The torqued man, p.30
The Torqued Man, page 30
He alerted Obelinka to this development.
“What?” she said, alarmed. “How does he know you’re here?”
Finn explained he might have written a letter to his wife and she may have put the pieces together and told her husband.
“You fool!” cursed Obelinka. “Quick, you have to hide.”
“But why? Kriegsmann’s no harm.”
“The man’s an elite commando, and I don’t want him mucking about.”
“So we’ll escape later.”
“It has to be tonight. Everything has been set in motion. Any delay means we’ll miss the boat and then we’re stuck.”
“Just hop on the transmitter and tell them we need some more time.”
“That’s not how this works, Finn! Besides, I’ve smashed our transmitters—they’re too dangerous to carry on us while we travel. Now quick, hide!”
But Finn was not going anywhere quickly. His foot was still in a cast, and he hadn’t stood up in ages.
The nun, who was across the room spooning gruel into a patient’s mouth, noticed Finn’s distress and stood to come over.
“You go,” he said to Obelinka. “I have an idea.”
She gave him a skeptical look, as if to imply ideas were not his strong suit, then slipped out.
When the nun approached, Finn, hoping he’d read her kindness correctly, grasped her hand and uttered his plea. “Merciful sister, please, my life is in your hands. A man just walked in, a very bad man, who wants me dead. He scorns the love of Christ and wants to finish the job he started when he threw me from the third-floor window. Please, dear sister, can you save me?”
“Who is this man?” she asked, instantly at the ready, as though she’d been waiting for ages to expand her repertoire of care.
“A dashing fellow in a field officer’s uniform. He’ll come in here any second looking for me. I know it’s against your vow to lie, but could you lie to save a life, even if it’s the miserable life of a contrite sinner such as myself?”
“Yes, of course,” she said, exasperated, “but what do you want me to say?”
“Wrap my head in bandages and tell him I’m not here.”
She ran to the doorway, peered into the hall, then ran back. “There’s no time for that. The man is coming now!”
She jerked Finn’s bedsheet from its tuckings and draped it over his face. “Hold your breath!”
Finn opened up the great bellows of his lungs [each the size of a zeppelin] and sucked in so much air he made the rest of the hospital light-headed. A few seconds later, he heard the well-mannered voice of his Teutonian warrior friend—one whom history had simply placed on the wrong side—inquire whether a foreigner resembling the man in this photo had been admitted as a patient.
“Yes, sir,” said the nun. “He was indeed here. But I’m afraid he’s dead.”
By God, his Christbride was a consummate liar.
“Oh. Dead, you say?”
“I’m sorry, sir.”
“When did he die?”
“Just a few hours ago.”
“Really? What of?”
“Fever, mein Herr.”
“Is that him?” said Kriegsmann.
Finn gathered she had pointed at his draped corpse.
“Can I see him?”
“It’s best if you stay there at some distance, sir. There’s been a typhus outbreak, and since he died of fever, we oughtn’t take a chance.”
Finn was running out of air. His lungs were sending urgent, unheeded messages to his brain as he heard the sister’s footsteps approach. “Don’t move a muscle,” she whispered as she bent down and pulled back the sheet to reveal his face.
“Yes, that’s him,” said Kriegsmann solemnly. “Thank you.”
She replaced the sheet over him. He was about to explode.
“Would you like to claim the body, sir?” he heard the nun ask.
What the hell was she up to?
“No, not yet. I’ll ring later to make those arrangements.”
“Very well, sir. Again, my condolences.”
Flashes of light sparkled in his mind’s eye and he felt a tingling throughout his body. Finally, the sheet peeled back again, and there, while he gasped for dear life, was his cunning little liar of a redeemer, smiling down on him.
47
journal
April 21, 1944
Backed into a corner with darkness in all directions, I could finally be honest with myself. Why had I been so drawn to Pike in the first place? He had charisma, a certain roguish charm, and a playful learnedness—yes. But at the root of all those qualities was a sense of self-possession. He was a sovereign self. He would not be cowed or corralled into anything. But it was precisely his association with us that called this essential aspect of his character into question. I couldn’t reconcile the two. It had perturbed me. And, in my attraction to him, I was moved by some vague desire to help him, to preserve his integrity. But, as I had just learned, Pike never compromised. He had resisted to the end. It was perhaps a kind of quixotic madness, a sickness that drove him to kill, but he had done the very thing I had always wanted but been too cowardly to do: revolt. To throw off this disgusting cloak of rationalizations, complicity, and guilt, in which for nearly a decade I had wrapped myself.
I had wanted to pretend the Abwehr was something apart. I had wanted to pretend my aversions and private opinions kept me above the swamp, floating on a cloud of inner exile. I had wanted to pretend saving Pike by sacrificing Crean was an act of heroic defiance, when it was simply an expression of my desire. But it was also my desire—to go along and keep myself out of harm’s way—that made me deliver the Bretons to their horrible fate.
Kant had it wrong. There is no distinction between duty and desire. Rather, duty is just a name we give to desire when we desire something difficult. We are faced then with a choice between conflicting desires. Do we choose one and violate our desire for moral dignity, or do we choose the other, that of revolt, and violate our desire for safety and comfort? To put it another way, the question is simply: In which way do we want to suffer?
There in my hole, I finally understood what Pike meant about the damnedness of choice. He had worn the mask of cynicism, having me believe he’d chosen to escape his Spanish pit, as he called it, simply out of the will to live. I had seen through the mask, though I hadn’t seen through to the truth. But now I understood. And with it, I understood the truth of myself. Apart from hiding Pike, I had consistently followed my desire for safety and comfort. His appearance in my life, I now realized, had disturbed me because I sensed in him a fantasy of my own repressed wishes. Beneath my worry, my anger, my hurt feelings, there—still intact—was a more authentic feeling: longing. Not just a longing for Pike, but a longing to be like him. I wanted to be damned in the way he had chosen to be.
And now the parameters of my choice had been radically simplified. I could endure their interrogations, their tortures, all the while maintaining my innocence, only to have them pin on me whatever charge they wished. Before long, the Gestapo would get their hooks in and unravel the truth about Crean and Pike. Some kind of a perfunctory show trial in the People’s Court surely awaited me. If not a death sentence, then its equivalent in the Lager. So much, then, for the desire for self-preservation. That meant the choice now before me was either to refuse responsibility or to accept it. I could stubbornly cling to the truth of my innocence on the futile hope I would be exonerated, or I could heed that other long-nursed, long-neglected desire. As Cervantes’s Knight of the Sorrowful Face once said, and will say for eternity, I know who I am and who I may be, if I choose.
The next time I was pulled from the darkness and sat in the chair before Kommissar Lipke, I looked at him calmly and said, “There’s no need for further questions.”
“Oh, really,” he said, laughing at my commanding tone. “And why’s that?”
“Because I confess. I killed the doctors. And the nurse. I killed them all.”
Finn McCool in the Bowels of Teutonia
48
Downriver
Obelinka returned after dark and pulled Finn from his bed. His muscles were atrophied, and he walked with a limp on account of the bulky plaster shoe round his right foot. But he could move. This he had discovered earlier that afternoon, at the same time he learned that his holy redeemer and lady of the sponge was not so chaste as he’d supposed. Finn had thanked the sister for granting him succor, a show of gratitude that somehow found him sucking her nipples in the mop closet. She had given him life in death and now, verily, Lazarus had risen.
“Let’s go,” said Obelinka testily.
But Finn would not go without first saying goodbye to his young friend Emil. He’d been sleeping all day on a morphine jag to ease the agony of his phantom limbs.
Finn hobbled over and put a hand to the lad’s forehead. He hadn’t meant to wake him, but the boy’s eyes popped open.
“I thought you were dead,” said Emil.
“Me? No, you were just dreaming, my boy. I’m right as rain. But I’m afraid I do have to go.”
“Where?”
“Back to my homeland.”
“To Erin?” asked Emil, excited. “Will you take me with you?”
“Oh, wouldn’t that be marvelous? But it’s a long way, as you know, and it’s a twisted, dangerous journey. You’ll be happier here with the good sisters. And just wait ’til you hit puberty. Then you’ll really enjoy yourself.”
“But I want to be part of your Fianna and swing through the trees like Oisín.”
“Finn!” said Obelinka. “It’s time.”
“I’ll tell you what,” Finn said to the boy. “You rest up here and get your strength back, and as soon as you’re feeling fit, I’ll send for you. And then you can join me in the forest with all the other merry Fenians, and we’ll fill our days with feasts and hunting. Now, how’s that sound?”
Emil nodded. “Gut.”
“Alright, then, it’s a deal.” Finn spit into his hand and extended it. Emil did the same, though the poor lad’s mouth was dead dry on account of the opiates, and the two shook on it.
The Ruslandish hausfrau heaved the canoe into the current, with Finn lodged in front, then nimbly leapt in.
“Two on the right, two on the left,” she called out like a seasoned cockswain, her paddle cutting through the water with remarkable force. She was an extraordinarily able woman, it turned out, culinary matters notwithstanding.
They had taken the S-Bahn to Pichelsberg, just past the Olympic Stadium. Obelinka had stowed a canoe there in the foliage along the banks of the Havel where it splayed into a dozen little channels and inlets. She had already laden the boat with two gallons of tea and a chewed suitcase of stale bubliki, beside which sat her prized replacement Hund, the little Jagdterrier Olaf, wagging his stump of a tail on the hull.
The Hund now sat, front paws on the bow, watching the rippled reflections of moonlight, while Finn struggled to keep up with Obelinka’s furious stroke.
“Once we reach Spandau, it’s thirty miles upriver to Liebenwalde, where the Havel meets the Oder Kanal.”
“Jesus,” said Finn, gasping for breath. “And how much oar-slapping after that?”
“I have a canal boat arranged there to take us the rest of the way. Now, mind your cadence!”
Finn complied as much as his weakened muscles would allow while he withdrew his faculties of sensual perception and contemplated the question of ultimate ends. He was confident his ox-strong paddlemaster Obelinka would, barring squall or torpedoing, carry them safely to Swedeland. But then what? She would likely turn him over to SIS, who, as Finn understood it, were rather annoyed with his off-book activities. They might be keen to make life difficult for him. Desk detail in a frigid office in Stockholm perhaps. A Swedish winter had killed a surly eccentric like Descartes—what’s to say it wouldn’t take him too? Or, even worse, what if they brought him to drizzly London, where he would surely die of a combination of pneumonia and despair? And to die abed when there was a war on? Be it of weather-related causes or weltschmerz, it was unconscionable.
To think, just two weeks ago he was lying in hospital waiting for death to take him. Thankfully, little Emil and his concupiscent nun had helped him over that hump. Not only that—the latter had rendered him officially dead, at least as far as his friends were concerned. Which meant he could now live in the bowels of Teutonia unfettered. Why, the Christbride had done him an even better turn than she knew. He was now free to become fully wild. Free to become a true creature of the forest. Free to continue his work as a foreign agent wreaking intestinal havoc on Hitler’s empire.
Kriegsmann and the Torqued Man would mourn him, to be sure, but then they would be fine. In fact, the Torqued Man would be relieved of his burden, absolved of all responsibility.
Ah, but that was rather disingenuous, wasn’t it, to think his death would be a favor to the Torqued Man? Like the self-serving bit of bollocks he’d foisted upon poor Emil, telling him he’d be better off an orphan in this crumbling metropolis and that he’d send for him eventually. The truth was, much as he was fond of the boy, he couldn’t be saddled with the responsibility of looking after him. Besides, even were he to stay on in Berlin, how could he continue his one-man insurgency with a paraplegic child underfoot?
It was then that an idea flashed into Finn’s wise brain. Young Emil needed someone to look after him. The Torqued Man needed someone to look after. It was a perfect fit—a merger of the two Emils! In a stroke, Finn could resolve the gnawing sense of dereliction he felt toward both of them. The Torqued Man would at last have a fair surrogate for his invalid niece, the little legless lad would have a proper guardian, and Finn would be free.
Of course, there was the question of how to do it without alerting the Torqued Man to the fact that he was still alive. Perhaps he could just leave the boy in a large basket on the doorstep? But which doorstep? And how to keep the boy from crawling off? And even if those logistics were solved, how to prevent Emil from divulging Finn’s existence to his new foster father? Yes, there were still many knots to untangle. But these were mere details in an otherwise sound plan.
As he dipped his oar left and right against the current, two things were now clear to Finn. First, if he followed his Ruslandish hausfrau across the Baltic, he would be of no use to anyone. And second, for all his colossal failures and delusions of efficacy, if anyone was going to drive a stake into the biomedical heart of the Reich, it was he. How exactly, he did not yet know. But he had decided.
He gave a final stroke to help Obelinka on her voyage, then flung himself over the side.
“Finn!” he heard her shout.
Olaf let out a bark, but Finn was soon drifting downstream, beyond reach of the Hund’s scent and the scant moonlight.
“What are you doing, you madman?” cried Obelinka. “Come back!”
“Godspeed, old girl!” he called, then disappeared beneath the current.
He floated downriver, resting atop his oar and kicking with his good leg. The water was frigid, but a regained purpose burned within him. After drifting past their put-in at Pichelsberg, he soon spied Schildhorn, that familiar phallus of a peninsula, discernible even in the dark.
Thrust into the plump thigh of the Havel, Schildhorn was for the Wilden hallowed ground. In warm months they enjoyed terrorizing visitors to the beach, groping bathers and raiding their picnic baskets. And in the off-season they congregated around the monument, smoking fag ends and etching tributes to the life priapic. The towering cross had been built by mythopoetic Teutonians of the previous century to hail the march of that wide-warring Saxon Albert the Bear against the pagan, impertinent Slavs. In recent years, under the Wilden’s stewardship, it had acquired a rich patina of puerile effacements.
Finn climbed ashore near the monument—at the moment deserted—and shook the wet from himself like a Hund. The forest smelled of smoke. Perhaps the Wilden’s campfire was nearby.
As he limped beneath the forest canopy, he could just make out a faint wail—either a cat’s cry or an air-raid siren. It was possible his hearing was not what it used to be, or perhaps some river water was still lodged in his ear.
The smoke became thicker, all but obscuring an orange glow in the surrounding forest. Suddenly, a gust of wind parted the veil of smoke. He felt a blast of heat, then for a brief moment saw: The trees were on fire. And the flames were coming toward him.
He escaped to the eastern edge of the woods and emerged by the train tracks. The intersection looked uncannily familiar. Yet nothing was the same. He saw the green logo of the S-Bahn station Obelinka and he had walked to earlier that night, just two blocks from the hospital, but the area around it had been transformed into a hell pit. The whole street was ablaze.
He gimped his way back to the Krankenhaus, where only hours earlier he’d patted young Emil’s head and communed with a sister of Christ in a cleaning closet. He now found it a heap of scorched stone.
Finn searched the burning rubble for Emil and his nun, or, for that matter, any living creature. But it had been a direct hit. There was nothing left. Only the charred, shrunken corpses of the holy and the sick.
49
journal
April 22, 1944
What did it matter that my confession was a lie? But was it even a lie? Pike was under my care, after all, so in some sense I was right to claim responsibility for his actions.
Besides, with the evidence against me and my suspect status as an agent of the recently liquidated Abwehr, I was going to pay, anyway. So why not pay for something that was worth the price?
It seemed everyone around me had already become part of the resistance—Lauhusen, Oster, Moltke, and God knows who else. Likely even Canaris himself. I thought back to the admiral fingering his biography of Frederick II, powerless to help while vowing he would still have the final say. Was it more than impotent bluster? Had he in fact been biding his time? And now that he’d been freed from house arrest and reinstated to the laughable position of Minister of Commercial and Agricultural Warfare? Perhaps the old fox was mobilizing more than beetroots. Then of course there was Pike. And, if his story was to be believed, even the loathsome Crean and our cranky Russian housemaid were not what they seemed. Everyone, that is, except me. But now Pike and I were a team, with a clear division of labor between Tat und Schuld: He did the deed and I now bore the guilt.
