I signalled Control before reaching the Z-Bureau, using a letter-card. REQUEST EARLY SIGHT OF LAST KLJ REPORT IN ORIGINAL FORM. HOTEL ZENTRAL MARIENDORF.
Captain Stettner was alone in his office and greeted me with slight embarrassment. He was a man typical of his stock, with a strong face and clear unimaginative eyes. Let him follow a saint and he would do saintly things; put him to work with a devil and he would out-foul Satan. They are born to obey, these men, born to be led, and it's luck that elects their leader. Stettner was young, perhaps thirty, and so he was working for a liberal chancellor; it was his duty to bring in the henchmen of a long-dead maniac and to hand them to justice. Had he been fifteen years older he would have graduated from the Hitler Youth in 1939 to command an SS company pledged to genocide in the glorious name of the Fuhrer.
He said to me: "You are not sleeping well, Herr Quiller."
"I haven't the time." It wasn't lack of sleep that was showing in my face, but the strain of Oktober's succession of treatments. It irked me that it showed. "You said you were trying to contact me?"
"Yes. I'm sorry you didn't feel it necessary to give me your change of address."
"I didn't know you'd need my help."
His embarrassed air increased. "I assume our relationship to be one of mutual assistance."
No answer. I studied the clearness of his skin and the freshness of his eyes and wished I were thirty, so that whatever I went through it didn't show in my face.
"I believe you knew Dr. Solomon Rothstein well?" he asked me suddenly.
"I knew him a long time ago."
"In the war?"
"Yes."
"Would you tell me what kind of work he was doing, in the war?"
I said: "In what precise way can I mutually assist you, Herr Stettner?"
"Of course you are not obliged to answer my questions, Herr Quiller -"
"That's right. You talk and I'll listen."
He considered this and I could see the brightly-polished cogs going round inside his transparent plastic skull. He worked for the Federal Government. I worked for an intelligence service of an Occupying Power, and was therefore of a technically higher status. Therefore I called the tune. When he got it set out correctly he followed procedure and said unemotionally:
"We have been trying to break a cipher and we have so far failed. I hoped you might succeed, since you once worked with Dr. Rothstein and might remember any cipher systems he used."
I knew what had happened.
"We can't trace his brother in Argentina – Isaac Rothstein. We have now opened the canister that was found in the laboratory on the Potsdamer-strasse, after checking it for explosive with magnetic sounding. It contains a glass phial and a sheet of paper covered with cipher."
It was some time since I'd had a piece of luck. I had expected a lot of trouble in persuading them to open the container and even more trouble in persuading them to show me what was inside.
I said: "I'll have a go."
He tried not to look relieved. "We are keeping the original, and will give you an exact copy. It's unnecessary to warn you that it must not be let out of your close possession."
"I thought of offering the publication rights to Der Spiegel."
He span in his chair. "But that would be unthinkable, Herr Quiller! Surely you must realise that the very highest possible secrecy has to be… maintained…" and the wind went out of him slowly while I watched him. A wan smile came to his face. "Of course… a little joke. Of course."
He took time to recover. I asked him: "Are you thinking of opening the glass phial?"
"My superiors believe it might be very dangerous to do that. Dr. Rothstein's main work was carried out in a special laboratory behind the one that was raided, and it is sealed off with decontamination air-locks. One of his staff has been interrogated and has warned us that Dr. Rothstein was researching on certain strains of bacteria highly dangerous to man. Unless the ciphered material specifies any good reason for our opening the glass phial it will probably be put into a furnace, still sealed. "He gave me a plain grey envelope. "This is your copy, Herr Quiller. May I wish you success."
On the way to Mariendorf a small grey NSU became lodged in the driving-mirror and I led it to within a kilometre of the Hotel Zentral. I wasn't going there but I went in that direction to give the impression that I was, so that the flush would be easier: anticipating my destination, though wrongly, the tag would be unprepared for a sudden change of route. I lost him in a turning off the Rixdorfstrasse and got clear, heading for the park and running the BMW into a gap between two other cars that stood empty outside the lodge.
The decipherment might take several days. If I sat like a duck at the Zentral Hotel working on it they could come for me whenever they liked, and I didn't want to see Oktober again until I was ready. He wouldn't wait long. I knew why he'd left Inga's flat, and it wasn't because he thought he could never get me to talk. He would go on trying until one of the higher executives gave the order to kill me off as useless. Since leaving the flat last night I had been under constant observation and they'd now be worried about the two flushes of today.
If they came for me at the hotel and caught me with the Rothstein document they'd haul me in and keep me held until they'd tried to break the cipher, and if they failed they would try to break me. The Hotel Zentral was a permanent red sector now.
The park was deserted. Sleet hit the windows of the car and slid down in rivulets. The engine was still warm so I turned on the heater-fan and worked up a fug.
The single sheet was copied in typed capitals. I took a letter-card and drew the skeleton-boxing. The pale afternoon light threw water-patterns from the windows across the paper, and it seemed to be melting as I studied it.
First considerations: was this code, cipher, or an unfamiliar language? Three or four of the words indicated a cipher; two of them comprised solely the letter N and there was more than one instance of a word comprising double A. This wouldn't happen with a code, and it was unlikely that even a lost language of Asia or South America would have a double vowel as a complete word. There was a thousand-to-one risk of my spending days on this task without realising I was trying to decipher the indecipherable: a purely unknown language.
Darmha valthala-mah im jhuma, for example, is pure Rabinda-Tanath and means ‘fire-cart kills very quick’. I had put this into speech for Fabian the narcoanalyst and he imagined it to be gibberish or a foreign tongue. In writing it would still look like gibberish, or like a foreign language, or like a cipher. To propose an absurd case anyone who had never heard or seen French might take the word arbre for cipher, and if he assumed A=M, R=O, B=T, E=R, he would finish up with the word motor. Obviously he wouldn't get far because he would soon find that most of the other words were turned into gibberish by applying the same assumption. (Barre would give tmoor, which is meaningless.) But he could waste hours of time trying different assumptions (A=B, C, D, etc.) before he realised he was dealing with the indecipherable: a foreign language.