A Man Lies Dreaming (20 page)

In the morning the bitch was gone and I tidied my office as best I could. I had slept fitfully. I was woken in the night by terrible dreams in which I was a Jew incarcerated in some sort of work camp. My leg was sore and tender with pus forming over a bloodied wound. In my dream I was a writer but all my readers were dead.

My bruises hurt and the little wolf, too, was sore. I woke early with the sounds of the bakery down below and the smell of the ovens. My mouth tasted of ash. I washed and dressed and grabbed a bite to eat at a cafe down the road and then returned to my office. I cleaned and tidied up but the smell of urine and my own excitement still filled the air and I cursed all Jews as I worked. My painting was ruined. It hurt unreasonably. It was another link to my past that had been severed.

When the office was more presentable I sat myself down behind my desk. I took out the fat brown envelope I had taken from Barbie’s shop on Petticoat Lane. I slit it open with my letter opener, etched with the image of twin lightning bolts of the old, defunct SS. I took out the papers, carefully, and spread them out across the desk.

Interesting.

They were identity documents. The girl in the cellar, Judith’s former schoolmate, had told me they were taken off them once they crossed the border out of Germany. There were all manner of papers, German identity cards, passports from a variety of nations, visas, onward tickets to Palestine or America, a whole plethora of identities, a life in papers. Most were women, but not all, and I found myself staring in fascination at the passport of one Moshe Wolfson.

This Jew was about my age, that is to say, fifty. He had been born in Vienna and worked as a furrier. In his photograph he wore the black clothes of Hasidic Jews. He looked older than me.

Perhaps it was the similarity of the name that gave me the idea. Though I no longer painted, I could still use my skill as an artist. I went out and returned later in the day having visited a photographer and an arts supply shop near Covent Garden. One curious thing happened while I was out: as I walked past the Seven Dials I saw the fat policeman again, Keech. He was just loitering about, and when he saw me his eyes lit up and he approached me, twirling his nightstick like a performing monkey in the circus. ‘So, Mr Wolf!’ he said. He poked his nightstick at me and I dodged it, restraining the anger that was threatening to make me lose self-control.

‘Constable,’ I said, coldly.

‘Spend time with any whores lately?’

‘Not since I climbed off your mother last night.’

At that his fat face lost its fat smile. ‘I’d tread carefully if I were you,’ he said.

‘It’s a free country, last I checked.’

‘Not for long, sweetheart. Not if your boyfriend Mosley has anything to do with it.’

‘Scared, constable?’

That brought the big fat smile back to his face. ‘Fucking immigrants,’ he said, poking the nightstick at me again, half-heartedly. ‘You should all go back where you come from.’

‘What about your boss, Morhaim?’

‘Morhaim’s as British as anyone.’

‘I’m not sure Mosley sees it that way.’

‘What is your problem, Wolf?’ he said. For a moment he seemed almost sincere. ‘What is it with you and Jews? Why do you hate them so much?’

I stared into his big fat face in silence. After a moment he laughed. ‘On your way,’ he said. ‘Don’t do anything stupid. If that’s at all possible.’ And, as I began to silently walk away – ‘We’ll be watching you, Wolf.’

I was more disturbed by the encounter than I let on. Was it coincidence? Were the Metropolitan Police watching me, following me? I needed to go about my business without the pursuit of shadows. But that afternoon I gave no one cause for concern. From the photographer I obtained several self-portraits of myself, cut to size, and from the arts supply shop I purchased scalpel and ink, glue and a selection of rubber stamps. So equipped, I returned to the office, where Herr Moshe Wolfson’s pitiful face stared up at me from his passport. I wondered where he was, and whether he was dead or alive – dead, I assumed, smuggled out of Germany only for his body to be dumped somewhere in the Alps, his possessions stolen: there was much to be admired in the efficiency of such a system, I thought. And again I wondered, futilely, which man was behind it all; I was sure that I would know him; would I not?

And so I spent a pleasurable hour at my desk, with scalpel and ink and stamps. I began by gently removing Wolfson’s photograph from his passport. I set it on fire and watched it burn to ashes and then returned to the document. The passport, I saw, had been used several times in the years before the Fall, with trips to France, Switzerland and Belgium. More intriguingly, it contained a brand-new, genuine Palestinian visa, granted by the British High Commission only a few months earlier. Such visas, I knew, were rare, and I wondered how much he had paid, and to whom, in order to gain one. Next I set about ageing my own photograph and, while it was drying, I put the other papers of the dead or enslaved Jews back into the envelope and into a drawer: I had no further use for them.

I inserted the photograph bearing my own face into Wolfson’s document and set about reproducing the official stamp over it. It had been a long time since I worked in such a trade and my concentration was complete. At last I had finished and with a sense of achievement sat there. For a long moment I stared at my new passport. ‘Moshe Wolfson,’ I said, trying out the name. ‘Moshe Wolfson,
ja
. It is a pleasure to meet you,
mein herr
.’

My face stared back at me, severe and mute, from the photograph. It was the face of a Jew.

Wolf’s Diary, 9th November 1939

Were I ever asked to offer my professional observations on the art of detection, I would merely note that it is a truth universally acknowledged, that once a detective acquires two concurrent cases, the two must be in some way related.

I call it Wolf’s Law.

It is a point of contention with me that I had never, in fact, been asked to offer my professional observations on the art of detection.
That big fat oaf Gil Chesterton
once said that the criminal is the artist, the detective only the critic. He was a Catholic and a prude and was never shy of a meal or an opinion. In this, as in all things, he was wrong. I
was
an artist, for it is an artist’s purpose to make order out of chaos. A criminal defaces; a detective restores. Had I been asked to proffer my observations, I dare say they would have made for a gripping and elucidating read. I had, in fact, been working, on and off, on a sequel to my first, and so far only, book, and in this
Zweite Buch
, or
Second Book
– for I did not yet have a title for it – I intended to set aside a chapter, at the very least, in order to discuss my methods and views on crime, which I believed would make a significant contribution to mankind’s understanding of the criminal mind.

Yet the manuscript eluded me; and I did not have a publisher.

My enquiry had led me to combine my twin investigations: these being Judith Rubenstein’s disappearance and the question of Mosley’s Palestinian assassins. The root of all crime, of course, is the Jew; and so it was only natural that it was in that direction that I next turned my attentions. I needed to understand the Jewish angle.

Jews always had an angle.

The headquarters of the Jewish Territorialist Organisation were in the basement of an office block off the Strand, towards the Fleet Street end. They were dark and dim and did not look busy. It was the sort of place rented in a hurry and abandoned even faster. It was exactly the sort of place I was looking for.

It was Thursday; and I was on the job.

Eric Goodman looked like a con man who’d seen better days. He was in his mid-30s, with receding black hair and watery blue eyes that were magnified by his too-large glasses. The collar of his shirt was open and his nails were bitten down to the quick and I didn’t like his eyes. They were those of a man who trusted no one and nothing and least of all me. Behind him in the office was a receptionist as old as Napoleon and as attractive, and she was bent over a cumbersome typing machine, pecking desultorily at the keys.

‘Moshe Wolfson,’ I said, trying out the name. ‘It is a pleasure to meet you.’

‘Funny,’ the man from the ITO said. ‘You don’t look Jewish.’

‘You want funny?’ I said. ‘Let me tell you a joke. A goy comes to a Jew acquaintance of his. “You Jews,” he says, “everyone knows you’re smart with money. Teach me how to be smart like a Jew.”

‘“Well,” the Jew says. “It’s simple. Go to the market and look for my cousin’s fish stall and buy his pickled herring. Once you eat the pickled herring, you’ll become smarter in no time.”

‘The goy, delighted, goes away. The next day, he shows up again, fuming with anger. “You cheated me!” he cries. “I bought your cousin’s pickled herring like you told me, then this morning I was at the market and I saw the same fish being sold on another stall – for a third of the price!”

‘“You see?” says the Jew, delighted. “You’re
already
smarter!”’

I beamed at him expectantly. Goodman looked at me sour-faced. ‘You’re a regular comedian,’ he said. ‘You’d be packing them in at the Hackney Empire in no time.’

‘How do you get to the Hackney Empire?’ I asked him.

‘You can take the bus,’ he said, and I stopped him in frustration before he could give me directions and said, ‘No, no … practice!’

He gave an involuntary shudder.

‘What exactly did you want again, Mr Wolfson?’

I stared into his ugly mug of a face and considered my response.

‘I am interested in the activities of our brothers and sisters in Palestine,’ I said at last, with what I hoped was an ingratiating smile.

‘Well, then I’m afraid that you came to the wrong place, Mr Wolfson.’

‘I’m not sure that I understand.’

He was of the English Jewry, like Morhaim, the prick from the Met. Thinking himself at home on this island and arrogant with it. But earlier, when I had gone down the Strand, the Blackshirts were marching and little old ladies were throwing them flowers and little boys ran about waving the Union flag; and as I passed Charing Cross Station I saw a Hasidic Jew, dressed all in black, propped up against a brick wall as young men took turns beating him about the face and body, until his thick white beard was matted with red blood. His heavy felt hat lay crumpled on the road beside him, as though he were asking for alms. The policemen who were set to patrol the march did nothing but watch. It was not becoming any easier for Jews in this country. But then it never does, for the Jews.

‘Mr Wolfson, the Jewish Territorialist Organisation was founded in 1903 by the author Israel Zangwill and the journalist Lucien Wolf—’

An author, and a journalist, I thought. Jews! They were good with nothing but words.

‘Following the offer, from then-Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain, of a Jewish settlement in British East Africa.’

A sensible offer, I thought, but didn’t say. Stick them as far away from civilisation as possible. ‘I take it that did not carry through, in practical terms?’ I said, politely.

‘
The Zionist Congress sent an expedition to British East Africa
—’

‘You mean Uganda?’

He looked pained. ‘That was the name the
common person
on the street referred to it by.’

‘I see.’

I would see his face smashed into the naked glass, if I had my way.

‘Unfortunately the expedition did not return a favourable report.’

‘Too hot?’ I said.

‘The heat, hostile tribes …’ He waved his hand airily. ‘Details to be overcome, in our opinion. But the Congress voted the offer down.’

‘How … short-sighted.’

For the first time he expressed real emotion. ‘Indeed! Quite right! And so the ITO—’