“When in doubt, remember that Radenau is the center of the circle.”
“Somebody could have told me this at the outset.”
My caller sighed. It made him sound almost human. “Somebody could have told it to me too, but nobody did. I dug it out for myself.”
This news did not make me happy, but I managed to keep it to myself. I said, “That brings me back to my original question. Who the hell are you? And if you’re taking care of this, what am I supposed to be doing?”
“You’re supposed to be leading and I’m supposed to b
e following. You’re not even supposed to know I’m here.”
“Why am I not supposed to know you’re here?”
“I don’t know. Maybe the idea is not to tax your powers of dissimulation. Or maybe the idea is to make you take some initiative.”
“Fuck you, Charlie,” I said. Some people are shocked when they hear a cleric talk as dirty as a third-grader, but this one just waited. “Listen,” I told him, “I’m not a detective. I admit it. I could use some help.”
“Not from me. Get out there and do some work.”
The line went dead.
Detective work
I got out my map, and that helped a lot. In a circle around Radenau there were fifty major cities where B might be speaking—Nuremberg, Dresden, Berlin, Kiel, Hamburg, Bremen, Essen, Koln, Frankfurt, Heidelberg, and Stuttgart, to mention just a few. There would have been nothing to it if Billy Graham had been out there touring, but how the devil was I supposed to track the speaking engagements of a virtual unknown named B?
Finding no inspiration in geography, I spent some time wondering who Charlie is. A civilian, surely. As people will, I conjured up a figure to fit the voice. I put him at age thirty-five, wiry, of middling height and weight, some sort of military or paramilitary type with a ratlike face and cheap clothes dating from the 1950s. As is evident from all this, Charlie had failed to win my affection. I toyed briefly with the idea of calling Fr. Lulfre and asking what the deal was but couldn’t find a shadow of an argument to support it.
If Charlie knows where B is, what does he gain by withholding this information from me? If he wants to make me look bad, why call and give me hints? On the phone he tried to sell me an explanation for these mysteries: He was dealing with a lazy schoolboy; I’d done my homework poorly, and he wasn’t there to give me the right answers, he was there to give me a taste of the stick. That makes sense if he really is a military type. He’s treating this like boot camp. Okay.
As far as I can see, there’s only one fact in everything he told me that is both hard and relevant: Wherever else B and “the girl” go, they eventually end up back in Radenau. I have to assume this is the best information Charlie has. If he knew for a fact that B is going to spend the summer in Spitzbergen, for example, he certainly wouldn’t give me all this dizdazz about Radenau. If I’m right about this, then Charlie himself is heading for Radenau.
And that, I have to suppose, is what he called to tell me.
Isn’t it grand to be educated?
Saturday, May 18
Radenau
Departing after a late, leisurely breakfast, I was in Hamburg by midafternoon. Germany is smaller than Montana, and traveling from one end of it to another on the high-speed intercity express makes it seem even smaller. Having a couple hours to kill before making a connection to Radenau, I visited the tourist office at the Hauptbahnhof and was earnestly advised not to miss the Jungfernstieg, an easy walk away, which would give me the city’s magnificent artificial lake on the one hand and its most elegant shops on the other. I took the advice, and there it was, by golly, exactly as advertised.
Not much of Radenau predates the 1940s. Albert Speer, Hitlers architect and technocrat-in-chief had something or other in mind for it during the late stages of the war but certainly not a fine-arts center. I think it was going to be a place where factories would really feel at home during the Thousand-Year Reich. Now it’s a sprawling industrial park dotted with apartment complexes indistinguishable from barracks. The only good things my guidebook could find to say about the hotel where I’d booked was that it was modern and scrupulously clean, and it was both of those. It was also “downtown,” which is to say in the older part of the city. Old Radenau doesn’t even pretend to be quaint.
I’d spent my time on the train making a readable longhand copy of “The Great Forgetting” to send Fr. Lulfre. When I checked in at the hotel, I asked the desk clerk if they had a fax machine, and he drew himself up as indignantly as if I’d asked about indoor plumbing. I’m glad I had a fax to placate him with.
I’m going to have a bath, a long, meditative dinner (meditating about as few things as possible), and perhaps a stroll before bed. No more than that. No work till tomorrow.
A long night begins
As I said I might, I took myself out for a walk after dinner. The night was pleasant, the streets were quiet. I’m not a big explorer. About three blocks out (in other words, near the limit of my adventurousness), I heard a mild sort of hubbub somewhere ahead. If this had been Beirut, naturally I would’ve just turned around and gone back to the hotel, but since it was Radenau, I was curious. I let the noise guide me to a nearby side street where a small theater was being picketed by forty or fifty citizens who seemed rather stunned to find themselves employed in such a vulgar display of rowdiness. They were milling about in an undisciplined way, parading crudely scrawled signs to nonexistent witnesses and halfheartedly chanting slogans whose exact wording was still being worked on.
It took me about three seconds to realize that I’d found B, or at least the site of his next gig. A favorite activity among the sign makers was to publish the supposed meaning of B’s name. Thus he was named as the blasphemer, the bastard, the bunghole, the bigmouth, the blowhard, the bonehead, le badaud, la bête, le bobard, le boucher, le bruit, die Beerdigung, der Bettler, and die Blattern, among others I no longer recall. Still others identified him as Beelzebub, the Beast, Belial, and Barabbas, and two or three, ignoring the initial problem altogether, confidently dubbed him the Antichrist, which I must say surprised me on the basis of what I knew so far. Really, the whole thing surprised me.
The theater entrance was being defended by a uniformed guard who looked both more fierce and more worried than I thought necessary under the circumstances. The only rule he seemed to be enforcing for admittance was that protest signs had to be left outside. Watching the traffic at the door, I soon saw that the procedure was to picket for a while, then to go in and heckle the speaker for a while, then to come back out and picket some more. I pushed my way in.
First I took in the fact that the lecture hall wasn’t very large, seating some three or four hundred, then I took in the much more important fact that the hecklers were definitely not putting their hearts into their work. Perhaps it’s true that Germans are uncomfortable defying authority. The first twenty rows pretty clearly held B’s supporters, looking sullen and tense, while behind them—and everywhere else—were arrayed his glowering (but largely silent) antagonists. There was an empty seat near the front, and I headed for it after grabbing a stack of handbills to use as writing paper. I was disappointed to see that, except for B, the stage was empty.
B lifted his eyes to mine as I sat down, and an electric charge of recognition flashed between us, or so I imagined.