Perhaps he hoped to save something of himself by saving me. I asked him:

'Who's doing it? Sending the Strikers down?'

There's no time. You must leave here.''

He wouldn't even bloody well listen. I leaned over the table. 'Who is doing it?' I was getting fed up because while he was busy collapsing I wanted to snatch the odd brick out of the rubble before it was too late. 'Did you tell him? Lovett?' He was slowly shaking his head but I didn't think it was meant as an answer: he was shaking his head at the whole of life or at least the life he knew. 'Well you're going to tell me. What's their name?'

'Die Zelle:'

'Where's their base?' No answer.

'Who's the top kick?'

He stared at me.

' You have to get away'

'I'm busy.' He hadn't got the guts to give it to me straight, couldn't admit it, face the responsibility. Once they start collapsing the whole lot goes and they're irresponsible, treacherous, and the most you can do is try to shore them up and get some last desperate sense out of them before it's lost in the roaring of bricks. I said through my teeth: 'Who runs it?'

His face rocked and his eyes closed as if I'd physically hooked one on him and I knew how important it was that he should save my skin but I wasn't interested because it was his conscience he was trying to save and so far as it suited my book he could stew in it.

A man came in with a briefcase and Benedikt heard the door and opened his eyes and stared at me again because he daren't look round: he was using my face for a mirror. He was pretty far gone so I said: 'What've you got on paper? Memos, documents, anything useful? Any micro stuff? We can decode it, don't worry about that. Come on, Benedikt.'

The manager was at the far end of the food-bar staring at him and then staring at me. Benedikt looked ill and he was wondering why I wasn't doing anything about it. He started towards us and then thought better of it.

Benedikt was still watching my face.

'Who just came in?'

'One man. Only one.'

Of course I would have got him away before now and handed him over to Ferris. But I'd made a mistake and I didn't want to do it again. I'd been so aware that they would come for me again that I'd fallen for an assumption: anyone searching my room must be an adverse party. It wasn't until I'd seen the collapse setting in that I'd known who he was. That had been a mistake.

The next mistake I could make would be another assumption: that he was totally allied to me. You've got to mind your fingers when you give a dog a bone.

'Look,' I said. 'We'll accept you. You can be in London by tomorrow. But I've got to have something more definite first.' Die Zelle. The Cell. He could have invented it off-hand.

He wasn't listening.

The restaurant was half-full now and getting noisy. There were no curtains; the headlights of cars coming in made a kaleidoscope of the opaque sculpted glass of the windows. The espresso machine shrilled.

I looked at Benedikt. He sat like a sack.

'You can still make it,' I told him. I had to lean half across the table because of the noise, But I could see I'd lost him now. It's something almost unnatural to witness: they just slip away as if they were drugged and you could time the process. Suddenly between one minute and the next they abandon interest in doing what they were recently desperate to do. (Ferris had said: They think it's someone trying hard to get across.) Final throw.

'We'll go now. We might as well. We can talk later.'

Some kind of consciousness came back. He said:

'If it were as easy as that…'

Headlights froze across the glass and dimmed away.

'It'll get easier as we go along,' I told him. 'This is the roughest bit, that's all.'

Then they came in and I knew he was right and that it was too late.

'Is he all right?'

'What did you say?'

It was very noisy.

'He looked ill. Is he all right?'

'Yes. But bad news.'

The beer was making them raucous. A lot of laughter.

'What sort?'

Headlights.

'His wife.'

'Teh! He talks always about his wife.'

Leaving. Not arriving. But no one had come through here.

'Are they lawyers?'

'Who?'

'The people who came to see him.'

'Friends. Just a couple of friends,'

Benedikt had got up and gone across to talk to them and they had stood there for a few minutes and there was no point in sitting somewhere else with my back to them because they knew I was here. Now they had gone up the stairs.

'That's bad, then, if it's his wife.'

'Yes.'

'He talks a lot about her.'

'I know.'

The staircase came halfway into the room and was very modern with glass at the sides, the same thick opaque glass that the windows were made of. He'd made an effort before getting up and some of his colour had come back. He had just given me the name r of a place — the clockmaker's in Neueburg — and then he'd gone across to talk to them. I hadn't expected them to go up the staircase, all three of them, like that.

I picked up the Kasseler-Zeitung he'd dropped on to the chair and looked through it because they were making it so obvious. All I had to do was walk out and get into the car and drive away.

The manager had gone back to the food-bar.

Lyon had beaten Hamburg 3–1.

The farther away I got from them the less I'd like it. I preferred to keep in close because they wouldn't expect that. I waited another fifteen minutes and then went across to the staircase. A group of travellers stood at the bottom with tankards waving about as they talked. They'd had a good day and were pleased with it and wanted me to join them but I said I couldn't just now.

The corridor was all right: there were no recesses. But his room was towards the far end and that was unnerving. It meant full exposure in confined quarters for something in the region of fifteen seconds and there was sweat inside my hands when I reached the door. The light was on in the room but there were no voices.

I gave it a minute and tried the handle and pushed the door open and gave it another minute before I went in. A gust of laughter came up the staircase and I shut the door so that I could think better. The curtains were drawn and I left them like that. There was almost no point in looking around because I couldn't see any signs of hurry and unless they'd been in a hurry they would have done a thorough search, but you never know your luck and I saw to the furniture first. It didn't take long: most of it was built in and I wasn't checking for hollows or magnets because he didn't live here permanently.

There was only one valise and most of the stuff was dispersed in the room and I checked the shaver-case and squeezed all the tooth-paste into the wash-basin. The black box he kept the figurines in gave nothing. It had come open for some reason and the only two pieces that had been inside — a faun and a shepherdess — were smashed on the floor near one of his outstretched hands. It looked as if he'd been taking them out of the box when they did it.

There were hollow sections among the bits and I checked them: the head of the shepherdess and one half of the log she was sitting on, the hind quarters of the faun. But they were empty. Finally I searched the body: pockets, linings, heels, inside the watch, inside the lighter and the three pens, going through the full routine while the hooded eyes went on looking at the fragments.

As I stood up I wondered whether he might not have been happier, more fulfilled really, selling these things between Hanover and Kassel instead of trying to slip the skids under people who travelled in violence. I believed even at that stage that Benedikt had never been first-class agent material. Ideology isn't enough. It seems enough: it's blinding and belongs to the heart. But it won't save you from being found one fine day on the floor with a cheese-wire mark on the throat.