01 The Quiller Memorandum by The Quiller Memorandum (epub)

Author:The Quiller Memorandum (epub)
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2017-11-21T00:00:00+00:00

13 : THE BRIDGE

There was a bar still open in the Moller-strasse and I went in and sat with a rum grog, cupping my hands round the glass and watching the steam. The kellner had gone back behind the bar and looked at me over the coffee-machine for a few minutes before giving it up.

I pressed the long spoon against the slice of lemon, watching the bubbles. The scent of the rum was heady and I breathed it in. Over in the corner a couple of kids sat canoodling, and a thin man was drooped across a table by the window trying to outstare his despair. There was no one else. At this hour of a winter night the bar was a refuge for lovers and the lost, and being neither, I was the only stranger here. When it was cool enough not to scald my lips I swallowed the grog and asked for another.

The worst of the shivering had stopped. Every time it tried to set up again I damped it out and sat slack with every muscle relaxed. There was a lot to think about and my body would have to stop demanding my attention; it could count itself lucky to be alive anyway.

My soaked clothes steamed on me.

I was unconscious before they took me from the house. There had been no way of avoiding the last injection because my hands and feet were strapped to the chair. The shot took half a minute to work and I sat there watching them.

Oktober stood looking down at me. The two guards came the length of the room and halted near him, waiting for me to slump. In those thirty seconds I did all I could against the drug, knowing that if I let it win my last hope would go. The anaesthetist came round the chair and eyed me impatiently and I knew that the reaction-time must be five or ten seconds. I’d stretched it to thirty and he was worried. Then the dark came down, on a final consoling thought: there’s nobody who’ll miss me.

Period of total blank.

Death is black and cold and I knew I had died. The waters of Lethe lapped at my feet. But life, returning, was worse, because of the cold. It was colder than death. My face was pressed to the earth and I lifted it and saw the lights along the bridge. A few sick seconds of irrational thought: then there’s a life after death and it looks just the same, so forth, then the shivers began and I lay there shaking and clawing at the earth. Inside every dying man there’s a live one trying to get out.

The bullet still hurt and I couldn’t turn my head. When I’d crawled far enough to get my legs out of the icy water I raised one hand and felt for the neck-wound. There wasn’t one. The pain began fading, once I realised that it was imaginary. “Shoot him in the back of the neck,” he’d said, and the subconscious had brooded about it, taking the word for the deed.

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