Your Face Tomorrow 3: Poison, Shadow and Farewell

'It's not pleasant to remember, Jacobo, nor to hear either. But I think, nevertheless, that I can tell you. I suppose there comes a point when one has to tell things, after a lot of time has passed, so that it doesn't seem as if they simply never happened or were just a bad dream,' Peter answered. ''I don't know how,' Maria had said in her letter, and Valerie, from the moment she read those words, kept repeating, even in German sometimes as if she were talking to Maria: 'I know how, oh, I know how, I know very well, in fact, I was the one who told the SS.' And she repeated over and over: 'The children. How could I have forgotten about Ilse and the children? I should have thought of them, why didn't I? I didn't take them into account at all.' She spent the last days of her life in torment, in hell, and at no point did she consider answering her friend's letter. 'I'd rather she believed me dead,' she said. 'I couldn't possibly tell her what happened.' 'And what if you didn't tell her, but just helped her,' I said, trying to convince her: 'Perhaps we can do something for the boy, get him some kind of permit to enter the country and a scholarship, I don't know, I could talk to people about it and give him a hand financially.' I've always had family money. My maternal grandfather, Thomas Wheeler, sold the newspaper companies he owned in New Zealand and Australia for a large profit, and Toby and I, when we were still very young, each received a large legacy when he died. I even suggested adopting young Rendl, even though I hated the idea myself. But Val was paralyzed with horror and grief, she didn't want to hear any of those ideas, and she didn't respond. She lay awake at night, and even if, for a moment, she did drop off out of sheer exhaustion, she would soon start awake, crying and drenched in sweat, and would say to me in distraught tones: 'Those girls. If I had just found out what happened on my own, I might have had some right, possibly, although I don't believe so. But I found out through Maria, and I betrayed her without a thought; how could I have done that, why didn't I realize? And those girls, who died because of me in a concentration camp, they wouldn't have understood anything, and their mother who got into the car with them, what else could the poor woman do, oh, dear God…'' Wheeler stopped for a moment and bit his forefinger, thoughtful, tense. ('Sorrow haunted thy bed,' I quoted to myself.) Then he said: 'Treachery just wasn't in her nature, still less betrayal. More than that, those were the very last things she would have been capable of in normal circumstances. She was a fine person, someone you could trust absolutely. She was the antithesis of bad faith, of deceit; she was, how can I put, a clean person. But war turns everything upside down or creates irreconcilable loyalties. It wasn't in her nature either to spare any effort in helping her country when its very survival was at stake. She was still smarting because she had lacked the courage to infiltrate enemy territory, and so it would have been impossible for her to hold back that information about Hartmut Rendl once she was convinced that revealing it was important and could save English lives. Now, though, her perspective had changed, as always happens in peacetime, except for those of us who know that war is always on the prowl, always just around the corner, even though no one else believes it, and that what seems to us reprehensible, horrific and extreme in peacetime could happen again tomorrow with the consent of the entire nation. 'War crimes' is the term they apply nowadays to almost anything, as if war did not consist precisely in the commission of crimes, which have, for the most part, received prior absolution. Now, though, Val couldn't see in what way the information she had given, the idea she had put forward, could possibly have contributed to victory. Or, rather, she was sure that if she had kept quiet the result would have been the same. And she was probably right in thinking that, as, with very few exceptions, would all the other Britons who had added their grain of sand. That's another thing that happens in time of war, Jacobo. You do everything that's necessary, and that includes the unnecessary. But who is capable of distinguishing one from the other? When it comes to destroying the enemy, or even merely vanquishing him, it's impossible to gauge what really is doing harm and what is merely a matter of shooting his horse from under him, or, as you say, lancing dead Moors or making firewood from a fallen tree.' And he said these last two expressions in my language: 'alancear moros muertos' and 'hacer lena del arbol caido'. 'I tried every means I could to make her see this: 'Valerie,' I would say, 'it was wartime and in a war, soldiers sometimes even kill their comrades, you've heard of friendly fire, haven't you? Or those in command sacrifice their own troops, send them to be slaughtered, and that doesn't always serve any useful purpose either: think of Gallipoli, Chunuk Bair, Suvla, and you can be quite sure that in years to come we'll find out about similar and equally bloody cases in this recently won War of ours. In every war innocent people are killed, there are mistakes and frivolous, foolish acts, there are imbecilic or cynical politicians and military leaders. In every war there is waste. Do you imagine that I haven't committed repugnant acts, things which, if I think about them now or in the future, could perhaps have been avoided? I committed them in Kingston, and even more in Accra and in Colombo. They're repugnant to me now and will seem more so as time passes, the farther off they get, but they weren't then. And that's what you mustn't do, view these things out of context and coldly. You can't look back after a war, don't you see? Not if you want to go on living.''

Wheeler stopped again, this time, more than anything, in order to catch his breath. He clearly needed to. He had a slightly faraway gaze, which was directed at the stairs, although without actually seeing them. He seemed to me simultaneously very tired and very agitated, as if he had relived the words he had spoken to Valerie rather too intensely, words spoken perhaps in their haunted bed, perhaps when she woke him with her crying and with her nightmares that corresponded all too closely to reality, and those are the ones no one can bear, when reality only echoes the dream. 'Let me be lead within thy bosom, may you feel the pin prick in your chest. Despair and die.' I waited and waited and waited. Finally, I said: 'I assume it was no use.'

'No, it wasn't, and the worst thing is that, by then, I knew nothing would be of any use, that her life had been twisted out of shape forever and could never be made straight again. I was already part of the group, which was created too late to save her life. Not that my gift, my capacity for interpretation was any less before I joined, of course, but you adapt your vision to the task in hand and you hone that vision; you grow used to deciphering and looking deeper into what tomorrow will bring. You must have noticed the same thing, that increase in perspicacity, since you've been with Tupra, or am I wrong?'

'No, you're right. I am more alert now. And I tend to interpret everything, even when I'm not working and no one wants me to report on what I've seen.' And I took the opportunity to ask him something that I couldn't quite understand, even at the risk of losing precious time and of Mrs. Berry interrupting us: 'If I remember correctly, Peter, the first time you talked to me about the group, you told me that Valerie was already dead when the idea was first mooted by Menzies or Vivian or whoever. I don't understand, given that the group was formed during the War.'

Wheeler looked bemused, perplexed. He sat thinking for a few moments and then his face lit up like someone who has found the solution to a minor enigma (right to the end, he enjoyed linguistic curiosities) and he said in Spanish:

'Ah, I see. It's a problem of ambiguity, or a misunderstanding on your part, Jacobo. If I said it as you said it now, 'she was already dead,' that would translate in your language as 'estaba ya muerta,' but in the figurative sense, I meant that she was already doomed, not that she had literally died.' And he moved back into English again, because by then, it was clear that speaking a foreign language tired him more. 'What I probably meant was that by then it was too late, that she had already done the thing that would later lead her to kill herself, that her fate was sealed. And that was the thing, you see; if the group had been formed before, someone might have decided, doubtless I myself with my watchful, trained, alert eye, that just as Valerie wouldn't have gotten very far as a spy, as she herself knew, neither was she equipped for black propaganda, which was too dirty for her scruples and for her dislike of deceit. Still less was she equipped to put at risk or sacrifice the lives of innocent people, however German they might be. As you know, step by step, you start doing things for which you have no stomach or aren't suited, and war stretches people a lot, or they themselves, without noticing, stretch themselves beyond their capabilities and only snap when it's all over. If someone had spotted her limitations in time, they would perhaps have withdrawn her from Milton Bryan. She would have been sent back to the Foreign Office maybe, or been restricted to working on white propaganda.' Wheeler ran his hand over his forehead, almost squeezing it this time. 'Sometimes I tell myself that I should have known anyway. But it's easy to be wise after the event or a tor pasado as you say-once the bull has passed-when you know all the facts. I wasn't altogether sure what kind of work Valerie was doing in the PWE, and we were thousands of miles apart most of the time. And she never even mentioned the term 'black propaganda,' so she may well have been engaged in it without knowing of its existence, or, rather, without even knowing the concept. She may also have been following orders and divulging nothing, not even to me. I don't know. If Delmer was diabolical, then Jefferys was Lucifer in person.' He paused very briefly, then added: 'I'll never know who he was, who was hiding behind that name. I have very little time left, Jacobo. Almost none.'

The music stopped, and after a few seconds, I heard Mrs. Berry coming down the stairs. 'That's it, it's over,' I thought. 'I'll never find out how Valerie killed herself and why Peter saw her do it, even though, in principle, I have