The Violent Century Page 11

  – It’s a regular medical conference, Spit says. Pretends to consult an imaginary guest list. Herr Doktor Carl Clauberg, she says. On a visit from some camp in Poland … Auschwitz?

  No one gives a rat’s ass about Herr Doktor Carl Clauberg, Fogg thinks, remembering the man’s dossier. A gynaecologist, of all things. Served in the First World War. Became Professor of Gynaecology at the University of Königsberg. In forty-one approached Heinrich Himmler about a radical new scientific opportunity: how best to mass-sterilise women. Jews made useful subjects, there were enough of them in the camps by then. Part of the research involved injecting liquid acid into the women’s uteruses. The budget did not extend to anaesthetics.

  – All? Oblivion says, again.

  Spit makes a show of consulting that list again. Herr Doktor Wernher von Braun, from rockets, she says—

  – Who gives a damn about these guys, Fogg says. Turns from the window. The fog collects in the street. Presses against the window.

  – Von Braun? Oblivion says. The name rings a bell.

  – Some sort of rocket scientist, Spit says.

  – Nasty things, rockets, Oblivion says. Fogg stares at him as if to say, What?

  – Come on, Spit, Fogg says. Almost begging. She lets him stew, then expels a breath.

  – And Herr Doktor Vomacht, she says.

  The name hangs cold in the air.

  56. THE FARM 1936

  The classroom is long and narrow, the chairs are all chipped wood and peeling paint fold-outs, there is a blackboard and a teacher’s desk and sunlight from outside. Fogg still feels uncomfortable in those ludicrous clothes. Like an oversized schoolboy. Sitting there with the others, as if time had peeled away, as if they are all children again.

  Dr Turing is in the front of the class. No older than they are. Wearing that white smock. Writing on the blackboard with his back to the class, the chalk making rending sounds that set your teeth on edge. Turns, at last. Moves aside so they can see. A single word in Turing’s handwriting. Hangs there like a Closed notice in a store.

  Vomacht.

  Silence in the class. The only sound is of Tank, at the back, shifting on the too-small chair. Fogg mouths the word without sound, exhales it softly. Vomacht …

  – Have you heard that name before? Turing says.

  No one answers. It is as if the name has cast a spell over them, a sort of awe.

  – You are all here because you are different to other people, Turing says. But all people are different. The difference is that you’re different in a different way.

  Some of the other pupils laugh. Not Fogg. Remembers again the train tracks, the fog. The day it all changed.

  – Why do you think you are different? Turing says, softly.

  57. PARIS 1943

  – Vomacht, Fogg says. Wonder in his voice. I never thought he was real.

  Oblivion is pacing the room. We’ll wait for them to arrive, he says. Spit and Tank will bookend the road.

  Says, Fogg and I will hit them before they enter the restaurant.

  Fogg nods. The plan seems simple enough. What could possibly go wrong?

  Everything, he knows, but doesn’t say. Goes back to his chair. Picks up his book.

  What did he think about all that week in Paris, waiting for the call? In occupied Paris he passed like a shadow, the fog, ever present, masking his existence, hiding his being. An informant deep within the Nazi administration of Paris had contacted the Bureau, had told them of this summit about to occur. It sounds, if truth be known, almost too good to be true.

  Vomacht! Reliable intel suggests Vomacht is indeed in Paris. Fogg briefly wonders what he has to do with a rocket scientist and a man reputed to experiment on human beings: an unholy trinity of German science and technology, it almost seems to symbolise this new, third Reich.

  A week of watching, of waiting, as the unnamed mole prevaricated, location changed, times, dates – at long last, here they are, on Rue Boutebrie, off Boulevard Saint Germain, watching the restaurant – a full Bureau contingent, minus Mrs Tinkle, who is otherwise engaged. It’s a shame, Fogg thinks. Her peculiar talent would have come in useful.

  Spit moves to the centre of the room. A low table sitting there. She places a folder down. Photos. Fogg gets up to study them, even though he already knows them off by heart.

  Kurt Lischka, the Gestapo Paris commander, looks like a seminarian. His hair is shaved short at the sides. His cheeks are clean-shaven. His face is well proportioned, Aryan. His mouth is slightly turned upwards, suggesting he might smile easily.

  In contrast the doctor, Carl Clauberg, is nothing an Aryan would be proud of. He is unshaved, wears large-framed dark glasses, he has an elongated skull, badly receding hair, a petulant double chin. His mouth looks like it is wrapped around a sweet.

  But Von Braun, now … even Spit’s impressed, and she’s not usually expressed an interest in men that way.

  Von Braun almost looks like an American. He has that easy poise, a handsome, chiselled face, a movie star’s good looks. He has a full head of hair, combed back, and piercing eyes. Oblivion fingers the photo, then lays it down: almost reluctantly, it seems to Fogg.

  Finally: Vomacht. A photo taken from a distance, blurry. No photos of the good doctor circulating. A private man. Here he is by a lake, holding a young girl’s hand in his. He is in a suit. She is wearing a dress. There is a boat by the shore, on the water. Hard to make out his face. Hard to make out anything about him. Just a man.

  Herr Doktor Vomacht.

  58. PARIS 1943

  When it is over, the operation blown, they scatter. Abort and evacuate. They flee from Paris singly, Oblivion and Spit.

  Not Fogg.

  Fogg stays behind.

  Fogg lies on the hard single bed in the hotel watching the cockroach scuttling across the dirty bathroom floor. The window is raised a few inches and a chill wind comes through but Fogg isn’t cold. He tosses and turns, the blanket pushed away from him. He’s sweating. Grinding his teeth. When he closes his eyes he can still see it, in confused snatches.

  Fogg and Oblivion, watching the restaurant.

  The black Mercedes pulling to a stop.

  The three men come out.

  Lischka. Clauberg.

  Von Braun.

  Gestapo man. Nazi doctor. And rocket-man.

  No Herr Doktor Vomacht.

  In the hotel room Fogg twists and turns and the bedsheets crumple underneath him. The fog calls out to him from the Seine. He is hiding in an anonymous hotel under a brand-new identity, a Swiss merchant, in Paris on business. He should be safe, he thinks. He should be back in London but he can’t. He has business of his own, first.

  Fogg stares at the cockroach, which seems to be watching him back, standing there, a black armoured figure, like a Panzer tank, on the line between hotel room and bathroom. A hidden army behind him. What makes a hero, Fogg wonders, biting his lips, his hands balled into useless fists. Whatever makes one, he isn’t it.

  – Oblivion, stop! It’s a trap!

  Lying in bed, shivering, but not from cold. Earlier he’d run the water, stood under it naked, the water lukewarm, low pressure, he stood like that until it ran as cold as ice, as if it could somehow freeze his body clean.

  – It’s a trap—

  Von Braun lifting his arms. A handsome man, not a hair out of place. Raises his hands not like a prisoner.

  Like a conductor.

  A flash of lightning. Smoke. Fogg raises his eyes to the sky.

  Sees them coming.

  Von Braun raises his hands like a conductor, and out of the sky come rocket-men. Fogg curses and pulls out his gun. He starts firing. The rocket-men’s faces are obscured by the masks they wear, these Greco-Roman constructions; they are like some ancient legionnaires granted the power of flight by a modern-day Daedalus.

  The rocket-men descend in a blaze of fire and rising smoke. For once Fogg is useless here. The smoke, acrid and heavy, masks everything but the flames and the gunshots
, and Fogg is as blind as the rest. He fires high and hits a rocket-man’s tank. For a moment nothing seems to happen, then the man explodes in a fireball that rips him apart. Dark rain falls on their heads and Fogg’s face is splattered with gore. He wipes it off with his sleeve and keeps shooting.

  Rocket-men pop like fat flies. Rocket-men pop like flies buzzing too close to an oil lamp. Later, Fogg will learn that more people died constructing Wernher von Braun’s rockets than had ever died in the rocket attacks themselves. So it is with the rocket-men, he comes to realise. They hover in the air on lethal flames, young boys metal-covered, machine guns cradled in their arms, their short blond hair hidden behind their faux-historical helmets. Oblivion lets out a shout of rage or disgust and removes his glove and his hand aims at these sky-borne Lost Boys. He makes their rocket-packs vanish and they fall down, one by one, one drops over the black Mercedes and impacts on its roof, bending and tearing it, the sound of crushed bones, the corpse sprawls on the roof, one arm splayed over, blood pouring down the arm, the lifeless pointing finger, and onto the ground where it gathers in a small puddle.

  Von Braun, in a half-crouch run, disappears inside the restaurant under cover of fire. The Gestapo man, Obersturmbannführer Kurt Lischka, doesn’t, though. Instead, as if this is the Wild West in a Karl May novel, and as if he were Old Shatterhand facing some unruly Injuns, he pulls out twin guns and starts blasting. At Fogg.

  Fogg ducks, rolls on the ground as the fog gathers desperately around him, trying to hide him from view. The fused bodies of dead rocket-men litter the ground, an unholy melange of men and machines.

  Fogg rises, in his hands, too, are twin guns. For a moment he faces Lischka across the black Mercedes, both their faces lit up with the fires of the dying rocket-men. Lischka’s mouth opens in a twisted grin, his teeth are predator’s teeth. They fire together.

  Fogg lies on the bed but he can’t sleep. Flashes of light from outside periodically wake him. The sting of the bullet on his shoulder still hurts. A red raw weal where Lischka’s bullet had grazed him.

  Fogg tries to sleep. Tries to think of her, of seeing her again. Instead all he can see is Lischka falling down, a surprised look on his face, blood blooming like a thousand night flowers on his chest. Oblivion reaching out a gloveless hand and touching the SS doctor, Clauberg, almost gently, like a lover. Sees the Nazi unmade, obliterated. Nothing of him. Fogg, breathing hard. A sudden silence in the street. The bodies of nameless faceless Nazi flyboys on the ground. Fogg looks at Oblivion. Oblivion looks at Fogg. And cold. It’s suddenly so cold.

  That’s when he sees him. Dressed in the white of the Übermenschen.

  The twin lightning bolts within the red umlauted U.

  Recognises him from his file in the Bureau.

  Schneesturm.

  Snow Storm.

  Then the snow hits them like a shovel.

  Wind smashing ice at them. The ice, like darts, cuts and penetrates. Fogg can hear Schneesturm laughing. He drops low. He tries to raise the fog to him, to do battle with this force of nature, this snow storm raging about them, a localised storm in the middle of this Parisian street. Everything is white, so white. He can no longer see Oblivion. He rises and a fist of snow smacks him on the side of the head and sends him reeling. Again he hears that laugh. Fogg fires his gun, but he has no idea who or what he could be hitting.

  – Oblivion?

  – Fogg!

  Fogg shakes his head, touches his hand to his shoulder. It’s bleeding. He tries to focus, tries to summon that thing deep within himself that responds to the invisible essences of that thing which is a fog. Half summons a half-shape: a loping, ungainly fog golem, insubstantial, tall and thin. Fogg watches and there is a mirror image to his own creation, a snowman. The snowman is bulky, a veritable giant. It grins a snowman grin. For a nose, someone with a twisted sense of humour has stuck a rotting carrot onto it – from the restaurant’s bins, Fogg realises. The snowman swings a heavy south paw. It connects with the fog and passes through it, dispersing it. Fogg feels as though he himself has been punched. He reels back and his fog man fades.

  – Oblivion? Oblivion!

  Fear grips him. He can’t see. He is snow-blind. He stumbles against something at once soft and hard and falls. Looks down at his friend, who has been fetched a heavy blow to the back of the head. Oblivion lies on the ground, useless, and Fogg realises they are both lost.

  When he looks up the snow moves, just a little, and he can see the man in the white uniform. The Übermensch.

  – Herr Fogg, the man says. He is blond and with a pleasing face, handsome and bland. One hears so much, he says. He smiles and aims his finger like a gun, at Fogg.

  – Schneesturm, Fogg says. Defenceless.

  – Meeting one’s heroes is always such a disappointment, Schneesturm says.

  He makes a firing motion and a dart of ice, long and sharp, condenses at the tip of his finger and shoots at Fogg, missing him by inches. It shatters against the ground. Schneesturm shrugs. He aims again. He is no longer smiling. His eyes, blue and cold, look into Fogg’s, and Fogg knows he is going to die.

  In the hotel he gives up sleeping, gets up, opens the window all the way and stares out at the street. The wood on the windowsill is rotten and chipped, the white paint faded and peeling. Fogg shivers and recalls the snow man looking at him, aiming that ridiculous make-believe gun. And Fogg knows he is about to kill him, kill Oblivion—

  Then, a roar, a familiar voice, the sound of giant footsteps crushing ice and snow as if they were mere inconveniences and Schneesturm turns his head, no longer sure, and a massive, angry figure bursts through the falling snow and it’s Tank, it’s Tank to the rescue—

  He swings a giant fist and it whistles through the air but Schneesturm is quick, he ducks and then the snow howls harder and Schneesturm is gone, vanished in the blizzard, and Tank gives a cry of rage and—

  Fogg grabs Oblivion, shakes him. Oblivion opens his eyes, mumbles, Wha—

  – We’ve got to get out of here. Can you stand?

  Fogg half supports him, Oblivion’s hand on his shoulder, and he looks at him and says, You’ve been shot?

  – It’s nothing, Fogg says.

  – Henry …

  – Let’s go. We’ve got to get out of here—

  In the snow, blindly. As if they were back in Minsk. But they don’t get far—

  The snow clears, creating a globe enclosing them. Within it they see the snowman, Schneesturm’s golem, larger even than before, the details lost within its frame: its two small boxer’s ears made of lumps of coal, its nose a rotted carrot, its eyes swastika buttons picked up from the dead rocket boys’ sleeves. It faces Tank. They trade punches. Grunts of pain from Tank, nothing from the animated snowman. Oblivion stops. We’ve got to help him, he says. We can’t, Fogg says, we’ve got to get away. The mission failed. I’m not leaving Tank, Oblivion says. We don’t have a choice! Fogg carries him onwards. Looking back at Tank. For one moment Tank looks back at them, and smiles a goodbye.

  59. THE OLD MAN’S OFFICE the present

  – Tank, the Old Man says, heavily.

  – Yes, Fogg says.

  – You got out all right, though, the Old Man says. You and Oblivion.

  – Yes. We made it away. Tank bought us time. Still, it wasn’t easy. The Gestapo had the street covered. We escaped in the fog. Oblivion was in no shape to … do anything. I killed one – no, two – Gestapo men. That was it. We somehow made it out to where Spit was waiting in the car. We drove to the safe house. We split up the next day.

  Something else, though. Stepping out of the snow cone into a clear Parisian street. Bright lights suddenly shining into their eyes, half blinding them. Fogg, with the last of his power, raises the fog around them, letting them escape.

  But just before the fog rises. Squinting against the glare, he sees him, standing with his armed men behind the spotlights, waiting.

  Brigadeführer Hans von Wolkenstein.

  Der Wolfsm
ann.

  – Well, the Old Man says. Consults his folder. Turns the pages. We failed to get Vomacht that time, he says. Shrugs, as if all this is of little consequence. But we got Lischka. He was supplying Clauberg with French test subjects. And Clauberg was working for Vomacht, wasn’t he, Fogg?

  – What was Vomacht doing? Fogg says.

  – Research, the Old Man says. Sighs. Lischka and Clauberg. Of course, both were immediately replaced. And we had underestimated von Braun’s importance.

  – Rocket-man.

  That was their old code for him. The Old Man shrugs again. Rockets were never our priority, he says. Unlike the Americans.

  – And the Americans got him all to themselves in the end, Fogg says, remembering.

  60. PEENEMÜNDE ARMY RESEARCH CENTRE, USEDOM ISLAND 1945

  We watch it from above, the way it was photographed by Allied spy planes: it looks like an ant colony in black and white, dug into the island. The island lies in the Baltic Sea, between Germany and Poland. Your mother, Emmy von Braun (née von Quistorp) suggested the location: It’s just the place for you and your friends, she said. Slaves dug the secret tunnels and built the base. You hand-picked them yourself, from the Buchenwald concentration camp.

  It can be a lot of fun having your own private island hideaway. Designing rockets, controlling their manufacture and launch. V2s, weapons of mass destruction. It can be a lot of fun playing at being a villain in a moving pictures serial: you feel invincible.

  Not in the spring of nineteen forty-five, though. Not with the Russians advancing steadily, so close, your colleague says, mournfully, you can almost smell the vodka fumes. You have no loyalty to the Nazis. Hitler is a madman. And you have a dream, a dream more important than rockets for war or those ridiculous rocket-men – one of the Führer’s less tenable ideas, you always, privately, thought. No. You won’t miss them when they’re finally gone. Not when what you dream of is outer space itself: space, and the stars.