sentimental, we don’t get involved. We just give the idiots a good push and send them on their way. We use them indiscriminately against friends and enemies, if you can tell the difference. If they want paying we pay them, if they want flattery we flatter them, if they want kicking we kick them. They are idiots and they are workhorses and we use them to move us a little closer, usually a fractional step, towards a successful conclusion of policy. What you have to remember, young man, the greater Germany is the most stable, wealthy, sophisticated, politically democratic country in Europe, but that is only the surface spectrum. Underneath, where the idiots go, it is as dangerous to them as Beirut in the old days. These idiots, tonight, are taking a train into man-trap country. We don’t cry tears for them if they lose, we walk away. If they lose we start again, look for other idiots. I didn’t ask them to step into man-trap country, it’s their decision, but I’ll damn sure take advantage of that decision. That’s the way it is and don’t ever forget it.’

The young fellow, the boy from kindergarten, walked silently beside him, head down, considering.

It had been Perkins’s intention to shake him, with his first-class honours in ancient history. He would have moved paper and tapped the keyboard of a computer at Vauxhall Bridge Cross, and believed in the romance of his work. In Bonn, first posting overseas, he would have scanned documents and met low-grade sources, and believed in the ethic of his work. In the bright-lit hail of the Berlin/Lichtenberg station, it was time for the boy from kindergarten to see, close up, the idiots who went into man-trap country.

He went forward, the young fellow close to him. He saw them. They were in a short queue at the ticket desk.

‘Evening, Tracy, evening, Mantle. Thought I’d find you here.’