The Quiller Memorandum

7: RED SECTOR

The bullet from a small 8 mm. short-trigger Pelmann and Rosenthal Mk. IV spins in the region of two thousand revolutions per second and at very close range the flesh laceration is severe, due to heavy scoring by the large number of lands in the rifling. Carbon monoxide discharge is high and the flesh tattooing is consequently vivid. The bullet enters the body with the effects of an ultra-high-speed drill combined with a blowlamp.

In the case of Schrader the skull had shattered badly and only one side of his face was recognisable. The police-captain compared it with the profile photograph, took a statement from the secretary in the outer office and then telephoned the Selbstmord department at Kriminalpolizei H.Q., since a suicide was more their job than his. Schrader would never go to trial and our interest in him was at an end.

I asked to be present at the summary search for papers and diaries but we turned up nothing that would lead me to Zossen. A phone-call had been made not long before the shot was heard, from a man whose voice and name were unknown to the secretary. It was an hour since we had handed over Rauschnig and started out for Schrader, so someone must have sprung a big leak about Rauschnig's arrest and Schrader had decided not to face the music. It was because of this sort of thing that the Z-polizei liked to be quick when they could.

The captain was again annoyed to find the two energetic Federal Associated Press cameramen on the pavement outside the offices of Schrader-Fahben Shipping Components and I didn't tell him I'd telephoned. It was usually relatives or friends who tipped off the next along the line when the Z went in and made a snatch, and the whole staff of the F.A.P. could buzz with news that wouldn't reach the close associates of arrested men until they printed it.

I made sure they got my picture and then went to find the car. It was a grey Volkswagen hired from Hertz on my sudden decision that morning: I wasn't a free agent, stuck in the back of the police-car all the time, and it irked me. The VW was ubiquitous in shape and colour and would make a useful mobile base if I had to stay away from the Hotel Prinz Johan for more than a day.

The black Mercedes followed me out of the city and through the snowscape. The sky at noon was dark against the white hills. The autobahn through the Corridor was treacherous with stretches of black ice where last night the snow had turned to rain and the rain had frozen. There were few other cars on the route and we were held up less than fifteen minutes at the Helmstedt checkpoint. I showed my second set of papers to avoid delay.

The Star of David School stood in a hollow of the land a few kilometres before Duisbach. The snow on the courtyard was churned by children's feet and they had built a snowman right in the centre, with three faces so that he looked everywhere at once; two were non-smokers and one had a pipe.

There was singing on the sharp air as we left the cars and made for the doors. The porch was stacked with galoshes and gumboots. The singing floated out across the soft white land, so that it seemed Christmas.

It was agreed that to avoid any scene that might worry the children I should locate Professor Foegl alone and get him into the superintendent's quarters before Captain Stettner made the charge. The only person in view was a boy standing glumly outside a classroom in some kind of penance; he was cheered by the apparition of a stranger ignorant of his sins, and told me that Professor Foegl was in the hall where the singing came from. I went in quietly and stood for a while below the rostrum. The choir went a bit ragged and then forgot me, steadying. I watched the children and the man on the rostrum. His head was narrow and the face long and gentle; he closed his eyes now and then and his hands sketched slow rhythms in the air for the singers to follow; they sang almost faultlessly now, the full sweetness of their song drawn from them by the mesmeric hands; they sang as if they loved him.

When the canticle was ended I clapped for the children and caused a total and embarrassed silence. I am no good with children, though I'd meant well. Forced to speak in a whisper I told Professor Foegl that I was the representative of a music publisher and the superintendent would be glad if he could spare a few minutes in his office.

He said he would come. His voice was as gentle as his face. Only the eyes revealed the weakness that had brought him to this day; they were the eyes of a man who is ready to show fear, even when he is smiling.

We found the superintendent with the captain and sergeant. He'd obviously been primed; his face was set in the aftermath of shock. It was quiet in the room. We could hear one another breathing. The captain went into his routine and I saw the fear come flooding into the older man's eyes, and looked away.

"I must therefore ask you to come with me, Herr Professor."

"Yes," he said softly. His gentle head was raised and he stared through the windows at the black trees that stood in the snow, a group of waiting skeletons. "Yes," he said in soft answer to the summons he had lived in fear of, for twenty years.

They took him away. The superintendent had asked me to stay a moment.

"It's unbelievable," he said. "I'm sorry."

"He was of my race." He stood staring at me and his hands were fumbling one against the other as if they were something he'd picked up and didn't know where to put. "Why did he betray us?"

"Out of fear."

"Was he tortured?"

"Not at that time. He knew he would have been if he refused to talk." For his sake I said: " It may be accepted in mitigation by the court."

"Mitigation?" I might have used a totally foreign word. "But there were thousands who were threatened with duress, and they didn't -"

"Hundreds of thousands. Millions. Six millions. He wasn't one of them. I'm sorry."

The blockwarts has used him, and then the Zellenleiters, and the kreisleiters, and at last the gauleiters, playing on his fear and using him as a more and more valuable tool. The evidence on file recorded that he had ‘caused the deprivation and ultimate death of his friends, his neighbours and hundreds of his own kind, by revealing their names and hiding places to the Gestapo.’

The shortest and most graphic of the testimonies held him responsible for ‘a good ten truckloads of deportees who had gone up the Auschwiq chimney.’

"Do you know anything about the Star of David School, Herr Quiller?" He was eyeing me reflectively, as if deciding to give me a confidence.

"It's modern, progressive, with a bias towards the Arts -"

"I don't mean that. Come to the window. I will tell you."

Beyond the window-bay the land rose gently towards the south. Behind the trees were scattered the black oblongs of roofs in the snow. There was the track of a stream running east-west through the floor of the hollow, but there were no willows to mark its banks.

"The school is modern and progressive, yes, and the Arts have a greater place in our curriculum than usual; but it has this in common with other schools: it's full of children. It was built for them especially. They run across these fields and climb those trees in freedom. It is their land, all theirs. And do you find the building itself bright and well-lighted with the big windows? And the decor vital with bright colours?"

I said I did.

"The architect was Joseph Steiner himself. Long rooms, wide corridors, a beautiful synagogue of white and purple stone from Bavaria, after the Finnish style of church. The children are very happy here. You can tell from their singing. You have heard them singing. You should see them in summer – that field is a carpet of clover and they picnic there. You should hear them sing on a summer evening, Herr Quiller." He pointed through the window. "That looks like a stream, but it's really the remains of a railway embankment – a siding. The rails were taken up and used in the construction of the building, and the embankment has slowly fallen almost level with the meadow. The trucks used to come in there from Magdeburg, and that farm behind the trees was the medical experimentation block. The gas-chambers were this side of the railway, here where we are standing. The foundations are built of their rubble. Some of the arrivals were hanged from those trees so that those who were brought here could see them and be warned about disobedience."

He turned from the window. "Few have heard of the camp, because it was one of those successfully destroyed by the Nazis under the last-minute ‘Cloud Fire’ order designed to obliterate evidence of atrocities. You won't find any record of it. But some knew of it." He turned his eyes on mine and I knew he wasn't looking at me but at men who had been here before me. "So we built this monument to our dead. We thought it was better than just a stone with a plaque. Some of the children laugh and play where their grandparents died. Of course they don't know it. This is in confidence, and I think you are a man to respect such a confidence. I have told you this because I can't believe this thing about Professor Foegl. He was so gentle. The children are going to miss him, you know."

He suddenly flung out his hands – "But what made him come here, to us? Did he know what this place was? Do you believe he knew?"

"He may have."

"Then why?"

"Remorse. Guilt. Cowards have the biggest consciences." I remembered how Foegl had stared out at those trees just now when he knew it was all up with him. "We don't know how much he might have been punishing himself, making himself face his past, everywhere he looked. It might have been that."

He stood for nearly a minute, motionless. Then he said:

"I'm glad he's gone. This is holy ground." He suddenly offered his hand. "You'll have to forgive me. The choir had only just started, you know. I must go and do my best with them, but goodness knows I'm practically tone-deaf."

I walked through the wide glass doorway alone, between the rows of galoshes and gum-boots. The tracks of the black Mercedes were on the snow. I looked across to the dark gnarled trees. For a minute the silence brooded, and I made myself wait, my breath half-held, standing beside the car.

Then it came again, the singing.

A thaw had set in and the evening streets were slushy. Snow was melting on the ruined shell of the Kaiser-Wilhelm Gedachtniskirche and the wrecked bones of its spire stuck into the sky, naked again and oddly beautiful.

Die Leute had me on the front page, a good full-face picture standing beside Rauschnig outside his beauty-salon. Three other papers had the same picture and two of them carried the later shot of the police-captain and myself leaving the offices of Schrader-Fahben.

Other front-page news was that Franz Rohm, Secretary of the Road Safety Committee, had hanged himself, as I had known he would.

It would have been difficult to get photographers down to the Star of David School because we didn't want the children worried, but I had sent in the word to F.A.P. and Die Leute carried a picture of Professor Foegl and a full paragraph, linking him with Rauschnig and Schrader and commenting on the ‘lightning wave of arrests’ that marked the day. I would therefore be linked, myself, with the Foegl snatch, and Phoenix wouldn't miss it.

They gave me half an hour with Foegl in his cell but I was out of luck. His fear – which I'd hoped would be the mainspring of ready confession – had gone, after twenty years. The worst had come to him and he knew his life would end in a cell like this, so he had nothing more to fear. I doubted if even the fullest confession would count for an acquittal, but I tried the idea on him. He wouldn't budge. He seemed to have already faded away in a kind of death.

They had a lock-up for the Hertz VW at the Hotel Prinz Johah and I backed it in. Slush dripped from the wings and a puddle of water had formed on the concrete before I left it and went in to a late meal. Some of the staff stared at me a bit because they'd seen the papers, and the wine-waiter had a greyness about his face. He was past middle age, and as his slightly-shaking hand poured my wine I wondered where he'd been between '39 and '45, and what he'd done.

But the wine's flavour was unspoiled. After six months on a dungheap you don't notice the smell.

Most of the tables had been cleared by the time I was served with the coffee. The American drew a chair near and dropped his evening paper on to the table. I glanced down at my own face and up into his. He said with a pleasant smile:

"Seems we're sailing a little close to the wind, sir."

I didn't want to talk or even know him but there is sometimes a danger in not responding and the strict orders are to do so, at once.

"Catch it as it comes, and the closer the better."

So this would be Brand. A flat shrewd face with level grey eyes and a crew-cut. The smile was pleasant but I resented him and resented his cheeking me. If an agent decides to splash his pan all over the front page there is obviously a reason, and it's his own business. He goes to work his own way, on one condition: that he doesn't endanger secrecy. It had to be accepted that if I decided to draw enemy fire the only one to get hurt was me. Now that my face was being advertised I couldn't go within a mile of the Unter den Eichen and Rohner-allee intersection even if I were certain there was no tag. In starting out to expose myself to the adverse party deliberately I had implicitly cut myself off from Local Control except for Post and Bourse, the sole safe line of communication. I'd become, since this morning, a ‘hot operator,’ whom no one wanted to go near. It was a classic move, and KLJ had used it twice in his career, breaking the normal conditions of strict hush and meeting the enemy on open ground as the most expedient way of doing a particular job. It is dangerous for the agent and he knows it and settles for it. It is more dangerous for him if people don't keep clear of him, and it becomes dangerous for them. A hot operator must have no cover, no contacts, and must never go near Control. Even a radio is dangerous.

"How long are you staying?" I asked him uncivilly.

"Oh, I practically live here."

We both knew that in a place like this we had to con verse carefully, so that even if a tape-recording were made it wouldn't give anything away. There were columns and curtains in this room, and waiters were still on the move. The table could even be miked.

He offered me a small cigar but I shook my head. "I don't know this brand."

"I just thought I'd introduce it to you." He put the cigar-wallet away.

"I'm hot," I said, looking at the windows. He picked up his paper.

"You kid me not," he grinned quickly, glancing at the front-page picture. He tucked the paper under his arm. "Well, I'll leave you in peace. Always at your disposal, of course."

I watched him away, took ten minutes to finish my coffee, and went up to my room, changing into dry shoes and mentally listing all the good reasons against what I was going to do. Then I switched on to light music, a few minutes before time.

I used the hotel paper. Repeat: there is to be no cover. Hengel made contact. I don't like this. Brand has made contact and is staying here. I don't like this either. Repeat: am operating solo.

The music stopped.

I decided, through the first half of the report, not to finish the note yet.

Portuguese Canning: 388. Minus 1.

Py-Sulpha: 459.Plus 7.

Quota Freight: 793¾. Plus 10¾.

Rhone Electric: 625 -

I switched off. It read: ALL PRECAUTIONS. YOURSELF RED SECTOR.

I finished the note. If no confidence in my policy you have only to say so, and pull me out. Q.

People were making me too angry and that was bad because emotions clutter up clear thinking on a job. I'd let the Hengel boy off lightly, saying only that he'd made contact and not saying that he'd picked me up on his own initiative and then let me flush him within minutes. I didn't want Control to rap him, only to keep him out of my way. But it had made me angry. So had Brand, contacting me when he knew damned well I was a hot operator. Even if Control hadn't warned him, he should have known as soon as he saw my picture on the front page linked with a ‘lightning wave of arrests’. Now Control itself had made me angry. ‘All precautions’ – in other words I wasn't to risk endangering secrecy by these wildcat methods I was embarked on. ‘Yourself red sector’' – I was exposing myself to enemy fire.

Did I need telling?

Let them call my bluff and try to pull me out. They wouldn't succeed. I was out for Zossen. They'd given a dog a bone.

I took the VW as far as the Wilmersdorf district and posted the signal, locking the car and walking the rest of the way to her flat, angry, finally, with myself, because of all the good reasons I had mentally listed against going there again.