The Matchmaker of Kenmare Page 15

  She laughed, and whispered, “Why don’t you?”

  “Can you tell me if I would be all right?”

  Miss Begley whispered back, “If you’re not all right, I won’t be.”

  In the years ahead, he told me that when he saw us on the street that day outside the basilica, he knew that we’d come for him. Or so he’d hoped.

  She reached for his hand, leaned closer, and said, “If you ask no more questions—we’ll go now.”

  Hugo Barrive was waiting where he said he’d be—at the rear door of the restaurant. Miss Begley said to him, “Behave yourself.”

  In the darkness of the car, Mr. Seefeld sat between Miss Begley and me. She held his hand as though he were her child; from time to time she patted his forearm; he leaned his head on her shoulder. This was the saddest man I had ever seen, and I can claim to know something about sadness.

  Hugo sat in front beside the driver. Even in the blackest of nights, even in that strange landscape, I could tell by the savage bumpings that we were taking roads few other people traveled. And still Miss Begley held Mr. Seefeld’s hand. And still she patted his forearm. He continued to lean his head on her shoulder. With what feelings was he overcome? Remorse at his act of betrayal? Grief for his dead wife? Fear of the void that lay ahead?

  He told me once, “Until that night I had forgotten how to feel more than one emotion.”

  The farmer and his doctor wife behaved with the utmost courtesy to Mr. Seefeld; they showed him none of the coldness they might have been assumed to feel. When they sat him in a comfortable armchair, Miss Begley sat on its arm. Hugo told us that we would not be going to Le Crotoy for another full day, because we might not get there now under cover of darkness. To all and any arrangements, Hans-Dieter Seefeld did no more than nod.

  The doctor led the way upstairs; Mr. Seefeld and Miss Begley followed. When the doctor came back down, she looked around the kitchen, at her husband, at Hugo Barrive, and at me, and shrugged. Naively, I didn’t understand that she meant the couple upstairs would share the room that night.

  He didn’t come down next day, and Miss Begley took up soup to him.

  “He’s feeling wretched. He’s in a bad state,” she whispered to me.

  At dusk, in the quiet of the evening, I went outside and stood at the top of the wooden staircase. Home-going birds were calling, their cries long and thoughtful across the water. In forty-eight hours I had walked straight into violent danger and seen an atrocity that haunts me to this day. The others, the ravages I was yet to see, haunt me too—but the first remains the worst and the most brutalizing, the event that most sensitizes and desensitizes; perhaps that is always so.

  Presently, I had a companion.

  “Kate, tell me now, or never tell me. How did all this happen?”

  “Not now.”

  “But there’s a deal up and running, isn’t there?”

  She turned away, as she always did when unwilling to face something.

  “Come on, Kate. This is too much for me.”

  She took my arms and shook me. “No, Ben. It isn’t, it shouldn’t be. You’re capable of it.”

  “This is preposterous. You undertook a spying mission. You took us into the middle of the biggest war the world has ever seen.”

  “Is that how you see it?” she said.

  “Why? Why did you do this? We could have been killed.”

  “But we weren’t, were we?” she said, and closed down as only she could.

  51

  My daydreaming, of Asian willows, waterbirds, and the banal, black languor of casual brutalities, yielded to lapping sounds. Beneath me, the curly hair of our boatwoman appeared as she eased the rippling canoe to the mooring ring.

  Annette Larbaud came up the wooden steps without a noise. She half-smiled at me, and then grimaced. A wave of her arm suggested the wider countryside, and inside she told Hugo that German soldiers were everywhere, urgent and searching.

  In an hour, when twilight had become night, we led Hans-Dieter Seefeld down to the boat. Annette went in front of him, Miss Begley behind, her hand on his shoulder. He looked like a man who had been sick to his stomach. As a last thought, the doctor handed Hugo a rug that he spread around Mr. Seefeld’s shoulders, but the stricken German, though wrapped up warm to his neck, continued to shiver.

  What is the name of the ferryman in the Greek mythologies? He who rows the newly dead across the River Styx to Hades, the land of souls? Charon—that’s his name, and if you don’t pay him, you’ll wander the shores of the afterworld for ever and ever, unrewarded, ill at ease. Our Charon asked for no immortal coin in her palm; she hunched amidships, pulling at her oars with slow, arm-length strokes.

  Miss Begley sat beside Mr. Seefeld, her arm in his. I faced them, and Hugo sat behind me, peering forward, twisting this way and that, on the lookout for searchlights and guns. We moved easily, silent and strong, out of the little river and down the long oxbow. Nobody spoke; we heard the dip and splat! of the oars; we heard night birds here and there, calling across the water with an oordle-oordle sound.

  And then we heard an engine.

  At first it could have been anything, anywhere—a truck on a nearby road; I assumed a large boat heading toward us, that huge mechanical roar. But it came up fast, and then very fast—an aircraft, not much above head height, in fact so close that we all ducked low. No lights; we saw nothing as it approached, but as it flew directly over us we saw fire. From the tail came flames, and I knew that the pilot had lost control, and he hit the bridge across to our right, the road bridge, fifty yards away, on the main road to Le Crotoy, and the flames went everywhere.

  The fallen plane belonged to the Allies. We saw it sinking. Mr. Seefeld, shaking like palsy, pointed out the tail insignia of the Royal Air Force now lit by the flames, said, “This terrible war,” and shuddered again. If he’d had any notion of changing his mind, he told me years later, that incident would have cured it.

  We beat the patrols that night, as we would do at other times in the coming year, though in very different circumstances. Through the lanes of Le Crotoy, and the humps and lumps of its sand dunes, we stumbled and staggered, Mr. Seefeld doing his best. During one moment as I helped him—and he was too young to have needed help—I began to realize that he probably had asthma; he wheezed like a horse. Miss Begley never left his side.

  At the boat, Bawn Buckley looked at Mr. Seefeld and said, “Are you coming fishing again?” And Mr. Seefeld laughed—they had known each other for years.

  Out quietly on a two o’clock tide, we now had to fear only submarines, but they tended to leave fishing vessels alone. I stayed on deck and didn’t inquire into any other arrangements on board.

  The weather gave out curious little voltages, like an unsteady person’s moods. A wind came up and died as quickly. In its wake, heavy splashing attacked the hull beneath where I stood, rocking the boat enough to make me grab a hold. Then a calm arrived, still and silent as the desert, and with it came a surge of almost warm air. And next, an hour or so later, came a cold breeze that blew in our faces for steady minutes, until it too died.

  52

  From Le Crotoy, we went north. I looked at the map. When level with Le Touquet, Bawn Buckley intended to turn to port—or “left,” as I called it—and make straight across the English Channel, as though to dock at Eastbourne. From there, having turned to port again, we would hug the shore of England all the way to the Land’s End in Cornwall. After what he called “the sprint” across the bottom of the Irish Sea, he then intended to hug the Irish shore all the way to Dingle.

  “Once we hit Waterford we’ll be all right.”

  We made steady knots. In general, when I turned my face to the stars, it felt benign, and when I went to the wheelhouse to ask Bawn Buckley about these little phenomena of changes in the weather and in the sea, he pointed to his right.

  “There’s your reason,” he said. “We’re close to the land. And isn’t the land always giving the sea problems?”r />
  I looked for sleepiness in myself and found none. The deck, the night, the opening dawn made me feel wonderful, and for the first time in a decade and more, I began to believe that my melancholy would one day evaporate. That is not the same as saying I had begun to cope with my loss. As you know by now, it certainly didn’t mean that I had let go of Venetia, or of whatever child (or children, as I must now say) I had fathered.

  What I am telling you is that my spirit had been changing. Can I call it reviving? I think so. Hope had a better chance in me now—though hope for what I couldn’t yet say. I moved here and there on the cramped deck of the little trawler, looking now at the land and now at the open sea, and I sensed that I had begun to feel different, even if I couldn’t put a name to it.

  At around five o’clock in the morning, I went back into the wheelhouse and was handed a mug of tea by Bawn Buckley, who murmured, “They’re awake, they’re talking.”

  He had cut the engine to half-speed, and I listened. From below I heard the rise and fall of talk. Then some vinegar began to flow in me, and my mind began to ask difficult questions: What is their sleeping arrangement? How cramped is it down there? I know it’s where the trawler-men sleep, so are they lying in two sleeping bags or one?

  53

  We didn’t land in Dingle Harbor. He took us to a little jetty a mile west, where stood Captain Miller, in a fawn trench coat, looking jaunty. He was flanked by four tough-looking men—American marines, I would learn. Behind them sat three cars, an unusual sight in Ireland during “the Emergency.” Near the cars stood an elderly German couple—a retired doctor and his wife, it transpired—who lived not far from Dingle, and who had been contacted by Captain Miller. They waved toward us—and Mr. Seefeld waved back; they knew each other.

  I went off the boat first. As soon as my feet touched the stones of the pier, I moved ahead and to one side—I wanted to observe the full scene. Miss Begley, alert as a bird, began to steer matters. And all the while, it rained.

  First, she called forward the German doctor and his wife, who went down to the trawler and greeted Mr. Seefeld like the old friends they were. Then she and I walked up the jetty, and Captain Miller came to meet us. From the wheelhouse Bawn Buckley watched everything, a man to whom nothing under the sun was new, his wrinkled face more than ever like that of an old king.

  Before Captain Miller could say a word, Miss Begley turned to me.

  “Ben, I need a witness.”

  She led the three of us up the jetty, away from everyone, as far as the parked cars.

  “Now listen to me,” she said, squaring herself to Miller. “I had a long chat with Hans on the boat. If you’ve ever been a man’s matchmaker he’ll tell you anything about himself. He doesn’t have great health—but he has great mental strength. If you take him away from here he’ll tell you nothing, he’s been trained against torture. But if you agree to let me come with him, and then send him back to his own house in Kenmare, and live a quiet life, he’ll tell you everything. And he knows everything.”

  Miller looked at her. “Okay. I agree.”

  “No harm will come to him, is that right?”

  “Sure.”

  “Say it.”

  “Okay. No harm will come to him.”

  “Give me your word,” she said.

  “I give you my word, Kate.”

  Then she put a hand on his arm and said, “And you and me, Charles. We have a deal, don’t we?”

  He looked out to sea, he looked at the ground, then he looked at her. He had no answer for her that would have freed him from his obligation. He said, in a voice quiet as wool, “We have a deal, Kate, you and I.”

  She raised that eyebrow. “And?”

  He said, “I always keep my word. Name the date.”

  54

  I was too staggered, I think, to take it in at first. She had landed him. The Matchmaker had made her own match! When I did reflect on it, I wondered whether that was always her only prospect. After all, a man who needed a matchmaker would never have had the courage to take her on. I watched both of them. She, to my surprise, looked serene; he, the more animated of the two.

  “Do you want to shake hands on it?” he said.

  “You mean—the word of a gentleman?” she asked, only half joking.

  “Or sealing the bargain,” he said.

  At that moment an expression crossed his face that bothered me. The words to describe it came to me instantly—“a seeming wish to devour.” He looked wolfish.

  I recoiled. Had Miss Begley hitched her wagon to that? Remember my training. I lived so much with legends that I saw important things in legendary form, and I tried to translate significant events into instant myth. That was James Clare’s doing; he taught me that if you can tell yourself your own life story as though it were a legend, you can cure many of your own ills.

  You’ll remember too that I remarked how I liked physical manifestations—how in Dublin I’d gone looking for the accidental debris of war in order to make the carnage of Europe real. Well, when I first saw Captain Charles Miller at a distance that morning, by the dove-gray light of the Irish southwest, he looked different. It wasn’t the civilian clothes—I’d seen him like that many times during our London capers, where he dressed like a half-dapper American. Nor was it the environment—remember I’d first met him on that same coastline. He was about to grab a prize, and therefore he looked greedy. And perhaps a little sinister. As I say, wolfish.

  This thought jabbed me, and I looked away from him. But when I scrutinized Captain Miller’s marine comrades, one of them actually had the appearance of a wolf—steady eyes in a bushy face. To crown it, the German doctor (I’ll remember his name in a moment) also looked at least vulpine, if not downright lupine. His face seemed to funnel to a thick point that projected his long nose forward, and he had gray, placid features—a wolf elder, so to speak.

  After the bombshell of what was, in essence, a proposal of marriage, driven by her, completed by him, Captain Miller smiled a kind smile at Miss Begley, followed by a laugh.

  “Kate,” he said. “You’re some woman.”

  “I’m halfway to Kenmare,” she said, “and I want to get home. So we might as well get started,” and the three of us walked back down the jetty to join the others.

  Dr. Manfred Hortig—that was his name—and his wife, Elisabeth, sat with Mr. Seefeld in Captain Miller’s car. I joined two of the silent marines in one of the other military vehicles, and we convoyed to the Hortigs’ house overlooking the sea near Castlemaine. When we arrived, Miss Begley jumped out and held open the door for Mr. Seefeld; Captain Miller stood back and watched; Dr. Hortig and his wife trotted to their doorstep, where they turned around and welcomed us all. For me, the Seefeld incident, keenly real and yet preposterous, had ended. For now.

  55

  How things happen. Next time I picked up my letters, James Clare had written, saying that he wanted to meet me in Donegal sometime, where he’d heard that “somebody has a great old story about a wolf and we’ve been trying to get it for aeons.” Therefore, I mulled the subject of wolves for days. I didn’t know then what a theme they would become in my life, and yet I must have had some inkling, because I couldn’t banish wolfish images from my mind.

  I dwelt on Dr. Hortig’s face, on Captain Miller’s face, and the bearded chops on one of his men, and I wonder now if that whole wolf thing wasn’t a kind of pre-haunting—by a man more ravenous than even the most rabid wolf, though with none of the kindness wolves are said to possess, a man who, had there not been a war, would probably have mutated into a serial killer, a man whose trademark was the slicing of flesh from female bodies before he poisoned them over a period of several days.

  He was born in Templehof, Berlin, on the twentieth of December, 1915, to an educated Prussian named Otto Volunder and a woman named Sophia Lieberstoldt.

  This Otto Volunder had a proud background. He claimed that his family went back to the Teutonic Knights and the Hanseatic League. The
se were the men who had most felt the sting of Germany’s Great War defeat; Otto, a cavalryman, had been “von” Volunder, but he dropped the nobleman’s identifier in shame at Prussian failure. Sophia came of minor nobility, and she broke all the ranks of aristocratic German young women in her day by studying medicine. The couple met at a military soiree, fell for each other that night, married within six months, and had three children, two daughters and one adored son, Sebastian.

  The boy was educated in Berlin, at the Goethe Oberrealschule, but he didn’t, as the school and his parents expected, go on to become a scientist or a mathematician—he wanted to be a soldier. In fact he wanted to be a cavalryman like his father, and he took riding lessons early.

  When he was eighteen, despite a modicum of parental reluctance—they were “old” Germany, after all—he joined the Hitler Youth. That was in March 1933; and six months later, on the seventeenth of October, 1933, there’s his name, Sebastian Volunder, on the list of men at the very foundation of the SS cavalry. He had amber eyes—amber like a timber wolf’s.

  Sebastian Volunder had put his foot on a golden ladder. From that early cavalry intake, his superiors selected him and one other to join a company known as Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler—the Führer’s personal bodyguard. He and his comrade (who later became his commanding officer) received their second lieutenant commissions on 20 April 1936, a day of added joy for them: It was Hitler’s forty-seventh birthday.

  Die Kreme des Korps, Sebastian Volunder called them. “We were the most superb of the elite,” he said to his sister, and they had to conform to dictates laid down in Hitler’s own handwriting: exceptional health and fitness; at least five feet nine inches tall; no teeth fillings. The body at the hip had to measure as close as possible to halfway; the leg had to measure “with equal felicity,” he said, between thigh and knee—in other words, no physical disproportion anywhere. As to the essential “racial purity”—for officers, they required proof of ancestry going back to 1750; for soldiers, the year 1800.