Heinrich Leifhelm moved his mistress and their son to the town of Eichstätt, fifty odd miles north of Munich, visiting them now and then, and providing an adequate but not overly comfortable standard of living. The doctor was apparently torn between maintaining a successful practice—with no social blemishes—in Munich and a disinclination to abandon the stigmatized mother and child. According to close acquaintances of Erich Stoessel-Leifhelm, these early years had a profound effect on him. Although he was too young to grasp the full impact of World War I, he was later haunted by the memory of the small household’s subsistence level falling as the elder Leifhelm’s ability to contribute lessened with the burden of wartime taxes. Too, his father’s visits served to heighten the fact that he could not be acknowledged as a son and was not entitled to the privileges accorded two half brothers and a half sister, strangers he was never to know and whose home he could not enter. Through the absence of proper lineage, certified by hypocritical documents and more hypocritical church blessings, he felt he was denied what was rightfully his, and so there was instilled in him a furious sense of resentment, competitiveness, and a deep-seated anger at existing social conditions. By his own admission, his first conscious longings were to get as much as he could for himself—both materially and in the form of recognition—through the strength of his own abilities, and, by doing so, strike out at the status quo which had tried to emasculate him. By his mid-teens, Stoessel-Leifhelm was consumed with anger.
Converse stopped reading, suddenly aware of the woman across the half-deserted café; she was seated alone at a table, looking at him. Their eyes met and she turned away, placing her arm on the low white railing that enclosed the restaurant, studying the thinning, late-night crowds in the terminal, as if waiting for someone. Startled, Joel tried to analyze the look she had given him. Was it recognition? Did she know him? Know his face? Or was it appraisal? A well-dressed whore cruising the airport in search of a mark, seeking out a lonely businessman far away from home? She turned her head slowly and looked at him again, now obviously upset that his eyes were still on her. Then abruptly, in two swiftly defined motions, she glanced at her watch, tugged at her wide-brimmed hat, and opened her purse. She took out a Krone note, placed it on the table, got up, and walked rapidly toward the entrance of the café. Beyond the open gate she walked faster, her strides longer, heading for the arch that led to the baggage-claim area. Converse watched her in the dull white neon light of the terminal, shaking his head, annoyed at his alarm. With his attaché case and leather-bound report, the woman had probably thought he was some kind of airport official. Who was the mark, then?
He was seeing too many shadows, he thought, as he followed the graceful figure nearing the arch. Too many shadows that held no surprises, no alarms. There had been a man on the plane from Paris sitting several rows in front of him. Twice the man had gotten up and gone to the toilet, and each time he came back to his seat he had looked hard at Joel—studied him, actually. Those looks had been enough to prime his adrenaline. Had he been spotted at the De Gaulle Airport? Was the man an employee of Jacques-Louis Bertholdier?… As a man in an alley had been—Don’t think about that! He had flicked off an oval of dried blood on his shirt as he had given himself the command.
“I can always tell a good ole Yank! Never miss!”
That had been the antiquated salutation in Copenhagen, as both Americans waited for their luggage.
“Well, I missed once. Some son of a bitch on a plane in Geneva. Sat right next to me. A real guinea in a three-piece suit, that’s what he was! He spoke English to the stewardess, so I figured he was one of those rich Cuban spicks from Florida, you know what I mean?”
An emissary in salesman’s clothes. One of the diplomats.
Geneva. It had started in Geneva.
Too many shadows. No surprises, no alarms. The woman went through the arch and Joel pulled his eyes away, forcing his attention back to the report on Erich Leifhelm. Then a slight, sudden movement caught the corner of his eye; he looked back at the woman. A man had stepped out of an unseen recess; his hand had touched her elbow. They exchanged words briefly, swiftly, and parted as abruptly as they had met, the man continuing into the terminal as the woman disappeared. Did the man glance over in his direction? Converse watched closely; had that man looked at him? It was impossible to tell; his head was turning in all directions, looking at or for something. Then, as if he had found it, the man hurried toward a bank of airline counters. He approached the Japan Air Lines desk, and taking out his wallet, he began speaking to an Oriental clerk.
No surprises, no alarms. A harried traveler had asked directions; the interferences were more imagined than real. Yet even here his lawyer’s mentality intervened. Interferences were real whether based in reality or not. Oh, Christ! Leave it alone! Concentrate!
At the age of seventeen, Erich Stoessel-Leifhelm had completed his studies at the Eichstätt II Gymnasium, excelling both academically and on the playing field, where he was known as an aggressive competitor. It was a time of universal financial chaos, the American stock market crash of ’29 further aggravating the desperate economy of the Weimar Republic, and few but the most well-connected students went on to universities. In a move he later described to friends as one of youthful fury, Stoessel-Leifhelm traveled to Munich to confront his father and demand assistance. What he found was a shock, but it turned out to be a profound opportunity, strangely arrived at. The doctor’s staid, placid life was in shambles. His marriage, from the beginning unpleasant and humiliating, had caused him to drink heavily with increasing frequency until the inevitable errors of judgment occurred. He was censured by the medical community (with a high proportion of Jews therein), charged with incompetence and barred from the Karlstor Hospital. His practice was in ruins; his wife had ordered him out of the house, an order expedited by an old but still powerful father-in-law, also a doctor and member of the hospital’s board of directors. When Stoessel-Leifhelm found his father, he was living in a cheap apartment house in the poorer section of the city picking up pfennigs by dispensing prescriptions (drugs) and deutsche marks by performing abortions.
In what apparently (again according to friends from the time) was a watershed of pent-up emotions, the elder Leifhelm embraced his illegitimate son and told him the story of his tortured life with a disagreeable wife and tyrannical in-laws. It was the classic syndrome of an ambitious man of minimal talents and maximum connections. But withal, the doctor claimed he had never abandoned his beloved mistress and their son. And during this prolonged and undoubtedly drunken confession, he revealed a fact Stoessel-Leifhelm had never known. His father’s wife was Jewish. It was all the teenager had to hear.
The disfranchised boy became the father to the ruined man.
There was an announcement in Danish over the airport’s loudspeakers and Joel looked at his watch. It came again, now in German. He listened intently for the words; he could barely distinguish them, but they were there. “Hamburg-Köln-Bonn.” It was the first boarding call for the last flight of the night to the capital of West Germany by way of Hamburg. The flying time was less than two hours, the layover in Hamburg justified for those executives who wanted to be at their desks by the start of the business day. Converse had checked his suitcase through to Bonn, making a mental note as he did so to replace the heavy black leather bag with a carry-on. He was no expert in such matters, but common sense told him that the delays required by waiting for one’s luggage—in the open for anyone to see—was no way to travel swiftly or to avoid eyes that might be searching for him. He put Erich Leifhelm’s dossier in his attaché case, closed it and spun the brass combination disks. He then got up from the table, walked out of the café and across the terminal toward the Lufthansa gate.
Sweat matted his hairline; the tattoo inside his chest accelerated until it sounded like a hammering fugue for kettle-drums. He knew the man sitting next to him, but from where or from what period in his life he had no idea. The craggy, lined face, the deep ridg
es that creased the suntanned flesh, the intense blue-gray eyes beneath the thick, wild brows and brown hair streaked with white—he knew him, but no name came, no clue to the man’s identity.
Joel kept waiting for some sign of recognition directed at him. None came, and involuntarily he found himself looking at the man out of the corner of his eye. The man did not respond; instead his attention was on a bound sheaf of typewritten pages, the type larger than the print normally associated with legal briefs or even summonses. Perhaps, thought Converse, the man was half blind, wearing contact lenses to conceal his infirmity. But was there something else? Not an infirmity, but a connection being concealed. Had he seen this man in Paris—as he had seen another wearing a light-brown topcoat in a hotel basement corridor? Had this man beside him also been at L’Etalon Blanc? Had he been part of a stationary group of ex-soldiers in the warriors’ playroom … in a corner perhaps, and inconspicuous because of the numbers? Or at Bertholdier’s table, his back to Joel, presumably unseen by the American he was now following? Was he following him at this moment? wondered Converse, gripping his attaché case. He turned his head barely inches and studied his seat-mate.
Suddenly the man looked up from the bound typewritten pages and over at Joel. His eyes were noncommittal, expressing neither curiosity nor irritation.
“Sorry,” said Converse awkwardly.
“Sure, it’s okay … why not?” was the strange, laconic reply, the accent American, the dialect distinctly Texas-Western. The man returned to his pages.
“Do we know each other?” asked Joel, unable to back off from the question.
Again the man looked up. “Don’t think so,” he said tersely, once more going back to his report, or whatever it was.
Converse looked out the window, at the black sky beyond, flashes of red light illuminating the silver metal of the wing. Absently he tried to calculate the digital degree heading of the aircraft but his pilot’s mind would not function. He did know the man, and the oddly phrased “Why not?” served only to disturb him further. Was it a signal, a warning? As his words to Jacques-Louis Bertholdier had been a signal, a warning that the general had better contact him, recognize him.
The voice of a Lufthansa stewardess interrupted his thoughts. “Herr Dowling, it is a pleasure, indeed, to have you on board.”
“Thank you, darlin’,” said the man, his lined face creasing into a gentle grin. “You find me a little bourbon over ice and I’ll return the compliment.”
“Certainly, sir. I’m sure you’ve been told so often you must be tired of hearing it, but your television show is enormously popular in Germany.”
“Thanks again, honey, but it’s not my show. There are a lot of pretty little fillies runnin’ around that screen.”
An actor. A goddamned actor! thought Joel. No alarms, no surprises. Just intrusions, far more imagined than real.
“You’re too modest, Herr Dowling. They’re all so alike, so disagreeable. But you are so kind, so manly … so understanding.”
“Understandin’? Tell you somethin’. I saw an episode in Cologne last week while on this picture and I didn’t understand a word I was sayin’.”
The stewardess laughed. “Bourbon over ice, is that correct, sir?”
“That’s correct, darlin’.”
The woman started down the first-class aisle toward the galley as Converse continued to look at the actor. Haltingly he spoke. “I am sorry. I should have recognized you, of course.”
Dowling turned his suntanned head, his eyes roaming Joel’s face, then dropping to the hand-tooled leather attaché case. He looked up with an amused smile. “I could probably embarrass you if I asked you where you knew me from. You don’t look like a Santa Fe groupie.”
“A Santa Fe …? Oh, sure, that’s the name of the show.” And it was, reflected Converse. One of those phenomena on television that by the sheer force of extraordinary ratings and network profits had been featured on the covers of Time and Newsweek. He had never seen it.
“And, naturally,” continued the actor, “you follow the tribal rites—and wrongs—the dramatic vicissitudes of the imperious Ratchet family, owners of the biggest spread north of Santa Fe as well as the historic Chimaya Flats, which they stole from the impoverished Indians.”
“The who? What?”
Dowling’s leathery face again laminated itself into a grin. “Only Pa Ratchet, the Indians’ friend, doesn’t know about the last part, although he’s being blamed by his red brothers. You see, Pa’s no-good sons heard there was oil shale beneath the Chimayas and did their thing. Incidentally, I trust you catch the verbal associations in the name Ratchet; you can take your choice. There’s just plain ‘rats,’ or Ratchet as in ‘wretched,’ or Ratchet as in the tool—screwing everything in front of it by merely pressing forward.”
There was something different about the actor now, thought Joel, bewildered. Was it his words? No, not the words, his voice. The Western inflections were greatly diminished. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, but you sound different.”
“Wal, Ah’ll jes’ be hornswoggled!” said Dowling, laughing. Then he returned to the unaccented tones he had begun to display. “You’re looking at a renegade teacher of English and college dramatics who said a dozen years ago to hell with old-age tenure, let’s go after a very impractical dream. It led to a lot of funny and not very dignified jobs, but the spirit of Thespis moves in mysterious ways. An old student of mine, in one of those indefinable jobs like ‘production-coordinator,’ spotted me in a crowd scene; it embarrassed the hell out of him. Nevertheless, he put my name in for several small parts. A few panned out, and a couple of years later an accident called Santa Fe came along. That’s when my perfectly respectable name of Calvin was changed to Caleb. ‘Fits the image better,’ said a pair of Gucci loafers who never got closer to a horse than a box at Santa Anita.… It’s crazy, isn’t it?”
“Crazy,” agreed Converse, as the stewardess walked back up the aisle toward them.
“Crazy or not,” added Dowling under his breath, “this good old rancher isn’t going to offend anyone. They want Pa Ratchet, they’ve got him.”
“Your bourbon, sir,” said the woman, handing the actor a glass.
“Why, thank you, li’l darlin’! My oh my, you’re purtier than any filly on the show!”
“You are too kind, sir.”
“May I have a Scotch, please,” said Joel.
“That’s better, son,” said Dowling, grinning again as the stewardess left. “And now that you know my crime, what do you do for a living?”
“I’m an attorney.”
“At least you’ve got something legitimate to read. This screenplay sure as hell isn’t.”
Although considered by most of Munich’s respectable citizens to be a collection of misfits and thugs, the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, with its headquarters in Munich, was making itself felt throughout Germany. The radical-populist movement was taking hold by basing its inflammatory message on the evil un-German “them.” It blamed the ills of the nation on a spectrum of targets ranging from the Bolsheviks to the ingrate Jewish bankers; from the foreign plunderers who had raped an Aryan land to, finally, all things not “Aryan,” namely and especially the Jews and their ill-gotten wealth.
Cosmopolitan Munich and its Jewish community laughed at the absurdities; they were not listening. The rest of Germany was; it was hearing what it wanted to hear. And Erich Stoessel-Leifhelm heard it too. It was his passport to recognition and opportunity.
In a matter of weeks, the young man literally whipped his father into shape. In later years he would tell the story with heavy doses of cruel humor. Over the dissolute physician’s hysterical objections, the son removed all alcohol and smoking materials from the premises, never letting his father out of his sight. A harsh regimen of exercise and diet was enforced. With the zeal of a puritanical athletic trainer, Stoessel-Leifhelm started taking his father out to the countryside for Gewaltmarschen—forced marches—
gradually working up to all-day hikes on the exhausting trails of the Bavarian mountains, continually shouting at the older man to keep moving, to rest only at his son’s commands, to drink water only with permission.
So successful was the rehabilitation that the doctor’s clothes began to hang on him like seedy, old-fashioned garments purchased for a much fatter man. A new wardrobe was called for, but good clothing in Munich in those days was beyond the means of all but the wealthy, and Stoessel-Leifhelm had only the best in mind for his father—not out of filial devotion but, as we shall see, for a quite different purpose.
Money had to be found, which meant it had to be stolen. He interrogated his father at length about the house the doctor had been forced to leave, learning everything there was to learn. Several weeks later Stoessel-Leifhelm broke into the house on the Luisenstrasse at three o’clock one morning, stripping it of everything of value, including silver, crystal, oil paintings, gold place settings, and the entire contents of a wall safe. Sales to fences were not difficult in Munich of 1930, and when everything was disposed of, father and son had the equivalent of nearly eight thousand American dollars, virtually a fortune in those times.
The restoration continued; clothes were tailored in the Maximilianstrasse, the best footwear purchased at bootsmiths on the Odeonsplatz, and, finally, cosmetic changes were effected. The doctor’s unkempt hair was trimmed and heightened by coloring into a masculine Nordic blond, and his shabby inch-long beard shaved off, leaving only a small, unbroken, well-trimmed moustache above his upper lip. The transformation was complete; what remained was the introduction.
The Aquitaine Progression: A Novel Page 15