‘If I don’t have a plan then we lose.’
‘And no people, just a home and babies and puppies and fields…’
‘I love you, Tracy. I’m so thankful to you. I want it, your afterwards, I want to be with you for it. Can you understand? I’m so frightened. I don’t have a plan, I can’t think… I don’t delude myself, Tracy. If we don’t win tomorrow, there is no afterwards. Loving you, loving me, and I didn’t think it possible that I would find happiness again, find what you’ve given me, but it doesn’t count tomorrow. Have to think, can’t, have to have a plan…’
She slipped off him. The warmth was gone.
Her bed creaked, took her weight.
He tried to think, tried to make the plan. He could not find it and ebbed towards sleep.
‘Did she win?’
‘She won.’
‘You were proud of her?’
‘I was.’
‘Would she be proud of you, Hauptman?’
Gunther Peters oiled his smile. Only the two of them that night in the little annexe corner of the cafe. Peters let his hand, long thin fingers, rest on the fist of Dieter Krause, and asked his questions with a familiarity, as if the old ranking of Hauptman and Feidwebel was no longer of importance, as if they were equals. Peters’ fingers held tight on Krause’s fist.
He hesitated, uncertain. ‘I don’t know.’
‘A man is privileged when his daughter is proud of what he does.’
‘That is shit.’
‘I have had several days to think, Hauptman.’ Peters rolled the word on his tongue. He mocked. ‘Over the last several days I have thought of the future…’
‘Tomorrow it is finished, tomorrow is the end of the future.’
‘Tomorrow I go home, Hauptman? Tomorrow, after it is finished, I go home and you pretend I never came? You go to America, you are the big-shot man, you are free to fuck with your new friends, and I go home and you forget me? You don’t believe that, Hauptman, you cannot believe that.’
Krause tried to break the hold of the fingers on his fist. ‘We came together in common purpose and you go when the matter of common purpose is finished.’
‘I come at a price, Hauptman.’
Krause gazed into the eyes of the former Feidwebel. Peters had been just a face in the corridors, another junior who had snapped smartly to heel-clicking attention each time they passed, just a face sitting at a desk and the order had been shouted through the open door. They had been chosen, grabbed, commandeered, at random. He gazed into the face and the fingers relaxed on his fist.
‘What is the price?’ Krause growled.
‘That is not gracious, Hauptman, that is not generous.’
‘Tell me what is the price.’
‘I come from Leipzig. I leave my affairs, I cancel a business opportunity. I stay, I don’t run, I stand with you.’
‘What is your price?’
‘You give me orders and I obey them. You involve me, I do not complain… and then you wish to forget me, as you would drop the wrapping of a cigarette packet.’
‘What is the goddamn price?’
‘I can do as Hoffmann did, as Siehl and Fischer did. I can walk away. I was only a simple Feidwebel, I was carrying out the orders of my superior officer. That is the usual defence, yes? It does not suit me but it is an option. I can go to my car, I can be on the road, I can reach Leipzig by the morning, if a price is not paid.’
‘Tell me the price.’ Sweat beaded on the forehead of Dieter Krause
‘You have new friends?’
‘I have.’
‘Your new friends have influence?’
‘They have influence.’
‘They value you?’
‘What is the fucking price?’
‘Do you want to be alone tomorrow, Hauptman, when the trawler boat comes in? Can you do it yourself, Hauptman, remove the problem? You want to go to America with the problem behind you?’
‘Name the price.’
He talked softly, silky smoothly. ‘You have new friends with influence who value you. They would protect you. You are the ideal partner for me.’
‘Partner in what?’
‘I put cars out of the country, I put munitions into the country. I move money into Germany and out of Germany, and your new friends, if you were my partner, would protect me.’
‘That is criminal activity.’
‘What is it you do now?’ He laughed quietly. His laughter was without noise, without mirth. ‘Without me beside you tomorrow you fail. If you fail you go to the Moabit gaol. That is the price.’
He was trapped. He squirmed. The rat eyes faced him, and the thin fingers were held out to him. He would be, in the Moabit gaol, with the scum and the filth and the addicts and the foreign pimps. He thought he plunged over a cliff and fell, and fell.
Krause took the hand that was offered to him.
There had been no car to meet him at Moscow Military Headquarters.
He had rung the drivers’ pool office at Defence, and he had won no sense out of an idiot: the idiot did not know why he was not met at Moscow Military. He had telephoned his driver’s home and the call had rung out unanswered.
Pyotr Rykov had hitched a lift into the city. A drunk sergeant, veering over the roads, losing himself, had taken him near to his home.
He had walked on the street past the surveillance car, and each of the three men in the car, smoking behind the misted windows, had looked at him without expression.
Pyotr Rykov banged the door shut after him, and woke Irma. She said, sleepy in her bed, that the telephone did not work and would he have it fixed in the morning.
He stood by the window with the darkness of the living room behind him. His driver, his old friend who should have been at Moscow Military, had told him that he should be careful. He had said, his reply defiant, that the minister was the guarantee of his security.
Pyotr Rykov did not know that the brass plate bearing his name had been unscrewed from the door of the office next to the suite of the minister. He did not know that three video-cassettes had been watched in full in the Lubyanka, or that the number of his laminated ID card had been given to the guards at the four doors of the ministry with instructions that he be refused entry. He did not know the name of Olive Harris, or of her plan… He looked down onto the surveillance car… Pyotr Rykov did not recognize the moment he had not been careful and had made the mistake. He could not recall that moment.
Away up the channel the sea spray burst on the breakwater.
The rotating lamp, millions of units of candlepower, caught the spray and lost it. The light moved on, thrusting out over the whiteness of the seascape, before bouncing back from the mist of low cloud, turning again. A small boat was paddled up the calm water of the channel towards the thunder rumble at the breakwater and the moving lamp of the lighthouse. The boat had been taken from the inner harbour. Cold, trembling fingers had freed the boat from the iron ring on the quay wall.
It was a vicious night. Darkened houses and shops beyond the quay on the one side of the channel, darkened boats and stalls and the darkened fish-gutting shed on the other. Not a night, in the small bad hours, for man or beast to be out. Not a fisherman yet out of his bed, not a cat moving from the warmth of a kitchen.
The swell was with the small boat when it came level with the length of the breakwater. The lamp of the lighthouse found the small boat and discarded it. It lurched hard against the rocks of the breakwater’s base, was lifted and fell.
A scrambled crawl over the wet grease on the rocks, and the mooring rope of the small boat was tied, the same trembling, cold, wet fingers, to a post on the breakwater’s low rail.
Olive Harris slept.
She slept untroubled, and did not dream. The pill, taken with a half-glass of water, ensured that she slept free of troublesome images. She didn’t see the faces of those who were, to her, irrelevant and a sideshow, nor did she see the face of the man she had described as a target of consequence.
It was important for her, in the small strange bed on the top floor of the embassy block, to sleep well because the morning would bring the start of a long day, unpredictable and dangerous but with the potential of high reward.