Franz didn’t notice the Studebaker parked behind his car in the University car park, and he wasn’t aware of it following him out of the University grounds, along the boulevard and then through the narrower streets of his route. Most days he might have observed it and wondered about it, but today he was too happy. He had spent the night in deep, yet dreamy, sleep, and woken relaxed, blissful and triumphant, and the mood had stayed with him throughout his classes. It wasn’t until they were caught at a traffic-light, which had in fact turned green, though movement was impossible, the crossing ahead being jammed, that the Studebaker eased itself alongside him, and the driver rolled down the window and said, “We need to talk. You need to talk to me.”
He spoke in English, and Franz examined him. He had a lean head with very fair hair cut very neatly, and he wore a blue-and-white checked seersucker suit and a navy blue white-spotted bow tie. He had a gold ring on the little finger of his left hand, and the hand holding the steering wheel was covered with little golden hairs that shone in the sunlight. The hands themselves were very pale in colour and manicured, and he wore a Rolex wristwatch.
Franz took all this in while he wondered at the approach and couldn’t think of a suitable reply.
“Pull in by that big bar on the left once we get across the Avenida.”
He had an American accent, and he spoke with the authority of a movie hero.
The Studebaker was slow away when it was at last possible to move – it was probably an automatic – and Franz had put enough distance between them to get away if he chose. But curiosity won. He eased the Triumph towards the pavement, and was out and waiting before the other car was parked. The man in the seersucker suit detached himself. He was shorter than he had looked sitting down; a movie star who would have to be stood on a fruit box to make love to a girl with legs as long as Alexis. He held out his hand to Franz, and then pushed ahead of him into the bar where he ordered two large Manhattans. He watched their concoction, giving directions, and then took both glasses and led the way to a table in the corner, though there was supposed to be waiter service only in that part of the café. But no one came to reprove them. Perhaps he was known there. He pulled out his wallet, extracted a card and handed it to Franz. It gave his name, Calthorpe Binns, and that of a newspaper in Indianapolis, and his address – Buenos Aires.
“I usually get called Cal,” he said. “I’ve been anticipating our meeting with pleasure, Franz.”
“I shouldn’t have thought Argentinian affairs were so interesting to readers in Indianapolis,” Franz said, “for a paper to afford a correspondent here. Which state is it anyway? Minnesota?”
“No, Indiana. Well, you are right, they’re not. But it gives me status, and then when I file a story, it gets syndication.”
“Look,” Franz said, “I think I can guess what you want to talk about. But there’s nothing I can say, nothing I can tell you.”
“You’re not drinking. Don’t you like Manhattans? Hell, when I think of the trouble I have gone to teach them to mix one right! ‘Look,’ I said, ‘Scotch is Scotch and I have nothing against it, it’s a great drink, but it doesn’t belong in a Manhattan.’ You’re mistaken, son, you don’t know what I want from you.” He picked up his drink and emptied the glass. “‘Rye,’ I told them, ‘you can’t make a Manhattan without a good rye whiskey.’”
A tall man wearing a straw hat and a biscuit-coloured suit – clothes too summery for the crisp morning with a touch of frost – sat down two tables away. He took a cigarette from a case, and fitted it into a long amber holder. A waiter flickered towards him, and he ordered coffee and an anis.
Calthorpe Binns took a coin from his pocket.
“There’s a juke-box over there,” he said. “Go and put something on. Choose three records. I don’t mind a bit of noise.”
Franz selected two Elvis records, and then, in deference to Cal’s age, a Sinatra one.
“That’s better, you can’t hear yourself think now. What does the name Kestner mean to you?”
“Nothing that I know of.”
“Rudolf Kestner. Rudi Kestner. Standartenfuehrer Kestner?”
“And you of course are Franz Kestner.” He waved to summon the waiter. “If you don’t like Manhattans, would you rather have a beer? Or perhaps an ice cream?”
He lit a Camel cigarette.
“Beer, is it?” he said, and gave the order to the waiter. “And now the Standartenfuehrer has disappeared, and nobody knows where he is. You must be worried.”
“Of course I’m worried, if you are talking about my father.”
“Who else? And the disappearance took place a few days after he met a certain German-Jewish doctor, who had the misfortune – we needn’t put it stronger than that – to have done time in a concentration camp, perhaps even consigned to it by the Standartenfuehrer himself. What do you make of that, Franz?”
Franz looked at the table.
“I don’t make anything of it,” he said. “Dr Czinner’s blind, didn’t you know?”
“And deaf and dumb? I hadn’t heard that. And you are still seeing his daughter? In fact, I have reason to suppose that you made love to her yesterday in a flat that is the property of the US Government.”
“Is that an offence?”
“Couldn’t rightly say. In certain circumstances, it might be made to seem one.”
Go climb your thumb, Franz thought, but instead said merely, “What the hell is this? Are you going to explain?”
“Patience, sonny.”
Cal Binns sat back, nursing his new Manhattan. The gentleman two tables away looked at Franz. Cal Binns intercepted the glance.
“We’d better take a ride,” he said. “You can leave your car here. I’ll tell Ramón to keep an eye on it.”
He drove the Studebaker in a newly casual manner, with only one hand on the wheel. He chain-smoked, screwing up his eyes. It seemed to Franz that he watched the rear-view mirror more closely than the road ahead. They left the part of the city with which Franz was acquainted and drove towards the harbour. The car bounced along a cobbled road between warehouses; a line of rails for a tram ran down the middle of the street. There were weeds growing between the rails.
“You’re not a journalist,” Franz said. “You’re something else. Is it CIA?”
“Sure I’m a journalist. Been with the good old Monitor twenty years. Maybe I dabble a bit elsewhere, but so what? You want to see my Press card, my accreditation?”
“All right,” Franz said. The car had stopped in front of a boarded-up warehouse. “But you won’t get a story from me.”
“Sonny, I’m the one that is telling you a story. Hell, I’m showing you the story. We get out here. There are some friends want to meet you.”
“Wait a minute. Whose side are you on?”
“I’m just looking after the interests of certain friends, that’s all. The sixty-four-thousand dollar question is, whose side are you on, buddy?”
He led the way down an alley that ran between two warehouses and towards the waterfront. It was overgrown with tall pink-flowering weeds; life had moved a long time ago from this part of the docks. They crossed a footbridge over a little channel, or canal; empty beer-cans floated on the water, hardly moving. A rat plopped from the bank.
“Just speak the truth,” Cal Binns said. “That’s all that’s required of you, it’s all that’s required of any of us.”
He knocked on a door in the side of the building. The top half opened a crack. Then Franz heard bolts being slid open, and Cal led him into the building. He marched straight across a yawning deserted hall. The man who had opened the door for them followed Franz. He wore carpet-slippers and his step was a soft-shoe shuffle. Cal Binns knew his way. He went through a doorway on the other side of the hall, along a narrow passage off which opened doors leading into what had once presumably been offices. He knocked at the third or fourth of them.
They were admitted to a small room where four men sat playing cards at a Formica-topped table. The room was lit by a single naked bulb and the air was heavy with tobacco smoke. All the men were middle-aged to elderly and all wore open-necked shirts. A fifth man, who had opened the door, slipped out of the room. The oldest of the party, a thickset balding fellow, who wore a flowered short-sleeved shirt and had a cigar stuck in the right corner of his mouth, raised a hand, palm foremost, to Cal Binns. Then he swept the cards towards himself, made them into a pack, shuffled it twice, and planted it on the table. He got to his feet. Without removing the cigar, he hugged Cal Binns, and then turned to face Franz. His scrutiny was intense. Then he threw up his arm in a salute.
“Heil Hitler.”
When Franz made no response, he lowered his arm, smiled, and clapped him on the back.
“I have never agreed with your father about your upbringing,” he said. “Consequently, you don’t even know who I am, do you?”
Franz shook his head.
“There, you see.” He inclined towards the other three card-players, who had all slewed round in their seats to watch. “It’s ironic, isn’t it? I’m in effect, young man, what I daresay you would call your godfather, and you don’t know me.”
“I didn’t even know I had a godfather.”
“Well, I say only ‘in effect’, since I do not believe in any Christian God. No more than your father does. You look like your mother when she was young. A pity. A boy should resemble his father. I shan’t tell you my name, since it would mean nothing, nor that of my comrades here. For that’s what we are: comrades and friends, and comrades and friends of your father too. Come, sit and let us drink to him. You can call me Klaus, that’s sufficient.”
A bottle of local brandy, a soda siphon and some stubby glasses were placed on the table. Klaus settled himself, raised his glass.
“Our comrade in distress.”
Then he began to talk. He expatiated at length, with many subordinate clauses, criticising his “dear Kestner” for thinking it possible to detach himself even in some degree from his past.
It wasn’t, he assured Franz, that his father was ashamed of it, rather that he urged them all to consider the past as something irrelevant, “mere history”, separate from a new existence. “Which isn’t, I assure you, dear boy, possible, if only because our enemies refuse to let the past die. Therefore we too, in self-protection as well as on account of our own self-esteem, must struggle to keep it alive, save it from the dead hand of history.” He smiled: there was something wonderfully inviting about his smile, like a promise of initiation into the arcane springs of being. At the same time, it was a greedy smile, ready to swallow you up. Franz sipped his brandy and waited.
So, Klaus resumed, their dear comrade had made mistakes, and now he was suffering for them. His refusal to defy history meant that Franz himself had grown up in ignorance. And what was the result of this ignorance? Catastrophic! He proposed to marry a Jewish girl.
He paused, lit a fresh cigar, blew out smoke, waved his hand, palm downwards, over the table.
“Filth.”
The speaker was a lean man with a twitch in his right cheek.
Klaus smiled again. “Well, we would have thought so, would we not? But one has to admit now that the Jews have surprised us. Yes, indeed! One has to admire what they have achieved in Israel.”
“Thanks to us,” said the youngest-looking of the group, a battered blond with a duelling scar. We have made that possible. We taught them that struggle is the motive force in history.”
“Indeed,” Klaus said, “the Israelis are well on the way to being our best pupils.”
It wasn’t enough, however, for Franz to have proposed to marry a Jewess, Klaus went on. He had to choose Dr Czinner’s daughter. Klaus shook his head. Dr Czinner was the worst sort of Jew, one who had pretended to co-operate with the Reich in order to work the more effectively for its destruction. It had been a mistake to send him to a camp; he should have been shot out of hand, or hanged. But that had been Kestner’s decision. And now: it was Czinner who had betrayed him; there was no question of that.
“So you see, Franz, you are caught up in an authentic tragedy.”
He pushed the brandy bottle towards him and licked his lips. A drop of spittle escaped the corner of his mouth; it was stained brown by tobacco juice.
“Your father made the mistake of trying to live independently of the group, of believing that he could in this way escape the past. But the past has caught up with him and arrested him.”
“How can you know all this?”
“My dear boy, we have our friends.” He gestured towards Calthorpe Binns. “The company he works for plays both sides of the street.”
“The Indianapolis Monitor?”
“If you like, sonny.”
“And it is thanks to Mr Binns that we know there has been a hitch in their plans, that your father is still in Argentina. Unfortunately we do not know exactly where, but we are certain he has not yet left the country. Which, dear boy, is where you come in. You have an affection for your father?”
Franz blushed: “Of course.”
“There’s no ‘of course’ about it,” said the man with the duelling scar. “We got rid of that ridiculous bourgeois nonsense. Family affection! An idea for Jews and the sort of idiots who read novels by Thomas Mann!”
“It survives,” said the fourth card-player, a thin, wizened man with a yellow complexion. “It is that which has destroyed poor Kestner after all.”
“Precisely,” Klaus said. “It is, as you say, bourgeois, Jewish, liberal, everything we rightly despise and detest. We shall turn the enemy’s weapon on the enemy. The situation is not yet altogether lost, as long as Kestner remains in Argentina. Do you know, young man, what they will do with him if they can?”
Franz looked away. Then he lowered his eyes and fixed them on the table. The Formica was peeling away at the corner where he sat, and he got his thumb under it and worked it. If they were right, if what they said was true. He remembered pictures of Eichmann in his bullet-proof glass cage, defending what could not be defended, except on terms which were no longer admissible. He had no idea what his father would be charged with, but that was what would happen. He would be put on display. Come and view the Monster, but with none of the bitter humour of a Freak Show. And Ilse too would be confronted with brutal facts which in her own heart she would always deny – since such denial was necessary to the way she lived her life – but which her friends would believe. And she would know they did. And as for him – he couldn’t bring himself to think of how his friends would feel, or Becky. He pulled at the Formica. The whole family, all of them, would be like Bastini, reduced to objects of contempt, thrown down on dirty sacks. He remembered how José-María had tossed the key of the torture-chamber on to the boy’s gleaming and trembling body, saying “Lock up behind you and return the key to its keeper.”
“Yes,” he said. “I know what will be done to him.”
Klaus smiled. “It can be prevented,” he said, “as long as he is held in Argentina.”
“Do you mean you plan to rescue him?”
“That would be a possibility – if we knew where he was. But there is no need for heroics. There are other methods.”
“Dr Czinner has a daughter.” Klaus smiled. It was a silly schoolmaster’s smile, intended to convey effortless superiority, and it irritated Franz; yet he also felt the first rustle of fear. He had thought that these old Nazis, ham actors though they seemed to be, were at least on his side.
“That’s absurd,” he said. “I understand the implications of what you say, but you can’t do that, you can’t threaten her.”
“Can’t?” The man with the duelling scar laughed. “He says ‘can’t’ to us, the child.”
“My father,” Franz said, “my father would never allow… he would never let you use Becky in any way… as a counter in a bargain, it’s obscene.”
“Our experience,” Klaus said, “is that people make all sorts of bargains when they consider their interests at stake. Ask Dr Czinner. He knows.”
And as he spoke, Franz recalled that only the other evening Becky’s father had murmured, “I too have played Faust in my time.” He had disliked the remark, which showed in his view an unbecoming vanity.
“So you will speak to Dr Czinner. The bargain is simple. Your fiancée for your father. She will be released when he is.”
Franz felt a glass being thrust into his hand. For a moment he held it there, as horrified by its suggestion of conviviality, conspiracy, concern for his condition, as by the words he had heard, words the significance of which he was unable immediately to grasp. It is not true that bad news hits you like a blow; it forces itself on you like the suspicion turning to certainty of cancer. The mind struggles against acceptance. With a short arm jerk Franz threw the brandy at the face that loomed over him. But the head turned away. Some liquor splashed on Klaus’s shoulder, the rest fell short even of the wall behind.
“She is quite safe. No harm will come to her. You will tell Dr Czinner that.”
“You can trust him, sonny,” the American voice intervened. “Believe me, I possess a comprehensive experience and I would be reluctant to so asseverate without evidence that would stand up.”
“Mr Binns’s company is our guarantor,” Klaus said. “Come, Franz, you must be ready to help us. It is the only way to save your father.”
Franz felt a hand fall on his shoulder. He looked up. His gaze was filled with the man’s smiling face.
“No,” he said, “no.”
“You are naturally disturbed. You have never encountered reality before. Believe me, you will come to value it. To escape from a dream world, that is the important thing.”
The hand squeezed his shoulder.
Calthorpe Binns drove him back into the city. They did not speak. Binns drove with one hand on the wheel. When he finished a cigarette, he took another from the packet in the breast pocket of his shirt and lit it from the stub of the first. For a moment he had both cigarettes, butt and replacement, in his mouth at the same time. Then he threw the first one out of the window without extinguishing it. Occasionally he hummed: “It happened in Monterey … in Old Mexico-o …”
He eased the car into the kerb.
“You should go to Czinner straightaway,” he said. “Your car’s fine, you owe Ramón a tip. Just remember. It’s a simple operation. A means of exchange. Czinner’s an economist, he understands the market.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Oh yes, you do, sonny.”
“What’s your role in this?”
“I’m a middleman. I keep an eye on things. See the boat doesn’t ship too much water. Don’t waste time. It’s got a limit.”
But the meaning was there. It’s always been there. Iphigenia knew that. Sacrifice either of oneself or of others is a temptation. Eli would offer himself in place of his daughter. They wouldn’t be interested. And Franz saw Becky’s face set white and frightened against a future she had not made; and then his father … his father’s face would reveal nothing, neither fear nor hope nor anger. He would read the situation differently. Life which he had both made and known had caught up with him. But Becky… Franz did not dare to drive his car. He stood on the sidewalk isolated from the crowd that thronged round him, by what he had learned of man’s capacity. Anyone seeing him would have observed only a handsome boy who looked as if he might have forgotten something, or have lost his way.
The cat purred, and thrust its head into Eli’s face, rubbing his chin, rasping with pleasure, clawing at his chest. His hand moved over its back in gentle strokes. He had not spoken since Franz without apology or introduction, making no effort to break the news gently, had told him what had happened. He had spoken in German, in a few frank brutal sentences.
Eli put his hand under the cat and turned her round and she settled herself along the line of his thigh, facing away. He lit a cheroot, using the old petrol lighter.
“You blame me,” he said.
Franz didn’t reply.
“Of course you do,” Eli said. “Furthermore you must think me treacherous. I suppose you are right.”
“None of that matters,” Franz said. He got up and went to the window. It was now late afternoon and the street was deserted, except for three or four children dancing their way home from school. “It’s Becky that matters.”
“She left for the University as usual this morning.”
“Where is Frau Czinner?”
Eli knew that she had asked the boy to call her Nell, but he respected his formality now. What had happened had made them irretrievably enemies, whatever eventually worked out for Becky and the boy.
He said, “It’s important that you understand, Franz.”
“Nothing is important except Becky, just at this moment.”
“She will be all right. Nothing will happen to her.”
That wasn’t of course true, or rather any truth it might have depended on his grammatical expression, that use of the future tense. Things had happened to her already. In the moment of arrest – which was the word he used to himself – she would all at once have grown up. She would have learned what had previously only been words to her; just as he had himself, and her Aunt Miriam and her Aunt Sarah and her Uncle Mark, and her grandfather and those cousins whose names he couldn’t even recall: that the world cannot be controlled. But still he repeated: “Nothing will happen to her.”
He sensed Franz turn, approach him, standing over him. “What do you mean? That my father will be set free? That you will arrange for the exchange to take place?”
“No,” he said. “I don’t mean that.”
“But you must. Becky is all that matters.”
“She will be all right. As for your father, I must tell you that I had word he left Argentina this morning. He will be in Israel tomorrow. It will be in all the papers, on the wireless and the television. So now do you understand? He cannot be set free.”
There was silence. Then the sound of sobbing. Eli smoked and caressed the cat. He said, “Talk to your American friend. You’ll see, he won’t allow them to go too far. And they depend on him. These clowns depend on the CIA as much as on the Argentinian police. Kidnapping, holding to ransom, that’s one thing … beyond that, no. Becky will be all right.”
Franz said, “And if she isn’t, will it have been worth it?”
Eli drew on his cheroot. The boy’s question led into a desert where he no longer wished to travel. Once he had thought of himself as an explorer, prepared to endure hardship, the heat of the day, the night cold that entered the bones, and to think himself rewarded not, as easier spirits were, by the occasional moments at an oasis, but simply by the experience itself, and the knowledge, the consciousness, of that experience. To be able to say, “I have been there and lived.” That was the significant thing in existence. Without that, all was merely palliative, like that soft green English countryside without horizons, which he had learned to loathe. It was in the wilderness that you found yourself. But in recent years, in his blindness which might – he would smile – be thought wilderness enough, he had been content to retreat, to dismiss the idea of value from his mind, relapse into mere existence, getting through the day, living as almost everybody did. But the past wouldn’t release him: it had forced him into the desert again, and now the boy’s question danced before him like a will-o’-the-wisp.
“Will it have been worth it?” Franz said again.
Getting no answer, he continued – and this time his voice, though challenging, seemed to come to Eli from a long way distant: “How could you do this to us?”
The easy answer was denial: “I have done nothing to you. What people do they do to themselves.”
But he couldn’t make it. There was casuistry there, for it was a perversion of the truth to pretend that he hadn’t known, when he made those calls to Tel Aviv and Vienna, that his words would explode in his daughter’s life. Wasn’t that after all why he hadn’t mentioned it to Nell?
So he said, “There are imperatives. Your own father would tell you that. It is how he has acted himself.”
“I don’t understand. Is it revenge? Do you hate me too?”
“Revenge is an imperative. The English philosopher Bacon called it ‘a sort of wild justice’.”
“But why?”
“Why do you love my daughter?”
“Because … because … you can’t answer that question.”
“But you have. Motivation is beyond comprehension. That is the answer.”
“But if that is true…”
The boy paused.
“This is crazy, this sort of talk.”
With a cry that contained a sob, he fled from the room. Eli listened to his footsteps descend, faster and faster at the turning of the stair, until they died away.