Riptide

by Lawton, John

  § 2

  It was going to be a blue day.

  Alexei Troy had spent a morning looking back. It was heartbreak, heartbreak of the sweetest kind.

  A cloud-puffed blue spring sky outside his window. Great bouncy billows of cumulo-nimbus. For the first time in weeks the skies over north London blissfully free of aircraft. Not so much as a training flight – all those young men, boys, boys, boys, those Poles and Czechs, the odd Canadian, the odder American – clocking up the hours on Hurricanes and Spitfires before they got into a real dogfight. Only the barrage balloons, hawsers taut, tethered as though to some giant hand, broke the skyline.

  And blue flowers in the window box that hung on the wall of his Hampstead home.

  And a blue uniform clothing his elder son. Flying Officer Rodyon Alexeyevitch Troy, RAF. Interned, released, enlisted, trained and promoted all in less than three months. The insignia of rank barely tacked onto his sleeve. If the next promotion were as swift as the first he’d be a Flight Lieutenant by the end of the month. This had baffled Rod. He had tried to explain it to his father some time ago.

  ‘I said the obvious thing. “Are you sure I’m ready for this?” Sort of expecting the genial “Of course, old chap” by way of answer – and they said “Ready? Of course you’re not ready. Ready’s got bugger all to do with it. You’re thirty-three, man, you’ve held a pilot’s licence for ten years. We need people who can fly, people who can command a bit of authority, people who might look as though they know what they’re doing even if they don’t. You couldn’t grow a moustache, could you?”’

  There were times when this seemed to Alexei Troy to be an apt summation of the precarious state of Great Britain a year or so after Dunkirk – a year in which the British had fought on alone. Finest hour stretched out to breaking point. All that stood between them and defeat was his son’s moustache (which he had never grown) – symbolic of the colossal bluff the nation and its leaders seemed to be perpetrating on the world stage.

  And blue-lined paper on the legal pad upon his desk.

  Alex had reached a natural hiatus in the writing of his Sunday Post editorial. It was known to working hacks as a ‘whip and top’, spinning the same words over and over again – getting nowhere.

  When I first came to these islands in the winter of 1910, I knew I had seen the last of my native Russia. [move this??] The prospect of England opened up to me when I watched M. Blériot take flight and I entered into an exchange of letters with Mr H.G. Wells on the subject of powered flight. [more about HG? will the old fart take umbrage?] . . . Mr Wells invited me to visit him in England. I came. I stayed. My wife, our son, our two daughters and I ended our years a-wandering. [hiatus here. what?] Perhaps the luxury I have allowed myself of speculating upon the fate of that tragic unhappy [?] land has been the whimsical [nostalgic?] indulgence of an exile – or a necessity. In their fate lie [or lies?] all our fates. [Can I say all this again?] Two years ago, I warned my readers that the Nazi-Soviet pact was not the act on which to condemn a country making itself anew. I was all but deluged in mail, none of it complimentary. [Zinoviev letter?] Well, I am going to badger hector you again upon that same matter. Russia . . .

  And on that word the axis of his thought, the top so whipped, spun to no conclusion. Time to read. When in doubt about your own prose, read someone else’s verse.

  As ever he had a volume of poetry on his desk, next to the lamp. A blue-bound book. He riffled the pages to see if they fell open at a blue poem. He read a line of Lawrence.

  Not every man has gentians in his house . . .

  The blue flowers in his window box were pansies. He could see them from where he sat. The first pansies of spring – a late spring, the first day of double summertime. Long, light nights to come. A deep, velvety royal blue, not the sky blue of the Bavarian gentians Lawrence was describing. It had been years since old Troy had been in Bavaria. England had gentians. He had vague memories of a pinkish plant with a Saxon-sounding name like blushwort or bladderwort – English was full of worts – but the ‘true’ gentian would not grow in this climate. His country home in Hertfordshire was a high plateau, but high in English terms meant a couple of hundred feet. Bavarian gentians were subalpine. He was seventy-nine. He’d probably never see one again. If the war ended tomorrow, he’d probably never see one again.

  Not every man has gentians in his house . . .

  He read on. Few poets were so long a-dying, few poets had dealt in death so long as D. H. Lawrence.

  ‘What are you working on, Dad?’

  His son Rod had come into the study. Doubtless sent by his wife to tell him lunch was ready. Old Troy looked up at his elder son, tore a page from his blue pad and balled it. Tossed it onto the growing pile in his wicker wastebasket.

  ‘The old, old story,’ he replied, not meaning to be cryptic.

  ‘Russia,’ said Rod, not inflecting the word as a question.

  ‘Russia,’ Alex muttered.

  ‘Tough going, is it?’

  Alex looked at the pile. He had balled twenty sheets or more already.

  ‘You could say that.’

  ‘What about Russia?’

  ‘I was thinking about when she would join us.’

  ‘Join us?’

  ‘Us. The war.’

  Odd to be spelling out the condition in which they all lived, so simply, so bluntly, to a man in uniform. The war was total – the war was, without exaggeration, England. History compressed. All history brought to fruition in this moment – this meaning. The meaning of England.

  ‘Sorry. I wasn’t being dense. I meant, isn’t it “if ” rather than “when”? Can we be at all sure they will join us?’

  ‘That’s the problem, my boy. I’m sure. Hardly anyone else is.’

  ‘I mean, one could pose the same question of the Americans, couldn’t one?’

  ‘Quite,’ said the old man. ‘When I get round to it.’

  Rod opened his mouth to speak, but his mother Maria Mikhailovna appeared in the doorway and cut him short and soundless.

  ‘Vite!Vite! Lunch has been upon the table these five minutes.’

  Alex rose, gathered his dressing gown about him, rubbed with one hand at the two-day stubble of his beard. His wife would give him hell if he were late for a meal; she would not dream of commenting on his appearance.

  As they followed her down the corridor, he turned to his son and asked, ‘Will Freddie be joining us?’

  Alex had two sons, Vienna-born Rodyon, and London-born Frederick. His ‘English child’, as he thought of him. Frederick was twenty-five, and had sloughed off his blue uniform, almost as Rod had donned his, when Scotland Yard had made him first a detective and then a sergeant.

  ‘God knows,’ Rod replied. ‘Am I my little brother’s keeper?’

  § 3

  Stahl had been lucky. The morning after his departure from Berlin a Heavy Rescue lorry had hit the house next door and demolished the party wall. Twenty tons of rubble had buried the late Herr Hölzel, and it was only on the day after that that a team of diggers finally recovered the body. Sergeant Gunther Bruhns, stuck with the task of reporting back to Heydrich at SD HQ on the Prinz Albrechtstraße, had not been lucky. Herr Obergruppenführer had a headache.

  ‘Read it to me,’ he said when Bruhns stuck the report on his desk.

  ‘Read it?’

  ‘Aloud.’ Heydrich put his fingertips against his high forehead and proceeded to knead the skin with both hands, eyes down, not looking at the man.

  The sergeant harrumphed and began.

  ‘Body found this morning in Kopernikusstraße. 9.53 a.m. Aryan male, approximately one metre nine, approximately seventy-seven kilos in weight. No recognisable physical features. Uniform of a Sicherheitsdienst Brigadeführer. Letters and notebook in inside jacket pocket are those of Brigadeführer Wolfgang Stahl. Body removed to city morgue. No time of death established, but the house had been all but destroyed by secondary blast on the night of the seventeenth. The local warden
said the bomb hit a house on the other side of the street about 9 p.m. I checked the duty log. Brigadeführer Stahl did leave here at seven fifty-eight. It is perfectly possible that he had arrived home before the air raid.’

  Heydrich had stopped kneading his skull and was staring at the back of his hands – long, long fingers outstretched.

  ‘No recognisable features? What about the blood group tattoo?’

  ‘Not everyone has them, sir.’

  ‘They’re compulsory.’

  ‘I checked. He broke two appointments to have it done – didn’t show up for either. He was booked in to have it done next week.’

  ‘The face?’

  ‘There is no face.’

  ‘The hands.’

  ‘The hands?’

  ‘Bring me his hands.’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘Bring me his hands! Go to the morgue and chop off his hands! I want to see his hands!’

  Heydrich laid his own hands flat upon the desk, palms pressed, fingers fanned as wide as they would go. He called the sergeant back before he reached the door.

  ‘Bruhns, has the Führer been told?’

  ‘No, sir. Not yet.’

  Not yet. Somebody would have to tell him. It was perfectly possible to keep secrets from the Führer. Often the only way to deliver what he wanted was not to tell him the bad news. If he but knew it, the Führer was a man habitually lied to by every member of his entourage from his cook to the Chief of the General Staff – but this was unconcealable. Word would spread. If Stahl had died in the raid, then he was, to date, the highest-ranking Nazi officer to die on the Home Front. There was propaganda to be made. If Stahl was dead, Hitler would notice his absence. One day soon he would ask. But if Stahl was not dead . . . if Stahl was not dead. Heydrich found it hard to believe in such a coincidence. Stahl denounced to him as an enemy agent only hours after he died in an air raid? The denunciation explained one thing – why Stahl had chosen to live in the East, in a petty bourgeois block off the Frankfurter Allee, when the Party had offered him his own villa in Dahlem – one of those taken from the Jews. It was not fitting for an SD Brigadeführer – Heydrich had told him to move when they’d promoted him – but it put distance between Stahl and the rest of the Party.

  He spread his fingers that bit the more – it hurt.

  Late in the afternoon Bruhns returned with a silver tray, draped delicately with a large linen napkin. He set it down on Heydrich’s desk. Heydrich was staring out of the window. Bruhns whipped away the napkin. Whoever it was had done a neat job, a piece of surgery worthy of Baron Frankenstein. All the same Bruhns pulled a face behind Heydrich’s back, wincing more at the gruesome notion of hands on a platter than at the sight itself. It inevitably put him in mind of John the Baptist – but the silver tray was all he could find to put them on. It was the tray he used for the Obergruppenführer’s morning coffee. The pathologist had sent the hands over wrapped in brown paper like two bits of haddock fresh from the fishmonger’s slab. Heydrich was a stickler for neatness – you didn’t serve up anything to such a fastidious man on a bloody sheet of wrapping paper.

  ‘Got ’em,’ he said simply.

  Heydrich turned. One glance at the hands and then straight into Bruhns’ eyes.

  ‘What are you waiting for?’

  ‘Nothing sir.’

  ‘Then get out.’

  Heydrich waited for the door to close. The left hand was broken, the fingers splayed at unnatural angles, the flesh black and blue. He spread the right, free of rigor, as wide as it would go. Then he laid his own hand across it. Cold. Softer than one would imagine. Dead meat. Nothing more than dead meat. Like picking up a pig’s trotter at the butcher’s. His own spread by far the wider. He knew his capacity at a keyboard – a slightly better than average span at an octave and two. This man scarcely touched an octave. It was a fat stubby hand. Heydrich had watched Stahl’s hands glide across a keyboard countless times. His span was an octave and four. There was no piece in the repertory of the piano the man could not play for want of the span of a hand. These were not the hands of Wolfgang Stahl. Stahl was alive. Alive and with a forty-eight-hour start on him.

  ‘Bruhns!’

  Bruhns appeared at the door, blankly expressionless.

  ‘Call the Chancellery. Get me an appointment with the Führer. And arrange a funeral for Brigadeführer Stahl.’

  ‘Private, sir? Family and friends?’

  ‘What family? Stahl had no family. No man, public. Large, lavish and public. We are burying a hero.’

  § 4

  Ten days later Bruhns found himself flipping the lid on a couple of steins of wheat beer with his old pal Willi. He and Willi went back to the twenties together – to their schooldays. They’d hated their teachers then. Now they hated their officers and met every so often to drink beer – wheat beer was great for inducing that delicious, deliriously sodden feeling; a nice heavy, cloudy brew, heavier still since the Reich had seen fit to boost public morale by raising the alcohol level of beer to ten per cent – and to moan about their bosses. Willi was in the Abwehr, a corporal in Military Intelligence – it was something to write home about, but Bruhns’ job was the more interesting. Not everybody got to work for a flash bastard like Heydrich. At best Willi got to pass Admiral Canaris in a corridor – he’d never even spoken to the man. And not everybody got the afternoon off to go to a top-notch Nazi funeral. All that goose stepping and dreary music, but it had to be better than working. Another thing he and Willi had in common, they’d both volunteered to avoid the draft. Get their pick of regiments. Bruhns had even joined the party for appearances’ sake – the trouble he’d had learning the Horst Wessel song! Didn’t make either of them into loyal Nazis – as far as Bruhns was concerned they were just two blokes trying to get by, occasionally get laid, and more often get rat-arsed. His old man had been a paid-up Commie, but he had no politics one way or the other. Nothing against the Jews – well not much, anyway – and for all he cared they could bring back the Kaiser – silly little prick with his wonky arm and daft hats. He should care.

  ‘You get to see the body then, Gunther?’

  Bruhns was puzzled, but too pissed to want to argue – daft question all the same.

  ‘Nah. Mind, I saw his hands though.’

  ‘His hands?’

  ‘The boss had ’em cut off.’

  ‘Cut off? Why?’

  ‘Search me. One minute he’s quizzing me about tattoos and things – wants to know if that body was Wolfie Stahl – next thing he’s damn certain it is and rushes off to tell old ’Dolf.’

  ‘Keep your voice down! Do you want us both to end up in a camp?’

  ‘Wossitmatter? Nobody’s listening.’

  ‘Gunther – this is Germany. Everybody’s listening. It isn’t just walls have ears – the floor, the ceiling, the doorknob and the garden shed have ears.’

  ‘Well if they’re listening, let ’em ’ear this. If that body was Wolfie Stahl, then my name’s Fatso Goering! Now it’s your round. Get ’em in.’

  § 5

  Calvin M. Cormack III sat in his Zurich office, breathed on his glasses, wiped them on his handkerchief and hooked the wire ends over his ears. The M in Calvin M. Cormack III was something Calvin M. Cormack III would have preferred to forget entirely. The M in Calvin M. Cormack Sr and in Calvin M. Cormack Jr (his grandfather and father respectively) stood for Michael. The M in Calvin M. Cormack III stood for Manassas, the battle of the Civil War in which his grandfather had lost an arm, almost eighty years ago. The old man – still going at ninety-seven – always called it ‘the war’ (pronounced ‘wawer’), thereby ignoring the Spanish-American War, the World War and eighteen months of what the British were already calling World War II regardless of its global imprecision. He had served under General Jackson in Virginia, and had worn the arm, or rather the absence of an arm, more proudly than any medal. General Jackson had emerged from the battle with the nickname ‘Stonewall’; 2nd Lieutenant Cormack had been less
lucky: ‘Catch’ – as in ‘One-handed Catch’ – Cormack. A one-armed hero, but a hero all the same. Years later, nearer the turn of the century, when he had been elected Senator for Virginia, he had been cheered into the Senate like a returning warrior – and he played the part to the hilt in a white linen suit, a frock coat, the empty sleeve pinned to the side, his frame spare to the skeletal, a shock of white hair combed back from his forehead, looking like the caricature of a circuit judge in some long-forgotten Twain story. A Southerner from tip to toe.

  ‘It’s crap,’ said Cal’s father. ‘He filled me up with all that rebel stuff when I was a boy. I love the old guy – and so should you – but take everything he says with a pinch of salt. All he wants to do is put back the clock. Can’t be done. We’re one nation. Don’t ever forget it.’

  ‘But why the name? Why Manassas?’ Cal had protested at about age twelve.

  ‘You’re a Southerner. Don’t ever forget it.’

  It was years before this struck Cal as anything other than a paradox, and paradox was not a word he knew at the age of twelve. His father had served the Democrat party machine in Virginia, but he’d also served it in Pennsylvania and New York. It had been convenient to send Cal to school in upstate New York. On the first day they had called the roll in full, and when they got to Cal the boys had sniggered at Manassas. The kid next to him had said, ‘Manassas? What kind of a name is that?’

  ‘Bull Run’ Cal had whispered back. ‘It means Bull Run, that’s all. That’s what it was called by the South.’

  ‘Bull Run? Who in hell’d name a kid Bull Run?’

  And so it had gone on. Five years or more. Manassas quickly became Molasses – he was stuck with it. ‘Molasses, molasses, skinny kid in glasses!’