The Human Pool

by Chris Petit

  Garage was the technically correct term in that it had been designed partly for cars, but there was a whole small apartment above, once presumably the chauffeur’s quarters. It was here that Beate thought the papers should have been. One wall was lined with shelves full of box files, but none contained the relevant documents.

  Beate does not look the forgetful type. A cleaner comes in twice a week, she said, and there are a couple of gardeners. Either the papers have been mislaid, like she said, or they have been taken, but I had no wish to alarm her. She thought it possible that the secretary, who comes in twice a month to deal with her mother’s affairs might know what had happened to them. She seemed relieved when I agreed. The explanation sounded plausible. Beate pressed her hands together. Her wrists, like her ankles, were slender and elegant. ‘However, it’s not all bad news.’ Inasmuch as she is capable of sounding skittish she did. ‘I have found one set of documents in Mother’s desk relating to your friend Herr Schmidt.’

  I followed her to her mother’s study, continuing to admire her ankles as we went upstairs. The study was large and well appointed, overlooking the garden. The shelves and panelling were beech. There was a day bed for afternoon naps, or daytime lovers, and lots of framed old photographs. Beate showed me the papers, typed on a translucent and waxy paper. They looked like carbon copies. I could smell her perfume, which was light and clean. We were standing close; I felt the ache of desire. It was pathetic, I told myself. The woman was showing me her mother’s papers, that was all. Our eyes met briefly and gave out confused signals. ‘Look,’ she said, ‘these papers are marked secret. We probably shouldn’t be looking at them.’ She laughed and said she thought her mother was probably very indiscreet. I read a lifetime of self-imposed inhibition into that remark.

  She made me a gift of the papers, or at least a copy of them. We both seemed to be aware that they were a surrogate for a different sort of transaction. The encounter felt like a botched coda to a Truffaut movie, about thirty years too late.

  There was a photocopier in a room downstairs. We stood in silence for a small age listening to the humming machine warm up. I watched the sweep of the green light under the cover as it copied each page, Beate’s hands pressing on the lid. ‘I suppose the fact that they are confidential papers doesn’t matter now,’ she said. ‘I’ll look again for the rest. There were boxes of them. I can’t think where they have gone.’ She looked at me and smiled and asked what I planned to do with the rest of my stay. I said I wasn’t sure.

  ‘Footloose and fancy free, as my mother used to say. That’s the best way. If you come to Zurich again, be sure to look us up.’

  She phoned for a taxi, and we spent the time it took to arrive standing outside. Beate showed me the garden, and we made conversation about the house. For her it had always been for grown-ups and not somewhere she had been comfortable growing up. I had the strange feeling that if we went back indoors we would see the ghost of Beate as a child. ‘Is something the matter?’ she asked. The taxi arrived before I could answer. We shook hands, then she leaned forward and kissed me on the cheek. It was an impulsive gesture, rather than standard Continental politeness, of a sort that I suspect she is not often given to.

  Betty Monroe

  ZURICH, 1942

  SECRET MEMO TO ALLEN DULLES

  Memo: BM/420093/AD/01/31/42

  Yr eyes only/read & destroy

  Subj: requested assessment

  Intelligence source Gerontius: a consignment of leather is on offer for sale by the Vichy French to a Swiss shoe company, Brevecourt, who will pay a better price, in Swiss francs, than German firms restricted to payment in Reichsmarks.

  While Brevecourt is not on the U.S. Treasury’s blacklist, it is suspected of German trade links.

  Brevecourt is in discussion with our consulate in Bern regarding export of a consignment of children’s shoes to the U.S. There is a hitch as the product leather was purchased from a Swiss company which is on the Treasury blacklist. Brevecourt argues that the leather was acquired before the other company was blacklisted.

  I have spoken to the consulate and am being allowed to manage the Brevecourt case. In the role of a trade official, I have met two of Brevecourt’s representatives. The elder, the overweight Herr R, is a windbag of no use to us, but Herr S strikes me as promising, and refreshingly impudent for a Swiss. He pulls faces behind Herr R’s back and supposes he is flirting. (I know you like a lively memo.) Herr S seems to be there as an observer because Herr R does the talking and plays an excruciatingly dull form of bureaucratic chess. The more boring the meeting, the greater the signs of collusion from Herr S.

  Herr S makes a point of arriving ahead of Herr R. As you are keen on my asides: Herr S probably makes up in stamina what he lacks in finesse. He tells me he was in New York for six months in 1938 (his English is good) where he said he saw the future. After tasting America, he informs me, Europe seems unbearably stuffy. His flirting is somewhat stodgy. His passion is jazz, his tragedy that he is a shoe salesman. This is a somewhat misleading assertion as his family own the company. There must be more to life than selling shoes, he tells me meaningfully. I warn him never to underestimate shoes where a woman is concerned.

  A fortunate breakthrough when Herr R became suddenly indisposed after drinking a cup of the consulate’s coffee and had to excuse himself. (Ex-Lax. I nearly muddled the cups, which would have been unfortunate.)

  In Herr R’s absence, Herr S proved himself an able negotiator. The export deal proceeded towards a smooth close, with previous objections less problematic. I have written formally to Brevecourt to inform them that, subject to final approval of the export papers, the consignment may go ahead, and to note Herr S’s negotiating skills.

  Herr S is being encouraged socially and understands his position: were he to come and work for us it would (eventually) gain him an American permit. Herr S regards his country’s neutrality as a slur on his manhood, and entertains the idea of adventure. He has failed to spot that he is working for us already: from his gossip, we can gather that his uncle, who runs Brevecourt, has a German wife, and is staunchly pro-Nazi; also Brevecourt is buying extra storage space, thus confirming suspicions that the company is stockpiling leather. This ties in with Gerontius’s intelligence. I have a feeling that Herr S’s impatience (and greed) might be to our advantage.

  Memo: BM/420097/AD/02/10/42

  Yr eyes only: read and destroy

  Subj: Herr S

  More positive developments. Sensing Herr S’s desire to rebel, I have: (i) fed him Gerontius’s information about the consignment of French leather on sale to Brevecourt; (ii) encouraged him to come up with a plan, quite a daring one, which would result in him earning lots of money.

  We have surmised correctly that Herr S likes money best. He has proved a quick and willing learner. A calculated recklessness appeals.

  It is now possible to assess Brevecourt’s illegal operations. In the years before the war, the company took advantage of the closure of many Jewish leather and shoe firms in Germany and bought cheap. Brevecourt has been stockpiling leather, and, to avoid trade embargos, it maintains an illusion of independence from its German outlets. It uses an agent named Ruiz and a dummy company in Lisbon to provide false documentation to show any sale to Germany coming from Portugal. The leather is used by the German companies to make boots for the army. Brevecourt’s foresight has led to huge profits.

  Herr S’s nerve is proving good. The other night I joined him in his office where he was working late, and together we found the transportation timetable for the leather consignment. It will travel as part of one of the German trains for civilian goods allowed to pass through Switzerland. Its destination is a suburban station near St Gallen where the trucks are to be uncoupled and diverted into a siding to await unloading.

  Since writing the above, the following postscript can be added. A reception party was waiting for Brevecourt’s lorries. Once the wagons were unloaded, Brevecourt’s drivers were detained and
the lorries driven away.

  Since then an anonymous caller has offered the stock back to Brevecourt at well above cost. Herr S, after his success in dealing with the U.S. Consulate, has I believe successfully negotiated the repurchase, and I understand that Brevecourt is more than happy to get its leather back, in spite of having to pay twice over. The discrepancy will be reflected in its next bill to the Wehrmacht. Herr S’s stock has further risen because of the export deal to the United States.

  Hoover

  ZURICH TO FRANKFURT

  THE TRAIN SPEEDS THROUGH the dark countryside. Given the seamless zone that modern Europe has become, it is hard to appreciate, now that access is so easy, the significance of borders in wartime. My grandchildren are being raised with almost no concept of boundaries—national, international, moral, religious, conceptual, or otherwise. To them history is the past, a dead subject. Actually, it is a non-subject. It has nothing to do with the way they perceive their lives. They live in a literal world, flatly lit from above.

  Thanks to Betty’s documents I finally appreciate the significance of the death of the first man I was ordered to kill. Señor Ruiz’s murder was the invisible Footnote to Betty’s memorandum. Another thing: even before I knew Willi Schmidt, I find we were linked in advance, as though destiny, not chance controlled the matter, and perhaps still does.

  In keeping with that destiny, which in the case of myself and Willi was anything but straightforward, my passage to Lisbon, via colonial French West Africa and Tangiers, prepared me for the life of detour that lay ahead.

  I arrived in French West Africa after escaping in September 1940 on a boat from Brittany to Dakar, travelling on papers stolen from the Belgian fascist I had befriended. It was an open secret that Belgium’s gold reserves were on the boat, too, after being forwarded from Brussels and then Paris after the Nazi occupation.

  The template of French colonial civilisation was wearing thin by the time it reached Dakar, redeemed only by the luxury of a servant economy. A new pro-Nazi regime had been hastily installed, but among its first tasks was fending off German requests for the return of the Belgian gold. I almost certainly saw this gold again when Dulles and I visited the Frankfurt vaults in May 1945, thus contributing to my theory that life’s most important patterns are anything but sequential. My own modest role in the affair was restricted to being interpreter for the local Dakar administration and a gang of recently arrived German civilians known by all to be Nazi agents.

  So my first proper job in the war involved working for the Germans. There were endless meetings in stifling rooms whose fans failed to make any impression on the heat. The Germans sweated into their starched linens. They were quite humourless, dedicated solely to recovering the gold, and frustrated by the need to maintain diplomatic relations with their collaborators. The French, more ironic and casual in the ways of bureaucracy, and not looking to impress any Germans so far from home, were experts at deferral. The Germans agreed to provide the transportation. The French were finally persuaded to be responsible for the security and, after much wrangling, the fuel bill.

  The Germans were suspicious of me at first but not inquisitive, being invasive by nature rather than colonial. The climate of French West Africa mocked their fiercely held beliefs. They yearned for the temperate zones of northern Europe. Dakar sapped their wills. The untidiness of French colonialism, with its sexual laxity and riot of vegetation, torpor, and maddening round of senseless ritual, offended their sense of order. The only real punctuality, which you could set your watch by, was the first evening drink served at six on the dot. A hard liver was the price of collaboration.

  By Christmas, only a small proportion of the ‘consignment of goods’, as the Germans comically persisted in calling the gold, had reached its initial destination in western Algeria because the Sahara had become vulnerable to Allied fighter attacks.

  Uncertainty was the making of the Germans. It provoked them into a plan that rivalled the maddest visionary quest of the Conquistadors for El Dorado. Unlike the Spanish, the Germans had their gold, and all objections were overruled. Once they had succeeded in giving their quest a mythical dimension there was no stopping them. I was told to inform the French that the itinerary presented was non-negotiable.

  Their journey was supposed to take two months. It took the next year of my life. I was kept on as interpreter and travelled with the first consignment. The plan was to ship the gold in several cargoes and stages, first by rail from Dakar to the terminus at Koulikoro, more than a thousand miles away, then nine hundred miles by boat along the Niger to Timbuktu. From there the river journey continued on smaller craft downstream to Gao, where the shipment was transferred to trucks to be taken across the Sahara.

  The voyage across the Sahara defined the madness of the enterprise, an epic transportation of a commodity that became increasingly meaningless in the context of such a vast emptiness.

  The enormity of our task and the implacable terrain ate away at us, while turning us silently heroic. We inhabited a realm beyond language. Our minds became divorced from our bodies. Memory faded, and with it desire. Distance, and time, ceased to have meaning. The burden of our journey and the unending harshness eroded identity, turning us into figments of our own imaginations, until we lost all sense of outside conflict and only the inner battle remained, for sanity and survival.

  Progress, pitiful to begin with, was delayed by sandstorms. The trucks became useless. The advances of twentieth-century engineering were abandoned for donkeys and camels. We travelled as Bedouin. Everything was jettisoned apart from the gold. The Germans, so loyal and obedient to their ideals, ended up questioning the gold’s worth, and, by extension, their own. We stared at each other, scarcely able to remember our own names. From the southerly terminus of the West Algerian railroad it was a further thousand miles by train to the coast, the stations along the way serving little except punishment and labour camps.

  Later I learned that by the end of 1941, only a third of the gold had crossed the Sahara, and it would be nearly another six months before the full consignment reached Berlin.

  By the time we arrived at Tangier, I discovered that the desert had relieved me of any conscience. I worked as a thug for a local Mr Big until the end of November, when I had enough to pay a fishing-boat captain to drop me near Algeciras. From there I travelled to Lisbon, arriving as news was breaking that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbour and the United States was at war.

  Lisbon at the end of 1941 was much like any other neutral city port, wide open and dangerously tight at the same time. The regime was fascist and vindictive. The country’s grand colonial dream had almost faded, along with its architecture, and the damp salt air and the proximity of the Atlantic, with its sense of uncertain departure, gave the city an air of fabulous melancholy.

  I presented myself to the Americans and was dealt with by an official called Coburn whose cynicism seemed excessive for what was apparently a desk job and paper administration. My plan had been to reach the United States, but Coburn said my visa application would be delayed because of the war. Coburn was like a tough old cop in an American movie, his prejudices brought out by whisky. He thought I was a spy. His interviews were exhaustive and verged on interrogations.

  Señor Ruiz ran an import-export company from a room above a shop, next to a café-bar. Most of his day was spent not working but sitting in the café-bar, drinking coffee and brandy, and reading newspapers. Ruiz was bored. He lived by himself and ate alone in local restaurants. His regular laundry was near the café. Most evenings he took home a parcel of clean clothes wrapped in waxed paper.

  I had no idea why I was supposed to watch Señor Ruiz. I became familiar enough with him to know that he shaved only every other day and his teeth were stained from black tobacco. He was around fifty, had a moustache, and was losing his hair, which he oiled with a strong pomade. Once I stood close enough on a busy tram to smell garlic on his breath. Liver cooked in the local manner was his regular dish.
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br />   Twice in the last week of his life he visited the same prostitute. Most nights he stayed and drank in the café-bar, with other regulars, then stopped off alone at different bars for several nightcaps. By the time he got home he was staggering.

  Lisbon, with its grand boulevards and labyrinthine alleys and side streets, was a city designed for surveillance. It could be said that to appreciate fully its street plan and architecture, you needed to follow someone for a week.

  On February 2, 1942, I killed Ruiz, on Coburn’s orders; stuck a knife in him in an alley, after coshing him with a sock full of stones. It sounds very melodramatic now. At the time it had seemed the only way to convince Coburn to take me on trust. I was more anxious about bungling the job than taking Señor Ruiz’s life. Besides, it was easy then to pretend that such acts were a proper test of manhood. The death merited one paragraph at the bottom of an inside page of the main newspaper. Someone had removed Señor Ruiz’s wallet. That was my only mistake: I was supposed to have taken it, and could never decide afterwards if one of Coburn’s men had been watching me stalking Señor Ruiz. That was Lisbon.

  For a week no one could find me, and I have no recollection of that time. After that, Coburn told me he had a proposition. I would be sent not to the United States but to Switzerland.

  The empty discipline of the desert made what followed more bearable. The world of subterfuge and espionage into which I was thrown was catholic and voluptuous by comparison—Shakespearean, even—in its capacity for embellishment and deception, for disguise and concealment.

  Vaughan