The Waiting Time (11 page)

‘I have not forgotten your kindness.’

Wilkins said, ‘This business, what you’ve told us, involves Army intelligence, the Germans, our security people. What are you getting into? This has always been a respectable, careful firm and we don’t aim now to change that. Are you stirring trouble for us that we’ll be left to clear up?’

‘There won’t be any trouble. I’ll just be into Berlin and out, back in twenty-four hours.’

Protheroe said, ‘You do realize, Mantle, that sometimes you stretch our tolerance pretty taut? We decide what clients the firm handles, not you. We decide what time and effort we commit to a client, not you. You are a clerk, not a partner. You are aware of that before you go off on this jaunt to Berlin?’

‘They never told us what had happened to him. They never brought us his body.’

‘I know who killed him. I know the name of that man.’

When the dusk had come, and the high lights had dimly lit the street, she had left the garden and walked along Saarbrucker Strasse, past the big wooden front door of the apartment block, past the small shop deserted and barricaded against squatters; she had turned on the corner at the end by the café with the grimed windows. She had been on the courses and knew what she should do: she had checked that she was not followed, that there was not a tail in place. She had stood in front of the old door and pressed the bell button. It was as she had remembered it from a long time before.

‘And it will do you no good, or me, to know the name.’

‘You can demand justice.’

She had waited on the pavement and gazed up at the pocked stonework of the block where the shrapnel of the bombs had fallen more than half a century before, and she had seen the rotted old window fittings of the apartments. The façade of affluence might have reached Unter den Linden, but the money had not seeped as far as Saarbrucker Strasse. It was all as she remembered it. He had gazed at her in shock, wide eyes in a white, wearied face, leaning on his stout stick, the same stick. The father of Hansie Becker had clung to her.

‘There were a hundred thousand of them, and there were more who informed for them. They have not disappeared. They are here, a rot in the timber. I tried . . . When the new time came, when the city was joined. I went to the government offices, days in queues, I asked the questions. Where is my son? I was shuffled between city police and federal police. What happened to my son? I was passed between the city prosecutor and the federal prosecutor. They are still here, they block the answers, they are a decay. Who wants to see them punished? I ask you, how many did they kill? How many hundreds? How many did they destroy? How many thousands? Then, I ask you, how many trials have there been? How many have been brought to the court? Six or seven out of one hundred thousand, a token, are in the Moabit gaol.’

‘If there is evidence...’

The room was as she remembered it. Hansie had only brought her to it after dark and taken her fast up the stairs so that the neighbours in the block would not see her, could not inform on her and on him and on his parents. The radio had always been played loudly while they talked. An old stove in the corner of the room, the old smell of gas, the old kettle steaming. The old chairs with the old covers. The old sideboard of dark wood. The old photograph. . . The face of Hansie, where the line of his smile ran at his mouth, had been joined together with Sellotape, as if the photograph had been torn into two pieces and dropped, maybe stamped on, maybe spat on. Beside it was a glass of old, faded plastic flowers.

‘You will be disappointed, my dear, if you have come here to find someone who is interested in the past. Believe me. I could not find that person. They are a network, they are an organization, they protect themselves. Twice in fifty years I hear the justification of the obeying of orders. And then, twice in my life, I hear of the need to close the book of the past. Did they hunt the Gestapo men before? Will they hunt the Stasi men now? I tried. . . I was ignored.’

‘But evidence cannot be ignored. There must be files, and in the files will be the names of eye-witnesses.’

The mother, older and more gaunt, stood by the stove. She had unwrapped the chocolates but not eaten one; neither had Hansie’s father. She had long ago warned her son that meeting with the English student was an unnecessary danger to him. Tracy imagined the trauma it would have been for the mother, her son missing and her home searched. They had owned the barricaded shop on the corner, had sold household fittings when they could get them, second-hand clothes, brushes, and thin paint if it was available. The shop would have been closed down when the Stasi had come to the apartment on Saarbrucker Strasse. Hansie had told her that his mother and father flowed with the tide, supported the regime, would have voiced quiet, mild criticism of its failures, would have existed inside the system. They would have been disgraced, ostracized, after the Stasi had come to Saarbrucker Strasse, destroyed. It was possible that his mother hated her, believed her responsible.

‘You will not be allowed near the files.’

‘It was murder.’

‘You wifi not be permitted near the ifies.’

The mother lifted the boiled kettle from the stove. Her voice was reedy thin. ‘Joachim’s daughter works at the Bundesbeauftragte. Hildegard works with the files...’

‘Please try, Doktor Krause. It is necessary, I assure you. Myself, I have served in Washington. I know. To Americans, the substance of the message is important, but its presentation is critical.’

It was the main briefing room of the complex at Cologne. Goldstein stood at the locked door. The room would have seated two hundred, but the room in Washington would be larger and they had been told that 320 invitations had been sent, and that more had been refused. He watched.

‘My friend, Pyotr Rykov, used to tell me, when we were together, when we were out on a lake, when we were fishing, that the lifeblood of Mother Russia was the Army. The KGB to him were filth, the word he used, “filth”, and it would only have been to me, his friend, that he would have dared such a confidence . . . But the Army was the lifeblood. He would say to me, his friend, that it was criminal of the politicians to have allowed the Army to be weakened, the lifeblood running from a wound. Only when the Army is strong, he would tell me, wi
ll
Mother Russia be listened to. If the Western powers are nervous of the power of the Russian Army, always his argument, then the voice of Mother Russia wi
ll
be respected. . . How is that?’

He stood at the podium, erect and composed.

Raub was beside him. ‘Brilliant, Doktor Krause, impressive. Please continue.’

Goldstein murmured, ‘Perhaps they will keep you to front the network news. God and we wi
ll
miss you.’

The boom of the amplified voice: ‘He despises the politicians whom he regards as responsible for the weakness of the Army. He will work until his last breath to change that weakness into strength...’

The head waiter leaned to speak discreetly into the ear of the judge, Court of Appeal, and made the slightest of gestures towards the door. The judge’s guests in the old timbered dining room of Middle Temple would not have noted the brief movement of his head. It would be wrong for them to be disturbed, and their conversations rippled uninterrupted around the table. There was a man at the door, hovering, a pale, stoat-faced man with a brush moustache, a black overcoat folded over his arm. The judge took a leather-encased notepad from an inner pocket, wrote, ‘Phlegm, you have a visitor — don’t bugger up a good evening, Beakie’, then tore out the page, folded it for the head waiter, and pointed his index finger across the table.

The head waiter circled the table, handed the note to Fleming. The frown settled on his forehead. The glance arrowed on the doorway, found Perkins. Fleming, so politely, apologized to the lady on his right, a tax consultant with no other avenues of conversation, and left the table.

He didn’t have to question the importance of whatever had brought Albert Perkins to Middle Temple. Fleming would have said that nothing in Perkins’s working life involved the trivial.

‘She’s gone, Mr Fleming, good as gold. Of course, I challenged her to produce evidence of murder, and I warned her. The challenge and the warning made it inevitable that she would go — actually she’s there.’

‘As you said, Albert, she would. Do you know where she’ll head for?’

‘Yes, Mr Fleming, I think I have that.’

‘Our friends and allies, they would be privy to the same information?’

‘I doubt it, Mr Fleming. Rostock would only have dealt with the incursion and the death. The follow-up would have been handled from Berlin. I doubt the
Hauptman
would have been told details of the follow-up. My understanding is that that sort of material is long gone from the Berlin files. I don’t think they’d have that information. They’d certainly want it but not have it.’

They murmured in the doorway.

‘But they are, Albert, friends and allies..

‘Exactly so.’

‘And, Albert, there is a moral obligation to share with valued friends and respected allies. .

‘Out of sharing, Mr Fleming, comes the opportunity of barter.’ Fleming mused quietly, ‘All that Iran stuff they’ve gathered.

If we shared, Albert, the Iran stuff bartered for her location, then would we be cutting her off at the knees?’

‘Maybe, and then maybe not.’

‘If we share, if they catch up with her — your
Hauptman
said on the tape that he would deal with matters himself, yes? — what would be her position?’

‘First they’d warn her — my opinion. If she kept going forward they’d rough her. If she continued going forward and they began to believe themselves threatened, then they would kill her. If it’s their freedom or her life, there’s no choice.’

Fleming looked into Perkins’s eyes. They were the coldest eyes he knew, the eyes of a ferret going into a rabbit’s burrow. ‘If we shared, Albert, as we should with valued friends and respected allies, just at the start, would we condemn her?’

‘Not necessarily. Right now she’s out in front, so we might handicap her, but she can still win. . . We would be making it harder for her to win, but still possible. You want my assessment of her, Mr Fleming. She is truly incredible. I hammered her, no sleep, no food, no heat, I was about to drop. Not a single word. She said nothing. People pass through our Resistance to Interrogation course who wouldn’t have lasted more than a few minutes alongside her. Her mental focus, her strength, they are fantastic. But that determination will cause her to ignore warnings and a softening beating. She will go for her evidence, she will threaten them. She’s driven by love for the agent who was killed. She won’t be deflected. She will win or she will be killed. That’s only my assessment.’

‘Go with it, Albert, share it.’

‘What might interest you — her file, the personal one, it tells nothing. Plenty of reports on her work, but inadequate on the personality. Her work is always highly praised, but I don’t know her. The person is locked away, kept from sight. You can read a file, most files, and proffle an individual — not her. She hid, very successfully, behind her work. Private, alone

· . . It makes her so much more interesting, Mr Fleming, don’t you think?’

‘Share it.’

‘So very sorry, Mr Fleming, to have disturbed you.’

Fleming wandered back towards the table. He felt a little sick.

The guests were standing in small knots and talking.

The judge, the host, came to him. They had been at school together, then at the same Oxford college, had played rugby together for Richmond 4th XV, they were godparents to each other’s children. The judge advised the Service on legal matters.

‘You all right, Phlegm?’

‘I’m fine, Beakie, but sometimes I disgust myself.’

‘Want the shoulder for the old weep?’

They were in a corner. Fleming’s hand trembled around the brandy glass pressed on him.

‘Our friends and allies, the Germans, they flick us at every turn. Our Bank, our City, our food, our EU membership, our diplomacy, our American link — every way we turn they seek to fuck us. Now it’s Intelligence. They’re looking for a way in, their usual delicate style, kicking and blundering towards influence. They resent that there, at least, we still punch above our weight.

They’ve some dreadful little creature from the old East German secret police and they’re trailing him round because he’s an alpha-quality source on a particular Russian in whom we have an interest. The Americans are panting because the German source — we cannot match it — is to be paraded before them, which will lead to increased German influence at our expense. I aim to destroy the credibility of that source, but at second hand. I am using a young woman to do my work, a very ordinary young woman, and I am endangering her. Can’t dress it up in fancy words, Beakie. In order to maintain correct relations I am sharing information with our friends and allies which will have the certain effect of hazarding that young woman’s life. Why will she do the job I want done? Love, boy-and-girl stuff. The target killed the boy she loved. I cannot be seen to help her, not when she works against the agenda of friends and allies, so I have to hope that she is resourceful enough on her own to destroy our mutual target.’