I don"t know whether she was lonely. I don"t know what her motives were. I know that I wanted her then, in the s.e.xual way that I hadn"t wanted her before. I couldn"t forget the cautions hers and my own as well as the Doctor"s but there was also a curious sense of excitement, as if by touching her intimately I would be touching her otherness.
In the room, we talked for a long time. My mouth was dry with a fascination I hadn"t felt since the age of nineteen, when I flirted with my younger siblings" nanny at my parents" house. These feelings of calf love returned to me in maturity with a strange intensity. In the moment, which in due course came, when I reached out and touched her cool body, all my doubts vanished and all I felt was a pa.s.sion beyond any I had felt before. My wife, my mistress Dorothy, the "jig-jig" girls in Sierra Leone always there had been a nagging humanness to the relation, a fear of hurting and being hurt, an awkwardness to the moment of climax, and before, and after. Here there was nothing but the heat of desire, the searing pain of climax, and the afterglow. s.e.x with Daria was a gorgeous cliche.
In the darkness afterwards, I began to realise that. She was quiet, smoking a cigarette as a woman in a film might afterwards, to indicate the success of pa.s.sion without the necessity of portraying it.
"What now?" I said.
I could sense her sensing my doubts. "You know Elgar is one of us?"
"Yes," I said. "And the Doctor."
"No, not the Doctor."
There was a silence. "How do you know that?"
"Elgar wants me to spy on you. To take advantage of my female form. I think his strategy is wrong."
It was an odd way to describe her body: "female form". But if she were No. I couldn"t think about what she might be. The whispering of wings was too loud.
The next day was the day Turing overheard Daria lying to Elgar in the cafe: telling him that she"d found out what she already knew. She did it, I think, because she wanted to see me again, and she would need Elgar"s blessing for that. Though whether it was the meeting of bodies, or of minds, or of souls that she sought, I don"t know. Perhaps I flatter myself. Perhaps her motives were more complex and less subject to human understanding. Whatever the reason, we spent another night in Elgar"s room. The pa.s.sion was the same, only this time it went on for longer, and afterwards I slept in the bed with her.
I woke at dawn, with the feeling that I had suffered a bad dream, though I couldn"t remember it. The bed next to me was empty, but there was shadow in the room, and movement. I heard Daria catch her breath, and I opened my eyes. She was crouching beside the bed, her hands underneath the draped-down covers, scrabbling at something on the floor.
"No!" I told her.
You will not believe it, but I had forgotten the Doctor"s "surveillance device": I had a.s.sociated it with Elgar, not with Daria and pa.s.sion. Now she stood up, holding it in both hands, staring with a fixation that was not human. Her neck and back curved like the architecture of a machine. She didn"t speak, didn"t explain, not that I could have hoped to understand the explanation. I reached out towards her, then saw that the sheets were smouldering where they touched her body.
I was up, out of the bed, heading for the door. "I"ll get help."
"Go." Her voice was without human intonation, the voice a machine might use. "Save your life." Her body was hot enough now that I could see the heat shimmering up from it. The skin was browning, like paper before it catches fire.
"I"ll get Elgar." Though I had no idea where he was.
She moved with a sudden ferocity, straight towards me. Though I am certain her body was not glowing from the heat, and retained its human shape, in my memory it is white, shining, and almost without form. She pushed me out through the door and slammed it shut behind me.
A moment later, she began to scream. Naked, I hammered at the door, until I felt a hand on my shoulder.
It was the Doctor. He pushed me away, his face contorted with a strong emotion. "Go away! This is not what I meant "
"You"ve killed her!" I shouted. She was still screaming, an inhuman sound. I ran down the stairs, with the intention of finding Elgar. I ended up stammering at the bewildered commissionaire, still stark naked, whilst upstairs Daria died.
Someone lent me a dressing gown, and I stood outside for half an hour, shivering. My skin was scalded where she had touched me, as if I had splashed boiling water over it. It hurt, though not enough to stop me thinking. I looked for Elgar first, but he was nowhere in sight. I saw Turing, but he didn"t see me, and I couldn"t be bothered to talk to him.
In the end, I had an inspiration and telephoned from a cafe the number that Daria had given me for her apartement apartement. Elgar answered the phone. I told him what had happened in his room. There was a long silence, then his cold voice said, "She"s irreplaceable." The syllables echoed over the phone line, as if it were long-distance, though Daria had told me that she lived in the Montmartre district of Paris.
He asked me where I was, and what had happened. I told him. He asked no questions, not even when I told him about the Doctor"s "surveillance" device. When I had finished he said, "I knew the Doctor was our enemy. I had hoped better of you."
I felt then that jolt in the stomach so beloved of cheap thrillers. It must have seemed obvious to you, reading about it, but for me as I lived through it, the full truth hit me only then: I had killed Daria. I had been a cause of her death, no less the Doctor"s instrument than that strange piece of metal he had given me. I tried not to be sure. I tried to tell myself that it had been an accident, that the Doctor hadn"t intended to kill anyone. I didn"t believe myself.
"Greene?" Elgar"s voice. I felt the phone against my ear, and realised I"d had it pressed against the lobe for some time, but hadn"t spoken.
"I"m still here. I don"t know "
"Look, I"m sorry. It wasn"t your fault you couldn"t have known. We"d better abort the operation here. Get Turing back to England. I"ll deal with the Doctor. Then I"m going to Dresden. I have to meet the enemy before they strike again."
In different circ.u.mstances the cliched lines would have made me laugh, especially since the idea of Elgar"s going to Dresden seemed inadvisable, even ridiculous. In the face of Daria"s death, I was only reminded that human beings do not speak in B movie cliches, and that Elgar could not, therefore, be human. Yet he was giving me good advice: get out now, while you can. And he had provided an excuse, in the form of Turing. His actions did not lack sophistication, appealing as they did to my interests as well as his own. They were merely subtly unreal, like those of a character in a bad novel.
I walked back to the hotel, in a state of shock. It was noon, but it was half dark, and I think it was drizzling. I remembered Daria: I remembered the tone of her voice, the shape of her face, the faint trace of something truly human struggling to escape from whatever she was. Was I only imagining that, now that she was dead, or had I always seen it? I tried to remember where and when I had thought of her as human, but could remember only the instances of her non-humanness.
Once I had dressed, I established that the Doctor was gone from the hotel hardly a surprise. I couldn"t bring myself to speak to Turing: his lack of reaction would have made me too angry to do my duty. I merely arranged for him to be sent home in the morning, and left the hotel for the Bordelaire base.
I didn"t know where the Doctor had gone, but it wasn"t difficult to guess where he would try to go. Standing in the driveway of the base, pushed and shoved by young American Marines setting out on a mission to the front line, I knew that the climax of the action would have to be in Dresden it was much like the sense I might have about the direction of a novel, and had the same tedious inevitability. Unlike Turing I had no sense of adventure at this point. His naive acceptance of the Doctor is typical of his light and thoughtless att.i.tude to his life he appears in his pa.s.sion and delight to have forgotten to give the proper emotional weight to the fact that the man might be a murderer. I couldn"t forget that, nor could I forget that Elgar might be just as suspect. I had no intention of giving myself to Elgar"s sway in the way that I had given in to the Doctor"s. If anything was clear after Dana"s death, it was that none of the strangers could be trusted, that any of them might kill, and that they were not afraid to use those of us who were merely human as their agents.
It wasn"t difficult to persuade Philby that I should go with Elgar. My superior was, I think, as uncertain about the colonel as I, and more than willing to take my word for it that he shouldn"t be trusted. I don"t know why, but Philby suspected everyone of playing a double game. That the Doctor had vanished helped my case: we both agreed he could be anywhere, doing anything, and that he certainly couldn"t be trusted. I didn"t tell Philby about Daria, of course, nor did I mention the Doctor"s "surveillance device" that had killed her. How could I? And the Doctor had intended this, I"m sure of it.
I expected Elgar to have objections why should he want my company? After I had planted the Doctor"s device in his room, I could hardly expect him to trust me. But, to my surprise, he agreed to it at once. In his rather artificial way he even greeted the plan with enthusiasm: "I will need help, as a matter of fact. But you must stick with me, and do exactly as I say. And if we meet the Doctor leave him to me."
I knew what this meant, but was hardly in a position to argue. It occurred to me that Elgar wanted my company only to make sure I didn"t fall in with the Doctor again. Given what happened to Turing, I can see that he was quite right to be concerned about this.
The chief problem with the German mission was my barely adequate German. I had once, many years ago when Germany was seen as the victim of the unfair Versailles agreement, proposed to be an agent for German interests. The plan had come to nothing, but I had attempted to learn the language. The smattering of accented German with which this had left me, though good enough to make myself understood and quite good enough to understand Hitler"s speeches on the radio, was nowhere near good enough for me to pa.s.s as a German. So it was proposed that I pose as an English POW, and that Elgar, whose German was idiomatic and unaccented, should play my captor.
All this was logical and sensible, yet on my first sight of Elgar as a policeman, I was sure I had made a mistake. The grey-andblack German uniform became a part of him as soon as he put it on. Elgar became a German a committed n.a.z.i. The moustache had gone. His face lost its twinkling English chubbiness and gained a pig-eyed, flabby sense of evil that was cheeks and eyes leery, as if they had spent the night in a house with ghosts.
I expected to be killed, but Elgar expected to be in control. He showed no fear. The car was German: he was wearing his uniform. He bullied the Germans. He didn"t shout, but his voice and face were icy and barely controlled as he told our cover story. His fierce tone, his visible anger, the almost suppressed twitching of a muscle in his cheek, all contrived to give the impression that he might shoot one of them at any moment for having the insolence to have stopped us. He marched back and forth, and his heels crunched on the road with the exact rhythm of a metronome. The officer leading the patrol a boy of perhaps twenty-two became desperate and confused. At the beginning when Elgar told our story I could see an intelligent suspicion in his face: he wanted to argue his case with this insane officer. But the metronome motion of Elgar"s boots wouldn"t allow it. Not only did the young officer have to believe our cover story, but was forced to allow us to siphon precious fuel into the car from one of his vehicles Elgar said he needed enough to reach Stuttgart.
Afterwards, Elgar said nothing about the closeness of our escape. He didn"t whoop with joy. He didn"t smile. He drove on, his heavy hands attached to the wheel of the German car, his eyes on the road and his face without expression. I asked if he was pleased with having got hold of the extra fuel. He nodded once, a twitch of the neck, and said it would save time.
We were descending into the Rhine valley, heading for one of the few bridges that remained intact after the Allied bombing. The sky was growing dark, and a silver-blue light was creeping up the vineyard slopes, reflected from the water. The rows of vines curled like the whorls of a fingerprint. Houses hunkered on the brown soil like black beetles.
I told Elgar about my first visit to the Rhineland my abortive attempt to become a German agent.
"How could you consider changing your duty like that?"
"Changing my duty?"
"Your duty was to be English, and to support the English. How could you think of supporting the Germans?"
I felt again that cold shiver inside my gut that is supposed to happen only in second-rate thrillers. Elgar"s remarks made no sense. What had the Doctor said about his having to "translate the concepts"? I"d thought he was talking about higher mathematics. Perhaps he had been talking about morality "Are you human?" I asked Elgar.
Elgar laughed. "You could say it"s my duty to be human. Just as it"s yours to be English. Fortunately, our duties happen to coincide."
The answer didn"t make me feel any better, but I had to shut up then as we were approaching the Rhine, and there was traffic ahead of us, a row of dark military trucks, unlit, grunting like hippos at a watering hole. It looked as if an entire German division, or the remains of one, was trying to cross the Rhine this was one of the few remaining bridges.
Elgar bullied his way through the traffic. Once he drew his revolver and pointed it at a stubborn, angry German officer. I couldn"t see the German"s face in the darkness: he looked inhuman, an empty uniform with silver trim glinting like small lights. I was more afraid of Elgar than the officer I thought he might shoot the German. However the bluff worked and the officer backed down. We crossed the bridge in darkness, with the hooded lights of trucks behind and ahead of us. Steel rails pa.s.sed on either side, and water glimmered below. There was the rumble of engines and the irregular dull chime of steel plates moving underneath the heavy vehicles.
We were almost at the German side when the convoy halted. We were told to turn lights and engines off: it was clear that the Germans were expecting a raid. The silence seemed to go on for ever. I could hear the faint chuckling of water beneath us, the tick of cooling metal, Elgar"s breathing. I would like to say that I prayed, but no words came to me, nor even an image of G.o.d. Instead, absurdly, I saw an image of the Doctor. At the time it seemed like blasphemy, but in retrospect I think it more likely to have been a premonition.
Chapter Fifteen.
The minutes pa.s.sed. Elgar said, "They should go on. There won"t be a raid."
It was true that, in Paris, we had been a.s.sured that the bridge wouldn"t be bombed tonight, but I had little faith in that promise. The war couldn"t be held up for a two-man mission, however important it was perceived to be and I knew too well the difficulties of communications. I doubted that anyone had told the air forces about us, or that they"d listened if anyone had.
I had more faith in the protection of the clouds, but that was erratic. At one moment I would see a ragged patch of stars overhead, then it would vanish. There was a brief, bright light that may have come from the moon through another gap in the clouds, or may have been a bomber"s flare. After around half an hour, I began to think that the clouds would after all be enough to protect us. Ice had started to form on the windscreen. I looked around for something to sc.r.a.pe it off, but Elgar told me not to worry. "I can see all right," he said.
A few minutes later the all-clear was given and the convoy crawled on, in almost total darkness. The ice on the windscreen slowly melted until it was gone, Elgar drove blind. By then we were off the bridge, driving quickly along a darkened road, away from the German division and towards Dresden. I don"t know how Elgar steered the car: even with the windscreen clear, I could see little in the darkness.
I asked him if he planned to stop for the night. "Not yet," he said. "We"ll drive whilst we have the fuel and the roads are clear. Sleep if you need to."
I did sleep, a few half-dozing moments, jolted by the car, watching the faint shuttered lights glancing off shapes that might have been walls or fences or trees. A ghostly figure in front of us: was it a man? Had we run him over? I felt no impact. An optical illusion?
When I woke, it was daylight bright, low, winter sunshine. I was surprised and disconcerted by how the territory of Germany enemy territory looked like home. For five years I had lived with the image of a darkened country, ruled by the foaming proclamations of the almost-mad Fuhrer. Instead I saw an ordered countryside, the fields dull with frost, stacks of firewood outside the houses. Children marched along the side of the road with school books under their arms they even waved at the pa.s.sing car. It could have been a country at peace. It was almost possible to believe the n.a.z.i propagandists who told the world that the war was far from over, that Germany might yet survive.
Then we reached the outskirts of Stuttgart, and were caught in a confused skirling of soldiers, dray horses, battered army vehicles, and hundreds perhaps thousands of dispossessed civilians on foot. We were fast running out of fuel. Elgar attempted to requisition some more: I remember a small German officer at the iron gates of what must have been a supply depot. He was a man with a feminine face, still a little chubby despite the hardship around him. I thought of a cupid in uniform, with a sidearm to replace his bow and arrow. The image lacked humour.
"We have no fuel here and we have lives to save!" he bellowed. "These people " he waved at the road behind us "they must be kept moving we must get them to Ludwigsberg today!"
This seemed an ambition unlikely to be fulfilled. It was already almost eleven and would be dark by five. We had pa.s.sed through Ludwigsberg it was some eight miles to the north, and the road was muddy and crowded. The people around us looked tired and hungry, all wearing the ageless, despairing look of the refugee on their faces. They carried old suitcases, cloth bundles, baskets, kettles, anything they could carry. One man with a pale, spotted face, perhaps sixty years old, towed a bright steel trunk on wheels. He was injured, a bandage around his arm, stained with what could have been dirt or blood. We pa.s.sed a young woman wearing a red headscarf and singing a jaunty marching tune, but the cheerful look on her face was forced and angular, and the sound soaked away into the leaden atmosphere without making an impression. It was freezing cold.
Elgar drove through them, past them, searching for another source of fuel that he could requisition.
"We should dump the car and go by train," I said. "We have the papers. It"s going to be safer than begging for fuel."
"Leave that decision to me," said Elgar, without taking his eyes off the road.
Near the station was a larger depot. Fuel tankers were lined up inside: ten, perhaps fifteen of them. Elgar almost drove through the barrier without stopping. He made his usual attempt to bully the officers at the gate, but this time the response was different. The man was tall, a cla.s.sic Aryan with blond hair and intelligent blue eyes. He demanded to see our papers. Elgar told our cover story. The officer asked us to get out of the car. He didn"t seem to be suspicious, but I knew that he was. He was too calm. For the third time in twenty-four hours I felt in imminent danger of death. Capture and torture, accompanied by the betrayal of my colleagues, didn"t seem a very dignified way of dying. I had a cyanide capsule in my pocket, but I wasn"t sure I could get to it in time.
"We should go," I murmured to Elgar.
Elgar frowned. I could see him hesitate, his face working as if thousands of small wheels and levers were turning behind it. Then he banged the car into reverse and roared out on to the street. I heard shouts. I didn"t hear a gunshot but something hit the car. It could have been a stone.
We made a sudden turn across the road. I saw a woman in front of us, staring like a frightened animal. She didn"t move, and Elgar was forced to stop. He waved her out the way, a vicious expression on his face. She turned, and I saw how thin her body was, and the dirt on her clothing. I can recall no expression on her face, I can"t see her features. The car body rang with impact again, we started to move, the woman was still in the way and was brushed aside. I saw her fall.
Then we were moving down a side road, narrow, cobbled, framed by brick warehouses. The windows were broken, some of them boarded up. I could smell the residue of smoke in the air. The road ended, after perhaps a half mile, in a brick wall, and Elgar pulled up smoothly. We got out of the car the air was shockingly cold. Elgar put the pack containing our remaining rations, fake papers and so forth on to his back. We began walking along a narrow alleyway. Outside the car, the smell of smoke and dust was stronger.
"Did we hurt that woman?" I asked him.
"What woman?"
"You must have noticed. We hit her."
"I couldn"t avoid her. We had to get away."
"You make it sound as if it doesn"t matter."
"It doesn"t. Getting to Dresden is all that matters."
I glanced at him. "Don"t lose your humanity, Elgar. That"s playing their game for them."
"I thought you believed I wasn"t human."
"It shouldn"t make any difference. Anyway, it"s the Doctor who thinks in terms of human and not-human. I think in terms of souls." I was lying.
"Like the priest?"
I hesitated, confused.
"We don"t lose our memories," he said. "All of us carry them."
I didn"t know what he meant, perhaps didn"t want to know, so I retreated into silence. We crossed a bridge over a ca.n.a.l. The path along the water was blocked by rubble from a warehouse which had been destroyed only a few hundred yards away. The bridge ended in a damaged street where there had been shops. Now there was a landscape of narrow houses, nibble and smoke. A young German soldier emerged from a darkened shopfront and peered at us, his eyes wide and grey. He struck me as an innocent: I could imagine him as a gentle country vicar or priest, with a collection of stamps or railway memorabilia. I knew he wasn"t going to kill us even before he spoke.
"You can"t go on, sir," he told Elgar. "There are several unexploded bombs."
"Where is the railway station?" Elgar asked him.
The young soldier pointed back along the ca.n.a.l and gave some directions. No explanation was asked or offered concerning me (this was to be the case several times during our journey). We began walking back along the ca.n.a.l. The smell of smoke and dust was strong enough to make me cough, but Elgar appeared able to ignore it.
"You"re fighting to win your war, Mr Greene, he said. "And I am fighting to win mine. Why do you think there"s a difference?"
"You don"t think the Allies are morally superior to the n.a.z.is?" I asked. I was aware of an irony: I was testing Elgar in the way that the Doctor had tested me. Did this mean that the Doctor was more virtuous than I? Again I had the sense of fighting on the wrong side.
"I"m not concerned with the rights and wrongs of a war," said Elgar. "I follow orders."
"The Germans also claim to be following orders," I said. "That"s the excuse that some of them give for ma.s.s murder. Surely you have better motives?"
Elgar glanced at me. "They believe they have better motives. That"s the whole problem. I don"t have to think about motives I just act."
"Like Sartre, then?"
"Who?"
I explained something of Sartre"s philosophy. His response was, "I"m not sure it would work for you, Mr Greene. Existentialism as you describe it isn"t a philosophy: it"s a state of being. I have it, you don"t."
I wasn"t sure whether his "you" was singular referring to me or plural referring to all of us. But we were now approaching a main street cluttered with people, and it wasn"t possible to speak in English. I didn"t want to risk exposing my nationality in order to discuss a point of philosophy.