The Violent Century Read online

  A trap. He should have known. Waits for a bullet, but none come. A strange silence. No one moves. Fogg looks at Drakul. The man’s face twisted in something like a smile. Fogg pulls at the other’s sleeve. Back down, he says, quietly. Facing the Gestapo men they climb backwards, cautiously. Back down the stairs. Back to the door. No one moves. Drakul, almost contemptuously, pushes the door open all the way. Darkness beyond. They pass the threshold and go inside.

  Into the dark. Fogg’s heart beating faster, his hands clammy, for once he doesn’t even feel the cold. Takes him a moment to realise it isn’t his reaction to their situation, it is the temperature in the room. The heat hits them fully a moment later. Warm, almost tropical air. A cloying smell. Like cloves. The door shuts behind them. Fogg turns a moment too late, just to see a sliver of light being extinguished. Anyway there is no escape that way, only death.

  Takes a step forward. Another. Hits something hard. Runs his fingers over it. A rounded wall, smooth and glass-like. Drakul somewhere close by. Breathing in short, hard bursts. Angry. Fogg traces the object before him. It appears to be a column of some sort, but wide, and tapering upwards. Like a bell jar, almost. Fogg takes a step back. Takes out his cigarettes, and a lighter. Puts a cigarette between his lips, more bravado than need. Can barely feel it against his lips. Flicks open the lighter. Pushes it to life.

  Light floods the chamber. Electric bars, arcs of light high above. Fogg takes a step back, the tiny flame of the lighter lost in the glare of light. Nevertheless he applies it to the tip of the cigarette, draws what he assumes might be his last breath of smoke. Blinks tears against the glare. Takes another step back.

  Details come into being around him. The room is a long cavernous chamber. It has a high ceiling. The floor is white and clinical, and cables snake across it like dark reptiles. But what makes Fogg swear, what makes him draw a nervous breath on the cigarette, are the objects dotted around the otherwise empty room.

  They are, indeed, bell jars. Giant bell jars, made of hardened glass, bolted to the floor with massive iron screws. Inside each one …

  Fogg shakes his head, from side to side, like a wet dog. Drakul is so still beside him, it is as if he’s become one of the things inside the jars.

  Suspended under glass …

  Fogg finds himself staring at the nearest bell jar, the one he hit in the dark. It is filled with water. The water is blue, rich with bubbles, as if it is oxygen-enriched. Inside the water is a man.

  The man’s skin looks hard, unnatural. It is an armour. A carapace. The man’s skin is blue-green. His hands, pressed against the glass in mute appeal, are webbed. Around his neck fleshy vents open and close soundlessly. Gills, Fogg thinks, numb. The man is like an ancient story of mermaids, he is like some mountain river crustacean, a human prawn. His eyes stare at Fogg. Is he alive? Is he somehow suspended there, in animation, within his glass prison?

  Fogg doesn’t know. Looks around the room. At the other inmates, specimens, caught within the bell jars.

  A girl with ivy growing out of her hair, her fingers. Leaves like a bracelet over her wrists and neck. Thick vines beating against the glass. Her eyes stare at Fogg. He turns away. The bell jars spread out across the room, there are so many he does not know where to look, it is a menagerie, a lab, a prison: a mixture of all three. In one jar a man constantly reconstitutes himself, his human shape shedding and re-forming, a blob that can’t stay still. In another a man looking as young as a boy has a beak and green-feather wings that beat against the glass. Fogg can’t look. Has to get back to London. To the Old Man. Tell him.

  Tell him what?

  – My people, Drakul says, beside him. Turns this way and that. Trapped like a bat. My people. What have they done to you.

  – Keep it together! Fogg says. So hot in that room. The smell of cloves or something else. Orchids. The place is like a hothouse, a greenhouse, but there are no plants, no shadows either with the bright electric bars overhead.

  Fear so sudden and cloying it makes Fogg shiver and draw in on himself. Waiting for the punch. Something sordid, something unnatural about this place, these jars. Would rather die than find himself in one of them. Takes a sudden run at the nearest bell jar. Impacts with it. Pain flaring. Reinforced glass. No way to break it. No way out for those inside.

  – Gentlemen, a voice says. Over on a balcony, at the far side of the room. Cautious, if nothing else. The wolf man.

  – I will kill you, Drakul says.

  The wolf man grins. It is an honour I have waited a long time for, he says. Vaults off the balcony. Cheap villain in a cheap book, Fogg thinks. Still numb. Wolf faces bat across the well-lit floor. This is ridiculous, Fogg thinks. Says, Drakul, don’t—

  The Jewish partisan flickers. One moment he is there, the other he is gone, his figure reappears halfway through the cavern. The wolf man howls, sprints at him. They meet mid-air, Drakul is repelled, falls on the ground, winded. The wolf man a negator, Fogg thinks. Remembers. You can’t fight him that way.

  Takes out his gun. You know where you are with a gun. Takes aim. Fires.

  The gunshot is loud in the room. The wolf man is no longer in the place he was. Someone taps the gun away from Fogg’s hands. Holds him, arms twisted painfully behind his back.

  – Drakul!

  But the Jewish partisan is on the ground, the wolf man stands above him, holding a long device, a metal arm with curving grasping fingers at the end, a cattle prod made for humans, Fogg thinks. Drakul lifts his face to the ceiling. Opens his mouth. A cry, a wordless cry, in the high register, ultrasonic, it makes Fogg’s ears hurt, the man holding him loosens his hold for just a moment –

  Fogg turns, it is a man he’d not seen before, a giant, reminds him of Tank. Memory of Tank brings hatred, anger – Fogg forms the remnants of fog around himself, a fist of hot air particles, punches the man in the gut, the giant stumbles, looks confused, his ears leak blood.

  The wolf man kicks Drakul in the ribs. Hard. The tortured scream ends. Enough, the wolf man says. Barks orders. Men appear, everywhere at once. Put them in the jars, he says. We’ll ship them to Poland for the doctor to study. Loses interest. Oh and round up the rest of his boys outside.

  Trapped. Men surround Fogg. He knows he can’t take them all. Risks a look at Drakul. The partisan looks back at him. Fogg can’t read his eyes. The men come for Fogg. Slowly. He turns and turns. Like in a game of tag.

  Turns and turns and turns.

  49. THE OLD MAN’S OFFICE 1944

  When it was over, during his debrief …

  – That was a bit of a cock-up, wasn’t it, Henry? the Old Man says.

  – Sir?

  – Transylvania, Henry. You, Henry.

  – Sir.

  – What did I tell you? What do I always tell you?

  Fogg feels like he’s back on the Farm, suddenly. Like an errant pupil. That we are only observers, he says.

  – Do you understand why?

  Fogg sighs, a long suffering sigh. Because even to observe something is to change it, he says.

  50. THE FARM 1936

  A classroom. A blackboard. Alan Turing behind the teacher’s desk. Looking at them with an expectant face. That shy smile. To observe an event is to change it, he says. On the quantum level.

  That level below atoms, those strange mysterious particles. In later years the physicist Murray Gell-Mann would call these quarks, after a word in the novel Finnegans Wake.

  When Vomacht pressed the button, Turing says, everything changed. The Vomacht wave was a probability wave.

  A girl raises her hand. Spit. Fogg knows her vaguely, like he knows the rest of them now. The Old Man’s orphans. Turing says, Yes? Spit says, Mutation.

  – Very good, Turing says. Yes. The wave made genetic changes on the subatomic level. Another word for that is indeed mutation, and mutation occurs naturally in – he coughs – nature.

  – But not this one, Spit says.

  – No, Turing says. He coughs again. His eyes find Oblivi
on’s, for a mere moment, then look away, and Fogg feels a sudden, inexplicable surge of jealousy. When the wave hit, Turing says, everyone changed, everything changed, from butterflies to crops to humans. But for most the change was undetectable. Tiny. Minute. Of the billions of humans on the planet, perhaps a few hundred became … you. Suspended in a moment in time.

  51. SIGHIȘOARA, TRANSYLVANIA 1944

  Fogg stares at the specimens of Übermenschen, suspended in time under the glass bell jars. We observe, the Old Man told him. We watch. We are the shadow men of a shadow war. But what about the Americans, Fogg protested, their Übermenschen have the uniform, the colour, they are on all the newsreels, in the magazines! The Old Man waved his hand, dismissing them. Propaganda, he said. You’re more use to me unseen.

  – Drakul! Fogg says. The Jewish partisan is on the ground, they are hunched over him, Fogg sees a syringe going into the other’s arm. The wolf man stalks towards Fogg, smiling, and once again Fogg feels that overriding fear emanating from the man, crippling him.

  – Paris, Fogg whispers.

  The wolf man’s smile grows wider in recollection.

  Fogg retreats from him, cowering away, the fear eats at his insides. Don’t be a goddamned hero, the Old Man said, before sending him out here. Now they’re going to put him in one of the jars and send him to Poland, where Tank went. Please, Fogg says, let me go, I won’t, I won’t—

  – Won’t what? the wolf man says. Please, Fogg says, please—

  And the ceiling explodes overhead.

  It showers stone and electric wires down and a body drops between Fogg and the wolf man, one of the guards, a hole punched through his head. He’s very dead. The wolf man loses the smile, the fear suddenly evaporates, like fog. The wolf man looks up, What is the meaning of this! Pulls out a gun—

  A shadow overhead, standing over the hole in the ceiling. A familiar sound – familiar to Fogg. A wet, hawking phlegmy sound and something wet and hard shoots through the air and hits the bell jar where the man with the gills is trapped and the glass explodes.

  Water floods the room. The man falls onto the hard concrete floor and flops there. The wolf man fires but there’s that whistling spitting sound again and a second bell jar explodes and the ivy girl emerges in a shower of glass and she reaches out, ivy growing like a weed, choking a hapless German soldier, tightening over his neck and crushing his larynx. Then two figures drop down from the ceiling and Fogg can hear gunfire overhead and then he sees them, and he can’t comprehend where they came from, or how they came to be here.

  Oblivion, and Spit.

  The wolf man howls with rage, he runs to his men, Oblivion says, Goddamn it, Henry! Fogg has never seen him so angry. What were you thinking! Spit says, Come on, we need to get out of here!

  – Drakul! Fogg says. Then the partisans come in through the doors, firing, and the Germans retreat, the bell jars explode and the Übermenschen trapped inside are released.

  – They’ll look after him, Oblivion says. Let’s go.

  – And the others?

  Oblivion shrugs. Come on! Spit says. She grabs Fogg and they run up the stairs, Spit hands him a gun, a fire-fight is going on but no one notices them in the confusion and they run into the outside, into cold clear air, and starlight, and fog.

  – You blooming idiot, Oblivion says, when they’re away, beyond the city, and there’s a car waiting for them, to take them across the border and into Romania, You blooming idiot, and he hugs Fogg, hard, almost crushing his bones, Fogg can feel Oblivion’s hot breath on his shoulder, You blooming fool.

  – I’m sorry, Fogg says, I’m sorry. Then they get into the car and drive away, lights off, Spit in the passenger seat, a taciturn Hungarian driving, Fogg and Oblivion in the back, close, Oblivion saying nothing the whole way just sitting there, turning sideways, looking at Fogg, looking away. He only speaks once and he only says, Paris. It is not a question and so Fogg doesn’t need to answer.

  SEVEN:

  VOMACHT

  PARIS–AUSCHWITZ

  1943

  52. PARIS 1943

  He watches the girl. Huddled in the doorway of a building, the fog around him, smoking a cheap French cigarette, Fogg watches the coffee house, he watches the girl.

  53. PARIS 1943

  The smell of rain. Distant gunfire. An outline in a high window, a woman in profile, dressing. But Fogg has eyes only for the girl in the coffee house.

  She leans over to her companion. Places her hand on his. A tall glass of hot chocolate between them. An ashtray, though neither of them smokes.

  Love cannot be understood as a quantum construct. Or can it? Some say consciousness is a quantum process. In the subatomic world, events are merely a spectrum of infinite probabilities. It takes an observer to collapse them into one.

  Rain. Fogg, watching the girl in the café. Is love merely a chemical construct? A spiritual connection of a religious sort? Fogg doesn’t know. Can’t stop watching the girl. Follows her, when she leaves the café, to the small hotel in the maze of streets, a hotel reserved for high-ranking German officers only.

  Watches her, watches the old man with her. Sometimes it seems to him that the girl knows he’s there. The way she turns her head, the way she looks into the fog.

  Gives him a frisson of excitement, when she does. Something in her eyes, like the sun in a clear blue sky. Like a perfect summer’s day.

  54. PARIS 1943

  Watches her across the street, sitting behind the glass window, drinking hot chocolate, the old man opposite her. Watches her turning her head and looking out of the window, looking at the fog.

  Watches her companion, watches her.

  Kill the one, kiss the other.

  A moment of uncollapsed probabilities.

  The girl looks out of the window, as if she can see him. She smiles, a hopeful, tentative smile.

  And everything, for Fogg, changes.

  55. PARIS 1943

  There might be a war on, there might be Nazi tanks on the Champs Élysées and Jews rounded up in the Marais, but this is still Paris, damn it. There are still fresh baguettes baking across the arrondissements, and if the cinemas have to occasionally show a German film to please the troops – H. A. Lettow and Ernst Schäfer’s documentary of the SS expedition to Tibet, Lhasa-Lo – Die verbotene Stadt, for instance – then so be it. Paris is still gay, there is still music in the cafés and wine in the brasseries, and aren’t some of those German soldier-boys handsome?

  Paris fell quickly, we know. ‘With indescribable joy, deeply moved and filled with burning gratitude, we share with you, my Führer, your and Germany’s greatest victory, the entry of German troops into Paris,’ wrote Leni Riefenstahl in a nineteen forty telegram to Hitler. ‘You exceed anything human imagination has the power to conceive, achieving deeds without parallel in the history of mankind.’

  For Fogg the city is a living thing. The music and the smell of cheap cigars mingle with the ever-present fog, the sound of Luftwaffe planes flying overhead, fresh bread, the damp of the flat, the crinkle of the pages of the book he’s listlessly leafing through as he waits.

  Oblivion, at the window, watching with binoculars. Fogg lights up a cigarette.

  – Spit’s coming, Oblivion says.

  – It’s about bloody time.

  Closes the book, gets up. Moseys over to the window and looks out.

  The Latin Quarter. Somewhere beyond the narrow street and the tall brick buildings is the Seine, and from a distance you can still hear the bells of Notre Dame. Outside on the street: a second-hand bookseller’s stall, a florist, a bakery, men in raincoats walking with their heads lowered, a group of German soldiers laughing as they pass in the opposite direction, a café with the prices chalked on a blackboard. Beyond the window, directly opposite the flat, is a restaurant: L’Auberge.

  It is raining, the rain streaks the frosted glass windows of the restaurant, a small dark figure glides down the street and disappears into the building’s entrance. Fogg bl
ows out smoke, cold air blows it away. Oblivion like a statue by the window, all white marble and chiselled angles. Footsteps on the stairs. The door opens. Spit comes in.

  Oblivion and Fogg both turn. Wet black hair tucked behind Spit’s ears. A serious face, a slight figure, Oblivion is a giant beside her. Well? Fogg demands.

  Spit grins. It’s a go, she says.

  Oblivion and Fogg seem to loosen up, all of a sudden. A tension they didn’t even know was there, leaving only to be replaced with a different kind, a sort of anticipation. They grin at each other. Fogg says, When?

  – Seven o’clock, Spit says. Grins at them too, suddenly, a ferocious expression on that studious face. Says, It’s confirmed.

  Fogg stares out of the window. Stares at L’Auberge. Dribbles smoke. And the party? he says. Doesn’t turn around. Spit says, They’re all going to be there.

  Tense again. That little accent she put on all.

  – It’s a big shindig, apparently, Spit says. SS-Obersturmbannführer Lischka himself is hosting it.

  Fogg nods, distractedly. Had studied the file. Had studied all their files. Lischka, Kurt. Son of a banker. A law and political science graduate, an unassuming man with a receding hairline and thin round glasses. Head of the Paris Gestapo. In charge of the mass deportation of Parisian Jews to the camps.

  – Big cheese, Spit says, with that lopsided grin. Americanisms creep into everyday conversations. Americans in the war, now. Americans seem to have a different way of walking, of talking. Bigger and louder than anyone else. They walk, Fogg thinks, like people who own everything they see around them. Like people who have already won the bloody war.

  – All of them, Oblivion says. The hint of a question mark.