The Contract (24 page)

'Another Scotch, another beer, and then we'd like to eat something, please,' Carter called cheerfully. There shouldn't be weighted silences, and leaden hesitations in the byplay of conversation. Must have been like this in the trenches, Pass- chendaele and Ypres and the Somme, when the Staff Officer came down from Brigade to explain the plan and knew that after the coffee was pressed on him and drunk that he would be going back to the cosy billet and they'd be heading forward into the mud and the wire and the machine guns.

Carter fumbled onwards.

'You didn't write any letters when you were at the house, Johnny. You know we didn't even do a blood chit form What are you at, Carter? There has to be a blood chit form, there has to be a next of kin procedure.

Should have been wrapped up on the last night at Holmbury, over drinks and with suitable ribaldry, should have been done then, not when the next stop is Platform Eleven on Hannover Station. Should have been, but it hadn't. 'You didn't get in touch with anyone?'

Johnny looked quizzically across the table. 'You wouldn't have expected me to send out a rash of postcards.'

'Let's put it formally. If there's any . . . trouble, an accident, something like that. . . well, who we do we notify?'

Johnny let him sweat. The girl came with the drinks. Carter paid and she reached in the leather purse she wore behind her apron for the change. She left the menu on the table.

'We have to have a name, Johnny.'

'Charlotte Donoghue, number 14 Cherry Road,

Lancaster,'Johnny rapped. 'You'd better write it down.'

A notebook was produced and a Biro pen. Carter wrote the name and address carefully. 'Anyone else?'

'No-one else.'

'It won't happen, of course, but it's part of the paperwork. I'd get my balls chewed if I hadn't looked after it.'

A tremble at Johnny's eyelids, a quick half smile. 'If it happened you'd go easy with her .. . Promise me that.'

' I promise you that, Johnny.'

'She's an old woman, and alone. She doesn't know about this sort of thing.'

' I'd make it my business to do it myself. Does that help ?'

'That's fine, thanks.'

Johnny's hand snaked across the table, gripped at Carter's, squeezed it.

The gesture of affection and gratitude. Carter blinked. Christ he was too old and the thread too worn and the steel too rusted, too old to be sending young men across frontiers.

'She hasn't understood anything for years,' said Johnny quietly. 'It's a fair old time since she had anything to cheer about .. . She was very proud in the Sandhurst days, each time I went home in the kit she always seemed to be about to head for the shops because she wanted me to go with her down the street and hold her bag and have everyone see how well her kid had done . . . The trial crucified her.'

' I can understand.'

'You can, perhaps, but try and tell a pensioner widow how it is. Little Johnny's across the Irish Sea fighting terrorists. Little Johnny's away and trying to save the lives and property of decent people from the forces of evil. Little Johnny's on hush work but it's very important. Little Johnny may be in line for a medal, a bravery gong . . . That was all right for her, that was simple enough, and then it changed, didn't it? . . . Little Johnny's charged with murder, he's under arrest in army custody, he's before the Lord Chief Justice, he's accused of handing down "untrustworthy evidence", he's slated for bungling. He's a bloody failure . . . That's a hard meal for an old woman to swallow. It's shame that hurts the old people.'

' I understand, Johnny,' Carter whispered.

' I was engaged, you'll know that from the file. You'll have read that.

The bitch treated me as if I had the scabs. Just a bloody letter. Didn't come to Belfast, had her father answer the telephone when I called from the airport to say it was "Not Guilty"

'Just the one girl, was there?'

'Just the one,' the savagery bit in Johnny's words. ' I bloody near smashed my mother . . . It's not the English way, is it? A man close to bloody middle age and living with his mother and talking about her. Get type-cast, don't you? Into the realms of the pansies . . . She was crippled, really cut about. I owed her something. You know that? We're both bloody owed something . . .'

'We'd better have something to eat,' Carter said.

He would remember Johnny for the rest of his life, remember the hand that had held his in the vice grip, remember the tremble of the hard man.

They had soup, and a schnitzel each with fried potatoes and sauerkraut and a litre of sweet wine from a carafe and watched the bar filling and the fluent noise of people who had no care, no sense of crisis. Pretty girls and young comfortable men and a random affluence and no attention paid to the two outsiders who sat at the far table and slowly cleared their plates. A cup of thick dark coffee, and then Carter went to the bar and the girl wrote quickly on the receipt slip and added for him, and Carter thanked her, and they edged their way through the throng and the silky warmth, and went out into the night.

The noise of the cafe Augusten dogged them as they walked away along the narrow pavement. They alone with work to be accomplished, they alone set aside from the noisy happiness of a bar in the centre of Hannover. There was nothing more to be said that was relevant, they went in silence.

First to the 'Left Luggage' and the collection of the bags. They stood then in the middle of the walkway that runs underneath the platform and track and solemnly checked Johnny's wallet and inside pockets. The identity of Johnny Donoghue was erased. No envelopes, no bills, no driving licence, no credit cards. John Dawson supreme. Around them the station shops were closed down, darkened and locked. The tourists'

place, the flower stall, the sex cinema, the newspaper and book stand.

Hours still to wait, but not in this place of the whores and the pimps and the police in pairs.

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.