the fourth floor: the police
‘Well?’ Wolff asked, walking purposefully towards them. ‘Did you find what you were looking for?’
They gazed at him blankly as if it wasn’t their place to say, and before he could repeat the question a young man with the hauteur of a recently commissioned officer stepped out of his room to stand beside them.
‘Who the devil are you?’
‘Herr de Witt?’ he asked, looking Wolff up and down very deliberately. ‘We are policemen.’ Then, after a pause, ‘But you know that. Passport, please.’
‘Don’t you have it?’
‘Find it for me.’
Wolff brushed past him into the sitting room. His passport was still in a drawer of the escritoire but not in quite the same place.
‘Here.’
The young officer pretended to scrutinise it but his eyes kept flitting to Wolff’s face. They were large and almost colourless, an unnervingly light shade of blue. Very like the eyes of a submariner Wolff knew who’d cracked and run amok at three hundred feet.
‘You must come with me,’ he said, slipping the passport into his overcoat.
‘At this hour?’
‘Yes.’
‘Are you arresting me?’ Wolff sounded incredulous. ‘You’ve seen my passport.’
‘Some questions, that’s all,’ he ventured. ‘If you wouldn’t mind…’
He was struggling to be polite. It wasn’t expected of secret policemen. Wolff guessed he had been instructed not to break the head of a neutral.
‘I do mind,’ he said impatiently. They — whoever they turned out to be — would expect him to mind.
‘My orders are to fetch you,’ the officer glanced over his shoulder to his men, ‘whether you wish to co- operate or not…’
At the front of the hotel, an Opel with curtains across the windows, the driver in a uniform he didn’t recognise. The rain was bouncing off the pavement and dripping through the hotel awning on to Wolff’s hat and coat. It reminded him of the evening at Rules and the morning at the safe house in south London — the morning he’d caved like a wet paper bag. C had rubbed his hands and chuckled like Bunter with a cake. ‘They’ll be intrigued by Mr de Witt, we’ll make sure of that,’ he’d promised.
They escorted Wolff to the car in the rain and he sat in the back between their damp shoulders, trousers clinging to his legs. When they turned right along the canal and passed the palace he knew they were taking him to the Alexanderplatz Police Headquarters.
‘Make them tease it from you,’ C had observed. Wolff had listened to his plan at the window of the safe house, gazing across acres of wet slate. He remembered reaching for his handkerchief and catching the scent of Violet’s perfume.
‘Did you hear me?’ C had upbraided him. ‘Do you want to stay alive? Concentrate, for God’s sake.’ Concentrate.
The police driver cursed as he braked for a man scuttling across the road beneath an umbrella. It was almost ten o’clock but the lights were still on at Tietz’s on the north-west side of the square. In front of the department store, a banner with the slogan ‘God Punish England’ was wrapped around the statue of the city’s protector, the wind lifting it immodestly from her full figure. They turned and Wolff glimpsed the dome of the Police Headquarters over the driver’s shoulder. In the course of one of his operations he’d passed it on foot, resisting the urge to walk faster and walk away. He remembered wondering if there was a country in the world with a larger police station: 19,000 square yards of neo-Gothic brick, according to Baedeker — all you needed to know about the new German order. He had stepped from its shadow into the square confident that he would never be obliged to visit the place. In his early twenties he was sure of a lot of things.
‘Do you mind if I smoke?’ he asked, as the car drew up to the security barrier. The officer didn’t reply. A brief exchange with the guard and they were moving again, passing beneath a high arch into a courtyard, then on into another. ‘This is all part of the scheme,’ he told himself. ‘Keep your faith,’ C had said at their last meeting. But he’d said the same thing before the Turkish operation.
The car stopped at the bottom of broad steps and guards stepped forward to open the doors.
‘Out, out, out,’ the young officer shouted, a little hysterically.
Wolff smiled. Poor fellow’s wound even tighter than me, he thought. The anxiety and anger of others always made him feel calmer. Sliding across the seat, he stood in the rain with his hand on the door and with a sergeant at his back, grinding his cigarette into the gravel of the immaculately swept yard.
‘All right, let’s get on.’
6. Inside the Alex
‘YOU’RE NOT AN American, Herr de Witt. Who are you, I wonder?’
‘I have an American passport.’
‘Easy for a resourceful man like you.’
‘I can’t imagine what you mean,’ Wolff retorted impatiently.
The officer didn’t explain but stared at Wolff intently as if the past could be read in the lines of his face. Foreign Office or General Staff, Wolff guessed. He had introduced himself as Lieutenant Maguerre; lieutenant of what, he didn’t say. Too well spoken and cultivated for a junior police officer, he was resting his fingertips on the table like a pianist, and his suit was cut in Paris. Mid to late thirties, of slight build, his name and fine Gallic features suggested a family tree that criss-crossed the border. He looked like the sort of fellow who’d have felt at home in any drawing room in Europe — before the war.
‘No one knows you’re here, Herr de Witt,’ he said at last, ‘and would Ambassador Gerard care if he did?’
‘What do you want?’
‘What are you doing here?’
‘I’m here for Westinghouse, you know that.’
‘Don’t lie to me. I’m not a patient man. If you want to behave like a spy I can arrange for the policemen…’ he enunciated the word contemptuously ‘…who generally carry out their business in this room to treat you like one. You see—’
‘For God’s sake,’ interrupted Wolff. ‘I’m a consulting engineer.’
‘Enough.’ Maguerre’s chair screeched as he pushed it sharply from the table. He stood glaring at Wolff for a few seconds, then turned and walked over to the chimneypiece. Picking the poker from its stand, he began stirring the embers so vigorously that the last of the heat was quickly lost from the fire. It was a bare brick room, stripped of anything that might distract from the pursuit of truth: windowless, timeless, its vaulted ceiling in shadow. ‘They’ll only believe in Herr de Witt if they smoke his story from you,’ C had counselled. In the Alex, only lies were held to be simple and offered freely. The truth was spoken on the edge, mumbled sometimes through cut and swollen lips. Wolff was relieved when Maguerre put the poker down and returned to the table.
‘Well?’
‘I’ve told you,’ said Wolff sulkily. ‘I’m a consulting engineer and sometimes I work for Westinghouse, or I used to.’
‘Our people say no one at Westinghouse knows what you’re doing in Germany.’
Wolff frowned. ‘I don’t suppose it matters. I’ve lost my job,’ he muttered. ‘I was involved in a little private business. It didn’t go…’ he hesitated. ‘It didn’t go quite as I’d hoped and, well, that’s why I’m here.’
‘And what was the nature of this private business?’
‘May I have a cigarette?’
‘Come on, come on.’ Maguerre leant forward, his elbows on the table. ‘Your private business?’
