The Contract by Gerald Seymour Read Free Book Online

confirmation of the unthinkable and had irrevocably destroyed the chance that some terrible mistake had been woven around the family.
    'You want to open the bag, Father?'
    'We should.' His voice had a husked control.
    'The car will be waiting
    'This once let it wait.'
    Erica Guttmann carried the suitcase to her brother's bedroom, and her father followed. It was a tiny cubicle of a room that Willi had used, but then there had been no com- plaints; a three-bedroomed flat was a rare privilege, was the evidence that Otto Guttmann had been accepted into the elite of the establishment. A poster from the Olympic Games took pride of place on the wall in front of them, the symbol of the yachting competitions fought out in the Baltic city of Tallin. On another wall was a large framed colour photograph of a crew at work in the interior of a Soyuz space craft. A desk that was bare and cleaned. A radio with chrome finish on a low table and the pile of cassettes neatly stacked beside it. Curtains that had been drawn in the awful moments after the telegram had arrived. The single bed with gaudy coverlet where Willi would have slept the last two nights if he had returned with the delegation from Geneva.
    The room of Otto Guttmann's son, the room of Erica Guttmann's brother.
    She lifted the bag onto the bed.
    'It is best that it's done now,' she said.

    The key turned smoothly in the lock. The top garments spilled out and across the bed cover and with a careful discipline she began to make piles around the suitcase. Trousers and jackets, shirts and vests and underpants, ties and handkerchiefs. The shoes she put on the floor. She felt the brooding, wretched presence of her father, but did not look round at him, continued with her task, and then she sighed as she reached the bottom of the bag and the thick, dear plastic sack in which her brother's personal possessions had been packed. She bit at her lip, and emptied the contents onto the bed. A wallet that had been his father's present for his eighteenth birthday. A silver ink pen that had been Erica's gift at the last Christmas. A photograph frame that held in its three compartments pictures of father and sister and the three together in the sunshine of the Archangelskoye Park with Willi shining in his happiness and rising half a head above those who looked down at the picture. The girl heard her father's choked breath and his hand came to rest on her shoulder.
    'Go and get your work ready, Father. I will finish it.'
    He obeyed and the door closed behind her. She slid the clothes into the drawers of a chest, shovelled the possessions back into the sack and found room for it under the bed, hidden by the fall of the coverlet. Time when she came home for her to be more thorough. It was horrible for her father that there was nothing tangible for him to fasten to. No funeral, no rites, no burial. .. and if at some future date the remains of Willi were recovered from the water and returned to them then the wound could only be reopened and the pain reawakened. The stupidity of the boy but she must not think ill of him, not now, not ever again.
    She walked out into the hall, easy and graceful on her feet, swung back her head loosening the shoulder length of corn silk hair and pulled on her coat. Otto Guttmann waited by the door with his overcoat, gloves and scarf, and wearing on his face the conquering burden of age and extreme tiredness. For a moment they embraced, tight and clinging, arms close around each other, and then she had the key in her hand for the front door and they went out onto the landing and she shut the door of their home and locked it.
    Henry Carter knocked tentatively at Mrs Ferguson's sitting room door, was told to enter, but stood in the doorway to deliver his message to the lady who rested her sewing across her lap to hear him out.
    'Mr Mawby's just been on the telephone. There's going to be a bit of a party here for the next few days. He will be back himself and there's three