Your Face Tomorrow: Poison, Shadow, and Farewell (66 page)

'To spread outbreaks of cholera?' I couldn't help asking. But he didn't pick this up as an allusion to himself, perhaps because he no longer remembered saying it.

'Exactly. Or even chicken pox. We were all convinced, in all the divisions, sections, units and groups, in the SIS in general, in the SOE, in the PWE, in the OIC, as well as in the NID, the PWB and, of course, the SHAEF, that any setback that might distract the Germans from what was really important, anything that hampered their war-time activities or took them away from or made them neglect their tasks, that even minimally diminished their efficiency, would be hugely to our advantage, and would help us to gain time while we waited for the Americans to make up their mind to enter the War (how tedious and hesitant they were; and then they have the nerve to boast about their contribution). It was a matter of keeping the largest possible number of men occupied with bothersome or seemingly dangerous minutiae. Each time the Nazis had to send a soldier or a member of the Gestapo to tackle some unexpected task that had nothing to do with the War proper, it helped a little and gave us some advantage, or that was our feeling, which, up until December 1941, after more than two years of resisting on our own, was one of absolute desperation. Anyway, this Jefferys fellow would arrive—a whirlwind of energy—and stay for a week, issuing all kinds of instructions and urging the people there to come up with their own tricks and dodges, all intended to cause the maximum amount of damage. He was an enthusiastic, hyperactive, febrile, infectious kind of man, who raised spirits simply because he treated everything as if it were really important. According to him, the smallest obstacle could prove useful, anything to make them trip or stumble. A city in Germany or occupied Europe, for example, might be plagued with murders or burglaries, with fires in buildings and hotels, or else an epidemic, even if it was only flu, might be declared, or the supplies of electricity, gas, coal or water were cut off; there might be a shortage of medicines in hospitals or foodstuffs left to rot; all those things could help. The accumulation of problems and calamities and crimes breeds insecurity, distrust and anxiety, and having to worry about many things at once is what most exasperates and wears people down. The more off-balance the Nazis were, the more burdened with nonessential tasks, the more chance we had of landing them a blow in the solar plexus.'

'You're not telling me that ordinary murders were committed that weren't ordinary at all? You're not telling me that you and your group planned and committed random murders of civilians?'

Wheeler made an ambiguous gesture with his open hand at forehead height, as if he were raising the brim of an imaginary hat.

'No, I don't believe so. Sefton Delmer may have been a
bon vivant
and a pragmatist, with few scruples about the subversive techniques used to undermine and destroy the enemy, a man who, in the middle of all this, was seen blithely eating, drinking and laughing as if entirely unaffected, but he did have a remnant of conscience. According to Hemingway, who met up with him in Madrid during our War, when both men were correspondents, he looked like 'a ruddy English bishop.' Others thought they saw a resemblance to Henry VIII, because he was a big man verging on the obese, with rather bulging eyes and a florid complexion. And since razors were in short supply during the War, he had let his beard grow too. Jefferys, on the other hand, did advocate encouraging or even actually carrying out non-political murders: nowadays, this would be termed terrorism. I'm sure they took no notice of him in that respect, and besides, the SOE, with its local collaborators in every country, had quite enough objectives of its own, in particular, military ones. When it came to acts of sabotage and torpedoings, most of his exuberant ideas were well received. And Valerie gave him an idea of her own. Yes, Valerie had an idea.' And Wheeler's tone, as he spoke those last two sentences, grew suddenly much more somber. He took another couple of sips of sherry, again rested his walking stick on the arms of his chair, gripped it with one hand, as if it were a bar to hold on to, and continued without further hesitation: he had decided to tell me this story and he was going to. 'Everyone wanted to help in those days, Jacobo. It was incredible how the whole country rallied round, first to endure, and then to destroy the Nazis. For those of us who lived through those times, what happened later on, in the Thatcher era, with the ridiculous Falklands War, when people got so fired up and cocky, was utterly shameful, a fake, a farce, a grotesque imitation of that other War. During the real War there was no cockiness and no vaudeville patriotism.' Wheeler pronounced 'vaudeville' with a French accent, as my father would have done. 'People simply resisted, but never bragged or boasted about anything. Everyone did what they could and, with a few rare exceptions, no one gave themselves a medal for it. They were real times, not phony, not sham. Jefferys was a stimulus, a spur during the days he spent in Woburn, or, rather, Milton Bryan, and Valerie wanted to help as much as she could, to make a real contribution. She worked hard. Anyway, her Austrian friend's older sister, the one who was some ten years older, Ilse by name, had had a boyfriend in the days when Valerie still used to spend her holidays in Melk with the Mauthner family, and so she got to know him over several summers. The boyfriend was already a convinced Nazi by then—I'm talking about the period from 1929 or '30 to 1934 or '35, which was when Valerie stopped going to stay with them and her friend stopped visiting her at Christmas, when they were both fourteen or fifteen. The older sister and the boyfriend finally got married in 1932 or '33 and moved to Germany, and the younger sister, Maria, with whom Valerie corresponded during the rest of the year and up until shortly before the War, had told her how worried the family were about that entirely expected marriage. The Mauthners always hoped it would never happen, that Ilse would break up with her boyfriend, as often happens with couples who meet very young. The man, whose name was Rendl—'

Here I couldn't help but interrupt him.

'Rendel? R-e-n-d-e-l?' I immediately spelled it out for him.

'No. In Austria, it was written without the second "e,"' he replied. 'But, yes, the Rendel you know and who works for Tupra is the grandson of that older sister and her husband. Not that I've ever met him and I only know his father slightly. I helped his father, Ilse's son, financially, so that he could come to England when he was still a child; afterwards, I preferred not to stay in touch. That's another story though. But let's not get ahead of ourselves. The husband, Rendl, and this was known by his in-laws, had a Jewish grandmother, who had died before he was born, and so he was a "quarter-Jew," a second-degree
Mischling.
As I said before, nothing tended to happen to such people because they were considered to be "German" and were assimilated, although they couldn't, in theory, aspire to holding any important post. However, that quarter of Jewishness worried the whole Mauthner family, the father, the mother and the other sisters. Not because they were Nazis—they were, it seems, apolitical, passive people, who did, later on, I imagine, become Nazified—what worried them was a fear of any "contamination," which was a very widespread fear at the time. Bear in mind that the Nuremberg Laws were passed in 1935, but in reality all they did was regulate many of the measures that had already been taken against the Jews unofficially (the whole business went back a long way) and to make official and legal an already existing situation, namely the intense social dislike of Jews and the discrimination against them. Now if Rendl hadn't been such a fervent Nazi, he could have lived a reasonably quiet life. However, he wanted to join the SS and achieved that ambition shortly after he got married. In order to do so, he first had to get rid of that Jewish grandmother, I assume by doing what so many others had done: offering a large bribe to the authorities in the place where she was born. And as a consequence of that concealment, that falsification, that imposture, the "stain" became a secret to be jealously guarded, and the Mauthner daughters were told as much as soon as the "cleansing" of the records had taken place. For one of them, however, it was too late.

'She had told Valerie, I mean, your wife, Peter.' This time I corrected myself at once.

Wheeler noticed my uncertainty. Very few things escaped him even now.

'It's all right, you can call her Valerie. And she wasn't my wife at the time. She was called Valerie Harwood then and could have imagined very little of what was to come. She couldn't even have imagined me because we hadn't yet met. But, yes, Maria Mauthner had told a friend who, a few years later, would turn into an enemy. Not a personal enemy, of course, but . . . how could you best describe it? National, political, patriotic? I don't know what kind of enemy one becomes in time of war. You hate complete strangers and old friends, you hate all-embracingly, hate a whole country or even several. It's very odd when you think about it. It makes no sense at all, and it's such a waste. Maria had not only told her about it just once, she continued to mention it in the years that followed, by letter. They had been friends since childhood, they trusted each other, they talked openly, they gave each other their news. Valerie learned that Ilse had three children, a boy and two girls, she even met the oldest, when he was just a baby, during her last visit to Melk, in 1934 or '35. She also learned that Rendl, whom she had always considered an imbecile when she'd met him during her summer visits, a kind of pre-fanatic, was rising fast in the SS; and when the two friends stopped corresponding in 1939, she knew that he had reached the rank of Major, or perhaps Captain, in one of the Cavalry Divisions of the SS. One of those divisions, by the way, the 33rd, met a sad (for us joyous) fate when it was wiped out at the Battle of Budapest in 1945, but I don't know if that was his division. Not that it matters, because, by then, Rendl wasn't in the Cavalry or in the SS, but, quite likely, in a concentration camp, in a mass grave or else incinerated.'

'What happened?' I asked so that he didn't get distracted recalling facts about the War.

Wheeler finished his sherry and hesitated as to whether or not he should have another. I encouraged him, got up to fill his glass, and he glanced across to where Mrs. Berry had been coming and going, but then we heard her begin to play upstairs, in the empty room where there was nothing else to do but sit down before the piano: perhaps it was her practice time, before lunch, at least on those Sundays exiled from the infinite. Wheeler pointed with one finger up at the ceiling and then at the bottle.

'You know already, don't you, Jacobo? You can imagine what happened. Valerie told me that she had doubts about the plan and would have liked to ask me my opinion. But I was away most of the time, and communications were difficult and brief, there wasn't time to discuss problems. When she told Jefferys about it, she hadn't had any contact with Maria for three or four years, and didn't even know if she was still alive. Besides, everything in the past fades and seems less intense, and childhood friendships are the quickest to blur, mainly because children cease to be children and they change, they cast off and deny their childhood until it's far far away, and only then do they miss it. Jefferys appealed to the inventiveness and to the remote, oblique, improbable heroism of his black gamblers, both those who knew what they were involved in and those who thought they were white gamblers; he'd say to them: "Don't keep anything back, however trivial and silly it may seem to you, tell us about it: it could prove vital, could save English lives and win this War." He demanded incessant activity, initiatives, plots, schemes, and always more ideas, and Valerie gave him hers, or he created one out of what she told him: "Hartmut Rendl, SS officer, with the rank of Major or at least Captain—if he's been promoted in the last few years—is a
Mischling
on his Jewish grandmother's side, and has, moreover, destroyed or falsified documents in order to expunge that information and be admitted to the SS, the most racially pure institution in the Reich and the principal perpetrator of atrocities." Rendl was a member of the SS, a criminal and an imbecile, so why have any doubts or scruples? It isn't hard to imagine the excitement that such a case would arouse in Jefferys and in Delmer himself when he was told about it. They couldn't wait to get the machinery up and running: they not only ensured that the information about Rendl reached the ears of the SS high command, and, if possible, the ears of his boss, the irascible and purgative Himmler, they saw in this a new opportunity for black propaganda. They began forging birth certificates and pages from the register of births, marriages and death, which accused other army officers, high-up government officials and even members of the Nazi Party of being "Jews," "half-Jews" or "first-degree
Mischlinge."
Not many, of course, they didn't want to overdo this "plague," they spaced out those reports, issuing just a few at a time, those that seemed most believable and had most basis in fact. It was no easy job, but the PWE was brilliant at forgery: thanks to a collector, they had German types and moulds (or matrices or whatever they're called, I know nothing about printing) of what are called
Fraktur
or Gothic print, dating from the seventeenth century to the twentieth. And even if sooner or later those forgeries were discovered (although not all of them were), while the Nazis were carrying out their investigations and checking each of those suddenly suspect files . . . well, it was worth keeping them busy over nonsense like that which had nothing to do with the War and making them waste time rummaging through the old archives of town halls and parishes (in the nineteenth century, many German and Austrian Jews had converted to Christianity, especially to Catholicism), and thus fomenting distrust towards their own kind, for as I mentioned before, one of Delmer's priorities was to bring the Germans into conflict with each other. And when the trick worked and brought with it the removal or fall from grace of a Colonel, a General, an Admiral, or a Party leader, that saved us a job and spread panic and lowered morale among the rank and file. It may seem idiotic to us now, but it was a real blow to them, the idea that there were infiltrators in their most select units, that the
Wehrmacht
was infested with "rats," and that no one, however loyal and whatever their merits, was safe from such "revisions." It was a pretty dirty trick. It was of course "black" in more than one sense, because what they did was to take advantage of the cruellest and most repellent aspect of the Reich and, by exploiting it, brought about the persecution of more Jews, whether real or imaginary. However, these "half-" or "quarter-Jews" were not your average Jew, they weren't poor innocents; they were, above all, convinced and active Nazis, who were either fighting us or hunting down "full Jews" or both, and so no one at Milton Bryan worried overmuch about the possible injustice of that tactic, based on false accusations or, worse still, on actual fact, as was the case with Rendl. No one lost much sleep over it. Nevertheless, Delmer, as I recall, chose not to mention it in his autobiography. I wouldn't have lost any sleep over it either, just as I lost no sleep over many of the other things I had to do and did. On the other hand, I did lose sleep over some of the things I
saw,
but that's different, it's easier to deal with what one has done oneself." He paused briefly, as if he were starting a new paragraph or opening a long parenthesis, and he turned to look outside, at the river. "I only disobeyed an order once, on a crossing from Colombo to Singapore. I was a Lieutenant Colonel at the time. I was accompanying an Indian agent who had first been recruited by the Japanese and who then, under threat of immediate execution, became a double agent for our side, a man whom I myself had interrogated and trained in Colombo. With the War nearing its end, I was told to dispose of him during the journey, since he was no longer of any use to us.' In that context, the words 'dispose of him' could, I understood, mean only one thing. 'It was suggested that I find him a watery grave.' And the expression 'watery grave' confirmed my first impression. 'His code name was "Carbuncle" and I'm sure that he, too, was expecting to meet his end on the crossing. Perhaps it was his conviction that he was going to die, and his apparent acceptance of the fact, that prevented me from finding the right moment. He had toyed with the Japanese and with us, as all double agents do, but then again, he had told a lie to the Japanese that had helped us intercept and sink the Japanese heavy cruiser
Haguro
off Penang, in May 1945. He had, after all, been instrumental in our laying that trap. I don't know why I did it, why I disobeyed. I didn't really see what reason there was to get rid of him, and, besides, the Secret Service was full of idiots. If he was no longer of any use to us, he would be of still less use to the Japanese: if he fell into their hands, they would soon find a grave for him, either watery or dry, or would leave him out in the elements to rot and be eaten by the pigs. I had seen what they had done in the Andaman Islands: part of the indigenous population piled into barges and shelled from the garrison, as target practice, when they were already far out in deep water; decapitations, terrible rapes, breasts not lopped off with a machete or a sword but crushed by repeated blows, a parade of soldiers in full array obeying the orders of a Commander whose years of atrocities, during the long Japanese occupation, I had to investigate when the Islands were liberated. I had had enough . . . Nowadays you hear or read that violence is addictive, or that once you've inflicted violence or seen it, it loses its impact, that you get used to it. In my experience this is totally false, a fools' tale told to fools. You can stand a certain amount, and possibly more than you imagined you could, but ultimately, it's not so much that you grow tired of it, more that it exhausts and destroys you. And it keeps coming back and you can't forget it . . . When we reached Singapore, I disembarked with "Carbuncle" still handcuffed to me, wrist to wrist, which is incredibly uncomfortable. Have you ever tried it? I shot a sideways glance at him from my great height, because he was much shorter than me. He seemed genuinely surprised to have reached his destination and to be on dry land again. Then I took out the key, unlocked the handcuffs while he stared at me in amazement, and then I said "Fuck off!" He took to his heels and I watched him disappear into the crowd filling the port. Yes, I'd had enough . . . But it wasn't over yet . . .'