He heard her voice, a song. He blinked awake. He smeared the snow off his face and the ice from his eye- brows. He saw her.
The cold was in his muscles, his bones, his throat. He struggled for the strength to push himself up from where he had slept against the step. She was dancing as she came, skipping like a happy child.
He staggered to his feet. He leaned against the wall beside the door. She stopped and stared.
Chapter Six
What the hell…?’
Josh tried to smile. He was wrecked, chilled, unshaven. He pushed off the wall and swayed.
‘What the hell are you doing here?’
It should have been a big speech, heavy with the older man’s wisdom, the world of experience, the lifetime of gathered knowledge. He stretched his spine, tried to stand upright. He knew that he should demonstrate, crystal clear, his authority. He scraped the snow covering off his coat.
He croaked, feeble, ‘I didn’t want to wake them.’
‘That’s not an answer. Why are you here?’
He said, quiet, ‘I came to bring you home.’
There was an impish light in her eyes. She stood with her hands on her hips. ‘Who bought your ticket?’
‘Your mother wanted you brought home. I paid for the ticket.’
She laughed in his face. ‘Bad luck. Bad luck, Mr Mantle, because you wasted your money.’
‘Now, you hear me…’
The big speech was beyond reach. He could have made the speech if she had stood contrite in front of him, if the relief that he had come as deliverer had been on her face. But the laughter caught her face, her mouth and her eyes. She made a mockery of his effort to summon the big words. She had come close to him and her gloved hand smacked the wet snow from his chin and his forehead. hear me, young woman.’ He tried to speak with the stern tone that he would have used to a sullen kid caught out vandalizing. ‘You should go back inside, get your bag, five minutes, I’m waiting here…’
Her fingers caught at his cheek and pinched hard.
‘… I’m waiting here for you. Five minutes and we leave for the airport. You’re going home, with me, first flight.’
‘You were an officer…’
‘The first flight back to your mother.’
‘Can see you were an officer.’
‘Back where you belong.’
‘When they talk balls, officers always shout.’
The anger surged in him. He pushed away her hand. ‘Listen to me. You are rude, you are impertinent. Learn to be grateful when people go out of their way to help you. What you are trying to do is beyond the capability of a single person acting without resources. Join the real world.’
‘Of course I’m capable – I’m trained.’
‘You were just a typist, a clerk. You are not equipped-’
‘I got the names.’
‘What names?’
‘I couldn’t just go up there, to Rostock and Rerik, blunder about, bang on doors. No bugger would speak to me then. I had to have the names.’
He felt old, and her laughter mesmerized him. The smile played on her mouth. She pulled off her gloves and unzipped her coat. The smile still played at her mouth, mocking. She reached under her sweater, pushed it up. He saw her navel and the narrowness of her waist and the white skin. She pushed her hand up under her sweater, and he saw, a moment, the material of her bra, a flash. She taunted him. She held the piece of paper.
‘There were four eye-witnesses, I have their names. They thought they’d stripped the file, but they missed one sheet of paper. I’ve been in the archive. Not bad for a clerk.’
Josh Mantle sagged back against the wall. A refuse cart turned the corner into Saarbrucker Strasse. He felt a black gloom of inevitability. He felt the suction force puffing him towards deep currents and fire. The cart came slowly down the street, spraying water on the pavement, rotating brushes cleaning the gutter. She waved the paper in front of his face.
He said, weak, ‘You should let me take you home.’
‘You go on your own,’ she said. She folded the paper, neat movements, slipped it into the inside pocket of her anorak.
‘So, you get the bloody speech,’ he said. ‘The speech is, I will stand in front of you, behind you, right side of you, left side. When they come for you, as they will, they will have to flatten me first. Don’t expect the speech again.’
The cart came by them. The water sluiced across the pavement, against her legs. She stood her ground and the water dripped off her.
She said, calm, ‘I don’t need you holding my hand, trailing after my skirt. You want to come, please yourself. I don’t need you.’
‘Where is he?’
Goldstein forced the palm of his hand across his forehead as if to drive out the throbbing ache. ‘He said he was waiting for a telephone call to be returned.’
Raub snapped, ‘Does he think the plane waits for him?’
‘He knows the time of the flight because I told him the time. He said he was waiting for a telephone call, then he had to make some calls.’
Raub revved the engine and exploded fumes into the frosted dawn air. ‘To whom?’
The ache needled his brain. He knew he had talked into the early morning, could not remember what he had talked of. He could remember lurching to his feet, and remember the realization that the Englishman had been ice sober. But he could not remember what he had said. Goldstein snarled, ‘Doktor Raub, I do not know because I did not ask. I just follow after that shit because that is what I am paid to do. He used his mobile phone, digital, so I am not able to check his calls.’
When Krause came, he did not apologize. Goldstein scrambled out into the dawn air to open the door for him, because he was paid to do so. Krause settled in the back of the car.
‘I cannot tell you, Fraulein, the names of the personalities involved, nor can I tell you the tactics they will use. What I do tell you, Fraulein, those personalities and their tactics are directed at one target. The target is Hauptman Dieter Krause.’
The authorities allowed her to wear her own clothes. Albert Perkins thought her older than himself by four or five years. It was difficult to be exact about her age because her complexion was washed out pallid from thirteen months in the cells. She sat stolid before him in a plain grey-green blouse and a plain grey-blue skirt and plain grey ankle socks inside canvas sandals.
‘What you should know, Fraulein, is that I seek specific information that will harm, damage, hurt Hauptman Dieter Krause. The damage to him may not come from you. Perhaps you will give me another name. I want you to believe Fraulein, that in this matter I will walk a long road.’
She was a grey mouse. They were always called the ‘grey mice’. She had been a secretary at the foreign ministry in Bonn. She would have been, in 1978, as plain and physically uninteresting as she was today. The grey mice had been in the foreign ministry and the defence ministry and the Chancellor’s office in Bonn, in the NATO offices and in the Supreme Headquarters, Allied Powers Europe, in Paris and Washington and, damn sure, in London. They were the spinsters, the plain, uninteresting women fearful of living out their lives alone. They were the women who believed love had gone by them. The grey mice were sought out by intelligence officers.
‘You would have been warned, Fraulein, as to the dangers of an association with an East German. But he didn’t come in those clothes, did he? Younger than you, good-looking, flattering and considerate. What was he? An academic, import-export? Doesn’t matter… He told you it was love. And after he’d done the love bit, he asked for those little pieces of unconnected information?
By screwing you, Fraulein, he would have advanced his career, he’d have been promoted. I aim to bury him, but I need help.’