The Quiller Memorandum

5: PHOENIX

Distrusting me in the open street she was prepared to trust me in the more dangerous confines of her flat and I assumed there was someone there to protect her.

It was a five-year-old Blue Oberschwaben wolfhound, a killer. Once inside the room I kept still. It stood with its head low and the great hindquarters braced for a leap, the jaws slightly parted but soundless. The eyes were on my throat.

I'd seen them at Belsen and Dachau. They would kill an Alsatian of equal age and weight, given ten minutes on mountain ground. I had seen them kill men.

The girl took off her coat without hurry, so that I should get the message. This would have been clear even to anyone without experience of the breed: if I lifted my hand suddenly in the girl's direction by one inch I'd be dead meat. I kept my arms folded and my face towards the dog. There was no fear-odour on me to provoke it, because I knew it wouldn't attack unless she ordered it.

She said at last, quietly, "Easy, Jurgen. Easy."

It backed from me and I knew that I could move.

"Police-trained," I said.

"Yes." She stood inspecting me, as she had in the street. She was thin, with the hard lines of her body unsoftened by the black polo-sweater and slacks; and she stood arrogantly, her hair like a gold helmet. In her stance and her brittle voice there was evident the defencelessness that you mark in a man with a gun: he shows it is all he has.

She had the dog.

"You still don't trust me," I said. She had told the dog ‘Easy’, not ‘Friend’'. If ever I came in here alone, by this door, he'd bring me down in the instant, though he had seen me here before and in her company.

"What will you drink?" she asked me.

"Whatever you're having." I took a second look round. Black everywhere, with hard lines: black Skai furniture with sharp angles, a rank of harsh abstracts and a moody Klee, a pair of boar's tusks mounted on ebony. She brought my Scotch and said:

"I don't trust anyone."

I'd been wrong. Her voice was no less harsh now than it had been after the shock in the street.

"I'm not surprised," I said. "How did they try to kill you the first time?"

"I was in a crowd at a trolley-stop."

"Someone pushed."

"Yes. Just as the trolley was coming. It pulled up in time. Are you with the Z Commission?"

"What's the Z Commission?"

She said nothing, turning away. Jurgen watched her and watched me. I said: "You're too young, Fraulein Lindt, to have seen anything of the war." She turned and swung a glance round the room and saw the envelope, ripped open, on the desk. Fraulein Inga Lindt. "Sowhy do you go to the Neustadthalle?"

Her lithe hips swung and she came half-way towards me and stopped. I was suddenly aware that there was no scent on her or in the room. She stood very still. "Are you prepared to show me your papers?"

I gave her my passport. Quiller. NATO representative for the Red Cross. Scars, groin and left arm. Only two frontier endorsements, Spain and Portugal. We never like it to be thought we're widely travelled and therefore experienced.

"Thank you, Herr Quiller." She looked more relaxed. It seemed she didn't know there was one thing that could lie better than a camera, and that was a passport. I said:

"I'm trying to trace refugees whose relatives have died in England. Some of them have been called as witnesses, so I go to the courts to find them." I didn't think she was listening. She came closer and stared at me.

"You're English. As an Englishman, what do you think of Adolf Hitler?"

"Bit of a fidget."

Her long mouth tightened in contempt. "The English were so safe on their little island. They never saw anything happen."

"No." The one in the groin had been done at Dachau.

"Do you think he is a genius?" she asked me angrily.

"Yes." ‘Is’ noted.

"That man?"

"An evil genius."

She seemed more satisfied with me. I was beginning to understand. The ‘is’ was the biggest clue. She was living in the past.

I am a bad judge of age in people. The most I could do here was to allow for certain facts: a girl who deliberately watched mass-murder trials, who believed that someone had twice tried to kill her, who kept a wolfhound to protect her, and who showed signs of fierce pent emotion, would look older than her age. She looked thirty.

"When will people understand," she said in the strange wail I'd heard against the wall in the street, "that he's got to be blotted out, right out, so that he doesn't exist any more?"

There'd been a lot of women like this, ever since Mitford. Now they were dying off but you still came across a few. This one had reached the stage of the obsessional love-hate relationship that presages final rejection: she still had leanings, and had to deal with them by voicing them, even to strangers. She had to get assurance from as many people as possible that she was on the right track now.

"The way to blot him out," I said, "is not to think of him at all. Nobody dies until the last lover stops loving him."

Then her face puckered and she began shaking, and it all came out, beginning with a lot of things like, "No one can understand " and "With me it's different " and "You don't know what it's like " while I quietly sat down on a black futurist chair and watched her until she brought out the cold hard facts.

"I was in the Bunker." She sat crouched on the floor with her lean shoulder against a chair, spent before she began.

"The Fuhrerbunker?"

"Yes." After the first sip she hadn't touched her drink

"When?"

She looked blank. "Don't you know when?"

I said: "I don't mean the date. I mean at the beginning, the end, or all the time?"

"All the time."

"How old were you then?"

"I was nine."

"A child."

"Yes."

Her tone had dulled. The answers were so automatic that I suspected she must have given them often before under psychoanalysis. She crouched with her eyes shut. I went on slipping questions in until she took over; it was the classic approach and she was versed in it.

"My mother was a nurse on Dr. Weismoeler's special medical staff. That's why I was there. With the Goebbels family there were seven of us in the Bunker, children I mean, and we didn't have much to do with the grown-ups. But I liked Uncle Hermann and he used to give me things, medals and things."

Hermann Fegelein, of the SS.

"I saw them bring him in. He had left the Bunker and they brought him back. I heard Hitler shouting at him, then they took him into the Chancellery garden and shot him and I didn't even cry. It was too much for crying. I kept asking my mother why they'd killed poor Uncle Hermann, and she said he'd been wicked. It was the first time I understood what death was: it meant that people went away and you never saw them again. Then the nightmare started and everything began going to pieces inside me. The grown-ups were acting strangely and I used to hide in cupboards and listen in the passages because I was desperate to know what was happening to everyone. At one time I heard a shot and later Frau Junge told me that the Fuhrer was dead; of course I didn't believe her: he was a god to me, to all of us; but there was the smell of burning, in the garden, and one of the Escort found me and sent me back where I belonged. But I didn't belong anywhere now. Even my mother was strange to me. Even my mother."

The first self-pity had passed and she spoke without emotion, sitting hunched with her arms across her knees, her body as black and angular as the chair behind. Her gold hair made the only softness in the room.

"The ground began shaking and people said there were Russian soldiers coming. The whole Bunker shook and there was nowhere to run. I stayed with the Goebbels children because the grown-ups frightened me now, but then my mother took me away from them and I never saw them again. I knew they were dead. I didn't know for a long time afterwards that it was my mother who had given them the capsules. Of course it was on the orders of Frau Goebbels. There were six of them. Six children."

She opened her eyes but didn't look at me. The wolfhound watched her, worried by the pain in her voice. "The grown-ups frightened me and now even the children had gone. I didn't know what to do. Once I ran to Uncle Guenther when I saw him standing alone at the end of a passage but he told me to go away. There was nowhere to go. Then I saw Goebbels and his wife come into the passage and walk past Uncle Guenther, who had a big can in his hand. I could smell petrol. When I heard the shots from the garden I screamed, but Uncle Guenther didn't even hear me – he simply went out to the garden. I didn't understand anything any more."

Guenther Schwaegermann had been Goebbels's adjutant. His orders had been to smother the bodies in petrol and cremate them.

"That night my mother took me away. We were with a lot of other people. The ground was shaking and the whole sky was red. There were four women in our party; one of them was the cook. She kept running ahead and the others kept pulling her back, because the Russians were shelling heavily and the whole length of the Friedrich-strasse was on fire. We got as far as the Weidendammer Bridge before I fainted; but I can remember water, and the smell of smoke."

She got to her feet so suddenly that the dog gave a low bark. The curtains were not drawn across the windows and the glow from the street lit her face as she stared down.

I waited, and went on waiting. I didn't move, even to ease the tension in my legs, because I knew the dog was on edge because of her voice. She was statue-still, her thin arms hanging loose from the shoulder, her head forward to stare at the scene below that she wasn't seeing.

"That was when the rot set in… In the Bunker. When they took Uncle Hermann out and shot him, my own life was altered, in that minute. When the grown-ups began to frighten me with their strangeness I ran back to the only people I could understand – the children. Then they were taken away from me and I knew they were dead too. With nowhere to run next, I felt the whole of the earth moving under my feet, and I knew that the soldiers were coming. But there had to be something I could reach for and trust in. Not my mother, because she was like the other grown-ups, strange and tormented, and I'd seen her coming out of that room where the children were, and knew what had happened. Only someone very powerful could help me now, someone who could never die and who would always be there to help. The only god I had ever been told about was the Fuhrer."

Suddenly she was looking down at me and because of the angle of the light from the street the lower part of her face shadowed her eyes, and I couldn't see their expression.

"It's called a trauma, isn't it? A psychic injury setting up a neurosis."

It seemed she really wanted an answer, so I said:

"I prefer the simpler phrase you used."

"What was that?"

"The rot setting in."

"It's the same thing."

"But a different attitude. The thing is to keep your feet on the ground instead of up on a couch."

"I don't go to psychiatrists any more."

"Then you're the only one in all Berlin who doesn't."

"I tried them."

"Gave them up?"

"Yes."

"Now you go to the Neustadthalle instead."

"Do you know why?"

"To rake muck with the rest of us, knowing that it's his muck. The only successful cure for alcoholism is the nausea drug that teaches you that you can't go on loving something that makes you sick."

I had to be careful not to touch on the question that would have to be answered before I left here. I wanted her to tell me without being asked.

"You understand me very well," she said.

"It's not a very complex situation."

She came and stood over me. She had a way of standing bullfighter-fashion in the black slacks, legs straight, buttocks tucked flat and thighs thrust forward, the hard line of her body curved and tensioned like a bow. In a more feminine woman it would have been provocative; with her it suggested challenge.

"Why did you come here?" she asked me.

"It was an alternative."

"To what?"

"Going to the police."

Her eyes narrowed to slits of light blue under the lids.

"The police?"

"I was a witness to an attempted murder. It was my duty to make an immediate report."

"Why didn't you?"

"Two reasons. You might have been suffering under delusions. That could have been what it looked like: an accident caused by a skid. Also I'm English and in England we tend to trot out our troubles to the nearest policeman because that's what he's there for and we know who he is. Inyour country you don't. I had to bear that in mind."

"You don't trust our police?"

"I'm certain they're a fine body of men but yesterday they arrested one of their highest officials on a mass-murder charge – the Chancellor's chief security man. It shows their strength. And their weakness." I stood up and found my glass. It was empty and she took it from me.

"You haven't explained why you came here."

"Again, it was an alternative. I suggested a bar. You suggested here."

"I wanted to talk to you."

'To someone. Anyone."

"Yes. It was a shock. Did you think I hadn't any friends?"

"I still think you haven't. People with friends don't want to talk to strangers." She gave me another drink and her face looked bleak. The arrogance had suddenly gone. I added: "The silliest people can't move for friends. You see them at parties all over the place."

Her body had gone slack. "You made it easy to talk to you. It must have sounded a little hysterical. Do you dismiss me as a psychopath with a persecution complex?"

"Hardly. Someone's just tried to kill you a second time and you didn't even mention it."

"There's nothing to say about it."

But I still had to get that question answered before I left. She didn't dodge it. She didn't even see that I must want to know.

Suddenly it came. "They've got their reasons."

"They?"

"The Nazi group."

"The Nazis have their reasons for exterminating someone who's half in love with Hitler?"

"Must you put it like that?"

"Obsessed with the image of a dead god."

Her shoulders were still slack. The defiance was over. The catharsis of the confessional had left her exhausted. She said almost without interest: "I joined their group when I was just out of college. They call it Phoenix. It was a foster-parent to me because my mother never got to the other side of the Weidendammer Bridge that night. A piece of shrapnel hit her. Then I began growing up, and two or three years ago I defected and left the group. Not suddenly – I just stopped going to that house. They found me and tried to make me go back, because I knew too much. I knew what people had left the Fuhrerbunker alive, and where some of them went. I know where Bormann is now. I refused to go back but I swore on – on something they keep there that I would never talk. Either they think I've talked, or there's a new man there, or a new policy, because there was the trolley-stop incident a month ago, and the car tonight."

I finished my drink. I was going.

"Why do we have such an urge to do something we know we mustn't?" she asked suddenly.

"It's our friend the id. Wants to drive wild, hates the brakes. But keep them on. If it gets difficult, talk to a tape and then burn it. Or talk to Jurgen. But don't talk to strangers any more. You don't know where they'll go when they leave here. If it's straight to the CIA Office or some anti-Nazi organisation Phoenix won't stage any more accidents – they'll be up here within the hour and you can't rely on Jurgen because he's not bullet-proof."

I moved for the door and the wolfhound was on its feet.

"Should I leave Berlin?" she asked wearily.

"It would be safer."

She opened the door for me. Our eyes met and I saw the struggle she was putting up for her pride's sake. She lost.

"You're… not with CIA, or anyone?"

I said no. "But I could be. Don't forget it. Don't pick up strangers. You never know where they've been."

The street was icy after the close heat of the flat and I walked quickly. Snow got into the sides of my shoes and my breath clouded against my face. I thought about her all the time, and believed that what I had done was right. If there were any doubts they were automatically dismissed when, somewhere along the Unter den Eichen, I knew that I was being followed.