"You don"t understand what he will do," said one of the fake SS men. "And we are not killing him, because he is not alive. You should know this if you have spoken to him."
I wondered if the real SS said that about the Jews. Probably they did.
"He seemed alive to me," I told them. "He is ent.i.tled to human compa.s.sion, just like you."
I heard an intake of breath from the Doctor, but he said nothing. Nearby, there was a big explosion. Gla.s.s shattered along the street, and a hot wind blew. The wind kept blowing, becoming cold and gritty, new air moving towards the centre of the city from which sheets of white flames were rising.
"The firestorm," said the Doctor. He looked around with a desperate expression, but seemed to have no more words.
"Let me back into the church," I said.
I saw that the tall "SS man" was holding a gun. Or perhaps it wasn"t a gun. It was hard to tell in the intense, drifting light.
I started running, and at the same time heard the whistle of shrapnel and a series of small impacts as the material hit the road. There was a cry behind me. I turned and saw that the "SS man" was kneeling. A chunk of shrapnel the size of a roofing slate was buried in his shoulder. He stood up, and I realised that he was unhurt, though the wound should have killed a man, or at least knocked him out. He walked towards me, still holding the gun, as if nothing very much had happened. Part of his shoulder flapped around like a door on a loose hinge. I was more afraid then than I have ever been.
The light brightened, and an explosion of gla.s.s fragments flew around me. I wasn"t hit, but a fragment caught the man with the gun. He wavered for a moment. I saw that the church windows had burst outwards, and that flames were roaring inside.
No, I thought. I"m not going to let Elgar die like Daria. I darted across and began to climb the church wall towards one of the shattered windows. They weren"t the usual leaded panes the breach was quite big enough for me to climb through. A drainpipe aided my grip on the wall.
"Don"t kill him!" shouted the Doctor.
The thought that they weren"t trying to kill me was more frightening than the thought of death. Elgar"s stories of cuckoos taking over my mind no longer seemed like fairy tales. I fought my way through the remains of the window, sustaining several cuts. I noticed the blood, but felt no pain. Inside the heat was tremendous, but I felt that only in an abstract way, as something that must be avoided for purely practical reasons. Death didn"t bother me, but I didn"t want to faint and risk being caught alive.
The choir stalls were burning, but at the far end I could see the door that led to the crypt. I ran inside and saw Elgar still tied to his chair. As I untied him, he said, "You needn"t have bothered, old chap. I was quite safe here. But thank you, anyway."
As soon as he was free he ran up the steps, into the smoky confusion of the nave. I followed, but couldn"t see a thing. I saw that I would be safer in the crypt, so I went back down and closed the door. There was smoke here too, but only a little, and not too much heat. Perhaps, I thought, Elgar would have been safe here, as he had said he would be. Had I been jumping to conclusions? Had the Doctor wanted to kill him, or just keep him out of the way? But why bring him here in the first place? If he hadn"t come for us, we would never have found him. It was Alice in Wonderland Alice in Wonderland again. again.
Worrying about this, I went to the cupboard where the vestments were kept, hoping I think to protect myself from the smoke and heat as far as possible. I disturbed the tattered black cloth, and it moved heavily, as if something were in the pocket. I felt there, and found myself holding a service revolver. I stared at it, and decided it was Elgar"s, and that Turing must have put it in this rather ridiculous hiding place. I was going to leave it there, and I don"t doubt that I should have done, but then it occurred to me that it would be better to shoot myself than fall into the hands of either the Doctor and his fake SS, or of the real Gestapo. I hefted the gun and put it in my pocket, without checking if it was loaded. I don"t think I even checked to see if the safety catch was on.
It can have been only a few minutes later that I heard the screams. I knew them at once the same piglike screams that had echoed through the Hotel du Parc as Daria died. I started to climb the steps without considering the fire, or the danger. This time, I had to stop it.
The fire had all but burned itself out, but the smoke was thick. I coughed my way to the door, and saw Elgar with one arm ablaze, whirling like Catherine on the wheel. The Doctor was watching, holding out one arm towards him. Turing had his back turned, as I would have expected. Tongues of flame rose behind them from the buildings of the city, as if h.e.l.l awaited. I lifted the gun, fiddled with the safety catch, and shot at the Doctor as well as I could. The gun jumped in my hand and I almost dropped it. The Doctor turned, startled, and Elgar began to run down the street, still screaming, trailing gobbets of fire from his arm. His jacket was ablaze.
I fired again at the Doctor, this time holding the gun with a better grip. He dropped, whether because I"d hit him or to take cover I couldn"t tell. I ran after Elgar, ducking and weaving in case anyone tried to fire back at me. I don"t know whether anyone did it was difficult to tell over the continuing racket of the air raid and the roar of the wind. I heard Turing shouting, something about being reasonable. There was an explosion nearby falling flak, I think, rather than a bomb but it was enough to send me diving for the cover of a wall. I got up almost at once, but then I could see only flames ahead, the whole street ablaze, and no trace of Elgar. I stopped, as I realised just how much fire there was. The sky was boiling with smoke, and a steady rain of ash and small debris fell around me. Dresden was being destroyed. I tried to think it was because of the Jews, that it was to save lives, but I couldn"t convince myself. It was because of the stubbornness of a few men, not all of them on the German side, and a city was dying in front of me. Thousands of lives were ending, and there was no real purpose to it.
A hand touched my arm. I turned and saw that it was Turing. He had a cut on his face, and was bleeding.
"Where are the others?"
He shrugged. "They went, when you shot the Doctor."
"Went where?"
He ignored the question. "Come on, we"ve got to go home now."
"Home?" I waved at the burning city. "And how are we to go home? In case you haven"t noticed, there"s a war on."
Turing looked around him, for all the world like a little boy lost. I glanced around one more time for Elgar, then told myself I"d done my best. He was on his own now, as we all are when h.e.l.l closes in. "We"d better find a cellar," I said. "As deep as possible."
The wind, which had started off cold, was getting hotter.
Chapter Eighteen.
"It was self-defence, you know." Turing"s face was flushed, and he had a lecturing, hectoring tone, inappropriate to the subject matter. "What the Doctor was doing. Elgar is dangerous. He would have killed the others. He might kill "
"Maybe."
"You shouldn"t have interfered. It would have been all right if he"d stayed in the crypt. We had a plan."
"You had a plan," I agreed. "And I shouldn"t have interfered. I"m sorry, all right?"
I wasn"t sorry, but I was willing to say anything to shut Turing up. Perhaps he was right. It wasn"t our war. Our war was raining down on top of us now. We"d been lucky: we"d found the beer cellar of a public house, the doors flung open, the s.p.a.ce deserted except for a small, thin, silver-grey cat, which Turing had picked up and cuddled as if it were a baby. It was purring in his arms as we talked. Around him was a large, quiet s.p.a.ce filled with empty wooden barrels at least, I a.s.sumed they were empty. There was no familiar smell of beer, or wood even here the air was hot and thick with the stink of oily smoke. It had occurred to me that this place would burn like a bonfire if an incendiary landed, which was no doubt why it was deserted: but it had been the only shelter we could find. Now it was getting hotter, and the smell was getting stronger. I looked around for an exit that didn"t involve climbing the stone steps that led back to the street.
"You have killed the Doctor."
Turing"s accusation distracted me from my search for an escape route. It was my turn to look at my boots and feel guilty. Perhaps that was why he"d followed me to make me feel guilty. I couldn"t think of any other reason.
"It wasn"t my intention to kill anyone," I said. "Not even the Doctor. I was frightened and confused. I acted without thinking. I"ve told you, I"m sorry."
Turing shrugged. "It"s no good being sorry if he"s dead."
"And is he?"
"I don"t know. It doesn"t matter. What matters is that you were willing to do it. To kill "
"You"re enjoying this, aren"t you?" I snapped. This is your revenge for my not liking you. The Doctor"s death matters less to you than it does to me!"
"That"s not true," said Turing sadly. He looked at me. "I don"t think you realise what you"ve done yet. If he"s dead "
"Nothing will matter if it gets any hotter in here," I snapped.
The heat felt like a choking wall, closing in around me. The sweat was running into my eyes, stinging them. I wiped it away with my sleeve. Turing started to cough, eyes bulging. A thin, snakelike trail of smoke was drifting down the wooden stairs. Someone banged on the doors and shouted in German.
"It will matter," said Turing, as I started up the stairs. I opened the door, and saw Elgar"s face. He was holding his melted, useless, arm: I could see a bare stalk of metal protruding from the damaged material. His uniform was burned not in tatters as you see in films, but charred and clinging to his body, as if it had always been a part of it. Perhaps it had.
"How bad is it?" I asked him. Somehow I managed to keep my voice calm.
"It"s all right, old boy. It doesn"t hurt a bit. But I"m glad I"ve found you here. I"m blind."
I saw then that his eyes were white, like those of a cooked fish. I tried not to be squeamish, but I remembered Daria. Was the heat all from the street, or was his skin burning? Even so, I stepped back to let him pa.s.s.
"You"re not going to let him in here!" squealed Turing from below.
"What do you want to do, let him die?"
The cat struggled out of Turing"s arms and dropped, yowling, to the floor. It scooted up the steps past Elgar and into the street, then, before I could close the doors, came panicking back again. I slammed the doors down and bolted them. A moment later there was a huge explosion and I was almost thrown from the stairs. When I regained my balance, Turing was above me, unbolting the doors.
"What are you doing?"
He didn"t reply, just opened the doors. A wave of heat and smoke came in.
"Close them!" I snapped.
"I"m not staying in here with him I"m going back to the Doctor!"
I grabbed his arm. If he went back to the Doctor, then the Doctor would know where Elgar was. And I had no doubt that unless the American bombers above did for the Doctor and his friends, they would come after us.
"Don"t go!"
From behind me, Elgar"s voice growled, "You"ll have to kill him. Now!"
The barked order had the opposite effect to that intended: I let Turing go. I"d had enough of this war. There was little enough prospect of survival as it was. I was sweating hard enough by now for the liquid to be dripping off my chin, as if I were back in the tropics. I looked out into the street. I couldn"t see Turing in the glare of the flames, and the heat was like that of an oven. I wouldn"t make it with Elgar, and I wasn"t about to leave him. I slammed and bolted the doors once more, and retreated into the now smoky air of the cellar.
Then I noticed the cat. It was perched awkwardly on the brick wall beyond the beer barrels, sniffing at a dark s.p.a.ce between the bricks. Suddenly it crawled in, tail waving. Elgar and I looked at one another, and followed her. It was easy enough to climb up to the hole in the wall. It was the entrance to a narrow brick tunnel which sloped downwards. I imagined it had been used for the pa.s.sage of beer barrels: it was about the right size. I saw the cat in the tunnel, a dim grey ghost almost out of the light. I helped Elgar up, and we set off through the narrow, damp s.p.a.ce.
A moment later, the lights went out behind us. But the tunnel carried on, for what seemed like a mile but was probably less than a hundred yards. The stone floor levelled off. I could hear the sounds and the cordite smells of outside ahead, and better still there was the plash of water. Another hundred yards took us to a low brick jetty on the edge of a narrow body of water perhaps a ca.n.a.l, or a natural spur of the Elbe. The skyline was still white with flame, and the sky itself still red. The wind whipped around us, stinking of flame and ash, and explosions pounded in the distance. I could hear flames nearby, but it wasn"t hot. People were crowded on to the other side of the waterway, where there was an old towpath: on our side, it was all brick. Several people called out to us, but I couldn"t make out the German words. I didn"t risk a reply. Pieces of flotsam drifted along the water. I saw several pieces of torn, burned clothing, which told their own horrid story and, more gruesome, a hand, severed from its body, drifting in the brown water like a white spider.
"You should leave me," said Elgar suddenly. "I am damaged beyond the ability to carry out my function. In a few hours I will be nonfunctional and my purpose will be lost."
It took me a few moments to work out that he had told me he was going to die. When I had worked it out, I said what people most often say in such situations. "Nonsense. Just stay with me. I"ll get you out of this."
Even as I spoke the words I knew that I was speaking in the cliches of Elgar"s false ident.i.ty, the ident.i.ty betrayed by the bare metal and the melted remains of his arm, but I didn"t care. I had to maintain something, some surface of the recognisable over the incomprehensible. It seems strange now that at this, the darkest moment of the war, I should resort to the easy thinking of a propaganda film. But I remembered Daria"s self-sacrifice, and that I had abandoned her. I wasn"t going to do it again.
Elgar was scrabbling at the bricks behind us with his one hand. "The purpose is lost," he said again.
I looked across the water, and saw three men in SS uniform cutting through the crowd on the other side, swords through quaking flesh. They were carrying something, and I saw that it was a body on a stretcher. They tipped it into the water without ceremony, and it was then that I saw it was the Doctor, his head wrapped in a bloodstained sheet and the ancient clothes smeared with more blood. The corpse fell face-down, and drifted away with the current. The slowness was unbearable.
I turned round to Elgar, who had not moved. "The Doctor"s dead," I whispered. "I killed him."
"Good. But don"t underestimate the strangers. They"re the really dangerous ones. You should kill them too, if you can."
I stared at him, and realised he meant it. To him, death was a solution to a problem, a resolution. It was neither a tragedy nor a transition: he didn"t care what lay beyond death, only whether the fact of death would change the situation here on Earth. I had been surrounded by men like him since the war started, bank clerks with guns whose job was to cancel Hitler"s moral overdraft with an interest in death. An interest the rate of which kept increasing, was increasing now as the bombs destroyed an ancient city around us.
In short, I knew then that I had chosen the wrong side, and that the wrong man was floating away down the river. The light of flames still shone off the water and the air was hot as if it were bleeding from h.e.l.l, but the rumble of explosions was receding now, like distant thunder. The raid, I realised, was all but finished. I wonder how many of the bomb pilots felt as I did. I had accomplished a mission, but all it had brought was death, and I had saved no one. I didn"t even feel like saving myself.
I heard a sound from the water, and saw a small rowing boat sawing its way across towards us, with a man at each oar. They were shadowy, gowned they might have been the strangers, or possibly the ferrymen come to take us across the Stygian water to the burning land on the other side. I even checked in my pocket for coins, and found the cyanide capsule. I have never been closer to using it.
[The preceding doc.u.ments were found amongst the papers of the late Joseph h.e.l.ler shortly after his death. At the bottom of the ms. is a note in an unknown handwriting, neither Greene"s nor h.e.l.ler"s: "Looks like Greene couldn"t bring himself to write any more can you finish the story?"]
Book Three
The Catch-22 Test
Chapter Nineteen.
Where do I start? At the beginning of my story, I guess. It has nothing to do with Greene"s, or Turing"s, except incidentally. Initially the Doctor just wanted an airplane the man was desperate to get out, a feeling I understood very well at the time. When I first saw him, in a hospital ward on Malta, I knew. He had that tic, that rolling movement of the eyes, that restless tossing of the head as if his brain was trying to get out and crawl away on its own. I just didn"t know how far away he wanted to crawl, how much further it was than my own mediocre desires, which at the time ran to no more than escaping the war.
I don"t think that Greene, or Turing, understood what the Doctor was doing, or where he was trying to go, until it was too late. Turing was thinking mostly about his own feelings, and Greene about the Doctor"s nature. All along, I was more interested in what the Doctor was going to do not that this interest did me any good. However, I can hardly claim my att.i.tude came about because of any unusual prescience. When somebody walks into your life and tells you he wants to steal an airplane, you generally watch him closely.
I thought he was mad even before he explained his plans for grand larceny. I thought he was mad because he wanted to talk to me, and at the time I was mad, or pretending to be. It"s hard to tell the difference between pretence and reality, especially when the truth has been hushed up and hidden from biographers.
I wonder if the Doctor has ever worried about biographers. Turing seemed to have appointed himself as one, then killed himself. Greene sought to explain the mystery, but gave it up before the end, as if he felt he were writing a bad novel and couldn"t bring it to a creative conclusion. I"m sure it must have been the Doctor who, somehow (perhaps a deathbed visit to Greene?) made certain that the ma.n.u.script reached me in the spring of "92.
The trouble is that so many years have pa.s.sed now since 1944 that I"m not so sure what happened any more, and, worse, I write gappy, hurried prose, the prose of an old man approaching mortality and with better things to do than write. Perhaps time has a different meaning to you, Doctor you always seemed older than you looked, so perhaps age truly does not wither you, nor time its battle-axe take to your features; perhaps like a fictional character you are ageless and changeless. But then, if you"re ageless and changeless, the need to justify your actions must become even stronger, as the years go on, and the memories rust, and the consequences multiply. Did you hope I would justify them? I"m still just as sorry as I was that day almost fifty years ago when I murdered in your name. All I can say is that, unlike Greene, I have forgiven you. For my own reasons.
But enough of the present. Let"s go back to Malta in 1944, to that sepia ward where I was probably only pretending to be mad. This was a pretence, you must understand, brought about by the necessity of war. It was a sacrifice made in honor of the men and women of America. I respected them enough, even at the tender age of a bit more than twenty, to pretend to be insane, in order to stop myself from having to kill strangers in their name. I also didn"t much want my inner organs ripped out by flak, a risk I had been forced to run more than fifty times in order to murder people with high explosives from two miles into the sky.
In honor of this great, muddled, unadventurous sacrifice for the American people, I had been placed in a large cool s.p.a.ce with a bare stone ceiling and a floor of darkened wood, where barred beams of sunlight from the barred windows just touched the knees of the nurses. To ensure that I stayed alive and alert, I had been fed pap food which wasn"t quite bad enough to make me vomit (in other words, better food than usual), and then examined by a parade of doctors who poked, prodded, and tested my heart, my liver, my appendix, my upper and lower intestines, my spleen, my lungs, my kidneys, and my brain, before finally admitting they didn"t know what was wrong with me. This was because there was nothing wrong with me: I was just pretending. But I couldn"t tell them that, of course. So I told them I ached here, and ached there, and I screamed a bit and p.i.s.sed on the floor, and they decided I was probably insane.
According to the nurse, not the pretty nurse but the one who wasn"t so pretty, who probably knew I was only pretending but liked me and so kept quiet about it, it was more complicated than that. There was more than one "they". There was a school of thought that wanted me to be discharged from the hospital so that I could fly more bombing missions, on the grounds that bombing the h.e.l.l out of Italian cities was good for brain fever. Another school of thought wanted me locked away, just in case I bombed the h.e.l.l out of anything I wasn"t meant to bomb. A third school of thought didn"t give a d.a.m.n what I bombed or didn"t bomb, so long as I didn"t do anything to disgrace the USAF, such as p.i.s.sing myself when a general was visiting the hospital. While these three schools of thought wrote memos to each other about my condition, I was safe, but (the nurse urged) my period of grace was rapidly running out.
When the Doctor presented himself before me in the medicinally scented ward, therefore, my main concern was which school of thought he belonged to and how insane I should pretend to be this time, in order to extend my exemption as long as possible. I examined his face, anxious for clues. I found it to be serious, cla.s.sical, and well proportioned, his gaze earnest and intense. His eyes had a peculiar quality of fixing on you, as if he were sighting a weapon. He would narrow his focus and talk directly, in an all but incomprehensible manner. However, since I was quite good at that myself, I didn"t let it put me off. On the plus side, he wasn"t wearing a flight uniform: instead he wrapped himself in a tattered jacket that looked as if it belonged in a fancy-dress party. Nonetheless, even before he spoke, I had a gut feeling that he was trouble, and I was right.
"You"re Joseph h.e.l.ler?"
"No. Abe Lincoln. h.e.l.ler"s in the next bed." There was no one in the next bed in fact, there was no next bed, because, warned by the nurse that they were ceasing to take my madness seriously, I"d been screaming so much that they"d evacuated the ward, and wheeled most of the beds out of it to use them somewhere else, probably for the men who"d already had their guts ripped out, instead of those who were running yellow from the thought that it might happen to them next.
The Doctor glanced at the nonexistent next bed, then he smiled, and spoke softly, gently, sweetly, persuasively, none of which fooled me one bit because the words he said were the four words in the English language that I most dread: "I need your help."
I reacted straightaway, in the way that I always reacted to demands for help. I considered it seriously, then I came to a decision. I got up and began to get dressed. I was wearing a hospital gown, so I shed that. I knew my uniform was being kept in a cupboard at the end of the ward, so I walked there and put on a pair of shorts, socks, a cotton undershirt, a shirt, a jacket, finally my pants. I couldn"t find my shoes, but guessed they would be around somewhere. If the worse came to the worst, I could run like h.e.l.l in my stockinged feet.
As I was doing up my belt, the man spoke up again. "I"m so glad! I asked for you especially when I heard "
His words dried up as I turned away from him and ran. I ran very fast, very hard, straight into the arms of a Military Policeman who was guarding the entrance to the ward. I struggled, then didn"t struggle, because the guard was bigger and stronger than I was and there was no point.
"This man"s mad," I said, my voice somewhat m.u.f.fled by the chest pads of the MP"s uniform. "He says he wants my help. I"m mad, you know. That"s why I"m in here."
The MP released me sufficiently to allow me to turn and face the newcomer. "Are you a colonel?" I asked him.