A Man Lies Dreaming (10 page)

‘
Marxism must be destroyed,’ Mosley said. ‘It is the poisoned ideology of the Jewish race
.’

Wolf rubbed the bridge of his nose, feeling a headache coming on. To see Mosley, that clown, with such power! It filled him with irrational rage. Even the man’s words were second-hand.

‘But I am sorry to go on,’ Mosley said. ‘Please, sit down, my friend. Can I get you anything?’

‘Thank you, no. Your wife has been most kind.’

‘Diana is a loyal woman.’ Mosley re-seated himself behind his desk. Wolf had heard of the man’s little indiscretions. When Oswald was married to his first wife, Cynthia, he was also having an affair with her younger sister Alexandra,
and
with their stepmother. Sometimes Wolf wondered how the man ever found the time to be a Fascist. But then didn’t Mussolini carry on as if he were single-handedly responsible for repopulating the entire Earth after a holocaust?

Whatever the case, he knew they were weak men, where he was strong. And yet their hearts were in the right place for all that, as the English said.

‘So,’ Wolf said. He watched Mosley, who sat back in the chair and folded his hands in his lap.

‘So,’ Mosley said.

They regarded each other across the desk.

At last Mosley sighed. ‘Unfortunate business with that young prostitute,’ he said.

‘Nothing to do with me,’ Wolf said.

‘Of course. Of course. Nevertheless …’

‘Yes?’

‘It’s bad publicity, Wolf. I am fighting for my political life here! For the very future of this country, if not the world! I cannot afford even a whiff of scandal. Not now.’

‘What are you suggesting, exactly?’

Mosley raised his hands. ‘I am not suggesting you are embroiled in all this,’ he said. ‘This … murder and what have you. But the signs are all too clear. The swastika most of all. Not many would understand the clue of the tin drummer. Not any more.’

It was a stark reminder of how far Wolf had fallen.

‘Yes.’

‘I cannot afford to be linked to these murders.’

‘You invited me to your home.’

‘Diana did that.’

‘I see.’

‘I had asked the driver to bring you directly to me. Perhaps he misunderstood.’

Wolf thought of the chauffeur and his Munich accent and his veteran’s poise. A loyal man, he thought. But not to Mosley.

‘What is it you want?’

Mosley lowered his hands. He looked tired suddenly, older than his years. ‘I want to hire you,’ he said.

‘
Hire
me?’ Wolf had not expected that. ‘To do what? To disappear?’

‘No, no.’ Mosley shrugged. ‘Look, I apologise. The murderer will be caught. So far I have managed to keep the details out of the newspapers. It is a problem, but it is a matter for the police. As for that Jew, Morhaim, I shall make sure he is dealt with. We do not want Jews in our police force, do we? But these are critical times, and I cannot be seen to interfere directly. Not yet.’

‘So you would do nothing.’

A hurt look entered Mosley’s eyes. Then he smiled.

‘You were always the most astute of us all,’ he said.

I was always your superior, Wolf thought, but didn’t say.

‘Thank you for getting me out,’ he said.

‘It was the least I could do.’

‘Something is troubling you.’ He adopted his detective’s voice. The voice of a confidant. ‘Tell me what it is.’

‘Someone is trying to kill me.’

‘Oh?’

‘Three nights ago an assassin opened fire on my car as I was driving to a rally in Derby,’ Mosley said. ‘I lived. The assassin escaped. We had kept the news from the papers.’

‘You must have been shaken.’

‘I was certainly bothered, yes,’ Mosley said. Wolf thought, You pompous coward. I bet you all but pissed yourself.

‘You were very brave.’

‘I serve a greater purpose,’ Mosley said.

Yes, your prick, Wolf thought.

‘Sorry? Did you say something?’

‘Oh, nothing.’

‘And two weeks ago there was an attempt on my life as I stepped out of a soiree in Kensington. My men found a suspicious package taped to the undercarriage of the car. It turned out to be a bomb. Only by luck it did not go off.’

‘So you are suggesting an orchestrated campaign?’

‘I am afraid, Wolf. I am afraid that next time they will succeed. I am afraid not for myself, but for the world I shall leave bereft of my leadership.’

Wolf would have been happy at that point to kill Mosley himself. But he brought himself under control. He always did.

‘Do you know who they are?’ he said, calmly.

‘Who do you think?’

‘Jews?’

‘Who else? They call themselves the Palestinian Liberation Front. The PLO.’

Wolf said: ‘Palestine?’ The word left an unpleasant taste in his mouth.

‘They want it for themselves. A land for the Jews. They demand Parliament cede it to them. Just imagine! Next thing you know the Indians will be demanding independence, or the blacks in—’ he waved his hand vaguely, ‘Bongo Bongo Land. Can you imagine, Wolf?’

‘It is a way of, in the first instance, removing the Jews from Europe,’ Wolf said. Such a plan had been put forward before, by Himmler, Göring, even Julius Streicher. ‘Surely that should be the main objective?’

‘Our problem in Britain has never been a large population of Jews,’ Mosley said. ‘Until recently, at any rate. The Fall and the influx of immigrants is rallying the country round to my way of thinking, at long last.’

‘But they are blaming all immigrants, not just the Jews.’

As an alien in Britain he had experienced his share of hostility, but he was not going to mention that to Mosley. He had his pride.

‘The Jews are behind it. They are behind everything. And is communism not just a Jewish ploy? But this is getting us nowhere, Wolf. The point is that the Jews have formed in recent years – no doubt emboldened by the rise of their kind in the communist East – several covert military groups even as they engage in illegal immigration to Palestine – very much
against
British Mandate law, I should add. They buy ships! They purchase false papers! And Palestine is a lawless land, a Wild West – we can hardly spend the resources to administer it properly.’

Wolf sighed inwardly. No doubt Mosley saw conspiracies under the bed – that is, if he was not himself hiding under it, having been surprised by the unexpected arrival of a lady friend’s husband.

‘I assume they have communicated with you.’

Mosley laughed, a short bitter sound. ‘Do you know the number of threats I have received over the past few years?’ he said. ‘They are all after me, Wolf!’

‘The cost of power,’ Wolf said, coolly.

Mosley subsided. Reluctantly, he smiled. ‘You are right. I am letting their tactics of terror affect me – but the danger
is
real, Wolf. I want you to work for me.’

Wolf clenched his fists, his short nails digging into his palms. How much he resented those words.

‘I want you to find them. Money is not an issue.’

‘What about your own MI5?’

‘They’re working on it.’ He lowered his voice. ‘To tell you the truth, sometimes I think the intelligence services don’t take me quite as seriously as they should.’

Wolf suppressed a rare smile. ‘Is that so.’

‘Please, Wolf! You I can trust, implicitly.’

Wolf said nothing. Mosley opened a drawer with some force and took out a cheque book. He tore out a cheque and wrote down a number and handed it to Wolf. Wolf looked at the cheque.

‘Well?’

Wolf was still looking at the cheque. Then he folded it, neatly, and tucked it away in his pocket.

He nodded, tight-lipped.

Some offers you just couldn’t refuse.

Herr Wolf—

Did you like her? She was so pretty. When we went into the alleyway her hand was warm in mine. It reminded me of going to Spitalfields with my mother shopping for vegetables, cabbages and peas. She was taken by God when I was very young. We have so much in common, you and I. Your mother, too was taken. But we are soldiers, we soldier on. Be brave, my mother said, she held my hand and it was moist and warm, she was lying in bed and she was running a fever. I don’t know what she died of; a doctor never came. Be brave, he needs you. I thought she was talking about my father but now I know the truth of it, and she must have known one day I would meet you. I took the whore into the alleyway and my knife came out all slick and sharp and she tried to cry, but I put my hand over her mouth and pressed my body against hers, against the wall, and put my lips close to her ear and said, Shut up you whore, or I will kill you. I put the knife to her throat. How she trembled! Her neck was so white and I could feel her heartbeat, I could cup it in my hand like a flame from a match. I kissed her.

It was so romantic. I remember the sky spread out above us, and the stars and the smell of pines – for some reason I could smell pines, and freshly cut grass, and her cheap perfume. I remember the taste of her lips, and the heat of her body against mine, and the sky all above, and thinking what lay beyond it, beyond air and the sun: did they have other worlds up there, like ours and yet unlike, where lovers met in secret in the strange byways of an alien city?

I stuck the knife in her. She dropped in my arms and I held her, tenderly, and looked deep into her eyes and saw the suffering ease and at last she was at peace, like my mother was at peace. I laid her down on the ground. The blood gushed out of her. I had the irrational desire to taste it. I stroked her hair. She was so blonde and so pretty. The front of me was wet. I knelt over her like a priest at prayer. I gave her benediction. Can’t you see that? The knife was in my hand and I delicately etched the sign on her. I had to make it deep. I was so excited that my hands shook. I arranged her properly. I made her beautiful again. Innocent. She wasn’t a whore now; she was like a new bride. I folded her arms on her belly, and finally I reached into my coat and took out the little toy. The little drummer. I was going to wind it up. I wanted to see it march across the ground of that alleyway, march along her body, march like I would have marched for you. But I heard voices and I was suddenly afraid. I left it by her head. I touched her one last time. I was shaking when I stood up. I wore a raincoat for the blood. The voices came closer, and so I went the other way and no one saw me.

The problem, Wolf reflected, was Balfour. Arthur James Balfour and all the other Jew-lovers in His Majesty’s government. Long dead now, the old fool – but promises hastily made are nonetheless remembered, especially ones made by the Foreign Secretary of the greatest empire in the world.

Wolf was only a young soldier then, serving with the First Company of the List Regiment in the Bavarian army, but he could still remember his outrage when news of Lord Balfour’s promise reached the front. Back then, of course, Jews were still a part of German and Austrian society. Jewish officers served in the war against the British, just as on the British side Jews fought against the Kaiser.

But already the Jews were agitating for
emancipation
. An insidious form of nationalism took hold of the Jewish people, a desire for a
homeland
. They had called their movement Zionism, and they had been spurred on by the vision of one Theodor Herzl, an Austro-Hungarian journalist Jew.

In 1917, Lord Balfour wrote a letter to Baron Rothschild, in which he asserted British support for the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine
(
then still in the possession of the Ottoman Empire
, though it fell to British forces shortly after). Of course, Wolf thought, no one had
actually
intended to commit to such a disastrous course of action, but the Jews persisted, and were becoming increasingly more militant in their nationalist aspirations.

But it was absurd, Wolf thought. Try as he might he could not take the threat to Mosley seriously. The Fall had changed things. Communism was a Jewish sickness and Austro-Germany had become a Jewish paradise in which their thinkers and their scientists flourished – did not Freud found and radically expand his very own Sigmund Freud Institute in Vienna, with branches in Berlin and even Moscow itself? Was not that clown Albert Einstein now Chair of the Max Planck Institute in Berlin? It seemed nearly every day his famous image, with that wild unruly hair and smirking face, stared out at Wolf from the dailies or in the newsreels, an icon used by the communists as a threat of terrible weapons to come, should war ever be declared.

Marx, Freud and Einstein: the three corners of the evil that was international Jewry, Wolf thought.

If only
he
had been in power …

But then reality, of course, sank in. He was not in power. He was a nobody, a grey man in a cheap grey suit, and his only reason for being at Mosley’s party was that they wanted to hire him. As the
help
.

Scheisse
!

He left Mosley’s office and started down the stairs clutching a large brown envelope containing – or so Mosley said – all of the communications he had received from the Palestinian terrorists. He intended to dump the file as soon as was convenient. There would be nothing useful in the anonymously mailed threats.

‘They have influence, still,’ Mosley told him. ‘The Jews. They’ve worked themselves into British public life, insidiously, and with money. The Rothschilds have been funding Jewish immigration to Palestine for decades. Don’t underestimate them, Wolf.’

Implicit in the words:
Like you have before
.

Now he went down the stairs and all he wanted to do was get away. He was beat-up and tired and old. In his pocket, Mosley’s cheque was a reminder of everything he had once been and would never be again.

Not looking, he bumped into something soft and full that smelled of expensive perfume. A squeal of delight followed and a familiar female voice said, ‘Wolfy!’