The Quiller Memorandum Page 7

  They lost me once and came up broadside-on by luck at the north end of a block, and once they hit something in a slide and the sound echoed between the walls of the narrow street. They were getting worried, certain now that I must be heading for a destination that had to be kept secret.

  The mount of the Kreuzberg was ahead of us and I swerved right by Flughafen station and then back-tracked because we were getting too close to the Hotel Prinz Johan and I wanted them to keep thinking I was going somewhere else, somewhere important, before I made an all-out effort to lose them and leave them guessing.

  Their lights were close behind me at the Alt-Tempelhof and Tempelhofer-damm crossing and then I saw them flick out. There was no tyre-squeal because of the slush; there were only a few long seconds of comparative silence before the sound of the crash filled the buildings like an explosion. I was placed in a slow drift for a right-angle when I heard it, and brought the nose round full-lock with the kerb for a cush. The impetus of the DKW had sent it back across the street in a ricochet and I saw it hit a parked Opel broadside-on in a smother of slush and debris. Then it took fire.

  My half-spin had brought me to a halt alongside the kerb so I doused the lights and sat there. A man was screaming. The doors of the car didn't come open. I think if I'd tried I could have sprinted those thirty yards and got a door open and a man out before the flames took hold. I didn't try.

  Because they were the enemy. In war, even in war, when death is the object of all human enterprise, there are small acts of chivalry when a man, being gentle in himself despite the orders to kill, performs a gentlemanly deed and redeems by a little the monstrous stupidity of his kind. But the soldier is not alone. He has the brotherhood in arms of a whole regiment behind him, and be they nowhere near at hand they are in his mind.

  We are alone. We are committed to the tenets of individual combat and there is no help for him who falls. Save a life and we save a man who will later watch us through the cross-hairs and squeeze the trigger if he gets the orders or the chance. It's no go.

  The car burned and the man screamed and I sat watching.

  We are not gentlemen.

  That was the first of the small signs that we were in business. The second manifested itself not long after dawn the next morning. It was nearer home.

  The light in the Schonerlinde-strasse was pale grey. Mist covered the airfield, rising from earth sodden from the thaw. There had been no aircraft movement for the last two hours: I had woken at half-past five and there had been silence from Tempelhof. The beacon was still flashing, its rays becoming fainter on the ceiling as the daylight strengthened.

  I'd been thinking about Inga, and realised it, and threw her out of my thoughts. The living mustn't haunt; the dead were quite enough.

  But I would try to see Rothstein. She had mentioned him.

  The air in the room was cold, like metal against the face. I shut the window, and saw the second small sign. It was a twin glint. The street was empty but for a cruising taxi and I remembered I must take care today: they'd missed their target against that wall and might be waiting to do a better job for their vanity's sake. (Had it been meant for her, that time, or me? I still wasn't sure. Another thing Phoenix might be no better integrated than any other big organisation, and the right hand in big organisations doesn't always know what the left hand's doing. Top orders were to keep me on ice, or I'd have been dead by now; but some thick-ear minion with a stolen taxi might be out for blood on his own account or even for revenge because of the man who'd screamed.

  The taxi turned the corner and the street fell quiet again but for the bang of my window. The twin glint had been framed by a window opposite. It doesn't matter how far back you stand in a room; a stray reflection may sometimes be caught across the fieldglass lens. It might have been the bright roof of the taxi. There is always something you can do about being followed: you can flush the tag once you have seen him. There is nothing you can do about being watched. You can draw the curtains but that won't help you when you go down the steps into the street.

  I dressed, listening to the radio. The morning Bourse announcement gave only the call-sign: QFT and a gibberish of figures. There was a seven o'clock special delivery to Eurosound because they ran three quiz programmes a week and an audience research team, and certain schedules were dependent on the mail. So our man would have just got my letter and they'd decided on a pained silence in answer to my bleat.

  It took twenty minutes to locate Dr. Solomon Rothstein in the new-subscriber addendum of the directory. I hadn't meant to see him right away because I would be in Berlin another month; but it would be more difficult later when they closed in on me and we were at grips. I didn't want him harmed, after all that had gone before.

  Then I went down the steps into the street.

  It may have been subliminal fear that had kept me so long at the directory. The id, alarmed by the plans of the ego (to go down those steps), had put up defences, tricking me into missing the name the first time and leading me into a series of delaying errors, hoping that we might call the whole thing off. No go. I had made up my mind to see Rothstein, and that meant the steps. The only other exits from the hotel were via the kitchens and the main fire-escape. Neither could be used unless I was in trouble.

  There were seven steps. They had been swept free of the melted snow and sand had been laid. It was gritty beneath my shoes. After the first two steps I was fully exposed to that window across the street, and my breath came short, involuntarily. It happens when you wade into cold water it catches your breath but you wade on deeper and deeper because you know the feeling will pass. You know that it's only the cold.

  They are only field-glasses.

  With luck. But look what happened to Kenneth Lindsay Jones. Five steps, six, seven. Too late now for them to do anything even if they wanted to because I was moving at right-angles along the pavement and they would have fired direct into me on the steps if they'd meant to. The street seemed achingly silent in contrast with what my ears had been listening to subconsciously: the shot.

  I was annoyed with myself. There wasn't a president of any republic in the world who didn't have to walk through that kind of risk whenever he showed himself in the open. I was annoyed more by my admission of the fear than by the simple fact of its existence. It is always present, all the time; without it we should all die young. But I was thinking about it, consciously, and I didn't like that. Six months' hard in strict hush had left the nerves exposed.

  There was sweat on me before I turned into the gates to the lock-ups and I thought: You poor bastard, you're getting old.

  The Volkswagen ran through flooded streets. Rothstein had a laboratory in the Zehlendorf district, on the top floor of a building in the Potsdamer-strasse. He was alone when I called, and for an instant he didn't recognise me. Then his eyes changed.

  "Quill…" He took both my hands.

  "Hallo, Solly."

  We'd met in Auschwitz and had seen each other only once since then, almost by chance, with no time to ask of our affairs. So this was the third meeting and I was always to remember it, because if I had not called on him that day he might have lived.

  9: THE KILL

  "It was a long time," said Solly in English.

  "Yes."

  He didn't mean since our chance meeting in Munich three years ago, but since Auschwitz.

  The day I first met him we got seventeen out and only four of them touched the high-voltage wire. The rest lived and were alive now, as far as I would ever know. Solly was one of them. He joined us afterwards. At that time I had linked up with three men: A Berliner Jew, a Pole and a Dane. Before linking with anyone I had worked solo for three years and my bag was some ninety-seven souls. After linking and forming a team we got more than two hundred out before the liberation of the south camps.

  Most of that time I was working as a low-intelligence pure Aryan camp guard, ex-seaman, with an uncle in Himmler's Einratzgruppen hierarchy. I used to curse Churchill with su
ch versatility that they made me do it on the stage once as part of the act when they ran a variety-show the night before the gas-chambers were ceremonially opened. I went over big. We got seven out that same night, because we'd been told that the capacity of the new gas-chambers was estimated at two thousand per day and the camp commandant got drunk to celebrate, and most of his officers got drunk too. We didn't. Seven out of two thousand seemed so little.

  Solly and I went back to Auschwitz after it was over, and showed the Allied troops where we'd cemented over a hole in the wall of the punishment block to conceal the records we'd been making for three or four months. The evidence hanged nine SS officers and fourteen guards, but we didn't have a drink on that either; all the time we were collecting the evidence it had seemed important, but later we saw it wasn't. It had simply helped to keep our spirits going, to scratch the face of Satan.

  Solly hadn't changed much in twenty years. His face had changed – we'd been young men then, but his spirit was still the same. You would call him the gentlest of men, and so he was, unless made angry. He was possessed of an anger that didn't show; it was as calm as the undetonated elements of a bomb.

  I could sense the dormant anger in him now, and knew that he would never be at peace.

  "I heard last night that you were in Berlin," I said.

  "And you come to see me at once. How good that was of you!"

  You can go through the fires of hell itself with a man and have nothing to say when you meet him again, unless it's ‘And do you remember old So-and-so?’ There was no one we wanted to remember.

  "What are you doing in Berlin?" he asked me, and we talked like that for a while. We were alone in his office but we could see the heads of two men, his assistants working in the laboratory. The partition had a glass panel.

  "Is it still bugs, Solly?"

  "Oh, yes!" He smiled, for he had a thousand million children whom he loved. When we had chanced to meet, in Munich, he was a member of the international convention of bacteriologists who were gathered there to discuss some proposal or other about germ-warfare. It wasn't in my line, but he was an accepted authority. "The University of Cologne gives me a grant of money," he said, "so I have my own laboratory!"

  "Congratulations. Frankly it gives me the creeps." There were control-canisters crawling with moulds and cultures all over his office. He talked about some of his work and interrupted himself often, gazing at me in a kind of hellish rapture. More than once he cocked his head up and peered through the glass partition and then turned to me as if he were on the brink of some vital confidence. Then his eyes dulled and I could see the control he had clamped down on his impulse to confide. It was then that he looked as I had seen him when they had separated the men from the women as they were driven down the ramps from the trucks. When they had dragged his young wife from him he had stood like this, his eyes dull in a kind of passing death.

  After a time he stopped telling me about his work, and there was nothing else to say and we knew it.

  "Where are you staying?" he asked me. "We must meet again!" I told him and he said: "The Prinz Johan? That is expensive!"

  "I never sleep in cheap hotels in Germany. "I don't know why I said it: just a thought-flash. At Ravensbruck they had always cut the hair from the women before gassing them, and the hair was steamed and baled for transport to the mattress-factories. The best hotels in Germany have foam-rubber.

  "We will meet again, then!" he said when he saw that I wanted to go. I said yes, we certainly would; but we didn't make a date.

  Back in the street I wished I'd never called on Solly Rothstein. Did he, up there with his bugs, wish I had never called? I'd left him frustrated: there had been something vital he'd been burning to tell me, and couldn't. There was the feeling in me that I wouldn't want to know.

  He phoned me in the late afternoon. I shall always remember my carelessness.

  He said in English: "It is me."

  I didn't answer. For some reason I was thinking about Pol. Then Solly said: "It was a long time, wasn't it?"

  "Yes." He had wanted to identify himself without giving his name.

  "I will come to see you," he said. "Wait for me."

  The line went dead.

  So he couldn't keep it to himself. The frustration was too much. Either that or he'd been unwilling to tell me in the laboratory: the partition had been thin. He had decided, after Ihad left there, to talk to me; otherwise he would have made a date for a meal somewhere, on the spot. He didn't trust the phone: no names. He didn't trust the thin partition.

  It wasn't only bugs, then. Or it was bugs in a big way. Germ warfare might be the clue. But I was still thinking of Pol, and about the box office of the Neukomodietheater, so I worried it. There must be a connection. Pol wouldn't phone me here; I was hot, untouchable, unphonable. His voice wasn't anything like Solly's and Pol had spoken only German to me. Not the connection. Must be one. I had to recall actual conversation between Pol and me before I got it. He'd said:

  We knew that you had reserved this box. So you've got access to the box-office.

  Yes.

  No go. I used the name Schultze.

  We knew that.

  By tapping my phone -

  I bruised my hand hitting the receiver in a blind grab and caught it as it began falling. I knew the laboratory number because I'd hooked it automatically in the memory when I'd shut the directory. Switchboard told me to wait.

  I waited. A nerve had begun flickering in my eyelid.

  Carelessness. There had been a click on the line when I'd answered Solly's call. I hadn't expected a call from anyone, not from Pol, Hengel, Ebert, Inga, Brand, anyone I could think of. In no situation would Pol, Hengel or Brand phone me here. Ebert didn't have my number: nor did Inga. Solly wouldn't phone me, because we hadn't even made a date to meet again. Then who? Consciously involved with the question, I'd heard the click on the line only subconsciously, and it had chain-reactioned in the memory so that I'd begun thinking of Pol and the box-office, for no known reason.

  My phone was being tapped again. Not by Control this time: that had just been a hush way of finding me. This time it was by the adverse party. The DKW tag. The twin glint. Now the tap. The third small sign that they were closing in.

  "The number's ringing, sir."

  "Thank you."

  The eyelid went on flickering.

  It didn't matter that they were tapping me now, at this minute, because all I had to tell Solly was don't come!

  I might be wrong but I couldn't chance it. Solly would trust neither a phone nor the partition in his own laboratory; therefore he was in some kind of permanent red sector and had to watch everything he did; therefore he might be known to Phoenix, so well that they even knew his voice. He might be doubling with them, still feverish with that undetonated anger of his after twenty years, playing his own game with them in order to get facts that would guide him along the fuse to that almighty detonation he must have before he died, however long it took, because of his young wife.

  "Dr. Rothstein's laboratory."

  I said: " I'd like to speak to him."

  "He's just left here, I'm afraid. Can I give him your message?"

  "There's no message."

  I put the receiver down.

  Solly Rothstein was burning to tell me something and it was something so vital that no one must overhear. If they knew him, and knew his voice, they would know that he was on his way here now, because of the tap. And they would try to stop him. And there was nothing I could do.

  The Zehlendorf district was ten kilometres from the east side of Tempelhof, so he wouldn't walk all the way. Nor would he simply take his car or a taxi from door to door; his tactics were already cautious; he would dodge about. Hopeless to start out from here and try to intercept him. Must wait here for him.

  Time-check: 5.09. Ten kilometres by car or taxi through the beginning of the rush-hour: twenty minutes. Add five, because he'd start out on foot if he were taking a taxi, and pick it u
p some distance from base; or he'd take it from base and leave it some distance from here. He might even take a trolley or the overhead but it was unlikely because he was impatient. He would be here between twenty minutes and half an hour from now. 5.29 to 5.39.

  I didn't phone the laboratory again to ask if he normally used a car or taxis because they would tap me, and if they'd no plans for Solly at this moment I didn't want to suggest they should make any. If I were wrong, nothing would happen. If I were right, they would be doing all they could to reach him along his route. A car would come into his mirror and stay there, waiting for the chance; or a man would open the door of his taxi and climb in while it was held at the lights; or someone would cross the road and fall in behind him along the pavement.

  5.14. Nothing to do.

  I left my room and went along the corridor until I found a door open. The room was empty. The curtains were filmy but opaque enough by winter daylight. Five minutes' gradual movement and the hem was parted an inch from the window-frame and I checked the apartments across the street. The window four up and seven along was open, a dark square. I let the curtain fall and came away.

  At 5.23 I went down and wandered around the main reception-lounge, keeping within sight of the switchboard so that the girl would recognise me and know I wasn't in my room, because Solly might conceivably phone again if he sensed he was being followed.

  At 5.27 I went through the revolving doors and down the steps and crossed the road and stood well back in the doorway of the apartments, so that my head would have to turn only about a hundred and twenty degrees instead of one-eighty to keep each end of the street under alternate observation. He might come from either direction.