I woke naturally at the top of a late sleep-curve and thought at once of her lean shoulders and the way she stood, because she'd been the last image of consciousness, quite unbidden.
There'd been a black panther in a dream, already fading. I beat around but couldn't bring it any clearer. It was too late. Dreams are gone in the first few seconds of waking, like ghosts at cock-crow. But she'd been there all right, a dark succuba.
Progress had been made in more practical directions. Before sleep I'd fed in the problem and by morning it was resolved. Decision: action this day.
I had assumed too much, and it had put me into a false position. I had assumed that the car had been out to crush me, and not the Lindt girl. I had assumed that the man who had begun tagging me along the Unter den Eichen was an adverse party: and I'd been wrong. I could have been wrong about the crush attempt too. They might not have been after me at all. They might not even know of my existence. My position would be false if I went on believing necessarily that while I hunted Zossen he hunted me.
So I still had to draw his fire. If they were already on to me, they'd stick, so I couldn't lose by taking action. I had to get where they wanted me, and hope to survive long enough for the overkill.
I was at the West Berlin Public Prosecutor's office before ten o'clock with a file on three suspects and a different set of papers showing me to be working in liaison with the Z Commission – which indeed I was. For six months I'd operated in strict hush; now I would head across open ground so that Phoenix could see me.
"We knew nothing about these three people." Herr Ebert said plaintively.
"You do now, Herr Generalstaatsanwalt."
He nodded ponderously; his head was like a great smooth stone balanced upon another. I had checked his dossier months ago because I'd been working through his office indirectly, unknown to him, merely sending in the evidence as I gathered it and leaving him to pass on the orders of arrest to the Z-polizei. He was a Socialist and a Resistance veteran with a record of escapes from concentration camps equalled by few. The political cartoonist Federmann had pictured him with his huge arms carrying a Jewish child through the mud of littered swastikas, and the original sketch was framed on the wall above him. Invoking enemies by the hundreds as he applied himself to ridding the German cupboards of their skeletons, he wished it to be known that of all the officials firmly astride the fence with a foot dabbling nervously on each side, he was not one.
I waited for twenty minutes while he rocked heavily in his chair reading my files. The evidence against these three men had been gathered during the last week and I'd meant to hand it over to my successor to give him a good start. Now I would use it myself.
"This is very detailed, Herr Quiller."
"Yes."
"Your sources are obviously authentic. You must have worked very hard." He gazed at me from beneath pink-and-blond eyebrows. He wanted to know how I'd dug up all this without his ever having heard of me.
"You set a good example, Herr Generalstaatsanwalt."
His face remained bland. He let it go. Neither of us had time to play poker. "These are cases for immediate arrest."
"Yes."
"You'll perhaps give me the addresses where these men can be found."
"If you'll signal the Z polizei I'll go with them."
"That isn't necessary."
"No."
"But you wish to be in at the kill."
"Put it that way."
"I will arrange it." He lifted a phone.
It's always rather cosy when you are forced to do something you want to do but shouldn't. I shouldn't have allowed myself to be present at the coming arrests, because it was an indulgence: it would be a sadistic pleasure to watch the faces of these three men in their moment of Nemesis, because I had last seen one of them – Rauschnig – inspecting a parade of young Jewish girls sent to him for ‘special treatment’ at Dachau. They had been lined up naked against the wall of a corridor and he had selected ten of them for medical experimentation. I didn't know what had happened to them but I knew that their death wouldn't have been easy.
I had never met the other two – Foegl and Schrader – but from the evidence in the file they had excelled Dr. Rauschnig in acts of inhumanity. Therefore I would take pleasure in seeing their faces on this, the last day of their freedom.
This corrosive emotion would be out of place in the pursuit of an intellectual exercise; it wouldn't do me or anyone any good; but it would be incidental to my main purpose in going along with the Z-polizei. By the time the third arrest had been made, at my instigation and in my presence, Phoenix would be on my track. That was the end of the means.
"A car will collect you in fifteen minutes, Herr Quiller." He gave me a signature for the receipt of the files. "Perhaps I shall have the pleasure of seeing you here again?"
"All going well, Herr Generalstaatsanwalt, I guarantee it.
The scbonheitssalon was in the Marienfelder-platz and the three of us went through the doors together. The police-captain and his sergeant were both armed but in civilian clothes. A screen of wrought filigree-work intertwined with climbing flowers divided the little individual cubicles from the waiting-room. We were invited to sit and remained standing. A fountain played in a pink marble basin the shape of a shell and there were tiny tropical fish gliding in it. Pink gossamer curtains draped the walls and the lighting was shed from the centres of gilt sunbursts in the ceiling. The air was perfumed. A slender Venus stood in a softly-illuminated niche, girdled with the gold riband of the Herr-direktor's diploma from the 1964 Exposition de Paris des Arts Esthitiques.
The receptionist came back: a heavy-bodied young madchen with jungle eyes. The Herr-direktor must oblige us to await him a further half an hour, since he was in the middle of a delicate treatment and (the eyes dilated) the client was a baroness. The hem of her pink Grecian tunic swung as she turned away.
The police-captain knew better than to trump this by presenting his credentials. The place would have more than one exit. I followed him with the sergeant through the low gilded gate.
Dr. Rauschnig was in the first cubicle. His face was plumper than when I'd last seen it but I recognised him and nodded to the captain.
"Your name is Julius Rauschnig?"
Shocked at the intrusion, he declared his name to be Dr. Liebenfels. He had never heard of Rauschnig. The captain produced a photograph taken of Rauschnig in 1945 in the U.S. Army liberation sector, Dutch frontier. The photograph had been nameless-on-file in the Z Commission archives and I had picked it out for them this morning before corning here.
The woman on the treatment-couch bent her neck and peered at us with two affronted eyes in a half-applied mud-pack. Then I turned my back because I didn't want to look any more at the face of Rauschnig. Corrosive emotions no go.
His voice was bad enough to listen to. The harder it pretended indignation the more it shook.
"I assure you that you are mistaken!" So on. "It is very harmful to the delicate facial tissues of the baroness if the treatment is interrupted!" So forth. But I caught sight of one of his hands as it gesticulated, and the corrosion set in. Because a face is not active: it is only the shape of a name. It is the hand that acts. And these soft white hands that had been tenderly ministering to this woman's vanity, touching her withered face as if it were a flower in pretence that he could restore the bloom of youth, had once been laid upon the faces and the bodies of girls in Dachau as urgently as a beast claws meat.