The Human Pool (11 page)

The trace of patterns not seen before acquires the faintest outline.

FRANKFURT

STRASSE ANSWERED THE DOOR HIMSELF,
very energised. A couple of dark young men came down from upstairs, and Strasse kissed them on both cheeks. They glanced at me as they left. They looked like street boys.

Strasse wanted to sit downstairs in the dining room because he was expecting a delivery. The table was covered with stacks of papers and documents: the mess of a still busy man.

The signs were excellent, he said. He questioned me about my credentials and the people I represented. I mentioned Carswell, which earned a sharp look. Strasse knew the name. I said he made documentary films for the Middle East market, and Strasse nodded and said that was probably where he knew it from. ‘It's a small world beyond Istanbul.'

I got out my tiny Sony video camera and asked if he minded my taping us talking. The camera's cute size and novelty value usually overcome most objections. Strasse inspected it, impressed, and commented favourably on the Zeiss lens. He had been something of a photographer himself. He made me go upstairs and film his room so he could see what it looked like on playback. ‘If I like what you shoot—' he said.

I took some general views and close-ups. ‘Make sure you get the rugs,' he called out. It was a pleasant room, bright and sunny. Strasse watched the playback with childish delight. He announced that I could make my recording, providing I made him a present of the camera. He grabbed my shoulder affectionately. I could smell the drink on him. My being there seemed rather pathetic.

But with the camera on he grew mistrustful. I asked how he wanted to be remembered, and he said it didn't matter because history always got it wrong.

He made me fetch the phone when it rang and spent several minutes speaking German. The name Carswell was mentioned. Afterwards I asked him what he had said about Carswell, and he shrugged for an answer and gave another ten-minute noninterview. Any request for elaboration was dismissed until eventually he asked what I had been taught about the second world war. That Germany had lost and the Allies won? That Hitler invaded Poland in September 1939, and killed a lot of Jews from 1942 on? I answered yes on both counts.

‘What did they teach you about Jack Philby?' He had to explain that Jack was the father of the spy, Kim. He was starting to enjoy himself; you can see it on the tape. Quote: ‘You need to ask yourself what Philby was up to with Allen Dulles in Saudi Arabia in the 1920s, remembering that Dulles became head of American intelligence in Switzerland during the war. You need to ask yourself what Dulles's real interests were, and those of his brother. You might ask yourself what precisely his brother John Foster knew, if, as we are reliably told, board members of I.G. Farben, the manufacturers of the gas that killed the Jews, were fully informed of all the company's activities. Because, you see, John Foster Dulles was a board member of none other than I.G. Farben, even
after
the start of the war in Europe.'

He sat back, weighing my silence, deciding whether to go on. ‘If you want to hear an interesting story remind Mr Hoover of our visit to the Hotel Maison Rouge in Strasbourg in 1944, and the time we met in Liechtenstein, and get him to tell you who our respective passengers were.' Strasse broke off. It sounded like he was coughing, but it was laughter. I had to fetch him a glass of water.

‘The second world war,' he went on, ‘was the first properly mechanised war. The first war of the corporate state. I.G. Farben. Krupps. Siemens. Mercedes. Volkswagen. Ford. Standard Oil. General Electric. IBM. Bell. Coca-Cola. The world was and remains a military-industrial complex. Bankers of all sides continued to meet in Switzerland throughout the war. Your computer is faster and cheaper than it was a year, even six months ago. Who do you have to thank for that research? The military. We live in a military world even when it is in civilian clothing. Your Prime Minister Thatcher understood that. Look at her arms deals. You are no doubt familiar with Saddam Hussein's use of chemical weapons against the Kurds of Iraq. But have you asked yourself, who was the first country to use chemical weapons against the Kurds? It was, I am sorry to report, the British. And who trained the Iraqi pilots and made the radio sets the Iraqis used to bomb the Kurds? Not the Germans, although the gas they used was the gas first developed by I.G. Farben. You see, my friend, we have not even got to the invasion of Poland, and already the world has become a more complicated place.'

I asked him what his interest was in the Kurds. He gave a sly smile. ‘This is off the record. Some might argue that the problem with Nazism was that it was destroyed by insufficient ideology—look who's the tough boy of the Middle East now. The Israelis would send the lot of us to hell in a handcart if they had a chance. I have heard it said that Muslim purity and zeal are the true inheritors of Nazism. The Kurds are a fierce and noble race, and there is a certain belief that the next great warrior leader will emerge from among their people.'

I wondered what to make of his ravings. Whatever his medication, it was giving him a big up. He went on to say that history lived was very different from history written. He told me to ask Hoover about the cold war as a war of ideologies, and as the ultimate cul-de-sac of physics. We were now moving into the age of what Strasse called the new biology, a final Biblical phase in which all the old predictions would be realised. Quote: ‘What if the Bible is right, and disease and pestilence will win in the end? That outbreak of foot and mouth disease in Europe, was it accidental or assisted? And what if it had been a virus that had killed people: who could say if it was natural or manufactured? Look at our friend Konrad Viessmann's pharmaceutical company—the irresponsible use of drugs and medicine in the treatment of illness in Kurdish refugee camps. They are using untested drugs to treat meningitis. Are you surprised someone burns down one of Herr Viessmann's factories?

‘Nostradamus tells us that there is only one pope left and he'll be the first nonwhite Holy Father—and get Mr Hoover to tell you about Mr Dulles and the Vatican while he is about it—and then it's all up. And it is shaping very nicely. What if the fundamentalists are right and the United States is Satan? Perhaps we will see that hot wind of retribution coming from the East. The son of Saladin and the spirit of the Waffen SS—riding shotgun—come to teach those Jewboys their final lesson, as some of our more extremist brethren might say. And why do I tell you this? Because I am ready to write history. Remember—I saw it from both sides.
And one side was as bad as the other.
I was Heinrich Himmler's envoy, but the CIA required me to do things that a man should not be asked to do. There's an irony. The Nazis never asked me to teach interrogation methods to anyone.'

Strasse's Nazi master class. I reckoned I had the measure of him. He could make equations all round his subject, but when it came down to what the Nazis did, he ducked and resurfaced somewhere else.

We were interrupted by the doorbell. I offered to go, but he insisted on going himself, struggling to stand then shuffling painfully to the door. He said it would be his delivery. It wasn't. It was Hoover.

There had apparently been a misunderstanding over when Hoover was supposed to turn up. Strasse said, ‘I am just talking to my friend here.' Hoover looked pissed off, asked how long we were going to be, and was told fifteen, twenty minutes. Strasse suggested he join us. Hoover shook his head and said he was going to lie down. ‘Take your time, Karl-Heinz, and tell it like it was. I'm going to be in your spare bedroom.' To me he said, ‘I hope you haven't got me on that camera of yours.'

It took Strasse a while to get his rhythm back. He sounded both uncertain and boastful, saying that his story needed Murdoch rather than Springer. It needed a world market. He started to get muddled then, confusing me with a journalist from the
Times.
He asked me to get him a schnapps and his pills—half a dozen bottles on a tray. He took a stiff belt of liquor and a different coloured pill from each bottle, giving each a look of disgust before swallowing.

‘We need the surprise of the English language. There are no surprises in German—no little bombs hidden in sentences. It is the language of premeditation, order, and command. Look at General Stoop's reports for the destruction of the Warsaw ghetto. The language of genocide is no more emotional than the settling of any accounts.

‘You see, I am in the end a fanatic, not a crackpot fanatic, but one who believes in inevitability and destiny, the weight of history. Everything I will tell you will come to pass. I won't be alive to see it, but I would like people to be able to point to what I said and know I was right. The auspices are good.'

Hoover's voice came down from upstairs. ‘Are you bullshitting that boy, Karl-Heinz?'

Karl-Heinz threw up his hands in camp horror. ‘Have your rest!'

‘Tell him what you told me about the man he's working for,' shouted Hoover.

‘Carswell? What about him?' I asked.

Strasse ignored the question and said, ‘I can see you are both inquisitive and horrified, which is how it should be. This is not comfortable stuff we will be dealing with. The truth never is, as the old cliché goes. Is “old cliché” a tautology? There are areas where my English is not quite up to the job.'

Strasse moved into overdrive, speed-hopping between subjects. ‘Willi was worried about what would happen when the leather ran out. He was doing a lot of research into synthetics. Imagine the money to be made from inventing a leather substitute in 1943!'

Strasse's voice suddenly began to slur and fade. I asked him to explain Willi Schmidt's name and career change into pharmaceuticals. Strasse did his familiar big shrug. ‘We believed Willi was dead because the Amis said he was. Body identified by Betty Monroe. If Willi wasn't dead and the Amis said he was, it follows that they had something in mind for him.'

Strasse lost his thread and resurfaced after a silence to announce that since his stroke—‘Stroke! What kind of word is that? Stroke is what you do to a woman!'—he had suffered a debility that had messed up his immune system. He was on steroids and pills for diabetes, and he shouldn't drink but he did. ‘And what do they ask me to do, these people who think they are running the show? They ask me to answer the phone. There's a consignment coming in on Tuesday, a shipment going out on Wednesday. Blah blah!'

When I asked what kind of shipments, he banged the table and said: ‘People! The Party was in the people business sixty years ago. It practically invented mass tourism! What was a trip to Auschwitz in 1942 if not the ultimate package holiday? And the Party is still in the people business. I will spell it out to the backward boy. The Nazis never went away. They just took off their uniforms. The Third Reich judiciary became the civilian judiciary. Law courts stuffed full of hanging judges! The camp doctors got jobs in the universities. Does the name von Verscheur mean anything to you? No? He was the mentor of Dr Mengele, the Auschwitz doctor, and a leading exponent of racial hygiene. In 1951, appointed professor of human genetics at the University of Munster, where he built one of the largest centres for genetic research in West Germany. The police force? The army? Where did they recruit from? And the ones for whom it got a little hot under the collar—why not a Mercedes posting? The Third Reich might have failed, but Mercedes conquered the world, like Japan and Sony. While the Amis crapped it away in Saigon, had the morale sucked out of them, who made the taxis that took them to and from their brothels and opium dens? Mercedes. Germany is as discreetly Nazi as it always was. Only Dr Goebbels has been removed from the equation. We have learned to do without publicity.'

He gave a hard laugh, and I hit him with a switch of subject, asking about the people smuggling. Was it true that by controlling the distribution, you also controlled the flow?

‘Of course! You make money from the process, and you keep the streets clean at the same time. But I tell you, my friend, if it was as simple as that, it would be—'

The doorbell went again. ‘Special delivery,' he said, relishing the phrase. He refused to let me help him up and slowly made his way across the shiny wooden floor and fumbled with the latch.

Some special delivery. There was a sudden movement towards Strasse's head, a blur of brown—the arm of a leather jacket, you realise on playback—followed by a dry noise, perhaps the driest sound I have ever heard. Then the back of Strasse's head exploded in a bouquet of blood and brain matter, one of the wettest sounds I have ever heard; it reminded me of watching a watermelon being dropped from a window onto the street below. Strasse's shooting was like reality TV, my objectivity sustained by watching it on the little camera screen: Strasse's opening of the door matched by the upward swing of the gunman's arm, the blue-black of the gun in his fist, followed by an explosion where the back of Strasse's head was a second before. This was accompanied by a surprisingly sweet smell.

I was halfway up the stairs while the gunman—dark-haired, moustache, leather jacket, probably no more than five eight, but broad, and me trying to remember if I recognised him from the paper yard—was administering the
coup de grâce
with a bullet behind the ear, though Strasse looked like his lights were out already, and all the while gazing calmly at me.

I stumbled at the top of the stairs, like silly girls do in horror films. I could hear the gunman quietly close the door and his soft footsteps. By then my physical response to what I had just witnessed had become entirely predictable. My legs refused to work, and my mind revved uselessly, trying to project my body into action that it would not achieve. I found myself crawling on all fours down the landing, hoping to throw myself out of a window, praying that it would not be too far to the ground. I used the doorway to lever myself up. The only noise I could hear was the panic of my own body. The gunman swung round the top of the stairs, looking composed and remorseless, and devoid of any imagination while my own leaped all over the place, trying to realise that the sight of that corridor might be one of the last things I would see. The small part of my brain still functioning reckoned I had less than thirty seconds to come to terms with the meaning of eternity.