"They're chained to 'is belt. Get up, you ——, and do what you're told or you'll get it." Ackermann went behind the desk and the sergeant rose to his feet, for he was a family man and did not wish to die. He was urged along the passage with Gruiter prodding him in the back with the revolver, largely to give himself courage.

  "Which cell's he in?" asked Heinz, and Ackermann glanced contemptuously at him.

  "Don't matter. Let 'em all out. May as well."

  The desk sergeant opened the first cell he came to, and, as though he were a runner poised at the starting line, Zolbin dashed out and along the passage. He was not Lachmann so Ackermann naturally let him go; without his overcoat Ernst and Heinz did not recognize him and in any case were relying upon Ackermann to identify his friend. The next cell door opened to reveal a drunk who stared haughtily at them and was in no hurry to go; the third door released a thin young man who had been caught in the very act of burglary only an hour before.

  The fourth cell was empty and its door was already open.

  "Where is he?" asked Ackermann, but the desk sergeant turned like an eel behind them to make a rush for the corner, with a loud yell to alarm his colleagues in the rest rooms off the passage. Gruiter, having been already recognized and seeing as it were an embodied report rushing to the inspector, lost his head and fired. The crash of the shot rang along the corridor and the bullet hit the desk sergeant in the back of the head, killing him instantly.

  In a moment the place was in an uproar. The two constables drowsing in the rest room, not actually on duty but "on call" in case they were needed, made a leap for the door just as they were, in shirt and trousers, pausing only to snatch up their belts with the holsters containing their automatics. It is not at all easy to get a gun out of a holster on a belt which is merely swinging in the hand, and they were still fumbling when they came out to be faced by a tall man who had wrenched open the lid of the sergeant's desk. He had a bulging brief case in one hand and a piece of the broken lid in the other, with this he struck in the face the first constable to oppose him and immediately rushed out of the door into the night.

  The inspector was reading reports in his room and trying to keep awake when the cry and the shot outside awoke him effectively. He too snatched up his gun and opened his door at the exact moment when what seemed like the hordes of Attila galloped past, headed by the thin burglar, with Ackermann and his three friends close upon his heels. Gruiter fired his revolver again at the inspector's face and missed, the bullet sang past his ear and the hot wind scorched his cheek. The two constables by this time had got their guns out, but in the excitement of the moment were firing high, and the whole battle emerged upon the street.

  The first that Hambledon and Spelmann actually saw of what was happening was when the door of the police station erupted the tall man, running like a hare away from them with his brief case clutched to his chest.

  "That's him," said Spelmann excitedly. "Zolbin."

  The Russians leapt from cover, waving their arms and crying: "Zolbin! Comrade!" Zolbin glanced over his shoulder and evidently saw them, but instead of stopping he put his head down and ran harder than ever. The Comrades, after a momentary pause of astonishment, set off after him, yelping: "Stop, stop," but he did not stop. Flight and pursuit disappeared into the distance.

  There was an angry exodus from the police station, headed by Ackermann and closely followed by the station staff and their inspector who had seen his dead sergeant and was bellowing to his constables to "shoot to kill." The inspector himself steadied his arm against the jamb of the door, took careful aim at Gruiter as he was running away, and fired. Gruiter leapt in the air and fell in a heap, moving feebly.

  "One," said the inspector grimly.

  By this time both constables were firing from such cover as they could find and Ackermann's gang were firing back. It was at this moment that the police-station door emitted another figure, and he was carrying a chair. He pushed past the inspector, who was too busy to stop him, advanced into the middle of the road, set down his chair, and mounted upon it. He was the drunken prisoner from Cell 2, and he had a message to deliver; regardless of flying bullets, the crash of shots, and the yells and imprecations of battle he proceeded to deliver it.

  "People of Berlin, take warning! Berlin is a sink of iniquity like Gorram and Somoddah. Evil is rampant. What is the evil of which I speak? Drink."

  He had the high, carrying voice of the practised orator; though his words were often entangled they were always perfectly audible, and his remarks floated across to Hambledon at all times when he had attention to spare for them.

  "Look around you. What do you see? A bagglefield'—a battle-found——"

  The young burglar, having been searched on arrest, was unarmed and decided suddenly to leave. He had the intelligence or the experience to run zigzag, and finally put on a spurt to pass close by Hambledon, who stuck his leg out. The burglar, having his feet swept from under him, fell heavily, hitting his head upon a lump of masonry, and lay very still.

  The voice of the speaker continued without pause. "... Whose degraded body lies yonder in a drunken stupor"—he was referring to Gruiter who was as dead as Argentine beef—"is a victim of the devil whose alternated nomacl—nomenacl—name is Steinhager and Beer, alternately. Oh, my friends——"

  Ernst had received a bullet in the chest and was on the ground, trying to drag himself away in the intervals of coughing his heart out. The inspector had been wounded in the leg by Ackermann and was sitting on the steps cursing steadily and waiting for Heinz to move out from behind a tree opposite.

  "Where did this disgraceful orgy take place? I will tell——"

  Heinz did move eventually, since the constables were working round towards him; he had fired off the contents of his magazine and was too agitated to reload. The inspector, who rightly prided himself upon his revolver shooting, chose the moment when Heinz came out from behind the tree and dropped him. He was not dead but, as the constables told him when they picked him up, that did not matter; the postponement was only temporary.

  "Within those doors labelled 'Polizei,' sheens of the most unexscribeable dishipation take place hourly. I know. I have but now escaped——"

  Ackermann had kept his head. After emptying his automatic in the general direction of the police and scoring upon the inspector, he ran down the side of the builder's hoarding and was lost to sight.

  The two Russians, with but one idea in both their minds and one duty clear before them, had ignored the battle completely. In fact, after the first few minutes they were not there, for they were running furiously along the road after Zolbin. He, being taller than either of his pursuers, would normally have outdistanced them easily, but he was hampered by his brief case. Track records are not broken while clasping a sizeable satchel stuffed with bundles of Deutschmark notes and other things. He gained a little but not much, and was in the act of glancing over his shoulder to see how far off they were when an elderly man came out of a side street upon a bicycle and Zolbin ran straight into him. There was a loud crash and two men and a bicycle rolled together in the road.

  Zolbin picked up himself, the brief case, and the bicycle almost in one movement, sprang on the machine and was away down the side turning before his pursuers could reach him. His progress was not, at first, easy because the handlebars had been twisted round until they were no longer at right angles with the front wheel. However, he had been a good cyclist in the days when, as a young man, he had worked in Germany, and he managed to lose the pursuit. He got off, hurriedly effected an adjustment, and rode anxiously away into the night. He had not been caught, but he was most hopelessly and comprehensively lost.

  The elderly man whose bicycle had been reft from him struggled to his feet as the other Russians came up panting, and seized them by their coats.

  "Who took my bike?"

  "We—I—it wasn't us," said Ivanovich in his limited German, and pulled to get away.

  "I know it weren't you, but you was running after 'im. Friend o' yours?"

  "No," said Ivanovich loudly. "Certainly not. I don't know him. Let go, old man, or I——"

  "Then why was you running after?"

  Ivanovich searched a treacherous memory for the German word for "coincidence," and failed to find it. "Life is like that," he said at last. "Let go, or I will strike you."

  "I will tell the police," said the old man. He pushed them peevishly away and they also disappeared down the side street which Zolbin had taken, but sadly and in no hurry. Zolbin had gone and all they needed now was a quiet place in which to consider.

  "Life," said Vassily Andreyevich passionately, "is unnecessarily cruel."

  The old man plodded on towards the police station where everything was now peaceful once more. The firing had entirely ceased, and all the neighbours had come out of their houses to stand about asking questions and uttering cries of horror when they encountered pools of blood in the road. Heinz was carried in, moaning loudly; Ernst also, but he did not moan because he was as dead as Gruiter. Police reinforcements arrived, and Hambledon indicated the person of the burglar.

  "I didn't hit him," he explained. "I thought you might want him for something so I only tripped him up."

  The police rolled the burglar over. "He's all right," they said. "Only stunned. He'll wake up again in an hour's time, back in his little cell. He will be disappointed, won't he?"

  The crowd had surged forwards towards the police station, from the steps of which the inspector had at last consented to be removed for bandaging, and the police had a moment to spare to attend to the orator. His head, which had been visible above the crowd, disappeared suddenly but his voice continued as he was borne away, until it died into the distance along the passage towards the cells.

  "Even the inspector cannot stand up, he has to cling to doorposts——"

  Hambledon came up to the crowd, who were laughing loudly in reaction to the recent horrors, and asked who on earth that was.

  "A temperance advocate——"

  "So I heard!"

  "But only when he is drunk, mein Herr. When he is sober he sells picture postcards."

  Hambledon pushed his way through the crowd towards the police station, and was himself elbowed back in the doorway by an elderly man with a just grievance. He stamped along the passage and laid hold upon a sergeant.

  "I have a complaint to make. A serious and important complaint."

  "What's the matter?" asked the sergeant, abstracting his mind with difficulty from two dead prisoners, a wounded inspector, and the shrouded form of the desk sergeant who had been his friend for many years. Someone would have to go and tell his wife. "What's your trouble?"

  "I've lost my bike."

  The sergeant laughed.

  10. MY UNCLE'S PARROT

  Vadim Zolbin was, like Gustav Renzow, an aircraft designer. In 1933 his father was labelled a "Trotsky-deviationist," and disappeared into the Lubianka prison in Moscow never to be heard of again. Vadim was an only child and his mother was dead; he had, therefore, no one to consider but himself; he was then twenty years old and had seen quite enough of Soviet methods to know, that, being his father's son, there was not much future for him in Russia. The Soviet authorities do not pay overmuch heed to the doctrines of the Bible but there is one text which they do most earnestly observe, that which says that "the sins of the fathers shall be visited on the children."

  Vadim left Russia and wandered across Europe, doing whatever work would provide him with food and shelter. He had had the beginnings of an engineering training and more than a natural bent for it; when he obtained work in the drawing office of the Focke-Wulf works at Bremen, he knew he had found his place in the world. Here he met Gustav Renzow, and indeed, worked under him. Zolbin rose rapidly in his profession and was generally regarded as a "coming man," when in 1939 Hitler signed a treaty of alliance with Soviet Russia.

  There is little doubt that Germany made a complete fool of the U.S.S.R. in this treaty; it was partly to insure against the war-on-two-fronts which Germany always dreaded, and partly to draw upon Russia's illimitable supplies of raw materials. There had to be a few counterbalancing clauses to benefit Russia, if only for the look of the thing; one of them specified the return to Russia of such of her nationals as were of scientific or technical value. Vadim Zolbin unwillingly returned to his native land.

  It is a measure of his technical brilliance that he was still alive and reasonably prosperous, for his political background was suspect and he never felt himself safe. On no less than three occasions he had been called to the M.V.D. Headquarters for one of their "little talks," and each time he knew very well that only his value to the aircraft industry had preserved him from disaster. The dramatic success of the MIG-15, in the design of which he had had a large share, set him above mischance for some time, but he was beginning to feel that its effect was wearing thin and no man can go on producing new and better MIGs indefinitely. Besides, he was homesick for a civilized way of life; decent clothes, decent housing, and, above all, decent police.

  When Lachmann arrived in the Soviet zone with his photostats of the Renzow designs, he was sent to Zolbin at Minsk, near the Polish frontier, to be interviewed and have the photographs examined. Minsk was a reasonably convenient place to which to take Lachmann since it was only about fourteen hours from Berlin; Zolbin worked there and he spoke fluent technical German. He was, besides, perfectly capable of assessing the value of aircraft designs and particularly capable, Moscow thought, of judging these since he had worked under Renzow in the past and knew his habits of mind. When Zolbin was told that Gustav Renzow had come over to sell his latest designs to the U.S.S.R., he did not quite believe it but neither did he argue. One does not, if a Soviet citizen, argue with Moscow.

  The moment that Zolbin saw Lachmann, therefore, he knew that the alleged Renzow was a fraud. Lachmann refused to talk aeroplanes at all, saying that he was in a hurry, there was no time to waste. He took a high hand with Zolbin as he had done with all those whom he had interviewed earlier upon this journey. There were the designs, and his price was half a million marks in Western zone currency. Take it or leave it. He tilted his hat to the back of his head and lit a cigarette.

  Zolbin assumed quite correctly that these designs had been stolen but he was not in the least concerned. If Renzow could not take better care of his designs he deserved to lose them, and so long as they came into Russian hands it did not matter who brought them. He looked attentively at the photographs, producing a small magnifying glass from his pocket to see them in greater detail. They covered, it will be remembered, only a quarter of each sheet, but there was enough there for him to see what Renzow had been driving at and he was intensely interested. He had himself made some study of the problem of varying in flight the angle of sweep of swept-back wing aircraft and had found the difficulties insoluble. But Renzow, whose reputation had risen with the years, might have found solutions which had evaded Zolbin.

  He put the photographs down and looked at Lachmann.

  "These photostats appear to be of some interest," said Zolbin coldly. "I should, of course, have to see the whole sheets before deciding whether they are, in fact, worth even a small fraction of the absurdly large sum you mentioned."

  "Then I'm afraid you won't, mister; and my figure is what I said. Five hundred thousand Western marks."

  "Ridiculous," said Zolbin.

  "They're worth that to you Russians," said Lachmann obstinately. "You aren't bargaining for stale fish on a Saturday night, you know. This is something that'll put your air force on top of the world, and you know it. All I'm asking for it is less than a fortnight's wages for a biggish factory. I can't think what's the matter with me. Mister, I'm giving them away."

  If the designs were all they seemed, this was nearly true.

  "You had better remember," said Zolbin in a menacing tone, "that you are miles inside Russia and completely in our power."

  To do Lachmann justice, he was not easily intimidated. He grinned in Zolbin's face and said: "But the designs aren't. Do you want the Western powers to have 'em? True, they won't pay so much as you, that's why I come here first, but they'll pay if only to keep 'em out of your hands. Look, you're not only buying the designs, you're paying me not to let them have 'em. It 'ud be cheap at half a million marks for you to see me burn 'em."

  "How am I to know you aren't selling them to both sides as it is?"

  Lachmann was deeply hurt, and said so. "Mister, though you don't seem to know it, there is such a thing as commercial honesty——"

  "I know there is," said Zolbin crisply. "What I question is whether you practise it. However, I am empowered to offer you one hundred thousand marks."

  "Five hundred thousand. What I said."

  They argued about the price and eventually settled for three hundred thousand marks which was exactly the figure Lachmann had suggested to Gruiter and his associates at their first meeting. Lachmann was delighted but naturally did not show it.

  "Where are the designs?" asked Zolbin.

  "In Berlin. This is what you have to do. You send a man with the money with me to Berlin. I take him to the house of a friend of mine. The designs aren't there, but when my friend sees the money he'll go and get them. Then your man can hand over the money and we'll hand over the drawings."

  "Or knock him on the head and keep both money and designs," said Zolbin. "Do you take me for a child? You will stay here as a hostage for your friends' good behaviour, and when the designs are safely received here you can go home."

  Lachmann argued, but Zolbin remained unmoved and eventually the German gave in. He was removed to safekeeping; when he found it was simply a jail he protested bitterly, but no one took the least notice. Zolbin communicated the results of his interview to his superiors in Moscow and received in reply orders to go to Berlin himself, since he was the only German-speaking man available with enough technical knowledge to know whether the series of drawings he would be offered were both genuine and complete. Zolbin, as it happened, had not heard that Renzow was in hospital with a serious brain injury, but the news had already reached Moscow. They deduced from it that they would be quite safe in buying what might well be his last designs for some time if not forever, provided that the sale was exclusively to Russia. Zolbin was told to make sure that the drawings were the originals and not copies, and, if possible, to find out whether copies had been made before the originals, if they were originals, had been offered for sale to Russia.

 

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