The Human Pool (26 page)

ZURICH

WHEN I DOORSTOPPED
Beate von Heimendorf she denied again that Hoover was there but was too flustered to carry it off. It turned out he wasn't there but should have been.

‘I don't know where he is,' she said, upset by my return. The last thing she wanted was me spoiling her fun with Hoover.

The phone in the hall rang, and she ran to answer. She shielded the receiver and asked in a disappointed voice, ‘Does that mean you're moving out?' She wrote down a number, taking care not to let me see. I asked to speak to him, but she hung up first.

‘Mr Vaughan,' she told me, ‘Mr Hoover is not a well man. He should avoid excitement.' I said it was news to me that he was sick. She said he put on a brave face.

We traded. I said it would be a shame to have to tell Hoover about her marriage to Dominic Carswell. She gave me Hoover's number in exchange for my silence.

When I called he sounded pleased. ‘Well, hello, nephew,' he said. ‘Why don't you come on down?' He was at Sol's downtown office, he said. Beate stood in the hall, watching with a stricken expression.

 

I was shocked by Hoover's physical deterioration. Beate was right. He looked sick. He was smoking, too. I asked if he should be, and he responded with a cough he turned into a laugh, and said it didn't matter. Sick or not, he was enjoying himself. ‘Come upstairs and meet the gang.'

The room he led me into was a huge space given over to untidy storage and vast amounts of junk. The building was an old factory, and Sol had the whole of the upper floor.

Hoover made a big show of introducing everyone as if we were at a party. There was Sol. Whatever animosity had existed was forgotten. Sol's magnified lenses made him look more than ever like a cartoon grasshopper. There was Manny, a sardonic-looking man apparently beyond surprise. Hoover said, ‘Manny and I think we were holed up in the same castle together in the Brenner Pass at the end of the war, but neither of us is sure.'

Manny had been working for the SS, Hoover explained. They enjoyed my mystification. Manny did the laundry, added Hoover.

‘Forging German bank notes for Heine Himmler,' said Manny. Manny chain-smoked. He rated smoking as the last subversive activity, a willed act of self-pollution. He smoked Celtique, a fat cigarette of black tobacco which reminded Hoover of Belgium. Manny associated it with adventure, gipsies, and Apaches, and slick knife fights and absinthe, unlike American tobacco, which tasted only of the chemical process.

‘And there's Abe,' said Hoover, ‘somewhere out the back. Abe is Sol's son.'

Abe tracked information. Each transaction created a spoor, and Abe traced people's movements just like American Indian scouts used to, said Hoover. He saw a record of passage where the less experienced eye would see nothing. ‘You, nephew, are an open book to a man like Abe.'

Abe's software programmes had been given state honours in Tokyo, and there was a photograph to prove it. Abe looked like Oliver Hardy as computer wizard. With Sol standing next to him at all of five foot six, Abe had to be at least six five. He hadn't dressed up for his award—jeans from Switzerland's Mr High and Mighty and a black hat. They looked like a sad comic act.

Sol looked proud as Hoover described how Abe had a mind way out on its own. ‘No small talk, but when it comes to keyboard skills he's a genius.'

I looked at Hoover and Sol and said, ‘So, everyone's made up, then?'

‘All buddies as of now,' replied Hoover. ‘I strong-armed Sol into believing I had nothing to do with Willi's con.'

Sol said, ‘He has kindly agreed to verify Frau Schmidt so that we can access Willi's account.'

‘And if I get caught, I'll be dead by the time it gets to trial.'

We laughed uneasily. Abe emerged from the other end of the room where he had been hidden behind a stack of shelves. He was quiet and courteous, in contrast to his initial alarming hugeness in all directions. He still wore the hat from the photograph, and the hair that poked out of it was long and plaited. His handshake was gentle. His calling was a solitary one, made lonelier by his intelligence.

The space we were standing in was being used to store a mess of junk, an accumulation of decades of debris. Sol called it a warehouse of memory. I picked up a Zurich tram ticket stub from 1943. There were papers, old clothes, books, documents, forgotten bank statements dating back forty years, a couple of old 78s which had belonged to Willi Schmidt. The place was like a deconstructed Schwitters collage.

Sol was pro-dirt, unlike the Swiss. What the Swiss did best was laundry. They rinsed money like they rinsed everything else. Sol was anti-laundry. Pro-mess, pro-life was his motto.

Hoover said, ‘Can you imagine, nephew, I saw Willi playing those records, and here we are all these years later. It makes you think. Willi should be here.' He sounded sad, as if everything had gotten too old.

But then he grinned. I was pleased to see him. He said, ‘This is my swan song. Let's go eat.'

On the street we made the oddest quintet. Sol announced that he had declared himself at war with Switzerland, dropping litter wherever he could. He wanted Zurich to look as messy as Greece or England. In the restaurant, an ersatz kitchen with Bohemian pretensions in a nearby warehouse, Manny resorted to playing the exaggerated Jew. Any difference embarrassed the Swiss, said Sol. I wasn't sure. The crowd was young and too concerned with being cool (Willi Schmidt's successors).

Talk turned to Carswell. Hoover thought I had been used by him to test the security of some aspect of his operation. I had been put in to see how far I got and to report back. Manny frowned and said, ‘It's obvious.' Manny's response to being in public was to look even more sardonic. ‘There was a split in the organisation. Carswell suspected, and when this was confirmed, Strasse was dealt with.'

Stuff started to dovetail. We résuméd. We pooled. Back at Sol's place Hoover got Abe to show me his party tricks, starting with all the details they had on Hoover—home address, travel arrangements, hotel bookings, medical insurance details. Abe had even hacked into Hoover's CIA file, including an internal report by Dulles from the mid-1950s which made for double-edged reading, sidelining him after a breakdown in Egypt. Hoover seemed unperturbed. ‘I asked for a transfer, and they called it a breakdown.'

Abe did me. Address, credit card payments outstanding, aerial photograph of my street before the fire. He even located a computer copy of the story on the fire due to run in the local weekly paper. It listed two fatalities and blamed risky cooking practices. Residents complained that many of the rooms weren't equipped with proper kitchens. More to the point, there were photographs. One was of the blaze itself, another of the watching crowd, with me out of frame, and a vaguely familiar face caught on the edge.

It came in a double tap. At the time, I had been so preoccupied with Karl-Heinz's killer as nemesis I couldn't connect him back to the Neos, and anyway had been more struck by their smart cars. His sidekick was the man in the picture. Hoover agreed that two dog-shit yellow jackets was too much coincidence.

Hoover said, ‘The shooter was Turkish army till five years ago, then a blank. Which means that he was either outside any system or so far in that he went off-record.'

‘Meaning?'

‘Secret military police, some covert antiterrorist outfit.'

We did Carswell. We did Viessmann. There was almost nothing on them. It was as though they understood and mistrusted normal channels of communication for what they could give away.

Hoover said, ‘I want to see Willi's face one more time before I die.'

ZURICH

THE MUDDLED AND FRETFUL
ghosts of the past return to haunt me. Betty Monroe's capacity for subterfuge lives on. I imagine her permitting herself a sly smile, in the unblank moments allowed by her disintegrating mind, as she continues from afar to oversee our frantic lives. How she would laugh out loud—the familiar high peal, the head thrown back, teeth bared, her gutsy laugh—to be told of what I have just learned. It is her legacy as much as anyone's.

Abe, while rooting around in the great yonder, making idle internet investigations into the Monroes and von Heimendorfs—those connected and well-listed families—came across a tiny detonation in parenthesis: ‘(m. Dominic Carswell 1967; dissolved 1968)'.

Cold rage and a silent taxi ride up the hill to Betty's house, where Vaughan witnesses the row between me and Beate and watches with growing alarm the angry pulse popping in my neck.

First I discover Vaughan already knew about her and Carswell when she accused him of telling me, after promising her not to. Perhaps to avoid his guilty conscience, he turns on her. Then, on the question of how she and Carswell met, he stumbles across the great, unsuspected connection.

Beate says that their families were friends. ‘Or it might have been Uncle Konny who introduced us.'

Uncle Konny: Vaughan and I look at each other.

Konrad Viessmann, present whereabouts unknown, has in spirit been looking over our shoulders all the time. Willi Schmidt was familiar with the house we were standing in; so, it transpires, was Konrad Viessmann.

An interesting point that has not occurred to me before. Among all Betty Monroe's souvenirs and memorabilia, there are no photographs of Willi and none of Konrad Viessmann, family friend. After all, Beate knew Viessmann—Uncle Konny—since she was a child. Konrad Viessmann, the adopted uncle, friend to her father. Childhood summer holidays, apparently camera-less, were spent at his summer villa on Lake Locarno.

Beate denies all knowledge of Viessmann's possible previous incarnation and won't budge when challenged, two red spots of anger high on her cheeks. If she is aware of the connection, then her lies are even better than her mother's.

To embarrass her I say in front of Vaughan, ‘And I'm the dope for getting goofy about you.'

Beate has a singular beauty when trying to keep her temper. It offers a rare glimpse into a private self. Once her control is regained she is quick to point out that no one had brought up Carswell's name, let alone Viessmann's. She was hiding nothing.

We end up shamed by our argument. I suspect we are using it as a surrogate for personal frustrations.

Vaughan plainly thinks Beate is still hiding something and I am too caught up with her to see it. I watch ripples of animosity pass between them.

Vaughan reminds me of my younger self. Perhaps Beate can read this identification and it makes her jealous. It's as if Vaughan and I are family, while her reticence has resulted in her exclusion. In Vaughan I recognise the same clumsiness, the same wariness, combined with an ability to trust the wrong person. The same willingness to run and be run (Carswell his Willi Schmidt). My boys used to buy airplane models: ‘Read instructions carefully before assembly,' it always said inside the box. The sentence was not one that could be applied to my own life. Vaughan appears similarly prepared to act on the minimum of information. In fact, he looks as though he doesn't even know there is a set of instructions.

It occurs to me that Beate hasn't properly identified her mother as the source of the anger she fights so hard to control. Much of my own anger toward her is not personal and more to do with being in the wrong time, of my not being ten or fifteen years younger. There is nothing more pathetic, or tragic, than falling in love too late. Beate and I were meant for Budapest, sixty years ago—before she was born.

 

Beate made a peace offering in the form of the phone number of Dominic's mother on the grounds that Mrs. Carswell might know where he was. In the end she was more or less bullied into placing the call, too. The only phone in the house was inconveniently situated in the hall, leaving the three of us awkwardly posed. It was not a straightforward call. Carswell's mother had promised not to pass on his mobile number to anyone, and Beate was trying to wheedle it out of her and was already flustered when the doorbell went. Vaughan looked instantly nervous, bad memories of earlier intrusions stamped on his face. I looked through the spy hole. It was Bob Ballard on one of his spontaneous house calls. He grinned as he stepped inside.

We stood around listening to Beate, as if we were extras on a film set, watching her resolve ebb until, in a moment of inspiration, she invoked Viessmann's name: ‘Konrad said it would be all right for you to give it to me.'

After she was done she handed me the number. Her hand shook slightly. She was still mad at me and clearly resented Vaughan and Ballard. She walked out with no more than a brusque good night. I went after her, tried to talk to her, took her arm, which she snatched away. She said, sounding cold, giving me the brush-off, ‘You have his number now. Do whatever it is you have to do, but don't involve me.'

 

The excitement of Carswell being a handful of digits away was too much for Vaughan. He wanted to know what I thought.

I was thinking at my age why should I care what a woman thought, while knowing that the surface anxiety hid a deeper one: fear of the inevitable deferred, final meeting between Willi and me; fear that the assignment between us still had some way to run. In truth, the real worry that lay beyond that was far more stark. Soon I would be lying in that last hospital bed, and Willi would have nothing to do with it. Willi was just one more distraction, whether he still existed or not.

‘Call Carswell,' I heard myself say.

Carswell was switched off, so we sat around and what emerged was the added curiosity of Bob Ballard's role in all this. He knew about Carswell for a start, even though we had never discussed him. ‘Now there's a surprise,' I said, and he gave me one of his coded looks. He told us there was leverage on Carswell, who could be investigated for illegal trading to Iraq and other sanctioned states. Again showing his cleverness, he said, ‘It sounds like the old wartime Brevecourt scam. Trading with the enemy. Isn't that where you came in?'

‘Whose files have you been reading?' I asked.

In my mind's eye I saw a direct correlation between the visible junk at Sol's place—accumulated, unsorted clutter, all forgotten about—and the near invisible traces left by Ballard's and my superiors down the years, of aborted operations; forgotten operations; operations supported by some hideaway fund long past their date of usefulness; unrecorded operations, reported only on a mouth-to-mouth basis, where one of the mouths had gone silent; whole castles of intelligence abandoned like medieval ruins.

 

As I get older I grow more afraid of the dark. On some trashy TV programme the grandchildren had been watching, I heard it said: ‘There is no such thing as
total
darkness,' with the emphasis on the penultimate word. I can't imagine it, but I know it is there and waiting, and Mary with it, acrimony in eternity.

I was woken by Vaughan, a man with things on his mind, needing to talk, even though it wasn't yet six-thirty.

He told me about his half-sister and their blocked relationship. Uncle Joe had no advice, painfully aware of Dominic Carswell's intrusion into our respective lives. Dora was missing, he said, and he felt lost.

All he could see was muddle, concealed motives and fragments. He told me about a Chinese woman in the Frankfurt smuggling yard who had no idea where she was or how long she had been there.

I said it always felt like this, for the longest amount of time. You made moves, you repeated moves, made wrong moves, and in the end they added up to an approximation of sense, though not all of the moves turned out to have counted. If you were lucky, you walked away with a clearer idea of what had happened.

He felt like that about his Kurdish contacts. Real names were missing, communication uncertain, explanations garbled. At the familiarity of these casual and fractured arrangements—I felt almost nostalgic. Vaughan had spoken to them for an hour in the middle of the night. From what he was saying it sounded like they were wanting to stir things up. They wanted to meet. They were muscling in—as they had every right to do—but they were an unknown and potentially volatile factor, because where they went Turks followed. The Kurd Vaughan had talked to wouldn't give his name. He told him to call him Maurice. Maurice!

It occurs to me to wonder whether Vaughan is part of my story, or am I part of his?

 

We met in a street café specified by Maurice, who made us wait. To be reminded of ordinary life was a surprise. See the mother with the baby buggy. See the man going to work. See the driver cutting up the cyclist. Vaughan talked of how nothing had felt like it fitted in London. The same applied here. Real life was looking strange. People, streets, weather had all receded. My sightseeing these days was in my head.

Maurice wore a beige suit and suede shoes and walked and talked like a respectable middle-class businessman. He smelled of Old Spice. His companions were two well-dressed young toughs alert to any potential hostile movement. Both wore shoulder holsters, and one looked as if he was carrying extra on his leg.

Maurice was suspicious about who I was. I said I represented certain interests concerning the past. He looked as if he hadn't considered anyone else might be involved.

Maurice was clearly important. He was educated and ideologically tooled up. The plight of his people was his only consideration, and he would do whatever it took to alleviate their suffering. When he asked me if I wasn't too old to be involved, I answered: ‘It's a lifetime's cause.' Said with a straight face, it prompted a glimmer of a smile. Maurice with his guarded manner, smart clothes, and taste for up-market cafés was a case of terrorist as aspiring diplomat, a negotiator-in-the-making. Our eyes gave out clear signals that we didn't trust each other, but we weren't enemies as such. It was the old Middle East game of my enemy's enemy is my friend.

Vaughan let me do the talking. Maurice wanted Carswell. I offered Carswell for Viessmann. I watched Maurice carefully. He knew whom I meant. I said we wanted to know where Viessmann was. Maurice said Viessmann had a house in Budapest. He also volunteered that Budapest was where Kurds attempting to escape from Turkey got picked up and turned around (shades of the old Istanbul-Budapest shuttle). I asked why they were allowed to get that far.

‘To encourage the illusion of escape,' he said. From there they were taken back and ended up in gaols, where they disappeared.

He believed that the Turkish army had American support in its war against his people, and therefore British backing, which was where Carswell fitted. He told us to keep him informed of our meeting with Carswell, and in return he would find out more about Viessmann. It felt like old times—the uneasy alliances, the trade of information, the general untrustworthiness. There was a phone number to memorise for getting in touch. Any message would reach Maurice within an hour.

‘And Viessmann, why do you want him?' he asked.

I said that Viessmann and I had unfinished business from before he was born. Maurice said he had no quarrel with Viessmann. It was he who had told them that escaping Kurds were being abducted.

‘Excuse me?' I said, thinking I must have misheard. Maurice repeated himself. My heart banged as it had done earlier over Beate's revelations.

What Maurice was saying made no sense, seen one way. But looked at from a more acute angle, the move was pure Willi Schmidt, with all the old qualities of Willi working both sides of the fence.

‘What was the trade-off?' I asked. There was always a trade-off.

Maurice appeared caught out by the question. ‘That we leave his factories alone.'

‘Is that a fair trade?'

‘No, but it gives us access to Herr Viessmann, who might yet prove a useful ally.'

Willi again.