A Man Lies Dreaming Read Free Page B

reached into his breast pocket and threw down on the table a
carte de visite
. I picked it up. Printed on thick, expensive paper, it contained an address in the East End and nothing more. On the back, a symbol I had not seen in some time: it was a swastika.
     
    The night was full of eyes, watching. Wolf made his way out of the Hofgarten. At the end of the street the same group of Blackshirts was beating a man lying on the pavement. The man had curled in a foetal position, his hands uselessly covering his head. The Blackshirts wore thick-soled boots and they were kicking the man savagely. A pair of policemen were watching from the sidelines without expression. The air was scented with the smell of men’s sweat and blood and violence. It was a smell Wolf knew well, had in fact delighted in. Two white teeth lay on the ground beside the victim. Wolf paused as he walked past them. One of the Blackshirts wiped sweat from his face with the hem of his shirt. ‘What are you looking at,’ he said. Wolf shook his head. He walked on. Behind him the victim was whimpering in a broken voice. Oswald Mosley stared down at Wolf from the public walls, smiling winningly. Wolf walked on.
    There were eyes in the night, watching. He felt shadows gathering about him and he stopped and started, dawdling in front of shop windows, trying to catch a reflection, a clue as to the unseen watchers’ identity. Perhaps there was no one there. But he could scent them, hunters in the night. He had used the name Wolf in the 1920s and now he used it again, in London. He had always felt himself to have an affinity with wolves.
    The
carte de visite
was in his suit pocket. He did not like seeing Hess again, did not like being reminded of what had passed. How Hess had risen while he himself fell. There was a dull ache in his left leg. It had broken in the camp and never healed properly, and ached in the cold. He had been there three days short of five months when he escaped. Sometimes he missed Germany with a powerful ache, with every fibre of his being. He knew he was unlikely to ever see her again.
    The ’40s were coming. Christmas was in the air and along Charing Cross Road early decorations were already going up. A man behind a cart was selling roasted chestnuts. He had the swarthy complexion of a gypsy. The city was filled with refugees from the Fall, but the borders were closing, and tensions were mounting everywhere. Wolf bought the evening edition of the
Daily Mail
and glanced at the headlines as he walked. ‘Duke of Windsor in Support of Mosley’ said the front page. Well, no surprise there. The abdicated king had been a keen supporter of Wolf’s own politics, too, back when Wolf still had politics. He was a fool to marry the American woman, though. Love was a weaker force than hate, and Wolf could not help but despise the former monarch for that.
    There. Was that a shadow moving behind him? Wolf ducked into an alleyway. A man in a black suit with an unremarkable face. But the man continued past, seemingly oblivious. Wolf emerged from the alleyway. He found himself by Collet’s Bookshop, still open at this hour, coffeehouse revolutionaries conspiring amidst leftwing pamphlets and communist propaganda. The man in the black suit had disappeared. Wolf walked on, stopped by Marks & Co. to browse the books outside. Popular fiction, books thumbed and marked. Dashiell Hammett’s
The Maltese Falcon
. A row of P.G. Wodehouse novels. Another copy of
The Hobbit
. A review copy of Anthony Powell’s
From a View to a Death
. But Wolf had little love for the weakness of the English tongue. German had a martial tune; it was neither tarnished nor afraid. He walked on.
    Oxford Street coming up, Wolf walking aimlessly, checking his reflection in shop windows. He had black hair receding at the temples, a high forehead, a strong chin, ears sticking out slightly. No moustache. He could no longer abide the moustache.
    There!
    He turned suddenly and rapidly and began to