The car of the kindergarten kid accelerated away, out of the car park.
Dieter Krause, in his car in the parking area outside the tennis hall, heard the news bulletin.
The radio said that, in Gustrow, a hostel for eastern foreigners had been firebombed; in Wismar, the chemical factory was to close with the loss of 371 jobs; in Schwerin, the tourist authority for Mecklenburg-Vorporren reported that advance bookings for the summer were down on the previous year…
The police chief, driving in his chauffeured car to his new home in the Altstadt, heard the news bulletin. In Rostock, the transfer of the reserve-team striker to Werder Bremen was confirmed with a fee of one million DMs; in Peenemunde, a former Rathaus official from Rerik had been found hanged in the forest near to the space- exploration museum…
Albert Perkins, in his hotel room, in shock, lying dressed on his bed, heard the news bulletin.
‘Where is Siehl?’
Fischer said, ‘He waited for you. He waited a long time for you.
Peters said, ‘I told him not to bother to wait longer. I told him that watching your bitch daughter play tennis was more important to you.’
The match had gone on. Christina had lost the first set before he had reached the stand and sat beside his wife. Christina, rampant, hugging him, at the end had said that she would not have won if he had not been there to watch her and she had babbled about the racquets that she should be brought from Washington. When Christina had gone to shower and change, Eva had asked him… No, the problem was not solved. No, the problem continued. She had stared ahead of her in the emptying stand and bitten at her lips. Her fingers had worried on the new bracelet of gold chain on her wrist.
Peters said, ‘The bastard quit on us.’
It was the first time in the three years that his career had so far run that young Henry Rogers had felt true involvement in a mission of importance. Everything before had been analysis and the interminable work at the computer screen. His pride mingled with apprehension. He had followed, most exactly, the detailed instructions he had received from Mrs Olive Harris in London.
He stood on the north side of the Unter den Linden.
The man, in front of him, crossed the wide street, went to the south side, walked towards the floodlit grey granite facade of the Russian embassy. Mrs Harris would have known of the man, Rogers assumed, from Mr Perkins’s daily situation reports. He had been to the apartment near to the Spittelmarkt and paid the wizened little man who stank of cats the sum of one thousand American dollars. He had given him, as the instructions of Mrs Harris had demanded, an airline ticket to Zurich, valid for the last flight of the evening with open-dated return, and had driven him to the Unter den Linden. He had written a Russian name, from Mrs Harris’s instructions, on the brown paper of the package, and handed it to him.
In the bright flush of the embassy’s security lights, he watched the man ring the bell at the heavy door.
He fished in his pocket for his car keys. He watched the man cross the Unter den Linden, scurrying to avoid the cars, not waiting for the pedestrian lights. It would be only a twenty- minute drive to the Tempelhof airport. He felt pride at his achievement in carrying out Mrs Olive Harris’s meticulous instructions, and he lost the apprehension of failure. He did not know his part in the destruction of a target of consequence.
Josh would have said, normal times, that he could accept silence.
He lay on the mattress and the blankets were tight around him. He lay on his side and faced the wall. He could smell the damp of the wretched little room they shared. The party of seamen from Sweden, Denmark, Norway, wherever, must have sailed that day. Down below, in the reception of the pension, his key and her key would be the only ones missing from the hooks. He could hear her breathing behind him, and he did not know whether she slept or whether she lay awake, and he did not know whether images of the body, the shoes, the terror of the man obsessed her as they knifed him.
He had held her close, tight, against him all the way back down the path through the forest. The moment that they had broken clear from the dull light and the sun had fallen on them, she had shouldered herself free of his arms, pulled away from him.
In the faint night light of the room he saw her hand hanging careless at the side of her bed, near to his face.
‘Are you awake, Tracy?’
‘Trying to sleep.’
‘You know that if we fight, Tracy, we fail.’
‘I didn’t ask you to be here… and I didn’t ask for lectures.’
‘Do you know how much you hurt, Tracy? Does it bother you?’ She murmured, savage, ‘God, are you going to moan again, again? Is that why your wife left you?’
Josh pushed himself up. He sat against the wall. He heaved the blankets around him.
‘We’ll start there. That’s as good a place as anywhere. Don’t interrupt me. Don’t open your horrid little mouth… I was out of the Army. I was a social worker. I worked with kids for three years. Can I say it, so it’s on the record? They were thieves and vandals and joyriders and none of them had the quality of viciousness that you parade, that you find so easy to justify.’
He heard her breathing sweet and regular. He saw the outline of her body and her hand careless beside his face.
‘There was a boy, Darren. He was on the pills. He thieved to get the money for the pills. I quite liked the kid, I thought I could break him off them. He thieved from this house, big place, smart road in the Chalfonts, he was all dosed up when he went in and he didn’t do the necessary with the alarm. The police picked him up outside the house. He was in the cells when I saw him and he was going back, as night follows day, to Feltham Young Offenders’, and he was sitting on the bunk bed and the tears were streaming down his face. I thought he was worth the effort, and the custody sergeant told me I was an idiot. I went to the house he’d broken into. She was Libby Frobisher, stinking rich, divorced, and I told her about Darren and what the custody sergeant had said and that the kid was in the cells and weeping his heart out. She withdrew the charges. The kid, Darren, walked free. I drove him round to see the woman and made him stand in front of her and apologize and mean it.’
He did not know whether she slept or whether she listened.
‘She rang me a month later, she wanted to know what had happened to the kid. She said I should come round, have a drink, tell her. Six weeks later we were married. I was fifty-one years old and she was the first woman I had loved. There was only her accountant and her solicitor at the wedding and they thought I was into her life for the easy ride. I made her – insisted on it
– write a will where nothing was left to me. Until I met her, I was not a man who cried or laughed or knew happiness or understood pain. I learned them all from her. For a year I knew happiness, and then she found the lump.’
Josh reached out and took her hand.
‘For half a year I cried and understood pain. She went through the treatment. She died.’
He brushed his lips against her hand and opened his fingers and allowed her hand to drop back, careless, beside the bed.
‘I tell her about you each day. I went to see her the day I left to come to find you. I told her then that you put your hand into a snake’s hole, that you weren’t beautiful, weren’t even very pretty. I told her about the killing of Hans Becker, your boy, and that the only thing we had in common was that we had both had the person we loved taken from us… I tell her, each day, how we’re doing. I tell her that we’re frightened, that we don’t know where it’s leading us.’
He thought she slept. He saw the calm stillness of the profile of her face.
‘I tell her that, thank God, tomorrow is always another day.’
Chapter Fourteen
Josh had tried to think, in his methodical way, while they had dressed in the gloom of the room at the pension, still dark outside the window, and then she had sung the song. Whether she sang it, whether she whistled it, whether she murmured it, the one bloody song with the words or the one bloody tune, it scraped through his
