The Quiller Memorandum

13: THE BRIDGE

There was a bar still open in the Moller-strasse and I went in and sat with a rum grog, cupping my hands round the glass and watching the steam. The kellner had gone back behind the bar and looked at me over the coffee-machine for a few minutes before giving it up.

I pressed the long spoon against the slice of lemon, watching the bubbles. The scent of the rum was heady and I breathed it in. Over in the corner a couple of kids sat canoodling, and a thin man was drooped across a table by the window trying to outstare his despair. There was no one else. At this hour of a winter night the bar was a refuge for lovers and the lost, and being neither, I was the only stranger here. When it was cool enough not to scald my lips I swallowed the grog and asked for another.

The worst of the shivering had stopped. Every time it tried to set up again I damped it out and sat slack with every muscle relaxed. There was a lot to think about and my body would have to stop demanding my attention; it could count itself lucky to be alive anyway.

My soaked clothes steamed on me.

I was unconscious before they took me from the house. There had been no way of avoiding the last injection because my hands and feet were strapped to the chair. The shot took half a minute to work and I sat there watching them.

Oktober stood looking down at me. The two guards came the length of the room and halted near him, waiting for me to slump. In those thirty seconds I did all I could against the drug, knowing that if I let it win my last hope would go. The anaesthetist came round the chair and eyed me impatiently and I knew that the reaction-time must be five or ten seconds. I'd stretched it to thirty and he was worried. Then the dark came down, on a final consoling thought: there's nobody who'll miss me.

Period of total blank.

Death is black and cold and I knew I had died. The waters of Lethe lapped at my feet. But life, returning, was worse, because of the cold. It was colder than death. My face was pressed to the earth and I lifted it and saw the lights along the bridge. A few sick seconds of irrational thought: then there's a life after death and it looks just the same, so forth, then the shivers began and I lay there shaking and clawing at the earth. Inside every dying man there's a live one trying to get out.

The bullet still hurt and I couldn't turn my head. When I'd crawled far enough to get my legs out of the icy water I raised one hand and felt for the neck-wound. There wasn't one. The pain began fading, once I realised that it was imaginary. "Shoot him in the back of the neck," he'd said, and the subconscious had brooded about it, taking the word for the deed.

Short period of nausea. Lay there panting and shaking with the breath hissing against the frosted soil: life, however cheap, comes as a gift when you think you've lost it, and the mind has to make the effort of acceptance.

Ten minutes hard thinking. I decided to go back among the living as unobtrusively as I could. They had driven me here in the VW and it stood not far off; they had run it clear of the road across the grass. I crawled along the bank of the lake, away from the car, and stood up in the shadow of the bridge. There was no point in checking the speedo-trip because I'd been too dopey to take a reading when the man had climbed in and said he would drive, and even if I'd taken a reading it wouldn't tell me anything: they could have made a detour to the house and/or a detour coming away from it. The most accurate trip-check would tell me only that the house lay within an area of a given number of square kilometres, useful enough in the Black Forest but no good in Berlin.

Tried running-on-the-spot to make warmth but found I was limping. No pain in the leg. Discovery: shoe missing. Limped under the bridge and along the bank on the other side, shaking like a marionette, hands blue in the lamplight.

The rum was spreading through me. It had saved lives at sea and it saved mine now. The kellner had stopped watching me. I'd told him I had slipped on the ice and fallen into the lake but he didn't believe me because I didn't look drunk, just half-drowned. Unfortunately he had small feet, otherwise I would have made him an offer for a pair of shoes.

After a while the shivering stopped and I began going through my pockets. Nothing was missing.

"I'd like a taxi."

He used the phone.

The driver looked wary when he saw me, and held the note against the light. I said: "It's a good one but it just needs putting in a toaster for five minutes. I fell in a lake. Get me some shoes, can you?" He drove me to the rank and did some business with his colleagues and brought me some shoes. I left him and walked for two hours at a fast pace from Grunewald to Siemensstadt and back south to Wilmersdorf to get the blood circulating again – and there was no tag.

There was no tag, and it was twenty-four hours before I realised that this one fact sent me along a line of false reasoning that pitched me straight into the red sector again. This night my psyche had been forced to withstand the effects of sodium amytal, benzedrine (or pervitine), invasion by interrogation, the certainty of death, pentothal (or a similar knock-out dose), immersion in water near freezing-point, and the shock of returning life. It explains my failure to understand why there was no tag on the fast walk to Siemensstadt and back to Wilmersdorf: the mind was not yet clear enough to think safely. It explains but does not excuse. There is no excuse for carelessness. I should have noted the fogginess of my mind and waited till it was alert enough to make safe decisions. I didn't.

The hotel was called the Zentral and I booked in because despite its name it was buried among a maze of small streets in the Mariendorf district, some eight kilometres south of Wilmersdorf. The place was smaller than the Prinz Johan and less efficiently run: a tousled night-porter and dust on the lamp-bulbs; and this suited me because it might be necessary to stay officially dead for a time.

My still wet clothes went unnoticed. Ja, there were some lock-up garages. I said I would leave my baggage in the car and bring it in tomorrow morning, as I was tired. He didn't bother to ask me where the car was now parked so that an eye could be kept on it. I went ostensibly to bed, locked the door, stripped, showered and spread my clothes to dry by the radiators. The room was small but clean and well-heated, a kinder resting-place for this night than the cold dark of the lake.

Immediate sleep was impermissible because the situation had to be worked out first.

I had missed the late-evening Bourse from Eurosound because I'd been on the way to the Prinz Johan to pick it up when they'd made the snatch. Likelihood: no important signal from Control. Nor had I anything to send in. They might find the name of Dr. Fabian – Psychoanalyst – in the Berlin directory (in missions of this kind when complicated shadow-boxing was the rule for both sides it was sometimes overlooked that a man could be found simply by knocking on his door instead of casting an under-cover dragnet for him) and they might start an inquiry on him if I suggested it. The Z Commission could be urged to make a snatch and send him for trial at Hanover as a war-criminal. He was working for Phoenix somewhere near the top level and it was likely that his wartime record would provide evidence enough to charge him. But I might be able to use him myself to better purpose: through him I could reach Oktober and finally Heinrich Zossen, my main target. Decision: don't signal Control to flush him.

I pulled one of the arm-chairs near the bed and sat with my feet at head-level, to feed the nerves while I worked. Major question: why was I still alive?

Supposition number one: the guards had driven me to the bridge as ordered, taken me out of the car, held me ready for dropping over, and had been disturbed at the last moment by people, possibly a police patrol. They had simply dropped me as I was (alive instead of dead), unable to risk the sound of a shot. The best-laid schemes could go like that. The sound of the splash had to be risked, if a greater risk were that of being seen carrying me back into the car. (Query: why had Oktober chosen the Grunewald Bridge? There were more secluded places.) So the job had been done at half-cock and they'd reported to Oktober that it had in fact been done in every accordance with orders, relying on the plunge into icy waters to kill me before the drug wore off and I could try to swim. They wouldn't report the truth, that I hadn't been shot in the neck, because Oktober would flay them.

Findings of supposition number one: Oktober believed I was now dead. The guards were almost certain. Therefore my case was closed and there would be no one tagging me. Confirmation: there had been no tag, either from the lake to the bar or along the Grunewald-Siemensstadt-Wilmersdorf route. Had there been one I would have known it.

Supposition number two: Oktober had tried the double-think on me. He'd wanted me to think that he thought I was dead, so that I would at once go to ground, change my open tactics, and lead him to my base. He had therefore ordered the guards to simulate a killing: they had dipped me into the water and left me on the bank so that I'd believe I must have swum, half-conscious, to safety and then passed out again. I would be expected either to think they hadn't been able to shoot me (for reasons as in supposition number one: interruption) or to be so thankful for finding myself alive that I wouldn't question it.

Objection: I wasn't likely to lead Oktober to my base unless they put a strict tag on to me, and they hadn't done that. Query still insistent: why the Grunewald Bridge?

Supposition number three: Oktober had threatened me with death in the hope that fear would work where the narcotics hadn't. He was too subtle a man, and knew my wartime experience among the death-camps too well, to make it an open threat. He had goose-stepped up to me, stood in the living stance of the typical Nazi executioner, and rapped out the Hitlerite announcement about unforgivably wasting his time. Leaving me, to speak to the guards, he hadn't raised his voice, because he knew I would hear and thus hoped I would believe in what I heard: my own sentence of death. There are many and distinct types of courage and fear. A man who will climb a cliff face may funk grasping a snake; a man who will brave a raging sea may faint at the sight of blood. Oktober might have hoped that a man who, with his hands free, was prepared to attack five others and go on attacking even when shooting began, would lose his spirit once his hands were tied and he was made to overhear the cold hard details of his certain death.

So I had been meant to talk, to save myself. They'd failed but must not admit it. The charade had been performed: the dope, the car-journey, the dumping. Oktober was shown to mean what he said. (Again, I was expected to reason as in supposition number one and satisfy myself that they had intended to kill me.)

Objection: they would have tagged me from the lake. But the query was answered now: they'd chosen the Grunewald Bridge (Oktober had carefully named it in my hearing) so that I should remember the death of Kenneth Lindsay Jones, who had died in the same lake. Intention: to increase my fear and my belief in their purpose, by reference to a similar killing.

There were only two major facts matchable with the three suppositions. One: I was alive. Two: there was no tag. Fact one matched: all three suppositions. Fact two matched only the first.

The wall-paper, a faint lilac trellis pattern, began swimming in front of my eyes. The need for sleep was now urgent. I would have to rest there for the night: the second supposition was attractive, and it could be combined with the third: they had tried to frighten me into talking, and when that failed they dumped me so that I would lead them to base; but they would have had to follow up. The absence of tag must rule. They thought I was dead.

The lilac trellis brightened and faded. I had to check to see that I had locked the door: further evidence of fatigue. Sleep.

I phoned the police first thing and reported a grey Volkswagen abandoned near the Grunewald Bridge. If Phoenix were keeping watch on it for any reason unknown to me they would see it was the police, and not I, who took the car away. I was dead.

Toothbrush, shaver, two shirts, socks, so forth. I left them at the Hotel Zentral and went to the Hertz office, hanging about for a time until the lunch-shift clerk took over. She hadn't seen me before. I chose a BMW 1500 LS saloon by Mechelotti. The name was Schultze, number three passport: there was a millionth chance that Phoenix might check to see if I'd re-hired.

Lunch at the hotel, quite the tourist, a brand-new valise in my room and a car in the lock-up.

Then my afternoon began. There is an innocence in the very word ‘afternoon’. Morning is for trains and business and hangovers, night is for love and burglary. The afternoon is the halcyon, the calm coming between earnestness and drama. In Berlin it is a time for cream buns, and the cafes swarm, even on a winter's day. But in Berlin there is, beneath this surface, a tide that runs darker than hell itself that carries people into tributaries not of their choosing. I was such a one.

There was a simple force propelling me northwards into Wilmersdorf, and it never crossed my mind to deny it.