The Rendezvous (12 page)

‘I shouldn't worry, Robert; Ruth's always having legal fights. She thrives on them. Surely he'll advise her?'

‘He doesn't know anything about our trust laws,' Bob said. ‘And I guess he's found out it's not easy to say no to Ruth, especially when it concerns her own money. Anyhow, let's forget it for now. Did you like the play? I was a bit disappointed – I suppose I expected the impossible. He's a fantastic guy, though. One of the biggest theatrical talents for years. Funny running into Karl Amstat and Julia – I wouldn't have thought it was his kind of an evening. She looked really something tonight.'

‘Yes,' Terese said, ‘she did. She dresses beautifully.'

‘By the way,' he said, and he was laughing, ‘did he ever take you out to lunch? I just remembered!'

‘Yes,' she said, ‘once.' It was the first real lie she had ever told him. ‘I suppose I forgot to tell you about it. It was quite pleasant.'

‘Nothing sensational.' He grinned, and finished his drink. ‘He's a bit Wagnerian for you, darling. There's something very tough about him and I don't know quite what it is. Anyway, Julia likes him. Maybe she likes being pushed around. Come on, time for bed. I have an early meeting in the morning.'

‘Darling, I was thinking,' she said it very quickly before he could get up, ‘couldn't we have a change?'

‘Change? What sort of change?'

‘Well, I was thinking about what fun Ruth said they'd had in India – couldn't we go, Robert? Couldn't we just pack up and take a nice holiday? I'd love it!'

‘Why, sweetheart, you've really thrown me! You don't mean to say you want to go and shoot
tigers
like that crazy sister of mine? What's got into you? You've never wanted to travel much before – why India, of all places? Why not Europe – we meant to go to Portugal last year and never made it.'

‘Portugal would be lovely,' she said. ‘I just thought India was different – I thought you'd enjoy it more than going to Estoril. Darling, let's go to Portugal!'

‘All right, we'll go to Portugal. May is the best month, or June. We should have cleared this trust business up in a few weeks. That's a swell idea.'

‘I don't mean May or June,' she said. She came and sat down on the arm of his chair and put her arm round his neck. ‘He's never said no to you for anything', that was what Joe Kaplan had said to her that morning and it was true. Now what she was asking for was for his sake more than hers. ‘I want to go away now, Robert, just on our own. Right away from here, from New York. You're right, I am tired – I need a holiday.'

‘Wait a minute, darling, I said May or June, but that doesn't tie you down … you could go on ahead for a week or two. But I can't walk out on this family business, not at this exact moment. Normally I don't have commitments that we can't change to suit ourselves, but this is serious. There's something like fifteen million dollars involved in this and Ruth needs me here. I'll try and hurry it up, I'll do my damndest, but I can't take off now, just like that. It's impossible.'

He squeezed her and got up, holding her tightly to his side, explaining why he couldn't leave his sister and avoid his family responsibilities just this once. He was much taller than she was, and he couldn't see her face.

‘Please, Robert.' She said it, and drew away from him. ‘Please take me away now. I really want to go. I need to get away!'

‘But why?' he said. ‘Why so suddenly? Look, Terese, if there's anything the matter, anything worrying you – for God's sake come out and tell me. Otherwise this wanting to rush off on a vacation at a minute's notice makes no sense at all. Especially when I've explained why I can't.'

‘Yes, you've explained.' The stupidity, the irony, of it made her suddenly angry with him. ‘Your sister decides she needs more money – thirty million dollars isn't enough for her, so you have to stay and hold her hand through it. This is the first time I've asked you for something I really wanted, and you can't do it. All right, Robert. Don't let's argue. It was a silly whim, I'm sorry.' She walked past him into the bedroom and shut the door. A moment later he had opened it and was behind her, taking her in his arms.

‘I'm sorry, my sweet. Of course I'll take you away. Just give me a week or two. Maybe I can talk her out of it. Say you book for three weeks ahead – that's not too long to wait, is it?'

‘No,' she said wearily. She leant against him, and shut her eyes. ‘I may go a little before you. Would you mind that?'

‘Of course I'd mind,' he said. ‘You know I hate being without you. I feel like a man without an arm. But you go if you want to, and I'll follow on, if you can't wait for a couple of weeks to get away.'

‘I can wait,' she said. ‘Of course I can wait.'

‘You're sure there's nothing the matter – nothing wrong?'

She looked into the anxious face, and knew that no matter what the consequences, she couldn't turn to him for help without telling him the truth. And she would never tell him that. Whatever happened, he must never know, never be hurt.

She smiled at him and touched his face. ‘There's nothing wrong. I was just being spoilt and stupid. Forget it, darling. We'll go away together when this family business is cleared up.'

‘I adore you,' he said seriously. ‘I'll even take you to India and we'll shoot a couple of maharajahs, just to be different.'

She found herself laughing and the old feeling of safety came back. ‘It would give the tigers a break,' she said. ‘Oh, Robert, you are ridiculous! And I adore you too.' At that moment Karl Amstat seemed totally unreal. The idea of running away from him was equally out of proportion, when all she had to do was remember all she owed her husband and refuse to see him again.

For the first time since he had moved there two years ago, Amstat noticed the emptiness of his apartment when he got back that night. It was a luxurious flat, furnished with Julia's help in excellent modern style, and he had bought several good pictures by artists who were considered an investment. It was his home, and he had been proud of it until that moment. Now, as he shut the front door and walked into the living room, it was a cold, echoing place, angular and stark, the impersonal room of a bogus personality. It wasn't him, this place; it had nothing to do with the real man who lived in it; it wasn't his true taste; it was part of the façade he had built round himself, as false as his name and his papers. He looked round at everything, and thought how ugly it was, how alien to what he would have chosen in other circumstances. He did something unusual; it was late and he had meant to go to bed, but he poured out a long whiskey and took it into the bedroom with him. The bedroom was dominated by a big double-bed, covered in brown and white calf-skin; the bedroom walls were white leather, the furniture Swedish designed and very functional. In the closets there were rows of American suits, a rack of handmade shoes, pyjamas with his initials on the left breast pocket, very discreetly embroidered in dark blue. It all belonged to Karl Amstat, who was born in Berne and was a successful architect in New York. And it had really nothing to do with the man who stood in front of the glass and looked at himself, the whiskey in his hand. That woman he had quarrelled with and walked out on, she had nothing to do with him either; she was as much a phantom as the rest of it. The only real thing she had ever done was to tell him he was in love with Terese Bradford; he could admit that calmly now. He was in love with the woman, just as he must have been in love with the girl twenty years ago. Nothing had changed, after all. He was still Alfred Brunnermann.

He hadn't allowed himself to say his own name for years. Terese was in love with him too; he knew it, and he knew that it was Brunnerman, the hunted outcast, that she wanted, and not Amstat. He had lived a lie for twenty years to save his life. He had tried to think of himself as dead, to obliterate the past; not just for safety but because there was so much pain and shame in it now, that he had wanted to forget. He had run after the war, because everyone round him was deserting, while Germany came down in a thunder of ruin and devastation that shook the world it had so nearly dominated. He was declared a criminal, and he had behaved like one. Unlike so many of those who fled with him, he felt that he
had
committed a crime, and taking on Amstat's personality was a means of escaping that guilt. He had become an architect, dedicated to the construction of buildings where he could marry the functional and the beautiful; he touched nothing that reminded him of the destruction and waste of his past life. And yet the aching need remained, the need to look back with some degree of pride. He had accepted that he must always be alone, but until now he hadn't been free to be alone with himself as he really was. Terese Bradford had made this possible; she had given him back his identity, because she knew it. Somewhere in the blacked-out memory the young Gestapo colonel who had tried to step between her and his own diabolical organisation was alive and in her life again.

That was who she looked at, talked to, gave her hand to hold when they had their meetings. Even though she didn't know it, and never would, her ignorance didn't matter to him. She mattered; she mattered more than anything because she was almost the last thing he could remember of which he wasn't personally ashamed. He had been dismissed from Paris because he had sent her to hospital, and transferred to the Russian front as unreliable. And that was where it happened, during the retreat.

He emptied the glass and sat down on the big bed, on the calf-skin cover which he had never liked, and hid his head in his hands. It had taken a long time to shut the memory out; he used to dream of it, and wake, in some dingy Argentinian lodging house, sweating and choking with horror. He had triumphed in the end, and stopped thinking about it, and dreaming about it. Now, it was back behind his eyes, a cold, white waste of land, dotted with shattered trees, and the smoking ruins of the retreating Panzer tanks which had been caught by the Russian artillery.

And a long uneven crocodile was moving across the snow, moving very slowly, disintegrating in parts and coming together again, as the old people, or the children fell, or lagged behind. There were thousands of them; he had watched from a scout car, through binoculars; men of his Waffen S.S. division were moving the dark human stream along towards a wood. His senior officer, a brigade general called Schaeffer, was sitting in the back of the scout car, drinking cognac out of a flask to keep warm. He didn't want to be bothered to watch; he had told Brunnerman to stand up in the biting wind and tell him what was happening. He had seen it all before; he had carried out so many executions that he was bored, not nauseated. It was routine, like squashing the lice that lived in their filthy, frozen uniforms. It meant nothing to Schaeffer except a duty he could delegate to someone else, while he comforted himself with sips of brandy. They were in Poland, just outside Lodz, and when the order came through from Army Headquarters in Berlin, Brunnerman had carried it out and sent his men to round up all the Jewish population of the town and march them out into the open country. He had known what Schaeffer was going to do with them. But it was an order. And they carried out their orders; this was their glory at that time, when defeat and death were pressing as hard on them as the pursuing Russian armies. Their discipline never broke. Only afterwards, in the hindsight of sanity and civilised values, did Brunnerman see it as his own and his nation's lasting shame. Four thousand Jews had been marched out that day, and taken into the woods where the men dug a series of long shallow trenches and the S.S. set up machine-guns, the crews slapping their sides and stamping on the ground to keep warm while they waited. Schaeffer had stayed on the perimeter of the wood in the car; he had sent his subordinate ahead to see the business was properly carried out. That's what subordinates were for, to stand in the bloody cold and get the men moving with the digging, and see that the mess was covered up properly afterwards.

It had been done very efficiently; within two hours the S.S. were coming out of the wood, climbing into their transports and throttling forward through the snow towards the shelter of Lodz for the night.

To the brigade general's surprise his young colonel had spent some minutes behind the car vomiting. He had shouted at him to get in, and made the squeamish bastard pull himself together by giving a precise report of what had happened, even though the noise of the motor engine made it impossible for Schaeffer to catch more than a few words.

‘And you had the trenches filled in?'

He could still hear that voice, after twenty years, the voice of a man he saw die only two weeks later in a vicious rearguard action with the first Russian troops to catch up with them. He could hear his answer, shouted above the revving engine, fighting its own battle with the soft snow. ‘All graves were covered over. Everything was in order.'

Everything was in order. The screams had stopped and so had the steady rattling of the guns, except for a shot here and there, as an officer inspected the heaps in the trenches and fired point blank at anything that moved. He had stood back, on the edge of the clearing, his hands deep in the pockets of his greatcoat, the noises still going on in his head, the figures still reeling backwards into the pits, long after it was over and his men were shovelling the fresh earth and newly fallen snow on top of what they had done.

He could see and hear it all again at the moment, and suddenly his stomach heaved, and he went to the bathroom and retched. He had nearly shot himself once; one night when he was in Buenos Aires, and he had enrolled at the university to study under Diego Bolsa when the chance of the Jewish intelligence agents catching up with him had decreased to a point where he seemed really safe – then he had taken out the little gun he carried for protection, and nearly blown his brains out because of what he had done in the wood outside Lodz. Now he came out of the bathroom and looked round the empty bedroom, and decided that this was not the night to try to sleep. He went into the living room and sat down to work. He owed his life to the German affiliations in America; they had formed an organisation that had its roots in the old outlawed Bundt, and they channelled their own refugees through the South Americas, providing funds and papers, maintaining a counter-intelligence system to the pursuing Israelis who took up the hunt when the Allies declared the war criminals files should be closed, marked dead or disappeared. Germans had helped him, anonymous sympathisers with the men of their own blood who were on the run, and he had been grateful and obedient. The instructions were precise. Keep clear of women, make no intimates, never on any account get drunk, and keep inconspicuous. He had lived this regime for years, existing on odd jobs here and there, until they gave the word that he could safely study seriously. He had accepted the forged identity and the carefully checked background of Karl Amstat and worn the man's personality like a suit of clothes until he felt it had turned into a skin. Nobody had approached him since he first settled in New York. He had forgotten them and they had presumably counted him a non-risk. But then nobody had imagined he would meet Terese Bradford.