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.If they were on that kind of pounce duty, though, they’d most likely reappear regularly.It didn’t happen while Mount looked, and he looked for half an hour: no encore performances.He’d push on.There was a small entrance foyer to the apartment block.As he stepped towards it, he saw a man descend from the stairs, obviously on his way to the street.Mount knew he must keep going, not veer off abruptly, scared.It could be a giveaway.He must pretend some of that ordinariness.‘Ah,’ the man said, ‘you are still here?’For a moment Mount had not recognized the host from thirty-four.The delay was excusable.He appeared much scruffier now.He wore a grubby navy jacket and black canvas cap, a rough navy jersey, greasy looking dark trousers, and was pulling on an aged, long raincoat before going out into the autumn.He had on heavy black boots.Mount guessed these must be work clothes.He was going to the factory he’d spoken about earlier.He’d arranged his shifts, hadn’t he, so he could be there when they called this morning?‘Our session with you was very helpful, very instructive, but I wanted half an hour to look at the development on my own,’ Mount said.‘Without your English friend who is so concerned about the plattenbauten?’‘It’s a matter of getting the full picture,’ Mount replied.‘You couldn’t do that this morning?’‘Ah, but that was this morning.I’ve seen the building by day, and as a matter of fact done a plan of it, but I wanted also the evening perspective.The occupants’ activities will be different at this time of day.’ A low-powered bulb lit the foyer.Mount pulled the papers out of his pocket again, this time with Baillie’s front-elevation sketch visible.‘I have to be able to tell my colleagues at home in Britain exactly what I’ve observed here.I, and I alone, represent their interests.’The man looked.‘It’s a good drawing.’‘One aspect only.’‘But correct, I think.Here is the apartment we discussed.’ He put a finger on thirty-seven’s windows.‘Which?’ Mount said.‘Number thirty-seven,’ he said.He moved his finger.‘Here the bedrooms, the living room, the kitchen, the bathroom.’‘Thirty-seven? Ah, yes, of course, the man you never see.’‘Almost never.’‘Now and then?’‘Yes, now and then.’‘Special occasions!’‘Yes, perhaps so.He had a new chair delivered not long ago, so, obviously, he must open the door and talk to the men.My wife saw this when coming back to the apartment one day.She thought it seemed an expensive chair - metal and wood, laminated.’‘I expect he wants to be comfortable when he sits in there alone.’‘I must go now.I’ll lose a quarter of an hour’s pay if I’m late,’ he said, buttoning his raincoat.‘Night work?’‘Oh, yes.’‘The factory operates non-stop - twenty-four hours?’‘Oh, yes.’‘There are plenty of jobs, are there?’‘Oh, yes, recently.’Making mortar shells? U-boat fins? Dornier P59 bomber parts? Mount wanted to ask, but didn’t.Questions could become too insistent, too professional - or non-professional for a dwellings specialist.‘When I refer to the evening perspective, I want to find what sound levels are like in the building now most people are at home, relaxed and playing their radios and gramophones and so on.This is quite important.Some people in Britain don’t like neighbours’ din.It’s an attitude they’ve taken from the upper classes, who live in manor houses away from the populace.I’ll stroll the corridors.’‘You fear that if the plattenbauten have shifted, as your friend suggested, noise might be able to crawl through the gaps and attack?’‘He was a worrier, wasn’t he?’‘I won’t slam the door when I leave now in case the apartment block falls on you because the plattenbauten are unstable.Then you wouldn’t be able to go back to your country and say how wonderful the Splanemann-Siedlung apartments are, owing to your death.’Mount climbed to the third floor.The corridor was empty.He walked pretty silently, he thought, to thirty-seven.His fourth key turned the lock.The corridor had remained clear.He went in and closed the door quietly behind him.That took a struggle.The training said you always left yourself a ready exit, especially when going on to unknown ground which might contain an enemy - or enemies.And, God, surely it must be a plural, if he was expected.But he could not let the door stand ajar.That would bring attention, because this door’s usual and notorious state was shut.He waited.The training had taught him how to disarm someone when not armed himself, but not how to disarm several when not armed himself.He crouched a bit against the door.This seemed the best countermeasure he could manage if guns surrounded him in here.The training hadn’t taught him, either, what a corpse would smell like after a longish time, but he thought it would be fairly bad, and he detected nothing like that now.SB, ex-no-man’s-land, might have been able to tell him.There was a cigarette odour, but ingrained, not new.He stood still, bent against the door for a minute, sniffing the darkness, but also trying to sense whether in fact this place seemed to match thirty-four for layout.He heard what might be footsteps and the scrape of moved furniture.But he thought these sounds came from other apartments, not this one, perhaps because plattenbauten had shifted, leaving holes, or simply because this was an apartment block with the usual neighbourly noises when people lived on top of and alongside one another, jam-packed.If he had really been on an accommodation mission from Britain he would have made a note.He switched on his torch.He was in a small hallway, which gave on to a passage with doors leading off.That did square with thirty-four [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]