For perhaps ten minutes Bradfield had not moved or said a word.
There was a lectern in a corner of the room made of an old Bible box and long, rather ugly metal legs which Bradfield had commissioned of a local blacksmith in Bad Godesberg. He was standing with his elbows upon it, staring out of the window at the river.
‘No wonder Siebkron puts us under guard,’ he said at last; he might have been talking about the mist. ‘No wonder he treats us as if we were dangerous. There can hardly be a Ministry in Bonn, not even a journalist, who has not by now heard that the British Embassy is engaged in a blood-hunt for Karfeld’s past. What do they expect us to do? Blackmail him in public? Reappear after twenty-five years in full-bottom wigs and indict him under the Allied Jurisdiction? Or do they simply think we are wantonly vindictive, and propose to have our revenge on the man who is spoiling our European dreams?’
‘You’ll find him, won’t you? You’ll go easy with him? He needs all the help he can get.’
‘So do we all,’ said Bradfield, still gazing at the river.
‘He isn’t a Communist. He isn’t a traitor. He thinks Karfeld’s a threat. To us. He’s very simple. You can tell from the files-‘
‘I know his kind of simplicity.’
‘He’s our responsibility, after all. It was us who put it into his mind back in those days: the notion of absolute justice. We made him all those promises: Nuremberg, de-Nazification. We made him believe. We can’t let him be a casualty just because we changed our minds. You haven’t seen those files… you can’t imagine how they thought about the Germans then. Leo hasn’t changed. He’s the stay-behind man. That’s not a crime, is it?’
‘I know very well how they thought. I was here myself. I saw what he saw; enough. He should have grown out of it; the rest of us did.’
‘What I mean is, he’s worthy of our protection. There’s a kind of integrity about him… I felt that down there. He’s not put off by paradox. For you and me there are always a dozen good reasons for doing nothing. Leo’s made the other way round. In Leo’s book there’s only one reason for doing something: because he must. Because he feels.’
‘I trust you are not offering him as an example to be followed?’
‘There’s another thing that puzzled him.’
‘Well?’
‘In cases like this, there are always external documents. In the SS headquarters; with the clinic or the transport unit. Movement orders, letters of authority, related documents from somewhere else that would give the game away. Yet nothing’s come to light. Leo kept on pencilling annotations: why no record in Koblenz? Why no this or that? As if he suspected that other evidence had been destroyed… by Siebkron for instance.
‘We can honour him, can’t we?’ Turner added, almost in supplication.
‘There are no absolutes here.’ His gaze had not left the distant scene. ‘It is all doubt. All mist. The mist drains away the colours. There are no distinctions, the Socialists have seen to that. They are all everything. They are all nothing. No wonder Karfeld is in mourning.’
What was it that Bradfield studied on the river? The small boats struggling against the mist? The red cranes and the flat fields, or the far vineyards that have crept so far away from the south? Or Chamberlain’s ghostly hill and the long concrete box where they had once kept him?
‘The Glory Hole is out of bounds,’ he said at last and again fell silent. ‘Praschko. You said he lunched with Praschko on Thursday?’
‘Bradfield-‘
‘Yes?’ He was already moving to the door.
‘We feel differently about him now, don’t we?’
‘Do we? Perhaps he is still a Communist after all.’ There was a strain of irony in Bradfield’s tone. ‘You forget he has stolen a file. You seem to think all of a sudden you can look into his heart.’
‘Why did he steal it? What was in that file?’
But Bradfield was already pushing his way between the beds and the clutter of the corridor. Notices had sprung up everywhere: First Aid Post this Way… Emergency Rest Room… No Children Allowed Beyond this Point. As they passed Chancery Registry, they heard a sudden cheer followed by a desultory handclap. Cork, white in the face, ran out to greet them. ‘She’s had it,’ he whispered. ‘The hospital just telephoned. She wouldn’t let them send for me while I was on shift.’ His pink eyes were wide with fear. ‘She didn’t even need me. She didn’t even want me there.’