The Striker Portfolio

by Adam Hall

  ‘Did you sell all of them, in Kassel ?’

  ‘No. I have some in my room. Are you still interested?’

  ‘No. I just wondered.’ He went away.

  I supposed there was a chance that it didn’t connect, just as there was a chance that Stockener had simply got into a skid, but it would have to be tested out so I said;

  ‘They don’t fit anything, really.’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘The keys. I just leave them there so as to know if anyone’s been poking about. What were you looking for?’

  The pale lids rose and for the first time I saw his eyes fully and saw that he was frightened. I hadn’t expected that and it threw me and then I understood. He said in a moment:

  ‘We must be careful.’

  He’d folded his hands again on the edge of the table to keep them still.

  ‘You weren’t very careful before. You got him killed.’

  ‘Yes.’ His voice broke on that one word. He could have said:

  Indirectly. It would have been true: Lovett had known what he was doing and he should have taken more care but it was this man who had put him in hazard. Now he was doing it again to someone else. To me. I said:

  ‘We’d better not waste any time.’

  There is no time. His face was grey and he looked tired suddenly and I knew that collapse was taking place. Inside Benedikt a whole edifice was coming down. All the things that had gone to the making of him as a child and a boy and a man, all the experience of half a lifetime that had brought him at last to a motel in a Weserbergland village to sit here with a stranger, all that had ever meant anything to him was coming down and soon it would be rubble. I didn’t know why. I only knew that it was happening because in our trade we see a lot of it and we know the signs when they come into a man’s face. They see quite suddenly that it’s no go: they’ve come too far and can’t find their way back or they’ve taken too much on and haven’t the strength to see it through or they’ve started hurting too many people and they realize that their high-flying ideologies don’t give them immunity to conscience when it comes to the crunch.

  In a savage whisper he was saying: ‘Get out of here’

  Perhaps he hoped to save something of himself by saving me. I asked him:

  ‘Who’s doing it? Sending the Strikers down?’

  ‘There’s no time. You must leave here.’

  He wouldn’t even bloody well listen. I leaned over the table. ‘Who is doing it ?’ I was getting fed up because while he was busy collapsing I wanted to snatch the odd brick out of the rubble before it was too late. ‘Did you tell him? Lovett?’ He was slowly shaking his head but I didn’t think it was meant as an answer: he was shaking his head at the whole of life or at least the life he knew. ‘Well you’re going to tell me. What’s their name?’

  ‘Die Zelle.’

  ‘Where’s their base?’ No answer.

  ‘Who’s the top kick?’

  He stared at me.

  ‘You have to get away.’

  ‘I’m busy.’ He hadn’t got the guts to give it to me straight, couldn’t admit it, face the responsibility. Once they start collapsing the whole lot goes and they’re irresponsible, treacherous, and the most you can do is try to shore them up and get some last desperate sense out of them before it’s lost in the roaring of bricks. I said through my teeth: ‘Who runs it?’

  His face rocked and his eyes closed as if I’d physically hooked one on him and I knew how important it was that he should save my skin but I wasn’t interested because it was his conscience he was trying to save and so far as it suited my book he could stew in it.

  A man came in with a briefcase and Benedikt heard the door and opened his eyes and stared at me again because he daren’t look round: he was using my face for a mirror. He was pretty far gone so I said: ‘What’ve you got on paper ? Memos, documents, anything useful? Any micro stuff? We can decode it, don’t worry about that. Come on, Benedikt.’

  The manager was at the far end of the food-bar staring at him and then staring at me. Benedikt looked ill and he was wondering why I wasn’t doing anything about it. He started towards us and then thought better of it.

  Benedikt was still watching my face.

  ‘Who just came in?’

  ‘One man. Only one.’

  Of course I would have got him away before now and handed him over to Ferris. But I’d made a mistake and I didn’t want to do it again. I’d been so aware that they would come for me again that I’d fallen for an assumption: anyone searching my room must be an adverse party. It wasn’t until I’d seen the collapse setting in that I’d known who he was. That had been a mistake.

  The next mistake I could make would be another assumption: that he was totally allied to me. You’ve got to mind your fingers when you give a dog a bone.

  ‘Look,’ I said. ‘We’ll accept you. You can be in London by tomorrow. But I’ve got to have something more definite first.’ Die Zelle. The Cell. He could have invented it offhand.

  He wasn’t listening.

  The restaurant was half-full now and getting noisy. There were no curtains; the headlights of cars coming in made a kaleidoscope of the opaque sculpted glass of the windows. The espresso machine shrilled.

  I looked at Benedikt. He sat like a sack.

  ‘You can still make it,’ I told him. I had to lean half across the table because of the noise, But I could see I’d lost him now. It’s something almost unnatural to witness: they just slip away as if they were drugged and you could time the process. Suddenly between one minute and the next they abandon interest in doing what they were recently desperate to do. (Ferris had said: They think it’s someone trying hard to get across.) Final throw.

  ‘We’ll go now. We might as well. We can talk later.’

  Some kind of consciousness came back. He said:

  ‘If it were as easy as that …’

  Headlights froze across the glass and dimmed away.

  ‘It’ll get easier as we go along,’ I told him. ‘This is the roughest bit, that’s all.’

  Then they came in and I knew he was right and that it was too late.

  Chapter Eight

  THE PALLBEARERS

  ‘Is he all right?’

  ‘What did you say?’

  It was very noisy.

  ‘He looked ill. Is he all right?’

  ‘Yes. But bad news.’

  The beer was making them raucous. A lot of laughter.

  ‘What sort?’

  Headlights.

  ‘His wife.’

  ‘Tch! He talks always about his wife.’

  Leaving. Not arriving. But no one had come through here.

  ‘Are they lawyers?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The people who came to see him.’

  ‘Friends. Just a couple of friends,’

  Benedikt had got up and gone across to talk to them and they had stood there for a few minutes and there was no point in sitting somewhere else with my back to them because they knew I was here. Now they had gone up the stairs.

  ‘That’s bad, then, if it’s his wife.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘He talks a lot about her.’

  ‘I know.’

  The staircase came halfway into the room and was very modern with glass at the sides, the same thick opaque glass that the windows were made of. He’d made an effort before getting up and some of his colour had come back. He had just given me the name r of a place - the clockmaker’s in Neueburg - and then he’d gone across to talk to them. I hadn’t expected them to go up the staircase, all three of them, like that.

  I picked up the Kasseler-Zeitung he’d dropped on to the chair and looked through it because they were making it so obvious. All I had to do was walk out and get into the car and drive away.

  The manager had gone back to the food-bar.

  Lyon had beaten Hamburg 3-1.

  The farther away I got from them the less I’d like it. I preferred to keep in clo
se because they wouldn’t expect that. I waited another fifteen minutes and then went across to the staircase. A group of travellers stood at the bottom with tankards waving about as they talked. They’d had a good day and were pleased with it and wanted me to join them but I said I couldn’t just now.

  The corridor was all right: there were no recesses. But his room was towards the far end and that was unnerving. It meant full exposure in confined quarters for something in the region of fifteen seconds and there was sweat inside my hands when I reached the door. The light was on in the room but there were no voices.

  I gave it a minute and tried the handle and pushed the door open and gave it another minute before I went in. A gust of laughter came up the staircase and I shut the door so that I could think better. The curtains were drawn and I left them like that. There was almost no point in looking around because I couldn’t see any signs of hurry and unless they’d been in a hurry they would have done a thorough search, but you never know your luck and I saw to the furniture first. It didn’t take long: most of it was built in and I wasn’t checking for hollows or magnets because he didn’t live here permanently.

  There was only one valise and most of the stuff was dispersed in the room and I checked the shaver-case and squeezed all the tooth-paste into the wash-basin. The black box he kept the figurines in gave nothing. It had come open for some reason and the only two pieces that had been inside - a faun and a shepherdess - were smashed on the floor near one of his outstretched hands. It looked as if he’d been taking them out of the box when they did it.

  There were hollow sections among the bits and I checked them: the head of the shepherdess and one half of the log she was sitting on, the hind quarters of the faun. But they were empty. Finally I searched the body: pockets, linings, heels, inside the watch, inside the lighter and the three pens, going through the full routine while the hooded eyes went on looking at the fragments.

  As I stood up I wondered whether he might not have been happier, more fulfilled really, selling these things between Hanover and Kassel instead of trying to slip the skids under people who travelled in violence. I believed even at that stage that Benedikt had never been first-class agent material. Ideology isn’t enough. It seems enough: it’s blinding and belongs to the heart. But it won’t save you from being found one fine day on the floor with a cheese-wire mark on the throat.

  It had occurred to me to telephone Ferris.

  The night wasn’t much above freezing and I was glad of the sheepskin coat. My breath was grey in the sharp air as I stood looking about. Everything seemed all right. If in point of fact it were not all right I wouldn’t get more than a few yards. It was fairly bright in the parking area and when I walked across to the N.S.U. I would present a slowly moving target with good fore-lighting and a clear outline against the motel windows.

  The more deserted a place appears the more it is peopled by the nerves and this could be discounted. Further, the headlights had been those of a car leaving, not arriving, and the two men had not gone out through the restaurant: the inference was that they had used a side-door, perhaps the one I had used. And finally: if they had wanted to deal with me they wouldn’t both have gone up with Benedikt.

  So I walked across to the N.S.U. and discounted another possibility as I went: there could be a third man waiting outside for me. That was just nerves again, stomach-think.

  Brain-think: Benedikt had run it too close. They had come here to deal with him, not with me. He may have realized that when we had sat talking at the table. Being not only a potential defector but a double, he had broken down. In cases like his there is a defeat mechanism: the psychic system suddenly can’t take any more because it’s overloaded. Coming across to the other side presents a hazard comparable to jumping a chasm. It may be only a short jump but when you’re in the middle of it you feel the onset of doubts, you distrust all the arguments that have driven you to the act. And you can’t turn back.

  This had been in Benedikt’s face. The outward physical sign of psychic collapse.

  The N.S.U. seemed all right. There would have been time for them to rig it, blow me up when I touched it. But that wasn’t logical. Even so I held my overnight case in front of me when I opened the door, as a gesture of man’s need to survive.

  I hadn’t checked out at the desk. They would find enough for the bill on the dressing table. (London is particular about things like that, and one fine day and with any luck the A-positive in Accounts would check with the Rhesus-negative in Mission Reports, to confirm. They slang you harder for not paying bills than for trying to sting them for expenses.) It would make no difference to the motel manager, the fact of my not checking out conventionally. He would still have reported it as unusual if I had gone through the correct motions, because I’d given no prior indication of leaving tonight. Either way I would be suspect number one as soon as the police were told about Herr Benedikt. Apart from my sudden departure there were prints all over the room that tallied with those in my own. But the German police were thorough and would busy themselves also with suspects two and three. The one real problem was the N.S.U.: its Hanover matriculation was duly noted in the reception book.

  But I couldn’t telephone Ferris from the motel. The best idea was to use one of the emergency phones along the autobahn. Then I could peel off eastwards and head for Neueburg where Benedikt said there was the clockmaker.

  Lights swung across from the road just as I started the engine and it was unsettling for an instant because it didn’t have to be a rocking detonator: they could have connected it with the ignition. Any kind of disturbance - sudden moving light - can be unsettling when you’re not certain it’s just the ignition you’re switching on, when you’re ready to believe you can be switching on Kingdom Come.

  But I didn’t like it. You shouldn’t have to justify being unsettled. If you think there’s a bomb linked with the ignition key then don’t touch the bloody thing.

  Some people got out of the car that had swung off the road and I watched them cross to the motel. Then I moved off, heeling her over a bit on the springs to displace anything if it were there and have it done with. But everything was all right so I went on worrying because everything shouldn’t be. When you get in their way they don’t just leave you alone.

  Between the motel and the filling station on the autobahn loop-road there was too much traffic to make observation worthwhile: the mirror was never clear of lights and I didn’t do anything about it because it was only a two-lane strip and nobody would have wanted to overtake even if I’d invited them, with so much stuff coming the other way.

  I wasn’t sure how I was going to put It to Ferris, over a telephone. There was a lot I still didn’t know about the Benedikt situation and all I could give him were the facts without throwing in any assumptions. Then he would have to tell London and they’d have an immediate baby. Ferris had said London wanted him badly: the contact, the man who’d told Lovett when the next Striker was going down. And now they couldn’t have him. They would say I should have got him for them, kept him alive and sent him through, and they would be absolutely right. I might even have done that if the material had held up but the simple fact was that it hadn’t. Benedikt had been dead before they took him upstairs and he would have been no use to the Bureau even if they hadn’t put the cheese-wire on him.

  It’s happened before with people like Benedikt: they collapse internally and go on running like a headless chicken until someone switches them off or they do it for themselves as Lazlo did. Parkis wouldn’t have got any sense out of Lazlo even if he hadn’t swallowed the thing and hit the floor and Parkis had known it. That was why he was so annoyed.

  It was an Esso station. There was enough on board for the run to Neueburg but I might have to go on from there and places in deeper country would be closed.

  Anyway it was for Ferris to tell them. One of his functions was to keep London off my back.

  ‘Vierzig.’

  His hands were raw in the cold.r />
  The stars were very clear and the moon was above the Harz Mountains, its outline sharp even on the eastern curve. The pump droned. A boy ran out from the building and sprayed the screen and began wiping it.

  Did it go well, with the rotary engine? They both asked the same thing at the same time, and laughed. I said it went well. There weren’t many RO-80s on the road yet and people were interested. The screen began shining.

  Twenty litres had gone in by the time the Mercedes 300 pulled in behind. It could have come up on the other side of the pumps but apparently it didn’t need petrol.

  The boy went to see to him.

  If it rained later tonight, the man said, the road would freeze. I said I didn’t think it would rain, the moon was too clear.

  The driver of the Mercedes had got out. I couldn’t see his face because the overhead floods threw shadow from his hat-brim. He wanted his screen cleaned, he told the boy. Sound carried easily on the cold air. Was that all he wanted? That was all.

  ‘Stop at twenty-five,’ I said.

  ‘Didn’t you ask for forty litres?’

  ‘Yes. But stop at twenty-five.’

  We worked a lot of instinct. Sometimes it’s all we have.

  The pump stopped droning.

  There was a second man in the Mercedes. He was just a vague shape behind the screen at the moment because the boy had sprayed it and hadn’t wiped it yet. The engine was still running.

  How about the oil ?

  I said he could check it. Instinct was wholly in charge now but confirmation was available. It would take longer for the man to check the oil than for the boy to finish the screen of the Mercedes and once it was finished they would tip him and drive away. But I didn’t think they would do that.

  The oil was all right, the man said.

  I gave him a note and he went into the building for the change: they don’t carry a cash-bag at night as they do in the daytime.

  The boy was thanking the driver of the Mercedes and going towards the building. The Mercedes was black, an uncommon colour these days, rather old-fashioned, funereal. The man wore a black overcoat. He was getting into the car, not hurrying.