The Contract

'In the drawer of the room desk you will find the hotel's needles and cotton. All the labels on your clothes show them as made here or in Moscow, they must be removed and replaced.' Johnny handed her a small plastic bag filled with the identification of manufacturers in West Berlin and Frankfurt.

'Will we be searched?' The nervousness narrowed her lips.

'It's a precaution,' said Johnny.

The telephone rang from the hallway, called through the door of the darkened bedroom. An insistent, howling whine. It stripped the provocation and the tease from the face of the woman. It drew an obscenity from the man who drove his gloved fist into the softness of the mattress to lever himself better from her body. He rolled beside her, his face clouded in the shades of frustration. The telephone was a prior claim on him and he shrugged away her reaching arms, and strode naked and white-skinned to the door.

No sheet to cover her, Renate screamed at the broad back, 'Tell the bastards to go to hell… you said they would not call you on a Saturday. ..'

She watched him through the open door. The anger withered, the giggles rose. Her lover in profile at the telephone, thin and spindly legs, only the glove to clothe him. She shook with quiet laughter.

'Spitzer… I will come immediately… nobody is to talk to him… the SSD should be informed that I have taken personal charge of him… that is all.'

The telephone was slapped down. He made for the heap of clothes around the bedside chair, pulled on his underpants and vest.

'Aren't you going to finish…?'

No response. Preoccupation with the shirt buttons, with the trouser zip, with finding a missing sock.

'What's so important…?'

He laced his shoes, retrieved his knotted tie, slid his jacket from the back of the chair.

'When are you coming back…?'

' I will not be coming back tonight.'

'On a Saturday…?'

'A man has come to see me and I have waited 7 years for the meeting.'

She saw the excitement bright in his small blue eyes, and not for her.

She knew the language. Some poor swine shitting himself in an underground cell at Number 2, Halber- stadter Strasse. Sitting in a corner and shitting himself. And Spitzer would enjoy it, more than being with her on the big bed. And better at it too, better at terrifying a snivelling cretin in the cells than satisfying Renate.

As the front door slammed she buried her head in the pillow and pounded it with her fists.

Under the canopy of the petrol station on the edge of the Grunewald Park beside the Berlin approach road to the E6 autobahn, Charles Mawby and Adam Percy shaded themselves and waited.

They had arrived early for their rendezvous with Hermann Lentzer, but that was Mawby's way, he said. Never be late if you don't have to be, always give yourself time, easier on the nerves that way. They looked up the road, watched for the car that would come with Lentzer and the two men who would make the drive to Helmstedt.

'I've enjoyed Berlin, Adam, rather an exhilarating place I felt. More going on than I'd expected. You hear of it as a sort of ghost city, all the young people leaving. I thought it was rather lively.'

' I suppose I come too often to notice,' Percy said dourly.

' I'd like to bring the wife, I reckon she'd be fascinated… bit bloody expensive, have to keep her on a rein. Do you ever bring your wife, Adam?'

'My wife died three years ago, Mr Mawby.'

'God, I'm sorry… I'd forgotten.'

' I wouldn't have expected that to be remembered back at Century

…

I'll get some coffee from the machine. White and sugar?'

And they'd drunk the coffee and found a rubbish tin for the beakers, and Mawby had started to flick his fingers, and he'd looked at his watch, and paced out into the evening sunlight, and come back to Percy.

'A damn good holiday we're having. Joyce and I when this is over.

Reckon I'll have earned it. Taking the kids with us, of course. A package trip, but that's the only way you can afford to go these days, down to Greece. Where are you going, Adam?'

' I usually go up to a place near Hull, my sister's family. They put me up for a fortnight, they're very kind.'

' I've heard it's very nice there, Yorkshire, isn't it?'

'Seems to rain the fortnight I'm there.'

'Does it?… I hope this bloody man isn't going to cut it fine.' 'He was very exact with his timings, but from what he said, he's a bit adrift.'

'You stressed the importance of the schedule?'

'Of course, Mr Mawby… I'll get another coffee.'

And the concern grew and the worry was bred and the anxiety draped their faces. The pump attendant gazed with undisguised curiosity at the steadily increasing discomfiture of the two Englishmen who had come in their office suits to stand in his forecourt.

'He couldn't have misunderstood anything, Adam?'

'He had it all pat, Mr Mawby.'

'He's late, you know that?'

Percy looked down at his wrist. 'He's five minutes short of an hour late.'

'It's the centre of the whole damned thing, the car…'

' I know that, Mr Mawby. He's a greedy bugger, he'll be here.'