The man wore two wristwatches on each wrist. I told him in German to empty his pockets. He didn’t seem to understand. I reached to undo the flap on one and to my astonishment he slapped my hands away.
“Nein,” he said, taking a pace backwards. He looked nervous, worried. Then, suddenly, he turned and ran into the vineyard.
With a shout Two Dogs was after him. I followed. Two Dogs ran down the aisle of vines, gaining on the soldier easily. He caught up with him on the edge of a small copse of cork oaks and, holding the barrel, he swung his carbine like a club in a wide arc. The butt glanced heavily off the soldier’s head. When I arrived Two Dogs stood over him, gun leveled. The soldier was trying to get up on his knees but kept falling over like a concussed boxer. Two Dogs pushed him flat with a boot. This time the soldier gave up and lay there, flat.
“Check his pockets, Mr. Todd.”
I was out of breath. Dusty sunbeams slanted through the leaves of the cork oaks. The Azerbaijani had a bad gash above his right ear. His eyes were shut, his face was covered in dust and he was moaning slightly. Carefully, with bilious foreboding, I unbuttoned his pocket and reached in. My fingers felt something.
I thought: saveloys, thin German sausages, Azerbaijani biltong.
I pulled out five severed fingers, women’s fingers, old and young fingers, all with rings on them.
I did not scream. I gave a kind of audible shudder, as one does when shocked by sudden cold.
“Jesus Christ,” Two Dogs said.
The man had fourteen ring fingers in his hip pockets. His breast pockets were full of jewelry and more watches. By now I was feeling sick. He was still lying down, moaning slightly.
“What’ll we do?” I asked.
“Maybe we should—”
Two Dogs put the muzzle of his carbine in the man’s left ear and pulled the trigger. The man’s head gave a little jump and then seemed to half-deflate. Then Two Dogs stepped back and fired three shots into his body. Puffs of dust rose from his tunic.
“We’ll say he tried to escape, OK, Mr. Todd?”
“What? Yes, fine. Absolutely.”
We didn’t touch anything. We left the fingers — a small pile of human kindling — beside the body. We walked silently back through the vineyard towards the car. Two of its doors stood wide open. All around us were woods, hills, small fields, vineyards. Some birds soared above in the pale blue sky. Cicadas screeched in the grass at our feet.
Two Dogs patted me on the shoulder.
“Best thing to do. I think we had to do that.”
“What a day,” I said.
“Shall I drive?”
“No, no. Let me. It’ll take my mind off things.”
We got into the car and I started the engine. We bumped down onto what we hoped was the Le Muy-Fréjus road and turned left as instructed. We had gone, I suppose, about four hundred yards when the first bullet shattered the windscreen and there was a metallic punching sound down the side of the car. I felt as though I had been kicked in the thigh and my right foot instinctively drove the accelerator down to the floor. We swerved, plunged off the road into an irrigation ditch. I banged my head and lost focus. My brain was a mist. I felt Two Dogs helping me out.
I stood on the road somehow. Two Dogs kept asking, “Are you all right? Are you all right?” I was aware of a damp heat about my torso. Before I fell over I saw the paratroopers advancing on us and I heard the clear accents of my native country.
“Sorry, Yank. We thought youse was Jerries inna fuckin’ Mercedes. Onyboady hurt?”
VILLA LUXE, June 27, 1972
I set off for the beach today longing for a swim. But I turned back after five minutes. My leg was aching slightly.
If we hadn’t shot the Azerbaijani … if I hadn’t volunteered to drive …
Two Dogs had bruised his elbow. I had taken a bullet through my chest, high up on the right side. It smashed a rib, passed through my right lung and ricocheted off my shoulderblade. The big rectus femoris muscle on my left thigh was almost severed, as if by a butcher’s knife. The two lasting consequences of this accident were a limp, when I was tired, and the ruination of my fine first serve at tennis.
Anyway, that sort of “if only” digression is futile. To indulge in it is to place a blind obeisance in the laws of cause and effect. The cause of my bullet wounds was a trigger-happy Scottish para. Any attempt to trace the line further back is doomed. Could we say that my being shot was the result of Leo Druce’s smear campaign in the English press? In one sense that would be entirely accurate. In another it’s perfectly absurd. It was bad luck. Happenstance. The quantum state breaking into one human life. I bear that soldier no grudge.
I convalesced in a large naval hospital near Washington, D.C. I was well looked after — Eddie saw to that. Fresh flowers every day, the best food. The Equalizer, as Two Dogs had told me, had been a considerable success. I had made some money. Lone Star was buoyant, as was its owner. Eddie had great plans, he told me: next we would make Jesse James, then Kit Carson. We could run the gamut of Western folk heroes. When I left the hospital he invited me to come and stay with him in Los Angeles, but I saw out the rest of the war in Ramón Dusenberry’s San Diego home, slowly and steadily regaining my health. I seemed to function surprisingly well on one lung. I wondered why nature had bothered to double up that organ — perhaps in case you got a bullet through the first.
I was as fully recovered as I would ever be by the end of 1945. Eddie was still urging me to have a look at his script on Jesse James. I pleaded ill health for as long as I could, but then a letter arrived that changed everything and set me on a different course of action.
The envelope that contained it was a curious-looking object, almost obliterate with official stamps and chinagraph markings. It had been sent first to my father’s house and had eventually found its way to me. It was from Karl-Heinz and was dated October 1945.
My dear Johnny,
So sorry to have to ask you for this, but would you lend me some money? One hundred dollars is all that I need and I will be in your debt forever and ever. I know it seems like a fortune to ask for, but I’m told that over there in Hollywood, U.S.A., dollar bills grow on trees in your gardens. Pick me one bunch, please, and send it to me at the Dandy Bar, 574 Kurfürstendamm, British Zone, Berlin.
How are things with me? Don’t ask, my old friend, don’t ask.
A warm English handshake from your old prison guard,
Karl-Heinz
Karl-Heinz was alive. This was the best news. How? By what unlikely chance? Suddenly the lethargy of my convalescent’s life fell away. I knew what to do now. I was going back to work for the Chula Vista Herald-Post.
18 Berlin, Year Zero
I was full of astonishing optimism during my journey to Berlin. I felt, hard though it may be to credit, that my life was beginning again. Karl-Heinz was alive. Somehow, I knew we would finish The Confessions now, and though I had no idea what form it would take, I was sure it would come about. Too much lying around in hospital beds. Too many hours staring at the Pacific Ocean with nothing to occupy my mind, I hear you say. I had sent Karl-Heinz the money he had asked for; now all I had to do was find him.
However, that elation — that old exhilarating sense of potential — began to seep away as we flew over the city on our approach to Templehof. I had been prepared for an image of destruction, but the vision that confronted me that afternoon in March 1946 was not so much shocking as unreal in a bizarre, sinister way. Berlin was gone, its skyline vanished. When you stand in a city and look casually about you, you see towers, roofs, steeples, gables, chimneys, treetops. Light comes at you through angles and over inclines, sometimes squeezing in through alleyways, sometimes basting the general view in wide boulevards and parks. Berlin was not razed, the shells of buildings still stood, but it had lost all those idiosyncrasies that made it particular — that made it “Berlin.” Only the Funkturm stood tall and untouched above the devastated streets. Everything else was uniformly gray and everything had been battered.