01 The Quiller Memorandum, page 16
Because I knew that Solly had been doubling.
“I am grateful to you, Herr Quiller,” Stettner was saying. “I shall of course take this decipherment straight to my superiors.”
Before I went I asked him: “Did you find anything else in that laboratory, anything significant, anything you decided not to tell me about?”
He seemed surprised. “Nothing.”
“I’ve done you a service, Herr Hauptmann, and you would be the first to reciprocrate. So I’ll take your word that the canister was all you found.”
“You have my word. Apart, of course, from the various papers we allowed you to see at the time. There was nothing else.”
He wasn’t lying. I wished he had been. It would have been something to bite on.
I left him and found the 230SL where I had parked it, half a kilometre from the Z Bureau. It was a model they’d never expect to find me driving, but once they’d got on to it they’d tag me at a distance because it was so distinctive, and distance-tagging was difficult to sense. They knew I might visit the Z Bureau at any time, so the car had been parked well clear. But I was expecting a tag to show up and there wasn’t one. The half-kilometre was a dead clear run and I got into the car with a sense of foreboding. The rope they were giving me was getting longer, and I feared it.
Going over to the offensive was more difficult than I’d thought. Two days wasted on the Rothstein document, with still no clue to the way in.
There was only one feature of the day’s work that eased my frustration: I now believed in Pol and in his briefing. The German General Staff did have - or might have - the means of triggering a non-nuclear war. Because of the parallel assumption.
Night was down and the streets shone with the aftermath of the sleet. There was a chance of getting the Mercedes into the Hotel Zentral lock-up without being recognised. If they still had a man posted in the bar at the corner he would be watching for the BMW.
I waited on the far side of the traffic-lights until a line of cars had built up, then followed the two who peeled off and took my street, keeping close behind them on the principle that one of three cars is less noticeable than if it travels alone. The windows of the bar were steamed-up but there was a black area low down in one corner and I turned my head away as I passed the place, swinging into the glass-roofed courtyard of the hotel with the riding-lights switched off.
The courtyard was oblong and the glass roof ran from the hotel building to the row of lock-ups. Observation could be kept on it only from the windows of the hotel itself and from a single house on the other side of the street, whose windows faced the open gates of the court. Three of these were lit and the fourth heavily-curtained. The lower windows of the hotel were of frosted glass and the five upper ones were all lit. I hadn’t been seen putting the new image into the lock-up, though I might have been seen driving it into the court.
Findings: the 230SL was probably a good bet if I had to get away in a hurry.
Routine checks made on entering my room indicated no interference. They were keeping their distance, paying out the rope.
One hour’s thought cleared up a lot of unanswered questions and posed some new ones. The Rothstein parallel assumption was given a thorough examination and still stood up. The frustration was eased a little and I even had the grace to send in a brief report to Control:
Correction to Signal 5. Container found at Rothstein lab. didn’t carry microfilm but a phial charged with heavy culture of pneumonic plague bacillus and ciphered message to R’s brother in Argentine detailing method of starting epidemic in San Caterina. Contact Captain Stettner Z Bureau if want details.
Ten minutes with the feet above head-level, the eyes closed. Review mental hooks for the day. One left: telephone the Brunnen Bar.
The line was clear of tapping. There was indeed a message for Herr Quiller: would I please ring Wilmersdorf 38.39.01 before midnight?
She answered after the second ring. There was no tapping at her end either.
I asked: “Are you feeling better?” There had been blood on her thighs.
“I am better now.”
“They gave me your message -“
“Yes. You must come to see me.”
“Too dangerous, Inga. It could start all over again.”
“There is no danger. You must come as soon as you can. I have something important for you. Believe me.” There was a choice of two reactions: to follow her view of the situation, or to follow mine. I said:
“I’ll be with you in fifteen minutes.”
My view of the situation might not be right but it was riskable. But I left the car in the lock-up, walking to the postbox and sending the signal before I got a taxi. I wanted the very fast 230SL to stay unseen in case there was trouble and I had to drive myself out of it.
There was no apparent observation on the entrance to the block of apartments. The hall, lift and top-floor passage were deserted. I pressed the bell.
She was in a tunic and slacks of a red so vivid that it glowed on my hand as I touched her and burned in her eyes as she watched me. It was the first time I had seen her in colour.
She said: “This is Helmut Braun.”
He was a small soft-eyed man with slightly hooded lids and a short kittenish nose. He never put his hands anywhere but let them hang by his sides, and he was as confident as she was nervous. She glanced twice at the ebony table within the first half-minute.
“I am officially working for them,” he said to me with a shy smile.
I was on the wrong foot and the thought was unpleasant. We always try to estimate whatever situation we go into, beforehand-even a few seconds beforehand. It was twenty minutes since I had telephoned her and I was still unprepared for three things: the vivid red of her clothes, the presence of the man Braun, and the object lying on the table. It was a black-covered file of papers.
It would have to be played by ear, and we never like that.
“For them?” I asked him. He might be anyone, Z Commission, a doubler, one of her lovers. He wasn’t in my group: there hadn’t been a single ‘c’ in his first sentence.
“Phoenix,” he smiled.
We were obviously here for business because he picked up the file and offered it to me with a pert bow. “This is for you, Herr Quiller.”
Inga sat on the black Skai settee, a flame on charcoal. I looked at her once before I opened the file but she was staring at her hands. The file was thin quarto and there was one word on the first sheet: Sprungbrett. Springboard.
I asked: “Do you want me to look at it right away?”
“We think you should.” His accent was Bavarian.
They both watched my face as I turned the sheets. The second sheet carried a list of names, all of them high-ranking officers of the German General Staff. Next was a list of armed units in readiness. There followed the main outline of the operation, detailing preliminaries, major attack-sectors and spearheads. The operation was to be launched by carefully-integrated land, sea and air contingents immediately following a false announcement by five international news-services that a bomb-test in the Sahara had misfired and was spreading fallout across the Mediterranean. Under cover of alarm conditions the immediate assaults would be directed against Gibraltar, Algeria, Libya, Israel, Greece, Cyprus and Sicily. Franco in the west, Nasser in the east, and Mafia battalions taking hold in southern Italy. A fait accompli before the major powers could put out the fire. And this only the springboard of a non-nuclear war in a nuclear age, with neither Russia nor the United States mutually threatened.
It took me fifteen minutes to read the file, during which time no one spoke. I dropped it back on to the table and said
“There’s no date. No D-Day, no H-Hour.”
Helmut Braun looked pained. “I hadn’t noticed that. It would be very difficult for me to find out the date of the operation. It was highly dangerous for me in any case to get this file.”
Inga had been watching me but now she looked at her hands again. I could tell nothing from her expression except that she was nervous about the whole thing. Braun was still looking hurt.
“There’s a testing-team set up in the Sahara,” I said reflectively, “at the moment. No one’s been told when they intend to fire their bomb.”
“We can assume it’s a matter of days, Herr Quiller.”
I stood close to him and asked: “Why did you make it your business to get hold of this file and what decided you to let me see it?”
His hands hung at his sides. He looked at me straight in the eyes. “I am a friend of Inga’s. She knows I am working against Phoenix. She told me about you. I wanted to do something active - definitive - and it was a chance for me after so many years of passive opposition to them. Herr Quiller, I am a Jew.” His hands moved at last, their fingers opening in an appeal for my understanding. “I can do nothing with this file, but you can. So I brought it to you.”
Then Inga moved and hissed out a breath and he swung his eyes to her and then to the door. In silence he went across the room and bent at the door, listening.
Sixty seconds is a long time. The silence went on for longer than that and he stood crouched like a cat at the door. She was beside me but I didn’t look at her. Knowing that if there came another sound he would hear it, I left the situation in his hands and used the time for thinking.
It sometimes comes to people like us that we are faced with the terrible temptation of risking all on a single throw. This happened to me now. But we never throw blind. There have to be certainties in support of the decision to take a risk that size. In my case there were these:
I knew why the Brunnen Bar hadn’t been put under observation on the night when Oktober had been here. I knew why Solly had been killed. I knew why Inga, tonight, was wearing red. And I knew why the briefing draft of Operation Springboard had been given freely into my hands.
But certainties can lodge in the mind as a partial result of stomach-thinking, which is always dangerous. Sometimes the facts in our possession interlock so elegantly that we reject the few pieces that spoil the edge of the picture. Therefore a risk is always present when the all-or-nothing type of throw is made; but the risk is calculated.
Braun moved, coming away from the door.
“I am an easily-frightened man,” he said. “I wish I weren’t like that. My operations would then be less passive, less ineffectual.” He had spoken in a whisper.
I looked down at the file. “You’re not doing badly.” It seemed to cheer him up and he asked: “You’ll take it to your people?”
“Yes. As soon as I’ve got confirmation on it. My people like us to vet this kind of thing at source, to save wasting time. And time looks short, with this one.”
“How will you get confirmation?”
“I’ll go to the source. The Phoenix base. I know where it is. The house by the Grunewald Bridge.”
At the edge of my field of vision I saw Inga begin shivering.
19 : THE SEPULCHRE
He said: “You would never get out alive.”
Inga was still shivering.
I picked up the file and he lifted his hand at once, saying, “I beg you not to go. But if you go, I beg you not to take the file with you.”
“Don’t worry, I won’t say where I got it.”
“You don’t understand my position, Herr Quiller. They’ll start an immediate inquiry at the highest level to find out who stole the file. They’ll examine it for fingerprints, and mine are on it - so are Inga’s.” He held his hands limply. “Please,” he said.
“All right.” The file hit the table with a slap. “But you’ll make it available to me when I get back?”
He sighed. “You will not get back.” He looked at Inga for help but she turned away and in a minute she came back with a coat on, a military-style trencher buttoning at the right. With her bright helmet of hair and the martial coat she looked all the things she was: man, woman, hermaphrodite, transvestist, a pagan Joan of Arc. She said ” I’ll go with you.”
Braun closed his eyes. “Inga …” he said hopelessly.
He was standing like that when we went into the passage together. A man was closing the door of the lift but saw us coming and waited so that we could go down with him. We let him make his way ahead of us through the hall as a return of courtesy. Our footsteps echoed; the place was mostly marble, and sounds carried.
We turned along the pavement and there were steps behind us. It was Braun, trotting to catch up. “Herr Quiller,” he said plaintively. “Inga … ” We didn’t say anything so he gave it up, signalling a taxi from the rank and getting in with us.
The night was cold and clear and I watched the city as we passed along its streets. People were about, and the lights burned brilliantly as if they had never gone out nor would ever go out again; but not far away where the Wall stood I had often seen rabbits bobbing among the rubble of no-man’s land, in and out of the tank-traps and barbed wire and the shadows of the machine-gun posts. In London you would see Piccadilly on one side, Leicester Square on the other, and in between a tract so desolate that rabbits ran there, safe from man.
I had told the driver: “Grunewaldbruck.”
The house was there. The address was in the last report from Kenneth Lindsay Jones. He’d been closing in on the enemy, with ‘a line on base’. Things were ‘very tricky’ and he had warned Control that he ‘might not signal for a time’ or even ‘receive Bourse’. He had followed that line and they’d killed him off before he got too close to their base. They had shot him and dropped his body into the Grunewald See: the nearest place. It was from the Grunewald Bridge that they had dropped me, into that same water.
We were going there now, to the house by the bridge with the single plantain tree outside, the tree I had seen through the window when I had sat trapped in the silk brocade chair.
The glint of water under starlight was now on our left and I began counting the streets on the other side, with the Verder-strasse as a reference. Then suddenly Braun shifted forward and told the driver to pull up.
“I will not go with you,” he told us. “I would die of fright, waiting for you to make a slip and give me away. For God’s sake don’t make a slip … ” He got out. On the left was now the bridge, spanning the neck of the lake and a single star. The house was humped on the other side, most of its mass in darkness. A street lamp marked the plantain tree. I told Inga:
“We can walk from here.”
She sat stiffly and her face looked bloodless in the shadows. I got out and waited for her, paying the driver. Her foot buckled over on a stone as she left the taxi and I knew how she felt. There was no strength in her legs.
She seemed about to tell me something but we weren’t alone. The taxi had gone and Braun had gone, but certain shadows moved and the night was too calm for even a murmur not to carry. Sounds were on the cold air, audible in the intervals of our footsteps. She walked with me through the gates of the drive and a man came down from the curve of steps that were lit by the lamp above the doors; his shadow reached us first. Another man came from behind us and we all climbed the steps in silence.
When I heard the doors close I knew I had made my throw and would have to stand by it.
Nobody seemed to be clear about what to do with us; three men stood in dark suits, each by a doorway, staring at nothing. There was no baroque here: the hall was immense and furnished as bleakly as a monastery. I said to Inga:
“Show me the shrine.”
It would be good for her to let me see it.
Her eyes were large, their pupils dilated in the artificial light. She took a step back from me and then another. “Do you believe,” she asked me, “that you’ll leave here alive?”
She’d begun shivering again.
“Yes.”
She seemed to accept it, and the shivering stopped. Her lips parted to say something more but footsteps were fading in from the marble distances. Two men were advancing on us, marching on us, their feet in unison; they were the kind of men who had never learned to walk.
“You will both accompany us,” said one of them.
Fifteen stairs, a mezzanine, ten more stairs. This data was filed mentally with the rest: six average paces from the plantain to the gates, gates twelve feet high and locked back with ball-levers, twenty-seven paces from the gates to the curving steps, reasonable shrub cover, two balconies on the face of the building … nineteen paces from the double doors to the staircase … so on.
More doors, with our shadows grouped against them.
Permission to enter was begged and received in staccato fashion, correct to the last heel-click, and then I heard the comic and terrible pig grunt that I had not heard for twenty years: ” Heil Hitler! ” And as the doors opened I knew that they opened on to the Third Reich.
It wasn’t the same room. This was Operations. The map of Europe was thirty feet wide and reached to the ceiling where a battery of spotlights was trained on it.
The main plotting-table took up a quarter of the room; a dust-cover masked it. The huge curtains were made of blackout fabric and there was the insignia on each of them in white and scarlet: the swastika.
Above the desk where the man sat was a portrait in oils floodlit by concealed lamps in the edge of the jutting frame; not a bad likeness, though the weakness of the mouth had been delicately altered and the eyes had humanity in them. The words were embossed in gold Gothic at the base of the portrait: Our Glorious Fuhrer.
There were six other men apart from the fat one who sat at the desk. All wore black shirts with a gold swastika on the breast. One was Oktober.
He came towards us. The others didn’t move.
Inga pulled the black-covered file from her trenchcoat pocket and gave it to Oktober. “He’s read it,” she said. “All of it.”
Oktober held the file in both hands. For the first time I saw him hesitate before speaking, and although his blank glass eyes were directed at me there was the impression that he was also looking behind him at the man at the desk. Oktober was in the presence of a superior.
