by Chris Petit
It came in a double tap. At the time, I had been so preoccupied with Karl-Heinz’s killer as nemesis I couldn’t connect him back to the Neos, and anyway had been more struck by their smart cars. His sidekick was the man in the picture. Hoover agreed that two dog-shit yellow jackets was too much coincidence.
Hoover said, ‘The shooter was Turkish army till five years ago, then a blank. Which means that he was either outside any system or so far in that he went off-record.’
‘Meaning?’
‘Secret military police, some covert antiterrorist outfit.’
We did Carswell. We did Viessmann. There was almost nothing on them. It was as though they understood and mistrusted normal channels of communication for what they could give away.
Hoover said, ‘I want to see Willi’s face one more time before I die.’
Hoover
ZURICH
THE MUDDLED AND FRETFUL ghosts of the past return to haunt me. Betty Monroe’s capacity for subterfuge lives on. I imagine her permitting herself a sly smile, in the unblank moments allowed by her disintegrating mind, as she continues from afar to oversee our frantic lives. How she would laugh out loud—the familiar high peal, the head thrown back, teeth bared, her gutsy laugh—to be told of what I have just learned. It is her legacy as much as anyone’s.
Abe, while rooting around in the great yonder, making idle internet investigations into the Monroes and von Heimendorfs—those connected and well-listed families—came across a tiny detonation in parenthesis: ‘(m. Dominic Carswell 1967; dissolved 1968)’.
Cold rage and a silent taxi ride up the hill to Betty’s house, where Vaughan witnesses the row between me and Beate and watches with growing alarm the angry pulse popping in my neck.
First I discover Vaughan already knew about her and Carswell when she accused him of telling me, after promising her not to. Perhaps to avoid his guilty conscience, he turns on her. Then, on the question of how she and Carswell met, he stumbles across the great, unsuspected connection.
Beate says that their families were friends. ‘Or it might have been Uncle Konny who introduced us.’
Uncle Konny: Vaughan and I look at each other.
Konrad Viessmann, present whereabouts unknown, has in spirit been looking over our shoulders all the time. Willi Schmidt was familiar with the house we were standing in; so, it transpires, was Konrad Viessmann.
An interesting point that has not occurred to me before. Among all Betty Monroe’s souvenirs and memorabilia, there are no photographs of Willi and none of Konrad Viessmann, family friend. After all, Beate knew Viessmann—Uncle Konny—since she was a child. Konrad Viessmann, the adopted uncle, friend to her father. Childhood summer holidays, apparently camera-less, were spent at his summer villa on Lake Locarno.
Beate denies all knowledge of Viessmann’s possible previous incarnation and won’t budge when challenged, two red spots of anger high on her cheeks. If she is aware of the connection, then her lies are even better than her mother’s.
To embarrass her I say in front of Vaughan, ‘And I’m the dope for getting goofy about you.’
Beate has a singular beauty when trying to keep her temper. It offers a rare glimpse into a private self. Once her control is regained she is quick to point out that no one had brought up Carswell’s name, let alone Viessmann’s. She was hiding nothing.
We end up shamed by our argument. I suspect we are using it as a surrogate for personal frustrations.
Vaughan plainly thinks Beate is still hiding something and I am too caught up with her to see it. I watch ripples of animosity pass between them.
Vaughan reminds me of my younger self. Perhaps Beate can read this identification and it makes her jealous. It’s as if Vaughan and I are family, while her reticence has resulted in her exclusion. In Vaughan I recognise the same clumsiness, the same wariness, combined with an ability to trust the wrong person. The same willingness to run and be run (Carswell his Willi Schmidt). My boys used to buy airplane models: ‘Read instructions carefully before assembly,’ it always said inside the box. The sentence was not one that could be applied to my own life. Vaughan appears similarly prepared to act on the minimum of information. In fact, he looks as though he doesn’t even know there is a set of instructions.
It occurs to me that Beate hasn’t properly identified her mother as the source of the anger she fights so hard to control. Much of my own anger toward her is not personal and more to do with being in the wrong time, of my not being ten or fifteen years younger. There is nothing more pathetic, or tragic, than falling in love too late. Beate and I were meant for Budapest, sixty years ago—before she was born.
Beate made a peace offering in the form of the phone number of Dominic’s mother on the grounds that Mrs. Carswell might know where he was. In the end she was more or less bullied into placing the call, too. The only phone in the house was inconveniently situated in the hall, leaving the three of us awkwardly posed. It was not a straightforward call. Carswell’s mother had promised not to pass on his mobile number to anyone, and Beate was trying to wheedle it out of her and was already flustered when the doorbell went. Vaughan looked instantly nervous, bad memories of earlier intrusions stamped on his face. I looked through the spy hole. It was Bob Ballard on one of his spontaneous house calls. He grinned as he stepped inside.
We stood around listening to Beate, as if we were extras on a film set, watching her resolve ebb until, in a moment of inspiration, she invoked Viessmann’s name: ‘Konrad said it would be all right for you to give it to me.’
After she was done she handed me the number. Her hand shook slightly. She was still mad at me and clearly resented Vaughan and Ballard. She walked out with no more than a brusque good night. I went after her, tried to talk to her, took her arm, which she snatched away. She said, sounding cold, giving me the brush-off, ‘You have his number now. Do whatever it is you have to do, but don’t involve me.’
The excitement of Carswell being a handful of digits away was too much for Vaughan. He wanted to know what I thought.
I was thinking at my age why should I care what a woman thought, while knowing that the surface anxiety hid a deeper one: fear of the inevitable deferred, final meeting between Willi and me; fear that the assignment between us still had some way to run. In truth, the real worry that lay beyond that was far more stark. Soon I would be lying in that last hospital bed, and Willi would have nothing to do with it. Willi was just one more distraction, whether he still existed or not.
‘Call Carswell,’ I heard myself say.
Carswell was switched off, so we sat around and what emerged was the added curiosity of Bob Ballard’s role in all this. He knew about Carswell for a start, even though we had never discussed him. ‘Now there’s a surprise,’ I said, and he gave me one of his coded looks. He told us there was leverage on Carswell, who could be investigated for illegal trading to Iraq and other sanctioned states. Again showing his cleverness, he said, ‘It sounds like the old wartime Brevecourt scam. Trading with the enemy. Isn’t that where you came in?’
‘Whose files have you been reading?’ I asked.
In my mind’s eye I saw a direct correlation between the visible junk at Sol’s place—accumulated, unsorted clutter, all forgotten about—and the near invisible traces left by Ballard’s and my superiors down the years, of aborted operations; forgotten operations; operations supported by some hideaway fund long past their date of usefulness; unrecorded operations, reported only on a mouth-to-mouth basis, where one of the mouths had gone silent; whole castles of intelligence abandoned like medieval ruins.
As I get older I grow more afraid of the dark. On some trashy TV programme the grandchildren had been watching, I heard it said: ‘There is no such thing as total darkness,’ with the emphasis on the penultimate word. I can’t imagine it, but I know it is there and waiting, and Mary with it, acrimony in eternity.
I was woken by Vaughan, a man with things on his mind, needing to talk, even though it wasn’t yet six-thirty.<
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He told me about his half-sister and their blocked relationship. Uncle Joe had no advice, painfully aware of Dominic Carswell’s intrusion into our respective lives. Dora was missing, he said, and he felt lost.
All he could see was muddle, concealed motives and fragments. He told me about a Chinese woman in the Frankfurt smuggling yard who had no idea where she was or how long she had been there.
I said it always felt like this, for the longest amount of time. You made moves, you repeated moves, made wrong moves, and in the end they added up to an approximation of sense, though not all of the moves turned out to have counted. If you were lucky, you walked away with a clearer idea of what had happened.
He felt like that about his Kurdish contacts. Real names were missing, communication uncertain, explanations garbled. At the familiarity of these casual and fractured arrangements—I felt almost nostalgic. Vaughan had spoken to them for an hour in the middle of the night. From what he was saying it sounded like they were wanting to stir things up. They wanted to meet. They were muscling in—as they had every right to do—but they were an unknown and potentially volatile factor, because where they went Turks followed. The Kurd Vaughan had talked to wouldn’t give his name. He told him to call him Maurice. Maurice!
It occurs to me to wonder whether Vaughan is part of my story, or am I part of his?
We met in a street café specified by Maurice, who made us wait. To be reminded of ordinary life was a surprise. See the mother with the baby buggy. See the man going to work. See the driver cutting up the cyclist. Vaughan talked of how nothing had felt like it fitted in London. The same applied here. Real life was looking strange. People, streets, weather had all receded. My sightseeing these days was in my head.
Maurice wore a beige suit and suede shoes and walked and talked like a respectable middle-class businessman. He smelled of Old Spice. His companions were two well-dressed young toughs alert to any potential hostile movement. Both wore shoulder holsters, and one looked as if he was carrying extra on his leg.
Maurice was suspicious about who I was. I said I represented certain interests concerning the past. He looked as if he hadn’t considered anyone else might be involved.
Maurice was clearly important. He was educated and ideologically tooled up. The plight of his people was his only consideration, and he would do whatever it took to alleviate their suffering. When he asked me if I wasn’t too old to be involved, I answered: ‘It’s a lifetime’s cause.’ Said with a straight face, it prompted a glimmer of a smile. Maurice with his guarded manner, smart clothes, and taste for up-market cafés was a case of terrorist as aspiring diplomat, a negotiator-in-the-making. Our eyes gave out clear signals that we didn’t trust each other, but we weren’t enemies as such. It was the old Middle East game of my enemy’s enemy is my friend.
Vaughan let me do the talking. Maurice wanted Carswell. I offered Carswell for Viessmann. I watched Maurice carefully. He knew whom I meant. I said we wanted to know where Viessmann was. Maurice said Viessmann had a house in Budapest. He also volunteered that Budapest was where Kurds attempting to escape from Turkey got picked up and turned around (shades of the old Istanbul-Budapest shuttle). I asked why they were allowed to get that far.
‘To encourage the illusion of escape,’ he said. From there they were taken back and ended up in gaols, where they disappeared.
He believed that the Turkish army had American support in its war against his people, and therefore British backing, which was where Carswell fitted. He told us to keep him informed of our meeting with Carswell, and in return he would find out more about Viessmann. It felt like old times—the uneasy alliances, the trade of information, the general untrustworthiness. There was a phone number to memorise for getting in touch. Any message would reach Maurice within an hour.
‘And Viessmann, why do you want him?’ he asked.
I said that Viessmann and I had unfinished business from before he was born. Maurice said he had no quarrel with Viessmann. It was he who had told them that escaping Kurds were being abducted.
‘Excuse me?’ I said, thinking I must have misheard. Maurice repeated himself. My heart banged as it had done earlier over Beate’s revelations.
What Maurice was saying made no sense, seen one way. But looked at from a more acute angle, the move was pure Willi Schmidt, with all the old qualities of Willi working both sides of the fence.
‘What was the trade-off?’ I asked. There was always a trade-off.
Maurice appeared caught out by the question. ‘That we leave his factories alone.’
‘Is that a fair trade?’
‘No, but it gives us access to Herr Viessmann, who might yet prove a useful ally.’
Willi again.
Vaughan
ZURICH
DOWN AT THE STATION I saw Hoover, Sol, and Frau Schmidt onto the Bern train, off to sort out Willi Schmidt’s estate. Instead of going to Abe’s like Hoover had told me to, I hung around trying Carswell. After twenty minutes he picked up.
He said straight off that I sounded tired. Carswell had that trick of deflecting everything with some personal remark. He did it again when he said, ‘I expect you want to talk about Dora.’
He offered to meet. I could choose where. Sensing my mistrust, he said, ‘Make it somewhere busy if you want.’
He sounded relaxed and normal. I asked if he was in Zurich, and he said near enough. A radio was playing in the background at his end. It sounded like he was eating. I pictured him in some sunny room with a plate of toast and had the strongest feeling Dora was with him.
The sentimental notion that Dora gave us something in common was a dangerous one, but, because of some perverse aspiration, it was Carswell I wanted to talk to most. I still felt like Carswell’s man, dupe or not, because I had gone in for him in the first place. He had the good grace to say, ‘I probably owe you an explanation.’
Many people unconsciously equate good looks with moral worth. Carswell’s voice—sincere and practised after years of reporting the world’s disasters—had the same effect. He sounded like a man who could be trusted. I believed he had the answers and he would share them. I took him to be saying, ‘Forget about the others. We’ll sort this out between us. I’ll get you Dora back.’
We agreed to meet at one. I suggested the street outside Frau Schmidt’s, opposite the Opel dealership. Only when I got there did I realise how exposed it was. Nobody was buying Opels that day. Every car that went past looked like it was slowing down. I gave him twenty minutes and left in a cold sweat. I tried his number, got no answer.
He picked up an hour later, sounding angry. He said, ‘I told you to come alone.’ My protests must have sounded convincing, because he then said, ‘In that case, you were followed,’ and hung up.
I hadn’t seen anyone. I went to Abe’s. The way Bob Ballard came calling five minutes later, giving me funny looks, made me wonder if it hadn’t been him.
Hoover
BERN
BERN’S GREEN STONE REMINDED Sol of mausoleums, as did the potted geraniums everywhere. I remembered geraniums on the balcony of the house in Budapest where Eichmann had lodged. I told Sol. He said, ‘My point exactly.’
Bern looked and felt exactly the same as when I had last been there in the war, entirely to order and reasonable, its history displayed with a pride that told of uninterrupted upkeep rather than renovation, as elsewhere in Europe, or wholesale replacement as in the United States. Bern was life as museum. The town was full of clocks that struck every quarter hour.
The lawyer’s office was up in the old town, close to where Allen Dulles had lived in Herrengasse. It was in a tall, old building full of dark wood whose age and permanency lent weight and continuity to the practise of the law and its interpretation, reducing any transient human presence to insignificance.
The lawyer was a no-nonsense young woman who refused to be impressed by Frau Schmidt’s performance of a lifetime. She remained brisk and sceptical of the law’s ability to accommodate
a case as vague and unsupported as ours. She hit us with technicalities, evasions, and that excruciating Swiss slowness that grinds you down every time. Swiss legal time runs at a speed quite unrelated to the rest of human experience.
I hit the desk hard with the flat of my hand. The room probably hadn’t heard a noise like it. The woman jumped, and I told her I was glad because I hadn’t been sure till then if I was dealing with a human being or a legal parrot.
How dare she doubt my word, I said, when I had been an official of the government of the United States, and had witnessed Frau Schmidt’s wedding, as a result of my friendship with her husband, as well as being responsible for her safe passage to Switzerland. Willi Schmidt should be a national hero, I said. He was one of the few Swiss who had chosen not to sit on the fence!
Sol and I revised Willi’s history. Willi had lived dangerously spying for the Allies. He had saved many Jews, including Sol. Sol showed the woman the number on his arm and asked, ‘Do you think I had that put on to fool you?’
The woman flushed. Sol said, ‘Willi Schmidt risked his life for other people, and you sit there and don’t even offer us coffee. You desecrate the man’s memory in your refusal to acknowledge his wife.’
‘Bravo,’ I said, but should have reserved my applause for Frau Schmidt. She sat with a trembling lip, radiating an enormous hurt. Outside, the clocks struck. Frau Schmidt opened her handbag and withdrew a child’s patent leather shoe and placed it on the desk. It was one of the pair she had shown me when we had first met. There were tears in her eyes.
‘This is the last souvenir I have of my husband. He sold shoes, but you know that. Everything else is gone. The photographs, our possessions, the certificates. Sometimes it feels that even the memories have gone, and I really have to remind myself that we met and married. Are you married?’ The woman shook her head. ‘Willi marrying me was a small miracle, and because of him I survived instead of being put in an oven. He wasn’t in love, but he did it to save me. Then we did fall in love, which was another miracle, and I wanted only to spend the rest of my life with him. The last thing he said to me was, “I’ll see you later.” And part of me still waits, every day.’