Geoff Nicholson - Still life with Volkswagens

Paul Loffler looks extremely pleased with himself, but Adolf Hitler shows a more complex, more equivocal response. His face is not inert, rather it seems to be searching for an appropriate expression. Beneath the moustache, his lips twitch in an uncertain manner that Loffler certainly hopes will turn into an expression of uncontainable pleasure, and sure enough, at length, the Führer does allow his lips to bend into a thin, taut smile.

Later that same day, Paul Loffler is taken out into the woods and, in a spot well screened from the cabin by a row of silver birches, he is shot by a Gestapo officer called Hans Krauss. Adolf Hitler shows his appreciation by giving Krauss an early version of a Kraft durch Freudewagen, a full size one, a car that will eventually find its way, not into Carlton Bax’s locked room, but into Phelan’s bunker.

♦

Renata continues to stare at the entry on the screen. Now she understands. So this is what Phelan has been looking for so hard and so long, why he kidnapped Carlton Bax and Marilyn Lederer; because Bax had got Adolf Hitler’s toy Beetle, and because Phelan wanted to play with it. Ah well, boys will be boys. But what Phelan obviously didn’t know was where to find it, and frankly she’s not sure she’s much wiser for having seen this file. What on earth does ‘Mrs Lederer’ mean as a location? Could that be Marilyn’s mother, Charles Lederer’s wife? Would Carlton Bax really have left his priceless Volkswagen with his girlfriend’s mother? Why not just leave it in the famous locked room?

And then she turns around, away from the screen, and she nearly jumps out of her skin as she sees Phelan is standing behind her, and may have been watching her for who knows how long. His hands are folded casually in front of him and he looks controlled and serene.

“I hate it when people lie to me,” he says.

“I haven’t lied…” she starts to say.

“Yes you have. You said Marilyn Lederer had told you nothing. It looks like she told you more than enough.”

“She didn’t…I was…”

“It’s all right Renata. I’ve known for some time that you weren’t exactly what you appear to be.”

“I always intended to tell you where Hitler’s Volkswagen was.”

“What you intended doesn’t matter at all. You’ve found out what I wanted to know. You see, I want that Volkswagen rather badly. I believe it’s the final thing I need. Once I’ve got it I’ll be ready. I believe it contains serious magic, Renata. It’s my Grail, my lost ark. And thanks to you, Renata, I now know where it is. I ought to be grateful to you.”

Renata stands beside her monitor screen, trying to back away from Phelan. He moves towards her, raising his hand as he approaches. He could be about to slap her, but in fact the hand comes to rest harmlessly on her shoulder. He squeezes her flesh, firmly but not harshly. In other circumstances it might seem affectionate.

“You don’t have to worry about me,” Renata says. “You don’t have to do anything about me.”

“Personally I’m not going to do anything to you at all.”

He reaches into his jacket pocket and takes out a pair of heavy duty handcuffs. He picks up Renata’s right hand and places one cuff around her wrist, gently as though it was a piece of jewellery, then locks it. He shepherds her into, the bedroom and pushes her face down onto the bed. He loops the handcuffs through the metal curves of the brass bedhead then locks in her other wrist. He gets up, walks to the bedroom door. She can hear footsteps and male voices and she turns her head to see Butcher and four other skinheads enter the room. She hasn’t seen these others before. They are Butcher’s friends, his new recruits.

“Do whatever you like to her,” says Phelan. “But make it permanent and don’t be too long about it. Remember there’s a gathering of the tribes you have to get to.”

♦

In some sense I suppose an author is all his characters. I am, I suppose, both Barry Osgathorpe and Fat Les. I am both Charles and Marilyn Lederer. I am the New Age travellers and the neo-Nazis. I ‘am’ these people to the limited extent that I need to impersonate them and live inside their heads for the amount of time it takes to write them. I become them but yet I don’t have to become like them; and this is a blessing. However, there is an important sense in which I am somewhat like Carlton Bax: I’m a Volkswagen collector.

Obviously I’m not in the Carlton Bax league. I don’t claim to be a great or even a very serious collector. I have no garage or warehouse full of classic and historic Beetles. I certainly have no locked room. In fact I don’t, own any ‘real’ Beetles at all at the moment, but my flat is littered with hundreds of toy and model Beetles, Beetle clocks, mugs, egg cups, books, magazines, a few T — shirts, that kind of stuff.

“When people ask me ‘How come?’ I usually say it all started as a joke and it subsequently got out of hand. I imply that I bought myself a couple of toy Beetles when I first owned a real Volkswagen and that it has grown from there. I say that well-meaning friends are always giving me Volkswagen stuff and that the collection has grown of its own volition without any guidance or interference from me.

This is almost entirely untrue. It’s obviously true that there was a moment when I had no model Beetles at all, and there must have been a moment when I suddenly had one or two. However, as soon as I had two or three it became entirely obvious to me that this coujd be the first step towards a vast and significant collection. This may not have been entirely rational. One or two friends have given me Beetles as presents, but I am a difficult person to buy for. Once a collection has reached a certain size the chances are that I already have the more common examples that people are able to buy for me.

From the beginning I have tried to explain and justify the collecting urge, and I tend to say that I collect Beetles, rather than, say, E type Jaguars or Morris Minors, because the Beetle has such an archetypal form. It has penetrated so many countries and cultures. It is ubiquitous and instantly recognisable. I am no great traveller but over the years I’ve been in the United States, France, Morocco, Egypt and Australia, and in every place there have been real Beetles on the roads and model Beetles for sale in the shops or at markets.

Some of the items in my collection become a form of travel souvenir. In Cairo I bought a couple of Beetles moulded out of recycled plastic, out of what looks like shredded and melted down detergent bottles. The moulds must have been too hot, so that the plastic has scorched and turned a slightly revolting shade of blue⁄brown. I remember clearly the Egyptian man who sold them to me, how he seemed to think I wanted to haggle over the price when in fact the price he’d asked was so cheap I just wanted to be sure I’d understood him correctly. They cost so little that I sometimes wish I’d bought dozens of them, taken them home and turned them into some sort of sculpture. I remember being in a gas station in Yuma, Arizona and trying to buy a couple of toy Beetles they had for sale at the counter, but they didn’t know what I was talking about when I asked to buy ‘those Beetles over there’ since they, of course, only knew them as Bugs.

Some of the models in my collection are extremely good, beautifully detailed, made by real craftsmen. Others are very crude, mass produced, designed to be thrown away. But they are all welcome. One of the thrills of these crude representations is to see just how inaccurate a model of a Beetle may be and yet still remain, recognisably, unmistakably, a Beetle. Quality is not a matter of complete indifference to me, but the essential concern is variety and diversity. And this must surely be the reason for collecting anything; a means of asserting difference in a world of mass duplication.