“Excuse me,” said Leiser. He was looking at the plan of Kalkstadt. He was very much the small man just then. He might have been pointing to a fault in an engine. The station, hostel and church were marked in green; an inset at the bottom left-hand corner depicted the railway warehouses and dumping sheds. At each side, the point of the compass was given adjectivally: Western Prospect, Northern Prospect.
“What’s a prospect, sir?” Leiser inquired.
“A view, an outlook.”
“What’s it for? What’s it for on the map, please?”
Leclerc smiled patiently. “For purposes of orientation, Fred.”
Leiser got up and examined the chart closely. “And this is the church?”
“That’s right, Fred.”
“Why does it face north? Churches go from east to west. You’ve got the entrance on the eastern side where the altar should be.”
Haldane leaned forward, the index finger of his right hand resting on his lip.
“It’s only a sketch map,” Leclerc said.
Leiser returned to his place and sat to attention, straighter than ever. “I see. Sorry.”
When the meeting was over, Leclerc took Avery on one side. “Just one point, John—he’s not to take a gun. It’s quite out of the question. The Minister was adamant. Perhaps you’ll mention it to him.”
“No gun?”
“I think we can allow the knife. That could be a general-purpose thing; I mean if anything went wrong we could say it was general purpose.”
After lunch they made a tour of the border—Gorton had provided a car. Leclerc brought with him a handful of notes he had made from the Circus frontier report, and these he kept on his knee, together with a folded map.
The extreme northern part of the frontier which divides the two halves of Germany is largely a thing of depressing inconsequence. Those who look eagerly for dragon’s teeth and substantial fortifications will be disappointed. It crosses land of considerable variety—gullies and small hills overgrown with bracken and patches of untended forest. Often the Eastern defenses are set so far behind the demarcation line as to be hidden from Western eyes—only a forward pillbox, crumbling roads, a vacated farmhouse or an occasional observation tower excite the imagination.
By way of emphasis the Western side is adorned with the grotesque statuary of political impotence: a plywood model of the Brandenburg Gate, the screws rusting in their sockets, rises absurdly from an untended field; noticeboards, broken by wind and rain, display fifteen-year-old slogans across an empty valley. Only at night, when the beam of a searchlight springs from the darkness and draws its wavering finger across the cold earth, does the heart chill for the captive crouching like a hare in the plow, waiting to break cover and run in terror till he falls.
They followed an unmade road along the top of a hill, and wherever it ran close to the frontier they stopped the car and got out. Leiser was shrouded in a mackintosh and hat. The day was very cold. Leclerc wore his duffle coat and carried a shooting stick—heaven knows where he had found it. The first time they stopped, and the second, and again at the next, Leclerc said quietly, “Not this one.” As they got into the car for the fourth time he declared, “The next stop is ours.” It was the kind of brave joke favored in battle.
Avery would not have recognized the place from Leclerc’s sketch map. The hill was there, certainly, turning inward toward the frontier, then descending sharply to the plain below. But the land beyond it was hilly and partly wooded, its horizon fringed with trees against which, with the aid of glasses, they could discern the brown shape of a wooden tower. “It’s the three staves to the left,” Leclerc said. As they scanned the ground, Avery could make out here and there the worn mark of the old path.
“It’s mined. The path is mined the whole way. Their territory begins at the foot of the hill.” Leclerc turned to Leiser. “You start from here.” He pointed with his shooting stick. “You proceed to the brow of the hill and lie up till takeoff time. We’ll have you here early so that your eyes grow used to the light. I think we should go now. We mustn’t attract attention, you know.”