Gerald Seymour - The Contract

'All right, Johnny?'

A wry grin for an answer. Johnny stood up, seemed to shake himself and with his bag in his hand walked across the platform to the carriage door. Carter opened it for him.

'Take care of yourself…' Carter said, a little stammer in his voice.

Johnny climbed the steps, and there was a frail grin of amusement and then he was gone along the corridor and looking for a compartment to himself. Carter searched along the line of windows, and found where he had settled. He hurried to stand underneath Johnny. Like a father and son, exchanging farewells, as if their next meeting would be long postponed. Carter strained to see into the shadow of Johnny's face.

'I'm an old fool, I know that… but be careful.'

'You worry too much,' a softness from Johnny.

'Probably… Take care, Johnny. And don't forget the whole team is with you.'

Johnny laughed. 'Don't walk under a bus,' he said.

The guard's whistle shredded Carter's thoughts. The train began to move, slowly at first, then catching its speed, drawing away, opening the gap.

Johnny waved, once and briefly. The window was drawn shut.

Carter stood and watched the going of the train till the red tail lights were lost to his view. An old fool, that was what he called himself.

Pathetic, and he was about right, wasn't he?

He went back to his bag that he had left beside the bench and set off for the staircase and the change of platform that he would need to catch the first train of the morning to Helmstedt.

An hour to wait, an hour alone with his thoughts of Johnny.

Charles Mawby presumed it to be an old custom of military hospitality and rejoiced in the provision of a cut glass decanter, liberally filled with whisky, on the dressing table of his bedroom. His day clothes folded and put on a chair, wearing his pyjamas and dressing gown, he poured himself an ample tumbler. He would brush his teeth later.

It had been a fine evening, with good company and good conversation.

The Brigade Commander of the British garrison stationed in West Berlin was the cousin of Joyce Mawby. It was not unnatural that he should forsake the hotel that the Service had allocated for his party and find accommodation for his team inside the protected compound that fringed the pre-war Olympic Stadium. Mawby would stay in the Brigadier's quarters. Smithson and Pierce had been farmed out to more junior officers' homes. George and Willi Guttmann were found a room with twin camp beds above the Brigade communications centre which offered security for the boy, peace of mind for his guard, and the presence of an armed Military Police Sergeant on the outside door.

He had talked more than was usual for him, drunk more than he was accustomed to, found himself free and at ease. Mawby was introduced to the dinner party guests as being from Foreign and Commonwealth Office, and his presence had raised no eyebrows. It was a chance to escape from the anxieties that would dog him over the following four days until he received the telephone call from Carter in the early hours of Sunday morning. Only once had the spell of reassurance and conviviality been broken. At the dinner table had been a colonel of the Intelligence Corps, serving his third year in Berlin.

Mawby asked with a casualness whether many escaped in these days from the German Democratic Republic across the city's dividing wall.

'Damn few,' the colonel had replied cheerfully. 'Not for lack of trying, not for lack of effort, but it's down to a trickle. That's not peculiar to Berlin, there are hardly any making it across the whole of the East/West border. They've spent a fortune sealing it and now they're getting their money's worth. Even after the DDR 30 years anniversary the gaols are still stuffed with kids who've had a go and failed. It's a pretty risky business, and don't let anyone tell you otherwise. I don't reckon I'd care to try it.'

The talk had switched to the new government in London, the capabilities of the Prime Minister and his Cabinet, the likelihood of further defence spending cuts. The passing of the port around the table had served to dismiss the one moment that threatened Mawby's confidence.

By the time that he was ready to switch off his light Mawby was a little drunk. And why not, he reflected.

Rubbing the towel across her shoulders, Erica Guttmann emerged from the bathroom. A close, hot night and she hoped that the shower would enable her to sleep.

It had been an endless, dragging, dreadful day. A walk in (he late morning to the Zoologischer Garten, a lunchtime snack there, a doze in the sunshine and then back to the hotel to change into a clean dress while her father took a new shirt and then another concert to be endured… He never went to hear music in Moscow and the city brimmed with ballet and symphony orchestras and chamber music quartets. Never went, and instead saved his trapped enthusiasm for the Magdeburg fortnight.

Beethoven at the Bezirks- musikschule on Hegel Strasse. Back to the hotel for late dinner before the dining room closed. She had seen her father to bed, sat and talked with him in his room and enjoyed the evidence that his strength and purpose were ebbing back in the days away from Padolsk.

She moved with a quick grace across the room, tall and light footed, slender and fast, the towel draped at her waist. No traffic moving on Otto von Guericke Strasse. There wouldn't be, they didn't have cars in this dreary, factory ridden camp. Even Moscow was better than here, even Moscow and God knew there were only trifles there. But these were her twin homes, these were the towns where she would grow old.

Complaint would not help her, nor dissatisfaction, nor dreams of the different world carried gently into her room by the hotel radio tuned to jazz music from Hamburg.

And her life was drifting, notching up anniversaries, and the petal prettiness of her youth would soon fade. Then she would be a matron caring for an old man, and when he was gone she would be an orphan with a faded face and nothing to call her own. Home was not Moscow because the barriers of life ensured that there she did not belong. Home was not Magdeburg because that was a city of concert halls and theatre seats and parks with chairs that were suitable for an old man who could not walk far without resting.

If she left the window open then the early trams would wake her. If she slept with it closed then she would drown in the sweat pool. That was the decision with which she wrestled without resolution while waiting for the relief of sleep.

Past Wolfsburg and first light coming diffused and uncertain, nibbling at the colossus of the power station, at the huge emptiness of the car parks underneath the towering and illuminated advertisement for Volkswagen. The train clattered forward, rolling with its speed, surging between fields and woodlands.

Johnny sat alone in a bare carriage. Who travels on the night train from Cologne to Zwickau? Not many, Johnny, not what a railroad would call a profit making exercise. It was cold in the carriage and Johnny wrapped his arms round him and zipped his anorak and stamped his feet. Not tired any more, not a vestige of sleep catching at him. Closing in around him, wasn't it? The carriage and the night pressing in on him… Wolfsburg station had been the last chance to turn back, when the BGS man came into the compartment and Johnny had shown his passport and seen the puzzlement on the frontier policeman's face. Only a fool wants to go over there, the eyes seemed to say. Too bloody right, brother. Only a fool and Johnny.

On a long swinging arc now, bending to the left the train shuddered and the first sight of the lands that fringed the track drifted to him. The lights were clear and bright in a ribbon line in front of the train. Like the lights for the autobahn: That's it, Johnny, that's what it's all been about… Those lights, the lights as far as you can see, the strip across the full width of the window. Keep looking, Johnny, and then you'll see the watchtowers, great big bloody monstrosities, and then you'll see the wire. The wire and the watch- towers and then you're nearly there. That's the overture, Johnny, and it gets better after that. Quite a bloody show it will be. Not one to disappoint Johnny Donoghue.