A Man Lies Dreaming (34 page)

One dead copper, one dead whore. I was getting too old. Everything hurt. I would miss my books most, I thought. But books, like people, can always be replaced.

… And so into the night Wolf went, and a thousand lamps glimmered in the dark, and the ancient light of a thousand stars fought through the cloud cover to be changed forever by the hard surfaces of the city; within its narrow twisting alien alleyways Wolf walked like an explorer on the surface of a foreign hostile world, an invisible umbilical cord stretched from his past to his present, stretched until it finally broke, unable to hold him anchored any longer; and so he felt light of gravity, and floating, like an astronaut in one of those glorious, colourful American pulps. He pictured men on the moon, proud Aryan
raumfahrer
: spacemen, voyagers. Pictured capsules of aluminium floating through space, men inside them; pictured a lunar landing, a man stepping out onto the alien dust, planting a swastika flag where no man had gone before. Wolf walked through the city that night as a man with no purpose, a man whose life had taken the wrong turn, around whom history had flowed a different way, taken a different course and left him stranded in an island of unreality in the midst of that great river that was time. He felt untethered. He did not know who he was or what he would become.

On Shaftesbury Avenue the last theatregoers had come and gone and the theatres were shut though their lights shone on. The pavements were crowded with a festive restless mass of people, shouting, drinking, waving Union Jacks and the cross of St George. Wolf was swept up in the current. His fate was no longer his own. He was carried by the tide of these English citizens the way a spectator may have been in one of his own rallies, in the old days. Down Shaftesbury to Piccadilly where a Blackshirt rally was in progress, a full military campaign, and the men in their futuristic outfits no longer looked ridiculous but serious and deadly. He was carried along through the throng down Haymarket and on to Pall Mall, where he saw a ring of policemen blocking the road and a clash between Unionists and Blackshirts spilling bloody and awkward across pavement and road, men with makeshift weapons of bricks and piping smashing at each other, blindly, in a rage, but silently, or so it seemed to Wolf, in a primitive battlefield such as between Spartans and Persians, and the cars in the street jammed against each other and were savaged, too, and he watched the battle escalate, drivers trying to escape, windows smashed, glass shards spilling on the road, skulls cracked, a vehicle set on fire, policemen shouting, someone firing a gun in the air, a stampede where men were trampled underfoot. Somehow he managed to get away, swept again in the tide, down to Trafalgar Square.

From just down the road, along Whitehall, a sudden silence spread out as Big Ben began to strike the hour. The first and then the second heartbeats of the old clock went almost unnoticed, at three the sound began to penetrate, at four and five the massed crowds quietened, at seven and eight the silence grew; at nine it was entire. Nine and then ten heartbeats Big Ben struck and they echoed over the ancient city, old and new, old and new like the harbingers of a new dawn. Time hung, suspended. On the podium by Nelson’s Column, Oswald Mosley waited, his face sweaty, his black uniform replaced for this one occasion by a dignified three-piece suit from Savile Row. Two other men were waiting in the wings, only one of whom Wolf would have known, but Wolf stood a way away, at the Whitehall intersection, listening to the clock strike the hour like a drum. Eleven, old Ben struck, and the second stretched and stretched and in its expectant silence Wolf saw the city as he had never seen it, rising before him like a metropolis dreamed of by Fritz Lang: huge shining buildings rose amidst the squalor of old London, by London Bridge a shard of glass taller than the pyramids pierced the sky. From the City of London there rose a phoenix egg of metal and glass, and a giant wheel spun and spun on the south bank of the Thames like a mandala. This city of the future was brighter, brasher, awash in an electric glow which faded as he watched, the ghostly outline of this futuristic could-have-been slowly washing away. Wolf held his breath and Big Ben tolled, twelve, and one day ended, and a new day began.

Wolf’s Diary, 23rd November 1939

The night erupted in a shower of fireworks. The air filled with the repeated sounds of explosions, playing out a moment after the formation of bright shapes in the air. The smell of cordite, magnesium and sulphur stung my nostrils. In the sky were the fabulous shapes of spinning rings and diadems and tailed chrysanthemum, crossettes and hearts and palm-shell fireworks. A band began to play, rather incongruously, Gilbert & Sullivan’s ‘He Is An Englishman’. The crowds around me cheered, faces red and teeth yellow and skin sickly white; they were cast in the lights and shadows of the exploding colours overhead. Demonic grinning faces all around me, a nightmarish vista of skulls seen through translucent skin, moving skeletons clad in sacks of blood. I hadn’t even thought of how I must look, bruised, battered and covered in blood, mine and others’, but I didn’t think anyone even noticed. I pushed my way towards the steps of the National Gallery. I had to batter my way through people and every moment I half-expected a policeman to find me, to blow the whistle, raise the alarm. But no one would find Keech and the dead girl, surely, I thought, not until the morning at least. What I would do then I didn’t know.

I watched the stage. Watched Mosley come on, smiling, waving at the crowds, his arm extended in a Blackshirt’s imitation of a Nazi salute. The man was nothing but a cheap copy.

‘Victory!’ he called out. The crowd erupted in cheer again but I could hear booing coming from the distance and turned my head to see a group of union demonstrators trying to push towards the podium and being repelled.

‘Britain belongs to the British people once again!’ Mosley’s voice echoed over the crowd. ‘We’ve won! This is the beginning of a new dawn! This is a new day for Britain – and for the world!’

Cheers. Boos. Fireworks exploding overhead, the booms coming a moment later, disorientating me. I felt sick and dry-heaved. I had not eaten in I couldn’t remember how long. On the stage Mosley assumed a serious, studious expression. His voice took on dulcet tones. He said, ‘His Majesty the King has asked me to form a new government and I have accepted.’

Silence. Overhead the last fireworks burst and died.

‘I would like to discuss some of the challenges we are now facing.

‘I believe we need a strong government, a stable, good and decent government that I think we need so badly.

‘It has been more than six years since the Fall of Germany to international communism. Communism with its method of madness is making a powerful and insidious attack upon the world today. It seeks to poison and disrupt, in order to hurl us into an epoch of chaos.

‘It has flooded our country with refugees. We have opened our borders, our arms, our homes to them, in friendship. And they came, in their thousands, and thousands of thousands. Our cities reek of their cabbage! Their children speak foreign tongues in our schools. They are draining our country of its resources, they are taking the very bread from our own people’s mouths!’

Cheers. Fists raised in salute. I felt a cold chill I could not explain. And yet it was almost as if it were my own words he was using against me.

‘I think the service our country needs right now is to face up to our really big challenges, to confront our problems, to take difficult decisions, to lead people through those difficult decisions, so that together we can reach better times ahead.

‘Germany is not our enemy. Communism is. That, and the bankers behind it all. I think you know their real name.’

‘Jews!’ – ‘The elders of Zion!’ – ‘Shylocks!’ – ‘Yids!’

‘We must help Germany in its time of need!’ Mosley said.

‘Yes!’

‘Get the foreigners out!’ someone shouted. Mosley smiled. The smile faded. His eyes gazed out coldly over Trafalgar Square.

‘This is a testing time,’ he said, gravely. ‘I have news, news we could not share before with you. At nineteen hundred hours today, Germany, with Russian help, has invaded Poland.’

Gasps. Shouts. A wave of shock running through the crowd.

‘It is true.’

He waited. Drew out the silence.

‘Our bilateral agreement with Poland dictates a response,’ Mosley said.

‘It is my first duty to you as your prime minister, to let you know that we are at war.’

Gasps, but also cheers. The mood was turning ugly. They were enthralled. They relished the idea of war.

‘I would like to introduce you to an old friend of mine!’ Mosley said.

I began to make my way through the crowd, up towards Leicester Square, but now I paused. Turned back.

‘Germany
will
return to its former glory,’ Mosley said. ‘This I promise. We will fight for its release from the shackles of communist oppression!’

This was less joyfully received.

‘I would like to introduce you to the head of the newly formed German Government-in-Exile: a man who loves his country, who wants to return the refugees from our streets to their rightful homes. A former member of the National Socialist party, the rightful winners of the last German elections.’

Somewhere behind that stage the American, Virgil, would be standing, smiling like the cat who drank all the cream. Somewhere there, waiting to make his entrance, would be the man behind it all, behind the white slavery and the people-smuggling rings, one of my old comrades, I was sure.

My replacement.

My fingers tightened into fists. Who could it be? Hess was dead, Goebbels ruthless but lame.

Himmler? Bormann? Heydrich?

‘Together we will change the world!’ Mosley pumped his fist in the air. ‘Please welcome the rightful Chancellor of Germany – Mr Adolf Eichmann!’

‘Who?’ someone beside me said, bewildered.

‘Who?’ I screamed. A tallish thin man with a vulture’s face and thinning hair came onto the stage and solemnly shook Prime Minister Mosley’s hand.

‘
Who the fuck is Adolf Eichmann!
’ I said.

‘Thank you, Prime Minister. You do me a great honour.’

‘Eichmann? I have never even heard of this Eichmann!’ I screamed. Heads were turning. ‘Who …? How …!’

‘You may not know me,’ the man on the stage said. ‘I joined the National Socialist party in ’32, only a year before the Fall of Germany. Some of you may even remember our one-time leader, the man we called our Führer—’

‘God damn you, Eichmann! Who is this imposter, this swindler!’

‘But he was weak. And I shall replace him.’

‘No one can replace me, do you hear! No one!’

More heads were turning my way but I didn’t care. I did not know this man! He was nothing, a nobody! Did Dorothy feel this way when she finally discovered the great wizard was just some man behind a curtain?

‘Germany has been taken over by Jews!’ Eichmann said. ‘But I have a solution! A final solution to the Jewish question. Mr Prime Minister?’

‘Indeed,’ Mosley said, smoothly. ‘Mr Eichmann has some innovative and creative ideas, and we shall be discussing them thoroughly in the coming days. And for now—’ he took a breath and looked mournfully at the assembled hordes. ‘I regret to inform you that as of this moment I am declaring limited martial law. All non-registered foreigners will be collected and deported. All Jews will be designated hostile aliens and rounded up, to be either deported or placed in internment camps. We must cut out the cancer eating away at our society! Together we can do this! Together we are as one!’

‘Together we are as one!’ They all raised their fists in the air. They were saluting him, his power. A woman beside me whimpered, her thighs rubbing together as she climaxed herself to an onanistic orgasm.

This should have been
me
up there! The mood was ugly, and I was a foreigner alone and undocumented in this crowd of bloodthirsty British pigs. I had to get away!

I began to push again, to try and edge away, but the crowds closed on me and on the stage Mosley was speaking, shouting, cheering, and the band struck again, that ridiculous song from
H.M.S. Pinafore
, and a second bout of fireworks shot into the sky.