The Human Pool (12 page)

I made it through the doorway. Maybe I remembered seeing them from the outside a split-second before they registered: the upstairs windows had grilles and were all locked up. Outside: greenery, sunshine, and a light breeze ruffling the leaves. (In the last glimpse I'd had of him, Strasse's head had landed in a patch of slanting sunlight.) I wanted to hide under the bed until it all went away. When the man came through the door, I had my arms out and was shaking like I was doing the St Vitus dance. I wanted to hit him with a barrage of words, stop him in his tracks, but not a sound came out. The camera was stuck to my hand, still filming, its red light on. My mind did all kinds of flips around the notion that it would carry on working and I would not. The gunman barely glanced at the camera. He stepped through the door, paused, and raised his arm. His expression was flat, his eyes disinterested. (Still I couldn't decide if he was one of the men from the paper yard. I badly wanted to know, more than I had wanted to know anything ever before. Why kill Karl-Heinz? He was as good as dead anyway, and I wasn't ready to join him.) The man's indifference restored a modicum of dignity. My final reaction was one of anger at finding myself being dispatched by a bored mechanic. Fuck you, I wanted to tell him. So much for thoughts of eternity.

I must have shut my eyes because I missed what happened. The man grunted, and when I looked he was falling down. My first thought was that by some extraordinary collision of events he'd had a heart attack at the very moment he was about to shoot me, that whatever prayer my brain had been trying to formulate had been answered.

In fact reality shifted again. In the space of less than a minute, since Strasse had fatally opened the door, events had tumbled through several unimaginable stages, perhaps most of all for the man with the gun, now lying on the floor having been hit over the back of the head with a brass lamp stand by Hoover. He had been standing behind the door. The gunman's eyes were still rolling up and showing a lot of white when Hoover put a bullet in his head, around the same spot that the gunman had put one in Strasse's, while I tried to grasp that the bullet had been meant for me, and that my life had just been saved by an old man I had taken for a fool.

The gunman was doing death twitches, and the camera recorded his final mortal seconds by chance. The camera shook, not surprisingly. Hoover sounded dry and ironic, like he had found himself in a situation he hadn't expected to be in again. ‘Well, nephew, it looks like time to leave. Don't worry. Normal service has been resumed.'

He checked Karl-Heinz and pronounced him dead. He told me to wipe anything clean I might have touched. Then to look around upstairs and downstairs and take anything that looked like it might be useful—floppy disks, notebooks, Karl-Heinz's maps. He said there was no rush, we had plenty of time. ‘Be systematic. Be thorough.' I obeyed like an automaton.

FRANKFURT

SEVERAL THINGS I NEVER GOT
around to discussing with Karl-Heinz. I never got to talk to him about Frau Schmidt, which was one reason for calling round. He was telling the English boy his life story. Which version? I wondered as I hauled myself upstairs. My insomnia had gotten worse. The European version was even more debilitating than the American kind. (English boy; he's in his thirties, so I should stop calling him that.)

I was dreaming when the doorbell went, but I was fully awake for the second shot—hand gun, silencer—and was up and waiting behind the door, a tight squeeze, with a bedside table in the way. The drawer was empty. I was hoping it was where Karl-Heinz kept his Luger. Vaughan crashed into the room like a cornered animal, in big contrast to the soft pad of the man following. They looked like they were acting out an experiment on speed and momentum in relation to life expectancy. The momentum was all with the second man, likewise the shots. The fluttery way Vaughan waved his hands: a moth hitting a light.

It's not often you get to play guardian angel. I kind of liked being able to surprise the man so soon after what he had done to Karl-Heinz, an exercise in poetic justice. The shooter obliged by folding up from the one hit—a brass ornamental lamp stand to the base of the skull. I silently thanked Karl-Heinz for his heavy taste. Had he bought plastic we would have been in trouble. Vaughan performed petrified's equivalent to several double takes.

The gun was snug in my hand. Two head shootings in as many minutes was not what Vaughan had been thinking about over his breakfast, which I could hear him losing in the en suite bathroom. He emerged not so much white as fish-slab gray.

Do we trust each other? Do we understand each other? We have embarked on what Naomi would call a steep learning curve, and from the shaky expression on Vaughan's face it was one he would have given anything to get off. And at my age you don't expect to have to kill a man. It was such a surprise I felt nothing at all, except a vague déjà vu. As for Karl-Heinz, maybe he had a split second in which to feel relieved that he was being given a quick exit instead of the direction he was headed, which, by the time his body was done, would have been slow and nasty and would have stripped him of the last of his dignity.

We left carrying stuff. Vaughan sounded asthmatic. We went out by a side door in the garden wall. It was a beautiful day. The Englishman had gone very quiet. His first pertinent question came in a café where we went to reacquaint ourselves with normality. He wanted to know what Karl-Heinz had said about Carswell. I told him there was a rumour he was an arms dealer. Vaughan nodded the hopeful nod of a man who didn't really understand the equation. Carswell plus
x
over
y
equals what? He looked desperate to hijack someone else's life. Two pretty women walked past the café's big window, and Vaughan watched from the wrong side of the glass. I got that old 1942–43 feeling, the one where you tried too hard to make it look like you belonged.

The book I had been sent in Florida was about a man whose secret wartime work had resulted in him being identified later by his undercover role. He ended up being hunted because his pursuer thought he was the man he had been pretending to be. If there was a similar connection, it meant we were dealing with some obscure aspect of the past, some secret so deep that to uncover it would bring instant retribution. I had a bad feeling that Karl-Heinz had got himself killed because of something we both knew.

FRANKFURT/STRASBOURG

THE SECOND BAD NEWS OF
the day was finding Dominic Carswell in my hotel room. I said hello, assuming he was there as a friend, then ‘Fuck' when I saw he was with one of the Neos, going through my things. Carswell smiled, which translated as:
You have caught me out, but I'll still have you for breakfast.
We all froze, then I ran fast-forward out of the hotel. Double fuck.

I lost them not through any skill—no chase through the streets, no pounding suspense. I simply ran until my lungs were raw, ducked left and right a couple of times, went in the front and out the back of a café, looked round, and found no one following.

Hoover was in his hotel checking out. He made a crack about my condition, but didn't even register surprise. I had been supposed to be collecting my bag and had turned up breathless and empty handed. Hoover seemed to have elevated himself to some plane of super-calm. His hand was steady as he signed his bill. He had decided we should leave town for a while, so I was to drive him to Zurich, he said. Frau Schmidt had sent him an old photograph from the war, he went on, showing him with Karl-Heinz and Willi. He was suspicious because he hadn't said where he was staying, plus she had told him she had no photos. ‘I keep getting sent stuff I haven't asked for.'

‘You can drive,' he said, yawning ‘while I get some shuteye in the back.'

Hire car. Autobahn. No speed limit. I drove as fast as I could, to put distance between us and Karl-Heinz. And Carswell. And the Neos. Hoover slept while I pushed us into a zone where I no longer felt safe or in control, thinking:
He should not have let me drive.

Hoover had an old man's hands, with liver spots and ancient purple veins. They had calmly picked up the gun that had just shot Strasse and used it on his assassin.

We made the third news bulletin on the car radio. Double shooting in Frankfurt, details to follow. On the evening TV news: there were shots of Karl-Heinz's house marked off with police tape and a cautious statement from an officer who looked more like a university lecturer, describing Karl-Heinz as a businessman, which made Hoover snort. The dead gunman was named as a Turkish military officer. It was thought that the shootings had been carried out by what the news reader coyly referred to as a Middle East terrorist organisation.

The dead man's wallet, which Hoover had taken, told us little. Some money, a family photograph of a wife and two small children, a Turkish driving licence with an Ankara address.

In Strasbourg Hoover insisted we stayed at the hotel Maison Rouge. I remembered Karl-Heinz mentioning the place just before he died. Small world, I remarked. Hoover grunted, his usual response. He stood looking for a long time at the old stained-glass medieval scenes on the stair windows and eventually said he remembered them from before. The view from my window showed the town much the same, an old city of steep roofs and sonorous bells.

Hoover wanted to eat at a restaurant he remembered from 1945. I thought the chances of it still being there were remote, but it was, down in the old quarter, on a bridge by the river. Like most of the buildings, it had been standing for several hundred years and looked set to last another few centuries. The district was one of impassive and unfussy burgher prosperity. The restaurant was crowded with frighteningly normal people. We were shown to a table on a covered terrace with a view back up the river. Below was another dining platform at water level.

It reminded Hoover of Switzerland, he said. Like the Swiss, the natives of Strasbourg—stuck as they were between the Germans and the French, who both made claims on them—had realised the tactical advantage of burying any difference of opinion and reinvesting that energy into the solid returns of trade. Hoover suggested we should order pork knuckle in honour of Karl-Heinz's memory.

We pretended everything was normal, circling each other warily. I taped him secretly, not for any investigative purposes, more because the act of switching the tape recorder on and off made me feel less blank. Men his age didn't use guns. What the fuck had Carswell been doing in my room?

Of me Hoover said: ‘You certainly subscribe to declining standards in the dress code, and I figure you're anti-corporate, anti-authority, antimarriage. Maybe you find it hard to settle down, through a lack of application. You're straight, not gay, bi maybe, but I doubt it. You have got some sort of a problem, but I haven't figured out what yet. Perhaps you find it hard to commit?'

Six out of ten, I told him, and asked about him and Elvis Presley like Strasse had told me to. Both of us were happy to avoid any reference to the day's events.

Hoover, after a bottle and a half of wine, his voice holding steady, delivered his companion piece to Karl-Heinz's rant. Quote: ‘Whatever he said, Karl-Heinz was exaggerating. He usually did. And while we're on the subject, let me put the record straight. I did not recruit Karl-Heinz, merely lent the hand that enabled him to cross over.

‘The thing with the Nazis was simple. We were in their country, and when the war was over it was better they were with us than against us. It wasn't a moral choice. We needed them against the Russians. We also figured even after you had cut off the head there would be a lot of body left. So we recruited what was left of the head and bought everyone else off.

‘We hit them with the one thing we had more of than anyone else. Consumer culture. We colonised their subconscious, and we did it very well. Money was no problem, and there were plenty of unaccountable budgets. We hired from American families who maintained good social contacts and were well connected to museums and galleries. We had worked out that the star system developed by Hollywood—the cult of the enhanced individual—would come to apply to other areas, even high culture. The argument was how far the system should extend. Wine and cheese parties with rich philanthropists who could be persuaded to endorse and buy tacitly sponsored product, and realise a profit—this was a very different proposition from the more volatile and unpredictable world of popular culture. Modern art was sniggered at, though accommodated as a necessary evil. Completely out of the question was any of that swivel-hipped nigger music.

‘But there were rogue departments whose bookkeeping flummoxed even internal auditing, and a clear phenomenon called rock and roll was waiting to be exploited. A few of the more enlightened spooks realised it was a more powerful weapon than all the rest put together, especially if it were broadcast directly into Soviet Russia.

‘Rock and roll was pure American propaganda. It spoke of freedom, movement, opportunity, and choice, however much it whined about “Since my baby left me”. It was also an early collaboration between the spooks and the mob, which controlled the jukeboxes and radio airplay. So we gave them pop radio, jungle rhythms, and abroad the Voice of America—the emasculation and repackaging of black culture for a white mass market. Elvis Presley was its paradigm: the perfect image and the perfect double-bind, simultaneously empowered and impotent. We subsidised him, created him, and promoted him. We knew Tom Parker didn't have a passport and was an illegal entrant, so we had him by the balls. When they got scared upstairs that we might have let the genie out of the bottle, they sent Presley off to the army. It was rumoured but never proved that James Jesus Angleton, that high don of counterintelligence and paranoia and product of Malvern College, England, was responsible for the drafting of Private 53310761, having belatedly discovered that certain of his employees had been responsible for advancing the young man's career. At the same time, the propaganda value of putting Presley into the army and sending him to Germany was not lost on him. Presley the patriot was an endorsement of American values, and also a product of his country. So they took him out of the picture, channelled wildness into duty, and also had the boy perform one of the great ambassadorial trips of the cold war.'

Hoover carried on in his semimysterious manner, getting drunker, letting me see that there was plenty of ironic space between the performance and the reality. I took this to mean that, given my failure to amuse him, he was going to amuse himself. I was left wondering how you got from Elvis Presley to the familiar use of hand guns.

‘Do you believe any of this stuff?' he asked.

I didn't. His response was, ‘If it was there to control, we controlled it because if we didn't, someone else did.'

When we left the restaurant Hoover wanted to walk up to the next bridge. The cool night air sobered him, and he grew silent. The river divided under the bridge, part of it forced into a tight, angry channel where it went into a millrace. Hoover pointed at the surging foam and said, ‘That's where I last saw Willi Schmidt. That's where Willi died.' He gestured back down the river to the lights of the restaurant. ‘And where we ate was where Willi and I went before it happened.'

He stared at the churning water and suddenly looked tired and too old to bother. He repeated that he had been standing there and watched Willi being swept away, and for that reason was reluctant to entertain Karl-Heinz's theory of Schmidt's resurrection as Konrad Viessmann.

He shrugged when I asked what had happened and just said, ‘He fell in the fucking river.'

He was being dragged back into Willi's past, he said, and therefore his own, whether he wanted it or not. It would only be when he fully understood Willi that he would understand the blanks in his own life. ‘And I am sure they are gaps that will tell me things I would rather not know.'

‘Why not leave it alone?'

‘Because I'll be dead soon and it's about time I knew.' He looked up from the river and said, ‘And I'd like to die in my own bed.' He didn't speak all the way back to the hotel.