The Human Pool (31 page)

BUDAPEST

My Dear Beate,

I don't know what the news will have told you by now. I can only apologise for the abrupt manner of my departure, which was somewhat hastened by circumstances beyond my control. Isn't it stupid, when you get to my age and head and heart still act in contradiction? I also find I cannot put down what is in my heart, that the distance between us has grown too great, though I sincerely hope not. My one aim is to return and for us to start again. Can we agree on that? I hope in no more than a week. In the meantime, I do need your help. I need you to get in urgent touch with whomever you contacted last time on behalf of your mother and explain where we have gone and whom we are seeing. I can only stress that Mr Ballard can be of no help to you in this instance. I am placing my trust in you and I have no one else I can ask. I am certain that my worst fears are being realised, that Willi Schmidt is exactly who I said he was and that he still is involved in something far worse than I ever suspected. I understand your loyalty and your reticence, and realise that the decision is yours. I would like for you, in spite of my own reluctance and what is probably best described as emotional carelessness with you, to believe in our future. I rarely if ever pray, but I would ask you to, for us, if you are the praying kind.

It was Willi who met me at the airport when I first arrived in Switzerland, and not your mother as planned. It was Willi who turned up in Strasbourg, and not your mother as planned. For my own conscience, I owe it to myself to try and make one final appointment with Willi.

Yours in trust and hope

ZURICH

HOOVER ASKS THE IMPOSSIBLE
. Whatever I do, I betray.

I have now read all Mother's private diaries, all the journals from the war. In them she wrote a lot about Willi, sounding like a soppy teenager.

The similarities to Uncle Konny are something I have great difficulty in accepting, except for one very good reason: a case of simple mathematics.

Nine months before I was born, Mother was in Strasbourg. It is more than possible that I am Willi Schmidt's daughter.

There is no proof. Mother has never even hinted as much, either to me or in her private papers. I cling to the illusion that the man I believed to be my father
is
—but he was not tall, and I fear my height is the legacy of ‘Uncle Konny'.

TURKEY

TOOK A PLANE.
Hired a car. Bob Ballard's cell phone a fading signal. We were stretched from the start.

We had to dump the gun because of airport security, and carried nothing apart from the clothes we wore, a bunch of Manny's fake dollars—a trail in themselves—toiletries picked up at the airport, and a map. The plane had landed somewhere I had never heard of. We had logged a message with Maurice's number, saying where we were going and that we would appreciate any assistance.

The feeling was of a beetle crawling across an arid cranial landscape, being watched by things much bigger.

We moved through a stripped-down, relentlessly physical terrain where human life was still measured in terms of survival. Gas stations and satellite dishes were among the few signs of the contemporary world, along with the usual McDonald's and Coca-Cola shit. (Cruising Frankfurt with the Neos now seemed like another lifetime.) We travelled away from the tourist map, more conspicuous with every mile, pale and different. The military established its presence with convoys and troop movements, roadblocks and document inspections. We were waved on. The protective bubble of the car created an illusion of immunity.

We stopped in some dusty place the first night, a roadside hotel used by lorry drivers who wore faded work shirts that must have been washed a thousand times. The top floor of the building was still a concrete shell.

In the dining room two men in black suits looked like they did something nasty for the government. One of the suits checked us out. He wanted to know if we were American. He spoke textbook English, and was surface chatty while his eyes calculated. He said they were doctors. Hoover bluffed, even mentioned Viessmann's name. Afterwards he said, ‘Someone has us logged.'

Big trucks boomed past all night, their lights tracing patterns across the ceiling. I could hear Hoover coughing in his room. I chased an image of Dora, but whenever I got there it turned out not to be her.

We drove on. The countryside grew still emptier. Now even a roadside garage was an event; smoking obligatory while refuelling. Military installations loomed up in the hills, reached by dirt roads. ‘A strategic landscape', Hoover called it, a terrain as unyielding as the feuds that got fought over it, where everything was a blood sacrifice.

Inside, the car grew dusty. The radio spoke in indecipherable languages or blared keening music. At another roadblock we were made to get out and were questioned about our destination, warned about rebel bandits. Then we were told to wait by the car while phone calls were made and half a dozen soldiers watched us, weapons aslant, cigarettes to hand. Military khaki, representative of a martial law even harsher than the surroundings; the soldiers looked familiar with the notion of informal execution. Waiting for them to make a decision, it was easy to picture the last of the heart-pump, bloodstained earth, hot bullet casings casually ejected, another cigarette lit after the shooting.

Seeing my nerves on getting back in the car, Hoover said, ‘You have an overactive imagination, nephew. Those guys are at the bottom of the order pole.'

The road climbed, narrowed, and sheared away into a dizzying drop. Traffic barrelled along. Road duelling was compulsory, breakneck speed a requisite. Everyone drove with the reckless panache of men on amphetamines or alcohol or both; no women drivers. Passing vehicles left a gap of inches, sometimes not even that. There was no turnaround. Hands sticky on the steering wheel, I would have driven with my eyes shut if I could. Hoover paled when a carelessly packed open truck braked and its load looked as though it was about to dump itself in our laps.

We greeted the level road with a relieved silence, then Hoover said, ‘I'm tired, nephew, I want to go home.' But five minutes later he was studying the map. ‘Oil. Money. Guns. Drugs. It pretty much comes down to that,' he said. ‘Dulles knew that. The Kurds know that. And water, too, in this part of the world. There are too many outside interests.'

A while later, he added, ‘I can see how those guys would have enjoyed shooting up a five-star hotel. All that pampered luxury, and a taste for violent change.'

He reminded me that the hotel was one of the places where Betty Monroe and Allen Dulles had met. Dulles was quite unworldly in some respects, said Hoover. According to Betty, he had been ignorant of the details of the homosexual act. Hoover's explanation was that money didn't fuck, and money was what Dulles really understood in a highly advanced, visionary way. Hoover said: ‘Money can fuck with you, and money can fuck you, but money itself doesn't fuck. It multiplies by itself.'

In the late afternoon we detoured off the main road. In a village store a woman spoke some French. Hoover said he was looking for a very tall European man with white hair who ran a camp for children. We drew a blank.

We criss-crossed the region. Cheap lodgings. Variable food. We got bad stomachs and had to stop to shit by the roadside. The processes of civilisation started to break down. In one village we were stopped and questioned by a couple of probable rebels. They spoke a little English. They let us go but warned us that our presence was known in the area.

We moved into the PKK heartland. We were never sure if the men who talked to us were part of Maurice's network. Mistrust translated into procrastination. We were a curiosity at best. Hoover grew discouraged, wondered what he was hoping to achieve. The quality of his life was not going to be improved for finding Viessmann.

Twice a helicopter flew above us. Twice was still coincidence, Hoover said.

Then, after miles of rough road and what felt like pointless circling, we stopped at a café in a town square and spoke to a German engineer named Dieter who showed a drunk's lack of curiosity. He was working on the dam construction project, he told us. He had believed it would bring prosperity to the region, with Kurds the main beneficiaries. The inconvenience of relocation would be compensated for by the better education, employment, and modernisation. Safe in his European compound, Dieter had dismissed the Kurds as backwards and reactionary. Now he wasn't sure. He had heard stories of how the Turkish army bought off Kurdish men and turned them into ‘village guards', paying the kind of money they would not earn by other means, setting Kurd against Kurd. And the completed dam, he had learned, could have adverse climatic effects on the whole region. Dieter's unease seemed in part historical. He said he was trying to get transferred back to Germany, to the head office in Frankfurt. His situation was complicated by his seeing an English woman, a co-ordinator on one of the construction sites, who shared none of his misgivings.

Outside the next town we found the corpse of a man casually thrown by the side of the road. He was young and poorly dressed, and there was a small bullet hole in his forehead. His nose had been bleeding, and flies drank the still-fresh blood. It was impossible to say whether he had been shot there or elsewhere and dumped on the edge of town as a warning or some kind of power statement. A truck went past and didn't stop. The driver hooted angrily at us and gesticulated.

A mile or so later we drove through a shack-town slum. Scruffy kids stared. Skinny dogs with yellow eyes skulked by the roadside.

The old town had a wall and was large enough to have municipal buildings and a square. A terrace café was being patronised by loud men with guns, dressed in civilian clothes, some sporting well-worn shoulder holsters, openly displayed. They were sullen and drunk and dangerous. Hoover insisted on asking in English and German if anyone could tell him why a dead man was lying in the road on the outskirts of town.

The corpse seemed to have unhinged Hoover. He was determined to report it. The men in the café had ignored him. The police station wasn't interested either. A minor municipal official with deferential manners and some English explained we would have to talk to the army. However, we should be aware that there was no formal procedure for reporting such a crime.

‘All bullets and no paperwork', grunted Hoover as he walked out. He insisted on going back to the café where the men still were, drunker. He ignored them, nursed a beer, and told me of an incident which had been no more than a footnote at the time. Now he wondered if it didn't connect to the final period of Karl-Heinz's life.

One of Hoover's last wartime jobs had been to arrange the transportation of a consignment of bullion from Budapest to Istanbul, using old Red Cross connections to ensure its safe passage. It was not a job he had paid any great attention to, and he never connected it, until now, to a story told by Karl-Heinz which had lain around in the back of his head.

It concerned the grand mufti of Jerusalem, leader of the Palestinian Muslims who had allied himself to Hitler because of shared anti-British and Jewish policies.

Hoover had seen the mufti once under strange circumstances in Croatia in 1942. While out riding with Karl-Heinz, they had chanced across a detachment of SS soldiers, in themselves an anomaly, being both Croatian and Muslim.

Just then, one of the drunken thugs came over to advise us to leave town before dark. It seemed like a good idea to me, but Hoover said it would be more dangerous to be on the roads after dark. The man said there had been a lot of shootings in town, and he could not guarantee our safety. Hoover thanked him, offered to buy him and his friends a round, which was accepted, then said, ‘We'll take our chances.

‘What you have to understand,' he went on to me, ‘is how uncertain times were by the end of the war. They were superstitious days, and there was much casting around. Astrologers became some of the most important figures in the last days of the Third Reich. Hitler used them. Himmler did, too—and his advisers, according to Karl-Heinz, told him something that might be connected with us being here.'

Among her future predictions, Himmler's astrologer had announced that the new millennium would see a development in the Middle East with the birth of a ‘Chosen One'. This new leader would become a Kurdish warrior in the tradition of Saladin and would unite Muslims in a holy war which would drive the Jews out of Israel.

He saw my scepticism and pointed out that what he or I believed didn't have anything to do with it. He personally retained a certain incredulity at Himmler's desperation and superstition. ‘But, if you ask me, the money I sent to Istanbul was being used by Karl-Heinz, to finance that prediction.' I remembered Karl-Heinz's admiration for the Kurdish warrior.

‘Meaning that Kurdish operations are on an old Nazi budget?'

‘It's not out of the question.'

On her other predictions, Himmler's astrologer had been accurate about where the Russian front line would end up, less so on the Reichsführer's fate. ‘She had him down as a big cheese in the postwar setup.'

 

We checked into a cheap hotel overlooking the square, which was patrolled by a Land Rover being driven by the now very drunk gunmen.

That night a bomb went off by the railway station: a thin, dull
thwup
that woke us both up but didn't sound dramatic enough to be alarming. Hoover joined me in the corridor, grumbling about interrupted sleep. Everything felt weirdly low-key, as it had with finding the corpse. We joined a small crowd that had gathered in the town square. The gunmen drove up and down at high speed a few times, then later they came and arrested us in the hotel. It was something I had been half expecting since Hoover's initial confrontation but it didn't prepare me for guns being pointed in my face.

We were handcuffed and taken off in the Land Rover. Hoover's sticking-up hair made him look old and frail. One of the gunmen unholstered a Colt .45 and looked like he might start firing it inside the vehicle. He shouted in Turkish while I silently cursed Hoover for having drawn attention to us in the first place.

We drove to a camp with a sentry post and barbed wire, behind which stood a central stone building and a number of smaller single-storey wooden huts. By the door of the hut into which we were dragged I noticed a plate displaying the manufacturer's name: a Swiss company.

We were separated, and a soldier in starched uniform and smelling of aftershave slapped me across the face—not hard, almost girlishly—and said I would be questioned about my role in the explosion at the railway station.

The smell of aftershave hung in the air after he had gone. I told myself it was mind games and that only the cold was making me shiver. Want and dread fought for attention: please let this end; don't let anything happen. I was stuck in dead time. At some point a helicopter hovered low overhead and landed nearby.

It was daylight before anyone came—other soldiers, politer and more deferential. They removed the handcuffs. I was taken to a canteen, given a cup of sweet black coffee, then led to a gymnasium. Hoover was there. We had no time to speak before being joined by another man whom I immediately recognised, though his hair was longer than I was expecting and, where he had previously been glimpsed in a smart overcoat, he now dressed like a bum in raggedy jeans, sandals, and an old work shirt.

Hoover appeared beyond surprise. ‘This,' he said, ‘is Konrad Viessmann.'

Viessmann's eyes were a blank pale blue and showed no recognition of Hoover, who looked uncertain. I had no idea if this was Willi Schmidt. He looked too young and fit.

‘What's going on?' I asked Hoover, but he was lost for words.