The Human Pool

by Chris Petit

  I told Beate I was interested in anything Betty might still have on Willi Schmidt. (Why? I asked myself, when I had been telling everyone, myself included, that Willi was dead.) Beate was familiar with the name from her mother’s papers. They had been sorting old documents and letters together before Betty’s deterioration.

  By then we were in a café drinking coffee and eating cake with sour cream. For the first time I fully appreciated that I was back in Switzerland, perhaps because everywhere so far had looked like it belonged to the same consumer state. Europe had become a landscape of convenience.

  I asked if she thought Betty would object to my seeing any of her papers relating to Willi. Beate said she could think of no reason, as it was all so long ago. She gave a brief smile of embarrassment, and apologised for her tactlessness. We arranged I would stop by after seeing Frau Schmidt, on my way back to the station.

  Vaughan

  FRANKFURT

  IT IS ALWAYS A SURPRISE finding out who’s listed in the phone book. Idle curiosity prompted the search. There was a telephone directory by the bed in my hotel room. Still hungover, I talked my way into Strasse’s place by claiming that he had agreed to the appointment at the end of dinner.

  The old Nazi hung out with young men from the Middle East rather than the Nordic types you would expect—young men who looked like street toughs, although Strasse himself was a cultivated man, clear from his taste in furniture.

  One of these acolytes answered the door. There was a shouted exchange with Strasse upstairs. I wondered why Nazis old and new seemed to cultivate Middle Eastern connections.

  There were another two men upstairs with Strasse speaking a language I didn’t recognise. He was worked up about what looked like an amateur tape on the TV. I recognised the football riot and the burning hostel. Siegfried featured in many of the shots, including infrareds of him sitting in his BMW. The sight of Siegfried angered Strasse. To me: ‘Tell your friend he is not as clever as he thinks.’

  Strasse seemed to regard me as Siegfried’s messenger. I wondered if they were enemies in spite of Siegfried’s deference.

  The men left suddenly. I asked who they were, but was ignored. I decided Strasse’s problem was loneliness, so I played housemaid, fussed over him, made him tea, got his pills, acted the polite young fascist, then hit him with the pitch. We wanted to make a film about his past that would be sympathetic, proper, and respectful.

  Strasse knew he was being courted and didn’t want to make it easy. Each time I nudged him towards the past he returned to the present. He thought he was a player, with his maps of Syria, Turkey, and Iraq, aerial photographs, and arrowed diagrams like in historical documentaries on the TV. ‘What’s this,’ I asked, ‘the next invasion of the Middle East?’

  Strasse coldly informed me that the region’s next big war would not be over its most obvious commodity, oil. ‘But what?’ he asked impatiently, snapping his fingers. It wasn’t hard to guess, given several pictures on the wall of a huge hydroelectric project. Water.

  ‘Precisely,’ said Strasse. The pictures were of part of a huge dam project which would flood a massive area of southeast Turkey and turn the region into what he called the bread basket of Europe. ‘A land of plenty,’ he said, his mouth turning down. He made me fetch another VHS tape, and another pair of spectacles to read the label. He held the tape at arm’s length, breathing through his mouth, sounding raspy. Close up, his skin was shiny and transparent, and looked even older than the rest of him. He wore Turkish slippers and no socks. The veins on his feet had come to the surface and looked like deltas.

  The new tape showed a female TV reporter with a microphone, behind her a snowy landscape—more mountains, obviously European—and the remains of a burned-out commercial building. It was the news item Strasse had been talking about in the restaurant, the arson report. When the reporter tried to interview a very tall man with silver hair dressed in a smart overcoat, he ignored her. Strasse froze the image with the remote and shuttled it back and forth. The chill of the man’s gaze, invisible to the naked eye, was revealed in slow motion. The reporter referred to him as Konrad Viessmann. Strasse shouted her down: ‘It’s Willi Schmidt, you stupid cow!’ He bellowed Willi’s name at the man on screen, adding, ‘Listen, cocksucker, I know who you are!’

  The man on screen looked too young to be a contemporary of Karl-Heinz’s—he appeared sixty-five at most—but Strasse was in no mood to be contradicted. Here was a man he had walked beside many times, he said. The walk and the height went together.

  Strasse: The factory had been attacked by Kurdish rebels, the PKK, because the company had been dumping inferior pharmaceuticals on Kurdish refugee camps in Turkey. As for Willi Schmidt, Strasse went on, his tone more hectoring, no one could appreciate how dangerous his reappearance was in relation to his own mission. Which was? Strasse ignored the question and ordered me to go to a drawer on the other side of the room. In it were several old photograph albums. He made me hold each one up until I found the one he wanted.

  ‘Look,’ he said, jabbing his finger at an old black-and-white photograph. It was very small with a crinkled border. It showed three young men standing in a field, one of them with a horse. ‘See?’ prompted Strasse. The photograph was tiny and faded. I peered closer. Strasse was the one in the riding jacket holding the horse. The man on his right was the American from the restaurant, Hoover. The third man, on Strasse’s left, was a head taller and looked like a younger version of the man on television.

  The photo album finally got Strasse onto the past, sort of. He talked me through his album—every picture a story, which he would allude to but refuse to elaborate upon. Strasse laughed, in a good mood all of a sudden, leading me a dance, playing the canny tease. Today he wasn’t interested in the past, he told me, because big things were going on and about to happen. ‘But tomorrow when we meet I will be able to tell you more because my agents will have reported in.’

  Hoover

  ZURICH

  FRAU SCHMIDT IS IN EVERY respect the opposite of Beate von Heimendorf. She is tiny and doll-like, slow-moving, and apparently timid, except for her eyes as sharp as knitting needles. She lives in an apartment block in one of those dreary residential quarters, mildly surreal in their banality, that cluster around European railway stations.

  She had sounded breathless and surprised on the phone. We spoke in German, and an elementary grammatical error of mine prompted a nervous giggle. I told her I had been a friend of her husband and was calling on Karl-Heinz Strasse’s behalf. ‘Ja doch?’ she said with an air of wonder. Frankly, she sounded soft in the head.

  Conveniently for her story, she has spent much of her life abroad, first in Uruguay, then Peru, where her second husband, Friedrich (Fredi) Kranz, deceased, worked for Volkswagen. Strictly speaking, the widow Schmidt is the widow Kranz. Kranz is the name on her bell. She is alone in the world, with no children and no living relatives.

  I tried to imagine her with Willi Schmidt, tried to picture them in the same room. She would have been attractive enough. Willi surrounded himself with good-looking people. It was almost a condition of entry into his circle.

  We made small talk over coffee. The apartment was typical of a modest European standard, with a white linen cloth covering the dining table we sat at, the ubiquitous spider plant, and a generally dust-free environment that told of too many hours to fill. (I know this because my own empty hours since Mary died have been spent doing anything but housework.)

  When I explained that Willi and I had knocked about together during the war, she responded with platitudes of her own: ‘Willi was a fine man.’ ‘Willi always brought me proper chocolate from Switzerland.’

  Frau Schmidt had worked for a German company which had become a subsidiary of Willi’s firm—that was how they had met. She proudly showed me the only souvenirs of their time together, several boxes of children’s party shoes. She opened one to reveal the shoes still wrapped in their original tissue paper. They were red and shiny patent
leather. Her hands shook as she unwrapped them.

  They had married in the late summer of 1944, but no record survived because the Rathaus had later been destroyed by shelling. Her copy of the marriage certificate was lost, along with all their photographs and Willi’s letters, when American planes had bombed the wrong side of the Swiss border in error. She had returned to their lodgings from the canning factory where she worked to find her building reduced to a large crater. After the war, she said, the Swiss had extracted an enormous compensation from the Americans.

  I still couldn’t picture Willi married, but I believed her account of the empty years waiting for him to come home, her reluctant return to Germany, the hardship of the postwar years, her gradual acceptance of the fact that he would not come back, and the realisation that, rather than live in the shadow of his memory, she had to make a new life. This she did by remarrying and moving to Uruguay, then Peru, a period well documented by albums which showed her with a stout, round-faced man who resembled Al Capone. His name was Kranz, she reminded me. I apologised for calling her Frau Schmidt. It was all right, she said. It was good for the memory of Willi. She snuffled a few tears into a handkerchief which she produced from up her sleeve, and said that sometimes Willi felt like a dream. They had met only twelve times before they married, and were together eleven weeks. Sometimes it seemed better to leave the past alone, she said. Still, it would be nice to have a little money, because Switzerland was expensive and Fredi’s policies didn’t go very far.

  When I asked how she had tracked down Karl-Heinz, she said she had hired a private detective to find him. ‘A private detective, at my age! As if I could afford one!’

  Karl-Heinz’s was one of the few names she remembered Willi mentioning. I thought Willi would have been more discreet. When I expressed my surprise, she gave a sly smile. ‘You are quite right. Willi kept secrets like the grave. To tell the truth, I was jealous. Jealous and suspicious! Willi could travel. Willi was handsome and there were plenty of lonely young women in Germany. He could have taken his pick. Willi had his little book. I’ll fetch it.’

  She came back with a pocket-sized book, with flimsy ruled pages. It was empty apart from a few scribbled names, or initials, and some timetables. On one page I read: ‘VH (Josef) [??]’, and on another what looked like a further reference to myself: ‘VH—Buda??’ My full name was written on its own on one page. Karl-Heinz’s appeared several times. The last page contained nothing but mathematical equations in pencil so faded they were impossible to read. I couldn’t remember Willi’s handwriting, wondered if I had ever seen it.

  I asked why there was nobody who had known about their marriage. No one was still alive, she said simply. What of Willi’s family? There must have been some relatives who knew. Frau Schmidt shook her head. Willi had never informed them, because he wished to protect her from their disapproval.

  I told her that hardly seemed a good enough reason. From what I remembered of Willi, he enjoyed flouting convention.

  Frau Schmidt agreed, but then dropped her big surprise. ‘They would have just about tolerated Willi marrying beneath himself but never to a Jewess.’

  ‘Jewish!’ Frau Schmidt nodded. ‘Working in Germany in 1944?’ Germany’s Jews had all been deported or killed by then, and the few left were in hiding.

  Seeing my scepticism, Frau Schmidt said that she had believed herself sufficiently assimilated until warned by a friend who was a typist for the Gestapo that her case was on file, with an investigation pending. She had confided this to Willi, whom she happened to see the next day. He insisted she leave Germany immediately and drove her to a farm near the border where he said she would be safe until he arranged the paperwork. What she had not realised was that this would mean their getting married. Willi proposed only on the morning of the ceremony, and straight afterwards drove her across the border to Switzerland.

  Willi had married her to get her out of Germany.

  If the story is true, then Willi never ceases to surprise me. How to reconcile this unexpected humanitarian side to the party animal I remember? Willi and me in 1943, both of us drunk, pretty women all around, his jazz records on the turntable: ‘Marriage is for the birds!’

  Vaughan

  FRANKFURT

  To: dcarswell@aol.com

  From: vaughan@freeserve.co.uk

  Date: Wed, 10 May, 18.06

  Subject: Top Nazi

  I talked with Karl-Heinz Strasse and will see him again tomorrow at ten. He is nibbling, hasn’t bitten. I am sure he will talk in full, but for the mo only to me as I come with the endorsement of Siegfried. Will try and film/tape him tomorrow and later, when he feels comfortable, you could come and take over.

  Everything he told me sounded like a man rehearsing his story. He hinted there are already people prepared to pay a lot of money.

  He remains vague about what exactly he was doing in 1942/43. This is what I have been able to work out in terms of rough chronology. He was in the SS and had cavalry connections. One of his main jobs involved buying horses, which required him to travel. He won the Iron Cross, which he showed me, on the Russian front. From what I can tell he was in Russia in 1941/42 and after that became a staff officer and possibly some sort of spy.

  The point he is quite specific about is how he was recruited at the end of the war as an intelligence officer by the Americans, and later worked for the CIA, as did a lot of Nazis. On the cold war his memory is date accurate. Anything before 1945, he’ll fudge and change the subject while dropping enough hints to suggest he would go on record if a deal were done.

  Strasse is also hanging around with the guy who recruited him into U.S. intelligence in 1945. I’m not sure what he is doing in Frankfurt. Says he’s on holiday.

  Strasse travelled to Switzerland a lot during the war. He showed me pictures taken there of him with the spook just mentioned. His name is Hoover and my guess is he too would have a tale to tell.

  There’s a third man in the Swiss photo, and Strasse is currently very exercised about him. Name of Willi Schmidt. Whatever they were all up to in the war, the three were pretty tight. Schmidt died in 1945—Hoover says he was there when it happened—except now Strasse is claiming Schmidt is alive and calling himself Konrad Viessmann. Interesting mystery.

  Strasse’s photo album is varied and includes a questionable range of contrasts. Peasants in some flat place (Byelorussia, who knows?). Strasse in SS uniform and death’s head cap, possibly compromised by the train trucks in background. Lots of equestrian stuff which backs up the horse-buying story. Lederhosen: alpine R&R. After the war there are pictures of him in Cairo. The CIA guy Hoover is there too in a picture which Strasse says shouldn’t have been taken. (They’re out in the desert somewhere.) There are also photos of Strasse with a Muslim leader I’d never heard of, who was pro-Hitler during the war and living in Berlin, and afterwards went to Egypt. In Berlin this leader was looked after by the SS, hence pix of him with Strasse, I presume. What I didn’t know was that the SS ran a Muslim division. (I knew they had Ukrainian volunteers.) I was confused by the racial implications until Strasse made the connections: Hitler didn’t much like Arabs, but Himmler was an admirer of the Muslim warrior—i.e., ganging up against the Jews and the British. There are also photos of Strasse with Roman Catholic Croatian churchmen. At some point during the war he was in Budapest because there are pictures of the city. He didn’t say what he was doing there. Strasse is an infuriating mixture of secretive and indiscreet. He seems to have been in contact with everyone.

  Strasse is very excited about something that’s happening. This may be an old man’s fantasy but towards the end of the meeting he was hinting that he isn’t a spent force and the foundations of an alliance put down in the war would soon pay off!

  Oh yes, and the Willi Schmidt/Viessmann guy has something going with Kurds in Turkey because they burned down his chemical factory, to do with bad drugs being dumped in refugee camps.

  Hoover

  ZURICH

 
THE CAB TOOK ME FROM Frau Schmidt’s, in a district showing signs of aspirations to change, up into the hills behind the university where the old money lives. Grey stone gives way to red brick, greenery and high walls, and the dead Sunday silence of Swiss discretion. It was like being back in the centre of what Fitzgerald called ‘the great Swiss watch’.

  Betty Monroe’s old house dates back to the early part of the last century and reveals little to the street. The house, with its quiet lawns, freshly mown in Betty’s case, stand behind iron gates. A short sloping drive emphasises its grace and superiority, two qualities reflected in Beate von Heimendorf herself (milky skin, soft blue veins, blue blood pulsing through them).

  Of a husband for Beate there is no sign. Just her Mercedes was parked outside. I was as tongue-tied as a teenager. I am attracted to Beate von Heimendorf, in spite of having about as much chance as any tongue-tied teenager. Less, because such impulses are considered unseemly, dirty even, in a man of my age. The attraction was intensified because she was a little breathless when she answered the door.

  Her mother’s papers weren’t where she thought they were, in the garage, and didn’t appear to be in the house, either, she said. The house was absurdly large, she went on, and they could be anywhere. We were standing in the hall. There was an expensive wooden floor, good furniture, and, through the open door to the living rooms, a view of cultured trees.

  ‘I hate this house,’ Beate announced unexpectedly. She doesn’t live there and isn’t sure what to do now her mother is ill. It would feel like a betrayal to sell it, she said, while Betty remained alive. She herself keeps a small apartment in town. I asked if a husband went with it. Not really, she said. It was hard to tell if the silence that followed was an invitation to further comment. She changed the subject back to her mother’s missing papers, which she was sure had been in the garage. I suggested we take another look.