Your Face Tomorrow: Poison, Shadow, and Farewell (67 page)

He fell silent, looking out at the placid river that I had come to know years before in the house of his brother Toby Rylands, as if he could still see his prisoner 'Carbuncle' vanishing into the crowds filling that distant port. I had seen that look in my father's eyes more than once, and in Wheeler's eyes too when he had slowly followed Mrs. Berry and me to the foot of the stairs and I had pointed out to them the place at the top of the first flight, where, during a feverish night spent at his house and after sitting up alone consulting books, I had found the bloodstain; it was a wide-eyed look that gave him a contradictory expression, almost like that of a child who discovers or sees something for the first time, something that does not frighten or repel or attract him, but which produces in him a sense of shock, or else some flash of intuitive knowledge, or even a kind of enchantment.

Wheeler took another long drink of water, almost unconsciously; it was hardly surprising that he was thirsty, he had been talking for a long time and, towards the end, had drifted into that strangely introspective loquacity of his. Apart from just one moment, I had been afraid all the time that he would decide to stop, because of fatigue or a more prolonged attack of aphasia or because he suddenly regretted telling me so much. He had never before spoken in such detail about his former life, or indeed about anything. 'Why is he doing this now?' I wondered. 'It's not as if I had insisted or even cajoled or flattered him into it, nor have I been trying to draw him out. I must ask him before I leave, if there's time.' I found everything he was telling me fascinating, but if I allowed him to wander off to the Southeast Asia of the special missions he had undertaken, there was a risk he wouldn't come back or only when it was too late, when Mrs. Berry was already calling us in to lunch, as a mother calls her children. Not that I thought Wheeler would keep quiet in her presence or that he would have many secrets from her, certainly not regarding Valerie's death, which is what I most wanted to know about just then, perhaps because I had recently seen my own wife and had felt her to be in danger; but one has to be careful with stories, sometimes they don't allow witnesses, not even silent ones, and if there are any witnesses, they stop. I could still hear Mrs. Berry at the piano, again she was playing some rather cheerful music—this time, I thought, pieces by the Italian Clementi, another exile, who had also lived in London for a long time, something from his popular piano exercises
Gradus ad Parnassum
or perhaps a sonata; he was another musician sidelined by Mozart (never, it seems, a good colleague), who had dismissed him as a mere
mechanicus
or automaton and with that remark had ruined him, perhaps because Clementi had dared to take part in a musical duel with him in Vienna before the Emperor, two virtuosi pitted against each other.

'What happened to Rendl?' I decided to get Peter back on track, but I didn't dare redirect him immediately to Valerie, although whatever I did, I might still end up losing her.

'Oh, yes, I'm sorry. That's why I don't like telling stories any more, especially in my current state. As you say in Spanish, I often go clambering about the branches—
voy por las ramas
—and I'm not sure how interesting those branches are. Ideally, they should be as relevant as the roots and the trunk, don't you think?'

'Oh, they're fascinating, Peter. The "Carbuncle" branch, for example, which, obviously, I've never heard before. It's just that I'm curious to know what happened to Rendl.'

'No one has heard this story before, not you or anyone. Until today,' he replied, and it seemed to me from the way he said this that he wanted to place due emphasis on the importance of this fact. 'Not even Mrs. Berry, not even Toby. Not even Tupra, who is always rummaging around in people's past lives. As I believe I told you once before, in theory, I'm not yet authorized to say
what my "special missions" were between 1936 and 1946, and the same applies to some I carried out afterwards, and I've kept my word. Until today. Of course for me to say "not yet" about anything is rather ironic and even in bad taste, since permission to speak will arrive too late. There's another reason to keep quiet about the "Carbuncle" affair: my superiors never found out that I'd let him go. Not that anything very bad would have happened to me just because I'd disobeyed an order: we weren't like the Germans or the Russians, and I didn't put anyone's life at risk by doing so. However, I preferred to tell them that, as recommended, I had found him a watery grave during the crossing. After all, the fellow was as untraceable and as unfindable as if he were lying at the bottom of the Strait of Malacca with a ridiculous golf bag tied around his neck, a bag I had, in fact, forced him to carry throughout the voyage, and which I allowed someone to steal from me in that same port. (Oh, yes, there were some real idiots in the Secret Service, like the ones who lumbered me with the golf clubs.) Having played that trick on the Japanese, it was in his best interests to be presumed dead, and there wasn't the slightest danger of him going and presenting himself to some other British person,
ni en pintura!
And he used the Spanish expression—meaning literally 'not even in the form of a painting,' but here meaning something like 'no chance' or 'no way'—perhaps because there is no exact equivalent in English, at least nothing quite as graphic. He'd had recourse to my language earlier when he'd referred to the expression 'me
voy por las ramas
and had then elaborated on the metaphor in English; such linguistic mixtures were commonplace between us, as they had been between Cromer-Blake and me in my Oxford phase. 'In Rendl's case, well, it wasn't just a matter of everything having its time to be believed, we were unfortunate in that the accusation wasn't false and that he wasn't in the regular German army, the
Wehrmacht,
let's say, where he might have received nothing more than a reprimand, a period of detention or a demotion, or all three. Even if he had been a Party leader, his deception, with luck—and depending on what friends he had and what influence—might well have been simply brushed under the carpet.' I noticed his use of the first person plural, 'we were unfortunate.' 'It was said that the SS, on the other hand, demanded that its members should be able to prove purity of blood as far back as 1750, at least in theory and in principle. Himmler must have realized that this was an impossibilty for most applicants and that the number of men in his unit would rapidly diminish once they started to suffer any war losses. And so from 1940 on, the SS depended in large measure on volunteers from countries considered "Germanic," this being especially true of the Waffen-SS, the combat arm, which filled up with Dutchmen, Flemings, Norwegians and Danes. And later on still, towards the end, they also admitted "non-Germanic" volunteers, Frenchmen, Italians, Walloons, Ukrainians, Belorussians, Lithuanians, Estonians, as well as Hungarians, Croats, Serbs, Slovenes, and Albanians. There was even an Indian Legion and Muslim divisions, I recall a Skanderbeg and a Kama division (and there was a third one, too, whose name I can't now recall); so much for Aryan purity. And there was even a tiny British Free Corps, which really only served for propaganda purposes. But the initial severity of the 1920s and '30s gives you an idea of how unacceptable it would have been for a veteran officer to have a not particularly remote Jewish ancestor, a grandmother to be precise, and for him to have lied about it and paid for incriminating documents to be removed in order to conceal the truth and so "contaminate" the corps. While the War was on, we didn't know exactly what had happened to Rendl after we'd unmasked him, although we did know that it must have worked, because his name disappeared from the lists of officers that periodically fell into the hands of MI6 or the PWE. Jefferys, or Delmer, or the East Germans, used to pass the accusations on to the Nazi authorities through our infiltrators, and the Nazis, I assume, then carried out their own investigations. It was relatively easy to pass such information on, especially in the occupied countries, where we could count on local collaborators. It wasn't quite so easy afterwards to find out what the results had been, to know which of our false reports had "taken" and what had been the fate of those affected, which forgeries had been accepted as authentic and which not, or only by checking which counterfeit "Jew" or "half-Jew" remained in his post, and was not removed or demoted or anything. At least we knew that Rendl, without having been declared or presumed dead, in action or in the rearguard, had ceased to be a Major or a Captain, or whatever he was at the time. He no longer appeared on the list.'

'And did that please Valerie? I mean, did it satisfy her?' I asked, spotting an opportunity to remind him of the person I was most interested in. This was pure naivete on my part, however, because she was also the person Wheeler was most interested in and he hadn't forgotten her for a moment. He never, in my presence, entirely lost the thread.

He raised one arm to his forehead—or it may have been his wrist to his temple—as if he were in pain or checking to see if he had a fever, or perhaps it was a gesture of horror. Whatever its intention, it was the same gesture he had made when he finally opened his eyes and uncovered his ears after the capricious passes of the helicopter that made a sound like a giant rattle or like an old Sikorsky H
-
5, 'the noise alone used to be enough to provoke panic,' on that other now distant Sunday in his garden by the river, as we sat on chairs with canvas covers the color of pale gabardine, on those chairs disguised as mammoths or tethered ghosts, when I wasn't yet working for the group and he recruited me and suggested that I join and become part of it. He took a while to respond, and I feared that he might have got stuck on some word again. However, it wasn't that, but rather—I thought a little later—because he preferred not to let me see all of his face while he was telling me what he had not yet told me, or that he needed to keep his arm or wrist near his eyes, so as to be able to cover them at once, just as I had been tempted to do several times—and as I had done, I seemed to remember, on more than one occasion—when Tupra was showing me those videos in his house. As if he wanted to be ready to hide or to put his head under his wing.

'Yes, it did satisfy her,' he said. 'I suppose you could say that. It had been her idea, and it was her first personal, individual, distinctive contribution to the development of the War or to the search for victory. She was congratulated by Jefferys on one of his subsequent visits. As I said, he would come for a week, leave a trail of ideas and then vanish, and not reappear again for a month or more. I've never heard him mentioned since or seen his name in any book, which is why I'm sure it was an alias. Sefton Delmer doesn't mention him, so who knows who he really was. But it also left her feeling unsatisfied, uneasy. She wondered what had happened to Ilse, Rendl's wife, what Ilse's situation would have been after her husband's downfall. He was our enemy and not just any enemy, not some poor recruit, but a Nazi volunteer, determined to join the SS. More than that, he was a complete imbecile; but he was also the brother-in-law of her old friend, and the husband of the older sister who had always been so kind and patient with her. The War, though, allowed little time for doubts or regrets. For that reason, some people remember times of war as the most vital of their entire existence, the most euphoric, and in a way they even miss them afterwards. War is the most terrible thing, but when you live through a war, you live with extraordinary intensity; the good thing about them is that they stop people worrying about silly things or getting depressed or pestering those around them. There's no time for any of that, you move ceaselessly from one thing to another, from anxiety to fear, from terror to an explosion of joy, and every day is the last day, no, more than that, the only day. You walk, you
exist,
shoulder to shoulder, everyone is busy trying to survive, to defeat the beast, to save themselves and to save others, and as long as panic doesn't spread, there's great camaraderie. Panic didn't spread here. You'll have heard your father and others talk about this, and your War was the same.'

'Yes, I have heard people talk about it, not so much my father, but mainly people who were still children at the time, because my father, although very young, was already an adult when the War began. I imagine, though, that you can only miss such times when your side wins, don't you think, Peter? It can't be the same for my father as it was for you.'

'Yes, you're right. I can't conceive what it would have been like if we'd lost, but if we had, I would probably only remember the horror, or have done everything I could to forget it, and perhaps, with great effort, would have succeeded. It's hard to imagine. I don't know, I can't know.' And Wheeler moved his arm away from his forehead and instead rested his cheek on his hand and sat pondering, as if the idea had never occurred to him.

'And what happened? What else?' That was what Tupra always used to say to me during our sessions together: 'What else, tell me more.' He would not do so again nor would there be any more sessions, that much was sure.

'The worst came after the end of the War, when the whole country raised its head to look around, and some, not many, started thinking about what had happened, what they had seen and how they had lived, and what they had been obliged to do. A few months after the surrender, Valerie received a letter from her friend Maria. They hadn't had any contact since 1939, since before war broke out. Maria didn't even know that Valerie was married and that her surname was now Wheeler. Val and I met in 1940 and got married in 1941, shortly before I turned twenty-eight and when she was twenty-one. The truth is that neither of them knew if the other was still alive. Maria sent the letter to Val's parents' address, and her mother forwarded it to Oxford, where we had moved after I'd been elected Fellow of The Queen's College in 1946. Val's father had died in one of the air raids on London. Valerie was overjoyed at first, but that feeling only lasted as long as it took her to open the envelope. That letter was our death sentence. Or rather, hers.' And when Peter added these words, some words Tupra had said came back to me, like a premonition, like an echo: 'While it isn't something any of us would wish for, we would nonetheless always prefer it to be the person beside us who dies, whether on a mission or in battle, in an air squadron or under bombardment or in the trenches when there were trenches, in a mugging or a raid on a shop or when a group of tourists is kidnapped, in an earthquake, an explosion, a terrorist attack, in a fire, it doesn't matter: even if it's our colleague, brother, father or even our child, however young. Or even the person we most love, yes, even them, anyone but us.'