We caught a train that was going to Nuremberg: there were no guarantees after that, but some trains were running to Dresden. The train was crammed with people, but Elgar's false status got us a compartment to ourselves. The journey was long, with frequent unexplained stops. At about three o'clock we heard the sound of air-raid sirens. The train stopped, then reversed slowly into the shelter of a wood. After a few minutes I heard the dull rumble of engines overhead, and looked up at the open sky visible between the trees. I couldn't see the planes, and no bombs fell. About half an hour later we went on.

We reached Nuremberg at dusk. The station was bomb-damaged, and the train had to stop a quarter-mile short. A temporary platform had been erected, made of rough unvarnished wood. Around it was a shunting yard broken by bomb craters. A shattered engine was tilted on to an embankment, half in view, like a sinking ship. We got out on to the platform and could smell the smoke and cordite: a porter told us that the city had been bombed again only an hour before.

Elgar asked a porter when the train to Chemnitz was scheduled to leave.

The man shrugged. 'Seven in the morning, last I heard. You'll have to walk to the other side of the station.' He pointed down the tracks. 'The stationmaster's office is open, it's the line that's blocked. Ask him what's happening.'

We did as we were told, following a darkened street of the shabby kind of houses that face railway lines everywhere in the world. The light was fading and there was a strong likelihood of another raid after dark, so we walked quickly. Elgar's heels clicked on the pavement, and again I was reminded of a metronome.

The man had been wrong the stationmaster's office was not open. The station, half ruined, was in darkness. Elgar and I were turned back by another porter. Slate-haired, with a military bearing, he might have been a general in the army. He gave us precise directions to a place on the track on the other side of the station from where we had disembarked, and said the train would be waiting there. It would leave at seven. 'But get in as soon as you arrive don't wait. It might be the last train for several days.'

'Why?' I asked.

He shook his head. 'The situation is very difficult. The English and Americans bomb that line every night. At the moment it is possible to get as far as Chemnitz, but that might not continue. I wish you luck.'

I couldn't resist the next question. 'Do you think the English will win the war?'

He glanced at Elgar, and said, 'The Fuhrer works ceaselessly to save Germany and National Socialism. He cannot fail.'

It wasn't the answer I wanted, but I could see the real answer in the tautness of his face, the hopelessness in his eyes. I wanted to apologise to this solemn old man, who had probably fought men of my father's generation in the last war, and now had to suffer once more the bitter tragedy of defeat.

'Your accent you are English?' The man was looking at Elgar.

'My prisoner,' said Elgar. 'He is trustworthy, up to a point.'

He glanced from one to the other of us, and I think he suspected us. He said nothing, though, and we walked on in silence, following his directions through the darkened streets. We met no one, and the only sound was a distant droning of engines, perhaps a military convoy.

'It's a shame,' I told Elgar. 'I'd like to see more of Nuremberg.'

'Why?' he asked.

'I'm curious. It's the heart of n.a.z.ism. Like Conrad's Heart of Darkness Heart of Darkness. Perhaps I want to see "the horror, the horror".'

'Konrad who? Adenauer? You won't see him: he's in prison.'

I had to laugh. Elgar obviously wasn't a literary man, and hadn't heard of Joseph Conrad. His confusion was understandable. For my part I had no idea who Konrad Adenauer was. I asked Elgar, and was given a short but detailed history of Adenauer's career, from Mayor of Cologne onwards to his current imprisonment by the n.a.z.is.

'You know a great deal about German politics,' I observed.

'It's my business to be completely informed. The basic political and historical facts are easily mastered.'

'I wouldn't call the details of a local politician's career a "basic fact"; I said. 'Still, I'm impressed.'

'You never know who will be useful, or necessary. Ama.s.sing facts is easy. It's the language that's difficult. And the disguise.'

'I thought you found those easy. You have a great facility for it.'

'A great deal of thinking time is required. And preparation. But we all have the same difficulty.'

'I didn't, in Sierra Leone. But then I wasn't an agent.'

'You were a controller?'

It was secret, but I told him anyway. 'Yes. I ran about fifty agents. I wish I could believe we found out one useful thing. It didn't seem like it at the time.'

'Why do you worry about it? If you carried out your instructions, then you should be fulfilled. The results are not your concern.'

It was a very odd remark, though not out of line with Elgar's general philosophy: yet in those dark, cold streets at the heart of the wrecked n.a.z.i empire, its emptiness and inhumanity made me angry 'They are. They should be yours, too.'

'You are an imperfect agent, then.' Elgar's voice was indifferent.

'And glad of it. If you don't feel the consequences of your actions you should not carry them out. A man without feeling is irresponsible.'

'And if you do feel them, you may not be able to carry them out. If you're a man.' He made man sound like a separate species, weaker than his own.

'If you're a man ' I made the word sound as it should should sound, I hope 'you may have no choice but to feel.' sound, I hope 'you may have no choice but to feel.'

'It's a great weakness.'

'No, it's a great strength.'

'How can it be a strength, if it leads to your failing in your mission?'

'It depends what your mission is. Or who you get it from man, or G.o.d.'

'A purpose is a purpose, wherever it comes from.'

'You can't say all purposes are the same!'

'Of course not. But they're all equivalent in the effect they have upon you.'

'So if someone gave you a legitimate order to gas a thousand people, you'd do it. Because it would "fulfil" you.'

There was a long silence too long, because the answer should have been obvious. I felt a sickness in my gut, a sort of fear. I wasn't afraid Elgar would hurt me not then. But I think I was afraid of contamination.

'There's a contradiction there,' he said at last. 'My best answer is "no".'

'Why not?' My voice was harsh.

There was another pause. 'The desire not to unnecessarily destroy my fellow men.'

It seemed a weak, cold reason, spoken in a weak, cold way. I wasn't sure he meant it. I think Daria would have meant it a little more, and the Doctor a little more than that. Were they progressively more human? Why? Had the Doctor been here longer than the others? I would have liked to have asked Elgar for direct answers, but our conversation was terminated by the wailing of air-raid sirens. The drone of aircraft followed within a couple of minutes, and the familiar thud and whistle of flak.

We ran for the place where we had been told the train was waiting, but found only empty tracks. A young soldier waved us away. 'Find a shelter!'

I heard an explosion, felt the ground jump under my feet. There was no time to find a proper shelter. We took cover in a small concrete hut, probably a signaller's. There was a wooden table with a dirty steel kettle: at Elgar's suggestion we got under the table, which was of stout wood and would provide us with some protection if the roof came in.

For several minutes the explosions were continuous, and the floor shook. I expected the small window to break, but it didn't. When it became a little quieter and the explosions more distant, Elgar said, 'The men who drop these bombs, for instance. I expect they have killed innocent civilians tonight. If they thought about that, and refused to drop the bombs, then the Allies couldn't prosecute the war. The Germans would win. What would happen to your morality then?'

It was a sound argument, but not quite the same one as I had been making. 'You said that any purpose would serve. The men in those planes have made a judgement about their missions: that they are for the greater good.'

'So have the n.a.z.is, including the ma.s.s-murderers.'

'No. They act from pure hatred. Their claim to higher motives is no more than an excuse.'

'I don't understand hatred.'

I looked at him. His face was just visible in the glare from the flames outside: a landscape of weak, shifting light and darkness. His eyes glinted, as if there were extra sources of illumination inside them. I was sure he was telling the truth. 'A man who doesn't understand hatred has no soul,' I said.

'I never claimed to have one.'

'You're an atheist, then?'

'I don't believe in G.o.d.'

'Have you ever loved anyone?'

'No.'

It was such a simple, blunt answer that it took my breath away. Most people have to make an excuse for not loving. They'll say that they've never met the right person, or that they were damaged by some previous affair, but they will never admit that they just don't want to. Elgar's lack of feeling and his lack of any sense that he should have feeling was worse than this.

'What is the purpose of pa.s.sion?' asked Elgar.

For a moment I thought he was asking a rhetorical question, along the lines of, 'What's the use of pa.s.sion? It's never done me any good!' Then I realised that his question was nothing so human and immature. He genuinely wanted to know the answer. I thought for a while, then said, 'I don't know, but it fulfils me.'

This was a lie. Pa.s.sion especially s.e.xual pa.s.sion had never fulfilled me, except physically, and then only for moments. But a life without pa.s.sion was inconceivable.

'Pa.s.sion serves the purpose of reproducing the species,' said Elgar. 'This is your biological purpose. Therefore pa.s.sion fulfils you. My mission fulfils me for the same reason.'

'I've known men with better missions who thought that. I didn't believe them either.' I was thinking of a priest who had told me that he never desired women. The pa.s.sion for G.o.d, he said, had replaced the pa.s.sion for s.e.x: theology had superseded biology. I never believed him, suspecting an insidious anger behind his earnest rationality.

'Believe me or not, it's the truth.'

His face had a solemnity that I a.s.sociate with truth (it was far more solid than that of the disturbed priest), but I didn't believe him even so.

'What about Daria?' I asked him.

'Don't confuse what you felt with what I felt,' he said.

'And what did you feel?'

'She was my mother,' he said.

I looked away from him, across the darkened floor at the ghostly legs of a stool. Then I closed my eyes against the flame's light. A world of impossibilities danced against my mind behind the closed lids.

'I'm sorry,' I said, after an age. 'I didn't realise how different you could be.'

'Well, now you do.'

Chapter Sixteen.

We waited in silence for the all-clear, and emerged to find a train shambling in from the darkness, orange sparks spitting from its wheels. It stopped and we scrambled aboard. Our papers were checked by a boy who looked no more than fourteen and whose chief emotion was fear. His blue eyes shot to Elgar's forbidding n.a.z.i face and away again, and his hands shook so much that he dropped the papers twice. He can have made no real inspection. He apologised to Elgar, but the man gave him no comfort. I knew that he would see no reason for comfort. The boy was an irrelevance to the logic of Elgar's mind; his comfort or discomfort didn't register. It did register with me, but all I could do was clasp the boy's shoulder in rea.s.surance as we boarded.

After all the talk of danger and difficulty, this train journey was rapid and uninterrupted. The German countryside sped by, bright and undamaged, brick farm buildings nestling in ordered winter fields, specked with cabbage and parsnips and potatoes. Elgar was silent, his arms folded across his chest, his face neutral. I should have been ready to sleep, but Elgar's revelations had unsettled me beyond any chance of rest. I asked how old Daria had been.

'Physically, about twenty months,' said Elgar. 'Actually, infinitely old. I told you, we don't forget.'

'And you?'

He shrugged. 'The same.'

'The Doctor?'

'I don't know. He's not one of us.'

'He's not one of us, either.'

'Maybe not. That's his affair. Look, old chap, I'll come clean with you. I'm no danger to you just a purpose that happens to look like a man, really. But the ones I'm after are dangerous. You met them in Markebo, didn't you? And you saw them kill?'

'I didn't see it.'

'They're like cuckoos, I suppose you could say. They lodge in the mind and rule it. Make men into copies of themselves.'

I didn't believe him. It had the air of a legend the legend of the golem, perhaps. If he had researched lesser German politicians, he would have researched legends, and the nursery tales you use to scare children. 'You want me to be afraid of them,' I told him.

'I want you to realise that they're a danger to you, not us.'

I wasn't convinced. 'I think you're all dangerous. You shouldn't be here.'

'Well, we are. There isn't anything to be done about it.'

'And the Doctor?' I asked again.

'I don't know, old chap. I really don't know. That's why I said you should leave him to me.'

It was almost dark when we got to Dresden. Thick sheets of ash lay across the railway track and formed layers of haze in the air, through which rose the ruins of the city's firebombed factories. The temptation is there to make a comparison with the charred bones of Valhalla, but the reality was sadder and more human than that. There were little white and dun-coloured patches amongst the dark ruins: it took me a few moments to notice that they were human beings, sleeping on blankets. They must have been refugees, because the city itself was still intact at this date, though some streets near the railway were bomb-damaged. I saw children playing in the rubble, firing at each other with sticks.

The railway station had been bombed, too, but there was one platform open. The others were piled with broken stone and gla.s.s. I was still unsettled by Elgar's revelations. I must have seemed jittery when we left the station the guard became suspicious and engaged Elgar in a long, rapid conversation in which the word 'trust' occurred several times. This time Elgar did not produce his gun perhaps he was learning diplomacy. I remembered the strangers I had met in Sierra Leone, how little they had known at first, how much they knew now if Elgar was one of them, and this wasn't another layer of his camouflage. Was he one of the seekers, as he claimed, or was he the original invader? I had no way of telling. And what was the Doctor's role? Even Elgar said he didn't know. And the emotional facts of the situation confounded me. I felt antipathy for the Doctor, but that was because he had manipulated me into killing Daria. I felt little either way for Elgar. However, I still had little choice but to go along with him. We were in Dresden: it couldn't be long, now, before the end, when everything would come together and I would have to make my choice.