The House of Rumour

by Jake Arnott

  And the contents of the missive were perplexing. Addressed to ‘all my loved ones’, most of the thing was taken up with an apology to his former secretary for having to act as if he didn’t know her. During his examination by psychiatrists at Nuremberg, he had been confronted with Hildegard Fath, who had worked for many years as his personal assistant, and he had claimed that he had never seen her before. She had been reduced to tears, but this was back in 1945, over forty years ago.

  The note brought everything back to the question of the man’s sanity. Marius Trevelyan once more attempted to thread his way through the maze of delirium and forgetfulness. The Soviet doctors had always maintained that Hess had been faking his loss of memory. The British had been more ambivalent, concluding that he had ‘suggested an amnesia for so long he partly believes in it’. Hess protested that he had been subjected to hypnosis and psychoactive drugs. American Intelligence had been intrigued by the possibilities in the case for advancements in mind-control. A psychiatrist on their panel later developed brainwashing techniques for the CIA.

  Trevelyan began to make notes on a series of index cards, a one-line subject heading on one side, details on the other. After some time he shuffled through this small pack of cards and turned up a blank one marked ‘American’. He buzzed for a desk officer and called up all the files pertaining to US Intelligence regarding Prisoner Number Seven. He had remembered that there had been an American commandant at Spandau in the 1970s who had got into trouble when it was discovered that he had been working on a book with Hess. He made a request for this file also, along with any relevant documentation.

  By the end of the day they had got the suicide note to him. It had been written on the reverse side of a letter Hess had received from his daughter-in-law, dated a month before his death. A nice touch, thought Trevelyan, if it indeed was what Eric Judd would call a ‘moody one’. Yes, Eric might be able to spot something, he concluded, as he carefully replaced it in the evidence bag.

  ‘But what do you think is in there?’ she asks, a gloved hand still holding him by the hair.

  ‘Mistress?’

  He feels the pressure sores as his bony knees dig into the floor and a tremor of arthritis in his right hip. His old and withered flesh is cramped and weary, trembling. She places her other hand between her thighs, lets out a little burlesque purr.

  ‘People often wonder what I’ve got down here,’ she says. ‘There’s uncertainty. You like that, don’t you?’

  ‘Oh yes, Mistress.’

  She was right. That was what he liked. Subterfuge.

  ‘Yes. Well, it doesn’t have to be one thing or the other, does it?’

  ‘No, no it doesn’t, Mistress.’

  ‘It could be both.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘In fact it is both, isn’t it?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Until you look at it, it’s both, isn’t it?’

  ‘I don’t, um. I don’t understand.’

  She lets go of his hair and slaps him across the face, sending him sprawling onto the floor.

  ‘Concentrate!’

  She pulls on the leash and he is up on his knees once more.

  ‘You have to concentrate. This is a thought experiment.’

  ‘Mistress?’

  ‘Until you look at it,’ she goes on, adjusting the straps on her satin cache-sex, ‘it really does exist in two different states at once. It’s Schrödinger’s pussy. Now close your eyes and see what’s real.’

  Eric Judd ran an antiquarian bookshop in Coptic Street. He had worked for Trevelyan in the Service as a senior art-worker in Technical Operations, and was an expert in handwriting and typography. Judd had been recruited in 1966, from Wormwood Scrubs, when he still had six months of an eighteen-month sentence to serve. For forgery. He had quite the genius for it.

  He had worked in Trevelyan’s section, creating fake political pamphlets that could be used to discredit left-wing groups, forging letters from Eastern Bloc organisations to militant trade unionists and other documents essential for state security. When Trevelyan was posted to Ulster in the 1970s, Judd went with him.

  Together they disseminated black propaganda, mostly aimed at undermining Republicans. One of their more obscure operations had been in disseminating disinformation that the IRA and other paramilitary groups had become involved in witchcraft and demonology. They circulated counterfeit literature on the occult throughout the province; black magic ritual sites were fabricated in derelict houses and on waste ground near army observation posts; animal blood and ceremonial objects were left on altars decorated with arcane symbols; and rumours were generated that some sectarian killings had actually been instances of human sacrifice. Judd became obsessed with the project, meticulously researching every detail of liturgy and sacrament, reading widely on the occult and the unseen. In the end, much to Trevelyan’s bemusement, he started to believe in it himself, which culminated in some sort of mental breakdown. He was given early retirement from the Service in 1979.

  Eric Judd was now a book dealer specialising in the esoteric. As Trevelyan entered his shop, Judd was at the counter with white gloves on, carefully examining a battered incunable.

  ‘So.’ Trevelyan leaned over Judd’s shoulder. ‘What do we have here?’

  ‘Careful.’

  ‘A book of spells. Some ancient grimoire, is that it?’

  ‘Nothing of the sort. An early bound version of Otto von Friesing’s Gesta Friderici I Imperatoris.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘It’s extremely rare, so keep your grubby mitts to yourself.’ Judd began to wrap the book in cloth. ‘So, shall we get down to business?’

  ‘It’s good to see you too, Eric.’

  ‘The pleasure’s all mine, I’m sure.’

  ‘Now, don’t get tetchy.’

  ‘I’m not. Just want to get on with it. Besides, you were never one to stand on ceremony. I’d better close the shop.’

  Judd put down his shutters and locked up, then they both went out the back to a small workshop. With a magnifier he showed Trevelyan how he had compared the suicide note with other samples of Prisoner Number Seven’s handwriting.

  ‘It’s considerably distorted, of course. That’s to be expected. The bastard’s old, ill, about to kill himself. But see? The shape, the integrity of the signature, it’s still there. Now, any old fucker can copy shape. Getting the dynamics right, that’s the difficult thing, the movement of a line, acceleration, deceleration. If you’re copying something, the chances are you’re going to lose speed and make a coastline.’

  ‘A coastline?’

  ‘Even with the smallest loss of flow, you can end up with tell-tale little crenellations. That’s a coastline and you know it’s a copy. Look, the hand may be unsteady here and there, and there’s a natural jerkiness to it. There are vibrations that tell us all kinds of things. But no coastline. I mean, we could enlarge it even further and do an analysis in terms of fractal dimension.’

  ‘Do you think we should?’

  ‘I think I’ve seen enough, Marius.’

  ‘Your eye’s still good enough, is that it?’

  ‘Well—’

  ‘All those years of kiting cheques. So, what does Eric’s clever little eye tell us?’

  ‘It’s a bloody good job, or…’ Judd shrugged.

  ‘It’s genuine?’

  ‘Could be. Or a very good copy of an earlier suicide note.’

  ‘I told you, he never left any notes on other attempts.’

  ‘Well, I’ve got a feeling that he did with this one.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I don’t know. It’s just that—’ Judd sighed. ‘There’s another way of looking at whether or not this thing is true.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘The emotions.’

  ‘The emotions?’

  ‘Yeah. I can read the emotions from this.’

  ‘Oh for goodness’ sake.’

  ‘I knew you’d be like this.’

  ‘W
hat, your extrasensory intuition or something?’

  ‘Do you want to know what I think or not?’

  ‘Go on, then.’

  ‘Because whether you like it or not, handwriting can tell you most of what you need to know about the writer’s personality. Their state of mind. And as I said, I got a feeling from this one.’

  ‘What kind of feeling?’

  ‘That whoever wrote this was sure that they were going to die.’

  ‘Eric—’

  ‘It’s all there in the hand. I can feel a vibration there, a shake to it that isn’t just illness and old age. A strange tremor of intent.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Look, you wanted my analysis.’

  ‘Yes, I did. Thank you.’

  ‘Still the unfeeling old bastard, aren’t you?’

  ‘Now, Eric, you’re not being very fair.’

  ‘Cold, that’s what you are, Marius. I might have been the one that went a bit doolally, but you—’ Judd stood up and opened a cabinet. ‘We’ll have a drink, that might warm you up.’

  He produced a bottle of scotch and two glasses and poured them both a measure.

  ‘Cheerio.’ Judd toasted his old boss and nodded at the papers scattered on the work surface. ‘Curious business, the Hanged Man.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Hess. That’s what we should call him. You know, the Hanged Man hangs upside down. An invert. Is it true that the KGB file of Hess is code-named Black Bertha?’

  ‘I wouldn’t be at all surprised. The Russians were always a bit petulant over Prisoner Number Seven.’

  ‘They thought the Service lured him over, didn’t they?’

  ‘Eric, there’s been so much nonsense over this affair. Negritude of the highest order.’

  ‘Is it true that astrologers were used to convince him to make the flight?’

  ‘Rumour and disinformation.’

  ‘So why did the Gestapo round up all those astrologers afterwards?’

  ‘Because they fell for all that mumbo-jumbo. All those Nazis, many of them fell for that New Age stuff, just like you.’

  ‘I’m not into New Age stuff.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘No. Nothing new about it. I’m into the Western Mysteries. Traditions that we’re all part of, whether we like it or not. I’ve tried explaining it to you, Marius, but you never listened.’

  ‘Well, try me now.’

  ‘Influence can be brought to bear on events. Especially in moments when probabilities are so finely balanced. It’s known as sympathetic magic.’

  Trevelyan laughed.

  ‘So, we put a spell on him, is that it?’

  ‘That’s not what I’m saying. You know that all sorts of things were played with. And they have an effect: we saw that in Ulster.’

  ‘A psychological effect, yes.’

  ‘That’s all magic has to be, Marius. A psychological effect. If you believe in something, it has power over you.’

  ‘It’s true some people on our side believed in some pretty strange things. Even Fleming was convinced that the whole episode had been predicted in a novel.’

  ‘Precognition: there’s proof of it everywhere.’

  ‘Proof, that’s a good one. You know, you can be very limited in your ability to spot fakery.’

  ‘You think so?’ Judd glared at Trevelyan and refilled their glasses. ‘Well, maybe I can spot one now.’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘We always wondered about you, Marius. In the Service.’

  ‘Not this again, Eric.’

  ‘It was never much a question of political loyalties but, you know.’ Judd gave a shrug. ‘We often wondered which side you batted for.’

  Trevelyan swallowed a gulp of whisky. He sighed sharply.

  ‘Shit-house gossip.’

  ‘Gibbs had the best theory,’ Judd went on. ‘Remember Gibbs from field projects? Well, he always said: “Trevelyan? Likes a bit of both but doesn’t get much of either”.’

  ‘I’d forgotten just how full of shit and shit-house gossip you were, Eric.’

  ‘Old times, eh, Marius?’ He raised his glass once more. ‘Old times.’

  ‘Should have left you to rot in the Scrubs.’

  ‘One of the best, you were. No one could ever work you out.’

  No, thought Trevelyan, and no one ever will. There had always been two sides, two possibilities. The self and the other self. A double agent. Something Fleming had once let slip. The man inside. The unknowable one.

  Back at his flat he found it hard to settle. He paced around, trying to align his thoughts. The Hess affair had come at the very beginning of his career in deception. Now it still haunted him at his retirement. Like his own life, the case was shrouded in rumour and now it conjured other remnants of intelligence. Things that he couldn’t possibly include in his report. Perhaps he should book an appointment with the staff counsellor, he mused. The modern confessional: therapy, analysis. All this fear in the Service of officers going public. They didn’t have to worry about him.

  But he did have the sudden urge to write something, not for anybody else but for his own record. A memory system in which he might encode something of himself. A narrative, something more like a short story than a file or a dossier. He found a pad of paper and a pen and poured himself a brandy. The warm fuzz from the scotch he had shared with Judd was dying out. He rekindled the glow. All that shit-house gossip, yes, that was part of it too. He remembered an anecdote, something that he could hang a few ideas on. Yes. And the title came to him at once. That image Eric had used, a great symbol of ambiguity. He quickly wrote the heading: The Hanged Man.

  ‘Suck my pussy,’ she commands and pushes her penis into his mouth.

  Sweet dissembler, mistress of disinformation, of transubstantiation. His mind is a labyrinth of corridors, a bal masqué, a school of night. Her flesh unhoods itself against his tongue, a worm uncoiling, growing inside him. Oh yes, she’s in the same trade as him. The art of deception.

  She looks down as he groans ungrudgingly. An easy mark, a grateful punter. She won’t have to give him much. She’ll be quick.

  A fluid pulse on his palate. Too soon, he thinks, surely. But no, another swift surprise, a secret blessing. She is pissing in his mouth.

  On his last day at Curzon Street, Trevelyan carefully initialled off all the files he had drawn and arranged for a desk officer to take them back to Archive and Registry. A secretary came to shred all his handwritten notes and memoranda into a burn bag. He walked down the corridor to the Establishments office and signed off all his current secret indoctrinations with the duty officer. Then he went to see the director.

  His report was on her desk.

  ‘It’s fairly routine stuff,’ he assured her. ‘Only one area of concern really.’

  ‘The note?’

  ‘Yes. I’ve come up with a theory about its source. Completely deniable, thank God, but it might be an idea to follow it up. Make sure it’s watertight.’

  In the American files in Archive he had come across a file dated November 1969, a report that Hess had been transferred to the British Military Hospital in Berlin, suffering from stomach disorders and a perforated ulcer after a prolonged hunger strike. On the night of 29 November, the American commandant noted that Hess had declared on more than one occasion that he was sure he was going to die. Prisoner Number Seven had claimed that there had been instances when his heart had stopped beating and his pulse had disappeared. He had written a letter that night.

  It was shortly after this incident that he agreed to receive visits from his wife and son, and on the first of these he mentioned his former secretary and his desire to explain his failure to recognise her at Nuremberg.

  Trevelyan concluded that the ‘suicide note’ found in the summerhouse was actually a copy of the letter written when he was dangerously ill in 1969. Eric Judd was right: he had thought that he was going to die, only nearly twenty years earlier.

  Had Hess been
murdered? It seemed unlikely. More probable was that somebody had made a clumsy attempt to force a verdict of suicide on the inquest. Somebody with no sense of negritude. It would have to be dealt with. But not by him. It wasn’t his case any more.

  He remembered what they used to say in the Political Warfare Executive: ‘There’s no such thing as intelligence, only counter-intelligence.’ In the last few days he had spent more time on his private narrative than with the official report. A personal account on how the case had marked his career, betraying a few secrets, offering a few conclusions. And something of a memoir of his own life. A chapter in his autobiography. Who had hanged the Hanged Man? He doubted if they would ever know for sure.

  The story was in his briefcase. He was taking it with him. Completely against the rules, of course. He should have either submitted it or had it destroyed. But they didn’t have to worry about him going public. It was for his own amusement as much as anything. A souvenir for his own archive. A fragment of memory saved for posterity.

  He said goodbye to the director and went out into the street. He hailed a cab and went to dine at his club. There was nobody there he knew. Such a lonely business, eating by oneself. For a moment he was overwhelmed with melancholy. He thought of Clarissa, his wife, who had died nearly twenty years before. The marriage had been a bit of a mistake really, but in the end they had learnt to bear each other’s company. He regretted that he had never found the time to thank her for putting up with his life of duplicity.

  It was getting dark when he got home. As he was paying off the cab he saw the tart he had spotted that morning in Shepherd Market. Sturdy-looking and big-boned. A bit top-heavy. Oh yes. There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in its proportion. He went up to her.