Wolf picked up the toy. Idly, he wound the little key. He set the drummer on the floor and watched it march past Dominique’s body, the tiny hands moving mechanically up and down over the drum, beating out a funeral dirge. It was the only sound in the room. He watched it go. It marched and marched.
On the desk was Wolf’s typewriter and in the typewriter was a sheet of paper, neatly inserted. Wolf went round the desk and sat down in his chair. The keys of the typewriter were smeared in blood. He pulled out the piece of paper and read.
It began, Herr Wolf.
He read the letter, holding it at a distance and squinting at the hard black letters on the page.
The letter was a confession of a sort. It ended with a simple entreaty for the two of them to meet.
On the desk next to the typewriter was a ticket for the revue show at the London Hippodrome, dated for that night. Wolf picked it up, looked at it, turned it over, put it back down. As an afterthought he turned the typewritten page over in his hand.
Written on the back of the paper in an unsteady hand, with the same ink that only a scant time before had run through Dominique’s veins, was a single word in the murderer’s hand.
Run.
Wolf’s Diary, 22nd November 1939 – contd.
The door downstairs crashed open. The sound, unexpected and terrifying, made me jump. My heart beat fast in my chest.
Could it be the killer, coming back?
A madman, I thought, dazedly. I was dealing with a madman. Not for the first time I wished I had a gun. A gentleman killed with bullets, the state with gas. Only a madman used a knife.
I listened to footsteps come labouring up the stairs. Stray light from the window bounced off an object thrown beyond my desk. It was a blood-covered knife. It must have belonged to the girl. It was the weapon she had used on the killer. I picked it up and sat behind the desk again, waiting. The footsteps reached all the way to the landing and stopped.
‘Oh, it’s you,’ I said.
‘Well, well, well,’ Constable Keech said. ‘What have we got here, then?’ He stood in the doorway, his fat face covered in a sheen of sweat. When he grinned his big square teeth looked like coral reefs buried under a murky sea.
‘I would like,’ I said, ‘to report a murder.’
Keech bellowed a laugh. He laughed genuinely, with big heaving breaths, his face turning redder and redder, his hands supporting his weight on his knees as he almost keeled over on himself. ‘Would you now, shamus,’ he said. ‘Would you now.’
‘I didn’t do this, Keech.’
‘Of course you didn’t.’
‘I didn’t do this! You have to believe me!’
‘Don’t insult me, Wolf.’ He straightened up, glanced at the corpse, lost his good humour. ‘Jesus, Wolf. What did you do to that poor girl?’
‘Someone is trying to frame me.’
‘Well, they’ve done a bloody good job, then, haven’t they! Get up. You’re under arrest.’
‘Fuck off, pig!’ I was feeling panicked. ‘How did you get here?’ I said. ‘How did you know?’
He shrugged. ‘I got an anonymous call at the station,’ he said.
‘I’m being framed!’
‘Come along, Wolf. You can explain everything at the station.’
‘Is it that inspector again? Morhaim.’ I spat out the name. ‘The filthy Jew has been after me from the beginning.’
‘Inspector Morhaim is no longer in the employ of the Metropolitan Police. And another word from you about him like this will get you some broken teeth to complain about.’ He took out his nightstick and ran his fingers along its dark shaft almost lovingly. Still I didn’t move from the desk. Hidden from Keech’s view was the dead girl’s knife.
‘What happened to Morhaim?’ I said. I was, genuinely, surprised.
Keech spat on the floor. ‘He quit. It’s not like he was popular with the men. And well, with your boy Mosley headed to Downing Street, I don’t think it would have been long before he was pushed out anyway.’
‘Now, are you going to get up from that chair there or do I need to make you?’
‘Make me, pig.’
‘Oh, I’ll make you all right!’ he said. He advanced on me, the nightstick raised. ‘Look!’ I said. I waved the killer’s letter in my hand. ‘It’s all but a confession, it’s proof I didn’t do it!’
‘Proof?’ His stick came down on the desk, shattering the cheap wood. ‘Proof?’ He snatched it from my hand, looked at it, his fat lips moving as he read. ‘You typed this.’
‘No!’
He scrunched the killer’s confession into a ball and tossed it in the corner. ‘You’re sick in the head,’ he said. ‘You know what they’re going to call you? The greatest murderer since Jack the Ripper. You’re not right, mate. You’re not right at all.’ And he brought his stick down once again, right on the typewriter, smashing it to pieces.
Keys flew in the air; a semicolon hit me in the eye. ‘Damn you, Keech!’ I said. I rose from the chair just as he strode past Dominique’s head and reached for me, his stick descending a third time. I slashed him with Dominique’s knife. The knife missed his face, grazed his chest. The nightstick caught me on the arm and a terrible numbing pain spread through me and I could barely breathe. The knife fell from my hand. I screamed, ‘Scheisse!’ and raised my knee sharply, catching him unawares between the legs. Keech made a high-pitched hissing sound and fell, slowly. Somehow he was still holding the stick and he swung it as he went down, hitting me on the shin, the pain so excruciating that I screamed and went down, too.
For a moment both of us were on the floor facing each other like two lovers at the end of an intimate moment, looking deep into each other’s eyes. ‘I didn’t do it, Keech. I didn’t kill them!’
‘I will … fucking kill you,’ he said. He spoke with difficulty. He reached for me, those huge meaty hands, his fat fingers closing on my throat. Their weight was terrible. His thumbs found my windpipe and began to press. I reached desperately for the fallen knife, scrabbling for it, panicking, the pain growing impossible, my breath departing. I tried to fight him off; we were entwined on the floor, slick with the dead girl’s blood. His body pressed on mine; he was so heavy I couldn’t breathe. I thought, what a way to die. Then miraculously my fingers scrabbling in the blood on the floor found the sharp edge of the knife. It sliced the tip of my finger, and my blood mingled with the girl’s. Slowly, slowly I moved my fingers until I found the handle of the blade. I was so weak I could not breathe, but I could do this, just as I had cured my blindness with my mind. The power came to me, for one last desperate act, and I thrust the knife into his neck; just so.
The blood came out of the wound hot; it spurted out of him. And still he pressed on my neck, and for a moment I blacked out.
I came to, only moments later. The pressure on my neck had eased – was gone. I could breathe. The air tasted so sweet. I blinked back tears. His face swam into focus. His hand was pressed to his neck, holding back the blood, but it spurted out of him nonetheless, running between his fingers. His eyes stared into mine, and I was terrified of him. I scrambled to get away from him, from the blood. It was everywhere in the room, his blood, my blood, the girl’s blood, the murderer’s blood. I slipped and fell in it. Typewriter keys were pressed painfully against my flesh, an A and an H. Keech said nothing, just watched me, the blood still pouring out of him. I pushed myself up until I stood, supporting myself against the desk, looking down at him. The knife was on the floor. I think Keech smiled. I think he said, ‘Now they’ll get you.’ I walked backwards until my shoulder blades hit the wall and I stopped and stood there, breathing deeply, looking about me at the room and the dead whore and the dying policeman.
Keech was right, I realised, with dread.
I was a marked man, now. And there was no escape.
I watched him die. He died well. I will say that much for him.
I picked up the ticket for the revue show off the desk. I took one last look at the
room. My office. I had been almost happy there, for a while.
One dead copper, one dead whore. I was getting too old. Everything hurt. I would miss my books most, I thought. But books, like people, can always be replaced.
… And so into the night Wolf went, and a thousand lamps glimmered in the dark, and the ancient light of a thousand stars fought through the cloud cover to be changed forever by the hard surfaces of the city; within its narrow twisting alien alleyways Wolf walked like an explorer on the surface of a foreign hostile world, an invisible umbilical cord stretched from his past to his present, stretched until it finally broke, unable to hold him anchored any longer; and so he felt light of gravity, and floating, like an astronaut in one of those glorious, colourful American pulps. He pictured men on the moon, proud Aryan raumfahrer: spacemen, voyagers. Pictured capsules of aluminium floating through space, men inside them; pictured a lunar landing, a man stepping out onto the alien dust, planting a swastika flag where no man had gone before. Wolf walked through the city that night as a man with no purpose, a man whose life had taken the wrong turn, around whom history had flowed a different way, taken a different course and left him stranded in an island of unreality in the midst of that great river that was time. He felt untethered. He did not know who he was or what he would become.
On Shaftesbury Avenue the last theatregoers had come and gone and the theatres were shut though their lights shone on. The pavements were crowded with a festive restless mass of people, shouting, drinking, waving Union Jacks and the cross of St George. Wolf was swept up in the current. His fate was no longer his own. He was carried by the tide of these English citizens the way a spectator may have been in one of his own rallies, in the old days. Down Shaftesbury to Piccadilly where a Blackshirt rally was in progress, a full military campaign, and the men in their futuristic outfits no longer looked ridiculous but serious and deadly. He was carried along through the throng down Haymarket and on to Pall Mall, where he saw a ring of policemen blocking the road and a clash between Unionists and Blackshirts spilling bloody and awkward across pavement and road, men with makeshift weapons of bricks and piping smashing at each other, blindly, in a rage, but silently, or so it seemed to Wolf, in a primitive battlefield such as between Spartans and Persians, and the cars in the street jammed against each other and were savaged, too, and he watched the battle escalate, drivers trying to escape, windows smashed, glass shards spilling on the road, skulls cracked, a vehicle set on fire, policemen shouting, someone firing a gun in the air, a stampede where men were trampled underfoot. Somehow he managed to get away, swept again in the tide, down to Trafalgar Square.
From just down the road, along Whitehall, a sudden silence spread out as Big Ben began to strike the hour. The first and then the second heartbeats of the old clock went almost unnoticed, at three the sound began to penetrate, at four and five the massed crowds quietened, at seven and eight the silence grew; at nine it was entire. Nine and then ten heartbeats Big Ben struck and they echoed over the ancient city, old and new, old and new like the harbingers of a new dawn. Time hung, suspended. On the podium by Nelson’s Column, Oswald Mosley waited, his face sweaty, his black uniform replaced for this one occasion by a dignified three-piece suit from Savile Row. Two other men were waiting in the wings, only one of whom Wolf would have known, but Wolf stood a way away, at the Whitehall intersection, listening to the clock strike the hour like a drum. Eleven, old Ben struck, and the second stretched and stretched and in its expectant silence Wolf saw the city as he had never seen it, rising before him like a metropolis dreamed of by Fritz Lang: huge shining buildings rose amidst the squalor of old London, by London Bridge a shard of glass taller than the pyramids pierced the sky. From the City of London there rose a phoenix egg of metal and glass, and a giant wheel spun and spun on the south bank of the Thames like a mandala. This city of the future was brighter, brasher, awash in an electric glow which faded as he watched, the ghostly outline of this futuristic could-have-been slowly washing away. Wolf held his breath and Big Ben tolled, twelve, and one day ended, and a new day began.
Wolf’s Diary, 23rd November 1939
The night erupted in a shower of fireworks. The air filled with the repeated sounds of explosions, playing out a moment after the formation of bright shapes in the air. The smell of cordite, magnesium and sulphur stung my nostrils. In the sky were the fabulous shapes of spinning rings and diadems and tailed chrysanthemum, crossettes and hearts and palm-shell fireworks. A band began to play, rather incongruously, Gilbert & Sullivan’s ‘He Is An Englishman’. The crowds around me cheered, faces red and teeth yellow and skin sickly white; they were cast in the lights and shadows of the exploding colours overhead. Demonic grinning faces all around me, a nightmarish vista of skulls seen through translucent skin, moving skeletons clad in sacks of blood. I hadn’t even thought of how I must look, bruised, battered and covered in blood, mine and others’, but I didn’t think anyone even noticed. I pushed my way towards the steps of the National Gallery. I had to batter my way through people and every moment I half-expected a policeman to find me, to blow the whistle, raise the alarm. But no one would find Keech and the dead girl, surely, I thought, not until the morning at least. What I would do then I didn’t know.
I watched the stage. Watched Mosley come on, smiling, waving at the crowds, his arm extended in a Blackshirt’s imitation of a Nazi salute. The man was nothing but a cheap copy.
‘Victory!’ he called out. The crowd erupted in cheer again but I could hear booing coming from the distance and turned my head to see a group of union demonstrators trying to push towards the podium and being repelled.
‘Britain belongs to the British people once again!’ Mosley’s voice echoed over the crowd. ‘We’ve won! This is the beginning of a new dawn! This is a new day for Britain – and for the world!’
Cheers. Boos. Fireworks exploding overhead, the booms coming a moment later, disorientating me. I felt sick and dry-heaved. I had not eaten in I couldn’t remember how long. On the stage Mosley assumed a serious, studious expression. His voice took on dulcet tones. He said, ‘His Majesty the King has asked me to form a new government and I have accepted.’
Silence. Overhead the last fireworks burst and died.
‘I would like to discuss some of the challenges we are now facing.
‘I believe we need a strong government, a stable, good and decent government that I think we need so badly.
‘It has been more than six years since the Fall of Germany to international communism. Communism with its method of madness is making a powerful and insidious attack upon the world today. It seeks to poison and disrupt, in order to hurl us into an epoch of chaos.
‘It has flooded our country with refugees. We have opened our borders, our arms, our homes to them, in friendship. And they came, in their thousands, and thousands of thousands. Our cities reek of their cabbage! Their children speak foreign tongues in our schools. They are draining our country of its resources, they are taking the very bread from our own people’s mouths!’
Cheers. Fists raised in salute. I felt a cold chill I could not explain. And yet it was almost as if it were my own words he was using against me.
‘I think the service our country needs right now is to face up to our really big challenges, to confront our problems, to take difficult decisions, to lead people through those difficult decisions, so that together we can reach better times ahead.
‘Germany is not our enemy. Communism is. That, and the bankers behind it all. I think you know their real name.’
‘Jews!’ – ‘The elders of Zion!’ – ‘Shylocks!’ – ‘Yids!’
‘We must help Germany in its time of need!’ Mosley said.
‘Yes!’
‘Get the foreigners out!’ someone shouted. Mosley smiled. The smile faded. His eyes gazed out coldly over Trafalgar Square.
‘This is a testing time,’ he said, gravely. ‘I have news, news we could not share before with you. At nineteen hundred hours today, German
y, with Russian help, has invaded Poland.’
Gasps. Shouts. A wave of shock running through the crowd.
‘It is true.’
He waited. Drew out the silence.
‘Our bilateral agreement with Poland dictates a response,’ Mosley said.
‘It is my first duty to you as your prime minister, to let you know that we are at war.’
Gasps, but also cheers. The mood was turning ugly. They were enthralled. They relished the idea of war.
‘I would like to introduce you to an old friend of mine!’ Mosley said.
I began to make my way through the crowd, up towards Leicester Square, but now I paused. Turned back.
‘Germany will return to its former glory,’ Mosley said. ‘This I promise. We will fight for its release from the shackles of communist oppression!’
A Man Lies Dreaming Page 25