Famous Last Words (7 page)

covered and that thing removed from the eye. But the company commander—Captain Freyberg—would only complain.

“Don’t touch a thing,” he would say. “I want every

single clue to be left intact. There are Nazis hiding everywhere, and every one we find and every thing we find may lead us to something or someone more important.” Freyberg had spent the latter part of the war, ever since they had crossed the Rhine, looking for something and someone “more important”. Yes, it was his job, Quinn thought. Freyberg, being an Intelligence Officer, had to chase a lead if he found one. But he was positively a fanatic when it came to Nazis.

Dachau had stunned him and withered his ability to think of anything else. He had given up even the pretence of rationality.

He moved alone. He sat alone. He ate alone. He

would not even talk about “going home”. He was traumatized.

“The war isn’t over,” he would say. “The war is not

over here.” Freyberg was not going to let it end.

If he smelled a rat outside his jurisdiction, he would even go so far as to commandeer another unit’s Intelligence activities, drawing them into his own private sphere on the

bold excuse he was some kind of expert. He spent all his time compiling dossiers and setting up a private filing system that required a Section of clerks and a truck to move

it about as a part of his personal entourage. Most company commanders only had five or six officers to push around.

Somehow Freyberg had acquired two more. But in spile of all this, he was liked and respected. He hardly ever raised his voice. In fact he could barely be heard. His rage was silent and he pursued his obsession like a man collecting butterflies. The only problem was—he had so manv nets.

Every single flutter was investigated and he demanded first

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examination rights of anything that was found. And now, in this room, there was cause for yet another examination—

yet another dossier. Photographs would have to be taken, new lists begun and nothing touched or moved until it had all been scrutinized and given an accounting.

And why not? Quinn sighed. Certainly, there must have

been a madman here. The means of achieving this death

were appalling. Even a bullet through the eye would have been saner than this… .No wonder Rudecki had been ill.

Quinn said a prayer for Mauberley, crossed himself and

got to his feet. He decided that, under the circumstances, he could allow himself one cigarette. He removed his gloves in order not to fumble the package and the striking of the match. His hands were not allowed to shake: not ever. Nothing must ever be dropped, nothing knocked over. Nothing

must fall. It was a rule.

He selected a Philip Morris and wetted his lips so the

paper wouldn’t stick. He struck the match and lit up, rounding the gesture by extinguishing the flame with his first

exhalation. Perfect. If only someone had seen.

On the other hand, the match. Where does one put a

burned-out match in an empty room?

“Lieutenant?”

Quinn put the match in his upstage pocket.

Sergeant Rudecki was bulging in the doorway.

“Sorry I was sick,” he said. “I’ll clean it up.”

Quinn turned away. He was not unfond of Rudecki, but

there were moments when his ingratiating tone, his incongruous thoughtfulness got on his nerves. As if a hippopotamus

were asking pardon for stepping on your foot.

“Any sign of Private Oakley or Captain Freyberg?”

“No, sir.”

Rudecki set to work—the work made easy by the tact that everything had frozen. He kept his back to Mauberley.

“What do you think happened here. Lieutenant? Who was

this guy? You said he was important.”

“He was important. And still is.” Quinn gave the corner a glance. “His name was Hugh Selwyn Mauberley—and, we

are told, he was a traitor.”

“Who to?”

“To us.”

“But you don’t believe it?”

“No.”

Rudecki went over to the window and threw out part of

the mess like a flapjack off the end of his bayonet.

“What makes people say he was a traitor, then?”

“The company he kept.”

“Like who?”

“Like Ribbentrop and Mussolini…”

“Go on! This tramp?”

“What tramp?”

“Well—look at the way he’s dressed, for Chrissake.”

“He wasn’t always dressed like that.”

“You talk like you knew him.”

“No. But I read every word he ever wrote. And his picture was always in the papers.” Quinn felt sad as he remembered the pictures of Mauberley smiling with his friends on terraces; strolling over summer lawns; lounging in a deckchair

on the Lido; waving from the entrance to the Hotel Meurice…

.

“What’d he write, then? I never heard of him?”

“Stone Dogs. Crowd Invisible…”

“Oh yeah. Stone Dogs they made a movie. Bette Davis.”

“Well. There you are, then.” Fame.

“Jeez. A famous writer.” Rudecki almost made the mistake of turning around to look, now that he knew the corpse was a true celebrity. “What’s his name again?”

“Mauberley,” said Captain Freyberg.

He was standing in the doorway; six feet plus and stooped at the shoulders. How long had he been there?

Rudecki and Quinn both shot to attention, Rudecki’s bay- , onet rattling to the floor.

“Stand easy,” said Freyberg.

Quinn went over to the window and flipped his cigarette out.

“Well,” said Freyberg, barely audible, squinting into the corner. “So this is where the son of a bitch was hiding.”

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Twenty minutes later Quinn was standing back against the furthest wall he could find.

Freyberg was checking out the bathroom and Quinn could

see his lanky shadow passing back and forth across the tiles.

Rudecki had been dismissed. Oakley had not yet reappeared.

The light was shifting. Late afternoon was approaching.

Quinn’s whole mind was on the ordeal of what would now

take place as Freyberg began to poke and pry and dig.

Mauberley was dead in a corner: murdered; wearing rags.

And surely this was sad—unjust—no matter what he’d done; so long as you considered who he was. Though doubtless

Captain Freyberg would not agree. Freyberg never spoke of justice. Justice was civilized, so how could you speak of justice in the context of Dachau? All that remained for Freyberg was vengeance. After vengeance, maybe—just maybe—

justice could be reinstated. Freyberg could speak for hours about this—never once raising his voice—and his arguments were lucid and persuasive. Not that he was eloquent. “How the hell can eloquence come into it?” he would say. But he was articulate; blunt and unwavering. Quinn had no argument with Freyberg there. His fear of Freyberg lay entirely

in the fact there was no way in past the Captain’s defences.

Every route to Freyberg’s reason—and reasonableness—was mined, and beyond the mines, there was the barricade of Dachau. And Freyberg stood in the cloisters there and would not—for anyone—come out to parley or to listen. He was deaf.

Quinn, too, had suffered—as every soldier had—the trauma of being confronted by the horror of what the Nazis had done in Europe. No one could escape it who was there to see it.

But Quinn’s sense of shock had not left him. Quinn could still look around him and wonder how these things had been accomplished by the race of which he was a part. All his life in the army since his induction after Pearl Harbor, Quinn had been deeply suspicious of the propaganda machine into which he was thrown with all his fellow soldiers. “We” and “they” were words about which he was paranoid. So when

Quinn thought of Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, it wasn’t good

enough simply to say “he was one of them”. It didn’t help Quinn understand how Mauberley, whose greatest gift had been an emphatic belief in the value of imagination, could have been so misguided as to join with people whose whole ambition was to render the race incapable of thinking… .

Misguided.

That was the word Quinn chose to use for Mauberley. Not traitor. “Traitors” could only be defined in a court of law.

And here the only court was Freyberg’s roped-off arena into which he was determined he would herd the first and the last of the Nazis—and all the others in between.

Quinn looked over into the corner, Mauberley staring back at him, one-eyed and grotesque. The assailant, it seemed, had been rage itself.

In the bathroom, Freyberg sneezed and blew his nose and coughed. With his handkerchief in hand, he came and stood in the doorway, dabbing at his nostrils.

“Going to want this room roped off,” he said. “No one’s to go in this bathroom, either.”

Yes. The Arena.

“You hear me, Quinn?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I’ll want a picket. Top of the stairs will do. And I don’t want anyone to come in here without an order. Understood?”

“Yes, sir.”

Freyberg turned and looked at the body.

“H.S. Mauberley. Well, well, well…”

“Yes, sir.”

Freyberg blew his nose again and put away the handkerchief, fumbling it into his pocket amongst his lists, his paper tags with strings, his candy-bar wrappers and his extra pair of gloves. The most appalling example of dress that Quinn had ever seen in an officer’s uniform.

Quinn made a sigh; unintentional.

Freyberg caught it and smiled—misunderstanding, perhaps.

“This is quite a coup, of course,” he said. “Our finding Mauberley. There was some concern he might have escaped.”

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“Surely there’s nothing he did to warrant so much concern.”

“You think not?” Freyberg’s voice was as icy as the room in which they stood.

“No, sir,” said Quinn. “And I think it only fair to tell you, Captain Freyberg, I do not agree with you about this man.

He was not a son of a bitch and not a traitor.”

Quinn was somewhat alarmed to discover he was trembling.

“You’re saying you admired his writing?” said Freyberg.

“Yes, sir. In part.”

“And what else?”

“Well—look at what they’ve done to him, sir. Jesus Christ.

Look what someone’s done.”

“Yes. I can see what they’ve done.”

“Well…?”

“Well what?”

Quinn looked over at Mauberley. “It seems to me,” he

said, “if we’re going to be concerned, we should worry about finding whoever killed him. I mean—that is not the work of someone sane.”

Freyberg’s expression did not even alter. “And you feel you’re exclusively qualified, do you, Quinn, to point out for those of us not in the know, what is sane and what is not?

By way of killings, I mean.”

“I didn’t say that, sir.”

“Oh. Then you mean you feel you’re qualified to tell us who is sane and who is not. Have I got it right yet?”

Quinn coughed.

“If I may be permitted to speak, sir…”

“Of course.”

Quinn said. “I think the implications of your question are extremely dangerous.” He looked over sideways at the Captain.

“It’s not that I’m personally affronted,” he said. “It’s just…You’re saying that—somehow—killing Mister Mauberley is understandable, and the method excusable. And I think you’re wrong.”

Freyberg turned away.

“Well. I’m sorry you think so,” he said. “I really am very

sorry.” He fished around for his extra pair of gloves and put them on; a woollen pair over the leather pair already being worn. “I guess the problem is,” he said—not turning, not looking—“you think of insanity as being the exclusive property of madmen.” He turned. “Which it ain’t,” he said. And

smiled.

It was then that Sergeant Rudecki burst in.

His face was red. He was greatly excited; almost speechless.

“Sir,” he said to Freyberg, “I think you better come.”

“What is it?” said the Captain.

“I found something. Honest. You better come right now.”

Rudecki’s eyes were like the eyes of a man who has just discovered gold. It was a wonder he could see.

“What is it?”

“Honest, Cap’n, I can’t explain. You gotta come see it—”

He turned to Quinn. “Please.”

“Where is it?” Freyberg asked, still unperturbed and not apparently the least excited.

” ‘cross the hall. Two whole rooms of it… .”

Rudecki was already leading the way—and when they got

to the corridor Oakley was coming along it, whistling through his teeth about the Chatanooga Shoeshine Boy.

Freyberg was brief. He jerked his thumb and said to Annie; “anyone goes near that body in there but you till we get back, I’ll brig you six months.”

Annie knew the Captain meant it and wheeled, without

so much as losing a note of his tune, and went inside to Mauberley.

The silver pencil.

There it was.

In the room across the corridor into which they were led by Rudecki, the first thing Quinn and Freyberg were aware of was the smell of plaster dust.

It was darker here than on the western side, but not so dark as to obscure completely what had so excited the Sergeant.

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It was the walls.

Every single inch of space had been covered with writing: all of it in pencil. Etched. And thus the smell of plaster dust.

No one spoke.

Freyberg and Quinn and Rudecki had never seen the like

of it.

Finally, Freyberg said; “and there’s another room as well?”

“Yessir,” Rudecki said. “Through here…” And he pointed to a door within the room.

Walking like pilgrims—loitering just to stare at the walls—

Freyberg and Quinn allowed themselves to be led across the dusty carpet to a door already standing open.

Freyberg went through first, then Quinn, who walked

through backwards, with his eyes like a child’s on the words they were leaving.

Here, in the second room, there was still some furniture.

A table and a chair; a writing desk and gramophone. The desk, the chair and the gramophone were all in the centre of the room. On top of the desk there was a pile of records, some of them chipped, some of them cracked, all of them covered with a fine white dust. The table had been set against the furthest wall and on it sat a five-point silver candelabra, all its candles burned away to crooked stubs, as if the wind had guttered them. There were bottles, too, on the floor in rows, each meticulously emptied, nothing but the faintest stain remaining: brandy and some wine. And down beside