I phoned the police first thing and reported a grey Volkswagen abandoned near the Grunewald Bridge. If Phoenix were keeping watch on it for any reason unknown to me they would see it was the police, and not I, who took the car away. I was dead.

Toothbrush, shaver, two shirts, socks, so forth. I left them at the Hotel Zentral and went to the Hertz office, hanging about for a time until the lunch-shift clerk took over. She hadn't seen me before. I chose a BMW 1500 LS saloon by Mechelotti. The name was Schultze, number three passport: there was a millionth chance that Phoenix might check to see if I'd re-hired.

Lunch at the hotel, quite the tourist, a brand-new valise in my room and a car in the lock-up.

Then my afternoon began. There is an innocence in the very word ‘afternoon’. Morning is for trains and business and hangovers, night is for love and burglary. The afternoon is the halcyon, the calm coming between earnestness and drama. In Berlin it is a time for cream buns, and the cafes swarm, even on a winter's day. But in Berlin there is, beneath this surface, a tide that runs darker than hell itself that carries people into tributaries not of their choosing. I was such a one.

There was a simple force propelling me northwards into Wilmersdorf, and it never crossed my mind to deny it.

She prepared Lapsang Suchong and served it with chips of orange-peel in small black bowls, kneeling on the floor to drink; we drank in the manner of a ritual. Sometimes she moved, for no reason other than to let me watch, her, knowing it pleased me.

A winter sun was in the sky and a ray of it struck through the window, gilding her helmet of hair. It was very quiet and when she moved I could hear the fabric of her clothes sliding over her skin. To each his aphrodisiac, and she knew mine. She made no secret of hers.

"Sometimes I can tell a man who has killed others. Iknow that you have."

"Yes."

"I don't mean in war."

"No."

"What does it feel like?"

"Disappointing."

"Not the thrill you expected?"

"I never do it for thrills. It's always a matter of life, his or mine. It's disappointing because all the urgency goes. "

"Like," she said, "when a mouse dies. The cat has nothing left to play with, nothing that moves."

This was why she went to the Neustadthalle: to watch men who had killed others.

We sat in silence drinking tea in the innocent afternoon.

She asked me what I had seen in the death-camps and I didn't tell her. It was no good thinking, if this wingless vampire had ever spent a day in a death-camp she wouldn't be so keen to talk about it now. She was part-masochist and in her pain there'd be pleasure.

We talked about the Fuhrerbunker. She liked that. It was no good thinking, this is no prelude to love. There would be nothing of love. This was the prelude to something that we would each act out for our own reasons: the simple biological urge to impregnate and be impregnated, the needs of dominance, subjection, identification, a lot of things known and unknown, an act of catharsis to let the fiends come out and perhaps to let others in. The beast with two backs would lord the jungle for a time, then it would die, without knowing why it had lived.

The small black bowls were empty, and she was trembling, so imperceptibly that only the gold links of the chain on her wrist gave sign of it. There had been nothing said, but she stood up and the ray of the winter sun threw her shadow across the wall as she went into another room, and when she came back she was naked.

Better than I'd imagined, or worse, as it had been in the amytal dream that we now relived, but with new dimensions that surprised me: most men think they know it all and most do not. It was impossible for me to think that the things she did could have been done by any other woman, though I had known them before. The doer matters more than what is done, and she was Inga, gold of hair, unique and measureless, sometimes whispering to me of things more naked than even her body was, the brittle Berliner accents whittling the air as she opened herself and let the fiends come out, and when the ray of the sun had gone from the wall her tears were drying on me.

And now get out, Quiller, get out, the amytal had said, but I stayed until the lamps came on in the street and the room glowed with their light. In the mirror of the bathroom my face looked much the same, though we sometimes fear the identity has suffered change by its exposure. I heard the bell ring, muted by the door between, and heard her receiving someone. When my tie was straight I went through into the living-room and saw Oktober standing there, and knew that since I had left the Grunewald Bridge my reasoning had been false and that it had led me here. Under the amytal I had done, in a dream, what I had come here this afternoon to do; and I had given Fabian and Oktober a running commentary. She'd rather do this with a short-arse with a small moustache who's dead and a poof to boot… You are a woman before you are a bloody necrophile… And I'd already given them her name. Inga. A thousand Ingas in this fair city, but only one of them in love with a dead Fuhrer. They knew which one, and they knew where I'd heard the name of Phoenix. (Phoenix? Phoenix, yes. How did you hear about Phoenix?)

The inaudible discussion between Fabian and Oktober was now as clear to me as if I had heard every word.

Fabian: "We shan't get anything out of him this way."

Oktober: "Then we shall give him special treatment."

"It shouldn't be necessary, and you stand to lose him. If he talked at all he would be so far gone that you might not get anything intelligible. You might have difficulty in reviving him for further use."

"Advise me, then."

"I saw your reaction when he mentioned the name ‘Inga’. You know her. Who is she?"

"A defector."

"Locatable?"

"Yes."

"Then let him go to her."

"He might not."

"He will. His libido will drive him to her. He'll want to do in reality what we have just heard him dream of doing. His urge to go to her is overwhelming, and we can even increase it to make certain. You notice his fear of death he harped on Kenneth Lindsay Jones and Solomon Rothstein. We shall play on that fear. Let him believe he is about to die, and let it be done convincingly. Then give him back his life and let him experience its shock effect. The life-force will surge back and the libido will become all-powerful. He will go straight to her."

"I'm not convinced."

"You must accept my word. I made a study of these mechanisms during the war. In hospital wards it was noted that night-loss among severely-wounded was always very high, within hours of their being told that operation was successful and that they were going to live. In my own work at the resettlement centres of Dachau and Nazweiler we developed a highly successful technique. We put a man under threat of imminent death for three days, then led him to a gibbet and placed the cord round his neck. An officer arrived to ‘save’ him at the last minute, countermanding the order to execute. We then closeted him with an expert interrogator – a young female of course – who withheld the means of sexual relief until he had talked. We learned more from these subjects than by any other method: and they were men who were quite prepared to go to their death in silence."

"You believe this one would follow the pattern?"

"No. Not this one. But I promise you he'll go to the woman Inga, within hours. In a way he is in love with her. So you will know where to find him, and when you have found him you know what to do."

And my reasoning had been false, because there'd been no tag. A tag hadn't been necessary. They'd known where to find me. But they'd do nothing, now. Nothing to me.