The Good Liar (23 page)

is all I was thinking.’

‘Well,’ she begins, ‘it’s a lovely idea. But we did agree when you

first moved in that our relationship would be for companionship,

not romance.’

‘Granted. But we’ve moved on from there. My feelings have

moved on. Yours haven’t?’

‘It’s not that, Roy. It’s certainly not that. It’s just that . . . Alasdair.’

‘I know you were very much attached to him.’

‘Yes. I’m sorry. I still feel an absurd bond of fidelity.’

‘It’s not absurd at all, Betty. It’s admirable.’

‘I just couldn’t, Roy. It’d feel like a betrayal of sorts.’

‘You don’t need to explain. I understand. It’s perfectly all right, of course.’

She smiles gratefully. ‘And anyway, I doubt that you or anyone

else could put up with my snoring.’

‘I simply can’t believe that you snore, Betty. You of all people.’

‘You’d better believe it. I snore for England. Have done for years.

It started in my fifties.’

‘Well then. It seems I’ve had a lucky escape. Friends?’

They grin at each other.

‘Yes, of course. Roy?’

‘Yes?’

‘You never say the word love, do you?’

‘Does anyone? In real life? Of our generation, at least? Men,

anyway?’

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‘I don’t know. But you certainly don’t use it. Not about the past.

Not about us.’

‘Would you like me to? Would that make you happier? Because I

can certainly have a go if you’d like. I’d feel awkward, but I can give it a bash. Because your happiness is of paramount importance to

me. I’ve grown very attached to you. Would you like me to speak of

love?’

She smiles. ‘No, that’s not what I meant. It just occurred to me. I wouldn’t like to force you to come up with something against your

conscience. And it is after all the English way, isn’t it? Not to speak of such things. We talk of fondness and attachment, because it’s

safe.’

‘Well, I suppose so. But if you’d like me to tell you I love you,

Betty, I’d most certainly do so.’

‘I’m sure you would, Roy. Thank you, but no. It really wasn’t

what I meant.’

He is relieved. The fact of the offer to share a life beyond com-

panionship, however bogus, may just have sealed the deal. Even

better that she declined. He would now not have to contemplate all

that, at least not for the moment.

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The Centre of Things

1

Berlin. Everything revolved around this city. Their six months in

Vienna had been fun, if that was the right word, but no one there

really wanted a full- scale search for the petty functionaries of the Nazi camps any more. The momentum was for speedy reconciliation and reconstruction, or as speedy as anything could be when

dealing with the Russians. The Western powers were now reason-

ably confident the Russians would pull back eastwards, keeping

Prague and Budapest in their ambit. Awkward characters like Roy

Courtnay and his interpreter, Hans Taub, their tenacity stoking dis-pute, were no longer required.

They had been assigned to Hannover, in the British occupied

zone of Germany, a relative backwater. They operated from a small

office opposite the main railway station. Hannover, like much of

the rest of the country, had been brought to rubble and to its knees.

Provincial and quiet, however, and they were allowed to go about

their business with little interference from above, levering assistance from other military units by sheer force of character. Captain

Courtnay was persuasive and the British soldier of almost every

rank was generally up for sport now the war was over and the

clear- up had begun, especially if it involved hunting down the bad guys.

Courtnay’s superiors had little interest in his activities. They had bigger fish to fry and post- war military careers to cultivate. He reported nominally to a major but kept himself away from HQ as

far as possible. He had a staff of five: his secretary, three NCO clerks and his German interpreter, Taub. Hans Taub and he were jokingly

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known as the Gruesome Twosome, after the cartoon film that had

come out the previous year. They’d hit it off the moment Taub had

been sent from London.

They were physically alike: tall, blond and imposing. Taub pos-

sessed certainty. He had not had the benefits of a rural upbringing and the conditioning of a minor public school education, designed

to insinuate an inchoate feeling of inferiority. He was not an Eng-

lishman by birth, swimming in compromise, awkwardness and

embarrassment. Perhaps not all Englishmen were like Roy – or

indeed all Germans like Taub – but Roy found Hans’s lack of diffi-

dence liberating. Taub, the son of a liberal journalist who had fled Germany and later committed suicide and a mother who had been

executed in 1939, was brimful of certainty when he might have been

burdened by grief and doubt.

Roy discovered in himself something hidden yet always present, a

confidence that at times surged in his physicality, his enthusiasms and his judgements. He could now begin to give it expression. Hans’s

simple attitudes made his petty repressions seem self- indulgently

and unnecessarily complex.

Generally the two of them would go out to do the interviews. If

arrests were in the offing, a call to the military police would serve up a team of beefy, maleficent- looking men to help with the dirty work.

He was doing scarcely more than going through the motions.

The work didn’t challenge him; nor did it result in a particularly

greater good that he could discern. Most of it could be done within the zone. The majority of the camp underlings had not travelled

far. They could be picked up, like rabbits stationary in the head-

lights, in the towns and villages around Celle. Their compatriots

were generally more than happy to give them up. The people who

really mattered had either already been detained or were long gone.

De- Nazification had become mere process, and a process in which

few believed. It was a means of returning to normal, whatever that

meant after these years. It amounted to something of a production

line: identify, locate, arrest, process, charge, prosecute, de- Nazify, jail or release.

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Occasionally they had to venture into the American or French

zones to undertake inquiries, but not beyond the dividing line of

the Harz Mountains to the Russian zone. Dealing with the Red

Army was simply too much trouble for the return. By design or

accident, they were shambolic and uncooperative.

Roy and Hans worked hard and played hard, immersing them-

selves at night in the hedonistic, morally questionable life of a city in chaos, escaping the sorrows and the grief. Not that there was

much of 1946 Hannover to paint red.

But Berlin. This was a first. Their search for Klaus Müller, a for-

mer administrator at Bergen- Belsen, had brought them here.

Müller, a Berliner, had moved to Celle when he married in ’37 and

now evidently thought his home city was a safer place to lie low.

Rather than passing the inquiry to the British authorities in Berlin, Roy had persuaded his bored boss to authorize him and Taub to

travel there. Roy hoped it might be a chance to find a route back to a function that he could plausibly describe to himself as important.

He was interested not in advancement, but in doing some measure

of good. Soon enough he would find himself back in Oxford, no

doubt to pick up his ecclesiastical studies again before taking a curacy in Dorset, close to the family home. Or would he? This war had

changed him, like so many millions of others.

He could not say it had brutalized him. His faith remained intact.

His instincts remained passive and pacifist, though he had been

required consistently to display the opposite behaviours. Moving

through Holland in 1944, he had led from the front, placing himself in the same danger as his men, and they had respected him for it. He had always insisted on compassion for the German soldiers they

winkled out in pockets of resistance from ruined buildings, even

when minutes earlier they had been killing and wounding his own

men. But what the war had taught him was the capacity for brutal

malice of one human being towards another, and this was some-

thing almost regardless of uniform, rank or social class.

He felt this when he typed his short poems, which with every

attempt took on a more worldly, cynical edge. His NCOs ribbed

him as he hammered at the keys at every lunch break. ‘
War and

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Peace
,’ they joked. But he loved the little portable that he carried with him. It conferred an odd sense of security and certainty that

his spidery scrawl could not, even in the letters home that he could not bear to write by hand, something else that amused his staff

no end.

When he typed those regular- as- clockwork weekly letters he

found less and less to say. There was less and less of him to connect with them. He was not sure whether he could aspire to a life of

obscure rural service; or whether it could now match his visions.

2

The house they sought was in Marsiliusstrasse, near the Jannowitz-

brücke station and the River Spree. It lay just inside the Russian

sector. They had considered making a quick covert incursion to lift their man, but that would have meant also crossing the American

sector and the Americans had said they could not afford yet another rupture of already poor relations for such a small gain. They decided to chance their arm at the Allied Control Council in Schöneberg, in the south of the American sector, where the occupying forces

administered issues that crossed the physical boundaries between

them.

They had spent two days in the broad halls, powerless, smoking

and waiting while the bureaucrats discussed and mediated their

request. There was no solid precedent to fall back on: at first the Russians wanted Müller for themselves, then acknowledged that

since the crimes had all been committed in what was now the Brit-

ish zone and that the British held all the evidence, they might have to cede to them. The British, as politely as they could, indicated that they would not be prepared to serve up the results of their findings, or their witnesses, to a Russian judicial process. The Russians questioned whether a judicial process was strictly necessary. The British and the Americans reeled back theatrically. Then the Russians

decided after all that Herr Müller was small beer.

It had been that much simpler back in Vienna, though not

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without its arm- wrestles. At least if one was persistent enough there was the chance that reason might prevail in the end. And you could

tell the Soviets didn’t really have their hearts in it. But Berlin was important to them. While they might be prepared to let Vienna drift back to its complacent stolidity, the price, tacitly at least, was Berlin.

So every battle here was to the death, and rational thinking played little part.

Finally, a compromise was reached. The Russians would accede

to an arrest by the British but would not allow a British armed support team in their sector. Barnes, the major allotted to their case, had warned them of this likelihood and the associated dangers.

‘Language is the least of it. The Russkies’ll be sloppy. There’s no discipline in their ranks and they detest officers and foreigners. They won’t look after you or your interpreter.’

Roy shrugged. ‘I appreciate your concern, sir, but it’s a routine

lift. We’ve done it dozens of times.’

Nor was he concerned that the Russians would not permit them

to wear uniform or to carry arms. ‘There’s no reason to believe

Müller will be armed and I want this as low- key as possible. We’ll snaffle him before he knows anything. I don’t want a squad of

troops bursting into the place.’

‘On your own head be it, then,’ said Barnes sniffily, before signing the necessary papers and washing his hands of the operation.

So here they were, sitting in the gloomy office just off Alexander-

platz, waiting for Karovsky, the irritable Red Army captain, to

authorize their plan. Karovsky smoked a foul- smelling Russian
papi-rosi
cigarette, having curtly refused Roy’s offer of American. He leaned back in his seat and again scanned the order from the Control Council, as though he thought its contents might change on a

third reading.

‘British Military Intelligence,’ he read in a cracked accent, and

laughed. He signalled to his interpreter, who shambled over from

his desk. Through him, he said, smiling, ‘I like you people. The

strangest people, but I like you. We are your enemies. You once had an empire. You like to pretend you’re still important. We liberated 152

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Berlin and now you wish to come on to my streets to undertake one

of your trivial arrests.’

‘Hardly trivial,’ said Roy equably. ‘The man we’re trying to arrest was an administrator at Bergen- Belsen.’