I recall complaining about the wife, a tedious stanza I shall not relate and him listening and then somehow we were talking about Dad and Mutti, and who was the least and most favored son, a familiar trope of ours on the few occasions when we talk about our mutual past, and we merrily recalled an incident in which Paul, aged around seven, had broken a precious Meissen figurine, and Mutti took after him with the hairbrush, our usual instrument of discipline. This was, by the way, not one of your cheapo drugstore plastic models, but a solid chunk of Deutsche maple stuck with boar bristles from the Schwarzwald, a weapon suitable for seizing Jerusalem from the Saracens. On this occasion Paul was attempting to escape by running around the oval dining room table, shrieking hysterically, Mutti in pursuit, uttering threats in German, with we smaller kids watching in fascination. After we had milked this one of its warmth, I happened to remark that, unlike him and Miriam, I had hardly ever felt the hairbrush, me being the good son. He looked at me strangely and said, “Yeah, she used to beat you with her hand. In the bedroom.”
“What’re you talking about? She never touched me.”
“You really don’t remember this? Almost every time Dad punched her out, she’d pick a fight with you and take you into the bedroom and lay you across her knee and pound your bare butt with her hand, and you’d wail like a lost soul, and then she’d hold you on the bed and rock you and murmur endearments until you stopped. Miri and I used to watch it through the keyhole. She used to call you mein kleines Judchen.”
“Oh, bullshit! You’re making this up.”
He shrugged. “Hey, don’t believe me-ask Miri. We thought it was weird even then, even compared to the normal freak show that was our home.”
“You think I suppressed this abuse? God, how unbelievably trite! And this explains all my current problems on the love and family front?”
“No, the explanation is that God has given you free will and you have decided to use it to sin, rather than abandoning your monstrous pride and submitting yourself to God’s will. Since you asked.”
Or something to that effect, a style of discourse that goes right past me. The other interesting thing from that conversation is that somewhat later I musingly asked Paul why our parents had ever hooked up in the first place, and he looked at me strangely again and said, “You really don’t know?”
“A wartime passion, I always thought. They never talked about the feeling part, though.”
“No kidding. You never thought it was strange that a Nazi princess would choose to marry a Jew? And a very Jewish Jew at that.”
“The mysteries of exogamy?”
“No, she was just being a good Nazi.”
I must have shown puzzlement because he said, “Look, they took this master race business seriously. The Herrenvolk have the right to conquer everyone else because they’re strong, yes? And who is the chief rival for world domination?”
“The Russians?”
“No, the Russians are cattle. The Jews are the only rival race. They control Russia and they control the western powers, especially including the United States. The war was fought against the Jews. And the Jews won.”
“What? The Jews were destroyed.”
“They won. They lost six million, sure, but they got back to Jerusalem, and the Germans lost seven million. And the armies that beat Germany into the ground were controlled by the secret machinations of the Jewish race. You never got this from her?”
“Never.”
“Lucky me, then. It follows that since the Jews conquered, it was the Jewish race that was superior-sorry about the camps-and it further follows that it behooves an Aryan maiden to join her loins to those of the superior breed. It all makes perfect sense, if you happen to be crazy.”
I have to say that this had never occurred to me, and neither Paul nor my sister had ever brought it up. My parents fought like fiends, of course, but I had woven a romance around this, which I got from the movies. People fell in love, they had children, the man was unfaithful and the wife threw plates, at which point the man reformed and realized that home was where the heart was, or else he left, and the mom found a new and better husband (Robert Young) and turned the bad old husband away when he came crawling back, or (even better) he died.
After what seemed like a very long interval, nor did the plane drop from the sky, I said, creakily, “So what’re you saying, Paul? That we’re phase two in the plan to breed the master race? I thought that mongrelization was what they were trying to avoid.”
“Yes, but they were fascinated by mutts and the idea of breeding. They even saved Aryan-looking Jewish kids from the ovens and gave them to good Nazi families to raise, which they shouldn’t have done at all if they really believed their racial purity line. And all that skull measuring they did and the Mengele experiments with twins…”
I recalled something he’d just said and interrupted. “What did you mean by ‘lucky me’ just now?”
“Oh, just that Mutti gave me and Miri the blood lecture, which apparently you didn’t get. I mean, did you think I figured all this out myself?”
“She told you she married Dad to advance the racial theories of the Third Reich?”
“Not in so many words, but we were often told that the Nazis lost because they were too pure and noble and so she was sacrificing herself to inject some sneaky-smart Jew genes into the mix. I mean, didn’t you think that the peculiar assortment of physical characteristics in our family had something to do with the way she treated the three of us? Oh, right, you kind of forgot some of that. In any case, we were disappointments in the Übermensch department, although of unimpeachable Aryan appearance: I was a thug and Miri was a whore, but you were, so to speak, the golden mutt who would make all of it worthwhile. That’s why she killed herself. The two of us were out of reach and she didn’t want to distract you from your studies with having to care for an old lady. Ritterkreuz mit Eichenlaub, Schwertern und Brillianten for heroic Mutti. You look surprised, Jake. You never figured this out?”
“No, and I want to thank you for bringing it to my attention. We should have more of these brotherly talks-I feel so terrifically up now. Gosh, and what a shame Mutti didn’t stick around to see the prodigal return in glory to judge the living and the dead. She would’ve been so proud!”
Paul ignored my sarcasm as he almost always does and replied mildly, “Yes, I’ve always regretted it. Are we finished with this, by the way? Because I have some thoughts about your present situation.”
After that, we talked strategy, and he developed his idea that the whole thing was a con and what that meant for our actions while in the U.K., and I thought he made sense. Of course it was a con. Wasn’t everything?
The plane landed. We drove to London, in a limo supplied by Osborne Security Service, the security firm Paul had engaged. The driver, one Brown, was an agent of said firm and according to Paul an ex-SAS piano wire artist. He did not impress me, being rather slight and weaselly in appearance. At the hotel I had rather too much to drink-understandable under the circumstances, I believe-and went to bed. In the morning, far too early, I awoke to a crushing headache, a foul, dry tongue, and my brother, dressed in his clericals, with the information that we were moving immediately. Apparently, his security team had spotted some bad guys and we needed to shake them. I allowed him to get me together and in short order we had picked up Crosetti, who seemed to have turned into a hostile little twerp overnight. He was barely civil on the ride to Oxford.
I may have dozed but awoke to Paul’s voice describing something he had found at some church in the old City. He thought it was the grille Bracegirdle had used to encipher the letters, which I suppose was a major find, but, frankly, I could not work up much interest at the time. I am a man of settled habits, as I believe I have indicated, and zooming around in cars in foreign parts holds no attraction. I noticed young Crosetti’s eyes were shining, though, and I might have drifted back to sleep were it not for Paul’s mentioning that this grille had been swiped by a young woman. Who
else could it have been? I dismissed out of hand Crosetti’s opinion that it could also have been Carolyn Rolly. The crime had Miranda’s prints all over it: the innocent come-on, the inveigling into the confidence of the perhaps lonely curate, the swift, violent denouement…Miranda! I didn’t even bother to argue with him. I recall thinking that we have the ciphers so she had to come to us with her grille, and I recall a sense of anticipation such as I have rarely known, like a kid on the way to a carnival.
We approached the outskirts of Oxford as it was, getting on toward noon, and I was growing hungry. I mentioned this to Paul and he told me that we were to meet Oliver March in a country pub. Shortly after this information passed, Brown started to drive like a lunatic, swerving across four lanes of the M40 at the last moment to shoot onto the A40 and then quickly leaving that for a local road, just west of Oxford.
Crosetti asked him if he were trying to lose our pursuers and Brown replied, “No, just one of them.” After this we roared down smaller roads, throwing up rooster tails of water and mud and tossing us all around unmercifully. I caught a look at my companions, who seemed to be enjoying the ride, and perhaps also enjoying my increasing discomfort. Then, after a particularly jarring turn down what looked like a farm track, Brown halted the car, leaped out, popped the trunk, and dragged from it a long black nylon bag. I left the car too, staggered over to a low fence, and was sick for a good long time. When I recovered, I heard the sound of an approaching vehicle and looking in that direction saw our Brown under a bare roadside willow, with a huge exotic-looking rifle propped in a crotch of that tree and pointing down the road. A blue BMW drove toward him at speed and when it was about a hundred yards away he shot it. Its engine made expensive breaking noises and the car rolled to a stop, with steam rising from its hood. Brown put his rifle back in its bag and noticed me standing there goggling and dabbing at my mouth with a handkerchief.
“Are you all right, sir?” he asked.
“I’m fine. Did you just shoot somebody?”
“No, sir, just the vehicle. This is a Barrett rifle, sir, nothing like it for stopping a car. Father Paul wanted some privacy for this meeting.”
I stared at him and he took my elbow. “We should get back in our car now, sir.”
We did and drove off down some more little roads until we came to a perfect little English village, whose name I have quite forgotten: Dorking Smedley? Inching Tweedle? Something like that; and pulled up in the yard of what looked like a coaching inn off the cover of a fancy biscuit package: thatched roof, black Tudor beams, heavy, purplish, leaded glass, the kind of place Dick Bracegirdle used to frequent for a pint of malmsey. We all trooped inside except for Brown, who waited with the car, talking into a crackling radio.
Inside it was dim and cozy, with a fire in the grate. A large man with unfashionable red sideburns was behind the bar, and when he saw us he nodded and gestured to one side, where there was a door. Through the door was a small room with a gas fire and a battered round table in it, at which sat a slight, handsome man in his late fifties wearing a tweed jacket, a tattersall shirt, and a black wool tie. He stood when we came in, and Paul made the introductions and we all shook and sat. This was Oliver March, the companion. Another evidence that Paul has taken charge of this expedition. I didn’t mind. I felt like one of those great black bladders of industrial chemicals one sees in barges in the harbor, inert and massive, pushed about by little tugs.
After some small talk, March said, “Well, secret meetings. It all seems so odd: when did you last see your father and all that…”
At this I started and looked wildly at Paul, who explained that it was a famous painting of a Cavalier boy being questioned by Roundhead soldiers, a figure of speech. The professor continued. “Yes, quite: and I would not have agreed to meet with you in such an inconvenient place were it not for your suggestion, Father Mishkin, that the police explanation of Andrew’s death was not accurate.”
This was the first I had heard of Paul’s involvement in the Bulstrode case and I listened with interest as he explained. “No it’s not. They found a doped-up rent boy named Chico Garza using your friend’s credit card and muscled a confession out of him. The boy had nothing to do with Andrew’s death.”
“On what evidence?”
“Well, first, I visited the boy in jail. He was sleeping in a squat at the time of the murder and he woke up with Andrew’s wallet in his bag. He never met Andrew Bulstrode, but he was carefully framed for the killing. The police found forensic traces of Garza in Andrew’s apartment, so it was well prepared. The other, and more compelling, reason is that no one outside of my brother and his secretary knew that Andrew had deposited the Bracegirdle papers with the law firm, yet within days of the murder, Russian thugs were shadowing him. How did they know? They must have extracted that information from your friend.”
The word “extracted” hung in the air, and March briefly shut his eyes. What I was thinking at that moment was this: Shvanov had mentioned “sources” when he told me how he had come to take an interest in me and I hadn’t pressed him on it. Of course, gangsters have “sources.” People tell them things, or they have people followed. Or maybe Shvanov was lying, maybe he was the torturer…
(Again, in hindsight, at an emotionless remove, things are marvelously clear, but in the instant of occurrence they are covered in layers of fog. And we are so good at denying what is before our eyes, as for example, the vignettes of Mutti and me that Paul had provided on the plane, and which I have, from that moment to this, thought about on a daily basis. So you must not blame me for not coming up with what became so obvious later.)
A barmaid came in at this point, not the sort of barmaid such an inn should have had, a jolly pink blonde in a peasant blouse and a canvas apron, but a thin, dark, dour girl in an olive pantsuit, a Maltese or Corsican perhaps, who took our drink and food orders and departed without any Falstaffian badinage at all. March now said, “I fail to see how Andrew could have got himself mixed up with Russian gangsters. I mean it just boggles the mind.”
“He needed money to finance the validation of the manuscript,” I said, “and if found valid, for locating the manuscript play Bracegirdle mentioned.”
“Excuse me…Bracegirdle?” said March, and the three of us gaped at him in surprise. Crosetti blurted out, “Didn’t Andrew tell you anything about why he came to England last summer?”
“Only that he was doing some research. But he was always on to some research or other. Who is Bracegirdle?”
I gave him the short version, and while I was doing this the barmaid came in with our food and drink. I had ordered a pint of bitter and finished it in time to flag the girl for another. March listened carefully, asking few questions. When I was done, he shook his head ruefully. “Andrew and I have been together more or less continuously for nearly thirty years,” he said, “and we’ve always been reasonably open about what’s going on in our lives-open for dons, I mean, not actual gushing or anything like that-but I must say that I had not the slightest clue about any of this. Andrew could keep things dark, of course, especially after the bloody catastrophe he went through, but still…and this doesn’t answer the original question at all. Why, if he needed funding, did he not come to me?”
“Are you particularly wealthy?” I asked.
“Oh, not at all, but I do have some assets, some property, some inherited things. I suppose at a pinch I could have raised a hundred or so without descending into absolute beggary. Would you say he would have needed much more than that?”
“If you’re talking about a hundred thousand pounds, then no. We have no indication that what he got was more than about twenty thousand dollars from the Russians.”
“Good Lord! Then it makes even less sense. Why didn’t he come to me?”
I said, “Perhaps he was embarrassed because of the scandal,” and mentioned that Mickey Haas had asked the same question. As soon as the name was out I was surprised to see a sour expression appear on March’s refined face.
“Well, of course he wouldn’t have approached Haas,” he said. “Haas hated him.”
“What! How can you say that?” I objected. “They were friends. Mickey was one of the few people in academia who stuck up for him when the fake quarto scandal broke. He gave him a place to work at Columbia when no one else would look at him.”
“I take it Haas is a particular friend of yours,” said March.
“Yes, he is. He’s my oldest friend and one of the most decent and generous people I know. Why did Andrew imagine that Mickey hated him?”
“It had nothing to do with imagination,” snapped March. “Look here, twenty odd years ago, Haas produced a book on Shakespeare’s women, female characters in the plays, that is, the point of which was that thinking about Shakespeare as an original genius simply reinforced the toxic individualism of bourgeois culture. I believe he said that Macbeth was really all about the three witches, and a load of similar twaddle. Andrew was asked to review it for the Times Literary Supplement and gave it the mighty bollocking it deserved, not only poking holes in its logic and scholarship, but also implying that Haas knew better, on the evidence of his own earlier writing, and that he had produced this farrago merely to curry favor with the Marxists and feminists and whatnot who control, I am informed, all hiring at American universities. Not that I know a thing about it myself, barely passed my A-levels in the damned stuff, just a simple biologist really. Amazing that Andrew and I got on so well together; absence of rivalry perhaps, two halves making a whole. He used to read me bits in the evenings. Well, it was a great scandal, outraged letters back and forth to the TLS, screeds in the little journals, and I recall thinking at the time how happy I was to be in a business where you have actual data. It blew over, as these things always do, and when Andrew lost his reputation because of that awful little man, Haas was there with a stout defense, and later a job offer. As I recall, neither of us mentioned the earlier dogfight. We assumed that it had been forgotten, simply part of the usual give-and-take of academic debate. But it hadn’t been. Almost as soon as Andrew arrived in New York, Haas began to torment him. At first it was just sly digs, little things that could have been confused with some kind of bumptious American humor, but then it grew worse, petty acts of tyranny…”
The Book of Air and Shadows Page 38