In two days, he checked the wall clock in his room, less a few hours, he would be airborne with his Direktor, with colleagues, with Raub and Goldstein, with the man they regarded as a jewel.
The senior official telephoned Goldstein, in Berlin, at his apartment.
He saw the face of Pyotr Rykov enlarged on a screen. He saw an audience of eminent and influential Americans rising to their feet to applaud, and saw the handshakes and the backslapping for his work. He saw opened doors at the Pentagon and at Langley. He saw the livid lines of the scratch scars on the face of Dieter Krause. His world closed on him, in darkness.
They passed the big airbase. There was little to see of the base the Soviets had used, from which they had flown the MiG-29s. Josh had read in the last year an assessment of the MiG-29’s performance by the Luftwaffe, who had inherited a former DDR squadron. What had been designated by NATO as ‘Fulcrum’ was damned as unstable in advanced air combat, with poor navigation and lacking the required look down-shoot down capability. A bit bloody late – nine years late in the making of the assessment. Everything was history. It was history that the British had allocated fifteen billion pounds sterling to the development of the Eurofighter as a counter to ‘Fulcrum’, and history that the MiG-29s had flown, from Ribnitz-Damgarten, mock attacks against the missile and radar base at Wustrow. And that was the reason Operation Catwalk had been launched, and Traveller had been sent through the Wall with the gear, and the boy had been pushed towards the coastline of the peninsula at Wustrow. History, pure and simple, had killed the boy, and history lingered to the present. He told her where to turn and where to stop.
She braked. She parked. She switched off the engine. She quizzed him with her eyes.
He pointed.
She looked at the door of the police station.
She frowned, not understanding.
‘It’s because, Tracy, I believe I’m beaten. I’m beaten because I believe I have the responsibility for two men’s deaths. Today he escaped us, he was so bloody lucky. Being dead already made it his lucky day. I cannot fight against a criminal conspiracy on this scale. I can’t.’
He opened the door of the car, had to force it open because it was buckled from the scraped impact against the trunk of the poplar tree. She folded her arms across her chest, stared straight ahead.
‘They won’t listen.’
Josh bent at the open door. ‘It’s their job to listen. Hear me.
This is a democratic country. It has laws and a constitution. It’s not Iraq or some other shit hole. Tracy, I’m sorry but I’m out of my depth. I’m sinking.’
She didn’t look at him. ‘They won’t listen.’
He stood straight. ‘They have to.’
He walked towards the door of the old brick police station that served the town of Ribnitz-Damgarten. He turned at the door. He watched her get out of the car, cross the road and go into a pizza bar.
He pushed open the door and went to the reception desk. A policeman folded away his newspaper, pushed aside his coffee mug and smiled a welcome as he had been taught to. The mud weighted Josh’s shoes, caked his trousers, spattered his coat, flecked his shirt and was smeared on his face.
‘I would like to talk, please, with a detective.’
Chapter Fifteen
‘Good, they brought you coffee. I apologize for the delay. I have tried to make a judgement on the accusation you have made, Herr Mantle. I hope the coffee was satisfactory.’
He had been taken to an interview room. The detective was young, fresh-faced, and dressed neatly but casually. He had sat across the bare table from him and written notes as Josh had blurted an accusation of criminal conspiracy and murder. He had not interrupted, not passed comment, and Josh had stumbled through a brief, chaotic version of the deaths. The detective would have registered the filth on his clothes and the exhaustion on his face. He had then been left in the interview room for five minutes short of an hour, alone in the bare room with the whitewashed walls and the wood table and the hard chairs and the concrete floor and the electric fire. He knew that he had wasted their time and his own. He had heard the voice, away behind the closed door, of the detective on the telephone.
Finally the detective eased into the chair opposite him.
‘You have mentioned, Herr Mantle, three situations. I have only a short digest of the facts involving the first two of those matters, but the third is more clear.’
The detective spoke slowly and was careful with his pronunciation, as if he believed that he spoke to an idiot who needed patient calming.
‘I have spoken with Rostock. You are correct, a man fell to his death, but the man, unfortunately, had a previous history of mental disturbance. I have to tell you, Herr Mantle, there are many sad people in our Eastern German society who have been severely traumatized by the pressures of “reassociation”. They have seen the pillars of their lives removed, cradle to grave dependency on the state, and are unable to adapt. It is unfortunate.’
The detective turned the page of his notebook.
‘I have also spoken with Wolgast, where the police deal with matters affecting Peenemunde. Again, you are correct, a man hanged himself. For my generation, Herr Mantle, there are only advantages and opportunities to be taken from “reassociation” and a higher standard of living. Older people, I regret, find the self-reliance of the new society most stressful. That generation has no knowledge of pensions, social-security payments, the new costs of a capitalist society. This individual, we understand, had allowed himself to fall heavily into debt. For that reason he took his life. Many gain from the modern greater Germany, but there are casualties.’
The detective closed his notebook.
‘And you have referred to a death two years ago on a farm at Starkow. I have spoken to the relevant local authorities. The deceased, it seems, was an elderly agricultural worker who chose to live in a conversion of a cowshed. He did not know how to look after himself, he had poor habits of personal hygiene. The conditions he chose to exist in were, to be very frank, similar to those of the animals he cared for. He died of pneumonia. There was a full investigation at the time by the health specialists, and it was found that no one, other than himself, could be blamed for his premature death. I cannot tell you why he made that choice, to live in filth and cold, but I can say that many of the older generation in the East have suffered from mental collapse. It is tragic, but..
Josh stood. He knew that she would laugh at him.
‘I have to tell you that there have been three deaths, but that there is absolutely no evidence of murder.’
He turned towards the door. She would laugh in his face.
‘You spoke of the Staatssicherheitsdienst. I am afraid that I did not understand you. There is no Stasi now in Germany. The Stasi was dismantled in nineteen ninety, it does not now exist.’
He walked out of the room.
‘Please, Herr Mantle, how does a foreigner become interested in these matters?’
He went down the corridor towards the light and the street. By the reception desk, he saw the grin as the policeman looked up from his newspaper. The officer would have heard that a foreigner, dirty as a vagrant, talked of the Stasi and murder. He blinked, the sun shone on the street.
He looked for her.
Dieter Krause rode in the cab of the recovery truck.
He had used his telephone, sitting against the trunk of a poplar tree, and had waited. When the recovery truck had come, he had supervised the hooking of the cable rope to the chassis fender of his BMW, giving orders as he used to give them. The mechanics had said that they thought the car might be serviceable, that they would need to lift it onto the ramp at their garage for checking.
The car had been his pride. The car was, to Dieter Krause, the symbol that he had reached the new stature. The car told him, shouted at him, that he was accepted by the people in Cologne. He could have, perhaps should have, abandoned it. If he had abandoned the new car then he would, also, have abandoned the symbol of the new life. The sides were scraped and dented, the paint had been torn away. The river water had poured from the engine when the cable had dragged the car clear. The engine had started – coughed, choked, belched – started, and then
