The Contract

They had come under the arch of the castle gatehouse, they had paused to find the coins for the admission charge, they had stepped into the strong light of the battlements adorned with cannon. He had no recollection of the man who had come in stealth behind him, could remember nothing of his face or features. He could recall only a slouched and disappearing back and the feel of the thin paper of the envelope in his fingers. If the palm of his hand had not been able to find the clear edges of the photographs in his pocket he would have known he had dreamed, imagined, that the mind of an old man could be harsh and vindictive.

He made an excuse to his daughter. He must find a lavatory. He would only be a few minutes. He left her to gaze down from the high walls across the panorama of the houses set in trees in the slope of the valley, and beyond to the rising woodlands and the Brocken mountain.

Behind a bolted door, cramped and closeted, he took the photographs from his pocket. The pictures admitted no possibility of doubt, nor of deception. Even in the meagre light he could see there was nothing fraudulent, no super- imposition, no trick… Willi in the centre of London… He felt his knees weaken and reached for the whitewashed walls for support. The tears flowed and he wept without inhibition.

Willi, his son. Willi, walking and alive and breathing the good air. He found his handkerchief, wiped his eyes and snivelled into its folds.

Why had the man come with such subterfuge? Why had he not stayed to offer explanation? Why did he torture him with such cruelty? When Otto Guttmann joined his daughter on the battlements she quizzed him sharply as to whether he felt faint, and he said that he was well.

This year, as every year, they set off to tour the state- rooms of the Feudalmuseum.

Too early for lunch, too early for the train back to Magdeburg, Johnny meandered along a wood path away from the cemetery. To his right, half hidden from him by trees was the road winding to the horizon of the hills. That would be the road to the Brocken, the summit at 1140 metres above sea level, the highest peak in the Hartz. Pierce had spoken of the Brocken, of the antennae of the Soviet technicians, of the principal Warsaw Pact listening post in the DDR. Triple towers rising into the skyline that could monitor NATO radio transmissions across West Germany. Less than 10 miles away and the most sensitive installation in the country and close to the frontier. And down the road he'd be drifting into the

Schutzzone that Smithson had warned of. He retraced his steps, turned his back on the far hill and its pylons.

The sign of the forking of the paths directed him to the Wildpark Christianental.

There were deer and pigs here that gazed sorrowfully from inside their wire lined compounds. A fox in a cement floored cage stared back at him and having no escape curled itself again into a fur ball. A wild cat scurried for its artificial cave. They were not the creatures that caught at Johnny's eye. It was the birds of the mountain that drew him. The buzzard and the sparrow hawk, the harrier and the peregrine, the merlin and the kestrel. Each with his stumpy wooden perch, each with his own chain for denying flight. What the bloody place is all about, a great sodding empire of clipped wings and restricted movement.

And Johnny would cut Otto Guttmann free. He would have loved to take a wire cutter to the birds, loved to watch them climb and soar again in the upper currents of the wind.

Suppose Otto Guttmann won't come, rejects it, won't entertain the drive down the autobahn… what then, Johnny? Cut the wires on those birds and they'll rise. Guttmann is the same, or he's a bloody lunatic.

It had taken Johnny half an hour to walk through the Wildpark. In front of him was the main road into Wernigerode.

Nothing more for him to do in this town. The dart had been thrust into the mind of Otto Guttmann. Its poison should be given time to run.

He would catch the early afternoon train to Magdeburg.

A pleasant sunshine in West Berlin. Crowds out on the Kaiser-Damm and the Bismarck Strasse. The people of this frenetic, isolated city around which 11 Divisions of the Red Army were stationed bobbed in and out of the department stores, crowded the pavements, jostled for seats in the cafes.

With the Brigadier's wife as his guide, Charles Mawby was shopping.