"It was a long time," said Solly in English.

"Yes."

He didn't mean since our chance meeting in Munich three years ago, but since Auschwitz.

The day I first met him we got seventeen out and only four of them touched the high-voltage wire. The rest lived and were alive now, as far as I would ever know. Solly was one of them. He joined us afterwards. At that time I had linked up with three men: A Berliner Jew, a Pole and a Dane. Before linking with anyone I had worked solo for three years and my bag was some ninety-seven souls. After linking and forming a team we got more than two hundred out before the liberation of the south camps.

Most of that time I was working as a low-intelligence pure Aryan camp guard, ex-seaman, with an uncle in Himmler's Einratzgruppen hierarchy. I used to curse Churchill with such versatility that they made me do it on the stage once as part of the act when they ran a variety-show the night before the gas-chambers were ceremonially opened. I went over big. We got seven out that same night, because we'd been told that the capacity of the new gas-chambers was estimated at two thousand per day and the camp commandant got drunk to celebrate, and most of his officers got drunk too. We didn't. Seven out of two thousand seemed so little.

Solly and I went back to Auschwitz after it was over, and showed the Allied troops where we'd cemented over a hole in the wall of the punishment block to conceal the records we'd been making for three or four months. The evidence hanged nine SS officers and fourteen guards, but we didn't have a drink on that either; all the time we were collecting the evidence it had seemed important, but later we saw it wasn't. It had simply helped to keep our spirits going, to scratch the face of Satan.

Solly hadn't changed much in twenty years. His face had changed – we'd been young men then, but his spirit was still the same. You would call him the gentlest of men, and so he was, unless made angry. He was possessed of an anger that didn't show; it was as calm as the undetonated elements of a bomb.

I could sense the dormant anger in him now, and knew that he would never be at peace.

"I heard last night that you were in Berlin," I said.

"And you come to see me at once. How good that was of you!"

You can go through the fires of hell itself with a man and have nothing to say when you meet him again, unless it's ‘And do you remember old So-and-so?’ There was no one we wanted to remember.

"What are you doing in Berlin?" he asked me, and we talked like that for a while. We were alone in his office but we could see the heads of two men, his assistants working in the laboratory. The partition had a glass panel.

"Is it still bugs, Solly?"

"Oh, yes!" He smiled, for he had a thousand million children whom he loved. When we had chanced to meet, in Munich, he was a member of the international convention of bacteriologists who were gathered there to discuss some proposal or other about germ-warfare. It wasn't in my line, but he was an accepted authority. "The University of Cologne gives me a grant of money," he said, "so I have my own laboratory!"

"Congratulations. Frankly it gives me the creeps." There were control-canisters crawling with moulds and cultures all over his office. He talked about some of his work and interrupted himself often, gazing at me in a kind of hellish rapture. More than once he cocked his head up and peered through the glass partition and then turned to me as if he were on the brink of some vital confidence. Then his eyes dulled and I could see the control he had clamped down on his impulse to confide. It was then that he looked as I had seen him when they had separated the men from the women as they were driven down the ramps from the trucks. When they had dragged his young wife from him he had stood like this, his eyes dull in a kind of passing death.

After a time he stopped telling me about his work, and there was nothing else to say and we knew it.

"Where are you staying?" he asked me. "We must meet again!" I told him and he said: "The Prinz Johan? That is expensive!"

"I never sleep in cheap hotels in Germany. "I don't know why I said it: just a thought-flash. At Ravensbruck they had always cut the hair from the women before gassing them, and the hair was steamed and baled for transport to the mattress-factories. The best hotels in Germany have foam-rubber.

"We will meet again, then!" he said when he saw that I wanted to go. I said yes, we certainly would; but we didn't make a date.

Back in the street I wished I'd never called on Solly Rothstein. Did he, up there with his bugs, wish I had never called? I'd left him frustrated: there had been something vital he'd been burning to tell me, and couldn't. There was the feeling in me that I wouldn't want to know.

He phoned me in the late afternoon. I shall always remember my carelessness.

He said in English: "It is me."

I didn't answer. For some reason I was thinking about Pol. Then Solly said: "It was a long time, wasn't it?"

"Yes." He had wanted to identify himself without giving his name.

"I will come to see you," he said. "Wait for me."

The line went dead.

So he couldn't keep it to himself. The frustration was too much. Either that or he'd been unwilling to tell me in the laboratory: the partition had been thin. He had decided, after Ihad left there, to talk to me; otherwise he would have made a date for a meal somewhere, on the spot. He didn't trust the phone: no names. He didn't trust the thin partition.

It wasn't only bugs, then. Or it was bugs in a big way. Germ warfare might be the clue. But I was still thinking of Pol, and about the box office of the Neukomodietheater, so I worried it. There must be a connection. Pol wouldn't phone me here; I was hot, untouchable, unphonable. His voice wasn't anything like Solly's and Pol had spoken only German to me. Not the connection. Must be one. I had to recall actual conversation between Pol and me before I got it. He'd said:

We knew that you had reserved this box. So you've got access to the box-office.

Yes.

No go. I used the name Schultze.

We knew that.

By tapping my phone -

I bruised my hand hitting the receiver in a blind grab and caught it as it began falling. I knew the laboratory number because I'd hooked it automatically in the memory when I'd shut the directory. Switchboard told me to wait.

I waited. A nerve had begun flickering in my eyelid.

Carelessness. There had been a click on the line when I'd answered Solly's call. I hadn't expected a call from anyone, not from Pol, Hengel, Ebert, Inga, Brand, anyone I could think of. In no situation would Pol, Hengel or Brand phone me here. Ebert didn't have my number: nor did Inga. Solly wouldn't phone me, because we hadn't even made a date to meet again. Then who? Consciously involved with the question, I'd heard the click on the line only subconsciously, and it had chain-reactioned in the memory so that I'd begun thinking of Pol and the box-office, for no known reason.

My phone was being tapped again. Not by Control this time: that had just been a hush way of finding me. This time it was by the adverse party. The DKW tag. The twin glint. Now the tap. The third small sign that they were closing in.

"The number's ringing, sir."

"Thank you."

The eyelid went on flickering.

It didn't matter that they were tapping me now, at this minute, because all I had to tell Solly was don't come!

I might be wrong but I couldn't chance it. Solly would trust neither a phone nor the partition in his own laboratory; therefore he was in some kind of permanent red sector and had to watch everything he did; therefore he might be known to Phoenix, so well that they even knew his voice. He might be doubling with them, still feverish with that undetonated anger of his after twenty years, playing his own game with them in order to get facts that would guide him along the fuse to that almighty detonation he must have before he died, however long it took, because of his young wife.