Mr. Justice Horner ruled the next four pages inadmissible evidence, but allowed that they concluded with the encomium ALPHA PLUS followed by four exclamation marks.
Many wartime diaries and journals, published thirty years later, were rich in references to Sir Hyman, a notable entry appearing in the diaries of the Duc de Baugé. The Duc, whose château was in Maine-et-Loire, had been a fixture at Hymie’s celebrated dinner parties in his own château, just outside of Angers, also on the banks of the Maine. Hymie’s château, surrounded by vineyards and parkland, had originally been built by a military family in 1502. Badly damaged during the revolution, left to crumble for more than a century, it had been lovingly restored by Hymie in the thirties. During the occupation it was the official residence of SS Obergruppenführer Klaus Gehrbrandt, something of a sybarite.
June 27, 1945
The charming Sir Hyman, whom we haven’t seen since the occupation, is with us again. Nicole is delighted to see him. So am I. His château, he said, had suffered only negligible damage, but there had been some serious thefts. A precious wall tapestry was missing and so was the portrait of Françoise d’Aubigné, who became Louis XIV’s mistress—Madame de Maintenon. Sir Hyman told us that Henri, his wine steward, had assured him that he had managed to keep the best bottles in his cellar out of the hands of Gehrbrandt, during his many dinner parties.
“As a matter of interest,” Sir Hyman asked Henri, “who came to the obergruppenführer’s dinner parties?”
“Oh, the same people who used to attend your dinners, Sir Hyman.”
Nicole burst into tears. “We had no choice but to accept his invitations. It was awful. His father was a pork butcher. He had no manners. He didn’t even know that Pouilly-Fumé is not a dessert wine.”
Sir Hyman, gracious as always, took her hand and kissed it. “Of course, my dear, we have no idea of what you went through here.”
Cross-checking, Moses came upon an interesting gap. Sir Hyman, or plain Hymie as he then was, seemingly dropped out of sight in June 1944 and was not mentioned again, and then only in passing, until August of the same year. His name surfaced in the diaries of a Labour MP, a noted Fabian pamphleteer who had served as a junior minister in the coalition government but had been forced to resign his seat in disgrace in 1948. Apparently he had taken too keen an interest in discipline at a hospice for distressed young ladies that was the pride of his constituency; the so-called spanking soirées that The News of the World made so much of at the time, publishing a photograph of the MP in a gym slip.
Aug. 21, 1944
Dinner at Lyon’s Corner House with a representative of the Anti-Vivisectionist League who is concerned about the damage to marine life by the wanton use of mines in the pursuit of U-boats. I take her point, but I am bound to remind her that innocent animals are often the first casualties of war. SS death squads have murdered all the animals in the Berlin zoo. Mindless, gum-chewing American pilots have been known to drop their bombs over grazing herds of cattle rather than risk the flak over Cologne or Dusseldorf.
Strolling back to the House I had to cross Whitehall hastily in order to avoid running into Hyman Kaplansky, looking unashamedly tanned and well fed. I understand that he has just returned from a holiday in Bermuda. Actually I’m surprised that one hadn’t fled London earlier, during the worst of the Blitz.
Then, quite by chance, reading The Berlin Diaries of Baron Theodor von Lippe, Moses was startled to come across the following entry.
May 18, 1944
Berlin is being methodically destroyed by Bombenteppich or what the Allies call “saturation” bombing. People have taken to chalking inscriptions on the blackened walls of crumbling buildings. “Liebste Herr Kunster, Lebst du noch. Iche suche Sie uberall. Clara.” “Mein Engelein, wo bleist Du? Ich bin in grosser Sorge. Dein Helmut.” All that remains of the Hotel Eden is the outside shell.
Last night, even as the bombs fell, Count Erich von Oberg gave a small dinner party in his wine cellar, attended by Elena Hube, Felicita Jenisch, Baron Claus von Helgow, Prince Hermann von Klodt, and Countess Katia Ingelheim. The goose was excellent. We talked about nothing but the raids.
That little imp of a Swiss financier, Dr. Otto Raven, was also there. His gleeful smile disconcerting, he said the whole thing reminded him of a meeting of persecuted Christians in the Roman catacombs.
I thought this bizarre coming from a Jew, but Adam von Trott says he is to be trusted with details of coming events.
This, of course, was sufficient to propel Moses into a search of publishers’ catalogues, German as well as English, but he came up with only one more reference to Herr Dr. Otto Raven. He found it in the Wiener Library, in the unpublished journals of a Swedish princess who had passed the war years in Berlin, married to one of the Hohenzollerns.
July 17, 1944
Lunched yesterday at Gabrielle’s. Started with crab cocktail and vol-au-vents filled with caviar. Not a word has been heard of Gabrielle’s Jewish mother since her last arrest—this time for good. Nothing can be done about it and I am desperately sorry. Presumably she has been sent to the ghetto in Theresienstadt in Czechoslovakia.
Today, at Potsdam, Otto Bismarck arranged a shooting party for boar. Only one was shot. Surprisingly the successful hunter was a little Swiss banker, Herr Dr. Otto Raven. He had learned to shoot, he said, on the pampas, south of the Amazon, where he had been raised by a rancher following his father’s death in a duel. He sat down at the piano and played us a number of South American cowboy songs, but Otto Bismarck was not amused. He was, in fact, extremely irritable, disturbed by Churchill’s latest speech, once more demanding “unconditional surrender”.
“It’s lunacy,” Bismarck said.
But Herr Dr. Raven assured him the speech was for public consumption, pour encourager les Russes, and that under certain circumstances, anticipated with impatience.…
Later I heard them quarrelling about Stauffenberg in the library.
“… wrong man,” Herr Dr. Raven said. “He’s missing two fingers of his left hand, which could be a fatal handicap.”
“It’s set for the 20th of July at Rastenburg and this time we won’t fail.”
When Hyman Kaplansky’s name appeared on the King’s New Year’s Honours List some six months later hardly anybody was surprised. He was not the first, nor the last, heavy contributor to the Conservative party chest to be rewarded with a title.
Three
One Saturday morning in 1974 a flock of the Faithful gathered at Henry’s house to celebrate the bar mitzvah of the great-great-grandson of Tulugaq. Nialie, who had learned to temper recipes plucked from her Jenny Grossinger cookbook with local produce, served chopped chicken liver moistened with seal shmaltz. Though most of the knishes were filled with mashed potatoes, there were others that were stuffed with minced caribou: In the absence of candy, a platter of succulent seals’ eyes was available for the children. Among Isaac’s gifts, there was a book from his father, a collection of sermons by the Rebbe who reigned over 770 Eastern Parkway, illuminating eternal mysteries, deciphering the code hidden within the holy texts: