The Sins of the Father Read online

  He didn’t have to urge Alexis hard to get her to accompany him to his mother’s apartment. She seemed to have constituted herself his guardian angel for the night. In his agitated state, he was overwhelmed by her goodness. It was in such contrast to everything else that he had learned that day. He couldn’t imagine why she should be ready to put herself to such trouble.

  “Because I like you and I adore Becky, dumbo.”

  As the lift mounted, she put her arms round him and kissed him on the mouth. He held her tight. He was grateful to her for not offering words of reassurance which they would both recognise as lying. There could never again be any absolute certainty for any of them that things would turn out fine. In a few hours they had been severed from the optimism proper to their age. Maybe Alexis had previously learned that the world was different from the way it had been sold to their generation, but for him the realisation had come unheralded. All the propositions on which he had based his life had come unstuck; it was like stumbling through a dark night, and the moon all at once revealing an open grave. How could he have been so blind? Hadn’t the wretched Bastini’s experience already warned him?

  Voices came from the drawing room as they let themselves into the apartment. Franz hesitated. Alexis squeezed his arm.

  His mother met them at the door.

  “There’s a gentleman who needs to see you urgently. We didn’t know where you were.”

  She smiled at Alexis.

  “I’m a friend of Becky’s,” Alexis said, and gave her name. Ilse stepped aside. Franz saw that his visitor was Calthorpe Binns.

  “Hi, Cal,” Alexis said. “Snap. We’ve been hunting you all over town.”

  “Hi, Alexis.” Binns did not rise from the armchair in which he sat clutching a square tumbler of whisky. “Hi, Franz.”

  Franz’s stepfather, the General, elegant in a grey suit, said, “Señor Binns and I have been enjoying an interesting conversation, but it might be helpful if someone would let me know what the hell is happening. I detect undercurrents, which make me uneasy. Franz?”

  The name was a command. Franz hesitated. He walked to the window and looked out on the city lights. Somewhere – out of the light, or perhaps with a single naked bulb directed at her face, was Becky. He turned round. Binns smiled at him. “Did you talk to Czinner?”

  Alexis said, “You’ve made a balls-up, Cal.”

  Binns sucked at his whisky.

  “We’ve had our obligations to fulfil,” he said.

  “Franz,” the General said, “when you went north to look for your father – and I wish your mother had told me in advance of your investigation, which it would have been wiser to leave in my hands – did you encounter a certain Lieutenant Vilar?”

  “Yes,” Franz said. “He looked after me. Why do you ask?”

  “He won’t do so again. He’s been murdered. Rather horribly. I have photographs, but I won’t show them to you. I wanted to speak to you about your conversation with him. However, Señor Binns’s arrival persuades me that the poor lieutenant is only one small part of a more intricate puzzle.”

  The General sat on the arm of the sofa, above his wife who had subsided there. He swung a long leg, gazing, as if in admiration, at the knife-edge crease of his trousers or the high polish of his black English-made shoe. He placed light fingers on Ilse’s bare shoulder.

  “My dear,” he said, “this is all going to be unpleasant, I fear. You will have to be brave. Or would you rather leave us, and let me handle it?”

  Ilse returned the squeeze of his hand.

  “I will stay,” she said. “I think perhaps I have let too many other people handle too many things.”

  “As you like, my dear, but it is going to be unpleasant. I wished only to spare you as much as possible. Franz.”

  So, for the second time that evening, Franz told the story as he had encountered it. When he had finished it was as if Becky’s fear was in the room with them.

  Franz said, “Why did you hide it from me, Mother? You must always have known what my father did. What he was.”

  The General’s fingers tightened on Ilse’s shoulder. She looked up, thrusting out her chin, and, for a moment, for the first time ever for Franz, she looked ugly.

  “You talk of such things,” she said. “It is easy to talk. What was I to do? He was my husband. He was the father of my son. He is your father. What would you have had me do? Denounce him to the Jews or the Russians or the Americans, who were anyway – as you can see” – she gestured with a terrified vague push of the hand towards Calthorpe Binns – “ready to overlook whatever he had done, in return for what he could do for them. And what in the end had he done? Only what he was commanded to do. But, eventually it was impossible for me also. That is why we separated.”

  “My darling,” the General said. “You have nothing with which to reproach yourself. Franz, you will not speak in that manner to your mother. You will apologise, now, please… Franz.”

  Franz felt the touch of Alexis’s hand.

  “Whatever I have done, I have done for love of you, Franz,” Ilse said.

  “I’m sorry, Mother. But Becky… I’m almost out of my mind…”

  “Oh, that poor girl… Carlos, my dear, what can be done for her?”

  “That is the next matter,” the General said.

  The telephone rang.

  For a moment it seemed as if nobody would take the responsibility of answering it. All feared the news it might bring. Even the General hesitated.

  “It’s for you, Franz.”

  “Luis? … No of course she isn’t. What? It can’t be… Oh, Christ… Look, Luis, where are you? Right, stay there. I’ll ring back.”

  He replaced the receiver, turned to face them like an actor confident of holding his well-drilled colleagues. But there was a tremble in his voice.

  “That was Luis. He wanted to know if Gabriella was here. Apparently she was going to spend the day with Becky. She was going to call him, and hasn’t done so…”

  The General lit a cigarette. Franz saw the tension leave his body. He smiled. It was a smile of which his subordinates would be wary, but at least it was a smile.

  “Mr Binns,” he said. “It seems to me that your associates, or rather your clients, are fools. They must know that it is one thing to take someone like Miss Czinner, quite another to seize a girl with the connections of Señorita Carmona. And then there is Lieutenant Vilar. Have they gone mad? Franz, I think we may stop worrying. Mr Binns will make it clear to his clients that they must release the girls.”

  “He can also tell them that they are too late,” Franz said. “By now my father is in Israel.”

  It was that night Franz learned that people really did have separate lives, which were not merely extensions of his own. Of course he had always known this intellectually, as we all do, but he had never felt it before. He had had warnings: the Bastini affair was one such, and he had sometimes tried to imagine how Bastini managed to live with his shame and his self-knowledge. But even this he imagined only in the way you might speculate about a character in a novel, someone who couldn’t really be said to exist except in the lines given him. Now, as he sat in Alexis’s apartment, waiting for Luis whom they had bidden there, after they had crept from the intolerable confinement of his own home, he struggled to come to terms with the otherness of life.

  That his father, as an officer in the SS, had been responsible – though in what precise capacity he didn’t know – for some share in the Final Solution of European Jewry; and that this was the same man who looked on him with a tender if remote affection, and ate the club pudding of pastry, fruit and cream, with such enjoyment. How did you connect these two pictures, and, more important, what went on in such a mind? And what was going on now in the aeroplane that was delivering him to Israel?

  That Becky was a prisoner somewhere, afraid, with Gabriella who would be weeping, because nothing in her life could have prepared her to feel powerless.

  That Becky’s father
had betrayed his father, that he had found his love for his daughter inadequate, when set in the scales against … what? He had denied that it was a passion for revenge.

  “Drink this coffee. You’ve had enough whisky.”

  But that wasn’t true. It was the whisky which granted him the capacity to endure what he now understood. He thrust his glass at the girl, who sighed, refilled it and said only, “You must be sober…”

  “Isn’t there a news bulletin on the BBC World Service?”

  “In a quarter of an hour.”

  “Oh Alexis, I don’t know what I would do without you.”

  He clutched her to him.

  “Luis will be here soon,” she said.

  “It’s going to be all right,” she said; but he heard the lie in her voice. They both knew that whatever happened, it would never be all right again.

  “It’s not like her to be late,” Nell said, “without letting us know. I’ve told her often, as long as we know…”

  Eli did not reply. His silence took on a new irritation for her. He played Schubert songs, and his eyes filled with tears.

  “I’m going to telephone Ilse to see if she’s there.”

  “No,” he said, “don’t do that.”

  To her surprise, Eli, who no longer took an interest in public affairs, who described world politics as “an inferior version of the commedia dell’arte”, asked her to tune in to the BBC World Service. She half-listened to the news bulletin as she toasted cheese in the kitchen. There was nothing in its catalogue of human folly and ill-will that could interest him.

  “She must be with Franz. It’s too bad of her not to have let us know. But something may have happened to her.”

  “What?”

  “Anything.”

  The doorbell rang.

  Franz turned off the radio. “I thought there might be something by now,” he said.

  “I’m sure there won’t be till morning. They will want to announce it with all the stops out.”

  “Oh God.”

  “Look…”

  “I can’t bear to…”

  Even the intimacy that they both felt frightened him. He was so conscious of the lines of her body as she sat on the arm of his chair with her hand stroking his cheek. He knew, and knew she knew he knew, that in other circumstances they would abandon words, go to bed, make love; and that what restrained them now was not so much Becky, or decency, as the superstitious thought that their betrayal might bring her bad luck; and perhaps that Luis would soon be with them. Even so he slipped his arm round Alexis, pulled her on top of him, and kissed her on the mouth.

  “No,” she said, but didn’t move.

  Then she said, “Your stepfather frightened Cal Binns. Did you get that? He left him scared as all hell. He’s quite a man, the General.”

  He kissed her again.

  “I adore Becky too,” she said. “She’s like a flower.”

  It was Kinsky. He was out of breath and his eyes, his whole face, looked wild. He looked strangely younger. He said, straight out, panting, “Ilse telephoned me, I can’t believe it.”

  “Who’s there,” Eli called, above the wireless which was now playing a snatch of opera.

  “It’s Kinsky.”

  The music stopped.

  “Kinsky? What are you doing at this time of night?”

  “Ilse telephoned me,” he said again, “I still can’t grasp it.”

  Nell followed him through into the living room. Eli sat in his chair with his hand on the knob of the wireless. It was the volume control he had turned down, but not off, and she was aware of a murmur in the background.

  “Would somebody tell me what this is all about? You obviously know,” she said to Eli.

  “Ilse’s in the most terrible state. It’s as if her whole world was crumbling. And she has constructed it with such care.”

  “We interrupt the programme with a newsflash.” Eli turned up the sound. “It is reported from Tel Aviv that the Nazi war criminal Rudi Kestner, the right-hand man of the SS chief Reinhardt Heydrich, and the chief accomplice of Adolf Eichmann in the Holocaust, has been captured by Israeli agents and will land at Tel Aviv airport later this morning. This report is as yet unconfirmed. We hope to bring you fuller information in our regular bulletin at six o’clock, Greenwich Mean Time.”

  * * * *

  Alexis slipped off Franz’s lap. She moved as if she was floating and she stood with her back to him and smoothed her bottom; he watched the fingers extended against the blue denim.

  “That’s it. That’s Part I, I guess, and this” – as the doorbell rang – “sounds like your friend Luis.”

  “Alexis…” but she had gone through the apartment in answer to the door, and Franz was left alone. He poured himself another whisky, and drank it quickly, then another which he stood holding in both hands as Luis entered the room.

  “So, boy, what gives, what is this?”

  “Tell him the whole story, honey.”

  “I don’t know the whole story… I don’t even know what I know…”

  “But who is Rudi Kestner?” Nell said. She took off her spectacles and held them, like counsel making a point to the jury, in one hand. “I don’t mean that. I mean – what is the significance? Of course I know who Kestner was, is, I should say…”

  “Nell,” Kinsky said, “Kestner is Franz’s father.”

  “Do you remember,” he went on, “in Berlin in 1939 or late ’38, you told me of how a man approached you in Unter den Linden and warned you about your relationship with Eli? That was Kestner.”

  She sat down, plomp.

  “No, that’s impossible… I would have known. I would have recognised him when…” But it wasn’t impossible. She had liked that man even while he frightened and disgusted her, and she had liked Franz’s father with reservations which were certainly different, and yet…

  “Oh my God. Does Becky know?”

  “Where can I find this Binns?” Luis said. “Just tell me, and I shall strangle him. First though I shall pull out his teeth one by one till he confesses where they are.”

  “It’s not like that,” Alexis said. “Cal Binns is only a middleman, a gobetween. And they’ll be all right.”

  “Becky will be all right,” Eli said. “There is no reason why she shouldn’t be now.”

  * * * *

  “It’s a mess, Luis, it’s an inferno, and don’t think I am not in the deepest pit of Hell.”

  “What makes you think I give a damn where you are, my friend? What I fucking want to know is why you are sitting here on your backside?”

  “My God.” Nell looked at her husband. “This is your doing. And don’t you see, you blind fool, Becky is harmed, ruined, whatever happens to her now?”

  EIGHT

  Franz watched the screen, a little breeze from the open window playing on the back of his neck. Four Israeli soldiers ran towards the plane. The steps were lowered, and they trotted up them. Then a man in an open-necked white shirt appeared in the doorway and waved them back. They obeyed, confused. One of them was a girl with a shock of heavy swinging dark hair; she looked a little like Gabriella. The man in the white shirt signalled a greeting to the world’s press. There were photographers everywhere: the television camera cut to the ranks of kneeling men, others pushing and jostling behind them. The man in the white shirt withdrew again into the plane. There was a pause. It seemed to last the length of a commercial as the camera held the shot of the empty doorway. The man in the white shirt returned, at the head of a small group. They descended the steps. There were five or six of them. The open-necked white shirt looked like a sort of uniform. But there in the middle, distinguished only by the cuffs on his wrist (the hands crossed in front of his body), was Franz’s father. He still wore his dark glasses, but two others were wearing dark glasses also, and it was only the manacles that made him any different from the crowd that surrounded him. He looked calm, blank-faced. Maybe he had used up expressions in the days since he had been snatche
d from his bungalow.

  The press surged forward but were restrained. There were now more policemen and more soldiers on the tarmac. Some of them were shouting and gesticulating, and you could hear yells coming also from the crowd that was held back even behind the press. Then a jeep came up very fast, followed by a small black van. Rudi was hustled into the back of the van. Three or four of the white-shirted figures clambered in after him. The two vehicles drove off, followed by motorcyclists.

  The cameras cut to an interview room. The man who had come out of the plane first described the circumstances of what he called the arrest. He didn’t mention Dr Czinner. He said only “Acting on information received…” He said that Kestner had tried at first to dispute the identification, “but we weren’t having that, and he desisted.” Of course he had been well treated. This was a serious business: An act of justice, not revenge, and so naturally the accused will be given every facility to conduct his defence, and will be treated in the manner enjoined by the Israeli penal code. No, Kestner would not be permitted to give an interview. No, the press would not be permitted to question him. That was a matter for the court.

  A journalist said, “Is it true that two girls are being held hostage in Argentina, and that there are proposals for ransom?”

  “I have no information on that subject, but the Israeli Government will never consider any such proposition. Kestner will stand trial for his crimes against humanity.”

  The General rose and switched off the television. “I’m amazed they asked that question about the girls.”

  Franz looked away: “Where are they? What’s happening? You were so sure they would be released.”