The Elegant Lie

…

In his room at the Hotel Europa, Carter was woken by a heavy knocking on the door.

When he opened his eyes and glimpsed the stuccoed ceiling of his room, he could not, at first, recall where he was. For a few more seconds, his half-conscious mind attempted to refocus his eyes, sure that the wavy texture of the stucco must be some blurring of his sight and that he was, in fact, still in his cell at Langsdorf, where the ceiling was smooth and dreary, like a bone-white sky on a winter’s day.

And then he remembered.

The pounding on the door continued.

‘All right!’ shouted Carter.

He put on a bathrobe and went to the door.

It was Ritter. He was wearing the same suit he’d had on the day before. ‘Good morning, Mr Carter!’ he said. ‘Are you ready to begin?’

Fifteen minutes later, Carter was in the passenger seat of Ritter’s car, heading towards the outskirts of the city on a long, straight road called Brühlerstrasse. Sunlight flickered through the abandoned buildings of the Raderthal district. On a morning like this, even the ruins looked pretty.

As the Tatra swerved along the potholed road, Carter felt a curious, familiar sharpening of his senses, like someone who had walked into a dark space and felt, without being able to see, the presence of another in the room. These same sensations came to him every time he went undercover, as a kind of mirage took the place of the person he actually was, coiling around him like a whirlwind of smoke, spinning closer and closer as it began to harden itself, like a shell, around his body, until at last the image of this new incarnation became, on the surface, indistinguishable from the man who hid beneath it.

As Carter had learned time and again in his years as a detective, his life would soon depend upon the flawlessness of this shell. Any cracks in the mask would quickly prove fatal under the scrutiny of those whose own lives depended upon trusting him.

For Carter, this transformation had become second nature. The only way he had survived this long was by learning to live behind masks, hiding who he really was in vaults so deep he sometimes forgot they were there. Everything else was illusion, the true art of which was to change as little as possible, leaving behind as much as he could of what was authentically him. Into this fabric of reality, Carter could then weave the threads of the lies, telling them with such conviction that as he spoke the words he actually believed what he was saying. He had taught himself not only to behave like the person whom others believed him to be, but also to react without thinking, so that half-truths merged with outright fabrications until one became indistinguishable from the other. Only then could those false parts of him, which had been stitched onto his soul like the borrowed flesh of Frankenstein’s monster, take on the same life as those parts he knew to be real.

The most effective of Carter’s traits, which he had imported from his real self into the chimeras by which some people came to know him, was a certain caustic bluntness with his superiors. This simultaneously irritated some of them and had the effect of reassuring them that he lacked the subtlety ever to be a threat. Dovetailed into this bluntness was a habit of asking questions, even at times when it might have been better to keep his mouth shut. Among the longshoremen, especially those who were engaged in the theft of cargo coming off the ships, the safest course was always to wait until you were told and to keep your curiosity to yourself. But there was a balance between being curious, which was natural, and making no attempt to satisfy that curiosity, which, ultimately, was far more suspicious. The man who never asked any questions was either too stupid to be relied upon or he already knew the answers, which made him dangerous. By asking the questions that any normal person would have asked in any given situation, Carter sometimes exasperated those for whom he worked. But his allegiance had never been questioned, while others with far less to hide than Carter had been singled out, not only for suspicion but for acts of disloyalty which existed only in the minds of those who swung the iron pipes that broke the bones of men who had stayed silent out of nothing more than ignorance and fear.

Carter’s inquisitiveness became a kind of trademark of his personality, allowing him to gather information far more rapidly than he might otherwise have done and, at the same time, to ensure his survival among the people he was tasked with bringing down.

The hardest part was not the building of this parallel universe, but in finding his way back to the one he’d left behind, and in remembering who he’d been before he went away. Carter lived in quiet dread that one day he would become lost in this labyrinth of his own making. Even when he did find his way out, the journey did not come without a price. Like a piece of sea glass washed up on the beach and thrown back again and again into the waves, a little less of him returned each time he made it to shore.

Before Carter could even begin asking questions, Ritter had plenty of his own◦– some of which, at first, made very little sense.

Where did you come from? What did you do in the war? What was the name of your commanding officer? What was your serial number? What was your father’s name? What was his job? How long have your parents been married? Do you have any brothers and sisters? Are you married? Are you right handed or left handed? What is your shoe size? What was the number of your cell at Langsdorf? Before the crime for which you went to prison, had you committed any other crimes? Do you have a police record?

Ritter fired these questions at Carter with such speed and relentlessness that Carter had almost no time to think about the answers. And he knew this was exactly the point. For almost every question, he was able to answer with the truth. Only when Ritter asked about the war did Carter shave away the facts and simply say that he had served in the Ardennes. Whoever Ritter was, he had experience in shaking people down to see if they were lying, and Carter knew that the answers mattered less than the way he answered them.

Finally, after Ritter had been pounding him with questions for more than fifteen minutes, Carter called out, ‘Stop!’

To his surprise, Ritter did just that.

‘Why are you doing this?’ asked Carter.

‘Mr Dasch considers himself an infallible judge of character,’ replied Ritter, ‘and maybe he is, but his methods leave much to be desired.’

‘And are we done?’ demanded Carter. ‘Or do you need to ask what kind of toothpaste I use and which way I stir my coffee?’

‘We are done for now,’ said Ritter calmly.

‘What are you?’ asked Carter. ‘A cop?’

‘I am what you see,’ replied Ritter. ‘A driver for Mr Dasch, and nothing more.’

‘But I doubt that’s all you’ve ever been.’

Ritter glanced across at him. ‘The war has forced us all to reinvent ourselves.’

‘So how long have you worked for Dasch?’

‘Since the time he almost ran me off the road.’

‘And why did he do that? Was he trying to kill you or something?’

‘Not at all. He wanted to purchase this car! I was driving it along the Oberländerufer in the southern part of Cologne, just along the west bank of the Rhine, when one of Dasch’s yellow trucks flashed its lights and its driver began waving at me. At first I ignored him, but he kept at it for so long that eventually I pulled over to see what the hell he wanted. It was Dasch himself! He had spotted the Tatra and decided right then that he had to have it.’

‘And did you sell it to him?’

‘Of course!’ Ritter turned to him and smiled. ‘Mr Dasch can be very persuasive. You see, he not only bought the car. He bought me to go along with it.’

‘You mean as his driver?’

‘As a person who would do whatever he wanted me to do, no matter what he asked, without question or complaint. I have amassed some considerable experience in that department. But they were the kind of skills that I had imagined would be of no use from now on, especially for someone like me.’

‘You mean you really would have shot me back there behind the Bleihof club?’

‘Of course.’ Ritter sounded almost offended. ‘Mr Dasch admires you, which means we are friends now, you and I. But you should be aware, Mr Carter, that if the day ever comes when Mr Dasch says otherwise, I’ll put you in the ground without a moment’s hesitation.’

‘Why would you commit a crime like that just to satisfy another man’s curiosity?’

‘Because he is not just another man,’ answered Ritter. ‘He is the one who saved me from myself.’

‘And how did he do that?’

‘By giving me a reason to live,’ answered Ritter. ‘When I was a child and it was time to go to bed, my mother would say, “Stay in your room. The night is full of monsters.” When the war ended, I was forced to navigate my way through a world in which, from one day to the next, I changed from a hero◦– a knight of an empire that was to last a thousand years◦– into one of those monsters about which mothers warn their children. There was no longer a place for me in the world. For proof of that, all I had to do was look out of my window at the ruins of Cologne, a city that has stood since the time of the Romans. And just as the Romans belonged to the past, so did I. The only difference, it seemed to me, was that the Romans had the luxury of being dead. For years, I was torn between killing myself and killing everyone around me. On the day that I met Hanno Dasch, I had reluctantly arrived at the conclusion that killing everyone else was impractical.’ He breathed in suddenly with a gasp of air, like a half-drowned man coming to life. ‘I was on my way to the ruins of the Drachenfels castle, just a few miles down the road at Königswinter. I had chosen this spot because it stands upon a cliff looking out over the Rhine, from which I could be sure the fall would kill me. But Mr Dasch convinced me otherwise, and that is why I owe him everything.’

‘And what about Dasch?’ asked Carter. ‘What did he do in the war?’ The question seemed innocent enough, but in fact it was high on the list of Wilby’s orders for Carter to discover exactly what Dasch had been up to before 1945. US intelligence had found nothing at all on him before that time. He seemed to have no record of service in the military, even though he was the right age to have been called up.

‘Mr Dasch,’ said Ritter, ‘does not like to speak about his time in the war.’

‘So you don’t know what he did?’

‘No.’

‘And doesn’t that bother you, not knowing?’

‘I have learned to contain my curiosity,’ said Ritter. ‘You might do well, at least for now, to follow my example.’

At the outer edge of the Raderthal district they arrived at a large gated compound, surrounded by fences topped with thick coils of barbed wire. Inside the compound was a collection of German Army Hanomags, British Bedford lorries and American Dodge trucks, all with coatings of yellow paint and the words ‘Dasch AG’ stencilled in red upon the doors.

A guard opened the gate for them to pass. He wore a battered pinwheel cap and a hip-length, double-breasted wool coat with wooden toggle buttons, and he carried a hunting rifle slung over his shoulder.

The car pulled up in front of a large brick building, which had been divided into a mechanic shop on one side and an office area on the other. In the service bays of the mechanic shop, two trucks were being worked on by men whose upper bodies were plastered black with oil. The office building had a bench out front, flanked on each side by a terracotta pot in which geraniums were growing.

Dasch himself stood at the window of the office, hands in pockets, watching the car approach.

‘As you see,’ said Ritter, ‘you are expected.’

At first glance, Carter could spot no place where it might be possible for quantities of black market goods to be hidden away, or any indication that the trucks in the lot could be loaded with contraband without being noticed, since everything was out in the open.

Far in the distance, across a tangled field of tall grass mixed with brambles, lay a railway siding in which goods wagons were being shunted back and forth by a small locomotive. The clank and rattle of the iron wheels sounded across the empty space, disjointed from the source of the noise, as if a ghostly crew of blacksmiths were hammering hot iron somewhere out there in the wasteland.

Entering the office, Carter caught the smell of coffee and cigarettes. The first person he saw was Teresa. She was sitting at a desk, tallying a stack of receipts which had been impaled upon a metal spike and whose many layers reminded Carter of the strips of meat he used to see on the kebab grill at a restaurant where he sometimes ate his lunch, down on the docks of Elizabeth. Teresa looked up at Carter, but did not smile. She seemed to be staring right through him and Carter wondered if this hostility was shared with everyone she met, or if it had been saved for him alone. ‘I didn’t think you would be so easily bought,’ she said.

‘I didn’t think I was for sale,’ replied Carter.

‘Of course you were,’ she told him. ‘Everyone who walks through that door is for sale. The only difference between them is the price.’

‘Nonsense!’ boomed a voice.

Carter turned to see Dasch advancing upon him, his hand held out to shake. ‘You must forgive my daughter. When the Nazis were here she hated them, and when the Allies drove the Nazis out, she hated them instead. It doesn’t matter who’s in charge. Teresa will hate them all equally. In this way, she is very democratic.’

Teresa sighed and went back to her work.

‘Come,’ said Dasch, and led him into a private room at the back of the office, which was furnished with objects of such lavish quality that they appeared absurdly out of place, hemmed in by clapboard walls and sheltered from the elements by a corrugated iron roof. There was a desk, veneered in ebony and inlaid with mother of pearl, showing scenes of pagodas and sampans poled along the inky blackness by men in conical hats. The curtains were red velvet, brocaded and tasselled and held in place with bell ropes made of silk. On one wall hung a picture of a woman with almost impossibly pale skin, who was sitting in a gilded chair wearing a ruffled white dress, with her chin resting in one delicate hand and staring out across the dusty compound towards the ruins of Cologne in the distance. Who she was, and in what stately home her portrait had once hung, Dasch showed no sign of caring. Neither did he appear to have any appreciation for his desk, which was cluttered with paperwork and old, half-empty cups of coffee, whose bases had left Olympic banners of overlapping rings upon the polished ebony.

The only thing that looked like it belonged there was a large map, which spanned from Ireland in the west to St Petersburg in the east and was still window-framed with creases from the folds of its original shape.

‘Three years ago,’ said Dasch, ‘I had a map of Cologne on that wall. It seemed like the whole world to me and, in a way, that is exactly what it was. It was my dominion, so to speak. But now, as you see, I have a bigger map and, with your help, the name of Dasch will soon be known in towns I can’t even pronounce. Have you travelled much in Europe, Mr Carter?’

‘I’ve been around a bit,’ he said.