spray broke across the glass of the windows.
They were on the floor of the wheelhouse. She sat with her back against the sink cupboard. He was crouched down across the wheelhouse from her.
Josh listened. Tracy wrote on her pad.
Willi Muller said, ‘I was at the boat with my father. We were working on it in the evening because there was a problem with the transmission in the engine, and my father said it was necessary to make the repair then. We heard the shooting at the base across the water of the Salzhaff. It was just after the planes had flown over and then there were flares fired there. The base was a closed place to the people of Rerik, we had no contact with the Soviet military there. Because we had no contact we did not know, my father and I, at first, whether this was an exercise or something different. We continued to work at the engine. The shooting seemed to move across the base, from the Ostsee shore, through the middle of the base, through the buildings, and then to the shore of the Salzhaff. They were using the red tracers and the flares. I said to my father that I was frightened, that we should go home, but my father was definite that the repair to the engine must be finished. We worked on. We finished the repair. Two cars came. They were Stasi, from Rostock. The superior told my father that he needed the boat, it was an order. He had a beard, cut narrow on his cheeks and cut close on his chin. They said my father should take them out on the Salzhaff, but my father, and it was a lie, said that his back was hurt, that I would take them. I could have said what my father did not dare to, that the engine was not repaired, but I did not.’
She finished the page. She passed the notepad to him and he signed his name on the page, a fast, nervous scrawl.
He pushed himself up and he studied the course Josh held, took the wheel from him, and made an adjustment to the west. He went out of the wheelhouse door, stood on the open pitching deck, and looked towards the black ribbon of land.
They were on the road between Nienhagen and Heiligendamm. There were stretches of road that veered inland, where they had to strain to see the navigation lights on the sea. On those stretches, Krause drove faster, and when he came back to the sight of the sea and the slow progress of the lights he stopped and waited until the lights of the trawler were level with the car.
‘We had, Dieter, a society that was disciplined. We did not have organizations, we did not have opportunities. We lived in the tedium of discipline, and the best we hoped for was a summer vacation at some stinking campsite in Bulgaria or Romania – it was the ultimate of our aspiration. You, I, could not buy advantage. The discipline suffocated us. The Wall came down, the wessis came to look at us as if we were some theme-park amusement, and they laughed at our discipline. Do I complain, Dieter? I can buy a tax inspector, I can buy an official in the department that issues import-export licences, I can buy a policeman, a politician, a priest. I can behave like a Sicilian, the discipline is gone. I can buy a former Hauptman and the purchase will bring me the protection of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution. You do not hear me complain, Dieter, do you?’
The old Makharov pistol lay on his lap as he drove. It was dulled from the years it had lain buried in the plastic bag inside the rubbish bin. He had checked the pistol and believed he would use it that night.
Tracy shouted at him, waved for him, through the door. He looked again at the lights on the shoreline and ducked back inside the wheelhouse.
‘When we were out on the Salzhaff, the flares were fired over a part of the water that was half-way between the Wustrow shore and the Rerik shore. At first I could not see the target, but the man with the beard directed me to that place. There was a contact with the base on the radio and they told the base that the firing should finish. We had a small spotlight on the boat. They told me to switch it on, and then they directed it onto the water. It was when I saw him. He was trying to swim away from the light, but he could not swim strongly. They held the light on him. We went close to him and circled him. I was ordered to go very slowly. He went under, but he must have had the desire to live, because he came again to the surface. They pulled him onto the boat and I could see that he was hit. There was a wound in his upper body and there was a second wound in his leg. He lay on the deck of the boat and he was very still except that he breathed hard. I remember that the men, there were five men from the Stasi, were all excited, and they kicked him on the deck and called him a spy and a saboteur, but I did not hear him say any words. He lay on the deck and he did not defend himself when they kicked him. I was fifteen years old, I was a patrol leader in the FDJ, I believed everything that I was taught at school about the hostile espionage units of the Americans and the British and the Fascist government in Bonn, and I hoped he would die. I hoped he would die, not because he was a spy or a saboteur, but so he would not feel any more the kicking. I brought the boat back to the pier at Rerik. The man with the beard held a pistol close against my face and he told me that I had seen nothing and that I knew nothing. They pulled him from the boat and onto the pier. He was very weak and it was difficult for him to walk and they dragged him along the pier towards where their cars were. I saw his face then, as they dragged him past me on the pier. He was tired, he was weak, he was in pain but, and I remember his face clearly, he did not drop his head. I remember that… They took him towards the cars..
She passed the notepad to him. Its page was covered with her neat close-packed writing. He held her pen and his hand shook. Her eyes never left him. He signed.
Josh did not think, himself, he could have played so cruel cold with the young man. There was no sympathy, no charity, and he tried to hope that it was merely the strategy she had chosen. She took the page back, and the pen.
Josh held the wheel steady on the course. The swell had dropped. He thought him more frightened of the animal cruelty, the bullying, of Tracy, than of the car that tracked them along the shoreline. He could not fault the strategy.
The young man stood beside him and flicked his finger against the dial of the fuel gauge and always it bounced on the red line.
He went out onto the deck. A rope lashed a fuel can to the port side. He slipped among the fish carcasses. He untied the rope, lifted the engine hatch and funnelled the remaining fuel down into the tank.
Josh thought the young man could have denied that he had the necessary fuel, and he thought his courage was supreme. Without the fuel they would not reach Rerik. She had given him, cruel and bullying, the courage to go home.
They were on the road between Heiligendamm and Kuhlungsborn. There was flat swamp ground between the road and the beach, few trees, the cloud had lifted and the wind had dropped. Away across the sea, the lights of the trawler were sharp, bright. The voice beside him dripped on.
‘With the ending of the discipline, with the coming of the wessis, so many more opportunities have arrived. I am not talking, Dieter, about running cigarettes out of the East, as the Vietnamese do, and I am not talking about shipping a few cars into the East, as the Poles do, or the trading in immigration from Romania, or keeping whores on the streets, as the Turks do. I am talking, Dieter, about the big opportunities that can be taken from our partnership. Weapons, Dieter. The East floats on weapons. Not rifles, Dieter, not pistols. Weapons that can be bought cheap and sold expensive. Missiles, air-to-air and air-to-ground and ship-to- ship. Heavy mortars. Artillery pieces. Armoured vehicles. If you have dollars they will clear out an armoury for you, you can buy anything. You can go south, to Libya, Iraq, Syria, Somalia, Algeria. You can name your price. Chemical, nuclear, anything can be bought in the East and anything can be sold. But, Dieter, I do not want eyes watching me. I wish to be protected. I think we have a good partnership.’
Beside him, Peters belched.
The suitcase was at the front door of the house on the Altmarkt, packed. She was on the boat with the red and green navigation lights, and she had the power to tip the suitcase empty.
Across the seascape was the land, with the car’s headlights, always with them. But ahead, on the closing horizon, was the concentration of lights.
She was taking him home to his past. His body shook.
She reached for him. She caught the waterproof coat he wore and rammed his body back against the planks of the wheelhouse, and again. He gasped.
Willi Muller said, ‘He was near to the cars. I remember it very clearly because the clock was striking the hour. It was the moment after the last strike of the clock on the tower of the Sankt Johanniskirche that he broke from them. It was ten o’clock and he broke from them. I do not know where he found the strength, but he broke from
