The Contract

The motorcyclist was admitted to the hotel room by a girl, tall and blonde and who at a different time might have been considered striking and pretty. She was pale, and her eyes bulged in the aftermath of weeping. The room was dark from the gathering night, the lights had not been switched on, the curtains had not been drawn, open sandwiches from 'Room Service' had not been eaten. An old man sat by the window, seemingly unaware of the intrusion until the girl brought the docket to him and he wrote his name quickly, then reverted to his empty stare across the skyline of the city.

Alter the motorcyclist had withdrawn, his boots beating away down the corridor, Erica Guttmann ripped open the envelope.

'It is from the commandant at Padolsk. The test firing was successful,' she said without emotion. 'They say it was completely satisfactory

… they offer their warmest congratulations… they call it a triumph of military technological development…'

She passed the sheet of paper to her father. As if with reluctance he held out his hand to receive it, then peered at the typed words in the half light. Abruptly he opened his hand and let the paper flake to the floor.

By the finish of the working day the reports ordered by the BfV official were arriving at his desk. An efficient and effective organisation. The safe return of the homing pigeons.

The neighbours of Hermann Lentzer had been spoken with, discreetly.

His telephone had been tapped at the local exchange, with official authorisation.

His personal file had been taken from the archive collections at Wiesbaden and teletyped to Bonn.

Gazing through the shallow lenses of the spectacles that he wore for close work, puffing occasionally at his pipe, the man from BfV read through the material that had been collated for him.

Lentzer in a training battalion of the Waffen-SS and finding his combat baptism in the 33 day battle to obliterate the Warsaw Ghetto, the battle that was fought until every Jew inside the perimeter was either dead or in transport for the extermination camps. Lentzer, who had stood guard at the fences of Auschwitz in the latter months of the war before slipping into peace-time obscurity. Now, Lentzer the trafficker.

They came again, these people. Their filth was never destroyed.

Where was he now?… The young man who had fired his rifle into the tottering, tragic remnants of the Ghetto, who would have marched the emaciated prisoners to the bulldozed pits of Auschwitz… What was his punishment? A secure future and immunity from prosecution. A big house in a pleasant village outside Bonn, a big car to drive, a big account in black at the bank. Where was the repayment of the debt for the disgrace of his country? They were scum, these people, scum at the rim of the cess-pit.

He read on.

Hermann Lentzer was going to Berlin. That afternoon he had made a telephone call, he had announced his arrival time. He had spoken to an Englishman and neither had used their name. He often went to Berlin, the neighbours said, because sometimes they saw beside his rubbish bins the plastic bags that carried the names of the stores on Kurfusten-Damm and Bismarck Strasse. And when he travelled, Lentzer went by car, the neighbours said. He would use false papers, the BfV man reflected, but the car would not change, the number plate would not be altered… How could the British associate with such dirt? Was this the courtesy of an ally?

The lights threw into relief the gloom beyond his window. Late in the evening and the building was quiet and empty save for a scattering of night clerks… All the frontiers of the world could be crossed. Through the minefields and wire and high walls there were hidden corridors of communication. The BfV in Bonn could make contact with the SSD in East Berlin. The route was tortuous but could be managed.

He wrote on his notepad the details of the model of Mercedes car driven by Hermann Lentzer, its colour and number plate. He pondered then for a few moments. The bastard deserved no sympathy, no mercy.

The British had made their own bed, they could lie on it, and they had not consulted on a matter that if it failed or succeeded would bring only nuisance to the Federal Republic.

Without emotion he weighed the correctness and the consequences of the action he had proposed to himself. The British had stepped outside the agreed guidelines; he had no responsibility that he owed them. And if he jeopardised the British plan? They had had the opportunity for consultation with the Federal authorities, they had not availed themselves of it. They had avoided the queries raised by BND.