by Ned Beauman
‘Who’s H.P. Lovecraft? Anyway, no, Hull’s not there any more. He resigned a few years ago. Sarcoidosis.’
‘So what are you doing for them?’
‘I’m sorry, Loeser, but I’m sure you understand that I can’t say anything about that.’
‘Presumably the same sort of thing as you were doing for the Ordnance Department,’ I said. ‘That’s why you’re valuable. But what did the Ordnance Department care about theoretical physics? Was it anything to do with the atomic bomb?’
‘No.’
‘What, then? Are you going to make me guess? That’s no use. I spent a few years at CalTech but I don’t know anything about the state of the art. Apart from ghosts and robots and that fellow trying to build a machine for making eel congee out of electric eels that was itself powered by electric eels, all I ever heard about back then was …’ I leaned forward. ‘Oh my God. Teleportation. You were working on teleportation, weren’t you? The Nazis were trying to develop teleportation as a weapon of war.’
This time Heijenhoort held my gaze. ‘Yes, Loeser. That’s right. And we didn’t do so badly. Why do you think the Soviets pretended Hitler’s remains were burned and buried?’
‘God in heaven, you’re telling me Hitler teleported himself out of the bunker?’ I shrieked. ‘So he’s still alive?’ There were puzzled looks from nearby booths.
‘Yes, Loeser. That is the world-shaking secret I am telling you, here in this coffee shop.’
‘Oh, are you being sarcastic?’
Heijenhoort got up again. ‘I’m sorry, Loeser, but I must be going.’
‘When did you become capable of sarcasm?’
‘Things happen in war.’
‘Hey, listen, they must have told you a lot of secrets in New Mexico?’ I said.
‘Not really. We’re still Germans.’
‘But do they know what happened to Bailey?’
Heijenhoort nodded as he put down a quarter-dollar for his coffee. ‘They spent almost a year studying his device after they removed it from CalTech.’
‘And?’
‘Goodbye, Loeser. I’ll see you around.’
‘Come on, you have to tell me! Did Drabsfarben rescue him from the chamber, or did he accidentally teleport himself into the Pacific?’
‘The answer is not what you think.’
‘But I haven’t told you what I think. Heijenhoort, stop! Come back!’
But he was gone. And I don’t suppose I’ll ever see him again. I hope the stenographer won’t have too much trouble with the punctuation of dialogue. Can I read my statement now?
The Chairman: Not yet.
The Chief Investigator: When did you discover the real nature of your summons to Washington?
Mr Loeser: I didn’t go straight up to the room when I got back to the Shoreham with a pair of stockings. Instead, I went to the bar and sat down on my own and ordered a whisky. All the way to Washington, I’d been praying for some sort of miraculous reprieve, but now there was only about seventeen hours left until I was due to testify here and I couldn’t see where it could come from. I was going to have to tell Mildred that her husband had been caught planning to steal a book called Midnight at the Nursing Academy from the national library of the United States; that he was going to be humiliated in front of the press and public; that he was probably going to be deported. I’d just finished my drink and was deciding whether to order another when Stent Mutton walked into the bar. I hadn’t seen him since the summer of 1943. That July, there was the first really caustic smog in Los Angeles, thick enough to humiliate the sun, as if Wormwood the Skunk had died and rotted up in the roof of the world, and naturally everyone assumed, just as I had a few years earlier, that it was an attack from some unseen enemy. No. Just cars.
‘Loeser!’ He wore a white suit with coral buttons. ‘Are you staying here too? I didn’t think I’d see you until tomorrow.’
‘Tomorrow?’ I said.
‘Yes. I’m testifying in the Caucus Room right after you. But you know that, of course.’
‘For the defence or the prosecution?’ I asked.
He smiled. ‘Very funny.’
But I was quite serious. ‘Do they think you were in on it somehow?’
‘“In on” what?’
‘Midnight at the Nursing Academy. The Library of Congress. The heist.’
I won’t bore you with the untangling that followed, or the relief that I felt. But before long, Mutton was explaining that there would be no need for me to conceal any facts when I testified today about his relationship with Drabsfarben. My account of the truth would not incriminate him (or me) any further.
‘But what about you?’ I said as his drink arrived. ‘What are you going to tell them?’
‘That I never knew Drabsfarben was a spy and neither did my wife. They can’t prove otherwise. Dolores and I have had so many hours of practice at telling that particular falsehood that we could enter some sort of conservatoire. And the final proof: how on earth could we have lived in that house if we’d had anything at all to hide?’
‘So when did you really find out?’
‘Loeser, I knew Drabsfarben was working for the Russians from the first time he came over for dinner.’
‘That’s impossible. Just before I left Los Angeles, your wife told me you’d never even suspected she was working for the Comintern.’
‘So I should hope. I never let her know that I knew.’
‘But she was manipulating you. You had to go to Russia and write all those articles about how puppies love Stalin.’
‘That wasn’t so hard. You must understand, I had a choice. Either I was a little dumb and a little blind but I still thought my wife was a perfect goddess. Or I wasn’t so dumb and I wasn’t so blind and I found out my wife had been fooling me to keep Moscow contented. My marriage survived the former but it could never have survived the latter. I would have forgiven Dolores anything. But I don’t think she would have let herself be forgiven. You’re married yourself now, Loeser, you understand what it’s like. You must have made some unspoken bargains of your own.’
Yes, perhaps I have. ‘You were prepared to keep all that up for ever?’ I said.
‘No. But I could tell Drabsfarben wouldn’t last that long in Los Angeles. He didn’t cast the right sort of shadow. Did you know Dolores and I have a six-year-old son? My wife fell pregnant only a few months after Drabsfarben disappeared.’
‘So until then you hadn’t been…’
‘Oh, quite the contrary, we’d been trying for years. But I think Dolores’s womb refused to bring a child into a lie. An ethical organ.’
‘Do you all still live in the glass box?’
‘Yes. Although it wasn’t easy during the war. Our neighbours — and when I say “neighbours”, I mean interfering strangers who lived about a half-mile down the beach — got together a petition. They thought the Japanese pilots would use the lights of our house for navigation on their all-too-imminent night raids. In the end we papered over the whole place with birch bark. Not quite what Gugelhupf intended. But to perdition with Gugelhupf. Do you know what he did for most of the war? He got a job with the Chemical Warfare Corps, erecting replica Berlin tenements in the New Mexico desert, full of replica Bauhaus furniture. They burned them down again and again to improve the design of their incendiary bombs.’
So Germany City really had been built in America, only to be razed each week like a torment from Greek mythology. Did Gugelhupf, I wondered, imitate the streets and squares he missed the most, so that he could he could walk through them once more before they perished in trial by fire, or did he imitate the streets and squares he missed the least — we all have a few marked on the maps of our memory that we associate for ever with rejection or despair — so that their arson would be a secret revenge? And since then had Heijenhoort and his colleagues ever been rewarded for their hard work with a coach trip from their own laboratory across the orange desert to the site of this fitful dream of Heimat? Mutton and I had
a few more drinks — he told me he’s writing science fiction now — then I went up to fetch my wife, who was dressing after a bubble bath, and we all had dinner together at a Chinese restaurant not far from the hotel. Mutton’s lawyer had forbidden him from eating in the Shoreham itself in case the waiters were eavesdropping on your behalf.
The Chief Investigator: We don’t employ waiters.
The Chairman: We do bug telephones, though.
The Chief Investigator: And Woodkin was working for us all along.
Loeser: Really?
The Chairman: For the purposes of the present hearing, yes, he was.
The Chief Investigator: Mr Loeser, one last question. Why are you such a total prick all the time?
Mr Loeser: Excuse me?
The Chief Investigator: Do you think it’s something to do with your parents?
Mr Loeser: ‘Something to do with my parents.’ With insights like that you should be a psychiatrist.
The Chief Investigator: You don’t seem to think about them very much or talk about them very often.
Mr Loeser: That’s because they’re dead.
The Chief Investigator: Yes. The Teleportation Accident.
Mr Loeser: Not a Teleportation Accident. Just a traffic accident.
The Chairman: Accidents, like women, allude. You remember, Mr Loeser, what Nietzsche said about the French Revolution? ‘The text has finally disappeared under the interpretation.’ So often the case.
The Chief Investigator: A lot of people had to die to get you to America. Your parents, and all those millions of Jews. Quite an advance on Lavicini’s two dozen.
Mr Loeser: You say that as if they were human sacrifices. But I didn’t kill anyone and neither did Lavicini (except that one girl) and there was no causal connection at all.
The Chief Investigator: Perhaps not. But they died, and you don’t seem to care any more than if they’d been clockwork automata.
Mr Loeser: Oh, grow up. We’re all clockwork automata.
The Chairman: Mr Loeser, you ought to remember that you are a guest of this nation.
The Chief Investigator: Did you follow the Nuremberg Trials in the newspaper?
Mr Loeser: Not if I could help it. Can I please read my statement now?
The Chairman: Yes, Mr Loeser, you may now read your statement.
Mr Loeser: Oh, I’m sorry, I…
The Chairman: Is something wrong?
Mr Loeser: I don’t understand what’s written here.
The Chairman: You wrote it yourself, didn’t you?
Mr Loeser: Yes, I thought I did, but…
The Chairman: What does it say?
Mr Loeser: It says…
The Chairman: Yes?
Mr Loeser: It says, ‘Wake up, Egon, you’re going to be late. Put some clothes on while I call down for a cab. Wake up, Egon. Can you hear me? Wake up. Wake up.’
10. BERLIN, 1962
Fitzgerald Estate Says ‘ Sorrowful Noble Ones ’ is Forgery
A lawyer for the estate of F. Scott Fitzgerald released a statement yesterday charging that The Sorrowful Noble Ones, a purported lost work by the late author, is a deliberate fabrication. The statement reports that there is no reference to The Sorrowful Noble Ones anywhere in Mr Fitzgerald’s letters or notebooks, and that his daughter, Mrs Frances Scott Fitzgerald Lanahan, has no recollection of such a book ever being mentioned. This contradicts the claims of Herbert Wolf Scramsfield, a self-described former friend of Mr Fitzgerald who attracted international publicity last week when he announced that he had been guarding the manuscript since 1931.
Interviewed by telephone from his home in Paris, Mr Scramsfield strongly denied any allegations of fraud. ‘The fact is, Scott trusted me to decide when the world was ready for this book,’ Mr Scramsfield said. ‘That’s why it’s been a secret all this time. Honestly, I’m flattered that anybody thinks I could write something as good as this. But that’s preposterous. I never wrote a book in my life, let alone a masterpiece.’
However, an enquiry by this newspaper has found that earlier in his career Mr Scramsfield did in fact write a manual of seduction, Dames! And how to Lay them, published pseudonymously in 1930 by the Muscular Press of Los Angeles, California. Reached yesterday for comment, Esquire magazine editor Arnold Gingrich said that he has cancelled plans to publish excerpts from ‘Rupert?’
Rackenham looked up from his newspaper. A woman of about his own age stood there in the posture of someone who has just dropped a fragile antique.
‘Yes?’ he said.
‘Don’t you recognise me?’
Rackenham smiled in apology.
‘You promised you’d keep me in your heart until the end of time.’
‘Oh. Did I really?’
The woman burst into tears. Rackenham searched his pockets for a clean handkerchief and his memory for a name or at least a context. He couldn’t help but feel she was behaving with extraordinary rudeness. Thankfully, after a few minutes, she seemed to accept that he wasn’t going to ask her to sit down with him, but before she’d leave him alone he still had to take down her address and promise to write her a long letter. Even her full name didn’t so much as gesture at a bell, and so, in the usual manner of these things, it wasn’t until she was on her way out of the café that Rackenham got any inkling. At the door, she looked back at his table, Orphean, and as she did so you could see in her face that she was already rebuking herself for her weakness, and then she turned away again and forced herself on, but too hastily, so that she bumped into a fat man on his way in and had to apologise in her bad German. The whole sad procedure took him straight back to 1932 or 1934 or whenever it was and he remembered her at last. One night she’d asked him to tie her naked to a clothes horse with shoelaces but it had collapsed and he’d had to pay his landlady for a replacement.
He was still a few minutes early for his appointment, but he decided that now his peace had been disturbed he might as well pay the bill. Outside, on Kurfürstendamm, the sky was a grey paving stone with a few dirty bootprints of darker cloud and the sparrows conducted their usual patrol among the tourists for unattended pretzels. Turning right at the Kino Astor, he went down a passage into a potentially pleasant courtyard that was rendered rather gloomy by a huge plane tree with the apparent ambition to expand like a gas to fill every cubic inch of available space. He found the doorway, buzzed for entry, and went upstairs.
‘You never seem to age, Rackenham,’ said Loeser when he invited the other man inside. ‘And I don’t mean that as a compliment. It’s sinister.’
‘Do you live on your own here?’ Rackenham didn’t really need to ask — in its resonant frequencies this flat was so much like his own in London that he could tell at once no woman shared it. The place was not untidy so much as rationalised in a precise and stable way to the habits of its occupant: a bottle of vodka on the floor by the armchair, an electric razor keeping a place in an etymological dictionary, a corduroy jacket on a hanger that was hooked over the door of the fusebox cupboard, and then by the window some chrysanthemums in a vase, alive but wilted, like a small delegation from a more feminine land who knew that their presence at these negotiations was a pointless diplomatic formality.
‘Mildred and I divorced in fifty-four,’ said Loeser. ‘That’s why I came back to Berlin. I have a “girlfriend”, though,’ he added, nodding at the flowers. ‘The word sounds ridiculous, of course.’
Last year, Rackenham’s cousin Etty had come to his flat in Paddington for tea, and she’d adopted such a tone of condolence as she looked around it that he was provoked to ask for an explanation. ‘It’s obvious you can’t be happy here, Rupert,’ she’d said. ‘Living like this. All alone.’ He’d assured her that, as reluctant as she might be to believe it, he was happy — much happier, in fact, than she was, with a husband and two children who were all visibly sick of the sound of her voice. But whether Loeser was happy here, he couldn’t yet tell. How strange, he thought, that Loeser should ever have been married to t
he Gorge girl, so that with respect to sexual genealogy Rackenham was to the German a sort of father-in-law. Did mother and daughter fuck the same way? He remembered all those afternoons with Amelia Gorge on Loeser’s sofa in Pasadena, cold dimes kissing his knuckles as he groped between the leather cushions for purchase, when he’d been obliged to accept that nothing he did to her body would ever match the ecstasy she milled from that nasty rumour he’d helped her to spread about the contents of her husband’s wine cellar. ‘Do you like being back here?’ he said.
‘I can’t find the old neighbourhoods any more. I tried to steal Ryujin’s daughter from his palace and when I came home without her it was all in ruins as if three hundred years had gone by. Puppenberg, Schlingesdorf, Strandow, Hochbegraben. What happened to them?’
‘Bombed. Demolished. Walled off.’
‘But they can’t all have been. Not every single street. It doesn’t make sense. I must say, though, yesterday I was in Kreuzberg and the wind made one of those hurricanes of blossom and it made me very happy to be here. I’d forgotten quite how fecund this city is.’ He sat down and gestured for Rackenham to do the same. ‘I spent quite a while trying to work out why you wanted to see me. But I can’t guess.’
‘I’m making a documentary film for American television,’ said Rackenham. ‘It’s about what Berlin was like in the last few years before the war. Kristallnacht and the rallies and the Gestapo and all that. I came to see if you’d agree to be interviewed. The idea is to mix my own recollections with those of some other prominent acquaintances of mine.’
‘But we both left in 1934. We missed the worst.’
‘The network don’t know that, nor is there any reason why they should find out.’
Loeser blew out a sceptical plosive. ‘How would I even know what to say?’
‘Oh, it’s easy. “I went to a cabaret and I saw an SS officer with an evil face slap his mistress for spilling a glass of champagne and then I knew the good times were over for ever.” You know the sort of thing.’
