A Man Lies Dreaming (4 page)

Briefly, he thought about Unity. He lay on his back and stared at the darkness beyond the window and listened to the voices of the night until he fell asleep.

Wolf’s Diary, 2nd November 1939

In my dream I was back in the trenches in Neuve Chapelle, in the dugout we called Löwenbräu, after the brewery. In my dream it was night time, some days after the battle that had raged over the 9th and 10th of May 1915. The battle was not significant enough to be named, though I suppose it was significant enough for the dead.

In my dream I stood half-crouched in the trench during inspection. In the night beyond, mortar fire bloomed and in the no-man’s-land the cries of the dying could be heard. Hundreds of dead British soldiers littered the barren ground and the stench of their death filled the night. When we had first arrived at the front the land had been filled with orchards and fields and the hum of bees could be heard. Now it was a wasteland. The British soldiers lay rotting in the sun during the day. At night their bloated corpses lay ripening as flies laid their eggs on the entry points of the bullets that killed them. Beetles crawled inside them, feeding, and the stench of the rotting corpses filled the warm spring air. Worse yet were the ones still, miraculously, alive; the ones who took so long to die. Their moans were unholy sounds. We wished them dead so we would be spared their horror.

In my dream Ziegler, the commander of the Tenth company, was walking down the line of inspection, slapping the soldiers he deemed slovenly or disrespectful. As he approached me I saw him as a being of great shadow, his face invisible behind a pool of darkness, the shadows lengthening behind him in the light of the moon like the wings of a great beast. When he reached me he stopped, and I could smell the rank odour of alcohol on his breath. He leaned towards me, into the light, and I saw his face, but it was not Ziegler’s face but my father’s, Alois. I cowered from him, his small eyes set in a fleshy face, the smell of wine on him. I saw him smile with unholy joy as he raised his fist and swung and hit me. The impact threw me back against the sandbags and then he was on me, kicking and cursing my name.

It is my habit to read a book a day. When I woke it was early and the sun had not yet risen. I washed my face in the sink, and the cold stung where my father had hit me in my dream. I made myself an infusion of camomile tea and set it on the windowsill. Soho at this hour is as close to silent as it ever gets. Even the whores were asleep. From down below came the smell of freshly baked bread. I picked up a book, Harold Laski’s
The Grammar of Politics
, published some years back by Allen & Unwin. I spent the next two hours thus quietly occupied. Then I rose, donned my coat and my hat and went into my office.

The morning passed uneventfully. I paid bills, caught up on paperwork. I have always loved working at my desk. From behind a desk, a man can force an order on things. From behind a desk, I once believed, I could rule the world. Now other men sat behind other desks, in offices grander than mine, and told the people what to do and how to think. In the afternoon my telephone rang.

‘Wolf Investigations, this is Wolf.’

‘This is Isabella Rubinstein speaking.’

‘Miss Rubinstein.’

Her voice sounded brisk on the phone. ‘Have you made any progress yet?’ she demanded. I pictured her in a vast London residence in Mayfair or Belgravia, somewhere anyway where they let Jews move in. Talking to me on the phone while her father’s chauffeur washed the Rolls and her father’s gardener pruned the rose bushes and her father’s chef prepared their Jewish meal in a kitchen with two separate sinks in it. ‘You only came to see me yesterday,’ I said.

‘I expect results, Herr Wolf,’ she said.

I held on to the phone for a long moment, watching how the blood drained from the tips of my fingers where I was gripping the receiver.

‘Hello?’

‘Yes, Miss Rubinstein.’

‘Well?’

‘I have met with one of my … old associates. He has given me the address of a club. I shall be visiting it tonight.’

‘What sort of club?’

‘The sort nice society girls shouldn’t go to,’ I said, and she laughed, a little breathlessly.

‘You’d be surprised what nice society girls do,’ she said. ‘When they have the mind to do it.’

I let that go. ‘If that would be all, Miss Rubinstein …’ I said.

‘No,’ she said.

‘No?’

‘I want to come with you.’

‘That is entirely out of the question.’ I think I was shouting down the line. She got me that way, did Isabella Rubinstein.

‘Where is this club?’ she said. I could hear steel sheathed in her voice.

‘Miss Rubinstein, you hired me to do my job. So let me do my job.’

‘I hired you for who you once were,’ she said. The intensity of her voice changed. I pictured her on the other end of the line, lying on her bed, the window open, a warm breeze wafting into the room (it is always spring, for the rich). Was she playing with the cord? Running her long slim fingers up and down the shaft of the receiver? ‘They used to scare us with your name. Did you know that? My mother told me if I misbehaved the big bad wolf would come and get me. I would lie in my bed at night in the dark and picture you, creeping into the house, climbing up the stairs, softly pushing the door to my room …’

‘Yes?’ I said. My mouth was dry.

‘You’d stand over my bed and I’d know you were there but pretend that you weren’t,’ she said. ‘You’d reach down at last and lay your claws on my bare shoulder and slowly push the strap of my nightie down, peeling it off, but gently. We all hated you. Your voice was everywhere, on the wireless. I used to hear it as I fell asleep.’

‘Yes?’

‘Like now,’ she said, and she suddenly laughed, gaily. ‘And now you work for me,’ she said. There was unholy glee in her voice, and something else, syrupy and sickly-sweet.

‘Yes …’ I said.

‘You will do what I tell you, won’t you, Wolf?’ she said.

I shifted uncomfortably in my seat. How dare she presume to order me about! I hated her and wanted to punish her and yet I wanted to be punished, too. Something to do with violence a long way back, no doubt, or so some hack like that Jew, Freud, would tell you.

I pictured her on the four-poster bed with the gardener outside watering the damned roses. Pictured her slowly lifting up her dress, her fingers trailing along the smooth whiteness of her leg. ‘No,’ I said, almost moaned. ‘No.’ I waited for her to say something, but all I could hear was her heavy breathing down the line and then abruptly she hung up and the line went dead. I swore and shifted in my seat. How I hated all Jews!
They were a parasitic race, preying upon the honest portion of mankind
.

Power. It all came down to power. To control. I thought of Geli. I missed her every day. At seventeen she was such a beautiful creature, vivacious and alive. With Geli I had found what I had sought. All women have a will. With Geli I had thought I could control that will, mould it to my needs. We had lived together, uncle and niece, I took her to the opera, to the picture houses in Munich. I had loved her and she had betrayed me with my own gun.

When I stood up the pressure had eased but a dark wet patch stained the front of my trousers. Men should never excuse their needs but subordinate them to a greater cause. But my cause was gone, shot down in flames when I was betrayed by the people, and now Ernst Thälmann presided over Germany, the fat loathsome prick. And so I went and got changed before setting out.

Wolf had decided to walk, though the day was cold and occasional lashings of rain stung his face. He drew his fedora low over his head, hunching his shoulders as he pressed against the wind. Outside the British Museum he saw a group of Gurkhas, each wearing a curved kukri knife. They passed close by, their faces alien to him. They marched in a unit. Wolf remembered them on the battlefield, the black devils they used to call them, these Nepalese soldiers serving the British king. In the trenches during that war he had been a dispatch runner, serving with the Bavarian List Regiment. As the warm spring turned to bitter winter, the rains flooded the trenches and the men lived in eternal damp. Liquid mud covered their faces and ran down their eyes, its taste was in their mouths. It was cold and their blankets were as wet as they were: they could not get warm. The walls collapsed, their bread was wet and inedible. Wolf remembered men who shot themselves in order to escape the front. Remembered one man who, on capturing a British prisoner of war, calmly cut the man’s throat with his knife. When challenged, the man had said, ‘I just felt like it.’ As was the practice, the PoW was reported as having died of heatstroke.

He remembered the winter of 1914 and the Christmas Truce. Night time, Christmas Eve, and a sky shining with cold stars like frost. Across the no-man’s-land the English troops of the Devonshire regiment began to sing carols and from the German side rose hymns in response. A soldier from RIR 17 stepped out of the trench and shouted in English, ‘You no shoot, we no shoot! It is your Christmas. We want peace. You want peace.’

The next day was cold and bright and the men from both sides met in the middle, shaking hands, exchanging hastily written Christmas cards, even dancing. Dancing! The others were overjoyed but how he had resented them! He had been enraged by the men, by their betrayal. Wolf did not participate in the truce and on the 27th the rains returned and with them the mud, and lightning flashed in the sky, etching indelible scars in the skin of night.

Wolf walked past the company of Gurkhas. As a young soldier he had admired them in battle. Later, as a leader of men, he had often wished he had a company of such men in his service.

Right now, as a down-at-the-heels private eye, Wolf just couldn’t give a damn.

He walked down Museum Street past the offices of Allen & Unwin and turned left on High Holborn. Already it was growing dark and the streets were filled with Londoners of all stripes. London reminded him sometimes of the Vienna of his youth, a godless city of sin and corruption. Here there were lawyers striding about in their robes, clerks hurrying at their sides; insurance men and bobbies on the beat; labourers grimy with dust; housewives returning late from market and society wives from their shopping; orthodox Jews arguing the Torah and the rising price of gold; newspapermen with cigarettes in their mouths congregating outside the Cittie of York pub; churchmen and pickpockets and here and there an early-rising prostitute; and the businessmen not in their offices yet.

When he reached Leather Lane, night had fallen and the air was fetid, rank with the smell of cooking and waste dumped openly into the street. Wolf began to hear German spoken, and saw in the people the lost gaze of the eternal refugee. These were his people, mostly: Austrians and Germans displaced by the Fall, rejected by the nations of Europe until they had made their way, in one secret form or another, across the Channel into England. They were people without papers, without hope. Their clothes were shabby and their habits frugal, and the women did not walk alone in the night and the men congregated in small furtive groups on the steps of their tenements, smoking thin cigars and drinking home-made schnapps that was little better than rotgut, but it was all they had.

They were a sign to him of how far he had fallen.

Running adjacent to Leather Lane was Hatton Garden, and here there were still Jews. Shuttered shops held behind them jewellery of gold and diamond, silver and sapphire and rubies, yet here too rubbish collected in the street; the fronts of the buildings were dirty and the brickwork exposed. Wolf walked slowly, his hat pulled down low. He walked the city and the darkness welcomed him as its own. Down Hatton Garden to the noisy thoroughfare of the Clerkenwell Road, where Wolf saw signs in the language of his birth and rowdy bars lit with electric lights that yet reminded him of Vienna and Berlin. The smell of bratwurst and sauerkraut wafted in the air from covered stalls and men, already drunk at this hour, walked with arms linked together singing of the glories of the Fatherland. Wolf averted his gaze and walked in the shadows, west along Clerkenwell and back down Leather Lane. Receding in the distance he could hear the Horst Wessel Song.

Wessel had been an SA-Sturmführer in Berlin, only 22 when he was murdered by a communist assassin, shot in the face when he answered a knock on the door. It was gimp-leg Goebbels’s idea to turn the young idiot into a hero, his song into an anthem for the Party. Wessel had lived with a young prostitute, Erna, and had probably acted as her pimp. It was just as likely that he died over her affections as for not paying the rent. Strange, though, how the song had caught on, that men were singing it even now, years after the Fall.