Second Violin

by Lawton, John

  ‘Herr Greene, Herr Troy.’

  No Heil Hitler. No salute. No Prussian clicking of the heels.

  ‘Will you be joining us, Standartenführer?’

  ‘Not today, Herr Troy. Nor any other day. You will be leaving shortly. Both of you.’

  Stahl put two folded foolscap sheets in front of them. Neither moved to pick them up.

  ‘Expulsion?’ Rod asked.

  ‘Yes. Try not to take it personally. Half the people in this room will be in the same boat, metaphorically if not literally.’

  ‘I’m sure you’re right,’ Rod went on. ‘However, we do seem to be the only ones receiving orders of expulsion . . . as it were . . . personally.’

  ‘Consider it an honour.’

  ‘And where might we be expected to go?’ asked Hugh.

  ‘You, Herr Greene, can go where you like as long as it is outside the Reich. You, Herr Troy? Alas not. I shall be putting you on a plane to London myself. Go home and pack. Your plane leaves at midnight.’

  ‘Midnight,’ Hugh protested. ‘Good God man. I’ve got family here, I can’t just –’

  ‘You have three weeks, Herr Greene. Pack up your suitcases, ship your furniture. We are not unreasonable people. Three weeks should be enough. But Mr Troy has until midnight. I shall leave an escort to assist you, and I shall see you this evening at Tempelhof. Good day to you both.’

  Stahl left. Again no salute, no Heil Hitler. Hugh looked at Rod and said, ‘And you think I’ve blotted my copybook. What on earth have you done to upset the buggers?’

  But Rod wasn’t giving any mind to what he had done. He was wondering what his father might have done to finally prise him out of Berlin.

  § 54

  Politely and firmly Rod was put into an armoured car and driven out to Tempelhof. The Gestapo man assigned to guard him had said next to nothing, answered all Rod’s questions minimally and seemed to be the sort of bloke who could wear a leather coat in May without breaking into a sweat. He had scarcely left Rod’s side since Stahl had set him the task. Back in his apartment, Rod had paused in packing to take a pee, peeped through the keyhole to find the man not three feet from the door – not listening or looking, merely guarding, doing exactly what had been asked of him to the letter.

  Out at the airport he had walked Rod up to a wooden hut somewhat isolated from the rest of the buildings, knocked on the door, and opened it. He stood, waiting for Rod to move.

  ‘In here?’

  ‘Hinein.’

  Rod peered in. It was empty but for a couple of bentwood chairs of the sort he’d so often seen between the thighs of lusciously decadent singers in Berlin cabaret. One chair was empty, and on the other was Wolfgang Stahl, long legs outstretched, eyes closed, fingers locked behind his head, the scattered pages of the banal Beobachter and the almost-as-banal 12-Uhr Blatt at his feet. Rod stepped into the room, heard the door close behind him, turned quickly to find that the man had not followed him in. Stahl’s eyes opened. He took his hands down, glanced at his wristwatch. No standing to attention, no Heil Hitler.

  ‘So – we have ten minutes in hand.’

  He waved the hand at the chair, motioned Rod to sit.

  ‘Ten minutes,’ Rod said. ‘Just enough time for an interview, if you have a mind to it, Standartenführer.’

  ‘Fine, then I shall interview you.’

  ‘I meant –’

  ‘I know what you meant, Herr Troy. Do you never think that your cleverness might on occasion be a failing?’

  ‘Ah, I see. Was it something I said . . . or rather something I wrote?’

  ‘The expulsion you mean? No. It has nothing to do with your reporting. In fact it’s a simple piece of tit for tat. One of ours is being expelled from London, so we send five or six of you packing in retaliation. Greene was top of the list. The man has a natural talent for making mischief. Indeed, I’m sure he will go far in his profession – if he lives. You were a good second. But your prose has nothing to do with it. You take risks in what you say. I would hardly expect otherwise. But the biggest risk you took was Vienna.’

  ‘You mean the piece I did on Leopoldstadt?’

  ‘No. I read that. You may well have been accurate in your account. God knows. I couldn’t care less. The risk was not what you wrote, it was in going there.’

  This gave Rod pause for thought.

  ‘That’s what Greene said,’ he said.

  ‘Good advice. You should have taken it.’

  ‘I felt like seeing Vienna.’

  Stahl shook his head.

  ‘No, no, Herr Troy. Far too casual. A very lazy lie. You have been angling, cajoling, pleading and wheedling to see Vienna since last April. I have read all your exchanges with your father. It has been . . . what shall I say . . . a compulsion on your part.’

  ‘And on yours, what? You didn’t have to go back to your home town looking like a conqueror as part of Hitler’s entourage. But you did.’

  Stahl spoke as though explaining the obvious to an exasperatingly literal child. ‘Unlike you, Herr Troy, I live in a country that lives by a chain of command, by orders and by obedience to orders. I was doing my job.’

  ‘You know, Standartenführer, when all this is over in ten or twenty years and your thousand-year Reich is dust and bad memories, I wouldn’t rely on “I was only following orders” as my defence.’

  ‘Perhaps I’ll take your advice. In the meantime let me give you some. Europe is ours now. We live in a world which demands clear ethnic and national distinctions. And in such a world people such as you blur the lines. That is not a safe or healthy position to be in.’

  ‘Blurred ethnic lines? In a country led by a man of dubious parentage and racial origin?’

  For a second Rod thought Stahl was going to hit him. But he had risen from his chair, stretched in a lazy-cat fashion, muttered ‘Jesus Christ’ a couple of times, sat back down, leaned close to Rod and lowered his voice to a stagey whisper.

  ‘Good God man – that’s the Führer you’re speaking of. You know, if you’d said that to Heydrich or Himmler they’d have had you taken out back and had you kicked till your balls were black and blue. Take my advice, if it is a touch of Vienna that you crave . . . there are now so many Viennese in London I rather think you will find enough of the old city to sate your craving. Give them enough time and they’ll have Little Viennas popping up everywhere. Now, go home to your wife and family and never come back.’

  Stahl already had his hand on the doorknob, his back to Rod, when Rod said, ‘You know Standartenführer, there’s a story doing the rounds of Berlin that Heydrich came home one night and shot his own reflection in the mirror. I wonder . . . who do you see when you look in the . . .’

  It was as smooth as a Hopalong Cassidy or Tom Mix in a Hollywood two-reeler – Stahl had turned, drawn and levelled his Luger at Rod’s head so swiftly it took his breath away.

  ‘This is Berlin, Herr Troy. I could shoot you now and no one would ever know. Your father would phone the embassy, telegraph von Ribbentrop, demand the lists for Sachsenhausen and Dachau and no one would know a damn thing. You would have vanished into Nacht und Nebel.’

  § 55

  7 July 1939

  Belgravia, London

  A time there was when London seemed to have been dominated by women like Daffy Carfax. Alex wondered when that time might come to an end. It had, after all, lasted the duration of his life in London, and that was close to thirty years. Paris wasn’t like this. New York was, but in its own way – London, after all, ignored the notion of new money, and to elevate and integrate took time as well as money Beerage into peerage. Daffy had money, and Daffy had breeding – the youngest daughter of a viscount, several of the right schools, in most of which she had behaved very badly, a year in Switzerland, a quick curtsey to Queen Alexandra on her coming out in 1902, a whirl of courtships by eligible young men, all of whom she had rejected for Sir Mungo Carfax bt., an entomologist many years her senior who was guaranteed to prefer pinning
his dead moths to inflicting his carnal attentions on her, and she, as Lady Carfax, was installed as one of London’s leading society hostesses. Her dinners and luncheons were legendary. Few, if any, ever turned down an invitation from Daffy. At fifty-three she looked thirty-five and was, a broken nose (result of a climbing accident in the Alps) notwithstanding, an eye-catching beauty – mixed a thorough knowledge of politics and the arts with a dash of mild flirtation and had the young bucks and old dogs of London eating out of her hand. Mungo hardly, if ever, attended. His wish to further the work of Darwin and Mendel, to do for moths what they had done for tortoises and peas, might be no more than a dream, but it was one that walled him up happily in a library and a world of his own. Alex never said no to Daffy . . . nor did Churchill.

  Alex found him getting out of a cab in Chesham Place. He could have walked here from his London flat, just the other side of Victoria railway station, but Churchill hardly walked anywhere.

  ‘I hear we have a treat in store,’ Alex said.

  Churchill was fumbling in his trousers pocket for change. Alex handed the cabman a florin, told him to keep the change and smiled at Churchill.

  Churchill smiled back. ‘I seem to have a pocketful of ha’pennies,’ he said. ‘The grand summation of my career. Stuck for the right change. Days there are when I feel I could turn my pockets inside out like elephants’ ears and not hear one farthing clink against another.’

  ‘That sounds like the opening line of a very rude joke.’

  ‘It is, and one I only perform when very drunk. The treat, by the way, is another of Daffy’s continentals . . . no idea who, but doubtless some bugger she’s got over to lecture us all on the Balkanisation of this and that or the Arab question.’

  ‘What is the Arab question?’

  ‘How do you castrate a camel?’

  ‘No idea.’

  ‘Well, you get two bricks . . .’

  As if by magic the front door of the Carfax house opened and Churchill abandoned his music hall routine. Daffy greeted them in the hallway effusive, calling them both darling, and before the door could close again a young man – short, forty-ish, undistinguished – bounded up the steps and in.

  ‘Victor, darling!’

  And Daffy glided between the two old men to embrace the younger. Churchill stalked off. Alex waited for a friendly handshake from Victor Cazalet, then followed Churchill.

  One of the delights of Daffy’s luncheons was that she would throw together a mixture; differing politics, differing generations. It was a chance to meet those whom one might not otherwise meet. Alex had met Cazalet once or twice and thought him interesting. He had, for a while, been in the same business – running an unsuccessful arts magazine called Night and Day (Alex had no idea if it was named after the Cole Porter song or if this was just coincidence). He had attended the magazine’s launch, thought it extravagant, given it less than a year and watched it fold in six months. In that brief interval it had given employment to the young novelist Graham Greene, whom he rather thought might be related to the journalist of the same surname with whom Rod knocked around Berlin. What he did not like about Cazalet was his support for the Spanish dictator Franco. It was as though fascism appealed to some dusty pocket in the English mind that craved uniforms and order and was capable of turning a blind eye to the brutality by which that order was bought. Mussolini had English fans among the most respectable and intelligent of people – something Hitler had been unable to achieve outside of a bunch of black-shirted tearaways and demagogic, messianic crackpots – and a nation devoted to railways (W. Heath Robinson had his finger on the political pulse here) and proud of making them run on time always seemed to admire any nation and any political system that would emulate them in this. He’d had rows with his old friend H.G. Wells about the fascists ever since the Twenties, and was inclined to accept this English quirk without being able to tolerate it. Churchill had not been notable in his opposition to Franco. It might have been what he and Cazalet had first had in common. Now, Alex wondered what the young man had done to incur Winston’s grumpy silence. It need not have been much.

  If Churchill no longer cared for Cazalet’s company, Alex found him in Daffy’s morning room in company he surely cared for even less. All but buttonholed by Wells – a man with an opinion on everything under the sun and quite a lot of things beyond it – a man who had imagined life on Mars and the Moon . . . the shape of things to come . . . and the start of World War II (and that he had played as comedy as it happens, in a railway station). He was expressing many of those opinions to Churchill at speed, in a high, slightly strangulated voice. Something about the fate of mankind, and the inevitability of extinction, how no dominant species had ever been succeeded by its own descendants . . . but then he’d been banging on about this for forty years, his novels full of trolls and crabs and thingies that ruled the earth after us. ‘Homo sapiens has failed . . . we have not developed the right brain . . . we have less than a thousand years left.’ Alex doubted whether Churchill was bothering to take any of it in. He doubted that Churchill had ever read The War of the Worlds or The Time Machine. Yet, years ago, about the time he and Wells had met, in the long Edwardian summer, every literate left-thinking person seemed to have read Wells’s fascist vision Anticipations, much as these days everyone seemed to have read the latest P.G. Wodehouse or J.B. Priestley. And as the cast assembled – Victor Cazalet MP, Winston Churchill MP, Harold Nicolson MP, Duff Cooper MP, Harold Macmillan MP, Alex wondered that he and Wells might be there simply because neither of them had a seat in parliament, that they were, as it occurred to him, the yeast in the Westminster loaf.

  He found himself standing next to a dishevelled old man wearing what appeared to be cricket whites, a man well prepared for lunch as half of yesterday’s seemed still to be drying on his shirt and trousers, which trousers, Alex surmised, were held up by a knotted old Harrovian tie. It was Mungo. A scotch and water in one hand, a specimen dead moth in the other.

  ‘It’s a Clifden Nonpareil,’ Mungo said without introduction. ‘You can tell it by the blue hindwings.’

  Alex plumped for the obvious response, ‘Rare, is it?’

  ‘Caught two in Kent in ’36. Not seen another until last night when this little chap tapped on me windowpane. Attracted by the poplars in the street, I suppose. There are several British Catocala, the red and crimson Underwings, for example, but this isn’t one you’d ordinarily regard as anything but a migrant . . . a sort of stray dog of the moth world.’

  Mungo looked at Alex for the first time. They’d met dozens of times, but Alex was fairly certain that all of Daffy’s men blurred into one from the husband’s point-of-view.

  ‘I suppose you’re here to put the world to rights?’

  ‘When am I not?’ said Alex.

  ‘Well, now’s your chance . . . the wife’s new specimen has arrived . . . another bloody stray.’

  Alex followed the old boy’s gaze and saw a man in the doorway about Cazalet’s age and about the same height – but less handsome, a hint of brutality in the broad, flat face, a severity in the close-cropped hair – without a monocle or a duelling scar and in a civilian suit of tasteless brown, still so obviously a German officer of some sort – a man born to horseback and military service.

  Alex turned back, but Mungo had vanished into his study and Daffy was introducing, word for word and at length, the Graf Lieutenant-Colonel Gerhard von Schwerin to the room.

  He greeted Alex by saying that he had long been an admirer, and Alex replied, ‘Of what are you a Lieutenant-Colonel, Count von Schwerin? From what pack have you strayed to London?’

  ‘I . . . er . . . don’t understand.’

  ‘Oh ignore him, Count,’ Daffy cut in. ‘He’s been talking to Mungo. I’d be prepared to swear he has. It’s one of Mungo’s thingies, one of his ill-chosen words. All Alex means is “what’s your unit?” and as you’re here incognito, my dear, feel no obligation to tell him.’

  But von Schwerin said, �
�My unit, Sir Alex? The Abwehr. I work for Admiral Canaris, of whom you have surely heard? A stray dog of the highest order.’

  And Alex looked at Churchill and Churchill looked back at Alex, the both of them realising that when Daffy had said ‘treat’ she had meant it.

  At lunch Alex was seated next to their hostess, with Cazalet on his right, and Wells on her left. Von Schwerin was placed where he could be of most use, between Churchill and Macmillan. Alex was, he knew, here to observe rather than participate. And he hoped Wells would shut up long enough for them to hear what von Schwerin had come five hundred miles to tell them all.

  ‘It is the gravest crisis Europe has seen these twenty years. More – I would say, without implied respect, that Hitler will plunge us all into war the way Napoleon did. And what were the wars of Napoleon but a world war for which we did not yet have the name?’

  Churchill was slow off the mark, left too long a pause for Wells to nip in.

  ‘Is it not inevitable? The inevitable end of mankind in an armageddon of its own making. Our destiny since we crawled out of the primeval slime?’

  ‘I’m sorry, Mr Wells? Inevitable? There is nothing inevitable about Adolf Hitler. I cannot see the force of destiny in the rise of an Austrian corporal . . . a tyrant who grew out of your ill-conceived treaties and our politics . . . not from our “natural evolution” . . . indeed, if he is destiny why then were we given so many opportunities to stop him?’

  ‘The Rhineland,’ Churchill muttered.

  ‘Austria,’ said Macmillan.

  ‘Czechoslovakia,’ said Cazalet.

  ‘Bert,’ Alex cut in. ‘How long would you like the list to be? A dozen violations of international treaties. They are political moments – mostly ones we missed – not strata in the rocks.’