Free The Human Pool by Chris Petit

wife. She lives there. I will give you the address.’
    My job would be to check her out, he said. He tried again and failed to find the letter. He fussed around, helpless. I decided it was another of his delusions.
    At the front door he gripped me with both hands, his eyes watery. He wept, a few stiff tears, and said that if it weren’t for the work in hand he would kill himself rather than endure the half-life left to him. He still had his service Luger.
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    When the room phone rang in the night, I knew it was Karl-Heinz. ‘I couldn’t sleep, either,’ he said. ‘I have found the letter. Do me a favour tomorrow, Joe, when you are in Zurich. Go visit Willi’s widow.’
    I was tired and in a sleepless funk thinking about my illness. ‘Go see her yourself, Karl-Heinz. I’m not over here to meet new people.’
    He sounded hurt. He had been counting on my help, he said. The journey to Zurich was far too exhausting for him to contemplate. He needed to conserve his energy. He rode my silence until I said, ‘Give me the address.’
    According to the letter, Frau Schmidt hadn’t seen her husband since 1945. Me neither. What she didn’t explain was how she had known how to contact Karl-Heinz.
    Karl-Heinz had two answers to that. His favourite was that Frau Schmidt was a trap set by the people watching him. He feared kidnapping. He had given evidence in camera at Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem and believed that the Israelis had been after him ever since. His second answer was that Willi wanted to access his account but couldn’t apply in person, being technically dead. The invented Frau Schmidt was his surrogate.
    For the first time I seriously asked myself whether Willi were still alive. I remembered my earlier trepidation. It reminded me of the nerves I always got before making a run.
    â€˜Okay,’ I said, and told Karl-Heinz what he wanted to hear. ‘I’ll go see the widow Schmidt. I’ll run you one more trip.’
    Karl-Heinz, rejuvenated, said, ‘For old times’ sake’.
    *Vaughan’s note: ‘In fact not true. According to Betty Monroe’s diaries there were several crucial meetings at the end of the war.’

Vaughan
    FRANKFURT
    LYING HUNGOVER IN MY ROOM when Dora called, early for her. She was keen to investigate her lover for me—a new form of our intimacy.
    Curiously little on Carswell existed, and he himself was not forthcoming. It had taken her a lot of work to find out that before television he had been in radical journalism in the 1960s, after an initial spell at the BBC had earned him a ‘Christmas Tree’ file, meaning that he was marked down for subversive leanings. At the same time he had fenced to an Olympic standard, prevented from representing his country because of an obscure scandal. ‘He gets moody if you ask.’ He still fenced.
    Dora sounded falsely cheerful. She had been offered silly money to go to a ‘party’ in Hampstead, fixed through a Grays member. She wanted me to say she should go. We ended up rowing. I told her she was getting out of her depth. I was distracted by the contradiction between Carswell’s upper-class pursuits and radical leanings.
    I called back to apologise, but the call lapsed into resentful silences and hostile questioning answered by more hostility. I hung up angrily, thinking: file under impossible relationships.

Beate von Heimendorf
    ZURICH
    Dear Mr Hoover
    Thank you very much for your last letter with your schedule. We look forward to seeing you on the Sunday after your arrival. I will warn you in advance how distressing it can be to see Mother now. She was, as you have written, remarkable for her alertness and intelligence.
    Since our correspondence began I have been thinking a lot about what Mother must have been like when you knew her. I have enjoyed writing in English again. Mother and I always spoke in English but I write it rarely, and