Below him, the sack drifted away towards the current.
The water spilled from his shoes and ran down his body.
All around her, they laughed with him, as if an idiot should be humoured.
Tracy said, ‘He’s at sea. He’s safe. He’s up the coast and after the herring. A man just told me. They’re due back in tomorrow afternoon. He’s safe from them.’
The words came through his chattering teeth. ‘Wouldn’t have minded knowing that earlier.’
‘He was due in today – stayed out another twenty-four hours. Only the crew of the sister ship knew it.’
He kicked off his shoes, peeled off his trousers and dragged off his shirt. He stood, a moment, in the evening air, in his sodden underclothes and soaked socks. The laughter convulsed him. He shrugged into his blazer jacket and wrapped the arms of his coat around his waist. The body of the coat hung over his legs as an apron would have. He picked up his shoes and shook the last of the water from them.
They walked away. She carried his trousers and his shirt. He hobbled in his socks on the coarse concrete of the quayside and she left a dribbled trail of water behind her. He led her past the back of the gutting shed, where they could hug the shadows of the harbour’s lorry park and slip unseen back towards the car.
Josh said, ‘It was the moment we won, Tracy. Can you see that? It’s the first time that it’s turned for us.’
Willi Muller’s life was the sea and his family were the crew and his home was the boat. On a small stove, powered by kerosene fuel, in a wide pan of sliding lard fat, he cooked porkmeat sausages. On the second hot ring of the stove he poured milk from a bottle and water from a kettle on to the dehydrated potato powder. They were far out in the Ostsee, east from the Wittow peninsula of Rugen Island, and north from the island bay that was called Tromper Wiek. They were at the limit range of the trawler boat that carried the designation WAR 79 on the white strip above the red-painted hull. The sister boat, WAR 31, in the early morning, had sailed for Warnemunde with its hold not yet filled with herring, but WAR 79 had stayed out as the wind had freshened and the sea had risen. His life was the sea and he had no fear of the sea wind and the sea waves. The wind hit the boat and the waves made it shudder, but the only fear he knew was when the memories came of the men with the guns dragging the body back to the pier, and aiming the guns at him and ordering him again to start the engine. The guns had been against his neck and his back, and he had helped to pitch the weighted body into the waters of the Salzhaff. He did not believe, ever, that the wind and the waves would make a worse fear for him than the guns had made… They drifted on low power, rolling in the water. The sea spray came across the windows of the small wheelhouse. It would be the third night they were out but the herring run, at last, was good. Because it was the third night, there were only sausages to eat with powdered potato and one apple for each of them. There would be old bread for breakfast in the morning and more coffee. They would fish through the night and before dawn they would head back west for Warnemunde.
His family were the skipper and the mate. They were brothers. They had been at sea together for fifty-two years. They had gone to sea together, the skipper and the mate, in 1944, in the submarines from the port of Brest, out into the dark Atlantic waters when the codes were broken and the enemy’s bombers and destroyers had hunted out the wolfpacks. They had taught him, as fathers and uncles teach, that the sea was not meant to claim them. The old brothers, wizened, thin, gaunt, bent, were the family he loved. There had been another family, long before, and he was shamed by his mother, who had said her son should swear his silence so that she would not lose her house, and she had kept the house. His father had said that he would lose his boat in Rerik unless his son went away, and his father had not lost his fishing boat. He would never go back to them. To go back was to face the shame of them. The old brothers’ boat was the only home he now knew. When they were tied to the quay at Warnemunde, sheltered from the wind and the waves, he slept on the boat. The frayed quilted sleeping bag came out at night, in harbour, from his wood chest below the wheel. His home was a place streaked with engine oil, where the paint flaked loose, where the floor was splintered planks, where all the possessions he owned fitted in the rough-built wooden box that the skipper and mate had made for him. The sea was the life of Will Muller, and the crew were his family, and trawler WAR 79 was his home.
He knew no fear here because the fear was in the past, with the shame.
He had paid a Turk for the use of her. She was 175 DMs for an hour and a half. There would have been a Turk pimping for her in Leipzig and, in Leipzig, a Turk would have charged him 250 DMs, minimum. He had found her on the Am Strande, and he had paid the Turk and driven her, followed her directions, to an apartment in a block in the Sudstadt.
Gunther Peters thought she was new to it. She had the gear, open blouse under a windcheater, and the short skirt, riding high on her thighs, hair rinsed platinum blonde, mouth coated with mauve lipstick. The gear was right but she didn’t know her trade. She wore a wedding ring, a television was playing in the living room, and children were sleeping in the other bedroom. He had done it twice and he had felt nothing. He thought that her husband would be out cleaning streets or polishing cars or washing dishes. She lay on her back and she had her legs still stretched wide as if she thought that necessary. She was skinny, white- fleshed, and dark-haired where it wasn’t rinsed from the bottle. He had come to Am Strande to look for a tart because it was not important for him to watch the harbour at Warnemunde that evening. Tomorrow was important… To use his hour and a half, he had thought about tomorrow, when the boy came back on the boat. Gunther Peters dressed slowly. He had time to kill.
Hoffmann had quit, and Siehl and Fischer, coward bastards. Only himself and the Hauptman would be there tomorrow, at the harbour at Warnemunde. He felt no hostffity to the tart because she was useless.
When he was dressed, when the Makharov was back in his tight, stretched belt, he gave her a good tip and said that he would drive her back to the Am Strande. After he dropped her, he had forgotten her thin white body within five minutes and was thinking only of tomorrow…
‘We are off the record, nothing is attributed to me?’
Albert Perkins nodded his agreement. It had been a long wait outside the office of the police chief. It would have been worthwhile. It was his luck that the police chief had served in Dortmund and, there, had worked closely with the British military, had been liaison officer between the German authorities and the British intelligence people trying, fingernail stuff, to keep a track on the Irish bombers targeting the British bases.
‘This is not a conversation that is happening?’
Albert Perkins tapped his lips with an index finger. He had already flattered the younger man: without the excellent cooperation of the German police the Irish shits would have had free rein to bomb and kill.
‘The correct procedure would be for me to report your arrival to BfV in Cologne, and to seek guidance, but I do not think you wish that?’
Albert Perkins shook his head and a grimace of mock pain crossed his face.
The police chief for Rostock said, ‘I went two years ago, Doktor Perkins, to Berlin. There was to be a seminar on the investigations into criminal acts by the former officers of the Stasi. There were two days of lectures and, I tell you very frankly, the two days passed slowly. It was the evening between the days that was interesting, my eyes were opened. I went to dinner that evening with an officer from Berlin on the special-investigation team, codenamed Zerv, and I met with a bitter man. The unit was denied the federal funding and the manpower it needed to be operationally efficient. A combination of covert obstruction and lack of a political will created, my dinner guest told me, a de facto amnesty for the Stasi. He said the attitude of government was that the prosecution of the Stasi for criminal offences would lead only to a further alienation of the people of the eastern part of our country. He was a disillusioned man – twice in a lifetime the German nation was confronted with the crimes committed by a totalitarian regime, and twice the blind eye had been turned to illegality. You give me the opportunity, Doktor Perkins, to stand beside that bitter and disillusioned officer.’