Nothing he could have done to intervene on the side of the NationalVolksArmee officer bringing over the Soviet battle order, defensive strategy.
He let the miniature bottle, the Jack Daniel’s, slip through his fingers and fall to the carpet. There was no tonic and no ice. He made a mix of orange juice and gin.
There were no minefields in Rostock, no death strips, no fences, no watch-towers and no dogs, but eating him was the same sensation of helplessness, of impotence, he had known too well. In three, four hours it would be dawn. With the dawn would come the start, the ticking clock, of the critical hours, and he would not be able to intervene. He reached, groped with a wavering hand, for the miniature of vodka, and he heard beyond the window the howl of police sirens in the night.
The great mouth of the hippopotamus crunched on the man, and he screamed. The scream filled his mind. He crabbed with his knees and the blankets would have slipped, and the cold would have settled on him. The scream… Josh woke.
He heard the scream of a siren going by the pension.
He shook, tried to scrape from his mind the intensity of the dream. Another siren was blasting further in the distance, and another coming closer. He glanced down at his watch, at the luminous markings, past three o’clock, and he looked across at her to see if she slept. He could see the shape of her in the bed, couldn’t hear her breathing, could hear only the sirens, as though they were cats chorusing. He settled. He turned his back to the window and her bed, and pulled the blankets close around him.
He shivered.
The draught blew on his back. Josh, so slowly, so carefully, turned over again and saw that the curtain, beyond the silhouette shape of her in the bed, blustered out into the room. Behind the curtain was the grinding sound of the window being forced upwards.
He tensed. He was naked under the blankets.
The curtains parted. It was hard for him to see. The leg edged between the curtains. He strained to see better. The window was half a dozen feet from the bed. The second leg came through the curtains, and Josh saw the bulk of the body looming above the bed where she slept, still, silent. The body shape, big against the curtain, moved towards the bed.
He had no weapon. Of course they’d found the fucking place. They’d had enough bloody days to find it.
He coiled his strength.
He erupted off his mattress.
The blankets caught in his legs and he thrashed them clear. He went over the bed, over her, groped for the shape. Waiting for the blow with a cosh or the flash hammer of a shot. Scrabbling to get his fingers into the bastard.
They were down.
They were beside the bed. Trying to get at the throat. He found the throat.
The gasped voice: ‘For fuck’s sake… Josh… leave it, leave it out…’
He was frozen rigid.
The coughing voice: ‘Christ, Josh… pack it… daft bugger, get off me!’
He knelt above her. He sighed into his lungs great draughts of chill air. He loosed his hands and they shook: he could not control them. He could have wept. She came from under him, wriggled clear of him. She crawled towards the bed and reached for the light switch. He knelt in his nakedness. She slammed down the window and fastened it. He saw the shape in the bed, a bolster and a pillow. She was dressed for the cold of the night and she rubbed gloved hands on her throat. He felt a great and savage bitterness. He stood, naked, in front of her, and he trembled.
‘You stupid bloody woman. I could have killed you. One punch, one kick, you were dead.’
There was a small gleam of wonderment on her face. Her face was bright flushed from the night wind, the sleet water sparked in her hair, and her eyes were wide in awe. ‘You’d have killed for me, Josh? For me?’
‘Where the hell have you been?’
‘For me?’
The anger coursed through him. ‘I make the decisions. I make the plans. When I work with an amateur, when my security is on the line, I take the responsibility.’
‘You’re quite funny when you’re angry, Josh. I’m trying not to laugh, Josh, you’re really funny.’
He turned away from her, to the mattress on the floor, scooped up a blanket and wrapped it around him. He felt shy, ridiculous.
She said, matter-of-fact, ‘You didn’t seem to have a plan.’
He said, empty, ‘I would have done, just needed time.’
‘Are you firearms trained?’
He spun. She was reaching into her pocket. She handed him the holster inside which the pistol was fastened. He heard the sirens out in the night, crossing the streets of the city. The policeman’s name was stamped on the black leather of the holster, and there was an index number. The sirens came and went, growing in fury pitch and diminishing. It was a Walther PPK. He knew the weapon from far back. It was scarred, scratched, might have been twenty years old. It was probably used twice a year on a firing range. It would shoot with accuracy to thirty metres; a marksman would stop a man at thirty metres. He had not seen a Walther PPK for close to twenty years, when he had been at Osnabruck, when this weapon would have been new. He checked the safety catch. He slid the full magazine from the stock of the weapon. He did not expect that a bullet would be in the breech, but it was his training to check. There was the harsh metallic scrape in the room as he cocked it, aimed it down into his mattress and squeezed the trigger. He held the pistol loosely in his hand. He said, flat, ‘Yes, I can handle firearms.’
She sat on her bed. ‘I used to do guard duty, every twelve days, and we had firing practice. I was fine with automatic rifles, piece of cake. Pistols were different, bloody difficult. Did you ever shoot a man, Josh?’
He said, quiet, ‘Once, shot at a kid, in Aden, not old enough to be a man.’
‘Did you hit him, Josh?’
‘I claimed a kill.’
He had thought that the handling of weapons was back in the dustbin time of his life thirty years ago. That day he was a young man and riding in a Saracen armoured personnel carrier from his billet to the Mansoura gaol where they did the interrogations. That day the Crown had put a firearm in his hand and given him licence to shoot to kill. He had seen the kid dart from the shadows of an alley, and he might have been about to throw an orange, or a stone, or an RG-4 grenade. Two machine guns hammering but their target was the sniper in the minaret of the mosque. He had seen the kid through the firing slit. He was crouched, sweating, in the cavern heat behind the armour plate. He had shot at the kid, twenty paces range, from the lumbering movement of the Saracen, and he had seen the kid go down. Might have ducked, might have been hit. He claimed the hit anyway. In the evening his warrant officer had bought him a can of lager, and the rest of the I Corps people had squirmed envy. Just another gollie kid dead and claimed, and they’d all got pissed up that night.. And until she had put the pistol into his hand he had thought that shooting to kill was in his past.
‘Did you feel bad about it?’
‘I felt good.’
‘When you shot at him, did you hate the kid?’
‘It didn’t seem important, didn’t matter.’
She took off her coat and gave him the pouch with the handcuffs and the key. He was back down on his mattress and he pulled the blankets over him. She was throwing her clothes onto the floor. He put the pistol under his pillow. She stood beside his mattress, bare-skinned. She stood above him and he looked up at her thighs and her hair and the tuck of her waist and the hang of her breasts, lit and shadowed by the lamp bulb beside her bed.
Josh said, ‘Afterwards begins when tomorrow is finished. Go to your own bed.’
She searched on the floor for her pyjamas. She switched off the light.
‘Josh.’
‘Yes.’
‘I’ll tell you the plan in the morning.’
‘Do that,’ he grunted.
‘Josh..
‘Go to sleep.’
