The room was still and no one moved. The murmuring went on. The smell of ether was on the air, and the taint of the guard's vomit. I wasn't thinking about anything. But I must. Make an effort. Why wasn't I thinking about anything?
Because I knew.
It was the only thing they could do.
Oktober had turned and was coming towards me. He stopped and stood looking down at me. His hands were clasped behind him and the eyes had the stare of glass; and I remembered a man who had stood like this, neatly-tailored in black, his hands behind him, saying, I am due back inBrucknerwald in one hour, for luncheon. The stamp was on all of them, and it was most marked when they were about to do what this one was to do now.
He said thinly: "You have wasted my time. That is unforgivable."
I watched him turn and go down towards the line of guards. He didn't raise his voice but I heard what he was saying to them. "Schell. Braun." Two of them stepped forward. "He will be given a final injection. When he is unconscious, you will take him by car to the Grunewald Bridge, shoot him in the back of the neck, and drop him over."
13: THE BRIDGE
There was a bar still open in the Moller-strasse and I went in and sat with a rum grog, cupping my hands round the glass and watching the steam. The kellner had gone back behind the bar and looked at me over the coffee-machine for a few minutes before giving it up.
I pressed the long spoon against the slice of lemon, watching the bubbles. The scent of the rum was heady and I breathed it in. Over in the corner a couple of kids sat canoodling, and a thin man was drooped across a table by the window trying to outstare his despair. There was no one else. At this hour of a winter night the bar was a refuge for lovers and the lost, and being neither, I was the only stranger here. When it was cool enough not to scald my lips I swallowed the grog and asked for another.
The worst of the shivering had stopped. Every time it tried to set up again I damped it out and sat slack with every muscle relaxed. There was a lot to think about and my body would have to stop demanding my attention; it could count itself lucky to be alive anyway.
My soaked clothes steamed on me.
I was unconscious before they took me from the house. There had been no way of avoiding the last injection because my hands and feet were strapped to the chair. The shot took half a minute to work and I sat there watching them.
Oktober stood looking down at me. The two guards came the length of the room and halted near him, waiting for me to slump. In those thirty seconds I did all I could against the drug, knowing that if I let it win my last hope would go. The anaesthetist came round the chair and eyed me impatiently and I knew that the reaction-time must be five or ten seconds. I'd stretched it to thirty and he was worried. Then the dark came down, on a final consoling thought: there's nobody who'll miss me.
Period of total blank.
Death is black and cold and I knew I had died. The waters of Lethe lapped at my feet. But life, returning, was worse, because of the cold. It was colder than death. My face was pressed to the earth and I lifted it and saw the lights along the bridge. A few sick seconds of irrational thought: then there's a life after death and it looks just the same, so forth, then the shivers began and I lay there shaking and clawing at the earth. Inside every dying man there's a live one trying to get out.
The bullet still hurt and I couldn't turn my head. When I'd crawled far enough to get my legs out of the icy water I raised one hand and felt for the neck-wound. There wasn't one. The pain began fading, once I realised that it was imaginary. "Shoot him in the back of the neck," he'd said, and the subconscious had brooded about it, taking the word for the deed.
Short period of nausea. Lay there panting and shaking with the breath hissing against the frosted soiclass="underline" life, however cheap, comes as a gift when you think you've lost it, and the mind has to make the effort of acceptance.
Ten minutes hard thinking. I decided to go back among the living as unobtrusively as I could. They had driven me here in the VW and it stood not far off; they had run it clear of the road across the grass. I crawled along the bank of the lake, away from the car, and stood up in the shadow of the bridge. There was no point in checking the speedo-trip because I'd been too dopey to take a reading when the man had climbed in and said he would drive, and even if I'd taken a reading it wouldn't tell me anything: they could have made a detour to the house and/or a detour coming away from it. The most accurate trip-check would tell me only that the house lay within an area of a given number of square kilometres, useful enough in the Black Forest but no good in Berlin.
Tried running-on-the-spot to make warmth but found I was limping. No pain in the leg. Discovery: shoe missing. Limped under the bridge and along the bank on the other side, shaking like a marionette, hands blue in the lamplight.
The rum was spreading through me. It had saved lives at sea and it saved mine now. The kellner had stopped watching me. I'd told him I had slipped on the ice and fallen into the lake but he didn't believe me because I didn't look drunk, just half-drowned. Unfortunately he had small feet, otherwise I would have made him an offer for a pair of shoes.
After a while the shivering stopped and I began going through my pockets. Nothing was missing.
"I'd like a taxi."
He used the phone.
The driver looked wary when he saw me, and held the note against the light. I said: "It's a good one but it just needs putting in a toaster for five minutes. I fell in a lake. Get me some shoes, can you?" He drove me to the rank and did some business with his colleagues and brought me some shoes. I left him and walked for two hours at a fast pace from Grunewald to Siemensstadt and back south to Wilmersdorf to get the blood circulating again – and there was no tag.
There was no tag, and it was twenty-four hours before I realised that this one fact sent me along a line of false reasoning that pitched me straight into the red sector again. This night my psyche had been forced to withstand the effects of sodium amytal, benzedrine (or pervitine), invasion by interrogation, the certainty of death, pentothal (or a similar knock-out dose), immersion in water near freezing-point, and the shock of returning life. It explains my failure to understand why there was no tag on the fast walk to Siemensstadt and back to Wilmersdorf: the mind was not yet clear enough to think safely. It explains but does not excuse. There is no excuse for carelessness. I should have noted the fogginess of my mind and waited till it was alert enough to make safe decisions. I didn't.
The hotel was called the Zentral and I booked in because despite its name it was buried among a maze of small streets in the Mariendorf district, some eight kilometres south of Wilmersdorf. The place was smaller than the Prinz Johan and less efficiently run: a tousled night-porter and dust on the lamp-bulbs; and this suited me because it might be necessary to stay officially dead for a time.
My still wet clothes went unnoticed. Ja, there were some lock-up garages. I said I would leave my baggage in the car and bring it in tomorrow morning, as I was tired. He didn't bother to ask me where the car was now parked so that an eye could be kept on it. I went ostensibly to bed, locked the door, stripped, showered and spread my clothes to dry by the radiators. The room was small but clean and well-heated, a kinder resting-place for this night than the cold dark of the lake.
Immediate sleep was impermissible because the situation had to be worked out first.
I had missed the late-evening Bourse from Eurosound because I'd been on the way to the Prinz Johan to pick it up when they'd made the snatch. Likelihood: no important signal from Control. Nor had I anything to send in. They might find the name of Dr. Fabian – Psychoanalyst – in the Berlin directory (in missions of this kind when complicated shadow-boxing was the rule for both sides it was sometimes overlooked that a man could be found simply by knocking on his door instead of casting an under-cover dragnet for him) and they might start an inquiry on him if I suggested it. The Z Commission could be urged to make a snatch and send him for trial at Hanover as a war-criminal. He was working for Phoenix somewhere near the top level and it was likely that his wartime record would provide evidence enough to charge him. But I might be able to use him myself to better purpose: through him I could reach Oktober and finally Heinrich Zossen, my main target. Decision: don't signal Control to flush him.