Man Who Wanted Tomorrow

by Brian Freemantle

  He jumped, startled, when the telephone rang. Kurnov, he decided, his mind still fogged. Smiling, he picked up the receiver, then winced at the Bavarian accent.

  “It’s all over, Helmut,” said Perez, at the other end. “Frieden’s dead … they’re all dead … Kurnov’s been exposed and is trying to escape … the police know everything. They’ll be coming for you soon. Run, Helmut, run.”

  The surgeon stared down at the dead phone, then threw it away from him, as if it were contaminated with some infectious virus.

  He dashed across the room, then stopped, frightened, not knowing why he was doing it. He needed another injection, he thought immediately, turning towards the bathroom. Then he halted, positively. Heroin wasn’t any good now. How they’d laugh and sneer, all those people who had sought his friendship and demanded secrecy for their operations. From outside the apartment, he heard the distant sound of a siren. Police car or ambulance? It was impossible to isolate. That’s how they’d come, he thought. Several carloads of police, forcing their way into the apartment or even worse, into the clinic, jostling and pushing him, anxious for it to be seen how they treated Nazis.

  He turned away from the bathroom. He began to sob, and bite his lips together. The veranda doors stuck, and he had to pull several times before they slid aside. The sudden cold contrasted with the central heating of the apartment and made him gasp. He stood for several minutes, staring out over the skyline of Berlin. He shouldn’t look down, he thought. If he looked down, he’d get frightened. And he couldn’t stand there too long, either, otherwise he’d be driven back by the same fear. He tried breathing deeply, several times, but the emotion began to build up, breaking it into the sobs that had started as he crossed the lounge inside. Abruptly he grabbed the edge of the balcony, hesitated momentarily at the coldness of the metal, then vaulted over.

  Far below, the waiting Israeli saw the body spreadeagle, then flutter down, as if it were flying. It seemed to take a long time to reach the ground.

  He sighed, shaking his head. It was amazing, he thought, that Perez had so correctly assessed the behavior of everyone. Strange how Mosbacher was objecting to it.

  (19)

  He screamed, once, as they half-carried him through the courtyard, his feet still dragging the ground in protest. It was Mosbacher who stifled the shout for help.

  “Go ahead,” he said, from the left where he was supporting him. “Make everyone look, Heinrich.”

  The scientist was shoved, stumbling, into the Mercedes, which was already moving off before he struggled upright. They sat flanking him, looking straight ahead.

  He tugged at Mosbacher’s arm, desperately. “I’ve got money. A lot of money. You can have it, all of it. Just help me.”

  “I remember my mother saying something like that to the Nazis who took us away,” Mosbacher goaded.

  Kurnov’s fear overrode the rebuke. “Where are you taking me? What are you going to do? You must tell me.”

  The scientist began staring left and right from the vehicle, anxious for landmarks. Suddenly he started to tremble, uncontrollably, like a man without clothes in a snowstorm. The men either side of him turned and smiled at the nervous reaction.

  “It often starts like that, Heinrich,” said Mosbacher.

  He couldn’t recognize anything, the scientist realized. The Berlin he had known had disappeared, along with an ideology.

  He felt the speed decrease and saw the Mercedes pulling into the curb. He strained out, looking for the indications of an official building. A police station. Or a Justice Ministry, he thought, forgetting in his apprehension that Bonn was the capital. He looked out on an ordinary street, full of shops and people.

  Mosbacher turned.

  “Time to learn what it’s like to be a Jew, Heinrich,” he said. “Start running.”

  Kurnov tried to push himself back into the seat, his feet braced against the floor, but they pushed him forward from both sides and the passenger in the front seat leaned across, grasping the front of his coat. The driver got out and opened the door and reached in, too, pulling at his overcoat lapels. Kurnov grabbed at the door pillar. Behind Mosbacher said, quite calmly, “People will start looking at you soon, Heinrich.”

  The driver, less controlled than the other men, said, “Let go that pillar, you bastard. Or I’ll slam the door and break your hands.”

  The man wanted to hurt him, Kurnov realized, his face only inches away. He let go and was expelled from the car in a rush, almost falling on the pavement. He swiveled, only half recovered and saw the Mercedes already moving off. He opened his mouth to shout, then stopped. People were looking, he realized. He stood tensed, awaiting for the first yell of recognition. What would they do? Hit him? Or merely stand around, staring, until the authorities arrived? They’d panic, he decided, reacting with the customary mentality, driven to mob violence. They’d beat him. He was sure of it.

  Nothing happened. The people who had glanced casually as he fell from the car looked away. Momentarily, unable to understand it, he stood in the center of the pavement as people washed around him. Then he realized the conspicuousness. Like a suddenly blinded man walking for the first time, Kurnov went to the side of the pavement and began to edge along, keeping close to the walls of buildings, as if they would provide protection. Hide, he told himself. He had to hide. Thank God it was winter and they had allowed him his overcoat. He shrugged the collar closer around him, burrowing his chin low into it. Good enough, he reasoned. No one was going to take too much notice of a man huddled against the winter. He saw a street sign and looked up, anxiously. Dachdecker Weg. He was still in Buckow. They’d just driven around aimlessly, to confuse his sense of direction. There was a park nearby, he remembered. That would be the place to go. Neukölln Park. On the streets, he was close to people. In an open space, there would be safety. Goaded scientifically to the point of mental collapse, he snatched at omens, as he had when he first arrived in the city. He’d been on the streets for fifteen minutes, he calculated. And no one had even glanced at him. Perhaps the Jew had been lying. Perhaps the whole story had been an invention, a clumsy rather than clever attempt to break him. That was it. He had been bluffed out of Russia and now they had tried to trick him into a complete mental breakdown by extending the delusion. He’d even conducted such experiments himself, in Buchenwald. Perez had said he was following the precedents he had established. That was it. Another trick. But he was sure he could defeat them. Easy, he warned himself, the elation filling him. Too much confidence would be dangerous. He gripped his hands inside the pockets of the overcoat. That was irrational thinking: exactly what had to be avoided. He could only survive by being cleverer than they were. His advantage was knowing in minute detail what they had done. And what they hoped to achieve by having done it. They were trying to drive him insane. And as he knew it, he could resist them and win.

  He recognized again the rehearsal and timing that had gone into Perez’s explanation. Every word and every action had been calculated to the last degree of stress, to tilt him off his mental balance. But they’d overlooked one important factor. Clever men always did. They’d ignored the fact that he was a psychiatrist, someone perhaps better trained than Perez. Definitely better trained, he assured himself. Certainly in behavioral stress.

  If he could avoid panic, he could save his mind, he knew. That was the trick. Never for a moment lose control of his reasoning. And consider everything logicably, forbidding any self-delusion.

  How stupid he had been, he reflected, bitterly. Perez had been right. He had been manipulated as easily as a child’s hand-puppet, performing to a carefully prepared script. If only he had stayed safely in Russia …

  He stopped the recrimination, fighting to regain control. His mind had slipped, he accepted, worriedly. Exactly what shouldn’t have happened. That was how Perez would want him to think, undermining his self-control with personal anger, driving common sense away with his own exasperation.

  Perez’s story could easily
have been concocted, he resumed again, the reasoning breaking away in another direction in a desperate search for the smallest degree of hope. Again he pushed the confidence back with logic. He had to be logical. He repeated the instructions to himself, like a child learning a calculation table. It didn’t really matter whether the Nazis had been shot or not, he decided. Or whether the Russians had declared him a defector. So anxious was he for a lifeline he had erased from his mind the pictures and recorded confession. They were enough. More than enough. It would all be made available to the authorities, even if everything else was a lie. So arrest was inevitable. And the pictures would be published, if he were thought to be wandering in Berlin. So he would be hunted, like the Jews had been thirty-five years before. And the city was an island. There was no way he could get out. Why had he forgotten that? It was a ridiculous omission. Was it his mind blocking out the unacceptable? He’d recorded the tendency a hundred times, in every camp in which he had worked.

  His tongue explored the now-aching cavity. If only the cyanide implant were still there, he thought. He would have used it. He would have had to. He couldn’t stand capture. He knew he couldn’t. He squeezed his eyes shut, visualizing what would happen. Arrest. Questioning. Mockery. Humiliation. A trial, where he would appear like a pet animal, for people to stare at. And then the imprisonment, the empty, sense-rotting incarceration in stinking cells where he would become sub-human, like they always did. He shuddered. He knew too well what happened to people in prisons to let it happen to him. And it would be imprisonment, he was sure. He would be tried in Germany, for war crimes. They’d ignore the Statute of Limitations, in his case. But they’d stop short of the death sentence. He’d probably be sent to Spandau, forced to listen to the gibbering of Rudolf Hess. The Russians would like that. It would give them a continuing excuse for the Four-Power presence in the city.

  He became conscious of the bulge beneath his jacket and reached in, remembering the Russian passport. He pulled it out, covering it with his hand against any passerby recognizing it as a Soviet document. It identified him, he decided, immediately. If someone grabbed him, challenging his identity, he could argue. And perhaps escape. But not if he carried papers showing who he was. Ahead he saw a rubbish basket affixed to a lamp standard. He glanced around, ensuring he was still unobserved, then quickly dropped the passport in, hardly pausing in his stride. Once he was freed of the document, the unsteady elation flooded him again. Now no one could prove who he was. Not instantly, anyway. He turned into Buckowerdamm, sighing with relief at the sight of the park. Leafless trees shivered ahead of him in the winter cold. It was like a churchyard, he thought. The unexpected sight of his own face, staring back at him from a newspaper stand, was like a physical punch. He stopped, the gasp pulled from him. There were two pictures. One was clearly from the cellar confession. But the other was an official print, obviously older than the first. From Russia, he accepted. So it was true. Everything the Jew had said was true. He was inescapably trapped. But then he’d already known that, he reasoned. The refusal to accept reality annoyed him. It showed immaturity.

  “Space Scientist is Nazi Murderer” said the headline. There were smaller headlines, but he was too far away to read them.

  He turned, small sounds grunting from him, like a puppy nervous in a new house. He ran across the highway, twisting between cars, then forced himself to stop, aware of the attention he was attracting. Inside the park, he hurried over the grass, anxious to get into the middle, to an isolated part. He felt a choking sensation, like drowning. He coughed, near to vomiting, recognizing as he bent double the extent of the nervousness. No, he corrected. Not nervousness. Fear … fear like the Jews said he would feel. Like they had felt. It was working, he told himself. Perez’s torture was working. Because of the cold, the park was almost deserted. But he was hot. The feeling came in spasms, with the regularity of a heartbeat. The nausea was at the back of his throat and his skin began to irritate. He felt the perspiration break out over his face and back. He scratched, but the irritation seemed to increase. He looked down, concentrating for the first time since leaving the cellar on his own appearance. His suit had dried into concertina creases from the sweat that had soaked him during the confrontation with Perez. His shirt was creased and stained, too, and again he became aware of his own smell. He brought his hand to his face. After the surgery, his beard had never been heavy, but stubble stuck out in odd islands over his face. He looked disgusting, he knew. But his very appearance might be protection, he decided, still seeking escape. Immediately the pendulum swung, rejecting it. Perez had got to his mind, insidiously, like water finding its way under a stone. He’d always been so sure of the strength of his own mind. Now that confidence was washed away, as easily as a twig in a stream. He had been beaten, he accepted. There was no point in fighting. Or running. The apathy crept over him, numbing. Is this how they felt, those Jews who had been whipped and herded like cattle into pens for him to select? And those in the Russian camps, the people with blank eyes, sure of only one thing, their helplessness. Resistance flickered, like a candle in the wind. But there was a difference. Surely they’d withstood it much longer, he thought, critical of himself. He’d known men brought into the laboratory after six months, sometimes a year, all the time knowing they were to be experimented upon, who still weren’t at the level to which he’d been reduced in hours. He groaned heavily, pulling the apathy around him like a blanket. So what? It didn’t matter whether he was the weaker or stronger. He shivered, suddenly conscious of the cold. Instinctively he glanced at his watch, but found it missing. He must have been there at least an hour, he decided. Again the shrug. It still didn’t give him an estimate of what time it was. Did that matter, either? He stood up, stamping the life into his feet and legs, moving slowly along the empty pathways. There was a sudden pain in his face, like a reminder, and again his tongue went to the extraction.

  Without thought, he found himself on the edge of the park. He hesitated, his mind refusing to function. Still undecided, the erosion now well advanced, he pushed out into the street. A boy approached, looking at him, and the fear jumped immediately. The child went on and Kurnov stared over his shoulder, but there was no answering look. He released the breath, relaxing. But at what, he demanded, attempting to recover some control over himself. That there was no recognition? Or that there hadn’t been the stare of realization that would have meant the end to the pointless meandering around the streets of a city he had once loved. Another newspaper poster shouted his name. He drew closer, hunched into the coat. Every newspaper looked the same, dominated by his photograph. The seller looked up and frowned, uncertainly. Kurnov hurried by, apprehensively. He imagined he heard a shout and immediately began running, blindly, pushing through the startled people until he reached a junction. He swerved to his right, listening for the following footsteps or shouts. Breath pumped from him and his chest hurt, like it had when he had climbed down the hotel fire escape. How long ago that seemed! The first positive step of an unnecessary journey, he reflected. Oh God, how his injured leg hurt. He crossed the road, still hurrying, moving into a shopping arcade. There he stopped, looking behind. No one followed. Another false alarm. They said he’d run, frightened at anything, he remembered. The scare had momentarily blown away the apathy, and now thoughts were engaging more easily.

  He was allowing them the satisfaction they had planned, he realized, suddenly. He was scurrying, stinking with his own fear, because they had told him that was what he was going to do. The anger flared in him. He’d long ago written a thesis on the characteristic of the Jewish people to accept oppression. There were isolated exceptions, of course. Warsaw. And Treblinka. But generally there had been little resistance. He’d sneered at it, he recalled, pointing it up as an inherent weakness in the race. And now he, Heinrich Köllman, one of the most feared and respected Nazis of the Third Reich, was doing exactly the same. He was behaving exactly like a Jew.

  He’d deny them their final satisfaction, he
decided. Again the cavity twitched, but this time he concentrated upon the pain. They’d revealed their fear by that extraction, he determined. And until now he had missed the clue. Their only fear was that he would have committed suicide to deprive them of the spectacle of a hunt, followed by a trial.

  So he’d die. And beat them.

  He tried to locate the street name, feeling for the first time the tiredness grab at him. He’d walked a long way, he realized, further than he could recall walking in one day. Mental fatigue was combining with the physical exhaustion, too. Geraerstrasse. There would be a U-Bahn station very soon. He hurried along, looking for the Underground. Now he had a purpose, he was more controlled. The idea of being the victor pleased him. It always had. He’d always enjoyed winning, Kurnov thought. Perhaps irrationally so. Certainly what little defeat he had so far experienced had always caused him too much anger.

  It would hurt, he decided, suddenly, remembering his abhorrence of pain. He felt the sweat flush from him again. But only for a second, he rationalized. Just the briefest second, providing he was very careful about throwing himself completely beneath the train. So there could be no pulling back, no last-minute change of heart. If he balked at the last moment, trying to twist away, then there would be horrific injuries. And pain. A lot of pain. He walked on, positively. It was almost as if he got courage from the determination to spite them. Just a second, he reassured himself again. Then it would all be over. Everything would be over.

  He identified the station, immediately ahead. And a newspaper seller, next to the entrance. He hesitated, uncertainly. He’d forgotten the prominence of his photograph. It didn’t matter. He’d have to pass. He waited until a group of people moved towards the station, then hurried up, tagging along behind and averting his face from the news-stand as he went by. Again he tensed for a shout, but nothing happened.