Skilful use of knights is the mark of the professional player.
Tuesday, October 8th
Examine closely the eyes of certain bold young men and you’ll see a frightened little man staring anxiously out. Sometimes I saw him in Vulkan’s eyes and at other times I wasn’t so sure about it. He carried himself like an advert for hormone pills; his muscles rippled under well-cut lightweight wool suits. His socks were silk and his shoes were made on a personal last by a shop in Jermyn Street. Vulkan was the new breed of European man: he spoke like an American, ate like a German, dressed like an Italian and paid tax like a Frenchman.
He used all the Anglo-Saxon idioms with consummate skill and when he swore did it with calm and considered timing and never with frustration or rage. His Cadillac Eldorado was a part of him; it was black with real leather upholstery, and the wooden steering wheel, map-reading lights, hi-fi, air conditioning and radio phone were unobtrusive, but not so unobtrusive that you could fail to notice them. There were no woolly tigers or plastic skeletons, no pennants or leopard-skin seat-covers in Vulkan’s car. You could scrape the surface of Johnnie Vulkan however you liked; he was gold as deep as you cared to go.
The commissionaire at the Hilton saluted and said, ‘Shall I park the Strassenkreuzer, sir?’ He spoke English and, although the term street-cruiser is an uncomplimentary word for American cars, Johnnie liked it. He flipped him the car keys with a practised movement of the fingers. Johnnie walked ahead of me. The tiny metal studs that he affected in his shoes made a rhythm of clicks across the marble. The discreetly shaded light fell across the carefully oiled rubber-plants and shone on the Trinkgeld of the girl in the newspaper stand where they sold yesterday’s Daily Mail and Playboy and coloured postcards of the wall that you could send to friends and say, ‘Wish you were here’. I followed Vulkan into the bar where it was too dark to read the price-list and the piano player felt his way among the black and white keys like someone had changed them all around.
‘Glad you came?’ Vulkan said.
I wasn’t sure I was. Vulkan had changed almost as much as the city itself. Both found themselves in a permanent state of emergency and had discovered a way of living with it.
Johnnie sniffed at his bourbon and downed it like it was medicine. ‘But you thought it would be different by now,’ he said. ‘You thought it would all be peacetime, eh?’
‘It’s too damn peacetime for my liking,’ I said. ‘It’s too damn “sundowners on the veranda” and “those infernal drums, Carruthers”. There are too many soldiers being Brahmins.’
‘And too many German civilians being untouchables.’
‘I was in the Lighthouse cinema in Calcutta once,’ I said. ‘They were showing Four Feathers. When the film came to that section when the beleaguered garrison could hold out no longer, across the horizon came a few dozen topees piping “Over the seas to Skye”, some short-muzzle Lee Enfields saying, “Cor blimey”, and some gay young sahibs with punkah wallahs in attendance.’
‘They put the tribesmen to flight,’ said Vulkan.
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘but in the cinema the Indian audience cheered as they did it.’
‘You think we are cheering on our Allied masters?’
‘You tell me,’ I said and I looked around and listened to English speech and drank the sherry that cost twice the price it would fetch anywhere else this side of the wall.
‘You English,’ said Vulkan. ‘You live out there in the middle of that cold sea surrounded by herring. How will we ever get you to understand? June the sixth, 1944, was D-Day; up till then you British had lost more people in wartime traffic accidents than you had lost in battle,1 while we Germans had already suffered six and half million casualties on the Eastern front alone. Germany was the only occupied country that failed to produce a resistance organization. It failed to produce one because there was nothing left; in 1945 we had thirteen-year-old kids standing where you are standing now, pointing a bazooka down the Ku-damm waiting for a Joseph Stalin tank to clank out of the Grunewald. So we fraternized and we collaborated. We saluted your private soldiers, gave our houses to your non-coms and our wives to your officers. We cleared the rubble with our bare hands and didn’t mind that empty lorries passed us coming back from your official brothels.’
Vulkan ordered two more drinks. A girl with too much make-up and a gold lamé dress tried to catch Vulkan’s eye, but when she saw me looking took a tiny mirror from a chainmail bag and gave her eyebrows a working over.
As Vulkan turned to me he spilled his bourbon over the back of his hand.
‘We Germans didn’t understand our role,’ he said. He licked the whisky from his hand. ‘As a defeated nation we were to be forever relegated to being customers – supplied by the Anglo-American factories – but we didn’t understand that. We began to build factories of our own, and we did it well because we are professionals, we Germans, we like to do everything well – even losing wars. We became prosperous and you English and Americans don’t like it. There has to be a reason that lets you keep your nice cosy feeling of superiority. It’s because we Germans are toadies, weaklings, automatons, masochists, collaborators or——lickers that we are doing so well.’
‘You are breaking my heart,’ I said.
‘Drink,’ said Vulkan and downed his most recent one with lightning speed. ‘You aren’t the one I should be shouting at. You understand better than most, even though you hardly understand at all.’
‘You are too kind,’ I said.
At about 10 P.M. a bright-eyed boy that I had seen at the Gehlen Bureau flashed his cuffs at the bartender and ordered a Beefeater martini. He sipped at it and turned slowly to survey the room. He caught a sight of us and gulped at his drink.
‘King,’ he said quietly. ‘Here’s a surprise.’
It was like finding a cherry in a sweet martini; a big surprise but you raise hell if it’s not there.
‘I’m Helmut,’ said the bright-eyed boy.
‘I’m Edmond Dorf,’ I said; two can play at that game.
‘Do you want to speak in private?’ Vulkan said.
‘No,’ said Helmut politely and offered his English cigarettes. ‘Our latest employee is, alas, in a traffic accident.’
Vulkan produced a gold lighter.
‘Fatal?’ asked Vulkan.
Helmut nodded.
‘When?’ said Vulkan.
‘Next week,’ said Helmut. ‘We bring him around the corner2 next week.’ I noticed Vulkan’s hand flinch as he lit the cigarette.
Helmut noticed it too, he smiled. To me he said, ‘The Russians are bringing your boy into the city in two weeks from next Saturday.’
‘My boy?’ I said.
‘The scientist from the Academy of Sciences Biology Division; he will probably stay at the Adlon. Isn’t that the man you want us to move?’
‘No comment,’ I said. It was very annoying and this boy was making the most of it. He flashed me a big smile before giving his teeth a rebore with the Beefeater martini.
‘We are arranging the pipeline now,’ he added. ‘It would help us if you supply these documents from your own sources. You will find all the data there.’ He handed me a folded slip of paper, shot his cuffs a couple of times to show me his cuff-links, then finished his martini and vanished.
Vulkan and I looked across the rubber-plants.
‘Gehlens Wunderkinder,’ said Vulkan. ‘They’re all like him.’