by Allan Massie
They sat in the park after lunch and listened to the band. It was just warm enough to be pleasant sitting out of doors. The band played Viennese waltzes, and after their bottle of wine over lunch they responded to the mood of the music: light, sensuous, exhilarating. Over lunch they had talked of the “situation”. They had talked it out and arrived nowhere. But the talk had done them good. They had not quarrelled, which both had been afraid of doing, and they were united against whatever was going to happen. Yet Becky had not been able to bring herself to ask anything specific about Franz’s father; that barrier remained solid between them, even though for the moment both pretended that they could not see it.
The band played the waltz from Der Rosenkavalier, the music surged over them, drowning the laughter of children playing on a nearby roundabout; there, swans, prancing horses, even (a touch of local colour) llamas, rose and swooped. Becky watched her lover in profile. She said, “We must go somewhere. I can’t wait.”
He turned towards her. She looked up at him, her thin face touched with pink, her lips parted.
“I mean it,” she said again.
Two policemen swaggered past. Snatches of their conversation, which was about football, were carried to them. Franz took her hands.
“Are you sure?”
She nodded, saw the surprise in his face.
“We must,” she said. “Look.”
She took her hand out of her pocket and held it open, palm uppermost, to display a key.
“A girl I know gave it to me. She shares an apartment with two other American girls, secretaries at the Embassy, I think. They’ll be at work.”
“What girl?”
“A friend of mine called Alexis. Come on.”
She put the key back in her pocket. They got up. Franz laid his arm across her shoulders. They hurried, awkward as the participants in a three-legged race, towards the park gates. They passed the bandstand where the military band, in its cherry-coloured uniforms, broke into a selection from Italian opera. As they turned out of the park and climbed into the little sports car, the “Grand March” from Aida boomed them towards happiness. Becky pressed Franz’s thigh.
Two hours later, they heard the door of the apartment open. For a moment they lay very still, like criminals. Franz rested his left arm round Becky. Her hair tickled his cheek. He was free of doubt, caught up in eternity, in goodness. She turned round, kissed his lips, pushed her hand between his legs.
“I love you,” she whispered. “Again…”
Later, he dozed. Then he sensed that he was alone. He heard voices; the swish of water, felt stupid with happiness. Becky placed a cup of coffee on the table by the bed, sat down, and stroked his cheek. She was dressed now, but he slipped his hand up her cotton skirt, and she let it rest there. A fragment of Latin verse came into his head: Neque enim malignior fortuna! Eripiet nobis, quod prima hora dedit – “A more malignant fortune can never take away from us what this first hour has given.” But he didn’t speak it. It wasn’t a time for other men’s words. Petronius had killed himself at Nero’s command, with mockery on his lips.
Becky said, “Come and speak to Alexis, she’s dying to meet you; have a shower first, there’s a towel over there.”
Alexis was a long-legged, California-beach blonde wearing only knickers and a bra. She sat on a stool, painting her toenails, and looked over her shoulder at Franz, through a forest of hair worn in the manner of Brigitte Bardot.
“Hi,” she said.
The tip of her tongue stuck out as she concentrated on her task.
“Don’t mind me,” she said, “I’m going to be late as usual.”
“It’s good of you to let us… I’m very grateful.”
“What are friends for? I don’t like this colour, honey, I don’t think it’s me. Still, it does him good to be kept waiting. These guys think they’re the tops. If this is New Spain, then God save me from Old Spain is all I say.”
“I thought New Spain was Mexico.”
His smile robbed the correction of offence, or so it seemed, for she laughed and rose from her contorted position in one easy movement – Venus from the sea perhaps – and smiled back.
“Boy, am I glad to meet you at last. Am I tired of hearing Becky on the subject, or am I?”
Becky came through from the little kitchen. She held out a flowered dress which she had been ironing.
“Like I say,” Alexis said, holding out her hand and laughing, “what are friends for?”
She slipped the dress on.
“Aren’t you going to wear tights?” Becky said.
Alexis looked down at her toes.
“Hell, no, why spoil the effect. He says he is some kind of liberal. He can take bare legs. Test his principles. ’Bye, darlings, must fly.”
“She didn’t even remind us to lock up,” Franz said.
“No, she’s crazy; I adore her. She does just what she likes and loves it. And she’s clever, you know. Works for some international agency, I don’t know which, UNESCO maybe.” She came and sat on the arm of his chair and wove her fingers through his hair, then she slid over on to his lap and kissed him.
“You don’t mind that it wasn’t the first time for me?”
He shook his head.
“Really?”
“Really.”
“Really and truly?”
He kissed her lips.
“He was an American boy, called Joe. Last summer. He was a friend of Alexis’s brother and they were both staying here.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“He was sweet. But he wasn’t like you.”
When he stopped the car outside the block of her parents’ apartment, and said, no, he wouldn’t come in, she said, “It’s not because of Joe?”
“Don’t be silly.”
“Because really he wasn’t that important.”
“You’re crazy,” he said. “Did you know that? But you’re also perfect. So was this afternoon. That’s why I won’t come in now. Because it was perfect. OK?”
“OK. Do you love me?”
“For ever and ever, amen.”
“Me too,” she giggled. “I mean I love you too, not myself.”
SIX
Franz didn’t notice the Studebaker parked behind his car in the University car park, and he wasn’t aware of it following him out of the University grounds, along the boulevard and then through the narrower streets of his route. Most days he might have observed it and wondered about it, but today he was too happy. He had spent the night in deep, yet dreamy, sleep, and woken relaxed, blissful and triumphant, and the mood had stayed with him throughout his classes. It wasn’t until they were caught at a traffic-light, which had in fact turned green, though movement was impossible, the crossing ahead being jammed, that the Studebaker eased itself alongside him, and the driver rolled down the window and said, “We need to talk. You need to talk to me.”
He spoke in English, and Franz examined him. He had a lean head with very fair hair cut very neatly, and he wore a blue-and-white checked seersucker suit and a navy blue white-spotted bow tie. He had a gold ring on the little finger of his left hand, and the hand holding the steering wheel was covered with little golden hairs that shone in the sunlight. The hands themselves were very pale in colour and manicured, and he wore a Rolex wristwatch.
Franz took all this in while he wondered at the approach and couldn’t think of a suitable reply.
“Pull in by that big bar on the left once we get across the Avenida.”
He had an American accent, and he spoke with the authority of a movie hero.
The Studebaker was slow away when it was at last possible to move – it was probably an automatic – and Franz had put enough distance between them to get away if he chose. But curiosity won. He eased the Triumph towards the pavement, and was out and waiting before the other car was parked. The man in the seersucker suit detached himself. He was shorter than he had looked sitting down; a movie star who would have to be stood on a fruit box t
o make love to a girl with legs as long as Alexis. He held out his hand to Franz, and then pushed ahead of him into the bar where he ordered two large Manhattans. He watched their concoction, giving directions, and then took both glasses and led the way to a table in the corner, though there was supposed to be waiter service only in that part of the café. But no one came to reprove them. Perhaps he was known there. He pulled out his wallet, extracted a card and handed it to Franz. It gave his name, Calthorpe Binns, and that of a newspaper in Indianapolis, and his address – Buenos Aires.
“I usually get called Cal,” he said. “I’ve been anticipating our meeting with pleasure, Franz.”
“I shouldn’t have thought Argentinian affairs were so interesting to readers in Indianapolis,” Franz said, “for a paper to afford a correspondent here. Which state is it anyway? Minnesota?”
“No, Indiana. Well, you are right, they’re not. But it gives me status, and then when I file a story, it gets syndication.”
“Look,” Franz said, “I think I can guess what you want to talk about. But there’s nothing I can say, nothing I can tell you.”
“You’re not drinking. Don’t you like Manhattans? Hell, when I think of the trouble I have gone to teach them to mix one right! ‘Look,’ I said, ‘Scotch is Scotch and I have nothing against it, it’s a great drink, but it doesn’t belong in a Manhattan.’ You’re mistaken, son, you don’t know what I want from you.” He picked up his drink and emptied the glass. “‘Rye,’ I told them, ‘you can’t make a Manhattan without a good rye whiskey.’”
A tall man wearing a straw hat and a biscuit-coloured suit – clothes too summery for the crisp morning with a touch of frost – sat down two tables away. He took a cigarette from a case, and fitted it into a long amber holder. A waiter flickered towards him, and he ordered coffee and an anis.
Calthorpe Binns took a coin from his pocket.
“There’s a juke-box over there,” he said. “Go and put something on. Choose three records. I don’t mind a bit of noise.”
Franz selected two Elvis records, and then, in deference to Cal’s age, a Sinatra one.
“That’s better, you can’t hear yourself think now. What does the name Kestner mean to you?”
“Nothing that I know of.”
“Rudolf Kestner. Rudi Kestner. Standartenfuehrer Kestner?”
“Look, what is this?”
“And you of course are Franz Kestner.” He waved to summon the waiter. “If you don’t like Manhattans, would you rather have a beer? Or perhaps an ice cream?”
He lit a Camel cigarette.
“Beer, is it?” he said, and gave the order to the waiter. “And now the Standartenfuehrer has disappeared, and nobody knows where he is. You must be worried.”
“Of course I’m worried, if you are talking about my father.”
“Who else? And the disappearance took place a few days after he met a certain German-Jewish doctor, who had the misfortune – we needn’t put it stronger than that – to have done time in a concentration camp, perhaps even consigned to it by the Standartenfuehrer himself. What do you make of that, Franz?”
Franz looked at the table.
“I don’t make anything of it,” he said. “Dr Czinner’s blind, didn’t you know?”
“And deaf and dumb? I hadn’t heard that. And you are still seeing his daughter? In fact, I have reason to suppose that you made love to her yesterday in a flat that is the property of the US Government.”
“Is that an offence?”
“Couldn’t rightly say. In certain circumstances, it might be made to seem one.”
Go climb your thumb, Franz thought, but instead said merely, “What the hell is this? Are you going to explain?”
“Patience, sonny.”
Cal Binns sat back, nursing his new Manhattan. The gentleman two tables away looked at Franz. Cal Binns intercepted the glance.
“We’d better take a ride,” he said. “You can leave your car here. I’ll tell Ramón to keep an eye on it.”
He drove the Studebaker in a newly casual manner, with only one hand on the wheel. He chain-smoked, screwing up his eyes. It seemed to Franz that he watched the rear-view mirror more closely than the road ahead. They left the part of the city with which Franz was acquainted and drove towards the harbour. The car bounced along a cobbled road between warehouses; a line of rails for a tram ran down the middle of the street. There were weeds growing between the rails.
“You’re not a journalist,” Franz said. “You’re something else. Is it CIA?”
“Sure I’m a journalist. Been with the good old Monitor twenty years. Maybe I dabble a bit elsewhere, but so what? You want to see my Press card, my accreditation?”
“All right,” Franz said. The car had stopped in front of a boarded-up warehouse. “But you won’t get a story from me.”
“Sonny, I’m the one that is telling you a story. Hell, I’m showing you the story. We get out here. There are some friends want to meet you.”
“Wait a minute. Whose side are you on?”
“I’m just looking after the interests of certain friends, that’s all. The sixty-four-thousand dollar question is, whose side are you on, buddy?”
He led the way down an alley that ran between two warehouses and towards the waterfront. It was overgrown with tall pink-flowering weeds; life had moved a long time ago from this part of the docks. They crossed a footbridge over a little channel, or canal; empty beer-cans floated on the water, hardly moving. A rat plopped from the bank.
“Just speak the truth,” Cal Binns said. “That’s all that’s required of you, it’s all that’s required of any of us.”
He knocked on a door in the side of the building. The top half opened a crack. Then Franz heard bolts being slid open, and Cal led him into the building. He marched straight across a yawning deserted hall. The man who had opened the door for them followed Franz. He wore carpet-slippers and his step was a soft-shoe shuffle. Cal Binns knew his way. He went through a doorway on the other side of the hall, along a narrow passage off which opened doors leading into what had once presumably been offices. He knocked at the third or fourth of them.
They were admitted to a small room where four men sat playing cards at a Formica-topped table. The room was lit by a single naked bulb and the air was heavy with tobacco smoke. All the men were middle-aged to elderly and all wore open-necked shirts. A fifth man, who had opened the door, slipped out of the room. The oldest of the party, a thickset balding fellow, who wore a flowered short-sleeved shirt and had a cigar stuck in the right corner of his mouth, raised a hand, palm foremost, to Cal Binns. Then he swept the cards towards himself, made them into a pack, shuffled it twice, and planted it on the table. He got to his feet. Without removing the cigar, he hugged Cal Binns, and then turned to face Franz. His scrutiny was intense. Then he threw up his arm in a salute.
“Heil Hitler.”
When Franz made no response, he lowered his arm, smiled, and clapped him on the back.
“I have never agreed with your father about your upbringing,” he said. “Consequently, you don’t even know who I am, do you?”
Franz shook his head.
“There, you see.” He inclined towards the other three card-players, who had all slewed round in their seats to watch. “It’s ironic, isn’t it? I’m in effect, young man, what I daresay you would call your godfather, and you don’t know me.”
“I didn’t even know I had a godfather.”
“Well, I say only ‘in effect’, since I do not believe in any Christian God. No more than your father does. You look like your mother when she was young. A pity. A boy should resemble his father. I shan’t tell you my name, since it would mean nothing, nor that of my comrades here. For that’s what we are: comrades and friends, and comrades and friends of your father too. Come, sit and let us drink to him. You can call me Klaus, that’s sufficient.”
A bottle of local brandy, a soda siphon and some stubby glasses were placed on the table. Klaus settled himsel
f, raised his glass.
“Our comrade in distress.”
Then he began to talk. He expatiated at length, with many subordinate clauses, criticising his “dear Kestner” for thinking it possible to detach himself even in some degree from his past.
It wasn’t, he assured Franz, that his father was ashamed of it, rather that he urged them all to consider the past as something irrelevant, “mere history”, separate from a new existence. “Which isn’t, I assure you, dear boy, possible, if only because our enemies refuse to let the past die. Therefore we too, in self-protection as well as on account of our own self-esteem, must struggle to keep it alive, save it from the dead hand of history.” He smiled: there was something wonderfully inviting about his smile, like a promise of initiation into the arcane springs of being. At the same time, it was a greedy smile, ready to swallow you up. Franz sipped his brandy and waited.
So, Klaus resumed, their dear comrade had made mistakes, and now he was suffering for them. His refusal to defy history meant that Franz himself had grown up in ignorance. And what was the result of this ignorance? Catastrophic! He proposed to marry a Jewish girl.
He paused, lit a fresh cigar, blew out smoke, waved his hand, palm downwards, over the table.
“Filth.”
The speaker was a lean man with a twitch in his right cheek.
Klaus smiled again. “Well, we would have thought so, would we not? But one has to admit now that the Jews have surprised us. Yes, indeed! One has to admire what they have achieved in Israel.”
“Thanks to us,” said the youngest-looking of the group, a battered blond with a duelling scar. We have made that possible. We taught them that struggle is the motive force in history.”
“Indeed,” Klaus said, “the Israelis are well on the way to being our best pupils.”
It wasn’t enough, however, for Franz to have proposed to marry a Jewess, Klaus went on. He had to choose Dr Czinner’s daughter. Klaus shook his head. Dr Czinner was the worst sort of Jew, one who had pretended to co-operate with the Reich in order to work the more effectively for its destruction. It had been a mistake to send him to a camp; he should have been shot out of hand, or hanged. But that had been Kestner’s decision. And now: it was Czinner who had betrayed him; there was no question of that.
