The torqued man, p.29
The Torqued Man, page 29
No sooner had I written that entry and gone upstairs to make a cup of tea to sip while I read the end of Pike’s story, having convinced myself that I at last knew how to read it, than the knock came. And with it, the start of the single most harrowing and defining chapter of my life.
I opened the door to the two bird brothers, each of them flanking Kommissar Lipke, all of them smiling at me. They wanted to ask me some more questions, they said, but this time it was necessary to take me into protective custody.
I don’t remember the conversation after that. Those terrible words cut some vital cord within me, because I knew perfectly well what “protective custody” meant. It meant they could do with me what they wanted. No need for an arrest, a formal charge—I was their plaything for as long as they liked. I could have shouted, “What’s this about?” And perhaps I did. But it would have been pointless. It didn’t have to be about anything.
As I feared, the car turned at Potsdamer Platz in the direction of Prinz-Albrecht-Straße. Toward Gestapo headquarters.
But when Lipke noticed this, he became indignant. “What are you doing?” he shouted from the back seat to the bird brothers in front. “This is my case, my jurisdiction—go to Alexanderplatz.”
The bird brothers looked at each other. “We have oversight, Lipke, in any case we choose. We advise you not to be so uppity.”
But uppity was exactly what Kommissar Lipke was.
“Gentlemen, I hardly need remind you my uncle is Reichskriminaldirektor Nebe. If he hears that the Gestapo is poaching on Criminal Police work, preventing the Kripo from working homicide investigations, and has to take time out of his busy day to meet with Herr Himmler, who I’m sure is even busier, to inform him that the clearly articulated divisions within the Reich’s security apparatus are not being adhered to—”
“Alright, alright, you’ve made your point. But we’re coming with you.”
The car turned back onto Leipziger Straße and headed across the river. Though I did not appreciate it then, the outcome of this dispute is likely the sole reason I am able to write these words today.
They put me in a small room with two opposing chairs and a table. I was seated in one and the young Kripo detective took the other. The birdmen loomed in silent menace behind me.
“Herr De Groot, can you confirm your whereabouts on the afternoon of April twenty-fifth, 1943?” asked the detective.
The accumulated tension and the absurdity of the question made me burst into laughter.
“You find that question humorous?”
“No, it’s just that I can’t possibly answer that—not without my logbook,” I replied, “which was destroyed when I was bombed out of my flat in January.”
“So you have no alibi for the afternoon in question.”
Alibi? For what? That date meant nothing to me as far as I could recall.
“I didn’t say that, Herr Kommissar. I only said I can’t immediately recall my precise whereabouts on an afternoon one year ago. But I believe that would have been right around the time I was tending to a group of visitors from South Africa concerning matters of state. Honestly, I don’t know, given the recent tumult of jurisdictions, whether I am at liberty to divulge further details of those operations.”
“Let me jog your memory, Herr De Groot: Do you recall visiting the children’s wing of the Brandenburg State Welfare Institute that afternoon?”
So it was that again. Not about Crean or Pike or my Abwehr associates or my stupid blackout curtains. It was about the doctor.
“No, I’m quite sure I didn’t. I hadn’t been there since my niece’s death, at the end of 1940. Of that I am certain.”
“You said a few days ago that you had been upset by your niece’s death. Were you upset with anyone in particular?”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Did you blame the doctor for your niece’s death?”
“No, of course not,” I said unconvincingly.
But hadn’t I once threatened Dr. Heinze with violence, he asked, when I learned of her death?
I had no recollection of doing any such thing, I said, as I felt the blood in my cheeks betray me. I thought back to that moment, in the days following Gretchen’s death, when I found myself shaking outside the hospital in Brandenburg, the word “murderers” on my lips. But it was true. I had no recollection of making any specific threat.
I was upset, I said, that was all. It’s possible I spoke to the doctor severely. In any event, I said, that would have been well over two years before the doctor and nurse were murdered. “That’s a bit too long for a crime of passion, don’t you think?”
“Yes, it is. But for a premeditated murder, I’d say it’s a most judicious window.”
“That’s preposterous!” I said. “I’ve never murdered anyone.”
The young Kommissar exchanged private glances with the silent Gestapo agents behind me.
“How, then, do you explain the recent testimony of a patient who claims to have witnessed the murders firsthand? A young Werner Essenfeld, eleven years old, was a catatonic patient in Room 113A, where Dr. Heinze and his nurse, Frau Mittler, were killed. Two days ago, for the first time in four years, he spoke.”
“A medical miracle,” said the Gestapo agent behind my left shoulder.
Yes, a miracle that the boy himself hadn’t already been murdered by the hospital staff.
The detective looked at me for a reaction to this news.
“According to his testimony, the killer, a man of medium height and pale complexion, came into the room with Dr. Heinze and, just before stabbing him, said the following words: ‘This is for Gretchen.’
“What do you say to that, Herr De Groot?”
So it was true. My God, it was true. Pike’s story was true.
“Okay, Lipke,” said one of the birdmen behind me, after I’d sat there a minute in shock. “Let him marinate.”
Whereupon I was stripped down to my underwear, marched to a black windowless cell, and left to decompose. For how long I cannot say. It could have been two days. It could have been ten. I wager it was somewhere in between.
Time vanished into the darkness. Even the normal animal rhythms went silent. I was too nauseated to eat and had little need to move my bowels—a blessing considering my sole outlet was a chamber pot discernible only by touch. The only punctuation came in the form of a stale roll and a pitcher of water deposited through my slot. I could not see my hand in front of my face. All I had to tie me to a reality beyond my own thoughts was the feel of cold concrete, the sounds of clicking boots and distant screams.
I was terrorized by the thought that the police would find the two manuscripts—my journal and Pike’s story—when they searched the Nymphenburger house. Thank God some part of me had the foresight to hide both of them before coming up the stairs that morning, as was my habit. But had I hidden them well enough? Would they think to poke a broom handle into a defunct pipe in the cellar ceiling?
There were waves of anger down in that hole too. I had been hurt by Pike’s words. They felt like a betrayal. Why had he done this to me? What had I done to deserve this? Why should I be punished for his actions? Pike had deceived me. But why? Why did he only pretend to be my friend?
And yet there were those few precious and ineradicable days just before he drifted away for good. Days without pretense or deception. Just us together. And how could I claim he did not care for me, when, after all, he had killed for me? Unasked, unbidden, he had done me this mad kindness. I spiraled through these thoughts until exhaustion put an end to all thinking.
I was woken with a bucket of cold water. Then dressed in someone else’s clothes and given another roll and a lukewarm cup of tea. The guard told me I would be interrogated within the hour and returned me to my dark cell. Now fully conscious, I was taut with anticipation, even though I knew there was nothing I could do to prove my innocence. I had thought of turning over Pike’s story to them, but to find it they would also find my journal.
A whole day must have elapsed before they finally brought me to the interrogation room. Kommissar Lipke sat at a table behind a large lamp. The Gestapo agents were gone. Perhaps he had successfully elbowed them out of his investigation, or they were busy digging for new evidence to bury me.
The detective switched on the floodlight. I cannot describe the pain one feels when, after days of total darkness, thousands of watts of light explode into your retinas. But I now know that light has a sound, like screeching train metal, as it screams into your brain.
He laid a file on the table. “Please have a look.”
It’s the journal, I thought, with a heavy, sinking feeling. I had signed my own death sentence.
“Open it.”
I squinted at it again, fumbling at it with my shaking hands. I then realized the file was far too slim to be my journal, or Pike’s manuscript for that matter. It was something else.
I opened it but could barely make out the words. Gradually, my eyes focused enough to read the heading: Directory of the Reich Committee for the Scientific Registering of Serious Hereditary and Congenital Illnesses.
“This was found in the house you were occupying at the time of your arrest. Would you like to explain how it came into your possession?”
I told him I didn’t know.
“Would you like to explain why the names of these doctors have all been crossed out?”
I told him I didn’t know.
“Don’t you find it an intriguing coincidence, Herr De Groot, that all these doctors are dead?”
I said nothing.
“Where did you get this directory?”
I told him it wasn’t mine, that the house had been host to several occupants over the years.
“Then you are saying one of the foreign agents under your oversight was in possession of this directory?”
I said I didn’t know.
“Who can vouch for your whereabouts on the afternoon of April twenty-fifth, 1943, between two and six p.m.?”
In the hole, I had reconstructed that day from memory as best I could. I had gone to Tirpitzufer in the morning to sort out the fake documents our Boers would need once they were smuggled back to Africa, then driven out to the cottage in the afternoon to deliver Pike another meager share of rations. He was of course gone. I stayed a few hours, on the off chance he’d return before dark, then, giving up, drove back to my flat and had dinner alone. In short, a perfect lack of alibi.
“No one,” I replied.
“Where did you get this directory?”
Lipke fired barrage after barrage of these same questions at me under the lights, raising his voice until he was shouting in my face. And then, quite abruptly, I was returned to the hole. No one laid a hand on me. With darkness, light, and time, they had all the tools they needed to crush a man’s will.
But, you see, it was precisely in this crushing of my earlier will, the will toward self-preservation, that I finally discovered a new one. A will that had been latent in me for years, that I’d fought for so long to ignore, and that there in the blackness flowered. Just like that, my thoughts changed and I found a way out. I recalled the caged ape of Kafka’s story and hugged myself with excitement. There was no escape. That much I knew. But there was a way out.
Finn McCool in the Bowels of Teutonia
46
Krankenhaus
The nun wiped Finn’s privates with such regularity you could have taken tea atop them. He had to hand it to the Teutonians on matters of hygiene. Sure, they ran amok with the concept when applied socially, but confined to the literal scrubbing and scouring of surfaces, they were nonpareil. Though there were signs that the lusty nun’s sponge baths were motivated by more than just cleanliness. Not only were they administered daily and each time longer than the last; she also used her hands more than the sponge, even an occasional pinky on the perineum, and lathered him so thoroughly that at the end of each session his horn positively sparkled.
Alas, it was the only part of him that did. His limbs were still in bandages, and a deep gloom pervaded his brain from crown to stem. At his lowest moment, believing he was at death’s doorstep, he sent final word to his old Fenian girl-chum in Daneland, bidding her pass on a farewell to his clan back in Erin. He would have liked to write the Torqued Man too, for he at least owed him a goodbye, but he didn’t want to compromise him. He asked the nun to post his letter and waited for his body to cough up his soul.
Sensing the deep funk her charge had fallen into, the Christbride redoubled her efforts to buoy his spirits, honoring her vow to show charity wherever it was needed. And while those chaste, life-affirming sponge baths were surely appreciated and must have helped circulate the vital sap through his veins, they were not enough to fix him.
That monumental task fell to his fellow invalid. Each day more beds were filled by new casualties from the Anglelandish air raids. The faceless man who once occupied the bed next to Finn had died and been replaced by a legless child. One afternoon, the boost from his midday bath long since dissipated, Finn lay gazing at the ceiling, waiting for either death or the next day’s horn-laving to come, when he felt the eyes of the little lad upon him.
He turned his head, still a slow and painful ordeal, and returned the boy’s look. They spent some minutes this way, eyes locked. When Finn finally caught on and realized he’d been informally challenged to a staring contest, he threw the match with a climax of dramatic bulges and a flurry of blinks. His opponent enjoyed this, and the game soon changed into a contest of facial contortions.
Much as this sport made Finn’s head throb, the laughter it elicited was a salve upon his wounds. He spent the afternoon this way, exchanging queer faces with the little legless boy called Emil.
“Emil?” said Finn, after the boy had told him his name. “And your family name wouldn’t happen to be Fluss, would it?”
The boy found this funny. “No, my name’s Hauser. Emil Hauser.” And then he got very sad and began to cry.
“What is it, Emil? Are your injuries paining you?”
No, it wasn’t that, said the boy. It was just that his father’s name was also Emil Hauser. And his father was dead.
“And what about your mother, Emil?”
Not the right question, it turned out, as the poor lad had twice the tears for his mother. She, too, was of course dead. The same roof that had crushed the boy’s legs had fallen on her head. Finn gave the boy his condolences.
“Life’s a real kick in the teeth, son. I’m sorry you’ve had to learn it so soon.”
“Why do you talk funny?” asked Emil, distracted by the peculiarity of Finn’s Teutonian.
“Because I’m from a strange and distant land,” said Finn.
“Which land is that?” asked Emil.
“The land of Erin, they call it,” said Finn.
“And where’s that?” asked Emil, a curious lad with a great thirst for knowledge.
“Across the North Sea, on the windward side of a dour but mighty place called Angleland.”
“That land I know,” said Emil. “They’re the ones who’ve taken my legs and killed my mum.”
A terrible, cowardly way to wage war, thought Finn. Surely the world was a better place when warriors gutted one another on the field of battle. But where was the honor in man-slaying like this? Did this six-year-old’s pair of obliterated legs or his mother’s smashed skull really put a dent in Hitler’s war machine? No, by God, the approach was all wrong. The steaming injustice of it all boiled in Finn’s brain—a clear sign that there was yet life in him.
With his horn kept immaculate and his young hospital mate pumping him for stories of his homeland, Finn slowly healed. He regaled the boy with tales of the great hunter Finn McCool and his merry woodsmen of the Fianna, his loyal hounds Sceolang and Bran, and the adventures of shapeshifting and trickery and great boastful lies with which they filled their days in the green forests of Erin.
Finn told him of the deer he once came upon in a clearing and how, just as he was poised to fell her, she transformed into a beautiful woman, and how Finn took this deer woman for his wife, and she bore him a son, Oisín, but not before changing once more into a deer and escaping back into the forest. As a result, Finn did not know his son until years later, when the lad was about six or seven, and he came upon him in a smoke-filled grove, where Oisín was roasting a boar. Seeing that Finn had just bagged a tusker himself, the boy challenged him to a cook-off. And observing the identical way each handled his hunting blade and manned the fire, Oisín and Finn recognized the other for father and son. After which Oisín joined the merry band of Fenians and the two of them were as entwined as the double spiral of Epona.
The little orphan Emil delighted in this story of recovered paternity and bade Finn recount it daily. Each time, Finn embellished and altered the tale, until the setting of Erin gradually morphed into the Grunewald, only a stone’s throw from their hospital beds, and young Oisín became a boy who, though missing his legs, could swing through the forest on branches and vines like an orang-utan.
In this way, Finn and Emil became fast friends. And though Finn had never in his forty years felt the paternal pull, he sensed within his wrecked self the budding of a new capacity—if not fatherly, then at least avuncular.
Then Obelinka returned.
“We’re going back to Angleland, Finn.”
“What? Why?”
“We’ve been recalled. In case you can’t already tell, the RAF plans to bomb Berlin to bits. It’s no longer safe here.”
There was some semblance of protest on his lips, though nothing he could articulate. He had no clear purpose. No plan. No mission.
Anyway, Obelinka had already arranged everything. They were to escape up the Havel by canoe, join the canal that flowed into the Oder, and then float downriver until they reached the Baltic coast. A fishing troller sent by SIS would pick them up outside Stettin and carry them to neutral Swedeland.
She had just explained to him the extraction plan when Finn saw the familiar figure of Helmut Kriegsmann walk past the doorway and down the corridor.
