Visibility (39 page)

Playing ignorant would no longer work, Herbert knew; nor would holding out.

Was it worth dying for?

No.

Would they kill him anyway?

Perhaps.

But if he continued to resist, they
would
kill him, of that he was sure.

It was no contest, really.

“It’s in Guy’s Hospital,” Herbert said.

“Guy’s?” Papworth said. “Good.”

Herbert could not see why that should be an especially propitious location, and from the look on his face
nor could Fischer, but that was hardly the most pressing of Herbert’s problems.

They ushered him into the backseat—no internal locks, he noticed—climbed into the front seats themselves, and set off.

“There you go,” Papworth said, more to Fischer than to Herbert. “I told you he’d be there.”

“A stroke of luck,” Fischer said.

“Luck be damned! Intuition.” Papworth chuckled. “Always trust your hunches.”

Papworth drove with skill and no little verve, slicing past the slower cars which had ventured cautiously out this morning.

Herbert looked out of the window and tried to calculate his options.

Papworth knew why Herbert had gone to Leconfield House, that much was clear. He would not have gone there himself otherwise. So should Herbert tell Papworth that he had the decrypt, or should he act as though he had found nothing?

The latter, clearly. The proof of Papworth’s treachery was Herbert’s only piece of leverage; to let Papworth know that he had it would seal his fate. Herbert’s elimination would then become desirable, even necessary.

No; his only hope of getting out of this alive was to give Papworth what he wanted and get away as quickly as possible.

When they crossed Waterloo Bridge, Herbert saw that the river was still shrouded in miasma, and the boats remained at anchor; no surprise, as waterways tended to be where fog settled first and lifted last.

A few minutes later, now on the south bank, they passed the approach road to Blackfriars Bridge.

From this point on, Herbert realized, they would follow the same route he had taken this morning in the ambulance.

In the half-light, seeing all the traffic islands and potholes, he caught his breath. He had been very, very lucky to get away unscathed on that drive.

The road outside London Bridge station was clogged by buses. Herbert counted seventeen in all, halted nose-to-tail in a gigantic red metal caterpillar, doubtless waiting for their drivers to come back and claim them.

Papworth parked as near to the foyer as he could without actually driving in, and they went inside.

The Emergency Bed Service warning was now at yellow, Herbert saw; the ratio of admissions to applications had dropped the wrong side of 80 percent.

Staccato whispers in the corridor, like bushfire.

There were no longer enough shrouds to wrap all the corpses in the mortuary.

There were more deaths than there had been in the cholera and influenza epidemics of times past.

In flats opposite Battersea power station, windows had fallen from their frames after sulfur dioxide had eaten through the metal hinges. Imagine what
that
was doing to your lungs.

Through corridors Herbert now knew well, walls smeared in blue green.

They passed two doctors chatting.

“I’m telling you, Reginald,” one was saying, “the best cure for a hemorrhaged ulcer is a large soluble capsule filled with Dreft washing powder and washed down with a gin and tonic. One every morning, that’s the prescription. It worked for Rodgers.”

“Rodgers?”

“Rodgers and Hammerstein. He’s the whitest man I know.”

Herbert kicked away the mocking bubbles of their laughter.

They reached the ward Hannah had been placed in.

“It’s in here,” Herbert said. “I’ll just get it for you.”

“We’re coming in with you,” Papworth said.

Herbert did not want to expose Hannah to any more danger than he had to; but there were plenty of people around, and if he could minimize the time spent there with her, then that would surely be all right.

He pushed open the door and walked in.

Hannah’s bed was empty.

“Where the hell is she?” Herbert said, to no one in particular.

“Are you her gentleman friend?”

The question had come from one of the other beds; a young man with a yellowing plaster on his left temple.

“That’s right.”

“She’s gone to see your mother. She said to tell you if you came back.”

“My mother?”

“Yes. One of the nurses was talking about what a coincidence it was, that they ended up in the same hospital. So she went to see her.”

Typical Hannah, Herbert thought; anyone else in her situation would have stayed in bed, rather than tapped her way through unknown corridors to make friends with a woman she had never met.

Herbert looked at Hannah’s bed again. Her cane was not there.

“Let’s go and see your mother, then,” Papworth said, his voice sunny for the benefit of the young man and anyone else who might have been listening.

“Yes,” Herbert said, forcing jollity into his voice, “let’s.”

They continued through the warren until they came to Mary’s ward.

She was not there either.

Angela was busying herself in the corner with one of the other patients.

“Angela,” Herbert said, “where’s my mother?”

“Oh, hello, Herbert.” She smiled at him, then at Papworth and Fischer. “Hello.”

They smiled back; Herbert’s friends, no need to worry.

“Two doors down, on the right.”

“Why did you move her?”

“A private room became available, and she kicked up such a fuss that we moved her there. More for our own peace and quiet than anything else, you know?”

She laughed, to let Herbert know she was joking—well, half-joking—and then turned back to the patient she had been attending.

Herbert was about to ask where Guy’s had got the spare room from, since they were on the yellow warning.

Then he realized that the previous occupant had probably joined the ranks of those on whom the fog had taken its toll in the most crowded part of the hospital: the mortuary.

They found Mary and Hannah at the third time of asking.

The room was small and almost dark; a small bedside lamp provided the only illumination. Mary was
sitting up in bed, with Hannah wrapped in blankets on the chair next to her.

“Is very simple,” Hannah was saying. “Marriage is love. Love is blind. So, marriage is institution for blind.”

“Stop it, dear,” Mary said through her chuckles. “It hurts me to laugh.”

“Hello,” Hannah said, having heard Herbert, or smelled him, or just had some sixth sense of his presence.

“Herbert!” Mary said. “Told you they’d find me a room, in the end. And your lady friend is making me laugh far more than is good for me.”

She looked at Papworth and Fischer, as though noticing them for the first time. “Who are you?” she asked.

Papworth closed the door behind him and stood in front of it, arms folded and shoulders out, like a linebacker.

“Hannah, I need your cane,” Herbert said.

“It’s in her
cane?”
Papworth asked.

When Herbert nodded, Papworth looked at Fischer, as if to ask,
How could we have missed that?

Fischer shrugged, and said nothing.

“What on earth is going on?” Mary asked.

“Is not here,” Hannah said.

“It’s not on your bed.”

“Must be down side.”

“I’ve had enough of this,” Papworth said.

“Without your cane, how did you get from your ward to here?” Herbert asked.

“Nurse bring me.”

Herbert turned to Papworth. “We’ll have to go back and get it.”

“She’s lying,” Fischer said. “The cane’s here.”

Hannah slumped suddenly, her eyes wide against skin quickly pale; a relapse. Herbert grabbed her under the armpits and held her upright. Her face was slippery with sweat, as though her skin had sprung a leak.

“Get a doctor!” Herbert yelled at Papworth.

“I’m a doctor,” Fischer said.

“A
real
doctor, damn you!”

“I
am
a real doctor.”

Hannah was staring at Fischer. Her gaze was so intense that Herbert could hardly believe she could not see. She was stammering, and Herbert had never seen her so uncollected.

Then, in the split second before she managed to get the words out, he knew what she knew, and what she was going to say.

“Hello, Uncle Pepi,” she said.

Mengele, Herbert thought uselessly; Mengele, Mengele. Mengele was here.

So obvious, when one knew. So obvious, when one put together the pieces.

Genetics, the new frontier of science; the battleground for the next world war.

Mengele, who had vanished from postwar Germany.

The Americans, recruiting Nazi scientists to stop them working for the Soviets.

Operation Paperclip, which had whitewashed the German scientists’ records and given them false names if necessary.

Dr. Fischer’s pursuit of DNA was the natural continuation of Mengele’s fiendish work in Auschwitz.

So obvious, when one saw Mengele’s unblinking basilisk stare, with all the biblical connotations, his
eyelids so heavily hooded that only half of his greenish brown irises were visible.

So obvious, when one considered Hannah’s reactions.

In Wheeler’s, she had excused herself instantly, almost as though she had taken a sudden turn. Mengele had been there. Even though he had not spoken in her presence, she must have sensed something, an injustice whose memory was locked so deep within her that, on reflection, she had simply refused to consider it.

The terror on her face in the small hours as the intruder rampaged through the flat; again, she must have known, even without knowing that she knew.

So obvious, when Herbert thought of the way in which that intruder had threatened to blind him.

So obvious, that here was pure iniquity, pulsing in endless waves of fission.

Hannah’s shrinking was almost visible. She had bowed her head and dropped her shoulders, clasping her hands in her lap. Suddenly she was fifteen again, the shy twin who would not have said boo to a goose, all her sparkling defiance—all
Esther’s
stubborn refusals—gone. She looked halfway catatonic; too far gone to speak.

For days, the radio had spoken of little but visibility, or the lack of it. With grudging admiration Herbert had to doff an imaginary cap to Mengele, for what could be more visible than a man hiding in plain view?

Mengele, too proud to go to ground in a Paraguayan jungle. While all those Jewish commandos were tramping around South America, their quarry was going about his unobtrusive daily business at the heart of the enemy.

At school, Herbert had occasionally played a game with an atlas, where each player in turn chose first a map and then a name on it, before obliging the others to guess at his selection.

The name could be anything—village, town, city, hill, mountain, river, lake, ocean, state, empire—as long as it appeared on the motley and perplexed surface of the chart.

The novice would opt for the most minutely lettered names, predictably deliberate in their obscurity and therefore easily deducible.

The adept, in contrast, would nominate words which stretched in outsize letters from one end of the map to the other, and which therefore tended to escape observation simply by being too obvious.

So it had been with Mengele; faced with the grievous nature of his crimes and his consequent need to hide forever, he had, with magnificent conceit, chosen not to conceal himself at all.

“Uncle Pepi?” Papworth said to Hannah, surprised. “You
know
him?”

Herbert saw the briefest flash of concern in Mengele’s eyes, and he knew instantly how deep the deception had run.

“His name is Josef Mengele, and he blinded her in Auschwitz,” Herbert said.

“What on earth is going on, Herbert?” my mother said. “Who
are
these people?”

“This man is called Fritz Fischer,” Papworth replied. “He worked at the Institute of Biological, Racial and Evolutionary Research at Berlin-Dahlen, and at the Frankfurt Institute for Hereditary Biology and Racial Hygiene.” Fischer had told Herbert much
the same the night before, but he had been economical with the institutes’ full titles, omitting any references to race or evolution. “He now works at Caltech with Linus Pauling,” Papworth continued. “He’s never been near Auschwitz in his life.”

“This man is Josef Mengele,” Herbert said. “He was camp doctor at Auschwitz.”

“Impossible.”

“Ask him.”

“Impossible,” Papworth repeated. “Auschwitz was staffed by the SS. The SS had their blood group tattooed under their armpits. We checked his armpit: no tattoo.”

“He refused to have one.”

“Why would he do that?”

Herbert turned to Mengele, questioning. Why, indeed?

Mengele would deny it, Herbert was sure; he was Fritz Fischer, he would say, and anyone who maintained otherwise was a fantasist.

Papworth, murderer of at least one and a double agent, a man whose entire life was based on the principle that black was white; would
he
believe? Would the arch-deceiver admit, even to himself—
especially
to himself—that he had been conned?

Even for Papworth, Herbert thought, wilfully consorting with a man like Mengele must have been beyond the pale.

“I refused to have the tattoo,” Mengele said, “because I was convinced that any competent surgeon would make a cross-match of blood types and not rely solely on the tattoo before administering a transfusion. Tattoos are ugly. I did not want one.”

Papworth ran his hand through his hair and puffed
his cheeks; but he did not move away from his guard post at the door.

He had come too far, and was too greedy, to be denied now, Herbert thought.

Papworth looked at his watch. “Come on,” he said. “We haven’t got all day.”

Once more, Herbert assessed his options.

Hannah was blind and, at least temporarily, stunned into submission.

His mother was sixty-five and bedridden.