I gave Pol the report I'd written during the early hours at the hotel and they all watched him reading it. He said:
"This will do for a start."
"It's all you'll get for the moment."
He told someone to get on to London and while we waited he said: "We'll have to go in, you know." He was speaking in English and I thought again of England and how much I needed her.
I said: "Give me till noon. Then you can go in."
"Why noon?" His featureless face was blanker than ever without the glasses.
"I need the time."
He dropped the report on to a desk and asked for copies.
"It depends on London," he told me.
I was feeling tired so I said: "Just for a few hours, London depends on me."
The call came through and they gave me the phone. I talked for a minute and finally had to persuade him. "You can send them in if you have to, sir, but we shall go off at half cock unless you can give me till noon. Once you raid their base they'll try to put calls out and they might succeed. Give me till noon and I'll give you the whole set-up."
He said I was putting a gun at their heads. Bloody fool. We had guns at all our heads. He asked if I couldn't make it earlier than noon.
"I'll try, sir. It should work out well before that, but it's just a reasonable deadline for me to aim at."
He still went on nagging and I had one of my regrettable impulses: "Things got very tricky, sir. I even had to blow up a garage and seven cars, all private property." I listened for a minute to give myself the pleasure and then handed the phone to Pol.
While Pol was trying to smooth things over I drank some more coffee and asked someone to get me the Public Prosecutor on the other phone.
"Which one?"
"Ebert."
I could hear the phone ringing for a long time and then the Generalstaatsanwalt came on. His voice was perfectly alert, though it was still only a quarter to seven. I asked if I could see him.
"It must be very urgent, Herr Quiller."
"Yes."
He said he was at my disposal and rang off.
Pol had finished with London.
"They don't like it," he said.
"Do them good."
"I don't like it either."
So they were all going to nag. I drank the coffee as fast as I could without burning my tongue. I would need the caffeine because I would be feeling the fatigue as the work of the morning went on. I was going to do something for the first time in my life and it would be very unpleasant.
"You'll be all right," I told Poll.
"We shall be here until noon, of course." He almost said ‘at our posts.’ I knew he would keep the rest of them here too, to help him sweat it out. All the time I was on the loose there was the danger of being picked up and made to talk. They had lived with this over their heads ever since Pol had given me the Q memorandum, but now it was worse for them because time was running short. They didn't want to be sitting here like so many ducks when Phoenix sent a party up here in the lift, or opened fire from the windows across the street with a battery of submachine-guns. They didn't want to be picked off one by one as they left the passage by the hat shop, dropping cold on to the pavement before they could warn the next man out.
It wasn't easy for them and they had my sympathy. I always get on better with a Local Control, wherever it is, than those bloody people in London.
I told Poclass="underline" "You won't see any adverse action. There's no risk. They think I'm dead. They're still watching the flames. They won't look for me again. So don't worry."
The London line began ringing. He answered the call and did a lot of listening, then hung up. He told me
"They've signalled British Military H.Q. Berlin. At twelve noon today the Commandant is sending four armoured cars to the Grunewald base with fifty troops."
"London always did get the fidgets when there's a flap on." I looked down from one of the windows. The street was filling with traffic. "Will you please phone me a taxi? And has anyone got an overcoat my size?" It looked cold down there, and my own coat was hanging on a peg in the kitchens of the Hotel Zentral.
Sleet was falling again as I crossed the pavement and got into the taxi, right in the middle of the Zeiss close-focus square-15's they had up there. But there would be no tags. I was dead.
Ebert opened the door himself as a gesture of courtesy and invited me to take breakfast with him.
"You have an important client for me, Herr Quiller?"
He was more jovial at the breakfast-table than in his office. I said: "Several, Herr Generalstaatsanwalt. We shall be notifying you later in the day." He gave me a long look from under his pink-and-blond eyebrows, then took another slice of pumpernickel. I
Ebert ruminated, saw no connection, gave it up and said "Certainly I shall arrange it."
"At his office, as early as possible. I imagine he gets there about nine, being a busy man. Don't give my name."
"As you wish."
The territories of Ebert and Lobst abutted, and they would know each other well in their official capacities. This was why I had come to Ebert, whom I trusted and who trusted me.
He made two telephone calls and said that I would be shown in to the Bundeminister's office on arrival at any time after nine o'clock. The Generalstaatsanwalt would be glad if I would convey to the Bundeminister his personal greetings.
There were forty-five minutes to go so I found an early barber and had a shave, manicure and neck-trim to take the fatigue away. It was nine o'clock precisely when I was shown into the Bundeminister's office. He was speaking on a telephone and his secretary had quietly gone away before he finished the call and turned in his chair and looked at me, but I had been prepared for the secretary still to be here so it would have been all right anyway.
He just sat there without moving or reaching for a drawer so I took my time crossing to his desk. He started to get up and I moved round the desk and brought my right hand flattened and palm-down and very fast against the side of the neck, taking off some of the force at the last inch so that he wouldn't be under for too long.
Then I left him and locked both doors and came back and sat on his desk.
"Zossen," I said, "I want to know everything."
It made me angry: he just sat there with his eyes turned up a little, trying to focus on my face; but he was a man like that, who never lowered himself to physical action. He gave the orders and signed the papers and left it to his henchmen to do the work.
His eyes were getting their focus now and he said loosely "It was reported that you were dead." I studied his face. It was worse than crueclass="underline" it was greedy. It was an eater's face, a devourer's, the eyes watchful for prey, the mouth long and thin and set between pouches, like a stretched H. It wasn't his face I had recognised in the Grunewald operations room, but his walk when he had moved from the desk to the map-table. Then I had looked at the face again and seen the ice-blue of Zossen's eyes set in the blubber of twenty years of greed.
This face had a third identity and it was public: I had seen it on the front pages of newspapers when Bundeminister Ernst Lobst had made a speech or greeted a visiting diplomat at Tempelhof. Thus I had known where to find him.
I had come here in case he had got wind of the raid at noon today and went to ground. I had come here to make him tell me everything, in case the raid misfired. And I had come here in the name of three hundred nameless men to whom he had once said: "I am due back in Brucknerwald in one hour, for luncheon."