CHAPTER ELEVEN
Königswinter
It was still dark when de Lisle collected him and Turner had to ask the night porter to unlock the hotel door. The street was cold, friendless and deserted; the mist came at them in sudden patches.
‘We’ll have to go the long way over the bridge. The ferry’s not running at this hour.’ His manner was short to the point of abruptness.
They had entered the carriageway. To either side of them, new blocks, built of tile and armoured glass, sprang like night weeds out of the untilled fields, crested by the lamps of small cranes. They passed the Embassy. The dark hung upon the wet concrete like the smoke of a spent battle. The Union Jack swung limply from its standard, a single flower on a soldier’s grave. Under the weary light of the front porch, the lion and the unicorn, their profiles blurred with repeated coats of red and gold, fought bravely on. In the waste land, the two rickety goalposts leaned drunkenly in the twilight.
‘Things are warming up in Brussels,’ de Lisle remarked in a tone which promised little elaboration. A dozen cars were parked in the forecourt, Bradfield’s white Jaguar stood in its private bay.
‘For us or against us?’
‘What do you think?’ He continued: ‘We have asked for private talks with the Germans; the French have done the same. Not that they want them; it’s the tug-of-war they enjoy.’
‘Who wins?’
De Lisle did not reply.
The deserted town hung in the pink unearthly glow which cradles every city in the hour before dawn. The streets were wet and empty, the houses soiled like old uniforms. At the University arch, three policemen had made a lane of barricades and they flagged them down as they approached. Sullenly they walked round the small car, recording the licence number, testing the suspension by standing on the rear bumper, peering through the misted windscreen at the huddled occupants within.
‘What was that they shouted?’ Turner asked as they drove on.
‘Look out for the one-way signs.’ He turned left, following the blue arrow. ‘Where the hell are they taking us?’
An electric van was scrubbing the gutter; two more policemen in greatcoats of green leather, their peak caps bent, suspiciously surveyed its progress. In a shop window a young girl was fitting beach clothes to a model, holding one plastic arm and feeding the sleeve along it. She wore boots of heavy felt and shuffled like a prisoner. They were in the station square. Black banners stretched across the road and along the awning of the station. ‘Welcome to Klaus Karfeld!’ ‘A hunter’s greeting, Klaus!’ ‘Karfeld! You stand for our self-respect!’ A photograph, larger than any which Turner had so far seen, was raised on a massive new hoarding. ‘Freitag!’ said the legend. Friday. The floodlights shone upon the world and left the face in darkness.
‘They’re arriving today. Tilsit, Meyer-Lothringen; Karfeld. They’re coming down from Hanover to prepare the ground.’
‘With Ludwig Siebkron playing host.’
They were running along some tramlines, still following the diversion signs. The route took them left and right again. They had passed under a small bridge, doubled back, entered another square, halted at some improvised traffic lights and suddenly they were both sitting forward in their cramped seats, staring ahead of them in astonishment, up the gentle slope of the market place towards the Town Hall.
Immediately before them, the empty stalls stood in lines like beds in a barrack hut. Beyond the stalls, the gingerbread houses offered their jagged gables to the lightening sky. But de Lisle and Turner were looking up the hill at the single pink and grey building which dominated the whole square. Ladders had been laid against it; the balcony was festooned in swathes of black; a flock of Mercedes were parked before it on the cobble. To its left, in front of a chemist’s shop, floodlit from a dozen places, rose a white scaffolding like the outline of a medieval storming tower. The pinnacle reached as high as the dormer windows of the adjacent building; the giant legs, naked as roots grown in the dark, splayed obscenely over their own black shadows. Workmen were already swarming at its base. Turner could hear the piping echo of hammers and the whine of powered saws. A stack of timber struggled upwards on a silent pulley.