The Quiller Memorandum

by Adam Hall

  The Quiller Memorandum

  Adam Hall

  This well-drawn tale of espionage is set in West Berlin, 15 years after the end of WW II. Quiller, a British agent who works without gun, cover or contacts, takes on a neo-Nazi underground organization and its war criminal leader. In the process, he discovers a complex and malevolent plot, more dangerous to the world than any crime committed during the war.

  On its publication in 1966, THE QUILLER MEMORANDUM received the Edgar Award as best mystery of the year.

  Adam Hall

  The Quiller Memorandum

  The first book in the Quiller series, 1965

  1: POL

  A coupleof air-hostesses came in through the glass doors, crisp andpure-looking in Lufthansa uniform. They looked once at the group of pilots who stood at the soft-drinks bar then swung on their spiked heels to preen themselves inthe mirrors. The pilots turned to watch them, all of them tall, all of them blond. Nobody spoke. Another girl came in and touched her reflected hair before she turned away andstudied her shining fingertips at armslength, glancing upjust once at the tall blond men, looking down again with her head tilted, admiring her spread fingers as if they were flowers.

  One of the young men grinned and looked among his friends to see who would join him in an approach towards thegirls, but nobody moved. A light flashed rhythmically acrossand across the window, coming from the airport beacon. The two girls left the mirrors, glanced again at thepilots and then stood neatly with their feet together and their hands behind them. Everybody seemed to be waiting.

  The boy who had grinned to his friends seemed to venture a step towards the hostesses, but another blocked his foot andthe boy shrugged, folding his arms. Into the silence was rising the sound of a jet airliner starting up outside.

  This was what they had been waiting for and they all turned towards the centre, looking upwards, listening, all of them smiling now.

  The rising sound of the aircraft was not yet very loud, so that I heard the door of the box being opened behind my chair; a wedge of light came against the wall and then went out.

  Clearly visible through the big window the dorsal lamp of the airliner began winking, and the sound of the jets levelled out to an even pitch. The pilots tensed and the hostesses took a few delicate eager steps towards the doors, with their bodies turned to face the group of boys.

  I was aware that someone had come into the box and was standing behind me. I did not turn my head.

  Then the pilots moved in a body towards the centre and the prettiest of the girls flung out her hands and called eagerly: "Who's for the air? "

  The tallest of the boys responded: "I am! " His friends chorused to the first notes of the music: "We are! "

  "Who's for the sky? " sang the girls, and they were into the number.

  Under cover of the music the man sat down in the chair next to mine, shifting it at an angle so that he could face me obliquely. The glow from the stage defined one side of his head and gleamed along the side-piece of his glasses.

  " Windsor," he introduced himself.

  Who's for a wide blue sky-high fling?

  We are! We're on the wing!

  "I'm sorry to break into your evening." The man spoke the kind of English that is heard only on the cold-war propaganda networks, the accent unplaceable but definitely there.

  "Don't apologise," I said. "This show had too good a press." I had broken a rule, and didn't care.

  I had come here because tomorrow I was going home and I wanted to take away a memory, however trivial, of the New Liberal Germany that people talked so much about. The Neukomodietheater was said to be the centre of fresh youthful gaiety (Suddeutsche Zeitung) where the new iteration was making its breakthrough to a kind of music that had not been heard before (Der Spiegel). No one had mentioned the corn.

  "What a pity you are disappointed," murmured the man, on your last night in Berlin." He glanced down at the hge and then moved his chair back quietly. "Perhaps I can interest you by way of conversation." For a moment had thought he was leaving, but he had sat down again. His chair was now below one of the little shaded lamps on thewall of the box, so that his face was in shadow. I wondered who he was.

  "Perhaps, Mr. Quiller," he said softly, leaning towards "you would care to move your chair closer, so that we can speak quietly." He added: " My name is Pol."

  I did not move. "Apart from your name, Herr Pol, I don't know anything about you. I think you are making a mistake. This box was reserved for me exclusively number 7. Yours is possibly Number 1. The figures are sometimes confused."

  The girls and boys were wheeling about the stage with heir arms out like wings, swooping and diving and cleverly missing each other in what the press called an aerial ballet of intricate patterns that bespelled the eye. Now the stage lights went dim and the dancers were seen to be wearing tiny electric lamps on their hands as they wove their way about each other. I was saddened. Even the bright new generation couldn't make its breakthrough without putting on a number that unconsciously resembled an air-battle.

  Pol said gently: "I came to talk to you here because it is a good place. Better than a cafe or your hotel. I was not seen coming here, and if you would care to move your chair back we should be completely concealed, in this light."

  I said: "You're mistaking me for someone else. Don't oblige me to call the usher and lodge a complaint."

  He said: "Your attitude is understandable, so I won't cavil."

  I moved my chair back and sat closer to him.

  "All right," I said.

  ` Windsor ' was the presently operating code-word, given as a name, when approaching a contact. The C-group had been in operation since the first of this month, giving us `care,' ` call ' and `cavil.' I would have cleared him provisionally on 'cafe' alone, because he knew three things about me: my name was Quiller, my box number was 7, and this was my last night in Berlin. But I had thrown him ` call ' to get ` cavil' simply in the hope that he wasn't a contact at all, but someone who had wandered into the wrong box and used the word 'care' by chance.

  I didn't want any more contacts, any more work. Six months in this field had left me sickened and I wanted England more than I had ever wanted her before.

  It was no go. This was a contact.

  Uncivilly I told him to explain how he had known which box I was in.

  He said: "I followed you here."

  "You didn't." I knew when I was being followed.

  "Correct," he said.

  So it had been a test for me: he had wanted to know if people could follow me about without my realising it. I resented the trap.

  "We knew that you had reserved this box," he said.

  I looked down at the firefly dance on the stage. The music played softly. It took me three or four seconds. I had booked for the show by phone, asking for a box because I didn't want to sit with anyone: half my six months had been spent sitting wedged between people at the trial and I felt contaminated. This reservation had been made in the name of Schultze, so he could have gone right through the list at the box-office without finding me. There was only one way.

  Between us we set three quick traps and sprung them:

  "So you've got access to the box-office," I said.

  "Yes."

  "No go. I used the name Schultze."

  "We knew that."

  "By tapping my phone."

  He said: " Correct."

  My leading trap had been set to find out if he were still testing me. He was. Otherwise he would have said, 'No, we didn't go to the box-office.' Instead, he had trapped me back at once with the one word – ' yes ' – to see if I'd spring it. I did: with ' Schultze '. Even then he wouldn't let me off the hook, because I had only gone half-way, telling hi
m that I knew he would have drawn blank at the box-office. That was how they hadn't found me; he wanted me to tell him how they had. He wanted the other half: how had they known about Schultze? So I threw it for him and he took it: ` Correct.'

  I didn't like that word. He'd used it twice – it was a schoolmaster's word. I didn't like being tested. Who did he think I was – a fresh scout just out of the training-school?

  Down there they'd got off their chests the aerial ballet of intricate patterns that bespelled the eye and the footlights came on again. Under the applause I said loudly: "I don't like being put through the hoop by an unknown contact right at the bitter end of a mission and I don't like my phone being tapped. How long has it been going on? "

  Blandly he said: "You tell me."

  The glow from the stage seemed bright after the gloom and I took a good look at his face. It was a round face and almost featureless. Mud-brown eyes behind schoolboy-type hornrimmed spectacles with plain glass in them that didn't magnify even by a fraction but good at their job since they made one bold feature for the blank face. Hair brown. Nothing to go on. If I wanted to recognise this man again I would have to watch him walk. Unnecessary. Tomorrow I'd be in England, therefore to hell with him.

  I said quietly (the applause was dying away): "It hasn't been tapped for long or I'd have caught the clicks."

  He began talking rapidly and softly with his hands to his face to focus the sound of his voice on my ear alone.

  "I was flown out from London this morning with orders to make contact in strict hush. I wasn't allowed to go to your hotel or meet you anywhere in public, so that local Control had a difficult task. Your phone was tapped at some time before noon in the hope that we could find out your programme for the day and somehow provide contact for me, and it was most fortunate that we heard you telephone for a box at the Neukomodietheater."

  "Played into your hands, like a fool."

  I was pleased to see his look of mild pain. I was acting the rebel. Tomorrow I was being let out of school so tonight I could cheek whom I chose, and he was handy. Also he was a stranger and might be a top kick of some kind very high in the echelon, out here in the field to chuck his weight about incognito. If so I could be saucy and get away with it until he identified himself. The show wasn't turning out so badly after all.

  He said: " This is all fully urgent."

  It was the big signal, then. 'Fully Urgent' was Control's phrase for covering most of the other ones from ' Top Secret ' through ' Action at Once ' to ' Priority Red.'

  He could keep it.

  "Find someone else," I said. "I'm homeward bound."

  I felt better now. The big signal wasn't for monkeying with, and I'd monkeyed.

  The words came softly out of his cupped hands:

  "KLJ was found dead last night."

  It caught me like a blow in the face and I began sweating immediately because years of training had kept my eyes and mouth and hands expressionless as the shock of the words hit me, and the body, denied instinctive reaction, has to do something at a time like this; so I sat facing him with calm eyes and a quiet mouth and motionless hands, and felt the sweat coming.

  He said: " We want you to take his place."

  2: THE HOOK

  I told him they couldn't expect it of me.

  He said it was a request, not an order.

  Talking was difficult most of the time because the music would break suddenly now and then in a good imitation of the West Side Story style, and a word we had pitched against the volume of the orchestra would explode in a gap of silence. It was easier during the two intervals; we locked the door of the box and sat on the carpet with our backs to the balcony, unviewable even from the highest box on the other side of the auditorium; the murmur of the people gave good background cover for our voices.

  One thought was lodged in my head like a bullet.

  KLJ was dead.

  I had asked Pol about it and he said: " Floating in the Grunewald See." So there was Kenneth Lindsay Jones's place. We all have a place. We know where we were born but not where we shall die. At home or a mile away at the crossroads or far across the face of the earth, not knowing it in our sleep or pitched down on the wet road or trapped in the wreckage on the mountainside and knowing it only too well. A place for each of us, and there was his, the lake at Grunewald renamed Kenneth Lindsay Jones by virtue of his presence.

  We'd lost five men during my time at the Bureau but this one was said to be unkillable.

  Pol had told me more because I had asked. "A very long-range shot in the spine from a 9.3 again, as it was with Charington."

  Then we stopped talking about KLJ as if he'd never existed. Pol set about stalking me and I let him, sitting with my back to the balcony and listening to the quiet modulated tone that I was already beginning to hate.

  "We are highly impressed with the way you have been working on these war-crime inquiries. There was no need for secrecy because the matter comes under the terms of the London Agreement, yet you chose to maintain strict hush and we have been told that even the chief of the Z Commission had no knowledge of the man responsible for the arrests. We assume that your reason was to keep in practice."

  He waited for confirmation. I enjoyed my silence.

  "Further, your operations have been on the periphery of a search-area that was opened at the Bureau three weeks ago, on pressure from Paris. No one – now – has more information on the Berlin nucleus of ex-Nazis and neo-Nazis than yourself. This now becomes invaluable to us and so do you."

  He gave up waiting for me to help him along, and this was a danger I didn't see until it was much too late. By refusing to answer him even by a grunt I was letting him keep up a monologue in that soft and modulated tone that never gave pause. And it was hypnotic.

  "Of the fifteen war-criminals you have indirectly arrested, five as you know were of major status, and we believe that the recent suicides of General Vogler, ' General Muntz and Baron von Taube were provoked by pressure from their own group rather than by the dictates of conscience."

  He talked about the three prosecution witnesses found shot dead and facially mutilated. "They were not removed in order to decrease the number of witnesses at the Hanover Trials because there are as you know nearly one thousand of them, and the mass of evidence is such that one could remove ninety per cent of them and still remain certain of conviction. Those three were murdered in reprisal and we believe that there will, follow twelve more unless the Federal police can protect them. In all, fifteen. One for every war-criminal convicted. Further, the intention is to dissuade new witnesses from coming forward at the successor trials in Bonn and Nurnberg. They intend by terror tactics to ensure that the Hanover Trial shall be the last of its kind ever held."

  I had his accent now, from the ` ur ' in ` Nurnberg '. He was a Rhinelander.

  He talked about the seventy thousand Nazi refugees and self-exiles living in the German colony in San Caterina, Argentine, among them the Hitler deputy Bormann. "As you know, their Tacuara organisation carried out reprisals against the Jewish population following the Eichmann abduction."

  I wished he would stop saying 'As you know,' or better, tell me something I didn't.

  "But Zossen is here in Berlin."

  He stopped. I knew why. I was hooked.

  I said: " Heinrich Zossen?"

  "Yes."

  A thin man. Pale of face, with dewlaps and a pouchy mouth. Round-shouldered like his Fuhrer. Little blue eyes, the blue of ice. A voice like a reed in a winter wind.

  I had last seen him twenty-one years ago, on an August morning when three hundred of them were lined up at the brink of the pit they had been made to dig from the rich earth of the forest of Briicknerwald. The birds had stopped singing when the SS staff car drew up and Obergruppen-fuhrer Heinrich Zossen got out. I watched him as he walked behind the lines of the three hundred naked men as if inspecting them. He turned and walked back and I watched him. He was a young man for his rank and proud of his uniform.
He was not a thug. A thug would have taken a whip from a guard and drawn blood from even these bloodless buttocks for our amusement; he would have pointedly held his nose, reminded that these men had been moved a hundred and thirty miles through the night in sealed cattle-trucks, packed ninety to a truck; he would have taken his revolver and fired the first bullet himself, to lead the fun. He did none of these things. He was an officer.

  He did worse, and I watched him do it.

  A guard shouted as one of the three hundred men broke from the ranks and came towards the Obergruppenfuhrer. He was not riddled where he stood because Zossen had raised his gloved hand, curious to know why the man had left the ranks. He had once been bigger than Zossen; his frame, outlined beneath the skin, was wide at the shoulder; but now he was smaller, because most of the flesh had gone and he looked as if made of paper. This batch, as I knew, had lived for months on acorns, crusts and rancid water. It would be impossible to judge how long it had been since they had eaten what anyone could call a meal.

  The Jew walked up to the Aryan in black and came to a lurching stop. The effort of walking ten yards had brought the breath hissing in his mouth, and his rib-cage pulsed beneath the skin that hung from the bones like loose yellow silk. I heard him ask Zossen if it were allowed that they all might chant the Khaddish, the prayer for the dead. The Obergruppenfiihrer did not knock him down for his impudence, as I had expected. He was an officer. He looked at the watch on his wrist, considered a moment, and shook his head. "There is not enough time. The roads are bad and I am due back in Briicknerwald in one hour, for luncheon." He signalled his Stiirmbannfuhrer and the machine-guns opened up.

  Heinrich Zossen. I remembered him.

  Normally one would keep such a memory to oneself for the sake of decency but as a leading witness for the prosecution at the 1945Tribunal I was obliged to recount this event, among many others. The others were no better, but it was mentioned afterwards that throughout my testimony totalling fifteen weeks I spoke calmly and objectively, with one brief lapse. This was when I spoke of Heinrich Zossen. Even now, twenty-one years later, in a Berlin where you could hear the singing from the synagogue rising freely, I was unable, when in a restaurant, to open a menu headed with that word, Mittagessen. Luncheon.