The Human Pool (24 page)

BUDAPEST, 1944

11.11.44. An SS general tells me how he came across one of the marches while in his staff car. He considers it too late in the war for such non-humanitarian behaviour (correct) and that the Hungarians are exceeding their brief (correct). Three years earlier, the same man was much less circumspect. Many others like the general are busy revising their CVs. Matters previously boasted about are downplayed. A calculated moral ambiguity is the latest thing. What is called the getaway suit is becoming fashionable—a country bumpkin's outfit suggestive of a wartime spent in a rural backwater, mowing lawns in an asylum for the insane; or perhaps not, given what went on in those asylums. Getting one's story right is taxing even the sharpest brain. Russia? Never went there. Channel Isles posting passim, entertainment division.

14.11.44. Every day the marches get worse because those who follow are made to camp in the refuse left by those who went before. A particularly virulent form of dysentery has broken out.

I have nothing to offer the Reichsführer except bluff. No one is interested in negotiating with the SS. Eichmann has made a point of telling him that his will has prevailed. The marches continue.

Last night he was celebrating the deportations with mare's-milk alcohol, exclaiming that it was the first time he'd drunk it. (Fancy!) Veesenmayer and others were on hand for one of a series of intimate soirées, intimate because most have grown wise enough to refuse the invitation. Everyone was toasting each other and congratulating themselves on the lack of local resistance. Eichmann was sad, too, that his job was nearly done. He declared 1944 his annus mirabilis, the year he had come out of his shell. He was congratulated on ‘an elegant performance' by Veesenmayer at his most smoothly diplomatic. Eichmann, with false modesty, replied that he could not have done it without the order from the chief of security police and the SD. Tome, Veesenmayer tut-tutted about Hungarian brutality and agreed the marches were lunacy.

Eichmann on being asked by me if he didn't think that the Hungarians had used excessive violence: ‘That is their problem.'

BUDAPEST, 1944

NO ONE KNEW WHY
the marches suddenly stopped. Some said it was because Dufy had threatened the Arrow Cross with Allied reprisals. I believed that Karl-Heinz had persuaded Himmler that his peace negotiations would stand a better chance if they were ended. At any rate, the day after, he had a message for Dulles, which was that all gas chambers were to be destroyed on Himmler's orders.

But Dulles seemed preoccupied with his own moves. History was a private affair for him, a series of deals of more or less his own making. His overriding concern was to move Germany's money. The rest was secondary. The peace negotiations were to keep Himmler sweet. Himmler was almost certainly no part of Dulles's postwar plans. Dulles had to keep the Jewish rescue negotiations going because David had threatened to expose him—while protecting his own position with his Moscow intelligence. Being seen to be making the moves was something Dulles excelled at, the appearance of getting things done. Formality and cheer, the pipe smoker's tricks. Give any man a pipe, and he will appear smart and a good listener.

Dulles's money convoys went about their business. Trucks from Budapest via Vienna into Switzerland. Red Cross markings. Trucks from Berlin. The same routes, the same border crossings; no hold-ups, no technical hitches. Always a night crossing into Switzerland and from there to a castle over the Italian border in the Brenner Pass. Turn round, go back, do it again. Dulles's reward for my loyalty: U.S. citizenship and the prospect of a job in the United States when the war was done, doing Allen's mon(k)ey business.

In Budapest Eichmann had one move left, done to spite Karl-Heinz and all those who had toiled so tirelessly at their rescue work. He had the Arrow Cross round up seventeen hundred men, who had protection papers and were employed in the city clearing bomb damage, and put them on trains to Germany. Eichmann: a man with an itch who couldn't stop scratching.

German newsreels were still labouring under the illusion of a glorious victory. Budapest grew full of importuning. A prostitute complained that the number of bourgeois women willing to sell themselves was causing a glut, and where were the men, anyway?

Through the chaos walked Willi Schmidt, a handsome man come into his own. What was Willi doing besides getting rich and bringing relief to the ghetto? I still find it impossible to make up my mind. However, Willi was consistent in certain respects. He always had the most attractive female staff, and in the ghetto was no different. The Arrow Cross were afraid of him because of his SS connections. I had to wait until Saigon to encounter Willi's equivalent again: men who thrived as everything fell apart, who were born to exist at those historical junctures where the general collapse is exploited by the few who operate outside any moral laws.

I bought the notion of Willi as life-saver and his line that it was no longer possible to stand by and do nothing. Swiss Willi converted from a lifetime of neutrality. On the one hand, Willi was a series of shifting moral refractions, capable perhaps of redeeming himself while also cultivating a profound ambiguity in the face of a moral absolute: Thou shalt not kill. Experience had taught me that there was always more to men like Willi and Karl-Heinz. So what was in the ghetto for Willi and nobody else?

The ghetto was the opposite of the dance of death of the marches. Stagnation prevailed. Cold ate at the marrow and the soul. You stepped over people, even in dark cellars. For most there would be no coming back, even for the survivors. They would remain eviscerated by the experience.

Willi used his position to barter for medical supplies and borrowed a German nurse. The place was an epidemic waiting to happen, he said. He insisted I take injections. We did them in his apartment, in a luxurious block with a carpeted entrance and a lift. Willi was living in ever greater opulence; the previous owner was an Arrow Cross official who had taken early retirement, and decided to leave the city. Willi was sharing with several actresses and Karl-Heinz's former mistress. He had his own bathroom, which he kept padlocked. Inside it was like a dispensary. Willi did the injections himself. He said, ‘I should have been a doctor.' Then: ‘We will all be gone by Christmas.'

By the time Christmas approached, everyone in the ghetto was suffering from malnutrition, and there were outbreaks of typhus and diphtheria. No food was delivered for five days, and there were frequent power cuts. When Russian bombing left casualties in the ghetto, Willi did what he could to get them to hospital. A particularly virulent form of diarrhea broke out, which was as psychologically undermining as it was physically, and many died. At 32 Kalona Jozsef Street, five lunatics were living in the building. Willi said, ‘Perhaps madness is the only answer.' His own sanity seemed in the balance. He became feverish, and for the first time I wondered if he would survive the war. His eyes acquired the burning, dangerous clarity that could be seen in those in the ghetto who were about to die.

By then the Danube was full of tortured corpses. People were hanged from lampposts. Willi, cackling, said, ‘They are known as Christmas decorations.' He told me that he had found abandoned Jewish orphans, previously under Dufy's protection, roaming the streets, skeletal two-year-olds hopelessly lost and screaming in fright from the bombs. ‘It's the children I feel sorriest for,' said Willi. ‘Nobody does anything for them.'

Was Willi a hitherto unsuspected sentimentalist when it came to children? What was perhaps his greatest humanitarian act went almost unremarked, except for a drunken commentary from Bandi Grosz on the last occasion we saw each other: ‘Willi would sell his mother for profit, and he arranged for Dufy to move a whole lot of children out of orphanages to the monastery at Panonalma, with no fee involved. Even Dufy is surprised by that. Willi must be saving up in holy dispensations for the next world!'

•   •   •

Karl-Heinz suggested I move to the Astoria, where it was still possible to get something resembling a meal. He was sure I could negotiate a good rate under the circumstances. There are few more delightful absurdities than a smart hotel trying to maintain standards in the face of catastrophe. We sat in an empty dining room, waited on by a couple of octogenarians, Hungarian fascists of the old school, who still clicked their heels. Karl-Heinz: ‘Budapest is fucked. Budapest can look forward to a thousand years of Communist rule, and that won't be any fun since they backed the wrong horse in 1941.'

We ate poached eggs on toast, with a bottle of French red wine from the hotel cellar, followed by cheese. Karl-Heinz said that if the Germans had run their war effort as efficiently as they had redistributed their assets, it would have all been over by 1943. Most of the money had been taken out of Berlin, he said, and no one was any the wiser.

For once I knew more than he did. I knew where the money was, a small sign of the shifting balance of power. Karl-Heinz was keen to know more. He'd heard that the money route doubled as a German escape line. He offered to pay me to find out more. I thought about the end of the war, and wondered whether aiding and abetting men like Karl-Heinz was the wisest course.

 

Willi Schmidt was right. We were gone from Budapest by Christmas. One last cameo remained to be played. On Christmas Eve the radio announced a programme of summary executions for, among other things, anyone hiding Jews. On that day Eichmann, I read somewhere, slipped like a grey ghost out of Budapest. More or less.

I still can't explain why I took Willi with me, what bond obliged me to find him in the ghetto and tell him it was time for us to leave. Willi was near delirious, shitting himself with sickness. He had some final things to do, he said, and told me to come and fetch him that night.

When I went back he wasn't alone. He was with a man dressed in civilian clothes, inspecting the last of his work, stepping through the diseased and the dying, a ghoul at the feast of the dead. Willi, stinking of death, said, ‘We have another passenger.'

‘No,' I said. ‘He can make his own way.'

Eichmann gave me his familiar mirthless grin. Willi said to me in a whisper: ‘Men like us are no longer in a position to make moral judgements. Take him, and you can take one Jew, too, any Jew you want. Some are still pretty.'

Four of us left in a Red Cross car. Willi, swathed in a huge nappy of blankets, vomited out the window and shat himself. A semiconscious child who passed the journey in a state of delirium. Eichmann, incognito, sat in the back of the car, inscrutable, dull again after his notoriety. He feared flying, he said. He feared enemy aircraft strafing his staff car. It had left with his possessions, he said, before adding unnecessarily that he wasn't in it.

Eichmann permitted himself a smile as we sped along the ancient Weiner Landstrasse down which, less than a month before, sixty thousand Jews had marched to his orders. Their suitcases still littered the verges. At Hegyeshalom the border post had been abandoned, and we passed into Austria unnoticed.

ZURICH

HOOVER AND I SPEND OUR
evenings talking about the end of the war, inching nearer to the point where I will have to lie. We sit in Mother's upstairs study, sipping whisky, and the room is full of our unmade moves. Perhaps we have grown too addicted to anticipation and tension. A ritual has grown up that neither of us is willing to spoil. I suspect Hoover is afraid that his masculine pride will be hurt. I am not sure what my role is supposed to be. Part confessor, part confidante. He wants to be free of his memories. He has grown obsessed with the notion that Willi Schmidt is in some way his darker, unlicensed self. He came out from the ghetto feeling as though Willi had infected him with a moral sickness. Willi had made him select, and in his derangement had enjoyed forcing Hoover to make his choice.

Where Hoover remains haunted by his suppressed past, I wish instead he would see me, us. I wish I could reach out, but a lifetime of caution forbids it. I wish only to preserve our idyll.

Vaughan phoned threatening to spoil that. He wanted to speak to Hoover—urgently, he said—and, without thinking, I lied, saying that he was no longer here.

Maybe he sensed I was blocking him, because he asked in an unpleasant tone, ‘Did you tell him about you and Dominic Carswell?'

I shook as I put down the phone.

When Hoover wanted to know who had called, I told him it was no one of consequence, then, without preamble, I asked if he had been one of Mother's lovers.

He looked startled. ‘What on earth makes you think that?'

Mother used the same trick, I remember: denial in the form of a question. I was disappointed. He was lying. I told him I was certain he had been, and wondered why I was trying to drive a wedge between us. Hoover qualified himself. He had almost been one of Mother's lovers, he conceded—still lying. I am more jealous than I care to admit.

 

Hoover finished the war in uniform. He must have looked good in one, I think. He was in Berlin by June 1945 as a ‘cultural attaché'. Before that he had continued to do his ‘private work' for Mr Dulles, who had arranged a job for him as interpreter for the commission responsible for the retrieval and safeguarding of looted treasures. This, he freely admitted, was a cover for doing Dulles's business. His last task as go-between for Dulles and Strasse had been the planned disappearance of a trainload of stolen Hungarian goods.

What Hoover doesn't know is that I have this from Mother's account: ‘A[llen] full of boasts about his pirate exploits. He is quite right that the United States is not being farsighted in terms of future security, hence his own efforts to redistribute large amounts of money for what he calls insurance purposes. A[llen] tells me his efforts are so successful that he can afford to sacrifice the contents of a Hungarian train carrying German loot. He is tickled by the fact that it was his personal call to General Patton which identified the train's whereabouts and the general complimented him on his excellent intelligence.'

I know from Hoover that the Hungarian crown jewels were on the train and they were later shown to him and Dulles in Frankfurt ‘on the day Hitler died'.

But I am getting ahead of myself. Mother and Hoover.

In late May, Mother summoned Hoover to the Hotel Maison Rouge in Strasbourg, which already held some significance for him. According to Hoover, she had made it plain that she wished to become better acquainted. Loyal service was to be rewarded with one of Mother's dalliances.

Hoover claims Mother showed up a day late. Instead he had been met by Willi Schmidt, who was there with a message explaining Mother's delay.

Hoover had spent the evening with Willi, who was still thin from his illness but seemed returned to his normal spirits. They deliberately avoided talking about Budapest and discussed only the future. Willi was looking forward to going to the United States, he said. They dined and walked afterwards through the deserted city. Then, on a narrow gantry over a millrace, Willi, without any warning, tried to kill Hoover. But the gun had jammed, and Willi was still weak; after a very brief struggle he had slipped and fallen into the river.

Hoover told me this story with a flatness that almost amounted to a denial of its happening. His voice was empty, but his hands fidgeted, betraying his discomfort. He said, ‘I will never understand why Willi wanted to kill me.'

‘I know why.'

‘You do?' He looked reluctant and afraid. I could understand that, after my own lifetime of finding it easier not to live with the truth. ‘And?' He spoke listlessly, like a man in shock.

‘Strasse arranged for Willi to kill you because it was thought you knew too much.'

Hoover looked at me and said, ‘I see.' I wondered if he did see, and why he had never guessed what was staring him in the face. ‘How do you know?'

‘Mother's papers. I remember reading her account before they disappeared. I never thought we would ever meet.'

‘Did she say if she was the person who identified Willi?'

I said I could not remember and watched him putting together what he thought were the final pieces.

‘Once Karl-Heinz was safe under Dulles's protection, then getting rid of me was no longer a priority,' he said. ‘Did Betty say whether Dulles was in on it, too? Dulles always worried about how much I knew.'

I shook my head.

‘Dulles appointed me Karl-Heinz's controlling officer and sent us both off to Berlin. That was typical of the man. Expendable one week, indispensable the next.'

I offered to take him to my bed. He declined, saying that it wasn't a good night for him. Tomorrow.

And so we move on, stepping politely around each other, neither forwards nor backwards, in our blind pas de deux.