by Chris Petit
Betty Monroe
ZURICH
My Dear Beate,
I shall be dead when you read this. Perhaps you will think good riddance. My illness will have been a trial for you, all the more because we have never been close in spite of the pretence.
I have no regrets except with regard to you. I know it will come as a great shock to you to learn that your father was not your real father, and that your Uncle Konrad was. I should have told you, and the reason I did not was because the man you believed to be your father was the better person, and more appropriate father. I never told him, either, and he never gave me any reason to suspect that he knew the truth. But truth, I have learned, is not an absolute commodity. I believed that subscribing to the lie would create a better truth than the truth itself. Besides, your father—I shall continue to call him that as that’s what he became—had always wanted children, particularly a daughter, where Konrad had no paternal inclinations. I am telling you now, after much deliberating with my conscience—that somewhat atrophied item—because I feel that you have been held back by the half-truths and shadows that have surrounded your life.
I was never proud of my relationship with Konrad, which is not the same as saying I regret it. It caused me to do many wrong things. I told myself these were done in the name of some higher cause, which justified the tough moral decision. For a woman to be part of the world of men, she has to be as ruthless. I was enthralled by their power and wanted it for myself and not by proxy.
Your father was a victim of that power, and I dare say you were, too. Perhaps most of all I enjoyed my selfishness at your expense because you and your father represented the kind of world everyone wanted for me, as a woman. One of obedience, fidelity, and insufferable boredom.
Happiness was not a condition of my life. I did wonderful things and competed on the best of terms, and, though it sounds old-fashioned now, I served my country. In spite of having enjoyed many lovers, I lacked companionship. Happiness was brief and often solitary. I remember one such moment very clearly. I was alone in Dulles’s garden one golden autumn afternoon, feeding a bonfire, watching its smoke disappear into a cloudless sky. On the train back to Zurich, I smelled of burned leaves and, still happy, had to change into clean clothes before dinner.
I carried terrible secrets throughout my life. I have hesitated long and often, trying to decide whether you should share this legacy. In the end, I have decided that as my daughter you should. You have always thought of yourself as closer to your father when, in fact, you are more like me. You are tougher than you think, despite your deference to me and the men in your life.
One last thing I would ask you to do, related to the above. I leave the choice of how it is done to you.
There is a final set of papers. They are not discreet. Allen made me burn all the originals of any extracurricular documents and correspondence before he left Switzerland in 1945, and he made sure he was there to watch me do it. But Allen was naive in a way only clever and deceitful men can be. He also remained ignorant of matters secretarial. He did not realise I had kept carbons of everything. This last set of papers details things even Allen did not know about.
My dear Beate, it is up to you whether you read them or not. What I ask is that you, as part of me, retrieve them and destroy them. I hope through doing this you will become free to move on, and that in the rest of your life you will achieve a happiness and fulfilment which—through my own fault, probably—eluded me.
There is a joke in all this, over the whereabouts of the papers. In Allen Dulles’s garden is a vaulted cellar for storing wine with a secret hiding place, a false brick concealing a lead-lined box. Allen had it put there, and we were the only ones to know about it. After he had left Switzerland, I returned and hid the papers there, and I am sure they are there still. The cellar is halfway up the slope, to the right of Allen’s apartment as you face it.
My wish is that you burn the papers in Allen’s garden. If that is not possible, then do it at the house where the gardener burns the leaves. As for getting into the garden, Stefan the lawyer has the key. Allen gave me one all those years ago, and I kept it. It worked when I last tried it, not so long ago.
You shan’t be disturbed. Nobody used the garden much and, if you are challenged, I am sure you will use that imperious manner to good effect.
I know I should think of a proper way of ending this letter, but I suspect that protestations of love would be rejected. Instead I shall think of you standing by the bonfire, hoping that you will remember my own brief happiness doing the same, and believe me when I write that I was and remain your loving errant Mother.
Beate von Heimendorf
ZURICH
THE REST WAS EASY. I told Vaughan about the papers and gave him the key to Dulles’s garden. Then I telephoned Dominic with details of Mother’s funeral arrangements. I said I wanted Hoover there, and he should arrange for that, otherwise I would be cancelling his museums contract. Loss of face was the thing Dominic feared most. If he guessed I knew more than I was letting on, he hid it well, but men like Dominic are always alert to information withheld.
I also needed a favour, I said. How sweet to be ordering him around for a change! I mentioned Mother’s papers hidden in Dulles’s garden, and told him that they were certainly an embarrassment to her good name, about which Dominic remained sentimental. Please could he collect and destroy them? I had no wish to see them. Nor did I have any wish for Konrad to be at Mother’s funeral, should he think of coming.
Whether I can face Dominic there remains to be seen.
Vaughan
BERN
IN BERN I STAYED DRUNK, as I had since returning to Switzerland, in that state of fuzzy blur that took the edge off. I had no plan for Carswell other than surprise, and a desire to see again that same skitter of fear which had crossed his face when I grabbed him at the camp. As a weapon I had a Stanley knife, bought in Zurich. Nothing but the finest cuts for Carswell. I reckoned after the first draw of blood the rest would follow.
I tried to think only of the knife making its first cut. I never considered any alternative—the due process of the law—because Carswell probably had a great big shiny, laminated get-out-of-gaol card. The rest I blanked. Hoover and Manny and Sol and Abe. Sol and Manny had died in the hotel shoot-out. Abe survived but was critical. Nobody had been charged or named.
Dulles’s house looked unremarkable from the front, with rooms on the street you could look right into. It was hard to equate it with the hotbed of intrigue Hoover had talked about.
I used the key Beate had given me to open the garden door, and stepped through it thinking about the times Hoover had gone this way. Dulles’s garden was a small wilderness of allotments and lush plantings, with clearances for sitting. Like the area, it, too, was essentially secret. The cellar turned out to be more of a tunnel driven into the side of the gorge. It was vaulted, with a dogleg, and empty apart from a stack of old wine bottles and gardener’s tools. With the door closed it was completely dark. It was like being back in the box.
I drank half a bottle of wine and told myself I was there by choice.
Betty Monroe’s papers were exactly where Beate had said, although the brick protecting the safe took some prising away. Nobody had touched it since Betty was last there, probably. The combination number was as Beate had said, with the papers inside protected by an oilskin wrapping. I had been expecting a fat document, but it was slim. The safe was also full of old paper money, including Nazi Reichsmarks, hastily stashed, the notes grown brittle with age. Betty’s carbons were typed on thin foolscap, and parts had been damaged. Elsewhere the typeface had bled into the paper.
I read Betty’s pages and marvelled. For all her Jungian inclinations, her icy clarity, her capacity for rational exposition, and her snobbery amounted to a perfect ruthlessness that was more than a match for Willi Schmidt’s amorality, which seemed decadent by comparison. She was Lady Macbeth without the anxiety attacks.
Betty ran Dull
es’s agents, and when Dulles couldn’t cope she ran Dulles. She ran stuff behind his back he didn’t know about. By 1945 she knew more about where the money was than Dulles did. Betty was keeping the books. Betty was also siphoning off money to set Willi Schmidt up.
Dulles was scared that his real war record would be investigated by what he called ‘Jewish agents in the Treasury’. Himmler was blackmailing him into acting as his protector. It was all coming apart, and for a while he entertained the idea of using the escape line he had set up through the Vatican and disappearing to South America where he had a friend in Perón.
Meanwhile, Karl-Heinz was brokering his own deals for freedom with Betty, among others, which tied in with her plans for Willi. Willi wanted two things. He wanted not to be Willi Schmidt anymore. Betty was evasive on this beyond noting: ‘Willi has been too adventurous of late, and it is better this chapter of his life is closed.’ Second, Willi wanted a clinic. He wanted German pharmaceutical expertise. He had no wish to go back to working his way up in the family company.
Betty and Karl-Heinz came to an agreement. Karl-Heinz was in charge of dismantling the last of the concentration camps, a task which mainly involved not being seen to be killing Jews. As a result, he had a large medical staff facing redundancy and the Russians. Karl-Heinz and Betty moved the best to Switzerland—her present to Willi.
But Karl-Heinz was not in the clear. Although she admired his brain and his opportunism, Betty needed him to be removed; he knew too much and was too clever to trust. If they were ever lovers—they should have been—she made no reference to it.
Of Karl-Heinz she wrote: ‘He has outguessed me. We met, cordially, at the Baur for tea, K-H wearing an impeccable suit. In spite of stricter Swiss border controls, in answer to American pressure, K-H seems able to come and go. We talk frankly. He worries that his recent good work on behalf of the Jews might be undermined by someone trying to besmirch his good name by spreading falsehoods about his earlier war record. Talk turns to Willi. K-H tells me about Willi in the Budapest ghetto, and what he calls Willi’s “infectious behaviour”. (He has boasted of killing Jews through disease. Typical Willi, he has to tell someone.) This makes Willi’s change of identity even more urgent. Only with that done will the way be clear to remove K-H.’
Betty noted the débâcle over Hoover’s nondeath. She had nothing against him. There was just no body for Willi. According to Betty, Karl-Heinz had been called in to pull one last set of strings. After that, what mattered was that Hoover and Willi never met again, which Betty arranged by having Dulles transfer Hoover to Berlin, where he was joined soon after by a de-Nazified Karl-Heinz.
After the Willi identity switch, Betty wrote: ‘Karl-Heinz is the cleverest swine. He has managed to acquire Allen’s protection and looks to be safe. Let sleeping dogs lie. Instead Reichsführer Himmler gets his comeuppance. Allen is still prone to pillow talk. He is just back from Frankfurt, for which he departed two or three days ago like a man stung. Thanks to Karl-Heinz’s intervention, Allen has retrieved and destroyed the Reichsführer’s file on him. In that crude Hemingway manner of his which he mistakes for manliness, he said, “I burned the thing and pissed on it.” Now, he says, the way is clear to stab Himmler in the back. It quite outdoes Julius Caesar!
‘Allen has long fretted about Himmler. Short of getting him to South America, Allen was in danger of being dragged down because Himmler was entertaining preposterous fantasies of his role in the new Europe. Karl-Heinz has short-circuited all that in exchange for his own safety. Allen will send him to Berlin, where he can be watched by Hoover. The serendipity of this outcome is almost the more pleasing.’
A few entries later, Betty noted: ‘Rumours of Himmler’s death. Suicide, apparently, while in the hands of the Brits. Allen positively genial when we spoke on the telephone. Says his gout is quite cured up.’
I waited in vain the whole of the next day, sitting in the dark to preserve what little battery the torch had left. It was a strange feeling, being caught in the tailspin of stuff that had gone down so long ago. I knew more than Hoover now, knew the full extent of Betty Monroe’s collusion with Willi in the Budapest ghetto experimenting with disease. No one had noticed. Even now they didn’t notice. Those of us in the truck, maybe our fate would have been the same. Some fatal illness, some epidemic about which nobody cared.
Viessmann and Carswell were proof that whole programmes are supposed to remain invisible, not a conspiracy as such, more a matter of silent clusters forming around vested interests, and investments. It was time that Carswell became part of that silence.
The dark’s terrors lessened. Waiting became more a matter of worrying whether a gardener would turn up before Carswell. As the day wore on, tiredness combined with the onset of a hangover. I had long run out of wine.
After sunset I risked stepping outside. It was a moonlit night. Some of the apartments had their lights on. It was very still, and the sound of traffic carried from the bridge. The air tasted sharp and fresh, after the fetid cellar.
I was about to go back when I heard a rustling, then saw a silhouette moving up towards the cellar. I started sweating in spite of the cool night air. Dry mouth. Thick tongue. Racing heart, so noisy I could not believe it couldn’t be heard. I was slow following and hoped I had the stomach for what was to come. I felt my way blindly into the dark of the cave and stood pressed against the wall just before the dogleg, willing myself on.
Something dropped, followed by a single expletive. A woman’s voice.
I called her name without thinking.
Dora was picking up her torch. We splashed our beams over each other’s faces. She didn’t seem surprised. ‘Dominic said you might be here.’
She sounded nonchalant, as if we had run into each other in the street. Cool Dora. I felt undone. I had grown half used to the idea of Carswell not coming. I had never dreamt, in the endless permutations thrown up in my head, it would be Dora.
Dora played Dora like she didn’t care, like she was running some silly, sinister errand. She didn’t share my surprise. She wasn’t interested. She was doing Carswell a favour, with me a mild inconvenience to be stepped around. Stealthy Dora, stealer of souls. Maybe Carswell had taught her to exploit her difference, and turn avenger. Dora, white-faced in my beam, as pale as one of the undead, saying, ‘Stop shining that thing in my face!’
Dora inspecting the money, indifferent. Dora asking, ‘Where are the papers?’
‘Gone,’ I lied. I told her I had burned them. She appeared not to mind one way or the other.
Dora gave me two minutes of her life, maybe three, saying she had been in Turkey to get her head together. Dora had done a crash course in idealisation. She denounced the hypocrisy of the club where she worked. She read Carswell as good.
‘You mistake his influence for virtue’, I told her. She disagreed. She took Viessmann on his own utopian terms. Slim-souled Dora. She saw only what she was shown and what she chose to see. She radiated hard purity.
I could see I took up no space in her life. Nevertheless, I tried to fool myself into believing she had persuaded Carswell to let her come in his place. Dora’s intercession, to spare me. But she turned the metaphorical knife as surely as if it were real.
Dora is a stranger again, no relation at all, more an accident of biology. She said goodbye, stretching the word, leaving me in no doubt of its finality. I stood there after she had gone, aware of the space where she had been, the only evidence of our phantom encounter Betty Monroe’s document, which I took with me.
I left through the door in the wall, locking up behind me.
Soft-pad Carswell was waiting. He played hide-and-seek in the night. Scuffling; me turning, him not there. Hide-and-seek turned to grandmother’s footsteps: Carswell there in spirit, never when I looked. My mind ran away with itself. I was spooking myself, I thought, and gripped the Stanley knife harder.
Carswell stage-managed his entrance well, waiting until I had decided he was a figment of my imagination.
I passed through the glow of a light, one of the few on the path. Ahead lay the buttress of the bridge, with steps running up the side. I thought of people in the bars up above, tantalisingly close. As I stood at the bend in the path, listening, I looked back at the pool cast by the lamp, expecting Carswell to step into it.
He didn’t, and I turned to make my way up the path.
He came at me from the side, moving silently and very fast. I felt the slash of his blade as it whipped across my face, nicking the skin by my eye. Carswell was looking impressive and preposterous in a black cloak, allowing him a freedom of movement not possible in a coat or jacket. Homicidal Carswell. I shouted for help, and none came. ‘This is Switzerland,’ he said. They were the only words we exchanged.
He had my line of escape cut off, blocking the path. The arc of his sword gave him a span of six feet. He swished its whippy foil in my face, relishing my panic. Were anyone to come across our silent pantomime, all he had to do was cover his sword with his cloak and stroll on.
I fled in the only direction available, up the rickety maintenance steps fixed to the buttress of the bridge. They ended in a small service platform high above the ground, going nowhere, except back down. Even standing on top of the safety rail, underneath the bridge would remain out of reach. Above me I could just make out a complex forest of metal stanchions. I was trapped. Carswell padded up the steps, utterly sure, nearly at the platform. He swung his sword low to high, to avoid the wall of the buttress, meaning to drive me backwards so that I would fall off the platform. Verdict: death by misadventure, or whatever it’s called here.
Fear dictated the next move. I climbed onto the rail of the platform, trying to escape Carswell’s blade. He was close enough now for me to see the gleam in his eye. Perhaps I fell, or started to. I remember the giddy sense of letting go, wondering how it would end, and then I was hanging on to the underside of the bridge, hugging it with my arms, while my legs bicycled air. I felt a thin string of pain down my thigh, and saw Carswell leaning out from the platform, glee on his face as he whipped his blade back and forth.