'What do you say, Johnny?' Carter murmured, his attention distanced.
' I said that I'll want a gun.'
Carter swivelled towards him. 'That's not on, Johnny, you know that.'
'Not to carry through the frontier, but to pick up there. I want one.'
' It's not cops and robbers, you know.'
'When we go for the autobahn, I'll want to carry a gun.'
' It'll never be agreed to, you know that. If anything happened. ..'
'Exactly right, if anything happened,.. if one idiot stands in the way. If one Schutzpolizei holds his hand up… What do you do? You won't be there to tell me. Not you, not Mawby.'
Because that was the crucible, and Carter wasn't travelling. He'd be at Helmstedt and waiting. Kicking his heels at Checkpoint Alpha and thinking of the restaurant they'd take over when Johnny came through.
Carter was the blunt end man. And Carter couldn't read this young man, young enough to be his son, young enough to have had the small front room of his home, young enough to have earned in Northern Ireland the mauve and green ribbon of active service, young enough to have killed there… How do you love a young man, offer yourself as parental substitute, when he's slaughtered a child, shown no public remorse?
And Carter didn't know him, could not search a path into the mind of the man they would send to Magdeburg. And he would only be waiting for him, waiting with a restaurant reservation.
'I'll see what I can do.'
'We wouldn't want a little thing to stymie us.'
Carter showed a beleaguered, tired sympathy. 'I'll argue the case for a gun with Mawby. Don't worry at it.'
He carried the bottle to Johnny. Something terrible in those watchful, clear lit eyes, something that frightened him, that made him want to turn his back on the man who had shot a teenage girl and wept no tears.
'You're a cold bugger, Johnny.'
' I'm a contract man,' Johnny said, and his eyes blinked and the brightness had fled.
Ulf Becker jumped easily down from the lorry's tailboard. He didn't look back to see how Heini Schalke coped with the drop. He held his pack lightly with one hand, trailed his rifle in the other. Dirty, hot, bathed in his sweat he stopped in front of Company Orders, the board on which duty rosters were posted. Becker sniggered, pointed out the carbon typed sheet to those who followed him.
Battalion at Seggerde directed company at Weferlingen to provide two sections in the morning in support of company at Walbeck. An epidemic of measles was responsible. Much laughter, much ribaldry.
And welcome… Becker's name on the list of those to be sent the eight kilometres south from Weferlingen to Walbeck.
Anything for variety, anything to change the outlook of the sugar beet fields across the wire, and the farm houses, and the road junctions, and the viewing platforms where the British troops and the Bundesgrenzschutz and the Zoll Customs men came to peer across at them
… and there was no hope of breaching the fence at Weferlingen, no justification there for writing a letter to a girl in Berlin.
Chapter Eleven
Carter opened the door silently, and walked on his toes towards the bed.
Johnny sleeping and lit by the early morning sunshine. Carter intruding, as if creeping into the room of his daughter when she had been small.
And this one had a child's face too. Relaxed and easy breathing, a calm set mouth, the legs drawn up and silhouetted under the bedclothes. The defenceless, vulnerable posture of sleep. Carter carried a china mug of tea to the bedside table and grimaced at the street map of Magdeburg that had been left crudely folded beside the lamp. Bloody awful bedside reading. Switch yourself off from the day's work with a street map of a ghastly city of chimneys and furnaces in the German bloody Democratic Republic. Poor bastard. Everything so neat in the room. As if Johnny infiltrated himself between the furnishings and fittings, disturbed nothing, moved nothing. Clothes all in the wardrobe, or folded on the chair. Shoes together and slippers beside, as if for kit inspection. Means more than that, doesn't it? If his possessions aren't strewn on the floor, if he doesn't leave his mark in the nest, then he's a stranger here. He doesn't believe that he belongs. The return of the thought, the thought that came many times to Carter… They did not know this man.
'Johnny, Johnny.'
He started in the bed, tightness on the face, the peace gone and fled. A sharpness of movement, the fast clearing of the mind. Carter had thrown a pebble into still waters. The private face was gone, Carter would not recapture it.
'Johnny, I brought some tea for you.'
Johnny propped on one elbow. Johnny gazing at him and seeking a reason. Johnny who slept so tidily that the parting of his hair was still intact.
' I brought some tea.'