The Human Pool Read online

  I live among the dead more than the living, find myself in increasing acceptance of death. The grandchildren were channel-hopping—an irritating habit for anyone old enough to remember having to get up to switch stations—and jumping up and down on the settee, when that once familiar figure, taller than the rest, stooping now, pushed the camera aside, refusing an interview. TV as resurrection machine: dead Willi Schmidt come to life again.

  It had to be coincidence, I told myself. The man looked too young. Nor am I comfortable with the notion that Willi might be alive. I am aware that in my writing I avoid mention of those who haunt me most—men like Willi and Karl-Heinz.

  The kids changed channels again and lost the item. I yelled at them. They snitched on me, which resulted in Naomi working to contain her anger as she said, ‘Don’t you ever raise your voice to my children.’ I wanted to push her until her resentment came bursting out, to have the flat-out row that would let her show her bitterness at my indifference and put us in touch. But she backed off, because she knew I would have forced her to admit that she had married a dope.

  What I am trying to record in these pages is what I once believed. I believed I was working for change. I deluded myself, that the system I supported was better than its alternative. I believed that enemies were there to be defeated, and once that was done, progress would be made. What I did not see, and see only dimly even now, is that there was and is a whole other set of connections, a whole other way of working, where these beliefs do not apply. (I delude myself still; I watched men working those connections throughout the war. Dulles. Himmler. Eichmann.)

  Most of all I believed in a future, even though that future would be betrayed by those who inherited it. Which was their right. That was part of the belief, too. However, I didn’t believe that what had been fought for would be dismantled and discarded quite so unceremoniously, nor that such idiocy would prosper. Today I see purposelessness everywhere, in the frenetic activity of the aimless, and a world bereft of ideals. This is what we fought for: the right of those who followed to pursue lives of gratification and self-destruction.

  *Hoover’s papers for this period consist of several formal and informal diaries, computer files of draft chapters of different parts of his ‘memoirs’, in no particular order, as well as other notebooks and files of thoughts and jottings. This chapter is an organisation of that material, much of it undated, and takes its cue from a note of Hoover’s: Start always with the past.

  *Hoover, elsewhere, on the subject of his wife: Another story; another life, another book(!) Hoover’s letters to his wife have since been deleted.

  Vaughan

  FRANKFURT

  THE KRAUTS DO BANTER. We drive around, bored, thrash-metal white supremacy on the tape deck, doing vigilante runs into the Turkish quarter. They talk tough-boy, kick shit out of the schwarzers. Pasty boys rule. Kraut pasty boys. Frankfurt pasty boys. Five men in a car, old enough to know better, on edge and off-guard from early cans of beer, gazing hungover at the morning street, looking for trouble.

  When they find none they turn on you, because you’re not one of them and you’re sitting next to them and tolerance is running low, seeing how far they can go before they start sticking the knife in. Thin beery farts and giggles, then they ask: What are you doing in Frankfart, man? More farts, more laughs. The driver cracks the window, in a tiny gesture towards civilisation’s progress.

  They speak invasive English, learned from music lyrics, and display an insatiable appetite for slang: dipstick, dog-fuck, dildo. Tomorrow we do the letter e. They call everyone wanker. Black wanker. Brown wanker. Yellow wanker. Cunt wanker. Jew-wank. They call each other Kraut-wank, fixing you with a look, daring you even to think it. It’s funny between themselves.

  They teach you to see the way they do. Stupid shops. Stupid rich-clothes consumer shit. American shit everywhere: Coca-Cola and McDonald’s shit. Love-your-neighbour shit. Advertising shit. Stupid big company sign shit: the corporate asshole. Smug suits. It’s a dog’s world. The Krauts do barking. They have learned to call everything a ditch. Frankfurt’s a ditch. You start to wonder what the executive suits would look like on all fours, picking their teeth up off the pavement.

  The line between acting and believing gets thinner. It would take a rash man to call the Neos’ bluff, jumpy as they are and afraid of penetration.

  Some days they tolerate you. Others they’re suspicious. Today is one of those days. You hit them with your Nazi spiel, the one that goes Daddy got himself a Kraut bride in the 1960s: Mummy Kraut. Mummy Kraut’s dead Daddy was a big Nazi. Cool uniforms, attitude, good scrapbook. The Krauts want to believe me. Grandpappy an SS general, dead in the war.

  But, hey, how do we know you’re not an undercover guy? Or a Jew? Let’s see if he’s got a Jewish dick. Come on, or why do you hang around with deadheads like us? Hey, cophead, you wanna suck some real dick? Hey, man, we’re just fooling around. German sense of humour.

  So why would a nice English boy hang around with a bunch of Neos? Of course there is an ulterior motive—but it’s my business to show them there isn’t.

  They tire eventually of the Grandpappy line and you own up—just kidding, boys—and tell them how you spent a long time in South Africa and your sister got gang-raped by Schwarzers with thirty-five-inch dicks. Eeeech! go the skinheads. But they’re not buying that, either. We want proof, man. So you tell them: look up the Tooled website. Tooled is a fanzine for racial invective. Let’s go check it out, man.

  Internet café. Computer geeks go cold sweat when we walk in. I show the Krauts stuff I wrote three or four months ago, standard hate riffs dressed up as jokes.

  They believe me now, but they still don’t like me. You’re a real funny guy about the Germans ha ha. We’re gonna make you eat Krautdick, teach you to be nice to us.

  Trashing a Turkish grocery store, throwing tins on the floor, playing for laughs, pissing on the counter: See, boys, I am on your side.

  To clarify: this is what I do for a living, pretending to be an unpleasant person, hanging out with unpleasant people, winning their trust. The problem is, hang around too long—we’re not even talking weeks here—you forget what nice is. You start to get off on that spurt of fear you see in people’s eyes when they realise you might hurt them. You start thinking Neo, applying their thinking back onto them. You end up thinking Neos are no better than animals: fascist cunts, all of them. Argue your way out of that.

  Hoover

  FLORIDA

  I AM BACK IN FLORIDA, in disgrace, after falling out with Naomi, who told me I was no longer a welcome houseguest. I left straight away—with some relief—without waiting for the grandchildren to return from school. Naomi insisted on driving me to the airport, to give me the full benefit of her silent disapproval.

  The strangest sight greeted my return. The outside walls of the house had grown black with what looked like a mould or fungus, until I noticed it squirming. Having watched The X-Files with the grandchildren—and been amused by their rampant paranoia and conspiracy; if ever there were a vehicle in search of a cold war—I thought I was witness to an alien invasion. Which in a way I was: millions of dark caterpillars were writhing over the concrete back wall of the house, but, for some reason, avoiding the wooden surfaces.

  By now, Naomi has no doubt told her two brothers of my banishment. As they all take after their mother in their lack of forgiveness, we will soon be entering our own cold war, with massed ranks of grandchildren exercising along the family border.

  The house feels lifeless after being shut up for so long. Walking in, I had the strongest premonition of its contents having used up nearly all their allotted time—the books, too many still unread, the sofa which I had always thought was in the wrong position, the sagging matrimonial bed we never got around to renewing. By Floridian standards the house is overdue for demolition. It stands on a key near Englewood, one of the less fashionable parts of the Gulf, another old people’s colony full of too many well-pensioned, bright-col
oured, romper-suited senior citizens too old to jog and down to a shaky power walk by way of exercise. The house was built in the 1950s by an international architect of minor repute, mainly out of dark wood and glass. For all the window space it has always been gloomy inside. My neighbours consider my neglect of it disrespectful to the value of the area. In the weeks after Mary died I had contemplated selling, and one Realtor—a vivacious woman whose cheer was, I suspect, chemically enhanced—described it to me, without meaning offence, as ‘just a shack’.

  As all the children experience money difficulties they are no doubt hoping I will sell and settle with them to avoid death duties. Which means that sooner or later they will make their peace with me and suggest I move somewhere more manageable and nearer one of them.

  The problem was the bad stuff I wrote about them on my computer—David, shiftless; Josh, dull; Naomi, disappointingly conformist. The offending passage made reference to my adulteries, previously unknown to Naomi, who said, ‘It desecrates Mom’s memory.’

  As for these infidelities, they happened a long time ago. The shadow lives of the war, the secrecy, the false identities, the fear—and excitement—of discovery had been hard to shake off, and had been replayed in the bedrooms of adultery.

  It was Naomi’s kids who undid me. Deciding they wanted a preview of Grandpa’s memoirs, they printed a batch.* Computer-literate they may be, at a frighteningly young age, but their reading skills are limited, and they needed Mom for help. Naomi had at first told them not to go interfering with Grandpa’s private business, but once she had taken a look herself, she couldn’t stop, and had ended up screaming, red-faced, ‘How can you even think this stuff? I see now I don’t know you at all!’

  My post was all mail shots and bills, apart from one package. In it was an old book with no indication of who had sent it or why, other than the book dealer’s receipt, which listed an address in Missouri I had never heard of and stated that the dealer, Richard W. Dean, traded in modern first editions and collectibles. The book’s title was Watcher in the Shadows, the author Geoffrey Household. The copy posted was the English first edition, published 1960.

  I had no idea who had sent it, or why anyone should think I would be interested.

  According to Richard W. Dean, whom I called, it was I who ordered the book, by post and paying with a credit card whose details matched mine.

  The story summary on the book’s wrapper noted that the hero was, like me, foreign, that ‘it was so long since the war that [he] had forgotten his past and former nationality’. That he was pitted against ‘a ruthless and highly intelligent murderer whose motive is neither political nor criminal, but straight revenge’. The back cover, publicising new fiction by the same publisher, included Richard Condon’s mind-control thriller, The Manchurian Candidate: was that a clue? For the first time in as long as I could remember, I felt uncomfortable being alone.

  On page 8 the postman knocks to deliver a package. Boom! He gets blown up and ‘On the path lay the upper and lower halves of the postman, joined together—if one could call it joined—by the local effects of the explosion.’ On page 16 the man for whom the bomb was intended receives a photograph of Buchenwald concentration camp with a small cross in the corner marking the officers’ mess, which he takes to mean, ‘You do not appear to be worried. That is a pity. I wish you to be worried.’

  It was nine thirty-two a.m. when I saw the postman coming, carrying the packet. My bomb disposal skills are nil. Everything felt so normal—the day, the weather, the man’s uniform—that it seemed absurd to tell him to put down the parcel and run, so I was left holding it, wondering if I was the chump.

  The label was neatly typed and correctly addressed, the packet almost snug in the hand. It seemed too late in life for any of this. I placed the packet carefully in a pail of water and phoned the local chief of police, who was more of an acquaintance than a friend. He did not sound convinced by my explanation, and I was messing up his day. The occasional case of geriatric jogger rage was about as tough as it got round here. The chief wasn’t sure of his procedure and said he would have to call back.

  While waiting for him I dropped and smashed the glass jug for the coffee maker—thanks to what an old aunt of mine, who had been a governess in England, would have called ‘butterfly fingers’. (Mary’s things had taken to ambushing me whenever I stray into what she regarded as her domain—the garage where the washing machine and drier are, the kitchen.)

  The local police were going to send down the FBI from Tampa until I persuaded the chief that it had been just a foolish old man’s fancy. By then I had decided I didn’t want the indignity of anyone discovering it was not a bomb and had opened the damned thing myself. Inside was shredded paper and no clues.

  Rather than sit around making lists of those who might still want to kill me (my grandchildren), I went down to the local library and found the following on the microfiche:

  Biographical Dictionary of Genre Fiction, ed. Pirie R/Rayner D. Household, Geoffrey, 1900–1982.

  Author best known for classic manhunt thrillers, notably Rogue Male(1939) in which a sniper who has stalked, fired at, and missed Hitler is hunted by a German adversary across a detailed landscape that is a fine example of the author’s love of topography and romantic pantheism. Filmed by Fritz Lang as Man Hunt (1941), with Walter Pidgeon, Rogue Male was cited by the Warren Commission Report on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in support of its ‘lone gunman’ theory. Household, although he never repeated the enormous success of Rogue Male, continued to publish into old age, alternating tight chase thrillers (Watcher in the Shadows) with picaresque adventure. His work forms part of a triangle with John Buchan and Frederick Forsyth.

  Someone was playing a practical joke, I decided, another old retiree with too much time on his hands. (Nor is it out of the question that in my current preoccupied state I had ordered the book and forgotten about it.)

  The rest of the day was spent making futile efforts to replace the broken jug, a quest met with general bafflement by local storekeepers who didn’t stock my brand, Bosch. They wanted to know what was wrong with the machines they had. When I located a stockist late in the afternoon, I had to drive nearly to Naples, where I found that my jug belonged to an obsolete model and a whole new machine cost less than twenty dollars. I understood the confusion of the earlier retailers.

  I brooded on the incident and decided what troubled me, apart from my own obtuseness, was that part of me can never be American or understand America. As in Mary’s relationship with me, part of me has been withheld in my relationship with this country.

  For the first time in as long as I can remember, I thought of going back to Europe. One last time. If only to escape the ghost of Mary.

  Mary is not here. There’s nothing I care about. Nothing left to do.

  The doctor’s hands felt unpleasant, his touch soapy. Doing up the buttons of my shirt, I recollected a similar moment of hopelessness seventy years ago, caused by what I no longer remember. I could, of course, use the sickness to ingratiate my way back into the children’s favour, to excuse my poor behaviour. In any case, I am probably exaggerating—always the hypochondriac. The doctor has referred me for further tests, which may be negative. It may, however, be the illness I always feared for myself: the defeat of the free radicals. Part of me feels skittishly alert at the thought, and prone to bad jokes. Nevertheless, staring at the squirming caterpillars, as I hosed them off the wall as part of my daily round, I did find myself asking how long was left, whether weeks and days, rather than the months and years I had always allowed myself.

  When I got home there was a message on the answer machine, an echo of my thought of returning to Europe. A voice I had known for sixty years, sounding the same, but a lot older and a lot more slurred, like it was in the middle of a long day’s drinking. The message said: Hey Joe, old friend, this is Karl-Heinz in Frankfurt. How are things with you in the Florida sunshine? When are you coming over to grey old Germany? By
the way, Kitty says thank you for your card.

  Two things were odd about this. First, I hadn’t heard from Karl-Heinz in years and would not expect to. Second, there never had been any card to Kitty. In the old days ‘Kitty’ had always meant: We need to meet, something urgent has come up.

  I presumed this was Karl-Heinz’s idea of a joke, like the book. We were men on the wrong side of eighty, after all.

  *File subsequently deleted by Hoover or his self-righteous family. No record exists.

  Vaughan

  FRANKFURT

  THE END OF THE GAME, Turkey nil, Germany nil. It was raining hard German rain, and everyone got wet leaving. The first sign of disturbance was an eddy in the crowd ahead. A low animal growl went up as the stampede began. Everyone ran or got pushed over. Spaces appeared as the charge broke up into skirmishes.

  In the bar before the game, Siegfried, yuppie Neo: ‘Riot is the voice of the unheard.’

  Two skinheads attacked a man on the ground. Everything sounded far away and close at the same time. The feathery noise of boots digging into soft flesh carried above the din. They started on his head, the dull crunch of steel toe-caps on bone, a dreamy look of concentration on their faces, like awkward boys dancing. Violence was the only thing that made sense. Everything else was just waiting.

  ‘Many voices go unheard in Germany today. Real German voices.’ Siegfried again, philosopher and expansionist. He said Germans have never felt comfortable with the constrictions of borders. He said Germans are never untroubled in their belief in themselves. He said nationhood is a matter of anxiety.

  Siegfried and his muscle used mobiles to choreograph the violence. Word went out that the action was moving on.

  There was an already sizeable crowd of hardcore support at the new location. The neighbourhood was a poor one, all sodium lamps and low box buildings. Siegfried seemed to have it in his power to keep the police away, and fire engines didn’t turn up until long after the building was alight.