The Contract (26 page)

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 offer concealment. There were no houses on the far side of the city to the autobahn, no factories, only a gravel works more than 300 metres farther beyond the bridge. An unseen place, a covert place, and here the car would come and take its load and spin its wheels and be away again within seconds back onto the racing circuit of the autobahn. A deviation of less than half a minute . . . That's the plan, Johnny. That's what Charles Mawby and his dark suit and his club tie have been sweating on.

Not Johnny's problem, not his concern how fast a car swivels and how quickly the driver guns an engine back onto the autobahn. Johnny's concern was the bringing of an old man and his daughter to this seedy patch of undergrowth where the cover was draped with old newspapers and the ground littered with beer bottles and household rubbish. Christ, that was enough, wasn't it?

Johnny walked on. Putting the briefings of Smithson into pictures.

He went through the gateway of the Barleber See camping site. Past the administration building, past the rows of planted tents, past the yellow sand of the lakeside beach, past the children that played with buckets and spades, past the men and women that walked listless in their swimming clothes. Jesus, and what sort of a holiday was this ? A fortnight beside a flyblown lake 3 miles down the road from the power station or the chemical works or the railway engine repair yard. He reached a wide patio where the tables were shaded by multi-coloured umbrellas. Take more than that, Johnny, to swing the Barleber See camp site into life.

A bar here. The prospect of a large beer, the chance to case his boots loose. And it would be the train back after the beer.

Smithson had done his homework. The pick-up place was good, right for concealment. The camping place was good, right for whiling away the hours till he was ready to head for the autobahn slip road. Have to give Smithson a pat when he saw him. Johnny rummaged in his pocket for coins, paid for the lukewarm beer and ambled to the comfort of a chair.

It had been a good morning.

Well, good as far as it went . . . and how far was that? Everything was gloss before the contact was forged. One step at a time, Johnny. He would see Guttmann tonight at the hotel. Not to talk to, of course, but to look at and evaluate.

One step at a time.

The desk in front of Valeri Sharygin was cleared, all the work finished that must be completed before his departure to New York. From his office in the headquarters building he carried the single sheet of typed paper down the stairs to Transmission section and the bank of telex machines and operators. He still smarted from the apathy of the KGB

colonel to whom he had explained that day the unanswered queries in the case of Willi Guttmann and a yacht out on a foul afternoon on the Lake of Geneva. Down many flights of stairs, along many corridors, and with each step and stride Sharygin's annoyance increased; he might have been with his children, at his home with his wife, he had no need to expose himself to a superior officer's sarcasm and poorly disguised scepticism. But the body of young Guttmann had still not been found, and without the corpse an area of ill- defined suspicion was entitled to remain. The matter remained in Valeri Sharygin's mind, irritating and margin- ally obsessive.

With faltering enthusiasm he had asked his colonel whether KGB in Germany could ascertain with certainty from surveillance of Doctor Otto Guttmann whether he, at least, believed in the death by drowning of his son. He had been told peremptorily that manpower in Berlin did not run to such poorly substantiated luxuries.

He had suggested that GRU might complete the investigation, and been slapped down for the suggestion that military intelligence should take on the spade work of KGB.

He had followed the one course left open to him.

The Schutzpolizei in Magdeburg would follow without question a directive from Moscow. They alone were lowly enough in the ladder of east bloc security to accept instruction from a major in KGB. And he did not ask much of them, only the confirmation that would dash his diminishing caution in this matter.

The message that he brought to Transmission section was addressed to Doctor Gunther Spitzer, Schutzpolizeipresi- dent of the city in which Otto Guttmann and his daughter now took their holiday.

The noise of the argument billowed from the shop onto the street pavement.

Erica Guttmann was window gazing and easily distracted. She cocked her head and sought the source of the shouting. The radio and television shop was in front of her. She was in no hurry, had nowhere to go, and the baying carried the prospect of amusement. Through the opened doorway she saw the crowd gathered at the shop counter - gesturing hands confronting the assistant at the record counter. The shop would only just have opened from the lunchtime closing and the young people would have lined up patiently outside for the new delivery of records and found when they were admitted that there were none for them. A mirthless grin dappled her face. Pathetic . . . Not teenagers, these ones, but boys and girls in their twenties with their tempers roused because they could not buy music with the money they had saved. Then the crowd was surging.

Up to a hundred and sprinting from the shop, stampeding across the Julius-Bremer Strasse towards the Centrum. She crossed after them, caught by the silly excitement of the rush. Into the Centrum, avoiding the counters of clothes and cosmetics and china, off into the depths of the shop. The newcomers joined the already formed twin queues that shuffled towards a wooden trestle table where piles of long playing records were stacked. She saw the pleasure of those who examined with a kind of love the sleeve of the record they took away.

No choice for them, only the one label, and one copy for each customer. Something discarded by the West and dumped, and picked on here with a humiliating excitement. She idled closer to the trestle table.

The name of the artist was Nana Mouskouri. Erica pulled a face, she had never heard of this woman, of this singer. But then Erica Guttmann was no longer a child, she had no feelings for the moods of the queue beside her. She would never have stood in line to buy a record. She would never have screamed if it were denied her, she would never have sulked if she had gone home without the prized possession.

There was no accommodation for such trivia in the life of Erica Guttmann.

The contented mood in which she had dawdled in front of the shop windows was destroyed.

Time to turn for the hotel because she had with docility accepted her father's wish that they should go to the Dom before dinner, another concert, another recital. And then they would meet Renate and her friend in the hotel restaurant. Renate with her man, Renate satisfied by a security policeman with a claw. She had been surprised, perhaps annoyed when it had been suggested that this Spitzer wanted to meet her father.

She had no long playing record and she had no lover. She had an old man that she must care for, and company for dinner that was unattractive.

Erica's foot stamped the pavement as she marched back to the hotel.

And it was hot and the stains from her exertion were visible at the armpits of her blouse.

Adam Percy had taken the Berlin flight. From Tegel airport he telephoned Mawby and arranged a meeting in a cafe on the Kurfusten-Damm.

Over afternoon tea in the sunshine he reported that he had spoken that morning to Hermann Lentzer, that he was assured that no difficulties had arisen and that Lentzer himself would be driving to Berlin from West Germany and arriving in the late morning of Saturday.

'Cutting it a bit fine, isn't he?'

'That's the way he wants it,' said Percy, 'so that's the way it has to be, I suppose. He does the trip pretty frequently.'

'The car, the driver, the second man to handle the pass- ports . . . ?'

'I'm afraid he wasn't very specific.' Percy sipped gingerly at the warm cup. 'All he did was to tell me that everything was in hand. That's his style.'

'He's an uncommunicative swine.'

'Has to be if he's to survive in that business, and he's a survivor.'

Percy would stay now in West Berlin.

The dispositions were complete. The team was in place. A chance to catch their breath before the whirlpool broke over them at the end of the week.

'Everything all right at this end ?' Percy asked.

'Couldn't be better.'

'And the Magdeburg end?'

'Carter saw our lad onto the train, said he was in fine shape.'

'Good,' said Percy, and there was a heavy flatness in his voice.

He believes in nothing, this one, thought Mawby. Almost a degree of insolence, Mawby reckoned and he'd have some- thing to say when he was back at Century House next week.