by Adam Hall
She was in a tunic and slacks of a red so vivid that it glowed on my hand as I touched her and burned in her eyes as she watched me. It was the first time I had seen her in colour.
She said: "This is Helmut Braun."
He was a small soft-eyed man with slightly hooded lids and a short kittenish nose. He never put his hands anywhere but let them hang by his sides, and he was as confident as she was nervous. She glanced twice at the ebony table within the first half-minute.
"I am officially working for them," he said to me with a shy smile.
I was on the wrong foot and the thought was unpleasant. We always try to estimate whatever situation we go into, beforehand-even a few seconds beforehand. It was twenty minutes since I had telephoned her and I was still unprepared for three things: the vivid red of her clothes, the presence of the man Braun, and the object lying on the table. It was a black-covered file of papers.
It would have to be played by ear, and we never like that.
"For them?" I asked him. He might be anyone, Z Commission, a doubler, one of her lovers. He wasn't in my group: there hadn't been a single ‘c’ in his first sentence.
"Phoenix," he smiled.
We were obviously here for business because he picked up the file and offered it to me with a pert bow. "This is for you, Herr Quiller."
Inga sat on the black Skai settee, a flame on charcoal. I looked at her once before I opened the file but she was staring at her hands. The file was thin quarto and there was one word on the first sheet: Sprungbrett. Springboard.
I asked: "Do you want me to look at it right away?"
"We think you should." His accent was Bavarian.
They both watched my face as I turned the sheets. The second sheet carried a list of names, all of them high-ranking officers of the German General Staff. Next was a list of armed units in readiness. There followed the main outline of the operation, detailing preliminaries, major attack-sectors and spearheads. The operation was to be launched by carefully-integrated land, sea and air contingents immediately following a false announcement by five international news-services that a bomb-test in the Sahara had misfired and was spreading fallout across the Mediterranean. Under cover of alarm conditions the immediate assaults would be directed against Gibraltar, Algeria, Libya, Israel, Greece, Cyprus and Sicily. Franco in the west, Nasser in the east, and Mafia battalions taking hold in southern Italy. A fait accompli before the major powers could put out the fire. And this only the springboard of a non-nuclear war in a nuclear age, with neither Russia nor the United States mutually threatened.
It took me fifteen minutes to read the file, during which time no one spoke. I dropped it back on to the table and said
"There's no date. No D-Day, no H-Hour."
Helmut Braun looked pained. "I hadn't noticed that. It would be very difficult for me to find out the date of the operation. It was highly dangerous for me in any case to get this file."
Inga had been watching me but now she looked at her hands again. I could tell nothing from her expression except that she was nervous about the whole thing. Braun was still looking hurt.
"There's a testing-team set up in the Sahara," I said reflectively, "at the moment. No one's been told when they intend to fire their bomb."
"We can assume it's a matter of days, Herr Quiller."
I stood close to him and asked: "Why did you make it your business to get hold of this file and what decided you to let me see it?"
His hands hung at his sides. He looked at me straight in the eyes. "I am a friend of Inga's. She knows I am working against Phoenix. She told me about you. I wanted to do something active- definitive – and it was a chance for me after so many years of passive opposition to them. Herr Quiller, I am a Jew." His hands moved at last, their fingers opening in an appeal for my understanding. "I can do nothing with this file, but you can. So I brought it to you."
Then Inga moved and hissed out a breath and he swung his eyes to her and then to the door. In silence he went across the room and bent at the door, listening.
Sixty seconds is a long time. The silence went on for longer than that and he stood crouched like a cat at the door. She was beside me but I didn't look at her. Knowing that if there came another sound he would hear it, I left the situation in his hands and used the time for thinking.
It sometimes comes to people like us that we are faced with the terrible temptation of risking all on a single throw. This happened to me now. But we never throw blind. There have to be certainties in support of the decision to take a risk that size. In my case there were these:
I knew why the Brunnen Bar hadn't been put under observation on the night when Oktober had been here. I knew why Solly had been killed. I knew why Inga, tonight, was wearing red. And I knew why the briefing draft of Operation Springboard had been given freely into my hands.
But certainties can lodge in the mind as a partial result of stomach-thinking, which is always dangerous. Sometimes the facts in our possession interlock so elegantly that we reject the few pieces that spoil the edge of the picture. Therefore a risk is always present when the all-or-nothing type of throw is made; but the risk is calculated.
Braun moved, coming away from the door.
"I am an easily-frightened man," he said. "I wish I weren't like that. My operations would then be less passive, less ineffectual." He had spoken in a whisper.
I looked down at the file. "You're not doing badly." It seemed to cheer him up and he asked: "You'll take it to your people?"
"Yes. As soon as I've got confirmation on it. My people like us to vet this kind of thing at source, to save wasting time. And time looks short, with this one."
"How will you get confirmation?"
"I'll go to the source. The Phoenix base. I know where it is. The house by the Grunewald Bridge."
At the edge of my field of vision I saw Inga begin shivering.
19 : THE SEPULCHRE
He said: "You would never get out alive."
Inga was still shivering.
I picked up the file and he lifted his hand at once, saying, "I beg you not to go. But if you go, I beg you not to take the file with you."
"Don't worry, I won't say where I got it."
"You don't understand my position, Herr Quiller. They'll start an immediate inquiry at the highest level to find out who stole the file. They'll examine it for fingerprints, and mine are on it – so are Inga's." He held his hands limply. "Please," he said.
"All right." The file hit the table with a slap. "But you'll make it available to me when I get back?"
He sighed. "You will not get back." He looked at Inga for help but she turned away and in a minute she came back with a coat on, a military-style trencher buttoning at the right. With her bright helmet of hair and the martial coat she looked all the things she was: man, woman, hermaphrodite, transvestist, a pagan Joan of Arc. She said " I'll go with you."
Braun closed his eyes. "Inga…" he said hopelessly.
He was standing like that when we went into the passage together. A man was closing the door of the lift but saw us coming and waited so that we could go down with him. We let him make his way ahead of us through the hall as a return of courtesy. Our footsteps echoed; the place was mostly marble, and sounds carried.
We turned along the pavement and there were steps behind us. It was Braun, trotting to catch up. "Herr Quiller," he said plaintively. "Inga… " We didn't say anything so he gave it up, signalling a taxi from the rank and getting in with us.
The night was cold and clear and I watched the city as we passed along its streets. People were about, and the lights burned brilliantly as if they had never gone out nor would ever go out again; but not far away where the Wall stood I had often seen rabbits bobbing among the rubble of no-man's land, in and out of the tank-traps and barbed wire and the shadows of the machine-gun posts. In London you would see Piccadilly on one side, Leicester Square on the other, and in between a tract so desolate that rabbits ran there, safe from man.
<
br /> I had told the driver: "Grunewaldbruck."
The house was there. The address was in the last report from Kenneth Lindsay Jones. He'd been closing in on the enemy, with ‘a line on base’. Things were ‘very tricky’ and he had warned Control that he ‘might not signal for a time’ or even ‘receive Bourse’. He had followed that line and they'd killed him off before he got too close to their base. They had shot him and dropped his body into the Grunewald See: the nearest place. It was from the Grunewald Bridge that they had dropped me, into that same water.
We were going there now, to the house by the bridge with the single plantain tree outside, the tree I had seen through the window when I had sat trapped in the silk brocade chair.
The glint of water under starlight was now on our left and I began counting the streets on the other side, with the Verder-strasse as a reference. Then suddenly Braun shifted forward and told the driver to pull up.
"I will not go with you," he told us. "I would die of fright, waiting for you to make a slip and give me away. For God's sake don't make a slip… " He got out. On the left was now the bridge, spanning the neck of the lake and a single star. The house was humped on the other side, most of its mass in darkness. A street lamp marked the plantain tree. I told Inga:
"We can walk from here."
She sat stiffly and her face looked bloodless in the shadows. I got out and waited for her, paying the driver. Her foot buckled over on a stone as she left the taxi and I knew how she felt. There was no strength in her legs.
She seemed about to tell me something but we weren't alone. The taxi had gone and Braun had gone, but certain shadows moved and the night was too calm for even a murmur not to carry. Sounds were on the cold air, audible in the intervals of our footsteps. She walked with me through the gates of the drive and a man came down from the curve of steps that were lit by the lamp above the doors; his shadow reached us first. Another man came from behind us and we all climbed the steps in silence.
When I heard the doors close I knew I had made my throw and would have to stand by it.
Nobody seemed to be clear about what to do with us; three men stood in dark suits, each by a doorway, staring at nothing. There was no baroque here: the hall was immense and furnished as bleakly as a monastery. I said to Inga:
"Show me the shrine."
It would be good for her to let me see it.
Her eyes were large, their pupils dilated in the artificial light. She took a step back from me and then another. "Do you believe," she asked me, "that you'll leave here alive?"
She'd begun shivering again.
"Yes."
She seemed to accept it, and the shivering stopped. Her lips parted to say something more but footsteps were fading in from the marble distances. Two men were advancing on us, marching on us, their feet in unison; they were the kind of men who had never learned to walk.
"You will both accompany us," said one of them.
Fifteen stairs, a mezzanine, ten more stairs. This data was filed mentally with the rest: six average paces from the plantain to the gates, gates twelve feet high and locked back with ball-levers, twenty-seven paces from the gates to the curving steps, reasonable shrub cover, two balconies on the face of the building… nineteen paces from the double doors to the staircase… so on.
More doors, with our shadows grouped against them.
Permission to enter was begged and received in staccato fashion, correct to the last heel-click, and then I heard the comic and terrible pig grunt that I had not heard for twenty years: " Heil Hitler! " And as the doors opened I knew that they opened on to the Third Reich.
It wasn't the same room. This was Operations. The map of Europe was thirty feet wide and reached to the ceiling where a battery of spotlights was trained on it.
The main plotting-table took up a quarter of the room; a dust-cover masked it. The huge curtains were made of blackout fabric and there was the insignia on each of them in white and scarlet: the swastika.
Above the desk where the man sat was a portrait in oils floodlit by concealed lamps in the edge of the jutting frame; not a bad likeness, though the weakness of the mouth had been delicately altered and the eyes had humanity in them. The words were embossed in gold Gothic at the base of the portrait: Our Glorious Fuhrer.
There were six other men apart from the fat one who sat at the desk. All wore black shirts with a gold swastika on the breast. One was Oktober.
He came towards us. The others didn't move.
Inga pulled the black-covered file from her trenchcoat pocket and gave it to Oktober. "He's read it," she said. "All of it."
Oktober held the file in both hands. For the first time I saw him hesitate before speaking, and although his blank glass eyes were directed at me there was the impression that he was also looking behind him at the man at the desk. Oktober was in the presence of a superior.
"Make your report," he told Inga. She stood away from me, and looked only at him.
"I received a visit, Reichsfuhrer, from Braun. He had managed to get hold of the file and wanted Quiller to see it and pass it to his Control." She spoke, I thought, a little like Oktober himself, her harsh Berliner accent whittling at the words. The peripheral glow from the map-lamps brightened the gold of her hair and she stood very straight with her heels together. "There was nothing I could do, Reichsfuhrer. My orders were to continue operating in the role of defector, whenever in contact with Braun. He – "
"Stop." The word came from the man at the desk like a soft pistol shot. I studied his face. It was simply an eater's face, a devourer's face, the eyes watchful for prey, the mouth long and thin and set between pouches, like a stretched H. "Bemore precise."
She had stiffened. "Yes, Reichsleiter. Braun contacted me and asked to meet Quiller. I reported the request to Reichsfuhrer Oktober and was told to allow the meeting. I contacted Quiller and asked him to visit me. Braun came first. A few minutes before Quiller arrived, Braun showed me the file and said he meant to let Quiller have it. There was nothing I could do since it was impossible to contact the Reichsfuhrer by phone in front of him. I was not too worried because I knew there was heavy cover and Quiller couldn't hope to reach his Control with the file -"
"Wait." She stopped immediately. "It must have occurred to you that there was a risk involved. You knew that there was heavy cover. You knew that you had only to use the telephone to ask for situation orders. Well?"
"Both Braun and Quiller would have realised at once that my role of defector was false and that I was in opposition to them. My standing orders to get their confidence and particularly to seduce Quiller morally and physically were of great importance to me, Reichsleiter. I was forced to make my own decision." She paused.
"Proceed."
"Thank you, Reichsleiter. I decided that when Quiller left the apartment I would report the situation at once by phone. With heavy cover in the vicinity I could have passed on any orders without delay and he could have been caught and put under immediate restraint, and the file taken from him. This was unnecessary. He told us he intended to come here himself, to confirm the information on file. I was unable to understand his reasons but I believed he meant it. I therefore came with him, so that if he made any attempt to contact his Control I could signal cover and prevent him. I beg you to consider, Reichsleiter, that my actions were dictated by the highest concern for the success of my personal mission."
Oktober had watched her intently and now seemed satisfied. He was directly responsible for this agent, and any lapse in her efficiency would reflect on him.
The others present also relaxed. The Reichsleiter sat brooding for some seconds, and now he turned his gaze on me.
"You are said to have read the file."
There were three ways to play it: obstinate, worried, or dumb. The first way would be the most expected, with my record of obstinacy with Oktober.
"Yes, I've read it."
"Why did you decide to come here?"
"To get confirmation. The info mi
ght have been false. I'd never heard of Braun and I wanted to get him confirmed as well."
"And now you have done that."
"I have."
"What gave you the impression that you could leave here as freely as you came?"
"Experience. I've been trained to get out of places."
He sat with his hands bunched loosely on the desk; they were a child's hands, pink-fleshed, podgy, designed to clutch at whatever they touched, to possess the world piecemeal so that it need no longer be feared. A ring clung to one finger like a dead blue eye. He said without expression:
"A short time before you arrived there was a signal from our agents in North Africa. The nuclear test will be set in operation at 23.00 hours. That is in twenty minutes from now. It is a night operation designed partly to test the effects of radioactivity and its fringe properties in the total absence of sunlight." He got to his feet and moved heavily across to the plotting-table. "Sprungbrett is similarly a night operation. That is why we are able to avail ourselves of this supreme opportunity. For seven hours the entire Mediterranean area will be in darkness and – according to news reports – under a shroud of radioactive fallout. We shall thus be in sole command of that area even before the operation is launched, since news of that nature will of course create mass confusion and panic."
He took a corner of the dust-cover and jerked it from the plotting-table. "You may study the situation for yourself."
I moved to the table. Mediterranean area Longitudes 7°W to 3 5°E, Latitudes 32°- 42° in relief. All units in red counters assembled eastern seaboard Spain, seaboard Egypt and the toe of Italy. Blue areas Gibraltar, Algeria, Libya, Israel, Greece, Cyprus and Sicily. The indications were magnetic-tab.
I gave it a couple of minutes. When I looked up he was gazing at me with his pale-blue glittering eyes.
"What do you think, Herr Quiller?"
I checked the wall-clock. "He left it too late. Braun."
"That is so. He had no indication of our timing, and of course it doesn't appear on the file. At this moment our forces are standing-by in the operational areas. Within sixteen minutes from now the nuclear test will take place. Within ninety minutes of the news that it has misfired, ten times that many units will have reached the area by troop-transport. German officers-commanding are awaiting the signal at this moment." He turned away from the table. " So there is nothing you can do. Nothing. Seven years' meticulous planning has brought us to the brink of this operation, and it cannot be arrested in a quarter of an hour. You have the intelligence to see that."