Earthly Powers (72 page)

       I had written stories about spiriting good people away from wicked places. Every fiction writer ought, once in his lifetime, to be forced to fulfil in fact what he had fashioned in fancy. I was to attempt a deed that would look well in my biography. I was also going to be rid of bloody Heinz. I looked at my watch: 5:05. All Heinz's stolen Ingersolls said the same. The office of William Heinemann, Ltd., would still be open. I was going to consult their publicity department.

       All the photographs of Strehler that Fred Holden was able to show me over warmish ho Pepe made him look blatantly the biblical prophet: the Nazis would not be subtle enough to discern the mockery. I took Fred Holden into my confidence. He said, Jesus, very risky. I said, What else honestly can one do to rescue a great man whose danger hour nears if, and then we'll never forgive ourselves, it hasn't struck already? Don't talk to the press when you bring him back, Fred Holden said, I want that story first. Let's see now. And he searched among the pictures that had been taken in Stockholm in 1935. Christ, that would do it with a bit of luck. Strehler in a group photograph with other prizemen: C. von Ossjetzky (Peace), H. Spemann (Medicine and Physiology), F. Joliot and his wife Irene Curie (Chemistry). Strehler looked gloomily into the camera lens, large schnapps in hand. Try it for size. I opened poor Dr. Manning-Brown's passport. Fred Holden called in his assistant, Christine, a girl in her element with scissors and paste. The photograph of the rightful owner was peeled off; it formed a template for the razorblading out of Strehler. Isn't this illegal? giggled Christine. Yes, I said, but very very moral. There's the matter of this bit of arc from the Foreign Office stamp, Fred Holden said. Let's see. On Strehler's pasted-in portrait he tried for size the rims of various tiny liqueur glasses: the publicity department had a fair hospitality allowance. The trouble is these things are round and that bloody thing's oval. Christine went out to the fusebox in the corridor and came back with what did the trick. Bless you, girl, you're a genius. We ended with the imprint, hammered home with the heel of Fred Holden's shoe, of half an inch of thick fuse wire. The passport might perhaps not pass a British immigration officer's inspection, but it was emigration I was concerned about. Get him on a Lufthansa plane, Wien-Milan. From then on everything would be all right.

       The following morning at about eleven Heinz came furtively in, walking in a crouch, arms up ready to defend his beauty from my blows. He was frightened to find me in a fauteuil with The Times, relaxed and amiable. "Sit down, my boy," I said. "Make yourself comfortable. Listen to me carefully." He humbly begged permission to smoke. "Have one of mine," I said, and flicked my gold Dunhill lighter: I realised I was lucky to have it still. "You," I said, "are going to stay for a little while at the Marmion Hotel on Coventry Street. I've telephoned and made all arrangements. The bill will be sent to me. Certain other arrangements have been made too. The next time you are tempted into criminal activity of any kind you will be promptly sent back to the Reich, where my friend Heinrich Himmler, Reichsfiihrer and head of the SS and the Gestapo, will have, with Teutonic efficiency, rendered all things ready for your reception. Do you understand me?" hi, ich versteh'. "I myself have to go away for a week or so, and I shall be locking up this apartment. I shall be back at the beginning of September. I shall bring you a present." I did not, of course, specify the present. It was all too possible that Heinz, hearing that I was to spirit his father out, might hare oft to the German Embassy and forewarn them. And then, with novelist's cunning: "Perhaps you find it boring here? Somewhat like that place you told me about near Vienna—what's it called?" Gerasdorf? Was I mad, was I joking? Gerasdorf was a pain in the Arsch: London was fine though beset with temptations. But Gerasdorf—Anyway, his father's country place was many kilometres from Gerasdorf, a fair tramp through a wood. "Do you have perhaps photographs of your father's house and your father and yourself perhaps standing in front of it? Knowing my old devotion to your father and my newer devotion to his son you will appreciate how much I cherish such tokens of a time of happiness for him and for yourself." Happiness? Scheiss. But I have such photographs in my room. He went toward it, feeling in his pockets for the key, then remembering that I had taken it. He looked at me with horror horror, then truculence: My room is my own, you have no scheissing right—"All right, Heinz, I know all. My felicitations on a very nice little lootheap. Don't worry, I won't talk. I'll put you in a book some day. I sincerely admire your criminal skills." The young fool then slid into a grin that became a smirk of complicity not without foundation: after all, was not sodomy a deadlier sin than theft? "Photos, Heinz."

       Most of his Kodak snaps were of himself in narcissistic poses, but there were one or two of him swinging beaming from an apple tree branch or vaulting a fence some kilometres from Gerasdorf, the house behind him. I learned its features swiftly by heart: triple-gabled, with a front porch roofed conically and wooden-railed, a low machicolated garden wall, a walnut tree, an American red currant bush. "Lovely," I said. "Peaceful. South of Gerasdorf? Not too far from Vienna?" No, no, it was northeast of Gerasdorf, halfway to Seyring, another arsehole of a dump. "Ah well, some day you'll see it again and perhaps, who knows, I may see it with you." Never want to see the scheissing arschloch of a place as long as I ficking live. Excellent boy.

       Some few days before I was able to get off to Vienna, via Paris and Berlin, the Germans signed a nonaggression pact with the Soviet Union. It was not a pact of friendship. Stalin was later to say: "The Soviet Government could not suddenly present to the public German-Soviet assurances of amicality (druzhba) after they had been covered with buckets of filth by the Nazi Government for six years." It was, I was assured by a Foreign Office acquaintance with whom I had a quick Pernod at Orly, not a bad thing: it limited German activity in Poland, which was a Russian sphere of influence. War? There'd be no war. The British Government could not take seriously an alliance with a country so far east and landlocked as to be less accessible than China. Things would arrange themselves. Chamberlain was talking of setting up a special international commission to discuss the problem of the Polish Corridor. There'd be another Munich, it was the only way. Rest easy. You have lovely flying weather.

       I snapped some of the feathery cloudscape through a port window of the Lufthansa cabin as we approached Vienna. I had borrowed a small Kodak from an ample store of stolen cameras that Heinz had proudly shown me in his wardrobe. At Vienna airport there were amiable SS officers helping to glamorise the normally tedious process of getting through immigration control. Mr Toomey, Mr Toomey, I seem to know the name. What is your purpose in visiting the Reich, Mr Toomey? I am an author with a new book coming out, its title, I think, Es Herbstet. What excellent German you speak, Mr Toomey. Of course, I knew I knew the name. An author, yes. And at which hotel in Vienna will you be staying? I am not yet sure, I thought of breathing a little country air in an inn a brief train ride from Vienna, perhaps at Bad Všslau. And how long will you be with us, Mr Toomey? Again, I am not sure. My old friend ReichsfŸhrer Himmier spoke of perhaps coming to Vienna and combining a few festive evenings with a rigorous toothcombing of the local Schutzstaffel. I beg your pardon, Mr Toomey, would you say that again please, perhaps your German is not so good after all. I took out, bloody fool, always going too far, my prized Himmler letter and handed it over. It was read with awe by all there; there was a temporary blockage of the immigration machine. The SS officer gave it back to me with reverence and some fear. He was a handsome dark young man with the rare distinction of irises of different colours, only one was hazel. He had a compassionate face, he would be compassionate while supervising human liquidation: this liquidates me more than it does you. I was heilhitlered and heelclicked to the freedom of beflagged Vienna. More than a bloody fool, I automatically heilhitlered back.

       It was too late to go to Gerasdorf today. I got a taxi to the Messepalast Hotel on Mariahilferstrasse and booked in for the night. Before dinner I walked up Neubaugasse, turned into Burggasse, then, off Thaliastrasse, found Albrechtsgasse. Outside Number 21 there was a half-obliterated red Jude scrawl but no boastful plaque any more above the level of the painting fist. Swastika flags listless in the windless warm evening hung from windows of the two top stories. The bottom floor, which I presumed to have been Strehler's, had smashed windows and, so far as I could tell by ungainly jumping two or three times, deserted rooms. A cat negotiated broken glass delicately and came out onto a sill to stare at me astonished with garnet eyes. I went back to the hotel and, in its almost empty restaurant, ate some Bouillon mit Ei and Tafelspitz with dumplings, following it with Sachertorte and coffee that smelt like burnt barley and tasted like embittered Ovaltine. Then I strolled to an open-air café in the Michaelerplatz and drank Gšsser Bier. An orchestra played Waldteufel. It also played, in honour of the new pact, the "Song of the Volga Boatmen." The laughing drinkers, pretty women and solid burgesses and slim men in uniform, relaxed, civilised, some of them joining facetiously in the yo-oh heave-ho, seemed an assurance that there would not be any war. Bright is the river flowing forever. A cool breeze blew in from the Danube.

       The following morning I got a taxi to take me to Gerasdorf. The driver, a lean shifty man and much too curious, noted my suitcase and wanted to know where I thought I'd stay in Gerasdorf: no hotels there. Are you sure you don't want to go to GŠnserndorf? You bring a foreigner—English?—the names might sound the same. It's a tidy way to GŠnserndorf but I'll take you. Drop me in Gerasdorf, I have photographs to take. Why there? That's my bloody business. All right, no cause to get offended, I was only trying to help. It was glorious late summer weather, all plums and apples and beanflelds and little children waving with sprays of cow parsley. Drop me here, I said. There was a StŸberl with vineleaves over the lintel. I paid him and he was sullen in his thanks. He was also slow in turning his vehicle to take the road back. He watched me as I sat at the table outside. It was as if he wished to see whether I found my first sip of the local white wine satisfactory. I nodded at him. He nodded back and was off.

       The keeper of the StŸberl wanted to know what I was after in these parts. Re was a robust man with a belly tight as a white cabbage and a mouthful of ruined teeth. I wanted to take some photographs, I said, patting my suitcase. My apparatus is all within. The beauties of rural Austria. I had been advised to come to Gerasdorf. Ah, said the man, you can begin by photographing my wife and myself under the vineleaves. He called Lise, Lise or some such name. A fat woman with fine teeth came out. Kjjss' die Hand, mein Herr. I snapped them. I will come back for more of your excellent wine when I have wandered a little. He watched me set off wandering, shaking his head. A mailman with a horn on a long lanyard and a thin letter sack wove to the StŸberl on his bicycle. Both watched me.

       I took the road north toward Seyring. A village idiot appeared from behind a hedge and went gurrh at me, pulling burrs off his dirty trousers. After a mile or so of blank fields I came to a wood on my left. I entered its dapple of gloom and sudden sun and stumbled over mast and crackling twigs, hazelnuts falling on my shoulders occasionally like timid welcomes to rural Austria. There was a crow's nest high above and a crow croaked caution caution. Squirrels darted and a lizard on a fallen trunk huffed and puffed at me. Free of the wood and sweating heavily I came to an expanse of stubblefields. There was the house over there beyond three elms: three gables and a cone and a low machicolated wall. I was surprised as well as relieved to see it, even Heinz's photographs ought to have been delinquent. I marched through exploding stubble for over a mile. The house was in need of pointing and painting. The gate, swinging from one hinge, whined when I pushed it. A couple of apples, admirable cookers, thudded from their tree. As I reached for the tarnished knocker, which seemed to be the head of the Emperor Franz Josef, the door opened. Strehler had heard me coming. He carried a shotgun.

       "Ja?" He looked like his Stockholm picture. He was about five feet eight, but he could always stoop. He was in baggy torn trousers, food-stained flannel shirt, waistcoat with two buttons missing, carpet slippers.

       I said, in English, "Toomey. The British writer. To whom you sent your son." He replied in English: "You should not be here. You should be looking after poor Heinz."

       "You and Heinz are to be reunited. May I come in?"

       "Reunited? You're mad. But come in."

       A passage cut straight through the house from front to back. It was crammed with old trunks and suitcases, a large child's rocking horse, books, books, topcoats flung about anyhow, dust dancing in the light from the front door. Which he now closed and bolted. He led me to a room on the right. Inside it, by its far wall, an iron stairway spiralled up to the next story. A vast cracked window showed fields and sky and swallows rehearsing their exodus. In front of the window was a large teak table covered with open books and paper. Strehler was working on something. His study, then, full of the junk of travel in ivory and ebony, the dust bristling from flat surfaces like grey iron filings. On the walls framed photographs: a grinning woman in a cloche hat in a park with kiwis, the young Strehler coming into his fame, Heinz as a little boy holding a tabby cat by its tail, Sigmund Freud, Hermann Hesse. Stefan Zweig, Rainer Maria Rilke. "Rilke," I said. "The last time I saw him was in a café in Trieste. He cried."

       "He often cried. But nobody heard him among the angelic orders. Sit on that chair there. It will not, I think, collapse." And he sat at his desk and looked at me frowning. "What was that word you used—reunited?"