The Violent Century Page 4

  The invasion follows Hitler’s previous acts of aggression: the September 1938 forced transfer of the ‘ethnically German’ Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia to Germany and the March 1939 occupation of the rest of Czechoslovakia.

  BRITAIN DECLARES WAR ON GERMANY

  September 3, 1939

  * * *

  LONDON Following the expiration of the deadline for German troops to withdraw from Poland, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain has declared war on Germany. The French government has also declared war following the expiration of its own ultimatum to Germany. A new War Cabinet has been set up and Winston Churchill has been confirmed as First Lord of the Admiralty. King George IV, speaking on the radio, said: ‘The task will be hard. There may be dark days ahead and war can no longer be confined to the battlefield. But we can only do the right as we see the right and reverently commit our cause to God.’

  All men between 18 and 41 are liable for conscription.

  THREE:

  SNOW STORM

  LONDON–BERLIN–WARSAW–LENINGRAD

  1941-1945

  18. LONDON 1944

  On rare shore-leave back home. Mother was still alive then; he was told Father had died a couple of years before. Didn’t go to the funeral. Henry Fogg no longer existed. Even the register of his birth was gone from the church. The Bureau was nothing if not thorough.

  He finds shelter in a dark cinema off Leicester Square. The uniforms keep away the roving bands of women handing out white feathers to civilians, a mark of shame, an echo of an earlier war. Why aren’t you serving.

  But he serves.

  Huddling deep in his seat, the air freezing, the coat too large over his frame. The cinema is almost empty. Every time he comes back to London the city has changed further, become darker and more menacing. The Blitz had ended by forty-one, but it changed the city permanently, a madman taking a blade to someone’s face. But savagery left Fogg numb, these days.

  Huddling in his coat, smoking a Lucky Strike – American. The smoke rising before the projector, a blue, magical fog with light passing through it. Everyone smokes, in the war. A couple of kids courting in the back row. A veteran with a face like a quarry sitting in the front, eyes like boreholes. Fogg trying to forget the goddamned war, if only for a minute.

  Instead, a newsreel.

  D-Day.

  American forces landing at Normandy. Grainy images in black and white. Warships crowding the sea. Landing craft beaching, soldiers pouring out like insects, aircraft flying overhead.

  Gunfire. The reel is coy at first about showing us the dead.

  Announcer: D-Day! Brave American soldiers are storming the beach at Normandy, coming under heavy enemy fire!

  The veteran in the front is lit up by the projector, unshaven cheeks, lips moving without sound.

  Announcer: The dastardly Hun fight desperately, but they are no match for American heroism!

  Fogg smokes, fidgets. Knows what’s coming next.

  Announcer: Here comes Tigerman!

  New landing craft has just beached. Painted garish colours, you can tell even in the black and white of the picture. Like something out of a storybook. The hatch opens. A man steps out onto the beach.

  He looks like a circus performer. He is dressed in leotards. He has a long mane of blond hair. He is bare-chested, despite the cold. Tigerman roars without sound at the camera, showing teeth.

  Wild eyes. Fucking hero, Fogg thinks. What makes a man. Tigerman roars again, shifts, half transforming – someone gasps in the back row of the cinema, the couple courting make their own sounds, oblivious. Fogg watches, Tigerman’s face shifting, jaws opening, teeth like weapons, a tiger’s canines. Roars. Hands extended to the camera, become claws. Stripes over his bare skin. What a fucking animal, Fogg thinks.

  A smaller shape materialises out of the open hull of the landing craft.

  Announcer: Here comes Whirlwind!

  A female figure, slight, ears almost elf-like, dark hair, an impish smile – doesn’t walk down but jumps, into the air, transforming into a localised storm, a cone of air, moving over the cold water of the English Channel. Bullets fired at it, the whirlwind takes them and fires them back, the camera jerks, a group of German soldiers die in a hail of bullets. Pans back, on Whirlwind: growing in ferocity, landing, at last, on the beach. Transforming, beside Tigerman, into a woman, barely more than a girl, Fogg thinks, that same half-smile on her face. She stands there.

  Fogg leans back. Fascinated despite himself. In the back row the moans reach a crescendo and suddenly stop. An embarrassed giggle. In the front row the veteran moves his blind face this way and that, the light from the projector surrounding his head like a halo.

  German soldiers dying on screen in a weird, speeded-up flickering. Announcer: The Electric Twins!

  Two young identical men in overalls and helmets. Look like electricians, or miners. Serious faces. Neither smiling. Walk carefully off the ramp onto the beach. Stand next to the others. Reach for each other’s hands.

  Their bodies shake, convolute. Electricity like a living thing, coursing through them, surrounding them in a haze of blue, cold fire. They point in unison, forming an arrowhead, and aim. They discharge a lightning bolt, it leaves the tips of their fingers and cracks like a whip across the distance, hitting a German tank. There is a massive explosion as the tank blows up and the camera shakes wildly. When it settles it lingers, for a moment, on the remains of the burning tank, before returning to the Electric Twins. Their hands are back at their sides. They look into the camera. For just a moment. That self-satisfied look in their eyes. Then look away.

  Americans, Fogg thinks.

  It’s one big fucking show, he thinks.

  On screen, the announcer: The Greeeeeeeeeen Gunman!

  Who’s not even green. He’s black. He steps off the ramp. Measured steps. A little older than the others. Wide-brimmed cowboy hat. Boots with spurs on them. Balls that clang as he walks, Fogg thinks. That swagger. The outfit must be green. Can’t tell. Patterned with leaves. The boots, the belt buckle. Gun holsters each side of the belt. Unlit cigar in his mouth. Surveys the scene of battle. Takes his time. The camera pans out. German snipers taking aim. The Green Gunman smiles. Draws. Fires.

  Not bullets.

  Shoots. Vines. Green tendrils. Growing at an enormous speed. Sprouting from the Green Gunman himself. Looping around the German snipers. Taking root. They bloom flowers. They extend big, fleshy leaves.

  Vegetation swallows the men. A hillside transformed. The Green Gunman holsters the guns. Not guns at all, Fogg realises. Props. The Green Gunman smiles. Fires up his cigar. Steps down the ramp. Stands with the others.

  The League of Defenders.

  Fogg shakes his head. Coughs. Drops the spent cigarette on the floor. Grounds it with his heel. Watches the screen. Announcer: Girl Surfer and the Frogman!

  Last to the party. Girl Surfer first, board gliding on the water, over the waves, American soldiers watching from the beach, cheering.

  Girl Surfer in a bathing suit, doesn’t feel the cold. Holds twin machine guns, fires them, blonde hair cut short, a fringe, cold grey eyes like an alien sea. Out of the water bobs the Frogman, a toad-like human creature with scaly skin, in his deformed flipper hands a German diver. The Frogman crushes the diver in a hug. He dives back down, dragging the German diver with him. Surfer Girl lands on the shore. Pins the surfboard in the sand. The Frogman rises, dragging the German diver’s bloodied corpse behind him. He deposits him on the sand. Steps over him. Joins Surfer Girl and the others. A line in the sand.

  Announcer: Fritz can never stand in the path of the League of Defenders! The tide of war has turned, and right has might!

  The camera turns, pans, the seven in their garish costumes stand, looking into it, a group photo, American power: Tigerman Whirlwind Electric Twins Green Gunman Surfer Girl Frogman. The image freezes, then disintegrates, the screen flashing, and Fogg sighs out, relief, a breath he didn’t realise he was holding – the fil
m’s about to start, at last.

  19. THE OLD MAN’S OFFICE the present

  Remembers the film, now. The Outlaw, from the previous year. Holding his breath when Jane Russell walked onto the screen for the first time. Makes him smile, now. Watched it again with Oblivion, at some American camp halfway to Berlin, before the fall. Oblivion had made a comment, later. They were drinking the Americans’ whiskey. Something about them being like the characters in the movie, Fogg and him. Doc Holliday and Billy the Kid. Fogg wasn’t sure which was meant to be which.

  Things he and Oblivion never talked about.

  Too many things unsaid. One of the things they taught them on the Farm. Speak little. Say even less.

  That had been Jane Russell’s first screen appearance. Remembers watching her later. After the war. Hiding in that same darkened basement cinema off Leicester Square, until they tore it down in the Sixties. Calamity Jane, in The Paleface. Dorothy in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. The Old Man says, What the hell are you grinning about? Fogg, jolted back into the present, says, Why did you bring me back?

  But the Old Man just wouldn’t start. Fogg knows the game, only it is not a game. His palms itch. Knows everything’s been set up, ever so carefully. Says, at last, the words dragged out of him unwillingly, When we went past the cipher room, earlier … leaves it open, like a question.

  The Old Man, eyes bright and predatory. Yes?

  Fogg says, What happened in the North Sea?

  – That is not your concern, the Old Man says. Waits. Fogg says, I heard them mention a name.

  – Oh?

  – Snow Storm, Fogg says.

  The Old Man sits back. Like he’s been waiting for this moment. Regards Fogg for a long while with those bright eyes. Eyes that saw you, wherever you went. Whatever you tried to hide. Says, at last, softly, But that wasn’t what he called himself, was it, Fogg?

  – No, Fogg says. Thinking, you bastard. Thinking, at least it’s begun.

  – What did he call himself, Fogg? the Old Man says.

  Fogg looks to Oblivion. For help. But there’s nothing there. Oblivion sits like a stone. His angular face pale and beautiful like a Greek statue. Fogg looks away.

  – Schneesturm, he says. He called himself Schneesturm.

  The words, like icicles, hang in the air. The Old Man smiles. Savours the moment. Fogg remembers him interviewing prisoners, after the war. The small, windowless room, breath fogging the air, a succession of German prisoners secured to the chair.

  20. BERLIN–MARIENDORF DP CAMP 1945

  A massive place, the throng of humanity is impossible to classify and tag correctly, but has to be, needs to be sorted, filed, questioned. Displaced Persons. DPs. There are similar camps all over Germany, and in neighbouring Austria, in places like Bad Reichenhall and Cornberg and Mittenwald and Pocking. Places no one’s ever heard of, or ever wanted to. Fogg’s never seen anything like it. The women like walking skeletons, skin over protruding ribs, bare feet covered in sores, heads shaved as the head lice crawled away on the cold ground. Men with that look in their eyes that said nothing could touch them any more. A school class where a dark-haired woman he knew slightly, her name was Anda Pinkerfeld, taught the children to sing Hebrew songs. Walking past the window with the singing coming from the inside, his feet leaving bootmarks in the dirty snow.

  – Sorting and classifying, the Old Man says. Fogg nods politely. Sorting is done according to Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force guidelines. People from all over Europe are at the camp, sorted and tagged, by SHAEF guidelines, into: evacuees, war or political refugees, political prisoners, forced or voluntary workers, Todt workers, former forces under German command, deportees, intruded persons, extruded persons, civilian internees, ex-prisoners of war, and stateless persons.

  With one category missing from the list altogether.

  Fogg doesn’t like the camp and doesn’t like the work, which has nothing to do with either sorting or tagging where the Bureau is concerned. It’s interrogation, pure and simple, with the solitary object of locating and holding on to any Übermenschen trying to disguise themselves in the civilian population.

  Hence the line of bootmarks in the sludge, past the classroom and the children’s reedy voices in song, past the lines of women and men waiting patiently and the soldiers watching them and smoking and around the back of the long one-storey building, and through an unmarked door (another Old Man favourite).

  Inside, the cold seems worse. Air condenses out of our mouths when we breathe. We know. We’ve seen inside the place before. There is a metal desk and a metal chair nailed to the floor before it. Behind the desk another chair, more comfortable, without the leather restraints. A harsh glaring lamp on the table, but the Old Man seldom needs to use it. Makes a show of laying papers on the desk. Folders. Dossiers. The Old Man uses paper like other people use pliers and knives. Fogg’s there as an observer. The silent figure sitting a little to the side. The one we don’t know, can’t read, can’t understand its purpose there, the one we’re afraid of because we can’t figure it out.

  – Bring them in, the Old Man says. Fogg does as he’s told. Goes to the door. Signals to the soldiers. They let the first one in. A woman, in her thirties. Dirty-blonde hair. The nail on the small finger of her left hand missing. Sits down. Looks at the Old Man with … what? Defiance? Acceptance? The Old Man says, Well. Shuffles papers. Opens a folder. The woman’s face, but younger, happier, looks out from a black-and-white photo. Maria Becker, the Old Man says. The woman says, Yes? Her voice shakes. She keeps glancing at Fogg, who is leaning against the wall, arms crossed on his chest. Looking at him like she can’t figure out why he’s there. Do you have anything you wish to tell me? the Old Man says. Such as what, Maria says. The Old Man turns a page, another. Waits. Such as what? Maria says again. Keeps glancing at Fogg. Tell me about Schneesturm, the Old Man says. Suggests. Maria’s face twists in old pain. She says, I don’t know anything. The Old Man says, That’s what everyone says. No one knows anything. Well, I don’t! she says. The Old Man turns another page.

  Cries outside. Some sort of a disturbance going on. Later, Fogg learns that some of the Jewish inmates have recognised amongst them a former kapo, a guard from one of the camps. By the time the soldiers get to them it is too late, the man is a bundle of meat and blood in the snow.

  Schneesturm, Maria says, as though tasting the word. You don’t owe him anything, the Old Man says. We just want to talk to him, the Old Man says. Silence in the room. A gunshot outside. Maria flinches. Fogg doesn’t move. I met him in Warsaw, Maria says, at last, unwillingly. In forty-three. The words dragged out of her. Bursts – I don’t owe him anything!

  – You don’t, the Old Man says. Agrees. Nods, encouragingly.

  – But I didn’t know what he was.

  The Old Man leans back. Inviting her confidence. And Maria talks.

  21. BERLIN–MARIENDORF DP CAMP 1945

  Maria Becker cries without sound. So quiet in the interrogation room. Fogg notes dark stains on the floor. Some of it is dried blood, he thinks. Some of it is probably urine. Maria Becker cries and the Old Man sits on the other side of the desk, his hands with the palms down on the desk’s cold surface. He’s waiting.

  – Tell me about Erich Bühler, the Old Man says.

  – I met him in Warsaw. He was a handsome man … and I was lonely.

  – What were you doing in Warsaw?

  – I was a secretary working for Obergruppenführer Krüger at the Schutzstaffel.

  The Old Man leans back. That glint in his eyes. Makes Fogg wonder what he was like before the change. What work he did. Questions they never ask. The Old Man says, That would be Obergruppenführer Friedrich-Wilhelm Krüger?

  – Yes.

  Schutzstaffel. The SS.

  – SS and police leader for occupied Poland?

  – Yes.

  – Were you close?

  – He was a good man, Maria says. He treated me decently.

  – He committed sui
cide, the Old Man confides. In Austria. Did you know that?

  – No, I did not know that.

  Fogg knows the Allies have little enough interest in people like Maria. The hunt is on for the big fish – for people like Göring and Eichmann and Ribbentrop, Speer, Mengele. An SS secretary interests nobody, and Maria knows it. Her best bet is to talk, to give them everything they want. And what the Old Man wants, it seems, is Erich Bühler, codenamed Schneesturm, once upon a time an esteemed member of the elite Nazi Übermenschen Korps, and now a wanted war criminal, a fugitive from justice.

  – I met Erich when he came to the offices. He was meeting with the Obergruppenführer. He stopped to chat to me on his way out. He had an easy smile. I did not recognise him at the time. Later, he showed me clippings. Schneesturm. Hero of Leningrad. Sometimes, when we made love, he made snow fall around us as he held me close, his naked body hot against mine … he could be very romantic. Do I shock you?

  The Old Man smiles. I wish you could, he says, genuine regret in his voice. Maria glances at Fogg again, but his face is expressionless, it gives nothing away. Maria says, I thought he loved me.

  The Old Man waits. Maria says, He used me. Like he used everyone else. He wanted information about SS operations. I brought him documents. Friedrich-Wilhelm – Obergruppenführer Krüger, that is – was very busy then. He had just been promoted. The Jews … she sighs, a long, suffering sigh. The Jews were rebelling in their ghetto. It was a mess. So much paperwork. The army had to get involved. They were like rats … She stops, catching herself. Starts to cry again, soundlessly, as though the tears offered some kind of protection from her interrogators. Fogg thinks, She must have been pretty, once.