The Waiting Time (48 page)

Four policemen were gathered round the Trabant and they were laughing at it and poking with their shoes at the bodywork. Josh took his grip bag from the back seat. He was told he could not leave the car parked there.

He said, ‘It belongs to the young lady. She always drives a Trabant. That was her mistake. Better ask her to move it.’

He carried his grip bag away and the spring sunshine was warm on his back.

‘Yes, of course you were right to call me immediately. I’ll be with you in half an hour, a call to make and a shower and a shit and a shave. Thank you, Rogers . . . What time is it? Must have been tired, don’t usually sleep in. I’ll see you...’

Albert Perkins put down the telephone.

He rubbed the deep sleep from his eyes. He shook, stretched.

He crawled from his bed and pulled back the curtains. Sunshine spilled into the room. He sat among the confusion of the sheets, pillows and blankets. Her face was in his mind. He saw every line on it, and the thrust of her chin, the brightness of her eyes and the colour of her hair. He sat, long moments, with his head in his hands.

He snapped upright. No requirement to go secure and unravel the bloody wires. He dialled.

It was more than the cleaning lady’s life was worth, to pick up a ringing telephone.

She should have been out of there thirty-five minutes before the telephone started to ring in Mr Fleming’s room. She had most of the drink stains off the carpet, but the red-wine spatter on the wall behind Mr Fleming’s desk was her headache. The phone rang insistently. It did not surprise the cleaning lady that Mr Fleming was not yet at his desk, an erratic gentleman, but it astonished her that Violet was late. Her plastic bin bag, on the marked carpet beside the desk, was half filled with the plastic cups and the emptied bottles. She had scrubbed the wall with kitchen tissue, might have to be repainted, and the carpet might have to be replaced. She gathered up her mop, her bucket and dragged her vacuum cleaner to the door.

She left the telephone ringing, and locked the door after her.

It was a great city in the heartbeat centre of Europe.

With his grip bag, Josh Mantle was a snail in the path of a caterpillar track.

The cranes and the bulldozers and the earth movers were fitted with the caterpillar tracks that broke the shell of the snail and buried the past and destroyed the history.

He was alone on the street. He was the pygmy figure among the racing, hurrying thousands, who made the pace of the new city. He walked with the ghosts, the few, who were rejected by the thousands. The ghosts held him tight below the towering cranes, beside the bulldozers and the earth movers that wiped out the faces of the ghosts. The short length of the Wall, preserved for tourists, so fragile where there had been permanence and death, mocked him. If he had stood, if he had put down his grip bag, if he had held out his arms, if he had snatched at the thousands who hurried past him and went about their business and lived their new lives, if he had shouted his truth, would any have cared for the forgotten past and the forgotten history? It was the conceit of Josh Mantle that he, alone, knew the debt value of the past and the history.

He was at the checkpoint.

The new buildings and the new cranes obscured the warmth of the sun from the street. The block where the holding cell had been, where the interrogating officer had come, where she had begged and wept for her freedom, was eradicated. A watchtower was still standing. They would have followed her, with their binoculars, when the bar had been raised, when she had crossed the no man’s killing zone, would have focused on her from the squat little watch-tower when she had gone into the shadow dawn with the lie and the deal. The dust of the building site choked in his throat. A freedom belonged to him...

The car came from behind him, blasted its horn.

Perkins’s face poked through the open window.

‘If I’d known you’d be here, I’d have bloody wiped you off the road. Never could keep out of business that wasn’t yours, could you, Mantle? Always had to interfere, hadn’t you? You think we wanted her — wanted her paraded in open court? But the little man, little shit-faced man, has to bleed his bloody principles over us. I hope you’re proud. I hope you rot.’

He shouted, ‘I was, I am, it’s precious to me, my own man.’

The window surged up.

She was alone in the back of the car. Afterwards, for ever, he would swear to himself that she smiled at him.

The car pulled away, went fast through the old checkpoint where there was no barrier, no guns, no past that survived, and he watched the car until he could see no longer the copper-gold of her hair above the seat, until she was gone from the mud pool and the rippled water was still.