by Glen Duncan
I had paused, as I say, at King’s Cross, leaning against a lamp-post with what must have been an expression of near obscene carnal happiness, when young Lewis had caught my eye, I his, and with an exchange of raised eyebrows and a couple of smirks, passed from the vulgarity of his price list to the charm of the room above the shop.
Slender lad. Elfin eyes of yellowish hazel; bones and lips that must have passed through the Caribbean at some stage, though his skin was barely the darkness of a Pret-à-Manger latte. Delicate (and slightly grimy on closer inspection) hands with long and pearly fingernails, and a dark dong of surprising proportions for one so otherwise slightly built. Talented, too, from what I can recall, though for all the impact his attentions had on Gunn’s treacherous member he might as well have been reciting the Highway Code. Oh those drugs. Cockroaches by the hundred hurrying out from the legs of my discarded trousers; the curtains’ burgundy roses morphing into tiny, sack-carrying dwarves; my hand the size of a double bed; a stadium of whispers; hot flushes; me expelling geysers of nonsense that did nothing for Lewis’s peace of mind. Worst of all (don’t relax too deeply, Monsieur Gunn, I’ll right this wrong before I go!), a penis that might as well have been a Brillo pad for all the sensitivity it retained.
‘I don’t think this is going to work, you dear beautiful boy,’ I heard myself saying, as if from a great distance, after forty minutes of fruitless fondling. ‘No reflection on your . . . your fitness for the task in hand, I hope you understand?’
‘Yeah well there’s no fuckin’ refund, babe,’ my companion replied, surprising me, somewhat, with the speed of his shift from cheeky mincer to no-dice businessman.
‘Delightful,’ I said. ‘Just the tack that’s likely to get your darling head cracked open one of these days – although not by me, of course.’ Not that it hadn’t occurred to me, especially given the sudden appearance of an enormous twin-headed battleaxe propped up against the mantelpiece, looking very much the part with both its edges sporting coagulated blood and the odd wisp of human hair. Lewis, meanwhile, got dressed as if the drawing on of each garment expressed a distinct and unique contempt. I was wondering how to reach the battleaxe – given the howling and bottomless chasm that had just opened in the floor between myself and the mantelpiece – when the door opened and a meaty-headed man with a very black beard and very blue eyes entered. He surveyed the scene with his knuckles on his hips and his chest thrust out – not entirely unlike the posture of a pantomime dame – an expression of mildly displeased boredom on his face.
‘Oh yeah?’ he said, rather non sequiturially, I thought, to no one in particular. ‘Oh yeah? Oh yeah? Oh yeah?’
It was taking me an age to shake those damned devil’s coach-horses from the legs of Gunn’s jeans, distracted, as I was, by the regularly rising urge to vomit and by the erratic flight of the room’s previously unnoticed white hot bats that whizzed hither and thither weaving a cat’s cradle of phosphorescence around the three of us.
‘Yeah, well, Gordon okayed it, babe,’ Lewis said.
‘Oh yeah?’ the bearded man repeated.
‘I do think, old sport –’ I began.
‘And you, sunshine, can fuck right off out of it,’ he said.
Well that tickled me beyond reason, I must say. Having finally managed to get Gunn’s de-bugged jeans and shoes back on, I staggered over to where our hirsute observer stood with both eyebrows raised and both lips joined in a curled expression of distaste.
‘I’d leave it, babe, if I were you,’ Lewis murmured.
Wisely, as it turned out, though I took no notice at the time. (I mean there’s no surer recipe for getting me to do something than the one warning me not to . . .) Besides, for hours – days, actually – a part of me had been busy decoding the body’s potential, its unreleased violence and bottled energy. Crystal clear that a good punch-up now and again would’ve done our Declan the world of good. Would probably have staved off suicide. (It’s shocking, really, this neglect of violence, your oft’ fatal ignorance of its therapeutic heft.) No chance of it with him living in his carcass, obviously, what with him being yellower than a canary in custard – strangely, specifically terrified of having his teeth knocked out (strangely, I mean, given what all else might happen to him in a brawl: spleen ruptured, kneecaps smashed, eyes gouged out, fingers broken, eardrums punctured, goolies crunched, nipples torn off and so on) – but it was all still available to me, the pent potential, its lively aesthetics of blows, gnashings, kicks, butts, throttlings, forkings and swipes – and I do quite clearly remember thinking how joyful his body was going to feel, how much it was going to thank me for finally releasing its stoppered talent into the world . . . I do quite clearly remember a fantasy vision of myself, post-fisticuffs, floating in a seratonin haze (I think I was reclining in a vast red leather armchair, actually, in this image), just before the guy with the beard took umbrage at my hands on his lapels and headbutted me with astonishing speed and accuracy, sending me – with similar speed and inevitable accuracy – down onto my buttocks, which, whether by his design or otherwise, turned out to be the perfect position for my face to receive his kneecap, a bit of down-to-earth physics with all the subtlety of a cannon-ball landing in a rum baba. I’m assuming, given the bruises, given this body’s new collection of aches and pains, that other things were done to me after that. Assumption is required, since an unequivocal blackness swallowed my consciousness a split second beyond impact, and did not regurgitate it until several hours later, when I found myself quite comfortably wedged between a recycling bin and a mountain of shredded paper in an alley at the back of the shop. Fleeced, I believe, is your word. Stiffed. Done over. Fucked. Teach me, I suppose, to walk around drunk and on drugs with 1,500 pounds sterling in my pockets. Nice team, those two, Lewis and his guy. I made a mental note to find out which of the boys is working with them and give him a raise . . .
‘Do you need help?’ a voice said. ‘Do you want me to call an ambulance?’
I looked up. Indecipherable against the dark brick and pewter sky. A patchouli-flavoured hand, dry and cool, reached down and took mine. My left. My right was clenched around some tiny object. ‘Can you stand?’
Apparently, I could, given that I found myself, after her braced yank, on my feet. Vertical, I found myself face to face with a stout woman in her late fifties. Ruddy cheeks, manly hands, a silver-grey ponytail, red corduroys and a battlescarred leather bomber jacket. Cheekbones. One earring of Chinese turquoise. Breath roll-up-scented and boots steelcapped.
‘Are you all right?’ she said. ‘You’re covered in blood.’
What does it say about the state I was in that I merely stood there opening and closing my mouth for a few moments? To my absolute astonishment, she started feeling me up. Or at least, so I thought, until I realised she was looking for the source of the bleeding.
‘Please,’ I said. ‘Please. No. I haven’t been – I’m not, ah, wounded.’
‘Just fucked over?’ she said, giving my elbow a compassionate squeeze. ‘You’ve got a shocking black eye, you know.’
Hard, really terribly hard, to describe my feelings at this point. First, I own, was incredulity. Do you, by any chance, have any idea how STUPID it is to go wandering around London’s alleyways in the small hours? And do you have any idea, dear Miss Ruth Bell, how FURTHER STUPID it is, given your presence in such locales, to extend a hand to a beaten body indisposed among the bins? Do you know who you could run into? But then that is Ruth, you see? Very seldom troubled by the gaps between knowing what the right thing to do is and doing it. (Whereas Gunn . . . Well, he’s all gaps, really.) She’s what we call Downstairs a Lost Cause. Course, being celibate helps. Leave sexual energy unspent and it’ll turn its hand to all sorts of creative activities (no wonder Gunn’s output was so poor), and dear Ruth hasn’t had a jump in three years. Claims she doesn’t miss it. Claims she’s too busy. But what irritates me is the stupidity, the ease with which such people keep themselves out of my grasp. There’s no
reading, very little reflection, just the spirit’s rough expression through salubrious hobbies and a worthwhile job. She doesn’t even go to fucking Church.
‘What’ve you got in your hand?’ she said, lifting my clenched right mit up between us.
Well, I thought, as I opened my palm and struggled to focus, perhaps things are looking up after all. She’s going to be . . . disappointed when I repay this kindness with . . .
‘Oh,’ I said, feeling terrible all over again. ‘Oh.’
‘Is that one of your . . . Is that one of your teeth, love?’
In the café (‘Come on,’ Ruth said, as the light brightened around us, ‘I’ll buy you a cuppa. You look like you need it.’) I went into the bathroom to get a hold of myself. Lucifer, I said – I did, you know; I don’t spare myself when I need a right good talking to – Lucifer, I said, you are going to pull yourself together. Do you hear me? Can you imagine – for the love of Farrah can you imagine how this would look in certain quarters? Can you imagine how Astaroth . . . No, enough. Amusing in its way – but really: enough. Enough.
‘Got to go myself, now,’ Ruth said, when I returned to our table. ‘Keep an eye.’
You’d think she was loaded. Two full Veggie Breakfast specials, despite my protestations. I saw the ex-crim behind the counter sketching his London theory: Older bird, arty, bit a dosh from the family; younger bloke – but he came a cropper with it when he saw the state I was in. Probably not your idea of aromatherapy, a night between King’s Cross rubbish heaps, though I myself found my lately acquired odour whoreishly seductive. You’d think, as I say, that she had some middle-class wedge behind her, but the truth is she’s barely making ends meet.
All the more reason, therefore, to relieve her of her purse while she was in the loo. A laughable haul, obviously, £63.47, NatWest chequebook and Switch card, photo of her dead ma and pa, any organ you like as long as I’m dead, and a slew of useless contact numbers scribbled on aged scraps and tickets – but that was hardly the point. A faithshaking betrayal, that was the point.
It should by now be apparent that I’m no fan of mere brutality. Brutality is to evil what a Big Mac is to hunger: it gets a job done, it accomplishes something – but utterly without beauty. There is a job to be done, obviously. Big Macs from Moscow to Manhattan address hunger’s pragmatic agenda even if they leave the demands of its aesthetic untouched. I do require a certain quota of broken faces and crippled minds; there are targets. But what I’m looking for – what I’m really looking for – is the marriage of brutality to the higher human faculties: imagination, intellect, practical reasoning, aesthetic sense – and this pearl is found in but few oysters.
Consider, for example, my work in the thirties and forties. I’m not just talking about the boom, the record profits, the staggering numerical achievement (oh my brothers how the dark flowers bloomed in Hell, how we wallowed in blossom, how the odour dizzied us, how we swooned); nor am I talking merely of the clean lines of the System, nor the inspirational role of the mob. I’m talking, dear reader, of the sublime fusion of order and destruction. Like most alchemical grails it wasn’t sought or won without risk and hardship. (Speaking of grails, shall I tell you where the Holy Grail is? You’d never believe it. Actually I’ll save it for later. Some incentive for you to hang in there through the grizzly bits . . .) My boy Himmler spent a great deal of time worrying – about all sorts of nonsense (his bowels, whether he was undermined by his spectacles, whether his face really resembled – as an old school enemy had cruelly claimed – a brainless onion) but chiefly about the excruciating difficulty of torturing and murdering millions of people without damaging one’s humanity . . .
Tonight Heinrich addresses an assembly of SS brass in Berlin. He has his speech prepared, but the cases of Kreiger and Hoffman won’t leave him alone. The cases of Kreiger and Hoffman are telling Heinrich that the speech as it is won’t do. He’s drafting an addendum mentally, now, combing his hair at the mirror of his mistress’s bathroom. The bathroom, like the rest of the grand, cavernous house, used to belong to someone else . . . Gentlemen, there is, in addition . . . no. In addition, gentlemen, I must draw your attention – no. There is no getting away, gentlemen, from the fact that – no. ‘The fact that’ is always redundant. If you feel yourself to be in possession of a fact, then state it. Gentlemen, there is something I would like you to consider. I mean of course – but the addendum falters at the intrusion of a slight colonic spasm and a sequence of soundless farts escaping in malodorous ellipsis that bring tears of something – humility, relief, joy – to the Reichsführer’s eyes. He must begin again with his hair. It’s not widely known that our Heinrich suffered from an obsessive compulsive disorder, that actions as mundane as combing his hair were hung around with curious methods and rituals. The floor of the bathroom is tiled in pale blue with blinding white grouting. He wonders about the workman who laid them, where he is now, whether he’s alive, whether he was a Jew. What I mean, gentlemen, is that there is a serious risk of – no. Fucking concentrate. But Kreiger and Hoffman won’t let him. Scylla and Charybdis, Kreiger and Hoffman. No point in mentioning them by name, obviously, but . . . Perhaps through the Scylla and Charybdis motif – though half that lot won’t even – he is thinning, he knows. Under the overgenerous light (the bathroom is big enough for a small chandelier) the pink of his scalp shows through. It is a great, dark, burden, gentlemen, and it is for us – it is for me – I will bear this burden . . . Remembering her soaping his hair in the bath, sculpting it into a single tuft like the stem of an acorn almost makes him laugh. He’s been finding in laughter of late hidden precipices, sudden sheer drops into the conclusion that he’s lost his mind. Laughter – genuine laughter, not the political variety – has of late had him slithering down unexpected tilts, arms windmilling, only to grab a halt at some vertiginous edge beyond which emptiness offers him the pitch into madness as his own final solution. So he doesn’t laugh genuinely of late. Instead he laughs strategically, loudly, letting each metallic ejaculation form its brilliant armour around him.
It’s a great difficulty for the Reichsfiihrer to ponder the wording of the warning Kreiger and Hoffman have made plain, without now, at this very moment, mentally re-living the two cases themselves.
Gerd Kreiger had done eight months at Buchenwald. (Marcus Hoffman had been there only three.) In December he’d been granted leave to attend his father’s funeral in Leipzig. Gerd hadn’t been close to his father (perhaps that, thinks Heinrich . . .?) and it was no secret among his colleagues in the camp that this two-day sojourn was cherished not as an opportunity for the formal expression of grief, but as a chance for a highly informal expression of lust: fortyeight hours in Leipzig would take him (once the onerous business with the old man’s corpse was concluded) into the arms of his fiancée, the tediously rhapsodized Wilhomena Meyer, or, as both she and Gerd preferred, Willie.
Heinrich, against his better judgement (he suspects not sentimentality, exactly, but some kind of weakness) has photographs of both Gerd and Willie (but not of Marcus) in the top drawer of his desk. Gerd is in uniform facing the camera: monstrously high cheekbones and giant grey eyes, a fulllipped mouth and a slicked-back widow’s peak so blond it shows up white in the print. (Just the sort of hair Heinrich himself would prefer.) Not quite the ideal – there’s a lopsidedness to the face as a whole, as if its components have been shaken by something and not come into correct realignment – but certainly nothing to arouse suspicion.
In the other photograph, Willie Meyer, Gerd’s intended, is bright-faced with dark eyes and her coppery hair wound up in an elaborate chignon. Her cheeks are on the heavy side, as is her jaw, and Heinrich suspects she would have thickened undesirably with age, but her throat is a pearly column of some loveliness, and you can see there’s a pair of formidable Teutonic Titten beneath the close-fitting blouse. The photograph shows her at twenty-two, seated at a piano but not playing, clutching, rather, her framed Certificate of Excellence from one of Leipzig’s pr
ivate colleges of music. She looks genuinely happy, relieved, shyly proud of herself. Whenever the Reichsführer places their images side by side on the varnished oak of his desk he feels sure they would have had a good, stodgy, tolerably unhappy marriage and four or five clumsy children. He feels sure everything would have been all right.
Afterwards, he had sent officers to interview Gerd and Marcus’s crew at Buchenwald. A good poker player, they’d said of Kreiger. A practical joker, of Hoffman. The prisoners? What’s to say about that? They felt as we all do. It’s a headache, you know, a constant headache. Jews, Jews, Jews, fucking endless shivering Jews. Kreiger used to complain the whole thing was going too slowly, maybe that they were coming out of the ground at night like mushrooms! What? No, no, of course not. What’s this all about anyway?
The bathroom radiator shudders and clanks. Difficult to do this in your head, Heinrich thinks. Heated bathrooms are the hallmarks of . . . The point I want to bring to your attention, gentlemen, is that our destiny places us on a knife-edge . . . Yes but then you lose the Scylla and Charybdis image. They won’t even be paying attention, half of them. Too many of them don’t realise even now what we’re . . . what we . . .
Gerd got his night alone with Willie. It was a big night for both of them. A big night for Willie because she knew her mother didn’t believe her story of staying at Lisle’s, and though she didn’t quite wink at her daughter, there was a curious movement at the corners of her mouth that indicated some new and shocking female complicity, brought on by the war, Willie thought, with feelings of liberation and betrayal queasily mixed. (It must be said here that it was by no means a small night for Marcus Hoffman, either, since round about the time Gerd and Willie were getting down to business, young Marcus was putting the pistol in his mouth, pulling the trigger, and blowing most of his brain out of the top of his head.) A big night for Gerd, because sometime shortly after entering her (standard issue condom) he stabbed Willie through the stomach with a pair of dressmaker’s scissors that were lying on the bedside table. Then he stabbed her through the kidneys, then the lower bowel, then the heart. Then he had a bath. Then he dressed. Then he went out to a nearby café and had a drink. He was still there six hours later when the Gestapo came to arrest him.
