‘You want the truth?’
‘I have to know the truth.’
Tracy gazed into her eyes, into the tears. She said, with sincerity and honesty, to the woman’s eyes, ‘Of course he loved you. If he had lived he would have married you. We were only a partnership for an operation of espionage, nothing physical and nothing emotional. He would have lived his life with you…’
‘That is the truth?’ The woman hugged Tracy, held her. ‘Could I look into your face and lie to you?’
She ran down the steps of the tunnel to the U-Bahn station.
The telephone rang on the counter. The cafe owner picked it up.
‘Yes… Yes, I can make such contact. Your name?’
He wiped the lead of the pencil on his tongue. He wrote the name he was given.
‘Yes, I have that. Krause, Dieter, Hauptman, of the Rostock Bezirksverwaltungen… Those you wish to contact, their names. All in Rostock, yes, in November nineteen eighty-eight. Please, the names…’
He wrote the names that were given him.
‘You should ring again. One hour will be sufficient.’
The owner replaced the telephone. His cafe was a meeting place early in the morning for the frustrated, insecure and vulnerable old men. They came down the steps from the tower blocks of Marzahn to his cafe at the same time each day as they had once gone to Normannen Strasse. They wore the same jackets of imitation leather. They were the veterans of the Staatssicherheitsdienst, too elderly and traumatized to find new employment. The state they had protected was gone. They had been the sword and the shield of the state, and they had been betrayed. They gathered in the cafe each morning to drink coffee, to buy a litre of milk to put in a plastic bag, to talk, to read the day’s edition of Neues Deutschland, to complain, to dream. The owner’s son threaded between them with the note-paper in his hand. The cafe was a cut-off point for what they knew as the insider network. The former men of the organization hung together in informal contact – better, the grey humour went, to hang together than separately.
There were sixty thousand apartments in Marzahn; a hundred and sixty thousand people lived there. In one apartment, a man had the computer that could summon up the names, addresses and telephone numbers of the former officers of the Staatssicherheitsdienst. The owner’s son would be back at the cafe with the telephone numbers within the hour.
He heard her voice, a song. He blinked awake. He smeared the snow off his face and the ice from his eye- brows. He saw her.
The cold was in his muscles, his bones, his throat. He struggled for the strength to push himself up from where he had slept against the step. She was dancing as she came, skipping like a happy child.
He staggered to his feet. He leaned against the wall beside the door. She stopped and stared.
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
