‘Where the hell have you been?’
‘For me?’
The anger coursed through him. ‘I make the decisions. I make the plans. When I work with an amateur, when my security is on the line, I take the responsibility.’
‘You’re quite funny when you’re angry, Josh. I’m trying not to laugh, Josh, you’re really funny.’
He turned away from her, to the mattress on the floor, scooped up a blanket and wrapped it around him. He felt shy, ridiculous.
She said, matter-of-fact, ‘You didn’t seem to have a plan.’
He said, empty, ‘I would have done, just needed time.’
‘Are you firearms trained?’
He spun. She was reaching into her pocket. She handed him the holster inside which the pistol was fastened. He heard the sirens out in the night, crossing the streets of the city. The policeman’s name was stamped on the black leather of the holster, and there was an index number. The sirens came and went, growing in fury pitch and diminishing. It was a Walther PPK. He knew the weapon from far back. It was scarred, scratched, might have been twenty years old. It was probably used twice a year on a firing range. It would shoot with accuracy to thirty metres; a marksman would stop a man at thirty metres. He had not seen a Walther PPK for close to twenty years, when he had been at Osnabruck, when this weapon would have been new. He checked the safety catch. He slid the full magazine from the stock of the weapon. He did not expect that a bullet would be in the breech, but it was his training to check. There was the harsh metallic scrape in the room as he cocked it, aimed it down into his mattress and squeezed the trigger. He held the pistol loosely in his hand. He said, flat, ‘Yes, I can handle firearms.’
She sat on her bed. ‘I used to do guard duty, every twelve days, and we had firing practice. I was fine with automatic rifles, piece of cake. Pistols were different, bloody difficult. Did you ever shoot a man, Josh?’
He said, quiet, ‘Once, shot at a kid, in Aden, not old enough to be a man.’
‘Did you hit him, Josh?’
‘I claimed a kill.’
He had thought that the handling of weapons was back in the dustbin time of his life thirty years ago. That day he was a young man and riding in a Saracen armoured personnel carrier from his billet to the Mansoura gaol where they did the interrogations. That day the Crown had put a firearm in his hand and given him licence to shoot to kill. He had seen the kid dart from the shadows of an alley, and he might have been about to throw an orange, or a stone, or an RG-4 grenade. Two machine guns hammering but their target was the sniper in the minaret of the mosque. He had seen the kid through the firing slit. He was crouched, sweating, in the cavern heat behind the armour plate. He had shot at the kid, twenty paces range, from the lumbering movement of the Saracen, and he had seen the kid go down. Might have ducked, might have been hit. He claimed the hit anyway. In the evening his warrant officer had bought him a can of lager, and the rest of the I Corps people had squirmed envy. Just another gollie kid dead and claimed, and they’d all got pissed up that night.. And until she had put the pistol into his hand he had thought that shooting to kill was in his past.
‘Did you feel bad about it?’
‘I felt good.’
‘When you shot at him, did you hate the kid?’
‘It didn’t seem important, didn’t matter.’
She took off her coat and gave him the pouch with the handcuffs and the key. He was back down on his mattress and he pulled the blankets over him. She was throwing her clothes onto the floor. He put the pistol under his pillow. She stood beside his mattress, bare-skinned. She stood above him and he looked up at her thighs and her hair and the tuck of her waist and the hang of her breasts, lit and shadowed by the lamp bulb beside her bed.
Josh said, ‘Afterwards begins when tomorrow is finished. Go to your own bed.’
She searched on the floor for her pyjamas. She switched off the light.
‘Josh.’
‘Yes.’
‘I’ll tell you the plan in the morning.’
‘Do that,’ he grunted.
‘Josh..
‘Go to sleep.’
‘Josh, do you hate him? Do you hate Dieter Krause?’
The hard shape of the pistol was sharp through the pillow and gouged at the flesh of his face.
He said, soft, ‘The kid had bright eyes. I can see his eyes. He was only a target. It’s what Dieter Krause is, only a target.’
The dawn came onto the old streets and old timbered buildings that the Hanseatic trading merchants had known half a millennium before, and onto the new streets and new concrete blocks that the Communists had planned a quarter of a century before, and onto the bright paintwork of the businesses of the newest gauleiter that sold Japanese cameras and cars and television sets. The dawn came to the city of Rostock.
It blew the mist and painted a grey pastel over the dock cranes that lined the Unterwarnow channel and the shipyards up the sea, way towards Warnemunde and the cold Baltic emptiness. The dustcarts roamed the streets, and those with work huddled in the carriages of the S-Bahn trains, drove iced-up cars and scurried on the bitter pavements.
The cold came across the flatlands from the Polish border and across the tossed sea from Finland and the Arctic waste. It was the same grey dawn that the city had known when the occupying armies had tramped through the old streets and through the new streets, that had followed the night raids of the bombers, that had come after the announcements of the closure of the shipyards and the docks.
The city was listless to suffering. The kids were pitched through their front doors to find their way to school. The city was indifferent to violence. The oldest went for comfort in prayer to the Marienkirche and the Nikolaikirche and the Petrikirche. The youngest went in search of work and hope. The newest culture of the city was self and survival. The people of the city, as the grey dawn came, lived lives dictated by the past. The past lived in Rostock.
On the radio, the announcer said that another low pressure trough approached fast from the north and the west, that after a dull dry morning there would be rain showers followed by sleet showers followed by persistent snow showers.
That day, unremarkable, ushered in by a chill grey dawn, the city and the flatlands around it, and the sand dunes and the deep tossed waters of the Baltic, would again be a battlefield, and there would be few who would recognize the combat.
The radio announcer wished his listeners a happy and successful day.
Chapter Eighteen
He sat very still.
He had drawn back the curtain and a dreary light seeped into the room. He sat on the hard chair and he held in his hands the Waither PPK pistol. He had stripped it and cleaned the working parts with the duster that he kept with his shoe-polish tins, and reassembled it. He held the pistol tight in his hands as if the feel of it would give him strength. He had taken each of the bullets from the magazine and then he had reloaded it because it was his experience that the breech mechanism of the Walther PPK could jam if the rounds were left too long in the magazine.
He sat on the hard chair and looked down the length of her bed. He could see only the red autumn of her hair. She lay on her side and the bedclothes were close around her. Beside him was his grip bag and her rucksack, packed. It would be finished before tonight. After he had buffed his shoes, especial attention to the toe-caps, and after he had cleaned the working parts of the pistol and reassembled it, he had put the duster into the cloth sack, closed his grip bag and locked it. He had started, then, on her clothes. They had been scattered, haphazardly, on the rug and on the linoleum, and he had handled each item of her clothing with care as if it were precious. On the dressing table, neatly folded, were a sweater for her, a T-shirt with a Mickey Mouse motif, the bra she had worn the day before, the last of her clean knickers, the final pair of unused socks and the best of her jeans. He had left her wash-bag on top of her filled rucksack for when she woke, and her anorak. He had cleaned the room with his handkerchief, wiped each surface, sanitized the room. At the end of the morning, they would go, leave the room, and it would be as if they had never been there. His mattress and the pillow and blankets were already in the room next door, and the bed was made. He wore the good suit he had brought with him, a clean white shirt, the green tie and the polished black shoes. He had shaved with care so that he did not cut himself and had used a fresh blade. He had combed his hair and left an exact parting. It had seemed important to him. He sat and watched her and held the pistol. He did not understand how, at the dawn of the last day, she could sleep in such peace and calm… but he understood so little of her. He loved her, and knew nothing of her. The pistol was gripped in his hands, and the light of the last day settled on her hair.