Famous Last Words (42 page)

Rudecki scurried back along the passageway into the

brightness of the kitchen. Something was already happening in his mind. This woman was his own… .Not to tell the others: not just yet. This seemed imperative. After all, it was him that found her. Why should he share her, just to have her taken away.

He brought a silver bowl and held it under the tap until it was full.

He would give her this to drink.

He would find some food and feed her.

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He would bring some rags—a towel—and clean her.

He would fuck her.

God.

The water overflowed the bowl.

Rudecki turned the taps and hurried like a spilling thing himself along the passageway.

“You wait,” he said. “You wait…” as if he spoke to a dog. “You wait—I’ll be right there. And then you’ll be all right. You’ll be all right. You wait…”

He set the silver bowl down out of reach of the hands, on the stones—and set about breaking the lock that closed her in.

Annie was drinking alone in his bar: alone, except for the people in his mind.

It would be nice if someone new should come. He was

sick of Ingrid Bergman. Sick of her always moping in the corner. All she did was sit there: waiting. All she ever wanted was the same old song. Movie queens. Sometimes they could really get you down. Some, of course, could get you up. He smiled.

Rita Hayworth? Ida Lupino?

Lana Turner.

Ah…Lana Turner in Ziegfield Girl.

She was drunk. It was perfect.

Somewhere Tony Martin was singing; “You stepped out

of a dream.”

And Lana Turner—Ziegfield Girl—was drunk and she was

walking down a staircase. That one there. In the lobby.

You stepped out of a dream,

You are too wonderful to be what you seem…

Annie Oakley, as he always did while tending bar, was

polishing his rifle. All his little cans of oil, his rags and his brushes were laid aside and he snapped the final pieces into place.

Out in the lobby, Lana Turner dragged her mink coat down

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the stairs behind her—moving her hips in perfect time to the music.

Could there be eyes like yours,

Could there be lips like yours…

Annie watched through lowered eyes. The golden hair;

the pouting lips; the hand, unsteady on the rail…

You stepped out of a cloud

I want to take you away…

Annie pressed his groin against the bar.

He closed his eyes.

And opened them.

Someone was running. Someone was calling.

“Help! Help! Jesus! Jesus! Help me! Help!”

Annie leapt across the bar.

Lana Turner froze against the rail. She had reached the bottom step. But someone real was falling through the lobby.

Someone real. A man. With his hand on his crotch—and his crotch all bloodied—half his trousers’torn away—and his hands going mad. He was bleeding. Bleeding and screaming: “Jesus! Help me! Jesus!”

Someone else was running. Someone else.

A woman.

Others were running, too—Freyberg still eating a candy

bar and Quinn trying to drag himself from the Duchess of Windsor on her walls.

And Lana Turner hung against the air.

Annie caught a glimpse of all these people standing on

the stairs or coming down—or partway down. He couldn’t

tell. He was watching Rudecki—it was Rudecki—bleeding

and screaming and clutching his crotch and falling

down. …

And the woman. Running. As if she could not find her

way—or was blind and did not know where anything was.

And there was something silver flashing in her hand.

“Kill her!” Rudecki screamed. “Kill the fucker! She cut my balls off! Kill her!”

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Annie stopped dead in his tracks.

Every muscle—every nerve was obedient.

This was his job.

He raised the Browning Repeater, making a short, clean

sweep of the woman’s path and he fired.

And she fell. In her moleskin coat.

And her razor spun out—whirring like a propeller—all

the way across the floor until it stopped at Lana Turner’s feet.

Germany: May, 1941

At exactly 5:45 p.m. on Saturday May 10th, 1941 a Messerschmidt 110 took off from Augsburg, Germany and flew

towards the British Isles.

The pilot of the plane was Deputy Reichsfiihrer Rudolf

Hess. His destination was the estate, near Glasgow, of the Duke of Hamilton. The journey, apparently, was sudden.

Hess did not even take a suitcase. In his pockets, however, he carried various phials of medicine and also photographs of his wife and son. On one wrist he wore a gold watch; on the other a gold compass. He carried a photograph of himself with his name in print across the bottom, afraid he would lose track of his identity before he arrived.

At midnight, von Ribbentrop was called into Hitler’s presence at the Berghof and asked to explain Hess’s strange

“defection”. The minister folded his arms and said he could think of nothing. The journey, he told the Flihrer, was just as much a shock to “myself as it is to you”. In the salon where this scene took place were two other men—Leitgen and Pintsch, Hess’s adjutants, whose misfortune it had been to bring the Flihrer the news his Deputy had flown. Hitler

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raged; screaming at the two men; “how could you have let this happen? England will say a knife has been plunged in my back! My allies will desert me! They will say I cannot be trusted! Think of the secrets Hess has taken with him!

Damn you! Damn you! Damn you! To have let him slip

through your fingers…Damn you!” And then, while von Ribbentrop sat and watched from his perch on a plundered settee (Louis XIV—taken from Versailles), Hitler demoted Leitgen and Pintsch, literally stripping their insignia from their collars and sleeves with his own two hands. He then called loudly into the antechamber, bringing the guard, who marched the two unfortunate men away to prison—and piano wire.

After they had gone, Hitler looked in the mirror and

smoothed his hair. “Ruin! Ruin!” he muttered. He almost seemed to have forgotten von Ribbentrop was present. Then he turned to him and said; “why has he done this? Why?”

von Ribbentrop languished on the settee, crossing his legs and looking at his fingernails like an ad for nonchalance.

“I shouldn’t worry,” he said. “There’s every likelihood that Hess is mad and nothing will come of it but gibberish.”

Hitler grunted.

von Ribbentrop lifted a long, grey hair from his lapel and set it free to float to the floor.

Hitler said; “how can you be so calm?”

von Ribbentrop smiled. “My dear old friend,” he said.

“I long ago learned that one must never react with panic in the face of madness.”

The two men looked one another in the eye. As “moments”

go, it must have been one of the strangest moments in the history of the war. Perhaps in the whole of history. For there was panic staring at madness personified—and smiling.

Hess was found, with his ankle broken, wandering in a field of maize. McLean, the Scottish farmer who found him, was

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nonplussed to be confronted by a courteous, wounded gentleman trailing the strings of a parachute and asking the way to Paisley. The famous countenance meant absolutely nothing to McLean, who never read the papers. As for Hess, he just kept saying; “take me to Paisley. I must see Paisley at once.” He meant, of course, Sir Alan Paisley. The farmer thought he meant the town.

The constable on duty at Paisley that night was shocked to look across his desk and see a man he instantly recognized as Adolf Hitler’s Deputy standing there, looking very angry and asking why he had been brought to the police.

” ‘e fell door,” the farmer said. “From up over.” No mention of the Messerschmidt was made, since no one had heard

it crash so far out in the darkened Firth.

Hess kept rapping on the desk with his knuckles and

saying over and over again that he must see Paisley. To himself he kept repeating his litany: even if you have to play the madman; do so till Sir AJan appears. He is the only one who will understand your message… . The words were

welded to his mind.

But Sir Alan Paisley did not come.

Hess began to cleverly insinuate the instability of his condition.

At first he merely twitched and drew the backs of

his hands across his cheeks.

“You got an itch?” said the constable.

Hess made a noise like a cat, crawled up on the nearest bench, crouched there and began to purr.

The constable soothed him, put him in a cell and telephoned for medical assistance. He had never seen a madman

before—any more than he’d seen a Nazi face to face.

Mewing in his corner, Deputy Reichsfuhrer Hess looked

out from under his bristling brows. His haunches ached. His ankle pained him and was swollen. Somehow there was a

crack in the scheme of things. And before it could be mended, it ran across the floor of Hess’s cell and up through his mind.

What if Paisley never comes? he was thinking. What if he never comes and I am left like this?

^

The next morning the telephone at the Eden Hotel was nearly jangled off its hook.

At the other end Sir Alan Paisley could hardly contain his disbelief.

“Did you send him here?” he said. “Did he actually come on your instructions?”

“Of course not,” von Ribbentrop said.

There was a pause.

Then Paisley said, “Do you think they sent him?”

“No.”

Paisley waited, but obviously von Ribbentrop had checked, so there was no point pursuing this line of thought.

“Then what am I to do?” Paisley asked. “Here he is on

my doorstep. He’s already mentioned my name. God knows

what he may say next.”

“Then he must be silenced, mustn’t he.”

“Well, we can hardly tear out his tongue.”

“That’s right,” said von Ribbentrop. “But what about his mind.”

England: 1941

Shortly after the First World War, the British Army purchased an estate called Latchmere House near the village of

Ham, in Surrey. Their purpose in doing so was to provide a shelter for the most severe cases of what was then called “shell-shock”. In time, psychiatry insisted all pretence concerning “shell-shock” must be dropped in favour of calling

a spade a spade: the patients at Latchmere House (all of them officers) were “irretrievably insane”.

By the time the Second World War rolled around, Latchmere House was officially designated as a Mental Hospital,

whose Director was a certain Major Oliver of the Army

Medical Corps. Early in 1940, Major Oliver was approached by MI 5 who thought a mental institution with a military

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cover might make the perfect place to sequester enemy agents whose will they were seeking to break.

So it was to Latchmere House that the supposed Nazi

agent, Rudolf Hess, was brought for “treatment” in the summer of 1941. He was suffering, or so it seemed, from a deep conviction that on or about the 19th of May he had ceased to be a human being and was now a cat without a tail.

Hess was delivered into Major Oliver’s hands by Captain (Doctor) R. S. “Bingo” Baggot, an agent of MI 5. Baggot had been provided with the credentials of a practising psychiatrist (he was a medical doctor only) so that he might stay

with his patient without arousing the suspicions of the staff.

No attempt was made to deny the patient was Rudolf Hess: only the nature of his “treatment” was disguised.

Ham was a mix of idyllic scenery, remoteness, village

charm and sinister walls. There was, in fact, an entirely fenced-in compound where the more recalcitrant of the German spies were housed in jerry-built barracks under the

watchful eyes of bully guards and guard-dogs. Every once in a while (though it was rare) the multiple crack of a firing squad rang out through the woods to announce that another agent of the Reich had refused to break allegiance with his secrets. So far as the inmates at Latchmere House were concerned, the war went on—and so far as the town’s folk were

concerned, another pig or sheep had been slaughtered for the inmates’ tables. This aspect of the institution was directed by a hulking colonial colonel known as “Tin-Eye”

Stephens. “Tin-Eye” Stephens was from Rhodesia, the land of Prester John and diamonds, and he wore a monocle.

Stephens and Baggot often took Hess out for walks in the evening under the trees. Sometimes, dogs went with them and Hess was made extremely nervous. But Stephens carried a stick and, so long as Hess kept close by, the dogs did not seem to be inclined to bother him. Baggot carried a small rubber ball in his pocket and whenever the dogs did not accompany the strollers, the ball would be thrown and Hess would chase it and bring it back to Baggot in his mouth.

Always Hess would be encouraged to investigate the rabbit warrens and the mole hills, in the hopes that he might con

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sider killing the inhabitants—but Hess seemed to have neither the taste nor the talent.

“You realize, of course,” said “Tin-Eye” Stephens—who, as a Colonial, knew a trifle more about animals than Baggot did—“this is the first and only vegetarian cat I have ever met.”

“Hmm.”

“Won’t eat meat; fish; raw eggs; mice; insec’s; birds—none of the food of a cat.”

“Distinctly strange,” said Baggot. But what Baggot really thought was that Hess must be faking the cat act, because “any real cat would defend itself by using its claws or by climbing a tree when chased or threatened by dogs. No real cat would run behind its keeper.”

“Just so,” said Stephens. “In fac’ you may be on to him entirely.”

It was decided Hess’s convictions must be put to the test.

“We shall overwhelm him with cat desirables,” said Stephens, “and see how he reac’s…”

The first thing Baggot and Stephens came up with was the scheme concerning fish-heads.

Every Friday, fish was served to the patients and prisoners, and late every Friday night the remnants (mostly heads and bones) were disposed of in the incinerator. Now, at Baggot’s insistence and with Stephens’ help, the fish-heads were gathered up in a barrow and taken around to the hut where Hess was ensconced with his personal guard, and dumped