by Chris Petit
Seeing my nerves on getting back in the car, Hoover said, ‘You have an overactive imagination, nephew. Those guys are at the bottom of the order pole.’
The road climbed, narrowed, and sheared away into a dizzying drop. Traffic barrelled along. Road duelling was compulsory, breakneck speed a requisite. Everyone drove with the reckless panache of men on amphetamines or alcohol or both; no women drivers. Passing vehicles left a gap of inches, sometimes not even that. There was no turnaround. Hands sticky on the steering wheel, I would have driven with my eyes shut if I could. Hoover paled when a carelessly packed open truck braked and its load looked as though it was about to dump itself in our laps.
We greeted the level road with a relieved silence, then Hoover said, ‘I’m tired, nephew, I want to go home.’ But five minutes later he was studying the map. ‘Oil. Money. Guns. Drugs. It pretty much comes down to that,’ he said. ‘Dulles knew that. The Kurds know that. And water, too, in this part of the world. There are too many outside interests.’
A while later, he added, ‘I can see how those guys would have enjoyed shooting up a five-star hotel. All that pampered luxury, and a taste for violent change.’
He reminded me that the hotel was one of the places where Betty Monroe and Allen Dulles had met. Dulles was quite unworldly in some respects, said Hoover. According to Betty, he had been ignorant of the details of the homosexual act. Hoover’s explanation was that money didn’t fuck, and money was what Dulles really understood in a highly advanced, visionary way. Hoover said: ‘Money can fuck with you, and money can fuck you, but money itself doesn’t fuck. It multiplies by itself.’
In the late afternoon we detoured off the main road. In a village store a woman spoke some French. Hoover said he was looking for a very tall European man with white hair who ran a camp for children. We drew a blank.
We criss-crossed the region. Cheap lodgings. Variable food. We got bad stomachs and had to stop to shit by the roadside. The processes of civilisation started to break down. In one village we were stopped and questioned by a couple of probable rebels. They spoke a little English. They let us go but warned us that our presence was known in the area.
We moved into the PKK heartland. We were never sure if the men who talked to us were part of Maurice’s network. Mistrust translated into procrastination. We were a curiosity at best. Hoover grew discouraged, wondered what he was hoping to achieve. The quality of his life was not going to be improved for finding Viessmann.
Twice a helicopter flew above us. Twice was still coincidence, Hoover said.
Then, after miles of rough road and what felt like pointless circling, we stopped at a café in a town square and spoke to a German engineer named Dieter who showed a drunk’s lack of curiosity. He was working on the dam construction project, he told us. He had believed it would bring prosperity to the region, with Kurds the main beneficiaries. The inconvenience of relocation would be compensated for by the better education, employment, and modernisation. Safe in his European compound, Dieter had dismissed the Kurds as backwards and reactionary. Now he wasn’t sure. He had heard stories of how the Turkish army bought off Kurdish men and turned them into ‘village guards’, paying the kind of money they would not earn by other means, setting Kurd against Kurd. And the completed dam, he had learned, could have adverse climatic effects on the whole region. Dieter’s unease seemed in part historical. He said he was trying to get transferred back to Germany, to the head office in Frankfurt. His situation was complicated by his seeing an English woman, a co-ordinator on one of the construction sites, who shared none of his misgivings.
Outside the next town we found the corpse of a man casually thrown by the side of the road. He was young and poorly dressed, and there was a small bullet hole in his forehead. His nose had been bleeding, and flies drank the still-fresh blood. It was impossible to say whether he had been shot there or elsewhere and dumped on the edge of town as a warning or some kind of power statement. A truck went past and didn’t stop. The driver hooted angrily at us and gesticulated.
A mile or so later we drove through a shack-town slum. Scruffy kids stared. Skinny dogs with yellow eyes skulked by the roadside.
The old town had a wall and was large enough to have municipal buildings and a square. A terrace café was being patronised by loud men with guns, dressed in civilian clothes, some sporting well-worn shoulder holsters, openly displayed. They were sullen and drunk and dangerous. Hoover insisted on asking in English and German if anyone could tell him why a dead man was lying in the road on the outskirts of town.
The corpse seemed to have unhinged Hoover. He was determined to report it. The men in the café had ignored him. The police station wasn’t interested either. A minor municipal official with deferential manners and some English explained we would have to talk to the army. However, we should be aware that there was no formal procedure for reporting such a crime.
‘All bullets and no paperwork’, grunted Hoover as he walked out. He insisted on going back to the café where the men still were, drunker. He ignored them, nursed a beer, and told me of an incident which had been no more than a footnote at the time. Now he wondered if it didn’t connect to the final period of Karl-Heinz’s life.
One of Hoover’s last wartime jobs had been to arrange the transportation of a consignment of bullion from Budapest to Istanbul, using old Red Cross connections to ensure its safe passage. It was not a job he had paid any great attention to, and he never connected it, until now, to a story told by Karl-Heinz which had lain around in the back of his head.
It concerned the grand mufti of Jerusalem, leader of the Palestinian Muslims who had allied himself to Hitler because of shared anti-British and Jewish policies.
Hoover had seen the mufti once under strange circumstances in Croatia in 1942. While out riding with Karl-Heinz, they had chanced across a detachment of SS soldiers, in themselves an anomaly, being both Croatian and Muslim.
Just then, one of the drunken thugs came over to advise us to leave town before dark. It seemed like a good idea to me, but Hoover said it would be more dangerous to be on the roads after dark. The man said there had been a lot of shootings in town, and he could not guarantee our safety. Hoover thanked him, offered to buy him and his friends a round, which was accepted, then said, ‘We’ll take our chances.
‘What you have to understand,’ he went on to me, ‘is how uncertain times were by the end of the war. They were superstitious days, and there was much casting around. Astrologers became some of the most important figures in the last days of the Third Reich. Hitler used them. Himmler did, too—and his advisers, according to Karl-Heinz, told him something that might be connected with us being here.’
Among her future predictions, Himmler’s astrologer had announced that the new millennium would see a development in the Middle East with the birth of a ‘Chosen One’. This new leader would become a Kurdish warrior in the tradition of Saladin and would unite Muslims in a holy war which would drive the Jews out of Israel.
He saw my scepticism and pointed out that what he or I believed didn’t have anything to do with it. He personally retained a certain incredulity at Himmler’s desperation and superstition. ‘But, if you ask me, the money I sent to Istanbul was being used by Karl-Heinz, to finance that prediction.’ I remembered Karl-Heinz’s admiration for the Kurdish warrior.
‘Meaning that Kurdish operations are on an old Nazi budget?’
‘It’s not out of the question.’
On her other predictions, Himmler’s astrologer had been accurate about where the Russian front line would end up, less so on the Reichsführer’s fate. ‘She had him down as a big cheese in the postwar setup.’
We checked into a cheap hotel overlooking the square, which was patrolled by a Land Rover being driven by the now very drunk gunmen.
That night a bomb went off by the railway station: a thin, dull thwup that woke us both up but didn’t sound dramatic enough to be alarming. Hoover joined me in the corridor, grumbling about in
terrupted sleep. Everything felt weirdly low-key, as it had with finding the corpse. We joined a small crowd that had gathered in the town square. The gunmen drove up and down at high speed a few times, then later they came and arrested us in the hotel. It was something I had been half expecting since Hoover’s initial confrontation but it didn’t prepare me for guns being pointed in my face.
We were handcuffed and taken off in the Land Rover. Hoover’s sticking-up hair made him look old and frail. One of the gunmen unholstered a Colt .45 and looked like he might start firing it inside the vehicle. He shouted in Turkish while I silently cursed Hoover for having drawn attention to us in the first place.
We drove to a camp with a sentry post and barbed wire, behind which stood a central stone building and a number of smaller single-storey wooden huts. By the door of the hut into which we were dragged I noticed a plate displaying the manufacturer’s name: a Swiss company.
We were separated, and a soldier in starched uniform and smelling of aftershave slapped me across the face—not hard, almost girlishly—and said I would be questioned about my role in the explosion at the railway station.
The smell of aftershave hung in the air after he had gone. I told myself it was mind games and that only the cold was making me shiver. Want and dread fought for attention: please let this end; don’t let anything happen. I was stuck in dead time. At some point a helicopter hovered low overhead and landed nearby.
It was daylight before anyone came—other soldiers, politer and more deferential. They removed the handcuffs. I was taken to a canteen, given a cup of sweet black coffee, then led to a gymnasium. Hoover was there. We had no time to speak before being joined by another man whom I immediately recognised, though his hair was longer than I was expecting and, where he had previously been glimpsed in a smart overcoat, he now dressed like a bum in raggedy jeans, sandals, and an old work shirt.
Hoover appeared beyond surprise. ‘This,’ he said, ‘is Konrad Viessmann.’
Viessmann’s eyes were a blank pale blue and showed no recognition of Hoover, who looked uncertain. I had no idea if this was Willi Schmidt. He looked too young and fit.
‘What’s going on?’ I asked Hoover, but he was lost for words.
The helicopter I had heard landing was Viessmann’s. To find ourselves suddenly his passengers seemed beyond any ordinary prediction. Hoover remained silent. He seemed ashamed of his frailty compared with the robust calm and technical competence displayed by Viessmann, who appeared lofty in every sense. Viessmann the mystery bird man descending from the sky.
We took off but flew only a few minutes before landing again on the bank of the Tigris on wasteland close to the shack town, our arrival watched by a gathering crowd.
We walked up through the slums, following Viessmann. Hoover said nothing and refused to meet my eye. This was not Willi Schmidt. There was a resemblance but too much wishful thinking and speculation on Hoover’s part. Viessmann wore a copper bracelet against arthritis, a very un-Willi detail, I thought. The man’s charisma was undeniable. He operated in the same sort of self-contained space cultivated by the very important or very famous, as though he was always a beat ahead and in anticipation of the next move. His unblinking gaze invited nothing in return.
We spent about half an hour in the slums. Hoover and I were like strangers to each other, while Viessmann did his pied-piper act, giving his attention to the children, and talking with the adults in their own language. Hoover spoke once, in English, to ask if Viessmann knew what the new buildings were behind the slum. He replied that they were for the security forces. He pointed out another taller block built originally for refugees from the big earthquake of 1976. Compared with the cost of housing the security forces, he said it would be far cheaper to send everyone home to their villages and restock them.
We left with two children, aged around four or five. They had no parents and would be coming back with us to be looked after. Viessmann behaved like a rich man playing Schweitzer, salving his conscience with the profits of his business. He reminded me of a sportsman, an old tennis pro, concentrated, eye on the ball, in the zone. An excellent advert for the ageing process.
As we took off again and the town seemed to shoot away from us, I spoke for the first time, saying we had a car down there. Viessmann announced that a pickup would be arranged. He smiled unexpectedly. We were going to ‘his place’, he said.
Getting to ‘his place’ involved flying over a mountain range, through narrow gorges, past snow-capped peaks. Beyond lay Iraq, he said. Against such dramatic and implacable scenery the fleeting shadow of our helicopter looked frighteningly insubstantial.
Where we landed didn’t look so different from the army barracks of our departure, except this had no stone buildings. The compound consisted of half a dozen prefabricated huts—Swiss-made, again. After such a spectacular, vertiginous flight our destination appeared makeshift and anticlimactic, until—whether spontaneous or choreographed—a crowd of thirty of forty children, their cheers just audible over the noise of the engine, ran out of the huts to greet our arrival. They were accompanied by several adults, all European, all female. None was Dora.
Viessmann gave himself over to the crowd of enthused children and introduced the new arrivals. Hoover and I stood there dazed and stupid. My head was still full of the noise of the flight. Viessmann’s child-handling skills continued to look exemplary. Hoover appeared more and more sour and withdrawn.
There was an outdoor eating area, with a roof but otherwise open. We ate, more or less immediately, with the others, adults interspersed with children. Hoover and I sat together, but two children wriggled between us, making conversation impossible. Lunch was rice and a vegetable stew. Viessmann was seated at another table and made no effort to join us. Afterwards we were left to ourselves. The children disappeared into one of the buildings, and Viessmann contrived to vanish without our noticing.
Hoover was behaving like a man who has just discovered that his holy grail is nothing but a tin pot. When I asked him if we had just had lunch with Willi Schmidt, he gave me a nasty look, and I left him to himself.
Everyone was indoors. The weather had turned warmer and was nearly hot. My head was muzzy, as if I had been drinking. The solitariness of the place was emphasised by an air of self-sufficiency, with gardens and allotments. I went and lay by a stream and soon fell asleep.
I was woken by the shadow passing over my face. Viessmann was looking down at me. I had the impression he had been watching for some time. I felt vulnerable but didn’t want to show it by moving. The sun made it hard to see him, and I had to shield my eyes.
‘What are we doing here?’ I asked.
‘Beate von Heimendorf said that you were making a dangerous journey and she was concerned for your safety.’
‘Beate?’
Viessmann ignored me. ‘Your friend is ill, isn’t he?’
‘I thought he was supposed to be an old friend of yours, too.’
He subjected me to his disconcerting silence.
‘Do you have someone from England working here called Dora?’ I asked.
‘Dora. Of course.’
I got up quickly. ‘Where is she?’
‘She moved on, last week. She was with us a few weeks, passing through.’
‘Where is she now?’
‘Perhaps we can find out later.’ He sounded reasonable, less aloof.
‘My companion is sure he knows you.’
‘He is wrong. I have an excellent memory for names and faces. Besides, your friend is not well. He probably should not be travelling at all. It would be best to take him back. I know Beate would be happy to arrange a clinic. Perhaps if he has good travel insurance, the medical costs would be covered.’
After what everyone had said about Viessmann, it was odd to end up talking about something as banal as medical insurance, but maybe not. He was Swiss.
Hoover
TURKEY
I COULD NOT TELL, I really could not. I felt it was my faul
t. Viessmann had admitted he was Viessmann and behaved as though our presence at his godforsaken camp was because he had interceded on Beate’s behalf. It also raised the question of how she had reacted to my letter.
I tried to fit what I remembered of Willi with Viessmann. The eyes. The voice. The walk. They were the things that were hardest to disguise. Sometimes it had to be Willi. There were too many similarities. Then I would look again and decide there was nothing of him.
We were treated like guests, but there was no escape. We had nothing to do. We were given no tasks. Remoteness acted like an anesthetic while the air was so clear it stung, resulting in a state of alert torpor. Clear vision was not matched by clarity of thought. My edginess was easily countered by Viessmann’s messianic aloofness. It seemed to be part of his power that he could leave one in a state of exhaustion and indecision. He was plausible, we the impostors. He was honest with his kids, and they liked him. Kids are good readers of adults. I knew that from the grandchildren who had been quick to figure me for a disgruntled old fart, short of any capacity for play.
On our first tour of the camp we had been shown kids’ dormitories, playrooms full of donated toys, informal classrooms, which was when I first noticed that all the helpers were female and barely more than teenagers. The office hut had computers and telephones, and was run by a couple more helpers. The technology relied on a local generator, which provided the distinctive noise we could hear, like an outboard motor. Viessmann said that we were very private, and even with satellite links communications remained variable.