The Contract (27 page)

With her key Jutte Hamburg let herself into the flat. A long day in the engineering faculty behind her, a long night in Iter room ahead.

Examinations at the end of the month.. Even for second year students at the Humboldt there were examinations that had to be passed. And necessary for her to make a good show because her father was the Director of a Kombinat and much was expected.

'Jutte?' The voice spread from the living room. 'Is that you, Jutte?'

'Yes, Mother. It is me.'

'A young man was here. He came with a letter for you.'

'Who was he?' she said indifferently, hooked her plastic coat on the stand in the hall.

'A young man from the Border Guard. He said he was a friend of that boy Becker that you see.'

'He brought a letter?' Jutte dropped the bag of books onto the floor, ran into the living room.

' I put it on your bed. You did not tell me that you were still seeing the boy.' Frau Hamburg sat in front of the television with a tray and teapot and a plate of cucumber sandwiches. Between mouthfuls, she spoke.

'Your father would not be pleased to hear that you still see Becker. Your father says the boy is nothing, that he has no career. His family is nothing, not even prominent in the Party in the quarter where they live .

..'

'He pesters me a bit, there is nothing more than that. He was at a camp a few weeks back, I cannot help who else is there.' The trembling gripped her, trickled through her legs, kissed the coolness of her arms. She turned away, hid her face from her mother.

'Your father will be pleased to know that.'

'There is nothing for him to know.'

'Have you much work tonight?' Her mother asked the question in sorrow. She was from a former generation where girls did not concern themselves with engineering. A pretty girl she had wanted for her only child, someone whom she could pet and beautify and take credit from, not a daughter that slaved at a drawing board and wore stained overalls in the Humboldt's workshops.

'Enough to last me three evenings, and there'll be more tomorrow.'Jutte grimaced.

A fat bitch with a fat arse and a fat pompous husband to sleep beside.

God, how they'd scream and howl, the pair of them, if they knew that Ulf who is nothing and has no career had spilled himself on their precious sheets. They'd rip them and burn them, and the noise would lift the roof, and the shrieks would bring the neighbours running.

'When is Father coming home ?'

'Soon ... he rang me at lunchtime, he has to go to the Council of State to meet with the Trade Secretariat. The Secretary is going to London tomorrow. Your father is one of a select few who are required to advise him on certain contracts that may be offered. Your father is well thought of by the Secretary . . . perhaps on another occasion he may even accompany a delegation.' The woman bled with pride.

' I'll go to my room, it's better I start the work before supper.'

It was the one virtue of the burden of study that she brought home that the books freed Jutte from the punishment of attending the living room seminars of the evening when her mother theatrically fed her father the cues for him to relate the anecdotes of his contacts with the high and mighty of the Central Committee and the Politburo.

She had a small room in the flat, barely large enough for the bed and her table and chair and the chest for her clothes and the hanging wardrobe for her dresses and coats. A sleeping and working place only, a room where she came as a stranger and a visitor. Not home, not her own, because her mother would root through the drawers for evidence of her life outside the flat. Not even her own pictures on the wall, those instead that her mother had wished on her. The framed photograph of Jutte in the dress of the FDJ at camp in the centre of a group of happy and toothy girls, and beside it the picture of her amongst a thousand others marching on a May Day on Unter den Linden in front of the Memorial to the Victims of Fascism and Militarism.

Jutte held the envelope and ran her fingers on the sealed flap. It had not been opened and refastened. She ripped the envelope apart and read the words written in Ulfs writing.

Had she really meant it? On the platform at Schone- weide, had it been just to tease him because he was frightened that he would lose his train, and the discipline of the military overwhelmed him? But her uncle in Hamburg had told her of a home that waited for her, and a job and a future. Her uncle in Hamburg had said that it was necessary for one in the group to have an intimacy with the border sector that would be crossed. Her uncle in Hamburg had said it could be achieved, and that was before she had met Ulf. That was not the reason that she had lain on the bed beneath the boy, and splayed her legs and caught him with her arms . . . That was not the reason. There were many boys she could have gone with. Why Ulf? Why the frontier guard? Why was her boy, the one she had chosen, the one who would know the sector at Walbeck?

She had told Ulf what she wanted of him, and he had done it. She had told him where she wanted to be taken, and he would guide her. She had taunted his courage, now she must prove her own.

'Jutte,' the voice whined behind her closed door.

'Yes, Mother,' she said brightly.

'What does the boy say in his letter?'

'Only that he will soon be coming back to Berlin in a few weeks' time and he asks if he can see me.'

'It is kinder if you write and are frank with him, tell him there is no chance of you meeting again.'

'I will write to him next week, soon enough then. And Mother. . .'

'Yes, Jutte ?'

'I really have to work tonight. I have some difficult things to do. I have to be quiet.'

There were apologies and the scraping retreat of the slip- pered feet.

Shit, that would make her miserable. Back to her tea bags and cream cakes and not knowing what was in the letter. That would wound the cow. Jutte opened a book on her desk, took her writing pad from her bag

. . . What would they do to them, her parents, when Ulf had taken her across? How great would be the shame, how far would be the tumbling fall of disgrace? Perhaps her father would lose his job, certainly the prospects of promotion to the permanent staff of the Secretariat.

Influence gone, friends gone, because who would want to be the confidant of a man whose child had won such disgrace ? Jutte would drag them down, down so that they suffocated in their humiliation.

The book lay unread.

She wondered how they would make the journey from this place called Suplingen, how they would cross. It could not be difficult or Ulf would not have written to her. There could not be great danger. She sat very still in the evening light of her room and tried to read and failed until the room dripped darkness and she heard the voices that heralded her father's return and the syrup of her mother's welcome.

It could not be difficult or Ulf would not have written to her.

He was at the Stettiner Hof, a small and vintage hotel. . . His wife would have liked to have stayed here on holiday, Carter thought . . . Low ceilings, dark woodwork, stairs that creaked in age. Not a bad room, simple and functional with a bathroom across the landing. But he'd mixed his seasons, muddled his habits and the evening had come and he was wide awake, and not hungry either because he'd eaten a big meal at 3 served by the proprietor's wife in the empty dining room.

The afternoon had been wasted with a stroll out onto the medieval Holzberg that sloped, cobbled, down the hill, in rounded by the timber and plaster houses that were made for postcards and holiday photographs, nothing to impress Henry Carter.

With evening there was at last some purpose to Henry Carter's day. He took a taxi from the Stetdner Hof to the NAAFI Roadhaus. That was what he had been told that he must ask for, not that he was searching for a cup of tea or a hamburger or a plate of chips.

Two kilometres short of Checkpoint Alpha the Roadhaus offered the British armed forces a last staging post before the drive along the autobahn through East Germany to their garrisons in West Berlin, access guaranteed by the four power post-war agreement. There was a Military Police unit stationed here, secure communications by radio and telephone and telex, and repair and towing facilities for service personnel luckless enough to blow a gasket or overheat an engine on the autobahn.

The Union Jack fluttered in the last minutes before coming down from the flag pole. At the Guard House Carter explained that facilities had been arranged for him. He was expected and that brightened him, he had resigned himself to an hour kicking his heels while they checked him out. Ushered straight to the major's office, and he was left by himself to telephone Mawby in West Berlin. There wasn't much for him to say, only that he'd arrived, was installed, was groping his way around and would put in a detailed reconnaissance in the morning. And Mawby sounded confident, and said the Berlin team were in shape and raring to go. Bloody Mawby, never a doubt up his sleeve. Well, just the once, just the once at Holmbury on the eve of the launch. Must have been his menopause then, right out of character.

When Carter came out of the room the major was waiting. An apology, the excuse that supper would be on the table at home, but if Mr Carter cared for a drink there was the NAAFI bar. Carter watched the major leave in his car, he'd never met a military man yet who was happy in the company of civilian intelligence.

The bar was little more than a hatch surrounded by the decoration of the wall shields emblazoned with the insignia and mottoes of the army and air force units that had stopped over the years at the Roadhaus before the drive to Berlin. It was a wide, airy room, some tables for eating, some easy chairs. The requisite portraits of the Queen and her Consort and the carefully stacked piles of back numbers of
Country Life
and
Woman's
Own
and
Punch.
Carter was back in the realm of the familiar.

There were two men at the bar, elderly and black uniformed, white shirts and black ties, and two white crowned caps on the stool beside them.

'Good evening, the name's Carter.'

'How do you do, Charlie Davies.'

'Pleased to meet you, Mr Carter, I'm Wally Smith.'

They'd be good for some beers thought Carter, good for some company. His estimation was correct, his hopes were justified. For several minutes they chewed over whether it would rain in the next 24

hours, whether at last the summer had come. They swapped winter anecdotes, how much snow there had been in southern England as against north-east Germany. They discussed the merits of the Stettiner Hof as a hotel, whether he could have done better. Gentle and pleasant conversation at the end of a piggish day.

'You'll forgive me, Mr Davies, but the uniform stumps me. I haven't come across it before,' Carter said.

'BFS . . . British Frontier Service . . . you're not alone, no one's heard of us. After the war we were up to 300 strong, but they've cut us so hard there's damn all lead left in the pencil. I'm called a Frontier Service Officer Grade Two, and there's three more that have Grade Three rank, that's all that's left along with a half dozen that do customs work for the forces on the Dutch border.' Charlie Davies spoke with a cheerful gloominess.

'What do you do ?'

'On paper it says that we're supposed to keep Chief Service Liaison Officer at Hannover informed of the day to day situation on the IGB .. .

that's Inner German Border. We do that and we accompany all army and RAF patrols within five kilometres of the frontier,' Wally Smith chipped in. 'In effect we have to know every damned inch of it from the Baltic down to Schmiedekopf, and that's 411 miles. It's our responsibility to see that no idiot goes where he shouldn't and starts a bloody incident going.'

'It's a fair old stretch of ground,' Carter said with sympathy.

'We manage . . .' confidence from Davies.

'Kind of. . .' doubt from Smith.

'What line are you, Mr Carter?' Davies sipped easily at his beer.

'Foreign and Commonwealth Office.'

'Do you know a Mr Percy, we sometimes see him here?' Davies drained his glass.

'Adam Percy, from Bonn, you could say we're colleagues.'

It had been done easily, the establishment of credentials, the presentation of Carter's pedigree. The talk moved on to civil service pay, the prospect of pensions being linked to inflation indexes. All were men of a common age and experience in their careers. Davies and Smith had bought a round, Carter had reciprocated.

'You'll be around for a few days, Mr Carter?'

'A few days, yes.'

'We're here most evenings, if you're at a bit of a loose end, if you're on your own and you'd like a bit of a natter.'

'That's very kind of you. I'll be using the communications tomorrow evening, round the same time . ..'

'Probably see you then . . . You'll forgive us, it's been a long day. There was a flap on south of here this morning. A silly bugger like me should know better than to get up and take a look

'What sort of flap ?'

'Two kids had a go at the wire. One made it, God knows how, bypassed the trip wires for the SM 70s ... the automatic guns on the fence . . . the other kid didn't have the luck. They're shitty bastards over there, don't let anyone tell you otherwise, they had the kid who was hit hung on the wire for an hour .. . his bloody leg was off. Looked about sixteen ... I didn't see the one who came over, the BGS had whipped him away.'

'Doesn't sound very friendly,' Carter said quietly.

'If they'd stuck a transfusion in for him they might have saved the kid.