The Human Pool

by Chris Petit

  Nothing was black and white. Nothing separated out the way they said it did later. I used to watch in wonder whenever my wife, Mary, separated the white from the yolk of an egg. It reminded me of men like Karl-Heinz, Dulles, and Willi, who seemed to be able to do the same with real events.

  I suspect that the job I was doing was not dissimilar to what went on in large office departments all over Germany with the confiscation and redistribution of Jewish assets, which would have amounted to equally routine office and committee work, with everything ratified in triplicate. Paperwork in Geneva, and the carbons required, was a business in itself, sometimes the only one, it seemed. Whole sections were needed to organise its clerical production, distribution, and filing. The Swiss were minute mad. An abiding memory, the sound of multiple typewriters at work, room upon room of female secretaries.

  I remember a considerable lapse of time between meeting Dulles and moving to Geneva for the Red Cross, yet it must have happened faster, because by the time Jean-Pierre’s family was taken away, I was travelling between Geneva and Zurich, and can date that by Willi’s birthday party, which was two days after the feast of the Assumption, the day of Jean-Pierre’s deportation. On that memorable night of 17 August 1942 Willi showed no signs of being anything other than a man out for a good time, kissing all the girls.

  Beate von Heimendorf

  ZURICH

  BY ANY CONSERVATIVE ESTIMATE there were at least six of Mother’s lovers at Willi Schmidt’s birthday party. This was something I could hardly tell Hoover about when he began to refer to it.

  During Hoover’s recovery there is a growing recognition that both our lives have been governed by blanks and secrets kept from us. I wish nothing more than to be his guide yet am forced to keep my own counsel to protect Mother’s reputation—particularly with regard to Willi Schmidt, and how that relates to Hoover.

  Many of the connections Hoover seeks to make in his own life I know about. What to him is coincidence is to me a matter of affiliation. With his return, the past took on an extra and unwelcome significance, and I became increasingly compromised. Yet the attraction between us persists, however much in one respect I rue the day we first met. It was only because of him that I went through Mother’s papers for the first time. Otherwise I suspect my tardiness, which I see now was a form of self-protection, would have continued.

  However much I already knew, I was still shocked to the roots by the casual confessions of so much promiscuity. Mother, usually so correct in her language if not her morals, writes of ‘fucking’ Allen Dulles. I was upset by this unloosening, and frustrated, too, because she avoided the real subject, which for me was Father.

  Family seems to have meant very little to Mother, compared with her other world of intrigue, adventure, control and assignation. I read on with a sense of terrible discovery that left me with a dirty sexual itch, which frightened and compelled. When Hoover came back that first afternoon, I was surprised to identify my feelings towards him as close to lust. Sex with Hoover would be a negation of my mother, I decided in the dark corner of my mind. It was hard not to make a fool of myself with him since my life has been lived on emotional ice. My first husband’s accusations of frigidity still cut deep. My second marriage aped my mother’s, without her infidelities. My second husband and I live apart, an arrangement disguised by his constant travelling.

  My subsequent reticence towards Hoover has been governed by duty. Power of attorney over Mother’s affairs takes precedence over my emotions. Before she became too ill, Mother gave me a sealed letter to post if any element from the past announced itself. This, I presume, extends to Hoover.

  Mother’s papers are what she in that refined but racy East Coast voice of hers would have called dynamite. Her private correspondence with Allen Dulles reads like one long breach of security. There are dozens of letters and diaries and notebooks, too, some pornographic descriptions of lovers, and undated jottings on the stationery of different hotels. Also included are many secret government papers which should have been destroyed or returned and not left to lie around in the garage. Many deal with what I can only describe as boring spy stuff, a kind of intrigue that holds no interest for me, or so I told myself. But the sense of personal danger I get from reading them persists. I now see them as a form of time bomb, which was perhaps Mother’s intention.

  Hoover

  ZURICH, 1942

  WILLI SCHMIDT’S BIRTHDAY PARTY was attended by several hundred guests and held in the gardens of the German Embassy of all places. Willi was proud of having fixed that. He had called in a lot of favours. Even God had complied by providing a balmy evening, if not the Chinese lanterns, which made for a miraculous sense of intimacy not at all Germanic. For Willi the beauty of the place was that its diplomatic status meant that the Swiss couldn’t complain about the noise. Later there would be an informal party, he told me, in a cellar club where they could play American jazz. German tolerance did not extend to that.

  Willi introduced me to three other guests, including a comical-looking little man with carroty hair and gap teeth. Willi introduced him as Bandi Grosz, the smuggler king of Budapest. Bandi looked pleased with the description, more so than the others who were described by Willi as, ‘Herr Kleer, a German spy, and his friend Herr Busse.’

  Bandi pointed at Busse and added, ‘Big German spy.’

  Kleer said, in the tones of a man already very drunk though it was barely seven, that it was as well they were in Switzerland, otherwise they would have Bandi shot. Bandi looked at me and mouthed the word Jude.

  He was being outrageous, I presumed.

  Bandi was content to play the knockabout drunk, though not as drunk as Herren Busse and Kleer on that first evening. His patchwork of languages included English which remained incomprehensible. A Jew at the same party as Nazis, even if it were in a neutral country, was by 1942 the unlikeliest sight, and I assumed that he and his companions were playing a joke at the expense of their hosts for the evening, the German diplomatic corps.

  How on earth did Willi manage to avoid the taint of compromise? I wonder now. By making sure that everyone got drunk and had an excellent time, I guess Dulles—should he have even been there?—and I bumped into each other in the gentlemen’s lavatory and studiously ignored each other as we flanked a reeling man with a Nazi armband who stood pissing in drunken circles. Betty Monroe was at the heart of the party, working the ambassadorial set. I saw Karl-Heinz behind a haze of smoke, in what looked like erotic conversation with a feral woman in a pink silk shift. Given the array of dignitaries on show, I wondered if the party really was Willi’s and if he hadn’t managed to insert his own guests, somehow, into a larger diplomatic affair.

  Bandi loudly informed me that he had agreed to work for the Nazis in exchange for his freedom. He had done this to avoid arrest by Hungarian customs after being caught supplying Austrian Jews with Hungarian papers and running gold in and out of Switzerland. What he called his survival kit included an impressively embossed document stamped by the Vatican (he said) and a letter from the director of Actio Catholica announcing his indispensable work for the Roman Catholic Church, to which he had converted. But his real hope of safety lay in the services he believed he could provide to all parties. Bandi’s motto was that everyone ended up talking in the end. Even the Nazis and the Jews would talk in the end, impossible as that might seem.

  Bandi Grosz went on to earn a few mentions in history books, which referred to him as a sleazy courier in Eichmann’s and the Nazis’ ‘trucks-for-Jews’ ransom negotiations in the summer of 1944. This footnote has gained him a tiny, dubious immortality.

  Kleer and Busse remained oblivious to Bandi’s indiscretions the night of Willi’s party. Kleer was on a drinking marathon, and Busse’s priority was finding a woman. Busse had travelled down from Stuttgart, where he ran the bureau controlling espionage in Switzerland and Spain, Willi told me afterwards. When in Willi’s jazz cellar Busse got what he wanted, I was surprised to note Willi’s disapprova
l. I mistook it for Swiss puritanism, and only properly understood later when he told me that he regarded money for sex as an unnecessary transaction. Women were not to be paid for. It occurs to me now to ask if Willi’s moral blind spot was rooted in money, in spite of his generosity, and whether his emotions remained controlled by a Calvinist thrift.

  Willi remained ambivalent towards Bandi because Bandi was a sentimentalist and Willi was cool, and he didn’t like being with people who weren’t physically attractive. There was something else about Willi. For all his assurance and social front, he was keen to go out of his way to prove to me that he was serious and an operator. He flattered me, told me that he couldn’t do what I had done. ‘It takes a special kind of nerve to go undercover,’ he said more than once. I had given the matter little thought. I had never thought of myself as going or being undercover, because I had no idea of what I was under the cover of. I simply thought of my excursions as more or less dangerous journeys.

  Willi’s importuning was evident the day after his party, when he dragged me out of my hangover bed to watch him operating with Bandi Grosz. Bandi’s ostensible task was arranging the purchase and delivery of food for Germany. Rice, cocoa, and chocolate were on his list. He was also trying to find out the names of Swiss transport firms dealing with the British, and the names of companies selling bomb fuses to the Allies. But his real purpose was to create tight relations with Willi. Bandi had smuggled platinum as a sweetener for Willi, who traded it on to an associate of Karl-Heinz at a good profit. Karl-Heinz’s papers make a reference to the sale.

  Bandi needed Willi for the Swiss end of his business. Swiss corruption was so institutionalised that an inside contact like Willi was essential. Bandi joked that in Switzerland his kind of work was done by bankers; also, the Swiss had fewer illusions than the Hungarians. Hungary was run by a man calling himself an admiral in a country that was as sealess as Switzerland.

  I was about to make my first trip to Croatia in search of supplies for the Red Cross. My trip to Zurich for Willi’s birthday parties—Willi: ‘Why have one party when you can have two?’—had been passed off as work. I had told Geneva I needed to attend another session with the Croatian legation, whose travel requirements were subject to constant revision.

  Bandi warned me Croatia would be a waste of time, and advised me to ‘get my ass’ over to Budapest, where he could help me locate produce and transportation. He implied that the Germans had a vested interest in Red Cross channels, too, so there would be no interference. He made the universal gesture for money, rubbing thumb against forefinger.

  Hoover

  CROATIA, 1942

  CLAUDE BUVIER WAS A BUSINESSMAN. I once told Jackie Kennedy I had travelled to Croatia with a man called Buvier, a slightly different spelling to her maiden name. She hadn’t been amused, and that was the full extent of my social contact with Jackie K (or Jackie O, for that matter). Buvier was what Dulles had in mind for me. It was Willi who had made the actual introduction some time before his birthday. Buvier needed a driver.

  Buvier had had a long career as a wholesale buyer and shipper of provisions, and was recruited out of retirement on the recommendation of Willi, whose family were friends of the Buviers. Buvier’s task was to acquire food and provisions for Red Cross relief. As the Red Cross ranked low in the list of wartime priorities, aid had to be scrounged. Transportation was poor, fuel hard to come by, communication unreliable. A rumour of a warehouse of maize would turn out to be several tons of bonemeal.

  It wasn’t until later, when Willi and Bandi Grosz became involved in Budapest, that any significant results were achieved, just as Bandi had predicted. Bandi and Willi knew whom to buy off and whom to bribe. There was a difference, I learned. They knew what would later become known as the Catch-22 of any given situation. Buvier was dead by then. He died, unnoticed by me, somewhere on a road in Slovenia, his polite expiry masked by the rattle and thump of the car. Guards at the Austrian border were curious to know why I was transporting a corpse, and when I told them I was unaware that I had been, they fell about laughing, held me for forty-eight hours while they did the paperwork, and knocked me about a bit as a matter of course.

  That first trip with Buvier in late August 1942 involved an unreliable old Citroën which overheated. In spite of the summer weather he travelled in homburg and overcoat. He wore pince-nez glasses and had a politician’s moustache, and his grey skin looked as if it had never seen outdoors. He was old and fussy, and dressed like a diplomat. His mild manner was, on acquaintance, unpromising.

  Once past the Swiss border the white Citroën with its large red crosses attracted plenty of stares. We clipped the top of Italy and passed into Slovenia, where for long stretches we had the road to ourselves, apart from the occasional horse and cart. Once we were buzzed by a fighter plane, which forced us to pull over for the convoy it was escorting. As we travelled on we found ourselves in an old Ruritania, a summery landscape of heat haze and ripened crops, with few signs of military order apart from the occasional nineteenth-century barracks. Buvier regarded it all with equanimity: flat tires, the overheating engine, slow to nonexistent service in cafés, the ubiquitous tomato and cucumber salad (often all there was), and the way we were looked at as though we had stepped out of a novel by Jules Verne.

  It wasn’t until we reached a small town near Rijeka that he addressed his first personal remarks to me. There were many refugee camps in Hungary, he said, and in winter the temperature would drop into the minus thirties, and refugees would be without warm clothing. Most of his own business had been in Spain, where we could easily have found what was necessary to prepare the camps for the coming winter. Yet here we were, because of bureaucratic in-fighting, hunting chickpeas in Croatia. I barely knew what a chickpea was. Chickpeas were Muslim, Buvier informed me. The potato was Christian, and that’s what we should have been looking for.

  Buvier was a strict Roman Catholic, and he attended early morning mass. Sometimes I went with him, if only for the familiarity of the universal ritual and the bright feeling of stepping out of the gloom into sunshine. Buvier would stand on the steps and converse in Latin with the priests. Our promissory note for the chickpeas was to be guaranteed by the church, and to this end Buvier carried an important-looking letter of introduction to Dr Stepinac, cardinal of Zagreb, stamped with the Vatican seal (shades of Bandi Grosz).

  In Zagreb, Buvier was entertained variously by the church, the local fascist puppet government, the Ustashi, and Nazi diplomats. The priests were everywhere, better dressed for the most part, focused by celibacy and unencumbered by meaningless familial and matrimonial duties, their sense of politics silky and insinuating. The power of the Holy Mass fed directly into that of the state. The doltish Ustashi was their blunt instrument.

  The Nazis cultivated blandness and were friendliest towards me. Herr Veesenmayer, German plenipotentiary, with his gracious incline of the head, was a good listener, expert at small talk. ‘Aren’t we having marvellous weather? Let me introduce you to my friend Wisliceny.’ ‘Till we all meet again,’ he had toasted on our first departure. And we would, with the exception of Buvier (R.I.P.), in Budapest in the summer of 1944. Wisliceny, big-boned and amiable, spoke of what he was doing in Zagreb: technical adviser. He showed his teeth when he laughed. He and Veesenmayer regretted being stuck in a provincial backwater and were happy to entertain visitors. ‘Chickpeas?’ I remember Veesenmayer repeating with a raise of the eyebrows. They were men of clear-eyed ideology, at ease with the implications of what they were doing, who would resent the guilt imposed on them later.

  We were also separately introduced to Father Draganovic, who talked airily of a policy of rapid conversion of Orthodox Serbs to Catholicism. I am ashamed to say I yawned at all these backyard politics, ignorant of the implications. I sympathised with Veesenmayer and the others’ boredom.

  We first met Draganovic at an evening recital of local music and poetry. There was a children’s choir and a lot of native doggerel, presided ove
r by a room full of badly uniformed men who laughed and smiled and pinched the children’s cheeks and clinked glasses.

  Draganovic’s kingdom might have been of the next world, but he was thoroughly adept at negotiating his way through this one. In private he touched one’s arm to make a point, the point being that he was there ‘for all to talk to’. I was twenty-three at the time. Through men like him I came to see that the ways of the world were unfathomable. He was forced to spell things out for me, insofar as a man of his circumspection was willing. The church would act as intermediary for people otherwise unable to talk, he told me. He hinted that the Allies and the Nazis should find ways of opening a dialogue about everyone’s next problem, Communism, which was the real enemy. Placed where it was, Croatia was especially vulnerable, and the Catholic Church had been in the front line of the fight against the heathen for centuries. I told him I would pass on his thoughts.

  ‘To Mr Dulles only,’ he warned me. Dulles’s name came as a surprise. I realised I had a lot to learn.

  That afternoon I was arrested by the Ustashi. A lieutenant interviewed me in atrocious French about currency irregularities. The man was drunk enough to be dangerous. At one point he opened his desk drawer and threw something on the table. It wasn’t until he tugged my ear and pointed to the bayonet in his belt that I realised what it was, at which point we were interrupted by an SS officer who marched in and shouted the lieutenant out of the room. Then I decided I really was in trouble.