He used to tell his wife, when he came home in the evening from August-Bebel Strasse, each time that the Hauptman praised him.
He had the route, not the direct way, down the E22, the main road, through Bad Doberan and Kropelin. On the map he had marked the minor roads through the villages skirting the two towns and then coming to Rerik from the south, using Neubukow as the crossing point over the E22. Slower roads and a greater distance, but safe. Painstakingly, using a sliver of rolled paper, he measured the distance on the minor roads, so that he would know how long the journey would take. It had to be thought through. It was important to know the detail. He had telephoned for a hire car, using the trade directory, not a company from the centre but a small business in the Sudstadt, and he would pay extra and the car would be delivered to the pension.
When he was finished, Josh folded away the map and went methodically through his room, through the pockets of his clothes, through his bag. He left nothing that identified him. With his nail scissors from the wash-bag he cut out the label tabs in English on every item that would be left in the room. He satisfied himself. When he brought her back he would do the same in her room, bully her into allowing him to destroy her identity. His telephone rang, his hire car was downstairs. He checked the money in his wallet. It was later than he had hoped to be. She would have longer to walk on her beach and her breakwater.
The breakwater ran two hundred metres into the sea.
The base of it was huge quarried rocks, some as big as a saloon car, cut rough and jagged edged. To the west was the sand beach, scattered with debris seaweed, ice and snow packed solid at the tideline. To the east was the channel for the fishing boats of Warnemunde, and the river passage running the few kilometres to Rostock and the shipyards.
More snow, more ice had gathered in the rocks of the breakwater. It would melt in the next month, but the bitter Baltic wind and the harsh frost nights would keep it in place for the next few weeks.
There was a concrete walkway on top of the rocks and a single strand of metal tubing made a barrier to save the unwary from being blown by the gale, or slipping on the ice, and falling onto the rocks, onto the snow and ice, into the pounding sea that smashed on the breakwater.
At the end was a squat lighthouse, paint peeled by the force of the winter’s sea spray, daubed with the names of the summer’s tourists. There was no fence around the base of the lighthouse, only a low wall less than half a metre in height. Below it the rocks fell sheer to the foaming motion of the water.
The sleet in the wind had driven visitors from the breakwater. Years ago, before the day of ‘reassociation’, before the day that the crowd had pushed and elbowed their way into the headquarters of the Staatssicherheitsdienst on August-Bebel Strasse, there had always been people standing on the breakwater, whatever the weather, huddled close to the curved wall of the lighthouse, to watch the big ferries sail for Sweden, Denmark, Norway, and to dream.
The low cloud, carrying the stinging sleet, made a short, grey horizon.
The breakwater and the base of the lighthouse were deserted, empty, but for one small splash of colour.
They stood at the south end of the breakwater, bent forward against the wind. They narrowed their eyes against the driven sleet.
Fischer said, ‘We should wait for him, we should not take action until he is here.’
Peters jabbed a finger into the taxi driver’s arm. ‘We don’t wait for Krause – you guarantee me a better place and a better time, do you? Can you?’
The year after the anti-Fascist barrier had come down, in the Sicilian town of Agrigento, Gunther Peters had been given advice by an old man with a weathered walnut face. Never, in a matter of importance, hesitate in the taking of action. He had accepted the advice, and the proof was in his wealth held in numbered accounts in Lichtenstein and in the British-administered Channel Islands, in Gibraltar, in the investment companies based on the Caymans, and none of that wealth was flaunted. He moved money for the Sicilians. He moved cars, stolen in Germany, for the Russians and the Ukrainians. He moved weapons, bought at a knock-down price in Russia, for the Chechens, the Kurds and the Palestinians. He forswore a top-of-the-range car, gold necklaces and gold bracelets, a penthouse apartment in one of the new blocks in Leipzig, following more of the advice of the man from Agrigento. It was his belief that he figured on no police computer. On the night of 21 November 1988, clearing his desk, about to go to his home, Hauptman Krause had seen him. Krause, running, had seen him, shouted, given the order. He had been in the car before he had even known the cause of the emergency. It was he who had first caught up with the kid, the spy, grabbed him and flung him down to the ground and held him in the moment after the kid, the spy, had lashed with a boot into the balls of the Hauptman. He had his freedom to lose, and his anonymity, and the wealth that he did not use, and his power.
Two hundred metres from them, away up the length of the deserted breakwater, was the young woman.
Peters jabbed again with his finger. ‘You are chicken shit. I do it myself.’
He went forward. Hoffmann ran, bent against the wind, to be alongside Peters. The young woman sat on the low wall at the base of the lighthouse and her legs were above the foam of the sea. Siehl, his hand protecting his face from the sleet, hurried to catch them. The young woman threw, one at a time, the bright flowers into the rising, falling, pounding spray below her feet. Fischer looked a last time behind him, as if hoping to see the Hauptman, and scurried to reach them. The young woman, above the rocks, above the sea, gazed down and did not look up.
They made a line and walked with purpose towards the lighthouse, and the spray rose around them from the rocks and the ice.
He came to the start of the breakwater. He peered the length of it, searched for her.
He had driven from Rostock, a fast four-lane road, bypassed the housing blocks on flat, windscaped ground, and the shipyards with the idle cranes.
He had checked the beach, looked as far as he could see, and the sleet in the wind had dampened his trousers and soaked his shoes.
He blinked. She was a small, blurred figure. He saw her and the colour of her flowers. She would be wet through because she was a lunatic to have gone in that weather to the end of the breakwater. He was old enough to be her father, feeling the responsibility of a parent for a child. He began to walk briskly, into the sleet wind, along the breakwater. Half-way, the spray wall climbed and fell, and he was aware of the men.
Josh saw four men.
They made a line across the width of the breakwater’s pathway. They were in front of him, and he had not noticed them, only her. It was where she had been with the boy, giving her love, frightened, kissing the boy and holding him. He saw them, the two of them, loving and kissing and holding. He seemed to see the boy, clear images, rattling through as if shown on a fast- changing projector, swimming and bleeding and staying afloat, sinking and rising again, and hands reaching for him from over the side of a small trawler.
Four men moving forward, striding in step. It was a cordon line. There could be only one purpose for it. Either side of them was deep water, and rocks and ice with snow. Holy Christ… His old, slow, numbed mind churned. So bloody obvious. He started to run.