be paid for.’
The former Oberstleutnant grinned cheerfully. ‘I do not take offence. The world changes, we adapt or we die. I do not complain. You should know I have a great pride in the quality of material on those three tapes. I went, a year before the end, to Leipzig to help with their surveillance techniques. It was two days before the Christmas of nineteen eighty-eight. There was a party that night and I showed my material. I received a standing ovation, I was applauded for its quality. Why do you wish to hurt them?’
‘Hurt who?’
‘When you buy a ten-year-old film of Frau Krause fucking with a Russian officer, then you go into the gutter to hurt either Frau Krause or the Russian officer. What have they done to you that they deserve to be hurt?’
Perkins turned away. He climbed the steps out of the cellar, he crossed the shop, he did not wish the man a good day. He walked out onto the street.
A week before, seven clear days, if he had been told that he could go to Peenemunde, Josh Mantle would have hugged the man who gave him the invitation. It should have been the place where the bare pages of books took life. He would have yearned, seven clear days before, to walk in that place of history.
It was the fourth time that they had tracked the length and breadth of the museum area.
He no longer cared for the history.
He had been through the smaller museum that housed the wartime exhibits – and his eyes had not caught the photographs of the V2 development, or the encased slave-labourer’s uniform that dressed a dummy, or the little personal possessions of the test pilots who had flown the Me 163 jet prototypes, or the artist’s impression of the Lancaster bombers over Peenemunde.
The wheelbarrow was still in the roadway, filled, with the brush and shovel placed carefully on the rubbish.
He had scrutinized the tourists on the benches and at the picnic tables beside the aircraft on their stands. He had gone into the graveyard area of the helicopters that needed renovation before they could be displayed. He had walked among the missiles. He had been through the power station building that proclaimed the site as the ‘Gateway to Outer Space’ where the displays boasted ‘Peenemunde to Canaveral’.
A man with a wet cloth cleaned pictures on the stairs. He had wiped the portrait photograph of Walter Dornberger, then soaked his rag, squeezed the moisture from it and started on the portrait of Wernher von Braun. Josh hadn’t seen him before.
Did the man know where Heinz Gerber could be found? He would be sweeping the roadway. No, not in the roadway, Josh told him, and not in the lavatory, not anywhere.
The face of the slow, dull man shook, as if he were puzzled that he had forgotten. Methodically he rubbed at the glass over the portrait of Werhner von Braun. ‘I remember… He was the start. Doktor von Braun was the beginning of everything the Americans have done. All of their rockets start with what Doktor von Braun created here… I remember. He was going to the path. I think he was going home. I remember that I wondered why he was going home. He goes home on the path through the forest.’
‘I am so sorry to trouble you. You are very gracious, Doktor.
A man yesterday fell to his death from the roof of a block in Lichtenhagen – one of those awful places built by the old regime, a desert of concrete. I would not have thought the matter involved the BfV, except that two foreigners had visited the apartment in which the fatality lived, British foreigners. That is peculiar because Lichtenhagen is an extraordinary place for foreigners to visit. He was a retired school-teacher from Rerik, which is west along the coast, but was now living in Lichtenhagen.’
He was young for the job. All through the morning he had hesitated from making the call. If he had stayed in Dortmund, he would have been, with his experience and seniority, the third man in the chain of command. He had gone east, joined the migration flood of Wessis, gone on the fast run of promotion and extra salary, taken the position of police chief for the city of Rostock. AU morning the report had been on his desk and he had hesitated before ringing a senior official of the BfV in Cologne. With greater age and greater experience he would either have made the call two hours before or dumped the report in his Out tray. His deputies were all Ossis, men of greater age and greater experience, and all had been passed over for the job of police chief for the city. He rarely asked them for advice: to have done so would have seemed to confirm their prejudice against him.
‘There is a problem with descriptions. The tenants of the apartment are elderly, one handicapped, one sighted, they were the uncle and aunt of the fatality. Neither can offer descriptions beyond that one was a man and one a woman. No, no, there is no evidence of homicide. There is no evidence of a crime… I forget it? I confirm your suggestion and apologize, Doktor, for wasting your time.’
The forest closed around them. They walked on the pine-needle path in the gloom. Only the cold drifted down from the canopy.
Among the pencil-straight trees were the stunted, angled shapes of broken concrete. He thought it was the true museum, not the museum in the sunlight fashioned for the tourists. The true museum was the cracked and disintegrated shapes of concrete that had been the buildings of the experimental-rocket works, where the scientists had been and the Polish labourers, where the bombs of concentrated explosive had fallen. The concrete shapes were covered with lichen. The needles had gathered on them and softened the angles of their destruction. The craters had survived half a century of the dark gloom below the forest canopy. Impossible for Josh, who had read the books, not to imagine the carnage hell of those who had run in their terror where he now walked, when the forest had burned and the buildings had come down as the bombs had fallen. She came easily behind him, light feet on the cushion of needles. They walked past the great facade of a building that had been taken by the pines. Only the facade survived, still fire-blackened. The pines were the roof and the interior of the building. It was the true history.
He saw the hanging body.
Josh stopped. He stared at it. She cannoned into his back. Tracy had not seen the body. He held her close against him.
There was no wind in the forest, under the canopy. The rope was over a branch and knotted. The hanging body rotated so slowly. He saw the back of the man and the collapsed shoulders, his side and the outstretched arms, the stain at his groin. He closed his eyes. The man had climbed the tree, struggled to gain the necessary height, clawed his way up the rough, scaled bark of the tree. He had climbed to the first branch that he would have judged could take the weight of the rope under strain, tied the rope to the branch and slipped the noose over his head. He thought of the man for whom the terror of living was greater than the fear of death.
He opened his eyes. He held her as she shook in his arms. He kept her head, her neck, against his chest.
The man’s shoes were on the path, had been kicked off. He saw the worn, holed socks of the man. He judged the terror that had been brought to the last moments of the life of Heinz Gerber.
‘Good to see you, young man, and how is Berlin?’
‘Cold, Mr Perkins, very cold. I’m sorry, I’m very pushed for time on the schedule they’ve set me. Have you the package?’
It gave Albert Perkins perverse pleasure to hand to Rogers, when the kindergarten kid was fresh from the Portsmouth recruit courses, a frayed supermarket bag containing a package loosely wrapped in brown paper. They were in the car park, broad daylight, in front of the hotel.
‘That’s the package. Going this evening, is it?’ He grinned. ‘If they get their eyes on that lot tonight, in London, when they get home their women can expect a pretty fearful time.’
He saw the confusion on the young man’s face. ‘London?’
‘London, yes, that’s where it’s going.’
He saw the flush on the young man’s face. ‘Weren’t you told, Mr Perkins, what was happening?’
‘Where’s it going, if not to London?’
He saw the young man flinch, blink, then summon the courage. ‘If you’d needed to know, Mr Perkins, I’m sure they’d have told you. I’d better get on, sorry.’
Young Rogers, kindergarten kid, ran to his car and he clutched the supermarket bag to his chest. Perkins’s breath spurted, steamed in his face.
