bags, and he saw a middle-aged man and a girl who sat languid and under-employed.
He pushed open the door.
The smile of welcome lit the man’s face. He was a customer, an event. The girl straightened. Albert Perkins wandered to the far end of the shop and the man, predictable, followed him. He had led the man out of earshot from the girl. There were times when Albert Perkins lied with the best of them, and times when he discarded untruths for frankness.
‘Good afternoon. I am a busy man, and I am sure you would like to be a busy man… You were the Oberstleutnant heading the Abteilung responsible for covert surveillance filming. I come as a trader. If you have what I want then I will pay for it. Life, as I always say, is a market-place. You don’t need my name, nor do you need to know the organization that I represent, and if the merchandise is satisfactory then I pay for discretion. There was a Hauptman Krause at August-Bebel Strasse. The wife of Hauptman Krause was Eva, and the lovely Eva enjoyed the favours of a Soviet officer, a Major Rykov. An Inoffizielle Mitarbeiter, overwhelmed by his ideological duty, reported these sessions in the art of copulation to a handler. The bed play was filmed. Now, if I am not to be disappointed and you are to be paid, those ifims will have been preserved. I wish to buy the films of Eva Krause coupling with Major Rykov.’
The man, the former Oberstleutnant, chuckled. The mirth ripped his face. ‘People want only, today, what is new. I could fill my shelves with cameras, lenses, produced in the old DDR, and people will walk past them. They demand only what is new, which they cannot afford to pay for.’
‘No money orders, no travellers’ cheques, banknotes in the hand – if you have the film I want to buy.’
The man waved to the girl, she should mind the shop. She was unlikely to be trampled by a stampede. He had keys on a chain and he walked through to where the stock was piled in boxes. Albert Perkins was pleased to see the quantity of the boxes, unpacked, as he had been pleased to see the quantity of cameras and lenses on the shelves. He thought the account books would make stark reading. The man unlocked a steel-plated door at the back of the shop. He led Albert Perkins down gloomy old stone steps.
The cellar was a small shrine dedicated to the past. The present and the future were at street level, where the Japanese cameras and lenses were displayed, and kept out by two sets of double- locked doors and a poorly lit stone staircase. Heavy timbers had been brought in, old wood, and were used as props between the floor and the ceiling, and Albert Perkins thought the cellar must have once been a shelter against the bombing. There was a good armchair on a square of good carpet. The man gestured that he should sit. In front of the chair was a television set, large screen, and under the television was a video player. He sat. The man ignored a shelf of video-cassettes and knelt in front of a wall safe and used his body to prevent Perkins seeing the combination he used. The exhibits, for the shrine, were on a shelf behind the television, and each was labelled as if the pride still lived.
There was a camera the size of a matchbox, what the ‘grey mouse’ would have used for the photography of documents; an attache case, and it took the trained eye of Albert Perkins to see the pinhead hole in the end of it; a cooler bag, and he saw the brightness of the lens set where a stud should have been for the holding strap, good for the beach in summer; tape recorders for audio surveillance; button-sized microphones for a man to wear on his chest; long directional microphones for distance; a length of log, the bark peeling from dried-out age, and he frowned because he could not see the lens; electric wall fittings and plugs for hotel rooms, in which a microphone or a camera could be hidden… The safe door was shut. The man had lifted out three video-cassettes.
He said, briskly, ‘Could you, please, my friend, stand up.’
Albert Perkins stood. The man came behind him and quickly, with expertise, frisked him. The man tapped with the palms of his hands at the collar and the chest and the upper arms and the waist and in his groin and at his ankles. Albert Perkins had never carried a firearm. Firearms were for the cowboys in Ireland. It was a good search, professional.
The man said, ‘Please, sit down.’
A video was placed in the cassette player. The television was switched on.
Monochrome… A cramped, tight bedroom, filled with the width of the bed, and the angle wide enough to show the wallpaper above the bed. She was a good-looking woman. Agony and ecstasy on her face. She had a strong body.
Perkins watched. The warmth came through him.
‘Fifty thousand DMs…’
‘Fifteen thousand.’
She was on her back. Sharp focus. He was on her. Her knees high and tight against his hips. His hands on her shoulders and his back arched.
‘Forty-five thousand DMs.’
‘Twenty, top.’
She squirmed under him, she lifted her ankles and closed them round him. It wasn’t the sex that he knew, what Helen allowed on his birthday or her birthday, or on their anniversary, or when, rarely, she had drunk too much. She rolled him. ‘Forty thousand DMs, that is final.’
‘Twenty-five thousand is where I finish.’
He saw Rykov’s face. His mouth was open, as if he gasped. He was on his back. She rode him, bucked on him as if he were a steer and her breasts bounced and she seemed to cry her rioting pleasure to the ceiling.
‘Thirty-five thousand DMs, and that is my absolutely final-’
‘I said twenty-five thousand was where I finished.’
‘You have seen five minutes, it is a three-hour tape, and there are two more tapes..
‘Twenty-five thousand, cash.’
His eyes never left the screen. He wondered whether the old bastard had stayed home on the day the Oberstleutnant had come to instal the camera, or whether he had merely left the keys under the mat. She sat across him and she stroked the hairs of his stomach and his chest and he cupped her breasts. There wasn’t shyness between them, and the old bastard had said it wasn’t love.
‘Thirty thousand DMs, that is quite absolutely the final-’
‘Twenty-five thousand – be a shame to go to insolvency when you’ve worked so hard to build your business.’
She was off him. He was limp. She wiped a tissue between her legs. They didn’t kiss. They dressed fast, as if he had to get back to commanding a missile and radar unit and she was headed for her office or for a meeting or for collecting the child from the minder. The room was empty and the film ended. ‘Twenty-five thousand DMs, cash.’
‘Twenty-five thousand, cash, for three tapes, agreed.’
Albert Perkins stood in the street. Behind him the man pulled down the shutters, obscured the window of unsold Japanese cameras.
The cold of the evening settled on him after the heat and warmth of the cellar. It was always a mistake for a man to insert himself into forbidden territory, he reflected, but Albert Perkins never ceased to be amazed at how many men jeopardized their future in sweaty copulation.
He murmured, ‘Might have been good at the time, Colonel Rykov, might have been brilliant, but did you ever consider that you might live to regret it. Did you?’
He left his apartment in the early evening to go back to his desk in the ministry. His wife, Irma, had watched him change. Pyotr Rykov crossed the pavement with a firm step, and the driver hurried from the car to open the door for him. His wife had watched him take the best, most recently acquired, uniform from the wardrobe and change into it, and she had not asked him why, that evening, he chose to wear his best uniform and why he went back to his desk. He paused at the open door. His minister would have left the building, and the aides and clerks from the outer offices. It was, to Pyotr Rykov, an act of necessary defiance. Down the road, misted windows, was a stationary black car. It was important to Pyotr Rykov that he should not believe he was intimidated.
She braked sharply outside the pension. He had not spoken all the time she had driven back to Rostock.
She turned to him. ‘All right, you want to bloody sulk, but do it on your own. Piss off.’
He looked into her face, contorted and ugly. Josh said, slow and deliberate, ‘I don’t find this easy, but I’ll say it because it has to be said. Today you have been more cruel and more vicious than any woman I have ever known. Beside that, you can be more gentle and more caring, and I include my wife, than any woman I have ever known. Tracy, I do not understand the depth of the scar…’
She said, cold, ‘I lost the boy I loved. Isn’t that enough for you, “sir”?’
