The Contract

Renate was both a relative and a friend. A second cousin and a contemporary. They'd met in the town ever since she could remember the holidays in Magdeburg. Always Renate was there from the days of dressing up and playing skipping games and taking picnics, right through to adulthood and confidence. Renate the single girl like herself, and bubbling with a cheerfulness that was champagne to Erica after the long winter and slow spring of Moscow. Bewildering that such a lovely girl as Renate, pretty as a flower, had allowed herself to become the mistress of a policeman. A policeman called Gunther Spitzer. The two girls would be swept by gales of laughter when they spoke of the affair.

But at least he was a senior officer, he was prominent in the Schutzpolizei. What a choice for her lovely friend to have made. But in less than a month they could talk of it. From the drawers of her table she took a writing pad and her pen.

My dear Renate,

You will have heard of the awful thing that happened to Willi in Geneva

…

Chapter Six

There was pressure on the bathroom space on the Monday morning and on the days that followed. And at eight o'clock sharp Mrs Ferguson bustling into the dining room with her trays of fried food and jugs of coffee and pots of tea and racks of toast played to a full house.

The fierce jollity of the all-male working society. All together, lads, Mawby seemed to be saying, something for us all to have some pride in, and only the best will be acceptable.

'If you don't mind, the butter please.'

'Coming over, Adrian.'

'The marmalade there, Harry?'

'Wish the old lady would get some decent colfee in, right, Johnny?'

'Hear the news this morning, the bloody sewage workers' strike?'

'Nothing changes, does it, Henry?'

'Come on, lads, each to his appointed.'

'Yes, Mr Mawby.'

The men of the Service coming together with their individual areas of expertise in the operation, and all making the effort to pull Johnny into their nest.

Mawby and Carter, the last to leave the table.

'Distant, isn't he, Mr Mawby. Removed from us, like he's an untouchable, don't you think?'

'Self-dependent, and self-reliant, that's the way I see him, Henry, and that's what I'm looking for.'

'He's a cold sort of fish.'

'As he should be for what we want of him.'

'Do you know that he even brought his old army boots down here. Next to no luggage, but he insisted on the boots,

Smithson told me. You'd have thought he'd have turned them out months ago.'

'Let's hope he doesn't need them. Let's hope we're not into a cross-country scamper… Take him slowly, Henry, slowly and carefully.'

'Tell us about his health, Willi, his condition physically.'

Carter at the table with the big notepad, sometimes Mawby beside him and taking a lesser part. Willi sat in a straight chair in which it would be difficult for him to relax. Johnny sat behind the boy.

'He's an old man now, he's close to seventy. Up till his sixty-fifth, birthday he used to go to a gymnasium that was in a sports club near our flat, but he strained himself and he has not gone back. We used to have a dog and he could go for walks with it, but it died several years ago. He said it was too much trouble to have another one. He has a medical check-up each twelve months that is done at Padolsk by the Army. He cannot walk far now. Always he used to like to walk, when Erica and I were younger he liked to go with us to the Hartz Mountains, to Wernigerode or Quedlinburg, and then walk in the hills and the woods. I think that he has a little rheumatism… Why do you ask these questions, Mr Carter?'

'That's not your worry, Willi. Just answer as best you can, like you're doing.'

In the afternoons in the sitting room, Johnny sat with Adrian Pierce.

Military talk and the resurrection of familiar subjects of the old days before Belfast, before the trial, before the return to Cherry Road.

'You're going to be with a man who is expert in armour and its counter-weaponry. It's possible that the objective of the mission will not succeed, that you will not bring him over, but that you will manage to talk with him. It is possible that defection will be beyond him… And bloody daft it would be if the man we've sent has forgotten what the front end of a Main Battle Tank looks like. This is a sort of re- fresher course, Johnny, and by the time we pack you off I want tanks, armour plating widths, squash head, control guidance and all the rest of the paraphernalia running out of your ears.'

Always supper at seven, prompt on the clock, all of them sitting down, napkins spread, glasses filled with water or milk or Coca-Cola. Two tables pushed together. A cotton cloth that was clean each day. All watching the door to the kitchen through which Mrs Ferguson would come with the evening's offering. And after supper back to the sitting room for Johnny and with him Harry Smithson.