The torqued man, p.20
The Torqued Man, page 20
Herr Eich stood scowling. “Even foreigners should know to respect the rules of the country that takes them in.”
“Sage advice, Herr Eich,” said Pike. “But try telling that to a couple of ignorant gobshites like these ones here. Why, they’d doggie-pile the Führer himself if he were here and give him a Dutch rub to boot. Wouldn’t you, you maniacs?” he called out to the Irishmen.
Fortunately, Herr Eich had no grasp of Pike’s English. But he had heard the word “Führer” uttered and, coupled with the jesting tone, took it to be seditious. “I have a good mind . . .” he said, but before he could finish his thought, Codd and McMannis suddenly trampled him.
They had tried to tackle Pike but missed, flattening Herr Eich instead. To this day I still wonder whether Pike sensed my predicament and intentionally baited his compatriots into incapacitating the block warden or whether it was just a drunken accident. That was his ambiguous way—only moments before I had thought he was taunting me, and now it seemed he’d come to my rescue.
“My back!” cried the block warden, frozen in a prone position in the yard. The assault had ignited his sciatica. Pike and the others carried him into his house, where they laid him on the sofa with a glass of water nearby and the telephone safely out of reach. At least he would not be able to file a complaint until well after our two guests were gone.
While this solved our immediate problem, it was not without repercussions.
January 20, 1944
I’ve just learned James von Moltke has been arrested. The Gestapo penetrated another resistance circle—a group run out of the home of the widow Solf. Dozens in custody. Unclear what James’s connection is or what his Christian group in Kreisau has to do with it. Terrifying.
Everyone at work is on pins and needles. Himmler’s guillotine hangs over us. What will people say under torture? Whose names will fall from those broken mouths?
Finn McCool in the Bowels of Teutonia
30
A Heist
After learning Finn had given up the wind hound, Obelinka stopped speaking to him.
She stopped cooking too, which was meant to be an added punishment, though Finn was quite happy to receive a bit of bread and margarine and a cup of dandelion tea in place of the congealed Russian casseroles that contained God knows what. But he was sorry to have made her sad. They had developed a bond, she and he. As two refugees in a sea of Teutonians, they had grown accustomed to taking refuge in each other. He by making her laugh, she by mothering him. Ever since the Bretonese had left—packed off to Frankenland for a bit of subterfuge, said the Torqued Man—Obelinka and Finn had settled into the domestic tranquility of an aging couple. Tea and books in the morning, lunch and a postprandial nap together, followed by more tea and visitors in the afternoon. He rather enjoyed playing the part.
But during the great Ruslandish silence, the house felt icy. She would not laugh at his jokes or respond to the pinches of her behind. She banged his tea down in front of him and retreated wordlessly to the kitchen. Finn promised Obelinka he would make it up to her.
An opportunity soon arose through his official duties. Pleasant as it was to lark about with the Fenian soldiers on his visits to the prison camp, he’d already formed his Fianna with the Wilden of the Grunewald. And he had long made up his mind not to return to Erin before his business here was done. Yet the camp at Luckenwalde, if you squinted your linguistic faculties, sounded like the Teutonian for “Lucky Forest.” Surely, there was some good fortune that could be squeezed from this auspicious-sounding place.
That good fortune, he soon discovered, went on four legs and answered to the name Olaf. Olaf was the camp warden’s prized Jagdterrier. Though not nearly as sleek or as elegant as Dr. Brandt’s wind hound, he was a bright and happy little beast with a great passion for killing rats. He also had a coat like a cozy wool sweater and eyes that made one smile even in a prison camp. Finn knew Obelinka would be smitten.
He selected two Fenian prisoners not for their ability to sabotage or fight off invading Anglelanders but for the simple fact that they were assigned to the camp warden’s yard every afternoon to pick up Olaf’s evacuations. Finn promised them liberation from the Lucky Forest and a night of mad carousal in exchange for the theft of the hound.
The Fenians carried off the heist in fine style. On the day the Torqued Man was to remove them from camp, they lured Olaf out of his wee house on the lawn with a sedative-laden Bockwurst from Obelinka’s larder. They then wrapped him in a protective bedsheet and stuffed him in the sack of his own droppings, which they deposited in the refuse bin, as usual, under the watchful eye of the guards. This left only ten minutes, it was wagered, for Finn to come to the bin with a crate of freshly emptied Fanta bottles—which he’d conveniently brought for the lads to enjoy—collect the hound from the bin, and transfer him to the boot of the Torqued Man’s car before he expired.
It was a close call. When Finn unwrapped the sheet, little Olaf lay inert. The light had gone out of his eyes. He worried the Luminal tablet he’d given him had been too powerful. But at the smell of a new sausage—this one laced with Pervitin—the hound soon revivified.
Finn stuffed the now boisterous Olaf into his sweater, buttoned his coat, and proceeded to slip link after link down his collar to keep him pacified. On the ride home, he insisted on abdicating the front seat to his fellow Fenians to let them better take in the view of their newfound freedom and passed around chewing gum to everyone to drown out the masticatory sounds coming from within his coat.
Once safely at home in the Nymphenburg, Finn instructed the Fenians to create a distraction to lure the Torqued Man out of the house for a moment so he could present his peace offering to Obelinka. The drunken sleeveens spilled into the street with a makeshift football and sent the Torqued Man running in twisted loops, while Finn unveiled the Jagdterrier.
A tear came to Obelinka’s eye as she hugged the handsome little hound to her face.
“He stink,” she said.
Finn beamed. They were again on speaking terms.
31
journal
January 21, 1944
The prospect of an Anglo-American invasion of Ireland faded that spring of ’42, and with it any hope of Pike’s imminent deployment. Operation Osprey was abandoned, like all the others. I don’t know what became of Codd and McMannis after I dropped them off in Wiesbaden; they were likely remanded to another POW camp in Hessen. But Pike showed little interest in any of it. A new restlessness had crept into him. And not just the kind that caused him to go wandering the streets at night and dipping his wick in anything resembling a hole.
I called on him one evening in June, on the first genuinely hot day of the year. Pike was looking mournfully at his tea, with a black bread and margarine so synthetic it glowed. I could hear Frau Obolensky in the kitchen, fawning over her new dog. Presumably the other one had run off in search of a decent meal. I was surprised to see Crean wasn’t there.
“He’s caught a bad dose of the erysipelas,” said Pike.
I suppressed a cry of joy at this news, then, feeling like celebrating, suggested we have dinner at the Ratskeller. We hadn’t been there together in ages. “Come on,” I said, “it’ll be just like the good old days.”
Pike humored me, even though I could tell he wasn’t in the mood. He claimed to have been working on a novel—a crime thriller of sorts—that was taking its toll. I told him I should like to read it, but he was very secretive about it. He said chefs don’t let diners finger the pudding while it’s still in the oven, and writing should be no different. I was skeptical how much he was actually writing, since the heavy bags under his jaundiced eyes told me what he had really been up to, no doubt in the company of Crean. He now looked like most Berliners I saw every day on the U-Bahn, a death-mask grimness guarding over immense anxiety and a swollen liver.
I, however, was in an ebullient mood. Not only was Crean absent and nursing a skin infection; word had come from Prague that Heydrich was dead. He’d been shot by the Czech resistance and, in a fitting bit of poetic justice, died only after refusing to be operated on by non-Aryans. A man of principle to the end. How distraught Himmler must have been to lose his hulking protégé.
Tucked into our usual booth, I raised my glass to Pike and, in a whisper, to the wily Czechs who had had the nerve to shoot their Aryan overlord. Pike had already begun drinking and half-heartedly pulled his glass from his lips.
“One Nazi arsehole dead and Lord knows how many hundreds of reprisals there’ll be. Not sure that’s a calculus worthy of a toast,” said Pike.
Pike was of course right, which was why acts of resistance were foolhardy. And while I knew the revenge on the Czechs would be brutal, I still couldn’t imagine that only a week later they would obliterate an entire village. “All the same,” I said, “I’m glad he’s dead.”
“Now, now, Grotius, where are your Christian morals?” he asked, mock offended.
“Perhaps Old Testament justice is more fitting for our age,” I said.
We drifted into a silence that had become characteristic of our conversations of late. Pike could still wax voluble, but there were now bouts of brooding. Did he do this, I wondered, with Crean? I also wondered if he knew anything of Crean’s ghastly hobbies. Surely he would have been horrified by them. But I never did bring it up, perhaps on the remote chance that he not only knew of Crean’s interests but shared them.
I scanned the room for potential eavesdroppers and unannounced guests, as had become my habit. I was grateful I hadn’t seen Egon again, where I would have had to witness his further humiliation of appearing in public with that repellent badge. Though I feared what had become of him. The deportations of Berlin’s Jews had already begun.
“Well, I don’t suppose this will come as a shock,” I said, breaking the silence, “but I’m afraid there won’t be any more visits to Luckenwalde.”
“Figures,” he said absently.
“But that doesn’t mean we’ve closed up shop just yet,” I said. “I have it on good word that Canaris will—”
“Say, remember how young Patrick redeems himself by becoming a double agent, letting the English think he’s their man and the Irish all think he’s a traitor, but in reality it’s his betrayal that allows the uprising to come off?”
It took me a moment to realize he was referring to the film from months ago. “Yes. Vaguely,” I replied. “Just how many times have you seen it?”
“Oh, about a dozen now,” said Pike. “But isn’t that a dazzling thought? The sheer dialectic of it. The initial betrayal opens up a path for greater loyalty.”
“You mean insofar as it applies to your case?”
Pike laughed. “My case? You know good and well I’m under strict orders to spend my days wearing out the couch cushions with my arsecheeks. But I’ve been thinking about what it means to be a real spy. Would you like me to bend your ear on the matter?”
“Please do.”
Pike gave himself over to a brief coughing fit, then launched into it. “The thesis is this: espionage as an enchantment of the mundane. The spy takes on a new and dangerous life that is meant to look exactly like the banal one we all live. But behind this banality lies the spy’s mission, the reality behind the veil of appearance. This gives occult purpose to the purchasing of eggs, the shining of shoes, the riding of trains—all those sordid perils of actual existence. The spy leavens these with the profundity of his choice. That German importer emptying his bowels in a Mexico City toilet? He is in fact making magic. That attentive waiter rolling napkins in Fez—staking his claim on the future. That journalist buying dish soap in Lisbon—taking a stand to say, ‘I will that the world go this way and not that way.’ They are all re-enchanting the world for themselves, investing the day-to-day drudgeries with meaning.”
I gave him a puzzled look.
“What I’m saying, Grotius, is that the spy is an agent in the truest sense of the word. All of his actions, down to the trimming of toenails and riding the trolley, are shot through with the meaning of having chosen. He wills the universal through the particular.
“Well?” he asked after a pause. “What do you think?”
“I think you’ve seen that silly film about ten too many times,” I said. To be honest, all I had remembered of it were the showering youths, but I was quite certain there was no Kierkegaard in it.
“Don’t let the metaphysics get in your way. All I’m saying is, a great betrayal is an opportunity. An opportunity to make another, even greater choice. To become an agent on a higher order of magnitude. And that, Grotius, bears consideration.” He swallowed the rest of his beer.
“Look, Pike, I’m not sure what you’re driving at, but I think it wisest if you concentrate on remaining as comfortable as you can here.” I gestured at our surroundings. “For starters, we have the cozy Ratskeller, with its horsemeat Jägerschnitzel, sawdust dumplings, and watered-down pilsner. You have your brothels and whatever else in that department I dare not ask.” The Waldhüter’s rack flashed again before my eyes. “And perhaps I can petition Lauhusen for you to continue visiting the men in Luckenwalde, even without the mission. You never know, things could change again. After all, it’s a war.”
“Oh, come off it, man. As far as Germany is concerned, Ireland has gone back to being the land of kobolds and fairies. It might as well be on a different planet.”
“Well then, why don’t you think of this window as an ideal time to write? Concentrate on that story of yours.”
He shrugged. “I’m rather busy fulfilling my destiny as an ailing tosspot.”
I realized that, despite my encouragements, we had put Pike in an impossible position. He was not a spy. Not so long as he was stuck here in Berlin. And yet he was embroiled in all the pretenses of those who find themselves living in a foreign land with ulterior motives. Unlike a spy, however, his daily actions had no greater meaning. Instead, he was perpetually waiting—the most uncomfortable of existential states. We had sustained him with just enough hope of going home that he couldn’t devote himself to anything else, and now that hope was dying.
January 22, 1944
Well, it’s official. I’m bombed out. The flat in Schöneberg is a pile of rocks. All my possessions—vanished. Whatever survived the blast is either buried under tons of rubble or taken by looters.
Only the books cause me pain. Grief, really. Who am I without my books? They were my evidence of an inner life, my holds on a better world. Without them, what am I? A cog in this vast machine of death. A lonely creature in a basement.
Pike was also a lifeline for me, similar to my books. Now both are gone. And all I have left is this. These thoughts made flesh.
By the fall, the Irish situation had fully deteriorated. Even if the chance of a British invasion of Ireland were to reappear, IRA attacks on military posts in the north had further deepened the rift between them and De Valera’s government, which was precisely the gap we had hoped Pike could plug. My daily duties at HQ were now filled with business from the eastern front—managing a flood of Ukrainian and White Russian anti-communists who were being groomed to raise hell behind enemy lines—as well as a contingent of Boers we hoped to deposit in South Africa with half a ton of gelignite. While most of my work consisted of getting papers in order and securing housing for these new agents, the few I dealt with in person were gruff and given to complaint. Even in Pike’s increasingly morose and besotted states, I still preferred his company. I would have taken him on his worst day, with no hope for anything more than his presence.
My dealings with Ireland had dwindled to a monthly briefing. Veesenmayer remained in Zagreb for the year, Kriegsmann was off on missions in North Africa, and Lauhusen remained obscured behind an ever-thickening fog of opiates. The latter had taken to calling me “youngster,” which made me suspect he had forgotten my name.
But when I walked into Lauhusen’s office for my October meeting, Veesenmayer was occupying his desk.
“There you are,” he snarled. “Alright, let’s make this quick.”
“Where’s Lauhusen?” I asked.
“He’s dead.”
“Dead?”
“As in not living, Grotius. The silly idiot overdosed on his pills,” he said, swiveling in the dead man’s chair. “Here’s another piece of news for you: The Ireland unit is officially closed. That means Pike is finished.”
A smile had broken out across his face.
“What do you mean, finished?” I asked.
“Finished is finished. Terminated. He is officially of no use to us, which means he’s a liability.”
“That’s preposterous,” I said.
“Irish neutrality is a given. De Valera wants it as much as we do. As hard as you may find it to believe, that neutrality is not contingent upon us paying Pike’s room and board here in Berlin. The man is a parasite.”
“But—”
“What’s more, he’s a threat to public safety. Did you honestly think I wouldn’t catch wind of his criminal activities?”
“Criminal activities?” I said, genuinely perplexed. Was he referring to Pike’s black-market purchases or brothel visits?
“What illness are you suffering from, Sonderführer, that makes you repeat every word I say in the form of a question? Or don’t you know that assaulting a gendarme is a punishable offense? I understand poor Herr Eich was mowed down by Pike and his goons right outside his own home.”
“Oh, that. It was a block warden, not a gendarme. And it was an accident. Pike didn’t even touch the man.”
“I’m not inviting you to a conversation on the matter,” said Veesenmayer. “You will deal with Pike just as you dealt with the Bretons.”
“But . . .” I protested, the alarm showing on my face.
“I want him in Sachsenhausen tomorrow, and I want you to deliver him. Failure to do so will be interpreted as an act of insubordination. Now, thank you, Sonderführer, that is all!”
