‘When she first came it was to regular classes in the evenings. Her husband handled me – that’s how she would have known about me. No, she did not know that I informed to her husband. He would have sent her, and it started out as the regular classes, English literature. But she was a busy woman, and it soon had gotten that she couldn’t make all the classes, she had meetings half the night, half the evenings of the week, something with the FDGB down in the shipyard. She asked if she could come here, fit in one-to-one classes when she didn’t have meetings. She paid. She was working, her husband was a top cat, she wasn’t short of money. She paid me and she came here. About a month after she’d started coming here, because of the way her talk was, liberated, I went to another officer who had handled me when Krause was away, sort of signed up for him with a different code- name and a different life, and talked about her to him. It wasn’t a big deal, at least I didn’t think so.’
Perkins wore his coat. The bar on the fire was not lit. The grimed dirt in the apartment seemed worse when the sunlight splayed on it than it had the evening before. Probably it was good that the wretched little man smoked because the cigarettes were strong enough to wipe out more pungent smells.
‘You said what you would do for me. It was South Carolina where I was raised, near to Summerville, up the river from Charleston. It was a crappy little place. You know, where we lived half the community turned out to see me head off on the bus to Charleston and the military, and half of that half wouldn’t have known where Germany was. I hated that place for its ignorance. My father had a bronchitis problem, he won’t have lasted. I think my mother would still be there. There were two sisters I had, younger than me, and I think they’d still be there because people from that sort of place don’t go far. It would have been about the day after the Wall came down that I stopped hating that place. What could I do? I could get on a train to Berlin, and another train to Bonn, and I could walk into the embassy and tell the marine guard that I was AWOL, that I was a deserter. You said you’d speak for me. Did you mean that? You’d speak to Immigration and Defense and the FBI, would you?’
Perkins nodded gravely, with sincerity. His wife, Helen, said he was as trustworthy as a second-hand dealer in Ford cars.
‘It came out when we were talking English literature. I’d gotten her on to D. H. Lawrence. Well, she was a spiky woman. We’d gone through Women in Love, then Sons and Lovers. She was sort of giggly about it. I sent her home one evening, she’d good enough English, with Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Krause was away. She came back the next evening. Shit, her clothes were a mess, crumpled like she’d been roffing, creased like they’d been on the floor. She might have reckoned I was some sort of monk, or maybe I was a eunuch to her, maybe she reckoned me one of those castrated creatures she could spill it all out to. What I gathered, she and her guy had screwed all afternoon trying to do what Lawrence described. The next time she came I was at the window. She was dropped off from a Soviet military jeep and she wanted to know if Lady Chatterley was in Russian. How the hell would I know? I said it was in German, but that wasn’t any good – sort of slipped out that the guy didn’t read German. It became confidential. She’d talk to me like I was her goddamn shrink.’
Perkins paused by the window and considered the wording of the letters that would be sent to Immigration and Defense and the FBI. He thought, after they had read his letters, that Immigration and Defense and the FBI would shred them and leave the wretch where he was, to rot in a damp, cold room.
‘He was a major, commanded a small outfit down the coast, west, an unimportant little place. You said that you wanted me to make you laugh – the Major was rated by her husband as his best friend. Does that make you laugh? I told you it wasn’t love, or even romance. It was about sex and flicking. She told me the size of him and how often he managed it and how long he did it. I didn’t feel bad about the telling of it, what I said to the handler, but I didn’t feel good that they’d gotten to film it. They had a department that did covert filming… You’ll write those letters, I’ve your promise? I’m washed up here, I’m old and I want to go home. You gave your promise.’
He nodded again. He might not even send the letters that Immigration and Defense and the FBI would shred. He thought it would be harsher punishment for the wretch to sit inside the walls of the apartment with the dirt and the damp until the end of his days, suffering betrayal at first hand.
‘Does that make you laugh, Mr Perkins, knowing that Lady Chatterley was squashing down daisies with the gamekeeper who was Krause’s best friend? The gamekeeper was called Rykov, Pyotr Rykov.’
The guide was a small man, perky, enjoying the reciting of history.
‘It was built as a school for recruits to learn the use of the air-defence guns. The base was opened straight after Hitler had taken power. It was the principal Flakartillerieschule in all Germany.’
It was a desolate, quiet place. They had come through the outer gate with the guide, who escorted half a dozen of the first tourists of the year. Mantle had been told that it was possible to enter the base only with the guide. The trees grew wild with bramble thorns and long grass.
Tracy said, ‘It was so bloody important to get in here that they didn’t care a shit if Hansie was killed. Now it’s just for tourists to have a laugh at. He waited till it was dark – he’d brought a little inflatable in the car, the sort that kids use on the lakes in Berlin, with a little bloody wooden paddle. He didn’t know what defences there were, whether they had infra-red. He went off the beach back there. I saw him go into the sea, I blew him a kiss and waved until I couldn’t see him any more. There wasn’t a man about, not a dog. He was going to go three hundred yards out and then paddle for a mile, it was a right foul night. The planes came over, then there was the first shot, then there were the flares.’
‘Sixty years ago, on the twenty-sixth of September nineteen thirty-seven, Adolf Hitler came to the Flakartillerieschule and was accompanied by the Duce, Benito Mussolini. They inspected an honour guard and they watched a display of the firing of the air-defence guns.’
They walked behind the guide and his small party, and slowly separated themselves from the group. Every window in every building was smashed. All around was the wreckage of cannibalized trucks rusted from the weather off the sea. The trees grew around a watch-tower where a sentry, that night, would have peered out into the spitting wind. She pointed, for him, towards the low-set concrete bunker where the radar dishes that controlled the missiles had been, and beyond the bunker was the brightness of the Baltic sea. It was criminal, he thought, to have sent the boy, as criminal as his murder.
‘On the second of May nineteen forty-five, the base at Wustrow was occupied by the troops of the Roten Armee. There were two and a half thousand men here with air-defence capabffity, also a small naval force, also aircraft, also a tank unit..
Tracy said, ‘Can you imagine it, what it was like for him? He was blocked from the dinghy and bloody running. Flares going up, shooting, sirens going. Couldn’t go back towards the open sea, had to cross the base. Blundering through the base and troops spilling out from the barracks huts. They had dogs, I heard them. He was running blind.’
They walked on the potholed tarmac of the roads through the base. Cats followed them, hissing and snarling and running on their bellies, the cats of the Soviet troops that had been abandoned so many years before and that now ran wild. He thought of the work he had done in I Corps, checking hazy telephoto pictures and satellite images, poring over Red Army magazines, all useless work when set against the chance to put Humlnt into the heart of a base with radar, missiles and tanks. They had played God, those who had sent him.