I, Lucifer: Finally, the Other Side of the Story (28 page)

Heinrich demanded the transcripts.

I don't know. It doesn't matter now so I'll tell you.
There was a woman in the camp. These things don't
matter to me now so what do I care? I couldn't stop
myself. I don't know about Marcus. He came in on us.

I don't know if it had ever occurred to him before. It
soon did! She worked up in the kitchens most of the
time, but sometimes I saw her. I'll tell you, it's a strange
thing, sergeant, but I knew, you know, that it would be
a defilement to let her touch me, to touch her ... but
it's difficult to explain. What does it matter me saying
this now? A strange thing. Really a strange thing. My
mother took me to see my grandfather one time in
Weimar, and he had a huge turd in his pocket, his own
turd, you know? The nurse said it was common in the
old. Not that I'm old. Touching something like ...
whereas you know ... What? Yes. You know I can say
these things now because it doesn't matter. And what
can it matter to Marcus, that idiot? They ran short of
fuel up at the house and she came down to our shed.
Franz was on duty and Dieter was playing solitaire - but
they didn't see her, you know. I went by myself. Marcus
only came in by chance, I think. It was all very simple.
The odd thing was neither of us said a word. What can
I tell you? I remember her body was cold. She didn't do
anything, just let me move her arms and legs where I
wanted. What is there to say? She felt like clay. Bits of
clay from my old school in Leipzig, but a bit harder. She
made barely a sound even when I stuck her. Couldn't
believe I got away with it. Well, I guess I didn't, did I?
Heh-heh! I don't think the commandant believed a
word. But what did he care? She never made a sound.
Afterwards, I remember Marcus lifting up her arm and
letting it flop back down. It had become dislocated - I
don't know how, she didn't put up any kind of fight.
Lifting it up and flopping it down. It was like he had a
fixation or something. If you ask me he should never
have been in the camp in the first place. No backbone.

Willie betrayed me, you see. When I touched her,
she felt just like the Jew in the woodshed. Just like clay.
I kept trying but I couldn't feel any difference.
Somehow I couldn't stop myself. It seemed not to
matter whether I did it or not. When I did do it, I felt
a great calm peace all over me, you know, like when
you've had a fever and then you wake in the morning
and know that it's gone, like magic ...

Heinrich has been to see Gerd Kreiger in his cell. Kreiger
read a two-week old newspaper. Didn't bother saluting.
Didn't bother standing up. The cell was clean, but with an
unpleasant smell, compressed and feral, as of a furiously alive
rodent in a box no bigger than its body. Heinrich had
insisted on going in alone. The bodyguard would have
pistol-whipped Kreiger for his insolence - but how would
that have helped? (Beyond, obviously, the minute addition to
the wildly sculpted mass of the Reichsfiihrer's ego; astonishing, given the weight of power that already attended him,
that Heinrich still noticed each new particle of another's
fear that increased it. He marvelled at it somewhat himself.)
He went with the intention of questioning Kreiger, but
found, when confronted with the youth's recumbent body
and mildly enquiring face, that he could not think of what to
ask him. So the two had regarded each other in silence for a
few moments, then the Reichsfi.ihrer had turned on his heel
and left.

There is also, gentlemen, a verygrave ►natter about which I must
speak. I mean of course -

Hoffman's suicide bothers Heinrich, if possible, more than
Kreiger's murder, stirring up not just fear, but contempt.
(One of the downsides of my work with the Nazi party was
that its evils threatened perpetually to become internecine, the brilliant by-products endangering the process as a whole.
I felt like the parent of a gifted but hyperactive child: take
your eye off it at the wrong moment - Stalingrad '43, for
example - and there was no calculating the damage it could
do to itself.) He doesn't know the cause of it, Hoffman's suicide. He doesn't know the particulars. (I do, obviously. I was
there, believe it or not, on a flying visit, touching up details,
checking loose threads, tensions, weights, contrasts - no rest
for the wicked and whatnot.) Heinrich doesn't know pins
and needles killed Marcus Hoffman. An off-duty nap in his
bunk. His left arm resting at an odd angle under his head. A
cut-off blood flow Pins and needles. He woke, as you do,
with the sense that his arm was by his side, in some deadening pain - only to find, on investigation in the dark, as you
do, that his arm wasn't by his side at all, but in fact strangely
elevated and seemingly possessed of a will of its own.

It was just that it had never happened to him before. It
was just that he'd never touched his arm and not felt himself
touching it. Manhandling it, in tingling increments, back to
where it belonged, he was reminded of the Jew in the woodshed. Her arm had felt ... Her arni ...

Well. It's a slippery slide, the imagination. Once you set
off there's no telling where you'll end up.

Heinrich stands in front of the bathroom mirror washing
his hands, scrupulously. The soap is good, and lathers as if
with hyperenthusiasm. He is not satisfied with his hair. But
against the odds - perhaps, perversely, because he has
allowed his anxiety to take him through the two cases, the
illuminated fear less potent than the one that still lurks in the
dark - his addendum is finally starting to flow:

I also want to talk to you quite frankly on a very grave
matter. I mean ... the extermination of the Jewish race ... Most of you must know what it means when
1(►O corpses are lying side by side, or 500, or 1 000. To
have stuck it out and at the same time - apart from
exceptions caused by human weakness - to have
remained decent fellows, that is what has made us hard.
This is a page of glory in our history which has never
been written and is never to be written ... It is the
curse of greatness that it must step over dead bodies to
create new life. Yet we must ... cleanse the soil or it
will never bear fruit. It will be a great burden for me to
bear .. .

Yet still it bothers hint, later that night under the lights and
the blood red banner with the stage wings like two dark
beckonings into eternity, that the after-image of languid
Kreiger and Hoffman's hungry ghost are slipping away from
him, their meaning, these unique bookends to the
danger ... and on the run, ad libitum, so to speak, he takes
a risky detour from his belaboured and beloved script:

... must be accomplished without our leaders and their
men suffering any damage in their minds and souls.
The danger is great indeed, for only the narrowest way
stands between the Scylla of their becoming coldhearted brutes unable any longer to treasure life where
it must be treasured (he thinks of IWillie, the chi Pion, the
Certificate of Excellence, the.five boisterous tappers that uoill
non' never he) where it trust be treasured, gentlemen, and
the Charybdis of their becoming soft, enfeebled, nervously debilitated, or in danger of mental breakdown ...

You lose even your golden earthly students, eventually. As I
did Heinrich to suicide (after continual problems with nausea, stomach convulsions, tics and a whole range of
physical and psychological irritations, bearing witness that
even the Reichsfiihrer had difficulty quite practising what he
preached) in 1945. But you've got to appreciate the sheer
effort he made to hold on. You've got to appreciate the
commitment to civilizing brutality. Nothing fucks the Old
Man off more, believe me. He can forgive the animal in you
dragging you down to the trough. He can't forgive you
inviting the animal up for afternoon tea.

But the system petered out, you'll say. The death camps
were liberated. The fucking Nazis lost.

Well, yes, my darlings, they did. But their victory wasn't
my goal. (Obviously it was their goal, the morons.) Their victory, ultimately, was neither here nor there, as long as, after
they'd done their thing, millions of people could no longer
sustain the preposterous fallacy that the Old Man loved the
world.

Heinrich, by the way, was awfully surprised to find himself
screaming in agony - I mean sipping his complimentary
arrivals cocktail - in Hell.

I have of late - wherefore I know not ...

Evening in Clerkenwell. I've been writing for hours.
Apathetic rain and London's sky like a tarry lung. The City's
gone home, exhausted, with aching feet and sour skin. It's
gone home to seek the relief of diversion. It's gone home to
consume, to drink, to masturbate, to babble, to smoke, to
watch no Wants to Be a Millionaire? It's gone home to an
ordinariness only occasionally punctuated by the awful intimation that despite everything, despite Coronation Street, Silk
Cut, chat rooms, Sainsbury's, Christmas and the Wimbledon fortnight, despite all these and infinitely more, one day the
ordinariness will be terminally punctuated by the extraordinary full stop of death. I sat at Gunn's window and watched
the offices and banks exhale, the systole and diastole of rushhour traffic. I saw what I always see, what I've made it my
business to make sure any ethereal observer would see:
human beings avoiding God. How beautiful you are to me
still, after all these years! Eyes - I've never quite got used to
the beauty of human eyes, so transparently enslaved by the
soul, so ready to show me how much I've achieved.

Hard to calculate the things that brought nie here. I'll tell
you one of them.

Not long ago, having been lengthily busy in the corporate
world, I decided to put some time back into the meat and
potatoes of the operation and get down amongst the plebs
for a bit of slap and tickle. You need to keep your hand in.
Senior style consultants in elite hair salons around the world
will tell you: every now and then you need to just give
someone a haircut. So you find me in a wood at the northern
edge of Salisbury Plain (Stonehenge', Me again. Ritual rape,
torture, murder. Calendars? These boffins kill me) with Eddie
and Jane. Eddie's been hearing voices - Baraquel, Arioc,
Ezekeel, Jequon and Shamshiel to be precise, whispering
words of wisdom in the small hours. In any case, up until a
few hours ago Jane and Eddie were strangers - or rather,
Eddie was a stranger to Jane; Jane was no stranger to Eddie,
who'd been observing her for some time. Eddie's a thirtyeight-year-old telecommunications engineer with a
tankard-shaped head, small brown eyes and one permanently
blackened thumbnail. Jane's a twenty-four-year-old brunette
of no special features but nothing wrong with her either
who works as one of two receptionists in a small van hire
office on an industrial estate at the edge of the city.

Serial potential written all over Eddie. Topple this domino
and there's no telling how many (look out girls!) will fall
after it. Plus, his mother's a rabid Catholic, which is icing on
any cake. The boys have put in some time, but confessed that
ultimately and against their expectations they need His
Master's Voice to clinch it. This happens to me a lot. I delegate, but sooner or later they shuffle in, sheepish,
cap-fingering, wondering if I might find time to ... ah ...
etc. Needless to say it's a piece of Battenberg to me, the old
Blade Runner. `Eddie,' I said to him in his mother's voice.
`It's okay, you know. You won't get caught.' (That's pretty
much all you lot need to hear, not that it's morally defensible, but that it's covered.) Did the trick. Downloaded the
recommended chloroform dosage from the web (eeeeyup:
me again) and off he went.

Most of you probably want the abduction, the rape, the
murder, all the Thomas Harris palaver with the corpse, and
believe me if this were Gunn I'm sure you'd get it; some
pseudo-poetic cladding, some poignant details about cloudshadows or the vividness of an empty Coke can by her knee,
some watch-the-birdie writing to distract your attention from
the possibility that the entire thing's titillating to him (and
you) - but even baldly listed facts will be enough to delight
others among you, as they often do Gunn, decaf and gutless
sadist that he is. My hands were tied and I was forced to perform
oral sex. These are just impersonal newspaper details, but still
lights wink, bells ring. He comforts himself with the belief
that it's the writer's job to tell the truth unselectively, be
that the truth of motherhood or the truth of murder. `Go
ahead,' Penelope barked at him. `You'll be joining a venerable list of male writers who've written about men
committing violence against women. Men killi;tq women is
a fucking genre all on its own. Of course I realise it's your obligation to write about it, if it's at all a part of the world (as
is friendship and honour and simple kindness and people
dying for their beliefs - but maybe none of those is creatively
interestinc) but it's also your obligation to understand what it
means to you and why you're doing it. At which point,
Declan, don't come fucking crying to me if it turns out
you're doing it because you like it.' As you can see, Penelope's
critical faculties were not to be engaged lightly - a lesson I'm
not sure boneheaded Gunn ever learned.