World War Two Will Not Take Place (23 page)

‘I'm pretty sure SB had that kind of thing in mind when he picked “Ahasuerus Fromanteel” for you. In fact, I think I can remember him mentioning it. He's a smart one. He actually spoke of your flair for it.'

‘Which?'

‘Not in those actual words, obviously, but I can see now this was what he meant.'

‘What?'

‘The “uncontainable endlessly approaching and disappearing context”. He stated you were just the one for that. SB has at least one Ahasuerus clock in his collection, so he was not talking idly.'

‘I don't believe it would be fair to say Hitler is narrow or negative about sex,' Fromanteel replied. ‘Ask his girlfriend, Eva Braun. She has a giggle when visiting politicians pose for photographs with Adolf on a certain sofa, because she's thinking what also happens on it – though, clearly, it will have been given a good de-juicing before the important guests sit. And then there are some of Eva's friends – real sleep-arounds, yet tolerated at Berchtesgaden, getting satisfaction with waiters and guards. Or Goebbel's lech antics with almost any woman under ninety-five. What Hitler can't put up with, though, is public scandal. They've had some bad instances of that, haven't they? He considers they lower the party's tone. And that's so precious to him. He wants the Nazi name to be an admired name worldwide, synonymous with civilization – robust civilization, but civilization. He recognizes there has to be sex, or how do you go on producing the master race? Not complicated, fractious or perverse, though.'

There had been an abrupt change of tone. Mount felt the real reason for the visit would show soon. ‘Tone is crucial to a political party.'

‘I wonder if you know the Toledo.'

‘It's a club, isn't it?'

‘Knecht goes there now and then. This would be to divert himself after an especially trying day, I expect. To have a couple of what the British call, I believe, “sundowners”.' Fromanteel did the term in English.

‘There are clubs in London with the same purpose, though many are all-male.'

‘Such as the Athenaeum and Boodle's? That might be a different kind of club. I'd say it's unlikely you've ever met Knecht's wife.'

‘Well, no, I don't believe I've run across her. But, then, I don't know Knecht, either.'

‘What I hear about Knecht's wife is she's no great hulk of a thing.'

‘I'm without reports on her at all, big or small,' Mount said. ‘Kale-Walker might have something. Many women prize slimness.'

‘And yet she can do damage.'

‘Anger will often startlingly empower quite slight-seeming women.'

‘Anger
was
a factor. Remarkable you should spot that. It's from reading the classics, I expect. Plenty of angry women there, I suppose.'

‘Clytemnestra murders her husband Agamemnon in a right temper. And Maia gets very cross with her son Hermes for rustling Apollo's cattle.'

‘Apollo's a god, isn't he? Utterly off colour, surely, to steal a god's cows. No wonder his mother was irritated. But, as to the other, I don't know whether it will get into the Press. That's why I thought I'd better come round and talk to you. If you read something like this in a newspaper without any background information on events it might make you wonder whether matters will continue as previously, or if you should adapt.'

‘Thanks, Has. It was a misunderstanding when I kept you out in the corridor. You shouldn't have had to undertake all that winking.'

‘This is what I had in mind when I spoke of “context”,' Fromanteel replied. ‘The incident took place last night, but I have to put it into one.'

‘Into a context?'

‘There is the occurrence itself, but also the past to that occurrence, the what we may call harbinger, and the future to come
after
that occurrence. This is context. Mind you, they've done a very good repair job. You wouldn't know just from looking that there'd even been an occurrence.'

‘At the club you mentioned?'

‘The Toledo.'

‘Did Knecht's wife go to the club and do some damage, although she's not heavily built?' Mount said. ‘Was Knecht there having a sundowner?'

‘That's the point, isn't it?'

‘Which?'

‘Most believe he was off with a girl somewhere.'

‘Which most?'

‘In the club at the time.'

‘She went there because she thought he didn't have just the sundowners he might be entitled to, did she?'

‘I don't know whether he brought something home,' Fromanteel said.

‘Brought something home?'

‘The word is that the girls there are extremely hygienic, with the management supervising and very rigorous. But error can, in a manner of speaking, slip in.'

‘Had she heard things about him, and went to the club to check?'

‘They met on a fast promotion course years ago in the secret state police. It was a lovely, dazzling, famed romance, I'm told. Two spirited, talented young people, top of their classes, brought together not just by their respective beauty and
joie de vivre
, but by a shared affinity for their approaching . . . well,
métier
. Many have said they were both brilliantly right for the secret police, born to it. This seemed a relationship made in heaven.'

‘Lovely.'

‘After some time, she left to have the children. But it goes without saying that she knows about prising information and is useful at other skills, too. They were surprised in the club that someone so petite could not just pick up a bar table, but raise it in two hands above her head and fling it. A few argued that, in fact, her petiteness could be an advantage, because she wouldn't have to lift the table so very high to get it above her head. I don't know. This might be illogical. The Toledo has a huge mirror behind the bar, virtually all one wall, enabling men customers to get varying views of the girls. Well, so much glass – that's asking for trouble, isn't it? But all credit to them, they got it replaced inside twenty four hours. One girl was slightly hurt by flying splinters. Named Annette. The lower arm. Not the face, though, which could have hurt her career.

‘There's a view that it was unfair for Charlotte Knecht to take action against the club when the real objective was her husband. However, people are not happy about criticizing Knecht, because of his police position. Apparently, he's often in touch with at least Heinrich Himmler. This mirror is very much part of the Toledo's character. People may forget the name of the club, but they will say, “Oh, you know, that busy little place where you can see the girls' faces and arses at more or less the same time owing to a reflection.” It became very much a priority to restore that service. As you would expect, the police came. That's why I thought I must talk to you, regardless of the usual prohibition. You'll understand.'

‘No,' Mount said.

‘Two questions. One, will Adolf hear about it? Two, if he does, will Knecht keep his job? Poxing is no way to produce a master race. Hitler might take a broad, permissive attitude to one of his most gifted colonels going to a whore. Normal male high-jinks. You'd agree, I think. But the Toledo fracas, the rumour of uncleanness, the hurled table, the fractured glass, the injury to another whore – all this might pile up and become unforgivable. Knecht could be damned by that disturbance at the Toledo.'

Mount said: ‘
The mirror cracked from side to side
,

“
The curse is come upon me
,”
cried
,

Colonel Maximilian Knecht.'

‘That's your Tennyson, isn't it?'

‘Prolific.'

‘We have to remember, don't we, that Knecht is nominally in charge of a possible mission in Britain to accumulate usable murk about Lionel Paterin. But how valid would any such work of his be in that regard if Knecht can be shown by the British propaganda apparatus to be sexually tainted himself? “The pot calling the kettle smutty.”' Fromanteel went into English for these few words. ‘Even if I hadn't come to visit you now, news of that Toledo turmoil and its reasons would have reached you eventually, I think. And you'd have transmitted it via Bernard Kale-Walker. Anyway, rest easy, London has been informed.' He paused and blushed slightly. ‘Oh, I'm sorry, I shouldn't have said “eventually”. It makes you sound slow, dismally out of touch, immature.'

‘Yes, I thought so.'

‘You'd have cottoned on to the implications and wondered. I thought it vital to brief you face-to-face.'

‘Knecht might be disciplined? Moved out of his post?'

‘This is why I'm here. You see it now, do you?'

‘No.'

‘Explanation: it was, on the face of it, Knecht's orders that you and Toulmin should be allowed to continue your operation here without interference.'

‘How the hell did you discover he'd ordered that?'

‘I gather they had you under surveillance, but this was suddenly stopped.'

‘How the hell did you discover he'd ordered that?'

‘It's not in the wider policy interest to hinder you. They want a continuing trickle of information about the possibility or non-possibility of a Soviet-German agreement to go to London. They'd like to maintain the idea that things are happening between Moscow and Berlin, though nothing substantive yet. Their aim is to promote uncertainty, and to fend off any decisive response by Britain. German rearmament can proceed. Those cardboard tanks scattered around the country to fool reconnaissance aircraft with the appearance of strength can then be replaced by real ones. Germany needs the time as much as Britain does, and perhaps more.'

‘So, following the Toledo incident, there—'

‘Following the Toledo incident there will be no change in the tolerance they offer you and Toulmin. The news from the club and the likely repercussions might put you off-balance, made your work seize up, they will think. Even if Knecht is kicked out, the policy will remain. As I suggested, Knecht works for Himmler, and Himmler works for Adolf. Knecht was their messenger boy, that's all. Their mouthpiece. He told Valk to let you run free and to call off the gumshoes because he'd been told to tell Valk to let you run free and to call off the gumshoes. The overall thinking hasn't altered.'

‘The context.'

‘The time factor. I thought you should be informed at once that you will have no immediate trouble should Knecht get pushed. You must not panic. But neither will you and Toulmin be any safer in reality than before Knecht got pushed. I don't know the Dresden area very well. Do you think there might be reasonably remote flat ground somewhere nearby for a make-do airstrip? Perhaps Bernard will tack on a little survey of the environs with this in mind. Quite often in our kind of
métier
, there's the main task, but also a side issue to be dealt with, isn't there?'

‘As just discussed.'

‘Quite,' Fromanteel said.

So there
had
been a Fromanteel warning, though nothing outright or absolute. In this operation, absolutes were rare. When Fromanteel had gone, Mount swapped the chairs back, then got into the shower and gave himself a good check over. What was that war poem by Rosenberg about a ‘cosmopolitan' rat moving between both sides on the battlefield? You could get cosmopolitan lice, too – the pubic kind.

BOOK THREE

TEN

P
erhaps, then, it was coming to an end with Liz. Lionel Paterin allowed himself to think so now: allowed himself to think so
at last
. For weeks, for more than a month, he had resisted – had refused to let himself think so, because, of course, he realized the idea would flatten him, drop him into sadness and a terrible sense of loss.

But no . . . no . . . This was a stupidly false account of what had happened in his head, and he knew it. He couldn't really have ‘refused to let himself think so'. Thoughts would not be kept walled-off like that. They'd jump over the wall, slither over the wall, get round the wall. Somehow, they'd sneak in. You might
think
you'd been thinking about other things, and you might in fact have been thinking about other things, but the thoughts you thought you had banished would suddenly force their way back, because these were the most pressing, most important thoughts. They had a claim, a solid right. Paterin trained originally as a lawyer, and his mind still led him into that kind of ruthlessly precise and plodding language sometimes. One of the important thoughts he'd tried to smother, but couldn't, declared it would soon be over with Liz.

It wasn't right, either, to say the ‘idea' would do him deep damage, flatten him, drop him into sadness. Ideas were wool, ideas were fleeting. The damage came from his decision
at last
to acknowledge to himself what was happening to them:
at last
to recognize the gap that had lately opened up between them, and which stayed there, and which he sensed would continue to stay there and very likely get worse. He believed he understood how this had happened. She suspected she was being watched, suspected
they
were being watched. And that possibly had speeded up her decision to finish it. But only speeded it up. The actual reason went deeper than that, much. ‘Well, I don't think there's anyone around spying on us now,' he said.

‘Perhaps they're not horsey. And, even if they are, how would they get themselves fixed up with mounts out here?' Elizabeth had a divorced friend – a ‘horsey' friend – who ran stables and could generally provide them with nags if Paterin telephoned. They usually managed a couple of hours on Tuesday and Friday afternoons. Generally, when they went riding together she was at her happiest and most relaxed. And that brought him happiness, too. Now, though, he could spot no pleasure in her face, no contentment at being with him on this stretch of open ground with nobody else about.