The Quiller Memorandum Read online

  The reply-system has two advantages, especially when an operator must not carry radio. A letter mailed to him in reply to his would take longer and could be intercepted even if unstamped. A letter delivered to me at the Prinz Johan Hotel would have its tax paid by the desk and would be lying in a pigeonhole for as long as I was absent – sometimes a matter of days. Not safe. Nor is it convenient to pick up mail post restante; post offices are scarcer than beer-houses and an agent would in any case have to carry the letter until he could burn it and could be forced to give it up at gun-point if an adverse party meant to have it. The second advantage of the P and B system is that it can reach an agent anywhere in Europe at a precise time when he can arrange to be alone to take the signal. Also the signal goes direct into his mind without trace. He can, if he must, receive a signal while standing in a public bar with an adverse party at his elbow, and receive it in total secrecy.

  But it's a slow system and is never used in emergency. Emergency justifies risk, and the risk in any country is that the Bureau may, for many reasons, be working against the interests of that country's police services. In my case a telephone call to Local Berlin Control would assume a risk and therefore be made only in emergency, because I was working against the interests of certain members of the Federal police services, the unknown ex- and neo-Nazis riddling the department from the highest echelons (people like Ewald Peters, just arrested) down to the constabulary. Any member of the police, seeing me leaving a telephone, could use his credentials and ask the hotel clerk, the barman or the operator what number I had called, and could find the address. Also, the line could be tapped.

  Against this risk we have two safeguards. There is a simple code system whereby "I'm dining with Davis tonight " means "I'm going to ground " and so on. If the signal is more complicated and a great deal of vital information has to be phoned in during an emergency, we speak in Rabinda-Tanath, the dialect of the Lahsritsa hill-tribes of East Pakistan, which is even more basic than original Malay and has the advantage of being instantly adaptable. (Oddly, there is no word for ‘bullet’, and we would use ‘kill-ball’. ‘Motor-car’ would be ‘fire-cart’.) A Lahsritsa is stationed permanently in Local Berlin Control, happily studying for a degree in Literature in between emergency calls.

  There had been no urgency in getting confirmation of Pol's identity and function, so that I had posted his photograph and set the system going. A photograph is always carried by an agent ordered to make contact with someone who has never met him before. Its receipt at the Bureau, without any message alongside, is taken to mean one thing:

  Who is he?

  He was 878¼. Plus 2½. TRUE NAME GIVEN. TOTALLY RELIABLE. LIAISON LONDON.

  That was why I'd never heard of him before. I'd been out of London for two years: Egypt, Cuba, now Germany. He was one of the new links normally liaising direct with London. I would never have seen him at all if KLJ hadn't bought it and thus created an emergency. Willi Pol (his Christian name had been in the memorandum) had been flown out to make contact and hand me the baby. Where was he now? Flying back. Lucky bastard.

  Something about the darkened radio dial afflicted me, on the very edge of consciousnesss, and I worried it until the answer came. KLJ Petroleum had been knocked out of the market, and wouldn't be quoted again.

  I woke naturally at the top of a late sleep-curve and thought at once of her lean shoulders and the way she stood, because she'd been the last image of consciousness, quite unbidden.

  There'd been a black panther in a dream, already fading. I beat around but couldn't bring it any clearer. It was too late. Dreams are gone in the first few seconds of waking, like ghosts at cock-crow. But she'd been there all right, a dark succuba.

  Progress had been made in more practical directions. Before sleep I'd fed in the problem and by morning it was resolved. Decision: action this day.

  I had assumed too much, and it had put me into a false position. I had assumed that the car had been out to crush me, and not the Lindt girl. I had assumed that the man who had begun tagging me along the Unter den Eichen was an adverse party: and I'd been wrong. I could have been wrong about the crush attempt too. They might not have been after me at all. They might not even know of my existence. My position would be false if I went on believing necessarily that while I hunted Zossen he hunted me.

  So I still had to draw his fire. If they were already on to me, they'd stick, so I couldn't lose by taking action. I had to get where they wanted me, and hope to survive long enough for the overkill.

  I was at the West Berlin Public Prosecutor's office before ten o'clock with a file on three suspects and a different set of papers showing me to be working in liaison with the Z Commission – which indeed I was. For six months I'd operated in strict hush; now I would head across open ground so that Phoenix could see me.

  "We knew nothing about these three people." Herr Ebert said plaintively.

  "You do now, Herr Generalstaatsanwalt."

  He nodded ponderously; his head was like a great smooth stone balanced upon another. I had checked his dossier months ago because I'd been working through his office indirectly, unknown to him, merely sending in the evidence as I gathered it and leaving him to pass on the orders of arrest to the Z-polizei. He was a Socialist and a Resistance veteran with a record of escapes from concentration camps equalled by few. The political cartoonist Federmann had pictured him with his huge arms carrying a Jewish child through the mud of littered swastikas, and the original sketch was framed on the wall above him. Invoking enemies by the hundreds as he applied himself to ridding the German cupboards of their skeletons, he wished it to be known that of all the officials firmly astride the fence with a foot dabbling nervously on each side, he was not one.

  I waited for twenty minutes while he rocked heavily in his chair reading my files. The evidence against these three men had been gathered during the last week and I'd meant to hand it over to my successor to give him a good start. Now I would use it myself.

  "This is very detailed, Herr Quiller."

  "Yes."

  "Your sources are obviously authentic. You must have worked very hard." He gazed at me from beneath pink-and-blond eyebrows. He wanted to know how I'd dug up all this without his ever having heard of me.

  "You set a good example, Herr Generalstaatsanwalt."

  His face remained bland. He let it go. Neither of us had time to play poker. "These are cases for immediate arrest."

  "Yes."

  "You'll perhaps give me the addresses where these men can be found."

  "If you'll signal the Z polizei I'll go with them."

  "That isn't necessary."

  "No."

  "But you wish to be in at the kill."

  "Put it that way."

  "I will arrange it." He lifted a phone.

  It's always rather cosy when you are forced to do something you want to do but shouldn't. I shouldn't have allowed myself to be present at the coming arrests, because it was an indulgence: it would be a sadistic pleasure to watch the faces of these three men in their moment of Nemesis, because I had last seen one of them – Rauschnig – inspecting a parade of young Jewish girls sent to him for ‘special treatment’ at Dachau. They had been lined up naked against the wall of a corridor and he had selected ten of them for medical experimentation. I didn't know what had happened to them but I knew that their death wouldn't have been easy.

  I had never met the other two – Foegl and Schrader – but from the evidence in the file they had excelled Dr. Rauschnig in acts of inhumanity. Therefore I would take pleasure in seeing their faces on this, the last day of their freedom.

  This corrosive emotion would be out of place in the pursuit of an intellectual exercise; it wouldn't do me or anyone any good; but it would be incidental to my main purpose in going along with the Z-polizei. By the time the third arrest had been made, at my instigation and in my presence, Phoenix would be on my track. That was the end of the means.

  "A car will collect you in fifteen m
inutes, Herr Quiller." He gave me a signature for the receipt of the files. "Perhaps I shall have the pleasure of seeing you here again?"

  "All going well, Herr Generalstaatsanwalt, I guarantee it.

  The scbonheitssalon was in the Marienfelder-platz and the three of us went through the doors together. The police-captain and his sergeant were both armed but in civilian clothes. A screen of wrought filigree-work intertwined with climbing flowers divided the little individual cubicles from the waiting-room. We were invited to sit and remained standing. A fountain played in a pink marble basin the shape of a shell and there were tiny tropical fish gliding in it. Pink gossamer curtains draped the walls and the lighting was shed from the centres of gilt sunbursts in the ceiling. The air was perfumed. A slender Venus stood in a softly-illuminated niche, girdled with the gold riband of the Herr-direktor's diploma from the 1964 Exposition de Paris des Arts Esthitiques.

  The receptionist came back: a heavy-bodied young madchen with jungle eyes. The Herr-direktor must oblige us to await him a further half an hour, since he was in the middle of a delicate treatment and (the eyes dilated) the client was a baroness. The hem of her pink Grecian tunic swung as she turned away.

  The police-captain knew better than to trump this by presenting his credentials. The place would have more than one exit. I followed him with the sergeant through the low gilded gate.

  Dr. Rauschnig was in the first cubicle. His face was plumper than when I'd last seen it but I recognised him and nodded to the captain.

  "Your name is Julius Rauschnig?"

  Shocked at the intrusion, he declared his name to be Dr. Liebenfels. He had never heard of Rauschnig. The captain produced a photograph taken of Rauschnig in 1945 in the U.S. Army liberation sector, Dutch frontier. The photograph had been nameless-on-file in the Z Commission archives and I had picked it out for them this morning before corning here.

  The woman on the treatment-couch bent her neck and peered at us with two affronted eyes in a half-applied mud-pack. Then I turned my back because I didn't want to look any more at the face of Rauschnig. Corrosive emotions no go.

  His voice was bad enough to listen to. The harder it pretended indignation the more it shook.

  "I assure you that you are mistaken!" So on. "It is very harmful to the delicate facial tissues of the baroness if the treatment is interrupted!" So forth. But I caught sight of one of his hands as it gesticulated, and the corrosion set in. Because a face is not active: it is only the shape of a name. It is the hand that acts. And these soft white hands that had been tenderly ministering to this woman's vanity, touching her withered face as if it were a flower in pretence that he could restore the bloom of youth, had once been laid upon the faces and the bodies of girls in Dachau as urgently as a beast claws meat.

  His soft hands flew in the perfumed air. His voice bubbled in denial, more shrilly now. The woman, alarmed, called out, and the madchen in the Grecian tunic came trotting, to stand confused.

  "You will please accompany me," the captain told him.

  "I must telephone my lawyer!"

  "We will telephone him from the gendarmerie."

  "But I have no shoes for the snow! My chauffeur is not here with the car!"

  "We have a car waiting.

  "You cannot just take me like this from my work! This lady -"

  "Herr Rauschnig, if you'll come with me peaceably there will be no inconvenience for anyone."

  He began blubbering now and I concentrated on the young receptionist's face to take my mind from the sound; but her face was horrified and the light of the lamp was reflected in her eyes; and I'd noticed the lamp before I had turned my back. It had a small pink shade and I remembered the white shade of the lamp that had been in Haptsturmfiihrer Rauschnig's private quarters at the camp. The white shade, and a pair of gloves, and a book-cover had been made by the deft fingers of his mistress who lived with him; by grace of a technique he had perfected, they were made of human skin.

  "You cannot take me like this!" And the woman screamed as he lurched past the girl. The sergeant tripped him automatically and he grabbed at the pink curtain, his shoulder smashing the thin partition of the cubicle as he fell and lay awkwardly, swathed in gossamer. The jar of mud-pack mousse toppled from the treatment-table and spattered his legs. He lay babbling. I stepped over him and went out through the waiting-room and into the street and the sudden burst of a flashlight.

  "Wait," I told them. "They're bringing him out." I'd phoned Federal Associated Press from the offices of the Z-polizei, tipping them off.

  When Rauschnig was led out I moved to stand beside him as the flashes came again. By this evening my picture would be in several papers where Phoenix could see it.

  7: RED SECTOR

  The bullet from a small 8 mm. short-trigger Pelmann and Rosenthal Mk. IV spins in the region of two thousand revolutions per second and at very close range the flesh laceration is severe, due to heavy scoring by the large number of lands in the rifling. Carbon monoxide discharge is high and the flesh tattooing is consequently vivid. The bullet enters the body with the effects of an ultra-high-speed drill combined with a blowlamp.

  In the case of Schrader the skull had shattered badly and only one side of his face was recognisable. The police-captain compared it with the profile photograph, took a statement from the secretary in the outer office and then telephoned the Selbstmord department at Kriminalpolizei H.Q., since a suicide was more their job than his. Schrader would never go to trial and our interest in him was at an end.

  I asked to be present at the summary search for papers and diaries but we turned up nothing that would lead me to Zossen. A phone-call had been made not long before the shot was heard, from a man whose voice and name were unknown to the secretary. It was an hour since we had handed over Rauschnig and started out for Schrader, so someone must have sprung a big leak about Rauschnig's arrest and Schrader had decided not to face the music. It was because of this sort of thing that the Z-polizei liked to be quick when they could.

  The captain was again annoyed to find the two energetic Federal Associated Press cameramen on the pavement outside the offices of Schrader-Fahben Shipping Components and I didn't tell him I'd telephoned. It was usually relatives or friends who tipped off the next along the line when the Z went in and made a snatch, and the whole staff of the F.A.P. could buzz with news that wouldn't reach the close associates of arrested men until they printed it.

  I made sure they got my picture and then went to find the car. It was a grey Volkswagen hired from Hertz on my sudden decision that morning: I wasn't a free agent, stuck in the back of the police-car all the time, and it irked me. The VW was ubiquitous in shape and colour and would make a useful mobile base if I had to stay away from the Hotel Prinz Johan for more than a day.

  The black Mercedes followed me out of the city and through the snowscape. The sky at noon was dark against the white hills. The autobahn through the Corridor was treacherous with stretches of black ice where last night the snow had turned to rain and the rain had frozen. There were few other cars on the route and we were held up less than fifteen minutes at the Helmstedt checkpoint. I showed my second set of papers to avoid delay.

  The Star of David School stood in a hollow of the land a few kilometres before Duisbach. The snow on the courtyard was churned by children's feet and they had built a snowman right in the centre, with three faces so that he looked everywhere at once; two were non-smokers and one had a pipe.

  There was singing on the sharp air as we left the cars and made for the doors. The porch was stacked with galoshes and gumboots. The singing floated out across the soft white land, so that it seemed Christmas.

  It was agreed that to avoid any scene that might worry the children I should locate Professor Foegl alone and get him into the superintendent's quarters before Captain Stettner made the charge. The only person in view was a boy standing glumly outside a classroom in some kind of penance; he was cheered by the apparition of a stranger ignorant of his sins, and to
ld me that Professor Foegl was in the hall where the singing came from. I went in quietly and stood for a while below the rostrum. The choir went a bit ragged and then forgot me, steadying. I watched the children and the man on the rostrum. His head was narrow and the face long and gentle; he closed his eyes now and then and his hands sketched slow rhythms in the air for the singers to follow; they sang almost faultlessly now, the full sweetness of their song drawn from them by the mesmeric hands; they sang as if they loved him.

  When the canticle was ended I clapped for the children and caused a total and embarrassed silence. I am no good with children, though I'd meant well. Forced to speak in a whisper I told Professor Foegl that I was the representative of a music publisher and the superintendent would be glad if he could spare a few minutes in his office.

  He said he would come. His voice was as gentle as his face. Only the eyes revealed the weakness that had brought him to this day; they were the eyes of a man who is ready to show fear, even when he is smiling.

  We found the superintendent with the captain and sergeant. He'd obviously been primed; his face was set in the aftermath of shock. It was quiet in the room. We could hear one another breathing. The captain went into his routine and I saw the fear come flooding into the older man's eyes, and looked away.

  "I must therefore ask you to come with me, Herr Professor."

  "Yes," he said softly. His gentle head was raised and he stared through the windows at the black trees that stood in the snow, a group of waiting skeletons. "Yes," he said in soft answer to the summons he had lived in fear of, for twenty years.