The Striker Portfolio

Chapter Four — THE DUMP

There was a blank wall at the end of the cul-de-sac and they'd left their headlights on to see with, so that their shadows were very big on the wall. They came side by side.

They didn't rush. They thought I might have a gun on me. They came slowly and once or twice halted, ready to drop fiat and fire from the ground. It looked a bit silly.

I sat where I was.

One idea would be to drop the gear into reverse and scatter them and try reaching the main street with the head well down and the fingers crossed. It was chancy because you can't dodge about when you're driving a car; you can only dodge the car about; they know where you are: stuck with the controls; and they only have to stand there and pump the stuff into you. No go.

The other ideas were worse so I sat there and worked up some anger about what they'd done to Lovett; anger is a prerequisite for action: it turns on the adrenalin.

I left my hands on the wheel for two reasons: I didn't want the indignity of having to put them there by order; and I wanted them there anyway so that they were free to do things quickly.

One of the men had fan-teeth which you normally associate with honest people of cheerful disposition but I didn't think this one was very honest and he didn't look cheerful. The other one smelt vaguely of almonds. They were both about my weight and I left my hands on the wheel while they frisked me and then one of them stood back a bit to keep me covered while his friend looked in the glove-pocket and under the seats and the dashboard. They spoke with a Luneburger accent. 'Where is your gun?' 'Please?'

'Where is your gun?' 'More slow of talking, please. I do not — '

'You speak better German than that,' he said and his friend laughed.

'Everyone has their off days,' I said. The laugh came again and I didn't like it. Perhaps it was the walls making an echo that distorted it or something but this man's laugh was a kind of wet guttural spasm as if someone was being carefully strangled. He was the one who smelt of almonds.

'Don't you have a gun?'

'No.'

'Why not?'

'The bang frightens me.'

Their faces were pale in the headlights. They both had hats on to look respectable. One of them wasn't happy about it and went diving about in the back of the car and I thought he must be taking the stuffing out of the seats. He was the kind who couldn't understand anyone not carrying a gun, which meant he depended on his own quite a lot, so he was the one I'd go for if a chance came.

'There isn't a gun anywhere,' he said.

'It doesn't matter,' his friend said.

They both climbed into the back of the car and shut the doors.

'What are you doing in Hanover?'

'Having a look round.'

'Who are you?'

'A bad-tempered ferret.'

'Don't mover It was jabbed into my neck.

'I was going to show you my papers.'

'We're not interested in false papers.'

'Then I'll leave them where they are.'

'Yes.' There was a rustling noise.

'Would you like some marzipan?'

I angled my head round politely. He was holding a packet to me with the silver paper half peeled off.

'Not just now, thank you.'

'Don't you like it?'

He was the one who couldn't understand anyone not carrying a gun either.

'Not very much. It's got prussic acid in it'

'It's got what?'

'Bitter almonds. Not very much, of course. What you might call a homeopathic dose, but somehow the idea puts me off.'

They wanted me alive or they could have done it by now and left the body here: it was an excellent place and no one would come up here until the morning. They wanted me to tell them things first. They couldn't make me do that here because there's no really useful technique available when the subject isn't tethered: hurt him too hard and he'll get violent and it's no good waving a gun at him when he realizes he's got a value; you're not going to kill him with it because then he can't talk and he knows that.

'I like it, anyway,' he said. He began smelling of almonds again.

His friend with the fan-teeth said: 'We're not going to kill you.'

'That's good.'

'But after we've finished with you I must warn you to leave Germany. You mustn't think about it any more. He did himself in like a lot of people do, so why do you have to worry about it? Do you know how many people in Germany commit suicide?'

'A lot of people, you said.'

They were enjoying themselves and it worried me. It meant they'd enjoy 'finishing' with me too and sometimes that kind of situation can get out of hand: they go od for the pleasure and then it's suddenly too late; the sigmoid colon becomes too bruised or the blood-loss increases to the point where the heart starts trying to pump a vacuum.

'Yes,' he said. 'Approximately ten thousand every year. That's almost one every hour. So you mustn't think any more about him. Start your engine and drive back into the main road.'

They were very cautious, not wanting to do it here. It was an excellent place but they obviously knew of a better one.

I said: 'You've left your car in the way.' I looked round and through the rear window.

'Can't you get past?'

'I don't think so, but I'll try.'

'No, I'll go and move it. I've got to switch off the lights anyhow.'

He got out and his friend sat very still with the Walther P38 lined up with the bridge of my nose. The catch was off and his hand was dead steady. He'd stopped munching on the marzipan so that he could concentrate. His face was plump and the stare had a slight smile in it as if he wanted me to know that for him it was a special thing, to kill a man, a special pleasure, a substitute for orgasm, and that he wanted badly to do it and he would in fact do it if I made him and that he hoped I would make him.

I wondered who his controllers were.

'Switch your headlights on,' he said.

Just as, a little while ago, the time sequence of the traffic lights had governed that situation, unseen people — his controllers — now governed this one. Their orders, through the media of his memory and his motor-nerves, were operating the fixator muscles of his finger so that it remained still, three millimetres from the end of the primary spring's travel, two millimetres from the end of the secondary spring's travel and the percussion.

I would have liked to know who his controllers were. He had respect for them but I couldn't rely on that. All I had to do was make too sudden a move and the flexor muscles would contract in nervous sympathy.

'You want to do it,' I said, 'don't you?'

'Yes.' The smile was going out of his stare. 'Switch your head-lights on.'

I thought I'd better do that. Target attraction is a fairly common phenomenon in most physical disciplines and if I let him go on staring at the bridge of my nose long enough he might easily lose his control.

It happens to military pilots on exercise, especially with dive-bombers: they home in on the target with such concentration that sometimes they become hypnotized and can't pull out. I wondered if the Strikers were always on dummy-gunning trips when they went straight in: but someone would have thought of that already.

His friend moved the Opel and doused the lights and we were sitting in reflected glare from the wall now that my own were on.

We listened to his footsteps coming back. If there had been a chance it was over now. The advantage had been that they didn't expect me to try anything while he was busy with the Opel. They both had faith in the gun even though there was only one of them with me. The main disadvantage had been the springs of the driving-seat: it would have needed an inflexible base for the body so that sudden movement wouldn't be shock-absorbed, giving the equivalent of a pulled punch.

'Good,' the man behind me said.

I knew he'd been watching me in the mirror but I didn't know he was so skilled: he understood that however poker-faced I was, the decision to move fast and suddenly would have shown in my eyes a tenth-second before the muscles were given the order; and in that tenth-second he would have tightened his finger.

'You're jumpy,' I said. 'You need more sugar.'

'I do what I can,' he said, and bit off another piece of marzipan.

His friend climbed in and said: 'Drive carefully.'

I put off the headlights and backed into the main street 'Ernst-August-Platz.'

'Where's that?'

'Go left just here.'

Halfway along Georgstrasse the one with fan-teeth said:

'Switch off your headlights.'

'I did.'

'Yes, but then you switched them on again.'

That was silly of me.'

'Yes.'

They'd seen people flashing me. I'd been hoping a patrol-car would decide to pull me up about it and ask to see my papers.

'Make for Sudstadt now.'

The only other chance before we got there was when we were held up at some lights at the Stadtbibliothek. A policeman was hanging around. The exercise was easy enough: clip the wing of the car alongside and cause a jam and bring him across to deal with me. But I didn't trust them: they were pure German and therefore law-respecting but they or their group had finished Lovett and they might finish me with one in the spine and get out and run clear before a policeman could reach his holster. They might even chance a running duel in the street: the police sometimes open fire on running men and the papers usually call them 'gangsters' but now and then they're not gangsters at all; they're men caught in a bad spot somewhere between a high-level attempt to sabotage a summit meeting and the mechanics of the opposition lined-up against the idea. Men like these.

Turn right in the square.'

We began heading for one of the main industrial sections. There were some lights on in the Sprengel chocolate factory and the three-quarter moon silvered the parapets and sparked on the glass.

One of them spoke quietly and the wet guttural laugh came again.

'Through the gates just here.'

I had to put the heads on. There were no lamps anywhere and the shadows flickered across the piled wreckage as we turned. They were stacked six-high: Volkswagen, Mercedes, Opel, Taunus, patches of rust-red and smoke-black, smashed glass and twisted axles and burst panelling. They'd been craned into orderly blocks with alleys between them.

'Stop.'

I put out the lights as if by habit because if there was anything to be done I wanted to start accommodating visually as soon as I could.

'Stay where you are.'

They got out and I sat waiting. I hadn't been brought here to talk, to be made to talk. It wasn't a rendezvous with anyone else. They must have meant what they said: I was to be beaten up and left incapacitated. In the flat light of the moon the wreckage looked like blocks of sculpting, monuments to the dead and the injured. The glass of a headlamp caught the light, an ever-burning flame. Did they assume I didn't know anything worth talking about, worth being made to talk about? They were right. The mission was in its first stage and all I knew so far was that it was a long drop from the fourth floor of the Carlsberg and that there was a girl in Hanover with too much pride to drink any vodka. The alleys between the blocks of wreckage were quite wide, the width of a mobile crane, and a running man would have to zig-zag like a forest hare: it wasn't much better than open ground. Whereas Lovett had known a lot: he'd even known there was one due to come down in the Westheim-Pfelberg-Nohlmundt area and they'd had to make him forget.

The shadow of a hat was across the windscreen, a respectable trilby. They were standing still and listening to make sure no one would hear anything when they did it.

The shadow moved, sliding across the glass.

'You can get out of the car now.'

A little ball of silver paper flashed away and bounced.

He had a black rubber cosh in his hand, which I was expecting because it is the perfect instrument for paralysing the main joints with very little effort. The. other one was standing back with the Walther P38 trained on the driving-door. It was a cold night and we'd been travelling with the windows shut and the smell of almonds inside the car was sickly.

'Come along, now. Get out.'

Apart from the special tactics they show you at the Box of Squibs in Norfolk there are the routine exercises that most people know. The handbook is written in Basic Civil-Service and this chapter is headed: Taking Leave of a Stationary Vehicle While Under Menace of Fire-Arms. But the actual idea is sensible and can work if you're very quick so I leaned over and hit the handles of both doors at the same time and jack-knifed with my feet against the driving-door and kicked so hard that the door's inertia helped to send me backwards and out through the other side before it swung against them explosively and put them off their guard for several fractions of a second. Some people say you should leave the door shut while you go pitching out of the other one so that it makes a bullet-shield and there's a lot of point in that but for one thing they can shoo i through the window and for another thing the Norfolk Instructions are based on psychological rather than physical factors and the chief of these is the use of surprise.

They'd expected me to emerge past a slowly opened door and in fact I was moving hard in the opposite direction and the door was bursting open against the hinge-stop with a lot of noise and up to a point it worked because the first two shots went into the seats and the third rang somewhere among the wreckage in front of me as I hunched over and started the zig-zag with my hands hitting out at the stuff on each side of the alley to help the momentum while the fourth hooked at my coat and the fifth smashed some glass near my head. He was playing it the best way, keeping still and taking steady aim instead of coming after me and firing wild. Another thing that worried me was that they had a gun each and it was no good counting on the basic limitations of the P38: it's a 9-mm Luger with eight shots and so far he'd only used five but there was a near-synchronized double report now as the other one started up.

They were anxious by this time because I could hear them following but the moonlight was a help to me and a hazard to them: I wasn't doing anything that called for precision. All they'd done so far was to put one into the flesh, upper forearm. My left hand was sticky but only through hitting at the wreckage which had a lot of torn metal among it. I saw a blob on the ground and scooped it backwards and heard it smash against metal — it was a headlamp from one of the wrecks and it hadn't caught anyone in the face but it might have and you've got to try everything because people who get into a mortal situation and don't try everything are selling themselves short and that's what a lot of them die of.

One was closer to me than the other. It would be the one with fan-teeth. He was thinner. He was running faster. Barbed wire, a sweep of headlights somewhere on the other side, a lamp as high as the moon: they were all I knew. And his pelting footsteps behind. I span at right-angles along the edge of the dump, along the barbed wire, trapped in the hare-track of the dump and the wire, my shadow flickering beside me, thrown by the tall lamp, beside me and slightly ahead of me across the sculpted facade of the wrecks, then he fired again and the bullet struck and droned on, deflected and struck again and rattled among the black metal carcasses-where I ran.

An irrelevant consideration (human pride) was trying to get my attention, make me stop and swing round and go at them, but it was dangerous and the instincts knew it and went on pushing me forward. You don't need Norfolk Instructions to tell you: never run into a gun.

Only one of them now. The thin one. His friend had stopped. He would be waiting somewhere at the other side of the dump to pick me off with a close calculated shot as soon as I came into range. It was no good going down there. The tall lamp swung as I turned again, then the instincts took over completely.

Their reasoning was sound: it was a geometrical certainty that if I stayed in the maze of the wrecks I would catch a bullet in the spine or the face sooner or later, a second from now or a minute from now. The thin one wasn't firing as often as he should be: he had become a beater and he was trying to flush me straight into the other one's gun. He would do that, would be bound to do it, as long as I went on running.

Headlights swept the wire again and I saw that it was close-rigged: four or five strands with six-inch gaps. The posts were angle-iron cut sharp at the top so I put one hand on the wire itself as near as I could to a post and went over the top with a shoe fouling and the wire dipping till I let go and dropped and tried to run and couldn't; my coat was caught by more than one barb and wrenching was no good and somewhere on the edge of the vision-field I noticed the flash as he fired again and came running on but you can get a coat off quickly if a lot depends on it and I was running again, running hard, my feet on the flat surface of tarmac.

The headlights were Blinding but not too close. It was a vacuum horn, the kind that big trucks have. The tyres began dragging.

Perhaps the thin one followed because he had only two shots left in the magazine or because my coat across the wire made it easy for him. But he must have been frightened, to take no heed at all. The orders were to beat me up, to kill me only if I gave trouble. There would be nothing in the orders to countenance my getting free. So he must have been frightened of them, the controllers, to do so desperate a thing.

Or it was simple misjudgement. I knew there was time and I was clear across the road and lurching among frosted mole-hills when the big horn boomed again. Then there was the other sound, of something soft being hit, and I slowed my run, relaxing.