The route led past a stretch of the Wall that I always tried to avoid, but tonight it was quicker for me to go that way. On the pavement below the Wall there were wreaths and dead flowers, because at this point there was a cemetery on the other side, and people tried to throw their tributes over in remembrance of dead relatives in the Eastern Zone.
Passing the place, my sense of oppression increased and I had to make a deliberate effort not to think about Solly, and the look of surprise that he had died with. He had heard my shout, and the bunch of keys had just missed his face, so that he had died surprised, not hearing the shot. With a breech-pressure of twenty tons per square inch a rifle bullet travels faster than sound. It had drilled his head.
Southwards through Kreuzberg I checked the mirror, saw nothing, and re-checked, and finally got bored. It didn't matter if there was a tag. The game had passed beyond that stage.
On my right stood the Schinkel Monument, floodlit, dominating the city, a shining beacon in the night. What did it say? This is Berlin. Where and what was Berlin? The capital of a some-time hell on earth, split by a wall and writhing, as a cut worm writhes.
A set of lights changed to red, to green, to red again, and I hadn't moved off on the green. Some bastard was blaring behind me with his horn. Too tired to get out and bash him. Green again. Shove off. Automaton. Birds are winged things, men are wheeled things.
The street ran straight, a bright rainbow running to the black of sky. The buildings leaned back for me and then closed in again. Brakes. Nearly hit a taxi. Foot too heavy on the throttle, going too fast. Slow. Something wrong. Pull up. Breather. People on the pavement.
A man with a quiet face opened the driving-door and looked down at me and said: " Shift over." I tried to lift my hand to push him away but there was no strength left.
"Wha'?" I asked him stupidly.
"Shift over. I'll drive."
I dragged my leaden body across to the other seat. Obedience. Worst sin of modern man, obedience.
He got in and slammed the door, pulling into the traffic-stream. I sat with my chin on my chest. Last remembered thought: hypodermic.
11: OKTOBER
Her skin was the shade and texture of a wax rose, quite flawless, and her hair fell across her naked shoulder in blond rivulets. Her regard was innocent, the eyes wide and frankly-gazing, too young to have learned that you must sometimes glance away. She leaned across the white chair without coquettishness, insouciance, her small breasts barbed with nipples of carmine, her thighs heavy with pubic hair.
The ant cleaned its antennae.
The light in the room came from a great Daum chandelier, and burned on the gold of the frame. It was no good thinking in terms of taste. She was there for raping. They might just as well have hung a whore on the wall. There was no signature, but the painter had been a German, a true-blue Prussian-born hypocritical bloody Aryan. You portray the face as symbolising purity – the flawless skin, the innocent gaze, the little-girl look – and then you go to town on the tits and pussy, symbolising carnality till it moans. Result you have a picture you can give to your own mother-in-law for hanging in the needle-room, and she'll always think you've come to admire her petit point.
Hypocrisy. Schizophrenia. They've always been like it. That's why you've got to talk about Beethoven and Belsen in the same breath. You can't think of one without the other.
If you kick over an ant-hill the first thing they do is to stop and clean their antennae with a foreleg. In their panic they resort at once to habit, to deceive themselves that everything is really all right and the sky hasn't fallen down. The human species is a little that way inclined. Tea in the Blitz.
Regaining consciousness in the confines of a trap, I had controlled primitive brain-panic by resorting to a habit, and criticising the picture, as if it had been in a cosy gallery along the Kurfurstendamm. But it was no go. You couldn't look at that split-minded perpetration without knowing precisely where you were. Deep in the heart of Deutschland.
The room was large, lofty-ceilinged, and encrusted with Baroque marble, gilt, silk and ormolu. Traceries, mouldings, coquillage and arabesque, brocade and parquetry – there was nowhere for the eye to rest. Hermann Goering would have rolled in here like a pig in clover. No, you couldn't get away from where you were.
The movement of my head had left no dizziness. I had expected to wake from the equivalent of a low sleep-curve, groggy and disorientated; but the drug had no after-effects. I was sitting in a silk brocade chair with a cushion behind my head, facing the length of the room at whose far end was a pair of white-and-gold doors. I felt like a minor monarch about to grant privy audience. They did you well here.
My watch read 9.01. Less than an hour since they'd snatched me. They'd followed me away from the Z Bureau, knowing I would pull in somewhere when the drug took effect. No rough stuff, nothing embarrassing.
There were four men in my audience-chamber. One against the doors, one standing with his back to the monstrous Rasputin Quinze fireplace, one staring out of the window, and one coming quietly towards my chair.
"Excuse me," he said in Heidelberg German, and lifted one of my eyelids. He had seen my movements.
I asked him: "How am I?"
He stood back with a faint and charming smile. Elegantly dressed, crisp white hair, two gold rings, a quiet and melodious tone. "You are very well."
Everyone began moving. The man by the window went down the room to the doors and the man there took a pace to one side. They were taking up positions. They were the guards. The man by the fireplace came to join the doctor. I looked up into his face and knew that if I got out of here alive it would be on his terms.
"I am Oktober," he said.
And the mirage dissolved, and all the silk and arabesque and ormolu were gone, and I sat here in a cell. Even the air had gone chill.
I bowed my head. "Quiller," I said.
His eyes were rivets in a face like a steel trap that clanged when the mouth opened and shut. "You may talk."
I took an instant to weigh up the moves. They had a doctor here. I knew what that meant. But there was a computer in operation inside the steel trap. The material was human, therefore it must be handled in human terms. It was invited to talk.
"How are the Z-polizei," I asked. "Back on the job?"
"They were injected with a neutral fluid."
"It was rather elaborate."
"It was efficient. We didn't want you to give any trouble."
The doctor had moved away. It wasn't his turn. The chill of the air reached my spine.
"And you didn't want me to get hurt. Yet."
"No."
"Then why did you try to crush me against that wall?"
A light gleamed in the eyes and went out. "It was a mistake."
In big organisations the right hand doesn't always know what the left hand is doing. I wondered what had happened to the wildcat operator who had jumped orders and gone for me against that wall. As a guess he was now hanged, drawn, quartered, cut piecemeal, canned, and on a shelf in the supermarket labelled Cat-Food.