Did I need telling?

Let them call my bluff and try to pull me out. They wouldn't succeed. I was out for Zossen. They'd given a dog a bone.

I took the VW as far as the Wilmersdorf district and posted the signal, locking the car and walking the rest of the way to her flat, angry, finally, with myself, because of all the good reasons I had mentally listed against going there again.

Within twenty-four hours they had me.

During this period there were small signs of their closing in, and I was content to wait for them.

It was midnight when I got back to the hotel from Inga's flat. She'd been on edge and had tried not to show it. The dog had been sent to bed: it had a kennel on the roof and went up by the fire-escape. She'd said ‘Friend’ and it went off without another look at me. Mostly we'd sat drinking and listening to things like Night Bounce that she put on the record-player for me, an eerie tune that suited her personality, lean, brooding, and cynical. She wore an all-black after-ski outfit more like a skin-tight track-suit with the top slit to the waist and a thonged belt. Nudity would have been less explicit.

I didn't alter my identity: I was still with the Red Cross tracing relatives of refugees. She mentioned Phoenix twice, during one of her bitter reminiscences, and spoke of Rothstein. I hooked his name immediately because I hadn't known he was in Berlin. If there were a chance, I would look him up.

Sometimes, watching her, I wondered: what sex are you? She must have known that she was getting under my skin, by all the things we didn't say. There was a rapport between us that made long silences unembarrassing even when the music wasn't playing and the room was totally silent. Tonight she smiled sometimes, and not altogether cynically. Lean, black, leather-belted and athletic-looking, gold hair thick along her arms: she might be anything. Lesbian, narcissist, sado-masochist, necrophile, any or all, and nothing for me, which was why I was here, a nihilist.

She knew that I wondered about her, and teased me, using her body as she moved in the light and shadow cast by the Chinese-moon lamp, displaying its moods of poise, rhythm, tension and repose, miming an animal and begetting images whose shapes we shared, hideous and comical according to caprice, so that I was at once repulsed and bespelled. She was a houri at the court of Thanatos, and had learned her darkness in the Fuhrerbunker, just as I had learned mine among the legions of the damned. This was our touch-stone and we both knew it.

When I left her we had not even kissed; we had done more and less than that. Inga. Her name rang in me.

The streets were deserted and the gutters arush with the thaw, and my trudging footsteps echoed among the buildings. A moon was out, scything the dark clouds. The colours of the neon signs ran melting over wet stones, and the Kreuzberg floated like a green island in the sky.

The Volkswagen was still where I'd left it in the Hohenzollern-platz and I checked the door-handles and key-slot with my bare fingers for nicks in their metal. The match I had rigged inside the driving-door hinge fell away. The car hadn't been touched.

I started up and headed south through Steglitz, checked the car behind, turned right, re-checked, turned right-left-right, re-checked and added up the score. This was: it hadn't been touched but it had been watched. They'd tagged me from the Hotel Prinz Johan to Wilmersdorf and let me go, waiting for me to come back. Now they were tagging again. I claim always to know when I am being followed, on foot. Flushing a tag by car is more difficult, sometimes impossible, because the traffic conditions occupy too much of the attention. Tonight I knew they were there, within the first mile of leaving the Wilmersdorf area, because the streets were empty: but they'd followed me four hours ago from the hotel to Wilmersdorf without my knowledge, because the traffic had been heavy.

It was a gunmetal-blue DKW F-102 Vierturer with the four distinctive Auto-Union rings on the rad-slats.

This then was the first of the small signs that they were closing in on me. Closing in – no more than that. They weren't after a kill or I would have been dead by this time. I was working on the assumption that they were too intelligent to kill me out of hand simply because I'd done a snatch on Rauschnig, Schrader and Foegl. Several hundred war-criminals had been herded into a dozen Federal courts since the London Agreement had triggered the hunt, and no one working for the Z Commission had been shot at. It would have led to a minor war, and it seemed to be the present policy of Phoenix to keep hush. Those lost souls – like Schrader, Rohm and a dozen others – who had taken a Pand R Mark IV or kicked a chair from under them had been put under pressure by their own kind or had just got tired of waiting for the knock on the door. Those – like Kenneth Lindsay Jones – who were killed off by the adverse party were the subject of simple murder, but they weren't killed out of hand. They were vetted first. As far as the Bureau knew, KLJ hadn't been caught and grilled before they finished him off, but then a dead man can tell his Bureau precious little. He may have been caught and grilled before the kill: that would be their policy. Squeeze the lemon before you throw it away. Or, if he'd been smart enough to dodge them at every turn, they may have simply decided that he was getting too close for comfort and must be stopped.

But I was all right, Jack. They didn't even know I was going for Zossen. All they knew was that a strange face had suddenly turned up on the front page alongside Rauschnig's, and that I'd been in on the Schrader death and the Foegl snatch. They knew the faces of the Z-polizei very well. They didn't know mine, and they wanted to. At the moment they were watching it in a mirror at a hundred yard's range and they meant to get closer than that. More important, they wanted to know where I was going. They knew about the hotel because they'd picked me up there, so they weren't just tagging me home.

We went right, left, right and across the Innsbruckerplatz through drifts of slush. There was no point in trying to lose them because they knew where I lived, but after the brooding sex-and-Gotterdammerung claustrophobia of Inga's flat I felt like a bit of healthy-schoolboy action and decided to give them a run. It would have to be quick because we were already hitting the limit and there'd be a police-patrol mixing with us before long, and there mustn't be any publicity of that kind. One thing to get your face in a flashlight, another thing to submit to police laws and show them all your papers. Mine were so well forged that even infra-red would reveal the same fibres but I didn't want to have any personal details printed even in a back-page filler because it would involve the Red Cross. Nor has the Bureau any kind of diplomatic immunity from contravention of traffic regulations. The Bureau doesn't exist.

Slush was coming up on to the windscreen and the wipers knocked it away. We made a straight run through Steglitz and Sudende because I wanted to know if they'd now make any attempt to close right up and ram. They didn't. They just wanted to know where I was going. I'd have to think of somewhere. Their sidelamps were steady in the mirror, a pair of pale fireflies floating along the perspective of the streets. We crossed the Attila-strasse and I made a dive into Ring-strasse going south-east, then braked to bring them right behind me – and make them slow. As soon as they had I whipped through the gears and increased the gap to half a block before swinging sharp left into the Mariendorfdamm and heading north-east towards Tempelhof. Then a series of dives through back-streets that got them going in earnest. The speeds were high now and I had the advantage because I could go where I liked, whereas they had to think out my moves before I made them, and couldn't, because I didn't know them myself until the last second.