the other. The damp was on the outer and inner walls of the stairway. The apartment, also wet, was a bedroom, a sitting room with a kitchen corner, a bathroom where he couldn’t have swung a cat with an outstretched arm. He had found the American. He had been told that the American would amuse him.
‘Famous for fifteen minutes, and that was forty years ago. One news conference and photocall. One debrief where you coughed out all you knew, and that was not much because a private first class, conscript, twenty years old, knew sweet damn all of anything classified that mattered. You’d have become like those Catholic Church converts, so sincere, so fervent and so boring. You embraced this awful quasi country like it was God’s gift to social engineering.’
There was no sign of a woman in the apartment on the sixth floor. The room was bare, bleak. The ashtrays were filled. There were books on the table, on shelves, on the floor.
‘It’s one thing to believe at the age of twenty in the interests of world peace being best served by the balance of military power, but at the age of twenty years plus fifteen minutes they’d squeezed out everything you knew about signals in Heidelberg. You had to start to make a new life here. Bright lad, graduate material if you’d been able to go home, but you couldn’t. Educated here, yes? Learned German, learned Russian, became more native than the natives. You were given a teaching post at the university in Rostock. What did you teach – English literature, American history? Found a little place, and convinced yourself you were a champion of peace, and that two Germanys would last forever.’
Albert Perkins had kept his coat on. The American sat in an old armchair. He had a small body. His legs seemed scrawny thin in his shapeless grey trousers. He hunched his shoulders forward and rubbed his hands incessantly as if that were the way to warm them. His head was big, the scalp shaven, and the veins ran riot patterns in his cheeks. He had thick pebble spectacles and one arm was held to the lens frame by Elastoplast. He smoked acrid cigarettes. Perkins bored on, never hurried himself to get to the point.
‘I expect you were quite a celebrity in the common room at the university – an American, gave the department a little international status, they’d have hung on your words. And you had the ideology, you believed in the rotten little neo-state. Natural step, wasn’t it, to inform on your academic colleagues? Not for money, not for privilege, not for power, but because you believed, in sincerity, in the need to protect the state from Fascist renewal. You’d have informed on anyone idiot enough to trust you, from the head of department to junior staff, from full-time students to part-time students. You had your codenames and your contact men in August-Bebel Strasse and the safe houses where you’d go, once a week or once a month, for the debriefs. Eva Krause, wife of Hauptman Dieter Krause, Stasi officer, was a part-time student.’
The big head jerked up and the stinking smoke from the cigarette billowed into Albert Perkins’s face.
‘Never bank on permanence, eh, that’s what I say, fatal to believe anything lasts for ever. The Wall came tumbling down. The wonderful little state ended in the gutter. Files were opened and identities were matched to codenames. You would have been slung out on your ear. Big job, big status, down the tube. What do you do? A bit of translation work if you can get it? You’re sixty years old, on the scrapheap because you backed the wrong horse, miserable mean little pension. Not much thanks for dishing the dirt on a part-time student – Eva Krause. What’s keeping you here? Let me list what you resent, shall I?’
Albert Perkins smiled, icily. It was not in his nature to feel pity. A man made his bed, he must lie on it. He stood in the American’s damp room and his presence emphasized the man’s failure.
‘You resent the new unemployment – two in five Rostock males, from the Rathaus statistics, out of work or being trained for work that does not exist. You resent the new poverty – the city is the poorest, as measured in per capita income statistics, in Germany. You resent the dumping of immigrants – gypsies, foreigners – in hostels in housing estates like this crap place. You resent the new crime – muggings, beatings, thievings, pick- pocketing, prostitution, protection racketeering. You resent the new drug culture – cannabis available and Ecstasy, crime syndicates bringing in the heroin and cocaine. You resent the new men in town – the Wessis come to take over the Rathaus, the police, the schools, business. Most of all, what you resent is the big message – everything you did in forty years was second rate, was rubbish, should be replaced. I think, my friend, that you should go home. Where is it? Is there an old mother there who’s never had a letter? You need me, my friend, because I can speak on your behalf to my American colleagues. I trade, life for me is a market-place. You talk to me about Eva Krause, and I talk to colleagues about forgetting the dumb stupidity of a twenty-year-old signals kid forty years ago.’
Albert Perkins believed the screw should be turned tightly, but always slowly. The maximum pain, the greatest hurt, was in the slow turning of the screw. He would come back the next day for his answer. A discussion on Eva Krause in exchange for letters being written to Immigration, Defense and the FBI. The American would brood on it overnight. He would be washed in sick sentimental memories of his mother and white bloody fences and apple bloody pies. The room was darkening. There was the glow of the single bar of an electric fire.
‘I’ll see myself out. You shouldn’t think of me as an enemy, was once but not now. You should think of me as your last best chance. There’s nothing left for you here. I’m trading that chance for the dirt, what’ll make me laugh, on the wife of Hauptman Krause. Have a good evening.’
‘Where is he?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘He said he would drive us.’
‘Yes, he said that.’
‘Where the hell is he?’
‘You do not, Christina, have to use foul language.’
‘He said he would drive us and he isn’t here: He said he would watch every match I played and he was late last night and went early. He said he would bring me a racquet from London and there was no racquet.’
Eva said flatly, ‘Your father is very busy.’
‘What does that mean, “busy”? Why does he lie?’
‘You should not speak of your father like that. Are you ready?’
The girl, her daughter, with her ugly, snarling face, flounced up the stairs. Eva Krause stood by the front door and put on her coat. He had said there was a problem that could lose them everything. She checked in her handbag for the car keys. He had touched the sleeve of her coat and the gold bracelet on her wrist, as if they, too, could be lost. She waited and ificked her fingers in impatience.
Christina stamped down the stairs, her bag scraping against the paintwork of the wall, and she carried an armful of racquets. When Eva Krause had been a girl of fourteen years old, her sports kit would have gone into a big paper bag and she would have been proud to own one racquet.
‘You have everything? You have checked?’
‘I have everything except my father, who has lied to me.’ Eva Krause locked the door behind her.
Through the late afternoon, through the evening, the five men searched the city and watched the roads out of Rostock. Two at any one time on the exit roads to the south and west that could lead to Bad Doberan and Kropelin and on to Rerik, three at any one time cruising the central city streets. Easier for them to watch and search now because all of them knew the face of the young woman. For Krause, the time for the tennis match, second round, came and went. They watched the exit roads, they idled in their cars in the old city and the new city of Rostock. Each yearned to see her, recognize her, to have the second chance to finish with the problem.
He knocked. He gave his name quietly.
There was loud music and shouting and laughter from the floor above and the floor below. Seamen filled all the rooms of the pension except those on their floor. He thought the crew big enough to have brought a bulk carrier or a container ship to Rostock but he did not know whether their language was Swedish, Finnish or Norwegian.
Josh knocked, gave his name, unlocked the door.
He had, in the Army vernacular, torn a strip off her. He had put her in the car, swerved off down the road, come close to crashing a lorry because the tension was still eating into him, driven back to the pension, and marched her up the stairs as if she were a foul little brat spoiling a family outing. He had taken her to her room, given her his tongue, and locked her in. He had sat in his own room, cold and damp, on the bed, gripped his hands to contain the trembling, and failed.
He turned the key and carried in the food boxes and the beer cans, his bedding, the mattress and a
