He was young for the job. All through the morning he had hesitated from making the call. If he had stayed in Dortmund, he would have been, with his experience and seniority, the third man in the chain of command. He had gone east, joined the migration flood of Wessis, gone on the fast run of promotion and extra salary, taken the position of police chief for the city of Rostock. AU morning the report had been on his desk and he had hesitated before ringing a senior official of the BfV in Cologne. With greater age and greater experience he would either have made the call two hours before or dumped the report in his Out tray. His deputies were all Ossis, men of greater age and greater experience, and all had been passed over for the job of police chief for the city. He rarely asked them for advice: to have done so would have seemed to confirm their prejudice against him.
‘There is a problem with descriptions. The tenants of the apartment are elderly, one handicapped, one sighted, they were the uncle and aunt of the fatality. Neither can offer descriptions beyond that one was a man and one a woman. No, no, there is no evidence of homicide. There is no evidence of a crime… I forget it? I confirm your suggestion and apologize, Doktor, for wasting your time.’
The forest closed around them. They walked on the pine-needle path in the gloom. Only the cold drifted down from the canopy.
Among the pencil-straight trees were the stunted, angled shapes of broken concrete. He thought it was the true museum, not the museum in the sunlight fashioned for the tourists. The true museum was the cracked and disintegrated shapes of concrete that had been the buildings of the experimental-rocket works, where the scientists had been and the Polish labourers, where the bombs of concentrated explosive had fallen. The concrete shapes were covered with lichen. The needles had gathered on them and softened the angles of their destruction. The craters had survived half a century of the dark gloom below the forest canopy. Impossible for Josh, who had read the books, not to imagine the carnage hell of those who had run in their terror where he now walked, when the forest had burned and the buildings had come down as the bombs had fallen. She came easily behind him, light feet on the cushion of needles. They walked past the great facade of a building that had been taken by the pines. Only the facade survived, still fire-blackened. The pines were the roof and the interior of the building. It was the true history.
He saw the hanging body.
Josh stopped. He stared at it. She cannoned into his back. Tracy had not seen the body. He held her close against him.
There was no wind in the forest, under the canopy. The rope was over a branch and knotted. The hanging body rotated so slowly. He saw the back of the man and the collapsed shoulders, his side and the outstretched arms, the stain at his groin. He closed his eyes. The man had climbed the tree, struggled to gain the necessary height, clawed his way up the rough, scaled bark of the tree. He had climbed to the first branch that he would have judged could take the weight of the rope under strain, tied the rope to the branch and slipped the noose over his head. He thought of the man for whom the terror of living was greater than the fear of death.
He opened his eyes. He held her as she shook in his arms. He kept her head, her neck, against his chest.
The man’s shoes were on the path, had been kicked off. He saw the worn, holed socks of the man. He judged the terror that had been brought to the last moments of the life of Heinz Gerber.
‘Good to see you, young man, and how is Berlin?’
‘Cold, Mr Perkins, very cold. I’m sorry, I’m very pushed for time on the schedule they’ve set me. Have you the package?’
It gave Albert Perkins perverse pleasure to hand to Rogers, when the kindergarten kid was fresh from the Portsmouth recruit courses, a frayed supermarket bag containing a package loosely wrapped in brown paper. They were in the car park, broad daylight, in front of the hotel.
‘That’s the package. Going this evening, is it?’ He grinned. ‘If they get their eyes on that lot tonight, in London, when they get home their women can expect a pretty fearful time.’
He saw the confusion on the young man’s face. ‘London?’
‘London, yes, that’s where it’s going.’
He saw the flush on the young man’s face. ‘Weren’t you told, Mr Perkins, what was happening?’
‘Where’s it going, if not to London?’
He saw the young man flinch, blink, then summon the courage. ‘If you’d needed to know, Mr Perkins, I’m sure they’d have told you. I’d better get on, sorry.’
Young Rogers, kindergarten kid, ran to his car and he clutched the supermarket bag to his chest. Perkins’s breath spurted, steamed in his face.
The car of the kindergarten kid accelerated away, out of the car park.
Dieter Krause, in his car in the parking area outside the tennis hall, heard the news bulletin.
The radio said that, in Gustrow, a hostel for eastern foreigners had been firebombed; in Wismar, the chemical factory was to close with the loss of 371 jobs; in Schwerin, the tourist authority for Mecklenburg-Vorporren reported that advance bookings for the summer were down on the previous year…
The police chief, driving in his chauffeured car to his new home in the Altstadt, heard the news bulletin. In Rostock, the transfer of the reserve-team striker to Werder Bremen was confirmed with a fee of one million DMs; in Peenemunde, a former Rathaus official from Rerik had been found hanged in the forest near to the space-exploration museum…
Albert Perkins, in his hotel room, in shock, lying dressed on his bed, heard the news bulletin.
‘Where is Siehl?’
Fischer said, ‘He waited for you. He waited a long time for you.
Peters said, ‘I told him not to bother to wait longer. I told him that watching your bitch daughter play tennis was more important to you.’
The match had gone on. Christina had lost the first set before he had reached the stand and sat beside his wife. Christina, rampant, hugging him, at the end had said that she would not have won if he had not been there to watch her and she had babbled about the racquets that she should be brought from Washington. When Christina had gone to shower and change, Eva had asked him… No, the problem was not solved. No, the problem continued. She had stared ahead of her in the emptying stand and bitten at her lips. Her fingers had worried on the new bracelet of gold chain on her wrist.
Peters said, ‘The bastard quit on us.’
It was the first time in the three years that his career had so far run that young Henry Rogers had felt true involvement in a mission of importance. Everything before had been analysis and the interminable work at the computer screen. His pride mingled with apprehension. He had followed, most exactly, the detailed instructions he had received from Mrs Olive Harris in London.
He stood on the north side of the Unter den Linden.
The man, in front of him, crossed the wide street, went to the south side, walked towards the floodlit grey granite facade of the Russian embassy. Mrs Harris would have known of the man, Rogers assumed, from Mr Perkins’s daily situation reports. He had been to the apartment near to the Spittelmarkt and paid the wizened little man who stank of cats the sum of one thousand American dollars. He had given him, as the instructions of Mrs Harris had demanded, an airline ticket to Zurich, valid for the last flight of the evening with open-dated return, and had driven him to the Unter den Linden. He had written a Russian name, from Mrs Harris’s instructions, on the brown paper of the package, and handed it to him.
In the bright flush of the embassy’s security lights, he watched the man ring the bell at the heavy door.
He fished in his pocket for his car keys. He watched the man cross the Unter den Linden, scurrying to avoid the cars, not waiting for the pedestrian lights. It would be only a twenty- minute drive to the Tempelhof airport. He felt pride at his achievement in carrying out Mrs Olive Harris’s meticulous instructions, and he lost the apprehension of failure. He did not know his part in the destruction of a target of consequence.