Any Human Heart

by William Boyd

  ME: Yes.

  VIVIAN: So have I. I spent thirty-six hours locked up in a cell in Cambridge police station. That’s violence for you. I was making a legal protest against fascist generals in Greece and the state took my freedom away from me.

  ME: I spent two years in solitary confinement in Switzerland, 1944-5. I was fighting for my country.

  VIVIAN: Two years? Christ…

  That shut him up for a while. He topped up our drinks.

  VIVIAN: Do you like travelling?

  ME: Don’t mind a spot of travelling.

  VIVIAN: Well, do you fancy a little trip abroad?

  Vivian was very circumspect as he outlined the itinerary. Everything would be paid for by the SPK, all I had to do was to take the ferry from Harwich to the Hook of Holland and go to a town near Hamburg, called Waldbach. There I was to book into a small hotel called the Gasthaus Kesselring, where I would be contacted by someone. Then new instructions would be given to me. Every evening I was to call Napier Street at 6 o’clock and report in, but I was to speak only to Vivian himself. Our password would be ‘Mogadishu’. I was to say nothing unless the person to whom I said the word ‘Mogadishu’ repeated it. Only you and I know this password, Vivian said, that way our conversations will be secure.

  ‘Mogadishu in Somalia?’ I said. ‘Why?’

  ‘Has a nice ring to it.’

  ‘So we could say I’m on Operation Mogadishu, then?’

  ‘If it makes you happy to think of it that way, Mountstuart, then indeed you are.’

  We sat and drank some more. I asked Vivian what this was all about. Ask me no questions and I’ll tell you no lies, Mountstuart, he said. We were both becoming a little pissed as we neared the bottom of the bottle. What do you believe in, John? I asked him. I believe in fighting fascism in all its forms, he said. That’s an evasion, a catch-all, I said, and fundamentally meaningless. Then I told him about Faustino Angel Peredes – my friend the Spanish Anarchist who had died in Barcelona in 1937 – and the credo we had evolved between us on the Aragón front that year. I let all these names and dates drop with full self-consciousness, wanting him to weigh up the implicit experience, the lived-life therein. Our credo of two hates and three loves: hatred of injustice, hatred of privilege, love of life, love of humanity, love of beauty. Vivian looked at me, sadly, and poured out the last of the whisky for himself, and said: ‘You really are an old unreconstructed tosser, aren’t you?’

  Thursday, 6 October

  I came home this evening to find two envelopes had been pushed through my letter box. The first one contained £100, cash, a train ticket from Waterloo to Waldbach and confirmation that a room had been booked for me at the Gasthaus Kesselring from Saturday onward. The other envelope contained $2,000 in $50 bills and a note to say that my contact in Waldbach would tell me whom to give it to. I am to leave early on Saturday morning – it seems Operation Mogadishu is underway. It may appear strange to make this observation, especially at my age, but I find myself tense with excitement and almost schoolboy anticipation. I could be back at Abbey about to go on a night exercise.

  MEMORANDUM ON ‘OPERATION MOGADISHU’

  Waldbach is a small town set on two sides of a slow meandering river (I forget its name). On the southern side of the town is a semi-ruined castle and a few steep-roofed timbered houses clustered around it. North of the river is the new town (largely post-war dominated by the functional buildings of a large teacher-training college). This was where the Gasthaus Kesselring was situated. I had a room at the rear with a view of a garage and a cinema. I arrived after midnight on Saturday and went straight to bed.

  On Sunday I explored the castle and lunched in the small square at its foot. I dined in the Gasthaus restaurant and read my book in the residents’ lounge (a biography of John O’Hara – very underrated writer). On Monday, I repeated the process, but instead of reading my book went to the cinema to see a badly dubbed film called Three Days of the Condor7 – which seemed to be excellent, as far as I could understand what was going on.

  I made sure to call Napier Street at 6.00 (there had been no reply the previous night).

  ‘Hello?’ a man’s voice said.

  ‘Mogadishu.’

  ‘Hello?’ ‘Mogadishu.’

  Someone else picked up. ‘Is that you, Logan?’

  It was Anna. ‘Yes. Could I speak to John, please?’

  ‘Where are you? Are you all right?’

  ‘Absolutely fine.’

  Vivian came to the phone.

  ‘Mogadishu.’

  ‘Hi, Mountstuart. Everything fine?’

  I hung up, then rang back two minutes later.

  ‘What the fuck are you playing at, Mountstuart?’

  ‘Mogadishu.’

  ‘All right. Mogadishu, Mogadishu, Mogadishu.’ ‘There’s no point in establishing a security procedure if you ignore it.’

  ‘Anna was standing beside me. I couldn’t start spouting “Mogadishu” all over the place.’

  ‘Shall we change the password?’

  ‘No, no, no. Any news?’

  ‘No sign of the contact.’

  ‘That’s odd. Well, hang on in there.’

  On Tuesday I trudged across the bridge that led to the castle, but I couldn’t stand another tour, and instead settled myself at the café with my book and ordered a beer and sandwich. It was a chilly day so I sat inside – the place was more or less empty.

  Then two girls came in and sat down. I sensed they were staring at me and having some sort of whispered discussion. Both of them had badly dyed hair – one blonde, one carroty red. Eventually I looked over and smiled – it seemed to make their minds up and they took seats at my table.

  ‘What the fuck are you playing at?’ the blonde one whispered harshly at me.

  ‘We’ve been sitting in that fucking railway station for two days,’ said Carrot-top.

  I explained that my instructions said nothing about meeting anyone at the railway station. I apologized and suggested buying them a drink as a peace offering and they had a couple of beers. They both spoke good English and smoked constantly.

  ‘I’m Mountstuart,’ I said.

  ‘Why are you so old?’ Blonde said. ‘Can’t they find any young people in England?’

  ‘No, no,’ Carrot said. ‘It’s very clever. Fucking clever, if you think about it. An old guy like him in his suit and overcoat. No one would think anything.’

  ‘Yeah…’ Blonde said. ‘I’m, ah, Ingeborg.’

  ‘And I’m Birgit – no, Petra,’ the redhead corrected herself guilelessly. They both tried not to laugh.

  ‘I believe you have instructions for me,’ I said.

  ‘No,’ Petra said. ‘I think you have something for us.’

  ‘I’d better make a telephone call’

  I went to the telephone-cabin and somehow managed to make a reverse-charge call to Napier Street.

  ‘Will you accept a reverse-charge call from a Mr Logan Mountstuart?’

  ‘Certainly not,’ Tina Brownwell said and hung up.

  I told Petra and Ingeborg they would have to meet me later that evening after I had made my 6 o’clock call to London and we arranged to rendezvous at a café-bar opposite the station.

  I called Vivian at the appointed hour.

  ‘Mogadishu.’

  ‘Cut all that crap, Mountstuart, this isn’t the Boy Scouts.’

  ‘It was your idea.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah. What’s happening?’

  ‘They’ve made contact, but they’ve no instructions.’

  ‘Fucking Jesus Christ!’ Vivian railed on for a while. ‘Where is he? Can you put him on?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The contact.’

  ‘It’s a couple of girls, actually. I’m meeting them later.’

  He said he would make some calls and try to sort matters out. I wandered up to the station and found Petra and Ingeborg sitting in the window of a blazingly bright cafeteria. We ordered some roast chicken and chips a
nd drank beer. The girls smoked. Petra, I suspected from her colouring, was a blonde who had gone redhead. She had blue eyes and a sulky, pouting face sprinkled with many small moles. Ingeborg was a dark-haired girl who had turned peroxide blonde – thin-lipped, with restless brown eyes and a cleft in her chin.

  We ate and chatted as if we were students on an exchange, meeting in the college refectory. They were curious about SPK and John Vivian. I gave them some evasive answers.

  ‘Did you know Ian?’ Petra asked.

  ‘Yes, a little.’

  ‘Poor Ian,’ Ingeborg said.

  ‘Why “Poor Ian”?’

  ‘He was shot by the pigs. They killed him, gunned him down.’8

  ‘We must be talking about a different Ian,’ I said.

  Petra looked at me. ‘Do you have a gun?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  She opened her handbag and showed me what looked like an automatic pistol.

  ‘I too have one,’ Ingeborg said. ‘And here’s your instructions.’ It was the address of a hotel in Zurich: Hotel Horizont. Back to Switzerland.

  I put this down in the interests of candour and what it may reveal about me and the situation I now found myself in. As soon as Petra had shown me her gun and Ingeborg had confessed she had one also I developed a keen sexual interest in these two grubby, neurotic girls. Rather than be alarmed by this turn of events I wanted to invite them back to the Gasthaus Kesselring and have sex with them. Is this the danger of the tawdry glamour of the self-appointed urban guerrilla? That somehow the ‘game’ always tends to obscure the brutal reality? I realized that ‘Operation Mogadishu’ was by now something far more sinister than I had ever envisaged, and yet I couldn’t take it seriously, I couldn’t believe these inefficient bickering girls with their bad dye-jobs posed any kind of threat. I was intrigued, beguiled, aroused. And then I have also to admit that after a moment’s reflection I was shocked at my own stupidity and naivety. What did I think I was doing on this cloak-and-dagger journey across Germany? Organizing some pan-European student demo? Delivering funds for a left-wing charitable organization? John Vivian’s bad-boy paranoia and cynicism had seemed nothing more than an attitude, an affectation, a way of appearing ‘cool’ – all with the aim, perhaps, of making it easier to attract pretty young women like Anna and Tina into his Napier Street lair. But I suddenly saw in that overlit bahnhof cafeteria the cold and ruthless consequences of this extremism – left or right, they all seemed in their rackety, accident-prone, haphazard way ultimately to involve some degree of violent confrontation and personal injury. The John Vivians of this world painted themselves into a political corner with their radicalism – and the only way out was with a gun or a bomb.

  I paid the bill and stood up to leave.

  ‘Nice to have met you,’ I said.

  ‘Oh no,’ Petra said, smiling. ‘We come to Zurich with you, Mountstuart.’

  Conversation with John Vivian.

  ‘They’re what?’

  ‘Coming with me.’

  ‘Why, for fuck’s sake?’

  ‘I don’t know. And they’ve got guns. I want out of this, Vivian.’

  ‘They haven’t got guns – they’re winding you up.’

  ‘This isn’t anything illegal, is it?’

  ‘You’re a 75-year-old man on a European holiday.’

  ‘Seventy-one.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘A 71-year-old man.’

  Silence. Then, ‘Go to Zurich with them and when you make contact there –’

  ‘Who with? With whom?’

  ‘Someone will approach you. “Mogadishu” is the password. Do your business and dump the girls. And don’t worry about this guns nonsense. This isn’t dangerous.’

  ‘I’m running out of money. These girls say they’re broke.’

  ‘I’ll wire you another hundred at Zurich American Express. Use your credit card.’

  ‘I haven’t got a credit card.’

  ‘Then economize.’

  Petra, Ingeborg and I travelled very uncomfortably by train – overnight, third class, smoking compartment – from Hamburg to Stuttgart, changed and then journeyed on to Zurich, during which time I managed perhaps two hours of uninterrupted sleep and inhaled the smoke of perhaps two hundred cigarettes. I insisted that we split up for customs and immigration checks – my old NID training awakening in me, I noted with quiet pride. We found the American Express office and I collected another $100, which I changed into a laughably small amount of Swiss francs. Then we checked into the Hotel Horizont – modern, over-used, anonymous – and were provided with a room containing a double bed and a kind of unfolding metal lounger with a rubber mattress: this was for me. No comment was passed by the hotel staff on the sleeping arrangements: clearly quite demure by the Horizont’s standards. The girls immediately went to sleep, curled under the duvet, removing only their shoes and coats – like escapees on the run, the thought came to me. Somehow all my sexual fantasies had dwindled away – now I felt like a put-upon uncle with a couple of disaffected, bolshie nieces.

  I telephoned John Vivian at 6.00.

  ‘I need more money.’

  ‘I sent you a hundred yesterday, for Christ’s sake.’

  ‘This is Switzerland and now we are three.’

  ‘All right, I’ll send more. Have a ball, mate.’

  ‘And I’ve got to get back, remember.’

  ‘Yeah, sure.’

  ‘And by the way, I resign.’

  ‘What from.’

  ‘From the Socialist Patients’ Kollective. From Working Circle – Direct Action and Working Circle – Communications. From the Napier Street Mob. Once I get back, that’s it. Finito. Kaput.’

  ‘You’re being over-dramatic, Mountstuart. We’ll talk when you’re home again. Take care.’

  That evening I dragged the girls out of bed and we found a pizza-parlour on a square somewhere. The girls seemed both sullen and edgy, eating their pizzas without talking. When they finished they asked if they could have some money to buy some ‘hash’ – they said they wanted to get stoned. I said no, and they withdrew into their moody silence again. We wandered around, an odd and uncomfortable trio, looking in shop windows until Ingeborg saw a bar up a side street and suggested a drink. I thought this a better idea and so we ventured in. A cocktail list was proffered but the drinks were shockingly expensive so we settled for marginally less expensive beer. The girls bought cigarettes and I was offered one. I declined.

  PETRA: Don’t you smoke, Mountstuart?

  ME: No. I used to, but not any more – too expensive.

  INGEBORG: Fuck – you’ve got to have some fun in your life, Mountstuart.

  ME: I agree. I love fun. I’m having fun now.

  The girls spoke to each other in German.

  ME: What did you say?

  PETRA: Ingeborg said maybe we shall shoot you and take your money.

  INGEBORG: Ha-ha-ha. Don’t worry, Mountstuart, we like you.

  Once we returned to the hotel the girls became annoyingly coy and insisted I wait in the corridor while they prepared themselves for bed. When they were ready they called me in.

  I changed into my pyjamas in the bathroom and on emerging provoked squeals of laughter. Now I felt like a curate in charge of a party of Brownies. ‘Shut the fuck up,’ I snarled at them, and eased myself into my creaking cot. I tried to sleep but they insisted on chatting and smoking, ignoring my complaints and curses.

  The next day [Thursday, 13 October] I woke early with a sore back. The girls were deeply, profoundly asleep, Petra snoring slightly, Ingeborg with the duvet thrown aside, exposing her small breasts. I dressed and went down to the dining room for breakfast, where I drank coffee, ate boiled eggs, ham and cheese in the company of three verbose Chinese businessmen, talking very loudly. I made up a couple of extra rolls with ham and pickled cucumbers, wrapped them in paper napkins and stuffed them in my pockets: breakfast for the girls or lunch for me.

  I picked up another $1
00 from American Express (thinking I must be draining the SPK’s funds alarmingly) and went for a wander, not taking much in, aware only that many church bells seemed to be ringing – a dull, flat, increasingly irritating sound that reminded me of Oxford. After about ten minutes I became aware I was being followed – by a young guy in a buckskin jacket and jeans. He had shiny long hair and a Mexican-style moustache. I turned a corner and stood in a patch of mildly warming sunshine, waiting for him.

  ‘Hi. Mogadishu,’ he said.

  ‘Mogadishu, I’m Mountstuart.’

  ‘Jürgen. What in fuck hell are those girls doing with you?’

  ‘They insisted on coming. I thought it was part of the plan.’

  ‘Shit.’ Jürgen swore some more in German. ‘Do you have the money?’

  ‘Not on me.’

  ‘Bring it to that café there. In one hour.’

  So I plodded back to the hotel, where I saw the girls sitting in the glassed-in sun porch off the residents’ lounge, reading magazines and, it goes without saying, smoking.

  ‘What’re we doing today, Mountstuart?’ Petra asked.

  ‘It’s a free day,’ I said. ‘Amuse yourselves.’

  ‘In Zurich?’ Ingeborg scoffed. Thank you so very much, Mountstuart.’

  ‘Have fun. Remember?’

  In the room I packed my bag and came down the stairs instead of the lift, but there was no need for caution – the girls had gone. I settled the bill and went to meet Jürgen at the appointed café. He arrived ten minutes late, carrying a small suitcase.

  ‘This is for you,’ he said, handing it over. It was quite heavy. I gave him the envelope with the dollars and for the first time he managed a smile, though he insisted on counting the money, laboriously. When he was satisfied he stuffed it in a pocket and shook my hand.

  ‘Tell John we’re ready,’ he said. ‘Good luck.’

  I caught a tram to the railway station and bought a ticket to Grenoble. From there I planned to head north to Paris and cross the Channel back to England via Calais. John Vivian had been insistent that I use a different port of entry for my journey back.