Gerald Seymour - The Contract

The team of Schutzpolizei had not concerned themselves with Johnny.

He'd felt the nerves wriggle and fidget in his body as they came into the carriage. Two men and two women. Navy blue trousers and navy blue skirts. Sexless powder blue blouses. Snug little pistols holstered at the waist; East German manufacture and a copy of the Soviet Makarov that in its turn was the copy of the West German Walther PP. Johnny tensed, slid his hand to the passport that he had collected from Reception before leaving the hotel and that carried the stamp of the Volkspolizei opposite his visa page. All trains going into the border areas were checked and under surveillance. Wernigerode was less than a dozen miles from the frontier, just routine. They had moved slowly, scraping their eyes over the passengers in the carriage. By the time that they were level with him Johnny had seen the pattern that they followed. The teenagers, the young ones, the kids with anoraks and rucksacks, they received attention.

Those who were going into the hills and forests towards the frontier, who were walking and camping in the Hartz, they were asked for their papers and tickets. The kids who had never known another life, who were ignorant of another colour, they were the risk. They were the runners.

Johnny stared out of the window. He repeated the catechism to himself. Not to take an interest, not to follow the gruff questioning and the hesitant answers. He must detach himself, follow the lead of people around him who closed their ears and eyes and minds. He wanted to smile and suppressed it. Out in the field, flat and stretching to a distant horizon was a corral of wire and floodlights and imprisoned inside was a single engine crop spraying aircraft. One last year, one this year… the way to the West at tree top height… the hope that the frontier guards weren't too accurate with the MPiKMs and the machine guns in the towers. Take a bit of nerve to lift a plane and fly out, a matter of courage and a fair load of luck. Up you, Comrade Honecker, because there were people here with nerve and courage and luck, and that's why a little aircraft has to have wire of 10 feet in height stretched round it. The man on the seat opposite Johnny would also have seen the plane, and his eyes were blanked and expressionless. Johnny pondered on what he thought of the sight, and had no possibility of knowing.

The Hartz gleamed green and lofty above the agricultural plain. He mused away the last minutes of the journey and was at the carriage door when the train stopped at Wernigerode station.

Otto and Erica Guttmann were not difficult to follow. Their pace and their steps were predictable.

Up the hill and towards the old, close knit town.

Into the Markt Platz where the hotels were and the tables and chairs were set and the stalls for the sale of vegetables. They had a coffee and Johnny surveyed them from a distance.

Along the gentle climb of the Burg Strasse, where the houses were timbered and painted, where the church was ageing and weeded, where the tourists were Party members and union officials and factory workers and holidaying with their families at the FDGB hostels.

By the bridge and over the shallow river. Johnny kept a gap of 30 to 40 yards between himself and the couple.

Across the road was a low roofed, century old stone chapel. There was a stall in front where an elderly woman guarded bundles of cut flowers, cheerful when set against the darkness of her clothes. Willi had talked of the cemetery, of the pilgrimage to the grave that would be made by Otto Guttmann and his daughter.

Johnny quickened his stride, closed the distance and reached in his inner pocket for the envelope.

Erica had paid for a spray of roses that were red and bold and erect, her father carried them and they nodded their thanks and passed into the cemetery. They threaded their way between the family plots. The old man struggled to maintain his straight, firm walk and his shoulder was tilted to his daughter as if he leaned more heavily for support. The grave they found was narrow, and there were tufts of grass sprouting between the gravel chips. With a quick gesture of annoyance Erica Guttmann bent down and snatched with her fingers at the grass stems and threw them to the pathway, then rose to stand in silence beside her father. A full minute Otto Guttmann waited, until the tears ran on his cheeks, and the tremble of emotion played at his lips, then he ducked and placed the flowers against the headstone and retrieved himself and stood again in stillness.

You're a pig, Johnny, you're the man in the night at the window of the Nurses' Home. A foul, nasty creature… Turn the screw, Johnny, turn it so that it hurts and brings agony. You're a pig, Johnny, and you don't give a shit.

Erica walked away from her father, leaving him to his inner contemplation, to the memories of the woman who had been his wife and given him his children, the memories of the woman who had died in the car that he had driven. Memories of holidays with a son and a daughter and picnics in these woods. Memories of shared happiness.

Erica was away from him and her back was turned and she browsed among other stones, other inscriptions, other flowers.

Johnny sidled forward, whittled the yards down, came to Otto Guttmann's shoulder.

'Doctor Guttmann…'

The old man's head cocked, jerked up at the stranger's voice. A spell broken, a mood disintegrated.

Johnny slid the envelope into the opened palm of Otto Guttmann's hand and as the fingers clenched and the eyes spun he was gone. Gone fast, gone because the work was finished.

Johnny didn't look back, did not expose his face, hurried in a fast walk to the cemetery gate. You've taken a chisel and hammered it into him, chosen the place where he'd be most vulnerable and beaten the sharp edge into him. You've destroyed him, Johnny.

On his daughter's arm Otto Guttmann climbed the path of stamped earth through the trees above the cemetery towards the Feudalmuseum.

This was the show piece of the town, the towering and restored castle that perched on a rock crag pinnacle above the houses. Several groups of walkers passed them because his steps were hesitant and the toes of his shoes bruised the stones in the path. Erica would notice nothing, would relate his stumbling progress to the graveside visit, equate his condition with the emotion generated by the cemetery.

He had looked once at the photographs in the envelope. Once also he had glanced at the words written on a single sheet of paper.

'If you ever wish to see your son, Willi, again, tell no-one of what you have been shown.'

In his mind there was a pandemonium of confusion. Five photographs of his son, cheerful and with a smile and clothes that he had not owned when he had left Moscow for Geneva. Willi on the streets of London because Otto Guttmann knew the symbols behind his son's back.. the red double decker buses, the policeman with his conical blue helmet, the monuments that were international and famous.

The photographs said to him that Willi was in London. But Willi was drowned in the Lake of Geneva.

His body had never been found.

That was explained. The man from the Foreign Ministry who had telephoned had said that it was possible in those waters for a corpse to stay submerged for many weeks. Possible, but unusual.

Which image should he take, which image should he accept? Willi with his face swollen and his stomach distended, caught in the weed, held in the slurry of the lake mud. Willi, drowned and dead and the file closed. Was that his son?… That, or the boy who posed with the grin and the wide smile of the photographs.

If it were a cruel trick then who would have the vicious- ness of mind to concoct it? The taunting of an old man with the resurrection of his son from the winding sheet.