The Quiller Memorandum

6: QUOTA

Austrian Union: 293. Plus 1¼

BMB Rubber: 106. Plus 1.

Bertram-Rand: 995¾ Minus 5¼.

Cinati: 185½. Plus 1½

Crowther Development: 344. Plus 6¼

D. R. Mining: 73. Minus 2.

Just before the corner of the Unter den Eichen and the Albricht-strasse I had walked at the same gait but with longer strides so that the spurt didn't show. The first cover down the Albricht-strasse was a parked beer-truck and I stood against its offside and used the long-stemmed driving-mirror to watch the corner. When he was past the truck, hurrying now, I crossed the street and bought an evening edition of Die Leute and carried it half-opened to alter the image. After a while he tracked back and I watched him take quick checks before trying the bar, the pharmacy and the newsagent's where I'd bought the paper.

He was worried now and stood on the pavement stamping his feet as if they were cold. It was frustration. Then he got going again and we rounded the whole of the Steglitz block before he gave up and made for a beer-house in the Schoneberg area. I held off for fifteen minutes but he never looked at his watch and no one turned up so I went in and sat down at his table and said:

"If I see you again I'll put such a blast through to Local that you'll end up washing the stairs."

He looked even younger than he was. He wouldn't even trust himself to speak until my beer came because he was so frustrated. Then he said:

"You know what happened to KLJ."

"It isn't going to happen to me."

"He was a damned good man." It sounded even more emphatic in German. He was angry about that death. His name was Hengel and I'd recognised him when I sat down.

His photograph, marked with the key-letter for Totally Reliable, had been in the memorandum. Pol had said:

"There are two people you can trust. An American, Frank Brand, and a young German, Lanz Hengel."

Before I'd recognised him I'd thought he was one of the adverse party and that Phoenix – if that was how they still styled their group – had set him to watch contacts of the Lindt girl. It would have tied in.

"Yes," I said, "he was a damned good man. But he was using cover and it didn't save him."

He said with a seething anger: "I was his cover."

"I know. Don't fret. That day in Dallas there were sixty Federal agents manning the inner ring."

"I was specially picked." He wasn't interested in Dallas.

"Then you're slipping." I'd had enough self-pity from the Lindt girl. "Five minutes' tag and I flushed you."

Polsknika A: 775. Plus 5.

Portuguese Canning: 389. Plus 2¼.

Py-Sulpha: 452. Minus 10.

Coming up.

I'd asked Hengel: "Whose orders, to cover me?"

"I had no orders."

At least he was honest. "What's your current term in this field?"

"Two years."

He volunteered nothing, but just sat biting his lip. He had a good face but there was no guile in him. He lacked the element most necessary to his needs: slyness. I wondered why they'd picked him to cover KLJ.

"You'll find plenty of games to play in two years, Hengel, but don't play any on my pitch. I told Pol no cover. It was called off as from last midnight."

If he had put up any argument I would have embarrassed him with a few facts. Where had he picked me up? He would know the address of my hotel but he hadn't picked me up from there or I would have sensed him. He couldn't have known I was going to the Neustadthalle because it was a last-minute decision: until I had Bourse clearance on Pol's photograph I wouldn't do anything active, so the Neustadthalle was a good passive search area for spending the day. He hadn't picked me up there, because I would have sensed him, and anyway he would have talked now about the crush attempt, especially as he was so desperate to cover me in the hope of saving my life and atone for the loss of KLJ. He'd never seen the crush attempt. He couldn't have known I went to the Lindt girl's flat or that I could be picked up from there when I left. There was only one answer: he's seen me, by chance, about half-way along the Unter den Eichen, or one of the staff had seen me and told him and he'd started out on his own initiative. Local Control Berlin has two rooms, each with two windows, on the ninth floor of the corner building at Unter den Eichen and Rhoner-allee, with front access through the passage at the side of the hat shop. The view of both streets is excellent and a lookout is normally stationed to make sure that any staff coming in has not been tagged to base by an adverse party. The lookout has a pair of Zeiss close-focus square 15's and can see the hairs on a fly at fifty yards. As one of the only three agents operating (in my case technically) from this base I couldn't go down either of these streets without being seen. It had been half-way down the den Eichen that I had sensed the tag.

Hengel hadn't only lost me within five minutes but had picked me up by sheer chance, and he knew it. If I told him that I knew it too he'd draw blood from his lip. If I told him he'd missed by ninety minutes an attempt on the life he was so eager to safeguard he'd bust a gut.

So I had just finished my beer and left him.

Back at the hotel I had some food and went up to tune-in to Eurosound. The Bourse was being read now. My signal was just coming up.

Quota Freight Tenders: 878¼. Plus 2½.

RhoneElectric: 626

1 switched off.

The ‘Communication Post and Bourse’ system is limited but foolproof. One of our cipher staff dreamed it up himself. It is relatively safe to entrust a signal to the ordinary postal services, and in the Federal Republic as safe as anywhere in the world. The agent doesn't stamp his letters because it might not be easy at any given moment (when leaving a theatre, for instance) to find a stamp. More important, an unstamped letter is virtually registered, since it must be handed personally to the addressee by the postman in order to collect the fee and tax. Thus, even if an agent is carrying a vital document and suspects he is being followed by an adverse party who might intend capturing the document at gun-point at the first chance, he can get rid of it readily at the nearest postbox and ensure its safety. We have a man at Eurosound to collect. Radio Eurosound is a perfectly genuine broadcasting station operating under the combined auspices of NATO and the Benelux Industrial Commune, and carries light music, U.S., British and French newscasts, and commercial programmes.

The Bureau has facilities not known publicly to exist for inserting into the twice-daily Bourse price announcements the name and movement of a fictitious stock, in my case Quota Freight Tenders. (At the time of the Zossen operation, ‘Quota’ was simply the call-sign (the memorandum being Q) and it could be varied five ways: Quota Freight Tenders in full, Quota Freight, Quota Tenders, Quota alone, and Q.F.T.) Each variation is in itself the key-word to one of four code-systems, and the agent normally uses the book, because the permutations of a single ‘price’ and ‘movement’ (878¼. Plus 2½in my case on that particular day) runs into thousands of signals the meaning of an 8 standing alone is different from that of an 8 appearing before a 7, and different again if it appears before 78. Also the fractions can change the whole of the signal given by the main digits. The ‘movement’ of the share can in its turn change the signal formed by the ‘price.’ I possess no code-book because a systematic permutation scheme can be committed to memory more easily than any random list of figures.

The Eurosound programmes are legitimately aimed at an audience demanding light music for housewives, up-to-the-minute news flashes and entertainment sponsored by the top Continental industrial concerns. That kind of audience does not want market news, and it would have been discontinued after the first probes by listener research, but the sponsors insisted on two daily readings of the Bourse because their stock was listed and it gave them free publicity especially when prices rose. The fact remains that since the inception of the Communication Post and Bourse system no listener has ever telephoned Eurosound to ask who the hell Quota Freight Tenders is and where the stock can be bought.

The reply-system has two advantages, especially when an operator must not carry radio. A letter mailed to him in reply to his would take longer and could be intercepted even if unstamped. A letter delivered to me at the Prinz Johan Hotel would have its tax paid by the desk and would be lying in a pigeonhole for as long as I was absent – sometimes a matter of days. Not safe. Nor is it convenient to pick up mail post restante; post offices are scarcer than beer-houses and an agent would in any case have to carry the letter until he could burn it and could be forced to give it up at gun-point if an adverse party meant to have it. The second advantage of the P and B system is that it can reach an agent anywhere in Europe at a precise time when he can arrange to be alone to take the signal. Also the signal goes direct into his mind without trace. He can, if he must, receive a signal while standing in a public bar with an adverse party at his elbow, and receive it in total secrecy.

But it's a slow system and is never used in emergency. Emergency justifies risk, and the risk in any country is that the Bureau may, for many reasons, be working against the interests of that country's police services. In my case a telephone call to Local Berlin Control would assume a risk and therefore be made only in emergency, because I was working against the interests of certain members of the Federal police services, the unknown ex- and neo-Nazis riddling the department from the highest echelons (people like Ewald Peters, just arrested) down to the constabulary. Any member of the police, seeing me leaving a telephone, could use his credentials and ask the hotel clerk, the barman or the operator what number I had called, and could find the address. Also, the line could be tapped.

Against this risk we have two safeguards. There is a simple code system whereby "I'm dining with Davis tonight " means "I'm going to ground " and so on. If the signal is more complicated and a great deal of vital information has to be phoned in during an emergency, we speak in Rabinda-Tanath, the dialect of the Lahsritsa hill-tribes of East Pakistan, which is even more basic than original Malay and has the advantage of being instantly adaptable. (Oddly, there is no word for ‘bullet’, and we would use ‘kill-ball’. ‘Motor-car’ would be ‘fire-cart’.) A Lahsritsa is stationed permanently in Local Berlin Control, happily studying for a degree in Literature in between emergency calls.

There had been no urgency in getting confirmation of Pol's identity and function, so that I had posted his photograph and set the system going. A photograph is always carried by an agent ordered to make contact with someone who has never met him before. Its receipt at the Bureau, without any message alongside, is taken to mean one thing:

Who is he?

He was 878¼. Plus 2½. TRUE NAME GIVEN. TOTALLY RELIABLE. LIAISON LONDON.

That was why I'd never heard of him before. I'd been out of London for two years: Egypt, Cuba, now Germany. He was one of the new links normally liaising direct with London. I would never have seen him at all if KLJ hadn't bought it and thus created an emergency. Willi Pol (his Christian name had been in the memorandum) had been flown out to make contact and hand me the baby. Where was he now? Flying back. Lucky bastard.

Something about the darkened radio dial afflicted me, on the very edge of consciousnesss, and I worried it until the answer came. KLJ Petroleum had been knocked out of the market, and wouldn't be quoted again.

I woke naturally at the top of a late sleep-curve and thought at once of her lean shoulders and the way she stood, because she'd been the last image of consciousness, quite unbidden.

There'd been a black panther in a dream, already fading. I beat around but couldn't bring it any clearer. It was too late. Dreams are gone in the first few seconds of waking, like ghosts at cock-crow. But she'd been there all right, a dark succuba.

Progress had been made in more practical directions. Before sleep I'd fed in the problem and by morning it was resolved. Decision: action this day.

I had assumed too much, and it had put me into a false position. I had assumed that the car had been out to crush me, and not the Lindt girl. I had assumed that the man who had begun tagging me along the Unter den Eichen was an adverse party: and I'd been wrong. I could have been wrong about the crush attempt too. They might not have been after me at all. They might not even know of my existence. My position would be false if I went on believing necessarily that while I hunted Zossen he hunted me.

So I still had to draw his fire. If they were already on to me, they'd stick, so I couldn't lose by taking action. I had to get where they wanted me, and hope to survive long enough for the overkill.

I was at the West Berlin Public Prosecutor's office before ten o'clock with a file on three suspects and a different set of papers showing me to be working in liaison with the Z Commission – which indeed I was. For six months I'd operated in strict hush; now I would head across open ground so that Phoenix could see me.

"We knew nothing about these three people." Herr Ebert said plaintively.

"You do now, Herr Generalstaatsanwalt."

He nodded ponderously; his head was like a great smooth stone balanced upon another. I had checked his dossier months ago because I'd been working through his office indirectly, unknown to him, merely sending in the evidence as I gathered it and leaving him to pass on the orders of arrest to the Z-polizei. He was a Socialist and a Resistance veteran with a record of escapes from concentration camps equalled by few. The political cartoonist Federmann had pictured him with his huge arms carrying a Jewish child through the mud of littered swastikas, and the original sketch was framed on the wall above him. Invoking enemies by the hundreds as he applied himself to ridding the German cupboards of their skeletons, he wished it to be known that of all the officials firmly astride the fence with a foot dabbling nervously on each side, he was not one.

I waited for twenty minutes while he rocked heavily in his chair reading my files. The evidence against these three men had been gathered during the last week and I'd meant to hand it over to my successor to give him a good start. Now I would use it myself.

"This is very detailed, Herr Quiller."

"Yes."

"Your sources are obviously authentic. You must have worked very hard." He gazed at me from beneath pink-and-blond eyebrows. He wanted to know how I'd dug up all this without his ever having heard of me.

"You set a good example, Herr Generalstaatsanwalt."

His face remained bland. He let it go. Neither of us had time to play poker. "These are cases for immediate arrest."

"Yes."

"You'll perhaps give me the addresses where these men can be found."

"If you'll signal the Z polizei I'll go with them."

"That isn't necessary."

"No."

"But you wish to be in at the kill."

"Put it that way."

"I will arrange it." He lifted a phone.

It's always rather cosy when you are forced to do something you want to do but shouldn't. I shouldn't have allowed myself to be present at the coming arrests, because it was an indulgence: it would be a sadistic pleasure to watch the faces of these three men in their moment of Nemesis, because I had last seen one of them – Rauschnig – inspecting a parade of young Jewish girls sent to him for ‘special treatment’ at Dachau. They had been lined up naked against the wall of a corridor and he had selected ten of them for medical experimentation. I didn't know what had happened to them but I knew that their death wouldn't have been easy.

I had never met the other two – Foegl and Schrader – but from the evidence in the file they had excelled Dr. Rauschnig in acts of inhumanity. Therefore I would take pleasure in seeing their faces on this, the last day of their freedom.

This corrosive emotion would be out of place in the pursuit of an intellectual exercise; it wouldn't do me or anyone any good; but it would be incidental to my main purpose in going along with the Z-polizei. By the time the third arrest had been made, at my instigation and in my presence, Phoenix would be on my track. That was the end of the means.

"A car will collect you in fifteen minutes, Herr Quiller." He gave me a signature for the receipt of the files. "Perhaps I shall have the pleasure of seeing you here again?"

"All going well, Herr Generalstaatsanwalt, I guarantee it.

The scbonheitssalon was in the Marienfelder-platz and the three of us went through the doors together. The police-captain and his sergeant were both armed but in civilian clothes. A screen of wrought filigree-work intertwined with climbing flowers divided the little individual cubicles from the waiting-room. We were invited to sit and remained standing. A fountain played in a pink marble basin the shape of a shell and there were tiny tropical fish gliding in it. Pink gossamer curtains draped the walls and the lighting was shed from the centres of gilt sunbursts in the ceiling. The air was perfumed. A slender Venus stood in a softly-illuminated niche, girdled with the gold riband of the Herr-direktor's diploma from the 1964 Exposition de Paris des Arts Esthitiques.

The receptionist came back: a heavy-bodied young madchen with jungle eyes. The Herr-direktor must oblige us to await him a further half an hour, since he was in the middle of a delicate treatment and (the eyes dilated) the client was a baroness. The hem of her pink Grecian tunic swung as she turned away.

The police-captain knew better than to trump this by presenting his credentials. The place would have more than one exit. I followed him with the sergeant through the low gilded gate.

Dr. Rauschnig was in the first cubicle. His face was plumper than when I'd last seen it but I recognised him and nodded to the captain.

"Your name is Julius Rauschnig?"

Shocked at the intrusion, he declared his name to be Dr. Liebenfels. He had never heard of Rauschnig. The captain produced a photograph taken of Rauschnig in 1945 in the U.S. Army liberation sector, Dutch frontier. The photograph had been nameless-on-file in the Z Commission archives and I had picked it out for them this morning before corning here.

The woman on the treatment-couch bent her neck and peered at us with two affronted eyes in a half-applied mud-pack. Then I turned my back because I didn't want to look any more at the face of Rauschnig. Corrosive emotions no go.

His voice was bad enough to listen to. The harder it pretended indignation the more it shook.

"I assure you that you are mistaken!" So on. "It is very harmful to the delicate facial tissues of the baroness if the treatment is interrupted!" So forth. But I caught sight of one of his hands as it gesticulated, and the corrosion set in. Because a face is not active: it is only the shape of a name. It is the hand that acts. And these soft white hands that had been tenderly ministering to this woman's vanity, touching her withered face as if it were a flower in pretence that he could restore the bloom of youth, had once been laid upon the faces and the bodies of girls in Dachau as urgently as a beast claws meat.

His soft hands flew in the perfumed air. His voice bubbled in denial, more shrilly now. The woman, alarmed, called out, and the madchen in the Grecian tunic came trotting, to stand confused.

"You will please accompany me," the captain told him.

"I must telephone my lawyer!"

"We will telephone him from the gendarmerie."

"But I have no shoes for the snow! My chauffeur is not here with the car!"

"We have a car waiting.

"You cannot just take me like this from my work! This lady -"

"Herr Rauschnig, if you'll come with me peaceably there will be no inconvenience for anyone."

He began blubbering now and I concentrated on the young receptionist's face to take my mind from the sound; but her face was horrified and the light of the lamp was reflected in her eyes; and I'd noticed the lamp before I had turned my back. It had a small pink shade and I remembered the white shade of the lamp that had been in Haptsturmfiihrer Rauschnig's private quarters at the camp. The white shade, and a pair of gloves, and a book-cover had been made by the deft fingers of his mistress who lived with him; by grace of a technique he had perfected, they were made of human skin.

"You cannot take me like this!" And the woman screamed as he lurched past the girl. The sergeant tripped him automatically and he grabbed at the pink curtain, his shoulder smashing the thin partition of the cubicle as he fell and lay awkwardly, swathed in gossamer. The jar of mud-pack mousse toppled from the treatment-table and spattered his legs. He lay babbling. I stepped over him and went out through the waiting-room and into the street and the sudden burst of a flashlight.

"Wait," I told them. "They're bringing him out." I'd phoned Federal Associated Press from the offices of the Z-polizei, tipping them off.

When Rauschnig was led out I moved to stand beside him as the flashes came again. By this evening my picture would be in several papers where Phoenix could see it.