The Contract

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.