The Untouchable (42 page)

His stammer was becoming steadily more pronounced.

“And you think,” I said gently, “that there may be … documents, relating to those meetings? Records? Transcripts, even?”

He cast a glance in my direction, tentative, pleading, almost shy, his eyes drooping with misery, and nodded.

“We know there are,” he said, in a hushed, husky voice, like that of a child at bedtime frightened at the prospect of the dark. “We are trusting you, Mr. Maskell, to retrieve them; we are confident you are the man for the job; we know you will be discreet.”

I nodded in my turn, putting on a deep frown to indicate dependability and bulldoggish resolve. Oh, mum’s the word, your majesty; mum’s the word.

I was flown to Germany on an RAF cargo plane, strapped precariously to a makeshift seat amid slumped mailbags and crates of beer that chattered like teeth. Amazing devastation below, charred forests and blackened fields and roofless cities agape. At the airfield outside Nuremberg I was met by a decidedly sinister Army intelligence officer with a ragged moustache and a mad smile. He told me his name was Captain Smith, but his look said he did not expect to be believed. He greeted everything I said with bitter amusement and a sceptical twitch of the moustache, assuming, I suppose, that I too must be lying about my identity and my purpose, out of professional habit, if nothing else. Not that I was required to say more than the minimum: Smith quickly let me know how grandly, sneeringly indifferent he was to me and whatever it was I was really up to. He had a jeep, in
which we drove at terrifying speed through the shattered streets of the city and out into the country. The late spring sun shone heartlessly on the untended fields. The driver was a fat corporal with little piggy ears and rounded, babyish shoulders; the stubbled back of his neck was layered in pachydermal folds. I am always attracted to drivers; there is something strangely stirring in that intent, unmoving way they sit over the wheel, so stern and somehow stately, keeping themselves to themselves, seeming to pay out the miles behind them like so many measured lengths of invisible steel cable. Smith and he treated each other with a sort of angered, high ironic contemptuousness, bickering in venomous undertones, like an unhappy husband and wife out for a Sunday drive. We travelled the ninety kilometres to Regensburg in little more than an hour.

“I’ll give old Adolf that,” Smith said, “he could build a damn fine road.”

“Yes,” I said, “rather like the Romans,” and was taken aback when Smith turned all the way round in his seat to stare at me with an expression of mock-amazed, fiercely smiling derision.

“Oh yes,” he snarled, his voice strangulated with inexplicable wrath, “the Romans and their roads!”

Here we are in Regensburg, an odd little town, its spindly, square towers, many of them topped with enormous storks’ nests, more suggestive of North Africa than the heart of Europe, an impression intensified for me, when I first arrived, by a Moorish sickle of moon hanging askew in the velvety, pale-purple evening sky. I was billeted in a small, dingy hotel called The Turk’s Head. Smith dropped me unceremoniously at the door and he and his driver roared away, the jeep giving a tremendous fart of exhaust smoke as it rounded the corner of the street on two wheels. Forlornly I carried in my bags. There were American soldiers everywhere, in the bar, in the dining room, some even sitting on the stairs, smoking and drinking and noisily playing poker. Their mood was one of dazed euphoria; they were like children who had got overtired at bedtime and were refusing to go to sleep. Children, yes: it was like the Children’s Crusade, with the difference that this ragtag army of overfed striplings would not be devoured by rotten old ogrish Europe,
but vice versa. But don’t get me wrong, as they say themselves: I did not hate the Americans; in fact, I found them perfectly congenial, in their unheeding, heartless way. In the sixties I made a number of trips to the United States—lecture tours, consultations—and once, unlikely as it may seem, I taught for a semester at a Middle Western college, where by day I expounded to a roomful of fanatically diligent note takers on the splendours of seventeenth-century French art, and in the evenings went out to drink beer with those same students, by now relaxed and doggily amiable. I recall one particularly convivial occasion at the Rodeo Saloon which ended with me calling upon my old music hall days with Danny Perkins, and standing on a table and singing “Burlington Bertie,” with appropriate gestures, to the noisy if surprised approval of my students and half a dozen cowboy-booted old-timers who were propping up the bar. Oh yes, Miss V., I am a myriad-sided man. And it was not just the American individual that won my admiration (though I more than admired one or two of my students, especially a young, honey-hued football player with flaxen hair and extraordinary cerulean eyes who surprised me, and himself, with the gauche intensity of his ardour on the old leather couch in my locked office one steamy afternoon when a giant summer storm was stamping thunderously across the campus and the rain-light flickered excitedly between the turned-down wooden slats of the rattling window blinds) but the American system itself, so demanding, so merciless, undeluded as to the fundamental murderousness and venality of humankind and at the same time so grimly, unflaggingly optimistic. More heresy, I know, more apostasy; soon I shall have no beliefs left at all, only a cluster of fiercely held denials.

At The Turk’s Head there was no dinner to be had: in Bavaria they dine at noon and are in bed by nine. I prowled the streets and at last found a
Bierschenke
that was open, and sat for a long time feeling sorry for myself, and drank enormous beakers of blond ale and ate platefuls of evil little linked sausages that looked like dried and shrivelled dog turds. The captain of the cargo plane came in, and before we could avoid it we caught each other’s eye, and so, being well-bred chaps, we were compelled
to spend the evening together. He turned out to have been a scholar long ago in peacetime, a specialist in medieval manuscripts. He was a large, diffident person with sad eyes, exuding an air of great weariness. In later years I ran into him again, one damp summer day at the Queen’s Garden Party. He introduced me to his wife, Lady Mary, pale, phthisic, nervous as a greyhound, with close-set eyes and a thin pale nose and a faintly demented laugh. I do not know how she and I got on to the topic of Prince George—very handsome, very queer, killed in an RAF crash in the war—but it became quickly and embarrassingly apparent to all three of us that at the time of the Prince’s death Lady M. and I had both been his lover.

Now he asked in his diffident way what I was doing in Germany.

“Sorry,” I said, “hush-hush and all that.”

He nodded, frowning, trying not to seem offended. We passed the rest of the evening discussing incunabula, a subject on which he was wearisomely well informed.

Early
next
morning Captain Smith arrived at the hotel in the jeep with the same fat driver and drove me out to Altberg, an unreally picturesque village clinging to the edge of a rocky eminence above the Danube and overlooked by the castle, a tall, turreted nineteenth-century horror, of no architectural interest. There was a drawbridge spanning a deep cleft in the rock, and above the gate a stone plaque bore a carved posy of Tudor roses. In the narrow, lopsided courtyard a pair of hunting dogs, enormous, starved-looking brutes, pricked up their ears and regarded us with truculent surprise. Once again Smith dropped me off with the air of a man brushing something unwholesome from his hands; as the jeep rattled away over the drawbridge I fancied I heard wafting back a cackle of derisive laughter.

The palace was in the command of Major Alice Stirling, a brisk, high-shouldered, hard-eyed woman in her thirties, remarkably good-looking, with red hair and very pale skin and a saddle of freckles on the bridge of her nose that should have softened her expression but did not. I found her disconcertingly attractive, I, who had not been stirred by a woman in years; it must have been those wide, vulnerable-looking shoulders. She
shook hands energetically, yanking my arm up and down as if she were working the handle of a water pump; I felt I was being not so much greeted as cautioned. She was from Kansas; she had always wanted to visit Europe, since she was a little girl, but it had taken a war to get her here—wasn’t that something? In the raftered entrance hall a series of begrimed family portraits leaned out at a sharp angle from the walls as if to allow their startled subjects a better view of these recent incomprehensible comings and goings in the family home. There were some massive pieces of dully glistening black furniture. In the middle of the floor stood a ping-pong table, looking oddly self-conscious and forsaken.

“Yes, the facilities here are not what you’d call great,” Major Stirling said, throwing up her eyes and pulling her lower jaw down sideways in an expression meant to portray despair, cheerfulness and pluck, all at the same time. “Still, we manage to show the boys a good time.” Here a knowing twinkle in acknowledgement of the
double entendre.
“Spirit is the thing, and we have plenty of that. Some of our guests have been shot up pretty badly, but that doesn’t stop them making their contribution. And what,” without missing a beat, “can we do for you, Major Maskell?”

“I should prefer to speak to Prince Wilhelm,” I said. “The matter is delicate. Is he about?”

Major Stirling remained perfectly motionless, canted forward a little toward me, like one of the portraits above her, with her head pertly inclined, gazing blankly at a point in space behind my left shoulder, her fixed smile gradually going rigid and yet seeming somehow to vibrate, as I imagine a wineglass must do in the second before the soprano’s high C shatters it.

“I think,” she said, sweetly, ominously, “I can answer any questions you might have.”

I mentioned vaguely the archive, the royal papers. “Were you not informed of my coming?”

Major Stirling shrugged.

“Someone sent a signal, yes,” she said. “It’s in my office somewhere.”

“Perhaps,” I said, “we should find it and you can read it again. It might clarify matters.”

At this she gave a throaty laugh and tossed her head, making her russet bangs bounce.

“Clarify!” she said. “Golly, you English do have a sense of humour. I’ve never seen a signal yet from your people that didn’t just add to everyone’s confusion.”

Nevertheless she led me to her office, a stone-floored baronial hall with a carved and varnished ceiling and yet more execrable giant pieces of mock-baroque furniture (“Don’t you just love it?” with another square-mouthed, sliding-jawed grimace). The signal was found and read; the Major, frowning at it, shook her head in slow, disbelieving wonderment.

“Maybe the decoders used the wrong code books,” she said.

“I have come,” I said gently, “specifically at the request of the King. King George the Sixth, that is. Of England.”

“Yes, that’s what it says here, Major Maskell.” I wished she would stop addressing me by my rank. The alliteration was unfortunate, and seemed to me to smack of Gilbert and Sullivan. “But I can’t release a used envelope from this castle without authorisation from US Army headquarters in Frankfurt.” A toothed grin. “You know how it is.”

“Surely,” I said in my most reasonable tones, “if the Prince— or, indeed, his mother, who I understand is head of the family now—were to authorise removal of the documents, you could have no objection …? These are private papers, after all.”

Major Stirling gave a positively mannish snort.

“Nothing private about this place any more, Major,” she said, putting on a Wild West drawl, “no sirree.” Prince Wilhelm, she informed me, and his mother, the Countess Margarete, were confined to special quarters. “We don’t call it house arrest, you understand, but let’s just say they won’t be going over to England to visit with their cousins at Buckingham Palace for a while. Not till our boys in the de-Nazification programme get through with them.” She nodded with humorous solemnity, and winked.

“Still, if I might speak to the Prince …?”

Certainly, she said; nothing easier; she would show me the way. She stood up, smoothing her skirt at the front, so that the outlines of her suspender clips showed through. Goodness, I
thought, with amused consternation, can it be that I am reverting?

The Prince bore a fascinating resemblance to an elderly battle-scarred crocodile. He had a thick trunk, and short, tapering legs ending in feet so small, in their delicate, pointed-toed, slipperlike shoes, that he seemed to be not standing, but balancing upright on a strong, stubby tail. His head was large and square, and curiously flat at the front and sides; his hair was shaved high up at the temples, with an oiled black saurian slick combed back fiercely from his forehead. His face was pitted and scaly, and cross-hatched with old duelling scars. He wore a monocle, which flashed urgently, like a covert distress signal, as he tottered forward to meet me, a big, beringed, liver-spotted hand held out before him, palm down, as if he expected it to be kissed. He had the distraught, desperately smiling manner of a man who has suddenly found himself at the mercy of people whom in the old days he would not have deigned to notice if they had fallen under the hoofs of his horse. He must have been alerted to my coming, for he was dressed—trussed, might be a better word— in frock coat and striped trousers, with a row of decorations pinned to his breast, among which I identified the Iron Cross and the Order of the Garter. The room in which he received me was in the upper reaches of the castle, a long, low-ceilinged garret with two squat windows at the far end looking out on a fir-clad hillside. The floorboards were bare, and the few pieces of gimcrack furniture wore the contingent look of things unceremoniously shifted out of long-accustomed surroundings and dumped here.

“Welcome to Schloss Altberg, Major Maskell,” he said, in accentless English. His voice was reedy and unexpectedly high-pitched, the result, I was told later, of a wound to the throat incurred in some immemorial battle—I pictured chainmail and lance and flashing tarnhelm—and when he spoke he drew his lips back over his big yellowed teeth in a sort of snarling smile. “I wish I could have received you properly into my home, but in these times we are all at the mercy of circumstance.”