Status Updates From The Quiller Memorandum

Possible key: U = S, B = M, O = A, eight others. Pick a long one for pride’s sake: VASOSFGWOBU. Gave OTNANGILAMS. Reverse and add prefix and suffix nulls. Gave SMALIGNANTO. Nearly missed it because it sounded Spanish. Drop prefix and suffix nulls. MALIGNANT. Check another. Thought we had Sprit, German for alcohol, yesterday. But hope has a grasshopper leap. RCIMEDIPEF. Drop nulls and reverse: EPIDEMIC.

There is an innocence in the very word “afternoon.” Morning is for trains and business and hangovers, night is for love and burglary. The afternoon is the halcyon, the calm coming between earnestness and drama.

He might as well know that I would never talk. If anything ever talked, it wouldn’t be me. It would be the half-dead remains of the thing called Quiller, jabbering in its death throes. ... The only guarantee I could give them now was that if I let them down, it wouldn’t be Quiller ratting on them, but just a lump of blood and gristle and pain that was beyond knowing what it was doing.

The homicide man was annoyed, because his bureau and the Z Polizei were out of gear with each other. Their fields overlapped and they were constantly thrown into each other’s pitch. They thus looked for every chance of making the situation worse so that sooner or later some administrative top kick would be obliged to define their provinces more clearly. People like me were useful as a ball to lob about.

There’d been a black panther in a dream, already fading. I beat around but couldn’t bring it any clearer. It was too late. Dreams are gone in the first few seconds of waking, like ghosts at cockcrow. But she’d been there all right, a dark succuba.

No one had come up. You heard it all the time in this weather, cars coming unstuck. This one had slid off course or it would have been dead on target, to pin me and drag me along the wall like a paintbrush dipped in red.