The Striker Portfolio

by Adam Hall

  They had double-locked the steel door and I was alone.

  They didn’t like you to have access to sharp things here and the beaker above the handbasin was made of soft plastic. I turned on a tap but it didn’t work so I tried the other one but that didn’t work either. Like everything else in East Germany the plumbing was shoddy. Then I realized this was wrong thinking, just -as Kohn had said: it was mere prejudice. The plumbing was perfectly all right, and I knew why he was so certain that I was going to tell him all he wanted to know.

  Chapter Sixteen

  ORDEAL

  The scorpion, trapped, will sting itself to death.

  Estimation: it would be five days before they dragged me out of here with my tongue rattling. Then Kohn would put his questions and I wouldn’t say anything and they would bring me back and leave me alone for another twelve hours and then drag me out again and I wouldn’t say anything and they would go on doing it until it became humiliating. I would avoid that. Humiliation.

  There were various ways. The window was glazed on the outside of its recess and the bars were inside and level with the wall but I could just reach far enough to smash the glass and get hold of a splinter and use it. The actual flow would take time because of the dehydration and they might be quick getting to me but the chance was good if I went for both wrists and the groin.

  The two blankets on the bed were made of processed cellulose pulp stitched inside loose-spun fibre that didn’t have any weave to it and even if I could make strips the knots wouldn’t hold enough to bear my weight. The bed it’s self was fixed to the wall with mason’s rag-bolts and the handbasin was metal. But they hadn’t thought of everything because the electric light worked and when I was ready I could just about bridge the distance between the lamp and the basin, a thumb pressed into the bayonet and a bare foot on the water-pipe.

  The other ways might work but I didn’t spend too much time thinking about them because they weren’t certain. The hand will do what it’s told to do and blood-letting and electrocution depend on voluntary manipulation but in a deliberate backward fall with the neck angled the body itself will try to survive: we only have to trip and the hand goes out at once.

  Five days before they thought I looked ready, seven or eight before I had to pull the chicken-switch. That was a long time and there might be something I could do as an alternative from going slowly mad with thirst. But I didn’t think so. They’d got it all worked out and I wasn’t the first one to look round this room and see in everyday things the potential instruments of death.

  The air was cold and I checked the radiator. It had lost most of its heat and the tap was open so it looked as if they turned off the main system about midnight. The unit held something like twelve litres of water but the octagonal unions and blanking-plugs were encrusted with paint and it would need a 5-cm spanner to loosen them so I would have to forget it.

  I stripped off most of my clothes and dumped them on to the bed for a pillow. The thing was to work out a compromise between staying too warm and getting too cold: normal body-heat produced invisible sweat and I had to hold on to all the fluid I could. Excess cold would drive the blood from the surface and stimulate the kidneys into producing urine. Muscular effort would have to be cut to a minimum but that called for another compromise: there was just a chance that when they came in here again they might make a silly mistake and leave me an opening and I wouldn’t be able to take it if the muscles were slack from disuse.

  The physical set-up was all right except that the shock-dose of saline in the caviar and beer was already drying the mouth: they had cut down the time-factor by a couple of days. But the problem wasn’t only physical. Denied fluid, the body will slowly shrivel to a point where it can no longer support life, but between the onset of thirst and final desiccation there is the effect on the mind. The resolves I was capable of making now could be maintained only so long as I stayed sane.

  They were relying on two things. One: that I would be brought to the stage where I would sell the Bureau for a glass of water. No go. We are prepared at any time to do what the scorpion does. Two: that I would lose my reason and become a gibbering traitor. And of this I was afraid. The Bureau and all of those men whose safety depended on the law that secrecy was sacrosanct would remain safe in my keeping until the moment came when sanity was threatened. Before then, and in good time, I would have to blot it all out.

  But I was afraid because no man knows when his reason goes: once it has gone he can no longer reason.

  The north light came grey from the winter sky through the glass that would soon be smashed.

  My one task for the day was to find out if the room were miked because I didn’t want them to hear my movements. I found it behind a section of wallpaper just below the ceiling and I tore a wad of pulp from one of the blankets and stuffed it into the gap. Never destroy a mike: it can sometimes be used to carry false information.

  The thirst was a worry now and at some time before noon I found myself at the basin making sure the taps were turned on.

  Someone might be stupid enough to open the main cock outside the room. I hadn’t planned to check on this but it seemed all right, a natural thing to do.

  There was some activity in the afternoon: some cars arrived and once I heard a shout as if someone were trying to run free. There was no shooting but the dogs barked a lot just afterwards. Their sound was faint and it reached me through the building, not through the window, so I assumed they were in kennels somewhere at the rear.

  The big man came when the light began fading. I was prone on the bunk when he looked through the grille. He opened the door and stood there while the heavy-breasted girl in brogues came in with a waxed picnic-plate. She didn’t look at me but just put it carefully across the corner of the basin and went out. There was something about her attitude that gave me the impression that she was afflicted, perhaps deaf-mute.

  They were salt-beef sandwiches so it wasn’t any good trying to press the moisture out. I didn’t even hide them under the bed: unlike thirst, hunger is containable.

  In the late evening I got up to make sure the taps were on but didn’t actually do it this time. The willpower was coming into its own at this stage: the body had at last recognized that things were serious. They’d no more let someone stupid turn on the water from outside than they’d let him unlock the door. I would have to stop thinking wrongly.

  I re-checked before putting the light out: possibility of forcing the metal basin away from the wall and using the brackets or the basin itself to lever the bars apart, possibility of straining the rag-bolts of the bunk and climbing on it to reach the ceiling and break through the lathes and plaster. This was the third floor and there was no support-scaffolding outside the window so the bars weren’t too important. There would be nothing higher than the raised width of the bunk to swing up on so a hole in the ceiling wouldn’t do any good. The microphone, however muffled, would bring them here to see what I was doing.

  Before midnight by mental reckoning they came and woke me from fitful sleep. One stood near me with the black-jack. The other stayed in the doorway and poured water slowly from a jug into a glass and slowly drank it. I turned away as soon as I saw the idea but the sound brought sweat on me, wasting my reserves. Impotence expressed itself in anger surprisingly fast and I had to relax consciously so that I couldn’t swing round on them and attack. Any effort of that sort would use up moisture and that was what they wanted.

  But when they had gone I couldn’t sleep again for a long time because of the sound of the water.

  Hallucinations began towards the end of the second day, most of them aural. Sometimes they came to the door and opened the grille and poured water for me to hear but sometimes I knew they weren’t there, only the noise, because the grille was shut.

  My tongue was shrinking now, the mouth a husk. One difficulty was in trying not to review the bodily processes that I knew were going on. Movement could be controlled, and I spent most of the day prone u
nder the window where it was coldest, but breathing had to go on and I knew that every breath was passing moisture from the lungs to waste it on the air. Inactivity and the visual monotony of the walls and ceiling were inducing sleep and I forced wakefulness and concentrated on keeping tidal respiration to a minimum.

  They came again at midnight. One filled the glass and offered it to me and I took it at once: the body was avid and the mind careless. Then I smelt petrol and threw it against his face but he was expecting it and ducked and the glass smashed on the wall of the passage outside.

  Later I knew they had devised the stratagem so that I should be made to see the glass: being offered it, I wouldn’t turn away as I had before. I had been made to see the cool liquidity of what I believed was water and the fact that it was petrol made no difference because I saw it still as they knew I would, shimmering in the dark against my eyes, and it had no smell and it was drinkable, infinitely desirable.

  By the evening of the third day I was ready.

  The initial shock-dose of saline had advanced the physical process critically and even though inactive, even though for most of the time inert, I had passed more than a gallon of moisture through the skin and lost an added amount from the lungs. The mental process had been advanced by the sight and sound of liquid and by the presence of the taps over the basin. Today I had had to tear the picnic-plate into halves and cover the taps so that they were hidden: because every time I woke it was there that I looked.

  I was ready this evening because earlier I had seen a damp patch forming on the wall below the metal basin and heard water trickling. Realizing that it was a leak I began gouging-at the plaster but found it was dry, perfectly dry. Memory came back from the far side of the miracle: pipes that are empty cannot leak.

  The body could go on for days before it died but the time was shorter for the mind. There had been seven hallucinations during last night and today, three of them visual, and the stage was approaching when I would tell them: Look, there’s water on the wall, his name is Parkis, head of Whitehall 9. And it would seem reasonable to tell them, reason being gone.

  The danger was in proportion to the stake: you can gain more with less to lose. The stake was the Bureau.

  In the afternoon I had pulled the wad clear of the microphone and crushed the diaphragm. The basin was difficult because I had lost a third of my strength but one of the brackets came away with it and it was a bracket I wanted: the pipes were plastic, not lead. It took an hour to free the bracket from the basin, flexing the bolt until it snapped.

  It was a poor weapon but the value of any weapon is increased when it’s the only one you have. There was of course no chance of success: none. They always come in pairs and were armed and there were others in the building and the building was itself under guard. Barbed fencing. Whip-lamps. Dogs.

  But what I had to do, for pride’s sake, before I turned to the final act of blotting it all out, was draw blood.

  By midnight they hadn’t come.

  An hour ago the grille had been opened and closed. I had been standing within three feet of it, close enough to conceal the wall where I’d wrenched the basin away. But they didn’t come in, and for this hour I had tormented myself because I could have waited against the door and driven the bracket through the grille: an eye for a withered tongue, with luck a death for a death.

  The central heating had gone off: the pipes ticked as they contracted, the water cooling, water, cool water.

  I left the light burning so that I could see objects that were real; in the dark I could see only fountains shining.

  In an hour they came, opening the door quietly without first looking through the grille. The lock turned so slowly that I had to put my hand against the panel and feel the movement of the mechanism, afraid that I imagined it.

  When he came in I used my bracket from left to right and starting low to drive upwards and across in a gouging swing to the face and saw surprise and heard his breath snatching as his head jerked back but the swing travelled on and struck nothing and I was off-balance and he knew it and hooked my leg behind the knee. The ceiling span. Somewhere the brain, cool, analytical, computer-quick, wryly reminded the poor fool body that fast action following prolonged inertia was crippled at the start. But we must do our best. He knew his locks: we were down and he worked for my throat and I knew how weak I was but he was worried and trying to speak and I wouldn’t listen because they always lied: salt, petrol. Scissors now but he broke it and we rolled over and I worked for the throat again, my left hand flaring, the wound pulling open, rage moving my hands unscientifically and the knee coming up and missing - ‘Freund’ - and trying again and missing as he brought his arm across and T felt the lock coming on. ‘Freund,’ he grunted again. The light circled. They always lie. The lights flashed and I was under, and water trickled near me, and his breath was sawing, and I could do nothing. Trickling.

  He moved very fast and I looked up at him. He stood warily, watching. Water soaked into my hair. It was chill on my scalp. He was holding a flask. It had fallen when we went down, spilling. He nodded, holding the flask for me to take. I got up. The bracket had been lost and I swung an empty hand at the flask but he drew it back, surprised. I stood swaying in the tilting walls and heard warning that I should consider, re-assess, brain-think trying to overcome the animal need to injure the enemy, draw his blood.

  Carefully he held the flask towards me again and I considered. There was no petrol smell. This man was alone. They had always come in pairs. The flask was not empty because some had spilled on the floor, puddling beside my head.

  He nodded, holding the flask. I turned away. My left hand was growing heavy, the bandage filling. I moved as far as the window and he followed: I could hear him. My breath was like blades in my throat.

  ‘You must drink,’ he said and I turned and he was holding the flask. I shook my head. He looked surprised.

  Belief began. Belief in water. But if it wasn’t, if I tried to drink and found it wasn’t, I didn’t know what I would do. I would rather not try. Not know.

  He seemed to understand and raised the flask and drank, holding it at a distance from his mouth so that I should see that it wasn’t a trick. Drops ran down his chin and he wiped them away. He nodded again.

  It was an army flask, felt-covered metal with a strap for hitching to the belt. I took it from him and slopped the water into my mouth and tasted it and closed my eyes and drank till there was no more.

  He seemed to have some small authority because there was a guard in the hall and he told me to wait, and went down the last flight of stairs, speaking to the guard, who turned and went along the lower passage. A door closed in the distance.

  The building was quiet. Naked bulbs burned but the spotlights were dark. In a white-walled cellar he threw a high-voltage switch and led me to the top of some steps and into the chill night air.

  ‘Is there more?’ I asked. ‘More water?’

  I had emptied the flask but the thirst raged. It had been like a raindrop on a hot coal.

  ‘Later. There’s no time now.’

  There were bushes, their leaves black against the sky. The moon swam beyond curdled cloud. He stood close to me, gripping my arm. ‘Listen. Go through the fence. Do it quickly: the current is off but I must switch it on again soon. Then go across the ploughed field to the far side. Go straight across. And hurry.’

  He pushed me forward.

  The earth was frosty under my feet. I shook with cold. The field was wide and I lurched on, letting the weight of my body force me across the ruts. I was free but afraid it might not be true, just as I had been afraid that it might not be water. But the sky was above me and I was alone.

  It began when I was halfway across: the distant clamour of alarm-bells, voices and the cry of dogs. Light swept the trees at the far border of the field. Surely I should have learned by now that they always lied.

  Chapter Seventeen

  THE GRAVE

  The thin beams of the whi
p-lamps pencilled across the trees. The balls had stopped but the dogs voiced their excitement, knowing that they would soon be released because that was what the sound of the bells had always meant.

  Perhaps Kohn had altered his decision or his advisers in Neueburg, Linsdorf, Hanover had counselled him that Martin had been operating alone with no back-up cell and was a subject for quick dispatch rather than interrogation.

  The chill of the earth seeped into me. I lay face down.

  A car and then another drove fast to the gates, their sound shifting from left to right, behind me. They were military vehicles, heavy-engined, and the earth flickered under the side-wash of their searchlights.

  The policy would be circumspect, a reason forwarded to the relevant authority in the Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands: a politically dangerous enemy of the State, shot while attempting to escape.

  The heavy engines raced, the wheels losing grip on frost-patches. Men shouted. Boots rang on metal footplates.

  I began crawling forward along my rut.

  Go to him and give him water and then set him running across open land, then alert the guards. Make him trust you or he may go for cover and we don’t want difficulties.

  For three nights the moon had been bright through the window but now a nimbus layer filtered its light and at moments the land was almost dark. If I got up and ran for cover they might not see me but I suspected the thought: it could be the onset of panic.

  More vehicles were on the move.

  I need not go, now, in the direction he had told me. But it was the nearest cover. They would know I was going there, to the trees on the far edge of the field, but if I took another direction they would find me sooner: their lights were already closing in at the flank. I crawled faster.