Tracy jack-knifed to her feet. They ran between the racks of files for the stairs, for the middle basement floor.
He had the boy drunk, slumped in the chair at the back of the hotel bar, in shadow. He made the sign to the waiter. Another vodka, double, with ice and tonic for the Jewish boy who had driven him to the hotel, another mineral water with ice for himself. The boy, Goldstein, thought he drank vodka, matched him. Perkins was always patient when sober and listening to a drunk who interested him.
‘I joined because I wanted to confront the new Nazis. You live as a Jew in this country, you want to be German and not a Jew, it is impossible… They are neurotic about the past, that the past can come again… They try to erase the twelve years of Nazi rule. Ask any old man what he did between nineteen thirty-three and nineteen forty-five, he does not answer.. They do not trust themselves, they censor the books and films, they need to ban Mein Kampf. They take the power from us, Office of the Protection of the State, because of fear that the old abuse of legal process will come again… Yet they cry for authority, regulation, as they had it before – no lawn-mower in the afternoon, no children shouting, brought to the court for taking a shower late at night which disturbs neighbours, cannot wash a car on a Sunday, cannot touch vegetables in a public market. You know where my parents met? In Auschwitz. They were six years old, both of them. They survived. Their parents, my grandparents, did not. My father is put on TV each anniversary of the Holocaust. They want to suffer, hear him talk. My father says the same thing for the TV each year. “Our parents just climbed the fence so that they would be shot… I never had a childhood, I never learned to play
· · · At six years old I was as hard as granite stone.” They have purged their conscience because they have watched and listened to the TV, and they can forget… My father has invitations to go to dinner as far away as Hannover, because it is exciting for a hostess to have a Jew from the camps at her table. I thought it was my duty to show that I was not a parrot in a cage, that I was a German. I thought that I could be a good German if I worked against the new Nazis.’
The boy gulped at his drink. Perkins sipped the mineral water, and prompted, ‘But there are two colours of Fascism. There is the black of the Nazis, there is the red of the Communists. Black or red Fascism, any difference?’
‘You know, Perkins, there was an American writer, nineteen forty-five, walked round Germany, never could find a Nazi, the Nazis were always in the next vifiage. People she met told her how they’d suffered. The way she heard it, there was never a Nazi in Germany. Today, you meet a little old man – will he tell you he stood in a watch-tower guarding the camps? Wifi he tell you he coupled the cattle trucks going to the camps? Somebody did, and they’re now little old men and denying it… That’s good, Perkins, red and black Fascism, the same. You go East, you see the crowds outside the hostels with petrol bombs, where the Romanians are, the Poles, the Vietnamese, old Fascists and new Fascists, the same hatred just new Jews for them to hate. Try to find, in the East, an informer of the shit Stasi. Better, try to find an officer of the shit Stasi. Like they didn’t exist..
Perkins nudged him again. ‘You’d know an officer of the shit Stasi, you’re alongside one.’
‘The young woman…’
‘Don’t worry yourself about her.’
‘What you’ve done to her…’
Perkins said soothingly, ‘She’s fine, she can look after herself. About that shit Stasi officer..
Albert Perkins traded. Seven double vodkas to Julius Goldstein for a plate of scum from the ifie of Hauptman Dieter Krause. Damn good trading.
‘I was with that shit, minding him at the trial, a little “grey mouse”, foreign ministry. She was pathetic…’
The third week in December, nothing. The files were heaped around Tracy’s feet, ripped open, grasped at. The second week in December, nothing. She pushed files away from her, grabbed at more.
The woman glanced at her watch, shrugged, passed the ifies for the third week of December as she placed the others back on the racks. Again, the look at the watch. Tracy scattered the pages of the file as she read, discarded, read.
Who had slept with whom. Who was denounced as being negatively disposed towards socialism. Who was to be taken from the community…
The woman reached down to pull Tracy up. Her finger rapped the face of her watch.
Tracy squealed.
She read the names. Brandt, Gerber, Schwarz, Muller.
Her squeal echoed between the racks of files. Brandt, Jorg (school-teacher).
There had been four pages on the instruction order. The fourth page had been missed. Gerber, Heinz (town hall, refuse disposal dept).
Three pages taken from the file, one page unnoticed.
Schwarz, Artur (senior engineer, railways, Bad Doberan).
One page left in the ifie by the fucking bastards. Muller, Willi (trawler deck-hand).
Tracy held the sheet of paper above her head. She jumped, leaped, danced. Twenty-seven days after the killing of Hans Becker, four men had been forced or sent out of the small community of Rerik. She grasped the paper. She thrust it under her sweater and buried it against her breast. Together they tidied the floor, put the last file together, as they had found it, but for one sheet of paper. They ran up the concrete steps.
They showed their cards and scribbled their initials on the check-out list.
Between the high buildings was the first smear of light. They passed the early shift, coming in cars, on scooters and bicycles, walking.
The woman panted, ‘You did not mean that? He never remembered my name?’
‘You want the truth?’
‘I have to know the truth.’
Tracy gazed into her eyes, into the tears. She said, with sincerity and honesty, to the woman’s eyes, ‘Of course he loved you. If he had lived he would have married you. We were only a partnership for an operation of espionage, nothing physical and nothing emotional. He would have lived his life with you…’
‘That is the truth?’ The woman hugged Tracy, held her. ‘Could I look into your face and lie to you?’
She ran down the steps of the tunnel to the U-Bahn station.
The telephone rang on the counter. The cafe owner picked it up.
‘Yes… Yes, I can make such contact. Your name?’
He wiped the lead of the pencil on his tongue. He wrote the name he was given.
‘Yes, I have that. Krause, Dieter, Hauptman, of the Rostock Bezirksverwaltungen… Those you wish to contact, their names. All in Rostock, yes, in November nineteen eighty-eight. Please, the names…’
He wrote the names that were given him.
‘You should ring again. One hour will be sufficient.’
The owner replaced the telephone. His cafe was a meeting place early in the morning for the frustrated, insecure and vulnerable old men. They came down the steps from the tower blocks of Marzahn to his cafe at the same time each day as they had once gone to Normannen Strasse. They wore the same jackets of imitation leather. They were the veterans of the Staatssicherheitsdienst, too elderly and traumatized to find new employment. The state they had protected was gone. They had been the sword and the shield of the state, and they had been betrayed. They gathered in the cafe each morning to drink coffee, to buy a litre of milk to put in a plastic bag, to talk, to read the day’s edition of Neues Deutschland, to complain, to dream. The owner’s son threaded between them with the note-paper in his hand. The cafe was a cut-off point for what they knew as the insider network. The former men of the organization hung together in informal contact – better, the grey humour went, to hang together than separately.
There were sixty thousand apartments in Marzahn; a hundred and sixty thousand people lived there. In one apartment, a man had the computer that could summon up the names, addresses and telephone numbers of the former officers of the Staatssicherheitsdienst. The owner’s son would be back at the cafe with the telephone numbers within the hour.