Wolf sighed inwardly. No doubt Mosley saw conspiracies under the bed – that is, if he was not himself hiding under it, having been surprised by the unexpected arrival of a lady friend’s husband.
‘I assume they have communicated with you.’
Mosley laughed, a short bitter sound. ‘Do you know the number of threats I have received over the past few years?’ he said. ‘They are all after me, Wolf!’
‘The cost of power,’ Wolf said, coolly.
Mosley subsided. Reluctantly, he smiled. ‘You are right. I am letting their tactics of terror affect me – but the danger is real, Wolf. I want you to work for me.’
Wolf clenched his fists, his short nails digging into his palms. How much he resented those words.
‘I want you to find them. Money is not an issue.’
‘What about your own MI5?’
‘They’re working on it.’ He lowered his voice. ‘To tell you the truth, sometimes I think the intelligence services don’t take me quite as seriously as they should.’
Wolf suppressed a rare smile. ‘Is that so.’
‘Please, Wolf! You I can trust, implicitly.’
Wolf said nothing. Mosley opened a drawer with some force and took out a cheque book. He tore out a cheque and wrote down a number and handed it to Wolf. Wolf looked at the cheque.
‘Well?’
Wolf was still looking at the cheque. Then he folded it, neatly, and tucked it away in his pocket.
He nodded, tight-lipped.
Some offers you just couldn’t refuse.
5
Herr Wolf—
Did you like her? She was so pretty. When we went into the alleyway her hand was warm in mine. It reminded me of going to Spitalfields with my mother shopping for vegetables, cabbages and peas. She was taken by God when I was very young. We have so much in common, you and I. Your mother, too was taken. But we are soldiers, we soldier on. Be brave, my mother said, she held my hand and it was moist and warm, she was lying in bed and she was running a fever. I don’t know what she died of; a doctor never came. Be brave, he needs you. I thought she was talking about my father but now I know the truth of it, and she must have known one day I would meet you. I took the whore into the alleyway and my knife came out all slick and sharp and she tried to cry, but I put my hand over her mouth and pressed my body against hers, against the wall, and put my lips close to her ear and said, Shut up you whore, or I will kill you. I put the knife to her throat. How she trembled! Her neck was so white and I could feel her heartbeat, I could cup it in my hand like a flame from a match. I kissed her.
It was so romantic. I remember the sky spread out above us, and the stars and the smell of pines – for some reason I could smell pines, and freshly cut grass, and her cheap perfume. I remember the taste of her lips, and the heat of her body against mine, and the sky all above, and thinking what lay beyond it, beyond air and the sun: did they have other worlds up there, like ours and yet unlike, where lovers met in secret in the strange byways of an alien city?
I stuck the knife in her. She dropped in my arms and I held her, tenderly, and looked deep into her eyes and saw the suffering ease and at last she was at peace, like my mother was at peace. I laid her down on the ground. The blood gushed out of her. I had the irrational desire to taste it. I stroked her hair. She was so blonde and so pretty. The front of me was wet. I knelt over her like a priest at prayer. I gave her benediction. Can’t you see that? The knife was in my hand and I delicately etched the sign on her. I had to make it deep. I was so excited that my hands shook. I arranged her properly. I made her beautiful again. Innocent. She wasn’t a whore now; she was like a new bride. I folded her arms on her belly, and finally I reached into my coat and took out the little toy. The little drummer. I was going to wind it up. I wanted to see it march across the ground of that alleyway, march along her body, march like I would have marched for you. But I heard voices and I was suddenly afraid. I left it by her head. I touched her one last time. I was shaking when I stood up. I wore a raincoat for the blood. The voices came closer, and so I went the other way and no one saw me.
The problem, Wolf reflected, was Balfour. Arthur James Balfour and all the other Jew-lovers in His Majesty’s government. Long dead now, the old fool – but promises hastily made are nonetheless remembered, especially ones made by the Foreign Secretary of the greatest empire in the world.
Wolf was only a young soldier then, serving with the First Company of the List Regiment in the Bavarian army, but he could still remember his outrage when news of Lord Balfour’s promise reached the front. Back then, of course, Jews were still a part of German and Austrian society. Jewish officers served in the war against the British, just as on the British side Jews fought against the Kaiser.
But already the Jews were agitating for emancipation. An insidious form of nationalism took hold of the Jewish people, a desire for a homeland. They had called their movement Zionism, and they had been spurred on by the vision of one Theodor Herzl, an Austro-Hungarian journalist Jew.
In 1917, Lord Balfour wrote a letter to Baron Rothschild, in which he asserted British support for the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine (then still in the possession of the Ottoman Empire, though it fell to British forces shortly after). Of course, Wolf thought, no one had actually intended to commit to such a disastrous course of action, but the Jews persisted, and were becoming increasingly more militant in their nationalist aspirations.
But it was absurd, Wolf thought. Try as he might he could not take the threat to Mosley seriously. The Fall had changed things. Communism was a Jewish sickness and Austro-Germany had become a Jewish paradise in which their thinkers and their scientists flourished – did not Freud found and radically expand his very own Sigmund Freud Institute in Vienna, with branches in Berlin and even Moscow itself? Was not that clown Albert Einstein now Chair of the Max Planck Institute in Berlin? It seemed nearly every day his famous image, with that wild unruly hair and smirking face, stared out at Wolf from the dailies or in the newsreels, an icon used by the communists as a threat of terrible weapons to come, should war ever be declared.
Marx, Freud and Einstein: the three corners of the evil that was international Jewry, Wolf thought.
If only he had been in power …
But then reality, of course, sank in. He was not in power. He was a nobody, a grey man in a cheap grey suit, and his only reason for being at Mosley’s party was that they wanted to hire him. As the help.
Scheisse!
He left Mosley’s office and started down the stairs clutching a large brown envelope containing – or so Mosley said – all of the communications he had received from the Palestinian terrorists. He intended to dump the file as soon as was convenient. There would be nothing useful in the anonymously mailed threats.
‘They have influence, still,’ Mosley told him. ‘The Jews. They’ve worked themselves into British public life, insidiously, and with money. The Rothschilds have been funding Jewish immigration to Palestine for decades. Don’t underestimate them, Wolf.’
Implicit in the words: Like you have before.
Now he went down the stairs and all he wanted to do was get away. He was beat-up and tired and old. In his pocket, Mosley’s cheque was a reminder of everything he had once been and would never be again.
Not looking, he bumped into something soft and full that smelled of expensive perfume. A squeal of delight followed and a familiar female voice said, ‘Wolfy!’
He raised his head and found himself staring directly into the adoring eyes of Unity Mitford.
‘Valkyrie?’ he said. He had always used her middle name.
‘Don’t you recognise me?’ she said, laughing.
Wolf winced. He found he could not draw away from her, his eyes kept searching that sweet, smooth face, the full red lips, the mischievous eyes. She had not changed. Her delicate perfume tickled his nostrils. ‘You haven’t aged a day,’ he said.
‘Always so gallant,’ she said, laughing.
‘Did my sister not say I would be here? I’ve been looking for you everywhere.’
Wolf took her hand in his. ‘It is very good to see you again, Valkyrie,’ he said.
‘And you, too. So, so much.’ She slipped her arm through his. In her other hand she was holding champagne. ‘Oh, Wolf!’ She looked up at him with those adorable, adoring eyes, a sad look just like the one Wolf remembered, so fondly, from his German Shepherd, Blonda. Leaving his dog behind had been one of the hardest things he’d ever done. ‘Oh, Wolf, where did we go wrong?’
‘You were too beautiful,’ Wolf said, ‘and I was a penniless prospect. A cat may look at a king.’
‘But you hate cats!’
He grinned, a wolf’s grin, and didn’t speak again.
‘Come,’ she said. ‘Let’s get some air.’
‘I should get back.’
‘Not yet you don’t.’ She led him and he followed. Down the stairs and out to the garden in the back. It was a beautiful night. The rich never live in winter; only the poor.
Music was playing, Glenn Miller’s big band tunes, and couples were dancing in the garden. Tall torches set into the ground cast shadows from their flickering flames, like snakes shedding their skin. Unity took Wolf’s hand in hers. ‘Do you still think of me?’
‘Always.’
‘You lie.’
‘In every great lie there must be a kernel of truth,’ Wolf said.
‘Always the cynic.’ She sighed and leaned against him. ‘Do you remember?’ she said.
Wolf said he did.
There are all kinds of truths and most of them are uncomfortable.
1933: the last of the Nuremberg Rallies.
Wolf, bitter in defeat. But not yet defeated.
It was an unofficial war and it had raged over the Roaring Twenties and early thirties, across Germany and in particular Berlin. Brownshirts and communists, SA men and KPD comrades fighting for control. That poor dumb fuck Horst Wessel was an SA-Sturmführer when a communist assassin shot him in the kisser. People were predicting civil war, though there was nothing civil about it. Germany was a powder keg, as the saying goes. Wolf was the match. Then came the elections and the communists, the KPD, came to power, shocking everyone but especially Wolf.
1933 and he still thought he could win. The commies were still consolidating their unexpected authority. It was time for a last, desperate push.
The Reichstag burned.
And Wolf marched in Nuremberg. Not in victory but in defeat, but he marched all the same. It was then that Valkyrie and her sister Diana came to see him. He had been taken with Valkyrie. She was only nineteen. In a way, she reminded him of Geli.
He was keeping Eva at the time. She was a pretty, uncomplicated little creature. At twenty-one years old she was two years older than Valkyrie but less mature. He had first met her at the photographer’s where she worked as a model and assistant. She had been seventeen, then.
He often wondered what had happened to Eva, after the Fall. Did she die in the camps? Or did she, a simple creature not much given to politics, get by? Did she find herself a handsome young commissar to marry and did she bear him children? Wolf supposed he could have tried to find out, but he never did.
Valkyrie came into his life when his life was all but over. She was a precious thing, and she doted on him. Those puppy eyes, just like Blonda’s. He took her to balls and rallies while Eva was left behind in the apartment he had bought her. Valkyrie looked good on Wolf’s arm.
It was the last ever of the Nuremberg rallies. He remembered the flags waving in the wind, the people standing down below looking up at him with heavy, veiled eyes. Remembered the heat, the sweat, the feel of the woollen suit against his skin, chafing. The smell of defeat was the smell of a homeless soldier back from the war, the smell of gangrene and sour alcohol.
‘Do you remember?’
Two months later the KPD thugs came and arrested him. The organisation had been broken, mass arrests were made, and Wolf was sent to the camps. Some of the others fled: Hess, the coward, took a private plane across Europe and into Britain. Göring joined the communists. Julius Streicher was killed in a shoot-out in Nuremberg. Even Wolf didn’t mourn his passing. The man was a menace, a rapist and a drunk, but he had been effective. Streicher’s newspaper, Der Stürmer, was shut down.
National Socialism was dead.
‘I remember,’ Wolf said. His teeth were clenched. All around them ghostly couples danced in the light of the burning torches. Valkyrie was close against him, her warmth like a promise, her perfume an invitation. Her lips by his ear. ‘Remember when we were alone. I could do those things for you again, that you like.’
He pushed her away, but not roughly, more with a sense of loss and regret. And tried not to think of the monstrous woman, that Ilse Koch as she had called herself, and her torture chamber under that now-abandoned club on Leather Lane.
‘I am no longer that man.’
‘Oh, Wolf.’ There was so much sadness in her voice it made him ill. ‘People don’t change. You are still who you were! A leader, a visionary. You are what poor deluded Oswald could never be.’
‘You’re young,’ he said. ‘And I am not. And time comes upon all of us, like a thief in the night.’
‘Oh, how I hate the Jews who did this to you!’
‘You were always steadfast in your hatred of them, Valkyrie.’
‘No one says my name like you do.’
One memorable night in Nuremberg, he and the two Mitford sisters … but no. He would not think of that.
‘Diana still worships you as I do,’ Valkyrie said.
Wolf smiled. ‘No one does it like you do,’ he said.
‘Come with me. Back to my flat.’
There was such naked need in her voice. Wolf shook his head. The past had a habit of catching up with you. ‘I had better go,’ he said. ‘I think Oswald would have preferred me to use the servants’ exit.’
‘The man is a buffoon.’
‘He is your brother-in-law.’
Valkyrie shrugged. ‘Let Diana warm his bed for him,’ she said.
‘He might be the next prime minister.’
‘Is that what this is?’ Valkyrie said. ‘Is it about power, Wolf?’
‘It is always about power,’ Wolf said.
‘Do you think I love you less for having lost your power?’
An ugly word: love.
Perhaps sensing she had made a mistake Valkyrie, too, withdrew. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—’
‘Did you not?’ Wolf said, darkly.
‘Please, Wolf.’ As if she couldn’t but move closer to him, a moth to his banished flame. Whispering in his ear, ‘I will fuck you the way you like it.’
He pushed her away, roughly this time. ‘Whore,’ he said.
‘I will be your whore, if you’d only let me!’
People were looking at them now. ‘Lower your voice,’ Wolf said, and his own voice was distant and cold.
The woman was close to tears, he saw. Wolf touched his fingers to the brim of his hat. ‘Auf wiedersehen, Valkyrie.’
‘Wolf, no!’
But already he was going, walking away, and the English people parted before him, as though they could sense the lethal mood he was in. Unity didn’t follow. She remained standing there, alone, with people staring and then looking away and murmuring amongst themselves. ‘Damn you, Wolf!’ she shouted. ‘And damn you too, you nosy bastards—’ pointing a finger at the assembled guests, who studiously avoided eye contact.
‘Come on, pet.’ It was that young broker, Fleming.
‘Oh, Ian,’ Unity said. She let him lead her away. She leaned her head on his shoulder. ‘It’s all so very beastly,’ she said, miserably.
Wolf’s Diary, 3rd November 1939 – contd.
That stupid bitch Valkyrie had made a miserable ending to a miserable day and I suspected it was not yet over. I did not like women trying to assert an authority over me. The Mitford girl was too unpredictable, too indepe
ndent. I liked my women the way I liked my dogs, obedient and devoted, like Catholics suddenly confronted with their maker.
I did not make a good Catholic. My father hated the clerics and I had hated both the clerics and my father. My mother was devout, and I remembered as a boy going to church and waiting on my knees, as God in the form of a priest stuck his flesh and dribbled his blood in my mouth. My mother had so much love to give, to her Lord and to me. Even to my father. And I remember, too, as a young boy, hearing the sounds coming from their bedroom, at night, my father’s grunting, my mother’s soft sobs and sighs. Perhaps it was as early as that that my dislike of my father began, with the sounds of his nightly assault.
But though I loved them, women always betrayed me. First and worst, Geli, of course. How dare she escape me, and using my own gun as the key to her freedom! But she was only the first of them.
I met Eva when I came to visit Herr Hoffmann’s studio in Munich. It was a place I frequented regularly. The first time I saw her she was climbing a ladder in the shop and I saw her pretty ankles and the rising hemline of her dress and I was smitten, I will admit that I was smitten. She was a model of Aryan womanhood and at seventeen she glowed with good health, her eyes were innocent and clear and yet unspoiled. Whenever I came in to see Hoffmann I would take her hand and kiss it with decorum and call her my lovely siren from Hoffmann’s. I would make her blush. She knew me as Herr Wolf, which was the nom de guerre I was using at the time. No doubt she thought of me as that politician what was in prison. Her language was plain. There was no guile about her. Later I would take her on holiday to Berchtesgaden where she would sun herself in the clear air, as naked as the day she was born. She was Eve before the fall. We would go rowing on the lake together. Such a simple, delightful creature she was.
In Munich I would take her out to the opera or to my favourite restaurant, the Osteria Bavaria. I would buy her presents – the first thing I ever gave her was a yellow orchid. It was the first flower a man had ever given her. I had given the whore everything! And yet she, too, tried to escape me.
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