Darkness into Light Box Set

by Michael Dean

  Out loud he said ‘Hartmut, A1 wants you to kill Rathenau. Will you do it?’

  Plaas shrugged. ‘’Course I will.’

  ‘Good!’

  ‘When do you want it done?’

  ‘Soon. He’s going to a conference in Genoa to heap further humiliations on the Volk. You killing him will probably stop the conference, too. You will be doing great service to all true-blooded Germans.’

  Plaas nodded absently. ‘One of his lovers has got a villa near Genoa. Portofino. He’s always asking me to go there. If we sneak off for a tryst, there’d be no security at all. Walther would see to that.’

  ‘Good! But….at the conference would be even better. Just as he is in the act of betraying Germany.’

  ‘I’ll see what I can do.’

  ‘What will you need?’

  Plaas shrugged. ‘Small calibre pistol, I suppose.’

  ‘Alright. But in that case three or four shots. Make sure he’s dead. OK?’

  ‘’Course. Leave it with me.’

  Plaas jumped in the air like a Jack-in-the-Box and was gone, pacing out of Aschinger’s, to sniff up the cocaine von Salomon had given him.

  Von Salomon sat there for a while, sipping his beer, wondering whether to cancel the payments to Rathenau’s chauffeur, now it looked as though they would no longer need him.

  But in the end he decided to keep the payments going, a decision he never regretted.

  Chapter Twenty

  By the time of the Genoa Conference, in the spring of 1922, Foreign Minister Rathenau was fifty-five. Though still every inch the dandy – dressing strikingly in yellow, blue and purple, smelling beautifully of lavender - he looked a decade older than that. The goatee beard was now more white than grey. The massive torso was plumper than it had been. The gaudily coloured silk waistcoats were stretching further and further over a hanging belly.

  A sense of calm fatalism had draped itself over him, like a protective shroud cover over an obelisk. He had made his love for Bosie – Hartmut Plaas - secure by the simple expedient of divorcing it from any action by the love-object, including desertion.

  Hartmut had in fact not left him, he was as sporadically passionate as ever, but if he did, Walther knew, his own love would survive unchanged. And it was his own love for Hartmut he needed, even more than he needed Hartmut’s love for him.

  The other source of Rathenau’s massive accepting calm was an inner certainty of success at Genoa. And surely the Foreign Minister had every right to his optimism.

  Georgi Chicherin, the Russian Foreign Minister, had stayed in Berlin for five months before the conference was due to open. A fluent German-speaker, Chicherin had supported Rathenau’s letter to Lloyd George, pleading with him to help Germany at Genoa. Both Rathenau and Germany’s leading Russia expert, Maltzan, regarded the chances of a German-Russian deal, backed secretly by Britain, as very likely indeed.

  So, obviously, did Organisation Consul as they brewed a plot to blow up Chicherin’s train on the way to Genoa. An account of the attempt is in von Salomon’s novel, Freikorps, on page 253.

  As the Genoa Conference opened, Rathenau had been Foreign Minister barely four months. Chancellor Joseph Wirth had appointed him despite a massive lobbying campaign against him by Hugo Stinnes, who lined up all his newspapers behind his own man, the ambassador to Vienna, Frédéric Hans von Rosenberg.

  Mother Mathilde had once again begged Walther not to expose himself to the dangers of high office. But Walther had accepted the post because Chancellor Wirth had adopted Fulfilment – Rathenau’s way of co-operation and peace - as government policy, announcing it as such at a meeting of Germany’s seventeen Länder.

  The Fulfilment Policy’s first test world-wide was at this coming conference, the biggest global conference the world had ever seen. Newly confident, Rathenau had already turned the very existence of the conference into victory. For months before and probably after Genoa there could be no further additions to Germany’s Versailles reparations burden, because the reparations committee talks would be suspended. There could also be no further occupations of German territory by the French.

  Rathenau the artist was at the peak of his powers, too. He had had three works exhibited at the Gurlitt Gallery, the leading art gallery in Berlin. They were the portrait of his mother, a self-portrait and his landscape of the house and grounds of Freienwalde. Reviews had compared his paintings favourably with the leading artist of the day, Lesser Ury, who was shown at the same exhibition. The Deutsche Zeitung even compared him favourably with Max Liebermann.

  The five-man German delegation was quartered at the small but convivial Hotel Eden Park. Chancellor Wirth stayed with the main delegation, even though a separate villa had been reserved for him as delegation leader. He did not wish to be isolated from the other delegates, and from Rathenau in particular.

  As the German delegation were unpacking and settling in there was a tentative knock on the door of Rathenau’s room. Rathenau was annoyed, planning his first walk around Genoa in the spring sunshine, wishing to be alone.

  ‘Come in!’

  Chancellor Wirth was a shapeless blob in the doorway. As ever, his aspect was slightly comic. Even his name was a joke – Wirt means innkeeper and Chancellor Joseph Wirth, pronounced the same way, was the son of an innkeeper.

  After his upbringing in the inn, Wirth became a schoolmaster. He was a man of plodding facility whose chance and turbulent times had thrown far higher than his talents warranted or could cope with. He blotted out his misery and confusion by eating too much and drinking far too much.

  The Chancellor was frequently drunk in public, indeed he appeared to Rathenau to be drunk now. Feeling threatened by the looming august company, Wirth wished to cling close to his more competent Foreign Minister.

  Rathenau gave him ten minutes, rapidly running over the German position which was, he thought, perfectly clear. A formal German agreement with the Russians would, in effect, smash the Treaty of Versailles, leading to Germany’s acceptance internationally. Lloyd George was ready to back this, secretly, as it meant outflanking the French, who would oppose it tooth and nail.

  Wirth nodded wearily, helping himself to a couple of glasses of grappa from the well-stocked hospitality bar in the corner of Rathenau’s room.

  ‘You have got your speech ready?’

  Wirth nodded miserably. ‘Do you want to have a look at it?’

  ‘No, I’m sure it’s satisfactory. Just make sure you keep to our main line, that’s all.’

  ‘I will.’

  And at that Rathenau left him to his grappa and went for his customary arrival-stroll around the city.

  He knew every street and byway of Genoa. He had supervised AEG’s installation of its tram system, spending five weeks here when he was in his early thirties. It was one of the first tasks Emil had given him after Bitterfeld.

  What had changed since then? Everything and nothing. Walther Rathenau was a success, the holder of high political office. The artist in him had not been suffocated. He knew, without dwelling on it, that his paintings were of real merit and quality.

  He had never found love, though. Or had he? For the first time, back there in the old Italian port, he believed his feelings for Bosie deserved to be called love whether they were reciprocated or not. He loved Hartmut Plaas unconditionally, that was why he was at peace.

  He must have said ‘I love you’ out loud, as a young couple strolling hand in hand in the weak evening sunshine smiled at him. Rathenau smiled back.

  The ancient port town of the fourteenth and fifteenth century Guelphs and Ghibellines was still veiled in tentative sun, spreading from the semi-circular harbour he knew so well, through the deep shadows of the narrow, winding streets of the old town, before creeping down the opulent façade of the newly renovated Palazzo San Giorgio, with its Roman arched windows, where the opening plenary of the conference was to be held tomorrow morning.

  Rathenau stared up at it – the theatre of his coming victor
y.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  The opening of the Genoa Conference, next day, was preceded by a Carnival Procession. Then, after lunch, the delegates were driven in gleaming black cars along the cordoned-off Via Sopraelevata, just inland from the port. The boulevard was posted with white-gloved, red-cockaded Royal Guards, mounted on glossy black horses.

  There were flags everywhere. Figures hung out of windows to catch a glimpse of and identify the first generation of politician-film-stars. Those at the upper storeys could see as funnels of liners against the deep blue of the harbour water.

  As the delegates entered the Palazzo San Giorgio, they were dwarfed by a vast rectangular hall dominated by a statue of the best-known son of Genoa, Christopher Columbus.

  As Rathenau smilingly said to Wirth, as he gazed up at the statue, ‘America started here.’

  The milling delegates sorted themselves into lines to make their way to their places in the Conference Chamber. This was an ornate Renaissance apartment whose every recess was filled with larger-than-life statues.

  None of these figures were immediately identifiable to any of the delegates, which accentuated the impression of tomb architecture. Rathenau quoted Shelley’s Ozymandias to Wirth – translating it into German for his benefit. Here were the great figures who once dominated their own history - now largely unidentifiable, completely forgotten, calcified into no-doubt inaccurate lapidarian lumps.

  The present company, however, were already combating each other for their own place in the future. A motion picture camera was whirring away under one of the anonymous statues as the delegates sat. Genoa was to be the first ever world conference on film. It had already baptised the uneasy political smile.

  The delegates took their places at the traditional double horseshoe-shaped table, covered by a green baize table-cloth. Above them, a chandelier burned away into the bright Italian daylight, again emphasising the tomb-like nature of the setting.

  As they sat, an insect-like throng of diplomats, experts, translators and Genoese dignitaries gathered behind them, at first standing then increasingly taking their ease on camp chairs. The Archbishop of Genoa, a splash of colour in deep wine robes, beamed beneficence from the Pope before seating himself behind the godless Soviet delegation.

  A Press Gallery had been set up at the far end of the hall, with space for 200 of the 750 journalists who had applied. Among them was Ernest Hemingway, representing the Toronto Daily Star.

  There was also, to Walther’s huge amusement, an unnecessarily large cohort of Italian sailors, garbed in white dress-shirts and blue bell-bottoms. They were notionally there as attendants or errand-runners.

  Walther assessed them with amused raised-eyebrow interest. He doubted that some of them, at least, had ever been far out to sea. They would have been more at home in the steam baths back in Friedrischstrasse. One of them shot Walther a smouldering look as he sat down, unerringly recognising his susceptibility.

  Promptly at 3pm, Facta of Italy opened the conference as host. He conveyed good wishes from his king, Victor Emmanuel III, then read a bland message from the French president Poincaré, who was absent, thus snubbing the conference. Facta made a plea for reconciliation. This was code for German inclusion. Rathenau smiled at Wirth, who looked strained and tense.

  Lloyd George spoke in passionate Welsh cadences in his beautifully modulated voice. He also glanced at the camera from time to time. He called Genoa ‘the greatest gathering of European nations which has ever been assembled on this continent.’ It was.

  The task, he said, ‘was to restore the shattered prosperity of this continent.’ That meant not breaking Germany on the wheel of reparations and helping Russian recovery. At key moments in his speech Lloyd George met Rathenau’s gaze, twice he even smiled at him. Their informal London agreement and Lloyd George’ s support since had not been forgotten.

  The French representative, Barthou, faced a predicament. Like many middle-ranking French politicians, he did not believe in the untenable position of his leadership – first Briand, then Poincaré – that Germany should be ground into the dust by reparations. He secretly supported Rathenau and the Policy of Fulfilment. But he could not say so. So he said nothing, at some length.

  Then came Wirth. Unfortunately, at his moment in the spotlight on the stage of the world, Wirth was drunk.

  The quantity of alcohol he had consumed was not that great, by his standards. But he was unused to Italian white wine at eleven in the morning, which is when the gargantuan breakfast-buffet at the Eden Park was thrown open to booze-fuelled diplomacy, which constituted the real work of the conference.

  He had continued drinking over lunch. So his always ruddy complexion was flushed to burgundy. His fair hair was matted to mud-colour from sweat, giving him an even more dissipated look.

  Wirth rose. Wirth wobbled. Wirth spoke in German.

  Outside of the German delegation and the German-speaking Russian, Chicherin, not more than a handful among the multitude understood a word. Rathenau kept his face a loyal mask of devotion while his leader spoke, nodding enthusiastic agreement to try and beam a light to the bewildered gathering.

  Inwardly he was cursing himself for not checking Wirth’s speech when he had the chance, last night. He should not have indulged his inner artist by going for that stroll around Genoa.

  The transcript of the speech, which was always passed round while the speaker was in flow, was also in German only, so delegates looking for relief from their bewilderment at the spoken word from the written, found only a different source of incomprehension. They began to shift in their seats in boredom. There was some twittering merriment from the younger delegates and, Walther noticed with interest, among the less nautical faction of the sailors.

  The dull hush engendered by Wirth’s incomprehensibility was ended by the Russian, Chicherin, who by general consent, set the conference afire. Chicherin was a tall, stooped, ascetic figure, donnish of aspect with a pointed nose and a pointed red beard. He gave his speech in French and English, both languages pronounced and stressed with a strong Russian accent. (His German was accent-free).

  Chicherin announced Russian readiness to collaborate in reconstruction – this meant German inclusion. He pleaded for ‘peace, a real peace.’

  Georgi Chicherin expressed the hope that Genoa would be the first of many European economic conferences, which in turn would pave the way for a congress in which all the nations of the world, not just Europe, would participate to undertake global rehabilitation. Finally, he proclaimed that Russia was prepared to undertake disarmament provided other countries did the same.

  It was a bold, a brazen, bid for world peace. It was outrageous. It was glorious. It caused uproar among the multitude in the ornate mausoleum of the Conference Chamber.

  Barthou was now furious, but fury did not become him. Walther’s masterful sketch of him, done in quick lines while he spoke, shows a tubbily-short, full-bearded, bespectacled figure, wearing a heavy tweed three-piece suit with a three-button waistcoat which was too hot for the Genoa climate. He came across like a petulant teddy-bear complaining at a leak of its stuffing.

  He rolled to his feet, redly sweating, and accused Chicherin of exceeding the bounds of the conference’s agenda. As he waved his arms to strengthen his point, his false cuffs fell off. Rathenau picked them up. To roars of laughter from the delegates, he solemnly handed them back to Barthou.

  Facta, speaking as chairman, cut Barthou off, refusing to let him speak again. The badly-stuffed teddy bear gathered his cuffs and sat down.

  Lloyd George had listened to Barthou with his face in his hands, hiding his inner satisfaction. Lightly asserting his de facto leadership, he warned against ‘overloading’ the conference but managed to make it clear that he agreed with Chicherin – and not the French – without openly saying so.

  As the delegates made their way out, Chicherin gave Rathenau a nod and a smile. They arranged a time to meet. The day could hardly have gone better for Rathen
au. Or could it?

  As he said a warm farewell to Chicherin, hand on the Russian’s shoulder, he was interrupted by one of the sailor-attendants who pressed a note in his hand. It was hand-written. In the spidery lettering Walther knew so well from reading his poetry, Hartmut Plaas announced his arrival in Genoa.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  There were rumours that the Russians were going to table a disarmament proposal. A note had arrived from the British Chancellor of the Exchequer, Horne, suggesting they discuss it over dinner. Rathenau left Wirth to deal with it.

  He changed hastily into the clothes he wore for his plunges into the demi-monde in Berlin – workman’s trousers and boots, a tight-fitting tweed hacking-jacket, leather cap pulled down over his brow. Then he sneaked out of the Eden Park, catching a cab at the corner down to the docks to meet his Bosie.

  Hartmut Plaas had checked in to a run-down Pension near the Ponte Colombo. Walther was, as ever, apprehensive as to his mood but the younger man was genial, tired from travel but clearly free of cocaine and he was sober, for now at least. Walther embraced him fondly, finding him as beautiful as ever; his skin peachy, his wavy mouth hinting at sin, his hair golden.

  ‘How are you?’ Walther was still holding Bosie’s shoulders, his old man’s voice croaky with tenderness.

  ‘I’m tired from the journey. I didn’t sleep well last night.’

  ‘Oh dear!’

  ‘Oh dear!’

  Walther was used to Bosie’s mocking imitations of the last thing he said and just ignored it. ‘What would you like to do now?’ Walther’s voice was now light with inexpressible tenderness.

  ‘Show me the town.’ Hartmut pouted.

  ‘Alright.’ Walther laughed. ‘Whatever you want.’