The Waiting Time

Chapter Eight

He spun. The movement of turning, fast, buffeted Josh Mantle into a woman standing behind him, pressing close to him in the queue. He had been far away, his mind, in the last moments before the voice had cut into his consciousness, in the office in the high street of Slough – the morning, the partners, his desk empty, the papers for the day’s court appearances not laid neatly out. It took him time, two seconds or three, to locate the voice.

‘Thought you’d be here. The obvious way would have been to hire a car ten hours ago and get straight up there, or to take the first train. Good thinking, Mantle, and what I’d anticipated.’

The old railway station had been cleaned. There was a polished floor, flowers in pots, new counters and computers for issuing tickets, fast-food stalls, newspaper and magazine stands. Progress had reached the railway station of Berlin/Lichtenberg, so that a veneer covered the past and obliterated history.

‘Always best to make your own agenda, not to let the opposition set it for you. Smart thinking…’

Perkins was close up to him.

He had looked right by Perkins. He focused. The pale, drawn face, the thin moustache, the evening stubble greying on the cheeks, the half-drawn cold smile, and the eyes that twinided bright from the reflection of the strip lights. There was a young man behind Perkins, but hanging back as if he were not a willing player in the game. He felt a loathing for Albert Perkins. In the queue, behind his back, Tracy would have turned, would be watching him, judging him.

‘You called them “gracious friends and respected allies”, and told them were to find me. You fucking nearly killed us. You are disgusting.’

‘Steady on, Mantle. No call to be wound up, stay calm. Tell him that, Tracy, shouldn’t ever lose your calm… Actually, I’m not with the hare and I’m not with the hounds. Done my bit in the market-place, very satisfactorily. I’m here to watch the chase.’

‘Get off my back.’

The queue shuffled forward a pace.

Perkins said, ‘I’ve warned you once, but I’ll warn you again, the last time. You go to Rostock and you will upset people. For those people there is a great deal at stake. For Hauptman Krause – by the by, Tracy, his scars are knitting quite well – at stake is his future. He’s in from the cold, the future looks comfortable, there’s no shortage of federal money in his wallet. Don’t think he’s going to hand that over, without a fight, for ten years in the Moabit gaol. His former underlings – they’ll be verminous – will have built new lives, too, and if Krause goes to the Moabit gaol then they go with him, as accessories to murder, and they won’t take kindly to it. There’s the BfV, my esteemed colleagues, who reckon that Hauptman Krause is their invitation card to top- table intelligence evaluation, and they’ll tell you that for too many years we and the Yankees have treated them as kitchen staff. They’ll not be pleased to see him wiped away. They will close their eyes and turn their backs on little matters of illegality. It will get bad up there in Rostock.’

The queue slouched forward another pace. Josh didn’t turn to face her, he did not look to see the effect on Tracy Barnes of Albert Perkins’s poisonous tone.

Perkins said, ‘You should know, the man I report to, he asked me what would happen if you, Tracy, were damn fool enough to go to Rostock. Only my opinion, I told him that first they’d warn you, very clear, no misunderstanding, and if you persisted they would rough you – that’s a quick ride to hospital Casualty – and if you still went forward and threatened them and it’s their freedom or your life, they’ll kill you. I hope you listen to the radio, you always should when you’re abroad, keeps you in touch. It only made two or three lines. An elderly couple beaten up in their home on Saarbrucker Strasse, unknown assailant, unknown motive. That’ll be the warning. After the warning they’ll go more physical, then they’ll kill. You go to Rostock and you’re on your own.’

Her voice, behind him, was clear, matter-of-fact.

‘Two persons, adults, one way, to Rostock.’

He saw the slow smile, so bloody cold, break at Perkins’s mouth.

He turned towards Tracy. She was shovelling banknotes out of her purse, and the computer was spitting out the printed ticket. Her face was quite set. He did not know whether Perkins had frightened her, or whether she hadn’t even bothered to listen.

Through the late afternoon, through the evening, Dieter Krause sat in his car and watched the slip-road. It was at Rostock Sud, the most direct turn-off from the autobahn into the city. Of course, they could have come off at the Dummerstorf-Waldeck slip-road up the autobahn, or they could have driven on to the Rostock Ost turn-off, but this was the best place for him to wait. He had the heater on in the car. In between the cigarettes he took a strip of gum and chewed incessantly, and every few minutes he used his sleeve to wipe the car’s windscreen. He looked for a hire car – a Ford, an Opel or an Audi. There were high lights over the slip-road, bright enough for orange day. He would recognize her, but he had no face, no build, no features for the man travelling with her. He would know her if he saw her, her face had been close to him. He could recall each bone and each muscle of her face. He watched the cars brake, swerve and slow as they came off the autobahn and onto the slip-road. When he had headed the section on the second floor at August-Bebel Strasse, when he had targeted environmentalist shit or the crap people with religion, then he would have had the authority to call out twenty men for a surveillance operation of such priority. He was disciplined. He studied each car for Berlin plates, and every woman in those cars. He looked for the gold of her hair and the small face and the bright eyes. The cigarette, the latest, was stubbed out, and he took the gum again from the dashboard beside the radio where he stuck it each time he smoked.

In the apartment on Saarbrucker Strasse, when the old people had found their last hiding place behind the kitchen door, when he had beaten them in his frustration, the wind and the cold had come through the opened window. He had seen the platform of stone and the distance of the platform between the window and the drainpipe, and he had looked down to the concrete of the yard. If she had gone along that platform to the drainpipe, so high above the concrete, then she was hard. If she was hard, then, certainty, she would come to Rostock. The headlights of each car, each truck and lorry, speared into his face, dulling his sight, as he searched for her.

‘What confuses me, Mr Perkins, you warned him and you spelled out the dangers of the course he was following.’

‘How is that confusing, young fellow?’

‘Frankly, Mr Perkins, I don’t see what more you could have done to persuade him to pack up and go home.’

‘Are you so very naive?’

‘The policy objective, Mr Perkins, is fulfilled by him going, but you were telling him to quit, walk away.’

‘That’s the nature of the beast. The beast is embittered, contrary, hostile. You tell the beast to go back and he will go forward, tell him to go right and he will go left, tell him the colour is black and he will say it is white. Tell him not to go…’

‘Then you manipulate him?’

‘Quite right. You can always get an idiot to dance like a marionette. Part of the job is jerking the strings, you’ll learn that

He’s predictable. But you’re wrong to focus on old Mantle. It’s the young woman who’s interesting.’

‘Is it real, the danger?’

‘Oh, yes, very real. As real as the minimal enthusiasm there will be from our friends and allies to accept evidence unless it’s served up cordon bleu. What have they done about the Stasi crimes? Listen, Erich Mielke was minister for state security for more than forty years, responsible for the psychological destruction of thousands of lives, responsible for the taking of hundreds of lives, and he was given six years’ imprisonment for killing two policemen at an anti-Nazi demonstration in nineteen thirty-one, believe it. Nothing, for their convenience, in his time as head of that despicable organization, was deemed criminal so they raked back sixty-six years, a farce. Hans Modrow was the last Communist prime minister, sat for years at the Politburo meetings that legalized repression, and his only crime was falsifying voting results, suspended sentence. A Stasi major presented the Carlos terrorist group with the bomb detonated at the Maison de France in West Berlin, three deaths, three persons murdered, as a direct result, and he was given six years, out by now. A hundred victims shot trying to scale the Wall, two border guards given decent sentences for firing at point-blank range on unarmed youngsters, nine suspended sentences so they walked free, thirteen acquitted. There was murder, unpunished, assassination squads roaming abroad and unpunished, wholesale theft of monies sent to relatives living in the East, unpunished, torture in the Stasi cells, unpunished. They don’t want to know who was guilty, they want it forgotten. If she is awkward and if she threatens, then it gets dangerous.’

He left the boy from kindergarten at the outer door of the hotel. He wouldn’t see him in the morning, would be off early. He wanted to walk around Savignyplatz, to be on his own, to sit in a cafe late in the evening and hear the talk around him, as he had walked and sat long ago when Berlin had belonged to him.

In his taxi, the ‘Free’ light off, Ulf Fischer watched the forecourt of the Rostock Hauptbcihnhof.

Twice, passengers off the trains had sworn at him because he would not take them. It was a hard life, driving a taxi in Rostock, and it hurt to turn away money. It was not his own taxi, and when he had paid for its hire, and the hire of the radio, and the fuel and the insurance, there was little enough left at the end of each week. He was a warm man, though, not greatly intelligent but cheerful. Once or twice a month, he was a professional mourner. The ethic of the family had broken down in the new Germany – money ruled, old people died alone. They needed, the old-and-alone dead, a small show of affection at their funeral. He made an oration at such people’s funerals, spoke well of them when no one else did. It brought a little more money into his life – as did the earnings of his wife, who went five evenings a week to clean trains at the Hauptbahnhof – but too little to hold the love of their two sons. His boys were beyond his control, without discipline, were in love with the American culture. In his plodding way, the way that he had learned from twenty-seven years in the MfS, he tried to merge into the new life, but he had wept the night that the mob had broken into the Rostock barracks building.

He had been the driver for Hauptman Dieter Krause. On the night of 21 November 1988, he had driven the Hauptman to Rerik, at panic speed. He had been the driver and confidant of Dieter Krause, he had done shopping for Eva Krause when her work at the shipyard did not allow her time and when the Hauptman was tied to his desk, he had been like an uncle to the little child, Christina. That night, his boot had been across the throat of the kid, the spy, to steady the head and make it an easier shot for the Hauptman. He had last seen Hauptman Krause in Rostock nine months before, and the Hauptman had walked past him and not seemed to recognize him, but there must have been some reason for it.

He had been at the station since the late afternoon, and all through the evening. He knew the times of the trains arriving from Berlin/Lichtenberg, and when each train was due he left his taxi and went to stand at the steps to the tunnel from the platform so that he could see the faces that passed him. He had been given a good description of the face that he watched for. Hauptman Krause had always been careful with detail. There would be a man with her, and Hauptman Krause had told him that the man would be about 1.85 metres tall and might weigh about 90 kilos. The Hauptman had found the man’s coat and made his estimates from it. It was English made. Later, after the last train had come, if the young woman and the man were not on the train, he would go to the meeting that the Hauptman had called. He still did not understand why the Hauptman had walked past him those months before on Lange Strasse.

There was a rap on the passenger window.

He saw the skinny, poor face of Unterleutnant Siehi. He unlocked the door for the Unterleutnant to join him. It was necessary, in these days, to lock the taxi’s doors while it was parked at the kerb, because of the violence of the new bastard undisciplined skinheads of the city. They shook hands formally. In the taxi, the Linterleutnant ate a sausage with chill from a small polystyrene tray with a plastic fork. It was not possible for Ulf Fischer, the Feidwebel, to tell Josef Siehl, the Unterleutnant, that he did not permit food to be eaten in his taxi. The next train from Berlin would be arriving in six minutes, and two hours after that the last train of the night would arrive.

She slept.

The train clattered north in the darkness. They were alone in the compartment. Ahead, in other compartments, were the Scouts with their adults, singing lilting songs in treble voices. Behind them the compartments were used by drab elderly people, their small cheap suitcases on the floor by their feet. He had the window blind up, and when the train slowed, the light from the carriage spewed over the snow-specked ground beside the track.

She slept, so peaceful, so gentle, her shoes kicked off, her feet on the seat and the weight of her body against the carriage wall.

The light showed him the frozen ice at the rim of the lakes beside the track and once he caught the eyes of a deer startled by the approach of the train. They went through the small towns and villages where there were illuminated advertising hoardings for new cars and new supermarkets and new soft drinks from America. They went past an old barracks of the Soviet Army, light and shadow from the train meandering over the vandalized buildings where once the big tanks had been serviced. It was Mantle’s nature to look out over the barracks. In the days when he had been stationed in Germany, days that were twenty years gone, on a few occasions he had been tasked to take the British military train from Helmstedt to Berlin. Every time it ran, most days of the week, an I Corps sergeant had travelled on it. From the West, across the Soviet zone, to West Berlin. An hour in West Berlin, then back on the train across the Soviet zone, through Potsdam and Brandenberg and Genthin and Magdeburg, peering over the walls and through the trees at Soviet camps, at tanks, at artillery, trying to spot cap badges that would say a new unit had arrived. Pitiful, small beer. He now rated the work of I Corps, scratching for information on the military enemy hidden behind the great fence of wire, mines and watch-towers, as pathetic.

She slept without care.

The train rolled on the track. Cattle trucks had come this way. They went by the town of Furstenberg, sandwiched between lakes, ringed by forests of straight pine. Going slower, pulled by steam, the cattle trucks had come, doors bolted. Would there, then, have been young people on the blacked-out platform at Furstenberg, waiting for a train north, or a train to Berlin, who had watched the cattle trucks slink noisily by, smelt the bodies and heard the cries? Would there, now, be old people on the bright platform at Furstenberg, waiting for a train to Rostock, or a train south, who remembered the roll of the cattle trucks, the smell and the cries? Past Furstenberg, as the train gathered speed, he saw the small narrow branch line disappear into the web net of the forest. The branch line had carried cattle trucks to Ravensbruck.

She slept beside him, as if his history was not important to her. He let her sleep.

West of the city, from the Reutershagen district, a narrow, unlit road straddled open ground and ran towards a wooded area of birch trees. Klaus Hoffmann had sited the pit and dug it seven years and four months before. In darkness, using only a small- beam pencil torch to guide him, he blundered and stumbled away from his car towards the dark outline of the trees. He carried with him a short-handled spade, kept in the boot of his car every winter as precaution against being marooned in blizzards. He remembered the track and the line of the trees ahead. He had taken trouble that night to site the pit. The path meandered close to a ditch. He had to stay on the path until he reached the line of trees, then backtrack for twelve long paces, a dozen metres.

Standing on that point, his feet either side of the scraped mark, he must search with the torch beam for the shattered tree across the drainage ditch. The bearing he must find was eighteen paces from the mark towards a direct line with the shattered tree. There was ice on the ditch. He tried to jump it but one leg fell short and the ice gave, cracked like a pistol shot beneath him. Frozen ditch water up to his knee, soaking his trouser leg and his sock, ifiling his shoe. Klaus Hoffmann swore. He pulled himself, heaved his body, scrabbling at the grass fronds, up the bank of the ditch. He made the measurement. His shoe squelched.

The night, over seven years before, that the mob had come into the building on August-Bebel Strasse, was the night he had come and made the siting and dug the pit. He breathed hard. He rammed the blade of his spade down into the earth. He dug, and failed to find the rubbish bin. He took another pace, on the same line, dug again and failed again. He dug the third time, his foot cold and sodden. The blade of the spade hit the buried plastic cover of the bin. It was near to an hour after he had left his car that Hoffmann lifted the top from the bin. As he had left it, the guns and the files were wrapped in greased paper and in sealed plastic bags. Wrapped against the wet were three Kalashnikov rifles, the magazines and bullets in smaller plastic bags knotted at the throat, hand grenades and gas canisters, four pistols and more ammunition, and the two shopping bags that held the files. He took the Makharov pistols and the ammunition. He searched for the names on the files, as he had been told to, and selected those that were required. He closed the rubbish bin, covered it again and stamped down with his cold numbed foot on the earth. He tore up grass, yellowed in his torch beam, and scattered it over the scar on the ground.

She moved. She did not open her eyes. She swung, so casual, still sleeping, away from the compartment wall. For a moment her body, her head, wavered upright, then she slumped, her head against his shoulder and her body against his arm.

He could not move. If he moved he would wake her. He thought it would be criminal to wake her.

The short spread of her hair was splayed against his collarbone. She slept on and the train gathered pace, its motion rocking her head on his shoulder. Josh Mantle felt a great tenderness towards her. He could have woken her, thanked her, because in sleeping against him he thought she showed her trust… Coming back from the specialist, after the diagnosis, as he had driven the car, Libby had rested her head against his shoulder and closed her eyes, and that, too, had been a gesture of trust. His arm was numb but he did not dare to shift it, to risk disturbing her sleep. She breathed smoothly. There was no panic in her breath, no nightmare. He saw the cleanness of her face, clear skin. He smelt the chilli sauce. He could not imagine living with himself if he had abandoned her. He was old enough to be her father. He felt as if it were demanded of him that he should protect her.

She slept. His arm ached. Her head was on his shoulder.

Coming fast off the autobahn, on to the slip-road, Gunther Peters saw the parked car. He flashed his lights. The headlamps lit the face of the Haupt man, whom he had not seen since the collapse of the regime. He pulled in his small Volvo behind the BMW. He was given the description, height, weight, build and hair colour, told what he should look for, and told at what time he should leave the slip-road and come to the meeting place.

The Han ptman was gone, driving away into the night. Peters settled low in his car, and watched and waited.

There had been an Armenian who had taken money up front for the supply of spare engine parts for Mercedes cars, and not delivered, and the Armenian’s body was now deep in an earth-fill site where rubble from the rebuilding of Leipzig was dumped. There had been a businessman from Stuttgart who had claimed to have the right contact in the Ukraine for the supply of infantry weapons, mortars, machine guns and wheeled 105mm howitzers, and there had been a suspicion that he doubled with the BfV; he had gone, weighted, into the Rhine river at Bingen, west of Wiesbaden. The Armenian, before he had died, without his fingernails and with a pain-shaking hand, had written the account number at the Zurich bank and the letter of authorization for its transfer. The businessman, before he had gone, alive, gagged, into the river, had spelled out in staccato gasps the limited information he had passed to the agency.

He watched the cars come past him on the slip-road. He thought the Hauptmcrn a fool to have killed the kid, the spy, before interrogation. Now the history of that night was churned up again, debris left on a beach, stones turned over by a plough. If he was threatened, he killed.

He watched for the face of the young woman who had been described for him by Hauptman Krause, a fool.

He checked his watch.

The feeling in his arm, against which she slept, had died. His shoulder was warmed by her head.

He felt almost a sense of fear because she slept against him as if she gave him her trust, and yet ahead of him was the earning of the trust.

He eased into the seat beside her.

‘You are late.’

‘I came when I could.’

‘You have missed most of the game.’

‘I came as soon as it was possible.’

‘If she wins this game she has the match.’

She sat high in the stand beside her husband. If Christina survived to the final for under fifteens of MecklenburgVorporren, and won, she would go to the under-fifteens all-Germany championship at Munich. The coach said that Christina had the ability. The club where the coach worked was a thousand Deutschmarks a year. The coach’s time was priced at seventy-five DMs an hour. When they had paid for the membership, the entry and his time, Ernst Raub had written the cheque. Without the cheque from Raub, her daughter would not be playing in the championship for under fifteens of Mecklenberg-Volpommern. She served for the match in the first round of the championship.

‘The problem, it is still there?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘The woman, has she come to Rostock?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘What do you know?’

‘It is about the collection of evidence.’

‘You told me that all the files were destroyed. What evidence?’

‘There were witnesses, that is the problem. The ifies were destroyed, I do not know if she can find the witnesses.’

‘What will you do?’

‘I have to finish with the problem before I go to America.’

Their voices murmured. They watched their daughter below. They applauded the point that was won. Eva heard the quiet, cold certainty of her husband’s voice.

‘If you cannot…?’

‘Cannot what?’

‘If you cannot finish with the problem before you go to America. ..?‘

‘If I cannot finish with the problem, if she finds the witnesses, if the witnesses talk to her, then I am named..

‘Then?’

‘I am arrested. I am tried, am convicted. I would go to prison.’

‘You will fight?’

The past clung to her. The past was Pyotr Rykov. And the past was also her husband coming home in the night with the wet salt smell on his clothes and the sand on his shoes and undressing in silence. The past was poverty, boredom, when she had been unemployed because the FDGB had closed down as an irrelevance, and it was four years of him struggling to find work. The past was him seeing the picture in the newspaper of a Russian general, and behind the General had been Pyotr Rykov, and driving to Cologne to offer himself, and coming back with Raub and the young Jew, and the move into the new refurbished home in the Altstadt near to the Petrikirche and the new clothes and the new furnishings. The past was ghosts… The overhead smash shot, the victory, their daughter leaping in celebration on the court with arms and racquet raised… All in the past if a young woman came to Rostock, searched for, and found, witnesses.

‘You ask me if I will fight. Yes, I will fight.’

He was gone from the seat beside her.

The train slowed. He broke the dream. They had gone through Maichin and were past Teterow. He moved his arm, edged it from behind her body. The train lurched on its brakes. Her eyes opened, blinked, stayed open. Her face was close to his. She didn’t shift her body from against his.

‘How long have I been there?’

‘A bit less than an hour.’

‘Enjoy it, did you?’

Josh said quietly, ‘I didn’t want to wake you.’

‘Got a thrill? Grope me, did you?’

He thought trust was beautiful and precious, and that he was old and stupid. He jerked up off the seat. He pulled her rucksack and his own bag down from the overhead rack. He did not care to look at her. He did not know which of her was real. The train was slowing, crawling. He did not know which of her was the core, when she was asleep and lovely, when she sneered and was ugly. Was he trusted, was he a convenience? Out of the window, slipping by, were small homes.

‘Is this Rostock?’

‘This is Laage, about fifteen miles from Rostock.’

‘Why’d you wake me?’

He felt the anger and tossed the weight of the rucksack onto her legs.

‘Do the obvious and that’s the way to get hurt. The obvious ways to reach Rostock are by the autobahn or through the railway station. This is the last stop before Rostock, so we get off.’

‘No call to be so bloody grumpy. I just asked.’

The train stopped.

She shrugged away from him, heaved the rucksack onto her shoulders and avoided his help. They went down the corridor, past the Scouts, quiet now and sleeping.

They walked out of the empty station and waited across the road at the deserted shelter for the bus to Rostock.

He had driven to a petrol station where there was a photocopier and reproduced the file, a dozen pages given him by Hoffmann, the reports of an Inoffizielle Mitarbeiter, codename Wilhelm, on the community in which he worked. In the payphone, he had called the directory for telephone numbers, and then the number of the TM, codename Wilhelm. He had pretended he was trying to reach another man with an offer for double-glazed windows, had checked the address, and apologized for the disturbance.

He drove into the small community, clear roads at that time in the night.

There was a storm out at sea, beyond the darkened peninsula, and the wind came in over the Salzhaff, the spray climbing over the piles of the piers where the trawlers were tied. The ifie would turn the mind of the man, would destroy the man who had been, many years before, an Inoffizielle Mitarbeiter of the Staatssicherheitsdienst. Where the man lived now, there would be a fine view of the shore and the sea.

He put the copied file in an envelope, gummed it tight, and the man’s name on it. There was no need to write a message. He walked from his car to the door of a small house and the box beside it for post and circulars. The man who lived, in retirement, in the small house close to the sea at Rerik had known the names of all the witnesses. The man would have friends, would be respected, would be destroyed if it were known that he had been listed as an Inoffizielle Mitarbeiter of the Staatssicherheitsdienst, if it were known that he had informed on those who befriended him and respected him.

Dieter Krause swung his car away from the sea and away from the beat of the surf on the shingle shore.

They walked out of the bus station.

There was a whiff of the sea scent in the air. He chose the side streets and the back streets, where the lights were sparse, where they could hug the shadows. She murmured her bloody song… The bloody song, played on the forces’ radio, was hers and her boy’s. He was not a part of the bloody song. It was all for love, her love and the boy’s love. He was not included in the love..

The last train of the night reached Rostock.

The passengers spilled down onto the platform.

The two men waited at the top of the tunnel from the platform, scanned each half-asleep face, beaded their eyes on each young woman who scurried with her bags from the platform to the tunnel.

They waited for the platform to clear, threw down their cigarettes, and turned away.

It was an old house, three storeys high. The facades of the houses on either side had been pressure-cleaned, but the house with the pension sign was grimed with old dirt. He waited at the door. She had dropped back. Through the glass he saw a man at the desk, reading, oil-slicked hair, wearing an overcoat, and behind the man was the row of keys hanging in front of the letter rack. She reached him.

‘Gold medal for picking luxury.’

‘There’s a Radisson in Rostock, and a Ramada, and there’s a new hotel at the railway station, and they are where they would expect us to go.’

‘Don’t be so bloody scratchy.’ She grinned.

He pushed open the glass door. The man looked up from the magazine. The reception desk was worn, unvarnished, and there was the smell of cabbage and boiled sausagemeat. The man shivered in his overcoat. Around the letter rack, where the keys were, the wallpaper was wrinkled, faded. The man greased them a smile.

It was obvious from the keys, hung unevenly from nails, but he asked if the man had accommodation available.

The man leered. ‘One room or two rooms?’

She laughed out loud behind him.

‘Two rooms,’ Josh said.

The man’s hand, the nicotine-stained fingers, flitted over the keys. He took two keys.

The man winked. ‘Two rooms – adjoining.’

She laughed again.

The man asked for documents. Josh took his wallet from his pocket and slid a banknote for a hundred DMs onto the palm of the man’s hand, which did not move. Another banknote. The hand slid with discretion towards the man’s hip pocket. He gave Josh the keys, pointed to the staircase, picked up his magazine again.

They climbed the stairs, up the threadbare carpet. The smell of cabbage and sausage was replaced by the must of stale damp. It was colder on the stairs than at the reception desk. They stood in the corridor on the second floor in the low light and he gave her the second key.

‘Is it off and running in the morning, Mr Mantle?’

‘We don’t run anywhere, at any time. We plan. We take it slowly. Step by step, so there are no surprises. I need to think it through.’

‘Goodnight, Mr Mantle.’

He needed to sleep and, in the morning, he needed to think… and in the morning he needed to tell her that he was Josh and not Mr Mantle. So damn tired…

‘Goodnight, Tracy.’

He had been the first to reach the cafe. Krause had taken a seat in an alcove where he could view the door. They drifted in from Augusten Strasse. He stood, correctly, for each of them, for the taxi driver who came with the building-site security guard, for the criminal, the property developer. The woman who now owned the cafe had once managed the canteen in the building on August-Bebel Strasse, she would once have run to take the orders of Hauptman Krause and Leutnant Hoffmann, even Siehi, Fischer and Peters. She had closed the cafe, kicked out her customers. She had put beer on the table and gone to her kitchen area.

Hoffmann said, ‘I can be away for two days. Too much work for me to be away longer.’

‘I am building a new life.’ Fischer shrugged. ‘In three years I hope to have my own taxi, but I have to work.’

Peters had a meeting in Warsaw the day after tomorrow.

Siehl whined that if he were not back by tomorrow night then he would lose his job, and did the Hauptman know how hard it was to find work in Berlin?

Krause wondered if they had walked past the old building before coming to the cafe and looked for the darkened windows above August-Bebel Strasse that had been theirs, remembering how they had walked with pride, anonymous, through the big door. He wondered if they had glanced down at the windows flush with the pavement behind which had been the interrogation rooms.

‘Can I tell you, my friends, the reality? You stay, we all stay, until the matter is completed, until the problem is finished with. We have one week. It is necessary for it to be finished in one week. If you do not stay, you will not be doing anything from a cell in the Moabit gaol… That, my friends, is reality.’

‘Because of one girl, height a metre sixty, weight sixty kilos. Not to forget the russet hair. It is just one girl. Easy to recognize her. Ask her to hold up her hands, look at her fingernails, scrape under fingernails for the skin of Hauptman Krause.’ Peters led their laughter.

‘It is amusing? It is the big joke? It is funny? We are together, as at Rerik we were together.’

Hoffmann hesitated. ‘I didn’t kill him.’

Siehl flushed. ‘You killed him and we only obeyed your orders.’

‘So, let me tell you more of reality. The kid, the spy, was chased. Who chased him? He was caught, felled. Who caught him? On the ground, he was kicked. Who kicked him? He was kept still on the ground by a boot across his throat. Who wore the boot? He was taken back to the boat. Who dragged him? He was weighted, he was put into the water. Who lifted him over the side of the boat? More of reality, it would be a common charge. It would be an accusation of conspiracy to murder. We were together at Rerik. If we fail we will be together in the gaol at Moabit. Do you now believe?’

Fischer said, loyal, ‘We did our duty. Again we will do our duty, whatever is necessary.’

He told them where they should watch in the city, what times and at what places, and repeated his description of the young woman. He took the Makharov pistols from his attache case, each still wrapped in the plastic bags, and passed them over the table, with ammunition and magazines. He handed them the mobile telephones he had hired in the afternoon and had them each write down the numbers. He passed a file to each of them – Jorg Brandt’s to Hoffmann, Heinz Gerber’s to Siehl, Artur Schwarz’s to Fischer, and Willi Muller’s he slipped between the beer glasses to Peters. For each of them there was a responsibffity. He laid his hand, palm down, on the table. Hoffmann’s covered his. Siehl’s covered Hoffmann’s. Fischer’s covered Siehl’s. Peters’ covered Fischer’s. He felt the weight of their hands on his.

They went their ways.

He walked in the shadowed streets towards his car.

He could see the body of the boy, moving in currents of water, held by the weighted pots, flowing against the sand bottom of the Salzhaff. There were crabs crawling at the eyes of the boy, and molluscs fastened to his lips. Eels writhed on the legs and arms. For six nights now he had seen the body and heard the laughter of the boy, mocking and taunting.

He ran, as if when in his car he would no longer see the boy.

Josh slept. A ragged, tossing, restless sleep. He was too tired to dream.