by Nick Salaman
‘How do you measure sex? It is surely something you cannot measure.’
‘You’re wrong. I can measure it very well. I have many interesting measurements in my files.’
He had produced a tape measure and spread it across her breasts. This was becoming annoying.
‘Stop that at once! What has got into you?’ she asked, but he sniggered: ‘The more you resist, the better the result.’
Where were Joe and David when she needed them?
‘I am a geneticist. I measure sex. It is tidier that way and more enjoyable. Your breasts are six and a half per cent larger than the Caucasian norm. Colour of eyes?’
‘What has that go to do with it?’
‘It is an added bonus if you have eyes of different colours. Do you have eyes of different colours?’
‘Yes!’ she said. She might as well have a look at this lunatic before he killed her.
Tearing her blindfold off, he gripped her shoulders and gazed deeply into her eyes. From a distance you would have thought the man was tall and distinguished-looking but close up the mouth was slack and the eyes glazed. There was a ghost of a bubble at the corner of his lips. It had become a nightmare castle indeed.
‘Liar!’ he screamed. ‘You do not have eyes of different colours. Your eyes are the same colour. Do you understand? THE SAME COLOUR!’
‘Please don’t shout,’ she said.
It seemed to calm him for a moment.
‘You have no idea what the loss of your family, your city, your country, your beliefs, your very reason for living does to a man,’ he said. ‘It is absolutely shattering. In the end you lose your mind. Nothing can make up for that.’
He might have been pleasant-looking once, but there were stains on his waistcoat and now an odd look of hatred entered his own identical eyes of dusty, pale grey-blue.
‘Now you’ll see…’ he threatened, kneeling down and raising his arm towards her. ‘Now you’ll see.’
‘Stop it,’ she cried. ‘What do you think you’re doing?’
He was just reaching up inside the hem of her dress with a hand on her thigh and his tape measure at the ready, when there was a sound like a pistol shot and the man fell to the ground where he crouched like Caliban. She looked round and a male nurse, who looked like a policeman trying to keep his identity secret, was curling up the tongue of a bullwhip which he had cracked within an inch of the man’s face.
‘I know who you are,’ the man snarled. ‘I’ll send for you in the night and we’ll start the tests in the small hours when you’re at your lowest. Then we’ll see who cracks the whip. First you’ll cry like a baby and at the end you’ll be howling like an animal. I have seen it happen, time and again.’
‘He’s one of Middleburg’s lot,’ said the secret policeman. ‘He thinks he’s Dr Mengele or someone. Quite possibly, he is. Sorry about that. I don’t know how he got out. His room’s normally locked and he’s under twenty-four-hour surveillance, but they were going to move him for the presentation. He’s been so quiet recently and he was meant to be sleeping now. He must’ve put his medication down the toilet. Or down her throat,’ he indicated the prone figure.
‘Is she all right?’ Marie asked, thoroughly shaken.
The man examined the woman cursorily and took her pulse. ‘She’s fine. It looks as though she took the tranquillisers.’
‘Someone should be spoken to,’ said Marie, feeling not unreasonably angry. ‘I could have been killed. Who did you say he was?’
Then the man said something, as he handcuffed her assailant, which completely took the breath out of her. ‘He thinks he’s your father.’
‘My father?’
‘Don’t worry about that. He thinks he’s everyone’s father.’
‘What is his name?’
‘Ask him yourself.’
‘OK. What is your name?’
The man who was her father seemed to have gone into a poached egg state but at that moment his eyes opened wide and he giggled.
‘Daddy,’ he said.
For a moment, she was so shocked she almost believed him.
‘This is what comes of too much study,’ said the secret policeman. ‘It addles the wits.’
‘Poor man. What have they done to you?’ she asked the crouching figure.
‘Best get out of here,’ said the secret policeman. ‘They say madness is catching. Go back down the stairs to the room you just left.’
The room was still there with the same seat beside the same little table, but the champagne had disappeared and there was now another chair set beside the original one. The same white partition, which served as a screen, was still in position. She gazed at the screen, waiting for something to happen. A stage seemed a funny place to have a meeting but nothing Middleburg did was without purpose. The stage was set.
The nurse left the way he had come and Middleburg entered, walked over to shake her hand and stroked her arm, making her flesh crawl.
‘Not so long ago, when I left your house, I had hoped never to see you again,’ she said, by way of conversation. ‘But now hardly a day goes by but we meet once more.’
Middleburg smiled to humour her. ‘I sometimes have that effect on people,’ he said. ‘Happy birthday.’
‘It’s not happy and it’s not my birthday. You have gone to a lot of trouble to get me here.’
‘Yes. That is what I have enjoyed about it.’
‘I thought for a while I had escaped you,’ she said.
‘There is no escape. We can talk freely now as we are alone.’
Middleburg smiled. He motioned at the walls around them. There was no sign of the attendant spirit who had placed the chairs and taken away the champagne glass, replacing it with a carafe of water and a glass tumbler.
‘We have had you under surveillance ever since you were born,’ Middleburg said, ‘and, maybe to your surprise, ever since you left us in Beverly Hills; ever since you thought you had left us. Mrs Holdsworth was beside herself with disappointment at your departure. I wondered where all the psychic energy was coming from. We do have séances. Hitler had them, you know.’
‘I didn’t know. But I imagine he’d do anything.’
Middleburg ignored her remark and continued, ‘I think she has a crush on you.’
‘Poor Mrs H. I think I would have had a crush on Quasimodo if I had been married to Mr Holdsworth.’
The evening seemed full of disagreeable thoughts.
‘Mr Holdsworth is not so bad.’
‘No, he is worse.’
As they spoke, the screen lit up with a picture of a large, beamed meeting-hall – the refectory, in fact – fitted with rows of long tables and benches. As she watched, a man in a white coat and surgical mask entered and sat down somewhere near the front. Then another came in. And another. The benches slowly filled up with more and more people in white coats and masks. The masks especially made them seem weird, unearthly. Gentle but insistent warbling from the organ – she had noticed the pipes above a console in the far wall – filled the empty spaces of the air and joined the walls together. The humans moved like goldfish between them. Nothing that happened under the authority of these people happened by chance. Cuckoo.
‘Handel,’ said Middleburg, indicating the music, ‘you like it? “The Cuckoo and the Nightingale.” A good German Englishman. Only I became a good German American.’
‘Are you good?’
‘Depends what you mean.’
‘What are these people here for? Some kind of speech?’
‘No, they have come to see you.’
‘Me? Why would they want to do that?’
‘Recently, as you know, The Other Judas combined forces with this big chemical and pharmaceutical company of ours called Messinger. Well, to be honest, Messinger took them over. They were having cash-flow problems while we had so much cash it was … well, we needed to do something with it. We were originally German prisoners – scientists and so forth whom the US Army thought could be useful to n
ational security, otherwise they would fall into Russian hands – it was called Operation Paperclip as your friend Margot told you the other day.’
‘I’d heard of that vaguely but didn’t know what it was.’
‘They were experimental physicists, biologists, geneticists, physicians and chemists like me.’
‘And of course they’d had people to experiment on, in places like Dachau.’
‘You have been reading too much of your Daily Mail,’ he said.
‘And you perhaps have not been reading it enough.’
There was a pause while they looked at one another.
‘Why are they wearing masks?’ she asked. ‘The effect is disagreeable.’
‘They work in a clean-room where there are no pathogens. When they go back inside, it is better that they take a minimum of pathogens with them.’
‘What have I got to do with all this?’
‘Your father helped us start the company – luckily it happened before he became confused … or out of control as some said.’
‘I thought my father was meant to have French connections, not German.’
Something Joe had said came to her mind. ‘Nothing these people do is coincidental.’
‘I explained that to you. Your father was German. He came from Alsace which is historically Germany, and which will be Germany again. He was heartbroken when your mother died. You should be grateful to him for thinking of your future and arranging to save your life before he went off the rails.’
‘Do not remind me. I am ashamed to be alive.’
‘That is ungrateful of you for it was your father providing for you that gave you a safe haven.’
‘I am not grateful to him for leaving me in the dark all my life.’
‘Your mother was half-German. Half-German and half-Scottish – genetically an unfortunate mix. The Celt and the Saxon have never been easy bedfellows.’
‘What happened to me after she died?’
‘You were saved and spirited away to your Scottish grandmother and her two sisters. I won’t go into how you got there. I believe we arranged it via Sweden. Such a shame your grandmother died soon after you arrived.’
‘And my father? Presumably he was in better form in those days?’
‘Oh yes. He was very fit. As I told you, he was a top Nazi scientist and research professor. Aviation medicine, the study of what the body can stand in extremes of speed, height and cold. Physiology, biology, that sort of thing. Extremes of psychological stress. His department also studied genetics and the physics of ageing. He was, in fact, nominally in charge of Dr Mengele, a man with a second-rate mind. Your father was picked up by the Americans in West Germany, as I was, after the fall of Berlin.’
‘You mean potential war criminals were given shelter by the Americans when they should have been at Nuremberg facing trial? How many were there?’
‘Some say fifteen hundred, others estimate up to four thousand – but many of them were bona fide, not even Nazi Party members.’
‘But that’s … that’s a huge number. How many war criminals in that lot?’
‘We do not call them criminals. They were patriots. The figure is not currently available.’
‘Was there no shame? No feeling of guilt?’
‘Here you betray your English education. We felt no guilt. It was considered necessary for national security. Stalin killed four times as many people as Hitler. The Soviets became the big threat as soon as the war ended. Many of these people still work here.’
‘Do people outside know about it. In America?’
‘Not very much. Openness is one thing, but national security is everything.’
‘So all that stuff about Laval and those hideous crimes was untrue?’
‘We had your great-aunts to think of too. We hit on it as a way of making them feel ashamed of your father and obliging them to bring you up under a cloud. They did not like it of course, but that way you could be an unperson, hidden for a time, and eventually returned to your real father as he wished. There had to be a reason why your father was not around. The next best thing to a Nazi scientist with a background in experimentation was a sex scandal. Don’t get me wrong. I am an authority on Gilles de Laval, Baron de Rais and probably know as much about him as anyone living. The man fascinates me. I enjoyed playing that game. He was almost certainly guilty. But that was then, 500 years ago.’
‘You were right. I’d rather have a killer sex maniac for a father than a Nazi who experimented on people and tortured and killed them in a concentration camp.’
Privately, she wondered if this were true, but it suited her argument to maintain it. It was bad enough to have either of them in her poisonous family tree.
‘Exactly. Even so, I hope I may be able to change your mind. I have told you part of the story but not all. The truth is stranger still.’
All the while, to add to her sense of dislocation, the men in white masks and coats kept on coming and coming. The hall on the screen in front of Marie and Middleburg was now nearly half-full.
‘I am not sure I want to hear any more,’ she said. ‘If they want to see me, why is it all on screen?’
‘They have seen you. The only thing was, it wasn’t you, was it? Or was it? Did you make the film with us or was it someone else, your Dopplegänger? As I have said, we never know if you are going to turn up.’
‘They have seen me? How can that be?’
‘Wait awhile and you will see. A glass of wine before the presentation?’
She made no response and sat like a wax doll. She wanted someone to pick up her arms and legs and waggle them about so she could walk. She wondered whether Middleburg had studied hypnosis.
Middleburg motioned her again to have a drink and indicated that she should sit down in the chair.. On the table, beside the jug of water and her tumbler, there now stood a bottle of wine in a cooler, along with two wineglasses – she noted that the wine was a 1963 Corton-Charlemagne, one of Joe’s favourites. – They seemed to have appeared; she had not noticed them arrive. He opened the bottle and poured a glass of wine whose gorgeous, deep golden-yellow hue was positively mesmerising.
‘You will have a little wine,’ he said. It seemed more of a command than an invitation.
Marie hesitated for a moment, remembering the tricks that the Holdsworths used to play with drinks in Beverly Hills, but then she thought, why not? She could hear Joe advising that the man, though essentially suspect, had some superficial standards. He wasn’t going to tinker with a Corton-Charlemagne.
‘Yes, I will. Thank you.’
‘The visitors come to the refectory here and unwind,’ he told her. ‘We have some good times here. It is good to have song and laughter and wine, no?’
Middleburg poured a glass for her, pushing the glass over to her on the polished wood as though in a game of chess, raising his own queen in salute. They looked at each other.
‘To “Come What May”,’ he said.
‘To “Come What May”,’ she agreed.
The wine was very good. She told him so. ‘Like mother’s milk,’ she said. ‘Not that I would know about that.’
‘It is from an estate we own,’ he said. ‘It oozes its way around the buccal cavity, tickles the epiglottis, plays deliciously with the adenoids and lingers like a lover all the way down the larynx, ending in a curlicue of warmth around the oesophageal sphincter. Not my words, but those of a review in the Journal of Medical Science, out next week.’
‘In spite of that, I still like it,’ she said. He could play at being charming but she refused to be charmed. The script was not working out at all as she had imagined. Or was he once again giving her a tall story? The wine was stronger than she had thought. Drink me.
‘About that other girl,’ she said.
‘What other girl?’
‘That other girl pretending to be me.’
‘Is there someone else? You sound like a jealous wife!’ he laughed.
She thought it better not to air
her doubts to him now. Her doubts were her weapons. Could it be that he had entrapped and groomed another girl like herself? Had he got the girl into his web, stirring like a half-dead fly, as she herself had stirred? How many had he got? And to what use was he putting them? Well, at least she had one answer to that. He was making this one pretend to be me.
Middleburg betrayed no emotion. He understood that she spoke, when she did speak, from a position of impotence. The web was tacky and her wings were pinned.
‘The workforce is still arriving. All these people work for the firm I founded with your father,’ he said, pointing at the screen.
‘With my father’s money?’
‘We funded the firm with the help of the United States. They had the money. They wanted our genius.’
‘And the name Messinger?’
‘Our name was actually von Melder – my cousin’s also, your father’s. The name Melder in German can mean a messenger or an orderly. It has a military ring. The Germans like that. The symbol of the messenger is Hermes, the winged-heeled god – a sign today that denotes Messinger Research & Development to the Government and medics, and Messinger Chemistry and Bio-diversity or MCB, now making everything from toothpaste to detergents, skin rejuvenation creams and painkillers for the TOJI brands, as well as some very dangerous things for the Government. It is much simpler and more comforting for the shareholders and the government if some members of the family are still involved in the company. That is why you are going to be Messinger. And if you are going to be married to Mr Drummond, you will be Drummond-Messinger. It rolls off the tongue very nicely, don’t you think?’