The gondolier wore the mask of a plague doctor, with a long white beak, and when he shook his head the gibbous moon flashed in the red glass of the mask’s eyes. ‘You don’t want to go to Vignole.’
‘Why not?’ said Sauvage.
‘It’s nice enough on a warm afternoon, but there’s nothing much there. I haven’t been across for months. I’ll take you to Murano instead. Much more pleasant. Much more to do at night.’
‘I have business on the island.’
‘Are you in negotiations with an old lunatic to buy a dead vegetable patch?’
‘Perhaps I am.’
‘You really don’t want to go to Vignole. If I don’t talk you out of it now, you’ll just blame me afterwards. And rightly so. You’re a Frenchman, aren’t you? In Venice we look after our visitors.’
Sauvage, who wore an ordinary gilded bauta that left his mouth uncovered, took two gold zecchini out of the purse at his belt and pressed them into the gondolier’s gloved hand. ‘In that case, please indulge me.’
The gondolier was silent for a moment and then gestured for Sauvage to step down into the boat. As they pushed off into the lagoon, Sauvage looked up at the two guard towers that rose to the west above the ramparts of the Arsenal. Often since coming to Venice it had seemed to him that the city was not an island but a great loose raft, tied together only with bridges and washing lines and the complacency of pigeons, ready to cut loose and float off south if at any time it began to lose interest in the mainland.
‘Why do you wear that particular mask?’ he said.
‘Plagues come into Venice by sea,’ said the gondolier. ‘Not for a while now, but they will again. We in the boats live in the kingdom of plague just as much as any doctor.’ He rowed fast but there was no exertion in his voice. ‘Also, my nephews love it.’
When they got to the other shore, a wolf sat there watching them like something crystallised in an alembic out of the reflection of the moonlight on the surface of the water. For a moment the beauty of it made Sauvage’s spine ring like a xylophone, but then the gondolier banged his oar several times on the side of the boat and the wolf rose and trotted away, unhurried, on its surprisingly spindly legs.
‘You’ll wait for me here?’ said Sauvage when they knocked against the little wooden jetty.
‘I’d better come with you. For all you know there could be a whole pack near by.’
‘I’ve never heard of the wolves in Venice attacking a human being.’
‘Not over there,’ said the gondolier, pointing his thumb back in the direction of the Arsenal. ‘But out on Vignole they don’t get so many scraps.’
So Sauvage waited while the gondolier tied up his boat, and then they set off along the shore towards a small church, with only the stump of a collapsed steeple, which stood next to a copse of trees.
‘Do you know anything about that place?’ said Sauvage. After a week in Venice, he was struck by the silence of Vignole at night.
‘Not much. It’s old, I think. Goes back to Barbarigo’s time at least. But during the plague that killed my great-grandmother, the priest there started taking in the sick. Before long it filled up, and then the priest himself died, and after the plague went away there was no one who wanted to take it over.’
Instead of heading straight for the church, Sauvage made his way up the low hill on his right, and the gondolier followed. When they got to the top, Sauvage unfolded a sheet of paper that had been tucked inside his purse: a workmanlike pencil sketch of the view from the hill on which they stood, with the Arsenal on the left and the marshes stretching off to the right. ‘I came here to check something I couldn’t quite confirm from the other shore. This drawing was made fifteen years ago by a Siamese man who came to Venice to learn to paint. The church should be here in the foreground, next to the trees. But it isn’t.’
‘Maybe he just left it out. Orientals are godless, after all.’
‘He’s a Christian, actually, and he didn’t leave anything out. I asked him.’
‘You met him?’
‘Yes. He’s still in Venice. I bought this from him and he made me a gift to go with it.’ Sauvage took a small cloth bag from his belt and showed the contents to the gondolier.
‘What are those?’
‘What do they look like?’
‘Armoured raspberries.’
‘They’re called lychees. They come from Siam.’
‘How do they get all the way to Venice?’
‘I don’t know.’ Sauvage ate one, then peeled three more and dropped them on the grass. ‘Maybe the wolves will find these and it will make up for some of the scraps they don’t get.’ It saddened him to think that in a hundred years there would be no wild animals left in cities.
They went back down the hill towards the church. Pink flowers burst from the bark of the Judas trees near by as if their trunks were stuffed beyond capacity. ‘Why are you so interested in this church?’ said the gondolier.
‘You say it was — oops — abandoned sixty years ago,’ said Sauvage, nearly tripping on a dead vine. ‘And that’s how it looks. But fifteen years ago, it wasn’t here. Don’t you think that’s interesting?’
As they came closer, they could see that not only had the steeple collapsed but also the front wall of the church, leaving the whole structure open like a cart shed. Inside, there was nothing but rotting pews leading up to an altar and a stained-glass window at the opposite end, which confided none of its colours in the moonlight. ‘Have you ever seen anyone enter or leave this church?’ said Sauvage.
‘I told you, I don’t often come to Vignole. But I can assure you no one uses this place.’
‘How can you be certain?’
The gondolier pointed. ‘Bats.’ And indeed Sauvage could see the silhouettes of dozens of the little creatures hanging upside down from the rafters, a few of them stirring or swaying in the gloom. The stone under his feet was scurfy with dried guano. ‘Rats don’t mind people. Nor do cats or birds or spiders. But bats can’t stand to be disturbed too often.’
‘Let’s see if you’re right,’ said Sauvage, moving further into the church. He spoke louder than usual, trying to weigh the echo.
‘We shouldn’t be here. A lot of people died where we stand.’
‘I’m not afraid of ghosts.’
‘We should go back to the boat.’
‘If I’m wrong, we will.’
‘Turn back.’
‘Not yet.’
‘I told you to turn back, Frenchman.’
‘Or what?’ said Sauvage. ‘You’ll peck me to death with your beak?’
And then Sauvage was flat on the ground with the gondolier kneeling on his back and a blade of some kind pressed against the side of his neck. ‘De Gorge sent you, didn’t he?’ shouted the gondolier.
‘No! De Gorge is my enemy!’
‘How many others does he have in Venice? Tell me or I’ll kill you.’
‘My name is Bernard Sauvage, son of Nicolas Sauvage.’
‘I think I’ll just kill you either way.’
But at that moment the air itself seemed to shuffle, faster than Sauvage could follow, like a card-sharp setting up a crooked game of bonneteau, and at the same time there was a sound of cogs turning and pulleys running, and then there was a bright doorway in front of him where before there had only been darkness and empty space. If the option to inhale had at that moment been available to Sauvage, which it wasn’t, he would definitely still have been rendered breathless.
‘Let him go, Melchiorre.’
The order wasn’t much more than a croak. But the gondolier did as he was told. Sauvage got to his feet, rubbing a bruised shoulder. Probably, he thought, it was only his cheap bauta that had saved him from a broken nose when he was knocked forward.
The room beyond the doorway was lit by oil lamps, and far bigger than it had any right to be. In the centre of the room was a bed, and in the bed lay a man in a mask. The wooden frame of the bed was hinged in the middle so that the man could sit up in it, and a draughtsman’s table was suspended by a complicated skeletonic sort of crane at an angle in front of the man so that he could work without changing his position. At the edges of the room were workbenches cluttered with tools and brushes and paint and twine and cloth and metal.
‘Come inside, boy, and sit down,’ said the man in the bed, gesturing to a stool. As he entered the room, Sauvage reached instinctively to take off his bauta out of respect, but the man stopped him. ‘No, keep your mask on,’ he said. ‘It’s Carnival. I intend to die in mine.’
‘The Théâtre des Encornets,’ said Sauvage softly as he came closer.
‘You recognise it?’
‘Of course. I lived in Paris until the year it was destroyed.’
The man’s mask was a gilded replica of the grand front of the opera house as it had stood until 1679. The density of detail was astonishing, a hundred times more exquisite than any doll’s house or architective ornament Sauvage had ever seen, so that you could see every nipple on every nude on every marble frieze; and yet the mask was not quite mimetic, because the façade had been artfully distorted to imply the shape of a human face; and not just a general human face, but the face of a man who had visited Sauvage’s childhood home in Paris several times before Sauvage’s father’s death.
‘Was it difficult to find me?’ said Lavicini.
‘Very,’ said Sauvage.
‘So you know the lengths to which I’ve gone to hide myself. And yet you didn’t care who you brought with you?’
Sauvage glanced at Melchiorre. ‘He told me that he hadn’t been to Vignole for months. But he hopped over that loose plank in the jetty without even looking down. I knew he was lying.’
‘Yes, Melchiorre has been very loyal.’
‘When did you build this place?’
‘Eleven years ago. A few seasons after I left Paris.’
‘Why build a false church? Why not just a false cottage? A false barn?’
‘No one ever looks at a chapel and wonders what it’s hiding.’
‘And the bats?’
‘Melchiorre, show him a bat,’ said Lavicini. The gondolier duly retrieved an object from one of the workbenches and then came back to show it to Sauvage. The bat had an iron skeleton, black velvet wings, and no face or feet. ‘They hang on a frame, and after Melchiorre winds the spring, they move in their sleep all night.’
‘And that wolf?’
‘The wolves are real.’ Lavicini coughed as if his lungs were brimming with hot tallow, and Sauvage was glad of his mask because he couldn’t help but wince. ‘Is it common knowledge that I am alive?’
‘De Gorge knows, of course, but not many others. It took me a long time to be sure.’
‘Yes. No one should ever have been able to find out. But after everything went wrong, I started to be careless. I didn’t bother to take all the precautions I’d planned.’
‘What do you mean, “everything went wrong”?’
‘You still haven’t worked out what happened at the Théâtre des Encornets?’
‘I know most of it, I think. I know you planned it all. But there’s one thing I’ve never been able to understand.’
‘What?’
Sauvage hesitated. ‘You were a friend of my father’s. He thought you were a good man. I can’t believe you would have let two dozen men and women die like that. It doesn’t make sense.’
‘I did not let two dozen men and women die.’
‘I watched them dig out the bodies the next morning.’
‘You’ve seen my bats, and you still believe that?’
‘So no one died that night?’ said Sauvage.
The other man shook his head. ‘That is not quite correct either.’
The circumflex of reflected candlelight in the drop of almond syrup that oozed slowly down the pale dough of the choux bun at the creamy summit of the chocolate croquembouche that was served one summer night in 1677 in the patisserie belonging to the only real Parisian pastry chef in Venice: that had been Lavicini as he sat opposite the ninth of de Gorge’s deep-pocketed emissaries to visit him since he left his job at the Arsenal to become a designer for the opera. He, too, hung in that drop of syrup, quite ready, if it was licked up by this fat Frenchman, to be licked up with it. Every previous offer from de Gorge he had rejected out of hand. He didn’t want to work for a monster like that. But the day after Pentecost the only woman Lavicini had ever really loved had told him that God wanted her to go back to her husband. His friend Foscolo, the playwright, had drowned himself in the Lagoon last year after a courtesan broke his heart, but Lavicini wasn’t seriously considering suicide. All the same, he couldn’t bear to go on living in the same city as his Wormwood, his star who had made the waters bitter. He didn’t care any more where he was, or what he had to do, as long as he would never again have to worry about catching sight of her by accident as he hurried across the Rialto Bridge. So he waited for the Frenchman facing him to take his first bite of the croquembouche, and then announced that this time he was ready to take de Gorge’s job. The lackey guffawed in triumph, spraying flecks of cream across the table, and shouted for brandy. Two weeks later, without ever having quite sobered up, Lavicini arrived in Paris.
He’d been at the Théâtre des Encornets nearly a year before his Wormwood wrote to him. She said she’d been arguing with God night and day ever since he left. And God simply would not back down. He still wanted her to be faithful. But she didn’t care so much what God wanted any more. God could hang. If Lavicini would come back to Venice, and forgive her for her indecision, then they could be together again.
He nearly jumped on a horse there and then. But he had another nine years left on his contract, and he knew de Gorge defended his contracts like other men defended their virgin daughters. He might get away for a few weeks, but eventually he would be hunted down, beaten, and brought back to Paris. The only way out of the contract was death.
And it was around this time that his friend Villayer disappeared. Lavicini guessed straight away that Louis had ordered the assassination, but it wasn’t until a few weeks afterwards that he discovered it was his own employer who had actually paid the assassin. There was often business in Paris with which Louis didn’t wish to dirty his soft hands even from the safe distance of Versailles, so de Gorge was sometimes called upon to make arrangements on his behalf, and in return Louis kept on attending the Théâtre des Encornets, ensuring that it would remain the most fashionable venue in the capital. Lavicini wanted to avenge his friend, but much more formidable men than he had gone against de Gorge and ended up dining on their own noses and ears. Also, he had no appetite for violence. Instead, he decided that he would have to find a way of staging his own death that would not just utterly dupe de Gorge, but also utterly destroy de Gorge’s livelihood. And some months later, when Nicolas Sauvage died in the same circumstances as Villayer, it redoubled his determination.
On the night of the premiere of The Lizard Prince, twenty-five costumed automata sat fidgeting in private audience boxes. Lavicini had been obliged to buy them all tickets at full price under false names. Many years earlier, when Louis XIV was still a child, a toymaker called Camus had reportedly designed for him a little carriage complete with mechanical horses, mechanical coachman, mechanical page, and mechanical lady passenger, but Lavicini’s own creations were so far advanced that he did not believe even such experienced eyes as the Sun King’s would recognise them for what they really were. Hidden in the ceiling above the automata, packed into crates along with two tons of broken ice, were twenty-five corpses that Lavicini had purchased from a porter at a failing anatomy school, explaining that he was an upholsterer who had received a very elaborate and unusual request from an aristocratic English client. And in place all throughout the Théâtre des Encornets were the contrivances that would be required to give the appearance that it was the devil himself who had destroyed part of the Théâtre des Encornets when he came to claim the soul of Adriano Lavicini, the Sorceror of Venice, while leaving no identifiable trace of the automata.
Towards the end of the second act, Lavicini poked his head hastily into every room backstage to make sure they were empty, and then slipped out of the theatre by a side door. Some superstitious instinct prevented him from turning back to watch as an apocalyptic rumble rose within the building behind him. Instead, he hurried on towards the convent of the Filles du Calvaire, opposite which there was a cold vacant room above a butcher’s shop where he intended to spend his last night in Paris.
So it wasn’t until the next morning, when he returned in disguise to the ruins of the Théâtre des Encornets, that he heard about the dead ballerina. He moved through the crowd of onlookers, listening to conversations, needing to be certain that the truth was not suspected. And indeed no one knew that Lavicini was still alive. But everyone knew that a dancer called Marguerite was dead. He had to wander a long time before he could complete the story: she had fainted at her first sight of the Extraordinary Mechanism, and had then been carried backstage and deposited on a couch, where she was still lying when the opera house collapsed. Lavicini remembered then that the couch faced away from the door to that dressing room. That was why he hadn’t noticed her on his final backstage inspection. He’d never spoken to Marguerite, but he remembered her face, because Montand always seemed to pay special attention to her during the rehearsals.
Lavicini knew then that he could never see his Wormwood again. He’d planned to live with her in Venice under a false name until her husband died, and then they’d run away to some exotic place where no one had ever heard the name Lavicini. But now, if he returned to her, he would have to confess that a girl had died to help bring them back together, as if sacrificed to their love, a proxy for the suicide that Lavicini himself hadn’t had the conviction to commit. Adultery was one thing, but the guilt of being party to a murder would drive his Wormwood out of her senses. She couldn’t ever find out. But he couldn’t keep back the truth if he was with her. He decided it was better if, like the rest of the world, she never found out that he’d survived the destruction of the Théâtre des Encornets.
Nevertheless, he went back to Venice. If he couldn’t have his Wormwood, he would at least have his home. Out on Vignole, he could live out his penance in a sort of exile, while still in sight of the Arsenal, where he’d worked as a younger, happier man. And during the months of Carnival he could wander the city, like Hephaestus returned to Olympus, in the masks he built and painted like tiny stage sets the rest of the year. Even if he jostled past his Wormwood a dozen times in a day, it wouldn’t matter, because he would never have to know it was her.
‘All the way to Paris, and all the way back, because of a woman?’ said Sauvage when Lavicini had finished his story.
‘Because of two women, really.’ Lavicini coughed again for a long time. ‘Why have you come here?’
Sauvage gathered his resolve. ‘I’ve written a play,’ he said, ‘and I want you to design the set. I had to find you because no one else can do it.’
‘I have many talented successors in Paris.’
‘No. The play is set two and a half centuries in the future. I don’t believe there is another man alive who could make that seem real. It’s about a young man whose friends are about to be murdered by a tyrant just like the Sun King. But instead of trying to save them, he runs away to a colony in the New World.’
‘What happens to him?’
‘He meets a man who has become very wealthy from the sale of currycombs, who sends him to find an inventor who is trying to build an Extraordinary Mechanism for the Almost Instantaneous Transport of Persons from Place to Place. But not a stage device like yours — a real one. A sort of reproducible miracle. The hero does find the inventor, but he also encounters an agent of the Ottoman Empire who wants to take the inventor back to Constantinople.’
‘Does this agent succeed?’
‘I haven’t decided yet. The important thing is that the hero comes to realise his cowardice and he returns to the land of his birth to overthrow the tyrant. But he is too late to save his friends.’
‘De Gorge always used to tell me that the hero of a successful play must be a man the audience would be happy to invite into their homes for supper. Otherwise no one will want to sit through the whole thing. Your “hero” who abandons his friends to their deaths — he doesn’t sound like that sort of man.’
‘De Gorge knows no more than a low pimp.’
‘A very astute low pimp.’
‘The point is that the hero has a change of heart. He redeems himself by his rebellion. Without that, the story is meaningless.’
‘And I assume you hope to encourage the same sort of thinking in your audience?’
‘Louis killed my father. I don’t know how else to take my revenge. I’m no Cromwell. I’m a playwright.’
Lavicini shook his head. ‘I’m sorry, Bernard, but I can’t design your set. I’m much too ill. Before more than a few more moons have risen, I’m going to die here, inside the Théâtre des Encornets, just as I was supposed to in the first place. You were lucky to find me still warm. I’m grateful for your visit, but I’m afraid you’ll leave empty-handed. Swap masks with Melchiorre before you go. If you were followed, that will cause some confusion.’
‘I certainly will not leave empty-handed.’
‘If you want to keep the clockwork bat you are welcome to it.’
‘No,’ said Sauvage. ‘I’ll leave with your story. You’ve told me a part, but I want the rest, the entirety, from the very beginning. I’ll write it down and then after you’re dead I’ll publish it and it won’t be lost. You know, my father wanted to write the story of his life. But he never had a chance before he died.’
‘I won’t pretend I have no pride left here in my languor, but are you quite certain?’ said Lavicini, amused. ‘There is a lot to tell.’
‘Of course.’
‘Very well. I hope you won’t come to rue the idea as the hours drag on. Melchiorre, would you be kind enough to bring our guest some paper and ink and a quill, and myself a little water?’ The gondolier did so. Lavicini drank and then sat back against his pillow. ‘Ready, Bernard?’
‘Yes.’
‘So then: I was born in Paris in the year of grace 1648…’
The Chairman: The Committee will come to order. The next witness will be Egon Loeser.
The Chief Investigator: When and in what country were you born, Mr Loeser?
Mr Loeser: I was born in Berlin, Germany, in 1907.
The Chief Investigator: And you are appearing before the Committee in response to a subpoena served on you Tuesday, 23 September — is that correct?
Mr Loeser: Yes.
The Chief Investigator: Are you a citizen of the United States?
Mr Loeser: No, I’m not a citizen. I still have only my first papers.
The Chief Investigator: When did you acquire your first papers?
Mr Loeser: In 1935, when I washed up on the shore of this country.
The Chief Investigator: Where do you live now?
Mr Loeser: In New York City with my wife.
The Chief Investigator: At what address?
Mr Loeser: At 36 West 73rd Street, near Central Park. Shall I expect a Christmas card?
The Chief Investigator: Mr Loeser, are you now, or have you ever been, a member of the Communist Party?
Mr Loeser: No. But I have a short statement I’d like to make.
The Chairman: Mr Loeser, you may read your statement after you testify.
Mr Loeser: I’d like to read it now.
The Chairman: Only after you are finished with the questions and the answers.
Mr Loeser: I’ve already told you I’m not a communist. I have never had any political affiliation. What else is there to say?
The Chief Investigator: Mr Loeser, you have been called before the Committee as a witness because we are investigating the nature of the association in the years 1934 to 1940 between a certain Soviet agent operating in Los Angeles and the novelist and screenwriter Stentor Mutton, who will testify tomorrow. Is it correct to say that you have some special knowledge of that association?
Mr Loeser: Most of the time I had no idea what was going on.
The Chief Investigator: But you were acquainted with both parties?
Mr Loeser: Yes, I knew Drabsfarben and I knew Mutton. Well, I still know Mutton.
The Chairman: Excuse me, Mr Loeser, but what are you doing?
Mr Loeser: What does it look like I’m doing?
The Chairman: It looks like you’ve taken off your tie and you’re whirling it around your head like a gaucho’s bolas.
Mr Loeser: Yes. I wanted to see if it would show up in the transcript.
The Chairman: What do you mean?
Mr Loeser: The strange thing about a transcript like this is that it contains no stage directions. I could beat you to death with your own gavel and the stenographer wouldn’t even be able to hint that it had happened unless somebody got up and said, ‘Let the record show that Mr Loeser has beaten the Chairman to death with his own gavel.’
The Chairman: Are you making a threat against the life of a congressional official, Mr Loeser?
Mr Loeser: I was only making a theoretical point.
The Chairman: Please put down your tie. May I remind you that you are standing before a Congressional Committee appointed by law?
Mr Loeser: But I don’t think I’m standing before any such thing. I don’t think I’m standing at all. I think I’m asleep in bed in the Shoreham Hotel about three miles away from the Capitol.
The Chairman: How can you possibly justify such an assertion, Mr Loeser?
Mr Loeser: Because I don’t remember getting here. All I remember is making love to my wife a little while after the alarm clock woke us.
The Chief Investigator: In what position?
Mr Loeser: I was on top of her, with my right arm hooked under her left knee in order to hold her thigh up against her stomach.
The Chief Investigator: Why not both arms under both knees?
Mr Loeser: That’s a lot of work. I’m forty years old. May I continue?
The Chief Investigator: Please.
Mr Loeser: I ejaculated, withdrew, rolled off on to my side, kissed her on the neck, and closed my eyes. Then before she went into the bathroom to take out her little rubber womb veil, she shook my shoulder and said, ‘Egon, you’d better not doze off again, it’s already nine and you have to be across town in an hour.’ I grunted in full and sincere agreement. Then I dozed off again. I think I may still be dreaming.
The Chairman: Does this feel like a dream to you?
Mr Loeser: Not really. But that doesn’t prove anything. Schopenhauer would say we all have a case of chronic ontological agnosia. ‘Life and dreams are pages of one and the same book.’ Our senses give us a few flickers and hums and tickles, and we mistake those representations for real objects and real experiences, even though every single bleary morning reminds us that we can’t tell dreams apart from life until we wake up. None of us are really any saner than Colonel Gorge. I loathe Brecht—
The Chairman: Mr Brecht is scheduled to appear before this Committee in a few weeks so please keep your language respectful.
Mr Loeser: — but I can’t help admiring the way he makes it impossible for the audience to forget that they’re only watching actors on a stage. In the theatre we develop a special temporary type of ontological agnosia and Brecht injects us with the cure against our will. But who can give us the same injection at double the dose when we’re out of the theatre and walking down Broadway? Nobody reads the philosophers any more.
The Chief Investigator: So what you’re contending, Mr Loeser, is that history is a nightmare from which you are trying to awake?
Mr Loeser: No. History is an alarm clock I want to throw through the window. Can I make my statement now?
The Chief Investigator: Not yet. Why did you come to the United States?
Mr Loeser: For the good of my health. If I’d dropped dead before I left Berlin the doctors would have cut open my spleen and they would have held it up to be photographed and they would have said, ‘Do you see these patches here and here, the colour and texture of rotten dog food? The patient was only just twenty-six, and yet we wouldn’t normally expect to find such a toxic accumulation of bitterness and jealousy in a man younger than sixty years old.’ That, and Adele’s eyes.
The Chief Investigator: What will you say if you are asked that same question again later this morning?
Mr Loeser: I have no idea. By the way, are we speaking in German or English? I can’t tell, which really does suggest this might be a dream. You two already seem to be on the point of admitting it.
The Chairman: No more of that sort of talk, please.
The Chief Investigator: What is your occupation?
Mr Loeser: I have none. I was once a set designer.
The Chief Investigator: Why did you give that up?
Mr Loeser: After I read the Lavicini book, there didn’t seem to be any point any more. He’d already covered it all. The man was perhaps the second ever professional set designer, after Torelli, and yet he anticipated almost every advance in the history of set design. Today, we only remember his conjuring machines, but he wasn’t just a technician. He was an avant-gardist.
The Chief Investigator: Have you really adopted as your ‘role model’ a man who abandoned the city of his birth, and of all his early success, because of a break-up? Not a death, not even a divorce, just a break-up? Is that rational?
Mr Loeser: Thoroughly rational, yes. I am full of admiration for anyone with such strength of character. Sometimes when there’s a dead skunk in your roof you just have to write off the whole house.
The Chief Investigator: If you’re no longer a set designer, how do you support yourself and your wife?
Mr Loeser: For most of the war we were almost penniless. Mildred’s father cut off her inheritance when we eloped. But then a judge declared, with retroactive effect, that he was mentally unfit to make a will.
The Chief Investigator: Why was that?
Mr Loeser: Gorge’s ontological agnosia, which I mentioned before, has developed to its inevitable final stage. Now, he just has to hear a word spoken aloud and he will see before him whatever that word represents. It’s as if his disease got so strange that it circled all the way round to boring again — you can hardly tell him apart from any other delirious old man. Even Woodkin can’t talk to him, except in pure abstractions, like bad transcendental poetry. Mildred goes back to Pasadena sometimes to see him.
The Chief Investigator: They reconciled?
Mr Loeser: Yes. He says he only changed his will because he wanted her to come back, and he’s forgiven her for going away. He still calls me Krauto, though. ‘My son-in-law, Krauto.’
The Chief Investigator: Now, please relate the circumstances in which you received your subpoena.
Mr Loeser: I was eating dinner with my wife and a man came to the door who described himself as a United States deputy marshal. He wanted to give me a document of some sort. I didn’t tip him. My wife and I sat down and I handed her the document and asked her to read it to me.
The Chief Investigator: Couldn’t you have read it yourself?
Mr Loeser: I was enjoying my steak. But then she said something about Congress, something about un-American activities, and something about going to Washington to testify, so straight away I dropped my cutlery and snatched the document out of her hand.
The Chief Investigator: Why so alarmed?
Mr Loeser: For some weeks I’d been in correspondence with a librarian at the Library of Congress about their copy of Midnight at the Nursing Academy. I was posing as a researcher from Columbia University, but my real intention was to travel to Washington, break daringly into the Library after dark, and steal the book. When the subpoena arrived, my first assumption was that my plot had been discovered — by some means I couldn’t even imagine, since obviously I hadn’t said a word to anyone — and I was being called to trial. I didn’t know what to do. I just stared at the subpoena in silence. (I have never met anyone who is more comfortable than Mildred with long and unexplained silences.) At last my wife finished eating and lit a cigarette. ‘We have to go to Washington,’ I blurted with a pubescent glissando.
The Chief Investigator: What was her response?
Mr Loeser: She simultaneously rolled her eyes and blew cigarette smoke out of the side of her mouth as if her whole face was being hoisted to the right. This occurs only once every few weeks due to the respective periodicities of the two actions and I find it supremely beautiful.
The Chief Investigator: More beautiful than her smile?
Mr Loeser: Yes. Anyway, she very seldom smiles.
The Chief Investigator: More beautiful than her laugh?
Mr Loeser: Yes. Anyway, she very, very seldom laughs. Except when she’s reading Krazy Kat.
The Chief Investigator: What’s Krazy Kat?
The Chairman: I believe it’s a newspaper comic strip.
Mr Loeser: By George Herriman, yes. Last year, for Christmas, on the recommendation of the bookseller Wallace Blimk, I bought her a 192-page Krazy Kat anthology published in New York by Henry Holt and Company with an introduction by EE Cummings. I’ve never understood what’s funny about it, but quite often I come home to find her slumped in an armchair with the book in her lap, snotty and straggly and red-faced like someone who’s just been informed of the death of a close relative.
The Chief Investigator: Doesn’t that make you jealous of Herriman?
Mr Loeser: A bit, but he died in 1944. And has never, to my knowledge, given my wife an orgasm.
The Chief Investigator: To return to the matter at hand, for how long were you under your misapprehension about the nature of the subpoena?
Mr Loeser: All the way to Washington. As a matter of fact, I was still squashed under it like a cockroach yesterday afternoon, when I left the hotel to buy some stockings for my wife, who had forgotten to bring a spare pair. I was walking down Calvert Street when I caught sight of someone it took me a moment to recognise. I hadn’t seen him for nearly fifteen years. It was Hans Heijenhoort — Ziesel’s sidekick from Berlin. We shook hands and went into a coffee shop to sit down.
‘When did you leave Germany?’ I asked him when my hot chocolate had arrived.
‘At the end of the war,’ Heijenhoort said. He has strong, almost heroic features, but his face is both much too long and, at the base, much too wide, so it’s only when he bows his head and the trapezoid proportions are foreshortened by perspective that he’s contingently quite handsome, like something from a parable about humility.
‘And you live in Washington?’ I said.
‘No, I live in New Mexico. I’m here for some meetings. Are you still in touch with any of the old gang from university?’
We began to go through them one by one, as people do in these situations. ‘Did you hear what happened to Ziesel?’ I asked.
‘Yes. Terrible.’
‘I was right there in the room. What about Klugweil?’
‘Yes, I heard about that too,’ said Heijenhoort.
‘I didn’t! What happened to him?’
‘Oh, quite an exciting story. He got conscripted into the Wehrmacht and ended up working for an army propaganda unit stationed in Paris. No one seems to know all the details, but somehow he got involved in the Resistance over there — something to do with a girl. And he became a very enthusiastic traitor. He used to pass along information, for instance, about where the next security sweeps were supposed to take place. Well, one day he realised that his commanding officer had begun to suspect him, and he fled. The Resistance hid him in a farmhouse just outside Paris, and the following morning they were going to try to smuggle him out of France. But that same night the SS came to the farmhouse — perhaps the Resistance had a traitor of their own. They beat him up, tied him to a chair, and then set the farmhouse on fire with paraffin. They told him he was going to burn alive.’
‘And then?’ This was not a dignified moment, I decided, to bring up the time Klugweil unacceptably started sleeping with my ex-girlfriend.
‘After the farmhouse was reduced mostly to ashes, the SS men went back inside for a look around. They were expecting to find Klugweil’s blackened skeleton. But there was nothing there. He’d escaped out of a window. Several months later, he turned up in Switzerland.’
‘What happened?’
‘The SS know how to tie a man up, of course. Even if you could dislocate your own arms, you wouldn’t have been able to wriggle out of those ropes. But Klugweil managed it. I heard he was never willing to explain exactly how.’
‘What about Achleitner?’ I said.
‘He died in the Battle of Berlin.’
‘And Blumstein?’
‘Dora.’
‘Who’s that?’
‘A work camp.’
‘Oh.’ I was silent for a while. Then I said, ‘What were you up to during the war?’
‘Physics. Just the same as ever.’
‘Still at university?’
‘No.’
‘Where, then?’
Heijenhoort picked up his cup of coffee and then put it down again without taking a sip. ‘For a certain period I was attached to the Ordnance Department.’
‘No! You were working for the Wehrmacht?’
‘Just an accident of organisational structure. My work was almost all theoretical physics. I wasn’t building rockets underground with slave labour like von Braun.’
I leaned back in my seat, suffused with gloating warmth. ‘You know, Heijenhoort, I always thought it was unnatural how indiscriminately nice and helpful you always were to everyone, and now I know I was right! I bet you were just as indiscriminately nice and helpful to the Third Reich! Good nature is deviant, like I’ve always said. You should meet my wife, she could teach you a thing or two.’
Heijenhoort got up and started to put on his scarf. ‘I had no choice, Loeser. You wouldn’t understand. You weren’t there.’
‘Oh, Hans, come on, don’t go! I haven’t seen you in fifteen years!’ I knew he wouldn’t be so self-assured as to leave after I’d asked him to stay. And sure enough he sat down again. ‘How did you get out of Germany?’ I said.
‘In that last April of the war, we were evacuated from the laboratory. We ended up hiding in the mountains. We weren’t under guard any more, but we were terrified that the SS would shoot us all just so no one else could have us. The next worst thing would have been the Russians. They might have taken us straight back to Moscow for torture. The British or the French would have been all right. But it was the Americans. They made us some good scrambled eggs. After that they put us in a barracks for a few weeks, and then on a plane to Boston, and then a train to New Mexico.’
‘And now you’re working for the State Department?’
‘Yes.’
I wondered how different I, too, might have found America if my first years there had been arranged for me in detail by some government office — and then as a sort of toy theodicy I tried to imagine the baffling aims that such an office would have to have had in order to arrange my first years there as they actually were. ‘Is Cordell Hull making you read a lot of H.P. Lovecraft?’ I said.
‘Who’s H.P. Lovecraft? Anyway, no, Hull’s not there any more. He resigned a few years ago. Sarcoidosis.’
‘So what are you doing for them?’
‘I’m sorry, Loeser, but I’m sure you understand that I can’t say anything about that.’
‘Presumably the same sort of thing as you were doing for the Ordnance Department,’ I said. ‘That’s why you’re valuable. But what did the Ordnance Department care about theoretical physics? Was it anything to do with the atomic bomb?’
‘No.’
‘What, then? Are you going to make me guess? That’s no use. I spent a few years at CalTech but I don’t know anything about the state of the art. Apart from ghosts and robots and that fellow trying to build a machine for making eel congee out of electric eels that was itself powered by electric eels, all I ever heard about back then was …’ I leaned forward. ‘Oh my God. Teleportation. You were working on teleportation, weren’t you? The Nazis were trying to develop teleportation as a weapon of war.’
This time Heijenhoort held my gaze. ‘Yes, Loeser. That’s right. And we didn’t do so badly. Why do you think the Soviets pretended Hitler’s remains were burned and buried?’
‘God in heaven, you’re telling me Hitler teleported himself out of the bunker?’ I shrieked. ‘So he’s still alive?’ There were puzzled looks from nearby booths.
‘Yes, Loeser. That is the world-shaking secret I am telling you, here in this coffee shop.’
‘Oh, are you being sarcastic?’
Heijenhoort got up again. ‘I’m sorry, Loeser, but I must be going.’
‘When did you become capable of sarcasm?’
‘Things happen in war.’
‘Hey, listen, they must have told you a lot of secrets in New Mexico?’ I said.
‘Not really. We’re still Germans.’
‘But do they know what happened to Bailey?’
Heijenhoort nodded as he put down a quarter-dollar for his coffee. ‘They spent almost a year studying his device after they removed it from CalTech.’
‘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.’
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.’
However, an enquiry by this newspaper has found that earlier in his career Mr Scramsfield did in fact write a manual of seduction, Dames! And how to Lay them, published pseudonymously in 1930 by the Muscular Press of Los Angeles, California. Reached yesterday for comment, Esquire magazine editor Arnold Gingrich said that he has cancelled plans to publish excerpts from ‘Rupert?’
Rackenham looked up from his newspaper. A woman of about his own age stood there in the posture of someone who has just dropped a fragile antique.
‘Yes?’ he said.
‘Don’t you recognise me?’
Rackenham smiled in apology.
‘You promised you’d keep me in your heart until the end of time.’
‘Oh. Did I really?’
The woman burst into tears. Rackenham searched his pockets for a clean handkerchief and his memory for a name or at least a context. He couldn’t help but feel she was behaving with extraordinary rudeness. Thankfully, after a few minutes, she seemed to accept that he wasn’t going to ask her to sit down with him, but before she’d leave him alone he still had to take down her address and promise to write her a long letter. Even her full name didn’t so much as gesture at a bell, and so, in the usual manner of these things, it wasn’t until she was on her way out of the café that Rackenham got any inkling. At the door, she looked back at his table, Orphean, and as she did so you could see in her face that she was already rebuking herself for her weakness, and then she turned away again and forced herself on, but too hastily, so that she bumped into a fat man on his way in and had to apologise in her bad German. The whole sad procedure took him straight back to 1932 or 1934 or whenever it was and he remembered her at last. One night she’d asked him to tie her naked to a clothes horse with shoelaces but it had collapsed and he’d had to pay his landlady for a replacement.
He was still a few minutes early for his appointment, but he decided that now his peace had been disturbed he might as well pay the bill. Outside, on Kurfürstendamm, the sky was a grey paving stone with a few dirty bootprints of darker cloud and the sparrows conducted their usual patrol among the tourists for unattended pretzels. Turning right at the Kino Astor, he went down a passage into a potentially pleasant courtyard that was rendered rather gloomy by a huge plane tree with the apparent ambition to expand like a gas to fill every cubic inch of available space. He found the doorway, buzzed for entry, and went upstairs.
‘You never seem to age, Rackenham,’ said Loeser when he invited the other man inside. ‘And I don’t mean that as a compliment. It’s sinister.’
‘Do you live on your own here?’ Rackenham didn’t really need to ask — in its resonant frequencies this flat was so much like his own in London that he could tell at once no woman shared it. The place was not untidy so much as rationalised in a precise and stable way to the habits of its occupant: a bottle of vodka on the floor by the armchair, an electric razor keeping a place in an etymological dictionary, a corduroy jacket on a hanger that was hooked over the door of the fusebox cupboard, and then by the window some chrysanthemums in a vase, alive but wilted, like a small delegation from a more feminine land who knew that their presence at these negotiations was a pointless diplomatic formality.
‘Mildred and I divorced in fifty-four,’ said Loeser. ‘That’s why I came back to Berlin. I have a “girlfriend”, though,’ he added, nodding at the flowers. ‘The word sounds ridiculous, of course.’
Last year, Rackenham’s cousin Etty had come to his flat in Paddington for tea, and she’d adopted such a tone of condolence as she looked around it that he was provoked to ask for an explanation. ‘It’s obvious you can’t be happy here, Rupert,’ she’d said. ‘Living like this. All alone.’ He’d assured her that, as reluctant as she might be to believe it, he was happy — much happier, in fact, than she was, with a husband and two children who were all visibly sick of the sound of her voice. But whether Loeser was happy here, he couldn’t yet tell. How strange, he thought, that Loeser should ever have been married to the Gorge girl, so that with respect to sexual genealogy Rackenham was to the German a sort of father-in-law. Did mother and daughter fuck the same way? He remembered all those afternoons with Amelia Gorge on Loeser’s sofa in Pasadena, cold dimes kissing his knuckles as he groped between the leather cushions for purchase, when he’d been obliged to accept that nothing he did to her body would ever match the ecstasy she milled from that nasty rumour he’d helped her to spread about the contents of her husband’s wine cellar. ‘Do you like being back here?’ he said.
‘I can’t find the old neighbourhoods any more. I tried to steal Ryujin’s daughter from his palace and when I came home without her it was all in ruins as if three hundred years had gone by. Puppenberg, Schlingesdorf, Strandow, Hochbegraben. What happened to them?’
‘Bombed. Demolished. Walled off.’
‘But they can’t all have been. Not every single street. It doesn’t make sense. I must say, though, yesterday I was in Kreuzberg and the wind made one of those hurricanes of blossom and it made me very happy to be here. I’d forgotten quite how fecund this city is.’ He sat down and gestured for Rackenham to do the same. ‘I spent quite a while trying to work out why you wanted to see me. But I can’t guess.’
‘I’m making a documentary film for American television,’ said Rackenham. ‘It’s about what Berlin was like in the last few years before the war. Kristallnacht and the rallies and the Gestapo and all that. I came to see if you’d agree to be interviewed. The idea is to mix my own recollections with those of some other prominent acquaintances of mine.’
‘But we both left in 1934. We missed the worst.’
‘The network don’t know that, nor is there any reason why they should find out.’
Loeser blew out a sceptical plosive. ‘How would I even know what to say?’
‘Oh, it’s easy. “I went to a cabaret and I saw an SS officer with an evil face slap his mistress for spilling a glass of champagne and then I knew the good times were over for ever.” You know the sort of thing.’
‘No, Rackenham. Absolutely not.’
‘There’s no formal fee for an interview, but the budget for expenses is almost unlimited. We can make something up. Bill them for an essential unicorn.’ Rackenham could see that this did interest Loeser, so he said, ‘How do you make your living these days?’
‘I’m writing a book.’
‘You’ve got an advance?’
‘No. I don’t have a publisher yet. But I got a grant from the Norb Foundation.’
‘What’s it about?’
‘The role of mass transit in the Endlösung der Judenfrage,’ said Loeser.
‘Are you joking?’
‘No. The Third Reich moved eight million people on sixteen hundred trains with two hundred thousand railway employees. And this is while they were fighting a war on two fronts. It’s an extraordinary feat. When people talk about the cattle wagons, it’s always as if the Nazis used them chiefly as some sort of demeaning symbolic gesture. But those cattle wagons can tell us so much more if we understand them as a logistical necessity. A hundred and fifty people in every wagon, fifty-five wagons on every train, at least four days for every journey. They could only manage it because there was so much redundancy built into the Deutsche Reichsbahn from before the war, and because they had so much coal, and because the French and Dutch and Belgian state railways were so helpful.’ Loeser was silent for a moment. ‘You know, when I went to Washington in forty-seven, there was no metro, but now they’re finally building one. And the truth is that anyone planning a public transport system now is trying to solve a lot of the same problems that the Nazis had to solve. Just for different ends. If you leave an Enlightenment running for long enough, eventually, one way or another, it will become preoccupied with the moving around of large numbers of people. Were you still in Los Angeles in forty-three? For the first big smog? I was back in Pasadena that week. Everyone said it was the Japanese. They didn’t want to believe it was their own cars turning against them. That same year the Nazis started using transportation vans where the driver could flip a switch so that the exhaust from the engine would be pumped into the back and suffocate the passengers. All those people, killed in transit — killed by the weight of their own bodies, in a sense, because the heavier they were, the more fuel the engine would burn, so because they’d been starving for months they’d have a few more minutes to live — an equation about calories and masses, like all the rest of history…’
Rackenham decided not to let Loeser go too much further down that hole. ‘They never built that streetcar network in Los Angeles,’ he said.
‘When I left, I thought they would. I took Mildred, so Gorge had nothing to give Clowne, so there was nothing to stop Plumridge.’
‘What happened?’
‘Plumridge got drafted. He established the Army Transportation Corps almost single-handedly in forty-two. And he liked the army so much he never went back to California. Without him there was no one to push for the streetcar network. So nothing I did could ever have made any difference. A few years ago they started dropping the old streetcars into the sea near Redondo Beach to make artificial reefs for fishing. Imagine them, all submerged like that. You know the only place in California that has real public transport? Disneyland. In Disneyland they have trams and steam trains and monorails and it all works perfectly.’ He sighed. ‘I’ve put all this in the book. I’m going to have to take it all out again.’
‘I didn’t expect to find you writing a book about genocide.’ Rackenham wanted to change the subject, but he also wanted to know: ‘When did you start to…’
‘Care?’ said Loeser.
‘Yes.’
‘I don’t know. It happened gradually. Very gradually. Remember in that taxi when I bet Achleitner that Hitler would never make one bit of difference to my life? I was right. I was nearly right. All those years, all that history … Everyone was else was packed into a tram and I was riding along in my car with the air-conditioning on and the windows closed and the radio up. Still, I wasn’t the only one. Brecht was always so “political” but he never understood what was happening any better than I did.’
‘How would you know?’
‘I’ve been reading him a bit since he died. The poetry’s not so bad. “We know we’re only temporary and after us will follow/Nothing worth talking about.” ’
‘And that one on how LA is just like hell.’
‘He didn’t leave until forty-seven,’ said Loeser. ‘Much later than me.’
‘You got there earlier.’
‘Yes. I never lived there, though. Not in a sincere way. Did you ever hear about that question Bailey used to ask? “What’s the one thing in the world that can uproot almost anything?” And that’s what he thought he wanted to invent. But what he should have invented was the opposite of that. The opposite of a teleportation device. That’s what we all needed. Something that could actually root a man in his surroundings. Wipe off some of the lubricant.’
‘A bit of in-der-Welt-sein.’
‘No Heidegger in this apartment, please. I feel zum Tode quite enough of the time as it is.’
‘I think a man with a teleportation device could do good business in a city with a wall through the middle.’ Rackenham noticed a book on Loeser’s desk next to a bottle of cologne. ‘You’re rereading that?’
‘Berlin Alexanderplatz? Rereading? No. I’ve been reading it for thirty years. I only have eleven pages to go. I hope to finish by next autumn.’
Rackenham got up. ‘Can I open the window?’
‘If you want.’
So Rackenham opened the window, picked up Berlin Alexanderplatz, and tossed it out. The book slid down through the branches like an exhausted wood pigeon and then lodged itself between trunk and bough.
‘What the hell did you do that for?’
‘I just had a sudden conviction that if you ever finish that book you will immediately drop dead. Like something from Han Chinese medicine.’ Rackenham shut the window and sat down. The truth was, in spite of everything, he liked Loeser. ‘Will you do this film or not?’
But Loeser ignored the question. ‘Just tell me something.’
‘What?’
‘How did you do it?’
‘Do what?’
‘How did you fuck all those women? Adele and Gorge’s wife and a million others? What was the secret? I still want to know. It’s too late to be of any use to me now but I still want to know.’
‘Loeser, if there really existed some trick that I could put into words, I’d … well, I suppose I’d write a manual or something. And get rich. Anyway, I never actually slept with Adele.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘After that party at the sewing machine factory or whatever it was. I left with her but she changed her mind.’
‘You’re serious?’
‘Yes. She said I reminded her too much of her father.’
‘Gott im Himmel, if I’d known that, I might never have become so pathologically obsessed! I might never have gone to Paris. Or Los Angeles. Everything might have been different.’
‘Oh, don’t be ridiculous. You left Berlin because you hated Berlin. You would have gone either way. What happened to her in the end?’
‘Adele? She stayed in Los Angeles. Married Goatloft, that director. I hear she’s very happy. Meanwhile Brogmann’s just been appointed Minister of the Interior and Marlene’s just been made film critic for Die Zeit. Seems like everyone from those days did all right for themselves. Everyone that survived. You know, last month I was on Kurfürstendamm and I was almost certain I saw Drabsfarben walking a dog. It can’t have been, of course.’
Rackenham took out a packet of Sobranies and offered one to Loeser, who shook his head. ‘I’ve got some coke,’ he said as he lit a cigarette for himself.
‘What?’
‘I’ve got three grams of really good coke that I bought from my cameraman. If you’ll be in my documentary, you can have as much as you want, on top of the “expenses”. We can do some now if you like.’
‘I haven’t taken coke in thirty years,’ said Loeser.
‘Then it will be a wonderful, sentimental reunion. Come on, just repeat after me: “In 1938 I went to a cabaret and I saw an SS officer with an evil face slap his mistress for spilling a glass of champagne and then I knew the good times were over for ever.” An hour of that tomorrow afternoon. That’s all it will take.’
Loeser didn’t answer straight away, and for a while the two men sat watching each other in silence. Outside, the breeze changed, and Berlin Alexanderplatz slipped from the tree.
The gondolier wore manatee-bone goggles, with pornographic engravings on the snout bridge, and when he cocked his head to the right in the Troodonian gesture signifying negation, the afternoon sun flashed in the smoked glass of the goggles’ lenses. ‘You don’t want to go to the temples.’
‘Why not?’ thought Mordechai.
‘Electric eels,’ thought the gondolier. ‘The biggest electric eels you’ve ever seen. They can shock you to ashes. May my slit close up if I lie.’ He chirruped the oath aloud for emphasis.
‘I can barter. I have manna.’
‘I don’t care. I’m not taking you into those waters. I value the life God gave me.’
So Mordechai knocked the gondolier unconscious and stole his boat.
As he paddled, he watched the turquoise surface of the lagoon, knowing that electric eels had an amateurish obligation to come up every so often to breathe. He’d licked the face of death more times than he could count as a soldier in the East, so he wasn’t afraid, but he didn’t want to be caught unawares. Every so often, to cool down, he flicked his tail through the water to douse his snout, then fluttered his dewlap feathers so they wouldn’t get too crusted with salt. In the distance, through their caul of heat shimmer, the viny white tops of the temples rose out of the water like a ribcage lying half submerged in a rock pool, and on his left were the rias of the mainland, their slopes fuzzy with groves of lychee trees. Many octaeterids ago, before Dagon-Ryujin’s half-fish came, when the Troodonians had still had the leisure to enquire into their world, archaeologists and playwrights had lived in villages on this coast, diving every day among the drowned conurbations of the apes. But now they were all gone, which was how the electric eels had begun to proliferate so menacingly in the lagoon, untroubled by hunters or trappers.
Like every Troodonian, except for a few thousand sickening heretics who had gone over to Dagon-Ryujin, Mordechai understood that all time was one instant, all space one point — that only God had the privilege of extension, and his creation was only the very tip of a claw — that any appearance to the contrary was just a sort of stereoscopic illusion. And so, like every Troodonian, he struggled with the paradox of how it could be that in the time of the half-fish, God wanted them to fight, and yet in the time of the apes, God had wanted them to humble themselves as shrunken quadrupeds, when the two periods were of course not only equivalent but simultaneous. Nonetheless, he knew that God did now want them to fight, and God did now want them to win. And that was why he, Mordechai, had abandoned his comrades and trudged across a continent to this lagoon. Whatever their clerisy might say, the Troodonians were losing the war, and if they ever hoped to drive the half-fish back into the sea, they would need either a direct intercession from God or some unimaginable new weapon. Since he did not dare rely on the former, Mordechai had come to these temples to look for the latter. The apes hadn’t understood much, but they’d understood fighting. There might be something here, forgotten in the ruins, an accidental legacy from an unmourned and intestate species. The chances were laughably slim. But he had to try, because no one else would. He was lost in these thoughts, and in the rhythm of his rowing, when his boat was flipped over like a dried peapod.
Smashed into the water, limbs flailing, bubbles streaming from his snout because he was too surprised to hold his breath, Mordechai stared for a moment into the eel’s monstrous right eye. Most of its gigantic body was dark grey, but its belly was a mottled orange not unlike the colour of his own intertarsal scales. He began a prayer that he knew he wouldn’t have time to finish.
Except that, somehow, he did finish. He opened his eyes and he wasn’t dead.
And then he realised that perhaps to this beast he was neither a threat nor a meal. The eel wouldn’t go to the trouble to fire its voltage organ just because it had bumped against something on its way up for air. Thank God he’d lost the oar when he went under, or he might have been stupid enough to try to use it as a weapon. He held as still as he could without sinking any further down, and just as the grinding of his empty lungs was becoming unendurable, the eel swam off into the cloudy water, its long anal fin rippling like shadow congealed into a dainty membrane. Mordechai’s knitted skullcap twirled in its wake and then was also lost to sight. Not since the half-fish themselves had he come across a creature that so obviously owed allegiance to Dagon-Ryujin as this long gullet with a face.
He floated, panting and retching, at the surface until he’d regained enough strength to right the stolen boat. The hull had sprung a small leak, he had nothing to row with, and he’d badly grazed his elbow climbing up over the side. But there wasn’t that much further to go until the temples. Cursing himself for coming here in such a puny craft, cursing the gondolier for being so correct, cursing the sun for being so plump, he began to paddle.
And that was when he saw it. The lone figure standing on the roof of the nearest temple on his right like a soliloquist on a raised stage. An animal that hadn’t walked God’s earth for more than eight times eight times eight generations.
An ape.
Mordechai began to paddle as fast as he could, his elbow stinging with every splash of brine. As he drew closer, he could make out the ape in more detail. It had a bald, pink, snoutless face, with sparse grey fur only on the top of its head, and like a Troodonian cantor it wore woven clothing that covered almost its entire body. The fabric of the clothing looked soaked through, but at low tide the lagoon here wasn’t nearly up to the level of the roof, so the ape must have ascended from some lower section of the temple. And instead of a left eye the ape had a meaty tunnel — although Mordechai had no way to be sure if that was a wound or just a characteristic of its species — a collateral sense organ or supplementary orifice.
The ape was barking loudly, and of course the noise itself meant nothing to Mordechai. But by the time the prow of his boat bumped up against the cracked and barnacled wall of the temple, he was close enough to hear the relict mammal in his own head.
‘I don’t know where I am,’ the ape was thinking. ‘I don’t know where I am. I don’t know where I am. I don’t know where I am. I don’t know where I am. I don’t know where I am.’