‘What confuses me, Mr Perkins, you warned him and you spelled out the dangers of the course he was following.’
‘How is that confusing, young fellow?’
‘Frankly, Mr Perkins, I don’t see what more you could have done to persuade him to pack up and go home.’
‘Are you so very naive?’
‘The policy objective, Mr Perkins, is fulfilled by him going, but you were telling him to quit, walk away.’
‘That’s the nature of the beast. The beast is embittered, contrary, hostile. You tell the beast to go back and he will go forward, tell him to go right and he will go left, tell him the colour is black and he will say it is white. Tell him not to go…’
‘Then you manipulate him?’
‘Quite right. You can always get an idiot to dance like a marionette. Part of the job is jerking the strings, you’ll learn that
He’s predictable. But you’re wrong to focus on old Mantle. It’s the young woman who’s interesting.’
‘Is it real, the danger?’
‘Oh, yes, very real. As real as the minimal enthusiasm there will be from our friends and allies to accept evidence unless it’s served up cordon bleu. What have they done about the Stasi crimes? Listen, Erich Mielke was minister for state security for more than forty years, responsible for the psychological destruction of thousands of lives, responsible for the taking of hundreds of lives, and he was given six years’ imprisonment for killing two policemen at an anti-Nazi demonstration in nineteen thirty-one, believe it. Nothing, for their convenience, in his time as head of that despicable organization, was deemed criminal so they raked back sixty-six years, a farce. Hans Modrow was the last Communist prime minister, sat for years at the Politburo meetings that legalized repression, and his only crime was falsifying voting results, suspended sentence. A Stasi major presented the Carlos terrorist group with the bomb detonated at the Maison de France in West Berlin, three deaths, three persons murdered, as a direct result, and he was given six years, out by now. A hundred victims shot trying to scale the Wall, two border guards given decent sentences for firing at point-blank range on unarmed youngsters, nine suspended sentences so they walked free, thirteen acquitted. There was murder, unpunished, assassination squads roaming abroad and unpunished, wholesale theft of monies sent to relatives living in the East, unpunished, torture in the Stasi cells, unpunished. They don’t want to know who was guilty, they want it forgotten. If she is awkward and if she threatens, then it gets dangerous.’
He left the boy from kindergarten at the outer door of the hotel. He wouldn’t see him in the morning, would be off early. He wanted to walk around Savignyplatz, to be on his own, to sit in a cafe late in the evening and hear the talk around him, as he had walked and sat long ago when Berlin had belonged to him.
In his taxi, the ‘Free’ light off, Ulf Fischer watched the forecourt of the Rostock Hauptbcihnhof.
Twice, passengers off the trains had sworn at him because he would not take them. It was a hard life, driving a taxi in Rostock, and it hurt to turn away money. It was not his own taxi, and when he had paid for its hire, and the hire of the radio, and the fuel and the insurance, there was little enough left at the end of each week. He was a warm man, though, not greatly intelligent but cheerful. Once or twice a month, he was a professional mourner. The ethic of the family had broken down in the new Germany – money ruled, old people died alone. They needed, the old-and-alone dead, a small show of affection at their funeral. He made an oration at such people’s funerals, spoke well of them when no one else did. It brought a little more money into his life – as did the earnings of his wife, who went five evenings a week to clean trains at the Hauptbahnhof – but too little to hold the love of their two sons. His boys were beyond his control, without discipline, were in love with the American culture. In his plodding way, the way that he had learned from twenty-seven years in the MfS, he tried to merge into the new life, but he had wept the night that the mob had broken into the Rostock barracks building.
He had been the driver for Hauptman Dieter Krause. On the night of 21 November 1988, he had driven the Hauptman to Rerik, at panic speed. He had been the driver and confidant of Dieter Krause, he had done shopping for Eva Krause when her work at the shipyard did not allow her time and when the Hauptman was tied to his desk, he had been like an uncle to the little child, Christina. That night, his boot had been across the throat of the kid, the spy, to steady the head and make it an easier shot for the Hauptman. He had last seen Hauptman Krause in Rostock nine months before, and the Hauptman had walked past him and not seemed to recognize him, but there must have been some reason for it.
He had been at the station since the late afternoon, and all through the evening. He knew the times of the trains arriving from Berlin/Lichtenberg, and when each train was due he left his taxi and went to stand at the steps to the tunnel from the platform so that he could see the faces that passed him. He had been given a good description of the face that he watched for. Hauptman Krause had always been careful with detail. There would be a man with her, and Hauptman Krause had told him that the man would be about 1.85 metres tall and might weigh about 90 kilos. The Hauptman had found the man’s coat and made his estimates from it. It was English made. Later, after the last train had come, if the young woman and the man were not on the train, he would go to the meeting that the Hauptman had called. He still did not understand why the Hauptman had walked past him those months before on Lange Strasse.
There was a rap on the passenger window.
He saw the skinny, poor face of Unterleutnant Siehi. He unlocked the door for the Unterleutnant to join him. It was necessary, in these days, to lock the taxi’s doors while it was parked at the kerb, because of the violence of the new bastard undisciplined skinheads of the city. They shook hands formally. In the taxi, the Linterleutnant ate a sausage with chill from a small polystyrene tray with a plastic fork. It was not possible for Ulf Fischer, the Feidwebel, to tell Josef Siehl, the Unterleutnant, that he did not permit food to be eaten in his taxi. The next train from Berlin would be arriving in six minutes, and two hours after that the last train of the night would arrive.
She slept.
The train clattered north in the darkness. They were alone in the compartment. Ahead, in other compartments, were the Scouts with their adults, singing lilting songs in treble voices. Behind them the compartments were used by drab elderly people, their small cheap suitcases on the floor by their feet. He had the window blind up, and when the train slowed, the light from the carriage spewed over the snow-specked ground beside the track.
She slept, so peaceful, so gentle, her shoes kicked off, her feet on the seat and the weight of her body against the carriage wall.
The light showed him the frozen ice at the rim of the lakes beside the track and once he caught the eyes of a deer startled by the approach of the train. They went through the small towns and villages where there were illuminated advertising hoardings for new cars and new supermarkets and new soft drinks from America. They went past an old barracks of the Soviet Army, light and shadow from the train meandering over the vandalized buildings where once the big tanks had been serviced. It was Mantle’s nature to look out over the barracks. In the days when he had been stationed in Germany, days that were twenty years gone, on a few occasions he had been tasked to take the British military train from Helmstedt to Berlin. Every time it ran, most days of the week, an I Corps sergeant had travelled on it. From the West, across the Soviet zone, to West Berlin. An hour in West Berlin, then back on the train across the Soviet zone, through Potsdam and Brandenberg and Genthin and Magdeburg, peering over the walls and through the trees at Soviet camps, at tanks, at artillery, trying to spot cap badges that would say a new unit had arrived. Pitiful, small beer. He now rated the work of I Corps, scratching for information on the military enemy hidden behind the great fence of wire, mines and watch-towers, as pathetic.