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.
Because they were the enemy. In war, even in war, when death is the object of all human enterprise, there are small acts of chivalry when a man, being gentle in himself despite the orders to kill, performs a gentlemanly deed and redeems by a little the monstrous stupidity of his kind. But the soldier is not alone. He has the brotherhood in arms of a whole regiment behind him, and be they nowhere near at hand they are in his mind.
We are alone. We are committed to the tenets of individual combat and there is no help for him who falls. Save a life and we save a man who will later watch us through the cross-hairs and squeeze the trigger if he gets the orders or the chance. It's no go.
The car burned and the man screamed and I sat watching.
We are not gentlemen.
That was the first of the small signs that we were in business. The second manifested itself not long after dawn the next morning. It was nearer home.
The light in the Schonerlinde-strasse was pale grey. Mist covered the airfield, rising from earth sodden from the thaw. There had been no aircraft movement for the last two hours: I had woken at half-past five and there had been silence from Tempelhof. The beacon was still flashing, its rays becoming fainter on the ceiling as the daylight strengthened.
I'd been thinking about Inga, and realised it, and threw her out of my thoughts. The living mustn't haunt; the dead were quite enough.
But I would try to see Rothstein. She had mentioned him.
The air in the room was cold, like metal against the face. I shut the window, and saw the second small sign. It was a twin glint. The street was empty but for a cruising taxi and I remembered I must take care today: they'd missed their target against that wall and might be waiting to do a better job for their vanity's sake. (Had it been meant for her, that time, or me? I still wasn't sure. Another thing Phoenix might be no better integrated than any other big organisation, and the right hand in big organisations doesn't always know what the left hand's doing. Top orders were to keep me on ice, or I'd have been dead by now; but some thick-ear minion with a stolen taxi might be out for blood on his own account or even for revenge because of the man who'd screamed.
The taxi turned the corner and the street fell quiet again but for the bang of my window. The twin glint had been framed by a window opposite. It doesn't matter how far back you stand in a room; a stray reflection may sometimes be caught across the fieldglass lens. It might have been the bright roof of the taxi. There is always something you can do about being followed: you can flush the tag once you have seen him. There is nothing you can do about being watched. You can draw the curtains but that won't help you when you go down the steps into the street.
I dressed, listening to the radio. The morning Bourse announcement gave only the call-sign: QFT and a gibberish of figures. There was a seven o'clock special delivery to Eurosound because they ran three quiz programmes a week and an audience research team, and certain schedules were dependent on the mail. So our man would have just got my letter and they'd decided on a pained silence in answer to my bleat.