The Human Pool (9 page)

ZURICH TO FRANKFURT

THE TRAIN SPEEDS THROUGH
the dark countryside. Given the seamless zone that modern Europe has become, it is hard to appreciate, now that access is so easy, the significance of borders in wartime. My grandchildren are being raised with almost no concept of boundaries—national, international, moral, religious, conceptual, or otherwise. To them history is the past, a dead subject. Actually, it is a non-subject. It has nothing to do with the way they perceive their lives. They live in a literal world, flatly lit from above.

Thanks to Betty's documents I finally appreciate the significance of the death of the first man I was ordered to kill. Señor Ruiz's murder was the invisible Footnote to Betty's memorandum. Another thing: even before I knew Willi Schmidt, I find we were linked in advance, as though destiny, not chance controlled the matter, and perhaps still does.

 

In keeping with that destiny, which in the case of myself and Willi was anything but straightforward, my passage to Lisbon, via colonial French West Africa and Tangiers, prepared me for the life of detour that lay ahead.

I arrived in French West Africa after escaping in September 1940 on a boat from Brittany to Dakar, travelling on papers stolen from the Belgian fascist I had befriended. It was an open secret that Belgium's gold reserves were on the boat, too, after being forwarded from Brussels and then Paris after the Nazi occupation.

The template of French colonial civilisation was wearing thin by the time it reached Dakar, redeemed only by the luxury of a servant economy. A new pro-Nazi regime had been hastily installed, but among its first tasks was fending off German requests for the return of the Belgian gold. I almost certainly saw this gold again when Dulles and I visited the Frankfurt vaults in May 1945, thus contributing to my theory that life's most important patterns are anything but sequential. My own modest role in the affair was restricted to being interpreter for the local Dakar administration and a gang of recently arrived German civilians known by all to be Nazi agents.

So my first proper job in the war involved working for the Germans. There were endless meetings in stifling rooms whose fans failed to make any impression on the heat. The Germans sweated into their starched linens. They were quite humourless, dedicated solely to recovering the gold, and frustrated by the need to maintain diplomatic relations with their collaborators. The French, more ironic and casual in the ways of bureaucracy, and not looking to impress any Germans so far from home, were experts at deferral. The Germans agreed to provide the transportation. The French were finally persuaded to be responsible for the security and, after much wrangling, the fuel bill.

The Germans were suspicious of me at first but not inquisitive, being invasive by nature rather than colonial. The climate of French West Africa mocked their fiercely held beliefs. They yearned for the temperate zones of northern Europe. Dakar sapped their wills. The untidiness of French colonialism, with its sexual laxity and riot of vegetation, torpor, and maddening round of senseless ritual, offended their sense of order. The only real punctuality, which you could set your watch by, was the first evening drink served at six on the dot. A hard liver was the price of collaboration.

By Christmas, only a small proportion of the ‘consignment of goods', as the Germans comically persisted in calling the gold, had reached its initial destination in western Algeria because the Sahara had become vulnerable to Allied fighter attacks.

Uncertainty was the making of the Germans. It provoked them into a plan that rivalled the maddest visionary quest of the Conquistadors for El Dorado. Unlike the Spanish, the Germans had their gold, and all objections were overruled. Once they had succeeded in giving their quest a mythical dimension there was no stopping them. I was told to inform the French that the itinerary presented was non-negotiable.

Their journey was supposed to take two months. It took the next year of my life. I was kept on as interpreter and travelled with the first consignment. The plan was to ship the gold in several cargoes and stages, first by rail from Dakar to the terminus at Koulikoro, more than a thousand miles away, then nine hundred miles by boat along the Niger to Timbuktu. From there the river journey continued on smaller craft downstream to Gao, where the shipment was transferred to trucks to be taken across the Sahara.

The voyage across the Sahara defined the madness of the enterprise, an epic transportation of a commodity that became increasingly meaningless in the context of such a vast emptiness.

The enormity of our task and the implacable terrain ate away at us, while turning us silently heroic. We inhabited a realm beyond language. Our minds became divorced from our bodies. Memory faded, and with it desire. Distance, and time, ceased to have meaning. The burden of our journey and the unending harshness eroded identity, turning us into figments of our own imaginations, until we lost all sense of outside conflict and only the inner battle remained, for sanity and survival.

Progress, pitiful to begin with, was delayed by sandstorms. The trucks became useless. The advances of twentieth-century engineering were abandoned for donkeys and camels. We travelled as Bedouin. Everything was jettisoned apart from the gold. The Germans, so loyal and obedient to their ideals, ended up questioning the gold's worth, and, by extension, their own. We stared at each other, scarcely able to remember our own names. From the southerly terminus of the West Algerian railroad it was a further thousand miles by train to the coast, the stations along the way serving little except punishment and labour camps.

Later I learned that by the end of 1941, only a third of the gold had crossed the Sahara, and it would be nearly another six months before the full consignment reached Berlin.

By the time we arrived at Tangier, I discovered that the desert had relieved me of any conscience. I worked as a thug for a local Mr Big until the end of November, when I had enough to pay a fishing-boat captain to drop me near Algeciras. From there I travelled to Lisbon, arriving as news was breaking that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbour and the United States was at war.

Lisbon at the end of 1941 was much like any other neutral city port, wide open and dangerously tight at the same time. The regime was fascist and vindictive. The country's grand colonial dream had almost faded, along with its architecture, and the damp salt air and the proximity of the Atlantic, with its sense of uncertain departure, gave the city an air of fabulous melancholy.

I presented myself to the Americans and was dealt with by an official called Coburn whose cynicism seemed excessive for what was apparently a desk job and paper administration. My plan had been to reach the United States, but Coburn said my visa application would be delayed because of the war. Coburn was like a tough old cop in an American movie, his prejudices brought out by whisky. He thought I was a spy. His interviews were exhaustive and verged on interrogations.

 

Señor Ruiz ran an import-export company from a room above a shop, next to a café-bar. Most of his day was spent not working but sitting in the café-bar, drinking coffee and brandy, and reading newspapers. Ruiz was bored. He lived by himself and ate alone in local restaurants. His regular laundry was near the café. Most evenings he took home a parcel of clean clothes wrapped in waxed paper.

I had no idea why I was supposed to watch Señor Ruiz. I became familiar enough with him to know that he shaved only every other day and his teeth were stained from black tobacco. He was around fifty, had a moustache, and was losing his hair, which he oiled with a strong pomade. Once I stood close enough on a busy tram to smell garlic on his breath. Liver cooked in the local manner was his regular dish.

Twice in the last week of his life he visited the same prostitute. Most nights he stayed and drank in the café-bar, with other regulars, then stopped off alone at different bars for several nightcaps. By the time he got home he was staggering.

Lisbon, with its grand boulevards and labyrinthine alleys and side streets, was a city designed for surveillance. It could be said that to appreciate fully its street plan and architecture, you needed to follow someone for a week.

On February 2, 1942, I killed Ruiz, on Coburn's orders; stuck a knife in him in an alley, after coshing him with a sock full of stones. It sounds very melodramatic now. At the time it had seemed the only way to convince Coburn to take me on trust. I was more anxious about bungling the job than taking Señor Ruiz's life. Besides, it was easy then to pretend that such acts were a proper test of manhood. The death merited one paragraph at the bottom of an inside page of the main newspaper. Someone had removed Señor Ruiz's wallet. That was my only mistake: I was supposed to have taken it, and could never decide afterwards if one of Coburn's men had been watching me stalking Señor Ruiz. That was Lisbon.

For a week no one could find me, and I have no recollection of that time. After that, Coburn told me he had a proposition. I would be sent not to the United States but to Switzerland.

The empty discipline of the desert made what followed more bearable. The world of subterfuge and espionage into which I was thrown was catholic and voluptuous by comparison—Shakespearean, even—in its capacity for embellishment and deception, for disguise and concealment.

FRANKFURT

SIEGFRIED DROVE. WE WERE
in his BMW, ultra-civilised classical music unspooling on the tape deck. We crossed over the river. Siegfried said nothing, concentrating on smooth gear changing. Traffic was light. We must have looked odd, us together at that time of night, lovers even, going back to his place in some rich outer suburb. Except we ended up in an anonymous industrial zone where my old friends the skinheads were waiting, less friendly now. They were in a VW camper with bench seats and a table in the middle, drinking cans of beer. They were drunk and belligerent.

They all shifted around and I was made to sit boxed in, with Siegfried opposite. With this rearrangement two skinheads were left crouching as best they could, trying to appear menacing. Siegfried looked at me. I stared back and found it hard to hold his eye. He seemed mildly expectant. The skinheads were chortling. Siegfried said, ‘Are you going to tell us what is going on?'

I told him I had nothing to tell. We hedged around until Siegfried nodded at the skinhead next to me, who grabbed my hand and slapped it on the table while the skinhead next to Siegfried drove a hunting knife into the table between my splayed fingers. The skinhead holding my hand sniggered. It was only luck that the knife had missed. Siegfried was getting off on this. He was looking messianic. His time had come, he said. The old guard would soon be gone, by which I took him to mean Karl-Heinz.

Siegfried twanged the knife handle, making it shiver. Siegfried's beef: he had been told something by a little birdie. About me. I was a spy. They would be looking into that.

It went very quiet in the van. I could hear the man next to me breathing. I held Siegfried's eye and shook my head slowly, not trusting to say anything.

‘What do you think about that?' he asked.

‘It's not true. I'm going home tomorrow, to help my sister.'

The skinheads guffawed.

Siegfried said it was time to prove I wasn't what the little birdie said. He had a test. More fire. The building would be empty.

Or what? I asked. Siegfried said, ‘We put you on a lorry to Turkey.' The skinheads laughed loud, best joke yet.

We drove in the camper to a poor part of the city, on the outskirts. The building they wanted to torch was an old shopfront with a plate-glass window painted over in white. Siegfried said it was a pirate satellite television station for Turkish Kurds.

We all went in except for Siegfried, who stayed in the van, and were there less than two minutes. Door kicked in, down a corridor and into a back room full of electronic equipment. Petrol thrown around. I wasn't asked to do anything, except be photographed, standing in the studio with a can of petrol in my hand. Flash photo, me stickily aware of my fingerprints all over the can, framed for a setup.

We were away before the flames were evident, the skinheads hollering, heavy metal on the tape deck, me queasy and bursting to piss, in way too deep.

We got back to Siegfried's BMW. No lift home for me. I was left to walk through dead nighttime streets, right out on the edge of the city. Siegfried said before he drove off, ‘No more warnings. Go home and watch your step. We have friends in England, too.'

 

Dear Dora. Dora's midnight call, waking me. Dora on a mobile from a party. Having fun, she said. Sounding high. ‘Why are you telling me?' I asked. ‘Because you weren't fun,' she said. I could hear music in the background. I asked where she was. In the toilet, she said. Dora coked, saying it was all very innocuous, really. She jabbered on, the rush apparent. I told her I was thinking of coming back. She ignored me, did party gossip. She told me she was wearing suspenders. I felt her slipping away and thought of my fingerprints on the jerry can.

‘Good-bye,' Dora said. I thought she meant for good until she said, ‘Call me soon,' and after a long pause, ‘I don't like this.' Before I could answer, she was gone.