‘You never, ever again call a man a coward. You call a man a coward and you strip him bare. To call a man a coward is to make a judgement on him. It is the worst of arrogance to believe yourself qualified to call a man a coward. He would have been soaked from the sea, bloodstained, he would have been in shadow, incoherent, but you say that the man who slammed the door on him was a coward. Your Hans was a goddamn problem. We all do it, every day, I do it, you, everybody, we cross over the street to avoid a problem. Jorg Brandt suffered, he didn’t have the memories of love that you had, but you call him a coward.’
‘Should have stayed at home, should I?’
‘Just get dressed.’
‘Don’t fucking lecture me.’
‘I walked away from you because otherwise I would have hit you.’
She tore his coat off. She crouched over her own clothes. ‘Your wife, when she left you, did you hit her?’
He rocked.
‘When she left you, did you lecture her?’
He clasped his hands together so they should not be free to strike her.
Josh said, ‘I’ll see you at the car. You should get dressed.’ He went back, away, along the beach.
Albert Perkins walked on Kropeliner Strasse in search of a former Oberstleutnant. He was inside the old city walls. The street was a pedestrian precinct, at the core of Rostock. There was, he thought, an air of prosperity about Kropeliner Strasse, new paint, new shopfronts, new pavings, but he knew the prosperity was a mirage because the interiors of the shops were empty. Women queued to be served at the fruit and vegetable stalls and kids lounged by the fast food outlets, but the boutiques and the hardware stores and the interior furnishing businesses were empty. There were people at the well stocked window of the camera shop, but inside the shop was empty. He looked through the window, past the shelves of cameras and lenses and tripods and binoculars and bags, and he saw a middle-aged man and a girl who sat languid and under-employed.
He pushed open the door.
The smile of welcome lit the man’s face. He was a customer, an event. The girl straightened. Albert Perkins wandered to the far end of the shop and the man, predictable, followed him. He had led the man out of earshot from the girl. There were times when Albert Perkins lied with the best of them, and times when he discarded untruths for frankness.
‘Good afternoon. I am a busy man, and I am sure you would like to be a busy man… You were the Oberstleutnant heading the Abteilung responsible for covert surveillance filming. I come as a trader. If you have what I want then I will pay for it. Life, as I always say, is a market-place. You don’t need my name, nor do you need to know the organization that I represent, and if the merchandise is satisfactory then I pay for discretion. There was a Hauptman Krause at August-Bebel Strasse. The wife of Hauptman Krause was Eva, and the lovely Eva enjoyed the favours of a Soviet officer, a Major Rykov. An Inoffizielle Mitarbeiter, overwhelmed by his ideological duty, reported these sessions in the art of copulation to a handler. The bed play was filmed. Now, if I am not to be disappointed and you are to be paid, those ifims will have been preserved. I wish to buy the films of Eva Krause coupling with Major Rykov.’
The man, the former Oberstleutnant, chuckled. The mirth ripped his face. ‘People want only, today, what is new. I could fill my shelves with cameras, lenses, produced in the old DDR, and people will walk past them. They demand only what is new, which they cannot afford to pay for.’
‘No money orders, no travellers’ cheques, banknotes in the hand – if you have the film I want to buy.’
The man waved to the girl, she should mind the shop. She was unlikely to be trampled by a stampede. He had keys on a chain and he walked through to where the stock was piled in boxes. Albert Perkins was pleased to see the quantity of the boxes, unpacked, as he had been pleased to see the quantity of cameras and lenses on the shelves. He thought the account books would make stark reading. The man unlocked a steel-plated door at the back of the shop. He led Albert Perkins down gloomy old stone steps.
The cellar was a small shrine dedicated to the past. The present and the future were at street level, where the Japanese cameras and lenses were displayed, and kept out by two sets of double- locked doors and a poorly lit stone staircase. Heavy timbers had been brought in, old wood, and were used as props between the floor and the ceiling, and Albert Perkins thought the cellar must have once been a shelter against the bombing. There was a good armchair on a square of good carpet. The man gestured that he should sit. In front of the chair was a television set, large screen, and under the television was a video player. He sat. The man ignored a shelf of video-cassettes and knelt in front of a wall safe and used his body to prevent Perkins seeing the combination he used. The exhibits, for the shrine, were on a shelf behind the television, and each was labelled as if the pride still lived.
There was a camera the size of a matchbox, what the ‘grey mouse’ would have used for the photography of documents; an attache case, and it took the trained eye of Albert Perkins to see the pinhead hole in the end of it; a cooler bag, and he saw the brightness of the lens set where a stud should have been for the holding strap, good for the beach in summer; tape recorders for audio surveillance; button-sized microphones for a man to wear on his chest; long directional microphones for distance; a length of log, the bark peeling from dried-out age, and he frowned because he could not see the lens; electric wall fittings and plugs for hotel rooms, in which a microphone or a camera could be hidden… The safe door was shut. The man had lifted out three video-cassettes.
He said, briskly, ‘Could you, please, my friend, stand up.’
Albert Perkins stood. The man came behind him and quickly, with expertise, frisked him. The man tapped with the palms of his hands at the collar and the chest and the upper arms and the waist and in his groin and at his ankles. Albert Perkins had never carried a firearm. Firearms were for the cowboys in Ireland. It was a good search, professional.
The man said, ‘Please, sit down.’
A video was placed in the cassette player. The television was switched on.
Monochrome… A cramped, tight bedroom, filled with the width of the bed, and the angle wide enough to show the wallpaper above the bed. She was a good-looking woman. Agony and ecstasy on her face. She had a strong body.
Perkins watched. The warmth came through him.
‘Fifty thousand DMs…’
‘Fifteen thousand.’
She was on her back. Sharp focus. He was on her. Her knees high and tight against his hips. His hands on her shoulders and his back arched.
‘Forty-five thousand DMs.’
‘Twenty, top.’
She squirmed under him, she lifted her ankles and closed them round him. It wasn’t the sex that he knew, what Helen allowed on his birthday or her birthday, or on their anniversary, or when, rarely, she had drunk too much. She rolled him. ‘Forty thousand DMs, that is final.’
‘Twenty-five thousand is where I finish.’
He saw Rykov’s face. His mouth was open, as if he gasped. He was on his back. She rode him, bucked on him as if he were a steer and her breasts bounced and she seemed to cry her rioting pleasure to the ceiling.
‘Thirty-five thousand DMs, and that is my absolutely final-’
‘I said twenty-five thousand was where I finished.’
‘You have seen five minutes, it is a three-hour tape, and there are two more tapes..
‘Twenty-five thousand, cash.’
His eyes never left the screen. He wondered whether the old bastard had stayed home on the day the Oberstleutnant had come to instal the camera, or whether he had merely left the keys under the mat. She sat across him and she stroked the hairs of his stomach and his chest and he cupped her breasts. There wasn’t shyness between them, and the old bastard had said it wasn’t love.