The mud clogged on their shoes and smeared their trousers. They walked, slow going, towards the buildings.
He could smell the farm, old hay and new manure, and hear the faint sound of a radio playing in the farmhouse and the bellowing of cattle as if they demanded attention. The farmhouse was at the side of a courtyard of buildings. It was a building, centuries old, that decayed. He thought the great armies passing this way would have seen that same farmhouse of brick and timber beams – the guards of Napoleon and the grenadiers of von Hindenberg and the panzer men of Mannstein and the artillery men of Zhukov. The radio played light music behind the heavy door. Water dripped on the step from broken guttering above. He rapped the knocker. He expected to hear a footstep, a grumbling complaint from a man or a woman that they were coming, but heard only the radio. They walked together, close to each other, around to the back of the farmhouse, past abandoned kids’ toys and a tricycle, past a small garden where winter cabbages grew in neat lines. The door at the back of the farmhouse was wide open.
He knocked with his fist on the opened door. There was food on the wide wood table and two mugs of steaming coffee. The pages of a newspaper were scattered on the table, as if discarded in haste. A cat slept in a chair and ignored his knocking. He called out, and the cat opened its eyes, scowled and closed them again. He called again, and only the bleat of the radio’s advertisements answered him.
In the courtyard of farm buildings, the outer door of the cattle shed was open. The animals shouted at them for their attention.
There was a light trailer of manure with a fork set in it, as if work had been interrupted. The sunlight came down into the courtyard and caught the old gold of the hay bales that had been moved from the open barn and left. A horse was wandering free in the courtyard with a halter on its head and a trailing rein.
She took his arm and pointed.
Josh followed the line she made with her arm.
A mud track led from the courtyard out over the yellow weed grass of the fields. He saw why she pointed.
They ran, slipping and slithering, along the track, between the deep ruts that the tractors had made.
The wind blew against them and the low sun was in their eyes.
The small, slow-moving procession edged towards them. A tractor pulled a trailer at the head coming steadily. He saw two men walking beside it, heads down. He saw four women, in pairs, walking alongside the trailer and none had coats against the wind and the cold. There was a tractor at the end of the procession and it dragged a muck-spreader through the ruts of the track.
He stepped into the mud of the field so that he should not impede the path of the procession. He slipped his hand into the bend of Tracy’s arm; she jerked it away from him.
The tractor at the head of the procession came past them. Mud clods were scattered from the big tyres and thrown against their bodies. He saw the lined, weathered faces of the man who drove the tractor and the men who walked beside the cab, who had left their cattle in the courtyard barns and left the horse free. He saw the women who had come from the warmth of the kitchen.
He looked for the body on the trailer.
He looked for Artur Schwarz.
He saw on the trailer a small load of winter turnips.
He caught the sleeve of the coat of one of the men, and asked where was Artur Schwarz, where could he be found. He was told… Josh closed his eyes, so old and so bloody tired. He heard the grating voice of one of the women talking to Tracy, but could not distinguish the words against the roar of the tractor engines.
He let the procession move away from him, watched them go all the way to the old courtyard.
He stumbled across the open emptiness of the field and she was behind him. Her shadow danced ahead.
Tracy shouted, ‘Their shit-spreader’s broke. That’s what they all came out for. Dropped everything because the shit-spreader’s buggered. A bust shit-spreader is their definition of disaster. Did they tell you where we’d find Artur Schwarz?’
Albert Perkins so rarely lost his temper.
‘Is that what the bloody woman called us, me and them? Are you telling me, Mr Fleming, that the bloody woman said I, they, were a minor sideshow?’
He sat on the unmade bed. The wires for the equipment that made the call secure were tangled in his arms.
‘And Krause is an irrelevance? And our operation is demeaning? How, in God’s name, did you let her get away with that fucking talk? Don’t you understand, Mr Fleming, what is being played out here? Four eye-witnesses were evicted from Rerik in nineteen eighty-eight. I don’t know their names. What I do know, in the last several days two men, formerly from Rerik, have died. That’s what is being played out here, bloody cruel warfare – and that is a sideshow, a minor sideshow? I am listening to hourly news bulletins for more deaths, damn it. There are two left, I don’t know who they are or where they are. What should I do, Mr Fleming? Should I place an advertisement in the local newspaper calling on these unnamed, unlocated individuals to dig a bloody hole in the ground and sit in it, because it’s not worth them getting themselves killed for a minor sideshow? How’s that, Mr Fleming?’
He heard the chambermaid’s trolley in the corridor and the knock at the door. He held his hand over the telephone and shouted at her that she should come back later. His bitter temper brought the sweat to his forehead.
‘No, I am not coming home, Mr Fleming. In case you had forgotten, Mr Fleming, the matter of agreed policy is as important now as it was before Mrs bloody Olive bloody Harris inserted her unwanted nose into my mission. And I hope, Mr Fleming, that you will make my views known to the ADD with clarity, and tell him there is blood spilt here and that there will be more spilt before it’s over. Good day, Mr Fleming.’
Albert Perkins so rarely lost his temper. He had never before spoken with such vehemence to a man of seniority. If Corporal Barnes and Mantle did not succeed, he would be crucified for what he had said to his senior, and out on his arse from the front doors of Vauxhall Bridge Cross. He sat alone on his bed and the radio played jazz music. He sat quietly.
The wooden cross was at the back of the churchyard, where the grass was longest and the weeds thickest.
The legend had been written in black paint, flaked, across the arm of the cross: Artur Schwarz 1937-1995. It was the only grave in the cemetery over which there was no headstone. Josh thought the man had lived his last years alone and died alone and now rested alone. He stood by the cross.
‘Have you seen enough?’ she called.
‘Yes.’
‘It’s like he cheated us.’
‘Yes.’
The car was where he had been told it would be.
He had driven at the speed of a lunatic, taking the fast road out of Rostock, through Ribnitz-Damgarten, and the needle had showed that his speed had reached 180 kilometres per hour. He had gone on the grass to pass a lorry and had swerved savagely to avoid an oncoming van. He had gone on the paving to pass a pick-up puffing a trailerload of pigs.
They were walking to the car. He saw her. She was with an older man. He saw the mud that was smeared and spattered over her legs and across the front of her coat. He had no plan. The Makharov pistol was out of his belt under his thighs on the seat. Dieter Krause had reached the rank of Hauptman, and if the regime had survived, in another year, he would have expected promotion to the rank of major, it would have been expected of him that he could act without a plan.
He drove past them, braking.
The man led. He was a big man, a man older than himself, with a short, old-fashioned, military haircut, and the hair was dark but peppered with grey. The man’s head was down, as if despairing, and his clothes, too, were mud-smeared and spattered. He drove on up the main street of Swarkow, then turned in front of the village’s small school. He had a clear view of them. She seemed to him more substantial than he remembered her, but that would be because she wore the heavy coat.
She could destroy, with the man beside her, everything he had built. She could put him into the cells of the
