It took twenty minutes to locate Dr. Solomon Rothstein in the new-subscriber addendum of the directory. I hadn't meant to see him right away because I would be in Berlin another month; but it would be more difficult later when they closed in on me and we were at grips. I didn't want him harmed, after all that had gone before.
Then I went down the steps into the street.
It may have been subliminal fear that had kept me so long at the directory. The id, alarmed by the plans of the ego (to go down those steps), had put up defences, tricking me into missing the name the first time and leading me into a series of delaying errors, hoping that we might call the whole thing off. No go. I had made up my mind to see Rothstein, and that meant the steps. The only other exits from the hotel were via the kitchens and the main fire-escape. Neither could be used unless I was in trouble.
There were seven steps. They had been swept free of the melted snow and sand had been laid. It was gritty beneath my shoes. After the first two steps I was fully exposed to that window across the street, and my breath came short, involuntarily. It happens when you wade into cold water it catches your breath but you wade on deeper and deeper because you know the feeling will pass. You know that it's only the cold.
They are only field-glasses.
With luck. But look what happened to Kenneth Lindsay Jones. Five steps, six, seven. Too late now for them to do anything even if they wanted to because I was moving at right-angles along the pavement and they would have fired direct into me on the steps if they'd meant to. The street seemed achingly silent in contrast with what my ears had been listening to subconsciously: the shot.
I was annoyed with myself. There wasn't a president of any republic in the world who didn't have to walk through that kind of risk whenever he showed himself in the open. I was annoyed more by my admission of the fear than by the simple fact of its existence. It is always present, all the time; without it we should all die young. But I was thinking about it, consciously, and I didn't like that. Six months' hard in strict hush had left the nerves exposed.
There was sweat on me before I turned into the gates to the lock-ups and I thought: You poor bastard, you're getting old.
The Volkswagen ran through flooded streets. Rothstein had a laboratory in the Zehlendorf district, on the top floor of a building in the Potsdamer-strasse. He was alone when I called, and for an instant he didn't recognise me. Then his eyes changed.
"Quill…" He took both my hands.
"Hallo, Solly."
We'd met in Auschwitz and had seen each other only once since then, almost by chance, with no time to ask of our affairs. So this was the third meeting and I was always to remember it, because if I had not called on him that day he might have lived.
9: THE KILL
"It was a long time," said Solly in English.
"Yes."
He didn't mean since our chance meeting in Munich three years ago, but since Auschwitz.
The day I first met him we got seventeen out and only four of them touched the high-voltage wire. The rest lived and were alive now, as far as I would ever know. Solly was one of them. He joined us afterwards. At that time I had linked up with three men: A Berliner Jew, a Pole and a Dane. Before linking with anyone I had worked solo for three years and my bag was some ninety-seven souls. After linking and forming a team we got more than two hundred out before the liberation of the south camps.
Most of that time I was working as a low-intelligence pure Aryan camp guard, ex-seaman, with an uncle in Himmler's Einratzgruppen hierarchy. I used to curse Churchill with such versatility that they made me do it on the stage once as part of the act when they ran a variety-show the night before the gas-chambers were ceremonially opened. I went over big. We got seven out that same night, because we'd been told that the capacity of the new gas-chambers was estimated at two thousand per day and the camp commandant got drunk to celebrate, and most of his officers got drunk too. We didn't. Seven out of two thousand seemed so little.
Solly and I went back to Auschwitz after it was over, and showed the Allied troops where we'd cemented over a hole in the wall of the punishment block to conceal the records we'd been making for three or four months. The evidence hanged nine SS officers and fourteen guards, but we didn't have a drink on that either; all the time we were collecting the evidence it had seemed important, but later we saw it wasn't. It had simply helped to keep our spirits going, to scratch the face of Satan.
Solly hadn't changed much in twenty years. His face had changed – we'd been young men then, but his spirit was still the same. You would call him the gentlest of men, and so he was, unless made angry. He was possessed of an anger that didn't show; it was as calm as the undetonated elements of a bomb.
I could sense the dormant anger in him now, and knew that he would never be at peace.
"I heard last night that you were in Berlin," I said.
"And you come to see me at once. How good that was of you!"
You can go through the fires of hell itself with a man and have nothing to say when you meet him again, unless it's ‘And do you remember old So-and-so?’ There was no one we wanted to remember.
"What are you doing in Berlin?" he asked me, and we talked like that for a while. We were alone in his office but we could see the heads of two men, his assistants working in the laboratory. The partition had a glass panel.
"Is it still bugs, Solly?"
"Oh, yes!" He smiled, for he had a thousand million children whom he loved. When we had chanced to meet, in Munich, he was a member of the international convention of bacteriologists who were gathered there to discuss some proposal or other about germ-warfare. It wasn't in my line, but he was an accepted authority. "The University of Cologne gives me a grant of money," he said, "so I have my own laboratory!"
"Congratulations. Frankly it gives me the creeps." There were control-canisters crawling with moulds and cultures all over his office. He talked about some of his work and interrupted himself often, gazing at me in a kind of hellish rapture. More than once he cocked his head up and peered through the glass partition and then turned to me as if he were on the brink of some vital confidence. Then his eyes dulled and I could see the control he had clamped down on his impulse to confide. It was then that he looked as I had seen him when they had separated the men from the women as they were driven down the ramps from the trucks. When they had dragged his young wife from him he had stood like this, his eyes dull in a kind of passing death.
After a time he stopped telling me about his work, and there was nothing else to say and we knew it.
"Where are you staying?" he asked me. "We must meet again!" I told him and he said: "The Prinz Johan? That is expensive!"
"I never sleep in cheap hotels in Germany. "I don't know why I said it: just a thought-flash. At Ravensbruck they had always cut the hair from the women before gassing them, and the hair was steamed and baled for transport to the mattress-factories. The best hotels in Germany have foam-rubber.
"We will meet again, then!" he said when he saw that I wanted to go. I said yes, we certainly would; but we didn't make a date.
Back in the street I wished I'd never called on Solly Rothstein. Did he, up there with his bugs, wish I had never called? I'd left him frustrated: there had been something vital he'd been burning to tell me, and couldn't. There was the feeling in me that I wouldn't want to know.