'They must have got on to him a few days ago. You can't rig that kind of thing at short notice.' I could hear him sweating it out. 'That Striker you saw.'
'Yes?'
'It was Lovett who told us it would happen. You were sent out there to confirm. They must have caught his signal, something like that.'
Suddenly I got a glimpse of the background behind the mission, just a glimpse. Lovett hadn't been active since Rome. He'd been passing on information and it had been correct: the thing had come down almost on my head. Someone had told Lovett that the next Striker would crash at noon on the 29th in the Westheim-Pfelberg-Nohlmundt area. Whoever could tell Lovett a thing like that must be someone who knew the whole works.
I'd been sent here to find him and Lovett was meant to tell me where to look. But they didn't want him to. They pushed him out of the window so that he couldn't.
'Is this thing off, then?' I asked Ferris.
They've blocked our run.'
That wasn't the same thing at all. 'What do you want me to do?' There was another pause while we listened for bugs. It seemed all right.
'Get in their way.'
The room seemed to go cold around me. You always have that feeling, a sort of goose-flesh that doesn't show on the skin. But I liked him for handing it to me without a tray underneath. Someone else — like Loman or Bryant — would have said well I don't really like to ask you and of course you know you can refuse, so forth. Ferris had just said go and bloody well do it. Get in their way.
Nobody likes it.
You can be told: they're holed up in that arsenal over there and you'll have to go through the barbed wire and round the machine-gun post and across the minefield and past the armed guard with the Alsatians, after that it's easy. And most of us will go in. It's not pleasant but we know what the odds are. However bad we know what they are. We're frightened but it's a different kind of fear, a, more supportable one, from the fear of what we call 'getting in their way'. Because then we don't know anything. We don't know who they are or how many or where they are or what they're doing or why. We have to find them by letting them find us first, and they can be anywhere in a street or a lift or a car or a shadow and when we get close to them we might not even know it, might have our back to them. We always find them in the end. Always. But quite often the only thing we know about them is that they were the people who fired the shot and didn't miss.
'All right,' I told Ferris.
Before he rang off he said: 'You didn't actually see him?'
'No.'
They said he'd gone through a glass roof first and woken everyone up.
'You might put his stuff together and check it for anything useful.'
There wasn't anything useful. A picture of Sheila, some notes on the conference (they would be props), two tickets for the Operhaus dated tomorrow night, money, cigarettes,'keys, the litter we leave behind. But I stayed a good hour in his room pretending to go through it and then asked the manager and the staff a lot of questions and then went back to his room and moved past the window quite a lot. Then I put his personal stuff together and posted it The only attention I attracted was from the police who wanted to know who I was. Someone in the hotel had obviously rung them up. They were perfectly satisfied that it was a case of Selbstmord because my unfortunate friend had left a note. I didn't advise them to compare the handwriting: perhaps it had been done on Lovett's portable and anyway they'd have used his own pen for the signature.
Then I went to see Sheila, the girl in the photograph, because that was what they'd expect me to do, call on his friends and contacts. No one tagged me when I left the Carlsberg.
'I suppose you can't give me anything to go on?'
She got up and tried to pour the vodka back into the bottle but her hand was shaking too much.
'What like?' she asked tonelessly.
'Did you see him with anyone? Was he alone when you left him last night? Did he talk to you about anything?'
She came up to me with dulled eyes and her voice on the edge of the breakdown she was going to have as soon as I left. 'I can't help you. I don't know who you are. Bill's dead. That's all I know. It doesn't matter to me how it happened. It might later but it doesn't now. I've got enough to be going on with.'
It hadn't been nice telling her the way I did but I'd wanted to know if she was involved. Pretty girls on the translation staffs at international conferences get a lot of attention from recruiting officers and some of them do things just for the kick.
I went to the door where the two dressing-gowns hung.
'When will you be seeing your friend?'
'My friend?'
The girl you share with.'
'I don't need anyone.'
It began the moment I shut the door after me and I didn't envy whoever it was that the Bureau would send along to see his wife because that was going to be even worse. We ought not to marry or if we marry we ought not to do the things we do.
No one tagged me from the block where she had her flat.
During the afternoon I showed up a few times at the Carlsberg where the manager was looking more cheerfuclass="underline" apparently the exodus of guests had stopped. He gave me the names of a couple of people known to be friends of Herr Lovett and I went to see them but it was no go: instead of telling me anything useful they just kept asking me why 'poor old Bill' should ever have 'done such a thing'.
One of them was at the conference hall and I hired a car to get there because it's easier tagging a car than a man on foot and I wanted to make it easy for them. It was a 250 SE and I chose the new grey because most of them were that colour and I didn't want them to think I was actually advertising or they'd wonder why, I was still drawing blank by nightfall. Either they weren't interested or they thought that with Lovett neutralized the rot had been stopped. All I could do was hang about at the hotel. Normal routine in the case of a bump is to stay clear but sometimes we're told to go in and find out what happened, and quite often the people who did it will keep in the area hoping for more trade. This time they didn't seem ambitious.
Finally I got fed up and drove down to Wernerstrasse and had a meal at the Bavarian place on the corner and when I came out they were sitting in a dark-coloured Opel parked twenty yards or so behind the 250 SE. It was the one that had been outside the Carlsberg when I'd started off from there.
The thing to do now was to make them lose me without my losing them. It's not an easy operation but it's always worth trying because if you're lucky you can find out where they go and that's halfway to finding out who they are. Ferris wanted to know that and it would be nice to ring him up and tell him.
I got in and had a look in the mirror. There were some traffic lights a hundred yards behind where the Opel was parked and that was almost the ideal distance. They were red at the moment. One or two cars were going past, turning out from a street not far up from the restaurant, but it was better to wait for the main bunch of traffic that was held up at the lights.
When they flicked to green I started the engine and sat watching for a bit to judge the conditions. The bunch of cars were coming up from behind me, two abreast and stringing out. I decided to call this one a dry run and wait for the next sequence of lights: it would give the oil more time to get round the engine before I used it as hard as I was going to. The 250 SE had a shoulder-type seat-belt so I put it on, watching the mirror. The lights were at red again and the tail-end of the bunch came past and left the street empty on this side.
It would be useful to edge the revs up a couple of hundred while I was waiting but they might notice the gas-haze and it wasn't worth risking; the engine was at fair working temperature and there shouldn't be any flat-spot even under full gun. There was nothing coming up from in front of me on the other side. In the mirror the lights were green and I touched the gearshift into low and kept the clutch down. The only thing that worried me now was that it was beginning to look too easy.