This was the kind of person Charles and Nicholas wanted me to know about. We had to have a similar ruthlessness if we were going to defeat them. We wanted to achieve our aims peacefully, but it wasn’t possible, whatever one thought of non-violent resistance. It made me think of an acquaintance who told me his half hour of yoga each morning was going to put the world to rights. He thought if you felt good about the world it somehow made the world better. Maybe it was possible. If you pointed out to him that millions of people were living in poverty or being oppressed by all manner of perverse regimes, he stared back, as if to say, I have a profound and mysterious understanding of the true nature of existence denied to persons like you. If only I could have told him about my recent experiences. I doubt it would have changed his outlook. Ritual—exercise, pursuing money—helps some people through their days and stops others from getting to know their own depths.
I guess I should get off my moral high horse.
I had come close to joining the rotten ranks. The spendthrift consumer’s view of existence was seductive, and in Australia, in a few enclaves, you could live in a fantasy land where reality hardly intruded. I used to mix with lots of people whose idea of a well-spent time was sailing, dancing, getting drunk and having sex in its various manifestations, wearing themselves into a frenzy locally, or at Ibiza or Fire Island. Their knowledge of the world was thin. They sometimes had a few notions about the arts, usually picked up out of the review pages in the local rag. Beneath the brittle surface, many of them seemed depressed, nihilism burrowing away at their pleasures. I had ventured dangerously near to this state in my banking ivory tower that was completely against nature. It was fun eating at expensive restaurants and wasting time in louche surroundings. But I had finally broken free of all that. My political conscience had been lying dormant, only to be reactivated by a phone call from Charles, my paradigm shift to the provisional.
‘Listen to this,’ Thérèse demanded. ‘I’m pretty sure you can hear them agreeing on a payment here for some inside information Priestnall’s meant to be bringing with him.’
We all listened to the recording and agreed it was so. The urgent thing now was to make a final decision about the explosion.
One of the local police cars went past our Strasse giving us some anxious moments, but it seemed to be a regular patrol, nothing more. Meanwhile, Anton had planned the quickest route back to Munich, after considering many options since our visit to the Fernsehturm.
Then a peculiar thing happened. The whole group went out one morning in several cars. This was unusual; it hadn’t happened since their arrival as all their needs were catered for in the villa. We followed them at a safe distance until we came to a dilapidated cemetery. They parked and got out, searching around until they found the grave they were looking for. They became quite solemn. Obviously someone of great importance to them was buried here. Speeches were made and flowers were laid near the headstone. We couldn’t get as close as we would have liked, but this was clearly a significant moment for this group.
Some of us stayed behind after they left to see what had brought on this amazing display of emotion, so unlike anything we’d seen before. We approached the gravestone that had been the object of such veneration. Heinrich von Schorr 1896–1944, we read. We turned to one another. Did the name register? No, none of us knew who this unlikely hero might have been. Could these thugs have come from all parts of the world for a simple ceremony in this graveyard? Surely, at the very least, a new distribution deal was being formulated.
Once safely back at observation headquarters, as Anton jocularly called our house, we checked up on who this von Schorr was. The ‘von’ indicated someone from a Prussian aristocratic family, but there was no mention of him in the state almanacs. I knew some of the first people to turn against Hitler and take part in the Stauffenberg plot had come from this group, but it wouldn’t have been one of them. It turned out we had been standing before the grave of one of Himmler’s cronies; the mob gathering was just another bonding session for protofascists. How very like our friends to find it an appropriate gesture to place flowers on the grave of this racist who had been responsible for getting tens of thousands into the death camps. Thérèse said none of us should ever forget we were dealing with people who had bypassed the Enlightenment. They had come straight from the jaws of hell.
Was a person born the bad seed. I didn’t want to believe it. You made choices as you went through life. You chose to do a good thing or a bad thing. Perhaps your stepfather beat you up, your parents quarrelled or there was some kind of otherness to put the frighteners on you. But I didn’t believe a child was some kind of demon spawn.
Time’s burden. Inexplicable things happened every second. And the seconds built to an intolerable weight, shattering through you at the least likely moment. We had Charles’ authorisation to go through with our initial plan, whether Priestnall was there or not, and now I felt the sensation of those accelerating seconds rearing. Since the explosives had been placed in the cellar, all that was needed was electronic activation. We decided to hold off for one more day to see if we could glean further information.
That evening we packed everything into our cars and finished cleaning the house, ready to leave.
At night I slept badly, and when I did sleep I had bad dreams, sloughing unresolved feelings about what was soon to take place.
We’d decided on a lunchtime departure, and as we no longer had our listening equipment active we had to base our timing on habits we’d noted over the week since they’d arrived. It looked like Priestnall was going to get a lucky break since there was no sign of him. We’d been told we had to move on because those in Munich couldn’t trust our position to stay secret much longer.
Thus it was that, after seeing Sylke leave, and knowing the retainer was visiting relatives, we closed up, got into our cars and travelled several miles away from the villa. All it now required was a call from Anton’s mobile phone.
Anton sat impassively. Thérèse examined her nails. I imagined what was to follow.
How to describe those last instants before Anton made the call. Fatalities were swirling. My heart beat faster. The decisive moment seemed to draw itself out, push past the false barrier of consciousness, before extending on to futures unknown.
And then I heard it. Even at this distance it was a massive sound.
Anton murmured in his quietest voice, ‘Schicksal.’
We moved off quickly after that.
We were soon out of Berlin and managed to get down to Munich easily. We only had one difficult moment when it looked as if we might be pulled over, but nothing came of it.
As soon as we were back at Hohentor we went to Charles. He was pleased with our efforts. Now we had to wait for the media to tell us how successful we’d been.
We listened to the radio, watched the television and read next morning’s papers. The reports were confusing and contradictory.
But there was a terrible surprise waiting for us. Sylke, who had left the villa—I saw her go—had returned after we had gone. She must have left something behind, or forgotten one of the beds. But she was dead. The body was found in the front section of the villa, broken marble lying across her. She may not have even been inside the building. The reports were ambiguous about the number of other bodies found, but we were alarmed because the tally mentioned in most of the newspapers was one less than we’d been expecting.
Who could have escaped? How did it happen? Had the journalists made an error? Anton was livid and I couldn’t say anything to him because he didn’t want to listen. But it seemed someone had escaped.
I went to see Thérèse but she was with that Greek who still stayed mysteriously in the background.
We spent the day digesting press speculation to see if we could get further clues as to who had survived. After all, journalists have lots of contacts too, and you can sometimes work out something approximating the truth by reading between the lines.
It took Anton a day
before he would speak to any of us again, beyond a required minimum.
But Sylke. Sylke, Sylke, Sylke.
The facts had registered. Sylke was dead, and she was innocent. All she had wanted was a little more money, which we had been willing to provide. She had helped us, and she was dead. I couldn’t get the photo in the paper out of my head. She was a single mother with two children. But we had not thought about that.
Choices—we had taken away Sylke’s choices. I looked out at a sky that seemed to be burning before me. Unfortunately, I was getting used to this ongoing violence, the brutality and sickness forever rearing out of an inchoate malaise. Who was I, or anyone else, to take into our hands the responsibility for another life. I had come to The Hammer because I believed in its cause, but here, in a corpse covered by split marble, there was only evil.
Anton had little time for such mind worries as he called them. He had a utilitarian view of his function in the scheme of things. We had rid the world of a certain number of people who had brought misery to others. If an innocent person had died through misadventure, you had to put it from your mind and move on.
Through forgetting we managed to push against the dirt. We came from some strangeness before birth and would confront the mystery of death. Living was making do, getting by, grabbing after the lightning sheet of joy that flashed through us like a summer storm, then was gone. To feel evolving consciousness exfoliate at the rock of its own limit, shedding philosophy, music, art and literature, was good. But the mind had to ruin itself with demands for money. Money was required to put food on the table, pay the overdue bills. But the human could not be bought. Not all the money in the world could pay for a single human life. It was as though the infinite capacity we called God had crushed our mortal strengths and weaknesses. We picked up the rubble of what was left to try and piece it together again. But our souls eventually grew weary, and then we wished to sleep through eternity, through cold, monotonous eternity.
I had failed Sylke. We had failed Sylke. And I felt the wind of a merciless fate at my shoulder.
‘We at least have to send some flowers to her funeral,’ I protested.
Charles said we couldn’t, but he would make sure her children were provided for.
I wanted to talk to Nicholas about what had happened, but he was back in Oxford writing his latest philosophical analysis. The quiet revolutionary sat patiently at his desk turning over in his head justifications for political action and its consequences.
I guessed if he could manage it, so could I.
But I sent roses to the funeral. Secretly, dutifully. It was only proper.
As luck wouldn’t allow, it looked as if it was Tonton Jacmel who had escaped the explosion. What horrible chance of fate had killed Sylke but allowed Jacmel to survive?
This was a question I couldn’t answer. But we had to cope with the consequences.
Naturally, our actions had aroused much interest. Fortunately, the press were on the wrong trail, choosing either MI6 or the CIA as the likeliest suspects. No doubt both organisations were annoyed, but we weren’t waiting for their approval.
I needed to find out more about Jacmel, so I asked for any further information from our bureau chief at Hohentor.
Jacmel came from a poor background. Through a certain natural ability he had got himself into one of the local Haitian schools. He received an excellent education at the hands of the local priests but, all the same, had developed a hatred for the Catholic church and an equally maniacal and irrational dislike for France, despite the fact he spoke French and wore haute couture. It was rumoured he had over fifty bottles of cologne in his bathroom, all used according to his mood on a particular day, a mood that could suddenly change from joviality to rage. He had studied in Paris for several years, but returned to Port-au-Prince because the government needed someone intelligent to discipline the army.
And I thought Haiti had calmed down, after being subject to so much natural and political catastrophe. I studied a recent video of the colonel. He was good looking in a dangerous kind of way. Tall, imperious and exuding a somewhat discomfiting brittleness, his hands betrayed the seething emotions within, flickering impatiently on armchairs and tables as he contemplated his next dire strategy.
Jacmel had not previously shown any real signs of difficulty in his personality, but with this sudden access to power, he soon demonstrated the shadow side within. He terrorised many, starting with some of his former teachers, and went as far as getting people murdered who had slighted his parents when he was a boy. Whether these hatreds were based on anything real would be hard to judge because it soon became obvious, as I went through all the material in our files, that we were dealing with one seriously disturbed human being. His chief characteristics were a sadistic pleasure gained from causing suffering to his perceived enemies and a vengefulness that could never be sated. Having progressed quickly through the ranks, with more than a little help from those above, Jacmel was soon an indispensable part of the local political landscape. And this person was the one who seemed to have survived our explosion.
Because he’d once held a sick child in his hands, and the child had recovered, Jacmel was thought to be a shaman. He involved himself in Voodoo, not because he believed in it, but because he had an infallible instinct for the politically-opportunistic thing to do. The combination of fear and admiration had the desired effect of drawing to him like-minded types. He always chose semi-literate young men for his gangs—no women were allowed—because he knew they would be loyal without indulging in much speculation. Absolute loyalty was the sine qua non of Jacmel, and he didn’t hesitate to destroy anyone who challenged him. He’d turned on one of his companions and macheted him in an horrific attack before members of one of his army units when the officer questioned Jacmel about a pay rise. Along with this violent streak was an adamantine arrogance. Since Jacmel never heard any critical voices he came to believe ever more fervently in his warped view of the world. This was comprised partly of mad racial supremacist theories, partly of born-to-rule patrician airs and graces. To think the boy with the good brain and healthy ambition had turned into this perfect storm of violence and conceit was enough to make anyone think twice about gifted and talented programs in schools.
Jacmel would have disappeared from Berlin. That was now our—or should I say my—problem, since Charles told me to find out where he’d gone. Looking at Jacmel, you wouldn’t think such bile was waiting to pour out. But he had the charm of a Hannibal Lecter along with the psychopath’s facility in making black appear white. Awards should go to psychopaths because of their uncanny ability to take people in so much more convincingly than anything you saw on the silver screen.
Our cryptographer, Stephen, had finally made some progress with the messages he’d been given from what we’d intercepted, one in particular, and it was looking more likely that Vella had been a key player in the activities we’d been trailing in Europe. Australia had seemed so removed from the heat of world politics. But we had been able to discern suspect travel often touching down in Sydney. There would be secret cells at work all over Australasia. Our days of brazen rapture were over. But that decoded message—d/saiOH/waiting. Meaning? Why should the fate of things hang on the edge of something so trivial.
Encrypted messages, names and faces and a lot of cold data were there in front of you, but working out how everything fitted together was problematic. That’s why governments needed intelligence agencies: to coordinate all the information they had and determine the patterning behind it. The difference for our group was that we didn’t have the special interests of particular countries in mind. But a lot of the time we were stumbling around in the shallow end of the shark pool.
My cynicism concerning politicians had almost reached its peak, and finding out about Sumner Priestnall ended any remaining illusions. Here was a man who’d been presented to the world as the model American citizen, the good American abroad, the great hope for racial integration and an upstanding defen
der of the constitution. Yet I now knew him to be corrupt. And I knew that if he was corrupt then I couldn’t trust anyone in power, no matter how seductive their rhetoric. Politics now seemed the art of managing the possible. Elected politicians could never do more than their electorates allowed them to. Thus the great temptation to abuse power. It might have been comic to see Bokassa turn himself into a horrible parody of a French emperor, but who realised, in the rest of world beyond the Central African Republic, that this emperor had actually had children murdered when poverty-stricken youths couldn’t afford the uniforms he insisted they should wear to school. It was sobering to read this history, but it was terrible for the people who had lived with this kind of megalomania daily.
I shuffled through the files of information, dispirited.
‘You don’t think this is ever going to stop, do you?’ Anton barked at me when he came down out of the mists of his own private furies. ‘All this,’ he hissed, with a lunge in the direction of my papers, ‘will be going on until the end of time. Along with the bad music, bad literature and bad living we have to put up with these days. Alles ist so schlecht!’
Hammerhead Page 11
