They climbed the stairs, up the threadbare carpet. The smell of cabbage and sausage was replaced by the must of stale damp. It was colder on the stairs than at the reception desk. They stood in the corridor on the second floor in the low light and he gave her the second key.
‘Is it off and running in the morning, Mr Mantle?’
‘We don’t run anywhere, at any time. We plan. We take it slowly. Step by step, so there are no surprises. I need to think it through.’
‘Goodnight, Mr Mantle.’
He needed to sleep and, in the morning, he needed to think… and in the morning he needed to tell her that he was Josh and not Mr Mantle. So damn tired…
‘Goodnight, Tracy.’
He had been the first to reach the cafe. Krause had taken a seat in an alcove where he could view the door. They drifted in from Augusten Strasse. He stood, correctly, for each of them, for the taxi driver who came with the building-site security guard, for the criminal, the property developer. The woman who now owned the cafe had once managed the canteen in the building on August-Bebel Strasse, she would once have run to take the orders of Hauptman Krause and Leutnant Hoffmann, even Siehi, Fischer and Peters. She had closed the cafe, kicked out her customers. She had put beer on the table and gone to her kitchen area.
Hoffmann said, ‘I can be away for two days. Too much work for me to be away longer.’
‘I am building a new life.’ Fischer shrugged. ‘In three years I hope to have my own taxi, but I have to work.’
Peters had a meeting in Warsaw the day after tomorrow.
Siehl whined that if he were not back by tomorrow night then he would lose his job, and did the Hauptman know how hard it was to find work in Berlin?
Krause wondered if they had walked past the old building before coming to the cafe and looked for the darkened windows above August-Bebel Strasse that had been theirs, remembering how they had walked with pride, anonymous, through the big door. He wondered if they had glanced down at the windows flush with the pavement behind which had been the interrogation rooms.
‘Can I tell you, my friends, the reality? You stay, we all stay, until the matter is completed, until the problem is finished with. We have one week. It is necessary for it to be finished in one week. If you do not stay, you will not be doing anything from a cell in the Moabit gaol… That, my friends, is reality.’
‘Because of one girl, height a metre sixty, weight sixty kilos. Not to forget the russet hair. It is just one girl. Easy to recognize her. Ask her to hold up her hands, look at her fingernails, scrape under fingernails for the skin of Hauptman Krause.’ Peters led their laughter.
‘It is amusing? It is the big joke? It is funny? We are together, as at Rerik we were together.’
Hoffmann hesitated. ‘I didn’t kill him.’
Siehl flushed. ‘You killed him and we only obeyed your orders.’
‘So, let me tell you more of reality. The kid, the spy, was chased. Who chased him? He was caught, felled. Who caught him? On the ground, he was kicked. Who kicked him? He was kept still on the ground by a boot across his throat. Who wore the boot? He was taken back to the boat. Who dragged him? He was weighted, he was put into the water. Who lifted him over the side of the boat? More of reality, it would be a common charge. It would be an accusation of conspiracy to murder. We were together at Rerik. If we fail we will be together in the gaol at Moabit. Do you now believe?’
Fischer said, loyal, ‘We did our duty. Again we will do our duty, whatever is necessary.’
He told them where they should watch in the city, what times and at what places, and repeated his description of the young woman. He took the Makharov pistols from his attache case, each still wrapped in the plastic bags, and passed them over the table, with ammunition and magazines. He handed them the mobile telephones he had hired in the afternoon and had them each write down the numbers. He passed a file to each of them – Jorg Brandt’s to Hoffmann, Heinz Gerber’s to Siehl, Artur Schwarz’s to Fischer, and Willi Muller’s he slipped between the beer glasses to Peters. For each of them there was a responsibffity. He laid his hand, palm down, on the table. Hoffmann’s covered his. Siehl’s covered Hoffmann’s. Fischer’s covered Siehl’s. Peters’ covered Fischer’s. He felt the weight of their hands on his.
They went their ways.
He walked in the shadowed streets towards his car.
He could see the body of the boy, moving in currents of water, held by the weighted pots, flowing against the sand bottom of the Salzhaff. There were crabs crawling at the eyes of the boy, and molluscs fastened to his lips. Eels writhed on the legs and arms. For six nights now he had seen the body and heard the laughter of the boy, mocking and taunting.
He ran, as if when in his car he would no longer see the boy.
Josh slept. A ragged, tossing, restless sleep. He was too tired to dream.
Chapter Nine
The banging split his mind. He hadn’t dreamed. He was dead to the world. He jerked, like a convulsion. The sheet and the two blankets came off his body, along with the coat that had been on top of them. The banging belted at the door.
‘Are you in there, or aren’t you?’
He yawned, gulped. The cold of the room came around him. Bright, brittle sunlight streamed through the thin material of the curtains. He shivered. There was no heating in the room. He blinked, tried to focus his eyes, looked at his watch.
‘If you’re there, then bloody well say so.’
It was past ten o’clock. God, he’d slept nine hours, dead, without a dream. He had been able to do without sleep in Ashford or Osnabruck, when he’d worked the night shifts merging into the day shifts at the Mansoura prison in Aden… but Josh Mantle was fifty-four years old and he had missed a whole night’s sleep on the step beside the door at Saarbrucker Strasse. He checked that he was decent, that he wasn’t hanging out of his pyjama trousers, had his coat wrapped tight around him. He turned the key.
She stood in the corridor. She looked at him, made him feel so feeble. She looked from his unshaven face to his coat tight around him, to his waist, to the pyjamas and down to his bare feet.
She grimaced. ‘Christ, that’s a pretty sight.’
‘I’m sorry, I overslept.’
‘Old for it, are you? Need your sleep, do you?’
He bit his lip. ‘I apologize. I’ve slept three hours longer than I intended.’
‘I’ve been sitting in that damp, grotty, freezing bloody room and waiting. What you’ve done, sir,’ she sneered on the word, ‘is bugger up the day, don’t you know.’
‘I said that I was sorry.’ She was dressed in her heavy walking shoes and jeans, the thick sweater and the new anorak. He stood aside so that she could come into the room. He went, dazed, across the room and moved his clothes from the one wooden chair. ‘Anyway, it doesn’t matter, I hadn’t intended that we’d do much.’
‘That’s good, “intended”. That’s bloody rich. “I hadn’t intended” – great, terrific!’ She had mimicked his words in a west London whine, the drawl of an officer thrown in. ‘You’re taking a bloody liberty.’
‘What I was trying to say…‘ He stood in the centre of the room, clothes of two days’ wear in hand. ‘I was trying to say that I hadn’t intended we’d do much today – get everything in place, think through…’
Her face lit, mock amazement, savage. ‘You have a misapprehension, sir. Do you think I came out here, one hope in my mind, that Mr Mantle would come running after me? Mr Mantle, bloody white armour, shining, and necessary to me? Can’t do it without Mr bloody Mantle, after he’s had his sleep.’
He said, ‘It’s right to plan, take time over it, plan routes and schedules. You work it out, don’t just pitch in, you weigh the options. We plan today, work it through, we go to Rerik tomorrow. Have to have decent maps, have to know what we’re doing.’