He watched for the girl with the russet-copper hair, and for the man who had thrown him onto the rocks and into the sea.
It was without thinking, but Josh had slipped into the old habit. He was the officer, she was the corporal. The glove fitted. In the car he talked to her as though he were an officer explaining procedure to a corporal.
‘We go the long way round, we do nothing that is obvious. They have lost us so they can only stake out the places that they believe we will come to. They know we have to come for the witnesses. You understand that, Tracy?’
‘Yes, “sir”.’
‘There’s no call for impertinence.’
‘No,
‘And you can cut the bloody “sir” nonsense…’
‘Is it because you’re frightened?’
‘Is what…?’
‘That you’re so bloody pompous.’
She was grinning at him. She’d read him; he was frightened. He didrL’t think she was. He thought that under the mischief, behind the grin, an excitement bounced in her. He wished it were the same with him.
‘Can we start again?’
‘Be a good idea.’
‘Without “sir” and without “corporal”?’
‘Shoot, Josh.’
‘We watch the backs and we watch the sides. It’s where the bastards know we have to come.’
‘I worked that much out.’
‘I do the talking…’
‘I’d have been here, come here, whether you’d been with me or not. I’d have done the talking.’
‘I really think it’s better, Tracy, if you leave the talking to me.’
She shrugged.
The estate stretched away to the right of them, and beyond the estate was the main road, the obvious route into Lichtenhagen. It was hard for Josh to accept that he didn’t matter, that his experience didn’t count, and that the streetwise craft of a lifetime was unimportant to her. He was frightened, he didn’t know what they would find. He carried no weapon, not a screwdriver, not a hammer. He felt, the truth of it, so bloody, God Almighty, involved.
He drove into the estate… Of course, they would be watching. He had planned the route in so that when he reached Lichtenhagen, he would not be going slow and looking for the block as any stranger might have been. He didn’t know how the man, Brandt, would be. He could be hostile, could be servile, could be co-operative. He looked for a man, or two men, sitting in a car. There were old Audis and Volvos and Renaults parked up outside the block, and there were older Trabants and Wartburgs. He looked for a car with steamed windows, for an engine spiralling exhaust fumes.
‘When we go out, go fast, direct.’
‘Back at it again – yes, “sir”.’
‘For Christ’s sake…’
‘Listen, I’m not your bloody corporal.’
She was out of the car and walking away towards a darkened alley at the corner of the block. He didn’t lock the car, thought it sensible not to. He hurried to catch her in the dirty, paintdaubed alley. It was where the graffiti smearers worked and over grotesque faces had been sprayed the slogans. Nazis Raus. Stoppt Den Nazi-Terror. The inner garden of the square was strewn with wind-whipped paper. It seemed to Josh, and he knew Slough and a dozen barracks towns, a place without hope. He had caught up with her. He took her arm as if to propel her forward, faster, across the garden square, and she shrugged his hand off. He went to the back entrance, where the communal rubbish bins, stinking, were stored. There was a hallway, and an elevator. He pointed to the stairs. After six flights Josh stopped. Tracy strode on ahead of him and waited for him on the landing. He went past her and paused by the door. He breathed hard and then hammered on the door.
‘I talk,’ he hissed at Tracy.
He looked around him. He looked for discarded chewing-gum wrappers and for a little heap of cigarette ends stamped out on the concrete floor in front of the door, left by men who watched and waited. He heard the scrape of slippers behind the door and the turning of a key. The door opened. He saw a small woman, bent with age, dress hanging loose on her body under a heavy wool cardigan. He saw the opaque glaze of her eyes. He saw, past her low shoulder, an old man hunched in a chair by the window.
Josh said, gently, ‘My name is Josh Mantle. I’ve come from England. I’ve come to see Jorg Brandt…’
The small woman gazed, unseeing, past him, through him.
‘I’ve come with a young lady who wishes to meet with Jorg Brandt, your nephew.’
‘He’s not here, the idiot is not here.’
‘Will he be back soon?’
A whistle sang in the voice, through mucus. ‘Nobody wants to see the idiot. Why do you come to see him?’
Josh said softly, ‘It’s about what happened a long time ago.’
The voice reeded from the chair by the window in contempt. ‘He’s not here, the idiot goes each morning to feed rabbits.’
‘When, sir, wifi he return?’
‘Perhaps he is an hour, perhaps less than an hour. How long does it take for a grown man to feed rabbits?’
‘May we wait for your nephew?’
The old man sat at a grimed window, in a threadbare chair. His life, handicapped, would revolve around what he saw from the window. The old woman saw nothing.
The smell of the room hit Josh and he choked. ‘We’ll wait outside for him. We don’t wish to disturb you. We’ll wait by the elevator…’
‘He does not use the elevator.’ The voice of the old man cackled in derision. ‘The idiot is afraid of the elevator. The idiot is afraid of the stairs, but less afraid of the stairs than the elevator. The idiot is afraid of everything except the rabbits.’
Josh leaned against the wall in the hallway. He thought of what the pastor had said. The woman shuffled from the door back into the room. The pastor had spoken of the dignity and integrity of a man sentenced to a prison cell. Tracy squatted down on to the dirt of the floor, back against the wall.
‘Are you OK?’
She looked up at him. ‘Of course I’m OK.’
They waited.
He was parking his car when the local news bulletin began.
Albert Perkins eased into the space. The rain had started and perhaps there would be sleet or snow later… The owners of the shipyard voiced concern at its future profitability…
He had made his telephone calls. His wife had complained that the man who did the garden was hiking his prices. Basil in his repair yard had babbled that Fulham had won 2-0, a goal in each half… The mayor of Rostock feared that further redundancies were necessary among the city’s employees, already slashed to a third of what they had been…
He had eaten a good breakfast, and driven south on the autobahn from Rostock Sud to this bleak and functional collection of shoebox offices. Down the road, beyond the trees, was the new prison. The old fence remained around the shoebox offices. The administration centre of the Stasi had moved here as AugustBebel Strasse had become too cramped… Two muggings on the S-Bahn the previous night on the line between Rostock-Bramow and Evershagen…
Near to him a bus had parked and he saw the schoolchildren jump from the bus and run to escape the rain… An elderly couple, a retired pastor and his wife, travelling from Rerik on the Wismar road had collided with a lorry, both dead…
He switched off his radio.
He followed the schoolchildren towards the nearest of the shoebox offices. The files of the Staatssicherheitsdienst of Rostock were kept here in the care of the federal authority. He hurried against the spitting rain towards the doorway. He told the guards that he was a research academic from Britain and needed to find the curator of the archive. He was directed upstairs, the third floor. The children were ahead of him, babbling, as if the shoebox was a place of fun. He gave his name to a secretary on the third floor and was told that the curator would not be available for several minutes. Would he care to inspect the museum while he waited? He joined the schoolchildren as they clustered round a guide. The museum was only three rooms, a token, but the walls were closely covered with mounted and photocopied Stasi documents and the rooms were edged with glass-top cabinets displaying Stasi equipment. ‘Go on, sir,’ Perkins murmured, ‘show the little beggars what it was all about.’