by Adam Hall
My breath floated grey on the cold air. Tyres hissed along wet tarmac. Two men came down the steps of the Prinz Johan and turned west side by side. Time 5.34. Didn't matter now, just have to wait and go on waiting. Cold. Cold outside and cold inside. Carelessness, bloody carelessness. Getting old.
A Borgward pulled in at the kerb and I had to shift my position to keep the east end of the street under watch. Present population of street: woman and dog ten degrees left coming east, man in black overcoat ninety degrees right coming west, two girls one-double-o right catching up, hear their voices, one laughing. Two men (same two?) extreme left coming east (coming back?). Borgward away, gas acrid on the air. Shift position. Girls passing black overcoat. Man extreme right coming west. Check left, check right. Walking quickly, short, black hat. Check left, check right. Yes.
I left the doorway and walked slowly at first to keep him under scrutiny and when the distance was fifty or sixty yards and I could recognise him with certainty I quickened and took a gap in the traffic and crossed over. We were closing on each other from thirty yards and all I had in my pockets were keys but they'd have to do. Twenty yards and within calling-distance. Stop. Check. Four up and seven along – and I was running, calling his name and shouting for him to dodge. He saw me, surprised. I flung the keys full at his face and they whistled through the air but never hit him because he was staggering, toppling, as the thin crack of sound echoed across the blank stone face of the buildings.
I caught him as he fell.
"Solly," I said to him, "it was my fault." He didn't hear.
10: THE NEEDLE
I phoned the Z-polizei within ten minutes and said:
"You may like to get some men along to 193 Potsdamerstrasse, top floor, a laboratory. Make sure they're armed. I'm expecting some trouble there."
I recognised the captain's voice. He said:
"We've just sent a squad in. There was a call from there not long ago reporting a raid. Papers were taken."
"Get them back if you can. Listen, please: I have an address for you. Concierge's office, main entrance, the Mariengarten building, middle of the Schonerlinde-strasse, Tempelhof." He was repeating, so that a clerk could get it down. "The laboratory is run by Dr. Solomon Rothstein. He's just been shot dead in the street outside the Mariengarten building and I've brought him in here. Shot was fired from a window of the Schonerpalast on the other side of the street, fourth floor, seven windows from the east end of the block. Telescopic rifle. Ambulance already laid on for Dr. Rothstein. I shall be here when you come."
I left the porter in charge of the body and pushed through the crowd in the entrance, going across to the Schonerpalast and hurrying the concierge into the lift, saying "The Kriminalpolizei will be here in a few minutes and no one must go into the room until they arrive." He asked me what had happened and I just told him it was a homicide case. "I want the seventh window from the end of this corridor."
It was apartment 303. The door pushed open easily and I didn't even bother to check the hingeside gap for anyone standing behind it. The marksman would have been out of this room and this building before I had carried the body into the Mariengarten. There was nothing unusual about the room except that it was cold in contrast to the corridor. The concierge went to shut the window and I stopped him. "Don't touch anything please." There was some greaseproof paper, empty, with the word Lunchpak printed on it, on the floor by the window. An ashtray was heaped with cigarette-butts.
I looked down across the street. The ambulance was just pulling up. Two men cleared a way through the small crowd of people, one of them carrying a rolled stretcher. I told the concierge to lock the door of the room and wait for the police to come.
It was necessary for me to keep active and not think about Solly. That would come later; remorse – worse, guilt – would set in like a rot and I would never be wholly free of it. I had never counted the men I had killed during the last thirty years, nor had the thought of their dying ever concerned me. Most of them had been Nazis during the short period of the war; the rest had died because they were in the act of attempting to kill me. They had all been enemies. Solly had been a friend and I'd killed him by carelessness.
Before the setting-in of permanent remorse there would be this immediate phase of self-fury to combat, and action was the sole anodyne.
A black Mercedes was stationed behind the ambulance when I went down and crossed the road but I turned left along the pavement and went into the yard of the hotel and got out the Volkswagen, heading due west and reaching the Potsdamer-strasse inside fifteen minutes by taking the new perimeter road round the airport and playing the lights on the amber most of the way.
The captain was still at the laboratory. He had followed up the emergency-squad after my call to him. He was the Z-officer who'd been with me on the Rauschnig-Schrader-Foegl operation. His name was Stettner. He said:
"What happened to Dr. Rothstein?"
"Nothing more than I told you."
"We sent the homicide people along. Did they get your report?"
"No. They can have it later. I wanted to see this place."
The two laboratory-assistants were here, looking shaken. The raid had been quick and not too thorough: some of the culture-canisters had been knocked on to the floor and their glass was smashed. A sergeant was gathering the last of the research-files for taking away.
The pattern was clear enough. Phoenix had known Solomon Rothstein. They had suspected him of doubling with them and had said nothing. Possibly they had found out that he had been working with me in the last months before the capitulation. Certainly they had tested him within these final twenty-four hours: I knew that. And they had not only tapped my phone; they had tapped his. Then, when they heard him say that he was coming to see me, they were certain, and they went into action. There had been no one close enough to his laboratory to catch him as he left, so they'd had to pass the orders to the man in Room 303. If he hadn't already had the rifle they would have taken it to him. (But I think he already had the rifle because it might have been policy at any time to pass him an order to kill, with myself as the subject.) And even before he had reached the Schonerlinde-strasse they'd ordered the search of his laboratory, because they knew that I'd go there hoping to find out what vital thing it was that he hadn't been able to tell me.
I looked at the broken glass. Glass, broken, looks so irredeemable. It is one of the few things that we can never mend.
"Have you found anything?" I asked the captain. He was looking at me intently, and said:
"He was your friend?" So I was showing it.
I said: "Yes. Have you found anything?"
"These files. A few other papers."
"Nothing special?" I knew he was baulking me because his training had told him never to talk to strangers, even when they were sent to liaise with him by an intelligence directive.
He was still watching me. I stared him back. At last he said: "This."
It was an oblong box about fifteen by thirty centimetres, black-painted metal with two grimp seals. A strip of paper was secured along the top side with transparent tape. In the event of my death please send this container by airmail to my next-of-kin: Isaac Rothstein, 15 Calle de Flores, Las Ramblas, San Caterina, Argentine. To be opened by himself personally. S. R.
I said: " Are you going to mail it?"
"It won't be my decision but I doubt it. We shall probably send for Isaac Rothstein to come and open it in our presence." He passed the container back to the sergeant.
"We are leaving now, Herr Quiller. Do you want to make any inquiries of your own?"
"No. I'll read the report you're given by these two people when they've been fully questioned."
They drove to the Z-polizei bureau in their car; I followed in the VW. The traffic was heavy. Night had come, and the city was dining out to celebrate the thaw. I couldn't be certain there was no tag, but it wasn't important. They were closing right in on me now.
The homicide office had appa
rently put out a dragnet for me in the last hour and I was asked to go over there and make my report on the shooting. It took ten minutes. They read it and kept me a full hour trying to probe my background. I kept strict hush. In the end I got bored and said:
"If you can't get enough clues out of Room 303, try the Potsdamer-strasse laboratory. Try my own room at the Prinz Johan as well if you like – they'll have had the paper off the walls by now."
This appeared to interest them. "Are you returning there yourself?
"Yes."
"Then we can send someone with you."
"Why not?"
Then the phone rang and he listened a minute and passed the receiver to me. It was Captain Stettner of the Z-polizei.
"Will you please come over, Herr Quiller?"
"I've just been there."
"This is very important."
I said I would go over. The homicide man was annoyed, because his bureau and the Z-polizei were out of gear with each other. Their fields overlapped and they were constantly thrown into each other's pitch. They thus looked for every chance of making the situation worse so that sooner or later some administrative top kick would be obliged to define their provinces more clearly. People like me were useful as a ball to lob about.
"You are not returning with us to the Hotel Prinz Johan, Herr Quiller?"
"No."
"But you have just said -"
"The phone call was urgent. I'm officially in liaison with the Z Commission. Simple as that, Herr Inspektor."
It was a ten-minute drive. I put the VW into the reserved parking area outside the Z Bureau and noticed an ambulance there. Captain Stettner was still in his office, with the five men who had gone to the laboratory: the three members of the emergency-squad who had gone there first, and the two men he had taken along with him. They all had their left sleeves rolled up.
He was looking worried. "It's been discovered that one of the smashed canisters contained virulent bacteria of the group -" he looked at the doctor, wanting to get it right.
"Verlanzickerpocken. "He broke another capsule while the nurse cleaned the next arm. "It isn't serious. No question of quarantine. But precautions are indicated."
I took off my coat. The taint of ether was in the air. "What about the people who raided the place?"
"I have arranged for periodic radio and television warnings," Stettner said. "The evening papers will also carry stop press announcements." He watched the hypodermic lance into my arm. "The Medical Association and all hospitals are being contacted immediately by cable and telephone, so that if anyone goes to a doctor or a hospital asking for inoculation the police can be called in to question them." He put his jacket on and spoke to the doctor. "There is no need for any special instructions? We may continue our work as usual?" There are people who, physically courageous, have nevertheless a horror of infection. He was one.
"You can forget about it. If you notice a rash round the genitals in fourteen days, report for medical attention."
He signed for the nurse to pack up the kit. I left soon after them. The evening Bourse would be on the air in thirty-five minutes; it would take fifteen to reach the hotel.
The route led past a stretch of the Wall that I always tried to avoid, but tonight it was quicker for me to go that way. On the pavement below the Wall there were wreaths and dead flowers, because at this point there was a cemetery on the other side, and people tried to throw their tributes over in remembrance of dead relatives in the Eastern Zone.
Passing the place, my sense of oppression increased and I had to make a deliberate effort not to think about Solly, and the look of surprise that he had died with. He had heard my shout, and the bunch of keys had just missed his face, so that he had died surprised, not hearing the shot. With a breech-pressure of twenty tons per square inch a rifle bullet travels faster than sound. It had drilled his head.
Southwards through Kreuzberg I checked the mirror, saw nothing, and re-checked, and finally got bored. It didn't matter if there was a tag. The game had passed beyond that stage.
On my right stood the Schinkel Monument, floodlit, dominating the city, a shining beacon in the night. What did it say? This is Berlin. Where and what was Berlin? The capital of a some-time hell on earth, split by a wall and writhing, as a cut worm writhes.
A set of lights changed to red, to green, to red again, and I hadn't moved off on the green. Some bastard was blaring behind me with his horn. Too tired to get out and bash him. Green again. Shove off. Automaton. Birds are winged things, men are wheeled things.
The street ran straight, a bright rainbow running to the black of sky. The buildings leaned back for me and then closed in again. Brakes. Nearly hit a taxi. Foot too heavy on the throttle, going too fast. Slow. Something wrong. Pull up. Breather. People on the pavement.
A man with a quiet face opened the driving-door and looked down at me and said: " Shift over." I tried to lift my hand to push him away but there was no strength left.
"Wha'?" I asked him stupidly.
"Shift over. I'll drive."
I dragged my leaden body across to the other seat. Obedience. Worst sin of modern man, obedience.
He got in and slammed the door, pulling into the traffic-stream. I sat with my chin on my chest. Last remembered thought: hypodermic.
11: OKTOBER
Her skin was the shade and texture of a wax rose, quite flawless, and her hair fell across her naked shoulder in blond rivulets. Her regard was innocent, the eyes wide and frankly-gazing, too young to have learned that you must sometimes glance away. She leaned across the white chair without coquettishness, insouciance, her small breasts barbed with nipples of carmine, her thighs heavy with pubic hair.
The ant cleaned its antennae.
The light in the room came from a great Daum chandelier, and burned on the gold of the frame. It was no good thinking in terms of taste. She was there for raping. They might just as well have hung a whore on the wall. There was no signature, but the painter had been a German, a true-blue Prussian-born hypocritical bloody Aryan. You portray the face as symbolising purity – the flawless skin, the innocent gaze, the little-girl look – and then you go to town on the tits and pussy, symbolising carnality till it moans. Result you have a picture you can give to your own mother-in-law for hanging in the needle-room, and she'll always think you've come to admire her petit point.
Hypocrisy. Schizophrenia. They've always been like it. That's why you've got to talk about Beethoven and Belsen in the same breath. You can't think of one without the other.
If you kick over an ant-hill the first thing they do is to stop and clean their antennae with a foreleg. In their panic they resort at once to habit, to deceive themselves that everything is really all right and the sky hasn't fallen down. The human species is a little that way inclined. Tea in the Blitz.
Regaining consciousness in the confines of a trap, I had controlled primitive brain-panic by resorting to a habit, and criticising the picture, as if it had been in a cosy gallery along the Kurfurstendamm. But it was no go. You couldn't look at that split-minded perpetration without knowing precisely where you were. Deep in the heart of Deutschland.
The room was large, lofty-ceilinged, and encrusted with Baroque marble, gilt, silk and ormolu. Traceries, mouldings, coquillage and arabesque, brocade and parquetry – there was nowhere for the eye to rest. Hermann Goering would have rolled in here like a pig in clover. No, you couldn't get away from where you were.
The movement of my head had left no dizziness. I had expected to wake from the equivalent of a low sleep-curve, groggy and disorientated; but the drug had no after-effects. I was sitting in a silk brocade chair with a cushion behind my head, facing the length of the room at whose far end was a pair of white-and-gold doors. I felt like a minor monarch about to grant privy audience. They did you well here.
My watch read 9.01. Less than an hour since they'd snatched me. They'd followed me away from the Z Bureau, knowing I would pull in somewhere when the drug took ef
fect. No rough stuff, nothing embarrassing.
There were four men in my audience-chamber. One against the doors, one standing with his back to the monstrous Rasputin Quinze fireplace, one staring out of the window, and one coming quietly towards my chair.
"Excuse me," he said in Heidelberg German, and lifted one of my eyelids. He had seen my movements.
I asked him: "How am I?"
He stood back with a faint and charming smile. Elegantly dressed, crisp white hair, two gold rings, a quiet and melodious tone. "You are very well."
Everyone began moving. The man by the window went down the room to the doors and the man there took a pace to one side. They were taking up positions. They were the guards. The man by the fireplace came to join the doctor. I looked up into his face and knew that if I got out of here alive it would be on his terms.
"I am Oktober," he said.
And the mirage dissolved, and all the silk and arabesque and ormolu were gone, and I sat here in a cell. Even the air had gone chill.
I bowed my head. "Quiller," I said.
His eyes were rivets in a face like a steel trap that clanged when the mouth opened and shut. "You may talk."
I took an instant to weigh up the moves. They had a doctor here. I knew what that meant. But there was a computer in operation inside the steel trap. The material was human, therefore it must be handled in human terms. It was invited to talk.
"How are the Z-polizei," I asked. "Back on the job?"
"They were injected with a neutral fluid."
"It was rather elaborate."
"It was efficient. We didn't want you to give any trouble."
The doctor had moved away. It wasn't his turn. The chill of the air reached my spine.
"And you didn't want me to get hurt. Yet."
