"Solly," I said to him, "it was my fault." He didn't hear.
10: THE NEEDLE
I phoned the Z-polizei within ten minutes and said:
"You may like to get some men along to 193 Potsdamerstrasse, top floor, a laboratory. Make sure they're armed. I'm expecting some trouble there."
I recognised the captain's voice. He said:
"We've just sent a squad in. There was a call from there not long ago reporting a raid. Papers were taken."
"Get them back if you can. Listen, please: I have an address for you. Concierge's office, main entrance, the Mariengarten building, middle of the Schonerlinde-strasse, Tempelhof." He was repeating, so that a clerk could get it down. "The laboratory is run by Dr. Solomon Rothstein. He's just been shot dead in the street outside the Mariengarten building and I've brought him in here. Shot was fired from a window of the Schonerpalast on the other side of the street, fourth floor, seven windows from the east end of the block. Telescopic rifle. Ambulance already laid on for Dr. Rothstein. I shall be here when you come."
I left the porter in charge of the body and pushed through the crowd in the entrance, going across to the Schonerpalast and hurrying the concierge into the lift, saying "The Kriminalpolizei will be here in a few minutes and no one must go into the room until they arrive." He asked me what had happened and I just told him it was a homicide case. "I want the seventh window from the end of this corridor."
It was apartment 303. The door pushed open easily and I didn't even bother to check the hingeside gap for anyone standing behind it. The marksman would have been out of this room and this building before I had carried the body into the Mariengarten. There was nothing unusual about the room except that it was cold in contrast to the corridor. The concierge went to shut the window and I stopped him. "Don't touch anything please." There was some greaseproof paper, empty, with the word Lunchpak printed on it, on the floor by the window. An ashtray was heaped with cigarette-butts.
I looked down across the street. The ambulance was just pulling up. Two men cleared a way through the small crowd of people, one of them carrying a rolled stretcher. I told the concierge to lock the door of the room and wait for the police to come.
It was necessary for me to keep active and not think about Solly. That would come later; remorse – worse, guilt – would set in like a rot and I would never be wholly free of it. I had never counted the men I had killed during the last thirty years, nor had the thought of their dying ever concerned me. Most of them had been Nazis during the short period of the war; the rest had died because they were in the act of attempting to kill me. They had all been enemies. Solly had been a friend and I'd killed him by carelessness.
Before the setting-in of permanent remorse there would be this immediate phase of self-fury to combat, and action was the sole anodyne.
A black Mercedes was stationed behind the ambulance when I went down and crossed the road but I turned left along the pavement and went into the yard of the hotel and got out the Volkswagen, heading due west and reaching the Potsdamer-strasse inside fifteen minutes by taking the new perimeter road round the airport and playing the lights on the amber most of the way.
The captain was still at the laboratory. He had followed up the emergency-squad after my call to him. He was the Z-officer who'd been with me on the Rauschnig-Schrader-Foegl operation. His name was Stettner. He said:
"What happened to Dr. Rothstein?"
"Nothing more than I told you."
"We sent the homicide people along. Did they get your report?"
"No. They can have it later. I wanted to see this place."
The two laboratory-assistants were here, looking shaken. The raid had been quick and not too thorough: some of the culture-canisters had been knocked on to the floor and their glass was smashed. A sergeant was gathering the last of the research-files for taking away.
The pattern was clear enough. Phoenix had known Solomon Rothstein. They had suspected him of doubling with them and had said nothing. Possibly they had found out that he had been working with me in the last months before the capitulation. Certainly they had tested him within these final twenty-four hours: I knew that. And they had not only tapped my phone; they had tapped his. Then, when they heard him say that he was coming to see me, they were certain, and they went into action. There had been no one close enough to his laboratory to catch him as he left, so they'd had to pass the orders to the man in Room 303. If he hadn't already had the rifle they would have taken it to him. (But I think he already had the rifle because it might have been policy at any time to pass him an order to kill, with myself as the subject.) And even before he had reached the Schonerlinde-strasse they'd ordered the search of his laboratory, because they knew that I'd go there hoping to find out what vital thing it was that he hadn't been able to tell me.
I looked at the broken glass. Glass, broken, looks so irredeemable. It is one of the few things that we can never mend.
"Have you found anything?" I asked the captain. He was looking at me intently, and said:
"He was your friend?" So I was showing it.
I said: "Yes. Have you found anything?"
"These files. A few other papers."
"Nothing special?" I knew he was baulking me because his training had told him never to talk to strangers, even when they were sent to liaise with him by an intelligence directive.
He was still watching me. I stared him back. At last he said: "This."
It was an oblong box about fifteen by thirty centimetres, black-painted metal with two grimp seals. A strip of paper was secured along the top side with transparent tape. In the event of my death please send this container by airmail to my next-of-kin: Isaac Rothstein, 15 Calle de Flores, Las Ramblas, San Caterina, Argentine. To be opened by himself personally. S. R.
I said: " Are you going to mail it?"
"It won't be my decision but I doubt it. We shall probably send for Isaac Rothstein to come and open it in our presence." He passed the container back to the sergeant.
"We are leaving now, Herr Quiller. Do you want to make any inquiries of your own?"
"No. I'll read the report you're given by these two people when they've been fully questioned."
They drove to the Z-polizei bureau in their car; I followed in the VW. The traffic was heavy. Night had come, and the city was dining out to celebrate the thaw. I couldn't be certain there was no tag, but it wasn't important. They were closing right in on me now.
The homicide office had apparently put out a dragnet for me in the last hour and I was asked to go over there and make my report on the shooting. It took ten minutes. They read it and kept me a full hour trying to probe my background. I kept strict hush. In the end I got bored and said:
"If you can't get enough clues out of Room 303, try the Potsdamer-strasse laboratory. Try my own room at the Prinz Johan as well if you like – they'll have had the paper off the walls by now."
This appeared to interest them. "Are you returning there yourself?
"Yes."
"Then we can send someone with you."
"Why not?"
Then the phone rang and he listened a minute and passed the receiver to me. It was Captain Stettner of the Z-polizei.
"Will you please come over, Herr Quiller?"
"I've just been there."
"This is very important."
I said I would go over. The homicide man was annoyed, because his bureau and the Z-polizei were out of gear with each other. Their fields overlapped and they were constantly thrown into each other's pitch. They thus looked for every chance of making the situation worse so that sooner or later some administrative top kick would be obliged to define their provinces more clearly. People like me were useful as a ball to lob about.