A Train of Powder (34 page)

We all waited for more to happen. Hume was a man who would have to talk, who would have to go on making drama. In prison it would be safe for him to talk. He had said that he had wanted to go to the police and tell them about the part he had played in getting rid of the body when the news of Mr. Tiffen’s find on the marshes had been published in the papers, but had been frightened into silence by a telephone call from the three men who had left the parcels with him. It might be perfectly true that from some quarter he had been threatened; he would be protected from such intimidation now. That he should have a new story to tell became more certain as certain facts about the old one sunk into our minds. In fact there had been three men, Mac or Maxie, The Boy, and Greenie. It was slowly realized that the description of Mac or Maxie quite closely fitted one of the policemen who were in the police station where Hume was examined; and as for The Boy and Greenie, there is a novel, by Graham Greene, called
Brighton Rock,
which had been turned into a film. The chief character is a nasty little gangster, who, like Hume, had been brought up in an orphanage, and he was known as The Boy and as Pinkie.

But, though there were rumours that Hume had made a statement in prison, nobody has been charged with the murder of Mr. Setty; and Scotland Yard has indicated that in its opinion the case is closed. But in our minds it is still open; and the individual members of the various organizations which cooperated to bring Hume to justice find it hard to stop talking it over. The features of the murderer behind Hume are so mysterious. For one thing, they are so trustful. It may be that Hume himself never met him face to face, but he knew the identity of his agents, and whether they were Maxie, The Boy, and Greenie, or anybody else, they left a trail which could have been followed back by Hume himself or by the police. Who was the man who could devise a cunning and intricate murder that but for the whimsical pull of the moon on certain tides would have gone for ever undetected, and confided the execution of it to a flying man who could only by a miracle have performed the flying essential to the plan, and who habitually gossiped and lied and boasted? Nobody could do anything so mad. But somebody had done it; and the behaviour of the witnesses was to give, before the case slipped down into the depths of memory, evidence that no course of action is so mad that some human being will not adopt it.

One day the crime reporter who had been haled before the court because of his letter and telegram to Mrs. Hume was sitting in his office when there came in, with that shy smile which told of such a strong desire to be liked, Philip. He carried a telegram which he said he had received at his London lodgings. It was from the gang, and it threatened him with revenge. What gang? And why did anybody want to revenge themselves on him? Why, Philip explained, the gang in Paris. They were angry with him because he had gone into the witness box and told how he knew Maxie, The Boy, and Greenie. The crime reporter was nonplussed by the reappearance of these characters. Pulling himself together, he expressed sympathy, regretted that he could do nothing about it, and advised Philip to go to Scotland Yard and tell them about it there. They went out and had some coffee and a chat, and Philip went off into London with a charming wave of the hand. The crime reporter never expected to hear anything more of the matter. But Philip took his advice. He went to Scotland Yard, where they took little interest in the telegram but looked at him sadly. Now he had come back to see them they could not help arresting him for a new charge that had been brought up against him since he forced his way into the limelight by giving evidence in the Hume case. He had been committing bigamy, and he got two years for it.

Up in Golders Green, Mrs. Hume was still living in the apartment, not because she was insensitive to the tragedy which had taken place there (whatever that had been) but because of the times. The apartment was under the Rent Restriction Act, so she got it for just over three dollars a week; and even if she had been financially justified in going out and looking for a more expensive one, the housing shortage was still so acute that it would have been difficult to find one. No fine feelings can disregard such solid facts. Now her sister and her little niece were living with her, but otherwise her domestic arrangements were much as before. The charwoman, Mrs. Stride, had presented herself on her usual day and had said that, if Mrs. Hume did not mind her working for her after she had given evidence against Mr. Hume, she would be pleased to continue to give her every Wednesday. When Mrs. Stride was asked by any of her other employers or in any of the local shops whether it was true that she was still working for Mrs. Hume, she was accustomed to reply with dignity, borrowing locutions used only in old-fashioned and majestic establishments of a sort not now found in Golders Green, that she was proud to do her best for Madam and Miss Margaret. By Miss Margaret she meant the six-months-old baby. But it would be unsafe to draw from this manner of speech any conclusion regarding Mrs. Stride’s view of social problems. It is her moral nature which is asserting itself. She will have no cruelty practised on the innocent and the unfortunate.

In that household also the Hume case is not closed. But it is not the same case that continues to perplex the outer world. What puzzled Mrs. Hume was not the identity of the man who sent the parcels to her husband: that was just somebody male doing something unusually silly and horrid. It was the identity of her husband, the identity of her home. Nothing in her life was what she had believed it to be, not even the dog. A short time after the trial she found herself telling a visitor how this cheerful mongrel, part Alsatian, part collie-dog, had come to belong to her husband. When he was in Europe with the RAF in 1945 his squadron took over an airport which the Germans had abandoned, and found a paddock in which the German airmen had left their dogs; and he and this mongrel had taken an instant fancy to each other, so he smuggled him back to England in his plane next time he flew home. That was the story she repeated, as she had heard him tell it again and again, to her, to their friends, to strangers, to anybody who was moved by the dog’s jolly character to ask where he had got it. Now it suddenly struck her that the story could not be true. Her husband had not been an RAF pilot, he had taken no part in the liberation of Europe, he had been by then a civilian. This made the dog a double mongrel, part Alsatian and part collie, part real and part phantom. She looked at it doubtfully, fearing that if she patted it her hand would go through it.

She felt a like amazement about her husband. Not, it must be emphasized, about his involvement in the murder. Women of her type resemble artists in their failure to feel surprise at the exceptional event. What amazed her was the incongruity between the facts which the police told her about her husband and what she herself knew about him. Of her own knowledge she was for the most part silent; she has a great faculty for silence. But sometimes she spoke of merits that he had, such as his great kindness, not merely warm and impulsive, but responsible and enduring, towards the men he had employed in his radio business. She did not deny that what the police said was true, she simply made a claim that what she knew was also true. It was a pity for her sake that she was not more sentimental and bemused, that she would have to go in a state of stone-cold emotional sobriety to all the prison visits which lay ahead of her; and indeed those visits went worse than could have been imagined, and later, because of them, she was granted a divorce. But these matters did not, of course, touch on the really important point. The baby upstairs was putting on the right amount of weight now. It was everything that a baby should be. Her mother would bring her up so that she was an attractive girl, very like any other attractive girl. The snarl in Hume’s genetic line would be disentangled.

The mystery which involved him with Mr. Setty will be written about as long as there is a literature of crime; but it will exist only on the printed page. Day by day, through the years, somewhere in the outer suburbs of London, its practical effects will have been quietly smoothed away, and it will be as if it had never happened.

Greenhouse with Cyclamens III (1954)

1

The Lake of Lucerne presented its usual paradox: mountains and a wide expanse of water were pretty as a kitten, as iced petits fours on Rumpelmayer’s counter. It seemed a pity we were there because one of our party was attending a congress of economists. For economists are the fortune-tellers of our age, as psychiatrists are the exorcists, and though their claims are extravagant, or the world would not be as it is, they are not quite baseless. It is much more difficult to count than to read or to write, and these are people who can count better than others, and are therefore likely to have a better understanding of those parts of destiny which go by numbers.

But destiny is very rarely determined by numbers, since man is perpetually deforming his calculations, either because he is too stupid to add and subtract, or because he wants to practice a fraud for his own profit, or because he wants support for some theory learned by the easier art of reading, or because he is suicidal and wants to be ruined. Numbers triumph in the end, for the sum of wronged husbands’ assaults on their wives’ lovers is a trifle compared to the terrible revenges that two and two wreak on those who pretend that they do not make four. But they take time to effect their vengeance, and it is the interim period which defeats the economists’ power of prophecy. It seemed better to cry over spilled milk and read history; and there was a book at hand which threw a light on the moralistic experiment of our times which had most ambitiously attempted to prevent the spilling of milk in the future. Hans Fritzsche, Goebbels’ radio chief, one of the three Nazi leaders who were acquitted at Nuremberg, had given his account of the trial in a book named
The Sword in the Scales.

2

After Fritzsche’s horrid exodus from jail with Schacht he was convicted under the denazification laws and released in 1950, on condition that he should neither speak in public nor write for publication during the rest of his life. Yet this did not prevent him from publishing this book. It was described on the title page as having been “told to Hildegard Springer,” a former colleague of his at the Ministry of Propaganda, whom he married after his release. This is a transparent evasion of the law, and one that could have been prevented only by imposing a restriction on the liberty of a person who is not a convicted criminal but related to one. But in any case it would have been a pity to suppress this book, which throws a bright light on Nuremberg and on the possibilities of affecting human conduct by international action.

Fritzsche got into the dock and out of it by sheer mediocrity. In the past, illustrated papers used to publish photographs of exalted personalities momentarily involved with the obscure, and print underneath captions identifying the Duke of This or the Duchess of That “and Friend.” The proper caption for the photograph of the Nazis and their Fritzsche should have been “Beelzebub and Friend.” He was himself not in the Beelzebub class, and he really knew nothing about the Beelzebubs except that they were on the crest of the wave. He served the monsters, but never discovered what monstrosity was, and therefore never became a monster, though doubtless he would have chosen to suffer that change had he ever discovered the trick. But the judges could find nothing in any of his administrative actions or his broadcasts which made him a participant in the gross crimes committed by the men who stood beside him in the dock. This may seem impossible, but reference to the trial records will show that the conclusion was just enough. His broadcasts were banal twitterings, which were of use to his employers because they suggested that the Nazi movement was controlled by normal citizens.

But he was so much of a Nazi that one of his chapters troubles us as if Goebbels were still about. The twenty-seventh chapter, “Funk and the Reichsbank,” is a thumping lie that bears the hallmark of his master. In this Fritzsche sets about whitewashing Walter Funk, one of the defendants sentenced to life imprisonment, a soft and platitudinous creature, a Mr. Chadband so credulous that he was taken in by himself. Originally a journalist, he became Hitler’s press chief. His evidence was genteel and pretentious: he tried to win the court’s sympathy by describing how Hitler liked listening to him playing the piano, and on one occasion broke up a large press conference in order that he should enjoy this pleasure. But it was certainly not Funk’s musical talent which led to his rapid elevation to various posts of a financial and economic kind. For our comfort it should be noted that there were many important posts which no decent German with genuine qualifications would consent to fill under Hitler.

Funk ended as President of the Reichsbank, and Fritzsche described how at Nuremberg the American prosecutor charged him with having in that capacity accepted certain deposits from the SS, and when, after some pressure, he admitted this, Mr. Dodd, the American prosecutor, charged further that these deposits consisted of loot stolen from the inmates of concentration camps. In quite convincing terms Fritzsche described Funk’s surprise when the prosecution then showed a film in court.

We saw projected on the screen before us the horrible pictures of what the Americans found in the strong-room of the Frankfurt offices of the Reichsbank. We saw soldiers enter the building and the big safes swing open. Huge tightly packed bags with the imprint Deutsche Reichsbank dropped to the floor; powerful men needed all their strength to lift them on the tables. Then the seals were solemnly broken and the contents poured out: rings, bracelets, earrings, trinkets; jewellery of every conceivable kind, from simple brooches to great tiaras, coins, banknotes, studs, sleeve links, and above all false and gold-capped teeth in their thousands. We sat flabbergasted.