A Small Town in Germany

Epilogue

Bradfield led the way; de Lisle and Turner followed. It was early evening and the streets were empty of traffic. In all Bonn, nothing stirred but the mute, grey-clad strangers who swarmed the alleys and hastened towards the market square. The black bunting, becalmed, drifted in idle swathes over the ebbing tide.

Bonn had never seen such faces. The old and the young, the lost and the found, the fed and the hungry, the clever, the dull, the governed and the ungoverned, all the children of the Republic, it seemed, had risen in a single legion to march upon her little bastions. Some were hillsmen, darkhaired, straddle-legged and scrubbed for the outing; some were clerks, Bob Cratchits nipped by the quick air; some were Sunday men, the slow infantry of the German promenade, in grey gabardine and grey Homburg hats.

Some carried their flags shamefully, as if they had outgrown them, some as banners borne to the battle, others as ravens strung for market. Birnam Wood had come to Dunsinane.

Bradfield waited for them to catch up.

'Siebkron reserved space for us. We should enter the square higher up. We shall have to force our way to the right.' Turner nodded, barely hearing. He was looking everywhere, in to every face and every window, every shop, corner and alley.

Once he seized de Lisle's arm, but whoever it was had gone, lost again in the changing mass.

Not just the square itself: balconies, windows, shops, every foothold and crevice was filled with grey coats and white faces, and the green uniforms of soldiers and police. And still they came, more of them, cramming the mouths of the darkening alleys, craning their necks for a sight of the speaker's stand, searching for a leader, faceless men searching for one face; while Turner peered desperately among them for a face he had never seen. Overhead, in front of the floodlights, loudspeakers hung like warnings from their wires; beyond them, the sky was failing.

He'll never make it, Turner thought dully; he'll never penetrate a crowd like this. But Hazel Bradfield's voice came back to him: I had a younger brother, he played scrum-half; you could hardly tell them apart. 'To the left,' Bradfield said. 'Make for the hotel.'

'You are English?' a woman's voice enquired, teatime in a friendly house. 'My daughter lives in Yarmouth.' But the tide carried her a way. Furled banners barred their path, dropped like lances. The banners formed a ring, and the gypsy students stood inside it, gathered round their own small fire. 'Burn Axel Springer,' one boy shouted, not with much conviction, and another broke a book and threw it on the flames. The book burned badly, choking before it died. I shouldn't have done that to the books, Turner thought; I'll be doing it to people next. A group of girls lounged on mattresses and the fire made poems of their faces.

'If we're separated, meet on the steps of the Stern,' Bradfield ordered. A boy heard him and ran forward, encouraged by the others. Two girls were already shouting in French. 'You are English!' the boy cried, though his face was young and nervous.

'English swine!' Hearing the girls again, he swung his small fist wildly over the lances. Turner hastened forward, but the blow fell on Bradfield's shoulder and he paid it no attention. The crowd gave way, suddenly, its will mysteriously gone, and the Town Hall appeared before them at the far end of the square, and that was the night's first dream. A magic baroque mountain of candy pink and merchant gold. A vision of style and elegance, of silk and filigree and sunlight. A vision of brilliance and Latin glory, palaces where de Lisle's unplayed minuets pleased the plumper burgher's heart. To its left the scaffold, still in darkness, cut off by the screen of arclights trained upon the building, waited like an executioner upon the imperial presence.

'Herr Bradfield?' the pale detective asked. He had not changed his leather coat since that dawn in Königswinter, but there were two teeth missing from his black mouth. The moon faces of his colleagues stirred in recognition of the name.

'I'm Bradfield, yes.'

'We are ordered to free the steps for you.' His English was rehearsed: a small part for a newcomer. The radio in his leather pocket crackled in urgent command. He lifted it to his mouth. The diplomatic gentlemen had arrived, he said, and were safely in position. The gentleman from Research was also present.

Turner looked pointedly at the broken mouth and smiled.

'You sod,' he said with satisfaction. The lip was badly cut as well, though not as badly as Turner's.

'Please?'

'Sod,' Turner explained. 'Sodomite.'

'Shut up,' said Bradfield.

The steps commanded a view of the entire square. Already the afternoon had turned to twilight; the victorious arclights divided the numberless heads in to white patches which floated like pale discs upon a black sea. Houses, shops, cinemas had fallen a way.Only their gables remained, carved in fairytale silhouette against the dark sky, and that was the second dream; Tales of Hoffman, the woodcut world of German make-believe to prolong the German childhood. High on a roof a Coca-Cola sign, winking on and off, tinged the surrounding tiles with cosmetic pink; once an errant spotlight ran across thefaçades, peering with a lover's eye in to the empty windows of the stores. On the lower step, the detectives waited, backs towards them, hands in pockets, black against the haze.

'Karfeld will come in from the side,' de Lisle said suddenly.

'The alley to the left.'

Following the direction of de Lisle's outstretched arm, Turner noticed for the first time directly beneath the feet of the scaffold a tiny passageway between the pharmacy and the Town Hall, not more than ten foot wide and made very deep by the high walls of the adjacent buildings.

'We remain here, is that clearly understood? On these steps.

Whatever happens. We are here as observers; merely observers, nothing more.' Bradfield's strict features were strengthened by dilemma. 'If they find him they will deliver him to us. That is the understanding. We shall take him at once to the Embassy for safe custody.'

Music, Turner remembered. In Hanover he tried when the music was loudest. The music is supposed to drown the shot. He remembered the hair-dryers too and thought: he's not a man to vary the technique; if it worked before, it will work again, and that's the German in him; like Karfeld and the grey buses.

His thoughts were lost to the murmur of the crowd, the pleasurable growl of expectation which mounted like an angry prayer as the floodlights died. Only the Town Hall remained, a pure and radiant altar, tended by the little group which had appeared upon its balcony. The names rose in countless mouths as all around him, the slow liturgical commentary began: Tilsit, Tilsit was there, Tilsit the old General, the third from the left, and look, he is wearing his medal, the only one they wanted to deny him, his special medal from the war, he wears it round his neck, Tilsit is a man of courage. Meyer Lothringen, the economist! Yes, der Grosse,the tall one, how elegantly he waves, it is well known that he is of the best family; half a Wittelsbach, they say; blood will tell in the end; and a great academic; he understands everything. And priests! The Bishop! Look, the Bishop himself is blessing us! Count the movements of his holy hand! Now he is looking to his right! He has reached out his arm! And Halbach the young hothead: look, he is wearing a pullover!

Fantastic, his impertinence: a pullover on such an occasion! In Bonn? Halbach! nu toller Hund! But Halbach is from Berlin, and Berliners are famous for their arrogance; one day he will lead us all, so young and yet already so successful.

The murmur rose to a roar, a visceral, hungry, loving roar, deeper than any single throat, more pious than any single soul, more loving than any single heart; and died again, whispering down, as the first quiet chords of music struck. The Town Hall receded and the scaffolding stood before them. A preacher's pulpit, a captain's bridge, a conductor's rostrum? A child's cradle, a plain coffin of boldly simple wood, grandiose yet virtuous, a wooden grail, housing the German truth. Upon it, alone but valiant, the truth's one champion, a plain man known as Karfeld.

'Peter.' Turner gently pointed into the tiny alley. His hand was shaking but his eye was quite steady. A shadow? A guard taking up his post?

'I wouldn't point any more if I was you,' de Lisle whispered. 'They might misunderstand you.'

But in that moment, no one paid them any heed, for Karfeld was all they saw.

'Der Klaus!' the crowd was calling. 'Der Klaus is here!' Wave to him, children; der Klaus, the magic man, has walked all the way to Bonn on stilts of German pine.

'He is very English, der Klaus,' he heard de Lisle murmur. 'Although he hates our guts.'

He was such a little man up there. They said he was tall; and it would have been easy enough, with so much artifice, to raise him a toot or so, but he seemed to wish to be diminished, as if to emphasise that great truths are found in humble mouths; for Karfeld was a humble man, and English in his diffidence. And Karfeld was a nervous man too,

bothered by his spectacles, which he had not had time to clean, apparently, in these busy days, for now he took them off and polished them as if he did not know he was observed: it is the others who make the ceremony, he was telling them, before he had said a word; it is you and I who know why we are here.

Let us pray.

'The lights are too bright for him,' someone said. 'They should reduce the lights.'

He was one of them, this isolated Doctor; a good deal of brain power no doubt, a good deal above the ears, but still one of them at the end of it, ready to step down at any time from that high place if someone better came along. And not at all a politician. Quite without ambition, in fact, for he had only yesterday promised to stand down in favour of Halbach if that was the people's will. The crowd whispered its concern. Karfeld looks tired, he looks fresh; he looks well; Karfeld looks ill, older, younger, taller, shorter... It is said he is retiring; no, he will give up his factory and work full time on politics. He cannot afford it; he is a millionaire.

Quietly he began speaking.

No one introduced him, he did not say his name. The note of music which announced his coming had no companions, for Klaus Karfeld is alone up there, quite alone, and no music can console him. Karfeld is not a Bonn windbag; he is one of us for all his intellect: Klaus Karfeld, doctor and citizen, a decent man decently concerned about the fate of Germany, is obliged, out of a sense of honour, to address a few friends. It was so softly, so unobtrusively done, that to Turner it seemed that the whole massive gathering actually inclined its ear in order to save Karfeld the pain of raising his voice.

Afterwards, Turner could not say how much he had understood, nor how he had understood so much. He had the impression, at first, that Karfeld's interest was purely historical. The talk was of the origin of war and Turner caught the old catch-words of the old religion: Versailles, chaos, depression and encirclement; the mistakes that had been made by statesmen on both sides, for Germans cannot shirk their own responsibilities. There followed a small tribute to the casualties of unreason: too many people died, Karfeld said, and too few knew the cause. It must never happen again, Karfeld knew: he had brought back more than wounds from Stalingrad: he had brought back memories, indelible memories, of human misery, mutilation and betrayal...

He has indeed, they whispered, the poor Klaus. He has suffered for us all.

There was no rhetoric still. You and I, Karfeld was saying, have learnt the lessons of history; you and I can look on these things with detachment: it must never happen again. There were those, it was true, who saw the battles of fourteen and thirty-nine as part of a continuing crusade against the enemies of a German heritage, but Karfeld - he wished it to be known to all his friends - Klaus Karfeld was not, altogether, of this school.

'Alan.' It was de Lisle's voice, steady as a captain's. Turner followed his gaze.

A flutter, a movement of people, the passing of a message? Something was stirring on the balcony. He saw Tilsit, the General, incline his soldier's head and Halbach the student leader whisper in his ear, saw Meyer-Lothringen leaning forward over the filigree rail, listening to someone below him. A policeman? A plain clothes man? He saw the glint of spectacles and the patient surgeon's face as Siebkron rose and vanished; and all was still again except for Karfeld, academic and man of reason, who was talking about today.

Today, he said, as never before, Germany was the plaything of her allies. They had bought her, now they were selling her. This was a fact, Karfeld said, he would not deal in theory. There were too many theories in Bonn already, he explained, and he did not propose to add to the confusion. This was fact, and it was necessary, if painful, to debate among good and reasonable friends how Germany's allies had achieved this strange state of affairs. Germany was rich, after all: richer than France, and richer than Italy. Richer than England, he added casually, but we must not be rude to the English for the English won the war after all, and were a people of uncommon gifts. His voice remained wonderfully reasonable as he recited all the English gifts: their mini-skirts, their pop singers, their Rhine Army that sat in London, their Empire that was falling apart, their national deficit... without these English gifts, Europe would surely fail. Karfeld had always said so.

Here they laughed; it was a warming, angry laugh, and Karfeld, shocked and perhaps the tiniest fraction disappointed that these beloved sinners, whom God had appointed him in his humility to instruct, should fall to laughing in the temple; Karfeld waited patiently until it died.

How then, if Germany was so rich, if she possessed the largest standing army in Europe, and could dominate the so-called Common Market, how was it possible for her to be sold in public places like a whore?

Leaning back in the pulpit, he removed his spectacles and made a cautious, pacifying gesture of the hand, for there were noises now of protest and indignation, and Karfeld quite clearly did not care for this at all. We must try to resolve this question in a pious, reasonable and wholly intellectual manner, he warned, without emotion and without rancour, as befits good friends! It was a plump, round hand and it might have been webbed, for he never separated his fingers, but used the whole fist singly like a club.

In seeking, then, a rational explanation for this curious and, for Germans at least, highly relevant - historical fact, objectivity was essential. In the first place - the fist shot upward again - we had had twelve years of Nazism and thirty-five years of anti-Nazism. Karfeld did not understand what was so very wrong about Nazism that it should be punished eternally with the whole world's hostility. The Nazis had persecuted the Jews: and that was wrong. He wished to go on record as saying it was wrong. Just as he condemned Oliver Cromwell for his treatment of the Irish, the United States for their treatment of the blacks and for their campaigns of genocide against the Red Indians and the yellow peril of South East Asia; just as he condemned the Church for its persecution of heretics, and the British for the bombing of Dresden, so he condemned Hitler for what he had done to the Jews; and for importing that British invention, so successful in the Boer War: the concentration camp.

Directly in front of him Turner saw the young detective's hand softly feel for the partition of his leather coat; he heard again the little crackle of the radio. Once more he strained his eyes, scanning the crowd, the balcony, the alleys; once more he searched the doorways and the windows; and there was nothing. Nothing but the sentinels posted a long the rooftops and the militia waiting in their vans; nothing but a countless throng of silent men and women, motionless as God's anointed before the Presence of the Word.

Let us examine, Karfeld suggested -since it will help us to arrive at a logical and objective solution to the many questions which presently assail us - let us examine what happened after the war. After the war, Karfeld explained, it was only just that the Germans should be treated as criminals; and, because the Germans had practised racism, that their sons and grandsons should be treated as criminals too. But, because the Allies were kind people, and good people, they would go some way towards rehabilitating the Germans: as a very special treat, they would admit them to Nato.

The Germans were shy at first; they did not want to rearm, many people had had enough of war. Karfeld himself belonged to that category: the lessons of Stalingrad were like acid in the young man's memory. But the Allies were determined as well as kind. The Germans should provide the army, and the British and the Americans and the French would command it... And the Dutch... And the Norwegians... And the Portuguese; and any other foreign general who cared to command the vanquished: 'Why: we might even have had African generals commanding the Bundeswehr!'

A few - they belonged to the front, to that protective ring of leather-coated men beneath the scaffold - a few started laughing, but he quelled them at once.

'Listen! ' he told them. 'My friends, you must listen! That is

what we deserved! We lost the war! We persecuted the Jews! We were not fit to command! Only to pay!' Their anger gradually subsided. 'That,' he explained,

'is why we pay for the British Army as well. And that is why they let us in to Nato.'

'Alan!'

'I have seen them.'

Two grey buses were parked beside the pharmacy. A floodlight touched their dull coachwork, and was moved a way. The windows were quite black, sealed from inside.

And we were grateful, Karfeld continued. Grateful to be admitted to such an exclusive club. Of course we were. The club did not exist; its members did not like us; the fees were very high; and as the Germans were still children they must not play with weapons which might damage their enemies; but we were grateful all the same, because we were Germans and had lost the war.

Once more the indignant murmur rose, but he scotched it again with a terse movement of his hand. 'We want no emotion here,' he reminded them. 'We are dealing with facts!'

High up, on a tiny ledge, a mother held her baby. 'Lookdown,' she was whispering. 'You will not see his like again.' In the whole square, nothing moved; the heads were still, staring with cavernous eyes.

To emphasise his great impartiality, Karfeld once more drew back in the pulpit and, taking all his time, tilted his spectacles a little and examined the pages before him. This done, he hesitated, peered doubtfully downwards at the faces nearest him and deliberated, unsure how far he could expect his flock to follow what he was about to say.

What then was the function of the Germans in this distinguished club? He would put it this way. He would state the formula first and afterwards he would give one or two simple examples of the method by which it could be applied. The function of the Germans in Nato was briefly this: to be docile towards the West and

hostile towards the East; to recognise that even among the victorious Allies there were good victors and bad victors...

Again the laughter rose and fell.Der Klaus, they whispered, der Klaus knows how to make a joke; what a club that Nato is. Nato, the Market, it's all a cheat, it's all the same; they are applying the same principles to the Market which they applied to Nato. Klaus has told us so and that is why the Germans must stay away from Brussels. It is just another trap, it is. encirclement all over again...

'That's Lésère,' de Lisle murmured.

A small, greying man who obscurely reminded Turner of a bus conductor had joined them on the steps and was writing contentedly in his notebook.

'The French counsellor. Big chum of Karfeld's.'

About to return his gaze to the scaffold, Turner happened to look into the side street; and thus he saw for the first time the mad, dark, tiny army that waited for the signal.

Directly across the square, assembled in the unlit side street, the silent concourse of men waited. They carried banners that were not quite black in the twilight and there stood before them, Turner was certain there stood before them, the remnants of a military band. The oblique arclights glinted on a trumpet, caught the laced panels of the drum. At its head stood a solitary figure; his arm, raised like a conductor's, held them motionless.

Again the radio crackled, but the words were drowned in laughter as Karfeld made another joke; a harsh joke, enough to raise their anger, a reference to the decay of England and the person of the monarch. The tone was new and hard: a light blow on their backs, brisker, a purposeful caress, promising the sting to come, tracing like a whip's end the little vertebrae of their political resentment. So England, with her allies, had re-educated the Germans. And who better qualified? After all, Churchill had let the savages in to Berlin; Truman had dropped atom bombs on undefended cities; between them they had made a ruin of Europe: who better qualified, then, to teach the Germans the meaning of civilisation?

In the alley, nothing had stirred. The leader's arm was still raised before the little band as he waited for the signal to begin the music.

'It's the Socialists,' de Lisle breathed. 'They're staging a counter-demonstration. Who the devil let them in?'

So the Allies set to work: the Germans must be taught how to behave. It was wrong to kill the Jews, they explained; kill the Communists instead. It was wrong to attack Russia, they explained; but we will protect you if the Russians attack you. It was wrong to fight for your borders, they explained; but we support your claims for the territories of the East.

'We all know that kind of support!' Karfeld held out his hands, palms upwards. 'Here you are, my dear, here you are! You can borrow my umbrella as long as you like; until it rains!' Was it Turner's imagination or did he detect, in this piece of theatre, a hint of that wheedling tone which once in German music-halls traditionally denoted the Jew?

They began to laugh, but again he silenced them.

In the alley, the conductor's arm was still raised. Will he never tire, Turner wondered, of that gruesome salute?

'They'll be murdered,' de Lisle insisted. 'The crowd will murder them!'

'And so, my friends, this is what happened. Our victors in all their purity, and all their wisdom, taught us the meaning of democracy. Hurray for democracy. Democracy is like Christ; there is nothing you cannot do in the name of democracy.

'Praschko,' Turner declared quietly, 'Praschko wrote that for him.'

'He writes a lot of his stuff,' de Lisle said.

'Democracy is shooting Negroes in America and giving them gold beds in Africa! Democracy is to run a colonial empire, to fight in Vietnam and to attack Cuba; democracy is to visit your conscience on the Germans!

Democracy is to know that whatever you do, you will never, never be as bad as the Germans!' He had raised his voice to give the sign, the sign the band expected. Once more Turner looked across the crowd in to the alley, saw the white hand, white as a napkin, fall lazily in the lamplight, glimpsed the white face of Siebkron himself as he quickly relinquished his place of command and withdrew in to the shadow of the pavement, saw the first head turn in front of him, then a second, as he himself heard it also: the distant sound of music, of a percussion band, and men's voices singing; saw Karfeld peer over the pulpit and call to someone beneath him; saw him draw back in to the furthest recess while he continued speaking, and heard, as Karfeld assumed his sudden tone of indignation, heard through all Karfeld's new anger and his high-pitched exhortation, through all the conjuration, the abuse and the encouragement, the unmistakable note of fear.

'The Sozis!' the young detective cried, far out across the crowd. His heels were together and his leather shoulders drawn well back and he bellowed through cupped hands. 'The Sozis are in the alley! The Socialists are attacking us!'

'It's a diversion,' Turner said, quite matter of fact. 'Siebkron's staging a diversion.' To lure him out, he thought; to lure out Leo and make him chance his hand. And here's the music to drown the shot, he added to himself, as the Marseillaise began. It's all set up to make him have a go. No one moved at first. The opening strains were barely audible; little, irrelevant notes played by a child on a mouth organ. And the singing which accompanied it was no more than the male chant from a Yorkshire pub on a Saturday night, remote and unconfident, proceeding from mouths unused to music; and to begin with the crowd really ignored it, because of its interest in Karfeld.

But Karfeld had heard the music, and it quickened him remarkably.

'I am an old man!' he shouted. 'Soon I shall be an old man. What will you say to yourselves, young men, when you wake in the morning? What will you say when you look at the American whore that is Bonn? You will say this: how long, young men, can we live without honour? You will look at your Government and say; you will look at the Sozis and say: must we follow even a dog because it is in office?'

He quoted Lear, Turner thought absurdly, and the floodlights were extinguished at one turn, a tone black fall of the curtain: deep darkness filled the square, and with it, the louder singing of the Marseillaise. He detected the acrid smell of pitch carried on the night air, as in countless places the sparks flickered and wheeled a way; he heard the whispered call and the whispered answer, he heard the order passed from mouth to mouth in hasty conspiracy. The singing and the music rose to a roar, picked up suddenly and quite deliberately by the loudspeakers: a mad, monstrous, plebeian, unsubtle roar, amplified and distorted almost beyond recognition, deafening and maddening.

Yes, Turner repeated to himself with Saxon clarity, that is what I would do if I were Siebkron. I would create this diversion, rouse the crowd, and make enough noise to provoke him in to shooting. The music boomed still louder. He saw the policeman turn and face him and the young detective hold up a hand in warning. 'Stay here, please, Mister Bradfield! Mister Turner, stay here please!' The crowd was whispering excitedly; all round them they heard the sibilant, greedy hiss.

'Hands out of pockets, please!'

Torches were lit all round them; someone had given the signal. They rose like wild hopes gilding the sullen faces with belief, making mad dreams of their prosaic features, setting into their dull eyes the devotion of apostles. The little band was advancing in to the square; it could not have been more than twenty strong, and the army that marched in its wake was ragged and undecided, but now their music was everywhere, a Socialist terror magnified by Siebkron's loudspeakers.

'The Sozis!' the crowd cried again. 'The Sozis are attacking us!'

The pulpit was empty, Karfeld had gone, but the Socialists were still marching for Marx, Jewry and War. 'Strike them, strike our enemies! Strike the jews! Strike the Reds!' Follow the dark, the voices whispered, follow the light, follow the spies and saboteurs; the Sozis are responsible for everything. Still the music grew louder.

'Now,' de Lisle said evenly. 'They've drawn him.'

A busy, silent group had gathered round the raw, white legs of Karfeld's scaffold; leather coats were stooping, moon faces flitting and conferring.

'The Sozis! Kill the Sozis.' The crowd was in mounting ferment; the scaffold was forgotten. 'Killthem!' Whatever you resent, the voices whispered, kill it here: Jews, Negroes, moles, conspirators, rejectors, wreckers, parents, lovers; they are good, they are bad, foolish or clever.

'Kill the Socialist Jews!' Swimmers leaping, the voices whispered; march! march!

We've got to kill him, Praschko,Alan Turner told himself in his confusion, or we shall be wearing the labels again....

'Kill who?' he said to de Lisle. 'What are they doing?'

'Chasing the dream.'

The music had risen to a single note, a raucous, crude, deafening roar, a call to battle and a call to anger, a call to kill ugliness, to destroy the sick and the unwieldy, the maimed, the loathsome and the incompetent. Suddenly by the light of the torches the black flags lifted and trembled like waking moths, the crowd seemed to drift and lean until the edges broke and the torches floated a way in to the alley, driving the band before them, acclaiming it their hero, smothering it with close kisses, dancing in upon it in playful fury, smashing the windows and the instruments, causing the red banners to flourish and dip like spurts of blood, then vanish under the mass which, cumbersome and murmuring, led by its own wanton torches, had reached in to the alley and beyond. The radio crackled. Turner heard Siebkron's voice, cool and perfectly clear, he heard the mordant command and the one word: Schaffott. And then he was running through the waves, making for the scaffold, his shoulder burning from the blow; he felt the survivors' hands holding him and he broke them like the hands of children. He was running. Hands held him and he shook them off like twigs. A face rose at him and he struck it a way, riding the waves to reach the scaffold. Then he saw him.

'Leo!' he shouted.

He was crouched like a pavement artist between the motionless feet. They stood all round him but no one was touching him. They were packed in close, but they had left room for him to die. Turner saw him rise, and fall again, and once more he shouted, 'Leo.' He saw the dark eyes turn to him and heard his cry answered, to Turner, to the world, to God or pity, to the mercy of any man who would save him from the fact. He saw the scrum bow, and bury him, and run; he saw the Homburg hat roll away over the damp cobble and he ran forward, repeating the name.

'Leo!'

He had grasped a torch and smelt the singeing of cloth. He was wielding the torch, driving away the hands, and suddenly there was no resistance any more; he stood on the shore, beneath the scaffold, looking at his own life, his own face, at the lover's hands grasping the cobble, at the pamphlets which drifted across the little body like leaves in the gathering wind. There was no weapon near him; nothing to show how he had died, only the crooked arrangement of the neck where the two pieces no longer fitted. He lay like a tiny doll who had been broken in to pieces and carefully put together, pressed down under the warm Bonn air. A man who had felt, and felt no more; an innocent, reaching beyond the square for a prize he would never find. Far a way, Turner heard the cry of anger as the grey crowd followed the vanished music of the alleys; while from behind him came the rustle of the light, approaching footsteps.

'Search his pockets,' someone said, in a voice of Saxon calm.

END