with few scruples about the subversive techniques used to undermine and destroy the enemy, a man who, in the middle of all this, was seen blithely eating, drinking and laughing as if entirely unaffected, but he did have a remnant of conscience. According to Hemingway, who met up with him in Madrid during our War, when both men were correspondents, he looked like 'a ruddy English bishop.' Others thought they saw a resemblance to Henry VIII, because he was a big man verging on the obese, with rather bulging eyes and a florid complexion. And since razors were in short supply during the War, he had let his beard grow too. Jefferys, on the other hand, did advocate encouraging or even actually carrying out non-political murders: nowadays, this would be termed terrorism. I'm sure they took no notice of him in that respect, and besides, the SOE, with its local collaborators in every country, had quite enough objectives of its own, in particular, military ones. When it came to acts of sabotage and torpedoings, most of his exuberant ideas were well received. And Valerie gave him an idea of her own. Yes, Valerie had an idea.' And Wheeler's tone, as he spoke those last two sentences, grew suddenly much more somber. He took another couple of sips of sherry, again rested his walking stick on the arms of his chair, gripped it with one hand, as if it were a bar to hold on to, and continued without further hesitation: he had decided to tell me this story and he was going to. 'Everyone wanted to help in those days, Jacobo. It was incredible how the whole country rallied round, first to endure, and then to destroy the Nazis. For those of us who lived through those times, what happened later on, in the Thatcher era, with the ridiculous Falklands War, when people got so fired up and cocky, was utterly shameful, a fake, a farce, a grotesque imitation of that other War. During the real War there was no cockiness and no vaudeville patriotism.' Wheeler pronounced 'vaudeville' with a French accent, as my father would have done. 'People simply resisted, but never bragged or boasted about anything. Everyone did what they could and, with a few rare exceptions, no one gave themselves a medal for it. They were real times, not phony, not sham. Jefferys was a stimulus, a spur during the days he spent in Woburn, or, rather, Milton Bryan, and Valerie wanted to help as much as she could, to make a real contribution. She worked hard. Anyway, her Austrian friend's older sister, the one who was some ten years older, Ilse by name, had had a boyfriend in the days when Valerie still used to spend her holidays in Melk with the Mauthner family, and so she got to know him over several summers. The boyfriend was already a convinced Nazi by then-I'm talking about the period from 1929 or '30 to 1934 or '35, which was when Valerie stopped going to stay with them and her friend stopped visiting her at Christmas, when they were both fourteen or fifteen. The older sister and the boyfriend finally got married in 1932 or '33 and moved to Germany, and the younger sister, Maria, with whom Valerie corresponded during the rest of the year and up until shortly before the War, had told her how worried the family were about that entirely expected marriage. The Mauthners always hoped it would never happen, that Ilse would break up with her boyfriend, as often happens with couples who meet very young. The man, whose name was Rendl-'
Here I couldn't help but interrupt him.
'Rendel? R-e-n-d-e-l?' I immediately spelled it out for him.
'No. In Austria, it was written without the second 'e,'' he replied. 'But, yes, the Rendel you know and who works for Tupra is the grandson of that older sister and her husband. Not that I've ever met him and I only know his father slightly. I helped his father, Ilse's son, financially, so that he could come to England when he was still a child; afterwards, I preferred not to stay in touch. That's another story though. But let's not get ahead of ourselves. The husband, Rendl, and this was known by his in-laws, had a Jewish grandmother, who had died before he was born, and so he was a 'quarter-Jew,' a second-degree
'She had told Valerie, I mean, your wife, Peter.' This time I corrected myself at once.
Wheeler noticed my uncertainty. Very few things escaped him even now.
'It's all right, you can call her Valerie. And she wasn't my wife at the time. She was called Valerie Harwood then and could have imagined very little of what was to come. She couldn't even have imagined me because we hadn't yet met. But, yes, Maria Mauthner had told a friend who, a few years later, would turn into an enemy. Not a personal enemy, of course, but… how could you best describe it? National, political, patriotic? I don't know what kind of enemy one becomes in time of war. You hate complete strangers and old friends, you hate all-embracingly, hate a whole country or even several. It's very odd when you think about it. It makes no sense at all, and it's such a waste. Maria had not only told her about it just once, she continued to mention it in the years that followed, by letter. They had been friends since childhood, they trusted each other, they talked openly, they gave each other their news. Valerie learned that Ilse had three children, a boy and two girls, she even met the oldest, when he was just a baby, during her last visit to Melk, in 1934 or '35. She also learned that Rendl, whom she had always considered an imbecile when she'd met him during her summer visits, a kind of pre-fanatic, was rising fast in the SS; and when the two friends stopped corresponding in 1939, she knew that he had reached the rank of Major, or perhaps Captain, in one of the Cavalry Divisions of the SS. One of those divisions, by the way, the 33rd, met a sad (for us joyous) fate when it was wiped out at the Battle of Budapest in 1945, but I don't know if that was his division. Not that it matters, because, by then, Rendl wasn't in the Cavalry or in the SS, but, quite likely, in a concentration camp, in a mass grave or else incinerated.'
'What happened?' I asked so that he didn't get distracted recalling facts about the War.
Wheeler finished his sherry and hesitated as to whether or not he should have another. I encouraged him, got up to fill his glass, and he glanced across to where Mrs. Berry had been coming and going, but then we heard her begin to play upstairs, in the empty room where there was nothing else to do but sit down before the piano: perhaps it was her practice time, before lunch, at least on those Sundays exiled from the infinite. Wheeler pointed with one finger up at the ceiling and then at the bottle.
'You know already, don't you, Jacobo? You can imagine what happened. Valerie told me that she had doubts about the plan and would have liked to ask me my opinion. But I was away most of the time, and communications were difficult and brief, there wasn't time to discuss problems. When she told Jefferys about it, she hadn't had any contact with Maria for three or four years, and didn't even know if she was still alive. Besides, everything in the past fades and seems less intense, and childhood friendships are the quickest to blur, mainly because children cease to be children and they change, they cast off and deny their childhood until it's far far away, and only then do they miss it. Jefferys appealed to the inventiveness and to the remote, oblique, improbable heroism of his black gamblers, both those who knew what they were involved in and those who thought they were white gamblers; he'd say to them: 'Don't keep anything back, however trivial and silly it may seem to you, tell us about it: it could prove vital, could save English lives and win this War.' He demanded incessant activity, initiatives, plots, schemes, and always more ideas, and Valerie gave him hers, or he created one out of what she told him: 'Hartmut Rendl, SS officer, with the rank of Major or at least Captain-if he's been promoted in the last few years-is a
