The Human Pool

by Chris Petit

  I asked if he believed that Mr Dulles could be exposed. The banker gave a weary smile. ‘If I thought that he could be brought down by any other means, I would not be giving you this information to pass on to an enemy I detest even more than Mr Dulles. Mr Dulles is a lawyer. He is an expert at laying down false trails. He has the advantage of being in Switzerland where under the cloak of neutrality he can consort with many of his former colleagues. Mr Dulles still has many contacts with the German Schroeder Bank, for which he has acted as an adviser in the past. Through them he is in a position to shield his American investors. Once President Roosevelt had frozen all Swiss bank accounts in the United States, on the grounds that they contained disguised Nazi assets, Mr Dulles was bound to come to Switzerland, and here he remains.’

  We met twice more. On the third occasion he didn’t turn up, and I failed to spot my followers who bundled me into a car and stuck a gun in my side. They didn’t seem like German agents or Americans. Given the banker’s abrupt no-show, I sensed they were probably working for him.

  David and his gang were the last players to slot into place.

  Our immediate destination was a deserted mechanic’s garage under a railway arch, where we went through the shameful process of extracting information and confession. They couldn’t decide if I was an agent for the Nazis, in which case they wanted to kill me, or for the Americans, in which case they wanted to turn and run, or both.

  The torture was of symbolic rather than actual importance, in part a result of their own frustration at fighting a war without enemy contact. They were not experts in the way I am sure Jaretski would have been. What I had always dreaded was made endurable by the belief that I was instrumental to their plans and they would therefore not kill me.

  I told them what I knew, which I did not regard as much, more out of a sense of accumulated isolation than anything else. It was a salutary lesson to discover that any illusions of loyalty I might have had were meaningless. If there was anything shameful about the process, it had to do with our complicit awareness of how little our small drama counted for in the face of so much death and suffering. We were playing self-conscious games, way off in the margins where forbidden alliances were forged. We were already shamed by the compromises of survival.

  David wore glasses and had a high forehead. His dark hair was already receding. He was wiry and intense. David, echoing Dulles, to me: ‘Information is either priceless or very dangerous, so use it well.’ He reminded me that I worked for the Red Cross as well as for Mr Dulles, and it was time both of us did something to help the Jews.

  The meeting between Dulles and David took place at Betty Monroe’s house, with myself as the agreed intermediary. Betty let us in and out, saving an ironic aside for me—‘Well, look who’s here’—but otherwise remained absent. She made a point of not offering tea or coffee. We used her upstairs study, the room in which I now sit.

  Dulles was uncomfortable dealing with someone as young as David, and tried to condescend. ‘Well, boys’, he said, ‘what can we do for you?’

  David’s emerging message was clear: Help us, or we dish the dirt on you. He was well informed on Dulles’s hidden activities and knew that the older man’s security had been penetrated on several fronts, including ones Dulles didn’t know about. Swiss intelligence was also feeding the U.S. Treasury information on Dulles’s irregular financial dealings. What’s more, David had the name of Dulles’s mole in the German Foreign Office, which gave Dulles pause to consider: the mole was a German diplomat named Kolbe.

  The bottom line was, Dulles was being blackmailed and he knew it. He afforded himself a pained chuckle as he said, ‘You boys really are serious, aren’t you?’

  Other than that, he covered his surprise well, kept up his pipe-fiddling act, and conducted the meeting as though it were an academic discussion on nothing more threatening than Spenser’s Faerie Queen, his mild discomfort a result of overindulging at lunch. But I could read his mind by then, calculating the odds, figuring out how best to accommodate David while using him. I could picture him saying to Betty afterwards: ‘I’m going to fuck that boy every which way.’

  Dulles’s only betrayal of interest was an almost imperceptible leaning forward, until David told him about his line into the Kremlin, which made his eyes bulge and gave him the look of a man who had just been offered something he wanted very badly.

  ‘Are we talking about the same Kremlin, son? As in Kremlin Moscow?’

  David ran the exclusive ring of Jewish agents protected by Canaris, who had allocated them on paper to the Hungarian secret service. The rumour we had heard was correct.

  The attraction of David’s network was that it offered a faster and more secure service than the old Vatican routes, as well as having access to something no one else had. David had spies in Moscow intelligence and knew what secrets lay at the heart of the Soviet empire. Years later it emerged that he had been the Kremlin’s agent all along and had fed crucial disinformation on Soviet military strategy to the German High Command.

  Karl-Heinz makes no mention of David in his papers, which doesn’t mean that he was ignorant or not involved. A passing remark suggested he knew perfectly well what was going on. Karl-Heinz contended that Dulles deliberately sacrificed his agent Hatz. Hatz had volunteered for the Russian front, as ordered, then defected to the Russians at the end of 1944, with the intention of operating as Dulles and Karl-Heinz’s agent behind enemy lines.

  It is left to me to suggest that David was given Hatz’s name by Dulles in order to prove his Moscow contacts. David duly passed Hatz’s name on, resulting in Hatz’s arrest, which gave Dulles his answer. (Hatz spent ten years in a Soviet labour camp, after which he was allowed to return to Hungary, which was then Communist, where he became coach of the national fencing team. Poor Hatz! He was one of those historical connectors, like Bandi, who ended up unaware of the extent to which others had used them.)

  Dulles gave an awkward laugh. Helping what remained of Europe’s Jews moved swiftly up the agenda.

  Beate von Heimendorf

  ZURICH

  LIKE MR DULLES, Mother didn’t like Jews, not in so many words, though her manners forbade any direct expression of the sentiment. Besides, she professed to be forward-thinking, emancipated, and of liberal persuasion, and was clever enough to know that her prejudices were best kept to herself.

  When Hoover told me of his meeting with Mr Dulles in Mother’s study, I experienced a shock of recognition. It took me a while to identify its cause, perhaps because I had suppressed it. Was Mother referring to the same day as the meeting with Hoover when she wrote, undated: ‘Allen turned up this morning ten minutes early for his meeting in a state of agitation. He needed a fuck, he said, to clear his head. He spat into his hand to lubricate me and kept his raincoat on but deigned to take his hat off. He told me not to bother to lock the study door even though the cleaner was in the house. He took no time at all and afterwards he said, “Thanks. That’s just what the doctor ordered.” He looked smug and bashful. It is not often that I allow myself to be used by a man, and I shall not co-operate again in “clearing Allen’s head”, however important his meeting.’

  Hoover and I have now entered what might be called the meaningful phase. We are both perfectly aware of our own and the other’s desire, yet do nothing for fear of spoiling everything. Sometimes I wonder if I should not take the initiative, and treat him as Dulles treated Mother, spitting into his hand so he can wet me.

  I feel infected by Mother’s crudeness. What for me is a subject of reticence, and fear of exposure, was for her a simple matter of appetite. To appropriate her forthrightness for a moment: a fuck had is better than one not had. She wrote that somewhere. Elsewhere she noted, ‘I shall learn to take sex like a man with no thought for the consequences.’

  I showed Hoover Mother’s note, hoping that it would release something in us, but it had the opposite effect, and we ended up giggling nervously. Hoover seemed depressed. He said, ‘Ironic, isn’t i
t? Excuse my language, but Dulles got a fuck before we fucked him in the meeting.’

  Hoover

  BUDAPEST/SWITZERLAND/LIECHTENSTEIN, 1944

  HISTORY, DON DELILLO ONCE WROTE, comes down to people talking in rooms.

  And the great battles, an eighteenth-century French general used to say, are nearly always fought in the points of intersection on staff maps: what happens in the joins.

  We move into areas so deniable and undocumented, and so far into the interstices, there is now only my word to say it happened, and I have never spoken of it before. There was no record. There were no witnesses apart from the four of us, and I am the last one. Karl-Heinz’s papers make no reference to the meeting, nor do history books even hint at it, though Dulles’s Nazi involvements have been noted, if not widely broadcast. But given what was at stake, the meeting was both logical and inevitable.

  Karl-Heinz sent word that we had to speak urgently. Our private communication was through not the local Red Cross office but a solitary tailor, the shabbiness of whose shop was misleading. He ran a large concession to provide the SS with uniforms.

  Karl-Heinz’s suite at the Astoria was what he called his ‘afternoon lodgings’. There was a mistress in jodhpurs with a Wallis Simpson hairdo, and a small furry dog ignored by Karl-Heinz. ‘Magda is just off riding,’ he said. Apart from the irksome prospect of being arraigned for war crimes, it wasn’t a bad life.

  We left Budapest that night in a Red Cross car. Karl-Heinz travelled on German Red Cross papers. There were no delays at the borders, which suggested that the guards knew who they were waving through, even though Karl-Heinz travelled in civilian clothes.

  He asked me what I was going to do after the war. I had no idea. I had no real understanding of what life in peacetime involved. He said he was thinking of emigrating. The opportunity to indulge his passion for horses would be more easily realised somewhere like Argentina.

  The darkness, the isolation, and the empty road allowed me to ask the impossible question. ‘What about the Jews?’

  He didn’t miss a beat. The answer came out sounding easy and well rehearsed. ‘That was Heydrich, and he’s dead. There are others who will be held accountable. It was complete madness, but on the other hand you didn’t hear anyone protest too much. The Allies did fuck-all to stop it. That Jew-lover Churchill, for instance.’

  Karl-Heinz was not an evil man, yet I have no doubt that he had seen and done evil. His deviancy was a matter of record. There had been an investigation of him by the SS judicial authorities in Warsaw for corruption and sexual co-habitation with a non-German. Karl-Heinz’s survival skills were demonstrated by the fact that he escaped indictment after the war when his immediate superior was hanged for his Warsaw activities. As for his time in Russia, he once told me, much later, he had served with the cavalry brigade of the Kommandostab Reichsführer SS. It was as close to a confession as he ever got. The brigade was one of three divisions created in 1941 under Himmler’s personal command, and therefore an elite among the elite, which carried out many of the early mass killings.

  We are talking about a period of what? Six weeks, perhaps only four, which Karl-Heinz deleted from his life. According to the record, his brigade, under the command of Hitler’s future brother-in-law, had cleared the large marsh areas south of Byelorussia which were accessible only to cavalry. The invasion was in June, and at the end of the first week in August, Karl-Heinz was transferred to an administrative post.

  His record is exemplary for its elisions, given how easily he could have tripped up. Iron Cross, first and second class, received 1941. No signatures on compromising documents. A dose of the clap in the summer of 1941, and a transfer back to Berlin to an economic department of the SS, where again his signature did not appear on any of the wrong documents. Karl-Heinz on paper: all the marks of an ambitious and red-blooded junior officer.

  We drove to Vienna and flew on a Swiss plane to Zurich, where our papers were scrutinised more thoroughly. We parted at the main station, where I would arrive again so many years later on my way to see Betty Monroe. I think I had guessed by then who his passenger would be.

  Dulles and I drove through the following afternoon in an ambulance across Switzerland to Liechtenstein, on the Swiss-Austrian border. The back had been adapted into a travelling saloon with comfortable seats and a toilet. I saw nothing of Dulles even when we stopped to fill up.

  The ambulance was a brute of a Mercedes. Each gear change, and there were many on the winding mountain roads, involved a double declutch.

  ‘Nothing you see in the next twenty-four hours will have taken place,’ Dulles had said to me before the journey. He looked conspiratorial. He knew I would report back to David in Budapest. It would be useful to him for me to be able to tell of a secret conference with top Nazis. No doubt I would be fed some line about the proposed rescue of Jews, too, to assuage David’s fear that Dulles was stalling on the issue.

  In fact, I never mentioned the meeting to anyone, sensing that even knowledge of it was enough to get me killed, and the more people who knew, the more likely that was to happen.

  I suspect that David did learn of it, but through Karl-Heinz, who had a very clear line by then, which was to be seen to be aiding the Jews as much as possible, both as Himmler’s secret envoy and as part of his own private efforts to save his neck.

  Our initial destination was an isolated private house by the border, timed for arrival after dark. We swapped to a private car. The crossing involved no checkpoint, just a forest track whose directions were explained by the man who organised the vehicle swap. He didn’t seem like the owner of the house, more like a groundsman or gamekeeper.

  On the track through the forest, a deer got caught in the headlights. Dulles said, ‘Look at that,’ and otherwise said nothing until we arrived at the inn. In the rearview mirror he looked preoccupied and nervous, his earlier cheerfulness gone. A man way out on a limb. I wish I could have said three words to him then: Bay of Pigs. He would have nearly another twenty years to wait until his nemesis. By then he would be head of the CIA. His night in Liechtenstein would amount to one of his greater triumphs, albeit one omitted by the official record.

  The inn was all lit up and busy, which surprised me, until I realised that it would provide perfect cover. A working inn was the last place anyone would expect an off-the-record conference to take place. The downstairs bar and restaurant were crowded and noisy. The place was unusual for there being no uniforms; Leichtenstein was another European pocket noted for its shady neutrality. I checked the inn out while Dulles waited in the car. There was nothing suspicious.

  Their meeting took place upstairs. Access was by an exterior staircase. It was still cold at night even though it was early summer. The air was fresh after rain. A dozy Alsatian patrolled the courtyard.

  Men who shouldn’t be in rooms together: Allen Dulles and Heinrich Himmler.

  Categorically two men who never met. I was there to deny it. History would fail to record such a meeting taking place, partly because it made a mockery of history, which, in the end, is just someone’s official account. Putting Dulles and Himmler together was an historical impossibility. Both men were aware of the fact, and much of their enjoyment stemmed from making it happen, and extended to maintaining the pretence of their travelling names as they introduced themselves: Mr Davis to Herr Kott.

  Dulles in tweed suit, Himmler in a sport coat and flannels, both wearing fanatically shined shoes. I rather fancied that Dulles had cleaned his own, Himmler not. (Dulles had a fondness for simple tasks like fire building. He had a housekeeper but complained to me that the man didn’t clean his shoes properly.)

  There were English-style sandwiches and bottled beer. Himmler looked as if he’d had a haircut that morning, severely razored up the back. He was a mild-looking man, with a receding chin, deferential almost, with cautious rather than good manners. He was several stages short of the Aryan ideal and resembled nothing more than an off-duty scout master talking to his
old professor.

  Improvisation makes for strange bedfellows.

  Karl-Heinz and I waited in another room, perhaps for half an hour. I had trained myself to be blinkered in such circumstances, but I do remember the flat, unreal quality to the introductions, how both Himmler and Dulles for all their knowingness seemed diminished by the furtiveness of the encounter. Even Karl-Heinz, usually so imperturbable, was betraying nerves.

  What was at stake that night? The future as we have come to know it? Possibly. Karl-Heinz, as an economist, was in no doubt. Perhaps because of his nerves he talked. Perhaps because I was less nervous, having the least to lose, I asked what was going on. He mimed deaf, dumb, and blind.

  I said, ‘We’re way beyond anything treasonable here.’

  Karl-Heinz eventually said, ‘Success in chess is about how many moves the player can see ahead. In historical terms, what is being discussed next door is about as far ahead as it is possible to think. They are talking in terms of moves that the rest might get around to seeing in five years’ time, if that.’

  Karl-Heinz was privy to the future. Karl-Heinz had the Reichsführer’s ear. Karl-Heinz never said as much, but he hinted that what was being discussed next door was based partly on his own proposals. Like the criminal who needs to share his crime, Karl-Heinz spilled the beans, in a low, urgent monotone. Our age was one where religious and moral absolutes no longer applied. For the moment the vacuum was filled by the principle of will, the totalitarian state. The upheaval we were witness to—the wholesale destruction of civilian populations—would become the norm. It was the corollary of mass production. It was his belief that totalitarianism would be followed by a modification of that system: the military-industrial state, which already had wide support in the United States.

  Karl-Heinz knew about such things. The SS had whole economic offices devoted to future predictions.