The Human Pool (25 page)

LONDON

LONDON WAS SUPPOSED TO
have been about finding Dora, but it turned into a zigzag of paranoia. People I wanted to speak to avoided me, while men I had no interest in were keen to talk.

From the start I was followed—fact or imagination? On the underground. In the streets. Even when I doubled back or jumped a bus, I couldn't rid myself of the thought (or them). They could have been Kurds. They could have been Turks. Or someone else.

Fact: Carswell's office has been closed since my return, his mobile dead. Dora's got clogged with my unanswered voice messages.

Fact: No Dora. No Carswell. Find one, you find the other—fact or speculation? A search fuelled by worry and resentment (fact).

Fact: I experienced a strong wish to discuss my growing isolation with Hoover and ask whether it was how he used to feel.

Paranoia is fast-spreading. The mundane assembly of previous existence disappears. Everything regroups in hostile form, a world only of bad connections, seen through a tight funnel. Paranoia is a state of pressurised ego, and the wild surmise of endless self-reference leaves you hopelessly trying to connect it all up, which you never can.

You become followed because you believe you are being followed. Extreme caution becomes a form of carelessness.

Paranoia as virus.

Fact: The women street sellers on the Holloway Road, dealing in black-market cigarettes, are Turkish Kurds, as are their minders. Illegal liquor stores in the neighbourhood are fund-raising fronts for Kurdish terrorists.

Fact: One of the main drug wars in North London is between the Kurds and the Turks, an extension of the domestic war between an oppressed militant minority and the state. It is also the bottom line of a liberal asylum policy which aids the seeding of criminal enterprise. It is not out of the question that this war connects back to the people who killed Karl-Heinz: drugs, illegal migration, criminal activity as fund raising for terrorism, nationalism, statewatch.

Step in past the walk-through blinds into the back rooms of the illegal liquor stores in Green Lanes or the Seven Sisters Road: London, Frankfurt, and Ankara become interchangeable. The men lolling around at the back of the shop are tough and self-contained in a way that reminds me of Karl-Heinz's assassin.

I offered them my story in an effort to assuage a bad conscience left by the Neos. No one was interested beyond my eventual referral to a Hornsey Road men's social club where I waited until I was told to go to another, then another, to no emerging purpose. These places were always on depressed streets full of closed-down shops, nearly always empty inside, with frosted windows, a concrete floor, an old pool table, posters, and bottled beer in crates.

Half a dozen moves later I emerged in middle-class Haverstock Hill, where I was told to wait at a pavement café. Three men turned up, smoothly cosmopolitan in a Mediterranean way. Two looked like they could be doctors at the Royal Free hospital. The third was older, more academic, and poker-faced. I could not tell what he was thinking.

Fact: He said that Mr Carswell, just mentioned by me, interested him very much. He told me he would be in touch.

Joining up the connections: paranoia realised.

 

Fact: Dominic Carswell's sexual preference is for heterosexual buggery. Quote: ‘Dominic liked to put his thingy up women's bums, whether they liked it or not.'

Fact: Dominic Carswell was married to Beate von Heimendorf.

The cold sweat of pre-recognition as I was being told that Carswell had once been married to ‘a Swiss woman':
I know who
. The near sexual pleasure of paranoia justified. Of all the unexpected facts, none causes more astonishment than this. It seems symptomatic of the associations clustered around the events of the last weeks, another connection no one could have guessed.

For all his elusiveness, Carswell belongs to a loosely affiliated world where old associates, and old girlfriends, of whom there are many, are only a call or two away. Purpose: to investigate contacts for possible leads on Carswell's whereabouts, and Dora's.

Source: a self-confessed ‘dolly bird' turned parody of upper-class, middle-aged do-gooding, running a Clapham charity shop with colonial efficiency. Three gins down, old girlfriend (unmarried) grew indiscreet.

Fact: Dominic's sexual predilection was shared by Graham Greene. Old girlfriend's quote: ‘Terribly overrated writer. All that tatty Catholicism, and a spook, of course, just like Dominic. I blame the public schools. The only things they come out understanding are secrecy and buggery.'

Rush of anxiety, frisson of discovery.
Spook.
It was the first time anyone had said it out loud.

 

Three nighttime gentlemen callers, something out of a bad dream, kick down my door—white men in plain clothes, muscle in boxy suits, both with buzz cuts, and a well-spoken gent, actor handsome, with hair handed out only a few times each generation, a luxuriant Bryan Ferry hijack. One goon did something very fast and nasty that made me thrash on the floor. The handsome man informed me that how far we went depended on me.

He produced surveillance photographs of me in Germany with the Neos. Quote from the handsome man: ‘Stop everything you are doing.'

As well as my German activities, he knows of my Kurdish contacts. However, he seems to know nothing of Carswell or of Karl-Heinz's death.

Promise from me: ‘I will.'

 

Fact: the next morning a phone call from a woman I had never heard of. She worked in television and she asked me out to lunch. She had a cancellation, she said. We went to Orso's and she offered me a job; afterwards I half-fucked her, having spent lunch trying to remember her name. Such social embarrassments were voluptuous compared to the memory of what the handsome man's goons could do. Coffee followed lunch at a cafe where she could smoke.

She had a great walk. She impulse-bought a load of videos (fuckably good taste, I thought). I was on vacation from the rest of my life. We ended up in a hotel room watching one of her videos. When she took a bath I was no longer sure what the signals were. A casual conversation through an open bathroom door, in that suspended state of afternoon hotels all over the world. I reminded myself of rule one—don't fuck the office—but decided I wouldn't really be, it would be one against Dora. I hated Dora for going off. That was what I had decided.

Post-bath, pre-coital in a big towel wrap. We drank mini-bar champagne. She provided the rubber. ‘What a good little scout,' she said, and rolled the condom onto my effortful erection.

I realised—while fucking her in that summer afternoon hotel—what the underlay was. I was being bought off. We were in the handsome man's domain. We were there because of him. It was how these people worked. Eliminate opposition by absorbing it. The job on offer would be real, up to a point. On the pretence of making sympathetic programmes, we would infiltrate protest groups and activist circles to gain counterintelligence. I would become a spook, by default. No programme would get made. The commission would never materialise. The plug would get pulled.

Paranoia and detumescence. I told her I was withdrawing, from her and from the job, pleased with the pun. File under strange fucks.

I met the Haverstock Hill Kurds again and told them about the Neos.

That night I arrived back to find my building on fire. The heat was so intense that the windows across the street had blown out. Alarms were going off everywhere. Everything glowed orange. A large crowd had gathered to watch. More fire engines came. I wondered if I was supposed to have been in the fire and who had started it.

Minicab to Paddington, gravelike bed in a cheap hotel. I took an early train to Heathrow, where I bought a ticket to Zurich. Nowhere else to go. In moments of unparanoid concern I worry about Hoover. Frau von Heimendorf, formerly Carswell, is lying when she says she doesn't know where he is. She wanted to know how I got the number. I don't tell her, to piss her off. The answer is easy: Betty Monroe is still listed in the book.

At the check-in the woman asked for my passport. I panicked until I realised I had been carrying it since my return, perhaps knowing all along I would be going back.

ZURICH

JUST WHO IS BOB BALLARD?
He claims to be ‘a friend of the family', i.e., of the Monroes, but Ballard is a company man, I'd bet my bottom dollar. The cliché is appropriate as Mr Ballard is something of a cliché himself: the spook posing as suit, the elite pretending to be ordinary. He's pretty good at it.

My guess is Mr Ballard is playing the coincidence card, while he checks out what is going on. Beate knows him, or pretends to, but their behaviour is not that of old friends. Her explanation—that he was a protégé of her mother's who was taken to calling round—sounds lame. Ballard is here to sniff.

Bob Ballard is thirty going on fifty, his act a rehearsal for the
gravitas
of middle age. He is portly, with Clark Kent hair and black horn-rims. Bob Ballard and his X-ray eyes. His gaze rarely settles on anything or anyone for more than a second, as if he is tracking an invisible fly. (Maybe he is. He looks like a man whose head is buzzing.)

Bob has the caution of someone who knows too much. His job title suggests a dreary desk-bound attaché whose actual brief is operating at the outer reaches of national enterprise. Bob comes over as steady and boring, despite his darting eyes—he dulls the other person into talking so effectively that it is difficult not to tell him everything that has happened since coming to Europe, if only to pep up the conversation.

Meeting two. I decided to get leaky with Bob. This was not a matter of trust, more that I am too old for his conservative tactics. I put him in the picture, with regard to Karl-Heinz, and Willi, plus the hypothesis that Willi equals Konrad Viessmann. Bob nodded, offered nothing back, issued a standard denial about his own capacities while calculating whom he needed to call.

Meeting three. By then I could remember how many sugars Mr B takes. He confessed to a likeness for an English-style brew. Bob threw a curve ball. Up till now we had been content with gentle lobbing.

‘Viessmann is Viessmann,' he said, ‘going all the way back.'

‘Meaning that Karl-Heinz's resurrection theory is bullshit?'

Bob nodded. The sceptic in me wondered if he was trying to mislead. I asked straight out: ‘Are you here as a wrinkle?' Bob's eyes alighted on mine a fraction longer than usual. He was enjoying himself, playing dude to the old hand, patronising me ever so slightly. I told him the seat of his pants would be shinier if he was as desk-bound as he made out, which made him laugh. Bob was not a practised laugher. It was a wrong laugh, the gulping motion of a man sucking in air before going back underwater. His awkwardness made me warm to him. Something had become clear: we both knew what our subject was.

Next day, next meeting. Ballard used the proximity of his office—ten minutes down the hill, he said—to justify calling by. He says he walks when I know he comes by car. I liked him more for the lie. This time he came with an offering. A report by British military intelligence dated February 1945. It was a facsimile of a document typed on semi-transparent paper. The print was faint, as though the typewriter ribbon had needed renewing, and had a misaligned letter
a
.

The report noted the establishing of a Tropical Institute in Basel, with an affiliated office in the winter resort of Davos. The report's author, an English army brigadier with a double-barrelled name, was as dry as a biscuit. He questioned Switzerland's need for such an institute, given its landlocked insularity and lack of channels through which such diseases might enter the country, compared with, say, Germany, with its colonies and international ports. The brigadier concluded that the institute was a front for the disbanding Nazi medical profession and a forward base for its realignment. The institute's journal, a review of tropical science and medicine, included several Nazi medical authorities among its contributors. The brigadier concluded: ‘Is anything more probable than that German tropical scientists, backed by big chemical industries in Germany, are already planning ahead so as to lose no time in reestablishing their dominant position in the control of chemotherapy of tropical diseases?'

The board of directors made for interesting reading. It included former members of I.G. Farben, who had conveniently relocated to Switzerland just before the war; a leading researcher in pesticides; and, among those attached to the Davos Institute, one Konrad Viessmann.

In print the name acquired an occult quality.

Ballard looked pleased with himself and wanted good-dog congratulations for his powers of retrieval. In fact, the rest of his news was not that hopeful. In company terms Viessmann was not even a file. Ballard had been able to find nothing except Viessmann's civilian biography, which indicated a full and complete life in the pharmaceutical industry.

Ballard grinned. ‘Apart from?' I asked. Apart from one company reference, discovered by chance while accessing old Turkish files. He produced his second offering from inside his jacket. Bob was sweating on a cool day.

He handed me an old U.S. assessment of Turkey's cold war defensive capabilities dating from the 1950s. Its emphasis was on the depth of anti-Communist feeling in the military. Strong racial and fascist tendencies were noted, so was the fact that its elite troops were being trained by ex-Nazis employed by U.S. military advisers to act as a stay-behind guerrilla force in the event of Soviet invasion.

Bob Ballard commented as I read: ‘Looks like they had themselves an ass-tight, buddy-love situation.' He appeared mildly shocked by his observation, less, I suspect, for its expletive nature than for his momentary break in character.

Cold war Turkey—certainly Karl-Heinz had ghosted his way through that setup, prior to Cairo. He had lectured junior Turkish officers on propaganda and psychological warfare, a euphemism for the extraction of information by physical means. This was a skill Karl-Heinz had learned after coming to work for us, as he never missed the chance to point out.

The report contained information on sponsored American lectures, among them an Ankara conference in May 1955, hosted by an American institute which was a front for the CIA. It included an address to an audience of invited Turkish military and academics on the subject of disease and warfare by the director of the Tropical Institute of Davos. Speaker: Konrad Viessmann.

Ballard put his fingers to his lips which he tried to disguise as a pensive gesture. He inhaled. I finally understood the reason for his nervous eye movements. It was down to his effort to quit smoking. He admitted that his body was patched together with nicotine pads which did nothing for his craving.

He made a joke: ‘Perhaps the Turks were in the habit of dispatching their political prisoners to Viessmann's tropical diseases clinic.'

Neither of us laughed. The penny dropped, all the way down. We stayed silent a long time, listening to the day wind down.

I told him to go out and buy cigarettes and a bottle of whisky. I gave him the money, so that his conscience would feel less bad.

Waiting for him to come back, I thought again of Willi's baptism by death in the icy waters of 1945, of Willi's gift for exits.

 

Ballard sucked on his cigarette. His head disappeared in a wreath of smoke. We drank whisky steadily. I told him the CIA was getting old, like everything else. Organisational deceleration occurred at a faster rate than human aging. The CIA was suffering from memory loss. Data corrupted. There were no longer the people to remember. I said: ‘There's nobody left who knows what Viessmann was there for, and you've been ordered to find out.' Ballard studied his cuticles, looking almost coy.

We ran with speculations. Was the Viessmann file missing, deleted, removed, or reallocated? What if? What if institutes and private empires traded in information just as the Medellin cartel did in drugs. Ballard drew comparisons with the old Texas cattle barons, capable through their wealth of running their own fiefdoms. We agreed on the essential lawlessness of the frontier. We agreed on the notion of oil barons as successors to the cattlemen, as men who had developed foreign interests, aided by friends and relatives in government, all of them with deep interests to preserve: the stuff of conspiracy theories.

We disagreed when Ballard argued that conspiracy theories always fell down because the last link couldn't be proved or made. I told him it didn't work like that. Conspiracies weren't linear and parallel, they worked in clusters, in successions of cause and effect. There was no mastermind. Dulles, for all his influence and big ways, was working a narrow channel. Big subjects—oil and money—narrow application; all Dulles's moves could be read as oil or money.

We agreed again. A secret organisation like the CIA fractured and its secrets extended to its own internal workings. Few, if any, knew or saw the whole picture. Operations got lost or superseded or hung out to dry. The ones funded by nonexistent, nonprovable budgets could go into twilight in perpetuity, like those Japanese soldiers who stayed on in the jungle years after the war was over.

Ballard looped back to conspiracy, saying that in real life there was no such thing as tying up all the loose ends. He said: ‘Even if you know all the moves in the JFK shooting down to the last calibration, it's still not enough.' I agreed. The truth is usually disappointing. Ballard asked about Dulles. I told him that Dulles was a combination of the carpet-bagging spirit of the Wild West and an East Coast education, a perfect fusion of lawlessness and the law, with a career devoted to breaking the rules and providing the necessary paperwork to prove that you hadn't.

We moved ahead, swimming in waters blacker than Chappaquiddick. We ended up speaking in whispers, the whisky oiling leaky brains. We asked ourselves if Viessmann was still covered by some ancient CIA umbrella and whether he was running a legacy of Dulles's wartime operations, which had blurred and mutated into a descendant of the Nazi genocide programme with the same overlap of business and government interests.

There. We have said it. Ballard has nodded out. I have scared myself too much. The room is dark apart from a desk lamp. Heavy drapes, which I don't remember drawing, extend to the floor. I have no impression of a world outside this room and what we have been talking about.