A Man Lies Dreaming (14 page)

‘Let’s go, boychiks.’

In moments, like silent shadows, they were gone; like they had never been. Wolf lay on the floor for a long time. The only sound in the room was the sound of his sobbing.

Wolf’s Diary, 4th November 1939

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Wolf’s Diary, 5th November 1939

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Wolf’s Diary, 6th November 1939

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Herr Wolf—

In my dream I was alone in the house upstairs. It is a big old house, and when I was a boy I believed there were ghosts living in it. My mother said ghosts are mean old people who don’t go away even after they die, and that is all there is to it. My father said, he served in the Great War and he’d seen no ghosts, but he had seen plenty of the dead. Like my father, I do not believe in ghosts.

In my dream I was alone in the house upstairs, and I could hear the floorboards creaking. It is an old house and it breathes as if it were alive, grunting and farting, but it is only the water in the pipes or the rats in the attic or the floorboards contracting and expanding with the weather. That’s all there is to it.

In my dream I felt a great dark presence in the house. It stalked from room to room, but quietly, like a parent, and I hid in my room. It was coming close to my door and still I knew there was no one else in the house, and that I was truly alone. I called out, Father, Father, but he was not there. When I was born he had touched me with his calloused fingers and traced my face, so he could see me: God took his eyes in the Great War with gas. Let me look at you, let me look at you. I cried, No, and the presence at the door huffed and it puffed and I became so frightened that I cowered in the corner of my room with my hands over my head, and the floorboards creaked and creaked.

No one can see me, but it saw. In my dream I looked through my pockets but the knife was not there, and it is my only friend. At last I became too frightened to cower and I went to open the door and see the face of my tormentor, but there was no one there, and the house was silent; there was no one there at all.

On the Tuesday the telephone rang and this time Wolf picked it up. The voice on the other end was cool and collected. ‘Well?’ she demanded.

‘Miss Rubinstein.’

‘Have you made progress?’

‘I met your father.’

That gave her pause.

‘Oh?’

‘He is a violent man.’

Her voice changed, became soft and concerned and rushed. ‘Did Daddy hurt you? What did he do to you?’

Wolf didn’t answer.

‘Stay right there. I will come over.’

‘I do not think that is a very good idea.’

The line went dead. Wolf stared at the receiver before placing it back.

Het set to tidying the office. It would all have to go. After the assault he had at long last dragged himself upright and tottered to his bedsit. The room was relatively undisturbed but in the middle of the small bed there lay a human shit. On Sunday Wolf’s landlord, the baker Edelmann, came and knocked on his door, but Wolf called him vile names and the baker withdrew.

The phone rang twice on Saturday and three times on Sunday and had begun to ring at half-hourly intervals on Tuesday until Wolf finally picked up.

After the call he dragged himself to the communal bathroom on the landing. He shared it with an ageing prostitute named Martha, a corpulent old crone who now made ends meet by selling seeds to feed the pigeons in Trafalgar Square. She had once confessed to Wolf that the seeds were poisoned. In her own small way Martha was a mass murderer, working in secret and without need for fame or acknowledgement of her deeds. She sold the seeds, the visitors to the capital fed the birds, and she watched them die with a sense of quiet achievement. ‘One day,’ she said to Wolf, ‘there will be no more pigeons in London, then the world. Then at last we will all be free.’ Wolf never knew what she had against the pigeons, which she seemed to view with the same hostility and suspicion as she did people who lived south of the river, immigrants, sailors, stone angels, moss and Wolf himself. He tended to avoid her after that.

He stared at his gaunt face in the mirror. Some of the bruises were fading. Others had turned a nasty shade of black and green. He shaved, though his hand shook from hunger and fatigue. Grey and black hairs stuck to the surface of the washbasin. He rinsed them off.

He washed himself. Scrubbed himself with soap. The water was lukewarm to begin with, then cold. He emerged shivering, dried himself and dressed awkwardly. He was still aching all over, and his cock burned. Wolf gritted his teeth and carried on. He went back to the room and put on his coat and his hat and then he went out.

Wolf’s Diary, 7th November 1939

Just a short hop to Gerrard Street. Down the stairs to the Hofgarten. The same dark atmosphere, the same brutish barman. Emil, I remembered Hess calling him.

‘Herr Wolf.’

I ignored him. I saw Hess at a corner table. He was beginning to rise as I came to him. Without stopping I slammed my fist into his jaw. He fell back against the wall, surprise and blood mixing on his face. His bodyguards were rising, coming for me. I saw the flash of gunmetal.

‘Wait.’

He shook his head and coughed. ‘I would not do that again, Wolf, if I were you.’

‘You set me up.’

‘How?’ He looked tired. He sat down again. ‘Please, Wolf. Sit.’

‘Who owns the club you sent me to?’

‘Does it matter?’ He shrugged.

‘Who controls the trafficking?’

‘Why do you care?’ His anger surprised me. He looked at me wanly. ‘Why do you care,’ he said again. ‘You’re not involved. You didn’t want to be. You could have led us.’

‘To be like common criminals?’ I barked a laugh.

‘For the cause. For Germany.’

‘Germany is lost, and you are a fool, Hess. Do not lie. Not to me.’

Old pain in his voice. ‘Wolf …’

‘You cheapen yourself and your race,’ I said.

‘Wolf! Enough!’

His open palm slammed on the table. Abruptly I sat down, opposite him. ‘No more lies,’ I said. ‘Who works the trafficking network this end?’

‘I tried to warn you,’ he said. ‘You didn’t want to listen.’

‘I heard you loud and clear.’

Thinking of that nameless club, the man Kramer with his face blown off, Ilse and her whip. ‘Give me a name.’

‘You should leave, now.’

Movement behind me. I stayed sitting down, looking straight. ‘You sold yourself for thirty pieces of silver,’ I said. ‘Oh, Rudolf …’

‘We are no longer your disciples!’

I stared into his eyes and saw nothing but craven greed there. Who was he so afraid of?

‘Where do they operate? Give me a name!’

He sighed. ‘Try Petticoat Lane,’ he said. ‘Ask for Barbie.’

I nodded. There was that movement again behind me. Hess’s agonised face stared at me. ‘Don’t come back here again, Wolf,’ he said. ‘You put me in danger as well as yourself.’

‘The Jew,’ I said, in hatred. ‘Rubinstein. You work with Jews now, Hess?’

‘This is out of my hands, Wolf. I’ve given you all I can.’

‘How much did he pay you to bring his daughter out of Germany?’

‘Wolf!’ He rubbed a weary hand over his face. ‘This is bigger than me, bigger than all of us. Don’t go poking your nose into business that doesn’t concern you.’

‘But it does concern me, Hess. It concerns me very much,’ I said. My groin burned with a pain I could barely keep under control. ‘What happened to her?’ I said. ‘What happened to the daughter?’

‘I am sure I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ he said. ‘Now go. We shall not see each other again.’

He motioned with his head and the big barman, Emil, loomed behind me. I nodded, ceding his warning – or perhaps it was a premonition.

I stood up. ‘I’ll leave on my own,’ I said. Emil’s ugly mug of a face stared at me without expression.

‘Very good, Herr Wolf,’ he said.

*

Wolf left the Hofgarten, his shoulder blades tense, half-expecting a cosh to the back of the head, a knife between the ribs. Nothing happened. Hess had always been a follower, not a leader.

So who was he trying to protect?

Or perhaps more cynically he was wringing his hands and protesting, all the while steering Wolf in the direction he wanted him to go. You could trust Hess to be untrustworthy, Wolf thought. You always knew where you were with an ex-Nazi.

He had no intention of staying off the case; not for Hess’s warnings, not for that murderous Jew gangster Julius Rubinstein and his assault. For did not the Jewish Bible itself say, ‘a man who inflicts an injury upon his fellow man, so shall be done to him: fracture for fracture, eye for eye, tooth for tooth. Just as he inflicted an injury upon a person, so shall it be inflicted upon him.’

His thoughts were murderous as he hopped on a bus going to the East End. The advert running along the side of the bus proudly proclaimed that Swan Vestas Were The Smoker’s Match. Wolf sat towards the back, sandwiched between the window and an elderly woman carrying a woven basket filled with something that stank: rotten fish or something even more vile. She was talking all the time, mumbling with a soft, emaciated mouth. ‘Bloody foreigners, coming over here, taking our jobs, taking our homes, pissing in the streets don’t they, the filthy buggers, selling their women cheap, the dirty whores, and their thieving children, a woman isn’t safe any more, not anywhere—’ She clutched the basket to her chest as if afraid Wolf was going to steal it. ‘Nasty buggers the lot of them, things like this would never have gone on in my grandmother’s time, we had proper law and order then didn’t we, not let any Tom, Dick and Kraut into the country, if it was up to me I’d gas the lot of them I would, put them in camps and gas them or chuck them in the sea.’

‘Jews?’ Wolf said, interested despite himself.

‘Germans,’ the woman said, and gave him a nasty, beaming toothless grin.

‘Disgusting old witch.’

‘Witch! Did you hear what he called me!’ the woman shouted. Heads turned, then turned away. No one wanted to be too close to that smell. ‘Witch! You people make me sick, you do! That Mosley fellow has the right idea, you just wait, coming over here, taking our jobs, pissing everywhere, bums! Bums!’ and off she went again, in a repeating cycle, while Wolf stared out of the window and breathed through his mouth and tried to ignore her.

Was that what Mosley was doing? he thought, uneasy. Mosley was right. He could not shift blame to the Jews in England, not easily. But was he really cultivating European immigrants as a whole to take the brunt of the British’s hatred? There were Jews amongst the refugees from the Fall of Germany, but there were also honest, respectable men and women, good Germans!

He was relieved to escape the bus at last, when it stopped outside Liverpool Street Station. The fresh air revived him, and it was raining in a thin drizzle that stung his face but brought with it relief for his bruises, if not for the fire in his groin where the bastard Jew had circumcised him. He went past bagel shops and pickle vats taller than a man, past black-clad children playing with stones and chalk, and yeshiva boys congregating in murmured conversations, past women with their shopping bags laden with food, apron-clad butchers with naked turkey birds displayed in their windows, fishmongers calling out in Polish and Yiddish, shoemakers and cloth merchants and fences and thieves, and amidst this population of Jewish Londoners the new arrivals, gentiles like Wolf, the refugees of Germany and Austria and of a once-bright dream that had burned to cinder and ashes. He made his way through the narrow crammed streets and pulled his hat low against his forehead.

He’d first met Jews in large numbers while living in Vienna. In his first few, heady weeks in the city he hardly noticed them. The Jews were a minority, after all, and at the time Vienna was, to the young Wolf, the very centre of the world. There amidst the politicians and artists, rabble-rousers and architects and opera-goers and poor young students not unlike himself, Wolf barely cared about Jews.
One day walking down the street he saw one of their number in the black Hasidic garb and he was plain bemused: was this a Jew?

And yet the longer he resided in that city the more he saw them; wherever he turned, like an alien entity forever embedded in the Germanic population; and more than that he thought them dirty; their very odour made him sick.