The Luzern Photograph

by William Bayer

  I pause. ‘There’s something else I’ll be putting into this piece – my obsession with her and with her obsessions. I even imagine a possible opening line: “Let me tell you how I took up residence in a loft previously occupied by a professional dominatrix …”’

  ‘Oh, I like that!’ Eva says. ‘I’d definitely pay to see that performance!’

  I decide then to confide what I know about Scarpaci’s investigation, but without mentioning he and I are now involved.

  ‘He’s a good detective,’ I assure her, ‘absolutely committed to finding out who killed Chantal. He thinks her killer was probably one of her clients. He has a couple suspects.’

  ‘I hope he finds out who it was.’ She speaks solemnly. ‘I hate the notion that her killer might get away with it.’

  We continue walking in silence back to her hotel. In the lobby Eva turns to me.

  ‘How long will you be in New York?’

  ‘Through tomorrow night.’

  ‘So you’re free in the morning?’ I nod. ‘I have an early appointment. I think it would be interesting for you to tag along. The person I’m going to see is notoriously difficult. Please wait in the bar while I give him a call. I’ll join you in a few minutes and let you know if he agrees.’

  The bar’s deserted. I take a seat, order a cognac, sit back, and review the extraordinary hours I’ve spent with Eva and her many startling revelations. She revealed many things I didn’t know, keys to Chantal’s character and obsessions, more than enough, I think, to enhance my play.

  A thought hits me then, a possible theme: that the more I find out about Chantal the less I understand her. And that my real subject is the story of my quest.

  The play could be staged, I decide, as a labyrinthine quest, through which I, the seeker, would lead the audience. It could start and finish with the Luzern photograph. In between secrets would be revealed and questions would be posed. At the end there would still be mystery, the mystery of a woman’s life. The dramatic conflict would not end with a revelation, but would reside in the experience of the quest.

  Eva returns to the bar. She’s smiling.

  ‘We’re on! Meet me here at nine. I’ve ordered a car. I’ll tell you more tomorrow.’

  We’re in a rented limo, heading, Eva informs me, for a house in Woodside, Queens.

  ‘We’re going to meet a man named Quentin Soames, a person I’d normally avoid. He’s the reason I came to New York. Heard of him?’

  I shake my head.

  ‘He’s a self-styled Freud-debunker. There’re a number of them. He’s the most prominent. Basically they think Freud was a fraud and they’re obsessive about proving it. They scour old hotel registers, look up people whose family members were in treatment with him, pride themselves on digging up little bits of dirt that everyone already knows … such as proof he was having an affair with his sister-in-law or was involved in a youthful homosexual liaison with Wilhelm Fleiss. But Soames, who publishes a blog, is after bigger fish. Lately he’s become obsessed with the notion that there was some sort of contact between Freud and Hitler. He’s not the only one. There’s an absurd story going around that Freud had one of Hitler’s cheesy watercolors hanging in his house. I saw a documentary at a psychoanalytic conference that raised the possibility they may have regularly exchanged greetings when Hitler walked daily down a particular street and Freud walked to an intersecting street to purchase his morning paper.’

  ‘Sounds like the intersecting routes Chantal drew on the map.’

  She nods. ‘We tried to track their walks. We had good reason. If we were to believe my father’s memoir, Hitler somehow met Salomé during the year she was in Vienna studying with Freud and came to know her well enough that he felt comfortable giving her that erotic drawing. It’s hard to think of a more unlikely pair – the famous, elegant fifty-one-year-old intellectual and the scruffy twenty-three-year-old failed watercolorist! Assuming they did meet, where did the young still-unformed Hitler find the nerve to present such a formidable lady with such a drawing? It seems so implausible, and yet years later, according to the memoir, my father is sent to Lou by Bormann to try and buy the drawing back.’

  She tells me some of her father’s story: how when Lou refused to admit she knew what he was talking about, he concluded she was lying. And then how after her death he found the drawing hidden beneath the cushions of her analytic couch.

  Eva reminds me of what we do know: Lou never spoke publically about the Nazi regime, never uttered a word of disapproval. Even more tantalizing, the day after she died a contingent of elite Gestapo assault troops went to her house, took away all the books and documents, then sealed the place up.

  ‘What were they looking for? You’ve read the biographies, you know the theories – books by Jewish authors, letters from Nietzsche … or, as my father writes, a certain drawing.’

  It starts to rain when we emerge from the Midtown Tunnel, then cut through Long Island City to Northern Boulevard. Our driver maneuvers through a series of drab rain-slick streets into Woodside, a multi-ethnic neighborhood of mosques, synagogues, churches, Irish sports pubs, and Thai, Filipino, and Latin-American restaurants.

  Eva shakes her head. ‘I told you all the Hitler scholars scoffed when I showed them the drawing. One of them must have mentioned it to Soames. He contacted me, wrote that there’d long been rumors about such a drawing … rumors he’d traced back to Marie Bonaparte, one of the few women beside Lou admitted to Freud’s inner circle. According to Soames, Bonaparte told several people about what she took to be a throwaway comment by Freud, that years before Lou had shown him a highly charged erotic drawing Hitler had presented to her.’

  I’ve read about Marie Bonaparte in several of Chantal’s books. Immensely wealthy, she’d been one of Freud’s patients then became an analyst herself. She helped Freud get to Britain with his family, books, and collections by paying the huge taxes demanded by the Nazis in return for an exit permit.

  Eva continues: ‘When Soames contacted me I blew him off. I didn’t like his debunking game. But then a month ago he wrote me again saying he’d acquired copies of letters that confirmed a connection between Hitler, Salomé, and Freud. He said he’d share them with me only if I came to New York and showed him my drawing. That’s why I’m seeing him. Today is show-and-tell.’

  We wind our way through residential side streets lined with three-story brick apartment buildings, finally stopping in front of a narrow two-story wooden house fronted by a minuscule fenced-in dog run. The color of the siding is a drab pea-soup green. The interior, I note, is concealed by drawn shades.

  As we step out of the limo and open our umbrellas, I hear a dog growling inside. The front door opens just as we reach it. A short balding middle-aged man with a lined face and poorly groomed goatee greets us with a frozen smile.

  ‘Frau Eva Foigel I presume,’ he says, bowing old-world style as if in respect. ‘Or should I properly address you as “Gräfin”?’ Before Eva can answer, he turns to me. ‘And you, my dear, must be Performance Artist Berenson.’ He bows again, informs us we have nothing to fear from his dog, a large black Doberman watching us intently from the bottom of the stairs. ‘Charley can be quite the menace if he believes an unwelcome stranger has entered the premises. But seeing how warmly I’ve welcomed you, he’ll be sweet as a pussy cat … won’t you, Charley Boy?’

  The dog lets out with a grunt, slobbers saliva onto the floor, then turns and retires up the stairs. The house interior, I note, is uncommonly gloomy due to the drawn shades and a bare low-wattage bulb hanging from the front hall ceiling.

  My first impression of Soames, after his arch welcome, is that there may be more to fear from him than from his dog. Something about him reeks of single-minded intensity, a harsh narrow world-view.

  Glancing at Eva, I observe the withering manner with which she peers at him. Turning to him I find him peering back at her the same way.

  ‘Not to be rude,’ Soames says, ‘but there are house rules. No
photography and no recording devices. Kindly leave your phones on the hall table, then follow me to the study.’

  Eva and I exchange a glance, then shrug and place our phones on the table. We follow Soames into a small room off the hall crammed with filing cabinets secured with combination locks. A desk beneath the shaded windows supports two large computer screens. Soames motions us to a triangular arrangement of chairs set up in the center of the room. He waits for us to sit then takes the chair opposite.

  ‘I know what they say about me,’ he begins. ‘That I’m a crazed old man set upon an obsessive mission. And yet,’ he adds with a tight little grin, ‘there are some who would do most anything to stop me. The Freud Cult People, of course, the true-blue acolytes, who take every word their master wrote as scripture and denounce anyone who holds a contrary view. They mock my research and heap ridicule upon me … for which I care not a damn. Just as Samson brought down the Temple of Dagon, so I shall topple the Myth of Freud.’

  He grins at us again. ‘Do you find me grandiose? Such passion over such small stakes! But, dear ladies, make no mistake, the stakes are huge. If a man of Freud’s undeniable intellectual gifts is allowed to perpetrate a fraud under the guise of science then “science” has no meaning.’

  Eva peers at him. ‘I read all this on your blog. Seems the Freudians aren’t the only ones attacking you.’

  ‘Oh, there are others! Mossad has tapped my phone and tried to crack my encryption codes. Why do they bother, you ask? Because they fear that if I can show that Freud did know Hitler, was aware of him years before he came to power and did nothing to stop him, then, in a metaphysical sense, that great Jewish intellectual must bear some guilt for the Shoah. Such a proposition from a “goy scholar” cannot be tolerated.’

  Soames laughs. It’s clear he relishes being regarded as crazed.

  ‘And then,’ he continues, ‘we have the Hitlerians …’

  Just as Eva warned me, he raves on for a while about them, ending with: ‘… so, you see, I am under attack from three sides. It is good to have enemies. Keeps one on one’s toes. So … now that we’ve dispensed with all that, shall we proceed to the matter at hand? You brought the drawing, Gräfin?’

  Eva meets his eyes. ‘You have the letters?’

  ‘Ah ha! It’s “I’ll show you mine if you show me yours”. I like you, Gräfin! I operate the same way.’

  Again he pronounces ‘Gräfin’ with mock-awe. Glancing at Eva I see she’s seething.

  Soames, ignoring her glare, informs us that although many boxes of material in the Freud Archive, housed in the Library of Congress, are embargoed (‘in many cases until the 2030s, and, in one case, 2102 – can you imagine! Whatever can they be so worried about!’) he has, he whispers, gained access to this restricted material. (‘Let’s just say I have a mole. Librarians don’t earn much. I found one in need.’) As a result, he tells us, he’s been able to obtain photocopies of a revealing exchange between Salomé and Freud.

  ‘Allow me,’ he says, ‘to read aloud in English translation the following pertinent passage: “In regard to the young man whose drawing we analyzed my last day in Vienna, I marvel daily at the mystery of fate, this great reversal of fortune. Twenty years ago he groveled before me. Now all of Germany grovels before him!”’

  Eva stares at him. ‘May I see these letters?’

  Soames meets her stare. ‘Of course! And may I simultaneously see the drawing?’

  I watch closely as Eva hesitates. It’s clear she’s making a decision. If she shows Soames the drawing she’ll have nothing more to bargain with. On the other hand, if she can read the letters she may learn how Lou Salomé viewed her father.

  ‘You may see the drawing,’ she tells Soames. ‘But you may not copy it. Clear?’

  ‘I set the same condition regarding the letters. You may read them, but you may not take notes.’

  She nods, reaches into her purse, extracts two pages.

  ‘These are copies front and back. I did not bring the original.’

  ‘Understood,’ Soames says reaching for her pages with one hand while handing over his photocopies with the other.

  He’s the first to react, or perhaps, I should say, to make sounds, joyful murmurings to which he adds a succession of ‘Oh my God!’s followed by a loud ‘Is this not the Holy Grail!’ and an even louder ‘Oh, Lord, I think I’m going to faint!’

  But Eva isn’t listening. Her face is transfixed. She turns to me. ‘It fits perfectly,’ she whispers. ‘It confirms Dad was sent to retrieve the drawing. This letter corroborates his memoir.’

  Soames doesn’t hear her. He’s too wrapped up in his ecstasy. He’s still muttering greedy little exclamations (‘This is dynamite. It’ll blow the Freud myth sky-high! Freud knew, he’d seen the pathology with his own eyes, and yet never said a word!’), when Eva rises from her chair.

  ‘This has been interesting,’ she says. ‘Time now for us to leave.’

  ‘Oh, please, not yet!’ Soames pleads. ‘We must negotiate!’

  ‘There’s nothing to negotiate,’ she tells him. ‘I always believed my drawing was authentic. Now that that’s confirmed, my business with you is finished.’

  He stares at her uncertain how to react. Suddenly she reaches down and grasps the drawing out of his hand.

  ‘Give it back!’ he cries. ‘I know people who’ll pay you a fortune for it!’

  Eva tosses the photocopied letters at him, then regards him with contempt. ‘Lou Salomé wouldn’t sell the drawing to this Fleckstein character she mentions, and I won’t sell it to you.’ She turns to me. ‘Come, Tess. Our driver’s waiting.’

  Soames rises too. For the first time since we entered his house he looks rattled.

  ‘Really, Gräfin,’ he pleads. ‘This is not the time to leave. We’ve only just begun.’

  ‘Perhaps you’ve only begun, but I’m finished.’

  ‘You can’t sit on this, Gräfin! It changes everything we know about Hitler and shows up Freud as a hypocrite. It’s a double bombshell. It’s what a scholar lives for!’

  ‘But you’re not a scholar,’ she tells him calmly. ‘You’re a zealot.’

  In the car, driving back to Manhattan, Eva shows me she kept back a page from Soames’s photocopied Salomé–Freud letters. She translates the passage that set her off:

  ‘Lou wrote: “… do you remember my describing the visit of a rather oily young man named Fleckstein who claimed he was prepared to offer me an enormous sum in return for the drawing just mentioned? Now I learn that Fleckstein has been making regular inquiries about my health. They are, you see, eagerly awaiting my death, after which I believe they intend to descend upon my little fortress here to retrieve that precious item! I do not believe that they will find it as I have secreted it well.”’

  She looks at me. ‘Do you understand what this means to me, Tess? It totally validates Dad’s account, that in the end, miraculously, he did find the drawing hidden inside her couch!’

  She shakes her head. ‘Soames is a scary little man, unbalanced and also foolish. He raves about a double bombshell but he misses the significance of what he saw. He has no idea that Hitler’s drawing was based on the Luzern photograph. That explains why Hitler gave it to Lou and why she kept it. Soames is so blinded by his delusions he couldn’t see that, and even if he could, he wouldn’t comprehend it.’

  Back at the hotel, saying goodbye, Eva embraces me, then stands back and fixes me with her blue-flecked eyes.

  ‘I can see how strongly you feel about your project, Tess. For that reason alone I encourage you. And if you complete it and mount a production, I’d certainly love to see it. But in the end it’s your project, your idea, your theme. You must do it your own way.’

  Before I can respond, she presents me with the photocopy of Hitler’s drawing, the one she snatched out of Soames’s hand. ‘A parting gift,’ she says softly. ‘Something to think about, maybe even use in your play. As for understanding Chantal, I suggest you think of her as a h
ealer. There was something she’d often say, something that may strike you as self-serving or even corny, but which she meant with all her heart. “In everything I do,” she’d say, “in my small way I want to help make the world a better place.” That, I think, makes her an exceptional person worthy of your best effort.’

  On the red-eye back to San Francisco, I think over the extraordinary hours I spent with Eva and our bizarre visit to see Quentin Soames. I learned many things from her, but one in particular stands out – that the reason Chantal panicked and suddenly left the Buckley had something to do with the Luzern photograph.

  In the middle of the flight, somewhere over the Great Plains, I stare out the airplane window. It’s night. I can make out occasional lights on the prairie far below. I’m filled with excitement for I now see a way to fit the many puzzle pieces together. The Luzern photograph is what binds them. And now I also know my theme: that in the end we are all unknowable.

  TWENTY-THREE

  Extract from the Unpublished Memoirs of Major Ernst Fleckstein

  (AKA Dr Samuel Foigel)

  From the time I arrived in the US things went well for me.

  I enjoyed my work in Washington, my only regret being that my role as a double agent was quickly curtailed. I betrayed the Abwehr agents who came to me and felt no remorse for having done so. There were only three of them, plus the courier who took their reports, and the radioman in Baltimore who transmitted them. As it turned out, two of the three were fabricators, their reports simply elaborated versions of articles appearing in the press. The third was a misguided young German-American enlisted man working as a translator in the Pentagon. In short it was a pathetic apparatus which my OSS handler, Jim Landon, decided wasn’t worth exploiting.

  ‘We’ll roll them all up, agents, courier, and transmission guy,’ he told me, ‘then put you to work on something useful.’