The Human Pool

by Chris Petit

  Paranoia and detumescence. I told her I was withdrawing, from her and from the job, pleased with the pun. File under strange fucks.

  I met the Haverstock Hill Kurds again and told them about the Neos.

  That night I arrived back to find my building on fire. The heat was so intense that the windows across the street had blown out. Alarms were going off everywhere. Everything glowed orange. A large crowd had gathered to watch. More fire engines came. I wondered if I was supposed to have been in the fire and who had started it.

  Minicab to Paddington, gravelike bed in a cheap hotel. I took an early train to Heathrow, where I bought a ticket to Zurich. Nowhere else to go. In moments of unparanoid concern I worry about Hoover. Frau von Heimendorf, formerly Carswell, is lying when she says she doesn’t know where he is. She wanted to know how I got the number. I don’t tell her, to piss her off. The answer is easy: Betty Monroe is still listed in the book.

  At the check-in the woman asked for my passport. I panicked until I realised I had been carrying it since my return, perhaps knowing all along I would be going back.

  Hoover

  ZURICH

  JUST WHO IS BOB BALLARD? He claims to be ‘a friend of the family’, i.e., of the Monroes, but Ballard is a company man, I’d bet my bottom dollar. The cliché is appropriate as Mr Ballard is something of a cliché himself: the spook posing as suit, the elite pretending to be ordinary. He’s pretty good at it.

  My guess is Mr Ballard is playing the coincidence card, while he checks out what is going on. Beate knows him, or pretends to, but their behaviour is not that of old friends. Her explanation—that he was a protégé of her mother’s who was taken to calling round—sounds lame. Ballard is here to sniff.

  Bob Ballard is thirty going on fifty, his act a rehearsal for the gravitas of middle age. He is portly, with Clark Kent hair and black horn-rims. Bob Ballard and his X-ray eyes. His gaze rarely settles on anything or anyone for more than a second, as if he is tracking an invisible fly. (Maybe he is. He looks like a man whose head is buzzing.)

  Bob has the caution of someone who knows too much. His job title suggests a dreary desk-bound attaché whose actual brief is operating at the outer reaches of national enterprise. Bob comes over as steady and boring, despite his darting eyes—he dulls the other person into talking so effectively that it is difficult not to tell him everything that has happened since coming to Europe, if only to pep up the conversation.

  Meeting two. I decided to get leaky with Bob. This was not a matter of trust, more that I am too old for his conservative tactics. I put him in the picture, with regard to Karl-Heinz, and Willi, plus the hypothesis that Willi equals Konrad Viessmann. Bob nodded, offered nothing back, issued a standard denial about his own capacities while calculating whom he needed to call.

  Meeting three. By then I could remember how many sugars Mr B takes. He confessed to a likeness for an English-style brew. Bob threw a curve ball. Up till now we had been content with gentle lobbing.

  ‘Viessmann is Viessmann,’ he said, ‘going all the way back.’

  ‘Meaning that Karl-Heinz’s resurrection theory is bullshit?’

  Bob nodded. The sceptic in me wondered if he was trying to mislead. I asked straight out: ‘Are you here as a wrinkle?’ Bob’s eyes alighted on mine a fraction longer than usual. He was enjoying himself, playing dude to the old hand, patronising me ever so slightly. I told him the seat of his pants would be shinier if he was as desk-bound as he made out, which made him laugh. Bob was not a practised laugher. It was a wrong laugh, the gulping motion of a man sucking in air before going back underwater. His awkwardness made me warm to him. Something had become clear: we both knew what our subject was.

  Next day, next meeting. Ballard used the proximity of his office—ten minutes down the hill, he said—to justify calling by. He says he walks when I know he comes by car. I liked him more for the lie. This time he came with an offering. A report by British military intelligence dated February 1945. It was a facsimile of a document typed on semi-transparent paper. The print was faint, as though the typewriter ribbon had needed renewing, and had a misaligned letter a.

  The report noted the establishing of a Tropical Institute in Basel, with an affiliated office in the winter resort of Davos. The report’s author, an English army brigadier with a double-barrelled name, was as dry as a biscuit. He questioned Switzerland’s need for such an institute, given its landlocked insularity and lack of channels through which such diseases might enter the country, compared with, say, Germany, with its colonies and international ports. The brigadier concluded that the institute was a front for the disbanding Nazi medical profession and a forward base for its realignment. The institute’s journal, a review of tropical science and medicine, included several Nazi medical authorities among its contributors. The brigadier concluded: ‘Is anything more probable than that German tropical scientists, backed by big chemical industries in Germany, are already planning ahead so as to lose no time in reestablishing their dominant position in the control of chemotherapy of tropical diseases?’

  The board of directors made for interesting reading. It included former members of I.G. Farben, who had conveniently relocated to Switzerland just before the war; a leading researcher in pesticides; and, among those attached to the Davos Institute, one Konrad Viessmann.

  In print the name acquired an occult quality.

  Ballard looked pleased with himself and wanted good-dog congratulations for his powers of retrieval. In fact, the rest of his news was not that hopeful. In company terms Viessmann was not even a file. Ballard had been able to find nothing except Viessmann’s civilian biography, which indicated a full and complete life in the pharmaceutical industry.

  Ballard grinned. ‘Apart from?’ I asked. Apart from one company reference, discovered by chance while accessing old Turkish files. He produced his second offering from inside his jacket. Bob was sweating on a cool day.

  He handed me an old U.S. assessment of Turkey’s cold war defensive capabilities dating from the 1950s. Its emphasis was on the depth of anti-Communist feeling in the military. Strong racial and fascist tendencies were noted, so was the fact that its elite troops were being trained by ex-Nazis employed by U.S. military advisers to act as a stay-behind guerrilla force in the event of Soviet invasion.

  Bob Ballard commented as I read: ‘Looks like they had themselves an ass-tight, buddy-love situation.’ He appeared mildly shocked by his observation, less, I suspect, for its expletive nature than for his momentary break in character.

  Cold war Turkey—certainly Karl-Heinz had ghosted his way through that setup, prior to Cairo. He had lectured junior Turkish officers on propaganda and psychological warfare, a euphemism for the extraction of information by physical means. This was a skill Karl-Heinz had learned after coming to work for us, as he never missed the chance to point out.

  The report contained information on sponsored American lectures, among them an Ankara conference in May 1955, hosted by an American institute which was a front for the CIA. It included an address to an audience of invited Turkish military and academics on the subject of disease and warfare by the director of the Tropical Institute of Davos. Speaker: Konrad Viessmann.

  Ballard put his fingers to his lips which he tried to disguise as a pensive gesture. He inhaled. I finally understood the reason for his nervous eye movements. It was down to his effort to quit smoking. He admitted that his body was patched together with nicotine pads which did nothing for his craving.

  He made a joke: ‘Perhaps the Turks were in the habit of dispatching their political prisoners to Viessmann’s tropical diseases clinic.’

  Neither of us laughed. The penny dropped, all the way down. We stayed silent a long time, listening to the day wind down.

  I told him to go out and buy cigarettes and a bottle of whisky. I gave him the money, so that his conscience would feel less bad.

  Waiting for him to come back, I thought again of Willi’s baptism by death in the icy waters of 19
45, of Willi’s gift for exits.

  Ballard sucked on his cigarette. His head disappeared in a wreath of smoke. We drank whisky steadily. I told him the CIA was getting old, like everything else. Organisational deceleration occurred at a faster rate than human aging. The CIA was suffering from memory loss. Data corrupted. There were no longer the people to remember. I said: ‘There’s nobody left who knows what Viessmann was there for, and you’ve been ordered to find out.’ Ballard studied his cuticles, looking almost coy.

  We ran with speculations. Was the Viessmann file missing, deleted, removed, or reallocated? What if? What if institutes and private empires traded in information just as the Medellin cartel did in drugs. Ballard drew comparisons with the old Texas cattle barons, capable through their wealth of running their own fiefdoms. We agreed on the essential lawlessness of the frontier. We agreed on the notion of oil barons as successors to the cattlemen, as men who had developed foreign interests, aided by friends and relatives in government, all of them with deep interests to preserve: the stuff of conspiracy theories.

  We disagreed when Ballard argued that conspiracy theories always fell down because the last link couldn’t be proved or made. I told him it didn’t work like that. Conspiracies weren’t linear and parallel, they worked in clusters, in successions of cause and effect. There was no mastermind. Dulles, for all his influence and big ways, was working a narrow channel. Big subjects—oil and money—narrow application; all Dulles’s moves could be read as oil or money.

  We agreed again. A secret organisation like the CIA fractured and its secrets extended to its own internal workings. Few, if any, knew or saw the whole picture. Operations got lost or superseded or hung out to dry. The ones funded by nonexistent, nonprovable budgets could go into twilight in perpetuity, like those Japanese soldiers who stayed on in the jungle years after the war was over.

  Ballard looped back to conspiracy, saying that in real life there was no such thing as tying up all the loose ends. He said: ‘Even if you know all the moves in the JFK shooting down to the last calibration, it’s still not enough.’ I agreed. The truth is usually disappointing. Ballard asked about Dulles. I told him that Dulles was a combination of the carpet-bagging spirit of the Wild West and an East Coast education, a perfect fusion of lawlessness and the law, with a career devoted to breaking the rules and providing the necessary paperwork to prove that you hadn’t.

  We moved ahead, swimming in waters blacker than Chappaquiddick. We ended up speaking in whispers, the whisky oiling leaky brains. We asked ourselves if Viessmann was still covered by some ancient CIA umbrella and whether he was running a legacy of Dulles’s wartime operations, which had blurred and mutated into a descendant of the Nazi genocide programme with the same overlap of business and government interests.

  There. We have said it. Ballard has nodded out. I have scared myself too much. The room is dark apart from a desk lamp. Heavy drapes, which I don’t remember drawing, extend to the floor. I have no impression of a world outside this room and what we have been talking about.

  Vaughan

  ZURICH

  WHEN I DOORSTOPPED Beate von Heimendorf she denied again that Hoover was there but was too flustered to carry it off. It turned out he wasn’t there but should have been.

  ‘I don’t know where he is,’ she said, upset by my return. The last thing she wanted was me spoiling her fun with Hoover.

  The phone in the hall rang, and she ran to answer. She shielded the receiver and asked in a disappointed voice, ‘Does that mean you’re moving out?’ She wrote down a number, taking care not to let me see. I asked to speak to him, but she hung up first.

  ‘Mr Vaughan,’ she told me, ‘Mr Hoover is not a well man. He should avoid excitement.’ I said it was news to me that he was sick. She said he put on a brave face.

  We traded. I said it would be a shame to have to tell Hoover about her marriage to Dominic Carswell. She gave me Hoover’s number in exchange for my silence.

  When I called he sounded pleased. ‘Well, hello, nephew,’ he said. ‘Why don’t you come on down?’ He was at Sol’s downtown office, he said. Beate stood in the hall, watching with a stricken expression.

  I was shocked by Hoover’s physical deterioration. Beate was right. He looked sick. He was smoking, too. I asked if he should be, and he responded with a cough he turned into a laugh, and said it didn’t matter. Sick or not, he was enjoying himself. ‘Come upstairs and meet the gang.’

  The room he led me into was a huge space given over to untidy storage and vast amounts of junk. The building was an old factory, and Sol had the whole of the upper floor.

  Hoover made a big show of introducing everyone as if we were at a party. There was Sol. Whatever animosity had existed was forgotten. Sol’s magnified lenses made him look more than ever like a cartoon grasshopper. There was Manny, a sardonic-looking man apparently beyond surprise. Hoover said, ‘Manny and I think we were holed up in the same castle together in the Brenner Pass at the end of the war, but neither of us is sure.’

  Manny had been working for the SS, Hoover explained. They enjoyed my mystification. Manny did the laundry, added Hoover.

  ‘Forging German bank notes for Heine Himmler,’ said Manny. Manny chain-smoked. He rated smoking as the last subversive activity, a willed act of self-pollution. He smoked Celtique, a fat cigarette of black tobacco which reminded Hoover of Belgium. Manny associated it with adventure, gipsies, and Apaches, and slick knife fights and absinthe, unlike American tobacco, which tasted only of the chemical process.

  ‘And there’s Abe,’ said Hoover, ‘somewhere out the back. Abe is Sol’s son.’

  Abe tracked information. Each transaction created a spoor, and Abe traced people’s movements just like American Indian scouts used to, said Hoover. He saw a record of passage where the less experienced eye would see nothing. ‘You, nephew, are an open book to a man like Abe.’

  Abe’s software programmes had been given state honours in Tokyo, and there was a photograph to prove it. Abe looked like Oliver Hardy as computer wizard. With Sol standing next to him at all of five foot six, Abe had to be at least six five. He hadn’t dressed up for his award—jeans from Switzerland’s Mr High and Mighty and a black hat. They looked like a sad comic act.

  Sol looked proud as Hoover described how Abe had a mind way out on its own. ‘No small talk, but when it comes to keyboard skills he’s a genius.’

  I looked at Hoover and Sol and said, ‘So, everyone’s made up, then?’

  ‘All buddies as of now,’ replied Hoover. ‘I strong-armed Sol into believing I had nothing to do with Willi’s con.’

  Sol said, ‘He has kindly agreed to verify Frau Schmidt so that we can access Willi’s account.’

  ‘And if I get caught, I’ll be dead by the time it gets to trial.’

  We laughed uneasily. Abe emerged from the other end of the room where he had been hidden behind a stack of shelves. He was quiet and courteous, in contrast to his initial alarming hugeness in all directions. He still wore the hat from the photograph, and the hair that poked out of it was long and plaited. His handshake was gentle. His calling was a solitary one, made lonelier by his intelligence.

  The space we were standing in was being used to store a mess of junk, an accumulation of decades of debris. Sol called it a warehouse of memory. I picked up a Zurich tram ticket stub from 1943. There were papers, old clothes, books, documents, forgotten bank statements dating back forty years, a couple of old 78s which had belonged to Willi Schmidt. The place was like a deconstructed Schwitters collage.

  Sol was pro-dirt, unlike the Swiss. What the Swiss did best was laundry. They rinsed money like they rinsed everything else. Sol was anti-laundry. Pro-mess, pro-life was his motto.

  Hoover said, ‘Can you imagine, nephew, I saw Willi playing those records, and here we are all these years later. It makes you think. Willi should be here.’ He sounded sad, as if everything had gotten too old.

  But then he grinned. I was pleased to see him. He said, ‘Th
is is my swan song. Let’s go eat.’

  On the street we made the oddest quintet. Sol announced that he had declared himself at war with Switzerland, dropping litter wherever he could. He wanted Zurich to look as messy as Greece or England. In the restaurant, an ersatz kitchen with Bohemian pretensions in a nearby warehouse, Manny resorted to playing the exaggerated Jew. Any difference embarrassed the Swiss, said Sol. I wasn’t sure. The crowd was young and too concerned with being cool (Willi Schmidt’s successors).

  Talk turned to Carswell. Hoover thought I had been used by him to test the security of some aspect of his operation. I had been put in to see how far I got and to report back. Manny frowned and said, ‘It’s obvious.’ Manny’s response to being in public was to look even more sardonic. ‘There was a split in the organisation. Carswell suspected, and when this was confirmed, Strasse was dealt with.’

  Stuff started to dovetail. We résuméd. We pooled. Back at Sol’s place Hoover got Abe to show me his party tricks, starting with all the details they had on Hoover—home address, travel arrangements, hotel bookings, medical insurance details. Abe had even hacked into Hoover’s CIA file, including an internal report by Dulles from the mid-1950s which made for double-edged reading, sidelining him after a breakdown in Egypt. Hoover seemed unperturbed. ‘I asked for a transfer, and they called it a breakdown.’

  Abe did me. Address, credit card payments outstanding, aerial photograph of my street before the fire. He even located a computer copy of the story on the fire due to run in the local weekly paper. It listed two fatalities and blamed risky cooking practices. Residents complained that many of the rooms weren’t equipped with proper kitchens. More to the point, there were photographs. One was of the blaze itself, another of the watching crowd, with me out of frame, and a vaguely familiar face caught on the edge.