The Striker Portfolio

by Adam Hall

  It was just because he didn’t know what to do. A lot of them are like that: they work to strict orders and when there aren’t any orders they beat the air. But I knew it would be all right: I had known since he’d looked at his watch just after he’d left the car. He had a rendezvous.

  ‘You go first,’ I told him. ‘And start now. They’re not going to wait forever.’

  He was staring into my face, intent on everything I said, hoping it might give him some kind of direction: and finally it did. He had needed telling almost in so many words that all he had to do was take me with him to the rendezvous where ‘they’ were waiting. Then he could ask one of them for a gun and he would be six feet tall again and I would be dead.

  ‘It is heavily mined,’ he said slowly. ‘You will have to take care.’

  A new thought had been worming its way through the sludge: he was worried in case I trod on the wrong thing and brought the guards out firing from the hip. He only liked shooting people: he didn’t like people shooting him.

  ‘We’ll both be very careful, yes. Both of us.’

  He nodded and turned away and went forward for three or four metres at a time, stopping to check bearings. There was something disgusting about the way I had to put my feet precisely where he put his, turning my head exactly as he did, it was just deep in my nature to resent being dependent on people, even people as good as Ferris, and now I was dependent on this gross creature, my life linked intimately with his.

  He moved again and stopped again and I checked the new reference: the third wire-stanchion from the nearest warning-sign was lined up with the edge of the ruin. I assumed we were halfway across the thirty-metre strip because he began checking ahead for bearings instead of behind. It was easier in that direction: pines stood sparsely at the fringe of a darker mass and the intervals between their trunks were irregular so that each had identity.

  The lightning flashed and everything leapt sharply in it: trees, wire, posts, the rutted earth. He caught his breath and stumbled. The pathology of the gun-dependent is odd: once armed he loses his fear even of things against which a gun is of no use: spiders, heights, the elements. He carries a magic talisman. Conversely, deprived, his fears are exaggerated.

  The lightning struck twice again and flickered out and for a moment it was difficult to see. We had both stopped. The Harz range stood fifty or sixty kilometres to the north but the storm had been drifting south-east and the thunder reached us in less than one minute. I looked up and saw that the moon was now ten or twelve degrees of arc from the edge of the cloud-mass.

  I said: ‘We haven’t got long.’

  He moved again, counting seven paces and checking. The post was lined up with the fourth pine from the end but I used one of the wire-stanchions as the closer reference because it was thinner and therefore more accurate. He was taking his time and I began thinking it had been a mistake to throw the bloody thing away: his confidence had gone with it, ‘Look, we’ve got about nine minutes’ visibility left so for God’s sake get off the pot.’

  Through his teeth: ‘You want me to blow myself up?’

  ‘If it’ll get you off the pot.’

  Halfway to the eastern wire my weight broke the crusty earth and one shoe slipped on the shoulder of something hard. I said:

  ‘Wait.’

  I made sure he stopped, then bent down and felt the thing because I needed to know how good his bearings were. The soil came away under my fingers and I went on clearing it until they could define the shape. It was a curved shoulder and pitch-smooth and the detonator would be three or four inches to the right, in the centre. It would be at least a fourteen-ounce actuator, otherwise the odd crow or some heavy rainfall would trip it, so I finished the job and left the whole thing exposed: it would be a help if I ever came back this way and if I didn’t it would help someone else.

  ‘You’re not very good,’ I said, ‘are you?’

  It was just possible that he’d deliberately taken me too close but I didn’t think so: even in his demoralized condition he must realize that he’d catch some of the blast.

  ‘You shouldn’t have done that.’ His whisper was reedy with fright.

  ‘You shouldn’t have taken me so bloody close.’

  There were two more changes of angle before we reached the wire and I took a final sighting with the military depot as a reference. It looked closer than I would have believed: the nerves had come farther than thirty metres. He climbed through the wire, more confidence in his movements now that we were clear of the mines and he could lead me to his friends and borrow a gun. When he’d gone five paces I said sharply:

  ‘What was that?’

  He turned his head and I did it and when he was down I looked for his papers. All he had were an identity card and a crossword puzzle and I held my watch-glass at an angle against the name to increase the light-factor. Guhl. Re-check, Guhl. I kicked a hole in the earth and buried the card and put the crossword puzzle into my coat as a flash came. There were three more over a ten-second period and I kept still until they were over. He lay in much the same position as Benedikt but there were no bits of porcelain around, just the scuffed earth.

  I had waited until he had taken his last five paces so as to know the direction of the rendezvous. It lay towards the group of pines and I started off. The sound of the preliminary flash was already crackling and the rest of the series followed and sent a ricochet of echoes from the Thuringerwald range to the south-east so that for longer than half a minute the sky and earth reverberated.

  The dark came down soon afterwards, sweeping from west to east across the land as the clouds reached and drew beneath the moon. I should have made him push on faster through the mines instead of wet-nursing him: the rendezvous could be a kilometre from here and if I missed it the one fine thread would break. Or I should have let him take me further than those five paces but the trouble was that I couldn’t stand his company.

  A long flash broke, a chain-discharge that went rippling across the dark mass of the trees and dusted them with grey-green light. I froze and waited, uneasy now because this was a patch of open ground where there was nothing higher than a clod of earth and anyone could pick me off with the other hand behind their back. The thunder arrived within a few seconds: at ground level the air was calm but a high wind-layer was shifting the storm-clouds at increasing speed. Then light flashed once and I wasn’t ready for it because it didn’t come from the sky. It could have been the nerves:

  I was stumbling blind across furrows and the spine was taking some of the shocks. The trunk of the first pine loomed and I began crossing the gap to the next one.

  ‘Hier.’

  I had overshot quite a bit and had to turn back and to the left before I saw it. There was still ploughed earth underfoot so they must have brought it right to the dead-end of the track.

  I got in and said: ‘You’d better get away quite fast because I kicked up some noise coming across.’ The dash-lamp threw a weird greenish glow on the driver’s face. He had his neck screwed round to look at me and I stared back at him. ‘What the hell did you have to flash your light for ?’ I said. ‘Did you think I couldn’t find you or something?’ He didn’t move but his eyes switched twelve inches to my left.

  She asked from beside me: ‘Where is he?’

  ‘Guhl ? Crossing tomorrow night. You’ll have to meet him.’ Her one question had been clipped and authoritative so I said: ‘Just tell him to shove off, will you ? There’s two of them out there looking for the noise I made.’

  She told him: ‘Wait for the next thunder.’

  ‘Kamerad Oberst.’ He faced the front.

  ‘What happened to Guhl?’

  Lightning flared and I was looking into bronze eyes, their brilliance heightened by the flash : then it was over but I had seen her face, hard, proud, altered by the storm and my strangeness.

  ‘I was ordered across first.’ The thunder shook the night and the engine started up and we were on the move before the echoes die
d away. ‘You want an intelligent report, don’t you? You think he knows what the hell’s going on? He’s a clod, you know that.’

  The track gave on to a metalled road within a hundred metres and we stopped bumping around.

  ‘How did you injure yourself?’

  She didn’t miss much: he hadn’t switched the heads on yet and there was no back-glare. She’d taken me all in, just in the one flash.

  ‘The nail-file slipped.’ We got into higher gear and now he switched them on so I hunched myself round a bit more to face her. Night-black hair, close-cropped but not masculine, pale lipstick, if any, a lean hard jaw-line, the nose by Michelangelo. ‘What do you imagine things are like in Hanover with the Benedikt thing just blown up ? I was lucky to get off with a stray one in the hand.’ It was the sort of face you’d expect to see at a night-rendezvous in the East German Frontier Zone if you expected to see a woman there at all. ‘Anyway,’ I-said wearily, ‘we’ve stopped the leak, that’s the main thing.’

  She kept her hands inside her battered flying-jacket. Perhaps she had a gun but I didn’t think so: one sharp word to the Prussian-headed type at the wheel and he’d swing one on me without even swerving. He’d called her Oberst: Colonel. She asked:

  ‘How far had it gone?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The leak.’

  ‘Christ, don’t you know anything? Didn’t Neueburg keep you informed ?’

  She didn’t answer but I wasn’t worried. You don’t set up a contact point thirty kilometres from a frontier without putting radio in. I let the silence go on for a bit and then said: ‘I’ll tell you how far it had gone. He’d made contact - twice. We got the one in Hanover and he went and did it again: he knew how to try, I’ll give him that much.’ The scene was lit up around us and I had to shout against the din. ‘It was Guhl who was sent in to fix him the second time, at Linsdorf. I thought they were your orders through Hanover. If they weren’t yours then whose were they for God’s sake?’

  She might have answered me, given me a name, a hand-hold, but there was a flash so bright that it looked as if the whole sky had fused: the headlights seemed to go out and the entire landscape went lichen-green and the thunder rolled between the hills with one long-drawn-out bowling-alley clatter. It was appropriate enough: I was on my way to what London called the ‘storm-centre’ and bloody Parkis was right again.

  The last lot had been tough on the ear-drums because when it was quiet again I could barely hear the engine. It was a three-cylinder Wartburg 1000, a home-product they described as a ‘limousine’ along the Unter den Linden though along Oxford Street it’d be a clapped-out minicab.

  ‘Where did they call you from?’

  She had a low and rather husky voice, the kind people wish they could keep once their cold has gone. It would have been attractive if every time she spoke I didn’t expect her to tell the Prussian to pull up and get in the back with us and bring his garotting tools.

  ‘Berlin.’

  ‘When?’

  Too late, as usual. No bloody co-ordination. I said in sudden frustration: ‘You know the trouble with Die Zelle? It’s over organized. Its left hand’s so busy trying to find out what its right hand’s doing that it can’t even feel the way along the wall.’ I looked for reaction but she just watched me, chin resting on the fleece collar of the jacket, saying nothing either with her eyes or her mouth. ‘Look at the Hanover cell: they didn’t get on to Benedikt till it was damned nearly too late. And who did the job on Stockener? They weren’t too clever, getting him alone in his car before they shoved it off the road - made it twice as difficult and in the end it stank of foul play. What’s one West German military driver among friends? Who went soft?’

  I looked away from her and left it at that. A lot of it didn’t add up but that was all right: I’d been called in late so I wouldn’t be expected to know some of the answers. I just wanted to show I at least knew some of the questions.

  It was a long time before she spoke. We passed one of the Soviet garrison barracks, a litter of two-storey hutments behind a picket fence with machine-gun towers. This side of the frontier there were twenty Russian divisions and they’d been here twenty years.

  ‘Did you talk to Benedikt?’

  ‘Of course I talked to him. Poor bastard, he was too good for this world, you know that ?’

  Lightning came again but this time there was quite an interval before the thunder followed. When the greenish glow brightened again on the facia-board I took another sighting on the speedo-trip. We’d gone twenty-seven kilometres from the frontier, due east most of the time, and it couldn’t be far now because the fuel was below a quarter and there wouldn’t be a filling-station open at night: we’d seen only two cars since we’d got on to the wider roads south of Mulhausen and there wasn’t even an oil-streak along the nearside lane. In the Deutsche Demokratische Republik if you weren’t military-or political you walked.

  ‘Who was your controller in Hanover?’

  ‘I never even saw him. They shot me straight in to locate Benedikt and stop the rot.’ I’d rehearsed it so many times that it seemed to make sense. There were half a dozen other direct questions I’d rehearsed the answer to but now she threw one in that I couldn’t hope to stop.

  ‘Who was your controller in Berlin?’

  Because you might get away with not knowing the people you’ve been sent in to assist but if you don’t know the name of your own controller at your own base there’s something just a fraction odd in the picture.

  I hitched myself round and looked at her and waited until she turned her head and then I said; ‘Look, I think you’re old enough to know. I haven’t been in East Germany since the night in 1945 when I was holed up for six hours in the undercarriage of a converted bomber that was due out of Leipzig with a cargo of anti-typhoid serum for Berlin. Maybe you know how long I’ve been working for Die Zelle on the other side of the frontier and if you don’t it doesn’t matter but I’ll tell you this: you may be one of the hierarchy at HQ and I could trust you with my last wristwatch but the dreary fact of the matter is that until tonight I didn’t know your face and I still don’t know your name, Kamerad Oberst, so if it’s all the same to you I’m going to play it a bit coy when you throw questions like that one. Because if you don’t know who my controller is in Berlin I might be a fool to tell you.’ There were gold flecks deep in the bronze but that was all, just the play of light on living colour. ‘No offence, of course.’

  When the eyes of two people meet and hold their gaze a silent conversation begins and when they are strangers there is a great deal, to be said because their lives are a blank to each other. But sometimes there is even more to be withheld and nothing of it must show and for some people it is difficult. For the woman sitting close to me in the Wartburg, her face sometimes shadowed and sometimes lit by the storm, it was easy. She had spent her life withholding things which spoken, even by the eyes, could betray her: she was a professional, the kind you occasionally meet in the bitter and grinding course of a mission and wish you could perhaps have met in some better place and at some better time when life held more promise of being longer. So that there was nothing in these honeyed tiger’s eyes at all. And nothing, as I knew, in my own.

  ‘We shall be there soon,’ she said and looked away.

  The moon was behind cloud and the land dark. From the distance the building made a honeycomb pattern of light as if a liner were moored there on still black water.

  Three men at the gates checked us in. One carried a repeater rifle but wore no uniform: I knew his type, the blank face, the attitude half-slack, half-military, the air of unlimited power subordinate only to higher-ranking members of the same regime -the secret police.

  ‘Kamerad Oberst.’ The click of heels.

  All I could see of the building was that it was modern, a slab of raw concrete with the silhouette of ship lamps jutting on the skyline. Most of the windows were barred and I heard dogs somewhere. The certainty was satisfying: the thr
ead had held and now I had come all the way. This was the storm-centre: the Kommandantur of Die Zelle.

  Two plain-clothes guards fell in as we climbed the steps but she dismissed them with a word and we went into the building alone. Two others met us and she sent for someone by name and we stood in a silent group until he appeared, a complex of hooded spotlights casting our shadows across the floor.

  She didn’t look at me: her head was turned away. Standing, she was a slight figure even in the flying-jacket though taller than I had imagined. She stood easily erect, gloved hands behind her.

  ‘Kamerad Oberst?’

  A big man, quiet on his feet, his eyes dulled by the long absence of any need to think.

  Her neat head turned to look at him.

  ‘This man crossed tonight. His name is Martin. Take him to Reception and search him. Strip him and search his body. Search the bandage particularly. Make certain there is no death-pill anywhere on him. Let him dress and then restrict his movements. If he should kill himself before the Herr Direktor can interrogate him I shall hold you responsible.’

  She left us without looking back.

  Chapter Fifteen

  KOHN

  The passages were as wide as in any modern building in East Germany and there were no other guards within sight but the place had the atmosphere of a penitentiary.

  ‘Is this a school?’

  When they have dull eyes don’t ask them what something is: they won’t tell you. Give them a bone: the pleasure of correcting you.

  ‘This is the Aschau Asylum for the Criminally Insane.’

  The room where they took me seemed appropriate. The big man went in first and the other followed me. Iron bed, metal handbasin, spotlights in a low ceiling: there were a lot of these lights about the place, all the better to see you with. One window, adequately barred, a quarter-inch-steel door with a continental double-action lock and a sliding grille-panel where they could look in to see what you were doing.

  The escort stayed in the doorway and the big man became a mechanical valet. She had said do this, do that, and now he did this, did that. The instructions had gone into his skull and the actions came out through his hands: he searched me and stripped me and searched my body and searched the bandage particularly and made sure there was no death-pill on me, then he let me dress and restricted my movements with a pair of military handcuffs, arms behind, because you can get through a vein with your nails if you work at it and she’d warned him that he was responsible for me. The other man stood near the door bouncing gently on his arches like a boxer fresh into the ring, the night-stick looped to his wrist with a leather thong.