The Human Pool (3 page)

FRANKFURT

THE END OF THE GAME,
Turkey nil, Germany nil. It was raining hard German rain, and everyone got wet leaving. The first sign of disturbance was an eddy in the crowd ahead. A low animal growl went up as the stampede began. Everyone ran or got pushed over. Spaces appeared as the charge broke up into skirmishes.

In the bar before the game, Siegfried, yuppie Neo: ‘Riot is the voice of the unheard.'

Two skinheads attacked a man on the ground. Everything sounded far away and close at the same time. The feathery noise of boots digging into soft flesh carried above the din. They started on his head, the dull crunch of steel toe-caps on bone, a dreamy look of concentration on their faces, like awkward boys dancing. Violence was the only thing that made sense. Everything else was just waiting.

‘Many voices go unheard in Germany today. Real German voices.' Siegfried again, philosopher and expansionist. He said Germans have never felt comfortable with the constrictions of borders. He said Germans are never untroubled in their belief in themselves. He said nationhood is a matter of anxiety.

Siegfried and his muscle used mobiles to choreograph the violence. Word went out that the action was moving on.

There was an already sizeable crowd of hardcore support at the new location. The neighbourhood was a poor one, all sodium lamps and low box buildings. Siegfried seemed to have it in his power to keep the police away, and fire engines didn't turn up until long after the building was alight.

The place was an immigrant hostel. The skinheads made grunting noises as the inmates ran out, about thirty of them, including kids, who soon made themselves scarce. A skinhead shouted: ‘Any Jews in there?'

The crowd applauded as the fire took hold. Someone pointed to the sky, then someone else, until there was a host of upraised arms doing the Nazi salute.

A woman in a headscarf was on the roof parapet, staring down, hand to her throat. The skinheads shouted at her to jump, expectation on their faces. This was the sort of grand finale they had been hoping for. Everyone shouted:
Eins, zwei, drei!
Someone told the woman to jump because there was no other way down. Someone else shouted out that he was wasting his time; the bitch didn't speak German. The crowd took up a chant.

The woman ran along the parapet. For a moment she seemed to hang suspended, defying gravity, then fell, screamless, her outline blurring as she gathered velocity. The last noise she made was the crash of her body landing on metal. That shut the crowd up. Moments later we were gone, dispersed by the impact of her fall.

 

After the riot I was allowed to graduate to Siegfried, the yuppie Neo. Siegfried was bars and restaurants. Siegfried was cappuccino. Strong leadership was his special subject. He acknowledged the need for an understanding of new technologies, just as Goebbels had when he realised the possibilities of the microphone as a political tool. Siegfried's idea of a joke was to say that Hitler had been the first rock-and-roll star.

I told him I represented certain interests that were researching the possibilities of political investment. My backers were impressed by his profile and the way he packaged his politics. They wanted him to act as their technical consultant, for a negotiable fee. Siegfried looked pleased. I also said I wanted an introduction to Karl-Heinz Strasse. Siegfried nodded. Strasse was a big bad old Nazi, former SS. My request seemed to convince the Neo of my authenticity.

•   •   •

Thanks to my association with Siegfried, the skinheads became as polite as chauffeurs, and I wasn't made to sit in the middle anymore.

One night we drank beer in a bar with two off-duty cops, crew-cut blonds, one with hair so pale it was almost white. The cops and the skinheads fitted neatly, their camaraderie tight and narrow. The cops hinted that they did political work that made them important. They were told I was from England, looking at the scene. They seemed cool about that. They talked about the riot with relaxed familiarity. The woman who jumped off the roof had survived, the paler cop said. One of the skinheads mimicked her bicycling motion, and they all laughed, and I watched her again, fall through the night.

At ten we left the cops and drove to a Chinese takeaway where a load of food was waiting, enough to feed a small army. The skinheads laughed at my mystification. They bantered with the Chinese woman owner, imitating the way Japanese spoke German, and were all laughing away. The carryouts filled the boot. Whatever the arrangement, it didn't involve paying over the counter.

We drove away from the city centre. The skinheads wanted to know other words for wank. Toss. Toss-off. Jerk-off. Jack-off. They recited the words obediently, polishing each one until it was as hard as a pebble.

Our destination was airport country, industrial zones full of anonymous big sheds. We turned down a side road, dotted with scabby litter and the first sign of a muddy green countryside. Railway lines ran alongside. We stopped in front of large security gates. The skinheads had a key. Inside was a big yard, stacked with house-high bales of pulped paper; at the far end a further set of gates and a Portakabin, with two cars parked outside, and beyond that a large windowless storage shed. The two men who came out of the Portakabin were from the Middle East or Turkey. They looked incongruously smart in their slacks and soft dog-shit yellow leather jackets. Their cars were smart, too, one a big 7-series BMW and a top-of-the-range Merc. The men looked like they could take care of themselves. The skinheads didn't do banter with them. Everything was carefully polite.

The food was for the people in the shed. We drove the car right in and unloaded it on trestle tables, behind which were racks of bunkbeds. About a hundred people were milling around, not doing much, until they saw the car. The food produced a rush to the tables.

Apart from the chomp of eating, the only noise came from a couple of unwatched televisions in the background. The skinheads stood around drinking beer given them by the men from the Portakabin. No alcohol was served at the tables. Those eating looked like the united colours of Benetton. There were even some Chinese, sitting in a group.

The skinheads started kicking a football around. This developed into a game of five-a-side, in another smaller shed where two goals with nets were already set up, the skinheads making up one team, with me drafted in as the fifth, against the best of the rest. One of the men from the Portakabin refereed. Others stood around and cheered. The game felt like a regular fixture. The skinheads appeared concentrated, happy even. I found a substitute and wandered off in search of a toilet.

Outside, everything felt remote and mysterious. A plane cut through the sky on its way to landing. The sound of a goods train carried from the railway. The noise of the game sounded far away. A Chinese woman stepped out to bum a cigarette. She stood there, arms folded, staring at the moon, hugging herself, the pair of us wondering who on earth the other was and how the hell we had got there. She muttered what sounded like a prayer. I tried to talk to her. We had only scraps of language between us, and a lot of guesswork. She didn't seem to have any idea where she was, not even which country; nor did she know how long she had been there. She had left China with travelling companions who weren't with her now.

After a glance she was gone. One of the men from the Portakabin walked round the corner with an Alsatian straining at its leash. He spoke a language I didn't understand, but his meaning was clear. No standing around outside.

Dog patrols—to stop the people inside from getting out or the other way round? I guessed the people were black-market labour, though how that fitted with the Neos' supremacy theories I could not see.

One of the skinheads mooned the crowd before we left and announced in English that they were all foreign-wanks. The other skinheads guffawed. Nobody else paid him any attention. It felt like this had happened before. On the drive back I asked who the people in the shed were and was told ‘Shit.'

FLORIDA TO FRANKFURT

WHY IS THE PROFESSIONAL
smile considered an essential part of a cabin crew's repertoire? Perhaps it is offered as a positive alternative to the rictus grin, and as a distraction from the crew's other role as agents of death, ritualised in their bizarre performance called ‘cabin safety exercises'. Now they don't even bother to do it themselves. They show a film.

 

The last and only time I had been to Frankfurt was in 1945, the day Hitler died. I wondered if I'd given any thought then to what the future would hold. Probably not. Most of us were trying to remember what peace felt like. Now, nearly everyone I knew then is dead, and those who aren't are sick. Betty Monroe, who had recruited me in 1942, is in a Zurich clinic with Alzheimer's. I had written to say I was coming to Europe, and got a reply from her daughter. Karl-Heinz had sounded depressed on the phone. He insisted everything was all right, but his speech was still slurred, and he took a while to recognise who I was and a lot longer to remember why he had contacted me. He was under the impression I was still his case officer and was going ‘to sort things out'. He would not say what these things were except they referred to his ‘immunity deal', and he expected me to liaise with Langley. I told him I was ancient history there, my contacts long gone.

‘I had to blackmail that cocksucker Dulles for my deal!' he shouted. He didn't care that Allen Dulles had been dead over thirty years. Before he hung up he said, ‘Joe, it's good to hear you again', sounding halfhearted. It was a sad call: Karl-Heinz in a time warp when once he had been the sharpest. I had protected him for years, no questions asked. It was part of the deal. My silence and deference remained the cornerstones of our relationship.

As for that ‘cocksucker' Allen Dulles, I had spent the war in awe of him. He had been in his forties then, a big shot already, running the U.S. Office of Strategic Services in Switzerland, and a future head of the CIA, from 1953 until the Cuban mess forced his resignation, a couple of years before they shot the president in 1963. Dulles had the sort of self-confidence promoted in Hollywood movies, that uniquely American harmony of individual ruggedness combined with a general willingness to conform while refusing to kow-tow. He came with the inherited fluency and confidence of privilege, not the exhausted mannerisms of European aristocracy but the energetic purpose of the elite of a nation big on achievement and short on memory. After his arrival in Bern in 1942, he did little to disguise his role as spymaster.

The first time we met he still dressed like a lawyer. Later he switched to well-tailored flannels and tweeds, worn with an old raincoat and a fedora, casually tilted back, reporter-style. He looked like a raffish academic, with his spectacles, moustache and pipe, but he was primarily a social creature, comfortable in smart hotels which he regarded as his prerogative. His espionage and social networks often overlapped. I was never his protégé, as such, more an awkward necessity when it came to the trickier stuff no one was supposed to know about (myself included). Hence his request that I drive him to Frankfurt that spring of 1945.

He needed a driver because of his gout and requested me specifically. Earlier in the year he had been responsible for my transfer into uniform. Official title: interpreter, Art Looting Investigation Unit, a division of the OSS. Freedom of movement was the key; we came and went as we pleased. Dulles the spymaster was able to incorporate many extracurricular activities under that title. During our drive to Frankfurt he told me it had taken a personal call to General George S. Patton to secure my release. Dulles enjoyed pulling strings, and his summons was a sign that he was up to mischief. I would be witness to something beyond my understanding and be relied upon to keep my mouth shut. Pretty much my usual role.

We drove from Switzerland, a journey made slow by roadblocks, footbound columns of refugees and convoys moving north. Dulles was uncharacteristically short-tempered. His gout was spoiling his enjoyment of the end of the war.

The first night we stayed in a
schloss
outside Munich where he held meetings to which I wasn't privy. The place was some kind of headquarters, of what no one was saying. I ate in the kitchen and was given a billet in an outbuilding.

We arrived in Frankfurt on the evening of the second day as night fell. On a main road outside the city, we stopped at a checkpoint and were given a map.

The map was little more than a set of compass directions. It looked like a blank puzzle. It's tempting to say that one flattened town looks much like another, but the ruins of Frankfurt felt very different from those of Munich or Berlin, as though the city had become a ghost of its previous incarnation. By moonlight its devastation took on the quality of a photographic negative and a heart-stopping beauty, for there is an enormous awe in mass destruction. Even Dulles was impressed.

Our only company that night was a distant rumble. Dulles, who had spent most of the war in Switzerland, seemed excited, and nervous. ‘What's that noise?' he asked.

It was tanks. We soon came up behind a convoy of covered trucks with an unusually heavy guard of several half-tracks as well as the tanks. It was easy enough to guess its destination as there was nowhere else to go.

In a city rendered completely dark by the destruction of its electricity services, we were confronted by a miracle of light, and the equally bizarre sight of an intact building, and an exceptionally large and official-looking one at that. Its survival I assumed was the result of carelessness or oversight. There was a checkpoint and a heavy guard. Barbed wire surrounded everything. Teams on scaffolds were mending windows while more shadowy figures on the roof carried out further repairs. The place looked like it had been a bank, and from the tight security I guessed it was now a prison for top Nazis.

Dulles smoked up the car with his pipe and grunted at the sight of a line of rats crossing the road while we waited for the checkpoint to clear the convoy. With his permission, I opened the window a crack and could hear the sound of generators. When I got out to stretch my legs, a guard ordered me back in the car. A checkpoint sign said it belonged to the 29th Infantry.

Regardless of Dulles's senior status our papers were checked and rechecked. We were escorted from our car to the building where we were questioned again by a major at a large desk in a marbled lobby. His uniform looked indecently new in such fusty, stiff-collar surroundings. Standing wooden crates, over six feet tall, were in the process of being loaded on flatbed trolleys by teams of workers. The mood was quietly purposeful. The place wasn't a prison. It was still a bank: a working bank in the middle of the night, in the middle of a non-city. The U.S. Army's recent appropriation was evident in dozens of stencilled signs. One warned, in case of fire, to use the field telephone in front of the main vault which connected to the civilian fire department, with an added Footnote that no one spoke English.

When Dulles was ordered to hand over his briefcase, he refused, saying it was a matter of national security. He won, after letting the case be examined a second time, and passing over the revolver that was in it. ‘Do you think I am about to hold up your bank?' he asked, and gave the major his most charming smile.

Our escort was a tall colonel from St Louis, accompanied by two junior officers. The colonel asked if Dulles knew what he was looking for. Dulles produced a typed sheet of paper which he gave to the colonel, who studied it with a frown. ‘This could be in one of several rooms,' he said. ‘We've got a ton of stuff coming in every day, and nobody to catalogue it. We've got the Hungarian crown jewels if you want.' (I knew. I had helped put them there. Dulles winked at me.)

The colonel proudly informed us that the internal security system was based on the one used in the U.S. Mint. Once we were locked inside the vaults, he insisted on a tour of the spoils, including a sealed chamber stacked floor to ceiling with gold bars. ‘Three deep, wall to wall,' said the colonel. ‘Each bar weighs 25 pounds and is worth $15,000. How many of these are we going to earn in a lifetime?' In Dulles's case quite a few. He had been a successful Wall Street lawyer before the war and would return to his practice.

‘Next door in one of those cages is the biggest gold nugget anyone has ever seen,' the colonel went on. ‘Size of a grapefruit.'

‘Any idea how much all this is worth?' Dulles asked casually.

‘Upwards of five hundred million dollars.'

‘Take a good look, Joe,' Dulles said. ‘You are witness here to one of history's great failures.'

Vault after vault of stashed gold became overwhelming in its pointlessness, in contrast to the destruction outside. This was underlined by a room where even Dulles moved on quickly. It was filled with suitcases of gold pellets. Perhaps he knew their provenance, too. There were forged English bank notes, stockrooms of gems, sculpture, and art. A van Gogh self-portrait had been left carelessly on the floor, his expression one of apparent disbelief. One vault was devoted entirely to alarm clocks in cardboard boxes, confiscated by the SS. Another contained nothing but fur coats.

The colonel said, ‘We don't have the security to carry out the valuations. We have teams working round the clock securing the old air raid shelters so they can be used for storage, and that take up all our guards. We caught a labourer yesterday trying to walk out with a bag of gold crowns, worth over six thousand dollars.'

It was past midnight before Dulles got down to the purpose of his visit. He acted as though he had mislaid nothing more urgent than a term paper. When the colonel offered a team to help, Dulles declined, saying he couldn't describe what he was looking for but would recognise it when he found it.

He worked his way through several rooms of documents, mostly in filing cabinets, some lying unsorted on tables, while the rest of us stood around smoking. The colonel managed to order coffee from somewhere. One stack of memos was from I.G. Farben, the big German chemical company, manufacturer of the genocide gas used in concentration camps. According to the colonel, the Farben headquarters was the only other large building in Frankfurt to survive the bombing. ‘It makes you wonder. You would have thought the big bank and the big company headquarters would have been the first targets. Yet at the Farben place there was hardly a cracked pane of glass. What do you make of that?'

‘Beats me,' I said, proud of this recently acquired Americanism.

‘Maybe they didn't want to hit it. It's now being used as Occupation Headquarters.'

A couple of times the generators shut down, and we had to use candles until they came back on. The soft light cast giant shadows. Whatever Dulles was looking for was proving elusive. I wondered what could be so important that he had to look for it himself. After several hours his tie was loose and his frustration showing. He said he found our presence disruptive and wanted to be left alone. The colonel stated that an escort had to remain in attendance. Later he relented, and we adjourned to a nearby chamber where suites of furniture were stashed among the filing cabinets.

I dozed, slumped on a well-upholstered sofa, until woken by an officer who came in to announce that Hitler was dead, by his own hand. When I told Dulles, he gave a sarcastic laugh and said, ‘That spares us the expense of a trial.' Hitler was the least of his problems, he added. ‘Why do the Germans commit every minor detail to paper? At this rate I'll be here a month.'

He produced a silver flask and took a pull. It was nearly empty, but he insisted I finish it, saying he would send out for more, like we were in a hotel. ‘There are dozens of crates of champagne in those rooms back there. Tell the colonel his news deserves celebration and that, one, it is entirely appropriate that the Führer's death is toasted with Third Reich champagne; and, two, I will reimburse the FED. It won't be chilled, but down here it won't be warm, either.'

The colonel dithered before deciding not to be a party pooper. I took Dulles a bottle. Of his search he said, ‘Never has the expression
needle in a haystack
seemed more appropriate.' I offered to help and was told to go away and celebrate. ‘You deserve it, Joe.'

We were all drunk by the time Dulles was done. ‘Colonel, I thank you for your time,' he said, and handed him a wad of U.S. dollars. ‘That should cover the drinks.'

The colonel was so drunk he was barely able to count, but mumbled that it seemed too much even for vintage champagne.

‘The price of victory,' said Dulles with a smirk. ‘Let's go, Joe.'

Later he told me that the money he had used to pay for the champagne was cash he had found in the vaults. ‘Reichsführer Himmler's counterfeits.' He laughed, and I laughed, too, thinking how from now on life would be about the road ahead.

The daylight hurt my eyes, but Dulles looked as refreshed as if he had just stepped out of a cold morning shower. ‘Give me the keys,' he said. ‘I'll drive. You get some shut-eye in the back.'

I dipped in and out of sleep, glimpsing crazily tilted ruins as we left the city, then sky racing past as the car hammered down the autobahn.

At one point Dulles pulled over and got out, on an empty country road untouched by war. There were trees in blossom. The shimmering foliage, lit bright by early morning sun, felt more unreal than the broken brick and dust and stench of Frankfurt.