by Adam Hall
Pol was still silent, knowing that he'd played the ace. Zossen was in Berlin.
"Then I hope you get him," I said.
Still silent. Playing my own game. I said:
"But I think you're wrong. They say he's in the Argentine."
Now we both talked and I knew that he knew that he'd won. He said:
"He was seen in Berlin a week ago."
"Who saw him? "
"A witness at the trial."
"I'll talk to him then."
"He fell from the tenth floor of the Witzenhausen Hof the day after he had told us."
"Olbricht?"
"Yes."
"He could have been mistaken."
"He knew Zossen well. You know that."
"Is that part of the search area, then? Zossen? "
"It has become part of it."
"So you're roping me in."
"Yes."
"Because you know I'd like to see him on trial. No go. They don't hang them any more." I suddenly said a terrible thing, because I believed Pol was genuine and my guard was down. "Give me a rope, though, give me a rope and ask no questions."
His silence was disapproving.
I said: "I'm tired, that's all."
"Of course. After sixmonths' work -"
"Don't talk to me like a bloody nurse."
He was silent again. The hum of voices was loudening under the domed roof as the people left the bars and went back to their seats.
"Come on then, Pol – you haven't got long. Finish me off."
He said immediately as if I'd switched on a tape: "There are thousands of Nazis still living in Germany with false papers and even the Federal Intelligence Services are riddled with them. The U.S. Gehlen Bureau quietly released hundreds of Army and SS officers from internment when General Heusinger dictated his terms to NATO andthey have since reorganised the German Army, which is now the largest and best equipped in Europe. The German Air Force is at present ahead of the RAF in striking power. The German General Staff has made secret non-NATO deals with Spain, Portugal, Egypt and African countries and established its own bases with ground-to-ground missiles. Scores of Hitler's officers have returned to power and influence in both civil and military key positions, and their, posts were granted them in the full knowledge of their past activities. In the General Staff itself there is a military microcosm of dedicated Nazis, a hard core prepared for an explosive expansion when the opportunity comes. If -"
"Pol," I said, "did the Bureau give you this stuff? "
"I am an executive, like yourself, not an administrator."
"If I decided – and I haven't – to take over this new operation without even a day's break I'd have to be convinced of their argument. It would take days. I think the German GGS is no more likely to make a war than the Ku-Klux-Klan."
"Let me remind you how the U.S. prosecutor put it at the Nurnberg Tribunal: ‘German militarism will tie itself to any new creed in order to regain the power of making war.’ There are new creeds emerging now in Egypt, China, Cuba. Further, they realise the huge potential of the GGS and its value as an ally, given the right ground: aworld on the brink."
"You can't start war without people."
"People never start war. Politicians and generals start them. As long as ten years ago – and only ten years after the bloodshed stopped – there was a rally of ex-Nazi soldiers in honour of Kesselring. The people protested but the police pushed them back and kept order."
"The people are still protesting, by means of the trials."
"And now the trials are becoming more and more difficult. Convicted war-criminals are no longer hanged, but witnesses are being shot. The tide is on the turn."
I sat with my eyes shut. The auditorium had gone dark. Music was playing. A girl sang.
Pol was silent. He knew that in persuasion one must pause, so that the subject is given time to dwell.
"Political polemics," I said wearily. "Keep them. Shove them down the next man's throat."
His silence was disapproving.
"I don't claim, Pol, to have my finger on the pulse of the human condition or to know what future mankind has, if it has any. And I'm tired. You chose the wrong box, just as I told you in the beginning."
He was moving about and I opened my eyes. From somewhere he'd taken a plastic briefcase. It must have been under his jacket. I would have seen it before, otherwise. He put it on my knees.
"I am to leave this with you," was all he said.
I let it rest there without touching it. "Damn your impudence, Pol."
"We have arranged a cover man for you," he said softly, "and a front."
"I don't want a cover."
"What happens if you get into a corner?"
"I'll get out again."
"You know the risks, Quiller."
"Did KLJ use a cover man?"
"Yes, but it is difficult to cover anyone from a long range shot."
"That's the way they'll get me if it comes to it. No cover, Pol. And don't post one without my knowing. I'm going in alone."
A pulse had begun beating in my leg, the onset of cramp. I moved and the briefcase slid off my knees. I left it where it fell. Pol said softly as the music broke:
"There are two people you can trust -"
"No people."
"An American, Frank Brand, and a young German, Lanz Hengel. They -"
"Keep them clear of me."
"You have a link man
"Keep him clear."
"It is myself. I am your link man."
"Keep clear of me then."
If I were going in, it had to be on my terms. They couldn't expect it of me and they shouldn't have sent this man Pol to hook me like this. They were bastards. Charington dead – get another man. KLJ dead – get another man. Who would they get after me? Six months hard, now this, and because of expedience, because I was handy. And they had the hook. "There's only one way to persuade him," they'd said, standing round the desk in that London room with the Lowrie and the smell of polish. "Tell him someone has seen Zossen in Berlin." And they'd lit a cigarette and sent for Pol.
I didn't care whether the monologue about a renaissant Nazi group was genuine or not. Given Zossen I needed no further blandishments. They'd wasted my time.
The cramp was beginning so I crawled on my hands and knees to the back of the box and got into the chair as if I'd just come in again after the interval. Pol did the same, brushing his hands carefully across the knees of his trousers. I sat with my eyes shut, thinking.
Now that I'd stopped resenting him and made the decision I could admit that it was my own fault. For years I'd operated in strict hush, as I'd been trained to do; so when they seconded me to liaise with the Federal Z Commission and supply the Hanover Tribunal with bodies for trial, I didn't see much point in coming into the open air. If I had, my face would have become, in those six months, the most recognisable feature ever to have spanned the crossed hairs of a telescopic rifle-sight. That wouldn't have worried me because I'd moved between Berlin and Hanover and back with a constant cover of six men, like a pocket president. But my insistence on secrecy had got me on this hook. After six months I knew Berlin like my face, yet my face was unknown in Berlin.
No wonder they'd come for me.
For a while Pol must have thought I'd refuse. Then he knew it was going to be all right, and had put the briefcase on my knees. It would contain all the information they could give me, all the names, suspects, dossiers, leads and theories they could cull from the whole of the Bureau files, a complete and exhaustive breakdown on the field. But they'd come for me because I knew even more.
"Pol," I said.
He was sitting with his arms folded, head tilted, watching the show. His head tilted the other way, towards me.
I said: "Tell them not to try tapping my phone again. I want to be able to know that if I hear any clicks, it's the adverse party doing it."
"Very well."
"No cover."
"Noted."
"Communication Post and Bourse."
"Available."
When the stage began filling and the music was loud I asked him for his photo and he gave it to me. The zip on the briefcase was the interlocking plastic flange type and opened silently. Inside was the folder with the black cover. It was the memorandum. Between the typed lines was written, invisibly, my future. In detail it gave specific outline to the manner of my life. It made no mention of the possible manner of my death. It was thus a highly personal document, and on the cover was a single letter: Q.
I put the photograph in and shut the case.
3: SNOW
The snow had stopped. It had been packed into ice by the tyres, and the traffic was slow and quiet. Half-way along the Kurfursten-strasse a street bollard lay smashed and they ere towing the car clear; rusty water steamed as it poured from the radiator.
Above the roofs the sky was black and the stars close. It was easy to see tonight that the earth was a star too, adrift in a void; a fur collar gave little protection against the thought.
I had left the box a minute before Pol so that when he went down the main staircase in the throng he couldn't see me. I had kept back by the wall on the balcony to get a good look at his face in the mirror above the stairs. I compared it with his photograph and asked for a plain envelope on my way past the box-office. In the street I put the photograph inside and addressed it to Radio Eurosound, posting it, unstamped, in the box at the kerbside.
It was fifteen minute's walk to my hotel on dry pavements. Tonight it took just short of thirty. The ice crackled underfoot. Only four of my cover men were within sight, picking me up at the Neukomodietheater and tailing at a distance. They worked well but they were useless because the system was useless. Once inside a theatre you were meant to be safe, but Pol could have easily been one of the adverse party and could have slipped a knife into me and no one the wiser. Useless.
There were fresh placards along the Bulow-strasse and I saw Peters's name, and bought a late edition. Ewald Peters, Chancellor Erhard's chief personal security man. Only last month he'd been in London, protection for the Chancellor in case anyone threw a tomato. Now they'd arrested him. Charge: mass murder of Jews. He was a senior official in the Federal Kriminalpoliiei and responsible for the security of the Chancellor, the President of the Republic, and visiting statesmen in Bonn. How much had Erhard known? Nothing. He'd resisted pressure recently at the Party Congress, insisting on continuing the trials and refusing the plea for an amnesty that would release a score of Nazis from the cells. If he'd suspected his chief bodyguard he'd have turned the man over right away.
It was the Z Commission who'd nabbed Peters. I admired them for that – they were more bulldog than dachshund. There was already a lot of unrest inside the department, because their job was exclusively to hunt down the Nazi remnant, and since there were several Nazis in the hierarchy of their own section they risked losing promotion with every arrest they made. A very odd way to run an eisenbahn.
Yesterday they'd got Hans Krueger, West German Minister for Refugees. Charge: serving as a judge at a ‘special’ Nazi court in Poland. In a few days' time there'd be a new name on the placards, because the Z-Polizei were just now tying up the loose ends. Franz Rohm, Secretary of the Road Safety Committee. It had taken me three weeks to find him. I was pleased with that one because suicide was among my subjects and I knew Rohm would kick a chair from under him any day now. I didn't hold with capital punishment; it had been abolished in West Germany since 1949, and that was good; but these men were infectious and there was one thing worse than that they should hang it was that they should live, and infect others.
The snow crackled under my feet.
I turned into the north end of the Kreuzberg Garten and passed the fountain; it was a frozen ice-cake. Another dozen yards and there was some shadow cast by shrubs, and I melted, waiting. When the first one came past I moved into the light of the lamps and stopped him, saying in German:
"For local Control, please. I've met Pol. Spelt P-O-L. From now on they're to call off all cover, fully urgent. They can find me Post and Bourse."
He lit the cigarette I'd put between my lips.
"I shall have to confirm before I leave."
"The sooner the better," I said. "The others can stay until you've confirmed. Then call them off. I want a clear field from midnight."
I thanked him for the light and walked on, flicking the cigarette away as soon as there was a chance. Nearing the hotel through the Schonerlinde-strasse where the pavement was being cleared of snow I heard an airliner go surging up from Tempelhof less than a mile away, and turned to watch its lights.
In the morning I would have to cancel my reservation on Lufthansa 174, because it was written between the lines of the thrice-accursed memorandum that I must stay.
Naumann: the snowman. Sickert: sick at heart. Kalt: cold. Helldorf: held off. Kielmann: kill a man. Hansnig: hands. Edsel: easily.
Shuffle.
Helldorf. Sickert. Kalt. Naumann. Kielmann. Edsel. Hansnig.
Try it.
I held off, sick at heart to see the cold snowman kill a man so easily with his hands.
There were forty-odd names on a single sheet of the memorandum, each one a possible contact of Heinrich Zossen. In half an hour they were locked in my memory and the sheet was added to the pile for burning. My habit was to travel light; by morning the complete memorandum would be cremated.
A mental note: keyword 'whale.' Tell Control to turn the heat off the big fish so that they relaxed their vigilance while I got within range.
It was only the smaller fish I'd netted so far. They'd sent KLJ after the big ones and now he was dead. The big ones were people like the Hitler deputy Bormann, and Mueller, and General von Rittmeister. They'd got out of Berlin under fire from the Russian batteries in ' 45, a whole gang of them running for Obersalzberg and beyond, while their Fuhrer's short round-shouldered carcass was smothered in petrol-soaked rag and set alight. Some of them had taken off in Himmler's four-motor plane from the Flughafen a mile from here through a dawn sky dark with smoke. I could see the runway lights from this window now.
I went across to it. Outside the night was still and the city frozen in sleep. The present and the past lay buried under the snow. What made us rake like this among the ashes of that distant hell after twenty years? They said it was to help a nation to its feet. The new young Germany had heard too many tales of the war that had raged above its unborn head, and wanted to know the truth, and face it and then forget. That was the reason.
It wasn't mine.
'Have we a minute,' they said, 'to chant a prayer?' He shook his head.
My breath made a bloom on the window's glass. The room was too hot and I turned the radiators off, working for another hour. With half the memorandum shuffled, linked and recorded in my mind I left the hotel and walked on the snow to clear my lungs for sleep. The street was empty.
Even in the instant of deciding I'd take over from KLJ the main plan had presented itself to me, just as a player sometimes gets an overall vision of the board before he makes his gambit. Therefore I'd told Pol: 'I'm going in alone.' Because it had to be a fast operation or nothing, a blitzkrieg on their own terms. I could stick this city another month, no more. In a month I'd have to find him or get out.
There were two ways to do it: the slow and the quick. The slow way was to flush those men one by one – Helldorf, Sickert, Kalt and the whole forty-odd of them – in the hope that they'd lead me to Zossen. Pol had played too fair with me, calling Zossen no more than 'a part of the search area'. The first quick reading of the memorandum told me that Zossen was the whole of the area. Knock him down and the rest would skittle over. To get to him by first calling on those forty-odd contacts would bring a great deal into the light, and that was what the Bureau wanted. It was the slow way. But the quick way would get the same result. Go straight to Zossen and strike.
The quick way was to reverse the order of things. To find one man
among three and a half million I must let him find me. Let him know I was here and here to get him. Draw his fire, so that he'd show himself. Then try to finish him off before he finished me. Hope for an overkill.
So I'd told Pol I must work alone. The only way was the quick way and I didn't want it cluttered up with a motley crew of cover men who'd trip me and get killed in the process.
The snow lay shimmering under the lamps. There'd been another light fall while I'd been working on the memorandum and the pavement was covered again. It had long gone midnight and the street was empty. After six months of cover protection I was alone; not in any doorway nor in any shadow did a man stand. Control had got my signal and called them off.
As I walked back to the hotel the only tracks in the snow were my own.
4: THE WALL
"Your occupation, Herr Stroebling?"
"Florist."
He blew his nose, taking his time about it so that we could admire the white silk handkerchief. A flower was in the lapel the dark jacket. His legs were casually crossed in the pinstripe trousers and the shoes shone. "You are a florist?"
"I direct a chain of shops."
'Is that why you wear a flower in your buttonhole?"
"I always wear a flower."
Someone tittered.
The light was bleak in the tall cold windows. The heating was full on but many still wore their overcoats, as if in need comfort.
Another objection: personal comment on appearance of accused. Overruled: not customary to enter this court dressed as if for a festive occasion, therefore reason sought.
I watched the spectators particularly. I knew who the accused were. I didn't know who the spectators were. Some were the wives of the accused and had come here with them, for most of the accused were on bail and free to go home at the end of the session. There were others in the gallery who came and went alone, hunched into their coats and with their eyes for no one. A few were women.
