The House of Rumour (32 page)

He poured another drink, lit another cigarette.

‘You’re like me, Trevelyan. A staff officer. Sticking pins into maps and sending men into danger. From a desk. A handler: yes, that’s what I thought I was doing, handling another agent. But he’s ended up running me. He’s the revenge for all the men I’ve sent into danger.’

I wanted to ask him about this but he changed the subject. He was keen to talk about current intelligence concerns and Service gossip. The conversation quickly turned to Cuba. It was Jamaica’s nearest neighbour, after all, and it had only been three months since the Missile Crisis had nearly blown us all to kingdom come.

We agreed that American policy towards Castro had been a disaster. All the CIA’s interventions and black ops had only forced Cuba closer to the Soviets.

‘They should have set about deflating Fidel, rather than building him up as a threat to world peace,’ Fleming suggested.

‘I’ve always found that the Americans lack a little finesse in negritude. They’re not very good at lying. Too bloody sincere.’

‘They should have found a way of ridiculing Castro. I said as much to Kennedy.’

He explained rather sheepishly that the president of the United States was something of a fan of his novels and that they had met when he was still a senator.

‘I told him that they should generate black propaganda, purportedly from the Russians, informing them that atomic testing in the region had caused beards to become radioactive and advising them to shave them off, thus undermining the whole revolution. One of their security advisors actually thanked me for my idea with a completely straight face. They don’t seem to realise that you need a sense of humour. And a sense of luck.’

‘Luck?’

‘Good fortune, yes. That’s what it mostly relies on, isn’t it? You have to find a way of using it. Take Cuba. You know what happened when Castro marched into Havana and gave his first televised speech in front of the cheering crowds? Two doves appeared. One perched itself on his shoulder. Now, in Santería, the Cuban version of voodoo or whatever, that meant he had the protection of the gods and was all-powerful. I mean, imagine being able to engineer something like that?’ He smiled. ‘Political power is largely a matter of superstition. Intelligence too. Magic, some of it.’

‘Like Operation Mistletoe?’

He let out a wheezing laugh and stood up, swaying a little.

‘Too late for that now. We’ll talk more tomorrow.’

The following night Fleming gave me his final word on the Hess affair.

‘You remember what Winston said? “In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.” That’s what worked so well for us. Perfidious Albion, yes, we’ve always been good at that. Our lies were better than theirs. Some of it was Maxwell Knight’s fantasy. M believed in some of that mumbo-jumbo so it appeared convincing.’

‘Stalin was sure that the Service had a part in the Hess flight.’

‘Yes, and we know now how well informed he was about British Intelligence. But I’m not so sure, you know. Crowley had some occult contacts in Germany that we used but nobody was sure if they actually had an effect. What did you find out?’

‘Not much.’

I told him that I’d managed to track down an astrologer and pyschic who had been some kind of voice teacher. Astrid Nagengast had been arrested during
Aktion Hess
and also had a record of being connected to a Munich section of the Red Orchestra. Along with some occultists she had been interrogated and detained in Sachsenhausen concentration camp for two months.

‘What happened to her?’

‘She survived the war and went to live in California.’

‘You could go out there and see her.’

‘Perhaps. But, you know, once you start investigating that part of the world it becomes more and more absurd. Crowley had something of a cult out there for a while, of course, but it’s easy to get carried away with conspiracies and all kinds of nonsense.’

Fleming poured us both another drink.

‘I circulated a paper for Naval Intelligence in 1940 titled
Rumour as a Weapon
,’ he said. ‘I wrote that we had the ammunition; we just needed the device to direct it. In Political you called it the Black Game or negritude. Later I found my own name for it. For where it all belonged. The House of Rumour.’

‘The House of Rumour?’

‘At the centre of the world where everything can be seen is a tower of sounding bronze that hums and echoes, repeating all it hears, mixing truth with fiction. It’s from Ovid’s
Metamorphoses
. A lovely image, don’t you think?’

‘It is, rather.’

‘And that’s what every intelligence service is, at its heart. It’s been the same since classical times. It was from the House of Rumour that the Trojans learnt that the Greeks were coming. An advance warning system. And we knew that Germany was planning to invade Russia and that’s what would save us. But we had to make sure. So there were all manner of phony peace feelers to help convince the enemy that they might not have to fight a war on two fronts.’

‘Like Operation Mistletoe?’

‘Perhaps. Though we’ll never be sure if it really had any effect. I think it was mostly good fortune. And bad luck on their side. You have to remember that in the end the Trojan War was won by deception and counter-intelligence.’

‘Oh yes, the wooden horse. Particularly nasty piece of negritude.’

‘Another phony peace offering. Well,’ he sighed, ‘we still need the House of Rumour. To make sure our own Trojan War never takes place. I mean, we had a bloody close shave last October.’

And that was the last time I spoke to Fleming about the case. He died the following year of a massive heart attack. Looking back, I think it was from that night on that I began to stop chasing after the affair. The myths and conspiracies continued to circulate but I chose to conclude that it was more likely that the Deputy Führer was deranged and had acted on his own.

The most ludicrous theory that I came across about Hess was that a doppelgänger had flown in his place. An absurd hypothesis with scant evidence or explanation, yet one that presented a compelling image: the double, that great theme of fiction and intelligence. And of two worlds, too – a splitting of possible outcomes. Fleming told me that there were only two crucial moments in any life (and he used this conceit in the title of the novel he was working on): that of birth and death. But by then he was facing the end. Now, it’s nearly all over for me too. I’m left with the final mystery of the Hanged Man. Just why was a ‘suicide note’ planted on him?

In the last two days of our stay the bad feeling between the Flemings became almost unbearable. Ian became tetchy even with me. I had been told that if I went for a morning swim, I was to make a detour around the front of the house because he didn’t like anything passing in front of his view out to sea at that time. It was then that he gazed out at the ocean and thought about what he was going to write that day. Well, I forgot and he bawled me out for it.

Later he was in a more sombre mood. He said that the greatest sadness in life was the failure to make the one you loved happy. He told me of his quantum theory of affection: that if not a single particle of comfort existed between two people, then they might as well both be dead.

And Clarissa was shocked when Ann confessed to her that being with Ian was like living with a wounded animal and at times she simply wanted to put him out of his misery.

‘Of course,’ she added with a cold smile, ‘I still love him, you see.’

So it was with great relief that we left the following morning. There were breezy farewells and promises to meet up back in London. Behind the clenched smiles and alert eyes, one felt the murderous intensity between them. It made one almost fearful to leave them on their own together.

We had gone only two or three miles when Clarissa realised that she had left a bracelet behind.

‘Can’t we get them to send it on?’ I reasoned.

‘For goodness’ sake, Marius, it belonged to the duchess.’ She meant her grandmother. ‘It’s a priceless heirloom.’

I turned the car around and drove back to the entrance to their driveway.

‘Please,’ pleaded Clarissa, ‘will you go? I don’t think I can bear going back there. It’s on the table in the garden.’

As I approached the house my first thought was to walk around the side but that would mean passing Ian’s window and interfering with his precious morning view. So I went up to the front door and knocked. It was off the latch so I let myself in. There was no sign of Violet the housekeeper. As I passed through the living room I heard a fearful row. The sound of violence, of blows, of cries of pain and harsh oaths. It was coming from the Flemings’ bedroom.

The door was ajar. I readied myself for the ghastly task of coming between them, of breaking up some pitiful domestic fight. But as I gently pushed at the door I saw the two of them standing naked, Ann armed with a riding crop, Ian with a thin bamboo cane, gleefully taking turns at one another. They were utterly oblivious to my presence in the doorway. The air sang with the swoosh of their thrashing, with loud yelps, exquisite insults and obscenities.

I turned on my heel and swiftly made for the garden to retrieve Clarissa’s bauble. Then around and back out to the driveway. I felt a spring in my step as I made my way back to the car. My mind still vivid with the image of them, the look of sheer joy beaming from their faces. The pure, bright energy of it. I remembered what Clarissa had said those few nights before and I found myself laughing out loud. Who knows what true happiness is? It’s the greatest mystery of all.

13

the devil

Haven’t you noticed how aliens always seem to look like pre-pubescent girls? Their heads too big for their skinny little bodies. You see them naked with no hair, no external genitalia. These are the ones called the Greys. I was ten years old when I became one. For them. They took off all my clothes and put a nylon stocking over my head, covering my hair, making my head bulge a little. My ears were flattened, my nose became two nostrils, my mouth a slit. Then they put dark goggles over my eyes and dusted me all over with talcum powder. Becoming a Grey was just one of the many rituals I performed for the cult that ran Operation Paperclip.

This was just after the war in Manhattan Beach in Los Angeles County. Mother drove me out to a big house there one evening. She had spent years pimping me out as a child actress. I figured that this was just another job.

Larry always thought I was making this stuff up. He never called me a liar to my face. He couldn’t. Lying and stealing, that was
his
job. He stole all my life experiences for his stories and novels. Fantasy, that was his racket. He admitted it. He told me once that he had developed this problem with reality. And he said himself that science fiction was a ridiculous conjunction, a contradiction in terms. I mean, how can fiction be scientific or vice versa? No, I know the truth. He took it from me. And he used it to give his stuff credibility.

I know now what happened in that mansion in Manhattan Beach. At the time I was a confused child, made to think of it all as a game. They took pictures of me. Some as a Grey alien, some of me naked. I was made to pose with other kids, with adults. Then there were parties where me and other children were made to work the room. The cult used blackmail as control. Operation Paperclip was a secret mission to recruit Nazi scientists after the war. Their files would be sheep-dipped. That meant they would falsify their employment records, clear them of war crimes, cover up the fact that they had been Nazi Party members.

Most important of all were the rocket scientists and the ones who had been experimenting with anti-gravity technology. That’s why they needed pictures of aliens: to spread rumours about the Greys, to hide the fact that the Nazis were in possession of advanced interplanetary knowledge and had now established themselves in America. That was the cult that used me and countless other children. And every new religion needs a new devil to blame the bad things in creation on. Something to frighten people. The Grey alien became a sort of scientific Satan.

And when they had finished posing me and the other children as Greys, they would take pornographic photographs and get us ready for the evening parties. It has taken me a long time to recover the awful memories from that time. For many years I suffered from traumatic amnesia. Now I can recall everything, just as I can recall many of my past lives.

I was abused not merely for pleasure but as a form of control for the people who attended the parties. Influential figures that the cult could use: the rich, the powerful. I remember how I watched them and felt their desires, their ambition. Their fear. They weren’t necessarily paedophiles; often our job was to trick them. Drunk or drugged, the guests could be fooled into incriminating positions. I remember Walt Disney and Wernher von Braun. I remember Ronald Reagan and Howard Hughes.

And I remember the devil. I mean, the real devil. He ran the show and sometimes he would appear in person. In disguise. He wore a lounge suit and dark glasses. He had a little goatee beard. He smiled and spoke softly but when he took his sunglasses off you could see the infinite cruelty in his eyes. Red-lined, the whites yellow as brimstone, jet-black irises like scorch marks burning into you, making you do whatever he pleased. He cast a spell with a simple gesture, a sign of abominable power.