For all those years, after the Wall had come down, the little grey mouse would have sat at her desk in the foreign ministry and wondered, as they all did, how long the secret would be kept. Had the ifie gone to Moscow? Had the file been sold on for hard currency to the Americans? Had the file stayed in the archive for the eventual and inevitable opening by the researchers? God, and the little grey mouse must have sweated, sweated in her heart and her mind and down between her legs. Six years of sweat, waiting for the BfV to come to her desk.
‘Last year, wasn’t it, Fraulein, that he turned up in Cologne and offered himself as a source? First he had to establish his credibility. Told them all about you. Closed court for the part when he testified against you, yes, Fraulein? After he’d testified, his new friends would have taken him for a damn good meal, and you were given ten years. You were a traitor, he was just carrying out the terms of his job description. You betrayed your country, he screwed you and talked of love, which was all part of a good day’s work. Life is unfair, Fraulein, and I’m giving you the chance to make life more fair.’
She spoke quietly.
Albert Perkins had heard that corruption was more widespread in the new greater Germany than ever before. He had slipped a thousand American dollars into the palm of the gaol’s assistant deputy director, arrangements made by the embassy staffer, after the boy, Goldstein, had finally spilled the necessary and been expelled into the night.
She spoke of the agent to whom she had been handed after Dieter Krause had gone back to Berlin, drunk, in her bed, boasting of his next posting, in the office of the minister at Normannen Strasse. She spoke of the second agent who had told her that Dieter Krause was too clever for his own good, too arrogant, was being sent to Rostock to kick his heels and scratch his arse.
He’d write a report on the new corruption, something for a wet winter day at Vauxhall Bridge Cross… After he left her, after the cell door shut on her, as he was escorted down the corridor, Albert Perkins made a note on his memory pad to have an embassy staffer send her a box of chocolates.
The cold was in him. He lay hunched with his knees up, and the voices were above him.
He was in the cemetery, the worst day and the worst night, a day of chill rain and a night of bitter sleet. Many times in many months he had walked by the cemetery. Once, an evening, he had taken the courage and gone into the cemetery and sat wet by the earth in darkness, he had slept… He had told Libby, insisted on it, that he was not to be mentioned in her will, demanded it of her. He had not married her for her wealth, he had married her for love. After the sickness and the treatment, the death and the funeral, he had walked past the cemetery then gone to find a hedge or a shed for sleep… The voices were above him, ‘A disgrace, Officer, a fit and healthy man, should be working – can’t have rubbish like that, Officer, sleeping in a graveyard, a place where people come in grief. Get him out of here, Officer, get that filthy creature out. Disgusting, Officer, when a grown man loses his sense of pride, sinks so low.’ The policeman had pulled him up. The women had watched him with contempt as he had been taken to the car, the policeman’s hand tight in his damp coat sleeve. He had been driven to the police station, had stood in front of the custody sergeant and been read the charge of vagrancy, and the senior partner had crossed the lobby with a chief inspector and recognized him.
‘There are four names. Four men were evicted by the Stasi from Rerik village. Hildegard explained it. They would have identified eye-witnesses, they would have destroyed them, then evicted them. Hildegard said it was what they did to people. I have those names. The names are everything. I get to those people, I get sworn statements, affidavits, I have evidence.’
He was on the wide chair of old and worn leather and a blanket had been laid over him. His movement alerted her.
‘You’ve been asleep for three hours,’ she said dismissively. ‘You snored and you smell. These are Hansie’s parents.’
She was at the table, wolfing alternately from bread on a plate and cereal in a bowl. He tried to smile at the elderly couple and he thought their faces were as old and worn as the leather of the chair. The room had been dark when he had come into it: they had been still asleep.
Tracy said, mouth full, ‘I told them that you’d come after me, had leeched on to me. I told them that I hadn’t thought out how to lose you yet, but I’d work on it.’
Josh crawled from the chair. He stood, stretched. The mother pointed to the food and he shook his head. She tried the coffee pot, and he nodded.
Tracy bored on, ‘They can’t ignore sworn statements, affidavits. However important the bastard is, they have to respond to evidence.’
He massaged the joints of his knees and his hips, and wondered how many times she had said it.
She had not convinced the old man, Hans Becker’s father: ‘You do not understand, there has to be will. There is no will in the new Germany to examine old crimes.’
The parents had lost a son, were victims of the past. He looked around the humble, sparse furnished room, and could not see anything that the present had brought them, still victims. He wondered how it would benefit them if they could go to the court and see a former Stasi officer tried, convicted and taken down. In a crappy world where there was no will then old victims, in the passing of time, were new victims.
He watched the mother. He thought she would have wanted to slap her old hand across Tracy Barnes’s mouth. She had been in their past lives, made the misery, gone, and come back.
‘They can’t buck the process of law, they can’t block evidence.’
He stood by the window. The frame needed paint. He saw the car turn into Saarbrucker Strasse, a big smart car, black, and it crawled up the street, as if the driver and his two passengers checked the numbers at the doors. It stopped in the street, opposite the window in which he stood.
‘You wait.’ Krause pushed up out of the car, slammed the door after him.
Raub stared ahead through the windscreen. He despised the East. Everything in the East was rotten. Half a century after the battle for Berlin, and still the stonework on Saarbrucker Strasse showed the damage of bomb shrapnel and artillery fragmentation. Maybe the whole East of the city should be flattened. Maybe it would have been better if the Wall had stayed up. Maybe…
‘What is he doing?’
Raub turned. He looked past Goldstein. Krause, the jewel, the one they smarmed to please, the bastard, had crossed the street and was at the door of the block, checking the names written with the bells.
‘He is doing what he is expert at… to warn, to threaten, to intimidate, to identify.’
‘Then we are involved. If we are involved then we are responsible.’
‘Only today, not after today.’
The life of Ernst Raub was well planned. There was no possibility of involvement hazarding the steady promotion climb that was so precious to him. He understood, because he was from a police family, the small division between legality and illegality, between involvement and clean hands. His grandfather, through involvement, was a failure – a policeman in Munich through the Nazi years, tainted with association, never promoted after 1945. His father, through involvement, was destroyed – a policeman in Munich with the marksmen’s group assigned to the shoot- out with the Palestinians at the Furstenfeldbruck airbase when they had lost the Israelis, never promoted after 1972. Raub had broken the hold of the family, gone to university, joined the BfV, stepped away from his family because to him they represented shame and failure.
‘There is nothing he can do here. And we have no responsibility, we are not involved, when he goes to Rostock…’
He saw Krause, through the misted window, press his finger on the bell.
The peal of the bell silenced her. The old man looked at the old woman.