'He is a good man, not a Nazi, who was congratulating himself on coming alive through both the war and the Hitler Reich. Though of course like all of us he is penniless. His daughter has the meningitis.' Rudi tapped his forehead. 'She is infected with the Staphylokokken. You will understand, I think, Mr Elgar? You were not sent to Wuppertal to interrogate Professor Dr Domagk for nothing.' I wondered how he had nosed out information about my duties. 'The disease cannot be touched with sulpha drugs. She must have some penicillin.'
'How did you get to hear about penicillin?'
'Everyone knows about penicillin, conversation buzzes about it in the food-queues. People have always grown excited over wonderful cures since the days of Christ and his miracles. But as you know, we Germans have no penicillin at all, no more than we have chocolates or new shoes,' he ended in a tone of self-pity.
I supposed this Anglo-American achievement had been paraded in the German newspapers before my arrival. It did not occur to me then that penicillin would become one of the most valuable goods in the German black market. I thought of it as a rare drug, with a rare use outside the battlefield. But I had the sagacity to reply, 'I have formed the opinion, mein Herr, that you are not wholly honest.'
He seemed to take no affront. 'Honesty in present conditions has become a little hard to define. So many day to day transactions necessary to remain alive are unlawful. Your soldiers don't mind going without a wash or a smoke to exchange soap and cigarettes for a bottle of brandy or half an hour with a pretty girl. The Woodbines so kindly provided by Dr Greenparish this evening will in the morning be bartered for turnips or sewing-needles or tooth-powder, or with luck a little butter. How bizarre our times, when cigarettes are far too valuable to smoke! But without the black market we should have no hope of the most meagre comforts and many essentials, and the problems of you people would be much greater.'
'I don't believe for one moment your sentimental story of the ill child.'
'I hardly expected you to,' he replied blandly. 'I wished to afford you an excuse for selling me some penicillin. I don't care for commercial affairs. I'm a writer, formerly an engineer. But _on doit travailler pour vivre._ I perform a useful function as middleman in various transactions. If you let me have some penicillin, I give you my word it would go only to the most deserving of sick persons. I shouldn't like to make a pfennig out of such a commodity.'
'I can obtain penicillin no more easily than you. But let me assure you that had I a kilo at my disposal, not a milligram of it would get into your hands. You can also take it from me that the rest of the British personnel would tell you exactly the same thing.'
'Are the Allies to continue their practice of killing German children into peacetime?'
I do not think Rudi calculated this as an insult. That would have been against his interest. But rather a way of shaming me somehow into scrounging some penicillin. I replied by turning my back. Undaunted, he said, 'In case you should change your mind, Mr Elgar
He thrust a slip of pasteboard into the neck of my battle-dress. It was an embossed visiting card with Count Rudolf Ernst von Recklinghausen in Gothic print, an address somewhere in Barmen, and in the corner Ьbersetzer, translator. I wondered how he had acquired it. Getting printing done in Germany was as difficult as getting a watch repaired or finding new bicycle tyres. Though for 100,000 marks a German could buy a new identity card, a new employment book and ration cards, an Army leave pass or even discharge papers, a Hungarian or Italian passport. In short, a new existence for a frightened Nazi. I suspected that Rudi knew his way to a forger's.
The don lectured apologetically about English Literature, ending by seeming to apologize for winning the war, and even for starting it. Afterwards, he sat with Greenparish and myself in the mess, apologizing for drinking our whisky.
'It went very well,' Greenparish said with self-satisfaction. 'I can even see this evening as the beginning of an entirely new phase in Anglo-German relations. Though next time I shall take care not to bring in the food before I've finished.'
I mentioned Rudi. 'Oh, yes. A most interesting young man. He was one of Goebbels' bright boys, you know. And however ruthless that mendacious propaganda machine, one must admit it was tremendously effective. Your German was still believing it while his roof was being blown off by advancing troops. And perhaps even his head.' Greenparish was amused at the joke. 'He's an interesting educational background. Before joining the Goebbels outfit, he took a degree in engineering at the University of Wittenberg.'
'Which is in the Russian Zone, like his home town of Schцnebeck. And so neither can be checked.'
'He's perfectly above board, I assure you. He's far too intelligent ever to have been a wholehearted Nazi.' I was aware of Greenparish looking uncomfortably at the don, who immediately apologized for keeping us up and went to bed. When the pair of us were alone, Greenparish took my sleeve and whispered, 'That Recklinghausen chap is hot stuff. You've heard of Operation Backfire?'
'These ridiculous names only confuse me.'
'That's the show at Cuxhaven with the V2 rocket engineers. You must have heard of a man called von Braun?'
'Never.'
'He was the top scientist at Peenemьnde, and was captured with about four hundred others on the launching site. He's been in the United States since summer, doing something important with their guided missile research at a place called Fort Bliss, which appears to be somewhere in the middle of Texas. Our Count was sent to Peenemьnde by Goebbels himself, to handle the propaganda side. He knows absolutely everything about the place. The Americans are very interested in the Count.'
'I suppose there's no chance the man's telling a pack of lies?'
Greenparish looked offended. 'Of course not. He has the fullest documentation to back him up.'
I decided to go to bed, letting Greenparrish make his own mistakes. At the door, I asked, 'But why should the Americans continue to be the slightest interested in missile research? They've won the war.'
'Dear boy,' Greenparish sighed. 'You don't imagine the Russians think they've won their war yet, do you?'
34
I was to go home before Christmas. My nose had smelt enough of the putrefying corpse of Nazi Germany. I had a career and a divorce to resume. I was delighted with last minute orders to travel by way of FIAT HQ in Paris. The pulse of Paris, I learned from American officers, had missed a beat or two during the occupation but was now bounding as joyfully as ever.
Two days before my departure in mid-December, I found a pair of familiar faces on the front page of the British Forces newspaper. Fleming, Florey and Chain were in Stockholm. The Karolinska Institute had been suffering the same confusion as many old-established bodies gazing across the rubble of the postwar world. Penicillin was eminently worthy of a Nobel Prize, particularly as its discoverers, unlike Professor Domagk, were on the winning side. The Swedes' intention to award it to Fleming got into the London newspapers, raising so much academic dust the Institute had to think again. They gave half the Prize to Fleming and shared the other between Florey and Chain. This raised the dust chokingly, so they ended by splitting it three ways. The trio were in tails and white waistcoats, Fleming looking like President Truman, Chain with a Groucho Marx moustache, and Florey resembling the then vanished band-leader more than ever.
'You know those fellows, I suppose?' asked Greenparish, reading the paper over my shoulder in the mess.
'I know Fleming and Florey quite well. I was wondering how they were enjoying each other's company in Stockholm. They've never worked in the same lab, nor collaborated in anything, nor even shared the same lecture platform. They're strange bedfellows in the cradle of success. People say they're enormously jealous of each other, though of course under a conscientious politeness.'