by Chris Petit
I took some general views and close-ups. ‘Make sure you get the rugs,’ he called out. It was a pleasant room, bright and sunny. Strasse watched the playback with childish delight. He announced that I could make my recording, providing I made him a present of the camera. He grabbed my shoulder affectionately. I could smell the drink on him. My being there seemed rather pathetic.
But with the camera on he grew mistrustful. I asked how he wanted to be remembered, and he said it didn’t matter because history always got it wrong.
He made me fetch the phone when it rang and spent several minutes speaking German. The name Carswell was mentioned. Afterwards I asked him what he had said about Carswell, and he shrugged for an answer and gave another ten-minute noninterview. Any request for elaboration was dismissed until eventually he asked what I had been taught about the second world war. That Germany had lost and the Allies won? That Hitler invaded Poland in September 1939, and killed a lot of Jews from 1942 on? I answered yes on both counts.
‘What did they teach you about Jack Philby?’ He had to explain that Jack was the father of the spy, Kim. He was starting to enjoy himself; you can see it on the tape. Quote: ‘You need to ask yourself what Philby was up to with Allen Dulles in Saudi Arabia in the 1920s, remembering that Dulles became head of American intelligence in Switzerland during the war. You need to ask yourself what Dulles’s real interests were, and those of his brother. You might ask yourself what precisely his brother John Foster knew, if, as we are reliably told, board members of I.G. Farben, the manufacturers of the gas that killed the Jews, were fully informed of all the company’s activities. Because, you see, John Foster Dulles was a board member of none other than I.G. Farben, even after the start of the war in Europe.’
He sat back, weighing my silence, deciding whether to go on. ‘If you want to hear an interesting story remind Mr Hoover of our visit to the Hotel Maison Rouge in Strasbourg in 1944, and the time we met in Liechtenstein, and get him to tell you who our respective passengers were.’ Strasse broke off. It sounded like he was coughing, but it was laughter. I had to fetch him a glass of water.
‘The second world war,’ he went on, ‘was the first properly mechanised war. The first war of the corporate state. I.G. Farben. Krupps. Siemens. Mercedes. Volkswagen. Ford. Standard Oil. General Electric. IBM. Bell. Coca-Cola. The world was and remains a military-industrial complex. Bankers of all sides continued to meet in Switzerland throughout the war. Your computer is faster and cheaper than it was a year, even six months ago. Who do you have to thank for that research? The military. We live in a military world even when it is in civilian clothing. Your Prime Minister Thatcher understood that. Look at her arms deals. You are no doubt familiar with Saddam Hussein’s use of chemical weapons against the Kurds of Iraq. But have you asked yourself, who was the first country to use chemical weapons against the Kurds? It was, I am sorry to report, the British. And who trained the Iraqi pilots and made the radio sets the Iraqis used to bomb the Kurds? Not the Germans, although the gas they used was the gas first developed by I.G. Farben. You see, my friend, we have not even got to the invasion of Poland, and already the world has become a more complicated place.’
I asked him what his interest was in the Kurds. He gave a sly smile. ‘This is off the record. Some might argue that the problem with Nazism was that it was destroyed by insufficient ideology—look who’s the tough boy of the Middle East now. The Israelis would send the lot of us to hell in a handcart if they had a chance. I have heard it said that Muslim purity and zeal are the true inheritors of Nazism. The Kurds are a fierce and noble race, and there is a certain belief that the next great warrior leader will emerge from among their people.’
I wondered what to make of his ravings. Whatever his medication, it was giving him a big up. He went on to say that history lived was very different from history written. He told me to ask Hoover about the cold war as a war of ideologies, and as the ultimate cul-de-sac of physics. We were now moving into the age of what Strasse called the new biology, a final Biblical phase in which all the old predictions would be realised. Quote: ‘What if the Bible is right, and disease and pestilence will win in the end? That outbreak of foot and mouth disease in Europe, was it accidental or assisted? And what if it had been a virus that had killed people: who could say if it was natural or manufactured? Look at our friend Konrad Viessmann’s pharmaceutical company—the irresponsible use of drugs and medicine in the treatment of illness in Kurdish refugee camps. They are using untested drugs to treat meningitis. Are you surprised someone burns down one of Herr Viessmann’s factories?
‘Nostradamus tells us that there is only one pope left and he’ll be the first nonwhite Holy Father—and get Mr Hoover to tell you about Mr Dulles and the Vatican while he is about it—and then it’s all up. And it is shaping very nicely. What if the fundamentalists are right and the United States is Satan? Perhaps we will see that hot wind of retribution coming from the East. The son of Saladin and the spirit of the Waffen SS—riding shotgun—come to teach those Jewboys their final lesson, as some of our more extremist brethren might say. And why do I tell you this? Because I am ready to write history. Remember—I saw it from both sides. And one side was as bad as the other. I was Heinrich Himmler’s envoy, but the CIA required me to do things that a man should not be asked to do. There’s an irony. The Nazis never asked me to teach interrogation methods to anyone.’
Strasse’s Nazi master class. I reckoned I had the measure of him. He could make equations all round his subject, but when it came down to what the Nazis did, he ducked and resurfaced somewhere else.
We were interrupted by the doorbell. I offered to go, but he insisted on going himself, struggling to stand then shuffling painfully to the door. He said it would be his delivery. It wasn’t. It was Hoover.
There had apparently been a misunderstanding over when Hoover was supposed to turn up. Strasse said, ‘I am just talking to my friend here.’ Hoover looked pissed off, asked how long we were going to be, and was told fifteen, twenty minutes. Strasse suggested he join us. Hoover shook his head and said he was going to lie down. ‘Take your time, Karl-Heinz, and tell it like it was. I’m going to be in your spare bedroom.’ To me he said, ‘I hope you haven’t got me on that camera of yours.’
It took Strasse a while to get his rhythm back. He sounded both uncertain and boastful, saying that his story needed Murdoch rather than Springer. It needed a world market. He started to get muddled then, confusing me with a journalist from the Times. He asked me to get him a schnapps and his pills—half a dozen bottles on a tray. He took a stiff belt of liquor and a different coloured pill from each bottle, giving each a look of disgust before swallowing.
‘We need the surprise of the English language. There are no surprises in German—no little bombs hidden in sentences. It is the language of premeditation, order, and command. Look at General Stoop’s reports for the destruction of the Warsaw ghetto. The language of genocide is no more emotional than the settling of any accounts.
‘You see, I am in the end a fanatic, not a crackpot fanatic, but one who believes in inevitability and destiny, the weight of history. Everything I will tell you will come to pass. I won’t be alive to see it, but I would like people to be able to point to what I said and know I was right. The auspices are good.’
Hoover’s voice came down from upstairs. ‘Are you bullshitting that boy, Karl-Heinz?’
Karl-Heinz threw up his hands in camp horror. ‘Have your rest!’
‘Tell him what you told me about the man he’s working for,’ shouted Hoover.
‘Carswell? What about him?’ I asked.
Strasse ignored the question and said, ‘I can see you are both inquisitive and horrified, which is how it should be. This is not comfortable stuff we will be dealing with. The truth never is, as the old cliché goes. Is “old cliché” a tautology? There are areas where my English is not quite up to the job.’
Strasse moved into overdrive, speed-hopping between subjects. ‘Will
i was worried about what would happen when the leather ran out. He was doing a lot of research into synthetics. Imagine the money to be made from inventing a leather substitute in 1943!’
Strasse’s voice suddenly began to slur and fade. I asked him to explain Willi Schmidt’s name and career change into pharmaceuticals. Strasse did his familiar big shrug. ‘We believed Willi was dead because the Amis said he was. Body identified by Betty Monroe. If Willi wasn’t dead and the Amis said he was, it follows that they had something in mind for him.’
Strasse lost his thread and resurfaced after a silence to announce that since his stroke—‘Stroke! What kind of word is that? Stroke is what you do to a woman!’—he had suffered a debility that had messed up his immune system. He was on steroids and pills for diabetes, and he shouldn’t drink but he did. ‘And what do they ask me to do, these people who think they are running the show? They ask me to answer the phone. There’s a consignment coming in on Tuesday, a shipment going out on Wednesday. Blah blah!’
When I asked what kind of shipments, he banged the table and said: ‘People! The Party was in the people business sixty years ago. It practically invented mass tourism! What was a trip to Auschwitz in 1942 if not the ultimate package holiday? And the Party is still in the people business. I will spell it out to the backward boy. The Nazis never went away. They just took off their uniforms. The Third Reich judiciary became the civilian judiciary. Law courts stuffed full of hanging judges! The camp doctors got jobs in the universities. Does the name von Verscheur mean anything to you? No? He was the mentor of Dr Mengele, the Auschwitz doctor, and a leading exponent of racial hygiene. In 1951, appointed professor of human genetics at the University of Munster, where he built one of the largest centres for genetic research in West Germany. The police force? The army? Where did they recruit from? And the ones for whom it got a little hot under the collar—why not a Mercedes posting? The Third Reich might have failed, but Mercedes conquered the world, like Japan and Sony. While the Amis crapped it away in Saigon, had the morale sucked out of them, who made the taxis that took them to and from their brothels and opium dens? Mercedes. Germany is as discreetly Nazi as it always was. Only Dr Goebbels has been removed from the equation. We have learned to do without publicity.’
He gave a hard laugh, and I hit him with a switch of subject, asking about the people smuggling. Was it true that by controlling the distribution, you also controlled the flow?
‘Of course! You make money from the process, and you keep the streets clean at the same time. But I tell you, my friend, if it was as simple as that, it would be—’
The doorbell went again. ‘Special delivery,’ he said, relishing the phrase. He refused to let me help him up and slowly made his way across the shiny wooden floor and fumbled with the latch.
Some special delivery. There was a sudden movement towards Strasse’s head, a blur of brown—the arm of a leather jacket, you realise on playback—followed by a dry noise, perhaps the driest sound I have ever heard. Then the back of Strasse’s head exploded in a bouquet of blood and brain matter, one of the wettest sounds I have ever heard; it reminded me of watching a watermelon being dropped from a window onto the street below. Strasse’s shooting was like reality TV, my objectivity sustained by watching it on the little camera screen: Strasse’s opening of the door matched by the upward swing of the gunman’s arm, the blue-black of the gun in his fist, followed by an explosion where the back of Strasse’s head was a second before. This was accompanied by a surprisingly sweet smell.
I was halfway up the stairs while the gunman—dark-haired, moustache, leather jacket, probably no more than five eight, but broad, and me trying to remember if I recognised him from the paper yard—was administering the coup de grâce with a bullet behind the ear, though Strasse looked like his lights were out already, and all the while gazing calmly at me.
I stumbled at the top of the stairs, like silly girls do in horror films. I could hear the gunman quietly close the door and his soft footsteps. By then my physical response to what I had just witnessed had become entirely predictable. My legs refused to work, and my mind revved uselessly, trying to project my body into action that it would not achieve. I found myself crawling on all fours down the landing, hoping to throw myself out of a window, praying that it would not be too far to the ground. I used the doorway to lever myself up. The only noise I could hear was the panic of my own body. The gunman swung round the top of the stairs, looking composed and remorseless, and devoid of any imagination while my own leaped all over the place, trying to realise that the sight of that corridor might be one of the last things I would see. The small part of my brain still functioning reckoned I had less than thirty seconds to come to terms with the meaning of eternity.
I made it through the doorway. Maybe I remembered seeing them from the outside a split-second before they registered: the upstairs windows had grilles and were all locked up. Outside: greenery, sunshine, and a light breeze ruffling the leaves. (In the last glimpse I’d had of him, Strasse’s head had landed in a patch of slanting sunlight.) I wanted to hide under the bed until it all went away. When the man came through the door, I had my arms out and was shaking like I was doing the St Vitus dance. I wanted to hit him with a barrage of words, stop him in his tracks, but not a sound came out. The camera was stuck to my hand, still filming, its red light on. My mind did all kinds of flips around the notion that it would carry on working and I would not. The gunman barely glanced at the camera. He stepped through the door, paused, and raised his arm. His expression was flat, his eyes disinterested. (Still I couldn’t decide if he was one of the men from the paper yard. I badly wanted to know, more than I had wanted to know anything ever before. Why kill Karl-Heinz? He was as good as dead anyway, and I wasn’t ready to join him.) The man’s indifference restored a modicum of dignity. My final reaction was one of anger at finding myself being dispatched by a bored mechanic. Fuck you, I wanted to tell him. So much for thoughts of eternity.
I must have shut my eyes because I missed what happened. The man grunted, and when I looked he was falling down. My first thought was that by some extraordinary collision of events he’d had a heart attack at the very moment he was about to shoot me, that whatever prayer my brain had been trying to formulate had been answered.
In fact reality shifted again. In the space of less than a minute, since Strasse had fatally opened the door, events had tumbled through several unimaginable stages, perhaps most of all for the man with the gun, now lying on the floor having been hit over the back of the head with a brass lamp stand by Hoover. He had been standing behind the door. The gunman’s eyes were still rolling up and showing a lot of white when Hoover put a bullet in his head, around the same spot that the gunman had put one in Strasse’s, while I tried to grasp that the bullet had been meant for me, and that my life had just been saved by an old man I had taken for a fool.
The gunman was doing death twitches, and the camera recorded his final mortal seconds by chance. The camera shook, not surprisingly. Hoover sounded dry and ironic, like he had found himself in a situation he hadn’t expected to be in again. ‘Well, nephew, it looks like time to leave. Don’t worry. Normal service has been resumed.’
He checked Karl-Heinz and pronounced him dead. He told me to wipe anything clean I might have touched. Then to look around upstairs and downstairs and take anything that looked like it might be useful—floppy disks, notebooks, Karl-Heinz’s maps. He said there was no rush, we had plenty of time. ‘Be systematic. Be thorough.’ I obeyed like an automaton.
Hoover
FRANKFURT
SEVERAL THINGS I NEVER GOT around to discussing with Karl-Heinz. I never got to talk to him about Frau Schmidt, which was one reason for calling round. He was telling the English boy his life story. Which version? I wondered as I hauled myself upstairs. My insomnia had gotten worse. The European version was even more debilitating than the American kind. (English boy; he’s in his thirties, so I should stop calling him that.)
&nbs
p; I was dreaming when the doorbell went, but I was fully awake for the second shot—hand gun, silencer—and was up and waiting behind the door, a tight squeeze, with a bedside table in the way. The drawer was empty. I was hoping it was where Karl-Heinz kept his Luger. Vaughan crashed into the room like a cornered animal, in big contrast to the soft pad of the man following. They looked like they were acting out an experiment on speed and momentum in relation to life expectancy. The momentum was all with the second man, likewise the shots. The fluttery way Vaughan waved his hands: a moth hitting a light.
It’s not often you get to play guardian angel. I kind of liked being able to surprise the man so soon after what he had done to Karl-Heinz, an exercise in poetic justice. The shooter obliged by folding up from the one hit—a brass ornamental lamp stand to the base of the skull. I silently thanked Karl-Heinz for his heavy taste. Had he bought plastic we would have been in trouble. Vaughan performed petrified’s equivalent to several double takes.
The gun was snug in my hand. Two head shootings in as many minutes was not what Vaughan had been thinking about over his breakfast, which I could hear him losing in the en suite bathroom. He emerged not so much white as fish-slab gray.
Do we trust each other? Do we understand each other? We have embarked on what Naomi would call a steep learning curve, and from the shaky expression on Vaughan’s face it was one he would have given anything to get off. And at my age you don’t expect to have to kill a man. It was such a surprise I felt nothing at all, except a vague déjà vu. As for Karl-Heinz, maybe he had a split second in which to feel relieved that he was being given a quick exit instead of the direction he was headed, which, by the time his body was done, would have been slow and nasty and would have stripped him of the last of his dignity.