The Waiting Time Read Free Page B

hoarse: ‘Get her out, Christie. Get the bitch under lock and key.’
    Their fists clenched, standing over their man, coiled, were the minders.
    · . He had started his day shitty cold and shitty tired.
    ****
    Julius Goldstein knew of nowhere more miserable than a commercial airport in winter as the passengers arrived for the first flights of the day. They had flowed past him, business people and civil servants, either half asleep or half dressed, either with shaving cuts on their throats or with their lipstick smeared, and they brought with them the shitty cold and shook the snow patterns off their legs and shoulders.
    He had gazed out into the orange-illuminated darkness, and each car and taxi showed up the fierceness of the cavorting snow shower. Of course the bastard was late. It was the style of the bastard always to be late. He had managed to be punctual, and Raub had reached Tempelhof on time, but the bastard was late. He was tired because the alarm had gone in the small room at the back of his parents’ home at four. No need for his mother — and him aged twenty-nine — to have risen and put on a thick housecoat and made him hot coffee, but she had. And his father had come downstairs into the cold of the kitchen and sat slumped at the table without conversation, but had been there. His mother had made the coffee arid his father had sat close to him because they continually needed to demonstrate, he believed, their pride in their son’s achievement. The source of their pride, acknowledged with coffee and with a silent presence at the kitchen table, was that their son was a junior official in the Office for the Protection of the Constitution. Not bad for a little Jew boy — maybe just a token to beef up the statistics of government employment for Jews, but he had made it there and they oozed pride. One night only in Helmstedt with his parents, giving them pleasure, and the cost to Julius Goldstein was that he had been on the autobahn at four thirty, hammering on the gritted roadway to Berlin and Tempeihof, driving at stupid speed to be certain that he was not late. His mother had said that he would be cold, and had fussed around him, had tried to press on him his father’s scarf from the hook on the kitchen door. He did not wear a scarf, or a tie, and his shirt of midnight blue was unbuttoned at the neck so that the gold Star of David hanging from a slight gold chain was clearly visible. He did not go to the synagogue. He had been only once to Israel, seven years before, and had loathed it. He wore the chain and the Star of David as his own personal small gesture towards the past. It made them squirm in the offices in Cologne.
    Raub had stood beside him and whistled his annoyance through his teeth, so Goldstein had smiled as if there was no problem with the bastard being late. Raub wore an overcoat of mahogany brown, a silk scarf, a striped suit and a white shirt, and Goldstein had known what Raub would wear so he had dressed in casual outdoor shoes, designer jeans, an anorak and an open shirt. Raub had worn a tie, Goldstein had worn the Star of David. Raub had carried a polished leather attaché case, Goldstein had a canvas bag hooked over his shoulder. They were calling the flight, the last call. Raub had the tickets and the boarding passes.
    The taxi had come to a halt in front of the glass doors, where it was forbidden to stop, the driver reaching back for his fare, his face lit with pleasure. It would be a good tip because it wouldn’t be the bastard’s own money, because it would go down on the expenses and for this bastard, high priority, expenses were a deep black hole. The bastard was out of the car, striding the few paces to the glass doors, which had swept open for him, and Goldstein had shuddered again as the cold caught him and the snow flurry settled on his face and his arms.
    Goldstein and Raub were the minders from the BfV: they were the escort from the counter-espionage organization.
    He was a