Johnny in fawn slacks, and his anorak zipped over his sports shirt and trainers on his feet and the boots bulky in his bag — as it should be for a tourist. They walked up the staircase to Platform Eleven. Like a bloody morgue, Carter thought. Midnight on any station in Europe, home for creeps and queers and misfits, like a bloody desert because only the parasites have business on a station when the clock shows past midnight.
Carter shuddered, held his arms across his chest. A few of the platform benches were occupied, there was the tramp of the feet of the military police patrol of the Bundeswehr, the trilling clatter of a kicked soft drink can, but overall a great quiet in shadowed light. Carter took the mood of Johnny, noticed the tightness of the skin on his cheeks and the way that he fidgeted with his hands. He kept his peace.
The Warsaw express came and went, east to west. Johnny hardly seemed to notice it, didn't turn his shoulders to watch the disembarking passengers and the surveillance of the Bundesgrenzschutz on those who had crossed through and now smiled with an ebullience as if the grey life was however temporarily behind them. Into the early, soft hours of Wednesday morning. Just a few days, Johnny, you'll be fine… Fussing like an old woman, Henry Carter, and Johnny was on the bench beside him and his eyes were closed now and his breathing regular and his face gentle. Not a gentle creature, though, was he? Pulled the bloody trigger on the Armalite, hadn't he? Dropped the kid, killed the girl, slaughtered her. And his mother would have been proud to have known him, proud with her chest swollen at the dosage. Her Johnny in a hedgerow with a high velocity rifle at his shoulder and a round in the breach and his finger curled on a cold trigger. Well, somebody has to bloody well do it, someone has to scrape the dog shit off the pavements, someone has to make life clean and sweet smelling for the wife of Henry Carter, and the daughter of Henry Carter…
The loudspeaker announcements came fierce and sharp.
Just before two o'clock and Carter could have done with the pullover folded in his bag.
The impending arrival of the express from Cologne. Service D441.
For Wolfsburg, Obeisfelde, Magdeburg and Zwickau. Carter shook Johnny's arm lightly, saw him start into wakefulness and brush a hand across his eyes as if to clear a veil.
The big engine edged towards them. The coaches with the livery paint of the railway system of the Federal Republic. The scraping of brakes and steam hissing from between carriages.
'All right, Johnny?'
A wry grin for an answer. Johnny stood up, seemed to shake himself and with his bag in his hand walked across the platform to the carriage door. Carter opened it for him.
'Take care of yourself…' Carter said, a little stammer in his voice.
Johnny climbed the steps, and there was a frail grin of amusement and then he was gone along the corridor and looking for a compartment to himself. Carter searched along the line of windows, and found where he had settled. He hurried to stand underneath Johnny. Like a father and son, exchanging farewells, as if their next meeting would be long postponed. Carter strained to see into the shadow of Johnny's face.
'I'm an old fool, I know that… but be careful.'
'You worry too much,' a softness from Johnny.
'Probably… Take care, Johnny. And don't forget the whole team is with you.'
Johnny laughed. 'Don't walk under a bus,' he said.
The guard's whistle shredded Carter's thoughts. The train began to move, slowly at first, then catching its speed, drawing away, opening the gap.
Johnny waved, once and briefly. The window was drawn shut.
Carter stood and watched the going of the train till the red tail lights were lost to his view. An old fool, that was what he called himself.
Pathetic, and he was about right, wasn't he?
He went back to his bag that he had left beside the bench and set off for the staircase and the change of platform that he would need to catch the first train of the morning to Helmstedt.
An hour to wait, an hour alone with his thoughts of Johnny.
Charles Mawby presumed it to be an old custom of military hospitality and rejoiced in the provision of a cut glass decanter, liberally filled with whisky, on the dressing table of his bedroom. His day clothes folded and put on a chair, wearing his pyjamas and dressing gown, he poured himself an ample tumbler. He would brush his teeth later.
It had been a fine evening, with good company and good conversation.
The Brigade Commander of the British garrison stationed in West Berlin was the cousin of Joyce Mawby. It was not unnatural that he should forsake the hotel that the Service had allocated for his party and find accommodation for his team inside the protected compound that fringed the pre-war Olympic Stadium. Mawby would stay in the Brigadier's quarters. Smithson and Pierce had been farmed out to more junior officers' homes. George and Willi Guttmann were found a room with twin camp beds above the Brigade communications centre which offered security for the boy, peace of mind for his guard, and the presence of an armed Military Police Sergeant on the outside door.
He had talked more than was usual for him, drunk more than he was accustomed to, found himself free and at ease. Mawby was introduced to the dinner party guests as being from Foreign and Commonwealth Office, and his presence had raised no eyebrows. It was a chance to escape from the anxieties that would dog him over the following four days until he received the telephone call from Carter in the early hours of Sunday morning. Only once had the spell of reassurance and conviviality been broken. At the dinner table had been a colonel of the Intelligence Corps, serving his third year in Berlin.
Mawby asked with a casualness whether many escaped in these days from the German Democratic Republic across the city's dividing wall.
'Damn few,' the colonel had replied cheerfully. 'Not for lack of trying, not for lack of effort, but it's down to a trickle. That's not peculiar to Berlin, there are hardly any making it across the whole of the East/West border. They've spent a fortune sealing it and now they're getting their money's worth. Even after the DDR 30 years anniversary the gaols are still stuffed with kids who've had a go and failed. It's a pretty risky business, and don't let anyone tell you otherwise. I don't reckon I'd care to try it.'
The talk had switched to the new government in London, the capabilities of the Prime Minister and his Cabinet, the likelihood of further defence spending cuts. The passing of the port around the table had served to dismiss the one moment that threatened Mawby's confidence.
By the time that he was ready to switch off his light Mawby was a little drunk. And why not, he reflected.
Rubbing the towel across her shoulders, Erica Guttmann emerged from the bathroom. A close, hot night and she hoped that the shower would enable her to sleep.
It had been an endless, dragging, dreadful day. A walk in (he late morning to the Zoologischer Garten, a lunchtime snack there, a doze in the sunshine and then back to the hotel to change into a clean dress while her father took a new shirt and then another concert to be endured… He never went to hear music in Moscow and the city brimmed with ballet and symphony orchestras and chamber music quartets. Never went, and instead saved his trapped enthusiasm for the Magdeburg fortnight.
Beethoven at the Bezirks- musikschule on Hegel Strasse. Back to the hotel for late dinner before the dining room closed. She had seen her father to bed, sat and talked with him in his room and enjoyed the evidence that his strength and purpose were ebbing back in the days away from Padolsk.
She moved with a quick grace across the room, tall and light footed, slender and fast, the towel draped at her waist. No traffic moving on Otto von Guericke Strasse. There wouldn't be, they didn't have cars in this dreary, factory ridden camp. Even Moscow was better than here, even Moscow and God knew there were only trifles there. But these were her twin homes, these were the towns where she would grow old.
Complaint would not help her, nor dissatisfaction, nor dreams of the different world carried gently into her room by the hotel radio tuned to jazz music from Hamburg.
And her life was drifting, notching up anniversaries, and the petal prettiness of her youth would soon fade. Then she would be a matron caring for an old man, and when he was gone she would be an orphan with a faded face and nothing to call her own. Home was not Moscow because the barriers of life ensured that there she did not belong. Home was not Magdeburg because that was a city of concert halls and theatre seats and parks with chairs that were suitable for an old man who could not walk far without resting.
If she left the window open then the early trams would wake her. If she slept with it closed then she would
