Adam Hall - The Striker Portfolio

The bandage was difficult because some of the stitches had pulled — probably when I'd tugged the edge of the wing clear of the tyre — and the blood had congealed, but we managed it in the end. The other one, right fore-arm, was perfectly clean. His dull eyes wandered over me and he kept turning me round and lifting my arms, a Simian frown of puzzlement forming slowly across his brow. It would take time for someone like this to catch up with progress and I assumed he was wondering why there weren't any bits of Elastoplast here and there because in the old days it used to be all the rage: you could pack a 1000-x microfilm and a flat-mould cyanide dose under quite a small strip and still leave room for the handbook.

They went away. They took the obvious things with them: sheepskin coat, papers for Waiter Martin, papers for Karl Rodl, Striker statistics folder, crossword puzzle. I was worried about that: even in the moonlight it had looked very like a plan Of the minefield layout Guhl had kept on him in case he wanted to check his bearings. They had taken the coat because it was so thick — you could secrete photostat copies in triplicate of the entire Early Warning System from Mexico to Nova Scotia in a coat like that — and because Nitri had patched it so neatly and they wanted to know why. They had taken the arm-sling I'd been given at the hospital because it would be possible for me to hang myself with it but they had left Nitri's scarf because it wouldn't.

I had only just finished checking the door-lock and the window-bars when they fetched me out and took me along to a small surgical ward where a doctor redressed my hand. He was a civilized man and asked if there were anything I wanted so I said food. They took me back to 'Reception' and after fifteen minutes a heavy-breasted girl in brogues brought a tray and left it with me. The big man unlocked the handcuffs and took them away with him. It must have been on orders: he would never have worked it out for himself that no one can eat with his hands behind his back.

No knife, no fork, nothing for surprise attack or self-infliction I hadn't expected to be given them. I hadn't expected to be given caviar either but there was a fair-sized paper picnic plate full of the stuff, spread for me on strips of buttered toast as neatly as you'd spread rat-poison. Beer in a soft plastic cup.

It had to be a brain-think all the way because my last meal had been with Benedikt the night before and I was already salivating. (1) If they wanted to kill me they could do it more cheaply than this way. (2) If they wanted me unconscious the same applied. (3) I hadn't been interrogated yet and they wouldn't learn much if I had to be carried to the grilling-room insensible or dead. (4) There was no effective drug in the oral-administration group that would force me to reveal what I didn't want to reveal.

Provided the foregoing were acceptable the fifth consideration was decisive: this stuff was high in protein, fats and carbohydrates. No value in the salt content but enough sugar in the beer to feed the muscles for a limited period.

I ate slowly.

They had taken away my watch to have it probed but by estimation it was an hour later when they came for me again.

That would make it approximately midnight. I had been keeping a conscious check on the passage of time since the watch was taken: it wouldn't be important for a while but I didn't know how things would go here and it might later be useful, even vital, to judge the coming of daylight.

They were the same two and they took me down to the main hall. It seemed busy, so late, but some of the spotlights were out and people talked quietly. Three men were passing through the hall, dark-suited and preoccupied, the members of a consultant body convening to discuss a recent autopsy. It was what they looked like but they might have been anyone: anyone important. My escort stopped them and spoke to the one with the rebuilt face and he glanced at me and nodded and went on with his colleagues.

'We will wait,' the big man said. He looked as if he'd waited all his life at some bus-stop where the road was closed. Other people went through, some of them women with patient faces that looked at nobody else: Vidauban is very good at this, with his interiors grey-toned and peopled with dream figures that however crowded appear uninvolved with each other.

From somewhere higher in the building a sound reached us and I didn't want to think it was a human voice because a human voice ought not to sound like that.

Quick footsteps and an interchange of words. The big man said tonelessly: 'We will go to the office of the Herr Direktor now.'

It was a long room with a low acoustic ceiling and an internal-communications complex on a desk. Black chairs with the East German equivalent of PVC upholstery and chrome legs, an ebonite console on one wall with some of the panels illuminated. From here they could probably diagnose a schizophrenic crisis in Patient 99, Cell 104, South Block, and prescribe shock-treatment.

They were the same three men but two of them said nothing and did nothing all the time I was there. The one who spoke to me was the one with the rebuilt face.

'Sit down, Herr Martin.'

There was a spare chair but no one else came. He sat behind the desk. Above him on the wall was the expected portrait of Walter Adolphovich Ulbricht, First Secretary of the Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands.

'I will call you Martin because that is the name we have known you by — ' he put the two identity cards together and pushed them aside — 'since you arrived in Hanover from London.'

I had never seen him before tonight but I recognized him now. With only the face to go on it would gave been difficult. The left eye was artificial but a perfect match and I wouldn't have suspected it if the original injury had been less massive: the face on that side couldn't have been damaged to that extent without the eye going too. The rebuilding had been beautifully done: the surgeon was a portrait artist and it was the very excellence of his technique that showed the change. One side of this man's face had continued to age and the new side was still young: Dorian Gray and his portrait all in one.

'Do you know where you are?'

'I've got a rough idea.'

You don't have secret police guarding the gates of an asylum for the criminally insane and you don't send a secret police colonel to pick up couriers at the Frontier and bring them here if your sole business is to look after manic depressives.

'This is Aschau.' He wasn't interested in my rough ideas. 'Have you heard of it?'

'Yes.'

'Where?'Rather quickly.

'The big slob mentioned it.'

One of the committee moved his head and I got the feeling that people weren't meant to talk like that to the Herr Direktor.

He didn't seem to mind. When you've caught a winged pigeon you must expect the odd drop of lime on your hand while you examine it. (It wasn't because Aschau was meant to be an asylum that I sensed a certain medical aspect in his character. Perhaps he'd spent so much time in hospital that he'd taken on the air of the surgeon: efficient, tolerant, a little abstracted. And in his case wholly indifferent.) 'Aschau is in part a political re-education centre. I am its director. My name is Kohn. Have you heard of me?'

'No.'

'At Aschau we receive people who stray from the Marxist-Leninist line and we persuade them to rethink.' He watched me the whole time. They all did. 'What made you come here of your own volition?'

'I got the feeling I was straying a bit from the Wilson-Powell line so I thought you could fix me up.'

His eyes were stone-blue and expressionless, the kind of eyes that looked through the glass at guinea-pigs dying of clinically induced cancer.

'I will ask you that question once more.'