Geoff Nicholson - Still life with Volkswagens

Amid the road noise she listens for the slamming of doors and the start of the engine and when she’s sure that he’s gone, she springs from the bed, dresses quickly and carelessly and runs out to her own car, the yellow Volkswagen that Fat Les smashed and then repaired for her. She drives fast and determinedly through the patterning and interplay of traffic until she arrives at Carlton Bax’s gentleman’s residence.

The gate is closed and there is some police tape tied across it to forbid entry, and yet it is unlocked and it moves and opens easily enough at her touch. The front door of the house and the broken French window have been hastily and clumsily boarded up, and entry wouldn’t be too much of a problem, but she isn’t going into the house, she’s going into the garage where Carlton Bax houses his full-size Volkswagens.

She gets out of her car, opens the boot and removes a tool kit. She uses a crowbar to break open the garage door and once inside she heads straight for the state of the art, electric-blue Baja Beetle. Its doors are open and she positions herself in the passenger seat. The car has a modified dashboard of very cool-looking brushed aluminium. It seems a shame to wreck it but that’s what she’s here to do. She takes a hammer and chisel from the kit and knocks the chisel in behind the dash so that it tears away from the frame of the car. She pulls back the metal until there’s just room enough for her to slide her hand inside. She feels around until her hand touches something small, square and plastic. She grabs it, pulls it out, and sees that she’s holding a piece of buried treasure, a computer disc containing the catalogue of Carlton Bax’s Volkswagen collection.

She pockets the disc, gathers up her tools and heads back for her car, then she drives to her own flat, a place she doesn’t get to very much since she’s been involved with Phelan. She is no computer buff and she hopes the information on the disc isn’t encoded, but since Carlton Bax went to the trouble of physically hiding the disc, she imagines the catalogue will give up its secrets easily enough. She hopes her own limited skills and her own PC will be enough. Then, if this catalogue tells her what she thinks it’s going to tell her, she’ll be able to get out, to write her big article or series of articles, expose Phelan and make a big name for herself as the daring and feisty investigative journalist who infiltrated and cracked a neo-Nazi gang.

She slips the disc into her computer, and sure enough, she was right. The disc gives up its information without too much of a fight. The problem is, there’s so much information and most of it is so desperately dull. She spends hour after hour searching through menus and files, through directories and spreadsheets, peering through windows, scrolling through bleak, dry entries that list and describe innumerable items of Volkswagen memorabilia in exhaustive, obsessive detail, complete with dimensions and colours, date and source of acquisition, and value. There are listings and groupings and cross references, and endless footnotes. Only a nut like Carlton Bax could possibly be interested in this stuff, and then she remembers that a nut like Phelan would be very interested in it too. The day passes. She is drowning in data. There are over 300 entries on Volkswagen key rings alone, and she needs to read each one, just in case the item she’s looking for is hidden there. From time to time she calls up the Help function on the menu, but each time it tells her, “No help is available here.”

Day turns into evening. Her eyes are hurting and her back aches from being perched on the edge of her chair. She’s falling asleep. She’s ready to call it a day. It’s all so maddening, so frustrating, and maybe she was wrong, maybe she’s been wasting her time and the information she needs isn’t even here. Then suddenly it is one in the morning, and she realises she must have dozed off, must have slumped down on the keyboard, but in the process she has somehow, inadvertently, given the right command. A really Zen piece of computer operation. She has summoned up a directory called LOCKROOM, a name that even in her weary state she can see is highly promising. She plunges into it. The directory contains a list of files with weird names like PRESLEY, MANSON, BUNDY, none of which she can quite understand, and then she sees it, the entry that makes sense of everything; a file called HITLER. DOC. She calls it up. The entry appears:

Item: Volkswagen automaton

Date of construction: 1938

Dimensions: 300×115×140 mm

Country of manufacture: Germany

Constructed of wood, metal, glass, semi-precious stone, human bone

Maker: Paul Loffler

Previous owner: Adolf Hitler

Value: priceless.

Location: Mrs Lederer

She almost swoons with pleasure.

♦

Here, finally, is Adolf Hitler in the Spring of 1938 in a timber cabin in the woods of Bavaria. He is here to relax from the affairs of state. Eva Braun sits beside him on a Biedermeier love seat, sipping Apfelwein and nibbling Mohnstriezel.

And here is Paul Loffler, one of Germany’s finest, most inventive makers of clocks and automata, and one of Hitler’s favourites. He is here to entertain the happy couple, to amuse and amaze them with his latest wonderful creation. In the past he has made cuckoo clocks out of which pop extinct or mythological creatures — cerberus, a gryphon, a tyrannosaurus rex, a dodo — or an automaton the size of a wedding cake on which lovingly hand-carved figures enact scenes from Wagner’s Ring , synchronised to music played on gramophone records.

Loffler enters carrying a large carpet bag which he places on a small occasional table in front of the Führer. He releases the clasps and opens the neck of the bag before reaching in and producing what looks like a small model of a Volkswagen Beetle, though at that time, of course, he would only have known it as a KdF-Wagen. It is carved from smooth, polished mahogany, with brass fittings for the hub caps, windscreen wipers, door handles and headlamps, and although it has a fabric sun roof, the windows are opaque, made of black glass. It is no more than a foot long.

Loffler holds it out to Adolf Hitler who takes it from him and eyes it carefully. He does not smile. He can see that it is a well-made and skilfully executed model of the car, but somehow he had expected more from Loffler.

Then he notices that there is a small brass winder protruding from the rear of the car, like a cranking handle, that just cries out to be turned, and Hitler duly turns it.

Slowly and smoothly the sun roof rolls back to reveal the interior of the car. There are seats and a steering wheel and a metal gear lever and foot pedals, but there are also two small figures, a man and a woman sitting beside each other on the rear seat.

“They’re carved from real human bone,” Loffler says confidentially.

Adolf Hitler peers at the two tiny figures. They are beautifully carved and they are articulated. They are able to move thanks to an intricate system of threads, wires and armatures, and as the handle turns, they begin to perform. But there is something disturbing about them. First, they are naked, a forgivable artistic licence perhaps since it shows off Loffler’s fine carvings of muscles and flesh; but what seems unforgivable, what in the circumstances would have previously been considered unthinkable, is the fact that the two white figures have been given the faces of Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun.

As Hitler continues to turn the handle, the female figure lowers her head towards the male figure’s crotch where a penis, flatteringly out of scale and disproportionately large, rises towards her mouth. The two bone automata mime an act of vigorous fellatio until, in a sudden rapid conclusion, the female pulls back her head and a shower of sparkling powder — “Genuine diamond dust,” Loffler explains — jets out of the automaton’s penis and coats the face of the miniature Eva Braun. Instantly the sun roof springs back over the car and conceals the two figures. Again it looks like a harmless model of a KdF-Wagen.