The pastor took Tracy’s hand and ducked his head, chin against his chest. His eyes were closed. The quiet was all around them.
Tracy let his hand fall free. ‘Thank you.’
‘Let me tell you, if a man is sentenced to death then he has an hour, a day, a week, to gather his integrity. If a man is sentenced to prison then he has a month, a year, to find a true dignity. Where is the integrity and true dignity of a man denounced as a paedophile, accused as a thief, rumoured as an informer against his wife, suffering shame for his father and himself? They were more intelligent than the Gestapo – they did not leave a trail of martyrs behind them. They destroyed but they did not permit their victims to hold the small light of dignity and integrity.’
Tracy stood her full height. She put her hand on the pastor’s shoulder and her lips brushed against his cold, lined cheek. Josh shook his limp hand, and said, ‘I wish you well.’
‘You should not take loosely the responsibility. There is little left for these men and the little left them is what you now hold in your hand. You should be careful with your responsibility. He was a brave boy. I saw his bravery.’
Mantle took Tracy’s arm. He led her away from the pastor and out of the deserted square. He understood. The wet blinked in his eyes.
They sat in the car and ate the sandwiches he had bought for both of them. He had gone as far down the coast as it was possible to drive, a kilometre beyond the last of Rerik’s houses. She gulped the bread slices, filled with sliced sausage and salad. He had parked the car so that it faced out over the Salzhaff and across to the trees masking the buildings on the peninsula.
Josh said what he felt he needed to say.
‘It’s where you were, yes, when the flares were going up, when you could see the tracers, when the trawler came in. I tell you, Tracy, when you couldn’t intervene, when you had to back out, that must have been worse than anything I can imagine. To leave him, to have to get back to Berlin for that bloody midnight curfew, that is a definition of hell.’
She choked. A piece of sausage fell to her lap. He thought it would help her to cry. She would never have cried before on a man’s shoulder.
‘To drive away from it, with the bastards after him, him running, for the bloody curfew. What was his car? A wretched little Trabant? Nothing you could have done for him. To have to drive back alone, not knowing… God…’
The tears streamed on her face, made rivers on her clean scrubbed cheeks. He groped in his pocket for his handkerchief.
‘I want to see him in court, Tracy, begging, and sentenced. It is more hideous than anything my imagination is capable of.’
He wiped her eyes and her cheeks. She stared straight ahead at the dark water. He gunned the engine.
‘Come on, girl. We’re going, together, to hack it.’
He swung the car off the grass, onto the road. He drove through the back lanes of the town, towards the myriad side roads that would keep them safe on the journey back to Rostock.
Clumsy, awkward, he had made his commitment. In the morning they would begin their search for the witnesses.
He came in the darkness into the town. It would have been good for him to have been in the town all through the day, but not possible. Dieter Krause did not possess the resources of manpower to have watched Rerik through the day and the early evening. The old goat would tell him if they had been to Rerik. The old goat would know who had come, who had asked, as he had always known, and would tell as always. He drove down the hill, the central road of the town, towards the sea. The road was deserted.
Not a soul alive on the road, not a car, no one walking the pavement, not a curtain undrawn or a door open. He could remember it and yet he could not place the image of the memory. He drove towards the shoreline, then swung left and drifted the car past the piers. He could see the roll of the fishing boats in his lights. He came to the small, darkened bungalow. Only the wind for him to hear, and the rustle of the sea on shingle and the flap of tossed paper.
He stepped from his car. He opened the gate and walked up the path. The street lamp threw enough light for him to see the paper that was nailed to the woodwork of the door. He snatched from the nail the pages of a file identifying an Inoffizielle Mitarbeiter. He ripped at the pages with fury. It was the first time that Dieter Krause had ever known the fear to be broken. He tossed the torn pages up into the wind and they scattered from the light to the darkness.
In his car, as he left the town, drove away from the sea and the pier where the trawlers were tied and the church, he placed the memory. That night, he remembered, after the chase and the shooting and the taking of the body out on to the Salzhaff, it was as though the town had emptied.
The policeman lit the cigarette for the lorry driver. There was no smell of alcohol on his breath but it would be tested. The lorry with the trailerload of steel construction girders being transported from Rostock to Wismar had been recently checked by a garage, but that would be verified. It was slewed onto the grass at the side of the road, but the radiator grille was barely marked. More policemen and men from the fire brigade were setting up lights around the wreckage of the car. The ambulance men sat in their parked vehicle, relaxed, because there was no need for their intervention. The policeman, newly posted to Rostock from Kassel in the West, went to the second vehicle involved in the accident. It was difficult to recognize it as a scarlet Wartburg car. It was mangled, concertinaed, crushed. He shone his torch into the interior. Their faces, extraordinarily, were unmarked. Their bodies, an old man’s and an old woman’s, were pressed back against two aged leather suitcases that had burst at the impact. The fire-brigade men were preparing the cutting equipment that would be necessary to recover the bodies. From reporting the registration of the scarlet Wartburg, from his radio, the policeman knew their names, that the man was a retired pastor of the Evangelical Church, that they were resident in Rerik on the coast. Tiredness, a heart attack, the glare of the oncoming lights of the lorry were equal possibilities, the shit engineering standards in the building of East German cars was most likely, but there was nothing of fact to tell the policeman why the Wartburg had come over the central white line of the road and into the path of a lorry carrying forty tonnes of steel girders.
‘You’re quiet, Josh.’
‘Just thinking.’
‘Thinking about what?’
‘What he said about responsibility, Tracy. About the responsibility we have to those four men.’
She snorted. ‘You think too much.’
‘For each of them we are a hand grenade rolled across the floor of a room, into their lives.’
‘That is crap.’
‘Tracy, listen, you have to know about the responsibility.’
‘You were better quiet, Josh.’
She never opened her eyes. Her head was against the back of the seat, as if responsibility was not important to her. He drove back into Rostock. The beginning ended that night. In the morning, the end would start. He did not know where it would lead and his mind tossed with the burden of his own responsibility.
Siehl listened.
‘We try to avoid the use of extreme measures. We aim not to use extreme measures.’ Dieter Krause rapped his knuckles on the table. ‘We employ extreme measures only if the alternative is the Moabit gaol.’ He stared each man in the face. ‘She has nothing without a statement from one of them. If it seems likely she will gain a statement then we must take extreme measures.’