Prime Target

by Hugh Miller

  ‘I swear on my mother’s life, I was.’

  ‘Then why object when we take serious action against the fascists?’

  ‘Because you’re into wholesale slaughter, and there’s no obvious proof that you’re targeting the right people.’

  ‘But we are.’

  ‘To say that, you must have substantial proof, or at least enough to get a legitimate investigation going. Why not hand over your evidence to the police?’

  ‘Conventional investigations are too polite and too prone to end in flabby liberal leniency. Our way is better.’

  ‘Erika,’ Sabrina leaned close again. ‘I can’t spend any more time arguing. I have a job to do. I need to know who your hatchet man is. I’m prepared to do what it takes to get an answer. I wasn’t kidding about the Pentothal.’

  Erika was staring into the bedroom. Gregor had come round. He lay coughing feebly against the carpet.

  ‘I don’t want you to hurt him,’ she said, the hardness gone from her voice.

  ‘Then talk to me.’

  For a long moment Erika stared at Sabrina. Then she nodded. ‘Take the cuffs off him. Give him water. Then I’ll talk to you.’

  ‘You want me to let him loose before you’ve talked?’ Sabrina shook her head. ‘I don’t think so. Not until -’

  ‘It’s a promise!’ Erika whispered hoarsely. ‘A promise. I never go back on a promise! Now in the name of God help Gregor. Help him!’

  The black pickup was parked on a rocky bluff high over a stretch of open land between two dense clumps of woodland. The sun was high and the temperature inside the pickup, in spite of the windows being open, was 92 degrees Fahrenheit.

  For more than two hours Chuck and Billy had sat behind the dusty windshield, observing Chadwick’s station wagon parked on the open ground below them, its grey-and-blue paintwork baking in the heat.

  ‘All that time in a wagon in this heat with a dead man,’ Chuck said. ‘That guy ain’t natural. What kind of man could put up with that?’

  ‘He’s English, don’t forget.’

  Since parking the station wagon Mr Beamish did not appear to have moved. He had simply stopped on the dirt road linking the clumps of woodland, the same dirt road that led right through that sector of the Greenbelt Park. When he stopped he switched off the engine, sat back behind the wheel and folded his arms.

  ‘He does have air-conditioning in there,’ Billy said. ‘But I don’t think that would give him too much protection, not after all this time.’ He groaned. ‘I promised Mr Chadwick I’d clean the inside of that wagon after this character’s done with it.’

  At that moment Malcolm Philpott, sitting in the station wagon, could see what the two men in the pickup would have to use their scopes to identify, a small bulk-liquid transporter with a fat blue chemical tank on its back. It approached along a branch road and came slowly down the hillside to the spot where Philpott was parked.

  The driver was Russ Grundy. ‘Mr Beamish?’ he called.

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Are we being watched?’

  ‘Yes we are. Get into your part, Russ. You have a keen-eyed audience up on the hill over there behind me. Please don’t look in that direction.’

  Grundy got out. He was dressed in the uniform of a US State Trooper. He came across to the station wagon and held the door as Philpott got out.

  ‘What do I have to do now?’

  Philpott pointed to the back of the station wagon. ‘There’s a roll of carpet in there. In the interests of verisimilitude, there are two half-filled plastic sacks of water taped to the centre of the roll. I want you to help me carry that carpet over to your empty tanker and poke it in through the lid on top, which of course you will first open.’

  ‘Can you tell me why I’m dressed like a lawman?’

  ‘Why do you ask? Do you need to know what your motivation is?’

  ‘No. I’m just eaten up with curiosity.’

  ‘In my experience,’ Philpott said, ‘it’s the really baffling visible evidence that burrows deep into people’s credulity. I mean, what in heaven’s name is a state trooper doing driving a tanker? And what’s he going to do with the carpet-wrapped corpse he’s loaded into the tank?’

  ‘It’s bizarre, I’ll give you that.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  From the pickup high on the bluff Chuck and Billy watched through their scopes as the ominous roll of carpet was manhandled on to the pickup and slid, after some struggling, down into the tank. They watched the trooper close the lid, get down, shake hands with Beamish, and drive away. After a couple of minutes Beamish drove off in the opposite direction.

  ‘I’ll be real glad when this day is over,’ Billy said to Chuck.

  Back in Dallas Philpott parked the station wagon at a quiet spot near his hotel, as arranged with Chadwick. Before he closed and locked the door, he sprinkled three drops from the phial of cadav-erine Grundy had obtained for him. Within seconds the unmistakable odour of decaying human flesh began to fill the interior of the station wagon. He shut the door quickly.

  ‘Mission accomplished,’ he whispered with satisfaction. He’d enjoyed this little jaunt. It felt good to be back in the field again. As he walked back to the hotel he whistled softly, thinking ahead to a hot bath, a fine dinner, then a late flight back to New York.

  23

  ‘Memories threaten me,’ Uli Jürgen said. ‘I hate the way they invade my present.’

  ‘Really? How strange.’

  Marianne Edel was on a high-legged stool in the centre of the bare-floored studio, her face and her uncovered shoulders mercilessly sunlit by tall windows and wide fanlights. When she spoke she tried not to move.

  ‘How else would you make contact with memories?’ she said. ‘They have to invade the present before you become aware of them.’

  ‘They always seem to challenge my safety. So I try to leave the past undisturbed.’

  Jürgen stepped back from his easel and put down the brush he had been using. He smiled at the canvas, being careful to frown at the same time, so he would look self-critical. The picture pleased him. It gave him a secure, competent feeling. All his good commercial work did that.

  ‘I think we are finished, Frau Edel.’

  At six sittings over four weeks he had painted a perfect likeness of his sitter, which any half-adequate portraitist could have done. But he was Uli Jürgen, so his picture was much more than a likeness. He had been described as an artist who could invest a portrait with the spirituality of its subject. The picture of Marianne Edel was a true likeness invested with a dozen ingenious falsehoods - at the eyes, the mouth, the jawline, the neck. Her skin sagged and wrinkled in exactly the places it did in reality, but in the picture the sagging and the furrows were softer-edged and looked more like silken drapery than tired epidermis.

  ‘May I look at it now?’

  ‘Well…’

  Individually the falsehoods were unremarkable, but the collective effect was to flatter Marianne Edel shamelessly, and brilliantly. A stranger looking at the picture would see a convincing harmony of line and tone and colour which suggested, powerfully, that the vigour and sexuality in the image must be a true reflection of those qualities in the sitter. Uli Jürgen had known Marianne Edel only a little over a month, but he doubted she had ever looked half as good as his creation.

  ‘Yes, come and look,’ he said.

  She stepped down carefully from the stool and stood beside him. For a minute they were silent, he thinking about his meeting later with his accountant, she bedazzled by a talent that could make her resemble so strongly her own idea of herself.

  ‘You are a genius,’ she said.

  ‘Oh, come now.’

  He cringed within himself as she impulsively threw her arms round his neck and kissed him on the mouth.

  ‘You darling!’ she exclaimed, and kissed him again.

  Jürgen held his breath and waited for it to be over. The woman was fifty, heavy for her size and not well preserved.
Facially she bore an unflattering resemblance to the actor Jon Voight. She had stale breath and bad taste in perfume. But she was rich, and Jürgen never repulsed money or anyone who came bearing it, however objectionable.

  ‘You think your husband will like it, then?’ he said as she released him.

  ‘He will adore it. When can I take it home?’

  ‘It should remain here another ten days, at least. But if you are really impatient to remove it to your home, I can have it taken there two or three days from now by someone who knows how to handle freshly-finished canvases. He can hang it for you, too.’

  ‘That would be splendid. Can you arrange that for me?’

  ‘Horst will be here later to pick up some other work. I will organize everything with him then, and call you to confirm.’

  Marianne Edel took her coat from the stand by the window. Jürgen helped her put it on.

  ‘You are so well organized for an artist,’ she said. ‘And more of a thinker than I would have expected.’

  ‘A thinker?’ Jürgen smiled cautiously. ‘What makes you say that?’

  ‘You’ve told me so many interesting things on my visits here. And what you were saying just now, about memories, that is so haunting.’

  If she had not been a client he would have laughed. In the circumstances he stared neutrally into his coffee cup. The observation about memories was entirely for effect. He had read some of it somewhere and made up the rest.

  ‘My husband says you’re the living image of Freud, you know.’

  Jürgen looked at Frau Edel. ‘Freud?’

  ‘Your beard, the broad forehead - and the way you hold a paintbrush when you look at the canvas, it’s just the way Freud held a cigar.’

  It was the first time he had been told he looked like a Jew, and it stung. He looked pointedly at his watch.

  ‘I must go,’ said Frau Edel. He accompanied her to the door. ‘Do call me as soon as you have made arrangements to have the portrait delivered.’

  ‘Of course.’

  She kissed his cheek one more time before she left. He closed the door softly behind her, making a sour face at the panels.

  ‘Freud, indeed.’

  The telephone rang. He hurried across and picked it up. It was his accountant’s secretary, reminding him of his appointment.

  ‘Tell him not to worry,’ he said, ‘I haven’t forgotten. ‘I’ll get there on time, I always do.’

  There was a sharp tap on the door. Horst, he thought, or the Edel woman had forgotten something.

  He crossed the studio and opened the door. A stranger was there, tall, blue-eyed, with very fair hair. He had a confident smile.

  ‘Herr Jürgen? I came for the package.’

  ‘I’m sorry? The package? There must be a mistake.’

  ‘That’s it.’ The young man pointed to a cardboard box halfway across the room.

  ‘No, it isn’t, I -’

  The young man pushed past Jürgen and entered the studio. He stopped in front of the portrait of Marianne Edel, staring at it.

  Jürgen came away from the door, frowning, confused.

  ‘That is rubbish,’ the young man said, still smiling.

  ‘Get out of here,’ Jürgen said. He took the young man by the arm. ‘Right this minute, or I call the police.’

  The young man pulled his arm free and slipped the other hand into the pocket of his tweed jacket. He pulled out a black snub-nosed revolver.

  ‘Here is a fact, Uli Jürgen. In 1942 the painter Samuel Weiss was kicked out of his Berlin studio, two streets away from this spot, and his canvases and paints were thrown out of the windows on to the road. Weiss was then made to wear a placard listing his alleged crimes against humanity, and while he was paraded around the little park near his studio, the Nazis made a bonfire of all his paintings.’

  The young man waved the gun at Jürgen, making him stand in front of the portrait of Marianne Edel.

  ‘Another fact. Samuel Weiss was estimated to be one of the foremost experimental painters of the thirties. His name was mentioned alongside those of Schwitters, Hodler and Kandinsky. He illuminated the world with his vision. You, on the other hand, call yourself a painter, an artist, and yet you have never displayed a talent for producing anything more elevated than sophisticated posters.’

  ‘What is your point?’ Jürgen demanded. ‘What do you want with me?’

  ‘Weiss finally died after being blinded and having his hands and his spirit broken in Belsen. That was his fate, after having lived his entire life in poverty. You, an ungifted hack, have brought no light into the world, have never been poor, and are about to die rich. My point, sir, is that everyday life bulges with sickening ironies.’

  Jürgen had turned white.

  ‘Suppose you at least try to die the death of a true artist,’ the young man said.

  ‘I warn you,’ Jürgen said, ‘you will find yourself in great trouble.’

  ‘Not me, sir. I am not about to suffer like so many people have suffered at the hands of you and yours, your sidekicks, the brotherhood with its benighted faith in the power of thickheaded bullies to prevail.’

  Jürgen felt his bowels loosen. He swallowed against the dryness in his throat. He remembered the telephone call from Viktor Kretzer, warning him to be on his guard.

  ‘Here is your chance of redemption, Uli Jürgen.’

  The young man extended his arm suddenly, pointing the gun at a downward angle. He fired. Jürgen stood where he was, half-deafened. His right arm was numb and felt incredibly heavy. He looked down and saw half his hand was gone. Blood trickled freely on to the floorboards.

  ‘You are an artist,’ the young man said. ‘Try to think like one. This context is unbearable, yes? You paint with your right hand, it is the instrument of your expression. But it is gone. It cannot be used so your art is effectively silenced.’

  ‘You bastard,’ Jürgen said weakly.

  ‘Enmeshed in such catastrophe, what does the true artist wish for at once, as a matter of reaction?’

  Jürgen stared at the bright intelligent eyes, the fixed smile, trying to read salvation from this nightmare. Pain suddenly surged along his arm and his stomach lurched. He doubled over and vomited.

  ‘So what does the true artist do? What can he want now, bereft of his raison d’être?’ The young man snapped his fingers. ‘If he is a determined artist who would wish to express himself in spite of the most major of setbacks, he would say, to hell with this, I will teach myself to paint with my other hand.’

  In an instant his arm was outstretched and the gun pointing downwards. He fired a second time, blowing off the thumb and first two fingers of Jürgen’s left hand. Jürgen staggered back, reeled for a moment, then dropped to his knees in the puddle of his vomit.

  ‘Now we have the position of ultimate despair. Discount any deranged impulses to learn to paint with the feet or the mouth. You have lost the ability to express yourself. Can you feel that, the sense of loss, the black hole of despair?’

  Jürgen tried to say something but managed only a grunt. Shock had put his body into tremor. Blood gathered in pools on the floor on either side of him.

  ‘You want to die. Am I right? You know life holds nothing for you any more. Tell me, Uli Jürgen, have I made you feel that?’

  Jürgen looked at the end of the barrel, thinking how small it was, how insignificant for something so terrible.

  ‘Do you feel the way poor old Samuel Weiss must have felt, after they had taken away his vision

  and his means of expression?’

  The young man pulled Jürgen to his feet and

  stood him in front of the easel again. He raised

  the gun.

  ‘In the end he must have longed for death.’ The young man fired the gun into Jürgen’s face.

  24

  Sabrina poured a large cognac and handed it to Erika as she came out of the bedroom. Erika drank it in two swallows. Sabrina poured another. This time Erika sipped.

  �
�He’s asleep,’ she said.

  Gregor had gone to bed. The CS gas had made him sick. Erika had overcome his apparent desire to fight, and told him firmly that he needed rest. In the end he felt too ill to resist.

  ‘I didn’t realize how attached I had become,’ Erika said.

  ‘It can be a surprise.’

  ‘I thought, if he dies, I’m going to die too.’ She looked at Sabrina.

  ‘I need you to keep your promise, Erika.’

  ‘Go to the kitchen, we can spread things out in there.’

  Sabrina prepared coffee while Erika made a telephone call. By the time the coffee was ready, a motorcycle courier was at the door with a satchel. Erika brought it to the kitchen and put the contents on the broad worktop. There was a thick book bound in black leather, a photograph album, and hand-written notes on hundreds of sheets of paper, stapled together in batches.

  ‘This material is kept at the home of a magistrate,’ Erika said. ‘This is the first time it has been out of that place since it was gathered together.’

  Sabrina touched the hard leather cover of the big book.

  ‘That is a catalogue of crimes committed by the Jugend von Siegfried. It’s the accumulated records of more than two thousand acts of brutality, robbery, fraud, coercion and murder, committed over a thirty-five-year period.’

  ‘These are their own records?’

  ‘Copies, yes. Hard won, I promise you. It has cost time, money and labour, and at least one cooperative lawyer’s clerk was killed for helping us.’

  ‘What are the pictures?’

  ‘The guilty men and mementoes of some of their victims. The collection means very little, unless your own heart is caught up in what they did, and what they still do.’

  ‘And the bundles of notes?’

  ‘Interview material, mostly the testimony of victims.’

  ‘It looks like a labour of love. Or hate.’

  ‘What astonishes me, even now,’ Erika said, ‘is that the records exist. They are so damning. Nazis have this self-destructive compulsion to record everything they do. They can’t make a move without making a record of it. They have to leave their mark, like dogs at lamp-posts. During the war, they spent fortunes in time, money and manpower just keeping their records straight - the very records that hanged dozens of them.’