‘A man, a woman, can be frightened, Tracy, and not be ashamed. Being frightened isn’t weakness. Admit it, Tracy, you’re driven by fear – why you’re so bloody cruel. Too frightened of failure to tell Hans Becker that he should refuse the Rostock job and walk away from it. Too frightened of falling off your little pedestal at Brigade to tell Hans Becker to quit on the Rostock job. And, Tracy, too frightened to do anything but crouch in cover and watch as they dragged Hans Becker off that boat, before he ran… But, Tracy, you have no call for shame. People push agents beyond the limit because that’s their bloody job. People hide in cover and don’t intervene because that’s their survival route. You don’t have cause for guilt, believe me. It’s just that you’re the same as all the rest of us, frightened. You’ve done what you could, and more. Please, come back to Berlin…’
She reached across him, unfastened the door beside him and pushed it wide open. She loosed his seat-belt. On the autobahn the traffic thundered by, going south for Berlin. There were kids on the slip-road, with their rucksacks beside them, holding pieces of cardboard on which they had scrawled the names of the cities of Berlin and Dusseldorf and Leipzig and Schwerin and Hamburg.
Josh asked, ‘Is that it?’
‘You wanted an answer. That’s it.’
‘Then your answer is selfish, conceited, egocentric.’
She said quietly, ‘You never listen, and you understand nothing. I will say it again, the last time, I don’t quit.’
He could get out of the car. He could hitch a ride into Rostock and collect his bag from the room at the pension, and take the train to Berlin. He could sit on an aircraft flying high in the evening darkness, and know that she searched in the fishing harbour at Warnemunde for a trawler’s deck-hand. He pulled the door shut. He fastened his seat-belt.
Her hands rested loose on the wheel. He saw the jut of her chin.
He took her hand from the wheel. He was his own man. He kissed her fingers as he had in the night when he had thought she slept. It was his own decision. She stared ahead.
‘Thank you,’ she said, small voice. ‘Thank you for staying.’
He said, gruff, ‘Time we were getting on, light’s going.’
She took the car off the hard shoulder, past the slip-road, under the bridge, towards Rostock and the fishing harbour at Warnemunde.
‘I couldn’t, if I left you, live with myself.’
Albert Perkins felt, from his telephoned harangue of his superior, Mr Fleming, a slightly light-headed excitement, and that was as rare to him as had been his loss of temper. He walked the length of Kropeliner Strasse. He imagined, and took a certain pleasure from it, that through the day his superior would have been badgering Violet to use her supremely oiled inter-office communication lines to arrange a meeting, one to one, for Fleming with the ADD, on high. He paused outside the camera shop. The window was empty. The stock of Japanese cameras was gone. He laughed out loud. Done a runner with a vanload of stock and a bagful of banknotes. Good that one bastard had won. Who else would win? The slight young woman with the copper- gold hair? Dreary old Mantle? The former Hauptman? One of them must win..
He walked briskly, a sharp stride, past the low arches of the old gateway at the Altmarkt and headed for the Rostock police headquarters. He was thinking that it could, of course, be himself who would win.
In the embassy on the Sofiyskaya Embankment, in a small room on a high floor, Olive Harris dozed.
She felt at ease, the matter was in place, her schedule was organized. She would rest until the middle evening.
She was grateful that she would not have to refuse the ambassador’s invitation to dine. Ambassadors seldom issued dinner invitations to travelling guests from the Service. They regarded the presence in the embassy of the likes of Olive Harris as pure potential for broken fences and expulsions. She did not expect, or wish, to meet with the ambassador during her short visit to his territory, but he would know she had arrived and he would be fearful of what she might achieve and what rocks might fall later on him.
She disliked being so far from home. Few at Vauxhall Bridge Cross would have believed it, but she missed sleeping with her husband close to her. She would be home the next evening, when the business was done. The local file on Pyotr Rykov, unread, was beside her on the bed. Where she lay, on her side, catnapping, she could see the small photograph frame she always carried away with her, the picture of her husband and her children. It would be a triumph, and the pity was that they, most precious to her, would never know of it.
‘Have another, why not? I always feel that sherry soothes… Fly it by me again, the basis of Perkins’s tantrum…’
The assistant deputy director filled Fleming’s glass.
The wickedness of sherry, it’s never too early. I always feel like a guilty schoolboy if it’s gin before six, but any time after five seems decent for sherry. Perkins may be totally disreputable but he is a damn good officer and it would be sad for him to harbour grievances.’
The afternoon had slipped away and the street lights across the river played on the water far below the office.
Fleming said, ‘The usual thing, disjointed nose. The feeling that the dragon woman has hijacked his act, that Moscow Desk is walking over German Desk.’
‘I wouldn’t want a niggle, not about something essentially trivial… Now, don’t get me wrong – I’m not in the business of buying off Perkins’s temper, but he’s well due for a step up the ladder.’
‘Always the tried and trusted way, a Special Responsibility peg to hang his coat on.’
‘Special Responsibility for Iran matters in Europe, right up his street.’
Fleming smiled. ‘Go up a grade with that, wouldn’t he? It’s rather a good sherry. Go to grade seven, wouldn’t he?’
He tapped slender fingers on his desk calculator. ‘God, how did we ever do without them? An additional annual increment of, what? ?4597.78 should straighten out his nose. I’ve been discussing reorganizations with the DD and we’re thinking about a European Desks supervisory grade, sort of pulling the strings together. This little spat would not have boiled if one man had been in the co-ordinating seat. Your name’s been pencilled in, would be a grade six position.’
‘Just a pencil, not ink?’
‘Early days…‘ The ADD refilled Fleming’s glass, and smiled. ‘Well, that’s that, then. Let me just confirm – Perkins, he’s not on a principle kick? It’s merely that Olive elbowed him off centre stage?’
Fleming chuckled. ‘Principle? Perkins wouldn’t know what it means, certainly wouldn’t know how to spell it. I’ll tell him what’s been decided. It’s just about played out over there, and he can see it through, can start his new position on Monday.’
‘First class. You’ve reassured me – I’d have thought we had a real problem if it was the principle thing. It will be a good day tomorrow, I’ve that feeling.’
He had brought the bottle of Scotch whisky and a carton of Marlboro cigarettes. That a degree, small, of civility was shown him was because of the whisky and the cigarettes.
They queued to complain.
‘We’re treated as if we were without value. We’re treated as trash. This garrison camp, and every camp you might care to visit, Colonel, is like a dumping ground for rubbish.’
A long-standing commitment, it had been in his diary for seven months that on this day he should travel to Kubishev and watch the annual showpiece exercise of a motorized rifle division of the strategic reserve based at Volga Military Headquarters. What he had witnessed, in Rykov’s opinion, was a complete and unprofessional shambles.
‘You saw, Colonel, a divisional scale live firing exercise. You would have asked yourself, Colonel, where was the artillery. The absence of the artillery was not because they had no shells to shoot – they did not have shells but they could have gone along for the walk without shells as women who push prams. The regiment of artillery was not present, Colonel, because they were in the fields picking cabbages. If they do not pick their own cabbages they starve.’