A Man Lies Dreaming (7 page)

‘That must be satisfying.’

He motioned to the fat policeman, who withdrew and shut the door behind him. We were alone. ‘Morhaim,’ I said. ‘Isn’t that a Jew name?’

‘It can be. In this case, it is. Does that bother you?’

‘Many things bother me,’ I said, and he laughed. ‘Tell me,’ he said. ‘Where were you last night? You were not at your flat.’

‘Is that a crime?’

‘Not yet,’ he said. He puffed on his pipe. The smell of it filled the room. ‘You are an alien here, Mr Wolf.’

‘I have been granted asylum.’

‘From Germany.’

‘Yes.’

‘All such asylums are by their nature temporary.’

I said nothing and he nodded, to himself. ‘I see that after the Fall you were kept for some time in a communist konzentrationslager.’

‘Concentration camp, yes,’ I said, enunciating it clearly for him in English. He smiled. ‘You escaped?’

‘Eventually.’

‘You are a lucky man, Mr Wolf.’

‘What is this about?’

‘First things first, Mr Wolf. Where were you last night?’

‘I work as a private investigator,’ I said. ‘I was out. On a job for a client. Surely you can appreciate the need for discretion in my line of work.’

‘That’s a curious line of work for a man such as yourself.’

‘It requires an orderly mind and a keen sense of justice.’

He was biting the stem of the pipe, blowing smoke rings into the air from the side of his mouth. A hard trick to master, I would have thought. Also, without use. ‘Your old associates seem to prosper. You don’t.’

‘So you know who I am.’

‘I know who you were.’

That one hurt, but I let it go. ‘What is this about?’

‘Do you have an alibi for last night, Mr Wolf?’

‘Do I need one?’

He sighed and sat back in the chair. ‘Why did you kill her?’

‘Who?’ I almost shouted in frustration. My fist hit the desk. ‘What is the meaning of this? I am an innocent man! I demand to be released!’

‘You used to have a moustache,’ he said suddenly. ‘A funny little moustache. We used to see a lot of you on the newsreels, but this was all a while back, wasn’t it?’

‘I do not see why we need to discuss one’s choice of facial hair, surely.’

He shrugged. ‘Perhaps it was merely the interest of one man with a moustache in another.’

I knew their tactics. Did he think I had never been interrogated before? He would give me nothing, and he would take his time in trying to break me.

‘I would like a solicitor,’ I said.

His pipe seemed to have gone out. He fiddled with it distractedly. ‘Do you have one?’

‘No.’

‘We can certainly appoint one for you. You haven’t been charged yet, Mr Wolf. Would it make you feel better to confess?’

‘Confess to what?’

‘To the murder, of course.’

I stared at him, no longer willing to talk. Perhaps he saw it in my stance, for he put down the pipe and reached into a drawer and returned with an envelope, which he opened carefully. He slid out a set of photographs and laid them neatly in front of me.

I stared at the photographs.

The watcher in the dark truly
was
invisible. Wasn’t he? He felt so calm now, so different from the way he’d felt the night before. Then he had been eager, almost frenzied with desire. She didn’t understand, no one understood. It wasn’t lust, it wasn’t
sexual
, he was not a monster.

It was
ideological
.

How trustingly she had taken his hand and led him into the dark! He shifted uncomfortably in his hard chair, wetting his lips in concentration. He had so much work to do, paperwork to get through, but no one paid him any attention: no one ever did. The office he worked in was grey like the light outside. Had he made mistakes? He had planned so carefully, had thought about it for so long and then it just happened. It felt so natural, the way they always said it should. He had not wanted to hurt her. On the contrary. He had wanted to set her free.

Wolf’s Diary, 3rd November 1939 –
contd.

I stared at the photographs. They were stark black-and-white. The Austrian girl I had spoken to, Edith, was lying on the ground. The photographs were from different angles. In one I could see a pile of human shit against the brick wall, not far from Edith’s blonde hair, which was made near-white by the photograph. Edith was situated in rest, on her back, her arms carefully crossed over her abdomen. Blood matted her hair. Her shirt had been ripped open and her breasts, full and wholesome, lay exposed. Carved into her chest was a swastika. Her face had been battered and her eyes were bruised and open to the sky. Beside her head stood a little toy figure. I leaned forward and drew one of the pictures close and studied it.

It was a little wind-up toy.

A tin drummer.

‘Who did this?’

Inspector Morhaim studied me levelly. ‘Did you know her?’

‘I live on Berwick Street, Inspector. It is hard not to see the whores.’

‘So you did know her.’

‘I spoke to her, last night. Briefly. She propositioned me. I do not like whores.’

‘Is that why you killed her?’

‘I did not kill her!’

‘Do you recognise that symbol?’

‘It’s a swastika.’

‘Why would anyone carve a swastika into a woman’s chest before killing her?’ He saw my look. ‘Yes, she was alive when he did it, though probably unconscious.’

‘I hope you find this man and hang him,’ I said.

‘But what if we
have
found him?’

I sat straight in the chair. One did not see the swastika much, any more. In Germany it had been banned by the new communist regime. In England it was irrelevant. One saw Mosley’s lightning bolt enclosed within a circle in its place, instead. Mosley, who had tried to copy Göring. It was the fat man’s initial idea to adopt the swastika as a symbol.

They used to call you the drummer
…

Did Morhaim just say that? Was it my imagination?

I raised my head and looked the Jew straight in the eyes. ‘I did not kill her,’ I said.

‘Your coat was covered in blood.’

‘It wasn’t hers.’

‘Then whose?’

‘I am being set up.’

At that Morhaim laughed. ‘Set up?’ he said. ‘Why? You’re nothing but a washed-out dick. You’re nobody, a nothing. I don’t like you, Wolf. You have the face of a cockroach. Is that why you killed her? To reassert yourself, what you once were?’

‘I did not kill her!’

‘Then where were you?’ he said. The door opened and the fat policeman came in carrying a tray with tea and biscuits on it. He set it down before Morhaim.

‘Thank you, Constable Keech,’ Morhaim said. He picked a sugar cube with small silver tongs and dropped it into his tea. ‘No, Constable. Stay, please.’

‘Sir.’

I knew what was coming. It didn’t hurt any less.

Morhaim pinched a second sugar cube and held it aloft above the tea. I felt Keech move behind me. Morhaim looked at me sadly. ‘A confession would go such a long way in your favour,’ he said.

‘Fuck you, Jew.’

‘Such a long way.’ Morhaim dropped the cube into the tea. Keech’s fat pig’s hand slammed into the side of my head, sending me sprawling to the floor. Then he was on me, a sadistic smile on his face, his fists and his boots speaking volumes. I curled up into a ball as best I could, covering my head with my arms. His boots caught me in the ribs, the side of the head, the back of the legs; his huge hands slapped me, his fists rained on my body. Through all this, Morhaim sat behind his desk and stirred his tea and took delicate little sips and looked down on me sadly.

‘Stop,’ he said, after a while. Keech lifted me up, one-handed. ‘For what it’s worth, Wolf, I do not think you did it. Only a fool would return to the scene of the crime when it is riddled with policemen, and I do not think you are a fool.’

‘That’s the nicest thing anyone’s said to me all day.’

‘I think you’re a despicable rat of a human being, a shit I would wipe off my shoe on the pavement, an anti-Semitic bully and leech who should have been left to rot in a communist konzentrationslager. I think you’re a murderer and a psychopath.’

‘You’re too kind,’ I said. I spat blood on the floor, hoping to catch the fat copper’s shoe, but I missed.

‘You’re all that, Wolf,’ Morhaim said. ‘But I don’t think you killed Edith Griesser. And while I would have no problem having you thrown in jail for the rest of your unnatural life, it occurs to me that, if you are not the killer, the real killer will still be out there, and that he may well kill again. And I do not want that on my conscience.’

‘How admirable,’ I said. ‘For a Jew.’

Keech grunted above me and slapped me on the side of the head, hard. I blinked back tears of rage. Morhaim looked at me with those sad brown eyes.

‘I will ask you one last time,’ he said. ‘Where were you last night?’

I hung loosely from Keech’s enormous hand. Stared into the unsettling brown eyes of Inspector Morhaim. Lowered mine.

And told him.

In the dream he was standing on a high podium in a town square in Nuremberg. It was a beautiful day and the sky was bright and blue and before him, below him, were thousands of people, men and women and children, their faces raised to him, their lips slightly open, adoration in their eyes. He spoke, and it was like an angel speaking down from Heaven, and the festivities below ceased, little boys with yellow and red balloons and women in their Sunday dresses and good German men who worked hard and went to church and paid their taxes, and the sausage sellers and the candyfloss sellers and the beer sellers and the SA men in their uniforms like a guard of honour and all for him. He spoke, with passion and intensity, raising his fist in the air, slamming it on the stand, shouting, spittle coming out of his mouth, but easing them in, at first, then rising, rising, rising until they were all a-frenzy – shaking, some of them were. He pictured the women wet under their dresses; it was said the power of his voice alone could bring them to a shuddering climax. The men with their fists raised, ready to follow him, the boys and girls watching wide-eyed as history was made. Higher and higher until women fainted and men grew berserk, ready to march now and fight and fulfil his orders, for it was the future he promised them: a glorious one.

Higher and then lower and gently until they rose blinking as if they had been sleeping and were now awake and looking all about them in wonder and awe, at a world remade anew. They had called him the Drummer, then: and it was said that all of Germany marched to his tune.

*    *    *

In another time and place Shomer rises blinking. Shomer rises energised and refreshed from the bunk he shares with nine other men and he makes the bed exactly to specification and puts his feet into the wooden clogs with illicit paper padding them and the sores on his feet rubbing and pussing. With the others he shuffles to roll-call, with the others he stands in rows as they wait, and Yenkl stands beside him, puffing on his pipe.

They wait for two hours in the cold before the SS officer arrives to take their numbers and tally the figures of the living and the dead. Shomer’s
kommando
once again marches to the same frozen piece of ground to continue the digging of the graves. The routine does not vary, and the graves do not end. At last Shomer is allowed to go to the latrines and Mischek, the scheissbegleiter – that is, the toilet companion or timekeeper – comes with. The latrines are cesspits divided into partitions for the Jews and the non-Jews: the common criminals and the politicals and the prisoners of war. Shomer goes into the Jews’ latrine and Mischek, the dirty little Russian Jew, keeps time.