by Chris Petit
Willi used his position to barter for medical supplies and borrowed a German nurse. The place was an epidemic waiting to happen, he said. He insisted I take injections. We did them in his apartment, in a luxurious block with a carpeted entrance and a lift. Willi was living in ever greater opulence; the previous owner was an Arrow Cross official who had taken early retirement, and decided to leave the city. Willi was sharing with several actresses and Karl-Heinz’s former mistress. He had his own bathroom, which he kept padlocked. Inside it was like a dispensary. Willi did the injections himself. He said, ‘I should have been a doctor.’ Then: ‘We will all be gone by Christmas.’
By the time Christmas approached, everyone in the ghetto was suffering from malnutrition, and there were outbreaks of typhus and diphtheria. No food was delivered for five days, and there were frequent power cuts. When Russian bombing left casualties in the ghetto, Willi did what he could to get them to hospital. A particularly virulent form of diarrhea broke out, which was as psychologically undermining as it was physically, and many died. At 32 Kalona Jozsef Street, five lunatics were living in the building. Willi said, ‘Perhaps madness is the only answer.’ His own sanity seemed in the balance. He became feverish, and for the first time I wondered if he would survive the war. His eyes acquired the burning, dangerous clarity that could be seen in those in the ghetto who were about to die.
By then the Danube was full of tortured corpses. People were hanged from lampposts. Willi, cackling, said, ‘They are known as Christmas decorations.’ He told me that he had found abandoned Jewish orphans, previously under Dufy’s protection, roaming the streets, skeletal two-year-olds hopelessly lost and screaming in fright from the bombs. ‘It’s the children I feel sorriest for,’ said Willi. ‘Nobody does anything for them.’
Was Willi a hitherto unsuspected sentimentalist when it came to children? What was perhaps his greatest humanitarian act went almost unremarked, except for a drunken commentary from Bandi Grosz on the last occasion we saw each other: ‘Willi would sell his mother for profit, and he arranged for Dufy to move a whole lot of children out of orphanages to the monastery at Panonalma, with no fee involved. Even Dufy is surprised by that. Willi must be saving up in holy dispensations for the next world!’
• • •
Karl-Heinz suggested I move to the Astoria, where it was still possible to get something resembling a meal. He was sure I could negotiate a good rate under the circumstances. There are few more delightful absurdities than a smart hotel trying to maintain standards in the face of catastrophe. We sat in an empty dining room, waited on by a couple of octogenarians, Hungarian fascists of the old school, who still clicked their heels. Karl-Heinz: ‘Budapest is fucked. Budapest can look forward to a thousand years of Communist rule, and that won’t be any fun since they backed the wrong horse in 1941.’
We ate poached eggs on toast, with a bottle of French red wine from the hotel cellar, followed by cheese. Karl-Heinz said that if the Germans had run their war effort as efficiently as they had redistributed their assets, it would have all been over by 1943. Most of the money had been taken out of Berlin, he said, and no one was any the wiser.
For once I knew more than he did. I knew where the money was, a small sign of the shifting balance of power. Karl-Heinz was keen to know more. He’d heard that the money route doubled as a German escape line. He offered to pay me to find out more. I thought about the end of the war, and wondered whether aiding and abetting men like Karl-Heinz was the wisest course.
Willi Schmidt was right. We were gone from Budapest by Christmas. One last cameo remained to be played. On Christmas Eve the radio announced a programme of summary executions for, among other things, anyone hiding Jews. On that day Eichmann, I read somewhere, slipped like a grey ghost out of Budapest. More or less.
I still can’t explain why I took Willi with me, what bond obliged me to find him in the ghetto and tell him it was time for us to leave. Willi was near delirious, shitting himself with sickness. He had some final things to do, he said, and told me to come and fetch him that night.
When I went back he wasn’t alone. He was with a man dressed in civilian clothes, inspecting the last of his work, stepping through the diseased and the dying, a ghoul at the feast of the dead. Willi, stinking of death, said, ‘We have another passenger.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘He can make his own way.’
Eichmann gave me his familiar mirthless grin. Willi said to me in a whisper: ‘Men like us are no longer in a position to make moral judgements. Take him, and you can take one Jew, too, any Jew you want. Some are still pretty.’
Four of us left in a Red Cross car. Willi, swathed in a huge nappy of blankets, vomited out the window and shat himself. A semiconscious child who passed the journey in a state of delirium. Eichmann, incognito, sat in the back of the car, inscrutable, dull again after his notoriety. He feared flying, he said. He feared enemy aircraft strafing his staff car. It had left with his possessions, he said, before adding unnecessarily that he wasn’t in it.
Eichmann permitted himself a smile as we sped along the ancient Weiner Landstrasse down which, less than a month before, sixty thousand Jews had marched to his orders. Their suitcases still littered the verges. At Hegyeshalom the border post had been abandoned, and we passed into Austria unnoticed.
Beate von Heimendorf
ZURICH
HOOVER AND I SPEND OUR evenings talking about the end of the war, inching nearer to the point where I will have to lie. We sit in Mother’s upstairs study, sipping whisky, and the room is full of our unmade moves. Perhaps we have grown too addicted to anticipation and tension. A ritual has grown up that neither of us is willing to spoil. I suspect Hoover is afraid that his masculine pride will be hurt. I am not sure what my role is supposed to be. Part confessor, part confidante. He wants to be free of his memories. He has grown obsessed with the notion that Willi Schmidt is in some way his darker, unlicensed self. He came out from the ghetto feeling as though Willi had infected him with a moral sickness. Willi had made him select, and in his derangement had enjoyed forcing Hoover to make his choice.
Where Hoover remains haunted by his suppressed past, I wish instead he would see me, us. I wish I could reach out, but a lifetime of caution forbids it. I wish only to preserve our idyll.
Vaughan phoned threatening to spoil that. He wanted to speak to Hoover—urgently, he said—and, without thinking, I lied, saying that he was no longer here.
Maybe he sensed I was blocking him, because he asked in an unpleasant tone, ‘Did you tell him about you and Dominic Carswell?’
I shook as I put down the phone.
When Hoover wanted to know who had called, I told him it was no one of consequence, then, without preamble, I asked if he had been one of Mother’s lovers.
He looked startled. ‘What on earth makes you think that?’
Mother used the same trick, I remember: denial in the form of a question. I was disappointed. He was lying. I told him I was certain he had been, and wondered why I was trying to drive a wedge between us. Hoover qualified himself. He had almost been one of Mother’s lovers, he conceded—still lying. I am more jealous than I care to admit.
Hoover finished the war in uniform. He must have looked good in one, I think. He was in Berlin by June 1945 as a ‘cultural attaché’. Before that he had continued to do his ‘private work’ for Mr Dulles, who had arranged a job for him as interpreter for the commission responsible for the retrieval and safeguarding of looted treasures. This, he freely admitted, was a cover for doing Dulles’s business. His last task as go-between for Dulles and Strasse had been the planned disappearance of a trainload of stolen Hungarian goods.
What Hoover doesn’t know is that I have this from Mother’s account: ‘A[llen] full of boasts about his pirate exploits. He is quite right that the United States is not being farsighted in terms of future security, hence his own efforts to redistribute large amounts of money for what he calls insurance purposes. A[llen] tells me his efforts are s
o successful that he can afford to sacrifice the contents of a Hungarian train carrying German loot. He is tickled by the fact that it was his personal call to General Patton which identified the train’s whereabouts and the general complimented him on his excellent intelligence.’
I know from Hoover that the Hungarian crown jewels were on the train and they were later shown to him and Dulles in Frankfurt ‘on the day Hitler died’.
But I am getting ahead of myself. Mother and Hoover.
In late May, Mother summoned Hoover to the Hotel Maison Rouge in Strasbourg, which already held some significance for him. According to Hoover, she had made it plain that she wished to become better acquainted. Loyal service was to be rewarded with one of Mother’s dalliances.
Hoover claims Mother showed up a day late. Instead he had been met by Willi Schmidt, who was there with a message explaining Mother’s delay.
Hoover had spent the evening with Willi, who was still thin from his illness but seemed returned to his normal spirits. They deliberately avoided talking about Budapest and discussed only the future. Willi was looking forward to going to the United States, he said. They dined and walked afterwards through the deserted city. Then, on a narrow gantry over a millrace, Willi, without any warning, tried to kill Hoover. But the gun had jammed, and Willi was still weak; after a very brief struggle he had slipped and fallen into the river.
Hoover told me this story with a flatness that almost amounted to a denial of its happening. His voice was empty, but his hands fidgeted, betraying his discomfort. He said, ‘I will never understand why Willi wanted to kill me.’
‘I know why.’
‘You do?’ He looked reluctant and afraid. I could understand that, after my own lifetime of finding it easier not to live with the truth. ‘And?’ He spoke listlessly, like a man in shock.
‘Strasse arranged for Willi to kill you because it was thought you knew too much.’
Hoover looked at me and said, ‘I see.’ I wondered if he did see, and why he had never guessed what was staring him in the face. ‘How do you know?’
‘Mother’s papers. I remember reading her account before they disappeared. I never thought we would ever meet.’
‘Did she say if she was the person who identified Willi?’
I said I could not remember and watched him putting together what he thought were the final pieces.
‘Once Karl-Heinz was safe under Dulles’s protection, then getting rid of me was no longer a priority,’ he said. ‘Did Betty say whether Dulles was in on it, too? Dulles always worried about how much I knew.’
I shook my head.
‘Dulles appointed me Karl-Heinz’s controlling officer and sent us both off to Berlin. That was typical of the man. Expendable one week, indispensable the next.’
I offered to take him to my bed. He declined, saying that it wasn’t a good night for him. Tomorrow.
And so we move on, stepping politely around each other, neither forwards nor backwards, in our blind pas de deux.
Vaughan
LONDON
LONDON WAS SUPPOSED TO have been about finding Dora, but it turned into a zigzag of paranoia. People I wanted to speak to avoided me, while men I had no interest in were keen to talk.
From the start I was followed—fact or imagination? On the underground. In the streets. Even when I doubled back or jumped a bus, I couldn’t rid myself of the thought (or them). They could have been Kurds. They could have been Turks. Or someone else.
Fact: Carswell’s office has been closed since my return, his mobile dead. Dora’s got clogged with my unanswered voice messages.
Fact: No Dora. No Carswell. Find one, you find the other—fact or speculation? A search fuelled by worry and resentment (fact).
Fact: I experienced a strong wish to discuss my growing isolation with Hoover and ask whether it was how he used to feel.
Paranoia is fast-spreading. The mundane assembly of previous existence disappears. Everything regroups in hostile form, a world only of bad connections, seen through a tight funnel. Paranoia is a state of pressurised ego, and the wild surmise of endless self-reference leaves you hopelessly trying to connect it all up, which you never can.
You become followed because you believe you are being followed. Extreme caution becomes a form of carelessness.
Paranoia as virus.
Fact: The women street sellers on the Holloway Road, dealing in black-market cigarettes, are Turkish Kurds, as are their minders. Illegal liquor stores in the neighbourhood are fund-raising fronts for Kurdish terrorists.
Fact: One of the main drug wars in North London is between the Kurds and the Turks, an extension of the domestic war between an oppressed militant minority and the state. It is also the bottom line of a liberal asylum policy which aids the seeding of criminal enterprise. It is not out of the question that this war connects back to the people who killed Karl-Heinz: drugs, illegal migration, criminal activity as fund raising for terrorism, nationalism, statewatch.
Step in past the walk-through blinds into the back rooms of the illegal liquor stores in Green Lanes or the Seven Sisters Road: London, Frankfurt, and Ankara become interchangeable. The men lolling around at the back of the shop are tough and self-contained in a way that reminds me of Karl-Heinz’s assassin.
I offered them my story in an effort to assuage a bad conscience left by the Neos. No one was interested beyond my eventual referral to a Hornsey Road men’s social club where I waited until I was told to go to another, then another, to no emerging purpose. These places were always on depressed streets full of closed-down shops, nearly always empty inside, with frosted windows, a concrete floor, an old pool table, posters, and bottled beer in crates.
Half a dozen moves later I emerged in middle-class Haverstock Hill, where I was told to wait at a pavement café. Three men turned up, smoothly cosmopolitan in a Mediterranean way. Two looked like they could be doctors at the Royal Free hospital. The third was older, more academic, and poker-faced. I could not tell what he was thinking.
Fact: He said that Mr Carswell, just mentioned by me, interested him very much. He told me he would be in touch.
Joining up the connections: paranoia realised.
Fact: Dominic Carswell’s sexual preference is for heterosexual buggery. Quote: ‘Dominic liked to put his thingy up women’s bums, whether they liked it or not.’
Fact: Dominic Carswell was married to Beate von Heimendorf.
The cold sweat of pre-recognition as I was being told that Carswell had once been married to ‘a Swiss woman’: I know who. The near sexual pleasure of paranoia justified. Of all the unexpected facts, none causes more astonishment than this. It seems symptomatic of the associations clustered around the events of the last weeks, another connection no one could have guessed.
For all his elusiveness, Carswell belongs to a loosely affiliated world where old associates, and old girlfriends, of whom there are many, are only a call or two away. Purpose: to investigate contacts for possible leads on Carswell’s whereabouts, and Dora’s.
Source: a self-confessed ‘dolly bird’ turned parody of upper-class, middle-aged do-gooding, running a Clapham charity shop with colonial efficiency. Three gins down, old girlfriend (unmarried) grew indiscreet.
Fact: Dominic’s sexual predilection was shared by Graham Greene. Old girlfriend’s quote: ‘Terribly overrated writer. All that tatty Catholicism, and a spook, of course, just like Dominic. I blame the public schools. The only things they come out understanding are secrecy and buggery.’
Rush of anxiety, frisson of discovery. Spook. It was the first time anyone had said it out loud.
Three nighttime gentlemen callers, something out of a bad dream, kick down my door—white men in plain clothes, muscle in boxy suits, both with buzz cuts, and a well-spoken gent, actor handsome, with hair handed out only a few times each generation, a luxuriant Bryan Ferry hijack. One goon did something very fast and nasty that made me thrash on the floor. The handsome man informed me that how far we went
depended on me.
He produced surveillance photographs of me in Germany with the Neos. Quote from the handsome man: ‘Stop everything you are doing.’
As well as my German activities, he knows of my Kurdish contacts. However, he seems to know nothing of Carswell or of Karl-Heinz’s death.
Promise from me: ‘I will.’
Fact: the next morning a phone call from a woman I had never heard of. She worked in television and she asked me out to lunch. She had a cancellation, she said. We went to Orso’s and she offered me a job; afterwards I half-fucked her, having spent lunch trying to remember her name. Such social embarrassments were voluptuous compared to the memory of what the handsome man’s goons could do. Coffee followed lunch at a cafe where she could smoke.
She had a great walk. She impulse-bought a load of videos (fuckably good taste, I thought). I was on vacation from the rest of my life. We ended up in a hotel room watching one of her videos. When she took a bath I was no longer sure what the signals were. A casual conversation through an open bathroom door, in that suspended state of afternoon hotels all over the world. I reminded myself of rule one—don’t fuck the office—but decided I wouldn’t really be, it would be one against Dora. I hated Dora for going off. That was what I had decided.
Post-bath, pre-coital in a big towel wrap. We drank mini-bar champagne. She provided the rubber. ‘What a good little scout,’ she said, and rolled the condom onto my effortful erection.
I realised—while fucking her in that summer afternoon hotel—what the underlay was. I was being bought off. We were in the handsome man’s domain. We were there because of him. It was how these people worked. Eliminate opposition by absorbing it. The job on offer would be real, up to a point. On the pretence of making sympathetic programmes, we would infiltrate protest groups and activist circles to gain counterintelligence. I would become a spook, by default. No programme would get made. The commission would never materialise. The plug would get pulled.