Here I couldn't help but interrupt him.
'Rendel? R-e-n-d-e-l?' I immediately spelled it out for him.
'No. In Austria, it was written without the second "e,"' he replied. 'But, yes, the Rendel you know and who works for Tupra is the grandson of that older sister and her husband. Not that I've ever met him and I only know his father slightly. I helped his father, Ilse's son, financially, so that he could come to England when he was still a child; afterwards, I preferred not to stay in touch. That's another story though. But let's not get ahead of ourselves. The husband, Rendl, and this was known by his in-laws, had a Jewish grandmother, who had died before he was born, and so he was a "quarter-Jew," a second-degree Mischling. As I said before, nothing tended to happen to such people because they were considered to be "German" and were assimilated, although they couldn't, in theory, aspire to holding any important post. However, that quarter of Jewishness worried the whole Mauthner family, the father, the mother and the other sisters. Not because they were Nazis—they were, it seems, apolitical, passive people, who did, later on, I imagine, become Nazified—what worried them was a fear of any "contamination," which was a very widespread fear at the time. Bear in mind that the Nuremberg Laws were passed in 1935, but in reality all they did was regulate many of the measures that had already been taken against the Jews unofficially (the whole business went back a long way) and to make official and legal an already existing situation, namely the intense social dislike of Jews and the discrimination against them. Now if Rendl hadn't been such a fervent Nazi, he could have lived a reasonably quiet life. However, he wanted to join the SS and achieved that ambition shortly after he got married. In order to do so, he first had to get rid of that Jewish grandmother, I assume by doing what so many others had done: offering a large bribe to the authorities in the place where she was born. And as a consequence of that concealment, that falsification, that imposture, the "stain" became a secret to be jealously guarded, and the Mauthner daughters were told as much as soon as the "cleansing" of the records had taken place. For one of them, however, it was too late.
'She had told Valerie, I mean, your wife, Peter.' This time I corrected myself at once.
Wheeler noticed my uncertainty. Very few things escaped him even now.
'It's all right, you can call her Valerie. And she wasn't my wife at the time. She was called Valerie Harwood then and could have imagined very little of what was to come. She couldn't even have imagined me because we hadn't yet met. But, yes, Maria Mauthner had told a friend who, a few years later, would turn into an enemy. Not a personal enemy, of course, but . . . how could you best describe it? National, political, patriotic? I don't know what kind of enemy one becomes in time of war. You hate complete strangers and old friends, you hate all-embracingly, hate a whole country or even several. It's very odd when you think about it. It makes no sense at all, and it's such a waste. Maria had not only told her about it just once, she continued to mention it in the years that followed, by letter. They had been friends since childhood, they trusted each other, they talked openly, they gave each other their news. Valerie learned that Ilse had three children, a boy and two girls, she even met the oldest, when he was just a baby, during her last visit to Melk, in 1934 or '35. She also learned that Rendl, whom she had always considered an imbecile when she'd met him during her summer visits, a kind of pre-fanatic, was rising fast in the SS; and when the two friends stopped corresponding in 1939, she knew that he had reached the rank of Major, or perhaps Captain, in one of the Cavalry Divisions of the SS. One of those divisions, by the way, the 33rd, met a sad (for us joyous) fate when it was wiped out at the Battle of Budapest in 1945, but I don't know if that was his division. Not that it matters, because, by then, Rendl wasn't in the Cavalry or in the SS, but, quite likely, in a concentration camp, in a mass grave or else incinerated.'
'What happened?' I asked so that he didn't get distracted recalling facts about the War.
Wheeler finished his sherry and hesitated as to whether or not he should have another. I encouraged him, got up to fill his glass, and he glanced across to where Mrs. Berry had been coming and going, but then we heard her begin to play upstairs, in the empty room where there was nothing else to do but sit down before the piano: perhaps it was her practice time, before lunch, at least on those Sundays exiled from the infinite. Wheeler pointed with one finger up at the ceiling and then at the bottle.
'You know already, don't you, Jacobo? You can imagine what happened. Valerie told me that she had doubts about the plan and would have liked to ask me my opinion. But I was away most of the time, and communications were difficult and brief, there wasn't time to discuss problems. When she told Jefferys about it, she hadn't had any contact with Maria for three or four years, and didn't even know if she was still alive. Besides, everything in the past fades and seems less intense, and childhood friendships are the quickest to blur, mainly because children cease to be children and they change, they cast off and deny their childhood until it's far far away, and only then do they miss it. Jefferys appealed to the inventiveness and to the remote, oblique, improbable heroism of his black gamblers, both those who knew what they were involved in and those who thought they were white gamblers; he'd say to them: "Don't keep anything back, however trivial and silly it may seem to you, tell us about it: it could prove vital, could save English lives and win this War." He demanded incessant activity, initiatives, plots, schemes, and always more ideas, and Valerie gave him hers, or he created one out of what she told him: "Hartmut Rendl, SS officer, with the rank of Major or at least Captain—if he's been promoted in the last few years—is a Mischling on his Jewish grandmother's side, and has, moreover, destroyed or falsified documents in order to expunge that information and be admitted to the SS, the most racially pure institution in the Reich and the principal perpetrator of atrocities." Rendl was a member of the SS, a criminal and an imbecile, so why have any doubts or scruples? It isn't hard to imagine the excitement that such a case would arouse in Jefferys and in Delmer himself when he was told about it. They couldn't wait to get the machinery up and running: they not only ensured that the information about Rendl reached the ears of the SS high command, and, if possible, the ears of his boss, the irascible and purgative Himmler, they saw in this a new opportunity for black propaganda. They began forging birth certificates and pages from the register of births, marriages and death, which accused other army officers, high-up government officials and even members of the Nazi Party of being "Jews," "half-Jews" or "first-degree Mischlinge." Not many, of course, they didn't want to overdo this "plague," they spaced out those reports, issuing just a few at a time, those that seemed most believable and had most basis in fact. It was no easy job, but the PWE was brilliant at forgery: thanks to a collector, they had German types and moulds (or matrices or whatever they're called, I know nothing about printing) of what are called Fraktur or Gothic print, dating from the seventeenth century to the twentieth. And even if sooner or later those forgeries were discovered (although not all of them were), while the Nazis were carrying out their investigations and checking each of those suddenly suspect files . . . well, it was worth keeping them busy over nonsense like that which had nothing to do with the War and making them waste time rummaging through the old archives of town halls and parishes (in the nineteenth century, many German and Austrian Jews had converted to Christianity, especially to Catholicism), and thus fomenting distrust towards their own kind, for as I mentioned before, one of Delmer's priorities was to bring the Germans into conflict with each other. And when the trick worked and brought with it the removal or fall from grace of a Colonel, a General, an Admiral, or a Party leader, that saved us a job and spread panic and lowered morale among the rank and file. It may seem idiotic to us now, but it was a real blow to them, the idea that there were infiltrators in their most select units, that the Wehrmacht was infested with "rats," and that no one, however loyal and whatever their merits, was safe from such "revisions." It was a pretty dirty trick. It was of
course "black" in more than one sense, because what they did was to take advantage of the cruellest and most repellent aspect of the Reich and, by exploiting it, brought about the persecution of more Jews, whether real or imaginary. However, these "half-" or "quarter-Jews" were not your average Jew, they weren't poor innocents; they were, above all, convinced and active Nazis, who were either fighting us or hunting down "full Jews" or both, and so no one at Milton Bryan worried overmuch about the possible injustice of that tactic, based on false accusations or, worse still, on actual fact, as was the case with Rendl. No one lost much sleep over it. Nevertheless, Delmer, as I recall, chose not to mention it in his autobiography. I wouldn't have lost any sleep over it either, just as I lost no sleep over many of the other things I had to do and did. On the other hand, I did lose sleep over some of the things I saw, but that's different, it's easier to deal with what one has done oneself." He paused briefly, as if he were starting a new paragraph or opening a long parenthesis, and he turned to look outside, at the river. "I only disobeyed an order once, on a crossing from Colombo to Singapore. I was a Lieutenant Colonel at the time. I was accompanying an Indian agent who had first been recruited by the Japanese and who then, under threat of immediate execution, became a double agent for our side, a man whom I myself had interrogated and trained in Colombo. With the War nearing its end, I was told to dispose of him during the journey, since he was no longer of any use to us.' In that context, the words 'dispose of him' could, I understood, mean only one thing. 'It was suggested that I find him a watery grave.' And the expression 'watery grave' confirmed my first impression. 'His code name was "Carbuncle" and I'm sure that he, too, was expecting to meet his end on the crossing. Perhaps it was his conviction that he was going to die, and his apparent acceptance of the fact, that prevented me from finding the right moment. He had toyed with the Japanese and with us, as all double agents do, but then again, he had told a lie to the Japanese that had helped us intercept and sink the Japanese heavy cruiser Haguro off Penang, in May 1945. He had, after all, been instrumental in our laying that trap. I don't know why I did it, why I disobeyed. I didn't really see what reason there was to get rid of him, and, besides, the Secret Service was full of idiots. If he was no longer of any use to us, he would be of still less use to the Japanese: if he fell into their hands, they would soon find a grave for him, either watery or dry, or would leave him out in the elements to rot and be eaten by the pigs. I had seen what they had done in the Andaman Islands: part of the indigenous population piled into barges and shelled from the garrison, as target practice, when they were already far out in deep water; decapitations, terrible rapes, breasts not lopped off with a machete or a sword but crushed by repeated blows, a parade of soldiers in full array obeying the orders of a Commander whose years of atrocities, during the long Japanese occupation, I had to investigate when the Islands were liberated. I had had enough . . . Nowadays you hear or read that violence is addictive, or that once you've inflicted violence or seen it, it loses its impact, that you get used to it. In my experience this is totally false, a fools' tale told to fools. You can stand a certain amount, and possibly more than you imagined you could, but ultimately, it's not so much that you grow tired of it, more that it exhausts and destroys you. And it keeps coming back and you can't forget it . . . When we reached Singapore, I disembarked with "Carbuncle" still handcuffed to me, wrist to wrist, which is incredibly uncomfortable. Have you ever tried it? I shot a sideways glance at him from my great height, because he was much shorter than me. He seemed genuinely surprised to have reached his destination and to be on dry land again. Then I took out the key, unlocked the handcuffs while he stared at me in amazement, and then I said "Fuck off!" He took to his heels and I watched him disappear into the crowd filling the port. Yes, I'd had enough . . . But it wasn't over yet . . .'
He fell silent, looking out at the placid river that I had come to know years before in the house of his brother Toby Rylands, as if he could still see his prisoner 'Carbuncle' vanishing into the crowds filling that distant port. I had seen that look in my father's eyes more than once, and in Wheeler's eyes too when he had slowly followed Mrs. Berry and me to the foot of the stairs and I had pointed out to them the place at the top of the first flight, where, during a feverish night spent at his house and after sitting up alone consulting books, I had found the bloodstain; it was a wide-eyed look that gave him a contradictory expression, almost like that of a child who discovers or sees something for the first time, something that does not frighten or repel or attract him, but which produces in him a sense of shock, or else some flash of intuitive knowledge, or even a kind of enchantment.
Wheeler took another long drink of water, almost unconsciously; it was hardly surprising that he was thirsty, he had been talking for a long time and, towards the end, had drifted into that strangely introspective loquacity of his. Apart from just one moment, I had been afraid all the time that he would decide to stop, because of fatigue or a more prolonged attack of aphasia or because he suddenly regretted telling me so much. He had never before spoken in such detail about his former life, or indeed about anything. 'Why is he doing this now?' I wondered. 'It's not as if I had insisted or even cajoled or flattered him into it, nor have I been trying to draw him out. I must ask him before I leave, if there's time.' I found everything he was telling me fascinating, but if I allowed him to wander off to the Southeast Asia of the special missions he had undertaken, there was a risk he wouldn't come back or only when it was too late, when Mrs. Berry was already calling us in to lunch, as a mother calls her children. Not that I thought Wheeler would keep quiet in her presence or that he would have many secrets from her, certainly not regarding Valerie's death, which is what I most wanted to know about just then, perhaps because I had recently seen my own wife and had felt her to be in danger; but one has to be careful with stories, sometimes they don't allow witnesses, not even silent ones, and if there are any witnesses, they stop. I could still hear Mrs. Berry at the piano, again she was playing some rather cheerful music—this time, I thought, pieces by the Italian Clementi, another exile, who had also lived in London for a long time, something from his popular piano exercises Gradus ad Parnassum or perhaps a sonata; he was another musician sidelined by Mozart (never, it seems, a good colleague), who had dismissed him as a mere mechanicus or automaton and with that remark had ruined him, perhaps because Clementi had dared to take part in a musical duel with him in Vienna before the Emperor, two virtuosi pitted against each other.
'What happened to Rendl?' I decided to get Peter back on track, but I didn't dare redirect him immediately to Valerie, although whatever I did, I might still end up losing her.
'Oh, yes, I'm sorry. That's why I don't like telling stories any more, especially in my current state. As you say in Spanish, I often go clambering about the branches—voy por las ramas—and I'm not sure how interesting those branches are. Ideally, they should be as relevant as the roots and the trunk, don't you think?'