Chapter Fifteen
For a little less than four hours Johnny slept, before the light woke him.
It took him some moments to adjust to the room because he had hardly accepted the furnishings when he'd thrown off his clothes and plunged down onto the narrow, single bed. Functional and adequate, could have been worse, and the sheets were clean. And a television and a radio. He ran himself a shower in the small bathroom, shaved and dressed.
Trousers and the sports shirt and his wallet in his pocket.
They had given him a voucher at the desk for his break- fast when he had registered, and when they had taken his passport. Quite a pretty girl she'd been, the one at the reception. His passport would be back by lunchtime, she said. It was routine that all personal documents must go to the police, and her eyes expressed the hope that he would understand.
It was a small set back to Johnny, the losing of his passport, for however few hours, and there was the thought in his mind of it being studied and examined for flaws.
No point in producing the breakfast voucher for the day, not after 9:30.
Missed out on his breakfast.
He looked from the window. His room was on the front of the building and he gazed across the wide expanse of grass, with the spaced high pine trees, cut by the lines of the flower beds where women were planting the blooms that would have come from the municipal hot house. Getting the place ready for you, Johnny, only you've come a couple of days early and the red carpet hasn't been unrolled yet. Silly bugger… The Americans had missed the station that was beyond the grass and on the far extremity of the square because the architecture bore the grandiose stamp of the
Third Reich. He saw the Soviet army lorries and jeeps parked to the left of the station. You'll see plenty of them, Pierce had said, the place crawls with the Red Army, Divisional Headquarters and all that.
He locked his door behind him, took the lift down six doors. Comrade Honecker was waiting for him in the hallway, the thin smile beaming from above the reception desk when he handed in his key. Johnny grinned. Someone should do something for the First Secretary's teeth.
He walked out of the hotel and turned right past a pet shop with a mournful parrot chained to its perch and terrapins in stagnant water. Past the window of teenagers' clothes. Run up in a hurry, right Johnny, like there's been art earthquake and the survivors need clothes, even the scruffy kids in Cherry Road would have given them two fingers. Into the length of Wilhelm-Pieck Allee. There was a bookshop and a shelf of maps. He bought the Stadtplan of Magdeburg, paid one mark and fifty for it and acquired that badge of tourism, the street map. It was all he needed for the morning, that and his boots for walking.
He headed past the big church where the bombers had taken the roof and their incendiaries had gutted the interior and he made his way to the fountains and green park lands by the river. Quite pleasant, really, with a bit of a breeze to counter the heat that would come and mothers there with prams and push chairs. Some glanced up at the freelancer with a contract from the British Secret Intelligence Service, some smiled at him, some fussed proudly with their babies. Smithson had warned of the danger factor of the fake sense of security, and he moved on.
You're not judging a clean town competition, Johnny, but the Promenade der Volkerfreundschaft was neat and tended enough with the big waters of the Elbe running fast, the old city walls restored and the cannon offering a glimpse of history in their stone revetments, but the effect was not for ever. With the bridge behind him so the showfront of central Magdeburg was lost. Into the narrow streets, onto the broken pavements, under the dust thrown by the lorries and their trailers, along the avenues of flats that were short of paint and creeping towards dereliction. First on Sandtor Strasse, then on Rogatzer Strasse, through the district of Alte Neustadt. Not much benefit derived from the 30 years of struggle. You're thinking like bloody Smithson, Johnny, spilling all his propaganda, all his prejudice.
Perhaps… Nothing much to excite him in the shops. Tins and sausage in the butchers. Cabbages and beans and potatoes in the greengrocers.
Clothes that were angular and drear in the narrow fronted window of the ladies' dress shop. Perhaps old Smithson was right, perhaps he was on course. Twice he slipped around a street corner and waited for the signs of a following tail, and he found none, and no interest seemed to be shown in him by the two boys in the blue shirts of the FDJ who hurried past him, nor by the green and white police car that cruised smugly on the street. No tail that he knew of, no one following and observing. And what was criminal about a tourist strolling on Rogatzer Strasse?
The railway line was in front. Easy to see because it was built high on an embankment. He looked at his watch. Smithson had said that it would take him 20 minutes to reach this point. Just about right. An exact man, Smithson, for all the cynicism, one who knew the value of information that was tested and proved. On time. Johnny climbed the metal footbridge over the line and busied himself with his map. A bad place to wait, a bloody awful place.
The train eased along the track. Nothing particular about the engine that was huge, oozing power, and that carried the initials of the Deutsche Bahn, the railway of West Germany. The main line from West Berlin to Helmstedt. He had not come to the bridge to see the engine, it was the carriages that he would observe. Ordinary and nondescript until his eyes caught the brilliance of the red and white and blue. The bloody old Union Jack, the flag attached to the carriage walls. The British military train on its daily run. A restaurant car and men with grey hair and trimmed moustaches tucking into their toast and scrambled eggs. The windows of the kitchen section were wide open to expel the grill fumes and the Army Catering Corps chef was taking time off from his frying pan and looking out. He would have seen the lone ligure on the bridge above. There was a corporal in camouflage dress who had positioned himself by a window in a carriage farther back. The train moved slowly, negotiating the junction of points. Time enough for Johnny to view the sight and scenes.
He wanted to shout, wanted to wave and communicate. The old Union Jack slipping through Magdeburg each day, a journey of impertinence, the maximum of effrontery. The historic legacy of the transit right of the Allied powers to West Berlin. And it was gone from him. He hadn't seen the East German troops who rode escort in the forward and rear carriages; complacent and on their arses they'd be, smoking and reading the day's Neues Deutschland. Right on time the train had come, mark that down as a bonus, Johnny.
A long walk now. And this was not tourist country and Johnny must forge on as if there was a purpose in his direction, as if he had the reason and the right to tramp past the factory entrances and the power stations on the Aug-Bebal- Damm. Guards of the National Volks Armee, with MPiKMs and magazines attached, watched the side roads leading to the city's heavy industry complex. Not a place to linger. Few houses here, just machinery and decay and old brickwork and heaving chimney smoke. On your way, Johnny. But better to walk, because then your eyes are brought into play. You see nothing from a train, nothing from a trolley bus, nor from a tram. You have to walk because that way you remember what you have seen. It was Wednesday morning and there was much that he must remember before Saturday evening and there would be no opportunity to retrace his steps. See it now, remember it now. Wide, flat, colourless country, pimpled with squat factory sheds and high rise chimneys.
Like a dividing ribbon the autobahn lay ahead.
Down the autobahn the car would come for the rendezvous and the pick-up of Otto Guttmann. Jumping the fences early, Johnny, light years till then. Not true, three and a half days. Not even worth thinking about.. God, they'd kept that in short supply, they'd hoarded and they'd played the miser with Johnny's available time. But that was the plan, to press forward and sweep the target up in a rush, above all and above everything deny him the opportunity for reflection and consideration.
Sounded good at Holmbury, but stretched and creaking beside the Magdeburg intersection of the autobahn.
The autobahn bridge of grey, weathered cement straddled the road.
There was a steady surge of traffic above him. Mercedes and Opels and Audis and VWs and the throbbing articulated lorries plying the isthmus strip between West Germany and West Berlin, drivers with documents and permit for transit through the DDR. Johnny looked quickly over his shoulder. And that was wrong, out of character for his cover. Suppress it, Johnny, shut it down. He walked under the bridge and saw the sharply curving slipway to the autobahn down which a car coming from Berlin would travel and beside it the bushes that were leafy and would
