Gerald Seymour - The Waiting Time

The most senior of the researchers escorted him from the basements. ‘You should not take it personally. If you wanted to know which teacher in a school in Saxony-Anhalt informed on his colleagues, then I could find you the answer. Which environment activist was beaten up because his wife betrayed him, which student reported on his colleagues, which poet infiltrated an arts group. I can tell you, names and dates and contact officers. Here, there is only the chaff of human misery, and that does not reach to the level of murder. They were busy in those last days, sanitizing the files, sterilizing the past. That is why, today, they swagger on the streets, certain of their safety. From what you looked for, from what is missing, I can tell you that the link between Hauptman Krause and Major Pyotr Rykov was sensitive in this matter of murder. If there was not guilt then the files would not have been cleansed. Is it important to you, this question of guilt?’

He stepped into the chilly floodlit yard. Julius Goldstein said, ‘The possibility of guilt is important because it can obstruct an advantage that we seek. My thanks to you, goodnight. The advantage is in the man, Rykov.’

‘Is that him?’

‘That’s our boy.’

The Briton and the American stood against the wall, a little apart from the guests in the salon where the Americans always entertained.

‘In the shadow of his man.’

‘I get the impression that the big shot doesn’t go to the toilet without the say-so of Rykov.’ The eyes of the Briton watered from the foul-smelling cigarettes around them. His diplomatic accreditation was for a second secretary (consular).

‘Use the soft tissue, imported, or the local ass scratcher – need a man with a sharp clear mind for the big decisions.’ The American, on the list submitted to the foreign ministry, was a cultural attache.

From where they stood, with soft drinks, they could see the line of guests filtering into the salon, past the handshakes of the ambassador and the deputy chief of mission. The minister, whose chest flashed ribbons, was in conversation with the deputy chief. The ambassador welcomed the short stocky Russian with the colonel’s insignia on his shoulders and the chest free of decoration colours. A heavy-built woman stepped forward hesitantly to meet the ambassador.

‘And brought his lovely wife with him.’

‘Our Irma – not what you’d call an ocean racer.’

‘More of a bulk carrier, Brad.’

‘Heh, look at that, David. Enjoy that.’

The minister had moved on to the centre of the salon, couldn’t have seen where he was headed. The Colonel had left his wife and was powering to him. The minister had blundered, stormy night and no navigation, into what Brad called the ‘recons’. They’d had eight different names in seven years, so Brad always won a laugh out of David with his name for the reconstructed KGB people. Eyes sparking, a stand-off, mutual hostility – military facing up to the ‘recons’. The Colonel had seen the opportunity of confrontation and come fast to his man.

‘You think they might actually fight, bare fist?’

‘I’m out of Montana, they used to have a betting game there. Put colours, for identification, on the back of a couple of rats which hadn’t been fed in several days, drop the rats in a sack and knot the top, tight. Bet on the winner.’

‘The loser’s dead?’

‘One rat lives. Where’d you put your money?’

Without finesse, Rykov had taken the arm of his minister and propelled him round like it was a parade-ground.

‘My paint’s going on Rykov’s back.’

‘Be a hard fight in the sack, he has to be clever and lucky. You rate him lucky enough – clever enough?’

‘I’m told he is. He wears a good face, a strong face.’

‘But you can’t see into the face. The way of this damn place, you never see behind the face of the man who matters…’

In the crowded room, the Briton and the American had eyes only for Colonel Pyotr Rykov. For the last four months, each, in his own way, through his own unshared channels, had sought to explain the man, unmask the character and analyse the influence. Both had failed. They were two veterans, middle-aged, heavy with experience; both had exploited the resources available to them to satisfy the hunger at Langley and Vauxhall Bridge Cross for hard information on the mind of Colonel Pyotr Rykov; both acknowledged that failure.

‘This guy the Germans are hawking…’

Droll. ‘Don’t, Brad, intrude on private grief.’

Chuckling. ‘Heh, is it right that a feisty little cat scratched his face? That’s pretty un-British manners.’

‘When’s he going across to your lot?’

‘A couple of weeks. The guest list’s the best and the brightest. They’re screaming for a profile on Rykov. He has undivided attention.’

They watched the Colonel. He was always a pace behind his minister, and they saw his lips move as if murmuring guidance. He was there for thirty-five minutes, the barest decency, before he was gone, slipping away with his minister and his wife, back into the frozen darkness of Moscow’s night.

It had been a late rail connection to the last ferry boat of the evening.

A squall had whipped off the harbour waters. The wind, even behind the high sea walls of packed rocks, had the strength to shake the pleasure boats, the tugs and the few fishing boats on their moorings, and to roll the ferry before the hawser ropes had been cast off.

Under scudding cloud, it ploughed through the waves, made a direct course across the Channel and towards the coast of Europe. It was the territory of the long-haul lorry drivers and the few passengers prepared to sacrifice comfort and time in the interest of economy.

She stood alone at the forward rail of the ferry boat, as far forward as passengers were permitted to be.

She did not seek the company of the lorry drivers in their lounge or other passengers, who clustered round the gaming table, the fruit machines and the cafeteria’s counter. She was unnoticed and unwatched. The night ferry was, for her, the most suitable way to travel from Britain to the Continent, the passport check would be the briefest. The spray, as the prow of the ferry ducked into the waves, spattered her hair and her face, her shoulders and her body. The tang smell of it was on her. She shouted her anthem to the night wind. It was a song of parting, waiting and death.

And she did not think of them, the men who had intruded into that aloneness and privacy in the last hours, days and weeks. If she had. .. Major Perry Johnson sat solitary in a corner of the mess, isolated, near to that place on the carpet where the drink stain had dried out. He was the man whose corporal had soured an excellent occasion. He was shunned. He was not called to the bar by Captain Dawson, or by Major Donoghue, and in the morning he would try again to attempt the impossible and discover the pattern of Tracy Barnes’s filing system. That afternoon, aggressive spite, he had told Ben Christie to keep the bloody dog out of G/9, and Christie had called him a ‘vindictive old bastard’ and applied for a transfer, immediate. He nursed his drink, he reflected that his world had fallen… but she had not thought of him.

The salt of the sea spray was on her lips and in her mouth.

Albert Perkins fought his tiredness. He sat at a plain table in the archive of Defence Intelligence. The material, too old to have been transferred to computer disk, was paper, bulging from a cardboard box, old sheets of typed and handwritten notes that were the bones, not the flesh, of an incident in the past that had a resonance of the present and might affect the future. He was brought coffee, a fresh mug every fifteen minutes. Without it, he would have slumped over the table.