Famous Last Words (44 page)

“In a way,” she said, “I suppose I’m glad that Charles

Augustus died when he did. It saves him dying now….”

And we left.

I had never seen Diana look so grim. It was just as if a pin had been drawn from a grenade in her pocket.

I told Diana I was going up to town in order to visit with my American publisher—a man, so it happened, who was

then in England as a Captain in the U.S. Army. This assignation was, of course, a lie—though I wished it could have

been true. It would have been good to sit across the table from him then with a manuscript between us, and all those marks in the margins that are like a signal: work in progress.

But it was not to be. The only work in progress was perfidious and ugly, nothing to do with the careful mind that used to be.

I went up by train. The room at the Savoy was booked,

as promised: H. S. Mauberley, Esq. But the clerk at the desk had no idea who I was. Time changes.

All evening and all through the night, the ‘phone did not ring. Only the bombs.

At last the call came through—on Saturday morning, very, very early, just as the “all clear” was sounding.

Paisley’s infuriating, nasal voice informed me he was down in the lobby. Might he come up?

“Are you alone?” I asked him.

“Do you think I’m mad? Of course I am.”

Paisley arrived in uniform. Blue, with excessive ribbons and braid. I disliked him at once. He was arrogant, brisk and dismissive of my past. I was nothing but another courier, so far as Alan Paisley was concerned. A messenger.

What I was told was this:

“…we have mutual friends in the Bahamas. She is most willing and co-operative. He, to put it bluntly, is a bloody coward and from what I’m told, is more and more into the drink and cannot be made to do a thing. Which is to say, he cannot be made to make up his mind. Now, I grant you, this business of the Fiery Bazaar has been most off-putting.

But a real man…” said Paisley, brushing some dust from his over-decorated chest, “would get around a bad experience and not let it get him down. After all, look at us. Bombs every night and positively surrounded by fire. Walk through a flaming inferno day in, day out. And do we run? Never!”

I became aware that Paisley would lecture me two orthree hours on the subject of manly courage if I didn’t prevent him, so I drew him back sharply. Why was I here?

“…you’re a friend of hers,” he said. “Someone she trusts, so I gather. Someone who can help her deal with the hubby.

He must be brought around to our side. And fast. The whole damn structure of everything we’re about to achieve depends on his being in Europe by midsummer.”

And so?

“…and so we are sending you over there to shore things up. To give the wife the support she requires—and to deliver information regarding their return.”

Their return.

“…but of course. They’re to come back over and be made ready to be set in place. But the gen you’ll be given just before you leave will explain. Above all else, you’re to instill a sense of urgency. And if you must, devise some way to force him back. And she, of course, will help you.”

And what if I refuse to go?

“…dear fellow. You must be joking.”

“No,” I said. “I’m not joking.”

Paisley’s blood-pressure red increased. “Look here,” n’

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said. “You’re bloody well on your way and that’s the end of it, Manderley… .”

“Mauberley,” I said.

“Well. Well—whatever,” he said. The name simply didn’t

matter. “If you don’t comply…” and here he had at least the decency to be embarrassed by what he had to tell me “…your friend Diana Allenby will suffer for it. And I’m sorry to tell you this so bluntly, sir, but she will suffer the very same fate as her husband. And you don’t want that to happen, now do you?”

Ned Allenby had been murdered.

Monday, I went back south by train.

Diana was seated in the morning-room. She was smoking.

There was hardly any light, though it was only three in the afternoon. It had been a very wintry day, and cold. It took me a moment to realize she was drunk. Not in any brazen sense, but lost in the liquor the way a person loses her way in the fog. The world looms up with a different shape than it does in the sunlight, and apparently that is how she saw me, for that is how she addressed me—as if I was a shadow or a ghost. But one with which she was familiar, and one for whom she had been waiting.

“Sit down,” she said.

I had barely removed my overcoat. I was shivering and

damp, and already in a state of shock. Here I was with the widow of a murdered friend and I was the only guarantee she had—though she did not know this—that she would not be murdered, too.

“What is it?” I said.

Diana reached out into the gloom beside her and took up a notebook—one of my own—from a table on which she had

also placed a decanter of whisky and the old glass box that had once been Neddy’s and was now her own, for cigarettes.

Abdullahs.

“I was going to apologize,” she said, “for having invaded - IT 1

Berlin: 1942

There was an air raid.

von Ribbentrop was working late at the Hotel Eden. When the planes came over, the only thing to be done was to

concentrate on something else. Air raids had come to be a time—both in London and Berlin—when many people made

love, wrote books, gambled for fortune and started diaries.

Only the children slept and, in order to achieve this sleep, mothers had begun to drug their babies with I. G. Farben’s revolutionary new-strength Aspirin tablets: (half-a-tablet in warm skim milk). They were a miracle.

von Ribbentrop was working alone. He had been there

four hours already when the air raid started. It began at ten.

His notes were spread out all around him under the brassy light of a single lamp. At the window, all the heavy drapes and muslin curtains had been drawn and, so long as the

planes stayed over the outskirts, the noise was not too bad. It was only when the guns in the Wannsee began to pound that the hotel shook and the lampshades tipped.

At ten-fifteen, he decided he was lonely. Picking up the ‘phone, he rang downstairs to the desk. The man on duty there was very cold and brisk about it all. Such things had not gone on at the Hotel Eden before the war. In those days, the clientele were all respectable older gentlemen with nieces and ladies with their nephews. The Desk was not involved with anything more clandestine than a bottle of wine delivered at midnight. Now, Herr Minister von Ribbentrop had

brought them to this: an actual whorehouse.

His Excellency’s woman (whose name was Lisi) could not

be contacted immediately, due to the raid. The Desk would have her there as soon as possible, von Ribbentrop was satisfied: he would go on working.

At eleven there was a knock on his door. Unthinkingly,

von Ribbentrop didn’t even bother to put on his jacket. He rose, with his fountain pen still in hand and slapped across the rug. He was wearing an old pair of slippers made of felt, and the heels were run down.

He opened the door without really looking to see who was

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there. “In, in…” he said—and was halt-way back to his desk before he realized no one had followed him. He had even undone the buttons of his flies.

“Lisl…?”

von Ribbentrop peered across the rims of his glasses.

Someone was standing in the darkened hallway. A man.

“Hallo,” said von Ribbentrop. “Who is that?” Involuntarily, his hands fell down to cover his groin.

The man was in uniform, with his greatcoat slung from

his shoulders in the Prussian style. He was also wearing his cap and appeared, from the silhouette, to be a personage of quite high rank.

“You’re creating a draught,” said von Ribbentrop, “whoever you are, and I’d appreciate it if you’d shut the door.”

He went back over to his desk, from behind which he

could see the figure—backlit—still in the hall. He sat down.

“I’ve come to tune your piano.” The voice sent a shiver scudding up through von Ribbentrop’s innards.

Schellenberg.

von Ribbentrop tried to laugh.

“Come in.” He stood up. He sat down. After all, it was he who had rank, he remembered (in spite of his fear). And it was he whose flies were open.

Schellenberg entered and shut the door behind him. Having done this, however, he stayed where he was with his

boots on the parquet.

“My, my!” said von Ribbentrop. “Look at you! A MajorGeneral.”

“Yes.”

“And

what may I offer you?”

“A little wine, if that were possible.”

“Of course.”

von Ribbentrop busied himself with the bottle and the

glasses. He was wishing he’d put on his jacket and shoes.

Somehow, he felt defenceless in his shirtsleeves and slippers.

Draughty through the middle.

Schellenberg threw aside his greatcoat and cap and finally strode across the rug to a sumptuous chair in the aura of the lamp. His uniform was new and shiny. The nap was not yet broken down.

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“Very impressive,” said von Ribbentrop, The uniform

creaked like cardboard. “Even though I never was fond of black.” His own uniform, designed by himself, would best be described as pearl green.

They drank.

“What’s all this about your coming here to tune my piano?”

von Ribbentrop slipped into the chair behind the desk and reached for his silver cigarette case.

Schellenberg smiled and placed his glass on the edge of the desk. “Nothing but a figure of speech,” he said. “Every time there’s an air raid, I think of tension. Every time I think of tension, I think of a wire pulled taut.” He made a gesture, using both hands. “And every time I think of a wire pulled taut, I think of a piano.”

von Ribbentrop swallowed. He stared at Schellenberg.

“Really?” he said.

“Yes,” said Schellenberg. “My father was a piano manufacturer.

He practically invented piano wire.”

von Ribbentrop smiled greyly.

“All our pictures were hung with it.” Schellenberg hung them in the air as he spoke. “All our mirrors—even the most gigantic mirrors in the hallways, framed with marble. Nothing tougher in the whole wide world than piano wire. Prosit.”

They drank.

von Ribbentrop looked at his lap. His flies were still open.

Very carefully, he did them up. Button by button.

“And so I grew up knowing all about pianos,” said Schellenberg.

“And I really do mean it. I can actually tune one.”

von Ribbentrop said, still staring at his lap. “But I have no piano, Walter.”

“I know that.”

There was an unpleasant silence, von Ribbentrop was

forced, at last, to speak. “I don’t like games,” he said.

” ‘Specially cat and mouse, Walter.” He looked at the master of espionage, but the master of espionage was playing with his lip. “Just tell me why you’re here,” said von Ribbentrop—

steadying the glass and drinking the wine.

Schellenberg released his lower lip and drew his finger over the other, like a man who had recently worn a moustache.

“Ah, me,” he said. “Yes. Why am I here…Maybe just

to check out what I know against what you know, Excellency, concerning one or two matters.”

“Good. Try me.”

Schellenberg finished his drink and set the glass back

where it had been, precisely in the centre of a ring of spilled wine. “You’ve heard the news about our old friend Hess, I suppose. Gone quite mad.”

“Yes.”

“Interesting, I thought—the role that Paisley played.”

von Ribbentrop closed his mouth up tight against his teeth.

How was it Schellenberg knew? His discussions with Paisley had been scrambled, as always. How did Schellenberg know?

Unless he had deciphered the code-break and tapped the

wire. Or unless—(though this was unthinkable)—Paisley had begun double-dealing.

“And then there’s all this new stuff about the Duke of

Windsor…”

“New stuff?”

“Yes.”

“Like what?”

“Well—I don’t know. But I can tell you this much: that kidnap plot, where we tried to land him in Spain, was over and done with almost two years ago…”

“Seventeen months.”

“Yes.” Schellenberg crossed his legs. “Seventeen months.” His voice trailed off for a second—and then came back like a thrown brick. “Following their escape, you know,, every piece of information and every instruction in my department regarding His Royal Highness was stamped, by orders of the Fuhrer, no longer operable.” He smiled. He sighed, von Ribbentrop was watching him so intently, the ash on his cigarette

had grown by over an inch and was about to fall into

his wine. “And in spite of the fact the Fiihrer has instructed me to call off the dogs…the dogs have not all come home.

Have they?”

The ash fell.

It even made a noise, like something drowning.

von Ribbentrop put his hand across the mouth of the glass.

as if he could silence it.

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Schellenberg was smiling his Schaemmel smile: his alter ego gleaming in the light.

Bombs were falling a mere kilometre away.

von Ribbentrop stood up and walked to the windows,

where he pretended to fuss with the blackout curtains.

“You were saying something about dogs,” he said.

Schellenberg held out his glass. “Was I?”

“Yes.”

von Ribbentrop, looking very white and old, crossed over to the wine and poured a drink for his visitor.

“Thank you.” Schellenberg sipped from the glass and then set it out in the light at arm’s length, staring at it. “I have come here,” he said—so quietly, von Ribbentrop had to lean forward to hear him—“in order to warn you. Excellency, that from now on, wherever your dogs go, my dogs will

follow.”

“You keep referring to dogs, as if…”

“Don’t interrupt,” Schellenberg said—and immediately

Schaemmel smiled and said; “Excellency.”

von Ribbentrop sat down.

“I admit I’m not entirely sure what you’re up to,” said Schellenberg. “But I have a fair idea. We made a bargain once, about a piece of paper. Perhaps you might do well to consider fulfilling your part of the bargain before you have gone too far. You will recognize, I’m sure, that it can only be a matter of time before I catch up. I shall not be unsympathetic, in the meantime, to hearing whatever you might