Hammerhead

by Peter Nicholson

  When I arrived Dad had gone. I cursed myself for my dilatoriness. Celia was crying in the loungeroom and Chris looked frightened. My mother was brave, but stooped. I went into the bedroom as the day nurse excused herself, and sat on the end of the bed, closing my eyes.

  Here was journey’s end, all diminished to the crumpled form that had once been my father.

  I sat there for a long time until Mum came in with the undertakers.

  Chris didn’t understand. But I didn’t understand either. And nobody understood anything.

  My father was carried away, eventually, and we reconfigured around what was left, crumbs of afternoon light dropping onto the carpet.

  The funeral was gruelling, but I did my best to help Mum through it.

  Afterwards, at the wake, Celia disgraced herself with a slurred, self-pitying speech to anyone who didn’t want to listen. She had lost the art of self-possession a long time ago, and she behaved particularly foolishly on this occasion. Her husband was understandably angry.

  I warded off questions about employment.

  I tried to think as I moved among the mourners.

  Did we want the likes of Bokassa and Amin, Kim Il Sung and Hussein, to gain the upper hand. I couldn’t work out why people who never moved out of their comfort zones couldn’t see they had comfort zones only because they lived in a democracy.

  Someone offered me cake.

  When you see populations behaving as if they are automata, or your government is bombing their political opponents with mustard gas, you know things are past bad.

  It might have been overconfidence on our part, but we wanted to break what had grown out of colonial rot, broken-backed Marxist enclaves and cults of personality.

  ‘No, I won’t have anything to drink, thanks.’

  I took Chris out into our backyard and asked him how he was. He didn’t want to say much, but I could see he wasn’t coping all that well. I mentioned the holiday I’d promised, and he brightened up then. I told him it couldn’t be for a while, and he seemed to accept that.

  Then we went back inside, and I did my duty, having pretty meaningless discussions with my relatives whom I had to lie to about my new job. They would understand in retrospect, I hoped.

  Letting go is the fiercest exhumation. Another life gone but your life still going on. Such confusion as I felt I tried to keep under my belt in the best masculine tradition. I had limits to my grieving and for the grieving of others. Grief exhausts, and I was exhausted.

  Images of my childhood collided topsy-turvy as I moved from one person to another, trying to pull myself together. My mother had reached a degree of equanimity. She was quiet, a kind of enclosure around her I couldn’t break through.

  Eventually the room emptied until just the dramatis personae were left, mute decor in a downwash of numbing light. Mum was going to stay with Celia for a while, God help her. I had to be back in Europe soon, so I couldn’t do much more for the moment.

  When I returned home I felt a turmoil like no other I’d known. Thérèse tried to calm me, but I was out of reach, too distracted. She had been so caring with me in the last few days, staying behind in my place when she should have been helping The Hammer in her usual practical way.

  Later, lying on my bed, left alone in my dishevelled room, I covered my face with my hands. Then, finally, I wept.

  Back in Munich not much had changed. There was the same gaiety and warmth I liked so much. I went to visit Charles who was here on business, as we called it. He’d asked me to see about having the Aboriginal rock art in his loungeroom removed and returned to its original site. There were plans to get it back to Arnhem Land, but it was going to be a costly operation.

  I asked after Anton but apparently he was off on one of his ‘holidays’, as they were styled. His appetite for primal, alpha male activities could be wearying, whether it was yachting—the more tempestuous the seas, the better—or climbing dangerous peaks. I wondered whether this was some sort of sublimated death wish on his part, but he was quite fearless, and I liked him too much to criticise him. You could be sure he meant what he said, and that was a refreshing change from people you always had to be second-guessing. I wouldn’t have called him arrogant, though many did. He believed in fate—Schicksal—which he was given to saying at odd moments, either ironically or seriously. A body falls at his feet—Schicksal. He cuts himself shaving—Schicksal. The plane that blew up—Schicksal. Never mind he had a hand in ordering the fates. He didn’t seem to care about possessions or status, or any of the signposts of respectability. If he was the classic man of action, he had his sensitive side too. But, as I had seen, he was also capable of ruthlessness when needed. I wasn’t like that, yet. I was more careful, and certainly not as brave.

  I’d been attending to financial matters when I received another call from my old tutor Sir Nicholas Vansittart. Sometimes he was confused with the anti-Nazi diplomat, Robert Vansittart. They weren’t related, but shared similar political inclinations. Nicholas said he would be in Munich soon. I said I would very much like to see him and that I was looking forward to catching up on Oxford gossip. We exchanged contact details.

  Nicholas was softly spoken. It was a pleasant voice to hear, but you did have to listen carefully. I sometimes suspected he used to do this deliberately to keep us concentrating. His students were some of the best informed. We had prided ourselves on belonging to an elite. And now I’d be seeing him again.

  A few days later I was whiling away an empty hour when Charles summoned me to his rooms in the castle. What now, I wondered.

  To my very great surprise, I entered his main study to find Vansittart and Charles in earnest conversation.

  How little some people change! There were the same patrician manners as before, the elegant clothes, the warm, open watchfulness. His intelligent, fine-boned face crinkled with pleasure as he stood to greet me.

  ‘Dear, dear David, my old friend. How are you?’

  He gave me a warm handshake.

  Before I could ask the obvious question, Nicholas interposed.

  ‘How do you think Charles found out about you in the first place? Yes, that’s right. I’m afraid I’m the culprit.’

  So, Nicholas was a member of The Hammer too. I’d never thought about it being a possibility until now.

  We reminisced, but it was evident Vella was the main topic of interest, for the moment.

  I was asked for my opinion about the validity of the data we’d gathered—what a word—and I gave as full a briefing as I could. Charles and Nicholas wanted to assess the feasibility of launching a major operation in Europe. It was too dangerous to go into a lot of the countries involved, so we had to try to work out a convincing way of getting the people we wanted here, in our domain.

  Things were getting complicated because Charles had received a call from the Second Secretary of the Australian Embassy in Germany, during which it was implied that the government wasn’t keen on some of the things they’d heard about.

  They still had it at the rumour stage.

  I wondered how much they knew, and how much was guesswork. Certainly we had a large number of people working with us. I hoped they were trustworthy, but recent events made me doubt it.

  Later, Nicholas had a heart-to-heart with me. He explained he’d been in intelligence—MI6—for years, but was frustrated, like Charles. They first got to know each other at one of Charles’ media conferences. These occurred regularly in London. Charles was always on the lookout for talent, and he had friends in all the right places whom he could contact if he needed more information. He was generous in his praise when he saw a person was doing their best. But if he was crossed, or thought someone wasn’t working to capacity, he could be harsh. Apparently he once sacked most of the economics desk of his Sydney newspaper only to reinstate them all the next day. They knew the boss was prone to tantrums, ignored him, and prepared the next edition.

  We were mainly interested in corruption, but we also looked into terrorist ne
tworks, even though we weren’t big enough to do much about them. Soon you felt unclean after reading yet another history of general awfulness. What had gone wrong with these people that they had given away all their morality? Did money always corrupt? I didn’t think so—it hadn’t corrupted me.

  The fact Vansittart had been a member of The Hammer almost from the beginning made me feel good about what I had done so far. The question for me was the one about truthfulness. At university there had been a lot of talk about the truthful life. Some claimed you lived it by overthrowing all the moralities with their certainty and hypocrisy. Others said you reached truthfulness only in contemplation, so that by divesting yourself of feeling—which I didn’t think possible—you came to a state where you were free. I didn’t believe that either. The anarchists just amused me. They wanted to destroy everything, even government and social order. Oh to be that young again.

  Some of my fellow students who’d gone along with these ideas now lived the high life in Hampstead and Monaco. They’d attached themselves to comfortable pension schemes, or were on boards of companies with enormous stock option packages. Others had declined to spending lost weekends blissing out on E. Now, Vansittart had proved to be better than all of them. He was the purest and noblest of us all. In his quiet way he had been liberated from the beginning, a true radical. My tutor had led me to this moment where I felt I could justify the compromises I had already made and which I knew I would have to keep on making. Even so, I could feel the sanctimonious, preachy side of myself starting to dominate. People wouldn’t like it, but it was probably an inevitable development in my character, already prone to holding forth at banking conferences. Too bad.

  Vansittart didn’t need the praises of the world, though he’d been awarded a knighthood earlier on. This fulfilled Tory orthodoxies. But what did the monarch feel when subsequently informed about this subversive knight of the realm.

  Charles convened a meeting of The Hammer the following week.

  The castle saw much activity, and there seemed to be an urgency to the arrivals and departures I hadn’t noticed before.

  I would have a chance to catch up with Thérèse. We had felt very close on our trip back from Melbourne, and I wanted that closeness back.

  Anton returned looking fit and tanned. He then spent a long time with Charles. I still wasn’t considered kosher enough to join in these discussions.

  Well, the meeting took place and the rituals I’d seen before were duly observed. I’d grown used to seeing famous faces here in our redoubt. There was a certain patrician air to these gatherings as they tended to be comprised of older, experienced people who knew what mattered. They had little time for small talk, but there was an unspoken acknowledgement amongst all of us that we were carrying out a supremely important task.

  Delusion?

  Vansittart had been asked to speak at this meeting. Everyone listened intently. His old lecturing habits weren’t wasted.

  Looking down and pausing occasionally, Nicholas seemed to be assessing the validity of what he was saying—Socrates in a suit. In these silences the rest of us also pondered what might be as we hoped the signals intelligence network ECHELON wasn’t eavesdropping on our deliberations, always a possibility these days.

  ‘I am coming before you today to put a most serious proposition. History has reached a moment of crisis. Not for a long time have we seen a moment like this, when the whole enlightened world is threatened with destruction. We must do something decisive, and we must be brave in our decisiveness. We cannot expect to be understood by our governments. Neither can we expect to be given an easy passage of convenience. That will not happen. We have already seen some of the sacrifices given. With regard to terrorism, the worrying thing is that we do not yet know who some of the terrorists are. It is hard to fight a faceless enemy. However, as you know—these people are our enemies.’

  Vansittart leant forward.

  ‘I grew up at a time when Hitler and Stalin were important world leaders. Some thought they were going to achieve real change for their people. We learnt to our cost how misconceived their hopes had been only after millions had perished. And it happened with our connivance. Now it is happening again. We are soon going to mount one of our biggest operations. It will require all of our resources. I know, and you know too, what terrible things we saw in New York, and Washington, in Bali and in the Philippines. This is the beginning of what will be a long struggle.’

  Did we have the right to overturn the rule of law? Nicholas’ conundrum—and ours.

  A bit late for that thought.

  ‘We have many people against us. They want us to fail and they will do anything they can to stop us. This is not about Hannah Arendt’s banality of evil. It concerns evil as an active principle. We are dealing here with matters of life and death. I am not just talking about my life and death, or your life and death. I am talking about the survival of nations, of civilisation, of hope. If we were ever to become what some have—sycophants who talk, and do nothing—we should regard ourselves as having failed, miserably failed. And we would not be worthy of the sacrifices made on our behalf. What did the millions die for in the Second World War? Was it so we could launch ourselves into oblivion, an oblivion modern technology has made possible, even probable. Every one of you must be firm in your resolve. One person may fail, may have to die. Ten, twenty. More. Many, many more. The cause of liberation requires decisiveness, alertness, action. And commitment. You know well enough—we do not adhere to any rigid ideologies here.’

  I looked at the others, each absorbed in Nicholas’ eloquence.

  ‘It sounds grandiloquent, and perhaps even foolish. But what is the United Nations doing? And our own governments, our democratically elected governments. What are they doing? What makes us different from them is that we have grown tired of waiting for due process to work. Some will ask—how can you believe in democracy and not be content with due process, the Geneva Conventions, the Davos economic forum? But the time for waiting is over. We cannot, in all conscience, sit by and wait for change to trickle through over another century. Think how much suffering could have been alleviated if I had had the courage to put a bullet through Hitler or Stalin. I was close to both men on several occasions you know. I did nothing, and governments did nothing, and thousands of well-intentioned people did nothing.’

  Vansittart’s eyes were shining now, his voice straining under the emotion he was trying to contain.

  ‘Many here have spent their lives going through the motions. I bitterly regret my past inaction. I have spoken to all of you at one time or another. We are successful and well-regarded in society. There are nice articles about us in the press.’

  He smiled in Charles’ direction.

  ‘But what of that? What are we going to leave behind when that is dust and forgotten history? You have to live with your conscience, and at my age I want to make peace with mine.’

  Here Vansittart paused, staring past all of us.

  ‘There is a group of people meeting in Germany soon—Carascaolo and his associates. They will be coming to Berlin. Their arrogance has made them careless. We have to utilise this opportunity. There will be drug syndicates, terrorists and some of Europe’s fifth columnists on their payroll. We have found out about this meeting through a source at MI5 who has grown tired of the way things are going in Britain. This is what we will all be working on over the next month and I want you prepared for what is to come.’

  Sir Nicholas sat, holding a large white handkerchief to his temples.

  The room was silent.

  Charles turned and thanked Vansittart for addressing us, then stood and spoke himself.

  ‘This is going to be our biggest operation yet. We are code-naming it Linden, only we want something a little more active than for leaves to be falling. Some particularly nasty creatures will be crawling out of the woodwork. They will be meeting in an outer suburb of East Berlin. I’m afraid to say one or two members of the old GDR troupe haven’t
learnt the error of their ways, and they are going to have to make the supreme sacrifice.’

  Charles was quite capable of gallows humour.

  He then went on to outline the bombing planned for their meeting.

  I finally managed to get hold of Thérèse after our conference was over. She was pleased to see me again, and we soon made up for lost time.

  Her head rested near my arm. I watched the hairs on my hand move to the rhythm of her breathing.

  All heroes have their falls from grace. And it soon became clear Nicholas had fallen mightily.

  It wasn’t long after our last meeting when Nicholas rang me from England to ask if he could see me privately.

  I said I’d meet him as soon as I could. I admired Nicholas in the same way I imagined those in the nineteenth century would have admired someone like Alexander von Humboldt, the kind of man who could meet with emperors and presidents, explore the world, contribute something really useful to it and still, at the end, be a democrat, albeit a loquacious, self-willed one. Voilà un homme!

  The thing was, Nicholas didn’t want to involve Charles in the situation that had developed. Charles was aware of it and Nicholas knew his friend was preoccupied. However, I was told I could help things through.

  I flew to London two days later and was soon at the hotel not far from Russell Square where Nicholas and I had arranged to meet.

  I could tell Nicholas was unsettled. He asked if we could talk at the British Museum. He felt more at ease amongst the antiquities.