The Teleportation Accident (46 page)

‘And?’

‘Goodbye, Loeser. I’ll see you around.’

‘Come on, you have to tell me! Did Drabsfarben rescue him from the chamber, or did he accidentally teleport himself into the Pacific?’

‘The answer is not what you think.’

‘But I haven’t told you what I think. Heijenhoort, stop! Come back!’

But he was gone. And I don’t suppose I’ll ever see him again. I hope the stenographer won’t have too much trouble with the punctuation of dialogue. Can I read my statement now?

The Chairman: Not yet.

The Chief Investigator: When did you discover the real nature of your summons to Washington?

Mr Loeser: I didn’t go straight up to the room when I got back to the Shoreham with a pair of stockings. Instead, I went to the bar and sat down on my own and ordered a whisky. All the way to Washington, I’d been praying for some sort of miraculous reprieve, but now there was only about seventeen hours left until I was due to testify here and I couldn’t see where it could come from. I was going to have to tell Mildred that her husband had been caught planning to steal a book called
Midnight at the Nursing Academy
from the national library of the United States; that he was going to be humiliated in front of the press and public; that he was probably going to be deported. I’d just finished my drink and was deciding whether to order another when Stent Mutton walked into the bar. I hadn’t seen him since the summer of 1943. That July, there was the first really caustic smog in Los Angeles, thick enough to humiliate the sun, as if Wormwood the Skunk had died and rotted up in the roof of the world, and naturally everyone assumed, just as I had a few years earlier, that it was an attack from some unseen enemy. No. Just cars.

‘Loeser!’ He wore a white suit with coral buttons. ‘Are you staying here too? I didn’t think I’d see you until tomorrow.’

‘Tomorrow?’ I said.

‘Yes. I’m testifying in the Caucus Room right after you. But you know that, of course.’

‘For the defence or the prosecution?’ I asked.

He smiled. ‘Very funny.’

But I was quite serious. ‘Do they think you were in on it somehow?’

‘ “In on” what?’

‘
Midnight at the Nursing Academy
. The Library of Congress. The heist.’

I won’t bore you with the untangling that followed, or the relief that I felt. But before long, Mutton was explaining that there would be no need for me to conceal any facts when I testified today about his relationship with Drabsfarben. My account of the truth would not incriminate him (or me) any further.

‘But what about you?’ I said as his drink arrived. ‘What are you going to tell them?’

‘That I never knew Drabsfarben was a spy and neither did my wife. They can’t prove otherwise. Dolores and I have had so many hours of practice at telling that particular falsehood that we could enter some sort of conservatoire. And the final proof: how on earth could we have lived in that house if we’d had anything at all to hide?’

‘So when did you really find out?’

‘Loeser, I knew Drabsfarben was working for the Russians from the first time he came over for dinner.’

‘That’s impossible. Just before I left Los Angeles, your wife told me you’d never even suspected she was working for the Comintern.’

‘So I should hope. I never let her know that I knew.’

‘But she was manipulating you. You had to go to Russia and write all those articles about how puppies love Stalin.’

‘That wasn’t so hard. You must understand, I had a choice. Either I was a little dumb and a little blind but I still thought my wife was a perfect goddess. Or I wasn’t so dumb and I wasn’t so blind and I found out my wife had been fooling me to keep Moscow contented. My marriage survived the former but it could never have survived the latter. I would have forgiven Dolores anything. But I don’t think she would have let herself be forgiven. You’re married yourself now, Loeser, you understand what it’s like. You must have made some unspoken bargains of your own.’

Yes, perhaps I have. ‘You were prepared to keep all that up for ever?’ I said.

‘No. But I could tell Drabsfarben wouldn’t last that long in Los Angeles. He didn’t cast the right sort of shadow. Did you know Dolores and I have a six-year-old son? My wife fell pregnant only a few months after Drabsfarben disappeared.’

‘So until then you hadn’t been . . .’

‘Oh, quite the contrary, we’d been trying for years. But I think Dolores’s womb refused to bring a child into a lie. An ethical organ.’

‘Do you all still live in the glass box?’

‘Yes. Although it wasn’t easy during the war. Our neighbours – and when I say “neighbours”, I mean interfering strangers who lived about a half-mile down the beach – got together a petition. They thought the Japanese pilots would use the lights of our house for navigation on their all-too-imminent night raids. In the end we papered over the whole place with birch bark. Not quite what Gugelhupf intended. But to perdition with Gugelhupf. Do you know what he did for most of the war? He got a job with the Chemical Warfare Corps, erecting replica Berlin tenements in the New Mexico desert, full of replica Bauhaus furniture. They burned them down again and again to improve the design of their incendiary bombs.’

So Germany City really had been built in America, only to be razed each week like a torment from Greek mythology. Did Gugelhupf, I wondered, imitate the streets and squares he missed the most, so that he could he could walk through them once more before they perished in trial by fire, or did he imitate the streets and squares he missed the least – we all have a few marked on the maps of our memory that we associate for ever with rejection or despair – so that their arson would be a secret revenge? And since then had Heijenhoort and his colleagues ever been rewarded for their hard work with a coach trip from their own laboratory across the orange desert to the site of this fitful dream of
Heimat
? Mutton and I had a few more drinks – he told me he’s writing science fiction now – then I went up to fetch my wife, who was dressing after a bubble bath, and we all had dinner together at a Chinese restaurant not far from the hotel. Mutton’s lawyer had forbidden him from eating in the Shoreham itself in case the waiters were eavesdropping on your behalf.

The Chief Investigator: We don’t employ waiters.

The Chairman: We do bug telephones, though.

The Chief Investigator: And Woodkin was working for us all along.

Loeser: Really?

The Chairman: For the purposes of the present hearing, yes, he was.

The Chief Investigator: Mr Loeser, one last question. Why are you such a total prick all the time?

Mr Loeser: Excuse me?

The Chief Investigator: Do you think it’s something to do with your parents?

Mr Loeser: ‘Something to do with my parents.’ With insights like that you should be a psychiatrist.

The Chief Investigator: You don’t seem to think about them very much or talk about them very often.

Mr Loeser: That’s because they’re dead.

The Chief Investigator: Yes. The Teleportation Accident.

Mr Loeser: Not a Teleportation Accident. Just a traffic accident.

The Chairman: Accidents, like women, allude. You remember, Mr Loeser, what Nietzsche said about the French Revolution? ‘The text has finally disappeared under the interpretation.’ So often the case.

The Chief Investigator: A lot of people had to die to get you to America. Your parents, and all those millions of Jews. Quite an advance on Lavicini’s two dozen.

Mr Loeser: You say that as if they were human sacrifices. But I didn’t kill anyone and neither did Lavicini (except that one girl) and there was no causal connection at all.

The Chief Investigator: Perhaps not. But they died, and you don’t seem to care any more than if they’d been clockwork automata.

Mr Loeser: Oh, grow up. We’re all clockwork automata.

The Chairman: Mr Loeser, you ought to remember that you are a guest of this nation.

The Chief Investigator: Did you follow the Nuremberg Trials in the newspaper?

Mr Loeser: Not if I could help it. Can I please read my statement now?

The Chairman: Yes, Mr Loeser, you may now read your statement.

Mr Loeser: Oh, I’m sorry, I . . .

The Chairman: Is something wrong?

Mr Loeser: I don’t understand what’s written here.

The Chairman: You wrote it yourself, didn’t you?

Mr Loeser: Yes, I thought I did, but . . .

The Chairman: What does it say?

Mr Loeser: It says . . .

The Chairman: Yes?

Mr Loeser: It says, ‘Wake up, Egon, you’re going to be late. Put some clothes on while I call down for a cab. Wake up, Egon. Can you hear me? Wake up. Wake up.’

10

BERLIN, 1962

Fitzgerald Estate Says ‘
Sorrowful Noble Ones
’ is Forgery

A lawyer for the estate of F. Scott Fitzgerald released a statement yesterday charging that
The Sorrowful Noble Ones
, a purported lost work by the late author, is a deliberate fabrication. The statement reports that there is no reference to
The Sorrowful Noble Ones
anywhere in Mr Fitzgerald’s letters or notebooks, and that his daughter, Mrs Frances Scott Fitzgerald Lanahan, has no recollection of such a book ever being mentioned. This contradicts the claims of Herbert Wolf Scramsfield, a self-described former friend of Mr Fitzgerald who attracted international publicity last week when he announced that he had been guarding the manuscript since 1931.

Interviewed by telephone from his home in Paris, Mr Scramsfield strongly denied any allegations of fraud. ‘The fact is, Scott trusted me to decide when the world was ready for this book,’ Mr Scramsfield said. ‘That’s why it’s been a secret all this time. Honestly, I’m flattered that anybody thinks I could write something as good as this. But that’s preposterous. I never wrote a book in my life, let alone a masterpiece.’