by Chris Petit
The colonel dithered before deciding not to be a party pooper. I took Dulles a bottle. Of his search he said, ‘Never has the expression needle in a haystack seemed more appropriate.’ I offered to help and was told to go away and celebrate. ‘You deserve it, Joe.’
We were all drunk by the time Dulles was done. ‘Colonel, I thank you for your time,’ he said, and handed him a wad of U.S. dollars. ‘That should cover the drinks.’
The colonel was so drunk he was barely able to count, but mumbled that it seemed too much even for vintage champagne.
‘The price of victory,’ said Dulles with a smirk. ‘Let’s go, Joe.’
Later he told me that the money he had used to pay for the champagne was cash he had found in the vaults. ‘Reichsführer Himmler’s counterfeits.’ He laughed, and I laughed, too, thinking how from now on life would be about the road ahead.
The daylight hurt my eyes, but Dulles looked as refreshed as if he had just stepped out of a cold morning shower. ‘Give me the keys,’ he said. ‘I’ll drive. You get some shut-eye in the back.’
I dipped in and out of sleep, glimpsing crazily tilted ruins as we left the city, then sky racing past as the car hammered down the autobahn.
At one point Dulles pulled over and got out, on an empty country road untouched by war. There were trees in blossom. The shimmering foliage, lit bright by early morning sun, felt more unreal than the broken brick and dust and stench of Frankfurt.
I thought Dulles had stopped for a leak until I saw he had his briefcase with him. He took out a manila folder. So slim and insignificant-looking, I remember thinking, compared with the bulk of everything else we had seen that night. I wondered again what could be so important that it required his personal intervention. Dulles got out his Zippo and put the flame to the file. He didn’t see me watching.
Vaughan
FRANKFURT
SIEGFRIED WAS DOING A LATE night at his regular evening hangout, a middle-class joint avoided by the Neos, with a big window to show off its clientele. Siegfried was with a couple of women who looked like models. The place smelled expensive.
Siegfried said he had arranged for me to have dinner the following evening with the old Nazi, Strasse. He first-named Strasse relentlessly, then, over several schnapps, practised his strong leadership riffs. The model-like girls sat in obedient silence. Lipstick, perfume, shampoo-smelling hair—it felt like an age since I had been anywhere near a woman. I missed Dora—complicated, impossible Dora.
I told Siegfried about the interesting trip to the yard. It looked like an unusual operation, I said. We played euphemism pat-ball. It offered people a freedom of movement not normally available, he said. Reading between the lines, what he was suggesting was that the Neos were into people smuggling as a growth industry. The Neos were into commodity, and the black economy was an expanding market.
Siegfried showed a fan’s enthusiasm for his subject. Hungary was the main road route into Austria. Budapest was good for Chinese because of a large local community. Chinese tourists—‘tourists’ was what he called them—flew more now. I mentioned the woman who had lost her travelling companions. He was familiar with the problem. There were different transit points even when destinations were the same. The difficulty was supply in the final stages, by which I understood him to mean lorries.
One of the models had her jaw clamped in an effort not to yawn. Siegfried, oblivious, said that a problem in Rotterdam was causing a knock-back effect. Rotterdam was a major dispersal point in the final stage of the process but was temporarily closed because of ‘technical difficulties’. This had resulted in congestion further down the line, hence the location I visited that evening.
The women looked bored enough to fuck.
I was slow to appreciate why the Neos should want to get into trafficking racial inferiors into Germany. Siegfried shot me a sneaky look. The tourist business was not only profitable, he said, it was directional. Thanks to their involvement, Germany was not a destination. Germany was transit only. They made sure everyone got shipped on. To England mainly, Siegfried added with a joyless grin. The women were looking around for better company. Siegfried didn’t care. He was saving his wad for the political orgasm. I rather regretted their going.
After that, Siegfried withdrew into a mysterious silence and left alone. I drank several black coffees. It was half one, half midnight in London. I left a message for Dora saying I would catch the first flight and be home for the day. She and I lived on recorded messages—cryptic blips from undercover, Morse code of the heart, SOS and Maydays combined, the last gasp of a relationship, or whatever it was that we had had, past tense. We would, of course, remain friends, as we moved on, she to fuck my employer, Dominic Carswell.
I left a message for Carswell, too. Charismatic Dominic Carswell, former television correspondent—Dominic Carswell, News at Ten, reporting from Beirut/Belfast/West Berlin/Afghanistan—fencing champion, a youthful fifty, trademark lock flopping across his brow, making him a little less earnest, a little more boyish. Carswell to me: ‘I hear you’re the best at what you do.’ Sincere Carswell, so well informed. He’d got the voice, the smooth delivery that could do one-to-one.
I did undercover well enough to have worked on a couple of TV series. Sometimes I got recognised in Safeway. Usually they thought I was a friend of a friend. I had the face of a friend of a friend. The website stuff I had showed the Neos was for a programme I researched but never filmed on U.K. football hooligans/the far right/website racism.
Carswell had been willing to pay an absurd fee for a couple of weeks’ stealth in Germany. He would pay in cash, he said, which meant I wouldn’t have to declare it to the Revenue. He told me he was rich and bored. His company produced what he called ‘innocuous pap for the Middle East market’, wildlife documentaries that earned him a pot of money, and left him hankering to return to hard news.
Target One: Siegfried, the yuppie Neo, considered by some a future national leader, the acceptable face of the far right, repackaging extremism for the mainstream. Target Two: the old Nazi who, according to Chinese whispers, was contemplating going public. My job was to persuade Strasse that I was his sympathetic ear. As for Siegfried, Carswell would turn up later, and together with our hidden cameras and tape recorders we would get him off-record, foaming at the mouth about dirty foreigners and Jews and all the rest.
‘Sounds fun?’ Carswell had asked at our first meeting. I had nodded. I didn’t say that I was happiest when I wasn’t having to be me. Carswell, by contrast, was one of the super-confident, fluent in all areas of exchange, especially those of the heart, followed closely by a proper dress sense. Carswell was the man other men wanted to be, and he went out of his way to make himself attractive to both sexes, and, above all, to Dora. It wasn’t hard to see why she had fallen.
Several coffees after Siegfried’s departure I was not tired and could not face my hotel, which smelt of grime, saturated fat, and industrial-strength cleaner. I decided to go to the airport early and got a taxi to take me back to the paper yard on the way. The driver was young, with a depressing taste for early Pink Floyd. He agreed to wait twenty minutes for an extra twenty marks, not bad for sitting and listening to ‘Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun.’
The gates to the yard were locked, but the perimeter fence was easy to crawl under. (The reason for the dogs, perhaps.) I heard the big diesel engines first, and had time to position myself behind a paper stack. Two big container lorries left, followed by the Merc and the BMW. The Alsatian was sitting in the front passenger seat of the Merc, lit up by the lights of the BMW behind.
Everyone was gone. The big shed door was unlocked. Everything had been stripped out. It was like no one had ever been there.
Frankfurt airport was the polar opposite to the paper yard, a regulated and authorised world of arrival and departure, of sponsored consumption, corporate politeness, and, above all, glass. Early morning and the first transatlantic flights were coming in.
Hoover
FRANKFURT
FRANKFURT, NEARLY SIX DECADES ON: the airport was a city in itself. Its efficiency and the speed at which we were processed took me by surprise. The flight—apart from the distraction of the chicken-or-beef moment—had remained another metaphor for death, of which, as you grow old, there are too many. Passengers waited under the harsh light of the arrivals hall at the baggage carousel, a ritual that never failed to remind me of one last game at tired children’s parties. Happy landings, time zones totally out of whack. Having had time to think, I decided I was running away from Mary’s reproving silence, which was absolute now, and from the fear of medical diagnosis. Karl-Heinz was just a sideshow, a distraction, like Betty Monroe, once so beautiful and now everything forgotten in senility. The thrill of being old: visiting friends who are sicker than you.
The new Frankfurt was as big a shock as the bombed-out shell had been. It stood as a testament to the corporate urbanisation and suburbanisation of Europe; and to think, one plan at the end of the war had been to turn the whole of Germany to pasture. Everything looked cosmetic and neatly fenced, as if to say that Germany had given up any designs on lebensraum, and was content with its lot. Plenty of glass said that it had nothing to hide. In the city there was no sign of Speer’s triumphalist vision, though in the swankily designed super-towers that dominated the centre, you could see the aggressive braggadocio of international corporatism. This was the real union forged out of the ruins of war. The universal business logos of peacetime profit were everywhere.
I have never trusted what they—‘they’ being the several overlapping interests that decided these things—had done to Germany, but I have always admired the smooth switch from expansionist, genocidal policies into something so thoroughly acceptable and apparently house-trained. The irony was obvious. Like the Japanese, the Germans got the hang of peace quicker than their European conquerors.
It goes without saying that I recognised nothing of Frankfurt. I had been away so long it didn’t even feel like coming back, more the case of the arriving stranger. My hotel was adequate in its steak-and-fries and patterned-carpet way, but a little desperate. The windows didn’t open, and a card on the TV offered me porno if I wished to pay.
The most noticeable thing about coming back was how nothing smelled anymore. Everything had been assimilated and conditioned. Warmth and coolness had replaced smell. Where I had grown up in Liège, the smells had always been pungent—black tobacco, leaded gasoline, drains, and that particular café mixture of liquor, baking, and coffee. As a child I associated them with the adult life that awaited me. They were evocative of a whole world I wanted to be part of, and still miss. All Florida smelt of—apart from the baby talc odour of American old age—was warm tarmac and hot car-metal, and the level, semichilled smell of supermarkets.
Nineteen forty-five was the stink of bomb damage, sewage and drains, and, with the warmer weather, bodies decomposing in the rubble. Being back, it was impossible not to think of death, given the proximity of the present foundations to the charnel house. No doubt Norman Mailer would equate it all with buggery.
In the flesh Hitler’s master race had on the whole been unimpressive. Most looked more like their leader—short, plain, and sallow—than the Aryan ideal. Americans, by comparison—black and white—were a different breed: taller, languid, and with much better dental work. There was also a established commercial beauty programme, a whole industry devoted to the improvement of people’s looks, and a cult of hedonism, the insistence on having a good time, that gave Americans a quality of being in the moment that has always struck me as quite un-European.
For me, the abiding image of the second world war was a smiling GI slouched in a jeep, cigarette in hand, behind him an old German town square. Memorable because it was like a snapshot of the shock collision of two cultures. The GI in the foreground made everything else redundant. In crude terms it struck me as an image that was marketable in a way that what Hitler and Goebbels had tried to peddle was not. With hindsight, I would say that what I identified was a shift away from ideology towards product. As for the GI slouched in his jeep, we saw his successor a decade later in the form of Elvis Presley (another marketable product), who duplicated on a universal level that sense of alien newness I had sensed, but not fully understood at the time, in that image of the GI.
Vaughan
LONDON
DORA WAS FATHER’S SECRET, one that had lasted until his funeral. Most of the mourners were unfamiliar, golf club members or Rotarians. I had seen Dora and wondered who she was. Tall, slim, younger than the rest, wearing a smart black coat with a hood. When I knew, I could see nothing of my father in her.
After the service she walked up with no hesitation, took off her glove to shake hands, and said, ‘I’m your father’s daughter, the one he didn’t tell you about.’ I liked the brisk way she said it, as though sharing a joke, which, given how we stood out from the rest, we already were.
The lilt to her voice came from her mother, Irish (too upset to attend). Her mother was the daughter of Father’s housekeeper, Mrs Shannon, who had been responsible for raising me after my own mother had disappeared to Canada with a client of Father’s. It was these overlaps Father had worked so hard to keep separate. He, too, was a professional keeper of secrets, a bank manager, a man of security who became a victim of recession, dismissed two months short of the forty years that made him eligible for a full pension. Within a year he was dead of cancer. I had failed to see behind the fussy neatness, the silences, and the discretion.
I had left his funeral with my newly acquired sister. We went back to her flat and got drunk. I thought we were flirting until we started kissing. An electric jolt of pleasure. Funerals and the shock of discovery. We carried on until we were breathless and told ourselves afterwards that we had just been fooling around. Desire and taboo, a piquant mix. Dora said, ‘It would, I suppose, technically be incest.’
In the paper yard I hadn’t been able to get Dora out of my head. It had nothing to do with jealousy. The correlation was an emotional smuggling in terms of what my father had done to her. I wondered if we weren’t both inheritors by default of the deep assignments, and detachments, that had secretly conditioned his life. Undercover is a form of detachment, too, of noninvolvement, while also being narcotic and addictive.
Thanks to a combination of mortgage laziness and general domophobia, my flat was in a deteriorating block, a dumping ground for London’s problem families and illegal immigrants. (Hello, Siegfried!) On warm days when windows were open, the smell of frying and spices hung in the air. Most families cooked campfire-style on primus stoves.
The building was terrorised by feral children, particularly two preternaturally pale, shaven-headed brothers. They were dumb in a damaged kind of way and barely articulate, apart from basic swearing. Their wildness was evidence of a withering parental neglect and boredom, but they made life unpleasant in so many little ways that it was impossible not to hate them.
I gave Dora until ten then phoned her mobile. She did her hello all surprised and glad, but there was a new coolness. It sounded like she was with Carswell, who was the silent partner in a three-way conversation. ‘You’re in London,’ she repeated. Only for the day, I said. She seemed surprised. She hadn’t got my message, and had just swapped to the day shift so she could only see me before noon. ‘Dominic wants a word,’ she added, and put him on the line. Carswell suggested meeting at his club for lunch.
Grays was a newish private members’ club in Mayfair, run by well-bred young men, with attractive staff. Grays was exclusive to the point of being secret, and secret to the point of variable spelling: no card, no notepaper, no telephone listing.
Dora was waiting in the mews behind the club, smoking a cigarette. She looked different dressed for work. It reinforced how much we were becoming strangers. I wanted to be intimate but not personal. My vocabulary had been corroded by the Neos. Word blips ran interference through my head—Jew-wank, cunt-rag. ‘You’re l
ooking great,’ I said, and censored out that fucking Carswell agreed with her.
There was no point in discussing our semi-incestuous relationship. The ground had been gone over endlessly, the dangerous novelty and the intense curiosity. It had stopped short of full knowledge, not out of deference to taboo but because we sensed that extricating ourselves would be even more painful. Fucking would have driven us even further into our father’s world of secrecy and denial. It would have, in the end, only been a way of fucking Daddy, we had decided, tipsy at the time.
She had moved on quickly to Carswell. I had guessed before she told me.
Dora worked at the club to subsidise her art course. It was how they had met. Carswell apologised for the tactlessness of his choice and fixed it so Dora didn’t wait on our table. I wondered what she had told him about us. He wore glasses to read the menu, the smart equivalent to school dinners. This was harder than Frankfurt. Dora and Carswell required a better level of acting. Dialogue with Carswell was notable for what was left unsaid; Dora the unspoken subject.
Carswell the fencing master drew me out and opened me up. I told him everything about Germany. He offered good audience in return, his attention holding, knife and fork poised, his food forgotten. Why, I wondered, should a man who had been on national television end up making crappy programmes for the Middle East?
The mask slipped once, maybe, when he said, ‘My affairs never last. I’m too fickle and vain. Terrified of growing old.’ He gave his best telegenic smile. There was bound to be a Mrs Carswell. Perhaps his unexpected display of conscience was a cover for a wider disingenuousness. I felt nostalgic for the skinheads.
