Authors: Anna Funder
That she called me Loquax was either a gesture of forgiveness or a sign she’d never expected much from me in the first place. I got out of bed and made myself a bowl of instant soup. I’d do as she said, and leave in a week.
The next morning, a postcard arrived from Switzerland, dated before the kidnapping. ‘
Gruss aus Ascona’
printed in red over a photograph of the lake. ‘BJ in good spirits,’ Hans had written in his perfect hand. I felt his betrayal rip right through my life. I called Walter. I hoped the Swiss would catch him soon.
That last week I saw Dora twice. Once, when I was ostensibly at one of my morning sessions at the psychiatrist’s. We took a walk on Hampstead Heath. Dora was incandescent with rage and hope together; she had the concentrated glow of a hunter approaching her quarry. There was no pull to anything else.
Spring was late, just a softening of the greyscape. We moved at a clip to stay warm, our boots crunching in time on the gravel. Dora talked the whole time, stopping only to cup a hand to light another cigarette. Her nails were massacred and there were reminders, names and numbers, inked into her skin; layers of them, some recent and some faded by a wash or two.
She was consumed by Berthold Jacob’s kidnapping. They had got him drunk, she told me, bundled him into a car ‘to go to finish the business at the “forger’s” house’ and sped him across the German border. The simplicity of the plan was offensive, given all Bert’s and her caution during these two years of second-guessing the Gestapo. But this case was a far cry from those of Lessing and Formis, Dora said, where the Czechs, cowed by German threats, did not protest. The Swiss were outraged about Gestapo activity on their soil. They had threatened to cut diplomatic ties with Berlin and had protested to the League of Nations. And they’d sent a public prosecutor to investigate the case properly in London.
‘Here?’ I stopped. ‘Why London?’
Her eyes squinted coolly at me. ‘It was Hans.’ It could have been the sun, or the smoke from her cigarette, but in her face I read also disgust–with him of course, but also with herself for not having foreseen it. ‘Our Hansi lured his best friend into a trap.’
‘He turned?’ A stupid question, blurted in one of those moments of shock when one becomes iterative, grasping with a dumb word which one does not wish to be true. She didn’t bother answering.
‘You’re not safe now,’ I said.
‘The Swiss have arrested him.’ She touched my arm with one hand. ‘In a restaurant by the lake at Ascona, of all places.’
The Swiss investigator, Roy Ganz, had already arrived in London. Scotland Yard was being deliberately uncooperative, Dora said, not providing anywhere for him to conduct interviews, or any information they might have on Nazi activities in Britain.
‘It’s outrageous.’ She stamped out the cigarette under her boot as if it held some of the blame. ‘So I’m organising for Roy to do his interviewing at the flat instead. I’ve called everyone in–and I mean
everyone
–to tell him what they know about Hans, and everything we suspect about what that lot have been doing here in London. Ganz will go back
fully
armed.’ She extended her hands as if to hold something big. ‘We can connect Hans directly with the German embassy in London–Ruth and I saw him there with our own eyes, for Christ’s sake. That’s enough to place the Nazis on British soil, planning this kidnapping. And God knows what else. It will be impossible for this government to keep turning a blind eye.’ She stopped and touched my forearm again. ‘We’ll get Bertie out too.’
There was a quiet ecstasy under her fury, her hand-waving and chain-smoking. For a long time she and They had been waging a tactician’s war, each camouflaged and concealed, the only proof of their existence being mysterious epiphenomena–violent deaths, articles in newspapers, questions in parliament. Now the waiting was over, and they were coming out to face one another.
She slipped her arm through mine. ‘It’ll be a coup for us in the end, I’m sure,’ she said.
This wasn’t a hope she was cajoling herself into. Her confidence was genuine. Bertie was now a lure on a long red thread, and when she and this Ganz fellow reeled him back into the light of international scrutiny, they’d beach the beast. I didn’t want to think about Ganz.
‘How’s Mathilde?’
‘Fine. Unflappable, as it turns out. Makes good tea cake. Reigns calmly knitting over everything. Though nothing escapes her, at all.’
She took a strand of hair out of her mouth where the wind had blown it. ‘Ruth’s coming next week, so that’ll be three of us. It’s funny, but she’s never left me before.’ She laughed a little.
‘I don’t see how that makes you safer.’
‘Actually,’ she said, ‘it’s the safest I could possibly be for the moment. Ganz is staying with me. My own private investigator.’
It slipped out before I could think. ‘Is he, are you—?’
What on earth was I asking her? Whether she was in love? I had no right.
She put her hands in her pockets. ‘He’s very … nice,’ she said, in a tone by which we both understood perfectly the limitations of the thing. ‘Look, they’re hardly going to dare do anything to us while he’s in the flat. The British would have no choice then but to protest as loudly as the Swiss about something done under their noses.’
‘And when he goes back?’
She turned her head on the side, looking up to me. ‘Thought I might turn up on your doorstep. With a suitcase.’ She smiled a close-lipped smile. ‘Again.’
I looked at the ground. Sometimes your life feels like a pile of wrong decisions.
‘I’m kidding!’ she laughed. She took the inside of my arm again, just above the elbow. We started walking. ‘Mathilde and I are thinking of going up to Dudley’s country house. We’ll take Ruth. There are always options.’
I couldn’t tell if she was rallying me or herself.
We walked in silence, till we reached the pond she had visited the night I’d told her Christiane was coming and she had left me to sit watching men leap through the dark into the black water. We both knew that refuge in some baron’s country house was just a way of stalling for time. There was no place on earth she could go and not be in their reach.
We sat on a bench. I thought of the carp I used to glimpse sometimes in my mother’s pond, blurs of gold under the ice, like something half remembered or yet to come, déjà vu or a promise. I looked at the water here, the ground around it dirty and naked. A few daffodils bobbed surprised, oversized heads out of the earth, lonely for colour in a dun world. My breath got shorter. There seemed a terrible inevitability about it. I studied the space between my legs.
‘Stop it.’ She put two fingers to my chin, turning me to her. I let myself be kissed. When we drew apart she put her forehead to mine. ‘Ernst. We made this decision a long time ago.’
‘Did we?’ I pulled away. I was holding back sobs. ‘Did we? I don’t remember.’
A duck came from nowhere and launched herself on the black water. Two early-born ducklings followed, eyes only for their mother. Dora put her hand on my chest. ‘You did for yourself.’ She breathed in sharply. ‘And I did for me.’ She removed her hand. ‘I’m not stupid. I know it’s quite possible they’ll get me.’ She turned to face the water. ‘But I am not—’ Her voice too started to crack. She patted herself crossly for cigarettes, found them. Lit one. I saw she was gulping it back, the thing she couldn’t think about, that would take her over if she let it. She threw her head back to shake it off. ‘I am
not
making it easy for them.’
We sat not touching. After a few minutes I took out my handkerchief and wiped my face. ‘What about India? Africa?’ I said without hope.
She shook her head slowly. ‘I wouldn’t be me.’
And then a fury rose inside me, white behind my eyes. I wanted to take her tiny stubborn shoulders and shake them, wanted to drag her off, imprison her in a tower. I could not bear this foreknowledge, I could not bear that she also knew. I wanted to scream at her that if they got her she wouldn’t be her precious self then either. But that would have been cheap. And anyway, of course, there was still hope. I said nothing at all.
The last time I saw her was at the Great Ormond Street flat on the Friday. I’d dropped by to have my own session with the Swiss investigator. Wolf the academic was just leaving. Dora propped the door open with her body, one hand covering the mouthpiece of the phone. ‘I’ll bring you back your keys then,’ I heard Wolf say to her, raising his hand in wordless salute. When he turned he was startled to find me there. His face was blotchy and pinched behind his trim moustache. He touched his hat and fled.
I took off my coat while she finished her call.
‘He seemed in a hurry,’ I said, gesturing to the door.
‘You won’t believe this.’ Dora was smiling, shaking her head. She told me when Wolf had arrived that morning and realised Ganz was already in the flat he bolted into Mathilde’s bedroom and shut the door. ‘He stayed holed up in there the whole morning.’ The Swiss investigator was now out for a walk so Wolf had made his getaway. Dora rolled her eyes.
‘Actually,’ she said, ‘it’s a permanent getaway.’ Wolf had told her ‘she had gone way, way too far’, inviting attention with all this interviewing and ‘public agitating’ against the Reich. Having Ganz stay overnight with her was absolutely the last straw. ‘He told me things were stretched between us beyond repair.’ Dora shrugged at the mysteries of male pride, which I doubt were mysteries to her at all. ‘How can you break up,’ she said, ‘if you were never really together?’
Dora didn’t love Wolf. She knew full well the narrowness of his appeal, the fragile constructions of grey breath and thought that were his theories for changing the world without setting foot in it. He was the worst kind of armchair revolutionary: supercilious and cautious to the point of cowardice; international and theoretical to the point of irrelevance. He had been precisely nowhere during our
real
revolution. What the men Dora took as lovers understood–indeed, what made her so attractive to them–was her independence. She did not want more from them. She certainly did not want more from Wolf.
We were still drinking our coffee when Ganz returned. He was a tall blond fellow with an even, open face, perfect as a mannequin, and as forgettable. When he started speaking it was clear he was fair-minded, decent and intelligent and I could not have liked him less. In our interview I told him how I was being followed in London, about the death threats in the post, about Hans proposing a trip with me to Strasbourg, and his wanting to see what I was writing.
When I left, Dora was already greeting the next interviewee at the door. I placed one hand on the small of her back, half-caress and half-goodbye, and she nodded at me. Our thing was always continuing.
When I arrived at Great Ormond Street from Paris I left my case in the entrance and ran upstairs. The building smelt like it always did, a warm combination of piny cleaning fluid and toast. I hadn’t heard anything from Dora since her telegram, but I didn’t expect to. I knew she’d have been consumed by the investigation.
I reached the wooden stairs and caught my breath. They might still be interviewing. I’d prepared my confession over the past seven days for whoever would hear it, the tale of all I had failed to see. Of football and the embassy and Hans in the document cupboard, of the Gestapo impersonating Scotland Yard and how Hans knew to introduce a lord by one name. The passport plan. I would tell it and tell it. I smoothed my skirt and knocked.
No response.
I took out my ring of keys. I didn’t have much hope that the old one would work but I tried anyway. It didn’t even fit in the opening. I knocked again. Put my ear to the door. Nothing.
Then Nepo crying.
I went downstairs and sat on my case. I probably sat there for an hour. I wasn’t thinking. I was hoping that the situation itself would take over from me, that Dora or Mathilde would walk in before I had to make a decision. Nepo was there; they couldn’t be far. Then I thought to look in the letterbox. There was three days’ uncollected mail.
A key turned in the front door and opened out my heart. But it was the retired insurance executive, Mr Donovan, coming home. I told him I was back from France but had no key. He said he thought the ladies had gone away. They had had a great many visitors the past week, he said, but he hadn’t seen them at all since the weekend. It was Thursday.
Mr Donovan let me use his telephone. There was only one person I could think to call. Christiane picked up, and I introduced myself. ‘I know who you are,’ she said, not unkindly, and passed me to Toller. He suggested that Dora and Mathilde may have gone to Lord Marley’s house in Sussex. Toller said he didn’t have the new key, or any key for that matter.
When Mr Donovan came back into the room he was wearing a dressing gown over his clothes. He offered me tea and went into the kitchen. I sat still, on his sofa.
Dora knew I was coming today, this morning. She would never have met me at the station but I could not imagine she would not be here when I was due.
I called Toller again. ‘She knew I was coming,’ I said.
He was at our building within the hour, his movements fast and fidgety, dark circles the whole way around his eyes. We walked to the police station on Gray’s Inn Road, Toller talking all the while. We just needed to check inside the flat, he said, we could have any damage to the door repaired before they got home. He thought the local police would probably have nothing to do with Scotland Yard, and it shouldn’t be too hard to keep them away from the cupboard. We just needed to check. I didn’t speak–there was a pit of anxiety in my stomach.
Police Constable Hall came back to Great Ormond Street with us. The three of us stood on the doorstep under the angel’s head and the boarded-up fanlight. The policeman rang the doorbell for the top flat. We waited out the silence of its wake. Then I let us into the building with my key.
Upstairs, PC Hall knocked on the door of the flat and opened his case. Fear crawled cold over my skull–for what we would find, for the violence of finding it. He barely waited for an answer before jemmying the door.