He had drained the excitement from Tracy, as if she recognized that he did not trust her with confidences. He could have kicked himself, so savagely, for having let his guard slip, for having broken her mood of child’s happiness.
She no longer held his hand and sulked beside him.
He took her to the hippopotamus house. The keeper eyed them, as if they were too late in the afternoon. The heat in the glass-sided house brought out the sweat in them. The creatures were in a wide pool topped with green slime and the stench of their excrement was sucked to his nose. There were limp-leafed plants in tubs beside the pool, to give it a fraudulent impression of African water, where he had been with Libby before the treatment started, and when they had known it was short time, borrowed time.
‘You’d better tell me,’ she said. ‘What’s my bloody name?’
It was ten years since he had been in the zoo park. He’d assumed that the hippopotamus was dead and commemorated.
‘I’m sorry, I was married then. I went with my wife to Africa, just once. I’m sorry that I was foul with you. The memory hurts..
She said, sour, ‘Don’t mind me. I’m only a bloody clerk.’
He pointed to the tooth. It was in a cabinet on the wall. An immense curving tooth was all that commemorated the animal.
He smiled, weak. ‘More history, Tracy. Don’t interrupt me, I’m not in the mood. I wanted somewhere good for you while we used time. The history. The zoo park was one of the last battlegrounds for Berlin in nineteen forty-five. It was the final line protecting the bunker where Hitler was. There were young guys in trenches, kids, fighting till they’d no more ammunition. There had been bombing as well, but the real killing was in the close- quarters fighting. There were five thousand creatures when the battle started, and ninety-one still alive when the final line broke. There was this big hippopotamus, monstrously big – he weighed several tons. When the shooting stopped and the smoke cleared, he came up to the surface of his pool. All through the battle he’d been down at the bottom in the mud. He was starved, thin, if you can imagine it. He was called Knautschke. He was a survivor. He stayed down in the mud, underwater, while there was all the shit and chaos up above. He became famous, a symbol of the spirit of isolated Berlin. He waited for the right time, the good time, then he came up from the mud…’
She pulled a face, mock grotesque. ‘I’m Knautschke?’
‘Right.’
‘I’m a big hideous bastard with a tooth a foot long, stinking of shit and mud, with a mouth you’d drive a bus into? Is there any more history?’
‘No.’
‘Can we go to Rostock now?’
‘Yes.’
A wizened little man, with a cat that stank on his lap, in an uncleaned room, faced Albert Perkins.
‘A thousand American dollars, yes? You have to understand, Doktor Perkins, that these are hard times for persons such as myself. I am an expert on matters of security, on the gaining and analysis of information, on the administration of any large corporate body – I cannot find work, Doktor Perkins. You would imagine that a person with my skills would not face a problem of poverty. Many of my illustrious colleagues, they have not faced a problem as I have, but they did not operate from inside the personal office of the minister. I think I am a very few years older than yourself, Doktor Perkins, but I am in the graveyard of life. You hear much talk of victims of the old regime. I myself am a victim. You agree, a thousand American dollars? I thank you, Doktor Perkins. I believe you are a very sympathetic and understanding gentleman. Cash, yes?
‘Hauptman Dieter Krause? It is right that you should know why I talk of him, not only because you pay me one thousand American dollars in cash, why I talk frankly of him. I had no feeling for that woman, she was a fuck, she was information, it was mechanical, it was a good source. But, believe me, I refused the offer to go to Bonn and give evidence against her. They came here, the supercilious pigs of the BfV, to ask that I travel to Bonn as a state witness. I refused them. I have my pride. My pride told me that, by expertise, we had destroyed the security of the West’s government. To us, they were donkeys, rubbish, quite lacking in the imagination necessary for intelligence officers. They wanted me to help to clear their garbage, and I refused. Krause offered himself, named the woman, sent her to prison, to ingratiate himself. The killing was on the twenty-first of November nineteen eighty-eight, Doktor Perkins. I have a very clear memory for dates and places and situations.
‘I was the personal assistant to the minister, I was in his office in Haus 1 at Normannen Strasse. The report had reached Mielke when he arrived at his desk the following morning. A spy intercepted and killed, and no opportunity for questioning the spy. Krause was summoned to Berlin. He came that afternoon. He was an arrogant bastard, but not when I met him in the corridor outside the minister’s office. I can picture him. I walked him through the outer offices, to the presence of Erich Mielke and I thought he might break his bladder on the carpet.
‘The old man saw him, and told him that he was stupid enough, if he killed a spy before questioning, to push his prick up his own arse. He cringed in front of Mielke’s desk and I thought he might cry… You would want to know, there were four men with him when he killed the spy. They were Leutnant Hoffman and Unterleutnant Siehl and Feidwebel Fischer and Feldwebel Peters… He told his story and he was dismissed by Mielke and I thought he might run clean out of the old man’s office. He was a suspicious old goat, Mielke, he demanded to know more of Krause. Had he killed the spy through incompetence, or killed him before he could be questioned? That was the way old Mielke’s mind worked. He had me examine the file on Krause. There was a particular aspect of the file, gone now, I am sure – Krause was here in the last hours, in Berlin, with many others doing the same work, cleaning their files – and the ifie dealt with the IMs of Krause. I direct you towards one Inoffizielle Mitarbeiter, who had a position at the university in Rostock. He reported to Krause on his academic colleagues. To another officer, he reported on Hauptman Krause’s wife, was given for that work a different codename, and Krause would not have known of that file. I see you smile, Doktor Perkins. We were very thorough. We were the best… I shall write you the name of that TM. He will still be there, he cannot leave the city. If you want amusement at the expense of Hauptman Krause, and I think you would be most amused, then you should go to see that man and hear about Krause’s wife when you travel to Rostock.’
The thin hands grasped the banknotes, the fingers flicked them and counted. The pen was given him, the receipt for a thousand American dollars in cash was already made out, and he signed for it.
Josh had bought her the food, a takeaway burger and fries. Tracy had paid for the taxi in the bloody shivering cold, on the pavement outside the station.
When she had eaten the food on the street in the old west of the city, when they had waved down the taxi, when the taxi had dropped them at Berlin/Lichtenberg, Josh had checked they were not followed, or watched.
They joined the queue at the ticket counter.
He parked the car in a side street, two hundred metres from the station. He snapped his fingers for Rogers to walk beside him.
‘Just a few things that you should take on board, young fellow. This isn’t the Great Game. Don’t expect to spend your life creeping up the Beka’a Valley, or cuddling with Yemeni tribesmen. It’s idiots, not us, who do the graft. We send them off through the wire, across frontiers and through the mines. We don’t go sentimental, we don’t get involved. We just give the idiots a good push and send them on their way. We use them indiscriminately against friends and enemies, if you can tell the difference. If they want paying we pay them, if they want flattery we flatter them, if they want kicking we kick them. They are idiots and they are workhorses and we use them to move us a little closer, usually a fractional step, towards a successful conclusion of policy. What you have to remember, young man, the greater Germany is the most stable, wealthy, sophisticated, politically democratic country in Europe, but that is only the surface spectrum. Underneath, where the idiots go, it is as dangerous to them as Beirut in the old days. These idiots, tonight, are taking a train into man-trap country. We don’t cry tears for them if they lose, we walk away. If they lose we start again, look for other idiots. I didn’t ask them to step into man-trap country, it’s their decision, but I’ll damn sure take advantage of that decision. That’s the way it is and don’t ever forget it.’