by Chris Petit
We left carrying stuff. Vaughan sounded asthmatic. We went out by a side door in the garden wall. It was a beautiful day. The Englishman had gone very quiet. His first pertinent question came in a café where we went to reacquaint ourselves with normality. He wanted to know what Karl-Heinz had said about Carswell. I told him there was a rumour he was an arms dealer. Vaughan nodded the hopeful nod of a man who didn’t really understand the equation. Carswell plus x over y equals what? He looked desperate to hijack someone else’s life. Two pretty women walked past the café’s big window, and Vaughan watched from the wrong side of the glass. I got that old 1942–43 feeling, the one where you tried too hard to make it look like you belonged.
The book I had been sent in Florida was about a man whose secret wartime work had resulted in him being identified later by his undercover role. He ended up being hunted because his pursuer thought he was the man he had been pretending to be. If there was a similar connection, it meant we were dealing with some obscure aspect of the past, some secret so deep that to uncover it would bring instant retribution. I had a bad feeling that Karl-Heinz had got himself killed because of something we both knew.
Vaughan
FRANKFURT/STRASBOURG
THE SECOND BAD NEWS OF the day was finding Dominic Carswell in my hotel room. I said hello, assuming he was there as a friend, then ‘Fuck’ when I saw he was with one of the Neos, going through my things. Carswell smiled, which translated as: You have caught me out, but I’ll still have you for breakfast. We all froze, then I ran fast-forward out of the hotel. Double fuck.
I lost them not through any skill—no chase through the streets, no pounding suspense. I simply ran until my lungs were raw, ducked left and right a couple of times, went in the front and out the back of a café, looked round, and found no one following.
Hoover was in his hotel checking out. He made a crack about my condition, but didn’t even register surprise. I had been supposed to be collecting my bag and had turned up breathless and empty handed. Hoover seemed to have elevated himself to some plane of super-calm. His hand was steady as he signed his bill. He had decided we should leave town for a while, so I was to drive him to Zurich, he said. Frau Schmidt had sent him an old photograph from the war, he went on, showing him with Karl-Heinz and Willi. He was suspicious because he hadn’t said where he was staying, plus she had told him she had no photos. ‘I keep getting sent stuff I haven’t asked for.’
‘You can drive,’ he said, yawning ‘while I get some shuteye in the back.’
Hire car. Autobahn. No speed limit. I drove as fast as I could, to put distance between us and Karl-Heinz. And Carswell. And the Neos. Hoover slept while I pushed us into a zone where I no longer felt safe or in control, thinking: He should not have let me drive.
Hoover had an old man’s hands, with liver spots and ancient purple veins. They had calmly picked up the gun that had just shot Strasse and used it on his assassin.
We made the third news bulletin on the car radio. Double shooting in Frankfurt, details to follow. On the evening TV news: there were shots of Karl-Heinz’s house marked off with police tape and a cautious statement from an officer who looked more like a university lecturer, describing Karl-Heinz as a businessman, which made Hoover snort. The dead gunman was named as a Turkish military officer. It was thought that the shootings had been carried out by what the news reader coyly referred to as a Middle East terrorist organisation.
The dead man’s wallet, which Hoover had taken, told us little. Some money, a family photograph of a wife and two small children, a Turkish driving licence with an Ankara address.
In Strasbourg Hoover insisted we stayed at the hotel Maison Rouge. I remembered Karl-Heinz mentioning the place just before he died. Small world, I remarked. Hoover grunted, his usual response. He stood looking for a long time at the old stained-glass medieval scenes on the stair windows and eventually said he remembered them from before. The view from my window showed the town much the same, an old city of steep roofs and sonorous bells.
Hoover wanted to eat at a restaurant he remembered from 1945. I thought the chances of it still being there were remote, but it was, down in the old quarter, on a bridge by the river. Like most of the buildings, it had been standing for several hundred years and looked set to last another few centuries. The district was one of impassive and unfussy burgher prosperity. The restaurant was crowded with frighteningly normal people. We were shown to a table on a covered terrace with a view back up the river. Below was another dining platform at water level.
It reminded Hoover of Switzerland, he said. Like the Swiss, the natives of Strasbourg—stuck as they were between the Germans and the French, who both made claims on them—had realised the tactical advantage of burying any difference of opinion and reinvesting that energy into the solid returns of trade. Hoover suggested we should order pork knuckle in honour of Karl-Heinz’s memory.
We pretended everything was normal, circling each other warily. I taped him secretly, not for any investigative purposes, more because the act of switching the tape recorder on and off made me feel less blank. Men his age didn’t use guns. What the fuck had Carswell been doing in my room?
Of me Hoover said: ‘You certainly subscribe to declining standards in the dress code, and I figure you’re anti-corporate, anti-authority, antimarriage. Maybe you find it hard to settle down, through a lack of application. You’re straight, not gay, bi maybe, but I doubt it. You have got some sort of a problem, but I haven’t figured out what yet. Perhaps you find it hard to commit?’
Six out of ten, I told him, and asked about him and Elvis Presley like Strasse had told me to. Both of us were happy to avoid any reference to the day’s events.
Hoover, after a bottle and a half of wine, his voice holding steady, delivered his companion piece to Karl-Heinz’s rant. Quote: ‘Whatever he said, Karl-Heinz was exaggerating. He usually did. And while we’re on the subject, let me put the record straight. I did not recruit Karl-Heinz, merely lent the hand that enabled him to cross over.
‘The thing with the Nazis was simple. We were in their country, and when the war was over it was better they were with us than against us. It wasn’t a moral choice. We needed them against the Russians. We also figured even after you had cut off the head there would be a lot of body left. So we recruited what was left of the head and bought everyone else off.
‘We hit them with the one thing we had more of than anyone else. Consumer culture. We colonised their subconscious, and we did it very well. Money was no problem, and there were plenty of unaccountable budgets. We hired from American families who maintained good social contacts and were well connected to museums and galleries. We had worked out that the star system developed by Hollywood—the cult of the enhanced individual—would come to apply to other areas, even high culture. The argument was how far the system should extend. Wine and cheese parties with rich philanthropists who could be persuaded to endorse and buy tacitly sponsored product, and realise a profit—this was a very different proposition from the more volatile and unpredictable world of popular culture. Modern art was sniggered at, though accommodated as a necessary evil. Completely out of the question was any of that swivel-hipped nigger music.
‘But there were rogue departments whose bookkeeping flummoxed even internal auditing, and a clear phenomenon called rock and roll was waiting to be exploited. A few of the more enlightened spooks realised it was a more powerful weapon than all the rest put together, especially if it were broadcast directly into Soviet Russia.
‘Rock and roll was pure American propaganda. It spoke of freedom, movement, opportunity, and choice, however much it whined about “Since my baby left me”. It was also an early collaboration between the spooks and the mob, which controlled the jukeboxes and radio airplay. So we gave them pop radio, jungle rhythms, and abroad the Voice of America—the emasculation and repackaging of black culture for a white mass market. Elvis Presley was its paradigm: the perfect image and the perfect double-bind, simultaneous
ly empowered and impotent. We subsidised him, created him, and promoted him. We knew Tom Parker didn’t have a passport and was an illegal entrant, so we had him by the balls. When they got scared upstairs that we might have let the genie out of the bottle, they sent Presley off to the army. It was rumoured but never proved that James Jesus Angleton, that high don of counterintelligence and paranoia and product of Malvern College, England, was responsible for the drafting of Private 53310761, having belatedly discovered that certain of his employees had been responsible for advancing the young man’s career. At the same time, the propaganda value of putting Presley into the army and sending him to Germany was not lost on him. Presley the patriot was an endorsement of American values, and also a product of his country. So they took him out of the picture, channelled wildness into duty, and also had the boy perform one of the great ambassadorial trips of the cold war.’
Hoover carried on in his semimysterious manner, getting drunker, letting me see that there was plenty of ironic space between the performance and the reality. I took this to mean that, given my failure to amuse him, he was going to amuse himself. I was left wondering how you got from Elvis Presley to the familiar use of hand guns.
‘Do you believe any of this stuff?’ he asked.
I didn’t. His response was, ‘If it was there to control, we controlled it because if we didn’t, someone else did.’
When we left the restaurant Hoover wanted to walk up to the next bridge. The cool night air sobered him, and he grew silent. The river divided under the bridge, part of it forced into a tight, angry channel where it went into a millrace. Hoover pointed at the surging foam and said, ‘That’s where I last saw Willi Schmidt. That’s where Willi died.’ He gestured back down the river to the lights of the restaurant. ‘And where we ate was where Willi and I went before it happened.’
He stared at the churning water and suddenly looked tired and too old to bother. He repeated that he had been standing there and watched Willi being swept away, and for that reason was reluctant to entertain Karl-Heinz’s theory of Schmidt’s resurrection as Konrad Viessmann.
He shrugged when I asked what had happened and just said, ‘He fell in the fucking river.’
He was being dragged back into Willi’s past, he said, and therefore his own, whether he wanted it or not. It would only be when he fully understood Willi that he would understand the blanks in his own life. ‘And I am sure they are gaps that will tell me things I would rather not know.’
‘Why not leave it alone?’
‘Because I’ll be dead soon and it’s about time I knew.’ He looked up from the river and said, ‘And I’d like to die in my own bed.’ He didn’t speak all the way back to the hotel.
Vaughan
ZURICH
FRAU SCHMIDT WAS NOT ALONE. She was with one of those little old guys who has ended up resembling a tortoise. He wore a white cap, even indoors, and large black-framed glasses with strong lenses which magnified his eyes. He had no colour or dress sense and was wearing polyester trousers, a clashing sports shirt, and an orange jacket. The cap had an aertex vent at the back.
Hoover seemed wrongfooted by the man’s presence. His name was Sol, and he made a point of not shaking hands. He also said hello to Hoover like he already knew and disliked him. Hoover gave him a who-the-fuck-are-you? look. Sol said, with a crackle of dislike, ‘I’ve been waiting for you.’
When Frau Schmidt went off to make coffee, Sol asked if I knew Zurich. He spoke correct English with a strong accent which turned him into a joke that was probably calculated. Whatever was going on, Hoover said nothing as Sol and I made tea-party conversation.
Frau Schmidt came back and motioned us around her dining table. It felt like playing bridge with no cards.
‘Do we know each other?’ Hoover asked Sol for openers and got a look that said that it was up to him to remember. Sol whipped his cap up like it was a lid and quickly passed his hand across his bald scalp.
I decided to kick-start proceedings. ‘Just who the fuck was Willi Schmidt?’
• • •
According to Sol, Willi Schmidt had been running a wartime escape line for Jews, as early as 1942, with the knowledge and co-operation of Karl-Heinz and Hoover.
Hoover said, ‘Not me. I was a go-between for Karl-Heinz and the Zionists in 1944, but 1942 was too early.’
Sol addressed himself to me. ‘By 1944 it was expedient for the upper echelons of the SS to start laying down plans for postwar survival.’
Sol was keen to prove Hoover’s involvement with Willi and Karl-Heinz’s business from the start. He claimed that Hoover had been the link man in an escape line for Belgian Jews to Switzerland.
Hoover and Sol looked at each other. Hoover said, ‘Did you send me the Jaretski obituary? And the photograph of me with Willi and Karl-Heinz?’
Sol ignored him and said to me, ‘Offering this service in 1942 was extremely far-sighted, and dangerous, and these three righteous men deserved to be congratulated on their boldness.’
Hoover asked carefully, ‘Does this have anything to do with Karl-Heinz getting killed?’
It took a while for that to sink in. ‘Herr Strasse is dead?’ Frau Schmidt asked slowly. ‘When?’
Hoover reached round into the back of his jacket, took out the gunman’s gun, and put it on the table.
‘Did Willi order Karl-Heinz to be shot?’ he asked.
‘Shot?’ she echoed. ‘Willi’s dead.’
Hoover picked up the gun and levelled it at Frau Schmidt’s head. ‘Now tell me you were married to Willi.’
Frau Schmidt started shaking. Sol watched Hoover with a caustic expression and said, ‘Put the gun down. It’s true. Willi was never married.’
‘And this is a scam to get his money, is it?’ asked Hoover, replacing the gun on the table. Old man as thug.
Sol turned his palms up and shrugged. ‘And of course you know nothing about any of it because you were just a courier.’
‘I was the mailman. I never read the message.’
Sol gave him a beady stare. ‘Messengers didn’t normally enjoy such protection.’
Sol seemed to know Hoover’s biography better than Hoover himself. Whether this was Hoover’s selective memory or an old man’s forgetfulness was hard to say, but occasionally his face betrayed signs of someone watching the lines being drawn between the dots of his life. Hoover claimed that the point of his job had been to connect other people without making connections himself; Sol was determined to show patterns that proved him wrong. He described out how what he called ‘the tight triangle of Willi, Karl-Heinz, and Hoover’ had developed an interesting offshoot when Hoover had become Karl-Heinz’s messenger to Allen Dulles in Bern. Hoover shrugged and said that the war had made for strange bedfellows.
Sol’s history lesson: different sides talked in wartime even when they were supposed not to—‘especially when they were supposed not to,’ Hoover corrected. But he refused to admit that it was through Dulles that he had got a job with the Red Cross in 1942.
Sol said, ‘You were placed in the job by Dulles so he could use you to speak to the SS.’ He looked at me and said, ‘Grey men in grey areas.’
Hoover said he could no longer remember. ‘You learn to forget. You live with the fiction until the fiction becomes fact.’
‘And who was your contact in the Red Cross?’ asked Sol.
Hoover saw the question coming and deflated visibly. ‘It was Willi Schmidt.’
‘Willi got around, didn’t he?’
‘Willi had wangled himself an executive post with the Red Cross. He said it was for the perks.’ Hoover sounded like a man who had suddenly ceased to believe a story he had learned by heart.
‘What happened then?’ asked Sol. Hoover was starting to sweat from the little man’s sarcasm.
His first task, he said, had been to go house hunting in Austria for the Red Cross, with instructions to find a small estate for use as a distribution centre. He couldn’t remember much about it, apart f
rom Willi and Karl-Heinz turning up at the gasthaus where he had been staying.
‘Coincidence?’ asked Sol.
‘I would have told Willi where I was. I think Karl-Heinz was on leave. He was in his best civilian clothes’.
Sol gave a sour smile. ‘While you were enjoying your well-dressed freedom, I was in concentration camp stripes. It was where I first met Willi Schmidt and Obersturmbannführer Strasse.’ Seeing my surprise, he explained. ‘How else would a poor Jew meet a nice young Swiss boy in Austria in 1942, except through the SS?’
Sol had been one of the more ‘privileged’ prisoners, as a researcher in the science wing. ‘I graduated top of my year, and they put me on the fast track, ha ha.’ He looked at Hoover. ‘You still don’t recognise me?’
‘Should I?’
Sol told Hoover to describe the place he had acquired. Hoover could remember a tower and some outbuildings. He had only made the one trip.
‘There was another time,’ said Sol. ‘We spent the best part of a day in each other’s company.’
‘That doesn’t mean I remember,’ said Hoover.
Sol turned to me. ‘He collected me, and we drove to a barn near the Swiss border. At night we crossed the border on foot and he left me at a farm.’
Hoover got there at last. ‘The crossing was upstream from a blown-up bridge, a hidden ford which we had to walk several miles to reach. You slipped as we were crossing and got one leg wet, and on the Swiss side you had to wring your trousers out. That’s all I can recollect. That and the fact that you made so much noise I was sure we were going to get shot by a border patrol.’ He shrugged and asked, ‘What made you so indispensable?’
‘Synthetics,’ said Sol.
Willi Schmidt’s leather substitute. Hoover wanted to know how Sol had got around Nazi laws preventing Jews from higher study. By going to Denmark in 1934. By the time the Nazis got there in 1940, his work was considered important enough for sponsorship by an eminent German academic. Ways were found for him to carry on in dusty rooms at the top of out-of-the-way stairs. Once finished, the thesis was appropriated, published under his sponsor’s name, and Sol was taken away. The academic had gone on to enjoy a distinguished postwar career in the United States, with the protection of the American government, developing space suits for NASA.
