Franz was in a bar where he had never been before. He had ordered whisky and a handful of tokens for the telephone. The late afternoon sun slanted in at the doorway, and there were still prettily dressed girls with men in business suits sitting at the tables on the pavement. He could hear laughter and happiness. He took out the card Calthorpe Binns had given him, and called the first of the two numbers listed, which was that of his office. He listened to the ringing in a room that he knew from the first ring was empty. Then he tried the other number; there was no reply there either. And when he replaced the receiver, he wondered whether he would have dared to tell the American that his father had already been spirited from Argentina. He couldn’t share Dr Czinner’s confidence that Becky’s captors would throw in their hand at that point. Why wouldn’t they seek to put pressure on Tel Aviv?
He knew that he should call his mother. But it was impossible. He ordered another whisky.
Then he searched in his address book, found the number of the flat where he and Becky had made love, and, when a crisp voice answered, asked if he might speak to Alexis. He told her he must see her. Would she agree to meet? Of course, she said, as if this was the most natural request in the world.
“Yeah, I know where you are. I’ll be right over.”
It was as if she had some idea of what had happened.
But when he saw her enter, the swing of her blonde hair and the relaxed confident stride causing male heads to turn, and provoking a wolf whistle from a gang of youths who hung around the news-stand, he knew that this was nonsense. Nobody burdened by knowledge could move that easily.
He told her the story from the beginning.
“That’s rough,” she said. “I appreciate your confidence.”
“The curious thing is that I am not horrified to find out what my father was. I suppose I have always had a suspicion. Do you know this Calthorpe Binns?”
“Everyone knows Cal. He’s a standing joke.”
“He didn’t seem like a joke to me.”
“No, but he’s a prick.”
“Is he CIA?”
“I guess he might be.”
“That business of knowing that Becky and I had … in your fiat. How could he know that? And is it US government property?”
“They pay the rent. ’Cos of Katie, one of my flatmates.”
“Is she CIA too?”
“Lord, no, she works at the Embassy… But look, what are we going to do?”
She put her hand on his knee.
“I’m with you,” she said, “body and soul. Poor Becky.”
“Her father thinks they’ll release her when they find out there’s no chance of a bargain. Or that’s what he says. I wish I could believe him. I hoped you might be able to help me locate Calthorpe Binns. He’s my only link, but he’s not at either of the numbers on the card he gave me. I was desperate. So I called you. I hope you don’t mind being involved.”
“Let’s go look,” she said. “We could try the Press Club.”
But he wasn’t there. Alexis cashed a cheque at the bar.
“We may need a lot of money,” she said.
They took a taxi and headed on a tour of the bars, and then later of the nightspots. Alexis seemed to be known in most of them. She was greeted with a smile and a “Hi Alexis,” or “Hi honey” by doormen, waiters, army officers, the stout Negress who kept a bar favoured by transvestites, two policemen, and a crippled seller of lottery tickets.
“Do you know everyone in this city?”
“I don’t know that man with no nose over there, I’m relieved to state.”
Her energy and exuberance were remarkable. He almost resented the enthusiasm with which she threw herself into their quest. It was as if she had forgotten the reason behind it. But he knew she hadn’t. “I can’t bear to think of Becky frightened,” she said. “And it’s no good hoping she may not be frightened. Anybody would be in her shoes. It’s the not knowing that does it.”
Calthorpe Binns had been seen early that evening in two or three of the bars. Then the trail seemed to run cold. Alexis asked Franz if he thought he could find his way again to the warehouse where he had met the Nazis. “She might be there, you know,” she said.
“You mean she might have been there all the time, while I was there?”
“Seems likely.”
He shook his head.
“I don’t believe I could.”
And he burst into tears, his whole body trembling. He felt her arm around him, her hair brushing against his cheek.
“You must think me an idiot.”
“No, why should I?”
“It’s all so hopeless.”
“Look, Franz,” she said, holding him close to her and speaking low, “you’ve got it in your head that you must find Cal Binns, but it’s going to come to the same thing whether you find him or not. They’re going to know their plan has bellyflopped when they hear the news bulletin. You’ve got another priority, it seems to me, to break the news to your mother. You can’t let her find out from the news bulletins.”
He didn’t have to urge Alexis hard to get her to accompany him to his mother’s apartment. She seemed to have constituted herself his guardian angel for the night. In his agitated state, he was overwhelmed by her goodness. It was in such contrast to everything else that he had learned that day. He couldn’t imagine why she should be ready to put herself to such trouble.
“Because I like you and I adore Becky, dumbo.”
As the lift mounted, she put her arms round him and kissed him on the mouth. He held her tight. He was grateful to her for not offering words of reassurance which they would both recognise as lying. There could never again be any absolute certainty for any of them that things would turn out fine. In a few hours they had been severed from the optimism proper to their age. Maybe Alexis had previously learned that the world was different from the way it had been sold to their generation, but for him the realisation had come unheralded. All the propositions on which he had based his life had come unstuck; it was like stumbling through a dark night, and the moon all at once revealing an open grave. How could he have been so blind? Hadn’t the wretched Bastini’s experience already warned him?
Voices came from the drawing room as they let themselves into the apartment. Franz hesitated. Alexis squeezed his arm.
His mother met them at the door.
“There’s a gentleman who needs to see you urgently. We didn’t know where you were.”
She smiled at Alexis.
“I’m a friend of Becky’s,” Alexis said, and gave her name. Ilse stepped aside. Franz saw that his visitor was Calthorpe Binns.
“Hi, Cal,” Alexis said. “Snap. We’ve been hunting you all over town.”
“Hi, Alexis.” Binns did not rise from the armchair in which he sat clutching a square tumbler of whisky. “Hi, Franz.”
Franz’s stepfather, the General, elegant in a grey suit, said, “Señor Binns and I have been enjoying an interesting conversation, but it might be helpful if someone would let me know what the hell is happening. I detect undercurrents, which make me uneasy. Franz?”
The name was a command. Franz hesitated. He walked to the window and looked out on the city lights. Somewhere – out of the light, or perhaps with a single naked bulb directed at her face, was Becky. He turned round. Binns smiled at him. “Did you talk to Czinner?”
Alexis said, “You’ve made a balls-up, Cal.”
Binns sucked at his whisky.
“We’ve had our obligations to fulfil,” he said.
“Franz,” the General said, “when you went north to look for your father – and I wish your mother had told me in advance of your investigation, which it would have been wiser to leave in my hands – did you encounter a certain Lieutenant Vilar?”
“Yes,” Franz said. “He looked after me. Why do you ask?”
“He won’t do so again. He’s been murdered. Rather horribly. I have photographs, but I won’t show them to you. I wanted to speak to you about your conversation with him. However, Señor Binns’s arrival persuades me that the poor lieutenant is only one small part of a more intricate puzzle.”
The General sat on the arm of the sofa, above his wife who had subsided there. He swung a long leg, gazing, as if in admiration, at the knife-edge crease of his trousers or the high polish of his black English-made shoe. He placed light fingers on Ilse’s bare shoulder.
“My dear,” he said, “this is all going to be unpleasant, I fear. You will have to be brave. Or would you rather leave us, and let me handle it?”
Ilse returned the squeeze of his hand.
“I will stay,” she said. “I think perhaps I have let too many other people handle too many things.”
“As you like, my dear, but it is going to be unpleasant. I wished only to spare you as much as possible. Franz.”
So, for the second time that evening, Franz told the story as he had encountered it. When he had finished it was as if Becky’s fear was in the room with them.
Franz said, “Why did you hide it from me, Mother? You must always have known what my father did. What he was.”
The General’s fingers tightened on Ilse’s shoulder. She looked up, thrusting out her chin, and, for a moment, for the first time ever for Franz, she looked ugly.
“You talk of such things,” she said. “It is easy to talk. What was I to do? He was my husband. He was the father of my son. He is your father. What would you have had me do? Denounce him to the Jews or the Russians or the Americans, who were anyway – as you can see” – she gestured with a terrified vague push of the hand towards Calthorpe Binns – “ready to overlook whatever he had done, in return for what he could do for them. And what in the end had he done? Only what he was commanded to do. But, eventually it was impossible for me also. That is why we separated.”
“My darling,” the General said. “You have nothing with which to reproach yourself. Franz, you will not speak in that manner to your mother. You will apologise, now, please… Franz.”
Franz felt the touch of Alexis’s hand.
“Whatever I have done, I have done for love of you, Franz,” Ilse said.
“I’m sorry, Mother. But Becky… I’m almost out of my mind…”
“Oh, that poor girl… Carlos, my dear, what can be done for her?”
“That is the next matter,” the General said.
The telephone rang.
For a moment it seemed as if nobody would take the responsibility of answering it. All feared the news it might bring. Even the General hesitated.
“It’s for you, Franz.”
“Luis? … No of course she isn’t. What? It can’t be… Oh, Christ… Look, Luis, where are you? Right, stay there. I’ll ring back.”
He replaced the receiver, turned to face them like an actor confident of holding his well-drilled colleagues. But there was a tremble in his voice.
“That was Luis. He wanted to know if Gabriella was here. Apparently she was going to spend the day with Becky. She was going to call him, and hasn’t done so…”
The General lit a cigarette. Franz saw the tension leave his body. He smiled. It was a smile of which his subordinates would be wary, but at least it was a smile.
“Mr Binns,” he said. “It seems to me that your associates, or rather your clients, are fools. They must know that it is one thing to take someone like Miss Czinner, quite another to seize a girl with the connections of Señorita Carmona. And then there is Lieutenant Vilar. Have they gone mad? Franz, I think we may stop worrying. Mr Binns will make it clear to his clients that they must release the girls.”
“He can also tell them that they are too late,” Franz said. “By now my father is in Israel.”
It was that night Franz learned that people really did have separate lives, which were not merely extensions of his own. Of course he had always known this intellectually, as we all do, but he had never felt it before. He had had warnings: the Bastini affair was one such, and he had sometimes tried to imagine how Bastini managed to live with his shame and his self-knowledge. But even this he imagined only in the way you might speculate about a character in a novel, someone who couldn’t really be said to exist except in the lines given him. Now, as he sat in Alexis’s apartment, waiting for Luis whom they had bidden there, after they had crept from the intolerable confinement of his own home, he struggled to come to terms with the otherness of life.
That his father, as an officer in the SS, had been responsible – though in what precise capacity he didn’t know – for some share in the Final Solution of European Jewry; and that this was the same man who looked on him with a tender if remote affection, and ate the club pudding of pastry, fruit and cream, with such enjoyment. How did you connect these two pictures, and, more important, what went on in such a mind? And what was going on now in the aeroplane that was delivering him to Israel?
That Becky was a prisoner somewhere, afraid, with Gabriella who would be weeping, because nothing in her life could have prepared her to feel powerless.
That Becky’s father had betrayed his father, that he had found his love for his daughter inadequate, when set in the scales against … what? He had denied that it was a passion for revenge.
“Drink this coffee. You’ve had enough whisky.”
But that wasn’t true. It was the whisky which granted him the capacity to endure what he now understood. He thrust his glass at the girl, who sighed, refilled it and said only, “You must be sober…”
“Isn’t there a news bulletin on the BBC World Service?”
“In a quarter of an hour.”
“Oh Alexis, I don’t know what I would do without you.”
He clutched her to him.
“Luis will be here soon,” she said.
“It’s going to be all right,” she said; but he heard the lie in her voice. They both knew that whatever happened, it would never be all right again.
“It’s not like her to be late,” Nell said, “without letting us know. I’ve told her often, as long as we know…”
Eli did not reply. His silence took on a new irritation for her. He played Schubert songs, and his eyes filled with tears.
“I’m going to telephone Ilse to see if she’s there.”
“No,” he said, “don’t do that.”
To her surprise, Eli, who no longer took an interest in public affairs, who described world politics as “an inferior version of the commedia dell’arte”, asked her to tune in to the BBC World Service. She half-listened to the news bulletin as she toasted cheese in the kitchen. There was nothing in its catalogue of human folly and ill-will that could interest him.
“She must be with Franz. It’s too bad of her not to have let us know. But something may have happened to her.”
“What?”
“Anything.”
The doorbell rang.
Franz turned off the radio. “I thought there might be something by now,” he said.
“I’m sure there won’t be till morning. They will want to announce it with all the stops out.”
“Oh God.”
“Look…”
“I can’t bear to…”
Even the intimacy that they both felt frightened him. He was so conscious of the lines of her body as she sat on the arm of his chair with her hand stroking his cheek. He knew, and knew she knew he knew, that in other circumstances they would abandon words, go to bed, make love; and that what restrained them now was not so much Becky, or decency, as the superstitious thought that their betrayal might bring her bad luck; and perhaps that Luis would soon be with them. Even so he slipped his arm round Alexis, pulled her on top of him, and kissed her on the mouth.
“No,” she said, but didn’t move.
Then she said, “Your stepfather frightened Cal Binns. Did you get that? He left him scared as all hell. He’s quite a man, the General.”
He kissed her again.
“I adore Becky too,” she said. “She’s like a flower.”
It was Kinsky. He was out of breath and his eyes, his whole face, looked wild. He looked strangely younger. He said, straight out, panting, “Ilse telephoned me, I can’t believe it.”
“Who’s there,” Eli called, above the wireless which was now playing a snatch of opera.
“It’s Kinsky.”
The music stopped.
“Kinsky? What are you doing at this time of night?”
“Ilse telephoned me,” he said again, “I still can’t grasp it.”
Nell followed him through into the living room. Eli sat in his chair with his hand on the knob of the wireless. It was the volume control he had turned down, but not off, and she was aware of a murmur in the background.
“Would somebody tell me what this is all about? You obviously know,” she said to Eli.
“Ilse’s in the most terrible state. It’s as if her whole world was crumbling. And she has constructed it with such care.”
“We interrupt the programme with a newsflash.” Eli turned up the sound. “It is reported from Tel Aviv that the Nazi war criminal Rudi Kestner, the right-hand man of the SS chief Reinhardt Heydrich, and the chief accomplice of Adolf Eichmann in the Holocaust, has been captured by Israeli agents and will land at Tel Aviv airport later this morning. This report is as yet unconfirmed. We hope to bring you fuller information in our regular bulletin at six o’clock, Greenwich Mean Time.”
* * * *
Alexis slipped off Franz’s lap. She moved as if she was floating and she stood with her back to him and smoothed her bottom; he watched the fingers extended against the blue denim.
“That’s it. That’s Part I, I guess, and this” – as the doorbell rang – “sounds like your friend Luis.”
“Alexis…” but she had gone through the apartment in answer to the door, and Franz was left alone. He poured himself another whisky, and drank it quickly, then another which he stood holding in both hands as Luis entered the room.
“So, boy, what gives, what is this?”
“Tell him the whole story, honey.”
“I don’t know the whole story… I don’t even know what I know…”
“But who is Rudi Kestner?” Nell said. She took off her spectacles and held them, like counsel making a point to the jury, in one hand. “I don’t mean that. I mean – what is the significance? Of course I know who Kestner was, is, I should say…”
“Nell,” Kinsky said, “Kestner is Franz’s father.”
“Do you remember,” he went on, “in Berlin in 1939 or late ’38, you told me of how a man approached you in Unter den Linden and warned you about your relationship with Eli? That was Kestner.”
She sat down, plomp.
“No, that’s impossible… I would have known. I would have recognised him when…” But it wasn’t impossible. She had liked that man even while he frightened and disgusted her, and she had liked Franz’s father with reservations which were certainly different, and yet…
“Oh my God. Does Becky know?”
“Where can I find this Binns?” Luis said. “Just tell me, and I shall strangle him. First though I shall pull out his teeth one by one till he confesses where they are.”
“It’s not like that,” Alexis said. “Cal Binns is only a middleman, a gobetween. And they’ll be all right.”
“Becky will be all right,” Eli said. “There is no reason why she shouldn’t be now.”
* * * *
“It’s a mess, Luis, it’s an inferno, and don’t think I am not in the deepest pit of Hell.”
“What makes you think I give a damn where you are, my friend? What I fucking want to know is why you are sitting here on your backside?”
“My God.” Nell looked at her husband. “This is your doing. And don’t you see, you blind fool, Becky is harmed, ruined, whatever happens to her now?”