The Contract (28 page)

They don't hurry themselves, not when some poor fucker . . . you'll excuse the French, Mr Carter . . . not when he's hanging on the wire. Not very friendly, as you say, that's why I've been taking a few jars tonight.

Like I said, we'll see you again.'

Carter walked back from the Roadhaus to the hotel. He walked briskly in the darkness, and he thought of Johnny. 30 miles down the road, behind the Inner German Border, Johnny upon whom they all depended.

He sat in the wide, high entrance hall of the hotel, deep in a black leather armchair and faced the 3 doors of the lifts.

More than 45 minutes he had been there, waiting calm and detached, rested by an afternoon sleep and a bath. He would stay there and watch, half the night if necessary. The old photograph trampled its picture in his mind.

Johnny would know him when he came.

There was a chorus of accents and languages in the chairs around him.

The coaches and officials of a basketball team from Bratislava who were waiting for their bus to take them to a reception. The excited chatter of three Libyan students who talked noisily and nervously because the surroundings were strange to them. A soprano singer and her accom-panist from Vienna. A trades union delegation from Cracow. A group of Red Army officers in their walking out best uniforms who celebrated with vodka the promotion of a colleague. The sounds eddied at his ears and Johnny was oblivious to them.

Erica Guttmann came first.

Tall, slim, fair haired and tanned skin. Wearing a dress for the evening.

Distracted as she stepped from the lift, con- cerning herself with holding the doors open so that they should not close on the old man who followed her. No hesitation for Johnny. The fast, quick clarity of recognition, as if he'd seen him yesterday.

An old man, a little bowed and stooping, but with a firm stride. The suit hung on him as if age had wasted his stomach and dropped his shoulders and the shaping of the jacket and trousers was now obsolete. A domed, wrinkled forehead and wisps of white hair, metal rimmed spectacles. As Willi had said he would be, as the boy had described.

Erica had slipped her hand through the angle of her lather's arm. She swept the hall with her eyes and found no satisfaction and whispered in her father's ear. He nodded agreement and the two of them went carefully and in step to the side of the reception desk and stood, examining and quizzical, in front of the framed and printed sheet that carried the timetable of Magdeburg railway station.

He was fast out of his chair and across the hallway.

Johnny hovered behind them, listened and watched as the old man adjusted his spectacles to peer at the close print, and Erica's fingers darted at the relevant information.

'The one at 11 is too late. It has to be this one, just before 9 ... it goes at 8.52 ... I will book the call tonight for us to be woken in the morning She led him away, spared no look for Johnny, left him the freedom of the timetable. He leaned forward to see the place where her fingers had played. The 8.52 via Oschers- leben and Halberstadt to Wernigerode.

Willi had talked of Wernigerode. Willi had talked of the annual pilgrimage to the town in the Hartz mountains. It suited Johnny well, was very adequate for the plan that had been conceived at Holmbury.

Johnny moved back into the centre of the hall. It took him some moments to find again the Guttmanns, father and daughter. Their backs were to him and they were talking to another girl and with a stout giant of a man. Johnny saw the glove and the scar. The girls talked fast and with the animation of friends. The men stood stiff and apart and seemed to spar with their words, in the guise of strangers. The girls in front, the foursome headed towards the glass doors of the restaurant. Time to find a table for one, johnny, not too near the band. Time to try the food, lad.

Johnny smiled up at Comrade Honecker and followed into the restaurant. Otto Guttmann had seemed older than he had expected. At the finish line of his career and that would be polite. And he was going to have a bastard time from tomorrow. Going to be wracked so that it hurt, deep pain, deep agony, because that was the plan that Mawby had endorsed. That was the way it had to be, wasn't it? Otto Guttmann was to be bent and crushed and broken. You're a nasty bastard, Johnny. Right. .

. and that's why you're here, that's why you were contracted to drive an old man half out of his mind with grief and dreams.

The restaurant seemed full and Johnny stood in the doorway and searched for an empty chair and tried to catch the eye of the head waiter.

Johnny stood outside the station entrance and looked across the square towards the International Hotel. He was early and his return ticket to Wernigerode was already in his pocket. Otto Guttmann would be late, because he was on holiday and he would be coming in a hurry and probably in an ill temper, and the girl would be fretting. And they would be confused and Johnny would be calm. That was the way it must be, for every hour and every minute that stretched before him in Magdeburg.

Johnny, with the reins tight in his fists.

Now 8.30 and the workers were scurrying for their offices and shops, for their desks and their cash counters and their construction sites. The slogan in front of him, 12 feet off the ground and 30 feet long, read 'DDR

30 - Werk des Volkes fur das Wahl des Volkes!' Impossible to know how many believed in the collective exhortations for greater striving and effort, impossible for Johnny to gauge how many of those brushing and bustling past him believed in the doctrine of 'the work of the people for the welfare of the people'. Don't they have any selfish buggers here? Just a myth, or is there really a Utopia that confronts capitalism? . .. They wore pressed and laundered clothes and dulled tired faces.

The presence of the Red Army at the station emphasised for Johnny the width of the bridge that he had crossed at Obeisfelde. Send them into apoplexy, wouldn't it? Johnny Donoghue, former holder of the Queen's Commission, former officer of the British Army Intelligence Corps, currently under contract to the Secret Intelligence Service, standing on the pavement outside the Hauptbahnhof of Magdeburg and running his mental check over their units and dispositions. Have a heart attack, wouldn't he, the Soviet military security commandant for the city? He saw the long serving men with their wide caps far back on their heads and badges of rank on their shoulders and their baggy trousers and floppy blouses. He saw the new recruits, some with the Asian tan and the narrow eyes of the far eastern territories and whose uniforms were poor fitting and whose boots were polished.

The Russians seemed to Johnny to dominate the station with their manpower and their transport. But this was what he had been told he would see, because this was a command area and Pierce had dinned that into his memory. Johnny saw the civilians thread and weave between the foreign troops, watched them ignore each other. Quit the rubbernecking, Johnny, that's the way you're noticed, that's the way the questions get asked. He walked away, turned his back on the military movement.

It was as he had thought it would be.

Otto Guttmann trailing his daughter. They came past him, Erica leading by two strides and heading straight for the ticket counter and leaving her father to rummage in his pocket for coins for a newspaper.

She would feel the burden of him, wouldn't she? Too fine a girl in her looks and bearing, as she stood in line in haughty impatience for the tickets, to be anchored to an old man. He wondered how they paced their evenings, what common ground they found for conversation. He swatted the mood away and set off in a leisured pursuit down the passageway to the platforms.

Across the track a troop train was loading. Children and wives, prams and parcels being stowed up the high steps and into the carriages. Men of the Soviet Military Police and the local Schutzpolizei overseeing.

Johnny the interloper. The families of a Signals Regiment returning to the Ukraine.

The loudspeakers blared the warning of the arrival of the train for Wernigerode.

Erica had her arm at her father's elbow. Johnny stood close and saw their heads merge as the girl whispered in her parent's ear. She laughed and he smiled, their crisis of departure was overcome. The train pulled into the platform and Johnny watched them climb on board and then walked to the next carriage.

He felt in his pocket for the envelope that contained the photographs, was reassured by the reminder of their presence and settled in a seat.

Sir Charles Spottiswoode drove fast along the A3 to London. The Volvo had brought him many column inches of comment and publicity in the national media after his well-docu- mented claim that the British motor industry produced vehicles of such poor workmanship that he, a patriot, had been forced to take delivery of a foreign produced motor. The Member for Guildford rejoiced in the brickbats that had been hurled at him, revelled in the abuse heaped at his doorstep.

But those who saw him as little more than an amusing by- product of public life had misread their man. The aggression and bitterness that haunted him were cultured in privacy. When he bit, he bit deep. He was not ignored.

The Prime Minister was seeing him that evening. In his mind he rehearsed the story that he would tell of the removal from a private house of a terrified young man at the hands of the louts of the Intelligence Service. He would demand the answer to his question of who sanctioned such behaviour, and by what legal right. The reputations of men previously unaccountable to Parliament would suffer, they would cringe away from the affair. That he guaranteed.

The team of Schutzpolizei had not concerned themselves with Johnny.

He'd felt the nerves wriggle and fidget in his body as they came into the carriage. Two men and two women. Navy blue trousers and navy blue skirts. Sexless powder blue blouses. Snug little pistols holstered at the waist; East German manufacture and a copy of the Soviet Makarov that in its turn was the copy of the West German Walther PP. Johnny tensed, slid his hand to the passport that he had collected from Reception before leaving the hotel and that carried the stamp of the Volkspolizei opposite his visa page. All trains going into the border areas were checked and under surveillance. Wernigerode was less than a dozen miles from the frontier, just routine. They had moved slowly, scraping their eyes over the passengers in the carriage. By the time that they were level with him Johnny had seen the pattern that they followed. The teenagers, the young ones, the kids with anoraks and rucksacks, they received attention.

Those who were going into the hills and forests towards the frontier, who were walking and camping in the Hartz, they were asked for their papers and tickets. The kids who had never known another life, who were ignorant of another colour, they were the risk. They were the runners.

Johnny stared out of the window. He repeated the catechism to himself. Not to take an interest, not to follow the gruff questioning and the hesitant answers. He must detach himself, follow the lead of people around him who closed their ears and eyes and minds. He wanted to smile and suppressed it. Out in the field, flat and stretching to a distant horizon was a corral of wire and floodlights and imprisoned inside was a single engine crop spraying aircraft. One last year, one this year . . . the way to the West at tree top height . . . the hope that the frontier guards weren't too accurate with the MPiKMs and the machine guns in the towers. Take a bit of nerve to lift a plane and fly out, a matter of courage and a fair load of luck. Up you, Comrade Honecker, because there were people here with nerve and courage and luck, and that's why a little aircraft has to have wire of 10 feet in height stretched round it. The man on the seat opposite Johnny would also have seen the plane, and his eyes were blanked and expressionless. Johnny pondered on what he thought of the sight, and had no possibility of knowing.

The Hartz gleamed green and lofty above the agricultural plain. He mused away the last minutes of the journey and was at the carriage door when the train stopped at Wernigerode station.

Otto and Erica Guttmann were not difficult to follow. Their pace and their steps were predictable.

Up the hill and towards the old, close knit town.

Into the Markt Platz where the hotels were and the tables and chairs were set and the stalls for the sale of vegetables. They had a coffee and Johnny surveyed them from a distance.

Along the gentle climb of the Burg Strasse, where the houses were timbered and painted, where the church was ageing and weeded, where the tourists were Party members and union officials and factory workers and holidaying with their families at the FDGB hostels.

By the bridge and over the shallow river. Johnny kept a gap of 30 to 40

yards between himself and the couple.

Across the road was a low roofed, century old stone chapel. There was a stall in front where an elderly woman guarded bundles of cut flowers, cheerful when set against the darkness of her clothes. Willi had talked of the cemetery, of the pilgrimage to the grave that would be made by Otto Guttmann and his daughter.

Johnny quickened his stride, closed the distance and reached in his inner pocket for the envelope.

Erica had paid for a spray of roses that were red and bold and erect, her father carried them and they nodded their thanks and passed into the cemetery. They threaded their way between the family plots. The old man struggled to maintain his straight, firm walk and his shoulder was tilted to his daughter as if he leaned more heavily for support. The grave they found was narrow, and there were tufts of grass sprouting between the gravel chips. With a quick gesture of annoyance Erica Guttmann bent down and snatched with her fingers at the grass stems and threw them to the pathway, then rose to stand in silence beside her father. A full minute Otto Guttmann waited, until the tears ran on his cheeks, and the tremble of emotion played at his lips, then he ducked and placed the flowers against the headstone and retrieved himself and stood again in stillness.