"A few? Out of three million five hundred thousand done to death at this single camp? A few?"
The young prosecutor was drinking water again. Three times they'd refilled the glass jug. He drank in gulps, breathing as if he'd been running hard. All the time he drank he didn't take his eyes from the accused.
I watched the spectators, but there was no one I could recognise. Sometimes these people, just as with ordinary man people, returned to the scene of their crime, re-enacted in these places by verbal witness and film projected on to the roll-up screens. I'd got five of them that way.
But it was the one man I wanted now, out of all this city. Zossen. Of the many faces in my memory I could recall only a dozen that I'd seen in that man's company; of that dozen, none were here.
Dark came before the session was ended. I waited my turn at the doors. People left this place looking drugged, as if awakening from a nightmare under anaesthesia. I new that three of the lay jury were under the constant observation of their doctors to avert a breakdown before the trial ended.
They shuffled into the vault of the main hall. The girl in the black fur hat was ahead of me. The big doors were fastened wide open, framing a rainbow of colours on the snowy street. The air tasted of metal in the mouth. I began walking. The others had nearly all turned in the other direction because they made for the inter-urban stop. There were only three people anywhere near me: a man signalling a taxi, a man going into the pharmacy next to the hall we had left, and the girl in the fur hat.
Directly facing the steps of the Neustadthalle is a narrow street forming a T-section with the Wittenau-strasse, along which I was walking. There are no standards for the lamps at this place: they're suspended from overhead cables. There is a stretch of blank wall for twenty yards, concealing a cemetery.
They missed.
The car came from the narrow street and swung in a curve to smash the rear end against the wall so close that brick-dust stung my face as I threw myself clear and fell, rolling at once to get my prone body in line with the car feet first in case they risked the sound of a shot. None came. I heard the diminishing exhaust-note and the strange wailing of the girl. I got up and found her in an odd crouch against the wall, shivering and staring at the distant car. I hadn't troubled to get the number: it would have false plates.
I called in German: "Are you hurt?"
There was no telling what she was saying; it sounded like soft cursing; she stared after the car; she didn't even hear me. There was no snow on her coat; she hadn't fallen. A great gouge ran along the wall and brickdust and chippings coloured the snow.
No one had come up. You heard it all the time in this weather, cars coming unstuck. This one had slid of course or it would have been dead on target, to pin me and drag me along the wall like a paintbrush dipped in red. The operation needed judgment but was easier than it looked. I'd done it with sandbags in training, because we were required to know the mechanics of it in case we were ever the target. It went: get up speed as far away as feasible, then slip the clutch with the gear still in low and go in silently, freewheeling until you're lined up at ten or fifteen degrees with the wall and a few yards to the rear of target. Then clutch in and gun up hard to get the back end round in a power-slide that brings the target between the rear wing and the wall. Keep the foot down and get clear.
I'd burst four sandbags out of five. It wasn't the training that saved me, but the snow.
She had said something intelligible.
"What?" I asked.
"They were trying to kill me," she said. She spoke brittle Berliner German. I assumed that normally her voice would be less harsh than now.
"Really?" I said. She was walking half-running along the pavement. She obviously hadn't meant to say that. When I caught up with her she swung round like a slim blonde tiger and stood her ground. A man sized us up and said:
"Can I help you, Fraulein?"
She didn't look at him, but stared at me. "No." The man went away. She faced me with a cat's undivertibility.
"I'm not one of them, Fraulein Windsor." We both stood perfectly still.
"Who are you?"
"Not one of them."
"Leave me alone." The pupils still almost filled the blue, dilated in anger.
"Would you care for me to call a cab?" She hadn't taken ' Windsor ' but I persisted because she was shocked and might not have got it.
"I'll walk." No go with the C-group either. It was a thin bid anyway: the bastards had been after me all right but she believed they'd been after her, which could mean that she was with the Bureau. She wasn't, because she didn't respond. The Z Commission used several women; she might be one of them.
She was backing from me, hands in the pockets of her military-style coat. Before she could slip me I took a long shot. "They had no more luck this time than the last, did they?"
She stood still again, eyes narrow. "Who are you?
It had come off. They'd tried before. The first time they try, you don't always realise it, especially if it's meant to look like an accident. The second time, you get that certain feeling. She had it now.
"Let's have a drink," I said. "Get the brickdust out of our mouths." I didn't say it in my best German because a strong English accent would help to disarm her; that car was Nazi, because it had tried to kill me; she must know it was Nazi because she believed it had tried to kill her; there couldn't be many Nazis with an English accent as natural as mine. She said:
"What is your name?"
"You wouldn't know it. There's a bar over there."
She had great powers of stillness. Her eyes didn't blink once. When she had finished inspecting me she said
"We shall talk where it's safe, at my flat."
Twice on the way she pressed herself into a shop entrance when she heard a car come close and each time I walked on, because if they were going to try again I didn't want her to be too near me; each time, I turned to watch the car in case it was necessary to jump clear.
It was a mile to her flat and I busied myself with the question all the time: how had they got on to me so soon? The answers weren't satisfactory, any of them. They might have suspected me because of my cover men, who were less concerned with keeping out of sight than with watching me and anyone who came near me. They might even have known that I was due out of here on the London plane today, and decided that if I were going to stay I wasn't going to stay alive.
They might have seen me going into the Neustadthalle here in Berlin this morning instead of flying to the court in Hanover as usual, and decided that I was showing up in too many wrong places. One thing I knew I hadn't been followed anywhere. I know when I'm being followed.
The interesting thing was that unless that car had been simply an isolated murder-patrol out for a killing to keep its hand in, the orders to get me had come from on high. So I wasn't going to have to stick my neck out to draw their fire: it was already drawn. Within twenty-four hours of my decision to hunt Zossen, Zossen was hunting me.