by Ned Beauman
From then on, not much is known. Sebottendorff moved to Turkey, in flight from the agents of the Bavarian Soviet Republic, and the Thule Society is usually assumed to have withered away like a moth’s cocoon. But one meets a surprising number of people in the internet Nazi memorabilia collecting community who believe that the Nazi Party was never anything but a front for Ariosophist sorcerors. (Meanwhile, others believe that Hitler was either a British secret agent or the boss of some sort of homosexualist mafia.)
Indeed, Stuart insisted for a few months, until he lost interest, that the Thule Society was responsible for the September 11 attacks. You may already have heard that at the end of the Second World War the US military ran something called Operation Paperclip, shipping dozens of Nazi scientists to America to work on nuclear physics and rocketry. Actually, their true expertise, claims Stuart, was in antigravity, extraterrestrial life and necromancy, and many of them were hierarchs of the Thule Society. Somehow, these scientists made an alliance with their cousins at Yale University, the Skull and Bones Club, to which allegiance was owed by many of the most powerful men of the twentieth century, including Robert A. Lovett, architect of the CIA, and both Bush presidents. This ‘Brotherhood of Death’ saw the Third Reich as merely a practice run for the Fourth Reich, America’s New World Order, and their recent dirty tricks have included the demolition of the World Trade Center towers with remote-control plastic explosives and two holographic aeroplanes. Their eventual aim is to conquer the holy city of Agartha, hidden beneath the snows of Tibet, and use its supernatural powers to dominate the earth for eternity.
Although it’s perfectly obvious to me that we’ve been told a lot of lies about September 11, I find Stuart’s account a bit implausible for reasons I won’t go into here. It’s funny, I suppose, that an organisation like the Thule Society, composed mostly of paranoid bores who talked about nothing but the gods of Atlantis and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, even worse than my ‘internet friends’, should itself return as a ghost to haunt every modern conspiracy theory. All paranoids soon begin to imitate their enemies, and the Thule Society did so almost too convincingly. Either way, however, there was something laughable about the notion of the Ariosophists, in the twenty-first century, assassinating a London private detective. Something laughable, and something terrifying. As I crossed Vauxhall Bridge, the MI6 building on my left, I thought of how a city is just whatever happens to accrete around the intersection of a million secrets: a fox in your garden is a stolen kiss is a pirate radio station is a dead detective is a Welsh Ariosophist with a gun is an ounce of skunk with your greasy chips is the collection of Nazi memorabilia that my employer, Horace Grublock, keeps upstairs in his penthouse flat.
5
AUGUST 1935
Judah Kölmel, half-brother of the gangster Albert Kölmel, bent to lick Sinner’s shoulder. It was as salty as a herring, so Kölmel said, ‘That’s all for now.’ Any good coach could taste the sweat on a boxer and know if he’d trained long enough that day, but eighteen years after he painted the words ‘KOLMEL’S GYM’ over the door of an empty garment warehouse on Eighth Avenue, Judah Kölmel could do a lot more. He could taste if you ate kosher; he could taste alcohol and nicotine and marijuana; he could taste flu before your first sniffle. He could taste if his naked wife had faked it. He sometimes thought that he could taste bad luck, that he could taste impurity before God, and that he could taste the shadow of death. Three times out of four, he could taste if a boxer was going to win or lose his next fight. But when he tasted Sinner, he could taste, naturally, that Sinner had been skipping, jogging, and sparring for eight hours and that he’d done just about enough, but beyond that, nothing – sweat as blank as the condensation on a mirror.
So Kölmel, still a little perturbed by this even after a week’s acquaintance, made no wisecrack as he handed Sinner a towel, leaving his cousin Max Frink to say, ‘You worked hard today.’ The three of them started up the metal stairs to Sinner’s first-floor dressing room, though several customers of Kolmel’s Gym (which had never, for trading purposes, rescued the umlaut) were still at their punching-bags.
‘Can I go to Times Square tonight?’ said Sinner. He said it sarcastically, as he had every night since they arrived in New York, knowing the answer would be no. Frink insisted that it wasn’t half as good as Piccadilly Circus, anyway.
‘No need, Seth,’ said Kölmel. ‘We’re having some fun tonight. Big dinner.’
‘What?’ said Frink.
‘A banquet with Rabbi Berg,’ said Kölmel. ‘You know, like I promised in my letter.’
‘In you go,’ said Frink.
‘I’m out of fags,’ said Sinner. Kölmel handed the boy three Chesterfields and shut the door after him, leaving the two older men in the corridor.
‘What the hell is this about a dinner?’ said Frink quietly.
‘Rabbi Berg is excited to meet the kid. I’m sure I told you about it.’
‘Will there be wine?’
‘Yes, but—’
‘Rabbi Berg can meet Sinner another time.’
‘I promised him!’
‘No.’
‘Max, you don’t know how much the Rabbi does for us all. Or how much the guy could do for Sinner. He’s like a kid himself when it comes to boxing – he loves it. And he has relatives in London.’
‘Are you crackers? We’re paying to keep a bloke on the boy’s bedroom door at night, and now you want to throw him a nice party with wine?’ said Frink, struggling to keep his voice down. ‘Listen to me, Judah, maybe I don’t know much about this Rabbi Berg, but I’ll tell you what you don’t know: you don’t know how fast it can go wrong with Sinner. You’ve never seen it. For God’s sake, he has to fight tomorrow night.’ Kölmel had arranged a couple of warm-up bouts with local boys in advance of Sinner’s crucial match with Aloysius Fielding the following weekend. If Sinner beat Fielding, and he ought to, it would be enough to establish him in America, and that meant bigger fights, bigger titles, bigger purses. He might not have to return to England for months. The trip couldn’t have happened without Judah Kölmel, and Frink was so grateful that he would normally have gone along with anything he said, but this was too important; and if Frink was capable, once in a while, of defying Albert Kölmel, which very few men or women ever did, then he was certainly capable of disappointing Albert Kölmel’s half-brother.
‘All we got to do is watch him. You sit on his left, I sit on his right, and we follow him when he goes to take a piss.’ Kölmel’s false teeth were loose and they rattled as he spoke. He was rumoured to carry a small automatic pistol in his hip pocket at all times, and was a member of the New York Pangaean Club.
‘No. Absolutely not. We’re honoured by the invitation, Sinner and me, but absolutely not.’
So while Sinner washed and changed his clothes, Kölmel went into his office, telephoned Rabbi Berg and persuaded him not to serve wine at the dinner, achieving, in ten minutes, what thirteen years of Prohibition never had.
Out in the street the five o’clock sunshine seemed to rise up like dew from the cracks in the pavement. Sinner and Frink took a cab back down to their hostel on the Lower East Side next to the old Bialystoker Synagogue. Kölmel knew the owner, and Sinner had been put in a room with bars on the windows and a heavy lock on the door. Sinner drank a Dr Pepper – which he had never tasted before and found almost alarmingly delicious – flicked through a boxing comic called The Abysmal Brute – which despite the name made boxing appear as bloodless as cricket – and changed into a suit borrowed from a tailor friend of Kölmel’s – which was both too tight and too long in the legs. Then the two Englishmen walked over to Rabbi Berg’s house on Cherry Street.
Frink couldn’t pretend he didn’t feel guilty to be treating Sinner like this, to be dragging him around like a convict on remand, to be denying him a single moment’s unharnessed enjoyment of this extraordinary place. When Frink fought ‘for England’ in the war he had really fought for London, and yet he had to admit th
at New York felt like an even greater city. This was what he was stealing from Sinner, who would only be seventeen once. But to reassure himself, he only had to think of the times that the boy had turned up to prizefights drunk, or vomited during training, or disappeared entirely for days at a stretch – not to mention the more carnivalesque episodes, like the time he stole a police horse. Frink had known Sinner had that chaos in him ever since the day they met, but it had got worse and worse. And despite all the help Frink had given Sinner, with his jabs and his scabs and his dinners and his debts, he couldn’t do the first thing to help him with this. He desperately wanted to, but he couldn’t. Frink knew what it was like to want to drink sadness into the distance, and he knew the sadness that Sinner had, or some of it. But he often felt that Sinner wasn’t drinking because of sadness, but rather because he looked at drunkenness like he looked at almost everything else: as a territory to be conquered, an opponent to be tested, a lover to be used up. No gouging, no biting: those were the words spoken before every fight like a harsh grace. Gouging and biting, though, were both just ways of grabbing a little bit of something that wasn’t yours. And Sinner, if he could, if he wasn’t stopped, would try to gouge and bite until there was no world left. Or until there was nothing left of him but fingers and teeth. Or until there was nothing left of him at all. Which was why he had to be a prisoner, as guilty as it made Frink feel.
But actually, to Sinner, as they passed a shop window advertising ‘MOSHA 100% PURE PUMPERNICKEL’ which just at that moment was nearly smashed by a little boy kicking a tin can, this place didn’t seem all that different from Spitalfields; except that New York had a certain deep generosity of sky which he would never forget. And, anyway, Frink wasn’t wrong to be wary: Sinner wanted gin, or whatever they drank here, and one way or another he would get some. He looked back at the little boy, and thought about how the kid would soon know his name, just like everyone else in this city would.
Rabbi Berg’s house was crowded with paintings and ornaments and little lamps and half-broken things. He welcomed them in saying, ‘Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful.’ His face was deeply and finely lined all over, as if he’d once been caught in a shrimping net. ‘A great pleasure to meet you, Seth. Who is your rabbi in London? Rabbi Brasch? Our paths have not crossed. Come and sit down because I cannot stand up for too long and Mr Kölmel is already here.’ They went into the dining room and drank iced blackberry cordial. Within a few minutes the two remaining guests had arrived: Mr Balfour Pearl, a handsome dark-eyed man in his mid-thirties, introduced as having come straight from the mayor’s office, and Rabbi Shmuel Siedelman, who was around the same age as Pearl and much more reserved than his colleague Berg.
Their host sat at the head of the table, with Kölmel and Siedelman on his left, Sinner and Frink on his right, and Pearl at the opposite end. As his maid brought out their dinner of veal sausage with minced onion dumplings and cabbage, the rabbi led his guests in a prayer for the Jews in Germany. Everyone closed their eyes except Sinner, who looked around the dining room. This wasn’t the first time he’d been in a nice house: there were toffs he’d met in the Caravan who’d taken him back to grand old places in Belgravia or Knightsbridge. But this was the first time he’d been in a nice house as a proper guest, let alone a guest of honour, and the first time he’d been attended by a maid. The rabbis he knew in London didn’t live like this, and they wouldn’t aspire to have government officials over for dinner, either. He wondered what the difference was, really, between a man like Rabbi Berg and a man like Albert Kölmel. You knew everybody, everybody knew you, and that was the foundation of your power: before long, there was no one left who didn’t owe you a favour. It was only the incantations, it seemed to Sinner, that were different.
‘Tell me, Seth,’ said Berg after the prayer, ‘how long have you been boxing?’
Sinner shrugged. ‘Since I can remember.’
‘Max, tell them how you found him,’ said Kölmel.
‘I don’t want to embarrass the boy,’ said Frink, looking at Sinner, but Sinner made no response, so Frink went on, ‘Well, this was when he was twelve years old. Some rich bloke in a big black Bentley – no idea why he was in our bit of town – but he’d given Sinner – Seth, I should say – he’d given Seth a shilling to watch his car for an hour, with another shilling promised when he got back. After ten minutes the boy just sidled off. Probably spotted something he could pinch,’ he added, smiling at Sinner, who again made no response. ‘When he got back, some pimply steamer was sitting on the bonnet, smoking. Must have been eighteen or nineteen. And Sinner wanted his second shilling. He told the other bloke to leave. He didn’t leave. So Sinner just jumped on him. I seen the whole thing from the dairy across the road. Had to run over and pull him away or I don’t know what might have gone off. Blood all over the both of ’em. Told Sinner he ought to be a boxer.’
After Berg had questioned Frink and Sinner a bit more, Siedelman said, ‘And you are not worried that the sport is a little … goyishe midas?’ Sinner didn’t know what that meant. ‘Lashing out to shed another Jew’s blood.’
‘Come on now, Shmuel,’ said Berg. ‘You take the Jews out of boxing and there is no more boxing. We should be proud of that. And it is no coincidence, I think. We know how to keep a diet. We know how to keep a fast. We know how to keep clean. We know how to keep good habits. Of course we make good boxers. Have you never seen Barney Ross, Shmuel? I taught him for his bar mitzvah. These days he gets into the ring with the talaith on his shoulders and the tvillan on his arms. He unwinds them slowly and kisses them and puts them in a velvet bag which he gives to his trainer, and everyone in the crowd stays silent as if they were at shul. It is a beautiful thing to behold. Whereas I hear he doesn’t even have the Star on his trunks, our Mr Roach?’
‘We’ll fix that, Rabbi,’ said Kölmel.
‘I love to see Jews fight,’ said Pearl. ‘It is not our scripture that says to turn the other cheek. We are all Darwinians now, aren’t we, gentlemen? And survival of the fittest means you have to learn how to throw a punch.’
‘Oh, leave Darwin out of it,’ said Siedelman. ‘I’ve found that if a gentile talks a lot about Darwin, it’s a pretty good sign he hates Jews.’
‘Darwin was a Jew himself, you know,’ said Berg.
‘He was not,’ said Siedelman.
Berg laughed. ‘No, he was not. But read your Talmud. Every seven years, Hashem used to change all the animals into other animals. You know that, Seth? You know that, once, boys and girls were one, and now are two?’ Sinner had never heard of this but he found it interesting. Everyone else had barely started on their food, but he’d already cleared his plate and was now twirling his knife back and forth around his thumb. ‘And it says in the Zohar that apes are the descendants of sinful men. We got there first, you see, as usual.’
‘Moses was most certainly a Darwinian,’ concurred Pearl. ‘What did he want for his tribe but that they should come out on top? That their offspring should own the world?’
‘The Christians, they panic,’ said Berg. ‘They find fossils that are older than ten thousand years, and they have to pretend they don’t exist. But Jews find them, and they know it is proof that there were other worlds before our own. The Torah can get along with science.’
‘You know, Rabbi, before Darwin the Christians had the Argument from Design,’ said Pearl. ‘They said, “Look at the beautiful butterflies in that meadow! That can only be the Lord’s work.” And the Hebrew just said, “What the hell is a meadow?”’ Most of the men guffawed. Frink laughed nervously, knowing he was out of his depth. ‘We have always lived in cities, ever since we lived in the desert,’ Pearl continued. ‘Everything we ever see, a man made. We never had time for the Argument from Design. We don’t need it for our faith. We don’t care that it’s on the trash heap now.’
‘And the man that made those cities will soon be you, Balfour,’ said Siedelman.
‘I’m not sure about that, Rabbi.’
‘I hear you are doing very well, Mr Pearl,’ said Kölmel.
‘I often tell Balfour about Nicholas Hawksmoor,’ said Berg. ‘He built churches in London. You must know Christ Church in Spitalfields?’
‘See it every day,’ said Frink, glad for the chance to contribute. ‘Lovely old thing.’
‘Yes, although I hear sadly a little neglected now,’ said Berg. ‘Now, they say Hawksmoor worshipped the devil. They say if you draw lines between his churches on a map you get a pentagram, or some such. To Balfour I say, you must be New York’s Hawksmoor. You must build your expressways and your parks so that they invoke kabbalah – perhaps the sephirot, the Tree of Life – and nobody but the Jews will know. Would that not be a wonderful thing?’
‘I have enough trouble getting anything done as it is, Rabbi.’
‘What exactly is your job, son?’ said Frink.
‘I work at the New York City Planning Commission, sir.’
‘Balfour is going to clean up the Lower East Side,’ said Siedelman.
‘That’s my ambition, at least,’ said Pearl.
‘Clean it up?’ said Frink.
‘Well, I hope that before long we can get rid of slums and the Hoovervilles. Move people into rational, modern developments, where children won’t have to play out in the street, and no one will live next door to a liquor store or a pool hall, and good families will have some space and some privacy.’
‘That sounds superb, Mr Pearl,’ said Kölmel. ‘But who pays for it?’
‘The city.’