Adam Hall: The Quiller Memorandum

They might have seen me going into the Neustadthalle here in Berlin this morning instead of flying to the court in Hanover as usual, and decided that I was showing up in too many wrong places. One thing I knew I hadn't been followed anywhere. I know when I'm being followed.

The interesting thing was that unless that car had been simply an isolated murder-patrol out for a killing to keep its hand in, the orders to get me had come from on high. So I wasn't going to have to stick my neck out to draw their fire: it was already drawn. Within twenty-four hours of my decision to hunt Zossen, Zossen was hunting me.

Distrusting me in the open street she was prepared to trust me in the more dangerous confines of her flat and I assumed there was someone there to protect her.

It was a five-year-old Blue Oberschwaben wolfhound, a killer. Once inside the room I kept still. It stood with its head low and the great hindquarters braced for a leap, the jaws slightly parted but soundless. The eyes were on my throat.

I'd seen them at Belsen and Dachau. They would kill an Alsatian of equal age and weight, given ten minutes on mountain ground. I had seen them kill men.

The girl took off her coat without hurry, so that I should get the message. This would have been clear even to anyone without experience of the breed: if I lifted my hand suddenly in the girl's direction by one inch I'd be dead meat. I kept my arms folded and my face towards the dog. There was no fear-odour on me to provoke it, because I knew it wouldn't attack unless she ordered it.

She said at last, quietly, "Easy, Jurgen. Easy."

It backed from me and I knew that I could move.

"Police-trained," I said.

"Yes." She stood inspecting me, as she had in the street. She was thin, with the hard lines of her body unsoftened by the black polo-sweater and slacks; and she stood arrogantly, her hair like a gold helmet. In her stance and her brittle voice there was evident the defencelessness that you mark in a man with a gun: he shows it is all he has.

She had the dog.

"You still don't trust me," I said. She had told the dog ‘Easy’, not ‘Friend’'. If ever I came in here alone, by this door, he'd bring me down in the instant, though he had seen me here before and in her company.

"What will you drink?" she asked me.

"Whatever you're having." I took a second look round. Black everywhere, with hard lines: black Skai furniture with sharp angles, a rank of harsh abstracts and a moody Klee, a pair of boar's tusks mounted on ebony. She brought my Scotch and said:

"I don't trust anyone."

I'd been wrong. Her voice was no less harsh now than it had been after the shock in the street.

"I'm not surprised," I said. "How did they try to kill you the first time?"

"I was in a crowd at a trolley-stop."

"Someone pushed."

"Yes. Just as the trolley was coming. It pulled up in time. Are you with the Z Commission?"

"What's the Z Commission?"

She said nothing, turning away. Jurgen watched her and watched me. I said: "You're too young, Fraulein Lindt, to have seen anything of the war." She turned and swung a glance round the room and saw the envelope, ripped open, on the desk. Fraulein Inga Lindt. "So why do you go to the Neustadthalle?"

Her lithe hips swung and she came half-way towards me and stopped. I was suddenly aware that there was no scent on her or in the room. She stood very still. "Are you prepared to show me your papers?"

I gave her my passport. Quiller. NATO representative for the Red Cross. Scars, groin and left arm. Only two frontier endorsements, Spain and Portugal. We never like it to be thought we're widely travelled and therefore experienced.

"Thank you, Herr Quiller." She looked more relaxed. It seemed she didn't know there was one thing that could lie better than a camera, and that was a passport. I said:

"I'm trying to trace refugees whose relatives have died in England. Some of them have been called as witnesses, so I go to the courts to find them." I didn't think she was listening. She came closer and stared at me.

"You're English. As an Englishman, what do you think of Adolf Hitler?"

"Bit of a fidget."

Her long mouth tightened in contempt. "The English were so safe on their little island. They never saw anything happen."

"No." The one in the groin had been done at Dachau.

"Do you think he is a genius?" she asked me angrily.

"Yes." ‘Is’ noted.

" That man?"

"An evil genius."

She seemed more satisfied with me. I was beginning to understand. The ‘is’ was the biggest clue. She was living in the past.

I am a bad judge of age in people. The most I could do here was to allow for certain facts: a girl who deliberately watched mass-murder trials, who believed that someone had twice tried to kill her, who kept a wolfhound to protect her, and who showed signs of fierce pent emotion, would look older than her age. She looked thirty.

"When will people understand," she said in the strange wail I'd heard against the wall in the street, "that he's got to be blotted out, right out, so that he doesn't exist any more?"

There'd been a lot of women like this, ever since Mitford. Now they were dying off but you still came across a few. This one had reached the stage of the obsessional love-hate relationship that presages final rejection: she still had leanings, and had to deal with them by voicing them, even to strangers. She had to get assurance from as many people as possible that she was on the right track now.

"The way to blot him out," I said, "is not to think of him at all. Nobody dies until the last lover stops loving him."

Then her face puckered and she began shaking, and it all came out, beginning with a lot of things like, "No one can understand " and "With me it's different " and "You don't know what it's like " while I quietly sat down on a black futurist chair and watched her until she brought out the cold hard facts.

"I was in the Bunker." She sat crouched on the floor with her lean shoulder against a chair, spent before she began.

"The Fuhrerbunker?"

"Yes." After the first sip she hadn't touched her drink

"When?"

She looked blank. "Don't you know when?"

I said: "I don't mean the date. I mean at the beginning, the end, or all the time?"

"All the time."

"How old were you then?"

"I was nine."

"A child."

"Yes."

Her tone had dulled. The answers were so automatic that I suspected she must have given them often before under psychoanalysis. She crouched with her eyes shut. I went on slipping questions in until she took over; it was the classic approach and she was versed in it.

"My mother was a nurse on Dr. Weismoeler's special medical staff. That's why I was there. With the Goebbels family there were seven of us in the Bunker, children I mean, and we didn't have much to do with the grown-ups. But I liked Uncle Hermann and he used to give me things, medals and things."

Hermann Fegelein, of the SS.

"I saw them bring him in. He had left the Bunker and they brought him back. I heard Hitler shouting at him, then they took him into the Chancellery garden and shot him and I didn't even cry. It was too much for crying. I kept asking my mother why they'd killed poor Uncle Hermann, and she said he'd been wicked. It was the first time I understood what death was: it meant that people went away and you never saw them again. Then the nightmare started and everything began going to pieces inside me. The grown-ups were acting strangely and I used to hide in cupboards and listen in the passages because I was desperate to know what was happening to everyone. At one time I heard a shot and later Frau Junge told me that the Fuhrer was dead; of course I didn't believe her: he was a god to me, to all of us; but there was the smell of burning, in the garden, and one of the Escort found me and sent me back where I belonged. But I didn't belong anywhere now. Even my mother was strange to me. Even my mother."