The Quiller Memorandum

2: THE HOOK

I told him they couldn't expect it of me.

He said it was a request, not an order.

Talking was difficult most of the time because the music would break suddenly now and then in a good imitation of the West Side Story style, and a word we had pitched against the volume of the orchestra would explode in a gap of silence. It was easier during the two intervals; we locked the door of the box and sat on the carpet with our backs to the balcony, unviewable even from the highest box on the other side of the auditorium; the murmur of the people gave good background cover for our voices.

One thought was lodged in my head like a bullet.

KLJ was dead.

I had asked Pol about it and he said: " Floating in the Grunewald See." So there was Kenneth Lindsay Jones's place. We all have a place. We know where we were born but not where we shall die. At home or a mile away at the crossroads or far across the face of the earth, not knowing it in our sleep or pitched down on the wet road or trapped in the wreckage on the mountainside and knowing it only too well. A place for each of us, and there was his, the lake at Grunewald renamed Kenneth Lindsay Jones by virtue of his presence.

We'd lost five men during my time at the Bureau but this one was said to be unkillable.

Pol had told me more because I had asked. "A very long-range shot in the spine from a 9.3 again, as it was with Charington."

Then we stopped talking about KLJ as if he'd never existed. Pol set about stalking me and I let him, sitting with my back to the balcony and listening to the quiet modulated tone that I was already beginning to hate.

"We are highly impressed with the way you have been working on these war-crime inquiries. There was no need for secrecy because the matter comes under the terms of the London Agreement, yet you chose to maintain strict hush and we have been told that even the chief of the Z Commission had no knowledge of the man responsible for the arrests. We assume that your reason was to keep in practice."

He waited for confirmation. I enjoyed my silence.

"Further, your operations have been on the periphery of a search-area that was opened at the Bureau three weeks ago, on pressure from Paris. No one – now – has more information on the Berlin nucleus of ex-Nazis and neo-Nazis than yourself. This now becomes invaluable to us and so do you."

He gave up waiting for me to help him along, and this was a danger I didn't see until it was much too late. By refusing to answer him even by a grunt I was letting him keep up a monologue in that soft and modulated tone that never gave pause. And it was hypnotic.

"Of the fifteen war-criminals you have indirectly arrested, five as you know were of major status, and we believe that the recent suicides of General Vogler, ' General Muntz and Baron von Taube were provoked by pressure from their own group rather than by the dictates of conscience."

He talked about the three prosecution witnesses found shot dead and facially mutilated. "They were not removed in order to decrease the number of witnesses at the Hanover Trials because there are as you know nearly one thousand of them, and the mass of evidence is such that one could remove ninety per cent of them and still remain certain of conviction. Those three were murdered in reprisal and we believe that there will, follow twelve more unless the Federal police can protect them. In all, fifteen. One for every war-criminal convicted. Further, the intention is to dissuade new witnesses from coming forward at the successor trials in Bonn and Nurnberg. They intend by terror tactics to ensure that the Hanover Trial shall be the last of its kind ever held."

I had his accent now, from the ` ur ' in ` Nurnberg '. He was a Rhinelander.

He talked about the seventy thousand Nazi refugees and self-exiles living in the German colony in San Caterina, Argentine, among them the Hitler deputy Bormann. "As you know, their Tacuara organisation carried out reprisals against the Jewish population following the Eichmann abduction."

I wished he would stop saying 'As you know,' or better, tell me something I didn't.

"But Zossen is here in Berlin."

He stopped. I knew why. I was hooked.

I said: " Heinrich Zossen?"

"Yes."

A thin man. Pale of face, with dewlaps and a pouchy mouth. Round-shouldered like his Fuhrer. Little blue eyes, the blue of ice. A voice like a reed in a winter wind.

I had last seen him twenty-one years ago, on an August morning when three hundred of them were lined up at the brink of the pit they had been made to dig from the rich earth of the forest of Briicknerwald. The birds had stopped singing when the SS staff car drew up and Obergruppen-fuhrer Heinrich Zossen got out. I watched him as he walked behind the lines of the three hundred naked men as if inspecting them. He turned and walked back and I watched him. He was a young man for his rank and proud of his uniform. He was not a thug. A thug would have taken a whip from a guard and drawn blood from even these bloodless buttocks for our amusement; he would have pointedly held his nose, reminded that these men had been moved a hundred and thirty miles through the night in sealed cattle-trucks, packed ninety to a truck; he would have taken his revolver and fired the first bullet himself, to lead the fun. He did none of these things. He was an officer.

He did worse, and I watched him do it.

A guard shouted as one of the three hundred men broke from the ranks and came towards the Obergruppenfuhrer. He was not riddled where he stood because Zossen had raised his gloved hand, curious to know why the man had left the ranks. He had once been bigger than Zossen; his frame, outlined beneath the skin, was wide at the shoulder; but now he was smaller, because most of the flesh had gone and he looked as if made of paper. This batch, as I knew, had lived for months on acorns, crusts and rancid water. It would be impossible to judge how long it had been since they had eaten what anyone could call a meal.

The Jew walked up to the Aryan in black and came to a lurching stop. The effort of walking ten yards had brought the breath hissing in his mouth, and his rib-cage pulsed beneath the skin that hung from the bones like loose yellow silk. I heard him ask Zossen if it were allowed that they all might chant the Khaddish, the prayer for the dead. The Obergruppenfiihrer did not knock him down for his impudence, as I had expected. He was an officer. He looked at the watch on his wrist, considered a moment, and shook his head. "There is not enough time. The roads are bad and I am due back in Briicknerwald in one hour, for luncheon." He signalled his Stiirmbannfuhrer and the machine-guns opened up.

Heinrich Zossen. I remembered him.

Normally one would keep such a memory to oneself for the sake of decency but as a leading witness for the prosecution at the 1945Tribunal I was obliged to recount this event, among many others. The others were no better, but it was mentioned afterwards that throughout my testimony totalling fifteen weeks I spoke calmly and objectively, with one brief lapse. This was when I spoke of Heinrich Zossen. Even now, twenty-one years later, in a Berlin where you could hear the singing from the synagogue rising freely, I was unable, when in a restaurant, to open a menu headed with that word, Mittagessen. Luncheon.

Pol was still silent, knowing that he'd played the ace. Zossen was in Berlin.

"Then I hope you get him," I said.

Still silent. Playing my own game. I said:

"But I think you're wrong. They say he's in the Argentine."

Now we both talked and I knew that he knew that he'd won. He said:

"He was seen in Berlin a week ago."

"Who saw him? "

"A witness at the trial."

"I'll talk to him then."

"He fell from the tenth floor of the Witzenhausen Hof the day after he had told us."

"Olbricht?"

"Yes."

"He could have been mistaken."

"He knew Zossen well. You know that."

"Is that part of the search area, then? Zossen? "

"It has become part of it."

"So you're roping me in."

"Yes."

"Because you know I'd like to see him on trial. No go. They don't hang them any more." I suddenly said a terrible thing, because I believed Pol was genuine and my guard was down. "Give me a rope, though, give me a rope and ask no questions."

His silence was disapproving.

I said: "I'm tired, that's all."

"Of course. After sixmonths' work -"

"Don't talk to me like a bloody nurse."

He was silent again. The hum of voices was loudening under the domed roof as the people left the bars and went back to their seats.

"Come on then, Pol – you haven't got long. Finish me off."

He said immediately as if I'd switched on a tape: "There are thousands of Nazis still living in Germany with false papers and even the Federal Intelligence Services are riddled with them. The U.S. Gehlen Bureau quietly released hundreds of Army and SS officers from internment when General Heusinger dictated his terms to NATO andthey have since reorganised the German Army, which is now the largest and best equipped in Europe. The German Air Force is at present ahead of the RAF in striking power. The German General Staff has made secret non-NATO deals with Spain, Portugal, Egypt and African countries and established its own bases with ground-to-ground missiles. Scores of Hitler's officers have returned to power and influence in both civil and military key positions, and their^, posts were granted them in the full knowledge of their past activities. In the General Staff itself there is a military microcosm of dedicated Nazis, a hard core prepared for an explosive expansion when the opportunity comes. If -"

"Pol," I said, "did the Bureau give you this stuff? "

"I am an executive, like yourself, not an administrator."

"If I decided – and I haven't – to take over this new operation without even a day's break I'd have to be convinced of their argument. It would take days. I think the German GGS is no more likely to make a war than the Ku-Klux-Klan."

"Let me remind you how the U.S. prosecutor put it at the Nurnberg Tribunal: ‘German militarism will tie itself to any new creed in order to regain the power of making war.’ There are new creeds emerging now in Egypt, China, Cuba. Further, they realise the huge potential of the GGS and its value as an ally, given the right ground: aworld on the brink."

"You can't start war without people."

"People never start war. Politicians and generals start them. As long as ten years ago – and only ten years after the bloodshed stopped – there was a rally of ex-Nazi soldiers in honour of Kesselring. The people protested but the police pushed them back and kept order."

"The people are still protesting, by means of the trials."

"And now the trials are becoming more and more difficult. Convicted war-criminals are no longer hanged, but witnesses are being shot. The tide is on the turn."

I sat with my eyes shut. The auditorium had gone dark. Music was playing. A girl sang.

Pol was silent. He knew that in persuasion one must pause, so that the subject is given time to dwell.

"Political polemics," I said wearily. "Keep them. Shove them down the next man's throat."

His silence was disapproving.

"I don't claim, Pol, to have my finger on the pulse of the human condition or to know what future mankind has, if it has any. And I'm tired. You chose the wrong box, just as I told you in the beginning."

He was moving about and I opened my eyes. From somewhere he'd taken a plastic briefcase. It must have been under his jacket. I would have seen it before, otherwise. He put it on my knees.

"I am to leave this with you," was all he said.

I let it rest there without touching it. "Damn your impudence, Pol."

"We have arranged a cover man for you," he said softly, "and a front."

"I don't want a cover."

"What happens if you get into a corner?"

"I'll get out again."

"You know the risks, Quiller."

"Did KLJ use a cover man?"

"Yes, but it is difficult to cover anyone from a long range shot."

"That's the way they'll get me if it comes to it. No cover, Pol. And don't post one without my knowing. I'm going in alone."

A pulse had begun beating in my leg, the onset of cramp. I moved and the briefcase slid off my knees. I left it where it fell. Pol said softly as the music broke:

"There are two people you can trust -"

"No people."

"An American, Frank Brand, and a young German, Lanz Hengel. They -"

"Keep them clear of me."

"You have a link man

"Keep him clear."

"It is myself. I am your link man."

"Keep clear of me then."

If I were going in, it had to be on my terms. They couldn't expect it of me and they shouldn't have sent this man Pol to hook me like this. They were bastards. Charington dead – get another man. KLJ dead – get another man. Who would they get after me? Six months hard, now this, and because of expedience, because I was handy. And they had the hook. "There's only one way to persuade him," they'd said, standing round the desk in that London room with the Lowrie and the smell of polish. "Tell him someone has seen Zossen in Berlin." And they'd lit a cigarette and sent for Pol.

I didn't care whether the monologue about a renaissant Nazi group was genuine or not. Given Zossen I needed no further blandishments. They'd wasted my time.

The cramp was beginning so I crawled on my hands and knees to the back of the box and got into the chair as if I'd just come in again after the interval. Pol did the same, brushing his hands carefully across the knees of his trousers. I sat with my eyes shut, thinking.

Now that I'd stopped resenting him and made the decision I could admit that it was my own fault. For years I'd operated in strict hush, as I'd been trained to do; so when they seconded me to liaise with the Federal Z Commission and supply the Hanover Tribunal with bodies for trial, I didn't see much point in coming into the open air. If I had, my face would have become, in those six months, the most recognisable feature ever to have spanned the crossed hairs of a telescopic rifle-sight. That wouldn't have worried me because I'd moved between Berlin and Hanover and back with a constant cover of six men, like a pocket president. But my insistence on secrecy had got me on this hook. After six months I knew Berlin like my face, yet my face was unknown in Berlin.

No wonder they'd come for me.

For a while Pol must have thought I'd refuse. Then he knew it was going to be all right, and had put the briefcase on my knees. It would contain all the information they could give me, all the names, suspects, dossiers, leads and theories they could cull from the whole of the Bureau files, a complete and exhaustive breakdown on the field. But they'd come for me because I knew even more.

"Pol," I said.

He was sitting with his arms folded, head tilted, watching the show. His head tilted the other way, towards me.

I said: "Tell them not to try tapping my phone again. I want to be able to know that if I hear any clicks, it's the adverse party doing it."

"Very well."

"No cover."

"Noted."

"Communication Post and Bourse."

"Available."

When the stage began filling and the music was loud I asked him for his photo and he gave it to me. The zip on the briefcase was the interlocking plastic flange type and opened silently. Inside was the folder with the black cover. It was the memorandum. Between the typed lines was written, invisibly, my future. In detail it gave specific outline to the manner of my life. It made no mention of the possible manner of my death. It was thus a highly personal document, and on the cover was a single letter: Q.

I put the photograph in and shut the case.