Shit!
The engines rumbled. The big wheels rolled. The truckers shouted. Then the man looked under the platform again and saw me.
25: END-PHASE
It was a long way.
A minute ago a police car had gone past the entrance to the freight yard with its lights flashing. I suppose it was one of the patrols which had gone to the scene of the bombed-out Mercedes. I didn't want any police near me.
A long way, maybe fifty metres, dragging him behind me through the litter, through the mess.
It had been an easy enough strike because he hadn't been ready for it and couldn't reach his gun. He'd given a shout as I'd pulled him down but there were shouts going on all over the place and no one took any notice. It was a 9mm Mauser and I'd emptied the magazine and scattered the bullets and wrapped the gun in some newspaper and dropped it into a crate. They're dangerous, and can hurt people.
I'd put the keys in my pocket.
He must have caught his leg on something, one of the platform supports or a splintered crate, when I'd brought him under here with me, because sometimes when I looked back I caught the glint of blood across the ground. So I turned him over and went on dragging him to the end of the row.
He was valuable. I prized him. He was the custodian of my enterprise, Quickstep. I didn't at this time dwell on the future, and what I would have to do.
Against your precious principles.
Yes.
It's nothing to do with principles. It frightens you.
If you say so.
You know it's true.
Shuddup.
I was dragging him by the wrists and it wasn't easy because I was having to move in a crouch below the platform and it was a strain on the lumbar muscles. But to get him from here to the end of the row wouldn't be the worst of it.
I felt his wrists jerk suddenly as he came to and tried to get free. I dropped him and did some minor work on the left side of the neck and then started pulling him along again.
A wrecking truck went past the gates, its lights dappling the dark with colour. They would haul the burnt-out Mercedes away, like a dead elephant. It had been a nice motorcar: I like that particular model.
And then we reached the end of the platform and I stopped work and rested a little, lying flat on my back, keeping one of his wrists in my hand so that I'd know if he tried to do anything.
Just gone five, 05:03 to be exact. Less than three hours, then, to the deadline. It wasn't long. It depended on how things went, how effective I could prove, and what kind of man he was, how strong, how weak. Three hours wouldn't be long, because I also had to locate Horst Volper and deal with him, and in time.
'Back off there! Get in the next line!'
Green uniform. Green uniform and a holstered revolver and polished hoots, peaked cap. He was directing the trucks.
Until he moved I couldn't bring my prisoner into the open. It was going to be bad enough with the other people around.
'Get in behind that one — come on!'
An engine gunning up.
I watched his boots. I watched them for ten minutes, fifteen, and listened to him shouting, telling them where to bring their vans and their pickups and flat-beds. Then a bit of trouble started in the next row, a scraping of metal, and a lot more shouting than usual. I think one of them had buckled another's wing and they were arguing the toss. The policeman went over there.
I got the man's wrists again and dragged him clear of the platform and began walking him to the gates with his arm round my shoulders and my own round his waist but his feet were dragging and it would have been easier to give him a fireman's lift but I couldn't do that because it would have looked very odd, something serious.
Headlights sweeping across the yard as the shopkeepers kept coming in. If they saw me they wouldn't do anything; this was a narrow time-gap for them — they had to get the produce through the checkers and into their shops and on display before they opened.
'What's the trouble, then?'
'He fell and banged his head.'
One of the truckers, sweating in the chill morning, his breath steaming as he stood fishing for his pack of cigarettes.
'Tell the cop, he'll get an ambulance.'
'He's not that bad,' dragging him faster, swinging him along. 'I’m getting him to the car — '
'You ought to tell the — '
'He's a friend of mine, had too much to drink — I don't want to get him in trouble.'
'That's different,' grunt of a laugh as he lit up and clicked his lighter shut, turning away.
Swinging him along, a dead weight, one of his feet getting in the way of my own, sweat on the back of my neck as I felt the cop's eyes on us — you there, what's the trouble? — don't let him turn, don't let him see us, swinging the bastard along, he would've shot me between the eyes if I hadn't been so fast, those were his instructions, his instructions from Horst Volper, come on you bastard lift your bloody feet up, come on.
'Had a skinful?'
'How did you guess?'
Face in a window of the van going by, laughing.
Crossing the street and I got the keys and let him slump against the BMW while I opened the passenger door and pushed him in, his eyes coming open but with no understanding in them. Coloured light flashing as a police patrol crawled past, pulling in to the kerb as the wrecking truck turned in from the next street, hauling the blackened shell of the Mercedes.
05:37 on the dashboard clock, the fuel gauge at half. I started up and waited until the wrecker had gone by and the police car swung in a U-turn and followed it and then I took the opposite direction, turning left at the intersection to keep clear of the police crew throwing sand on the road where the fire had been.
Heard his breath coming in a jerk as he recovered enough to realise the situation and instinctively tried to do something, lifting his foot and bringing it down as I used the edge of my hand on the knee-cap — I suppose he was trying to break the gear-lever or smash my ankle and hit the brake-pedal, something like that.
His breath was hissing now and he was holding his knee.
'Give me your name.'
Didn't answer.
Later would do, but the name is important, the key to the psyche. Our name is the most personal thing about us, a cypher for all that we are, our claim to identity. It is the first thing you do, when you begin the matter: you get their name, so that you can turn it as a weapon against them.
I drove circumspectly, slowing in good time for the lights when they changed to amber, keeping five kph below the speed limit, driving west and south and reaching the safe-house at 05:52.
Before we got out of the car I said: 'You are in my hands, as you realise, but you have a choice.'
I told him what it was.
Gunter Blum, looking down, his face white.
'Don't stand there,' I said. 'Don't just stand there like that.'
I wanted to be angry with him, for showing me what I had done, for holding up a mirror to me, to the picture of Dorian Gray. That was how it felt, how I thought of it.
'What happened?' he asked me.
I didn't answer. The light was still very bright: I'd taken the shade off and put some aluminium foil round it to intensify the glare. That too is important, another tool of this most hideous of all trades. There were smells in the room, too, none of them strong but none of them pleasant. There was no sound, except for his breathing. Dollinger's, Helmut Dollinger's breathing. It was all, one might say, that he had left: the ability to breathe.
Gunter was watching me now, his mouth open a little, his eyes naked and appalled under the fierce glare of the lamp.