The Striker Portfolio

by Adam Hall

  But it was all right. The 300 had been so close that it ripped metal off the side of the N.S.U. as its black shape came sliding past but the swing was already under control when the brakes had begun dragging and there was no more than a slight rolling on the springs. There was also one guaranteed factor in play: despite larger discs and tyres the Mercedes didn’t have the stopping-power of the N.S.U. because of the difference in mass and this was so cheerful to think about that I threw in an added risk and cut the Lights and hoped that the near-blackout would worry them more than it worried me: the balance of life or death could depend in the final analysis on liver and carrots.

  The howling noise went on and I freed the discs a couple of times to break down the friction as the needle swung through the nineties and below. Their lights came on and I saw the big silhouette still drawing away although it was under the brakes by now and slowing. Rubber-smoke began curling past my windscreen in little clouds and then I stopped thinking about the 300 and concentrated on what had to be done next. The sidelamps had been left burning so that the facia was lit and I could read the speed because after five kilometres at 180 k.p.h. my normal visual judgement would be affected and true speed through the lower register would seem slower than it was and I didn’t want to roll her when I turned.

  There was a strong smell of rubber and asbestos by now but the braking effect had damped out the last of the swings and we were on a perfectly straight course a metre from the grass centre strip and when the needle dipped below 30 k.p.h. I released the brakes and made a three-quarter-lock turn across the soft ground and into the faint light flooding from a car that was coming south on this track. I was already accelerating through the sixties and tucked well in but the driver had been worried to see me broadside on across the road even in the distance and he went by fast with a lot of noise from the horn because in any case it was strictly verboten to drive across the centre strip like that.

  By the time the N.S.U. was over the ton and still climbing I began trying to assess the chances but the basic data was so vague that I gave it up. It would mean having-to work out how long it would take the Mercedes to slow up and how long it would take it to make the turn and close the gap again behind me on the north-south track. There had never been any question of foxing them: they would have got the rough idea the moment I braked, and the man who wasn’t driving would have hung himself over the seat to see what I was doing. It was a question of using the only two advantages the N.S.U. had over the Mercedes on a straight run - acceleration and braking - and hoping to find some sort of peel-off point on this side before they closed up again.

  I gave them something like three minutes.

  There wasn’t anywhere to turn off within that period and the obvious thing to go for was the loop-section where I’d taken on fuel. They would be big in the mirror before I could reach it but they might not succeed in knocking me off in tune. The idea had only one advantage: there weren’t any alternatives. The N.S.U. would be faster along winding roads but there would be other traffic and there was the risk of smashing up an innocent family because the big 300 was in business now and no one was safe. The only hope was to stay on the autobahn and use the elbow-room.

  Light began filling the N.S.U.

  They had been quick.

  There wouldn’t be another chance of pulling the same trick again if I let them come right up on me so if there were anything to do it had to be done now and I thought of something and did it and the tyres shrilled again as the brakes came on at full grip. I judged the gap to be still big enough to make the operation worth trying.

  The speed was down to 30 k.p.h. when I turned on to the grass centre strip and felt the rear end break away and corrected it and brought her back in the opposite direction with my undipped heads catching the Mercedes full across the screen. I could see them clearly, their hands going up to shield their eyes, the big car veering a degree in the glare and the brakes hissing on. Then it came at me.

  I was ready for it but the grass was soft and I was late getting away because of the wheelspin and the glancing blow slung the N.S.U. full circle and for a while I was just sitting there looking along the headlight beams watching them start an initial slide along the centre strip that carried them sideways for fifty metres with turf ploughing up in a wave over the roof before the momentum died and their wheels began spinning again for grip.

  I was back on the concrete before they were but the gap was only medium and they were closing as hard as they could and I knew that somewhere inside the correct black overcoats and stiff white collars the semblance of an emotion had been provoked. Anger. From my limited information I assumed that their controllers had given orders that I should be killed and that my death should appear accidental, but they were finding it more difficult than it had seemed and now they were angry because their pride I I was hurt. They were no longer implementing an arrangement: they were conducting a duel.

  They wanted to kill me now. It hadn’t mattered to them before.

  This could make a difference. Emotion at very high speed could lead to misjudgement. But it was my sole consolation. The light was already a glare inside the car before the last of the mud was centrifuged from the tyres and we settled down on the top-limit mark with the windrush blotting out most of the engine sound.

  Then they cut their lamps so that I couldn’t see which side they were going for. The mirror was only a frame for vague movement now, dark and shifting and inconsistent.

  A bump came and I corrected the line but it wasn’t too bad because they’d hit too close to the centre. Then they had another go and the impact was well to one side and very heavy and I did what I could but this time the strain dragged a tyre off and I watched the headlamp beam go spilling across the edge of the road and flooding down into woodland. The N.S.U. was airborne for a few seconds, floating strangely among light and shadows, then it struck rubble and began pitching and I saw the trees coming and turned the engine off before the night went wild.

  Chapter Ten

  FUGUE

  The moon gleamed, set in shadows.

  Shapes, but not of trees or smashed metal: I expected shapes of trees. The moon was glass-bright, translucid, shimmering, sometimes going dark and emerging again among the shadows.

  ‘Wait a minute.’

  The whole of the organism was prepared to arrange its survival if it could: run, fight, beat out flames, bind blood in with a tourniquet, free itself from wreckage. The components were immediately available: nerve, sinew, gas-interchange process, adrenalin supply. Intelligence alone was absent. The organism had to be told what to do, and nothing new.

  The moon, alive with light, held a globe of colour in its centre: blue. And in the centre of blue was another globe, totally black.

  The shapes were fainter, touches of light on cloud, the cloud silver, curling, hanging near the moon, a line dividing its softness. A feather lying curved above the moon.

  ‘Who are you?’

  The moon darkened again and shone again and watched me. It was an eye watching me.

  ‘Bitte?’

  There was pain in the organism but not enough to limit movement. I was on one elbow looking across at her face, recognizing it but not recalling it, knowing I had seen it before but not knowing where or when.

  Information came flooding in so fast that the receptor areas couldn’t cope with it but I saw now that there was light coming from behind her, from the street, and that something reflected it so that her eye shone. Then there was an implosion of random images and within a millisecond the whole scene was formed and took on significance: she was sitting hunched in a chair near the bed where I lay and tears had dried on her face.

  ‘Who are you?’ I said it in German this time.

  She told me her name but paramnesia is odd: recognition is present but recall can’t just be switched on like that. The name meant nothing when she said it.

  A young face with amethyst eyes swollen from crying, a bewildered mouth. All her attention w
as on me. There were no trees or shattered glass, no flames to beat out. Sweat began trickling from my temples and I stopped making an effort, suddenly aware that the effort I had been making was enormous and very desperate because I was scared sick of seeing the lot go, the whole lot.

  The only hope was in taking the pressure off, letting the neural traces show up under the hypo in their own good time. I didn’t use English any more: the one word she had spoken had been in German.

  ‘Is there any kind of head injury?’

  My hands were moving about, the fingers hunting for blood. Quite a lot of the organism was coping well enough, doing its best to look after itself.

  She said something but I wasn’t interested: there was so much data coming in that I wanted to sort it out before anything new was presented. A window and the unlit lamp and of course her face and various colours and the tear stains.

  ‘Oh yes,’ I said and sat still for a bit. Traces were showing up: I had seen tears on her face before when she’d said she hated me and that I was impotent. ‘So that’s who you are.’

  Memory, returning, can’t present every detail because there are too many. Putting your clothes on you don’t observe the pattern of the tweed or the style of the shoes: you simply know that these are your clothes. It’s not a matter of Striker, shepherdess, Wagner, cheese-wire, Benedikt, ignition switch plus several million other images and their significance. It’s a matter of finding yourself back in a place composed of all the things you have ever known. Identity.

  ‘Wait a minute.’ I was sitting on the edge of her bed, head in my hands. It would need a minute to settle in. If you don’t take it easy the whole thing can go blank again.

  ‘Nitri,’ she said again, frightened.

  ‘Yes I know. Yes.’

  Her scent. It had been inside the car. The N.S.U.

  There was still an area of darkness and I was aware of it but it would have to be left alone. Some kind of inhibitory block, repression of unpleasant events.

  ‘What time is it, Nitri?’

  ‘Four.’

  ‘Night?’

  ‘Yes. But you - ‘

  ‘When did I get here ?’

  ‘In the night.’

  ‘Hours ago - this night? Come on - some hours ago?’

  ‘You said you were coming.’

  Blank. It didn’t fit anywhere. She had sounded frightened. Perhaps I’d spoken too loudly. That was because I was frustrated: there might be a need for hurry and I couldn’t ‘Don’t worry,’ I told her.

  I sat blanking my mind for as long as a minute and it worked and I got a completely lucid sequence: the telephone cold in my hand, the sweep of light as a car went by, the smell of the exhaust-gas. I’m coming to see you. Pain across the shoulders and chest What happened? A loose feeling in one shoe. I’ll be there in an hour. A car slowing or seemingly slowing so that I dropped back into the shelter of the woodland.

  ‘I was phoning from the autobahn. I just wanted to know if you’d be alone.’

  ‘I’m always alone.’

  She meant always without Franz.

  Her body was milky under the nightgown and the light from the street shadowed her eyes. She asked me why I had come.

  I couldn’t tell her. They might already have found him on the floor and the number of the N.S.U. was in the reception-book and there was an N.S.U. with that number lying smashed in the trees near the autobahn. So I couldn’t have gone back to the motel or checked in at any hotel in Linsdorf or Hanover or anywhere at all, looking like this. There was no safe-house because I was working with prescribed cover: Walter Martin attached to Accidents Investigation Branch temporary overseas location Weserbergland Federal Republic Germany. The A.I.B. was an official organization in the pursuit of lawful business in cooperation with a foreign government and if anything irregular happened to Walter Martin the A.I.B. must be protected from any consequences. The Bureau would want to take care of this situation before it could get out of hand so I had to tell Ferris as soon as I could. The trouble was that I’d blown my own cover and couldn’t go near the Linsdorf base or the A.I.B. unit or Ferris himself. I’d had to find a bolt-hole and go to ground and this was the only place but I couldn’t tell her that.

  ‘I needed you,’ I said.

  ‘People don’t need me.’

  She meant Franz didn’t ‘I had an accident.’

  She let herself laugh suddenly. ‘Did you?’

  The Special Uses sheepskin coat was ripped and one shoe was loose, split right across. I didn’t know what my face looked like but the wound in my hand had been opened up and they were both caked with earth.

  Another clear sequence began and I sat with it as if I watched a film: the trees coming up in a wave at great speed as the car lurched into a slow roll, still airborne and then hit rubble and plunged with the headlights turning the scene into an abstract kaleidoscope pattern of black and white, the trees winter-bare and resembling a gigantic stack of driftwood bursting and hurled against the windscreen, the percussion of wood on metal and glass and the white hail as the screen went, the scene revolving slowly at first until it was upside down and then jerking as the saplings bent under the onslaught and sent the car sideways and straight and sideways again-and pitching lower into the undergrowth while the momentum was broken against stripped white bark and I kept my knees jack-knifed and my feet on the crash-cushion, the reek of fuel from a torn pipe and sometimes the glow of the moon spinning through black branches and always the bite of the straps holding my body back while my head’s own weight dragged at the neck and tried to break it. Everything suddenly still.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ I said again.

  ‘I was scared.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘You didn’t recognize me, I mean.’

  ‘I do now.’

  She slid off the chair and knelt in front of me and I made to touch her face to reassure her but my hand was scabbed with dried blood and she was clean and young and fragile in the aureole of the street’s light and I took my hand away.

  ‘Do you need a doctor?’

  ‘No. Why were you crying?’

  ‘I was thinking about Paul and I suppose I went to sleep. It was late when you phoned. Paul Dissen. You know it was his plane today? He -‘

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘He got mixed up in my dream, half himself and half Franz, it was grotesque. Dead, of course,’ She got up and looked helpless for a moment, floating in the light from the window, aimless. ‘He’s always dead when I dream about him. I’ll fetch some water.’

  I decided to recognize the fact that retrograde amnesia was blocking off part of the past. I didn’t want to telephone Ferris until I could give him the whole thing. I remembered most of the post-crash sequence, leaving the N.S.U. and finding an emergency phone and later going down through the trees again and reaching the secondary road and stopping a truck, waving a handful of deutschmarks in the glare of his lights. But I didn’t know why I had crashed the N.S.U. because the retrograde kick covers a period of anything up to fifteen minutes prior to concussion and the last thing I could remember was a man at an Esso station saying if it rained later tonight the roads would freeze. I said I didn’t think it would rain because the moon was too clear.

  It happens with a lot of people - drivers, airline pilots - and there’s nothing they can do about it when there’s an enquiry: they just ‘don’t remember what happened’. It is why Stirling Moss couldn’t explain what made him crash. The memory traces need time to consolidate and store experience and if the head gets a blow it’s like tapping a bowl of sand just after someone has drawn figures on it with a stick: it smooths over.

  She was bathing my hands. I could have done it for myself in the bathroom but she’d got it all set up with towels on the carpet and hot water in the bowl and I didn’t stop her because playing dolls would help her to deal with the fright and bewilderment: she’d been dreaming about Paul-Franz being dead and then I’d come through the doorway and fallen flat on my face
with delayed shock and it must have been hard for her to take.

  ‘I never see him in a plane or in a wreck or anything. You’d think I would.’

  ‘Yes.’

  She had a whole plastic bag of cotton wool and tore bits off it the wrong way, tugging at it and not getting anywhere. ‘I see the funeral, men in black with pale faces I can’t recognize. It’s always a civilian funeral, I suppose because that’s the only kind I’ve ever seen, my mother’s, with big black cars and flowers. And all the time I’m thinking about the plane - it’s made another widow and this time it’s me.’

  There had been a boy washing the windscreen of the N.S.U. He’d asked about the engine, if it ran well. The edge of the blank area was somewhere there: at the Esso station.

  ‘You’ll mess yourself up, Nitri.’

  The water was red-brown in the bowl. She nodded and went to change it. I got up and followed her because this needed an entire bathroom and anyway I wanted to see if anything had happened to my face. But there must have been some kind of memory trace in the subconscious: the moment the N.S.U. had come to rest with the front lodged at an angle between two trees I’d snatched at the buckle and thrown the straps clear, kicking at the driver’s door and finding it was jammed solid, dragging myself through the white fragmented windscreen and slitting a shoe on the frame. There was a branch in the way and my coat was catching but I forced myself through the gap with my scalp shrinking and goose-flesh everywhere: there was some kind of fear driving me on, pushing me through a gap that would have been impossibly small if the fear hadn’t given me the strength. Not quite fear: a kind of dread.

  ‘I’ll make you a tourniquet from something.’ The water span red in the basin.

  Full consciousness hadn’t come back until I’d felt the telephone cold in my hand. The concussion would have left me trapped inside the wreck: it was the dread that had taken over. I had known that unless I could get away from the wreck, something would come for me there. Even when I’d finished talking to her on the emergency phone there was no let-up: a car was slowing along the autobahn and I dropped down the earth bank and clawed my way through bramble and gone on across a knoll of trees. At one time headlights had swung through the higher branches as if a car were being turned, and the frost glittered on the dead leaves underfoot. Then there was the truck, much later, on the minor road, and my hand full of deutschmarks, waving.