The Quiller Memorandum

4: THE WALL

"Your occupation, Herr Stroebling?"

"Florist."

He blew his nose, taking his time about it so that we could admire the white silk handkerchief. A flower was in the lapel the dark jacket. His legs were casually crossed in the pinstripe trousers and the shoes shone. "You are a florist?"

"I direct a chain of shops."

'Is that why you wear a flower in your buttonhole?"

"I always wear a flower."

Someone tittered.

The light was bleak in the tall cold windows. The heating was full on but many still wore their overcoats, as if in need comfort.

Another objection: personal comment on appearance of accused. Overruled: not customary to enter this court dressed as if for a festive occasion, therefore reason sought.

I watched the spectators particularly. I knew who the accused were. I didn't know who the spectators were. Some were the wives of the accused and had come here with them, for most of the accused were on bail and free to go home at the end of the session. There were others in the gallery who came and went alone, hunched into their coats and with their eyes for no one. A few were women.

One girl had come in late this morning and I had noticed her. She was good-looking but I hadn't noticed her because of that.

"Usher!"

A man was trying to slip out of the doors and on the presiding judge's cry an usher stopped him.

"Where are you going, counsel?"

"I am expecting a message, Herr Richter."

"You must not leave the court. I've told you before."

"It's a message to do with my clients, Herr -"

"Resume your place."

Both spoke wearily, repeating the formula. It was one of the recognised nuisance-tactics designed to wear down the patience of the court: a defence counsel would try to slip out unnoticed, so that later an appeal could be made under the Federal law on the grounds that some of the accused were technically unrepresented during a part of the hearing, their counsel being absent.

Procedural objections were also frequent. In the streets outside, the tabloids militated against this trial and all war-crime trials, while inside the court there were attempts at every turn to make a farce of the proceedings. They were totally unsuccessful. The presiding judge had the patience of a cat, and the legal and lay panel was disciplined by it.

I watched the spectators, only half-listening to the examination.

"Will you please tell us what your responsibility was at the camp, Herr Stroebling?"

He considered the question. Neat, silver-haired, professional-looking, his eyes calm behind heavy black-framed glasses, you'd take him for a top-ranking medical man and trust him with your life.

"To maintain calm, order and of course cleanliness."

"And your special duties?"

"I had no special duties."

"Evidence has been given that your special duty was select men, women and children for the gas-chambers they were unloaded from the cattle-trucks." It was the counsel for the prosecution speaking now: a young man with a face hollowed by months of sifting the reports whose every sheet recorded the unimaginable. The two counsels for the prosecution had been chosen for their youth, so that the new Germany could demand the account of the old. "It is claimed by an established eye-witness that while ordering the selection of disabled deportees for the gas-chambers you took a crutch from a cripple and beat him to death with it because he wouldn't hurry to the chambers."

"I know nothing of that."

"You cannot claim to know nothing. You can say that you did this thing, or that you didn't. You cannot just forget."

Was it a camellia or a gardenia in the buttonhole? I couldn't see from where I sat.

"It was twenty years ago."

"It was twenty years ago for the witness too, but he hasn't forgotten."

I watched the spectators. The voices droned.

"You say these people went willingly into the gas-chambers on that occasion?"

"Yes. We had told them they were de-lousing rooms."

"So they left all their clothes in the changing-room, hanging on pegs, and followed one another into the gas-chamber, peacefully?"

"Yes. There was no persuasion."

"But the evidence has it that some of them knew they were going to die. Several women left their babies hidden under the clothes in the changing-room, hoping to save them. The evidence has it that you personally, Herr Stroebling, led a hunt for such infants, and that you spitted them on bayonets when they were found."

It was too warm in here, too wearisome to lie.

"They were only Jews. I keep telling you."

A man among the spectators, an official of some sort with a peaked cap, broke down, and his sobs were embarrassing; an usher led him out. It was common enough.

The good-looking girl in the black Russian hat watched him go. She never looked in my direction so that I couldn't see her expression. She stared mostly at the accused, with her pale face.

The voices droned.

"… But I was given full and legal power, absolute power to treat these prisoners as I thought right!"

"And you thought it right to mutilate the body of this ten-year-old boy with every instrument of torture known to man, for the amusement of your friends?"

"For their instruction! They were not my friends, they were my junior officers, some of them just out of training college! They had to be hardened, and I had explicit orders to harden them!"

A woman was moaning, rocking on the bench, moaning with anger, her teeth chattering, staring at the accused. She was led from the court on the judge's instruction. I had not ever seen, in six months, a woman sob. It was always the men. The women moaned or cried out in their anger.

"… It was ordered me by Standartenfuhrer Goetz!"

"He is not here to confirm that."

He was still in Argentina, where the Bonn Ministry Justice had asked for his extradition. He was also in my memory, out of the burned memorandum. Goetz, the goitre.

"… And all the time you were on these 'administrative duties', Herr Stroebling, you say you did not know of any deaths taking place among your prisoners?" A fingernail now bitten to the quick. "A few. I knew of a few."

"A few? Out of three million five hundred thousand done to death at this single camp? A few?"

The young prosecutor was drinking water again. Three times they'd refilled the glass jug. He drank in gulps, breathing as if he'd been running hard. All the time he drank he didn't take his eyes from the accused.

I watched the spectators, but there was no one I could recognise. Sometimes these people, just as with ordinary man people, returned to the scene of their crime, re-enacted in these places by verbal witness and film projected on to the roll-up screens. I'd got five of them that way.

But it was the one man I wanted now, out of all this city. Zossen. Of the many faces in my memory I could recall only a dozen that I'd seen in that man's company; of that dozen, none were here.

Dark came before the session was ended. I waited my turn at the doors. People left this place looking drugged, as if awakening from a nightmare under anaesthesia. I new that three of the lay jury were under the constant observation of their doctors to avert a breakdown before the trial ended.

They shuffled into the vault of the main hall. The girl in the black fur hat was ahead of me. The big doors were fastened wide open, framing a rainbow of colours on the snowy street. The air tasted of metal in the mouth. I began walking. The others had nearly all turned in the other direction because they made for the inter-urban stop. There were only three people anywhere near me: a man signalling a taxi, a man going into the pharmacy next to the hall we had left, and the girl in the fur hat.

Directly facing the steps of the Neustadthalle is a narrow street forming a T-section with the Wittenau-strasse, along which I was walking. There are no standards for the lamps at this place: they're suspended from overhead cables. There is a stretch of blank wall for twenty yards, concealing a cemetery.

They missed.

The car came from the narrow street and swung in a curve to smash the rear end against the wall so close that brick-dust stung my face as I threw myself clear and fell, rolling at once to get my prone body in line with the car feet first in case they risked the sound of a shot. None came. I heard the diminishing exhaust-note and the strange wailing of the girl. I got up and found her in an odd crouch against the wall, shivering and staring at the distant car. I hadn't troubled to get the number: it would have false plates.

I called in German: "Are you hurt?"

There was no telling what she was saying; it sounded like soft cursing; she stared after the car; she didn't even hear me. There was no snow on her coat; she hadn't fallen. A great gouge ran along the wall and brickdust and chippings coloured the snow.

No one had come up. You heard it all the time in this weather, cars coming unstuck. This one had slid of course or it would have been dead on target, to pin me and drag me along the wall like a paintbrush dipped in red. The operation needed judgment but was easier than it looked. I'd done it with sandbags in training, because we were required to know the mechanics of it in case we were ever the target. It went: get up speed as far away as feasible, then slip the clutch with the gear still in low and go in silently, freewheeling until you're lined up at ten or fifteen degrees with the wall and a few yards to the rear of target. Then clutch in and gun up hard to get the back end round in a power-slide that brings the target between the rear wing and the wall. Keep the foot down and get clear.

I'd burst four sandbags out of five. It wasn't the training that saved me, but the snow.

She had said something intelligible.

"What?" I asked.

"They were trying to kill me," she said. She spoke brittle Berliner German. I assumed that normally her voice would be less harsh than now.

"Really?" I said. She was walking half-running along the pavement. She obviously hadn't meant to say that. When I caught up with her she swung round like a slim blonde tiger and stood her ground. A man sized us up and said:

"Can I help you, Fraulein?"

She didn't look at him, but stared at me. "No." The man went away. She faced me with a cat's undivertibility.

"I'm not one of them, Fraulein Windsor." We both stood perfectly still.

"Who are you?"

"Not one of them."

"Leave me alone." The pupils still almost filled the blue, dilated in anger.

"Would you care for me to call a cab?" She hadn't taken ' Windsor ' but I persisted because she was shocked and might not have got it.

"I'll walk." No go with the C-group either. It was a thin bid anyway: the bastards had been after me all right but she believed they'd been after her, which could mean that she was with the Bureau. She wasn't, because she didn't respond. The Z Commission used several women; she might be one of them.

She was backing from me, hands in the pockets of her military-style coat. Before she could slip me I took a long shot. "They had no more luck this time than the last, did they?"

She stood still again, eyes narrow. "Who are you?

It had come off. They'd tried before. The first time they try, you don't always realise it, especially if it's meant to look like an accident. The second time, you get that certain feeling. She had it now.

"Let's have a drink," I said. "Get the brickdust out of our mouths." I didn't say it in my best German because a strong English accent would help to disarm her; that car was Nazi, because it had tried to kill me; she must know it was Nazi because she believed it had tried to kill her; there couldn't be many Nazis with an English accent as natural as mine. She said:

"What is your name?"

"You wouldn't know it. There's a bar over there."

She had great powers of stillness. Her eyes didn't blink once. When she had finished inspecting me she said

"We shall talk where it's safe, at my flat."

Twice on the way she pressed herself into a shop entrance when she heard a car come close and each time I walked on, because if they were going to try again I didn't want her to be too near me; each time, I turned to watch the car in case it was necessary to jump clear.

It was a mile to her flat and I busied myself with the question all the time: how had they got on to me so soon? The answers weren't satisfactory, any of them. They might have suspected me because of my cover men, who were less concerned with keeping out of sight than with watching me and anyone who came near me. They might even have known that I was due out of here on the London plane today, and decided that if I were going to stay I wasn't going to stay alive.

They might have seen me going into the Neustadthalle here in Berlin this morning instead of flying to the court in Hanover as usual, and decided that I was showing up in too many wrong places. One thing I knew I hadn't been followed anywhere. I know when I'm being followed.

The interesting thing was that unless that car had been simply an isolated murder-patrol out for a killing to keep its hand in, the orders to get me had come from on high. So I wasn't going to have to stick my neck out to draw their fire: it was already drawn. Within twenty-four hours of my decision to hunt Zossen, Zossen was hunting me.