He drove slowly, spoke slowly. She sat, so still, so small, beside him.
‘You are isolated. You ar’ beyond help. In a holding cell. You are very young and very frightened. The East Germans may have roughed you, may have shouted at you, threatened you, but not the Soviet military intelligence officer. He would have been GRU, highly sophisticated, and very kind. Sophisticated enough to see that you were literally desperate to get through the checkpoint before dawn, and kind enough to let you get through the checkpoint…’
Each time he paused, Josh waited for the denial. She said nothing.
‘They would have filmed you and taped you. They had evidence of you. They would have driven, Tracy, nails through the palms of your hands and into the wood. You belonged to them, Tracy. Before dawn, the intelligence officer would have put the stamp on your visa, and he would have told you that you should not be frightened of the future, and you would have wept your gratitude to him, but the nails had been hammered through your hands, Tracy… The last best chance you had was that morning. When Colonel Kirby came to work, nine o’clock, you could have told him then, there, what had happened, made the confessional. You did not. And each day afterwards it would have been harder. Each month afterwards, it would have been worse. Each year afterwards, it would have been impossible… You opted, chose, to live the lie…’
They were past the Wittstock intersection. The signs were for Berlin Mitte. Nothing was denied. She seemed not to hear him, seemed not to care to listen to him.
‘The moment the chance died, would have been buried, was two years, three, four years afterwards. The intelligence officer would have been a patient man, and the people to whom he passed the file. A new world order had come. I doubt you thought the nails were out of your hands. The GRU continued to exist, continued to probe. Did you believe, Tracy, in the new world order, that you were free of them? A phone call, a letter, a chance meeting that wasn’t chance, after two or three or four years… Of course, little Corporal Barnes doesn’t seek promotion, doesn’t seek a transfer. She stays at Templer Barracks. She is an asset, she is a talent spotter, she goes to her office each morning an hour before her officers come and for that hour she can read any file she wants to. At first she is coerced but that ends. Later she is overwhelmed by the arrogance of her superiority. The arrogance is the secret that she holds. The last instruction was for the hacking down of Dieter Krause… I, stupid and infatuated, was a used bonus. That’s what hurts, Tracy, wounds me, that I was just used. You did very well. The only mistake was the clock at Rerik church, and that, for you, was bad luck… It was a lie. The lie that I believed was that it was all for love.’
He drove on. They were coming towards Berlin from the north. The first lorries of the day were on the road. Nothing denied and nothing explained.
‘You were Knautschke. You were the hippopotamus in the mud. I thought, Tracy – I thought, Knautschke – that you came from the mud in your own time. They called you, Tracy – the keepers called for Knautschke. You came from the mud, Knautschke, when they called for you. They were, they are, your keepers…‘
The lights of the oncoming traffic sparkled indistinct in his eyes. The tears welled.
Tracy turned to him. ‘What choice, Josh, do you think I had?’
‘It starts with a small lie, but the lie has a life of its own. The small lie grows, overwhelms. They all say they had no choice, all the traitors.’
‘That’s a speech, Josh. What’ll they do to me?’
‘Hate you for embarrassing them, lock you up, throw the key away.’
‘What good will that do?’
‘About as much good as locking up Dieter Krause.’
‘We had a life.’
‘We have no life, the lie killed the life.’
‘Don’t believe you, don’t believe old Josh. Josh loved Knautschke. Josh wants to cuddle and fuck with Knautschke. Josh wants to make babies. Josh is old, wants to be cared for, Josh doesn’t want to be old alone. Old Josh wants love. The love, Josh, wasn’t a lie.’
‘The love, Tracy, is dead.’
‘You are such a daft, bloody innocent.’
She reached, difficult for her, behind him. She took the carnation bloom. She put the stem in her mouth. She picked the petals from the flower and they fell on her lap.
Dieter Krause sat on the bed in the cell. The Moabit gaol, around him, was waking. He had not slept. They had told him, before they had locked the door on him, that in the morning a lawyer would be appointed to represent him that day.
They had taken him all the way to the cell door, and Raub had grimly shaken his hand, and Goldstein had grinned and said he should claim he was merely obeying orders. Dieter Krause, as the gaol woke around him, waited for the coming of a lawyer.
He saw the face of the boy on the frozen dirt of the ground.
He stood above the boy and held the pistol loosely.
He was kicked by the boy, doubled up, in pain.
He fired the pistol, involuntary, in the shock of the pain.
He had the rank of Hauptman, he had little experience of firearms. It was several years since he had practised with a firearm. Firearms, of course, were issued to officers of that seniority but they had no call to use them.
He had not realized that the safety was off on the pistol.
He had shot the boy in a regrettable accident. If he had not kicked, made the sudden pain, the boy would not have been shot.
He agonized over the tragedy of the death of the boy. He was, himself, a parent. There were witnesses who could be approached, persuaded, to tell the truth of that night: Klaus Hoffmann, a respected dealer in property. It was an accident: Josef Siehl, a trusted security guard. He carried no guilt: Ulf Fischer, a much praised orator at funerals… It was a tragic accident of history, the past.
Dieter Krause, with the noise of the waking Moabit gaol with him, planned what he would say when the lawyer came.
The policeman on the pavement of the Unter den Linden gazed in astonishment.
A Trabant car parked at the kerb, driven by a man in a good suit who had the bearing of a military officer, and produced from it was a young woman in handcuffs…
Josh led her by the arm through the door, ignored the late protest shout that parking in front of the embassy was forbidden. The doors swung shut behind him, behind her.
It was dawn. The first glimpse of the sun would be up behind the television tower on Alexanderplatz, and behind the hill of Prenzlauer Allee. God alone knew where they found them, the older men, stout, comfortable, who were the night-duty security officers in the service of the embassies… No sunshine, at the beginning or the middle or the end of the day, reached the fortress cubbyhole of strengthened plate glass in which the security man sat. He had a mug of steaming tea in front of him and a plate of thin-cut toast, and he was listening to the radio music that came from Britain on the satellite.
She looked at Josh, as if to test him.
The security man, crumbs at his mouth, studied him. Then he looked past Josh and saw the young woman, the handcuffs, and the frown spread on his forehead. He drank from the mug and wiped away the crumbs.
Josh said, ‘My name is Joshua Mantle, I am a solicitor’s clerk from Slough in the United Kingdom. I have brought with me a prisoner, Miss Tracy Barnes, of the Army’s Intelligence Corps. The charge against her is espionage – Section 1 of the Official Secrets Act. There’s a man called Perkins, Albert Perkins, in Berlin. You should find him. He’ll be flying out today, but you should reach him before he leaves. From this moment, Miss Barnes is in your custody, you are responsible… Oh, please, I’d like some paper to write my arrest statement. Thank you.’
He was given the paper and a hard chair at a low table, and he started to write. He wrote the story of a killing at Rerik in the night darkness, and the chiming of a clock high on a church tower.
The security man was on the phone, and she leaned forward on the wood shelf in front of him. The security man smiled back at her grinning face and she lifted her handcuffed wrists and took a siice of his toast, as a squirrel would have stolen from a bird table.
A young man came through the inner security door, earnest- faced, shirt-sleeved, with his collar open and his tie loosened and the tiredness in his eyes, and asked why he had been called.
The security man talked in a low voice into the ear of the young man. The head was shaken in disbelief. She finished the toast on the security man’s plate and she took his mug and drank his tea, and she smiled sweetly at the young man.
He wrote the story of Hans Becker who had died alone, in courage, for nothing. He folded the paper. He put the pen back in his pocket, and felt for the knot of his tie.
He walked to the desk, uncertain, weak in the legs.
‘My name’s Rogers, I work with Mr Perkins. What in heaven’s name is all this about?’
Josh gave him the folded sheets of paper.
She had the light of the mischief in her eyes that he had seen and known and loved. She challenged.
‘You can tear it up, Josh, tear it into small pieces. If you don’t tear it up, Josh, there is no afterwards. If you don’t tear it up into small pieces you’ll live to be old and alone..
Josh rocked. old and alone, Josh. You can’t sleep with principles, can’t love with them, can’t find happiness. With your principles, you’ll be old and alone.’
Rogers, young face curled in anger, snapped, ‘What good does this do? It’s out of history, it’s cobwebbed. No one will want to know.’
Josh said, stark, ‘It is evidence. Just because it is not convenient, evidence cannot be ignored. Because it is embarrassing, evidence cannot be shelved. I promise you, and pass my promise to Mr Perkins, that if I see the signs of compromise I will bring down on his head the accusation of cover-up. The whole circus will land on his head. Someone once said to me, “They can’t buck the process of law, they can’t block evidence,” and I believed it. My regards to Mr Perkins..
He looked at her, into the small, enigmatic, masked face. He did not know her. He reached into his pocket and gave the handcuffs’ key to the young man.
He walked out of the embassy and onto the Unter den Linden.
Four policemen were gathered round the Trabant and they were laughing at it and poking with their shoes at the bodywork. Josh took his grip bag from the back seat. He was told he could not leave the car parked there.
He said, ‘It belongs to the young lady. She always drives a Trabant. That was her mistake. Better ask her to move it.’
He carried his grip bag away and the spring sunshine was warm on his back.
‘Yes, of course you were right to call me immediately. I’ll be with you in half an hour, a call to make and a shower and a shit and a shave. Thank you, Rogers… What time is it? Must have been tired, don’t usually sleep in. I’ll see you…’
Albert Perkins put down the telephone.
He rubbed the deep sleep from his eyes. He shook, stretched.
He crawled from his bed and pulled back the curtains. Sunshine spilled into the room. He sat among the confusion of the sheets, pillows and blankets. Her face was in his mind. He saw every line on it, and the thrust of her chin, the brightness of her eyes and the colour of her hair. He sat, long moments, with his head in his hands.
He snapped upright. No requirement to go secure and unravel the bloody wires. He dialled.
It was more than the cleaning lady’s life was worth, to pick up a ringing telephone.
She should have been out of there thirty-five minutes before the telephone started to ring in Mr Fleming’s room. She had most of the drink stains off the carpet, but the red-wine spatter on the wall behind Mr Fleming’s desk was her headache. The phone rang insistently. It did not surprise the cleaning lady that Mr Fleming was not yet at his desk, an erratic gentleman, but it astonished her that Violet was late. Her plastic bin bag, on the marked carpet beside the desk, was half filled with the plastic cups and the emptied bottles. She had scrubbed the wall with kitchen tissue, might have to be repainted, and the carpet might have to be replaced. She gathered up her mop, her bucket and dragged her vacuum cleaner to the door.
She left the telephone ringing, and locked the door after her.
It was a great city in the heartbeat centre of Europe.
With his grip bag, Josh Mantle was a snail in the path of a caterpillar track.
The cranes and the bulldozers and the earth movers were fitted with the caterpillar tracks that broke the shell of the snail and buried the past and destroyed the history.
He was alone on the street. He was the pygmy figure among the racing, hurrying thousands, who made the pace of the new city. He walked with the ghosts, the few, who were rejected by the thousands. The ghosts held him tight below the towering cranes, beside the bulldozers and the earth movers that wiped out the faces of the ghosts. The short length of the Wall, preserved for tourists, so fragile where there had been permanence and death, mocked him. If he had stood, if he had put down his grip bag, if he had held out his arms, if he had snatched at the thousands who hurried past him and went about their business and lived their new lives, if he had shouted his truth, would any have cared for the forgotten past and the forgotten history? It was the conceit of Josh Mantle that he, alone, knew the debt value of the past and the history.
He was at the checkpoint.
The new buildings and the new cranes obscured the warmth of the sun from the street. The block where the holding cell had been, where the interrogating officer had come, where she had begged and wept for her freedom, was eradicated. A watchtower was still standing. They would have followed her, with their binoculars, when the bar had been raised, when she had crossed the no man’s killing zone, would have focused on her from the squat little watch-tower when she had gone into the shadow dawn with the lie and the deal. The dust of the building site choked in his throat. A freedom belonged to him…
The car came from behind him, blasted its horn.
Perkins’s face poked through the open window.
‘If I’d known you’d be here, I’d have bloody wiped you off the road. Never could keep out of business that wasn’t yours, could you, Mantle? Always had to interfere, hadn’t you? You think we wanted her – wanted her paraded in open court? But the little man, little shit-faced man, has to bleed his bloody principles over us. I hope you’re proud. I hope you rot.’
He shouted, ‘I was, I am, it’s precious to me, my own man.’
The window surged up.
She was alone in the back of the car. Afterwards, for ever, he would swear to himself that she smiled at him.
The car pulled away, went fast through the old checkpoint where there was no barrier, no guns, no past that survived, and he watched the car until he could see no longer the copper-gold of her hair above the seat, until she was gone from the mud pool and the rippled water was still.