The Aachen Memorandum

by Andrew Roberts

  ‘Dr Horatio Lestoq, an Oxford don, is being sought for questioning relating to the murder of the ninety-one-year-old former Admiral Michael …’ Where was the clicker to switch the bloody thing off? No sign of it. Maybe it was voice-controlled. ‘Off!’ he barked at it, and then tried it again in an American accent. No luck. ‘… Ratcliffe at his home near Basingstoke on Sunday. The search …’ He leapt forward to try to find a wall plug he could pull. But it was one of the new beam ones.

  Gemma walked in. Just as she crossed the threshold the screen suddenly went blank. ‘Oh God, not another power cut! This really is a Third World continent.’ It was racist, but he was not about to comment.

  ‘Oh I don’t know.’ Horatio smiled. ‘I rather enjoy them.’ Absolutely no response. Perhaps it had been Cleo who’d kissed him. He must get her away before the power returned.

  ‘Well, you’re probably conditioned to them by now. Anything interesting on the news?’ He shook his head. He could hardly trust himself to open his mouth.

  ‘So tell me, did you manage to evade your pursuer yesterday? The guy you tried to tell me was an agent of a foreign power?’ She grinned. ‘Now what was his name again, Michael Ongar was it? Or Peter High-Barnet? Or …’

  ‘Yes, yes I lost him, thank God. And all thanks to that genius of a son of yours.’

  ‘Great.’ She left the room again.

  The photograph of him on the cable had been taken two years ago. By Marty, he seemed to remember, at a party a few years back. Grinning, and perhaps drunk, his face looked incredibly callous and vicious when placed above the ‘Have You Seen This Person?’ caption. How had the police got hold of it? Had Marty given them it? Where was he?

  ‘Right,’ said Gemma, reappearing with two travelling bags, ‘that should be about the lot. Ah’m ready.’

  ‘Where’s Oliver?’

  ‘He’s staying with some friends of mine at the Embassy till Sunday. Would you mind giving me a hand putting this in the boot? Here’s the card. It’s in Cadogan Street. Look right when you get to the Moore Arms. Ah’m just going to set the alarm.’

  Horatio heaved the canvas bag up onto his shoulder and stepped outside, half expecting to be cut down by laser beam as soon as he opened the door. There was hardly anyone on the street. With the bag covering the left side of his face and his arm the other he was virtually unrecognisable. As he walked down the street he surreptitiously read Gemma’s I.D. card.

  JEMIMA LOUISE REEGAN. A.F.T.A. citizen. I.D. No: 592X 382W Sex: F (Het). Marr Status: Div (one s – Oliver Jefferson Reegan). Address: 9, Moore Street, London SW3 2RS, South England Region, U.S.E. Occup: Author/Academic. Modem no. 673987. Pager no: 01171 824 6226. Blood Gp: A.B. Auto reg: F765 055. Insurance: Full. D.o.B: 7/7/2015

  Coming up for her thirtieth birthday. Not bad. She didn’t look it. A divorced foreign authoress in her late twenties, who clearly liked him. Interesting. If Cleo didn’t work out …

  When he reached Cadogan Street he looked right and spotted her auto. He put the card in the auto boot lock, opened it, shoved the bag inside and shut it quickly. Then he went round to sit in the front passenger seat and buried his face in the electronic A–Z Journey finder, working out the best way to Basingstoke and hoping no passer-by would recognise him. An agonising half-minute later, Gemma got in.

  He directed her down Moore Street, back through Lennox Gardens and Ovington Square and left out onto the Brompton Road. They joined the Cromwell Road, passing the Victoria and Albert Anglo-German Friendship Museum and the Natural History Museum on their way out west.

  ‘Do you want the radio on?’ she asked. The last thing he wanted was for her to hear the news.

  ‘No, let’s talk.’

  In the two hours it took her electric to reach the Basingstoke turnoff they managed to cover just about every subject under the ozone layer. Nothing and nobody was exempt from her attractive, eager, questing brain. Except perhaps sequential thought, for it was something of a grasshopper mind which left a subject the moment she tired of it and hopped onto something more appealing and often unrelated. Horatio soon got over his initial irritation at this.

  ‘How can you say that you’ve abolished nationalism in the U.S.E. when your soccer matches still turn into pitched battles?’

  ‘Because in a state where there’s no other possible outlet for patriotic, partisan sentiment – politics, economics, culture and so on – sports competitions become a kind of war by other means. It’s soon going to be dealt with though. Regional teams will no longer be allowed to play each other after 2048, so you won’t get the violence you probably saw on the news after the Northern England v. Grossdeutschland Union Cup final in Copenhagen last month. It’ll all be between local teams next season.’

  ‘Those people were animals, complete maniacs, those German fans. Did you hear what they were chanting? ‘Britons for ever, ever, ever will be slaves’ and so on. The sheer blatant nationalism of it. Ah can’t tell you, it was horrific!’

  ‘I feel rather guilty about admitting this, Gemma, but in a sneaking sort of way I have to say I’m rather proud of our own football hooligans. Did you know the Danish Commission had to deploy more riot police at that match than at the height of their recent anti-Aachen riots? Brain-dead those fans might be, but they’re also often incredibly brave. They’ll cheerfully attack forces five or six times their number. They just weren’t going to take all that German provocation lying down. I sometimes wonder whether it is only amongst the working classes that the spirit of aggressive patriotism …’

  ‘Nationalism, you mean.’

  ‘Yes, all right, if you like, nationalism, lives on. The social and intellectual elites are all conforming to the new cosmopolitanism like crazy, talking German, naming opera houses after Jacques Delors and so on, but ordinary working people and their families are still sticking up Union Jacks and pictures of William Windsor in their homes. Hardly a week goes by without some publican in Bermondsey or Southwark or somewhere getting picked up for allowing clandestine Carlist meetings in his upper rooms. Those soccer hooligans who attacked the Germans reminded me, this is perhaps just the romantic in me speaking, of a regiment under Clive of India which fixed bayonets and charged a Franco-Indian force thirty times their number during the Seven Years’ War …’

  ‘Romantic? That little rant managed to be classist, militaristic, atavistic, racist, anti-peace and male-assertive all at once!’ She looked peeved, but not genuinely angry.

  ‘It’s true that I’m secretly rather pleased that a century of peace and brotherhood hasn’t completely bred out the instinctively aggressive nature of the English people. What the German fans sang – it sounds worse in German you know – was really unforgivable.’

  ‘Why rise to them? Why not just sit back and enjoy the game?’

  ‘Because everyone knows, deep down, that what they were singing was true. That’s why it had to be punished. Most people in this country – God, I could never talk to anyone but a foreigner about this! – actually do know in their heart of hearts that Aachen was a terrible mistake and we should have stayed independent. So when Germans, who do after all pretty much run the Union today, point out that they have now succeeded by hard work and stealth in doing what we British twice stopped them doing by force last century, it’s bound to make our blood boil. It shouldn’t, because we’re all part of one big happy Union now, but human beings aren’t quite made like that yet. At least we aren’t, thank God. It takes more than thirty years – thirty years today by the way – to erase a millennium of tribal allegiance.’

  ‘But all that Second Nat War stuff was over a century ago. Germany has been peaceful and democratic now for a hundred years.’

  ‘A century this Saturday. Quite a week for anniversaries.’

  ‘That’s right. All they’ve done since is work harder and produce more and show more leadership than the rest of you in the Union. We Americans cannot understand why they shouldn’t be allowed to enjoy the fruits of that, without you nats constantly s
till dragging up what happened a hundred years ago.’

  ‘Because, Gemma, they force you to. It wasn’t our fans who were chanting and crowing about domination. It was theirs. You don’t get the Portuguese strutting around Brussels demanding a high euro–dollar rate despite its effect on our exports, or interest rates which suit their industry, it’s the Germans. Every time. You don’t find the Spanish threatening a scorched earth policy in Estonia, or the Greeks sabre-rattling against the Ukraine, do you now?’ He felt a rant coming on. ‘One hundred and ten million hard-working, as you say, and committed Germans bang in the centre of the Union – or Reich as I’ve heard them call it amongst themselves when they don’t think anyone’s listening. It’s no good feeling sorry for them any longer, they’ve won, they’ve no reason to boast their famous inferiority complexes now. They’re in control. What were their fans chanting? Nothing more than the unpalatable truth. We made a historic error in ever allowing the European trading scheme to get political.’

  ‘With all this talk, it sounds like you ought to be in the Resistance.’

  ‘Too much of a coward. Anyhow, I still think it can be done peacefully.’

  ‘By writing snide articles about Aachen in the newspapers?’

  ‘Yes, partly. It all helps. What’s getting at you?’

  ‘Ah don’t know. You just sound so cynical. Ah mean, my country has been a union of states since 1776. Now with A.F.T.A. it’s an even bigger union, and it works.’ This was getting like those endless, aimless, late-night philosophical conversations about life, love and politics he’d had with fellow undergraduates at university. But anything was better than Gemma hearing the radio news.

  ‘But you started off with a common language, religion, revolution, values, assumptions, aspirations, manifest destiny, legal system, flag and all the rest of it.’

  ‘Well, you’ve got most of those things now. History’s being written to emphasise the European dimension of everything. Oliver’s being taught about the positive aspects of the Roman, Charlemagne, Holy Roman and Austro-Hungarian empires as forerunners of the Union, and virtually nothing about the English monarchy. The only times wars are mentioned it’s in order to admonish the kids about the horrors of nationhood. Teaching dates has been completely phased out. Oliver gets marked down if he mentions them, as they ‘over-contextualise’ history according to his teachers! You’ve had a single currency since 1999, and although you’re probably right about the Germans dominating the economy, well, they’re good at it aren’t they? What’s the big problem?’

  ‘The problem is that it isn’t working. Look at the waste, the inefficiency, the smuggling. And the corruption! Why did Italy split into three regions rather than stay as one? Corruption. Who’s cornered the black market in tobacco, foreign booze and Hollywood videos? The various mafias. Maltese in Streatham, Sardinians in Bayswater and so on. Our poor old homegrown East-End villains never stood a chance! What do you do if Brussels refuses you your oak subsidy on the minor technicality that you’d chopped down all your oaks last year for the timber subsidy? You find the guy responsible and bribe him. Then there’s Euroflation, seven million unemployed …’ Horatio was getting into his stride.

  They debated hard but flirtatiously until the M3 turnoff.

  She was certainly spirited, and brighter than he’d previously given her credit for. He wondered whether he was right to pick up the sparks of sexual electricity somewhere there too?

  ‘Why did France let Germany get away with it?’ The locust mind had leapt again. There was now no danger of her listening to the radio until after she’d dropped him off.

  ‘With what?’

  ‘With controlling the Union.’

  Horatio had a pet theory about France which he would never put down on screen, but which was probably safe to air to a foreigner alone in an electric auto approaching Ausgang 6 on the M3 on a bright and cloudless May morning.

  ‘The French’ – he wanted to say ‘Frogs’ but remembered at the last minute that Georgie Worcester had got three days in prison and seven Ethnic-offence penalty points on his I.D. for doing just that – ‘had their political and military self-confidence – not their linguistic, cultural or culinary self-confidence, nothing ever could touch those – blown away between February and December 1916 at the Battle of Verdun. They lost 1.3 million men in the First Nationalist War, almost twice as many as us. Everything that came after that: the mutinies of 1917, Fourth Republic instability, Appeasement, Munich, the June ’40 collapse, Vichy, the de Gaulle–Adenauer axis, the Coal and Steel Community, Treaty of Rome, Maastricht, Schengen, the Fast Track Six, the soft-then-hard euro, the Single Currency, Aachen, the whole lot, they all came about as a result of that national loss of will. It was shot up and left hanging, haemorrhaging away on the barbed wire at Verdun. Afterwards, they conned themselves into thinking they could ride the tiger, be the Greeks to Germany’s Rome and so on. Why do you suppose they raised that statue to Marshal Pétain in the Place de la Concorde five years ago?’

  ‘It was the hundredth anniversary of his becoming President.’

  ‘Yes, but why did they feel the need to commemorate him? Because for five years, when everyone else in the world was fighting the Second Nationalist War and millions were dying, he made sure that most Frenchmen weren’t. You can be sure that if Norway was in the Union today they’d have a statue up to Vidkun Quisling in Oslo.’

  Gemma just nodded through all of this. Had the lecture bored her? It seemed so, for the grasshopper leapt again.

  ‘You know something, Horatio. You’ve got a very attractive mind. Ah like the way you seem to formulate whole sentences before you say them. Most people, me for instance, just start off and work out the rest of it halfway through while we’re speaking. You seem to know what you’re about to say about three sentences before.’

  ‘Thanks, it’s nice to know something about me is attractive.’ He was fishing.

  ‘You’re fishing.’

  ‘No I’m not.’

  ‘Yes you are and Ah’m flattered you’re bothering. Actually, Ah do find you very attractive. Except for …’ He waited. And waited.

  ‘For what? You can’t stop there.’ It looked as though she had. ‘Come on, Gemma. You can’t lead a horse to water like that. Except for what?’

  ‘Oh … nothing. Let’s just say that Ah find you attractive.’

  ‘No. Sorry. You can’t leave it at that! You can’t say ‘except for …’ and then stop there!’

  What could it be? The dandruff? (Wasn’t too bad, he was on top of the problem now.) Receding hairline? (He was twenty-nine.) Teeth like mossy old gravestones? (He’d never forgive his mother for calling them that. They were much better now too.) The flecky upper lip? (OK, perhaps that.) ‘Say what it is you don’t like and I promise I’ll have all the necessary surgery! Please. Please.’

  ‘Well, you’re clearly besotted with that Cleopatra woman whose husband chased us around the houses yesterday afternoon. It was all very confusing for Oliver to be introduced to a new friend of his mom’s only to have to help to push him through the restroom window to escape a jealous husband. No woman likes to be involved in a stupid old cliché of a love triangle, it’s bad for the ego.’

  He thought for a short time. ‘I see. Yes. That’s fair. Although I’m not besotted actually. Anyway, if the past is anything to go by, my love life is programmed on self-destruct mode anyhow.’

  He badly wanted to change the subject and was helped by the approach of Ausgang 6. ‘Come off here’ – he pointed – ‘and at the roundabout follow signs for Basingstoke.’ She turned off. He watched carefully in the rear-view mirror to see who followed. One blue petrol, which overtook them, and a couple of electrics. One red, one black. He noted the plates on his pager, just in case.

  ‘How do you feel about your son being taught all that Union Civics and Lifestyle Studies crap? I mean, that test yesterday was such blatant federationist propaganda put out by the Education Commissioner.’

  ‘I
t was bad, wasn’t it?’ They passed Basingstoke shuttle station. They had lost all three cars. He was quite certain now that they were not being followed.

  ‘Whereabouts do you want to be dropped off?’ she asked.

  ‘Anywhere near here’ll do. You’ll want to head off south now, presumably.’

  ‘No, not really. Ah’ll take you anywhere you like. Ah’ve got plenty of time on my hands. Mr Weaning said Ah didn’t have to file till twenty hundred tomorrow.’ For a brief moment Horatio considered taking her to a hotel and discovering, after a bottle or two at lunch, exactly how attractive she really did find him. Then he thought of Cleo and remembered why he was there. There seemed no harm in getting her to take him to Ibworth. He didn’t want to be recognised in Basingstoke trying to catch a taxi. Not after having come this far.

  ‘It’s a village three miles or so outside Basingstoke. If you go into town we’ll see some signposts.’

  Gemma brought up the subject of Oliver’s father. He was American, and by her account a thoroughgoing pig. They had divorced three years before and his publishing job in New York was part of the reason she wanted to pursue her career in London. Before Horatio had a chance to show sympathy, or even be genuinely sympathetic, they were at The Free Fox. He asked her to drive a short way up the high street, wanting to avoid the pub.

  ‘Could you stop just along here? Thanks. And thanks for the ride. You were great to do that for me. Now, you just have to retrace your steps to get back to the motorway.’ He was damned if he was going to call it autobahn.

  ‘You never told me what you’re doing here,’ she said. ‘Something cloak-and-dagger again?’ He thought quickly. Europol would be bound to ask her later.

  ‘A relative has just died and left me some property. I’m just going to look over it.’ Almost true.