'Sit down, Herr Martin.'
There was a spare chair but no one else came. He sat behind the desk. Above him on the wall was the expected portrait of Walter Adolphovich Ulbricht, First Secretary of the Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands.
'I will call you Martin because that is the name we have known you by — ' he put the two identity cards together and pushed them aside — 'since you arrived in Hanover from London.'
I had never seen him before tonight but I recognized him now. With only the face to go on it would gave been difficult. The left eye was artificial but a perfect match and I wouldn't have suspected it if the original injury had been less massive: the face on that side couldn't have been damaged to that extent without the eye going too. The rebuilding had been beautifully done: the surgeon was a portrait artist and it was the very excellence of his technique that showed the change. One side of this man's face had continued to age and the new side was still young: Dorian Gray and his portrait all in one.
'Do you know where you are?'
'I've got a rough idea.'
You don't have secret police guarding the gates of an asylum for the criminally insane and you don't send a secret police colonel to pick up couriers at the Frontier and bring them here if your sole business is to look after manic depressives.
'This is Aschau.' He wasn't interested in my rough ideas. 'Have you heard of it?'
'Yes.'
'Where?'Rather quickly.
'The big slob mentioned it.'
One of the committee moved his head and I got the feeling that people weren't meant to talk like that to the Herr Direktor.
He didn't seem to mind. When you've caught a winged pigeon you must expect the odd drop of lime on your hand while you examine it. (It wasn't because Aschau was meant to be an asylum that I sensed a certain medical aspect in his character. Perhaps he'd spent so much time in hospital that he'd taken on the air of the surgeon: efficient, tolerant, a little abstracted. And in his case wholly indifferent.) 'Aschau is in part a political re-education centre. I am its director. My name is Kohn. Have you heard of me?'
'No.'
'At Aschau we receive people who stray from the Marxist-Leninist line and we persuade them to rethink.' He watched me the whole time. They all did. 'What made you come here of your own volition?'
'I got the feeling I was straying a bit from the Wilson-Powell line so I thought you could fix me up.'
His eyes were stone-blue and expressionless, the kind of eyes that looked through the glass at guinea-pigs dying of clinically induced cancer.
'I will ask you that question once more.'
He was sitting absolutely still but even so I knew I was right: it wasn't of course Kohn himself that I had recognized, but someone else with these mannerisms and this tone of voice, this way of sitting so absolutely still with the head a fraction on one side and a fraction forward. The walk had been the same, passing through the hall, and if ever he uttered a laugh I knew what sort it would be. But I didn't think Kohn would ever laugh again, even cynically.
'You needn't have asked me at all,' I said. I might as well play it straight and volunteer the information he already had. 'I was sent out from London on a sabotage-investigation job, find out why the Strikers are making holes all over the place.'
He went on watching me and I left it at that because I didn't know how much the Kamerad Oberst had told him and even if they've got a fistful of aces there's no point in playing your two of spades.
'How much do you know of the political situation concerning the two Germanies?'
'Is there one? I thought Ulbricht had walled it up.'
He never moved, ever. They might as well have stuck a computer in front of me except that I would have expected this degree of inhuman indifference in a computer: in a live man it struck chill and I decided not to remember the sound I'd heard while we'd been hanging around in the hall.
'I assume you are close to Whitehall.'
'More towards Clapham, really.'
'You decline to admit the extent of your political knowledge and connections.'
'No. They're nil, that's all I mean.'
But he wouldn't just accept that. He was an East German and in East Germany they scratched at their ideology till it bled. If you told them there was a place called Hyde Park where you could stand on an orange-box and shout to hell with the government they'd send you to an asylum for the criminally insane. Perhaps that was why they'd brought me here.
He said: 'Fifteen months ago in his closing address to the Eighth German Party Congress in Berlin, First Secretary Ulbricht took the preliminary steps towards the eventual re-unification of Germany. Since that time there have been overtures made in secret between the two republics. Bonn is expected shortly to withdraw its claim of being the capital of the only legal German state and this will be the signal for overt negotiations to re-establish Germany under a central government whose leaders will be drawn from both sides.'
He paused long enough to let me comment but I didn't say anything because either there'd been a lot going on in both Berlins while everyone else was busy with Czechoslovakia or Kohn was betting on sudden money. You wouldn't find anyone in Whitehall or Clapham for that matter who'd agree that overt negotiations would be the order of the day until the red flag was hoisted at the White House, which didn't seem likely this century. Probably he was just trying to do what I'd done with the big slob: make me correct him.
He put on the other side. 'It is vital that those leaders of the New Germanic State should be neither Eastern lackeys of the Soviet Union nor Western idolaters of the U.S.A. For some time there has been a growing need for the creation of a nucleus of potential government: a consortium capable of assuming control of the New Germany. Such a nucleus now exists.'
Die Zelle.
And bloody Parkis was right again. He didn't know the details but he'd made a blind swipe and come up with the general idea. Die Zelle was not only 'existing': it was in gear and on its way, knocking out the opposition on the other side of the wire — Feldmarschall Stockener and Bundesminister von Eckern et alia — and crippling the military structure so that West Germany would have to get out of NATO and surrender any claim to a nuclear role by virtue of an effective air strike-force. Otherwise the U.S.A. would want a lot of say in the election of the New German Government.
Kohn watched me. I still didn't say anything. He'd told me just enough to pitch me into an argument: if I'd had any 'political connections' he knew very well that I'd grab at the chance he was giving me: there were undercover factions in London who'd ally themselves with Die Zelle if they knew what he'd just told me and all I'd have to give him were their names. It was no use making them up: he'd check them first. I'd have to get out of Aschau under my own steam or do the other thing.
'You understand my motives in revealing as much as I have, Herr Martin?'
I was going to say yes but one of the lights on the wall-console was winking and he flicked a switch on the internal-communications complex. The voice was very faint in the room: it was one of those whorled-diaphragm speakers that focussed the output and beamed it towards a single listener.
'When did he arrive?'
It's up to the listener to frame his own speech according to whether he wants anyone else in the room to understand. Kohn was indifferent. If I ever left Aschau it would be on his terms.
'Is Schaffer with him?'
It could be the Schaffer they'd thrown out of East Berlin's Humboldt University a month ago. His paper had said that man's thought was the one thing beyond any form of applied philosophy. For 'applied' read 'enforced'. Professor Schaffer would be just the man for a bit of re-education at Aschau.
'Offer him caviar.'
The faint voice went on for a bit and Kohn said: 'Not unless it is essential.' Then he cut the switch and looked at me. 'I asked if you understood my motives. Heir Martin.'