She did not seem to see them. She was looking down into the breaking waves at her flowers.
He ran, and the wind caught him. The sleet cut at his face and blinded him, the spray fell on him and drenched him. He slipped as he ran, legs splayed by an iced footfall, and he fell, his trouser knee ripped. He pushed himself up and ran again.
They were across the breakwater’s pathway and closing on her. He could not have shouted to her, not while he ran and sucked for breath. He saw the sea, rising and falling and hostile, and the rocks, hard and jagged and cruel. The four men would have turned if they had heard him, but he came into the wind and the sleet and the crash sound of the sea on the rocks.
Josh ran. As he ran he ripped down the zipper of his coat, which billowed out, a sail against the wind and the sleet, slowed him. He sobbed for breath. He reached with cold dead fingers inside his jacket, to the inner pocket. It was the only fucking answer in his head. He was near to them and they were unaware of him.
He dragged the gold-plate fountain pen from the inner pocket, the pen that Libby had given him, their last Christmas, held it in his fist. He could see the backs of their necks.
She looked down at the sea. There was one flower left in her hand and she threw it to a wave crest.
He came behind them. He chose the one with the black hair falling on the collar of his coat, the one with the longest hair. He grabbed it. He rammed the metal, gold-plated end of the pen against the nape of the man’s neck, pulled him back, in one movement. The line broke, they were turning on him, swinging to him. He was behind the man. They could not see the end of the pen, cold metal, against the man’s neck.
Josh shouted, good German, ‘Get back or I shoot. I shoot to kill.’ He felt the tremble-shiver of the man’s fear. The three faced him. He must dominate and fast. He must use the shock of the three and the fear of the one.
He hissed, ‘Tell them, bastard, they back off or I shoot. Tell them.’
She was forty paces from him. She stared at him, at the men. He yelled against the wind, fought for breath for his voice: ‘Tracy, come to me. Come on.’
The man croaked, pleaded, to the three.
‘I shoot, bastard, I shoot through your fucking spine.’
One, the youngest, with a cold face, thin lips, took a half pace forward. The man Josh held shook and cried, and the two older men grabbed the youngest, held each of his arms.
Josh shouted at the wind, at the spray, at the sleet, at the cloud where it merged with the wave caps behind her: ‘Come to me, Tracy. Move!’
God, and she was so bloody slow, pushing herself up as if she did not understand.
He hissed again, into the ear of the man he held. ‘They interfere with her, they stop her, you are dead. Tell them.’
The youngest was trying to break free and his hands flailed towards the inside of his coat. The two older men hung grimly to his arms. She reached them.
‘Come on past. Then run.’
She went by them, past him and the man he held.
‘Run.’ He shouted again, at the three: ‘Stay your ground, stand where you are.’
Josh backed away, hanging on to the hair, pressing the metal end of the pen deep into the flesh, smelling the lotion on the man’s body, and the scent of sweat.
He backed, in steady movements, to prove control, twenty-five, thirty metres from them. There was only the rail beside them and then the rocks, the ice and the sea. He thought the man’s legs gave out on him and he had to hold him up by the hair. The man screamed. He manoeuvred him to the side of the pathway, and pitched him over the rail. Over the rail and onto the rock. His hand caught at a rock edge and Josh stamped hard, frozen sodden shoe, on it. The man slipped on the rock, on the ice, towards the water.
Josh ran until he caught her and grabbed her arm. He turned once. They were on the rocks, three of them, holding hands to make a chain, trying to pull the man back from the sea and the spray.
He ran with her until the breath died in him.
Krause had come.
Hoffmann was soaked, incoherent. ‘He would have shot me. Peters would have had him shoot me.’
Fischer, shaking, blurted, ‘I said that we should wait for you.’
Krause had gazed at the waves and the rocks, through the sleet, and at the small colour points of flowers in the water.
Siehl, shivering, whispering: ‘There was nothing we could do, we did the best that was possible.’
Peters, defiant, storming: ‘We had the chance. If through losing the chance it goes against us, then remember it was me who was prevented from taking the chance.’
Krause felt the cold strip his flesh and walked back up the pathway of the breakwater.
‘You were aged twenty, serving in a signals unit based in Heidelberg. It was forty years ago. You were that rare American who reckoned he had principles. You defected, took the big step and crossed the line, and you never knew how to retrace the step.’
Albert Perkins had driven into the Toitenwinkel district. The blocks of homes, with stained and weathered concrete outer walls, were sandwiched between the Autobahn and the railway line on one side, and bog marsh on the other. The damp was on the outer and inner walls of the stairway. The apartment, also wet, was a bedroom, a sitting room with a kitchen corner, a bathroom where he couldn’t have swung a cat with an outstretched arm. He had found the American. He had been told that the American would amuse him.
‘Famous for fifteen minutes, and that was forty years ago. One news conference and photocall. One debrief where you coughed out all you knew, and that was not much because a private first class, conscript, twenty years old, knew sweet damn all of anything classified that mattered. You’d have become like those Catholic Church converts, so sincere, so fervent and so boring. You embraced this awful quasi country like it was God’s gift to social engineering.’
There was no sign of a woman in the apartment on the sixth floor. The room was bare, bleak. The ashtrays were filled. There were books on the table, on shelves, on the floor.
‘It’s one thing to believe at the age of twenty in the interests of world peace being best served by the balance of military power, but at the age of twenty years plus fifteen minutes they’d squeezed out everything you knew about signals in Heidelberg. You had to start to make a new life here. Bright lad, graduate material if you’d been able to go home, but you couldn’t. Educated here, yes? Learned German, learned Russian, became more native than the natives. You were given a teaching post at the university in Rostock. What did you teach – English literature, American history? Found a little place, and convinced yourself you were a champion of peace, and that two Germanys would last forever.’
Albert Perkins had kept his coat on. The American sat in an old armchair. He had a small body. His legs seemed scrawny thin in his shapeless grey trousers. He hunched his shoulders forward and rubbed his hands incessantly as if that were the way to warm them. His head was big, the scalp shaven, and the veins ran riot patterns in his cheeks. He had thick pebble spectacles and one arm was held to the lens frame by Elastoplast. He smoked acrid cigarettes. Perkins bored on, never hurried himself to get to the point.
‘I expect you were quite a celebrity in the common room at the university – an American, gave the department a little international status, they’d have hung on your words. And you had the ideology, you believed in the rotten little neo-state. Natural step, wasn’t it, to inform on your academic colleagues? Not for money, not for privilege, not for power, but because you believed, in sincerity, in the need to protect the state from Fascist renewal. You’d have informed on anyone idiot enough to trust you, from the head of department to junior staff, from full-time students to part-time students. You had your codenames and your contact men in August-Bebel Strasse and the safe houses where you’d go, once a week or once a month, for the debriefs. Eva Krause, wife of Hauptman Dieter Krause, Stasi officer, was a part-time student.’