Gerald Seymour - The Contract

An old man, a little bowed and stooping, but with a firm stride. The suit hung on him as if age had wasted his stomach and dropped his shoulders and the shaping of the jacket and trousers was now obsolete. A domed, wrinkled forehead and wisps of white hair, metal rimmed spectacles. As Willi had said he would be, as the boy had described.

Erica had slipped her hand through the angle of her lather's arm. She swept the hall with her eyes and found no satisfaction and whispered in her father's ear. He nodded agreement and the two of them went carefully and in step to the side of the reception desk and stood, examining and quizzical, in front of the framed and printed sheet that carried the timetable of Magdeburg railway station.

He was fast out of his chair and across the hallway.

Johnny hovered behind them, listened and watched as the old man adjusted his spectacles to peer at the close print, and Erica's fingers darted at the relevant information.

'The one at 11 is too late. It has to be this one, just before 9

… it goes at 8.52… I will book the call tonight for us to be woken in the morning She led him away, spared no look for Johnny, left him the freedom of the timetable. He leaned forward to see the place where her fingers had played. The 8.52 via Oschers- leben and Halberstadt to Wernigerode.

Willi had talked of Wernigerode. Willi had talked of the annual pilgrimage to the town in the Hartz mountains. It suited Johnny well, was very adequate for the plan that had been conceived at Holmbury.

Johnny moved back into the centre of the hall. It took him some moments to find again the Guttmanns, father and daughter. Their backs were to him and they were talking to another girl and with a stout giant of a man. Johnny saw the glove and the scar. The girls talked fast and with the animation of friends. The men stood stiff and apart and seemed to spar with their words, in the guise of strangers. The girls in front, the foursome headed towards the glass doors of the restaurant. Time to find a table for one, johnny, not too near the band. Time to try the food, lad.

Johnny smiled up at Comrade Honecker and followed into the restaurant. Otto Guttmann had seemed older than he had expected. At the finish line of his career and that would be polite. And he was going to have a bastard time from tomorrow. Going to be wracked so that it hurt, deep pain, deep agony, because that was the plan that Mawby had endorsed. That was the way it had to be, wasn't it? Otto Guttmann was to be bent and crushed and broken. You're a nasty bastard, Johnny. Right.. and that's why you're here, that's why you were contracted to drive an old man half out of his mind with grief and dreams.

The restaurant seemed full and Johnny stood in the doorway and searched for an empty chair and tried to catch the eye of the head waiter.

Johnny stood outside the station entrance and looked across the square towards the International Hotel. He was early and his return ticket to Wernigerode was already in his pocket. Otto Guttmann would be late, because he was on holiday and he would be coming in a hurry and probably in an ill temper, and the girl would be fretting. And they would be confused and Johnny would be calm. That was the way it must be, for every hour and every minute that stretched before him in Magdeburg.

Johnny, with the reins tight in his fists.

Now 8.30 and the workers were scurrying for their offices and shops, for their desks and their cash counters and their construction sites. The slogan in front of him, 12 feet off the ground and 30 feet long, read 'DDR

30 — Werk des Volkes fur das Wahl des Volkes!' Impossible to know how many believed in the collective exhortations for greater striving and effort, impossible for Johnny to gauge how many of those brushing and bustling past him believed in the doctrine of 'the work of the people for the welfare of the people'. Don't they have any selfish buggers here? Just a myth, or is there really a Utopia that confronts capitalism?… They wore pressed and laundered clothes and dulled tired faces.

The presence of the Red Army at the station emphasised for Johnny the width of the bridge that he had crossed at Obeisfelde. Send them into apoplexy, wouldn't it? Johnny Donoghue, former holder of the Queen's Commission, former officer of the British Army Intelligence Corps, currently under contract to the Secret Intelligence Service, standing on the pavement outside the Hauptbahnhof of Magdeburg and running his mental check over their units and dispositions. Have a heart attack, wouldn't he, the Soviet military security commandant for the city? He saw the long serving men with their wide caps far back on their heads and badges of rank on their shoulders and their baggy trousers and floppy blouses. He saw the new recruits, some with the Asian tan and the narrow eyes of the far eastern territories and whose uniforms were poor fitting and whose boots were polished.

The Russians seemed to Johnny to dominate the station with their manpower and their transport. But this was what he had been told he would see, because this was a command area and Pierce had dinned that into his memory. Johnny saw the civilians thread and weave between the foreign troops, watched them ignore each other. Quit the rubbernecking, Johnny, that's the way you're noticed, that's the way the questions get asked. He walked away, turned his back on the military movement.

It was as he had thought it would be.

Otto Guttmann trailing his daughter. They came past him, Erica leading by two strides and heading straight for the ticket counter and leaving her father to rummage in his pocket for coins for a newspaper.

She would feel the burden of him, wouldn't she? Too fine a girl in her looks and bearing, as she stood in line in haughty impatience for the tickets, to be anchored to an old man. He wondered how they paced their evenings, what common ground they found for conversation. He swatted the mood away and set off in a leisured pursuit down the passageway to the platforms.

Across the track a troop train was loading. Children and wives, prams and parcels being stowed up the high steps and into the carriages. Men of the Soviet Military Police and the local Schutzpolizei overseeing.

Johnny the interloper. The families of a Signals Regiment returning to the Ukraine.

The loudspeakers blared the warning of the arrival of the train for Wernigerode.

Erica had her arm at her father's elbow. Johnny stood close and saw their heads merge as the girl whispered in her parent's ear. She laughed and he smiled, their crisis of departure was overcome. The train pulled into the platform and Johnny watched them climb on board and then walked to the next carriage.

He felt in his pocket for the envelope that contained the photographs, was reassured by the reminder of their presence and settled in a seat.

Sir Charles Spottiswoode drove fast along the A3 to London. The Volvo had brought him many column inches of comment and publicity in the national media after his well-docu- mented claim that the British motor industry produced vehicles of such poor workmanship that he, a patriot, had been forced to take delivery of a foreign produced motor. The Member for Guildford rejoiced in the brickbats that had been hurled at him, revelled in the abuse heaped at his doorstep.

But those who saw him as little more than an amusing by- product of public life had misread their man. The aggression and bitterness that haunted him were cultured in privacy. When he bit, he bit deep. He was not ignored.

The Prime Minister was seeing him that evening. In his mind he rehearsed the story that he would tell of the removal from a private house of a terrified young man at the hands of the louts of the Intelligence Service. He would demand the answer to his question of who sanctioned such behaviour, and by what legal right. The reputations of men previously unaccountable to Parliament would suffer, they would cringe away from the affair. That he guaranteed.