The Striker Portfolio

by Adam Hall

  The bandage was difficult because some of the stitches had pulled - probably when I’d tugged the edge of the wing clear of the tyre - and the blood had congealed, but we managed it in the end. The other one, right forearm, was perfectly clean. His dull eyes wandered over me and he kept turning me round and lifting my arms, a Simian frown of puzzlement forming slowly across his brow. It would take time for someone like this to catch up with progress and I assumed he was wondering why there weren’t any bits of Elastoplast here and there because in the old days it used to be all the rage: you could pack a 1000-x microfilm and a flat-mould cyanide dose under quite a small strip and still leave room for the handbook.

  They went away. They took the obvious things with them: sheepskin coat, papers for Waiter Martin, papers for Karl Rodl, Striker statistics folder, crossword puzzle. I was worried about that: even in the moonlight it had looked very like a plan Of the minefield layout Guhl had kept on him in case he wanted to check his bearings. They had taken the coat because it was so thick - you could secrete photostat copies in triplicate of the entire Early Warning System from Mexico to Nova Scotia in a coat like that - and because Nitri had patched it so neatly and they wanted to know why. They had taken the arm-sling I’d been given at the hospital because it would be possible for me to hang myself with it but they had left Nitri’s scarf because it wouldn’t.

  I had only just finished checking the door-lock and the window-bars when they fetched me out and took me along to a small surgical ward where a doctor redressed my hand. He was a civilized man and asked if there were anything I wanted so I said food. They took me back to ‘Reception’ and after fifteen minutes a heavy-breasted girl in brogues brought a tray and left it with me. The big man unlocked the handcuffs and took them away with him. It must have been on orders: he would never have worked it out for himself that no one can eat with his hands behind his back.

  No knife, no fork, nothing for surprise attack or self-infliction I hadn’t expected to be given them. I hadn’t expected to be given caviar either but there was a fair-sized paper picnic plate full of the stuff, spread for me on strips of buttered toast as neatly as you’d spread rat-poison. Beer in a soft plastic cup.

  It had to be a brain-think all the way because my last meal had been with Benedikt the night before and I was already salivating. (1) If they wanted to kill me they could do it more cheaply than this way. (2) If they wanted me unconscious the same applied. (3) I hadn’t been interrogated yet and they wouldn’t learn much if I had to be carried to the grilling-room insensible or dead. (4) There was no effective drug in the oral-administration group that would force me to reveal what I didn’t want to reveal.

  Provided the foregoing were acceptable the fifth consideration was decisive: this stuff was high in protein, fats and carbohydrates. No value in the salt content but enough sugar in the beer to feed the muscles for a limited period.

  I ate slowly.

  They had taken away my watch to have it probed but by estimation it was an hour later when they came for me again.

  That would make it approximately midnight. I had been keeping a conscious check on the passage of time since the watch was taken: it wouldn’t be important for a while but I didn’t know how things would go here and it might later be useful, even vital, to judge the coming of daylight.

  They were the same two and they took me down to the main hall. It seemed busy, so late, but some of the spotlights were out and people talked quietly. Three men were passing through the hall, dark-suited and preoccupied, the members of a consultant body convening to discuss a recent autopsy. It was what they looked like but they might have been anyone: anyone important. My escort stopped them and spoke to the one with the rebuilt face and he glanced at me and nodded and went on with his colleagues.

  ‘We will wait,’ the big man said. He looked as if he’d waited all his life at some bus-stop where the road was closed. Other people went through, some of them women with patient faces that looked at nobody else: Vidauban is very good at this, with his interiors grey-toned and peopled with dream figures that however crowded appear uninvolved with each other.

  From somewhere higher in the building a sound reached us and I didn’t want to think it was a human voice because a human voice ought not to sound like that.

  Quick footsteps and an interchange of words. The big man said tonelessly: ‘We will go to the office of the Herr Direktor now.’

  It was a long room with a low acoustic ceiling and an internal-communications complex on a desk. Black chairs with the East German equivalent of PVC upholstery and chrome legs, an ebonite console on one wall with some of the panels illuminated. From here they could probably diagnose a schizophrenic crisis in Patient 99, Cell 104, South Block, and prescribe shock-treatment.

  They were the same three men but two of them said nothing and did nothing all the time I was there. The one who spoke to me was the one with the rebuilt face.

  ‘Sit down, Herr Martin.’

  There was a spare chair but no one else came. He sat behind the desk. Above him on the wall was the expected portrait of Walter Adolphovich Ulbricht, First Secretary of the Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands.

  ‘I will call you Martin because that is the name we have known you by -‘ he put the two identity cards together and pushed them aside - ‘since you arrived in Hanover from London.’

  I had never seen him before tonight but I recognized him now. With only the face to go on it would have been difficult. The left eye was artificial but a perfect match and I wouldn’t have suspected it if the original injury had been less massive: the face on that side couldn’t have been damaged to that extent without the eye going too. The rebuilding had been beautifully done: the surgeon was a portrait artist and it was the very excellence of his technique that showed the change. One side of this man’s face had continued to age and the new side was still young: Dorian Gray and his portrait all in one.

  ‘Do you know where you are?’

  ‘I’ve got a rough idea.’

  You don’t have secret police guarding the gates of an asylum for the criminally insane and you don’t send a secret police colonel to pick up couriers at the Frontier and bring them here if your sole business is to look after manic depressives.

  ‘This is Aschau.’ He wasn’t interested in my rough ideas. ‘Have you heard of it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Where?’ Rather quickly.

  ‘The big slob mentioned it.’

  One of the committee moved his head and I got the feeling that people weren’t meant to talk like that to the Herr Direktor.

  He didn’t seem to mind. When you’ve caught a winged pigeon you must expect the odd drop of lime on your hand while you examine it. (It wasn’t because Aschau was meant to be an asylum that I sensed a certain medical aspect in his character. Perhaps he’d spent so much time in hospital that he’d taken on the air of the surgeon: efficient, tolerant, a little abstracted. And in his case wholly indifferent.) ‘Aschau is in part a political re-education centre. I am its director. My name is Kohn. Have you heard of me?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘At Aschau we receive people who stray from the Marxist-Leninist line and we persuade them to rethink.’ He watched me the whole time. They all did. ‘What made you come here of your own volition?’

  ‘I got the feeling I was straying a bit from the Wilson-Powell line so I thought you could fix me up.’

  His eyes were stone-blue and expressionless, the kind of eyes that looked through the glass at guinea-pigs dying of clinically induced cancer.

  ‘I will ask you that question once more.’

  He was sitting absolutely still but even so I knew I was right: it wasn’t of course Kohn himself that I had recognized, but someone else with these mannerisms and this tone of voice, this way of sitting so absolutely still with the head a fraction on one side and a fraction forward. The walk had been the same, passing through the hall, and if ever he uttered a laugh I knew what sort it would be. But I di
dn’t think Kohn would ever laugh again, even cynically.

  ‘You needn’t have asked me at all,’ I said. I might as well play it straight and volunteer the information he already had. ‘I was sent out from London on a sabotage-investigation job, find out why the Strikers are making holes all over the place.’

  He went on watching me and I left it at that because I didn’t know how much the Kamerad Oberst had told him and even if they’ve got a fistful of aces there’s no point in playing your two of spades.

  ‘How much do you know of the political situation concerning the two Germanies?’

  ‘Is there one? I thought Ulbricht had walled it up.’

  He never moved, ever. They might as well have stuck a computer in front of me except that I would have expected this degree of inhuman indifference in a computer: in a live man it struck chill and I decided not to remember the sound I’d heard while we’d been hanging around in the hall.

  ‘I assume you are close to Whitehall.’

  ‘More towards Clapham, really.’

  ‘You decline to admit the extent of your political knowledge and connections.’

  ‘No. They’re nil, that’s all I mean.’

  But he wouldn’t just accept that. He was an East German and in East Germany they scratched at their ideology till it bled. If you told them there was a place called Hyde Park where you could stand on an orange-box and shout to hell with the government they’d send you to an asylum for the criminally insane. Perhaps that was why they’d brought me here.

  He said: ‘Fifteen months ago in his closing address to the Eighth German Party Congress in Berlin, First Secretary Ulbricht took the preliminary steps towards the eventual re-unification of Germany. Since that time there have been overtures made in secret between the two republics. Bonn is expected shortly to withdraw its claim of being the capital of the only legal German state and this will be the signal for overt negotiations to re-establish Germany under a central government whose leaders will be drawn from both sides.’

  He paused long enough to let me comment but I didn’t say anything because either there’d been a lot going on in both Berlins while everyone else was busy with Czechoslovakia or Kohn was betting on sudden money. You wouldn’t find anyone in Whitehall or Clapham for that matter who’d agree that overt negotiations would be the order of the day until the red flag was hoisted at the White House, which didn’t seem likely this century. Probably he was just trying to do what I’d done with the big slob: make me correct him.

  He put on the other side. ‘It is vital that those leaders of the New Germanic State should be neither Eastern lackeys of the Soviet Union nor Western idolaters of the U.S.A. For some time there has been a growing need for the creation of a nucleus of potential government: a consortium capable of assuming control of the New Germany. Such a nucleus now exists.’

  Die Zelle.

  And bloody Parkis was right again. He didn’t know the details but he’d made a blind swipe and come up with the general idea. Die Zelle was not only ‘existing’: it was in gear and on its way, knocking out the opposition on the other side of the wire -Feldmarschall Stockener and Bundesminister von Eckern et alia - and crippling the military structure so that West Germany would have to get out of NATO and surrender any claim to a nuclear role by virtue of an effective air strike-force. Otherwise the U.S.A. would want a lot of say in the election of the New German Government.

  Kohn watched me. I still didn’t say anything. He’d told me just enough to pitch me into an argument: if I’d had any ‘political connections’ he knew very well that I’d grab at the chance he was giving me: there were undercover factions in London who’d ally themselves with Die Zelle if they knew what he’d just told me and all I’d have to give him were their names. It was no use making them up: he’d check them first. I’d have to get out of Aschau under my own steam or do the other thing.

  ‘You understand my motives in revealing as much as I have, Herr Martin?’

  I was going to say yes but one of the lights on the wall-console was winking and he flicked a switch on the internal-communications complex. The voice was very faint in the room: it was one of those whorled-diaphragm speakers that focussed the output and beamed it towards a single listener.

  ‘When did he arrive?’

  It’s up to the listener to frame his own speech according to whether he wants anyone else in the room to understand. Kohn was indifferent. If I ever left Aschau it would be on his terms.

  ‘Is Schaffer with him?’

  It could be the Schaffer they’d thrown out of East Berlin’s Humboldt University a month ago. His paper had said that man’s thought was the one thing beyond any form of applied philosophy. For ‘applied’ read ‘enforced’. Professor Schaffer would be just the man for a bit of re-education at Aschau.

  ‘Offer him caviar.’

  The faint voice went on for a bit and Kohn said: ‘Not unless it is essential.’ Then he cut the switch and looked at me. ‘I asked if you understood my motives. Heir Martin.’

  The whole thing was genuine. A man like this didn’t have to frighten me with tricks. They’d really brought someone in and he was going to have to fight for his sanity just as I was. So I was getting worried and an idea was forming at the edge of consciousness : the people up there who made inhuman sounds hadn’t been brought to Aschau because they were insane. It was the other way round.

  I said: ‘You want international support for Die Zelle. You want me to ferret around the political sewers in London and recruit whatever rats I can find who are willing to work for an outfit that’s trying to set up the kind of Germany we had to cut into two so that it couldn’t do any more damage. But the kind of new Germany that we all want - its own people included - isn’t going to be set up on the dead bodies of men like Stockener and von Eckern and the thirty-six pilots that Die Zelle has murdered so far and it isn’t going to be run by people especially qualified to direct a political re-education centre using an asylum for the criminally insane as a front. If you’d like me to elaborate on that I’ll do it but I think you get the point.’

  One of the other two men moved again uncomfortably. They reminded me of Guhl, the man who had liked marzipan. He had been gun-dependent: these two were Kohn-dependent.

  ‘Your thinking is wrong, Herr Martin, but we may decide at a later date to correct it for you. At Aschau we hold the view that every man is valuable, and that it requires only a little adaptation to put his values to good use. Meanwhile I will ask you to give me full information on the character, functions and personnel of the organization controlling you.’

  ‘Oh come on, be your age.’ I was getting fed up.

  ‘You must remember that this is a re-education centre. We are giving you the opportunity of telling us what we require to know without first undergoing re-education. It would save time.’

  ‘I’m in no hurry.’

  ‘Perhaps you underestimate our persuasive abilities?’

  ‘No, I should say they’re pretty good.’

  ‘Then why decline to do something voluntarily that you will eventually do under duress? Surely that is a little unrealistic?’

  I got out of the chair. He’d given me a lot of info and I wanted to think about it undisturbed and if I stayed here arguing the toss I might forget some of the details that I would need to fit into the pattern before I handed it to Ferris, one fine day.

  It never does any good to consider that the only fine day you’ll ever get is this one.

  ‘It’s no go,’ I said.

  They all watched me. I took a look at the other two but they weren’t interesting. Kohn said:

  ‘Perhaps I can be of help to you by repeating -‘

  ‘I don’t need help.’

  ‘In your position any man would be glad of it.’

  ‘But not every man. Not this one.’

  I was trying to make him specify. If I could get some idea of the actual method it would give me a chance to prepare myself and start combating it before it be
gan. In London they’d put the 9-suffix against my code-name because I’d twice proved reliable under torture and although I’d stuck it out on those two occasions by the doubtful virtue of sheer bloody pig-headedness it had been Norfolk training that had saved me in the end and a lot of the Norfolk training deals with the efficacy of psychological preparation. If you can find out what kind of thing you’re going into you’ve got a chance of containing the natural fear while you’re still fit and in full possession so that when the breath speeds up and the skin goes cold the mind can be released from the worst fear of them all: of the unknown.

  ‘I must accept your decision,’ he said.

  Still wouldn’t name it.

  ‘Thank you. Now tell them to heat up the irons.’

  He pressed a switch but I couldn’t hear anything. It was probably a light-signal outside the room. He said indifferently: ‘Our methods here at Aschau are not those of the Spanish Inquisition. You will not be molested in any way, of course. Nevertheless you will shortly give us the information required - that is quite certain’.

  The big man came in and Kohn stood up when we left, which was civil of him.

  It was now well after midnight by mental reckoning and most of the building was quiet, but sometimes I heard voices and a crack of light showed under some of the doors as I was taken along the passages. It might have been Cambridge, a few people still talking in their rooms.

  But it was Aschau and I didn’t like it because you can’t correct a man’s thinking unless you molest him and Kohn said you could and he ought to know: he’d done it before and was doing it now to the man who’d made that sound up there and you can only keep the 9-suffix until you meet someone who knows how to take it away from you and I believed that Kohn knew how. He was already applying the worst fear of them all: of the unknown.