She threw the two rings and the bracelet and the wrist-watch with the gold strap on to the floor, near Raub’s feet. She never looked at him. Goldstein knelt and pocketed them. He was close to the photograph scraps. He recognized the face. It would be magnified behind the jewel in Washington, as it had been behind the jewel at the barracks in England. He thought the life was gone from her eyes.
They went out into the street. Raub followed Goldstein. He left the street door wide open. They hurried against the wind towards the car.
‘Heh, Ernst, if – hey, if – we get the shit bastard to America, what then?’
‘Dumped.’
‘Hey, Ernst, but he thinks he comes on the payroll, he thinks he’s permanent.’
‘Dumped, when he is no longer of use. Dumped.’
They had sat in the room all through the morning.
Earlier, when she had woken, the sound of the vacuum cleaner had seeped up the stairs, along their corridor and through their door.
She had gone to the bathroom, then dressed without shyness in front of him. She had talked, a long time back, through her plan and he had nodded his agreement. He was a man more comfortable when he was alone and he did not believe in talk that was not necessary. With their own silence, with their own thoughts, they killed the morning. They would talk afterwards, when it was finished. He had sat all morning with the pistol in his hand and she had sat on the bed and picked imagined dirt from under her fingernails.
Josh stood. He broke the silence.
‘You ready?’
‘Ready.’
He picked up his grip bag and reached for her rucksack. She shook her head. He carried his bag out of the room and she hitched her rucksack onto her shoulder. They went down the stairs. She murmured her anthem song. He thought she murmured its words to give herself strength. Afterwards, he would hug her. He would kiss her, if they were not on trolleys in the morgue…
The man who had the overcoat and the oil-slicked hair counted their money, note by note. He leered at them as he hung the two keys on the hooks behind him, and he wished them a good day.
They went out through the doors of the pension and the sleet storm hit them.
They hurried to the car.
Josh drove.
She was small, quiet, beside him and it was hard for him to believe in her strength. He felt a humility. Her strength was love. He had, as he drove, a sense of pride that she shared her love with him at the time when there was no going back. He would fight for that love, and shoot for it, and kill to deserve that love.
Peters smoked.
The smoke, acrid, from his cigarettes, carried on the wind gusts, was in Dieter Krause’s nostrils.
The gutting shed was idle and the fleet, excepting WAR 79, was in the safe harbour. The storm winds came from the sea. The stalls were shuttered against the wind, which shook the plank sides and rattled the wood awnings. They could see the length of the quayside and there was one space for one boat. Peters looked for the young woman and the older man… Krause looked out to sea. The white sleet gathered on his coat, clung to his eyebrows and hung on the stubble bristle at the edges of his beard.
From behind, without warning, his shoulder was slapped, hard.
‘Eh, Dieter, you look like you’re dead.’ Peters laughed. They were no longer the Hauptman and the Feidwebel. They were equals. They had shaken hands on a partnership. ‘You look like you’re fucking dead.. . Wrong, Dieter, they should look, when they come, like they’re fucking dead.’
Krause stared up the length of the quayside. He waited, the old Makharov pistol in his belt.
He had spoken to Mr Fleming.
Albert Perkins presented himself at the reception desk of police headquarters.
Fleming had told him, on Secure, tangled in the wires, sitting on his bed, of the Special Responsibility peg and the elevation to grade seven. He had walked, almost a jaunty step, from the hotel.
He was escorted to the control and communications area and saw them. They had been given a table to sit at across the area from the bank of screens and the radio input equipment.
‘Morning, Doktor Raub, and good morning to you, Julius. A pleasure to see you again.’
Albert Perkins basked in a sense of mischief.
‘Come to escort your vile man across the ocean, I see. But you are here and he is not, which tells me that you don’t have control. Exasperating, yes, when control is lost?’
He walked towards them. He pulled up an additional chair and sat himself at their table.
‘To us, you understand, this is a sideshow. Because you’re way off the top table this is important to you – not to us. We already sit at the top table. Actually, I feel considerable sympathy for you, this being so important to you.’
The mischief gave Albert Perkins satisfaction.
He doubted that he would ever again in his professional life achieve such an opportunity for baiting. It would be his last throw for the recall of the good days, the old days, when the Service had stature over the BfV.
He sat comfortably in his chair and smiled kind warmth at the suppressed hostility of Raub and the undisguised dislike of Goldstein. The chance would not come again, and he milked it.
‘Forgive me if I bore you but, because it is only a sideshow to us, I feel rather relaxed today. You don’t seem to me, Doktor Raub, to be relaxed – nor you, Julius. You don’t seem to be taking today in your stride. How many bodies is it now, scattered around the countryside? It’s the messy old business of evidence, yes? If evidence is produced, if evidence of murder is laid before you, then there’s no way out. Evidence, in open court, of your involvement with a murderer would be a nasty pill to swallow. So, we’re just going to have to sit back and see what happens, what that young woman achieves, yes?’
It was, and Albert Perkins recognized and enjoyed it, a virtuoso performance in insult.
‘I meant, sincerely, the sympathy. You are dogged by the past. You have made a great nation, a nation of engineers and technicians, musicians and artists, but it is never enough to turn away the past. You are never at ease because wretched little people like me will not allow you to forget the past. Always you are condemned to carry blame for the past. The past is the bad Pfennig in your pocket, Doktor Raub, and I expect young Julius doesn’t spare you with blame for the past. So unfair… Right now, what I would really appreciate is a cup of coffee.’
The few fishermen had left their boats and gone to the shelter of the gutting shed. Peters tugged at his sleeve, pointed. The boats writhed at their moorings.
He looked across the channel, where Peters pointed.
He saw her first, and then Dieter Krause saw the man, who walked a half-dozen strides ahead of her. He saw the sharp flash of her hair.
They were on the far side of the haven channel and they went quickly, purposefully, heads tucked down, into the sleet and the snow. They walked away from the bridge that crossed the channel. He did not understand why they walked away from the bridge that would bring them to the fish quay, where the trawler would tie up. He was frozen cold in the wind on the quay, he could not think, he shivered. There was no fear in her.
She walked past the shops with their lights already bright, and past the houses with their summer balconies, and past the tourist boats that waited for the summer, towards the breakwater.
He stared. He did not understand. Peters kicked his shin and started to run. Dieter Krause followed him, past the gutting shed and the closed stalls and the moored trawlers and over the bridge that crossed the Alter Strom channel, but he did not understand.
The assistant deputy director met Olive Harris at the airport.
She came to him. With that passport she was the first of her ffight through.
He thought, his first impression, that Olive Harris was quite radiant. He thought the triumph bathed her.