"Nothing doing?"
"No," said he.
He got in. "Now we'll just drive round the other streets.
I've got a feeling we must be going to meet them any minute."
The car bellowed and was immediately throttled down again.
Softly we stole through the white, eddying night, from street to street; at corners I held Gottfried tight, so that he should not slip off; and every now and then we would pull up a hundred yards beyond a pub and Koster would run back with long strides to look in.
He was obsessed with grim, cold hate; he did not think first of taking Gottfried home; then twice he started to do so, but turned again because he fancied that just at that moment the four might be under way.
Suddenly, in a long bare street, we saw a dark group of people far ahead.
Koster at once switched off the ignition; and soundlessly, without lights we came up.
The people did not hear us. They were talking together.
"There are four," I whispered to Koster.
At the same moment the car bellowed, raced the last two hundred metres, rode up on to the pavement and with a grinding skid stopped not a yard from the shouting people.
Koster hung half out of the car, his body a steel bow ready to spring, and his face unrelenting as death.
It was four harmless old people.
One of them was drunk.
They started to curse.
Koster did not reply.
We drove on.
"Otto," said I, "we won't get him to-night.
I don't believe he'd trust himself on the streets."
"Yes, perhaps," he replied after a while, and turned the car.
We drove to Koster's.
His room had its own entrance, so we did not need to wake anybody.
As we were getting out I said:
"Why didn't you want to tell the police what he looked like?
We would have had help then in the search.
And we did see him well enough."
Koster looked at me.
"Because we're going to settle that by ourselves, without any police.
Do you think—" His tone was quite soft, restrained and terrible— "Do you think I'd hand him over to the police, anyway?
So he'll get a few years' gaol?
You know very weU how all these cases end.
These chaps know they'll find easy judges.
We're having none of that.
And what's more if the police did find him, I'd swear it wasn't he, so I could get him after.
Gottfried dead and he alive . . .
We're having none of that."
We lifted the stretcher from the seats and carried it in through the whirling snow and the wind, and it was as if we were back in Flanders carrying to the rear a dead comrade from the front line.
We bought a coffin and a grave in the parish cemetery. Gottfried had often said, when we had discussed it, that crematoriums were not for soldiers. He meant to lie in the earth on which he had lived so long.
It was a clear sunny day when we buried him. We put Km in his old service uniform with the sleeve torn by shell splinters and still stained with blood.
We shut the coffin ourselves and carried him down the stairs.
There were not many who came with us: Ferdinand, Valentin, Alfons, Fred the bartender, Georg, Jupp, Frau Stoss, Gustav, Stefan Grigoleit, and Rosa.
At the gate of the cemetery we had to wait some time.
There were two other funerals there before us, one with a black motor hearse, the other with black-and-silver-draped horses and an endless procession of mourners who seemed to keep themselves well amused.
We lifted the coffin from the car and lowered it with ropes ourselves.
The gravedigger was satisfied, as he had enough to do at the other graves.
We had got a parson too.
We didn't know what Gottfried would have said to that, but Valentin had been for it.
We had at least asked him not to make any speeches.
He was only to read a passage from Scripture.