playing skipping games and taking picnics, right through to adulthood and confidence. Renate the single girl like herself, and bubbling with a cheerfulness that was champagne to Erica after the long winter and slow spring of Moscow. Bewildering that such a lovely girl as Renate, pretty as a flower, had allowed herself to become the mistress of a policeman. A policeman called Gunther Spitzer. The two girls would be swept by gales of laughter when they spoke of the affair.
But at least he was a senior officer, he was prominent in the Schutzpolizei. What a choice for her lovely friend to have made. But in less than a month they could talk of it. From the drawers of her table she took a writing pad and her pen.
My dear Renate,
You will have heard of the awful thing that happened to Willi in Geneva
…
Chapter Six
There was pressure on the bathroom space on the Monday morning and on the days that followed. And at eight o'clock sharp Mrs Ferguson bustling into the dining room with her trays of fried food and jugs of coffee and pots of tea and racks of toast played to a full house.
The fierce jollity of the all-male working society. All together, lads, Mawby seemed to be saying, something for us all to have some pride in, and only the best will be acceptable.
'If you don't mind, the butter please.'
'Coming over, Adrian.'
'The marmalade there, Harry?'
'Wish the old lady would get some decent colfee in, right, Johnny?'
'Hear the news this morning, the bloody sewage workers' strike?'
'Nothing changes, does it, Henry?'
'Come on, lads, each to his appointed.'
'Yes, Mr Mawby.'
The men of the Service coming together with their individual areas of expertise in the operation, and all making the effort to pull Johnny into their nest.
Mawby and Carter, the last to leave the table.
'Distant, isn't he, Mr Mawby. Removed from us, like he's an untouchable, don't you think?'
'Self-dependent, and self-reliant, that's the way I see him, Henry, and that's what I'm looking for.'
'He's a cold sort of fish.'
'As he should be for what we want of him.'
'Do you know that he even brought his old army boots down here. Next to no luggage, but he insisted on the boots,
Smithson told me. You'd have thought he'd have turned them out months ago.'
'Let's hope he doesn't need them. Let's hope we're not into a cross-country scamper… Take him slowly, Henry, slowly and carefully.'
'Tell us about his health, Willi, his condition physically.'
Carter at the table with the big notepad, sometimes Mawby beside him and taking a lesser part. Willi sat in a straight chair in which it would be difficult for him to relax. Johnny sat behind the boy.
'He's an old man now, he's close to seventy. Up till his sixty-fifth, birthday he used to go to a gymnasium that was in a sports club near our flat, but he strained himself and he has not gone back. We used to have a dog and he could go for walks with it, but it died several years ago. He said it was too much trouble to have another one. He has a medical check-up each twelve months that is done at Padolsk by the Army. He cannot walk far now. Always he used to like to walk, when Erica and I were younger he liked to go with us to the Hartz Mountains, to Wernigerode or Quedlinburg, and then walk in the hills and the woods. I think that he has a little rheumatism… Why do you ask these questions, Mr Carter?'
'That's not your worry, Willi. Just answer as best you can, like you're doing.'
In the afternoons in the sitting room, Johnny sat with Adrian Pierce.
Military talk and the resurrection of familiar subjects of the old days before Belfast, before the trial, before the return to Cherry Road.
'You're going to be with a man who is expert in armour and its counter-weaponry. It's possible that the objective of the mission will not succeed, that you will not bring him over, but that you will manage to talk with him. It is possible that defection will be beyond him… And bloody daft it would be if the man we've sent has forgotten what the front end of a Main Battle Tank looks like. This is a sort of re- fresher course, Johnny, and by the time we pack you off I want tanks, armour plating widths, squash head, control guidance and all the rest of the paraphernalia running out of your ears.'
Always supper at seven, prompt on the clock, all of them sitting down, napkins spread, glasses filled with water or milk or Coca-Cola. Two tables pushed together. A cotton cloth that was clean each day. All watching the door to the kitchen through which Mrs Ferguson would come with the evening's offering. And after supper back to the sitting room for Johnny and with him Harry Smithson.
'We want you to know as much as is possible before you cross. You'll remember some of the basics from your 'I' Corps days, forget that and listen to me. The DDR is a captive state. The regime of the Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands, that's SED in future, survives because of the permanent garrisoning on her territory of a minimum of 20 full strength Soviet divisions. Effectively the country is beholden to Soviet military command headquarters at Zossen- Wunsdorf outside Berlin.
When you pull this one off, Johnny boy, that's where the squeal's going to come from, that's where the boot will be to kick every arse in sight to kingdom come. I said it's a captive state… Along a frontier of just under 900 miles with West Germany there is a crip- plingly expensive set of border defences, with some 50,000 men deployed to keep their own brothers and sisters from doing a flit to the BDR. So start with an occupying force and the closed frontiers and you begin to get the sour taste in your mouth, you can call me a fascist if you want to and it'll give no offence, but that's my view of the place and I've been detailed to brief you. They enjoy living there so much that at the latest count more than two million nine hundred thousand citizens have skipped it, given their masters two fingers and run. That's the German Democratic Republic, Johnny. Perhaps I'm just an old right wing bastard, but I hate that place because it's sinister, it's tedious, it's drab.' 'Are you going to hurt my father?'
Carter's face slackened with surprise.
'No… nothing like that
'Why do you want to know so much about him, and about his holiday?'
Willi cut across him, his voice strained.
'It's just routine,' Carter hurried. 'We're not going to harm your father, why should we?'
'You're lying to me, Mr Carter.'
'You've done very well so far, Willi, confine yourself to answering our questions.' The slip of Carter's control had been momentary. The cutting chill was once more in his voice. From where he sat Johnny saw it all, admired him for it.
'It's a lie,' the boy shouted.
The click of the door handle alerted Johnny and he turned to see George in the doorway. The boy too would have heard the door, realised its signal. Threatened from front and rear, Willi's protest was stifled.
'That's all right, George. No problems in here, are there, Willi?' A glacial smile from Carter. '… You were telling me, Willi, about your father's programme in Magdeburg. Let's start again with who he will be seeing there.'
The boy hesitated, he would have heard the door close. He turned full round to face Johnny. Johnny looked away, didn't meet him.
'There are many people that he will meet,' Willi said softly. 'He has many friends there. There is a pastor at the Wallonerkirche, he is a friend from many years, my father always attends the evangelist church, and the man who keeps the bookshop beside the Kloster Unser Lieben Frauen, he also is a friend. There is another pastor from
