She waited for dusk to fall on the city, and the memories danced in her mind.
‘I’m very sorry for the inconvenience, but I’ve given my word.’
‘For how long?’ snapped Greatorex.
‘I know where the daughter will have gone. One night and one day will be sufficient.’
‘Who’s paying?’ whined Wilkins.
‘I will. I hope at a later date to be able to recover the expenses.’
‘Who’s going to handle your workload?’ demanded Protheroe.
‘I’ll work late this evening and early tomorrow before court. If I went tomorrow at the end of the day, then I’d be up and running at the start of the day after, and back that night. I’d seek to cause the minimum disruption.’
Greatorex said, ‘As I would hope. Your late wife may have been a valued client of this firm, but you should be damn grateful that we lifted you out of the gutter. Is this the way to repay us?’
After her death, after his collapse and living as a derelict, after he had been taken to a police station and was about to be charged with vagrancy, after Mr Greatorex had seen him and recognized him, he had been given the chance. He was fifty-four years old and he worked as a clerk.
‘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 cafe 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 facade 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, will 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 will be respected… How is that?’