A Man Lies Dreaming Read online

  Wolf’s Diary, 1st November 1939 – contd.

  At night the fruit and vegetable market closes and a different type of market springs beyond my office window. Whores. How I hated whores! Their bodies were riddled with syphilis and the other ills of their trade. The disease was but a symptom. Its cause was the manner in which love itself has been prostituted.

  I did not feel pity for the young girl, Edith. No. Instead I felt a cold anger, the sort of anger that had once driven me to oratory, when it had burned bright and strong. To see a Germanic girl prostituted in this way, in a foreign land, was a reminder to me of my own failure, of the way the land itself had been prostituted. Once Germany bled like a soldier; now it bled like a whore. It was a slow death; it was a death of love. I walked past the girls and in the night I felt unseen eyes watching my passing; but there are always eyes watching in the night. A mystery is not when one’s action goes unobserved. Rather it is an action to which no witness is willing to come forward.

  I know what Isabella Rubinstein feared. I made my way down through Walker’s Court onto Rupert Street, passing the White Horse and the Windmill cinema onto Shaftesbury Avenue. Theatreland. The lights burned bright here and theatregoers strolled along the avenue mingling with pickpockets and dollymops. At the Apollo Theatre on the corner the electric signs advertised Patrick Hamilton’s Gaslight. A pair of coppers I knew by sight went past me, eyeing the whores openly. I nodded to them and went on.

  Gerrard Street was full of little clubs and dusty alcoves. At this time of night gentlemen were heading out to supper with their wives, and young men of a literary bent were debating the merits and faults in the poetry of H.B. Yeats, Ezra Pound and Modernism in general. On the corner with Dean Street I saw a group of Blackshirts standing together in a dark mob, eying the passers-by with sullen hostility. On a wall I saw a placard for Mosley’s election campaign. Oswald’s handsome British face stared out at me with its dapper moustache and ironic smile. I saluted him, crisply. Then I went into the Hofgarten.

  It lay at the bottom of a narrow staircase behind a grey wooden door that bore no plaque. It was not a members-only club but then it was not not a members-only club, either. It was a place for like-minded people to meet and talk of the past. I abhorred it for all that it represented and all that it wasn’t, and couldn’t be. I pushed the heavy door at the bottom of the stairs and went in.

  It was dark and smoky inside. The smell of heavy Bavarian beer hung in the air like a peasant woman’s thick skirts hanging to dry. I could hear laughter, men’s drunken talk, the tap-tap-tap of chess pieces against a chessboard. A small piano stood in the corner, but no one was playing. It was too early and years too late for anyone to be playing the Horst Wessel Song.

  I could feel eyes on me. Heard the pitch of conversation change. In years past I would have revelled in it. Now I set my jaw and bore it. I hung up my coat and my hat and made my way to the bar counter.

  ‘What could I get you, sir?’

  ‘I would like a herbal tea,’ I said.

  He was a big ugly brute of a man; a fine Aryan. The face he turned on me began to open its maw in a display of mockery or outrage, revealing a wealth of gold. He truly was a man who carried his valuables on his person. He never did finish, though. He took me in and his face changed and his mouth closed without voicing whatever wisdom it was he had been about to impart.

  ‘Tea, sir?’

  ‘If you would be so kind.’

  ‘But of course. Of course. Herr—’

  ‘Wolf,’ I said.

  He rubbed his hands together, as if he were cold. ‘Wolf. Of course.’

  ‘Has Herr Hess come in yet?’ I said.

  At that he all but stood to attention. ‘Not yet, sir,’ he said.

  I gestured to an empty table in the corner. ‘I shall be sitting over there,’ I said. ‘Please be so kind as to bring me the tea when it is ready.’

  He nodded that great big head of his. A farmer boy from Austria, of the kind I had grown up amongst. Salt of the earth. I wondered if he was smarter than he looked. I made my way to the empty table and sat down. I was glad of the darkness of the room. Too many familiar faces, too many reminders of a past the world had already forgotten and I was trying to. I fingered the roll of money in my suit pocket. I had not been to the Hofgarten in three years.

  ‘Our fight is for the soul of this country, and the soul of the world. We must struggle, for nothing comes easily to men such as us, who will change the world. We, the Blackshirts, have been called, and we shall lead this nation to a new and higher civilisation. There is a cancer growing in our midst, the cancer of Judaism. This is our revolution. We shall be baptised in fire. Remember, you have a voice. You have a vote. Vote Mosley. We shall triumph in adversity—’

  ‘Turn the God damned radio off,’ someone said.

  His shadow fell on the table before I saw him. I may have dozed off. The cigarette and pipe smoke hurt my eyes. My tea had been cooling on the table for some time.

  ‘Hess,’ I said. He had thick wavy black hair and thick black eyebrows. His smile was genuine but cautious. I didn’t blame him.

  ‘Wolf,’ he said. For a moment, I thought he might try to hug me. I rose from the chair and shook his hand, formally.

  ‘It is good to see you again,’ he said.

  ‘You, too,’ I said. I looked at him. He bore up well. London had been good to Hess. His hair looked luxurious and shiny. His jacket was styled in black with the lightning bolt of the Blackshirts on the lapels. It looked tailor-made. He wore riding boots and a paunch. Hess had grown fat in this foreign city, after the Fall.

  ‘You are doing well,’ I said.

  He patted his belly. ‘I get by,’ he said.

  I gestured at the chair opposite and sat down again. He followed. ‘Can I get you anything?’ he said. I shook my head. ‘You never come to the Hofgarten,’ Hess complained. ‘Never come to see me. I wish you’d let me help you, at least. Money—’

  ‘I do not want your money.’

  He sighed. ‘I know,’ he said. He signalled to the barman. The lad brought over a small brandy and placed it at Hess’s elbow. Hess swirled it around, sniffed it appreciatively, and sipped.

  ‘Good?’ I said.

  ‘Wonderful.’

  I slapped the glass out of his hand and it smashed to the floor, the brandy spilling on Hess’s hand. I heard chairs scraping back, saw three men rise and marked them. Hess shook his limp hand then sucked on his fingers. He stared at me mournfully. ‘Bring me a napkin, please, Emil,’ he said. He gestured at his men and they sat down again. ‘You have an escort, these days,’ I said.

  ‘These are dangerous times,’ Hess said. ‘A man needs must take precautions.’

  The big barman brought over a silk handkerchief. It was embroidered with RH. Hess wiped his hand clean fastidiously and gave it back. ‘Thank you, Emil,’ he said.

  I stared at him across the table. ‘I meant no disrespect,’ he said.

  ‘I’m sure that you didn’t.’

  ‘What is it?’ he said.

  ‘I need information.’

  He nodded. ‘I heard you were working as a private investigator,’ he said.

  ‘You heard correctly.’

  His eyes grew as soft as his face. ‘They called you the Drummer,’ he said.

  ‘I have always fought,’ I said. ‘But I have always fought for order.’ I took a sip of my cold tea. ‘There must be order in all things.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Of course.’ He loosened his tie. ‘What do you need to know?’

  ‘I am looking for a girl. She would have been coming from Germany, to London.’

  ‘I see. Without papers, naturally.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Such a thing is not impossible, for a price,’ he said.

  ‘Tell me, Rudolf,’ I said. ‘Do many people disappear, en route from Germany?’

  ‘Disappear how?’

  I said, softly, ‘She was a Jewess.’

  He
stared into my eyes. ‘Wolf …’ he said.

  ‘Don’t.’

  ‘For the sake of my love for you,’ he said. ‘Don’t ask me.’

  ‘I need to know.’

  ‘There are doors which are best left closed,’ he said. He pushed his chair back and stood up. ‘For the sake of our friendship.’ He looked at me curiously. ‘What do you care what happens to a Jew?’

  ‘I don’t.’

  ‘Come and work for me,’ he said, impulsively. He saw my face. ‘With me, I mean. There is money to be made, power. I am someone here, Wolf. I am a man of influence.’

  ‘Hess,’ I said, ‘you are a pimp and a thief. You have traded your honour for cash.’

  ‘Don’t use those words.’

  ‘What words would you have me use?’

  He laughed at that. ‘Perhaps I’ve merely outgrown you,’ he said.

  ‘You have been reduced,’ I said. ‘While I remain the same. My integrity cannot be purchased so cheaply.’

  ‘You are a shadow of what you once were. A ghost.’ He laughed again, a sad, bitter sound. ‘You died in the Fall; what is left of you makes a mockery of what you once were.’

  I stood up too. He was taller than me, but he had always been the smaller man. ‘Please,’ he said, again. ‘Do not go asking such questions, mein freund.’

  ‘Give me a name,’ I said.

  Hess sighed. He reached into his breast pocket and threw down on the table a carte de visite. I picked it up. Printed on thick, expensive paper, it contained an address in the East End and nothing more. On the back, a symbol I had not seen in some time: it was a swastika.

  The night was full of eyes, watching. Wolf made his way out of the Hofgarten. At the end of the street the same group of Blackshirts was beating a man lying on the pavement. The man had curled in a foetal position, his hands uselessly covering his head. The Blackshirts wore thick-soled boots and they were kicking the man savagely. A pair of policemen were watching from the sidelines without expression. The air was scented with the smell of men’s sweat and blood and violence. It was a smell Wolf knew well, had in fact delighted in. Two white teeth lay on the ground beside the victim. Wolf paused as he walked past them. One of the Blackshirts wiped sweat from his face with the hem of his shirt. ‘What are you looking at,’ he said. Wolf shook his head. He walked on. Behind him the victim was whimpering in a broken voice. Oswald Mosley stared down at Wolf from the public walls, smiling winningly. Wolf walked on.

  There were eyes in the night, watching. He felt shadows gathering about him and he stopped and started, dawdling in front of shop windows, trying to catch a reflection, a clue as to the unseen watchers’ identity. Perhaps there was no one there. But he could scent them, hunters in the night. He had used the name Wolf in the 1920s and now he used it again, in London. He had always felt himself to have an affinity with wolves.

  The carte de visite was in his suit pocket. He did not like seeing Hess again, did not like being reminded of what had passed. How Hess had risen while he himself fell. There was a dull ache in his left leg. It had broken in the camp and never healed properly, and ached in the cold. He had been there three days short of five months when he escaped. Sometimes he missed Germany with a powerful ache, with every fibre of his being. He knew he was unlikely to ever see her again.

  The ’40s were coming. Christmas was in the air and along Charing Cross Road early decorations were already going up. A man behind a cart was selling roasted chestnuts. He had the swarthy complexion of a gypsy. The city was filled with refugees from the Fall, but the borders were closing, and tensions were mounting everywhere. Wolf bought the evening edition of the Daily Mail and glanced at the headlines as he walked. ‘Duke of Windsor in Support of Mosley’ said the front page. Well, no surprise there. The abdicated king had been a keen supporter of Wolf’s own politics, too, back when Wolf still had politics. He was a fool to marry the American woman, though. Love was a weaker force than hate, and Wolf could not help but despise the former monarch for that.

  There. Was that a shadow moving behind him? Wolf ducked into an alleyway. A man in a black suit with an unremarkable face. But the man continued past, seemingly oblivious. Wolf emerged from the alleyway. He found himself by Collet’s Bookshop, still open at this hour, coffeehouse revolutionaries conspiring amidst leftwing pamphlets and communist propaganda. The man in the black suit had disappeared. Wolf walked on, stopped by Marks & Co. to browse the books outside. Popular fiction, books thumbed and marked. Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon. A row of P.G. Wodehouse novels. Another copy of The Hobbit. A review copy of Anthony Powell’s From a View to a Death. But Wolf had little love for the weakness of the English tongue. German had a martial tune; it was neither tarnished nor afraid. He walked on.

  Oxford Street coming up, Wolf walking aimlessly, checking his reflection in shop windows. He had black hair receding at the temples, a high forehead, a strong chin, ears sticking out slightly. No moustache. He could no longer abide the moustache.

  There!

  He turned suddenly and rapidly and began to walk with purpose the way he’d come. A second youngish man in a black suit and tie like an underemployed undertaker had begun to turn the other way, too late. In moments Wolf was on him, grabbing the man by the lapels, slamming him against the brick wall. He pressed his face close into the stranger’s. ‘Who are you?’ he said, speaking low. ‘What do you want?’

  The man didn’t struggle. ‘Excuse me, pal,’ he said, ‘I think you got the wrong idea there.’

  Despite his diction his accent came across loud and clear and American. Wolf released him. The man had not struggled though he looked like he could have put up a fight, had he wanted to. Under the cheap suit was a body kept trim and in shape. ‘Why are you following me?’ Wolf said. The man looked embarrassed.

  ‘Do you know the way to the British Museum?’ he said. ‘This damn city can be confusing. I think I lost my way somewhere.’

  ‘Yes, you did,’ Wolf said. He stared hard at the man. ‘The museum is closed.’

  ‘It is?’

  There was a twinkle in the man’s eyes. Wolf’s hands tightened on the man’s lapels. The man still didn’t struggle. He seemed to regard Wolf with some irony. It was not a quality Wolf possessed, or much appreciated.

  ‘Where is your friend?’ Wolf said.

  ‘Excuse me?’

  Wolf spat. His phlegm hit the brick wall over the man’s shoulder and slid down, slowly. ‘I won’t give you and yours a second warning,’ he said. He turned just as abruptly and walked off. He did not watch to see if the other man was following him still.

  * * *

  In Berwick Street the whores were busy at their trade. The watcher in the dark had seen the detective exit his office and speak to the young German whore and to the coloured one, and seen him leave, but he remained behind. He had time. All the time in the world. He eyed the whores.

  He was wrapped in shadows. He was like a ghost, or H.G. Wells’s invisible man. In his invisibility there was power. He felt the knife under the coat. The smoothness of the grind versus the sharpness of the point and edge. How good it felt. He watched the whores, watched a sailor talking to the young German, or was she Austrian, he understood only hazily the difference but it didn’t matter. The sailor took her by the hand and they vanished into the shadows. He felt the knife, stroking the metal. They couldn’t see him, nobody could. All he had to do was choose. He felt so hard, painfully so, but it was a good pain: it was a pain of anticipation. Soon. He had no need to rush. Waiting was half the pleasure, though perhaps he did not see it that way. It was just a fantasy. He wouldn’t do anything. Not yet. But he could imagine it, standing there, watching the women, holding his knife. The things he would do to them. They didn’t even see him. But he saw them.

  Later he saw the detective come back. A small figure, so unremarkable. But you couldn’t be deceived by appearances. It was for the detective that he was doing this. He watched the man’s weary steps. The detective passe
d so close to him, nearly brushing against him, and he held his breath, but the detective didn’t even notice him. No one ever did. Once the detective was past he pressed his back against the bricks and watched the whores again, his hand in his pocket. He was so hard and then he was soft and there was a pleasant warmth. He wasn’t going to do anything. Not yet.

  But soon.

  * * *

  In another time and place Shomer lies dreaming.

  2

  When Wolf returned it was late. He climbed the steps slowly. He rented a small bedsit next to his office. When he pushed the door open he found an envelope on the floor where it had been pushed through under the door. It was a heavy cream paper. His name was written on the back in a beautiful hand, in black ink. He picked it up and hefted it. There was no postmark. It must have been hand-delivered. He thought he knew the handwriting. He carried the envelope across the room.

  Wolf’s accommodation consisted of a bed and a desk and a kitchenette. The only decorations were the books. They lay everywhere, on the floor, on the windowsill, on the desk. A sea of books, their pages like waves. Sometimes he thought he would drown in words, all those words.