The Waiting Time (18 page)

‘It’s a bloody miserable place and I want to get the hell out of it.’

She seemed to shiver. He did not know whether he had reached her or whether it was just the wind across the dead space catching her.

‘Come on.’

‘Is it Rostock now?’

‘We go to Rostock late tonight.’

‘Where do we go now?’

‘I’ve a name for you. It’s a male name, but it will do for you, just right.’

He had annoyed her and her eyes blazed at him. ‘I’m cold, I’m tired, my rucksack weighs a fucking ton. I don’t need you.’

‘You need me, Tracy. You may be too stupid to realize it. You need me. I brought you here so that you could get into your dumb little brain the importance of what you are doing, and the opposition you will face.’

She was tiny beside him. He could have slipped the straps of the rucksack off her back. He could have carried it for her, but he was damned if he would offer to. They would be expecting him back that evening, and in the office in the morning, and the paper would be piling on his desk. He did not know when it would be finished, but he thought it would go hard before it was. Without history, she couldn’t realize how hard it would go.

‘What’s this fucking talk about a name?’

‘We’re going to the zoo. You’ll find your name there.’

The manager remembered him — a sweet moment for Albert Perkins - and gushed a greeting.

‘Doktor Perkins, how excellent. The usual room, of course?’

‘Mr Perkins — I’m not a doctor.’

‘Everyone in Germany, Herr Perkins, is a doctor, or they are a Turk sweeping the streets.’ The manager dropped his voice, mock conspiracy, grinning. ‘Or they are an
ossi,
a new brother from the East — and you have a colleague.’

‘I have brought Doktor Rogers with me. He’ll be here a few days. For me it’s just one night.’

He looked around the small reception area. Spotless with fresh paint and clean. The hotel was unpretentious, quiet, discreet. It was three years since he had last stayed there. It was in a street of Savignyplatz at the heart of the old café area of West Berlin. At the hotel off Savignyplatz he had been able to find, in the old days, the anonymity that was valuable to his work, and the inexpensive restaurants that did not challenge his
per diem
expenses allowance. He thought the boy from the kindergarten, Rogers, would have expected to stay in a Holiday Inn or a Hyatt, would have expected porterage and a modern room, stereotyped in design. He’d not get it here. Perkins tramped up the stairs to the first floor, his usual room, the view over a yard and a car park and over the back of another block. Rogers came after him.

He said, ‘What’s the plan, Mr Perkins?’

‘I unpack, I make a few phone calls, we collect the hire car. We go visiting.’

‘It’s just, Mr Perkins, that I don’t really krLow what it’s about.’

Perkins went sharply to the door, closed it. He drew the curtains at the window and turned on the bedside radio before taking the slim file from his briefcase. He tossed it casually at the young man.

Perkins rang a number from his personal directory, a number from way back. He murmured into the telephone, against the music from the radio.

‘Mr Perkins, am I being an idiot? I understand the position of Corporal Barnes. I understand why we’re targeting Krause. What I don’t understand is the reason that Mantle has involved himself.’

‘You’ve the file.’

‘Doesn’t help me, Mr Perkins, doesn’t tell me why he’s pushed his nose in.’

‘Read the file — read it to me.’

The life of Joshua Frederick Mantle, as known to Albert Perkins, was a single sheet of paper. The boy from kindergarten, Rogers, had a good voice, well-articulated, quiet against the music.

Born: 27 March 1942. Parents: Frederick Mantle and Emily Mantle (née Wilson). FM served Royal Engineers, Military Medal in North Africa, twice promoted to Sgt and twice demoted for persistent alcohol abuse. Served post-war in Catterick, Plymouth, Coichester, Palestine and Malaya. EM shot dead by CCT (Chinese Communist Terrorist) in Penang, 1953.

Perkins said, ‘The ifie always tells the story, rare when it doesn’t. His father was a drunk with a career saved by one daft moment with a bazooka. The child had little contact with his father, his mother was everything. She was shot dead in a street market in Penang. The night she was killed, his father wasn’t in the barracks comforting his son, he was pissed and out wrecking the Chinese quarter with his mates. It would have been, aged eleven years, the end of his childhood.’

Education: Army schools, Army Apprentice College (Chepstow).

‘There were no relations to dump him on so he was carted round his father’s postings. One school after another, no permanence and no stability. A lonely and self-contained teenager. Would have thought he was unloved, would have been damn sure he was unwanted. Went to the Apprentice College as soon as he was old enough to be taken in. His father came out of the Army in nineteen sixty and headed for South Africa, his latest woman in tow. Mantle told a man I spoke to that he never heard from him again. The last time he saw his father, in a pub at Chepstow, the old bugger was in his cups and yakking on about building pontoon bridges, under fire, over the gullies, in front of the tanks in the desert. The truth is his father dug latrine pits and plumbed in the field showers, but just had the one glory moment with the bazooka. The Army, his own service, was the only horizon he had as a youngster.’

Army career: Joined I Corps as clerk, 1961. Stationed at

Templer, Ashford. Aden, 1966/1967. Osnabruck (Germany)

1972/1975. Staff Sergeant 1981. Belize 1982. Transferred out of I

Corps.

‘He started at the bottom of the heap. Not particularly sharp, but dedicated. He was pretty typical. Had made corporal by the time he went to Aden, based at the Mansoura gaol where the FLOSY and NLF guerrillas were held. Would have done a bit of native bashing in the interrogation sessions, would have been able to justify it. Then to Quebec barracks in Osnabruck. He was pushing paper with the rest of them, waste of time, analysing the Soviet order of battle. Quite a shy man, I was told, made his work everything. I don’t think there was anything in his life but his work. What he owned fitted into the suitcase under his bed. He went to Belize with an officer . . . A prisoner being interrogated died. A soldier reported the death to his unit padre. There was an inquiry. I was sent to minimize the fall-out. If Mantle had made a statement indicting his officer, who had tortured a prisoner to death, then the officer was gone and we were knee deep in propaganda shit. He didn’t, he was sensible, kept his mouth shut . . . Frankly, at that time I reckoned he hadn’t the bottle. He’s regretted that act of compromise ever since. We bought him off with a transfer and a commission. He left I Corps as a changed man.’

Joined SIB, Royal Military Police. Commissioned 1984, rank of

Captain. Served RMP Hounslow HQ and Tidworth Garrison.

Left Army in 1989.

‘He went into Special Investigation Branch. He was chasing squaddies for petty pilfering, for being drunk louts on Saturday nights, for flogging equipment out of the stores. They made him up to a commission. He would have been a cuckoo in the mess, too old for his junior rank, never works. I saw him at Tidworth camp . . . I was told he was very cold and very bitter, poor company. Actually, he was ostracized, ignored like he didn’t exist. There had been a touch of a scandal the month before, a major who was popular had a finger pointed for pocketing a very small amount of money. Mantle had played it by the book, and the regiment involved thought it should have been handled internally. Mantle went for prosecution. He’d gained that awful bloody sense of duty that afflicts bitter men, everything lined up against him. When the downsizing started at the end of the Cold War, he was top of the list.’

Civilian occupation: Social Worker 1990/1994. Unemployed 199411996. Solicitor’s clerk, qualifying as Legal Executive, 1996...

‘He came out. He would have been a lost man. He would have thought that the Army had rejected him, and he’d have been right. He worked with juvenile offenders, car thieves, yobs, but to him they’d have been disadvantaged by the system. A police officer in Thames Valley told me about him. Then he was married, a very wealthy woman. She died. Don’t expect me to score points. He would have crumpled. He went right off the rails, went downhill, lived rough . . . He was lifted out of the gutter by the solicitors who had handled his late wife’s affairs. Outwardly he’ll have pulled himself together. Inwardly he’ll have blamed the world, every symbol of authority, for what has happened to him.’

Status: Married Elizabeth (Libby) Harris (née Thompson), divorcée, 1994. No children. Died 1996.

‘That was bad luck. Up to then, his marriage, he’d seemed like one of those men who just couldn’t make it with women. No girl-friends before. One plunge, and again the failure. He has no one to love, and no one to love him. At his age, now, he’s left on the shelf. As a substitute, he will attach himself to any cause and to any unfortunate that happens along...’

The city had been the gateway to the world. But the gate of Rostock was now rotten and decayed. In medieval times, under the same grey-black clouds of late winter, Rostock had been the trading gateway to the Baltic but the Hanseatic League had fallen apart under the spite of war and been rebuilt. It had been destroyed again by the grey-orange tongues of flame in the fire of three centuries ago.

The great churches and the university and the timbered homes of merchants had risen again in Rostock and then collapsed, lost, under the incendiaries of the bombers flown from Britain to target the shipyards and the submarine pens beside the grey blue of the sea.

The Soviet Army had come. On the coat tails of the Soviets had been the Party, the German Communists, the Stasi and the lorry convoys bringing the grey dull concrete for rebuilding the shipyards. Rostock was once more the gateway.

All crashed down again, as surely as if the bombers had returned to the city sprinkled with grey-white snow. The bureaucrats and business men had travelled from Bonn in the wake of ‘re
-
association’, from Kiel and Hamburg and Bremen. They spoke of ‘self-determined democratic renewal’, and for every ten jobs in the shipyards they took nine men and threw them on the refuse tip of unemployment. In the grey, tired and suffering city, fragile hope again fell, as it had through history.

Each morning of late winter the grey-brown mist was settled on the Warnow river that split old Rostock from new Rostock. The city, the people of Rostock, suffered again, sullen and hostile to the disasters brought by strangers, as they had been through history.

Under the cloud bank, by the sea, in the mist, spattered with snow, the city struggled for survival.

The city, Rostock, its people, would fight to hold the little they had. Each man for himself in the grey cold jungle. It was a bad place for strangers who came to throttle the little that was left, as it had always been.

She heard the key in the door. He had been gone a week. He had not telephoned her.

She sat in the comfortable chair, new, and watched the television, new, and slipped her feet into her shoes, new. The programme on the television was a game show, new, imported from America. She switched the programme off with the remote control, new . . . Everything around Eva Krause was new. The house in the refurbished terrace beside the Petrikirche was new for her.

In their generosity, they had allowed her to choose her new clothes and had provided the money, but everything else around her had been chosen by them, by the man from Munich and by the little Jewish shit, as if Dieter and Eva Krause were not permanent but only on trial. If Dieter failed in what they wanted of him, a removal van would come and carry away everything that was new and provide it for the next manipulated man and his family, and the house would be closed to them, locks changed.

Eva Krause stood. She smoothed her dress and touched the styling of her hair. She tidied the magazines.

He came into the living room. They had been married for fifteen years, the wedding a week after she had passed her vetting, after he had been told she was suitable. She gazed at his face. He had been told that, as a full-time official of the Freier Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund in the shipyard, she was acceptable as the wife of a Stasi officer. He came across the room. She saw the tiredness, and she saw the scars. He bent to kiss her and the thickness of his trimmed beard brushed her chin.

She twisted her face away so that his lips, beside the raked scars, touched her cheek and not her mouth. They had been equals, she in the trade union office at the shipyard, he at the headquarters of the Staatssicherheitsdienst on August-Bebel Strasse; they were not equal now because there was no job for a trade unionist in the castrated shipyard. She had only the money that he gave her, that they gave him. The scars were alive, knitting angrily, raw dark red. Now that she no longer had a position of importance, she had the time to manicure her nails. She understood the scratch scars on his face, either side of his mouth. Her nails used to be pared short: now she had the time to grow them, shape them.

‘A good trip, a good journey?’

He would not try to kiss her again. He looked into her eyes.

‘You were made welcome, you met new friends?’