The Passenger
Page 34
‘Do you think she would be allowed her own things?’
His wife was sure they could dig out something. ‘There’s that rug with moth I haven’t had the heart to throw out.’
The commandant was pleased, for himself, and for his wife, pretending that what pleased her made him happy too, contenting himself with the surreptitious relish of his innocent obsession.
His wife proffered her cheek. She had no right to be taking the car. Oh, let it go. He wasn’t prepared to berate her in front of staff. The time would come when he would delight in her humiliation. He recalled his Corinthians: ‘For the man is not of the woman; but the woman of the man. Neither was the man created for the woman; but the woman for the man.’
Transported, thought the commandant’s wife. The heartbreak of the story! The misunderstandings that were still possible between two so in love. Orfeo must not look back and Euridice takes this as a sign he no longer loves her.
The auditorium was full, a throwback to another era, with everyone dressed up, the civilised rapture of the audience, the elegance of the uniforms, the women in evening dress. The commandant’s wife had a box. She considered it good that people still appreciated culture in straitened times. She was very jealous of the woman sharing with her, the wife of a local general. The woman’s full-fur coat was the most beautiful the commandant’s wife had ever seen, making her feel dowdy by comparison. The woman had travelled, to France, even North Africa, and she had been nowhere.
Events reached their climax as Orfeo’s forbidden look caused Euridice to die. You could have heard a pin drop, thought the commandant’s wife. A tragedy for their times! To have a love like that, she sighed, even if it were lost. Love was, the Bible said, the great mystery. Nothing written or uttered since had provided an answer. But where was love?
The commandant thought: Strange that he had not thought of the seamstress during his purge in the woods. He wondered where she was now.
Several drinks and smokes later he was assailed by the terrible image of his wife crawling naked on the floor, proffering her ample rear to some faceless stud. Or worse, could the crowbar tool be Erich’s? The man was a committed rapist, perhaps unable to control himself, a perpetual offender for all his reformed air, and his wife was no oil painting. Only too clearly could the commandant picture Groenke taking proprietorial delight in his wife’s stolen, gasping pleasure. Over a year now since she had shared it with him; and it wasn’t as though it had all been going swimmingly before.
The doorbell rang. The housekeeper answered. The commandant adjusted his dress in time to be standing to greet the garrison doctor. The man was such a transparent fellow, obviously there to press his cause under the guise of a follow-up to check on his health and give him another earful about what he considered his moral duty. Yes, the good doctor had arrested the march of disease, but that was not the point.
Teaching the facts of life was normally done by man-to-man chats over stiff drinks, except the bloody doctor didn’t drink. The commandant listened to him bleat on about how the security police were guilty of irregularities. Of course they were! It was called initiative. There was no point in banging on about regulations. If they waited for Berlin everything would have been swamped years ago. The compounds were riddled with informers, spy networks and double agents.
What the commandant did not volunteer was that he secretly shared the doctor’s shame at the state of the place. It was the real reason for him to block anyone coming in.
What a nightmare, thought the doctor, and always that split – between the uniform and his oath of loyalty versus his Hippocratic duty and individual conscience. As for his wife, what a relief it would be to write honestly that his mind was assailed by dark and troubled thoughts about the hopelessness of it all, really.
Corruption was a cancer eating away at them, there from the start, with the place being so neglected, but what came after was beyond all imagination. The shrink had observed something interesting. From what he could tell, no one there dreamed any more.
The shrink preferred to eat alone, so that evening the doctor was surprised to be invited to share his table, even though the man had finished.
Like many, the doctor suspected the shrink had been sent there for underhand reasons.
He was as good-looking as a film star, which set him apart, and was further distanced by a solitary manner. The natural nucleus of the garrison was small tables of urgent, drunken groups, caught between boisterous and conspiratorial talk.
The doctor ordered duck and red cabbage and wondered how much he was being manipulated when the shrink announced that he knew about the doctor’s difficulties in trying to open up the garrison. This was not something the doctor had talked about to anyone than the commandant.
‘The commandant and his boss in Berlin are tight,’ the shrink said. ‘The boss is still smarting from having another of his camps turned upside down by a pushy investigative prosecutor named Morgen, who has a history of rocking the boat. The business in Weimar was an embarrassment – people on the home front lining their pockets while our lads take a pasting; not good publicity. So the commandant will have been told to repel all boarders. However, there may be a way to get Morgen in.’
He looked enigmatic and wondered how the commandant’s wife was getting on at the opera.
‘She is rather smitten by you, as it happens.’
‘How do you know?’ the doctor asked in astonishment.
‘She told me.’
If garrison men weren’t keen on consulting him, their wives were and the commandant’s had led by example in what became a fashion.
‘Not much treatment involved. Most of it is hard gossip. She considers you a gentleman, out of her league.’
The doctor said stiffly such information was confidential and he shouldn’t be told.
‘Confidential between us now. Let’s say I am seeking a second medical opinion. Now, let’s be serious. As I understand it, you, as garrison doctor, believe this place should be properly run in terms of hygiene and labour. It should more resemble a functioning work camp than a penal colony. In a nutshell?’
The doctor could not tell whether the man was to be trusted.
‘There may be a way of opening the place up but it won’t be done by your complaining,’ the shrink said.
‘What do you propose?’
Acknowledgements
Of the many books consulted and trawled through, the following, along with Google, were referred to most. Cold Warrior (Simon & Schuster, 1991) Tom Mangold’s biography of Angleton contains many details used in this book, including a copy of the photograph of Angleton as a prefect at Malvern College. Ron Rosenbaum’s Travels with Dr Death (Penguin, 1991) contains essays on Angleton and on Mary Meyer, briefly mentioned. Books consulted on Philby include Anthony Cave Brown’s Treason in the Blood (Robert Hale, 1994), on Philby father and son; Philby: The Spy Who Betrayed a Generation (Andre Deutsch, 1968) by Bruce Page, David Leitch and Phillip Knightley; and Philby: The Long Road to Moscow (Hamish Hamilton, 1973) by Patrick Seale and Maureen McConville, which most resembles Evelyn’s fictional effort. Bob Woodward’s Veil: The Secret Wars of the CIA 1981–1987 (Simon & Schuster, 1987) is self-explanatory. Useful background works include Alan Friedman’s Spider’s Web: Bush, Saddam, Thatcher and the Decade of Deceit (faber and faber, 1993) and Gideon’s Spies (Pan, 1999) by Gordon Thomas. The most extreme interpretation of events covered by this book is offered by Trail of the Octopus: From Beirut to Lockerbie – Inside the DIA (Bloomsbury, 1993) by Donald Goddard with Lester K. Coleman. Other works on the subject include On the Trail of Terror (Jonathan Cape, 1991) by David Leppard; Paul Foot’s special report, Lockerbie: The Flight from Justice (Private Eye, 2001); and John Ashton and Ian Ferguson’s Cover-up of Convenience (Mainstream, 2001). This book owes a debt to all the above but could not have been written without the following three works. John Loftus and Mark Aarons’ The Secret War Against the Jews (St Martin’s Griffin, 1997), remains indispensable;
it was Loftus who suggested to me that Angleton’s father was probably the key to the man. In the Public Interest (Little, Brown and Co, 1995) by Gerald James is a sobering and frightening account of a man who went into covert arms dealing, at the bidding of the Conservative government, and was sacrificed in the cover-up. The most lucid contemporary account of how money really works is Loretta Napoleoni’s Modern Jihad: Tracing the Dollars Behind the Terror Networks (Pluto, 2003).
Thanks are owed to Gerald James, John Loftus, Loretta Napoleoni, David Pirie, Emma Matthews, Richard Williams, Vikram Jayanti, Jennifer Potter, my agent Gillon Aitken, and particularly to my editor Ben Ball for his persistence beyond the call of duty, and his insistence on clarity.
Chris Petit is an internationally renowned author and filmmaker. His films include the now definitive Radio On, and he has written a trio of highly acclaimed political thrillers: The Psalm Killer, The Human Pool and The Passenger.
Also by Chris Petit
Robinson
The Psalm Killer
Back from the Dead
The Hard Shoulder
The Human Pool
The Passenger
The Butchers of Berlin
First published in Great Britain by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd, 2006
This edition published in 2017
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