I, Lucifer: Finally, the Other Side of the Story (27 page)

`Do you need help?' a voice said. `Do you want me to call
an ambulance?'

I looked up. Indecipherable against the dark brick and
pewter sky. A patchouli-flavoured hand, dry and cool,
reached down and took mine. My left. My right was
clenched around some tiny object. `Can you stand?'

Apparently, I could, given that I found myself, after her
braced yank, on my feet. Vertical, I found myself face to face
with a stout woman in her late fifties. Ruddy cheeks, manly hands, a silver-grey ponytail, red corduroys and a hat-
tlescarred leather bomber jacket. Cheekbones. One earring
of Chinese turquoise. Breath roll-up-scented and boots steelcapped.

`Are you all right?' she said. `You're covered in blood.'

What does it say about the state I was in that I merely
stood there opening and closing my mouth for a few
moments? To my absolute astonishment, she started feeling
me up. Or at least, so I thought, until I realised she was
looking for the source of the bleeding.

`Please,' I said. `Please. No. I haven't been - I'm not, ah,
wounded.'

`Just fucked over?' she said, giving my elbow a compassionate squeeze. `You've got a shocking black eye, you know.'

Hard, really terribly hard, to describe my feelings at this
point. First, I own, was incredulity. Do you, by any chance,
have any idea how STUPII) it is to go wandering around
London's alleyways in the small hours? And do you have
any idea, dear Miss Ruth Bell, how FURTHER STUPII) it
is, given your presence in such locales, to extend a hand to
a beaten body indisposed among the bins? Do you know
who you could run into? But then that is Ruth, you see?
Very seldom troubled by the gaps between knowing what
the right thing to do is and doing it. (Whereas Gunn ...
Well, he's all gaps, really.) She's what we call Downstairs a
Lost Cause. Course, being celibate helps. Leave sexual
energy unspent and it'll turn its hand to all sorts of creative
activities (no wonder Gunn's output was so poor), and dear
Ruth hasn't had a jump in three years. Claims she doesn't
miss it. Claims she's too busy. But what irritates me is the
stupidity, the ease with which such people keep themselves
out of my grasp. There's no reading, very little reflection, just
the spirit's rough expression through salubrious hobbies and a worthwhile job. She doesn't even go to fucking Church.

`What've you got in your hand?' she said, lifting my
clenched right mit up between us.

Well, I thought, as I opened my palm and struggled to
focus, perhaps things are looking up after all. She's going to
be ... disappointed when I repay this kindness with ...

`Oh,' I said, feeling terrible all over again. `Oh.'

`Is that one of your ... Is that one of your teeth, love?'

In the cafe ('Come on,' Ruth said, as the light brightened
around us, `I'll buy you a cuppa. You look like you need it.')
I went into the bathroom to get a hold of myself. Lucifer, I
said - I did, you know; I don't spare myself when I need a
right good talking to - Lucifer, I said, you are going to pull
yourself together. Igo you hear me? Can you imagine - for
the love of Farrah can you imagine how this would look in
certain quarters? Can you imagine how Astaroth ... No,
enough. Amusing in its way - but really: enough. Enoq~h.

`Got to go myself, now,' Ruth said, when I returned to
our table. `Keep an eye.'

You'd think she was loaded. Two full Veggie Breakfast
specials, despite my protestations. I saw the ex-crim behind
the counter sketching his London theory: Older bird, arty, bit
a dosh from the family; younger bloke - but he came a cropper
with it when he saw the state I was in. Probably not your
idea of aromatherapy, a night between King's Cross rubbish
heaps, though I myself found my lately acquired odour
whoreishly seductive. You'd think, as I say, that she had some
middle-class wedge behind her, but the truth is she's barely
making ends meet.

All the more reason, therefore, to relieve her of her purse
while she was in the loo. A laughable haul, obviously,
£63.47, NatWest chequebook and Switch card, photo of
her dead ma and pa, any organ you like as long as I'm dead, and a slew of useless contact numbers scribbled on aged
scraps and tickets - but that was hardly the point. A faithshaking betrayal, that was the point.

It should by now be apparent that I'm no fan of mere brutality. Brutality is to evil what a Big Mac is to hunger: it gets
a job done, it accomplishes something - but utterly without
beauty. There is a job to be done, obviously. Big Macs from
Moscow to Manhattan address hunger's pragmatic agenda
even if they leave the demands of its aesthetic untouched. I
do require a certain quota of broken faces and crippled
minds; there are targets. But what I'm looking for - what I'm
really looking for - is the marriage of brutality to the higher
human faculties: imagination, intellect, practical reasoning,
aesthetic sense - and this pearl is found in but few oysters.

Consider, for example, my work in the thirties and forties.
I'm not just talking about the boom, the record profits, the
staggering numerical achievement (oh nay brothers how the
dark flowers bloomed in Hell, how we wallowed in blossom,
how the odour dizzied us, how we swooned); nor am I talking merely of the clean lines of the System, nor the
inspirational role of the mob. I'm talking, dear reader, of the
sublime fusion of order and destruction. Like most alchemical grails it wasn't sought or won without risk and hardship.
(Speaking of grails, shall I tell you where the Holy Grail is?
You'd never believe it. Actually I'll save it for later. Some
incentive for you to hang in there through the grizzly
bits ...) My boy Himmler spent a great deal of time worrying - about all sorts of nonsense (his bowels, whether he was
undermined by his spectacles, whether his face really resembled - as an old school enemy had cruelly claimed - a brainless onion) but chiefly about the excruciating difficulty
of torturing and murdering millions of people without damaging one's humanity ...

Tonight Heinrich addresses an assembly of SS brass in
Berlin. He has his speech prepared, but the cases of Kreiger
and Hoffman won't leave him alone. The cases of Kreiger
and Hoffman are telling Heinrich that the speech as it is
won't do. He's drafting an addendum mentally, now, combing his hair at the mirror of his mistress's bathroom. The
bathroom, like the rest of the grand, cavernous house, used
to belong to someone else ... Gentlemen, there is, in addition ... no. In addition, gentlemen, I must draw your attention -
no. There is no getting away, gentlemen, from the fact that - no.
`The fact that' is always redundant. If you feel yourself to be
in possession of a fact, then state it. Gentlemen, there is something I would like you to consider. I mean of course - but the
addendum falters at the intrusion of a slight colonic spasm
and a sequence of soundless farts escaping in malodorous
ellipsis that bring tears of something - humility, relief, joy -
to the Reichsfiihrer's eyes. He must begin again with his
hair. It's not widely known that our Heinrich suffered from
an obsessive compulsive disorder, that actions as mundane as
combing his hair were hung around with curious methods
and rituals. The floor of the bathroom is tiled in pale blue
with blinding white grouting. He wonders about the workman who laid them, where he is now, whether he's alive,
whether he was a Jew. What I mean, gentlemen, is that there is
a serious risk of - no. Fucking concentrate. But Kreiger and
Hoffman won't let him. Scylla and Charybdis, Kreiger and
Hoffman. No point in mentioning them by name, obviously, but ... Perhaps through the Scylla and Charybdis
motif - though half that lot won't even - he is thinning, he
knows. Under the overgenerous light (the bathroom is big enough for a small chandelier) the pink of his scalp shows
through. It is a great, dark, burden, gentlemen, and it is for us -
it is_for inc - I will bear this burden ... Remembering her soaping his hair in the bath, sculpting it into a single tuft like the
stem of an acorn almost makes him laugh. He's been finding
in laughter of late hidden precipices, sudden sheer drops
into the conclusion that he's lost his mind. Laughter - genuine laughter, not the political variety - has of late had him
slithering down unexpected tilts, arms windmilling, only to
grab a halt at some vertiginous edge beyond which emptiness offers him the pitch into madness as his own final
solution. So he doesn't laugh genuinely of late. Instead he
laughs strategically, loudly, letting each metallic ejaculation
form its brilliant armour around him.

It's a great difficulty for the Reichsfuhrer to ponder the
wording of the warning Kreiger and Hoffman have made
plain, without now, at this very moment, mentally re-living
the two cases themselves.

Gerd Kreiger had done eight months at Buchenwald.
(Marcus Hoffman had been there only three.) In December
he'd been granted leave to attend his father's funeral in
Leipzig. Gerd hadn't been close to his father (perhaps that,
thinks Heinrich ...~) and it was no secret among his colleagues in the camp that this two-day sojourn was cherished
not as an opportunity for the formal expression of grief, but
as a chance for a highly informal expression of lust: fortyeight hours in Leipzig would take him (once the onerous
business with the old man's corpse was concluded) into the
arms of his fiancee, the tediously rhapsodized Wilhomena
Meyer, or, as both she and Gerd preferred, Willie.

Heinrich, against his better judgement (he suspects not
sentimentality, exactly, but some kind of weakness) has photographs of both Gerd and Willie (but not of Marcus) in the top drawer of his desk. Gerd is in uniform facing the camera:
monstrously high cheekbones and giant grey eyes, a fulllipped mouth and a slicked-back widow's peak so blond it
shows up white in the print. (Just the sort of hair Heinrich
himself would prefer.) Not quite the ideal - there's a lopsidedness to the face as a whole, as if its components have been
shaken by something and not come into correct realignment - but certainly nothing to arouse suspicion.

In the other photograph, Willie Meyer, Gerd's intended,
is bright-faced with dark eyes and her coppery hair wound
up in an elaborate chignon. Her cheeks are on the heavy
side, as is her jaw, and Heinrich suspects she would have
thickened undesirably with age, but her throat is a pearly
column of some loveliness, and you can see there's a pair of
formidable Teutonic Titten beneath the close-fitting blouse.
The photograph shows her at twenty-two, seated at a piano
but not playing, clutching, rather, her framed Certificate of
Excellence from one of Leipzig's private colleges of music.
She looks genuinely happy, relieved, shyly proud of herself.
Whenever the Reichsfiihrer places their images side by side
on the varnished oak of his desk he feels sure they would
have had a good, stodgy, tolerably unhappy marriage and
four or five clumsy children. He feels sure everything would
have been all right.

Afterwards, he had sent officers to interview Gerd and
Marcus's crew at Buchenwald. A good poker player, they'd
said of Kreiger. A practical joker, of Hoffman. The prisoners? What's to say about that? They felt as we all do. It's a
headache, you know, a constant headache. Jews, Jews, Jews,
fucking endless shivering Jews. Kreiger used to complain
the whole thing was going too slowly, maybe that they were
coming out of the ground at night like mushrooms! What?
No, no, of course not. What's this all about anyway?

The bathroom radiator shudders and clanks. Difficult to
do this in your head, Heinrich thinks. Heated bathrooms are
the hallmarks of ... The point I want to bring to your attention,
,ientlen►en, is that our destiny places us on a knife-edge ... Yes but
then you lose the Scylla and Charybdis image. They won't
even be paying attention, half of them. Too many of them
don't realise even now what we're ... what we ...

Gerd got his night alone with Willie. It was a big night for
both of them. A big night for Willie because she knew her
mother didn't believe her story of staying at Lisle's, and
though she didn't quite wink at her daughter, there was a
curious movement at the corners of her mouth that indicated some new and shocking female complicity, brought on
by the war, Willie thought, with feelings of liberation and
betrayal queasily mixed. (It must be said here that it was by
no means a small night for Marcus Hoffman, either, since
round about the time Gerd and Willie were getting down to
business, young Marcus was putting the pistol in his mouth,
pulling the trigger, and blowing most of his brain out of the
top of his head.) A big night for Gerd, because sometime
shortly after entering her (standard issue condom) he stabbed
Willie through the stomach with a pair of dressmaker's scissors that were lying on the bedside table. Then he stabbed
her through the kidneys, then the lower bowel, then the
heart. Then he had a bath. Then he dressed. Then he went
out to a nearby cafe and had a drink. He was still there six
hours later when the Gestapo came to arrest him.