"You haven't explained why you came here."
"Again, it was an alternative. I suggested a bar. You suggested here."
"I wanted to talk to you."
'To someone. Anyone."
"Yes. It was a shock. Did you think I hadn't any friends?"
"I still think you haven't. People with friends don't want to talk to strangers." She gave me another drink and her face looked bleak. The arrogance had suddenly gone. I added: "The silliest people can't move for friends. You see them at parties all over the place."
Her body had gone slack. "You made it easy to talk to you. It must have sounded a little hysterical. Do you dismiss me as a psychopath with a persecution complex?"
"Hardly. Someone's just tried to kill you a second time and you didn't even mention it."
"There's nothing to say about it."
But I still had to get that question answered before I left. She didn't dodge it. She didn't even see that I must want to know.
Suddenly it came. "They've got their reasons."
"They?"
"The Nazi group."
"The Nazis have their reasons for exterminating someone who's half in love with Hitler?"
"Must you put it like that?"
"Obsessed with the image of a dead god."
Her shoulders were still slack. The defiance was over. The catharsis of the confessional had left her exhausted. She said almost without interest: "I joined their group when I was just out of college. They call it Phoenix. It was a foster-parent to me because my mother never got to the other side of the Weidendammer Bridge that night. A piece of shrapnel hit her. Then I began growing up, and two or three years ago I defected and left the group. Not suddenly – I just stopped going to that house. They found me and tried to make me go back, because I knew too much. I knew what people had left the Fuhrerbunker alive, and where some of them went. I know where Bormann is now. I refused to go back but I swore on – on something they keep there that I would never talk. Either they think I've talked, or there's a new man there, or a new policy, because there was the trolley-stop incident a month ago, and the car tonight."
I finished my drink. I was going.
"Why do we have such an urge to do something we know we mustn't?" she asked suddenly.
"It's our friend the id. Wants to drive wild, hates the brakes. But keep them on. If it gets difficult, talk to a tape and then burn it. Or talk to Jurgen. But don't talk to strangers any more. You don't know where they'll go when they leave here. If it's straight to the CIA Office or some anti-Nazi organisation Phoenix won't stage any more accidents – they'll be up here within the hour and you can't rely on Jurgen because he's not bullet-proof."
I moved for the door and the wolfhound was on its feet.
"Should I leave Berlin?" she asked wearily.
"It would be safer."
She opened the door for me. Our eyes met and I saw the struggle she was putting up for her pride's sake. She lost.
"You're… not with CIA, or anyone?"
I said no. "But I could be. Don't forget it. Don't pick up strangers. You never know where they've been."
The street was icy after the close heat of the flat and I walked quickly. Snow got into the sides of my shoes and my breath clouded against my face. I thought about her all the time, and believed that what I had done was right. If there were any doubts they were automatically dismissed when, somewhere along the Unter den Eichen, I knew that I was being followed.
6: QUOTA
Austrian Union: 293. Plus 1¼
BMB Rubber: 106. Plus 1.
Bertram-Rand: 995¾ Minus 5¼.
Cinati: 185½. Plus 1½
Crowther Development: 344. Plus 6¼
D. R. Mining: 73. Minus 2.
Just before the corner of the Unter den Eichen and the Albricht-strasse I had walked at the same gait but with longer strides so that the spurt didn't show. The first cover down the Albricht-strasse was a parked beer-truck and I stood against its offside and used the long-stemmed driving-mirror to watch the corner. When he was past the truck, hurrying now, I crossed the street and bought an evening edition of Die Leute and carried it half-opened to alter the image. After a while he tracked back and I watched him take quick checks before trying the bar, the pharmacy and the newsagent's where I'd bought the paper.
He was worried now and stood on the pavement stamping his feet as if they were cold. It was frustration. Then he got going again and we rounded the whole of the Steglitz block before he gave up and made for a beer-house in the Schoneberg area. I held off for fifteen minutes but he never looked at his watch and no one turned up so I went in and sat down at his table and said:
"If I see you again I'll put such a blast through to Local that you'll end up washing the stairs."
He looked even younger than he was. He wouldn't even trust himself to speak until my beer came because he was so frustrated. Then he said:
"You know what happened to KLJ."
"It isn't going to happen to me."
"He was a damned good man." It sounded even more emphatic in German. He was angry about that death. His name was Hengel and I'd recognised him when I sat down.
His photograph, marked with the key-letter for Totally Reliable, had been in the memorandum. Pol had said:
"There are two people you can trust. An American, Frank Brand, and a young German, Lanz Hengel."
Before I'd recognised him I'd thought he was one of the adverse party and that Phoenix – if that was how they still styled their group – had set him to watch contacts of the Lindt girl. It would have tied in.
"Yes," I said, "he was a damned good man. But he was using cover and it didn't save him."
He said with a seething anger: "I was his cover."
"I know. Don't fret. That day in Dallas there were sixty Federal agents manning the inner ring."
"I was specially picked." He wasn't interested in Dallas.
"Then you're slipping." I'd had enough self-pity from the Lindt girl. "Five minutes' tag and I flushed you."
Polsknika A: 775. Plus 5.
Portuguese Canning: 389. Plus 2¼.
Py-Sulpha: 452. Minus 10.
Coming up.
I'd asked Hengeclass="underline" "Whose orders, to cover me?"
"I had no orders."
At least he was honest. "What's your current term in this field?"
"Two years."
He volunteered nothing, but just sat biting his lip. He had a good face but there was no guile in him. He lacked the element most necessary to his needs: slyness. I wondered why they'd picked him to cover KLJ.
"You'll find plenty of games to play in two years, Hengel, but don't play any on my pitch. I told Pol no cover. It was called off as from last midnight."
If he had put up any argument I would have embarrassed him with a few facts. Where had he picked me up? He would know the address of my hotel but he hadn't picked me up from there or I would have sensed him. He couldn't have known I was going to the Neustadthalle because it was a last-minute decision: until I had Bourse clearance on Pol's photograph I wouldn't do anything active, so the Neustadthalle was a good passive search area for spending the day. He hadn't picked me up there, because I would have sensed him, and anyway he would have talked now about the crush attempt, especially as he was so desperate to cover me in the hope of saving my life and atone for the loss of KLJ. He'd never seen the crush attempt. He couldn't have known I went to the Lindt girl's flat or that I could be picked up from there when I left. There was only one answer: he's seen me, by chance, about half-way along the Unter den Eichen, or one of the staff had seen me and told him and he'd started out on his own initiative. Local Control Berlin has two rooms, each with two windows, on the ninth floor of the corner building at Unter den Eichen and Rhoner-allee, with front access through the passage at the side of the hat shop. The view of both streets is excellent and a lookout is normally stationed to make sure that any staff coming in has not been tagged to base by an adverse party. The lookout has a pair of Zeiss close-focus square 15's and can see the hairs on a fly at fifty yards. As one of the only three agents operating (in my case technically) from this base I couldn't go down either of these streets without being seen. It had been half-way down the den Eichen that I had sensed the tag.