Peter Vansittart - Secret Protocols

Profitably was two-faced. His arrogance, his complacency, was stretching me tight, though he might now suspect loss of my fidelity. To call him Father would nauseate. The UN, the EU, must clamour for his like: he would not end decrepit in some Terre Gaste, one of the lonely in the dead, vengeful centre of a ruined self. Simultaneously, he had much that I wished to know. This would be my chance, only chance, of hearing it. My first question gratified him; he raised his glass, perhaps to me, perhaps not.

‘Goering? A Thor with hammer mislaid. He had drug-addict’s vision in which things were both real and unreal. In a world dangerously balanced on a hill. Insane but not clinically so. His physique confirmed Einstein’s discovery that the more swiftly an object travels the heavier it becomes. He always demanded everything at once . Women, jewels, dogs, but all he saw was himself, from different angles. Millions always excited him. Millions of marks, animals, casualties, like a child who promises Mama a million kisses. He had few hopes of the war, shrewdly quailing from the risks but fearing his employer more. He became the star actor-dramatist, forgetting his lines, improvising wildly, but with the requisite tone and gestures to lull the audience. A sleepwalker. Massive but not grown-up. A sponge, sucking in offices, gifts, uniforms, cocaine, praise, swelling into a soggy mess, eventually squeezed into nothing.’

He was silent. I waited, but he had not ceased. ‘His study was a veritable Valhalla, the framed text on his football-field of a desk belied the founder of the Gestapo. Whoever injures Animals injures German sentiments . I was surprised by his inordinate desire for Cranachs, though for art, as art, he felt almost nothing. He would stand staring at stolen masterpieces, footmen’s nudes, flashy junk, as if they were identical. Possession, not value, was his mania, unceasing, while the Reich he had sworn to defend crashed around him. He mistook dire warnings for rich promises, inhabiting opera.’

Not appearing to notice my inability to enquire further, he glanced outside at tinted blossom, blue sky. ‘An Englishman, Mr Ruskin, advised an artist, hypothetical genius, that were someone to fall dead, his business would not be to help him but to note the colour of his lips. The Reichsmarschall would have done neither. He would have tripped, in haste to step over the body. He was very much the Grand Huntsman. He once, rather wistfully, confessed his hankering for Cretan bullfights, dangerous but usually bloodless. He thought the bull symbolized earthquake, destructive but magnificent. By mastering the bull, the performer, more dancer than butcher, could tempt yet master the earthquake and achieve stature. Hermann both shrank from earthquake and was thrilled by it. At Nuremburg he regained reality, after so much sloth and absurdity, a fraudulent horse-dealer, though occasionally…’

His voice dropped. He did not finish but shed his small-arms trainer’s poise for another, very slightly attempting to ingratiate. ‘He could be like you, when, years ago, resenting an order to go outdoors, you blamed not your parents but your overcoat. I wonder now whether our New Europe will render obsolete such as he. A rather grubby astrologer, from Hamburg, Herr Wulf, warned that he might, to his disadvantage, die.’

He was balancing a frown against a heap of well-grained rice, with engineer’s precision. I wished that Nadja could have been with me, with scholarly questions about Herr Wulf’s qualifications.

‘You must have met Hitler?’

‘Never. We might not have suited each other. One may need to summon the plumber, pay him more than well but go no further. He had read sufficiently to start interesting topics – mountaineering, Catharism, Roman slavery, race, Shakespeare, Venice – but was woefully inadequate to contribute anything of value. I dare say this compares well enough with the conversation in the Kremlin, the Elysée, Downing Street, but it would lose itself in dogmatic rant. If anyone is to monopolize proceedings I prefer it to be myself. But in the latest Reich the war is unmentionable. The old put up shutters, declaring they were somewhere else; the young merely shrug and attend to their own well-being. Politics, you know more than most, massages short memories. And, most of the world…’ refilling my glass, disregarding his own, treating most of the world to a forbearing sigh, ‘still inhabits the mental dimension represented by Herr Wulf.’

Wine placed me in an uneasy complicity. The hum and clink were tireless, waiters moved as if on rollers, women’s laughs were like fountains.

The lines on his face deepened. His voice, very steady, was determined to please.

‘There was some notion of arraigning me at Nuremburg, but I knew too much. Disagreeable facts about the Soviet invasion of Finland, the Pact, British plans to invade Norway before Hitler. British behaviour to the Shah and Farouk. American occupation of Iceland and its luring Japan into the war. Today, I move between intelligent, scarcely élitist groups scattered throughout the Weltwirtschaft . I like to think we are in part kin with the Stoics, so honoured in your old home, recognizing each other not by passports, language, tribal emblems – the Flag, ah, the Flag! – but by values, manner, allusions, appropriate to this new Roman Empire and its satellites. You might agree that one test of the coming century is whether it will consider history relevant. The old empires decayed, not through war, a secondary cause, but from governments becoming too remote from the governed. Charging more, giving less. Possibly, though not probably, technology, having abolished distance, will render my diagnosis outdated.’

He had leant forward, adding to his brief. ‘Consider your opportunities in these puny countries. I am seldom resident here but have a nose for projects more or less respectable. Some areas of Poland and Romania have reason to be grateful. There are areas I suggest you avoid. In democratic Russia, violence and corruption spread on a Hollywood scale, worse even than French export concerns, particularly, you may know, in titanium. I scarcely see you selling plutonium from Pakistan to Afghans. But you must look further than this hole-in-the-corner. My consortium assists financing peaceful nuclear projects favoured by Gorbachev. Only the delightful Raisa can be tempted to call him Gorby.

‘We have Middle East oil interests to protect, though, unostentatiously, I am withdrawing my private stakes. I see no hope there. Summits, Camp David handshake, lamentations, signatures by mediocrities, will settle nothing between Arab and Jew. People of the Book, though a book ill designed for peace. You ask my solution…’ I had not. ‘It will be unpopular, dangerous. Denounced as fascistic. But I can place hope only in some charismatic prophet… a Mr Mandela, Dr Luther King, a Roosevelt, a Gandhi. Someone to rouse people above lunacy, tradition, above history. Still, we are not planning to remould the world but to invest in your future. Extraordinary creatures are on the loose, laundering their stacks in Swiss and Cypriot banks. Their rings and counter-rings will soon stretch along the Baltic. The Russians have left vast deposits in Estonian finance houses, which will not be allowed to rot. Much is available to intelligent outsiders like yourself.’

Signalling for liqueurs, seen through tremors of wine and thickly spiced food, he had simian grins. I was marooned in cloudy bubble-wrap, the hubbub swelling, though he was distinct, persuasive as an adept seducer.

‘Erich, I am not, as far as I know, God. I lack the deformity of obsession. I never luxuriate in giving orders but am often compelled by default, by other’s inadequacies. Many, perhaps most, for whom each day threatens emergency, enjoy orders as they do sex or this very passable brandy. Enveloped in the Gestalt , they enjoy the trumpet. A certain freedom exists in slavery. I admit sometimes desiring escape to simplicity, not only to quiet libraries but to graceless brigands. You remember Marinetti? So let them come, the cheerful arsonists with charred fingers. Though he ended licking the Duce’s boots. I am, of course, no arsonist and was horribly bored by Nietzsche’s dictum that great ends justify the most frightful means. My ends are merely to ensure survival, yours and mine. I do not trust other people, remembering the fate of Aristides the Just, exiled not for crimes, vainglory, incompetence but merely from people tiring of hearing him called the Just. Socrates and, I suppose, Christ, certainly Robespierre, though you know more of him than I do, held that crime results from ignorance. Forgive them, Father … though surely a forgery. I have seen no evidence for this. Well-informed extremists share identical psychology, the Stalin–Hitler Pact the most obvious example.’