The Waiting Time (27 page)
Authors: Gerald Seymour
Tags: #Mystery & Detective - General, #Fiction - Espionage, #Fiction, #Mystery fiction, #Thriller, #Large print books, #Large type books, #Large Print, #Intrigue, #Espionage
He gazed at her. His eyes never left hers. She thought it was as if he had waited a very long time, as if he would not now be deflected.
‘Your husband, yes? The name of your daughter was announced on the loudspeaker and I saw her wave to you and you waved back, so I knew it was your daughter. The man, your husband, came and joined you, I saw that. I did not know that his name was Krause, but I knew his face. Do you have a good memory for faces, Frau Krause?’
The row of seats behind her ran to a wall. He stood between her and the aisle steps of the stand. He spoke with a soft, reasonable voice that was without menace, and the voice chilled her.
‘Eighteen years ago, I was a student at the university, my first year. My course should have led me to be a constructional engineer. You would say, Frau Krause, that I was stupid, but in my defence I would say that I was young. On a wall in August-Bebel Strasse, opposite the building they used, with my girl-friend, I painted the slogan “Old Fascists, New Fascists — Old Nazis, New Stasi”. It was scrubbed out by dawn the next morning, but I was very stupid and I returned the next night with my girl-friend and we painted the slogan again. We were caught and arrested. Your husband, Frau Krause, was in charge of the investigation. Did he ever tell you about the conditions in the cells at August-Bebel Strasse? Did he tell you what was done to those charged with being “politically negative”? I was sent to the prison at Cottbus for three years and my girl-friend was sent to the prison at Bautzen for one year and a half. That is why I remember so well the face of your husband. You should not be afraid of me, Frau Krause . .
Her daughter, Christina, was waiting at the bottom of the aisle steps and waved peremptorily for her to come.
‘The day I was released from the prison at Cottbus, the day I met again with my girl-friend, our Edelbert was conceived. I did not have a university degree, nor did my girl-friend, but we could do the arithmetic, it was that day in 1983. For both of us, there was no possibility of returning to the university. Our futures were destroyed because we had painted on a wall. I swept the streets, my girl-friend scrubbed the floors at the offices of the Freie Deutsche Jugend. Our futures were destroyed because of the thoroughness of the investigation of your husband, Frau Krause. When the Wall came down, when your State was finished, I believed a fresh opportunity would come for me, for my family. But I had no qualifications. I have gained nothing from the new freedom. You should not be afraid, Frau Krause, I will not beat you as I was beaten in the cells at August-Bebel Strasse . .
Below her, her daughter had her fingers in her mouth and whistled piercingly for her to come.
‘I am pleased to see that you have done well from the new times, Frau Krause, and that your daughter wears a beautiful costume, that you can afford for her to be coached, that she has expensive racquets. Remember me to your husband — the name is Steiner, but perhaps he will not recall me. Frau Krause, believe me, I have to be very disciplined so that I do not put you on the floor and kick your face, as your husband kicked my face in the cells at August-Bebel Strasse. Will your good fortune last for ever, Frau Krause, or will the day come when you are destroyed as I was? Goodnight.’
He was gone. Her daughter whistled again. She saw the man go to his daughter near to where Christina stood, hands on hips and pouting, and put his arm around the girl, who kissed him, and they left arm in arm.
She felt so cold. She went down the steps.
‘Who was that old drone?’
Eva Krause said, ‘It was the father of your opponent.’
‘What did he want?’
She took her daughter’s bag, carried it for her. She said, wearied, ‘He came to me to congratulate you.’
‘She was useless, not coached. Did you see her gear? Rubbish. Where is my father?’
Chapter Eleven
Right now.. . What would you be doing...?’
‘What do you mean?’ She lay on the bed, on her stomach, chin resting against her fists.
‘What would you be doing, if this hadn’t happened?’
‘Does it matter what I’d be doing?’
He was on the hard chair, bent forward and polishing his shoes. ‘Of course it doesn’t matter. I was just making conversation — you know, communication. But if you don’t want to tell me, if it’s a secret . .
Josh had slept poorly. He’d had a wretched night on the mattress against the door. Each time he’d been awake, each time he’d drifted back to consciousness from the dreams, images, moments of half memory, he had heard the sweet regular breathing of Tracy. She had slept, an innocent, a child, beside him while he had been tossed by the image of the young Guatemalan soldier with the ropes round his ankles and his wrists and the blood dribbling from his nose and from his lips.
He slipped his feet into the polished shoes, began to lace them. The top buttons of her pyjama jacket were unfastened. He could see the hang of her breasts. His fingers fumbled with the laces.
She would have wanted him to see the hang of her breasts. He felt the blood rush through him. She rolled over on to her back and stared at the ceiling and the single burning bulb under the plastic shade. He could see the outline of her breasts and the drop of her waist and the rise of her hips.
She glanced at her watch. She said, ‘About this time, I’d have been heading down to G/3...’
‘A bit early.’
I like to get in early. Got G/329 to myself if I’m in early. The rest of them are filling their faces at breakfast then . . . Check the messages in overnight on the printer, do the decipher if it’s necessary. Sort out the Major’s day, can’t wipe his bum unless it’s down on his schedule. Put the Captain’s programme in place, useless and idle sod . . . Sorry, shouldn’t talk like that of officers, ‘cos you were an officer. . . Best time of the day, early, before the Major and the Captain come in. Sort everything out so it’s tidy, so there aren’t surprises. .
‘Why didn’t you get to sergeant?’
‘Is that your business?’
‘No, it’s not my business...’
He frowned. He didn’t understand why she kept him far away, beyond arm’s length. He thought she believed her privacy was her strength.
‘Are you just going to sit there and watch me dress?’
He muttered something about needing to get to the bathroom. He folded away his bedclothes, took the mattress from across the door and dragged it down the short length of the corridor. He unlocked his own door and dumped the mattress on his own bed with the folded sheets and blankets and the pillow.
Josh went back into her room and said coldly, ‘We leave it about another half-hour, then we go. Time for him to be up, about . . . I talk, I ask the questions. It’ll be time for a bit of sensitivity. You write down everything he says, down to the last word, and he signs each page of the transcript...’
She was dressed. He had never known a young woman who took so little care of her appearance, no make-up, no comb or brush through her hair, no effort in style. She wore her jeans and the shapeless heavy sweater and she picked her anorak off the floor. He handed her a notepad and two ballpoint pens and she pocketed them.
He let himself out of the apartment on the tenth floor of the block. Jorg Brandt suffered claustrophobia so he did not try to use the lift. He left the apartment high in the block early each morning to go to the home of the Schultz children. Each morning he left behind him his uncle, who sat in the chair by the window, and his aunt, who groped around in the half-light of the room. His uncle, confined all day to the chair, and his aunt, who suffered severe and untreated cataracts, were the only people he had known those many years ago who would have accepted under their roof a man denounced as an abuser of children and who had been evicted from his home and abandoned by his family.
The agony of leaving the apartment did not end when Jorg Brandt reached the block’s litter-strewn, paint-daubed hallway. He also suffered from agoraphobia. He shuffled on his stick as close to the walls of the apartment blocks as was possible. Sometimes, if the kids were going to school, if they saw him, they would jeer at him. A long time ago he had been the headteacher and a man respected for both kindness and discipline. This time of the morning, early, was the most precious in his day as he made his way amongst the apartment blocks to the Schultz home.
He went slowly and sometimes he stopped as the clammy fear of the open spaces between the blocks gripped him. He would stand then, the perspiration running on his locked legs; the agony was the struggle to overcome the phobia. This was the daily nightmare of Jorg Brandt. The nightmare after darkness gathered around the tower blocks of Lichtenhagen was the memory of what he had seen when the young man had come bleeding to his door and had pleaded for help. With the nightmare, each evening when the small bed was unfolded in the corner of the living room of the apartment, were the memories of the denunciation and the impact of a stone thrown at him from behind by a child as he left. The rabbits were the only peace Jorg Brandt knew.
The Lichtenhagen housing complex was built on flat land between the bog wilderness to the west and the An der Stadtautobahn linking Rostock to Warnemunde. The front façades of the blocks were of brick with small balconies, the sides were featureless concrete and the backs were pocked with small windows. If it had not been for the Schultz family’s rabbits he would never, day or night, have left the apartment. The hostel had been six floors below the apartment of his uncle and aunt. They had been trapped for two days in their apartment when the crowds had gathered to burn out the foreigners from the hostel. The skinheads and the neo-Nazis and the people of Lichtenhagen and the neighbours from the block had bombarded it with petrol bombs to drive out the immigrants. They had been trapped for two days in the apartment that was his refuge.
At the broken perimeter fence around the housing complex was a cluster of houses with small gardens. Jorg Brandt came each day to the Schultz family garden to feed their children’s rabbits and to escape the memory of the boy at his door and the sight of the men who had chased him. He cleaned out the rabbits’ hutches, and in those few minutes he forgot the nightmare of his denunciation. They were fine rabbits, black and white and heavy with flopped ears. He told the rabbits the same stories each day, of Rerik and of his home, and of what he had seen from an upper window.
Klaus Hoffmann watched the door of the apartment through the c]osed window of his car, and he shouted in growing fury into his mobile telephone.
‘... You don’t have to cry, weeping doesn’t help. You tell them to go screw themselves. I bought that house. I paid 700,000 DMs for that property. . . I don’t give a fuck what they say. . . I bought the house in good faith . . . No, you listen — see if I care if a smartarse man comes from Stuttgart and claims his grandfather ran from Wandlitz in 1945, that the Communists had no legal authority to expropriate the freehold of his home. I paid in good faith, it is my home...’
A family had been evacuated from Berlin as the Red Army closed on the city. A house had been locked, in the spring of 1945, abandoned and taken by the Party to become the residence, for thirty-eight years, of a senior official in the department of economic planning. When the Wall had come down, the official had produced papers of ownership for Klaus Hoffmann and had sold the property. Hoffmann had paid cash. It was said that two million properties in the East were subject to ownership claims by the grandchildren of original residents, and the courts backed them with restitution orders.
‘What do you mean, he has documents? What shit court in Berlin? See if I care about a “restitution order” . . . They were all bastard Nazis in Wandlitz. . . When? I’ll come back when I can, as soon as possible...’
He cut the call, and the sound of his wife weeping. He watched the door of the apartment block. The house in Wandlitz for which he had paid 700,000 DMs was collateral for his business. It was the new fear in a district such as Wandlitz, the big car with
Wessi
plates. Smart bastards from Frankfurt and Cologne and Hamburg searched the streets of districts such as Wandlitz for the homes of Nazi grandparents, and the lawyers came with them.
He watched for the girl with the russet-copper hair, and for the man who had thrown him onto the rocks and into the sea.
It was without thinking, but Josh had slipped into the old habit. He was the officer, she was the corporal. The glove fitted. In the car he talked to her as though he were an officer explaining procedure to a corporal.
‘We go the long way round, we do nothing that is obvious. They have lost us so they can only stake out the places that they believe we will come to. They know we have to come for the witnesses. You understand that, Tracy?’
‘Yes, “sir”.’
‘There’s no call for impertinence.’
‘No,
‘And you can cut the bloody “sir” nonsense...’
‘Is it because you’re frightened?’
‘Is what...?’
‘That you’re so bloody pompous.’
She was grinning at him. She’d read him; he was frightened. He didrL’t think she was. He thought that under the mischief, behind the grin, an excitement bounced in her. He wished it were the same with him.
‘Can we start again?’
‘Be a good idea.’
‘Without “sir” and without “corporal”?’
‘Shoot, Josh.’