‘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
