The Waiting Time (33 page)
Authors: Gerald Seymour
Tags: #Mystery & Detective - General, #Fiction - Espionage, #Fiction, #Mystery fiction, #Thriller, #Large print books, #Large type books, #Large Print, #Intrigue, #Espionage
‘There is a problem with descriptions. The tenants of the apartment are elderly, one handicapped, one sighted, they were the uncle and aunt of the fatality. Neither can offer descriptions beyond that one was a man and one a woman. No, no, there is no evidence of homicide. There is no evidence of a crime . . . I forget it? I confirm your suggestion and apologize, Doktor, for wasting your time.’
The forest closed around them. They walked on the pine-needle path in the gloom. Only the cold drifted down from the canopy.
Among the pencil-straight trees were the stunted, angled shapes of broken concrete. He thought it was the true museum, not the museum in the sunlight fashioned for the tourists. The true museum was the cracked and disintegrated shapes of concrete that had been the buildings of the experimental-rocket works, where the scientists had been and the Polish labourers, where the bombs of concentrated explosive had fallen. The concrete shapes were covered with lichen. The needles had gathered on them and softened the angles of their destruction. The craters had survived half a century of the dark gloom below the forest canopy. Impossible for Josh, who had read the books, not to imagine the carnage hell of those who had run in their terror where he now walked, when the forest had burned and the buildings had come down as the bombs had fallen. She came easily behind him, light feet on the cushion of needles. They walked past the great façade of a building that had been taken by the pines. Only the façade survived, still fire-blackened. The pines were the roof and the interior of the building. It was the true history.
He saw the hanging body.
Josh stopped. He stared at it. She cannoned into his back. Tracy had not seen the body. He held her close against him.
There was no wind in the forest, under the canopy. The rope was over a branch and knotted. The hanging body rotated so slowly. He saw the back of the man and the collapsed shoulders, his side and the outstretched arms, the stain at his groin. He closed his eyes. The man had climbed the tree, struggled to gain the necessary height, clawed his way up the rough, scaled bark of the tree. He had climbed to the first branch that he would have judged could take the weight of the rope under strain, tied the rope to the branch and slipped the noose over his head. He thought of the man for whom the terror of living was greater than the fear of death.
He opened his eyes. He held her as she shook in his arms. He kept her head, her neck, against his chest.
The man’s shoes were on the path, had been kicked off. He saw the worn, holed socks of the man. He judged the terror that had been brought to the last moments of the life of Heinz Gerber.
* * *
‘Good to see you, young man, and how is Berlin?’
‘Cold, Mr Perkins, very cold. I’m sorry, I’m very pushed for time on the schedule they’ve set me. Have you the package?’
It gave Albert Perkins perverse pleasure to hand to Rogers, when the kindergarten kid was fresh from the Portsmouth recruit courses, a frayed supermarket bag containing a package loosely wrapped in brown paper. They were in the car park, broad daylight, in front of the hotel.
‘That’s the package. Going this evening, is it?’ He grinned. ‘If they get their eyes on that lot tonight, in London, when they get home their women can expect a pretty fearful time.’
He saw the confusion on the young man’s face. ‘London?’
‘London, yes, that’s where it’s going.’
He saw the flush on the young man’s face. ‘Weren’t you told, Mr Perkins, what was happening?’
‘Where’s it going, if not to London?’
He saw the young man flinch, blink, then summon the courage. ‘If you’d needed to know, Mr Perkins, I’m sure they’d have told you. I’d better get on, sorry.’
Young Rogers, kindergarten kid, ran to his car and he clutched the supermarket bag to his chest. Perkins’s breath spurted, steamed in his face.
The car of the kindergarten kid accelerated away, out of the car park.
Dieter Krause, in his car in the parking area outside the tennis hall, heard the news bulletin.
The radio said that, in Gustrow, a hostel for eastern foreigners had been firebombed; in Wismar, the chemical factory was to close with the loss of 371 jobs; in Schwerin, the tourist authority for Mecklenburg-Vorporren reported that advance bookings for the summer were down on the previous year...
The police chief, driving in his chauffeured car to his new home in the
Altstadt,
heard the news bulletin. In Rostock, the transfer of the reserve-team striker to Werder Bremen was confirmed with a fee of one million DMs; in Peenemunde, a former
Rathaus
official from Rerik had been found hanged in the forest near to the space-exploration museum...
Albert Perkins, in his hotel room, in shock, lying dressed on his bed, heard the news bulletin.
‘Where is Sieh
l
?’
Fischer said, ‘He waited for you. He waited a long time for you.
Peters said, ‘I told him not to bother to wait longer. I told him that watching your bitch daughter play tennis was more important to you.’
The match had gone on. Christina had lost the first set before he had reached the stand and sat beside his wife. Christina, rampant, hugging him, at the end had said that she would not have won if he had not been there to watch her and she had babbled about the racquets that she should be brought from Washington. When Christina had gone to shower and change, Eva had asked him. . . No, the problem was not solved. No, the problem continued. She had stared ahead of her in the emptying stand and bitten at her lips. Her fingers had worried on the new bracelet of gold chain on her wrist.
Peters said, ‘The bastard quit on us.’
It was the first time in the three years that his career had so far run that young Henry Rogers had felt true involvement in a mission of importance. Everything before had been analysis and the interminable work at the computer screen. His pride mingled with apprehension. He had followed, most exactly, the detailed instructions he had received from Mrs Olive Harris in London.
He stood on the north side of the Unter den Linden.
The man, in front of him, crossed the wide street, went to the south side, walked towards the floodlit grey granite façade of the Russian embassy. Mrs Harris would have known of the man, Rogers assumed, from Mr Perkins’s daily situation reports. He had been to the apartment near to the Spittelmarkt and paid the wizened little man who stank of cats the sum of one thousand American dollars. He had given him, as the instructions of Mrs Harris had demanded, an airline ticket to Zurich, valid for the last flight of the evening with open-dated return, and had driven him to the Unter den Linden. He had written a Russian name, from Mrs Harris’s instructions, on the brown paper of the package, and handed it to him.
In the bright flush of the embassy’s security lights, he watched the man ring the bell at the heavy door.
He fished in his pocket for his car keys. He watched the man cross the Unter den Linden, scurrying to avoid the cars, not waiting for the pedestrian lights. It would be only a twenty- minute drive to the Tempelhof airport. He felt pride at his achievement in carrying out Mrs Olive Harris’s meticulous instructions, and he lost the apprehension of failure. He did not know his part in the destruction of a target of consequence.
Josh would have said, normal times, that he could accept silence.
He lay on the mattress and the blankets were tight around him. He lay on his side and faced the wall. He could smell the damp of the wretched little room they shared. The party of seamen from Sweden, Denmark, Norway, wherever, must have sailed that day. Down below, in the reception of the
pension,
his key and her key would be the only ones missing from the hooks. He could hear her breathing behind him, and he did not know whether she slept or whether she lay awake, and he did not know whether images of the body, the shoes, the terror of the man obsessed her as they knifed him.
He had held her close, tight, against him all the way back down the path through the forest. The moment that they had broken clear from the dull light and the sun had fallen on them, she had shouldered herself free of his arms, pulled away from him.
In the faint night light of the room he saw her hand hanging careless at the side of her bed, near to his face.
‘Are you awake, Tracy?’
‘Trying to sleep.’
‘You know that if we fight, Tracy, we fail.’
‘I didn’t ask you to be here.. . and I didn’t ask for lectures.’
‘Do you know how much you hurt, Tracy? Does it bother you?’ She murmured, savage, ‘God, are you going to moan again, again? Is that why your wife left you?’
Josh pushed himself up. He sat against the wall. He heaved the blankets around him.
‘We’ll start there. That’s as good a place as anywhere. Don’t interrupt me. Don’t open your horrid little mouth. . . I was out of the Army. I was a social worker. I worked with kids for three years. Can I say it, so it’s on the record? They were thieves and vandals and joyriders and none of them had the quality of viciousness that you parade, that you find so easy to justify.’
He heard her breathing sweet and regular. He saw the outline of her body and her hand careless beside his face.
‘There was a boy, Darren. He was on the pills. He thieved to get the money for the pills. I quite liked the kid, I thought I could break him off them. He thieved from this house, big place, smart road in the Chalfonts, he was all dosed up when he went in and he didn’t do the necessary with the alarm. The police picked him up outside the house. He was in the cells when I saw him and he was going back, as night follows day, to Feltham Young Offenders’, and he was sitting on the bunk bed and the tears were streaming down his face. I thought he was worth the effort, and the custody sergeant told me I was an idiot. I went to the house he’d broken into. She was Libby Frobisher, stinking rich, divorced, and I told her about Darren and what the custody sergeant had said and that the kid was in the cells and weeping his heart out. She withdrew the charges. The kid, Darren, walked free. I drove him round to see the woman and made him stand in front of her and apologize and mean it.’
He did not know whether she slept or whether she listened.
‘She rang me a month later, she wanted to know what had happened to the kid. She said I should come round, have a drink, tell her. Six weeks later we were married. I was fifty-one years old and she was the first woman I had loved. There was only her accountant and her solicitor at the wedding and they thought I was into her life for the easy ride. I made her — insisted on it
— write a will where nothing was left to me. Until I met her, I was not a man who cried or laughed or knew happiness or understood pain. I learned them all from her. For a year I knew happiness, and then she found the lump.’
Josh reached out and took her hand.
‘For half a year I cried and understood pain. She went through the treatment. She died.’
He brushed his lips against her hand and opened his fingers and allowed her hand to drop back, careless, beside the bed.
‘I tell her about you each day. I went to see her the day I left to come to find you. I told her then that you put your hand into a snake’s hole, that you weren’t beautiful, weren’t even very pretty. I told her about the killing of Hans Becker, your boy, and that the only thing we had in common was that we had both had the person we loved taken from us. . . I tell her, each day, how we’re doing. I tell her that we’re frightened, that we don’t know where it’s leading us.’
He thought she slept. He saw the calm stillness of the profile of her face.
‘I tell her that, thank God, tomorrow is always another day.’
Chapter Fourteen
Josh had tried to think, in his methodical way, while they had dressed in the gloom of the room at the
pension,
still dark outside the window, and then she had sung the song. Whether she sang it, whether she whistled it, whether she murmured it, the one bloody song with the words or the one bloody tune, it scraped through his mind and deflected him, breaking his train of thought. They had left Rostock early, before the traffic was on the main streets. The irritation grew in him because he had not made a plan in his mind. It was another day, the day for Artur Schwarz. Time was so precious, and was running, sand grains from the upper bowl slipping steadily into the lower . . . but the bloody song, the tune, hacked at his ability to use the time. His irritation surged.
‘Can you leave it?’
‘Leave what?’
He said, ponderous, ‘Can you leave that noise?’
‘What noise?’
‘Can you, please, stop whistling, singing, whatever, that puerile dirge?’
‘What’s the harm of it to you?’
‘Just that I can’t think.’
She lifted her eyebrows and made a face at him that was grotesque. She closed her eyes and pursed her lips shut as if to show him how idiotic she thought his irritation. The song was her anthem. She would have lain in her bed at Brigade in Berlin and heard it played on the radio and known that her boy, beyond the Wall, heard it too.
He had the wipers on now. The light was a grey smear ahead, to the west. The sleet storm burst over the car, was running free over the flat expanse of the fields either side of the road. They had driven through the last village before they came to Starkow. He had not used the main road from Ribnitz-Damgarten to Stralsund, the obvious way to Starkow. He tried to think. He could see into the low cloud of the storm. He could see the dulled shapes, far away, of rectangles of planted forestry, and at the fringes of the trees were timber-built platforms for the marksmen who shot deer in summer. Cranes were feeding in the yellow weed grass close to the road, tall, elegant birds who seemed not to notice the blow of the sleet storm against them. He wanted cover from which to watch the farm, high ground or hedgerows or a plantation of forestry...
There was only one farm at Starkow. The village was a main street of old houses, a post office, a shop with a new front and a church. From the main street he could see the farm. Up a long lane, between open fields, was the huddle of buildings. There was a rectangular block of trees away to the left, and a marksman’s tower, but nowhere to leave the car where it would be hidden. There was no way to the forestry and the marksman’s tower but across the open yellow weed grass of the field. He parked the car at the end of the village main street, and saw a curtain flicker. He stood beside the car and shivered. The sleet blew into his face and settled on her hair. He looked at his feet.
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Why are you sorry?’
‘Because I didn’t think it through. Because we don’t have the right footgear.’
‘Is that why you’re so miserable?’
He stamped away ahead of her. There was a hawk in front of him, blown by the storm, careering in flight, not able to hover and hunt. The mud was a slippery carpet to the frozen ground. He plodded forward. It caught at his shoes, clung to them, weighted them. Once, he fell and slithered to the ground and she stood over him and grinned. He hoped, the night before, that she had slept and had not known that he had held her hand and kissed it. He went across the open field towards the block of forestry. He was near it, close to the marksman’s tower, when he saw the car leave the farm, bump away on the potholed track from the buildings of grey-red brick and grey-brown wood. He was too far from the track to see who was driving behind the misted windows. The wind swayed the high trees above.
‘How long are we staying here?’
‘Long enough to see who comes to and who goes from the farm.’
‘What about the taxi?’
‘Was it a taxi?’
‘Didn’t you see that? Of course it was a taxi. It had the sign on it for a taxi.’
He felt the cold. He huddled behind the trees. He stared at the farm buildings away across the open fields and tried to scrape the mud off his shoes.
He wondered if they had come to the farm too late. Nothing moved. There were dull lights in the windows of the farmhouse and in one of the barn buildings but he did not see the signs of man, woman or child.
‘We wait and we watch,’ he said. ‘We wait and watch until I am satisfied.’
He had wept the night that the mob had entered the building on August-Bebel Strasse. Ulf Fischer, the former
Feidwebel
who was now a taxi driver and the maker of orations at the funerals of old people, had stood on the far side of the street, on the fringe of the mob, and he had watched the clamouring, jeering crowd beat on the doors of the building and hammer at the shuttered windows. It was said, among the lowly ranks of the Stasi, that the
Generalleutnant
had forbidden the guards to use their weapons, that the senior officers had argued bitterly on whether they should open fire on the mob. The ‘realists’ had wanted to shoot and the ‘idealists’ had wished to capitulate. He had not, that night, seen Hauptman Krause. He had thought it the worst hour of his life.
He sat in his taxi outside the one small bar in the village of Starkow. Before he went back to the rank for taxis on Lange Strasse, he would need to hose off the farm mud from the wheels and bodywork of his Mercedes taxi. He had not felt guilt when he had pushed his boot down on the throat of the young man so that the
Hauptman
could have the easier shot at his head. He was with, then, the power of the Staatssicherheitsdienst. The power had protected him from guilt. Sitting in his taxi, going to the farm at Starkow, he had decided, with personal anguish, that he no longer believed in the protection. He would make one last action, and he had agonized on it in his taxi, in defence of the power. He could see, from where he was parked outside the bar, the hire car in which they had come. His last act, before he went back to Rostock and found a car wash at a garage and took his place on the taxi rank, would be to telephone the
Hauptman
and give him the make, colour and registration of the hire car. He had no more fear of the cells of the Moabit gaol. He held the telephone in his hand and the tears coursed down his cheeks, as they had done on August-Bebel Strasse when the mob had come in. Afterwards, he would go to the car wash and clean his taxi and take his place on the rank, and in the evening he would go home, as Leutnant Hoffmann had gone home and as Unterleutnant Siehl had gone home.
She said, ‘Do you chase the tail of the beast or do you chase its head?’
Dieter Krause sat in his chair in the living room of the new house.
She said, ‘You can forever cut the tail of the beast but you do not kill the beast until you cut the head.’
Dieter Krause sat in his chair and held the telephone. It had been ringing when Eva had come back to the house. She had been in the hallway when he had answered it. She stood in front of him, above him. The shopping bags were by her feet.
She said, ‘You have to cut the head of the beast or the beast is with us always, will take everything and break us.’
Dieter Krause looked up into her face. There was a hardness that he had not known before, a pitiless contempt that he had not seen before.
She said, ‘If you do not cut the head from the beast then it will be behind you for ever, and for ever you will look over your shoulder for the beast.’
Dieter Krause put the telephone into his inside pocket. The tail of the beast was the witnesses. The head of the beast was the man who had come from England and the young woman with the copper-gold hair who had kicked and scratched and bitten him. He tapped, a reflex movement, at his waist, and he felt the shape of the pistol lodged there by his belt. He picked up the car keys from the table beside the door.
She said, ‘You have to be there tonight, when she plays. . . First you must cut the head.’
The sleet storm swirled around the farm. He had seen no movement, but there were short times when the storm was so intense that the blizzard took from him the view of the farm buildings. He had heard, faint, a man’s shouting but he had not seen the man. He had heard the noise, distant, of a tractor engine starting up but he had not seen the tractor.
The sun came out abruptly, great pillars of light that fell on the fields and onto the buildings, as if a curtain was drawn back. The cold was gone, and the driving sweep of the sleet, but still Josh held his arms across his chest for warmth. Away to the right, from the forest block, a young deer with stubbed antlers came cautiously from the cover and tried to find food in the yellow weed grass. The light played on its back.
He took Tracy’s arm, squeezed it hard. He started to walk across the field towards the farm buildings, lit by the sun.
The mud clogged on their shoes and smeared their trousers. They walked, slow going, towards the buildings.
He could smell the farm, old hay and new manure, and hear the faint sound of a radio playing in the farmhouse and the bellowing of cattle as if they demanded attention. The farmhouse was at the side of a courtyard of buildings. It was a building, centuries old, that decayed. He thought the great armies passing this way would have seen that same farmhouse of brick and timber beams — the guards of Napoleon and the grenadiers of von Hindenberg and the panzer men of Mannstein and the artillery men of Zhukov. The radio played light music behind the heavy door. Water dripped on the step from broken guttering above. He rapped the knocker. He expected to hear a footstep, a grumbling complaint from a man or a woman that they were coming, but heard only the radio. They walked together, close to each other, around to the back of the farmhouse, past abandoned kids’ toys and a tricycle, past a small garden where winter cabbages grew in neat lines. The door at the back of the farmhouse was wide open.
He knocked with his fist on the opened door. There was food on the wide wood table and two mugs of steaming coffee. The pages of a newspaper were scattered on the table, as if discarded in haste. A cat slept in a chair and ignored his knocking. He called out, and the cat opened its eyes, scowled and closed them again. He called again, and only the bleat of the radio’s advertisements answered him.
In the courtyard of farm buildings, the outer door of the cattle shed was open. The animals shouted at them for their attention.
There was a light trailer of manure with a fork set in it, as if work had been interrupted. The sunlight came down into the courtyard and caught the old gold of the hay bales that had been moved from the open barn and left. A horse was wandering free in the courtyard with a halter on its head and a trailing rein.
She took his arm and pointed.
Josh followed the line she made with her arm.
A mud track led from the courtyard out over the yellow weed grass of the fields. He saw why she pointed.
They ran, slipping and slithering, along the track, between the deep ruts that the tractors had made.
The wind blew against them and the low sun was in their eyes.
The small, slow-moving procession edged towards them. A tractor pulled a trailer at the head coming steadily. He saw two men walking beside it, heads down. He saw four women, in pairs, walking alongside the trailer and none had coats against the wind and the cold. There was a tractor at the end of the procession and it dragged a muck-spreader through the ruts of the track.
He stepped into the mud of the field so that he should not impede the path of the procession. He slipped his hand into the bend of Tracy’s arm; she jerked it away from him.
The tractor at the head of the procession came past them. Mud clods were scattered from the big tyres and thrown against their bodies. He saw the lined, weathered faces of the man who drove the tractor and the men who walked beside the cab, who had left their cattle in the courtyard barns and left the horse free. He saw the women who had come from the warmth of the kitchen.
He looked for the body on the trailer.
He looked for Artur Schwarz.
He saw on the trailer a small load of winter turnips.
He caught the sleeve of the coat of one of the men, and asked where was Artur Schwarz, where could he be found. He was told . . . Josh closed his eyes, so old and so bloody tired. He heard the grating voice of one of the women talking to Tracy, but could not distinguish the words against the roar of the tractor engines.
He let the procession move away from him, watched them go all the way to the old courtyard.
He stumbled across the open emptiness of the field and she was behind him. Her shadow danced ahead.
Tracy shouted, ‘Their shit-spreader’s broke. That’s what they all came out for. Dropped everything because the shit-spreader’s buggered. A bust shit-spreader is their definition of disaster. Did they tell you where we’d find Artur Schwarz?’
Albert Perkins so rarely lost his temper.
‘Is that what the bloody woman called us, me and them? Are you telling me, Mr Fleming, that the bloody woman said I, they, were a minor sideshow?’
He sat on the unmade bed. The wires for the equipment that made the call secure were tangled in his arms.
‘And Krause is an irrelevance? And our operation is demeaning? How, in God’s name, did you let her get away with that fucking talk? Don’t you understand, Mr Fleming, what is being played out here? Four eye-witnesses were evicted from Rerik in nineteen eighty-eight. I don’t know their names. What I do know, in the last several days two men, formerly from Rerik, have died. That’s what is being played out here, bloody cruel warfare — and that is a sideshow, a minor sideshow? I am listening to hourly news bulletins for more deaths, damn it. There are two left, I don’t know who they are or where they are. What should I do, Mr Fleming? Should I place an advertisement in the local newspaper calling on these unnamed, unlocated individuals to dig a bloody hole in the ground and sit in it, because it’s not worth them getting themselves killed for a minor sideshow? How’s that, Mr Fleming?’