A Man Lies Dreaming (35 page)

In the general confusion, at least, I began to make headway in my effort to escape, pushing through the crowds at last to reach Charing Cross Road. Bands of drunken men were forming into impromptu search parties, seeking out foreigners to round up and beat. Communists and agitators challenged them and fights broke out and policemen appeared like mushrooms and the whole thing was threatening to become one huge riot. Then I saw it.

The Hippodrome.

The club sat on the corner of Leicester Square. Charlie Chaplin had played there once, that vile man. It was a grandiose building, once home to a travelling zoo, from which it got its name; then it became a music hall and then a revue. I remembered the ticket in my pocket. The building was shut now, of course. I was being pushed closer to it by the turning tide, people fleeing the melee. The main doors were locked and I was shunted sideways, into Leicester Square, where a battle was commencing between Blackshirts and a group of belligerent, drunken Austrians. My people. I could have wept!

At last I came to the back of the building, and found the service entrance to the Hippodrome.

The chain holding the doors fast was broken.

It was dark inside the Hippodrome and quiet, the noise from outside abating almost instantly when Wolf shut the door. Metal surfaces gleamed in the dark. Pots and pans hung in orderly rows. All he could hear was the soft tap-tap-tap of water drops hitting the bottom of a sink. He tried to listen for movement, for signs of life, but there was nothing. The entire building felt oppressively
empty
. Wolf tiptoed through the kitchen. Somewhere inside the building, he was sure, a killer was lying in wait.

In a kitchen drawer, wide as the span of his arms, he found an assortment of sharp knives. He equipped himself with a chef’s knife. The sound the drawer had made when he pulled it sounded very loud to him, and so did the rattling of the knives, and he went hurriedly on, through the service doors and into the theatre proper.

It was a magnificent place, though desolate in its abandonment. No players moved upon the stage. There was no magician to perform his tricks, no comedian to tell off-colour jokes, no dancing girls to flash a glimpse of thigh, no jugglers to astound with feats of the impossible, and no audience to applaud and laugh and gasp and jeer, as could be demanded by the occasion. There was nothing but a great barren silence. The wide stage stood to one side, draped in red velvet curtains, which were raised now, and before it the floor was set with tables for tomorrow night’s diners. Overhead, the auditorium rose in four tiers, all sparkle and velvet and dark wood, steep stairs rising on each side. But all the seats were empty: there was no one in the house.

Wolf moved cautiously, quietly through the aisles. He stopped and listened, but still there was no sound. Was the killer waiting, watching? He stumbled against a chair in the dark. It fell over with a loud crash. Wolf said, ‘
Scheisse
,’ softly.

He heard someone moving, high overhead. Craned his head upwards. Sudden white light hit him in the eyes, blinded him. He turned his head away. A spotlight illuminated Wolf, alone in the theatre. It fell on him from high above, from the gods. Wolf moved, and the spotlight moved with him, and he heard someone laugh; high above the world.

‘Show yourself!’ Wolf cried.

‘I have been waiting a long time, Mr Wolf.’

There was something familiar about the voice but it was distorted, amplified. Wolf climbed onto the stage. He stood facing the empty theatre, one hand protecting his eyes. At last he thought he caught movement, but all he could make out was a shadowy figure in the gods.

‘What do you want?’

Wolf moved. The spotlight followed. He paced the stage. His patience was being exhausted. He had had a bad night, a bad month. The whole of November had been a bit of a washout, really.

‘I wanted you to see.’

The speaker sounded plaintive. As though Wolf had somehow let him down. ‘See what?’ Wolf snapped. He edged to the wings and then slipped off-stage. The spotlight tracked him but it couldn’t follow him beyond the curtains. ‘Where are you?’ the shadow said.

Wolf crept behind the scenery. A magician’s sawing-a-woman-in-half trick box, a clown’s red nose hanging from a hook, a pastoral village scene with cardboard cut-out cows that looked good-naturedly at Wolf as he passed.

‘I don’t like this, Mr Wolf. Really, hiding won’t make any difference. I mean you no harm. On the contrary, I am your friend.’

A prop gun, a mask like something out of a Venetian dance. Ah, there! A set of hidden stairs behind the stage, twisting and turning away, leading up. Wolf raised his head. It was a jumble of unsteady construction as far as he could see, hanging sandbags and rickety gangways suspended from the ceiling. But the stairs looked solid enough.

‘Don’t you
see
? This isn’t who you are! When I first saw you I was in awe, I could not believe it was really you, but then I watched you, I observed, I am the watcher in the dark—’

The watcher in the dark? How ridiculous! Wolf thought. He climbed the stairs quietly, cautiously. They rose up, a service passageway that ran parallel to the paying customers’ stairs that mirrored them. The man – this
watcher
– was somewhere above. Probably he would be in a technician’s box somewhere. The spotlight moved across the empty stage, still searching for Wolf. The man was all the time talking, talking: Wolf wished he would shut up.

‘… Fallen,’ the watcher said. ‘Reduced, debased! You who were the greatest of all men, now playing out the role of the lowest: a shamus, a private dick? I could not believe it, I was outraged. You had a
destiny
!’

What do you know about destiny, Wolf wanted to shout, you stupid little man. What do you know of real pain?

‘And you just gave up! You were like a man who is sick, I finally realised. A man out of his senses, a man in shock. I had to wake you. I had to make you see. To face yourself again. So you could become the man you were always meant to be.’

There. The voice was close. Wolf could see the limelight now, and the vague outline of the man behind it, moving it. He gripped the knife tightly. He would make this fast. He was an orderly man and he was settling up all of his accounts.

‘That’s why I killed them,’ the watcher confided; his words floated down to the empty seats, the unserved tables, the stage on which no clown or magician performed. He had an audience of one, this watcher, and he seemed intent, Wolf thought, on boring him.

How he abhorred bores!

‘They were whores, they didn’t matter,’ the watcher said. ‘Diseased prostitutes, you said so yourself. In your book. I have read it so many times. It changed my life. Where do you get your ideas from?’

Wolf crept the rest of the way up, low on the metal stairs. The man was just behind the wall of wood.
Where do you get your ideas
? Really? It was the stupidest question Wolf had ever heard.

‘I needed you to see. I need you to wake up!’ He sounded desperate. ‘Don’t you
understand
?’

Then he stopped speaking and Wolf, too late, tried to rise with the knife but he was, of course, too slow. A young man in a shabby suit stood on the other side of the divide, holding a gun which he aimed at Wolf. It was a Parabellum M17, a German pistol. Wolf remembered when it was first produced, in the closing years of the Great War.

‘Drop the knife. Please.’

Wolf dropped the knife. They were suspended high in the air. Below them the theatre stretched in tiers, all lifeless, all expectant. It was quiet. So quiet.

‘My father brought it with him as a memento from the war,’ the young man said. ‘The pistol, I mean. He always had much respect for the German soldiers. He said the German army was the best in the world, but it had been let down by its leaders. It’s good to see you again, Mr Wolf. I am glad to see you well.’

‘Oh, it’s
you
,’ Wolf said.

A small smile played on the boy’s face. ‘Yes,’ he said, softly.

‘I’m sorry, I don’t quite remember your name.’

The smile disappeared. The gun wavered. ‘It’s
Alderman
! Thomas Alderman! We spoke on the
phone
! We met at Sir Oswald’s party!’

‘Mosley’s man, right! I wondered where I knew you from.’

The boy’s face was pale, his eyes too large, bloodshot. His clothes were covered in gore and he held himself as though he were wounded.

‘I visited you at the
hospital
!’ the boy, Alderman, said.

‘I wondered if that really happened,’ Wolf said, softly. ‘It seemed rather odd, at the time. I assume the nurse did as I asked her, and got in touch with Oswald?’

The boy looked genuinely confused. ‘What nurse?’ he said.

‘How did you know I was at the hospital?’

‘I looked for you everywhere! I was frantic with worry when you never returned to your office. I have been watching you. It’s what I do, I watch, I listen, and no one sees me, no one suspects. No one
sees
me!’

‘Alderman.’

‘Yes!’

‘What do you
want
, Alderman?’ Wolf said. He was so very tired.

‘I just want you to
see
!’

‘I’m looking,’ Wolf said. ‘Put the gun down, Alderman. You’re not going to shoot me.’

The gun wavered. ‘I don’t know … I don’t know if I will or not. You can’t tell me what to do! Don’t you understand?’ he said, pleadingly. ‘I did it all for
you
. I killed them.
I
did it. So you won’t have a choice but to become what you were meant to be. I didn’t
like
to do it – well, not much.’ An expression that was part sly smile, part grimace rose and fell on Alderman’s face. ‘And it worked, didn’t it?’ he said. ‘The police, they will be coming for you. For the girls, and that fat policeman. What did you do to him?’

‘I killed him.’

‘You see!’ the boy shouted in triumph. ‘There is nowhere left to run! Admit who you are! Say it!’

The whole thing was grating on Wolf’s nerves. ‘I know who I am, Alderman,’ Wolf said. ‘I have always known myself. Now give me the gun, boy!’

‘Say it!’ Alderman screamed. ‘Your name, say it!’

‘Wolf.’

‘No! Damn it, don’t make me shoot you, I won’t—’

Wolf stumbled against the low wooden door. It swung open into the box, catching Alderman on the knees, knocking him back. The boy lost his balance and his gun dropped from his hand. He tottered on the edge of the box, above the dark chasm of the stage. His face was beaded with sweat, white and grotesque. ‘Help me!’ His hand reached out in a mockery of a Nazi salute. Moved by compassion or some other, more nebulous emotion he could not quite name, Wolf reached for him; for just a moment the tips of their fingers met, touched. The boy’s eyes shone wet. ‘Adolf …’ he whispered. And then he said, ‘
Heil
Hitler,’ and, for just a moment, Wolf thought he smiled. Then he lost his balance and fell.

Wolf watched him fall. Alderman fell like a trapeze artist, sailing with a grace he had never possessed on the ground. Then he hit the railings of the lower circle with a wet sound and rolled ungainly downwards until he smashed through a table already laid out for tomorrow night’s guests, crushing the china, scattering the silverware and coming to land, at last, in a broken heap on the Hippodrome’s floor.

‘Wolf. Adolf. It’s the same fucking name, you dolt,’ Wolf said. He turned off the useless spotlight. It was still shining, on the wrong spot, on somewhere where nothing had happened. Everything was clearer in the dark but not for Wolf, not any more.

He saw the gun lying on the ground and tucked it into his waistband at the small of his back. Then he stepped out of the box and began to descend the stairs, going slowly.

Back on the ground he went and looked at the boy. He stood over him for some time; what remained of him. He felt like a match, burning. A hot hate suffused him. ‘I’m Hitler!’ he screamed. He kicked the boy, and again, and again, his foot slamming into the soft unresisting flesh of the corpse. ‘I’m Hitler! I’m Hitler! I’m Hitler!’

The dead ruined face stared up at him with mocking blind eyes. Wolf’s own voice came back to him reedy and thin, lost in the high ceiling of the Hippodrome. He was no one. He was nothing.

‘I’m …’ he said. The theatre was quiet. The seats were empty and silent with disuse. There was no one to see him; no one at all. There was no one to hear him, no one to respond. There was no one to acknowledge him; there was no one to march to his tune.

‘I’m a Jew,’ he said, and laughed; but like Wolf himself, the sound meant nothing.

In another time and place Shomer builds doors; endless doors come down the production line: small doors, big doors, house doors, prison doors, dollhouse doors and cage doors, and oddly shaped doors that fit no blueprint Shomer can imagine. A row of skeletons work on the production line, skeletons bent over in the cold emptiness of the factory, skeletons still clutching their soup bowls and spoons between their legs so that they are not stolen, like some nebulous proof of their vitality, of their existence. Men die like smoke. Time ebbs and congeals like dirty, slushy snow. Suns rise and fall, days turn to nights, trains come to a stop, men die. Across this vast camp children still clutching their dolls are escorted to showers from which no water comes but gas and gassed they are taken out in wheel-barrows, arms soft and flaccid, eyes glassed, their mothers and fathers lifted up and placed before the
Sonderkommando
whose job it is to extract their gold teeth, search their cavities for hidden valuables, to shear their hair for the war effort, to strip the corpses clean.

It is the job of the
Kanada kommando
then to sort through the items retrieved, piles and piles of gold teeth, shoes, rings – for Canada is the land of plenty; it is the promised land, so much wealth piled up, so many dead, but if only you can steal the occasional item you could trade gold for an extra slice of bread, a bowl of soup that came from the bottom of the vats and not the top, for down in the depths there could be lurking a cube of grey meat, a speck of potato. But all that rich food runs through you, constantly, and it is the job of the
Shiessekommandos
to clean up the latrines, every day wading in so much liquid shit, an endless sea of it, running and dripping and collecting in great oceanic puddles, but there are worse jobs.