The Quiller Memorandum

by Adam Hall

  They took him away. The superintendent had asked me to stay a moment.

  "It's unbelievable," he said. "I'm sorry."

  "He was of my race." He stood staring at me and his hands were fumbling one against the other as if they were something he'd picked up and didn't know where to put. "Why did he betray us?"

  "Out of fear."

  "Was he tortured?"

  "Not at that time. He knew he would have been if he refused to talk." For his sake I said: " It may be accepted in mitigation by the court."

  "Mitigation?" I might have used a totally foreign word. "But there were thousands who were threatened with duress, and they didn't -"

  "Hundreds of thousands. Millions. Six millions. He wasn't one of them. I'm sorry."

  The blockwarts has used him, and then the Zellenleiters, and the kreisleiters, and at last the gauleiters, playing on his fear and using him as a more and more valuable tool. The evidence on file recorded that he had ‘caused the deprivation and ultimate death of his friends, his neighbours and hundreds of his own kind, by revealing their names and hiding places to the Gestapo.’

  The shortest and most graphic of the testimonies held him responsible for ‘a good ten truckloads of deportees who had gone up the Auschwiq chimney.’

  "Do you know anything about the Star of David School, Herr Quiller?" He was eyeing me reflectively, as if deciding to give me a confidence.

  "It's modern, progressive, with a bias towards the Arts -"

  "I don't mean that. Come to the window. I will tell you."

  Beyond the window-bay the land rose gently towards the south. Behind the trees were scattered the black oblongs of roofs in the snow. There was the track of a stream running east-west through the floor of the hollow, but there were no willows to mark its banks.

  "The school is modern and progressive, yes, and the Arts have a greater place in our curriculum than usual; but it has this in common with other schools: it's full of children. It was built for them especially. They run across these fields and climb those trees in freedom. It is their land, all theirs. And do you find the building itself bright and well-lighted with the big windows? And the decor vital with bright colours?"

  I said I did.

  "The architect was Joseph Steiner himself. Long rooms, wide corridors, a beautiful synagogue of white and purple stone from Bavaria, after the Finnish style of church. The children are very happy here. You can tell from their singing. You have heard them singing. You should see them in summer – that field is a carpet of clover and they picnic there. You should hear them sing on a summer evening, Herr Quiller." He pointed through the window. "That looks like a stream, but it's really the remains of a railway embankment – a siding. The rails were taken up and used in the construction of the building, and the embankment has slowly fallen almost level with the meadow. The trucks used to come in there from Magdeburg, and that farm behind the trees was the medical experimentation block. The gas-chambers were this side of the railway, here where we are standing. The foundations are built of their rubble. Some of the arrivals were hanged from those trees so that those who were brought here could see them and be warned about disobedience."

  He turned from the window. "Few have heard of the camp, because it was one of those successfully destroyed by the Nazis under the last-minute ‘Cloud Fire’ order designed to obliterate evidence of atrocities. You won't find any record of it. But some knew of it." He turned his eyes on mine and I knew he wasn't looking at me but at men who had been here before me. "So we built this monument to our dead. We thought it was better than just a stone with a plaque. Some of the children laugh and play where their grandparents died. Of course they don't know it. This is in confidence, and I think you are a man to respect such a confidence. I have told you this because I can't believe this thing about Professor Foegl. He was so gentle. The children are going to miss him, you know."

  He suddenly flung out his hands – "But what made him come here, to us? Did he know what this place was? Do you believe he knew?"

  "He may have."

  "Then why?"

  "Remorse. Guilt. Cowards have the biggest consciences." I remembered how Foegl had stared out at those trees just now when he knew it was all up with him. "We don't know how much he might have been punishing himself, making himself face his past, everywhere he looked. It might have been that."

  He stood for nearly a minute, motionless. Then he said:

  "I'm glad he's gone. This is holy ground." He suddenly offered his hand. "You'll have to forgive me. The choir had only just started, you know. I must go and do my best with them, but goodness knows I'm practically tone-deaf."

  I walked through the wide glass doorway alone, between the rows of galoshes and gum-boots. The tracks of the black Mercedes were on the snow. I looked across to the dark gnarled trees. For a minute the silence brooded, and I made myself wait, my breath half-held, standing beside the car.

  Then it came again, the singing.

  A thaw had set in and the evening streets were slushy. Snow was melting on the ruined shell of the Kaiser-Wilhelm Gedachtniskirche and the wrecked bones of its spire stuck into the sky, naked again and oddly beautiful.

  Die Leute had me on the front page, a good full-face picture standing beside Rauschnig outside his beauty-salon. Three other papers had the same picture and two of them carried the later shot of the police-captain and myself leaving the offices of Schrader-Fahben.

  Other front-page news was that Franz Rohm, Secretary of the Road Safety Committee, had hanged himself, as I had known he would.

  It would have been difficult to get photographers down to the Star of David School because we didn't want the children worried, but I had sent in the word to F.A.P. and Die Leute carried a picture of Professor Foegl and a full paragraph, linking him with Rauschnig and Schrader and commenting on the ‘lightning wave of arrests’ that marked the day. I would therefore be linked, myself, with the Foegl snatch, and Phoenix wouldn't miss it.

  They gave me half an hour with Foegl in his cell but I was out of luck. His fear – which I'd hoped would be the mainspring of ready confession – had gone, after twenty years. The worst had come to him and he knew his life would end in a cell like this, so he had nothing more to fear. I doubted if even the fullest confession would count for an acquittal, but I tried the idea on him. He wouldn't budge. He seemed to have already faded away in a kind of death.

  They had a lock-up for the Hertz VW at the Hotel Prinz Johah and I backed it in. Slush dripped from the wings and a puddle of water had formed on the concrete before I left it and went in to a late meal. Some of the staff stared at me a bit because they'd seen the papers, and the wine-waiter had a greyness about his face. He was past middle age, and as his slightly-shaking hand poured my wine I wondered where he'd been between '39 and '45, and what he'd done.

  But the wine's flavour was unspoiled. After six months on a dungheap you don't notice the smell.

  Most of the tables had been cleared by the time I was served with the coffee. The American drew a chair near and dropped his evening paper on to the table. I glanced down at my own face and up into his. He said with a pleasant smile:

  "Seems we're sailing a little close to the wind, sir."

  I didn't want to talk or even know him but there is sometimes a danger in not responding and the strict orders are to do so, at once.

  "Catch it as it comes, and the closer the better."

  So this would be Brand. A flat shrewd face with level grey eyes and a crew-cut. The smile was pleasant but I resented him and resented his cheeking me. If an agent decides to splash his pan all over the front page there is obviously a reason, and it's his own business. He goes to work his own way, on one condition: that he doesn't endanger secrecy. It had to be accepted that if I decided to draw enemy fire the only one to get hurt was me. Now that my face was being advertised I couldn't go within a mile of the Unter den Eichen and Rohner-allee intersection even if I were certain there was no tag. In starting out to expose mys
elf to the adverse party deliberately I had implicitly cut myself off from Local Control except for Post and Bourse, the sole safe line of communication. I'd become, since this morning, a ‘hot operator,’ whom no one wanted to go near. It was a classic move, and KLJ had used it twice in his career, breaking the normal conditions of strict hush and meeting the enemy on open ground as the most expedient way of doing a particular job. It is dangerous for the agent and he knows it and settles for it. It is more dangerous for him if people don't keep clear of him, and it becomes dangerous for them. A hot operator must have no cover, no contacts, and must never go near Control. Even a radio is dangerous.

  "How long are you staying?" I asked him uncivilly.

  "Oh, I practically live here."

  We both knew that in a place like this we had to con verse carefully, so that even if a tape-recording were made it wouldn't give anything away. There were columns and curtains in this room, and waiters were still on the move. The table could even be miked.

  He offered me a small cigar but I shook my head. "I don't know this brand."

  "I just thought I'd introduce it to you." He put the cigar-wallet away.

  "I'm hot," I said, looking at the windows. He picked up his paper.

  "You kid me not," he grinned quickly, glancing at the front-page picture. He tucked the paper under his arm. "Well, I'll leave you in peace. Always at your disposal, of course."

  I watched him away, took ten minutes to finish my coffee, and went up to my room, changing into dry shoes and mentally listing all the good reasons against what I was going to do. Then I switched on to light music, a few minutes before time.

  I used the hotel paper. Repeat: there is to be no cover. Hengel made contact. I don't like this. Brand has made contact and is staying here. I don't like this either. Repeat: am operating solo.

  The music stopped.

  I decided, through the first half of the report, not to finish the note yet.

  Portuguese Canning: 388. Minus 1.

  Py-Sulpha: 459 .Plus 7.

  Quota Freight: 793¾. Plus 10¾.

  Rhone Electric: 625 -

  I switched off. It read: ALL PRECAUTIONS. YOURSELF RED SECTOR.

  I finished the note. If no confidence in my policy you have only to say so, and pull me out. Q.

  People were making me too angry and that was bad because emotions clutter up clear thinking on a job. I'd let the Hengel boy off lightly, saying only that he'd made contact and not saying that he'd picked me up on his own initiative and then let me flush him within minutes. I didn't want Control to rap him, only to keep him out of my way. But it had made me angry. So had Brand, contacting me when he knew damned well I was a hot operator. Even if Control hadn't warned him, he should have known as soon as he saw my picture on the front page linked with a ‘lightning wave of arrests’. Now Control itself had made me angry. ‘All precautions’ – in other words I wasn't to risk endangering secrecy by these wildcat methods I was embarked on. ‘Yourself red sector’' – I was exposing myself to enemy fire.

  Did I need telling?

  Let them call my bluff and try to pull me out. They wouldn't succeed. I was out for Zossen. They'd given a dog a bone.

  I took the VW as far as the Wilmersdorf district and posted the signal, locking the car and walking the rest of the way to her flat, angry, finally, with myself, because of all the good reasons I had mentally listed against going there again.

  8: INGA

  Within twenty-four hours they had me.

  During this period there were small signs of their closing in, and I was content to wait for them.

  It was midnight when I got back to the hotel from Inga's flat. She'd been on edge and had tried not to show it. The dog had been sent to bed: it had a kennel on the roof and went up by the fire-escape. She'd said ‘Friend’ and it went off without another look at me. Mostly we'd sat drinking and listening to things like Night Bounce that she put on the record-player for me, an eerie tune that suited her personality, lean, brooding, and cynical. She wore an all-black after-ski outfit more like a skin-tight track-suit with the top slit to the waist and a thonged belt. Nudity would have been less explicit.

  I didn't alter my identity: I was still with the Red Cross tracing relatives of refugees. She mentioned Phoenix twice, during one of her bitter reminiscences, and spoke of Rothstein. I hooked his name immediately because I hadn't known he was in Berlin. If there were a chance, I would look him up.

  Sometimes, watching her, I wondered: what sex are you? She must have known that she was getting under my skin, by all the things we didn't say. There was a rapport between us that made long silences unembarrassing even when the music wasn't playing and the room was totally silent. Tonight she smiled sometimes, and not altogether cynically. Lean, black, leather-belted and athletic-looking, gold hair thick along her arms: she might be anything. Lesbian, narcissist, sado-masochist, necrophile, any or all, and nothing for me, which was why I was here, a nihilist.

  She knew that I wondered about her, and teased me, using her body as she moved in the light and shadow cast by the Chinese-moon lamp, displaying its moods of poise, rhythm, tension and repose, miming an animal and begetting images whose shapes we shared, hideous and comical according to caprice, so that I was at once repulsed and bespelled. She was a houri at the court of Thanatos, and had learned her darkness in the Fuhrerbunker, just as I had learned mine among the legions of the damned. This was our touch-stone and we both knew it.

  When I left her we had not even kissed; we had done more and less than that. Inga. Her name rang in me.

  The streets were deserted and the gutters arush with the thaw, and my trudging footsteps echoed among the buildings. A moon was out, scything the dark clouds. The colours of the neon signs ran melting over wet stones, and the Kreuzberg floated like a green island in the sky.

  The Volkswagen was still where I'd left it in the Hohenzollern-platz and I checked the door-handles and key-slot with my bare fingers for nicks in their metal. The match I had rigged inside the driving-door hinge fell away. The car hadn't been touched.

  I started up and headed south through Steglitz, checked the car behind, turned right, re-checked, turned right-left-right, re-checked and added up the score. This was: it hadn't been touched but it had been watched. They'd tagged me from the Hotel Prinz Johan to Wilmersdorf and let me go, waiting for me to come back. Now they were tagging again. I claim always to know when I am being followed, on foot. Flushing a tag by car is more difficult, sometimes impossible, because the traffic conditions occupy too much of the attention. Tonight I knew they were there, within the first mile of leaving the Wilmersdorf area, because the streets were empty: but they'd followed me four hours ago from the hotel to Wilmersdorf without my knowledge, because the traffic had been heavy.

  It was a gunmetal-blue DKW F-102 Vierturer with the four distinctive Auto-Union rings on the rad-slats.

  This then was the first of the small signs that they were closing in on me. Closing in – no more than that. They weren't after a kill or I would have been dead by this time. I was working on the assumption that they were too intelligent to kill me out of hand simply because I'd done a snatch on Rauschnig, Schrader and Foegl. Several hundred war-criminals had been herded into a dozen Federal courts since the London Agreement had triggered the hunt, and no one working for the Z Commission had been shot at. It would have led to a minor war, and it seemed to be the present policy of Phoenix to keep hush. Those lost souls – like Schrader, Rohm and a dozen others – who had taken a Pand R Mark IV or kicked a chair from under them had been put under pressure by their own kind or had just got tired of waiting for the knock on the door. Those – like Kenneth Lindsay Jones – who were killed off by the adverse party were the subject of simple murder, but they weren't killed out of hand. They were vetted first. As far as the Bureau knew, KLJ hadn't been caught and grilled before they finished him off, but then a dead man can tell his Bureau precious little. He may have been caught and grilled before the kill:
that would be their policy. Squeeze the lemon before you throw it away. Or, if he'd been smart enough to dodge them at every turn, they may have simply decided that he was getting too close for comfort and must be stopped.

  But I was all right, Jack. They didn't even know I was going for Zossen. All they knew was that a strange face had suddenly turned up on the front page alongside Rauschnig's, and that I'd been in on the Schrader death and the Foegl snatch. They knew the faces of the Z-polizei very well. They didn't know mine, and they wanted to. At the moment they were watching it in a mirror at a hundred yard's range and they meant to get closer than that. More important, they wanted to know where I was going. They knew about the hotel because they'd picked me up there, so they weren't just tagging me home.

  We went right, left, right and across the Innsbruckerplatz through drifts of slush. There was no point in trying to lose them because they knew where I lived, but after the brooding sex-and-Gotterdammerung claustrophobia of Inga's flat I felt like a bit of healthy-schoolboy action and decided to give them a run. It would have to be quick because we were already hitting the limit and there'd be a police-patrol mixing with us before long, and there mustn't be any publicity of that kind. One thing to get your face in a flashlight, another thing to submit to police laws and show them all your papers. Mine were so well forged that even infra-red would reveal the same fibres but I didn't want to have any personal details printed even in a back-page filler because it would involve the Red Cross. Nor has the Bureau any kind of diplomatic immunity from contravention of traffic regulations. The Bureau doesn't exist.

  Slush was coming up on to the windscreen and the wipers knocked it away. We made a straight run through Steglitz and Sudende because I wanted to know if they'd now make any attempt to close right up and ram. They didn't. They just wanted to know where I was going. I'd have to think of somewhere. Their sidelamps were steady in the mirror, a pair of pale fireflies floating along the perspective of the streets. We crossed the Attila-strasse and I made a dive into Ring-strasse going south-east, then braked to bring them right behind me – and make them slow. As soon as they had I whipped through the gears and increased the gap to half a block before swinging sharp left into the Mariendorfdamm and heading north-east towards Tempelhof. Then a series of dives through back-streets that got them going in earnest. The speeds were high now and I had the advantage because I could go where I liked, whereas they had to think out my moves before I made them, and couldn't, because I didn't know them myself until the last second.