I pulled one of the arm-chairs near the bed and sat with my feet at head-level, to feed the nerves while I worked. Major question: why was I still alive?
Supposition number one: the guards had driven me to the bridge as ordered, taken me out of the car, held me ready for dropping over, and had been disturbed at the last moment by people, possibly a police patrol. They had simply dropped me as I was (alive instead of dead), unable to risk the sound of a shot. The best-laid schemes could go like that. The sound of the splash had to be risked, if a greater risk were that of being seen carrying me back into the car. (Query: why had Oktober chosen the Grunewald Bridge? There were more secluded places.) So the job had been done at half-cock and they'd reported to Oktober that it had in fact been done in every accordance with orders, relying on the plunge into icy waters to kill me before the drug wore off and I could try to swim. They wouldn't report the truth, that I hadn't been shot in the neck, because Oktober would flay them.
Findings of supposition number one: Oktober believed I was now dead. The guards were almost certain. Therefore my case was closed and there would be no one tagging me. Confirmation: there had been no tag, either from the lake to the bar or along the Grunewald-Siemensstadt-Wilmersdorf route. Had there been one I would have known it.
Supposition number two: Oktober had tried the double-think on me. He'd wanted me to think that he thought I was dead, so that I would at once go to ground, change my open tactics, and lead him to my base. He had therefore ordered the guards to simulate a
Objection: I wasn't likely to lead Oktober to my base unless they put a strict tag on to me, and they hadn't done that. Query still insistent: why the Grunewald Bridge?
Supposition number three: Oktober had threatened me with death in the hope that fear would work where the narcotics hadn't. He was too subtle a man, and knew my wartime experience among the death-camps too well, to make it an open threat. He had goose-stepped up to me, stood in the living stance of the typical Nazi executioner, and rapped out the Hitlerite announcement about unforgivably wasting his time. Leaving me, to speak to the guards, he hadn't raised his voice, because he knew I would hear and thus hoped I would believe in what I heard: my own sentence of death. There are many and distinct types of courage and fear. A man who will climb a cliff face may funk grasping a snake; a man who will brave a raging sea may faint at the sight of blood. Oktober might have hoped that a man who, with his hands free, was prepared to attack five others and go on attacking even when shooting began, would lose his spirit once his hands were tied and he was made to overhear the cold hard details of his certain death.
So I had been meant to talk, to save myself. They'd failed but must not admit it. The charade had been performed: the dope, the car-journey, the dumping. Oktober was shown to mean what he said. (Again, I was expected to reason as in supposition number one and satisfy myself that they had intended to kill me.)
Objection: they would have tagged me from the lake. But the query was answered now: they'd chosen the Grunewald Bridge (Oktober had carefully named it in my hearing) so that I should remember the death of Kenneth Lindsay Jones, who had died in the same lake. Intention: to increase my fear and my belief in their purpose, by reference to a similar killing.
There were only two major facts matchable with the three suppositions. One: I was alive. Two: there was no tag. Fact one matched: all three suppositions. Fact two matched only the first.
The wall-paper, a faint lilac trellis pattern, began swimming in front of my eyes. The need for sleep was now urgent. I would have to rest there for the night: the second supposition was attractive, and it could be combined with the third: they had tried to frighten me into talking, and when that failed they dumped me so that I would lead them to base; but they would have had to follow up. The absence of tag must rule. They thought I was dead.
The lilac trellis brightened and faded. I had to check to see that I had locked the door: further evidence of fatigue. Sleep.
I phoned the police first thing and reported a grey Volkswagen abandoned near the Grunewald Bridge. If Phoenix were keeping watch on it for any reason unknown to me they would see it was the police, and not I, who took the car away. I was dead.
Toothbrush, shaver, two shirts, socks, so forth. I left them at the Hotel Zentral and went to the Hertz office, hanging about for a time until the lunch-shift clerk took over. She hadn't seen me before. I chose a BMW 1500 LS saloon by Mechelotti. The name was Schultze, number three passport: there was a millionth chance that Phoenix might check to see if I'd re-hired.
Lunch at the hotel, quite the tourist, a brand-new valise in my room and a car in the lock-up.
Then my afternoon began. There is an innocence in the very word ‘afternoon’. Morning is for trains and business and hangovers, night is for love and burglary. The afternoon is the halcyon, the calm coming between earnestness and drama. In Berlin it is a time for cream buns, and the cafes swarm, even on a winter's day. But in Berlin there is, beneath this surface, a tide that runs darker than hell itself that carries people into tributaries not of their choosing. I was such a one.
There was a simple force propelling me northwards into Wilmersdorf, and it never crossed my mind to deny it.
14: LIBIDO
She prepared Lapsang Suchong and served it with chips of orange-peel in small black bowls, kneeling on the floor to drink; we drank in the manner of a ritual. Sometimes she moved, for no reason other than to let me watch, her, knowing it pleased me.
A winter sun was in the sky and a ray of it struck through the window, gilding her helmet of hair. It was very quiet and when she moved I could hear the fabric of her clothes sliding over her skin. To each his aphrodisiac, and she knew mine. She made no secret of hers.
"Sometimes I can tell a man who has killed others. Iknow that you have."
"Yes."
"I don't mean in war."
"No."
"What does it feel like?"
"Disappointing."
"Not the thrill you expected?"
"I never do it for thrills. It's always a matter of life, his or mine. It's disappointing because all the urgency goes. "
"Like," she said, "when a mouse dies. The cat has nothing left to play with, nothing that moves."
This was why she went to the Neustadthalle: to watch men who had killed others.
We sat in silence drinking tea in the innocent afternoon.