A Man Lies Dreaming
Read A Man Lies Dreaming Online
Authors: Lavie Tidhar
Contents
Osama
The Violent Century
First published in Great Britain in 2014 by Hodder & Stoughton
An Hachette UK company
Copyright © Lavie Tidhar 2014
The right of Lavie Tidhar to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead is purely coincidental
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 444 76296 9
Hodder & Stoughton Ltd
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London NW1 3BH
‘He had gone beyond good and evil, and entered a strange landscape where nothing was what it seemed and all the ordinary human values were reversed.’
Hugh Trevor-Roper, report for the Secret Intelligence Service
‘Clichés, stock phrases, adherence to conventional, standardised codes of expression and conduct have the socially recognised function of protecting us against reality.’
Hannah Arendt,
The Banality of Evil
In another time and place, a man lies dreaming.
Extract from Wolf’s Diary, 1st November 1939
She came into my office and stood in the doorway though there was nothing hesitant about the way she stood. She gave you the impression she had never hesitated a moment in her life. She had long black hair and long pale legs and she wore a summer dress despite the cold and a fur coat over the dress. She carried a purse. It was hand-threaded with beads that formed into the image of a mockingbird. It was French, and expensive. Her gaze passed over the office, taking in the small dirty window that no one ever cleaned, the old pine hatstand on which the varnish was badly chipping, the watercolour on the wall and the single bookshelf and the desk with the typewriter on it. There wasn’t much else to look at. Then her gaze settled on me.
Her eyes were grey. She said, ‘You are Herr Wolf, the detective?’
She spoke German with a native Berliner’s accent.
‘That’s the name on the door,’ I said. I looked her up and down. She was a tall drink of pale milk. She said, ‘My name is Isabella Rubinstein.’
Her eyes changed when she looked at me. I had seen that look before. In her eyes clouds gathered over a grey sea. Doubt – as though trying to place me.
‘I’ll save you the trouble,’ I said. ‘I am nobody.’
She smiled at me. ‘Everyone is somebody.’
‘And I do not work for Jews.’
At that the clouds amassed in her eyes and stayed there but she remained calm, very calm. Her hand swept over the room. ‘I do not see that you have so much choice,’ she said.
‘What I choose to do is my own damn business,’ I said.
She reached into her handbag and came back with a roll of ten-shilling notes. She just held it there, for a long moment.
‘What is it about?’ I said. At that moment I hated her, and that hatred gave me pause.
‘My sister,’ she said. ‘She is missing.’
I had two chairs for visitors. She pulled one to her and sat down, crossing one leg over the other. She was still holding the notes between her fingers. She didn’t wear any rings.
‘A lot of people are missing nowadays,’ I said. ‘If she is in Germany I cannot help you.’
‘No,’ she said, and this time there was tension in her voice. ‘She was leaving Germany. Herr Wolf, let me explain to you. My family is very wealthy. After the Fall our assets were seized, but my father still had friends, some even amongst the Party, and he was able to transfer much of our capital to London. I myself, and my mother, were both allowed to leave the country legally, and my uncles continue the family’s continental operations in Paris. Only my sister remained behind. She is young, younger than me. At first she was beguiled by their ideology; she had joined the Free Socialist Youth before the Fall. My father was furious. But I knew it would not last.’ She looked up at me, with a half-smile. ‘It never does, with Judith, you see.’
All I could see was the money she was holding between those long slim fingers. She moved the roll of notes back and forth, idly. I had been penniless before, and poverty had made me stronger, not weak, but that was in my former life. My life was different now, and it was harder to be hungry.
I said, ‘So you arranged for her to leave.’
‘My father,’ she said quickly. ‘He knew men who could smuggle people out.’
‘Not easily,’ I said.
‘Not easily, no. Not cheaply, either.’ Again that half-smile, but it flickered and was gone in a flash.
‘How long ago was that?’
‘A month. She was meant to be here three weeks ago. She never appeared.’
‘Do you know who these men were? Do you trust them?’
‘My father did. As much as he could be said to trust anyone.’
Something jogged my recall, then. ‘Your father is Julius Rubinstein? The banker.’
‘Yes.’
I remembered his likeness in the
Daily Mail
. One of the Jewish gangsters who grew rich and fat on the blood of the working man in Germany, before the Fall. His like always survived, like rats abandoning a sinking ship they fled Germany and re-established themselves elsewhere, in clumps of diseased colonies. They said he was as ruthless as a Rothschild.
‘Not a man to cross,’ I said.
‘No.’
‘Your sister … Judith? She could have been captured by the Communists.’
She shook her head. ‘We would have heard.’
‘You think she was brought to London?’
‘I don’t know. I need to find her. I
must
find her, Herr Wolf.’
She put the roll of notes on my desk. I left it there, though whenever I looked at her the notes were in my field of vision.
The Jews are nothing but money-grubbers, living on the profits of war
. Perhaps she could see it in my eyes. Perhaps she was desperate. ‘Why me?’
‘The men who smuggled her here,’ she said, ‘are old comrades of yours.’
There was nothing behind her eyes, nothing but grey clouds. And I realised I had misjudged Fräulein Isabella Rubinstein. There was a reason she had picked me, after all.
‘I do not associate with the old comrades any more,’ I told her. ‘The past is the past.’
‘You’ve changed.’ She said that with curiosity.
‘You do not know me,’ I said. ‘Do not ever presume to think that you do!’
She shrugged, indifferent. She reached into her purse and brought out a silver cigarette case and a gold lighter. She opened the case with dextrous fingers and extracted a cigarette and put it between her lips. She offered me the open case. I shook my head. ‘I do not smoke,’ I said.
‘Do you mind if I do?’
I did mind and she could see it. She flicked the lighter to life and wrapped her half-smile around the cigarette and drew deep, and blew smoke into the cold air of my office. A draught came in through the window and though I was dressed in my coat I shivered. It was the only coat I owned. I looked at the money. I looked at her face. She was nothing but trouble and I knew it and she knew I knew. I had no business hunting for missing Jews in London in the year of our Lord 1939. I once had faith, and a destiny, but I had lost both and I guess I’d never recovered either. All I could see was the money.
I was so cold, and it was going to be a cold winter
.
When the Jewish woman departed, Wolf sat there for a long moment staring at the money. The smell of her cigarette hung in the air, rank and nauseating. He could not abide the smell of tobacco. Outside the window it was already dark. The cold clawed at the windowpane. Below he could hear the market shutting, the sound of whores sashaying into the night. His landlord’s bakery on the ground floor had already closed for the day. He stared at the money.
He pushed the chair back, stood up and took the roll of notes and put them in his pocket. He set the chair back and went round the desk and stood looking at his office.
The painting on the wall showed a French church tower rising against the background of a village, a field executed in a turmoil of brushstrokes
. Three dark trees grew out of a tangle of roots rising in the foreground of the church. On the bookshelf,
a personally inscribed copy of
Fire and Blood
, Ernst Jünger’s memoir of the Great War
, sat next to J.R.R. Tolkien’s
The Hobbit
, Madison Grant’s masterpiece of racial theory,
The Passing of the Great Race,
a collection of Schiller’s poetry, and a row of Agatha Christies.
There was no copy of Wolf’s one published book. He stood looking at the shelf. He had saved only a handful of the collection of books he had amassed before the Fall. Their loss ate at him. But he had already lost so much. He went to the hatstand and put on his hat. His shadow fell on the wall like a dirty coat. Wolf opened the door and went outside.
