by Chris Petit
I had seen Eichmann once in Budapest walking the streets alone, in civilian clothes, early one morning when it was still dark, as the marches got under way. His private quarters, on a hill in Rozsadómb, weren’t far from the assembly point at the brick factory. He told me later he liked to stroll unnoticed, without escort. The remark was one of the few times I ever had the notion of him as a personality rather than a unit in a chain of command. I wondered if he had ever connected this individual impulse—his own late liberty—with what he forced thousands to do at his command.
We hit Budapest in hard continental rain that felt like it was falling for hundreds of miles around. The car fogged up. We had no map. I recognised a cemetery I used to drive Dufy past, near the brick works. Of them there was no sign. The Communists had long since turned the neighbourhood into cheap apartment blocks.
I told Vaughan to turn down an old cobbled street. The area here, a combination of fringe building and scrub land, reminded me of America. You could still see the dirt emerged out of which the city had. The road twisted and rose in steep bends. The tires made that unique corrugated sound they make on cobbles, which took me straight back to my Liège childhood.
Eichmann had lived on Apostle Street, an affluent suburban road with big detached houses, and there it was suddenly, the familiar humpback of the road, unchanged in over fifty years, with the hill running down towards the city. I recognised Eichmann’s house straight away from its balcony. I told Vaughan to stop. I had to support myself on the car door as I got out.
There were geraniums on the balcony as there had been in 1944. I could see Eichmann as if it were yesterday. Karl-Heinz had made a present to him of an amphibian car (requisitioned) which had stood in the drive. Where it had come from nobody ever learned. They were not friends, not even strategic allies, and Karl-Heinz required nothing in the way of favours. I suspect it was largesse towards a man he knew was bound to lose.
Standing there in Eichmann’s old grounds, I realised we were down to Willi and me. I wondered if Willi had reinvented himself so thoroughly that nothing remained of his old self, or if Willi was still the real man and Viessmann the shell.
Willi would have chosen this side of the river to live, I decided, up in the hills of Buda, near where Eichmann and his gang used to have their offices. I could see him in one of those secretive roads, the houses bigger than Apostle Street, with convenient back lanes for those who wished not to be seen coming and going.
Vaughan came to find me. I had sat down on a balustrade and couldn’t get up without help. The rage I felt at my own failing strength I took out on him, and he had the good grace to understand I didn’t really mean it.
Pest lies on the other side of the Danube. Pest was as I remembered. The shock was realising how such a large drama had been played out in such a small area. Buildings grown far apart in memory were all within a short distance: the Astoria; Eichmann’s downtown headquarters, borrowed from the university; the Jewish ghetto. My old apartment building was there, in a broad tree-lined street with trams, up the road from the ghetto boundary. The wooden street toilet opposite the front door of my building was still there, quite forgotten by me in the meantime. At the end of the road was a giant crucifix on a church wall. Its position, facing what had been the ghetto, was provocative and tactless. Had it been there in 1944? I could not remember. There was no word to describe how I felt except ‘catapulted’. I had never expected to find myself back, staring down the funnel into that particular past.
We went into the ghetto, a network of normal-looking streets now, like a lot of other moderately run-down areas in dozens of other cities. Its past was practically unguessable, apart from the synagogues and the museum. I said to Vaughan, ‘Remind me. Carswell’s Systemsinc has an office here, and Faraid runs a subsidiary. And there’s something called the Kalona Institute which no one has managed to connect up.’
‘That’s right.’
‘I have no idea what the Kalona Institute is, but I’ll bet it has something to do with Willi. A couple of blocks from here there’s a street called Kalona Jozsef. Willi talked about it once. During the time of the ghetto there were mad people living at number thirty-two.’
Number thirty-two turned out to be a normal house which showed nothing of its history. The Kalona Institute wasn’t listed in the book. Systemsinc had a number that rang unanswered, as did the Faraid subsidiary. Neither had a machine for leaving messages. I thought of Ruiz in Lisbon running his dummy company with its false paper trail.
Van der Valden was sitting in the mezzanine lobby above the Astoria’s reception. He was a big man in a light suit. His skin was very pale, and he was in the process of losing his sandy hair. I remembered the mezzanine space very well. Karl-Heinz had liked to sit there because it overlooked the entrance and was private, with just a couple of tables.
I met him alone, introducing myself as an associate of Mr Ballard. Van der Valden spoke good English. In spite of his corporate bonhomie, he was nervous. In the Braille-like language of our conversation’s sub-text, I understood we were supposed to be offering a job to Mr van der Valden. I had no idea who Ballard was in his book. He said he wanted to work in the United States, not to be shoved off into what politeness prevented him from calling ‘some Third World shithole’.
Van der Valden worked in pharmaceutical research. He was a salesman of sorts, except that the delicate nature of his work made it more complicated than that. He backed off when I asked about his clients. ‘Big clients,’ he said.
‘Let’s not be coy about this,’ I replied.
But he wasn’t ready to talk. I figured he sold to governments, a combined package of medical aid and arms. His clients would be drawn from the emerging nations. He admitted that the ‘sensitive nature’ of his work was responsible for the company’s relocation to places where interference was less likely.
‘Meaning nobody is going to care if you kill the patient,’ I said, deadpan, and watched him crack up as if it was the funniest thing he had ever heard. ‘Tell that to the patient,’ I added, still deadpan, and he laughed till he doubled up. A man under pressure. Nothing is that funny. He smoked too much and exaggerated his importance. He had the beginnings of a drinker’s nose. I asked Mr van der Valden to join us for dinner at the Kempinski.
Vaughan
BUDAPEST
HOOVER STRESSED THAT WE were a young company. Van der Valden was suspicious of my presence. My leather jacket was a testament to its informality, Hoover said, my Britishness to its internationalism. Van der Valden wanted to know what I did. I blanked, then said, ‘Security. I make sure everybody feels secure.’
Hoover laughed and said, ‘That’s horseshit.’ He was making a point of being in an excellent mood. We did banter. We filled van der Valden’s glass. Hoover had said we needn’t be specific. We were buying. Van der Valden was the one looking to move. Hoover had said keep it general and let him fill in the blanks.
Hoover mentioned van Boogaert and got points. He remarked that he had been interested in head-hunting van Boogaert during his time as chief of Vesco security. He then introduced Viessmann’s name into the conversation, and moved smoothly back into the past. He told van der Valden that Viessmann had been very helpful with a recruitment programme in 1945, involving the relocation of German doctors. Van der Valden got the joke and relaxed.
Our guest was a holocaust groupie. He opened up because Hoover opened up. Hoover ensnared him with tales of meeting Eichmann and a lot of Nazi shit. Van der Valden sat with big eyes while Hoover fed him Eichmann until he was sated, and plied him with wine.
It was a shame Eichmann had given the business of population control such a bad name, Hoover said, ‘given that’s the business we’re all in’.
The sentence lingered. Van der Valden smirked. Hoover added, ‘The problem is how to avoid drawing attention to it.’
Van der Valden looked undecided. Hoover went lateral. ‘I have to ask you, as we are moving into delicate areas, who you think we are.’
Van der Valden glanced at me. Hoover said I was there to look after him. I took the ambiguity with good grace. The beauty of it was that van der Valden didn’t know who he was dealing with, any more than we did. Hoover announced that he represented a privately sponsored organisation, funded by a consortium of extremely wealthy Americans, which specialised in ‘bringing medical aid to underassisted areas. It is the underassisted that concerns us most, along with virus control. A colleague of yours, whom I cannot name, recommended you to Mr Ballard, and here we are. Now, let’s stop beating about the bush.’
It was show-off time. Perhaps out of deference to Eichmann, van der Valden started with sarin. Hoover told him that he was familiar with sarin. It was the nerve gas developed by I.G. Farben. Out of research into organic phosphorus compounds, van der Valden added. Its efficacy had been proved in the case of millions of Jews, and more recently by Saddam Hussein on Iraq’s Kurds. It had also been used by the cult responsible for the Tokyo subway attack in 1995. Leaning forward in the manner of a man warming to his subject, Van der Valden noted that the same cult had earlier sent representatives to Zaire, ostensibly to aid Ebola victims, in fact to obtain samples of the virus.
We slipped into another dimension. Van der Valden droned on, in his flat Americanised English, a dangerous bore, a man in a suit talking mass death at the dinner table, happy to be in the company of like-minded men. Ever the solicitous host, Hoover offered brandy.
Cost and efficiency. The vagaries of weather. The problems of an uncontrolled environment. Ratios of termination in relation to area size. The risk of accident. Van der Valden covered them all. The price of conventional warfare per square kilometre: two thousand dollars, as opposed to eight hundred for nuclear weapons, and six hundred for a nerve gas like sarin. Cost of a biological weapon over the same space: one dollar.
Hoover told him that design and privatisation were what it came down to. The rest was just cartoons and term papers.
Van der Valden revealed himself over several brandies. He brokered research at what he called ‘the sharp end of eugenic and political biology’. He wanted to know about our testing facilities.
Hoover answered with a question of his own, asking if testing facilities were a problem for Vesco. In terms of remoteness and inaccessibility, van der Valden answered yes. Hoover asked if we were talking about Turkey, and van der Valden agreed.
Hoover told him what he wanted to hear. We had a secure facility less than an hour’s drive from an international airport.
Van der Valden asked, ‘What about the human pool?’
I got it before Hoover did. I laughed and said, ‘We call them lab rats. I know you’re supposed to dress this stuff in cotton-wool language, but research has taught us that in a small and controlled environment irreverence is healthy. The generic name is toast, as in “Can we get more toast?”’
Van der Valden wanted to show that there was nothing that could not be laughed at. It set him off on his own comic jag. He offered to design us a nice disease to suit somebody we had in mind. It wouldn’t be long before we had target diseases, he said, specific cocktails for different types. ‘A guy says, “Hey, I think I got a cold coming.” Forty-eight hours later, boom, dead. Just like the old saying, “you’ll catch your death.”’
We obliged by laughing. ‘For the moment, it’s bulk,’ he went on. ‘Soon, who knows? You want someone specific to catch it, we can fix it.’
Hoover said we should be serious a moment, and van der Valden should convince us of his discretion.
‘We’re discreet. Stuff happens, nobody realises, not even the guy from CNN. He thinks everyone just got sick.’ He motioned us closer. ‘The way I see it, you have two kinds of genocide now.’
Hoover told him, no mention of the g word at the dinner table. We clutched our sides with mirth. Van der Valden needed no further encouragement.
‘You get your dictators showing off, wanting to be TV news, but there is another way, less in-your-face. A silent programme. It means you don’t end up in front of the War Crimes Commission. Everything gets taken care of, and nobody is any the wiser. It isn’t even news half the time, just another epidemic in some country halfway round the world that nobody gives bats’ shit about. Most of the time it isn’t even statistics. Maybe you don’t get to brag, except to your friends, but hey, Himmler and those guys would still be alive today if they could have bought our service.’
Hoover
BUDAPEST
My Dear Beate,
I don’t know what the news will have told you by now. I can only apologise for the abrupt manner of my departure, which was somewhat hastened by circumstances beyond my control. Isn’t it stupid, when you get to my age and head and heart still act in contradiction? I also find I cannot put down what is in my heart, that the distance between us has grown too great, though I sincerely hope not. My one aim is to return and for us to start again. Can we agree on that? I hope in no more than a week. In the meantime, I do need your help. I need you to get in urgent touch with whomever you contacted last time on behalf of your mother and explain where we have gone and whom we are seeing. I can only stress that Mr Ballard can be of no help to you in this instance. I am placing my trust in you and I have no one else I can ask. I am certain that my worst fears are being realised, that Willi Schmidt is exactly who I said he was and that he still is involved in something far worse than I ever suspected. I understand your loyalty and your reticence, and realise that the decision is yours. I would like for you, in spite of my own reluctance and what is probably best described as emotional carelessness with you, to believe in our future. I rarely if ever pray, but I would ask you to, for us, if you are the praying kind.
It was Willi who met me at the airport when I first arrived in Switzerland, and not your mother as planned. It was Willi who turned up in Strasbourg, and not your mother as planned. For my own conscience, I owe it to myself to try and make one final appointment with Willi.
Yours in trust and hope
Beate von Heimendorf
ZURICH
HOOVER ASKS THE IMPOSSIBLE. Whatever I do, I betray.
I have now read all Mother’s private diaries, all the journals from the war. In them she wrote a lot about Willi, sounding like a soppy teenager.
The similarities to Uncle Konny are something I have great difficulty in accepting, except for one very good reason: a case of simple mathematics.
Nine months before I was born, Mother was in Strasbourg. It is more than possible that I am Willi Schmidt’s daughter.
There is no proof. Mother has never even hinted as much, either to me or in her private papers. I cling to the illusion that the man I believed to be my father is—but he was not tall, and I fear my height is the legacy of ‘Uncle Konny’.
Vaughan
TURKEY
TOOK A PLANE. Hired a car. Bob Ballard’s cell phone a fading signal. We were stretched from the start.
We had to dump the gun because of airport security, and carried nothing apart from the clothes we wore, a bunch of Manny’s fake dollars—a trail in themselves—toiletries picked up at the airport, and a map. The plane had landed somewhere I had never heard of. We had logged a message with Maurice’s number, saying where we were going and that we would appreciate any assistance.
The feeling was of a beetle crawling across an arid cranial landscape, being watched by things much bigger.
We moved through a stripped-down, relentlessly physical terrain where human life was still measured in terms of survival. Gas stations and satellite dishes were among the few signs of the contemporary world, along with the usual McDonald’s and Coca-Cola shit. (Cruising Frankfurt with the Neos now seemed like another lifetime.) We travelled away from the tourist map, more conspicuous with every mile, pale and different. The military established its presence with convoys and troop movements, roadblocks and document inspections. We were waved on. The protective bubble of the car created an illusion of immunity.
We stopped in some dusty
place the first night, a roadside hotel used by lorry drivers who wore faded work shirts that must have been washed a thousand times. The top floor of the building was still a concrete shell.
In the dining room two men in black suits looked like they did something nasty for the government. One of the suits checked us out. He wanted to know if we were American. He spoke textbook English, and was surface chatty while his eyes calculated. He said they were doctors. Hoover bluffed, even mentioned Viessmann’s name. Afterwards he said, ‘Someone has us logged.’
Big trucks boomed past all night, their lights tracing patterns across the ceiling. I could hear Hoover coughing in his room. I chased an image of Dora, but whenever I got there it turned out not to be her.
We drove on. The countryside grew still emptier. Now even a roadside garage was an event; smoking obligatory while refuelling. Military installations loomed up in the hills, reached by dirt roads. ‘A strategic landscape’, Hoover called it, a terrain as unyielding as the feuds that got fought over it, where everything was a blood sacrifice.
Inside, the car grew dusty. The radio spoke in indecipherable languages or blared keening music. At another roadblock we were made to get out and were questioned about our destination, warned about rebel bandits. Then we were told to wait by the car while phone calls were made and half a dozen soldiers watched us, weapons aslant, cigarettes to hand. Military khaki, representative of a martial law even harsher than the surroundings; the soldiers looked familiar with the notion of informal execution. Waiting for them to make a decision, it was easy to picture the last of the heart-pump, bloodstained earth, hot bullet casings casually ejected, another cigarette lit after the shooting.