by Chris Petit
The house was being watched, he said, plucking at my sleeve. He was being followed, probably by Israelis except they weren’t professional enough. (I looked outside. The street was quiet. It was an unremarkable night, quite forgettable. I knew I wouldn’t sleep in spite of my tiredness. Seeing Karl-Heinz had unsettled me. I saw my conscience: cold clinker at the bottom of the stove waiting for the rake.)
He kept telling me he had unfinished work, although he couldn’t say yet what it was, and pointed to the maps strewn about—Hungary, Turkey, Syria, the Middle East, Germany, all were arrowed and circled—testament to some vast, final campaign. In his head; I doubted if it existed anywhere else. He showed me these maps proudly, saying that soon he would be able to explain. The old Karl-Heinz cliff-hanger.
Around one o’clock he stopped pretending. He asked if I had held a Swiss bank account during the war. I shook my head. He looked surprised. ‘I thought everyone did. It was like having a mistress!’ He had got his on Willi Schmidt’s recommendation, but had not used it to stash away loot like some others he could name. Once Karl-Heinz had lied better than anyone. Not anymore. I doubted if he had used the account as little as he claimed. Even in uniform he had been a consummate businessman and deal maker.
After the war he had ‘forgotten about the account,’ and it had lain dormant, along with thousands of others. Most had belonged to Jews killed by the Nazis, and the subsequent refusal of the Swiss banks to turn them over to surviving relatives, citing the absence of death certificates as a reason, had taken more than fifty years and an international scandal to sort out. The banks—stubborn, proprietorial, and ultra-conservative—finally owned up, only to find themselves involved in a further controversy. The published list, meant as a late apology to the Jews, included the names of several Nazis, some of them war criminals. Relatives of those Nazis were entitled to claim the contents of the accounts regardless of their provenance. So stolen goods went to the relations of the stealers. Karl-Heinz had learned that much to his cost, he said: his name was on the list. A nephew he had no idea existed had made a claim, and the story got followed up by a television company, who had come knocking on his door.
I asked about the Englishman who had been at dinner. Karl-Heinz shrugged him aside. ‘He was recommended as someone who might be able to put my side of the story. I think it’s more likely he is some sort of spy.’
He insisted ‘they’ were catching up with him. ‘They’ were building a case against him, despite his immunity deal. This, he believed, could still result in prosecution for war crimes. ‘It’s all bullshit, of course,’ he added. ‘Zionist cocksuckers.’
I suspect, as for me, terror of medical diagnosis lies at the root of his fear, and the rest is embellishment. We both know without having to remind each other that there is no such thing as remission, only undiagnosed illness.
Karl-Heinz refused to accept that I wasn’t in a position to help. He thought I had contacts and influence long gone. His paranoia did another flip. ‘Of course!’ he said. ‘It’s because everyone’s dead that they are coming after me!’
I told him a good lawyer could probably delay the case until after he was dead, but Karl-Heinz’s earlier good humour had deserted him.
I asked the next question with an old trepidation. ‘Was Willi’s name on the bank’s list, too?’
Strasse nodded. It had been printed just above his. He held up his fingers to indicate the tiny space that had separated them. ‘Small world, like the Englishman said. Now it turns out Willi has a wife. I bet you didn’t know that.’
‘Bullshit. Willi wasn’t the marrying kind.’
According to Karl-Heinz, the widow had written saying she had married Willi in 1944, and was looking for witnesses to vouch for her because all the relevant certificates and memorabilia had been destroyed. Her letter, he remembered, was what he had been trying to locate in his bedroom wardrobe.
‘Tomorrow when you are in Zurich—’ Karl-Heinz gave me a crafty look that said: I am not so forgetful as you may think. ‘You will go and see Willi’s wife. She lives there. I will give you the address.’
My job would be to check her out, he said. He tried again and failed to find the letter. He fussed around, helpless. I decided it was another of his delusions.
At the front door he gripped me with both hands, his eyes watery. He wept, a few stiff tears, and said that if it weren’t for the work in hand he would kill himself rather than endure the half-life left to him. He still had his service Luger.
When the room phone rang in the night, I knew it was Karl-Heinz. ‘I couldn’t sleep, either,’ he said. ‘I have found the letter. Do me a favour tomorrow, Joe, when you are in Zurich. Go visit Willi’s widow.’
I was tired and in a sleepless funk thinking about my illness. ‘Go see her yourself, Karl-Heinz. I’m not over here to meet new people.’
He sounded hurt. He had been counting on my help, he said. The journey to Zurich was far too exhausting for him to contemplate. He needed to conserve his energy. He rode my silence until I said, ‘Give me the address.’
According to the letter, Frau Schmidt hadn’t seen her husband since 1945. Me neither. What she didn’t explain was how she had known how to contact Karl-Heinz.
Karl-Heinz had two answers to that. His favourite was that Frau Schmidt was a trap set by the people watching him. He feared kidnapping. He had given evidence in camera at Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem and believed that the Israelis had been after him ever since. His second answer was that Willi wanted to access his account but couldn’t apply in person, being technically dead. The invented Frau Schmidt was his surrogate.
For the first time I seriously asked myself whether Willi were still alive. I remembered my earlier trepidation. It reminded me of the nerves I always got before making a run.
‘Okay,’ I said, and told Karl-Heinz what he wanted to hear. ‘I’ll go see the widow Schmidt. I’ll run you one more trip.’
Karl-Heinz, rejuvenated, said, ‘For old times’ sake’.
*Vaughan’s note: ‘In fact not true. According to Betty Monroe’s diaries there were several crucial meetings at the end of the war.’
Vaughan
FRANKFURT
LYING HUNGOVER IN MY ROOM when Dora called, early for her. She was keen to investigate her lover for me—a new form of our intimacy.
Curiously little on Carswell existed, and he himself was not forthcoming. It had taken her a lot of work to find out that before television he had been in radical journalism in the 1960s, after an initial spell at the BBC had earned him a ‘Christmas Tree’ file, meaning that he was marked down for subversive leanings. At the same time he had fenced to an Olympic standard, prevented from representing his country because of an obscure scandal. ‘He gets moody if you ask.’ He still fenced.
Dora sounded falsely cheerful. She had been offered silly money to go to a ‘party’ in Hampstead, fixed through a Grays member. She wanted me to say she should go. We ended up rowing. I told her she was getting out of her depth. I was distracted by the contradiction between Carswell’s upper-class pursuits and radical leanings.
I called back to apologise, but the call lapsed into resentful silences and hostile questioning answered by more hostility. I hung up angrily, thinking: file under impossible relationships.
Beate von Heimendorf
ZURICH
Dear Mr Hoover
Thank you very much for your last letter with your schedule. We look forward to seeing you on the Sunday after your arrival. I will warn you in advance how distressing it can be to see Mother now. She was, as you have written, remarkable for her alertness and intelligence.
Since our correspondence began I have been thinking a lot about what Mother must have been like when you knew her. I have enjoyed writing in English again. Mother and I always spoke in English but I write it rarely, and find that the impression I have of her is different if I think in English not German.
On her good days, which sadly are few, she asks what she h
as done to be spared in such a terrible fashion, and, as she puts it, ‘kept behind after everyone else has been called’.
You had the privilege of meeting her in the war, her most extraordinary period in a life that was never ordinary. You will be well aware of her fortitude and charm.
In your letter you asked what she was really like, given that your own dealings with her were restricted. You know she was fiercely intelligent, and always determined. Her artistic side she attributed to Edith Wharton, a distant cousin. Mother was blue-blooded and blue-stocking, and travelled to Europe to study at the Sorbonne. She then moved to Switzerland in 1936 to do her doctorate under Carl Jung, a study of taboo and ‘cargo cults’ in primitive societies. She was ahead of her time in her demand for equal treatment from men. Few were her equal in any respect.
She claimed she once partnered Nabokov at tennis. I believe that Nabokov taught tennis in Berlin, but I have no idea if he was ever in Zurich. Mother could be fanciful on occasion. I remember Father once telling me when I was too young to understand, with a mixture of affection and something else I now see was exasperation, that Mother collected famous people.
Her marriage, to my father, has always been a source of mystery and some pain. It was the central enigma of her life, and, for those of us who were the result, not an easy one to live with! If my father was hurt by her adventurousness he never showed it. He was a dedicated and private man, and careful in granting my mother her freedom, but saddened by what he thought of as his failure. He was in all respects decent and upright. I know it hurt him that she refused to take his name after they married. But I risk being indiscreet. Perhaps I am writing this for myself, so please forgive me if it is not what you want.
When the war broke out in 1939 I know she considered moving back to the United States, in spite of being married. Her family put pressure on her because it was by no means certain whether Switzerland would succeed in remaining neutral. She has never told me what stopped her, but, given what follows, it is possible to make an educated guess.
You ask about Mother and Allen Dulles. Her account of their meeting is fresh in my mind because she spoke to me about it at the start of her illness. While her memory was still good she spoke a lot about the past. She said she was ‘setting everything in order before putting it away’. It was only then that we began to become close.
I have never understood the assertion that America is a classless society. Mother and Mr Dulles came from that loose association known as the ‘top drawer’. I have the impression they knew each other long before their first official meeting in 1942. Mother has never talked about this. She was well capable of playing the clam when it suited.
Their relationship is generally documented as starting with Mr Dulles’s arrival in Switzerland in November 1942. According to Mother, he first came to see her on a clandestine visit in January 1942, just after the United States entered the war. She had been recommended to Mr Dulles by her uncle who was a senior partner in the same law firm.
Mother was struck by Mr Dulles’s comical insistence on cloak-and-dagger secrecy, and spoiled his surprise by guessing that he had been asked to become a spy. His task was to start assembling an espionage network, which he would return to take charge of later in the year. That Mother was central to his plans was a surprise, she said, if only because she was used to speaking her mind rather than dealing in subterfuge. She was being disingenuous. She was quite capable of putting her life in separate compartments, and her recruitment was inevitable, given her nationality, her connections, her languages, and her knowledge of Germany and Switzerland.
Mother said she measured the seriousness of Mr Dulles’s intentions by the out-of-the-way restaurant of indifferent quality where he insisted they dine so no one would overhear, rather than somewhere more their style. Mr Dulles was nothing if not a social creature. Over dinner he explained that it would be their job to provide Washington with accurate information about relations between Switzerland and the Third Reich.
As a lawyer in peacetime he had represented many German and Swiss clients, and it would be his business to maintain contact with them while Mother monitored Switzerland’s secret trade with the Germans and established clandestine links with occupied countries. Mother took that to mean that Mr Dulles would go to parties while she did the hard work.
We talked several times about that evening, and she could still recite the menu (with a shudder) after so many years, as well as most of the conversation.
Mother suspected someone very smart was behind Mr Dulles’s appointment. Mr Dulles was a very clever lawyer, with a keen eye for the loophole. He proved knowledgeable at explaining how Swiss banks and businesses were flouting the rules of neutrality and acting on behalf of German companies. He relished his involvement in the war, and insisted upon the widest possible reading. Did Mother understand, for example, the implications of Japan’s recent entry into the war for China and Germany? (For all his willingness to treat her equally, she found he talked down to her in matters of business.) Mother could rattle off verbatim the answer to Mr Dulles’s question: Germany relied on China for tungsten, essential to aircraft manufacture, but as of December 1941, and Japan’s new alliance with Germany, trade between China and Germany ceased because the existing conflict between China and Japan, dating back to 1937, placed Germany and China indirectly at war.
Mother, who was capable of showing off with the best, said that Germany would have to get its tungsten from another neutral source such as Portugal, and had the satisfaction, as she put it, of watching Mr Dulles’s ‘jaw drop’.
In many ways Mr Dulles found his match in Mother. She was quick to understand his reading of the war, not in terms of politics or ideology, but in relation to essential raw materials. Tungsten, manganese, and chromium, as well as more common commodities like iron ore, oil, and diamonds, were what won wars. Trade, not troop movements, was what Mr Dulles called the bottom line, which is why the role of neutral countries like Switzerland would always be crucial.
In her way Mother was ahead of Mr Dulles. She told him that it was her understanding that the German war effort without Swiss help would last no more than two months, and she had the satisfaction of seeing Mr Dulles lost for words twice in one evening.
Her source was, ironically, a man she had met at a party, though the deduction was her own. The man in question was a German diplomat. He and Mother had become social friends, and, even before her meeting with Mr Dulles, he had intimated that he was against Hitler and for America, and interested in maintaining and developing personal relations in spite of their new status as enemies. I believe he went on to become one of Mother’s most informative agents.
I would appreciate in return any memories you have of my mother. I find it a great source of consolation reading about her. It helps dull the awful sense of injustice at her incapacity. I am sure I can speak for Mother when I say that we both look forward to our meeting with you and we trust you have a safe and comfortable journey.
Yours sincerely,
Beate von Heimendorf
Hoover
ZURICH
BEATE VON HEIMENDORF SPOKE as she wrote, in perfect, formal English. She was waiting at the head of the platform, as she said she would be, a tall, supple-looking woman in her late fifties, wearing a Burberry raincoat. Her handshake was firm. I liked her immediately. She was somewhat distant, with a precise air that I suspect had been hard won and at the expense of trust. It could not have been easy growing up as Betty Monore’s daughter, and she looked as though she was only now emerging from the shadow. She said I was the first of her mother’s agents she had met and left it at that. We drove to the clinic in a Mercedes estate, the last word in understated luxury.
Seeing Betty, shock as it was, didn’t tell me anything I didn’t know. We are all due out pretty soon, and time does the cruellest things to those who don’t deserve it. Such a fine woman reduced to a husk. She was sticklike and frail. Even her cardigan sat on her like a topcoat, weighing her do
wn. She gave no sign of recognising us, just as I had been warned. Betty had once been what life and intelligence were all about. The biggest shock was that she didn’t look like she missed it. In contrast to her physical deterioration, the eyes were clear and serene.
How an old man’s mind works: it works the way it always did, except it gets more selective and can operate on several levels at once, more than it used to. The here-and-now has become the least important aspect of any dimension.
It can get you pretty frisky, this long walk down the last corridor to that green door at the end (believe me, it’s green), and I ended up wanting to bed the daughter and one of the nurses (squeak of rubber shoes on polished wooden floors). I knew this was a desperation measure, know, too, that I panic about all the things I won’t do again. Who’s to kid? Ejaculations reduced to a tearful flutter. When was the last time that Mary and I did it?
Betty was in what I could only describe as a Swiss room. The Swiss design fixtures and fittings for sickness better than anyone else. I’m sure you pay, but I kept thinking it would be a privilege to be ill in such surroundings.
For someone whose brain is still too active, and given to morbid thoughts, I almost envied Betty her serene blankness, and would be curious to know from her how it feels to find chunks going missing, whether it is scary or like watching snow fall. Better that way than the full invasion my body might soon be undergoing. Memo: Go out leaving as many loose ends as possible. Resolve nothing!
Icebergs are among the most beautiful and mysterious things I have seen. Being with Betty reminded me. I can’t describe it any better. Perhaps there is a poetic justice to her condition. We were in a business where memory was too often a curse.
