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
