' I should go to Spitzer, Renate's friend,' Erica said.
'Do that and you kill me.'
In front of them the man did not deign to turn and watch them again. In a little time he was gone from their view. In a business like this, Guttmann knew, nothing would materialise by chance. Everything was calculated, everything was weighed and tested before being allowed to go forward. It would have been intended that he should see his torturer, the courier who thumbscrewed an old man's mind. They would leave him now, leave him to brood and curse. Only when he was broken would they come.
Holding fiercely to Erica's hand, Otto Guttmann started back for the centre of Magdeburg.
Through the afternoon Johnny slept in his room. He was not tired but he knew no other way to chip through the hours till it was time for dinner.
He had undressed, slipped under sheets, closed his eyes and tidied his mind. Two more days and he would have Carter fussing round him, Mawby pressing his hand. Two more days and he could make the telephone call to Cherry Road and he would be standing high on his pride. Two more days and the killing of Maeve O'Connor would be purged. There would be a hell of a party in Helmstedt, he thought of that before the release of a shallow, mottled sleep.
A thousand yards from the International Hotel a middle- aged man dropped a parcel into a deep litter bin behind the back doors of the Kulturhistorische Museum on the narrow Heydeck Strasse. He hid the package with a shallow covering of refuse.
Friday afternoon was the right time for a litter bin 'drop'. The last clearing of the week by the city's cleansing department would have been made in the morning. The bin would be untouched until Monday. The man retraced his steps to the Hauptbahnhof. He would have less than 20 minutes to wait before the departure of the express to Berlin.
She was sorry, very sorry, said the housekeeper, but the pastor had gone for the day to his niece in Cottbus. She told the caller that he would not be back till very late in the evening because it was a long journey to make in one day. Was the matter urgent? Could it wait till the morning?
The pastor would be at the Dom all the next morning, she knew that for certain. She took a pencil and wrote down a message on the notepad beside the telephone. The pastor would find it there when he returned.
'Doctor Otto Guttmann telephoned. It is most important that he should see you. He will come to the Dom tomorrow before lunch.'
A pall of smoke floated over the shell of the T 34 tank. There was much laughter, cheerful banter, as the generals came down from the viewing stand to their transport. Both of the prototype missiles that had been made available for the test firing had run with unerring aim towards their battered target. There was a round of drinks for them when they reached their staff cars.
'The opportunities for evasion to a tank commander are negligible.'
'When is the German back?'
'Guttmann returns in two days.'
'Where is he now?'
'Still in Magdeburg.'
'He should be told of the success of the firing. He deserves congratulation.'
'We have witnessed the birth of a famous weapon…'
The message from Padolsk went via Defence Ministry in Moscow to Soviet military headquarters in East Germany at Zossen-Wunsdorf, was then relayed to Divisional head- quarters for the Magdeburg region. An army motorcyclist brought the communication to the International Hotel, and took it by hand to the sixth floor because he must bring back a signature of receipt.
The motorcyclist was admitted to the hotel room by a girl, tall and blonde and who at a different time might have been considered striking and pretty. She was pale, and her eyes bulged in the aftermath of weeping. The room was dark from the gathering night, the lights had not been switched on, the curtains had not been drawn, open sandwiches from 'Room Service' had not been eaten. An old man sat by the window, seemingly unaware of the intrusion until the girl brought the docket to him and he wrote his name quickly, then reverted to his empty stare across the skyline of the city.
Alter the motorcyclist had withdrawn, his boots beating away down the corridor, Erica Guttmann ripped open the envelope.
'It is from the commandant at Padolsk. The test firing was successful,' she said without emotion. 'They say it was completely satisfactory
… they offer their warmest congratulations… they call it a triumph of military technological development…'
She passed the sheet of paper to her father. As if with reluctance he held out his hand to receive it, then peered at the typed words in the half light. Abruptly he opened his hand and let the paper flake to the floor.
By the finish of the working day the reports ordered by the BfV official were arriving at his desk. An efficient and effective organisation. The safe return of the homing pigeons.
The neighbours of Hermann Lentzer had been spoken with, discreetly.
His telephone had been tapped at the local exchange, with official authorisation.
His personal file had been taken from the archive collections at Wiesbaden and teletyped to Bonn.
Gazing through the shallow lenses of the spectacles that he wore for close work, puffing occasionally at his pipe, the man from BfV read through the material that had been collated for him.
Lentzer in a training battalion of the Waffen-SS and finding his combat baptism in the 33 day battle to obliterate the Warsaw Ghetto, the battle that was fought until every Jew inside the perimeter was either dead or in transport for the extermination camps. Lentzer, who had stood guard at the fences of Auschwitz in the latter months of the war before slipping into peace-time obscurity. Now, Lentzer the trafficker.
They came again, these people. Their filth was never destroyed.
Where was he now?… The young man who had fired his rifle into the tottering, tragic remnants of the Ghetto, who would have marched the emaciated prisoners to the bulldozed pits of Auschwitz… What was his punishment? A secure future and immunity from prosecution. A big house in a pleasant village outside Bonn, a big car to drive, a big account in black at the bank. Where was the repayment of the debt for the disgrace of his country? They were scum, these people, scum at the rim of the cess-pit.
He read on.
Hermann Lentzer was going to Berlin. That afternoon he had made a telephone call, he had announced his arrival time. He had spoken to an Englishman and neither had used their name. He often went to Berlin, the neighbours said, because sometimes they saw beside his rubbish bins the plastic bags that carried the names of the stores on Kurfusten-Damm and Bismarck Strasse. And when he travelled, Lentzer went by car, the neighbours said. He would use false papers, the BfV man reflected, but the car would not change, the number plate would not be altered… How could the British associate with such dirt? Was this the courtesy of an ally?
The lights threw into relief the gloom beyond his window. Late in the evening and the building was quiet and empty save for a scattering of night clerks… All the frontiers of the world could be crossed. Through the minefields and wire and high walls there were hidden corridors of communication. The BfV in Bonn could make contact with the SSD in East Berlin. The route was tortuous but could be managed.
He wrote on his notepad the details of the model of Mercedes car driven by Hermann Lentzer, its colour and number plate. He pondered then for a few moments. The bastard deserved no sympathy, no mercy.
The British had made their own bed, they could lie on it, and they had not consulted on a matter that if it failed or succeeded would bring only nuisance to the Federal Republic.
Without emotion he weighed the correctness and the consequences of the action he had proposed to himself. The British had stepped outside the agreed guidelines; he had no responsibility that he owed them. And if he jeopardised the British plan? They had had the opportunity for consultation with the Federal authorities, they had not availed themselves of it. They had avoided the queries raised by BND.
He remembered the displacement camp in which he had stayed for two years after the war. Temporary barrack buildings near to Celle, swill to eat, thin clothes to wear through winter, and the guards of the British Army of Occupation behind the fence with their jeers and cat-calls and the arrogance of the victor. Two years as a number and he had committed no offence, only served with what he had believed to be an officer's honour in the crumbling Wehrmacht. That was how they had treated him, and now they hired an animal, a criminal like Lentzer to
