She knew that I wondered about her, and teased me, using her body as she moved in the light and shadow cast by the Chinese-moon lamp, displaying its moods of poise, rhythm, tension and repose, miming an animal and begetting images whose shapes we shared, hideous and comical according to caprice, so that I was at once repulsed and bespelled. She was a houri at the court of Thanatos, and had learned her darkness in the Fuhrerbunker, just as I had learned mine among the legions of the damned. This was our touch-stone and we both knew it.
When I left her we had not even kissed; we had done more and less than that. Inga. Her name rang in me.
The streets were deserted and the gutters arush with the thaw, and my trudging footsteps echoed among the buildings. A moon was out, scything the dark clouds. The colours of the neon signs ran melting over wet stones, and the Kreuzberg floated like a green island in the sky.
The Volkswagen was still where I'd left it in the Hohenzollern-platz and I checked the door-handles and key-slot with my bare fingers for nicks in their metal. The match I had rigged inside the driving-door hinge fell away. The car hadn't been touched.
I started up and headed south through Steglitz, checked the car behind, turned right, re-checked, turned right-left-right, re-checked and added up the score. This was: it hadn't been touched but it had been watched. They'd tagged me from the Hotel Prinz Johan to Wilmersdorf and let me go, waiting for me to come back. Now they were tagging again. I claim always to know when I am being followed, on foot. Flushing a tag by car is more difficult, sometimes impossible, because the traffic conditions occupy too much of the attention. Tonight I knew they were there, within the first mile of leaving the Wilmersdorf area, because the streets were empty: but they'd followed me four hours ago from the hotel to Wilmersdorf without my knowledge, because the traffic had been heavy.
It was a gunmetal-blue DKW F-102 Vierturer with the four distinctive Auto-Union rings on the rad-slats.
This then was the first of the small signs that they were closing in on me. Closing in – no more than that. They weren't after a kill or I would have been dead by this time. I was working on the assumption that they were too intelligent to kill me out of hand simply because I'd done a snatch on Rauschnig, Schrader and Foegl. Several hundred war-criminals had been herded into a dozen Federal courts since the London Agreement had triggered the hunt, and no one working for the Z Commission had been shot at. It would have led to a minor war, and it seemed to be the present policy of Phoenix to keep hush. Those lost souls – like Schrader, Rohm and a dozen others – who had taken a Pand R Mark IV or kicked a chair from under them had been put under pressure by their own kind or had just got tired of waiting for the knock on the door. Those – like Kenneth Lindsay Jones – who were killed off by the adverse party were the subject of simple murder, but they weren't killed out of hand. They were vetted first. As far as the Bureau knew, KLJ hadn't been caught and grilled before they finished him off, but then a dead man can tell his Bureau precious little. He may have been caught and grilled before the kilclass="underline" that would be their policy. Squeeze the lemon before you throw it away. Or, if he'd been smart enough to dodge them at every turn, they may have simply decided that he was getting too close for comfort and must be stopped.
But I was all right, Jack. They didn't even know I was going for Zossen. All they knew was that a strange face had suddenly turned up on the front page alongside Rauschnig's, and that I'd been in on the Schrader death and the Foegl snatch. They knew the faces of the Z-polizei very well. They didn't know mine, and they wanted to. At the moment they were watching it in a mirror at a hundred yard's range and they meant to get closer than that. More important, they wanted to know where I was going. They knew about the hotel because they'd picked me up there, so they weren't just tagging me home.
We went right, left, right and across the Innsbruckerplatz through drifts of slush. There was no point in trying to lose them because they knew where I lived, but after the brooding sex-and-Gotterdammerung claustrophobia of Inga's flat I felt like a bit of healthy-schoolboy action and decided to give them a run. It would have to be quick because we were already hitting the limit and there'd be a police-patrol mixing with us before long, and there mustn't be any publicity of that kind. One thing to get your face in a flashlight, another thing to submit to police laws and show them all your papers. Mine were so well forged that even infra-red would reveal the same fibres but I didn't want to have any personal details printed even in a back-page filler because it would involve the Red Cross. Nor has the Bureau any kind of diplomatic immunity from contravention of traffic regulations. The Bureau doesn't exist.
Slush was coming up on to the windscreen and the wipers knocked it away. We made a straight run through Steglitz and Sudende because I wanted to know if they'd now make any attempt to close right up and ram. They didn't. They just wanted to know where I was going. I'd have to think of somewhere. Their sidelamps were steady in the mirror, a pair of pale fireflies floating along the perspective of the streets. We crossed the Attila-strasse and I made a dive into Ring-strasse going south-east, then braked to bring them right behind me – and make them slow. As soon as they had I whipped through the gears and increased the gap to half a block before swinging sharp left into the Mariendorfdamm and heading north-east towards Tempelhof. Then a series of dives through back-streets that got them going in earnest. The speeds were high now and I had the advantage because I could go where I liked, whereas they had to think out my moves before I made them, and couldn't, because I didn't know them myself until the last second.
They lost me once and came up broadside-on by luck at the north end of a block, and once they hit something in a slide and the sound echoed between the walls of the narrow street. They were getting worried, certain now that I must be heading for a destination that had to be kept secret.
The mount of the Kreuzberg was ahead of us and I swerved right by Flughafen station and then back-tracked because we were getting too close to the Hotel Prinz Johan and I wanted them to keep thinking I was going somewhere else, somewhere important, before I made an all-out effort to lose them and leave them guessing.
Their lights were close behind me at the Alt-Tempelhof and Tempelhofer-damm crossing and then I saw them flick out. There was no tyre-squeal because of the slush; there were only a few long seconds of comparative silence before the sound of the crash filled the buildings like an explosion. I was placed in a slow drift for a right-angle when I heard it, and brought the nose round full-lock with the kerb for a cush. The impetus of the DKW had sent it back across the street in a ricochet and I saw it hit a parked Opel broadside-on in a smother of slush and debris. Then it took fire.
My half-spin had brought me to a halt alongside the kerb so I doused the lights and sat there. A man was screaming. The doors of the car didn't come open. I think if I'd tried I could have sprinted those thirty yards and got a door open and a man out before the flames took hold. I didn't try.