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.

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 – "