The torqued man, p.21
The Torqued Man, page 21
I saluted with as much contempt as the gesture would accommodate and stormed out of his office.
I had feared this day would come. Operationally speaking, Pike had stopped being useful months ago. But why, I wondered, had Canaris just now relinquished his support? Was it really over that stupid incident with the block warden? I couldn’t help but suspect that Veesenmayer, without consulting the admiral, had issued the directive himself.
Not twenty minutes later, I found myself on the top floor in a grand mahogany vestibule, standing before Canaris’s secretary. I’d worked in the building for more than two years by then but had never had the occasion, or the nerve, to set foot in the fox’s lair. Not since Madrid had I even glimpsed the man himself.
“I know this is highly unorthodox,” I said to the athletic-looking young man behind the desk, “but is the admiral in?”
“And who might you be?” he asked.
“Sonderführer Adrian de Groot, Branch II, formerly of the Kriegsorganisation Madrid. The admiral knows me. Please, I need only a few minutes of his time.”
“I’m sorry,” said the secretary, “but the admiral does not have any visitors scheduled.”
I was about to grovel before the man, when the door to the office swung open and out ran a Dachshund. I heard Canaris bellow, in one of those odd voices that humans reserve for pets and babies, “Mitzi, come back here, you cunning little rascal, you. Keyserling, quick, Mitzi’s gone rogue!”
The secretary popped up to scan the corridor for Mitzi, but I had already seen her scuttle down the hallway and, seizing my opportunity, tore after the beast.
I caught her by the stairwell and toted her back as she yelped and writhed in protest. The secretary came down the hallway to intercept her, but I elbowed him aside, Mitzi nipping at his hands, and marched hound-first into Canaris’s office.
It was just like the rumors I had heard. Books from floor to ceiling. A Peruvian rug. A Landsknecht arquebus with a beautifully carved stock and intricate silverwork. A woodblock print of an ancient samurai. A huge oil portrait of Franco. A photo of Canaris and Miguel Primo de Rivera in hunting clothes. A Humboldt watercolor map of South America—where, during the last war, Canaris had, legend had it, escaped from an island prison off the coast of Chile, ridden a stolen horse three hundred miles over the Andes, hopped a train across the pampa to Buenos Aires, where he boarded a Dutch steamer under a false Chilean passport bearing the name Reed Rosas, and was, less than three months after being captured, back at his desk in Berlin. In the entire office, there was not a single sign of Nazi officialdom. No swastikas, no Hitler, nothing. Here was a man who was fighting a different war.
“Look, Mutzi! There’s our Mitzi Witzi!” said the admiral, holding his other hound like an infant.
He was wearing a louche smoking jacket and leather slippers. I had never seen the man in uniform. He’d aged considerably in the last few years but still possessed a dignified air. Beside him on the desk was Kantorowicz’s biography of Frederick II.
Seeing that the face behind Mitzi was not his secretary’s, he quickly recovered his normal voice. “Oh! It looks like Mitzi has made a new friend.”
“Indeed, Herr Admiral. I just happened to be in the area when she leapt into my arms.”
He took Mitzi from me with his hound-free hand and studied my face. I could tell he was straining to place me in his memory.
“Forgive me, Herr Admiral. My name is Adrian de Groot, formerly of the Madrid KO. We’ve met briefly before.”
“De Groot? Of course, of course. The translator with the Dutchman’s name. One of Leissner’s crack team, right?”
“Exactly, sir.”
“Tell me, De Groot. Have you read Lugones yet?”
I was stunned he remembered. It was the Argentine writer he’d asked me about years ago. Thank God I had read him since. “Why, yes, sir. In fact, I have. Las fuerzas extrañas.”
“And?”
“And you were right, sir. A true master. I particularly admired the one about the gardener who breeds killer plants.”
“Good man, De Groot. But now you’re here in Berlin, yes?”
He had the habit of addressing everyone informally, with Du. I recalled how disarming I had found it upon first meeting him and found it to be equally so now. I immediately felt like the old man’s school chum.
“Yes, sir. I’ve been tending to our sabotage agents awaiting deployment. And, well, sir, one section in particular, the Irish, has just been shut down.”
“Ah yes, damn shame, that. Never could get the right angle with the Irish. And poor Lauhusen. He deserved better.”
“Yes, sir. My condolences. I . . .” I tried to think of something elegiac to say, but Canaris was already past it.
“Of course, if that damn fool Hitler would have kept out of this infernal Russia business, things might have been different. It’s the end of the cycle, De Groot—the Iron Age, as Spengler calls it. The great unraveling.”
I knew Canaris was an independent operator but was nonetheless shocked to hear Hitler disparaged in such open terms.
“Well, what’s on your mind?” said Canaris, as if just remembering I was still there.
“Sir, it’s about how we . . . decommission the agents once a cell has been deactivated. After all, they have agreed to work for us. It doesn’t seem . . . well, fair that when their contract ends, we then treat them like criminals.”
“Yes, I quite agree with you there, De Groot. Modern war’s a rotten business. Not like in the days of Stupor Mundi,” he said, tapping the book on his desk, “when there was still some honor to it. Himmler, Schellenberg, Kaltenbrunner—all those bloodlusting bureaucrats at the Security Office wouldn’t know a code of honor if it slapped them in the face. Well, let me tell you, De Groot. They won’t have the final word. They think they pull the strings on this show, but soon they’ll see that I still have a sharp pair of scissors.”
“Does that mean, sir, you can override the remand order?” I asked, suddenly buoyed with hope.
“No, not a chance of that, I’m afraid. Security Service is calling the shots now on foreign agents in the Reich. If you want decency these days, De Groot, you have to go beyond our borders. Age of Iron, indeed.”
I had thought Canaris had magic powers, but it turned out he, too, was just another cog in the machine. For all his maverick eccentricity and hostility toward Hitler, he was, when it came down to it, the same as the rest of us. Clinging to his Kantorowicz in inner exile, all while helping to create the terrible reality he claimed not to condone. I remember thinking as I walked home that you could replace the old knight Canaris with a modern fanatic like Heydrich or Schellenberg and nothing would really change. No sooner had the thought passed through my mind than, like the lightning bolt that knocked Luther from his horse, the revelation struck me: You could also replace Pike with someone else.
And that is when, for the first time, the name Archibald Crean entered my mind and made me smile.
I pulled up to Crean’s flat in Kreuzberg early the next morning. I had been here once before, the first time I trailed him.
I left the auto idling and rang the buzzer. It was a second-floor flat on a tree-lined street near the Görlitzer Bahnhof. He lived alone and seemed not to have much intercourse with his neighbors.
Crean buzzed me in and was at the door in trousers and a thick robe when I came up the stairs.
“Fluss! What a pleasant surprise,” he said unconvincingly.
I adopted the air of someone frantic but trying to remain calm, which was rather natural considering the circumstances. “Crean, I’m terribly sorry to barge in on you like this, and at such an early hour. But I’m afraid it’s about Frank.”
“What happened?” he said, alarmed. Thankfully his worry had prevented him from asking how I knew where he lived.
“He’s still alive, but our friend was struck by a car last night.”
“Last night? But I was with him. When? Where?”
Of course he was with him. “It was late, possibly early morning, right outside his door. The motorist struck him and drove on.”
“The bastard!”
“I only just heard from the hospital this morning. They say he’ll recover, but he took quite a knocking all the same.”
“Oh, thank God.”
“I thought maybe you’d like to accompany me to the hospital. They moved him to one outside town. But I have my auto out front and am on my way to see him.”
“Of course. Just give me a moment to fetch my shoes and coat. Here, won’t you come in.”
I entered his apartment and stood in the foyer while Crean went to the bedroom to dress. I noticed his overcoat hanging on the rack beside me. I checked his breast pocket and, as luck would have it, found his identity card. Here was the riskiest moment of my plan, and it had fallen right into my lap. Hearing him still padding in the bedroom, I swapped his pass and replaced it with the one I had hastily forged the night before—the skills from my Madrid days were rusty but still functional. Now I could only hope that he didn’t check for his papers before we arrived.
Crean came out of the room dressed and reached across me for his coat and hat. I watched as he fastened his buttons and patted his pockets.
“Have everything?” I asked.
“My cigarettes,” he said, annoyed with himself.
“No matter, we can share mine. I ought to cut back anyway.”
“Cheers, Fluss.”
Off we went, past two hospitals, and out of the city to the north. After we had driven for a good thirty minutes, Crean began to get restless.
“Why in Christ’s name did they move him so far?”
“I don’t understand it either. Something about needing a kidney specialist.”
“Kidney specialist? I thought you said he would be alright.”
“Well, that’s what they said. I suppose that’s because they brought him to the kidney specialist.”
“How did he go and get himself run down by a bloody car? There’s not a soul on the street that time of night in his neighborhood. It makes no sense.”
“I know. But you know how dark it is in the dead of night with the blackout. All it takes is one drunk or negligent motorist. Had the two of you been out late drinking?”
“Not particularly. Just our usual haunt for a few wee pints of the cat piss.”
Both Crean and Pike thumbed their noses at our lighter German beers and waxed nostalgic for their beloved stouts, all the while swilling down vast quantities of the derisively labeled “cat piss.” When I told them we, too, had dark beer in Germany, in the many varieties of Dunkles and Schwarzbier, Pike had said, “Oh, you mean black cat piss? Why, your rudest Jerry dark couldn’t tie the shoes of the plainest of porters.”
This was the first time I had been alone with Crean, at least with him being aware of it. “If you don’t mind my asking,” I said, “what is it you and Frank get up to on your outings together?”
“Up to? Nothing. A few pints, a few laughs, that’s all. Why?”
“Oh, nothing,” I said. We were drawing near Oranienburg. I could make out the watchtower and smokestacks in the distance. “It’s just that I’ve never understood why he preferred your company to mine.”
“I don’t know what you mean, Fluss,” he said, with evident discomfort.
“At first I thought it was because he was embarrassed by my affection for him. But it’s clear you’re in love with him too.”
“In love with him? Look, Fluss, I’m afraid you’ve jumped the rails. I don’t know what in the world—”
“I really don’t mind. He’s an extraordinary man. But I want you to understand that I’m not doing this out of jealousy. I’m doing this for him.”
“Doing what?” said Crean as we approached the gates of Sachsenhausen, emblazoned with a sinister wisdom about the liberating powers of work.
“Arbeit macht frei?” said Crean, reading the iron letters. “Say, what kind of hospital is this?”
Two armed sentries approached the car.
I rolled down the window as the guard heil-Hitlered me. I gave him my credentials and Pike’s internment papers.
“Is this the prisoner, Herr Sonderführer?” he asked, pointing uncertainly at Crean in the front seat.
“Of course it is,” I said, like he was an idiot for even asking.
“Prisoner? What in the bloody hell is going on?” asked Crean.
The guard saluted and waved me through. I drove past the watchtower into the vast triangular campgrounds, with Crean now in a panic.
Two more guards brought me to a stop at the Appellplatz. Three gaunt, bald prisoners were on the roll-call line, frozen in a squat with their arms stretched painfully in front of them. When I got out of the car, I noticed them looking at me and muttering. Then they began to yell unintelligible curses. Looking again, I realized these living ghosts were the very same Bretons, Pike’s former housemates, that I had delivered here over a year ago. Seeing the wrecks they had become—a wreckage I played a hand in, and an evil no amount of cynicism could conceal—I felt something within me break. I had done this to them.
But in that moment it was only an inchoate feeling, and there wasn’t time to dwell on my guilt. Crean was screaming about the mistake that had been made as the guards dragged him from the car. He kept demanding they look at his identity pass. The guard snatched the pass from him, examined it, and smiled.
“Alles in Ordnung, Herr Finn.”
Crean looked my way, and a flicker of understanding passed across his face.
Finn McCool in the Bowels of Teutonia
32
Hibernation
And this was how Finn was unmanned and slept through his long-dreamed-of doctors’ appointment.
The leaves of Berlin died on the trees and the Doctors’ League Dinner loomed. Finn had arranged for a great inventory of smut to be supplied by Crean shortly beforehand. Per their routine, they would make their broadcasts, then repair to the Pickled Herring to drink their pints and deal in Dreck.
But when Finn arrived at the Funkhaus, instead of seeing Crean in the booth, he saw Patrick Cadogan, the irritating Irish persona of the even more irritating Billy Joyce, sharing the microphone with Rosaleen Lynch as they sang a risible duet of “Londonderry Air.”
When the broadcast ended, Joyce emerged from the booth in his usual obnoxious manner, slapping the backs of all misfortunate enough to be in the station. Despite claiming an Anglo-Irish pedigree, he was at heart a phony American. His voice was an adenoidal whine, and his attempt at a brogue was something like an English foxhunter imitating a Bowery Boy.
“Your man Crean was a no-show, Finny,” said Joyce, as he socked Finn on the shoulder [thickly sinewed as a medicine ball].
Rosaleen Lynch came out of the booth in tears. “Oh, Finn, it’s terrible. I think Archie’s been arrested.” She buried her head in his chest, and Finn got a noseful of harsh chemicals swirling up from her red coif.
“Arrested? How do you know?”
“We were supposed to walk together to the station today, but when I turned onto his street, I saw him being ushered into a black motor car.”
“Ushered by whom?”
“It was that clubfoot friend of yours, the one who came here to the station. Archie said he thought he was a spy.”
Finn said he would look into the matter, that he was sure there was nothing nefarious about it, and for Rosaleen not to worry.
“I’m a mess, an utter mess, I tell you. I don’t want to go home alone tonight, Finn. Will you come with me?”
He needed to find Crean and, more important, Crean’s smut. But, gallant by nature, he agreed to escort her.
Rosaleen lived in an elegant flat in Mitte and invited him in. She put on the kettle while he listened to the radio and admired the sumptuous living space.
“Quite the hovel you have here,” said Finn, following the arabesques of the cornice molding as they erupted in a spray of floral ejaculations.
“It belonged to some smarmy Jew,” she shouted from the kitchen. “You should have seen all the dusty books and filth he had on the walls. I had to have the place fumigated with Lysol before I could move in.”
“And here I thought that was just the toxic scent of your character,” said Finn under his breath.
He had been debating how he felt about having a twirl with old Rosie. Obvious cons: her raving bigotry. Obvious pros: a warm, welcoming hole, presumably below a fire-red pubis. Did the former make the latter less compelling? Certainly. But did it render it uncompelling? On that he was undecided.
Rosaleen set the tea tray down on the side table. “Why don’t you play mum?” she said, kicking off her shoes and laying her head on Finn’s thigh.
Finn poured the tea, then stirred in the powdered milk and synthetic honey.
“What could Archie have possibly done to get himself detained?” asked Rosaleen, looking up at her expropriated ceiling.
“It’s a mystery,” said Finn. “I’ve always known him to be upright and law-abiding.”
“Do you think that clubfoot of yours really works for the consulate?”
“You mean Fluss? I think so. Though who really knows the truth of anyone else?”
“Well, as for me,” said Rosie, turning over so that her chin lay firmly in Finn’s lap, “I’ve made a point my whole life of being honest about my feelings and direct in expressing them.”
“I can see that,” said Finn.
She looked up at him, smiling, as she grazed her fingers upon Finn’s inseam. She had worked her way into his pants and had just laid hands on his glans when he noticed out of the corner of his eye a photo on the armoire. He could make out Rosie standing beside a familiar jug-eared face.
“Who is that you’re with in the photo over there?” he asked, squinting.
“Where? Oh, why that’s General O’Duffy. I had the pleasure of meeting him right before I came over to Germany.”
“Eoin O’Duffy is a fascist cunt,” said Finn involuntarily, as he felt his horn go soft.
