John Wray - The Right Hand of Sleep

— He wanted a private peace, too, remember. Above everybody. Nobody was good enough to change his knickers, either. Not even your mother, God rest her. And where did it get him? Where did it get him, after everything?

— Some people are good enough to change my knickers, Uncle.

— You want to end up like the old fool? Is that it?

— No, said Voxlauer, taking a breath. — But then he was mad, wasn’t he, my father. Voxlauer put a finger to his skull and tapped it. — And I, on the other hand, am very sane. Too right in the head for my own good, most likely. He laughed. — Bless you, Uncle, for asking me that question. I’ve been waiting nearly my whole life to answer it.

Gustl stood in front of him now suddenly, almost clownishly, holding out a fat red hand. — Come down to Rindt’s with me, Oskar. One last favor to your old uncle. He held his hand out straight at Voxlauer’s chest, opening and closing his stubby fingers. — They’ll be drinking to your health before closing. I promise you. Let’s us bring them round together, you and I. He paused. — I won’t ask again.

— Thanks all the same, said Voxlauer, looking up the street.

— How’s that?

— I said no. No thank you, Gustl. Not today.

Gustl’s hand was still outstretched, flapping clumsily in the air like a poorly managed puppet. His face was a flat and lifeless shade of white. — Perhaps it’s for the best, he said quietly after a time.

— Yes. Maybe so.

The hand fell. — Take care, then, nephew. Try to keep out of sight.

— You keep out of trouble yourself, said Voxlauer. He waved Gustl off down the empty street.

I stayed on the chancellery roof three days and nights, drinking water from the gutters when it rained and hiding in the shadow of the chimneys from the full heat of day. I felt grateful, in spite of myself, to Almighty Providence for the fact that the putsch had been planned for the summer months. No one came through the skylights after me; I doubt now whether the attic was ever searched. By the second day I realized no one was likely to be coming and I felt a vague amazement at the thought. I thought often, as well, about the vision I’d had in the little room, how it had been reserved for me and me alone, and wondered whether Spengler was already dead.

By the second night the patrols had let up on the Ring and I felt very weak. Sometime late in the third night I woke with a horrible last-ditch thirst, an unbearable burning in my mouth and my windpipe. I slid across the damp tiles to my skylight and pushed it open and felt around with my foot for the top of the column of crates. They were still where I’d piled them and I scuttled down their ricketing length onto the floor, then stood leaning against them to steady myself, waiting for the spots to clear from my eyes. After a long time my sight was no better but I decided to carry on. I groped my way to the stairwell and went down. Before pulling aside the drapes at the bottom, I listened without moving until I was close to fainting; all I heard was my own breathing, shallow and rushed, and a faraway humming noise.

The long corridor was empty. I took off my boots and walked along the carpet past the conference hall and the chancellor’s rooms, past the place where the bodies of the guards had lain, to the head of the marble stairs leading down to the lobby. It was very dark on the stairs but a faint glow came in from the streetlamps. The cut-glass chandeliers flickered dimly. I sat awhile at the top of the stairs, waiting for the night watch to pass on its rounds. After a few minutes a man came out from beneath me and made a haphazard circuit of the lobby. I watched him through the banister, looking behind me now and again and tying my bootlaces. Eventually he was gone and I hurried down the stairs. The doors that had been battered open by the gendarmes were only poorly closed and I pushed one of them open and walked out through the courtyard into the open air.

After leafing through the early-morning papers and learning to my profound relief that all conspirators, with the exception of Glass, were officially in police custody, I decided to buy a ticket for the next train to Bavaria at the main counter of the Westbahnhof like any other tourist. Before going to the station, I stopped at the house of a friend and supporter, a philology student at the university, to change into a plain brown suit I’d left there. My friend was very surprised to see me and confessed with a guilty look that he’d thrown away all the clothes I’d given him for fear of being arrested. As there was nothing else to be done, I helped myself to some clothes of his, a very handsome pair of spats and a suit of lightweight summer twill, and took twenty dog-eared marks to replace the hundred-schilling note I’d left in the pocket of my coat. He was a good boy really, of simple means, et cetera. His father was a draftsman in an engineering firm and a long-term supporter of the cause. He offered me his passport as well, but I saw no reason not to travel with my own.

I boarded the Munich Express without a care in the world, rolling cozily into Bavaria in the first-class car, chatting about football matches and stomach trouble and politics and the latest styles of hats. My companions were mostly businesspeople of one kind or another, heavy sober-eyed men very worried over the state of international affairs. Every aspect of international affairs worried them, of course, but mainly they seemed worried about the possibility of a British trade embargo, or a “commodities freeze,” as a result of the Dollfuss affair. I was hard put to put on a somber face, giddy as I’d begun to feel the farther we traveled from Vienna, but I made a concerted effort — otherwise it would all have seemed just too ridiculously easy. I was asked whether as an Austrian, a neutral party, as it were, I thought an embargo might occur and I allowed that I thought it very likely. They shook their heads gravely at this and clucked at one another. A bristle-haired, mustachioed banker from the Berchtesgaden Chamber of Commerce, returning from a spa holiday with his tubercular-looking wife, asked me what it was that had brought me into Germany. “The assassination of the Austrian Chancellor,” I answered.

“Of course,” he said, nodding sympathetically. “Are you very affected?”

“I should say so, mein Herr. I am.”

“Did you know the Chancellor well?” asked the wife.

“Tut, Berthe!” said her husband. “I apologize for my wife’s indelicacies, Herr Bauer.”

I waved this off. “Not very well, to be honest,” I said, turning to her. “But I was present at his execution. He died like a fish.” I rolled my eyes and made gulping noises at them across the aisle.

“Good gracious!” said the wife. She seemed not at all taken aback. After a moment she glanced over at her husband, who was looking me over from top to bottom, his baggy-lidded eyes suddenly open very wide. “What exactly do you mean, Herr Bauer?” the wife whispered after a breathless little pause.

I was still wearing my policeman’s shirt under the borrowed suit and I unbuttoned the jacket without further ado and showed it to them. They were incredulous at first, of course, but by the time the train pulled into the station at Munich I had convinced them completely and won my first admirers. I was to stay as an honored guest at their town house in the old city for a period of “convalescence,” however long that might be. “We are not only patriots of the Reich but patriots of all of Germany!” my host declared, perilously close to tears. His wife wept freely as she escorted me down the platform, flushed with excitement at the prospect of sheltering a “freedom fighter,” as I was newly christened. “Just think of it, Gottfried!” she said over and over.