Aiding and Abetting (2 page)

“I’ve listened to Walker. He sounds very troubled.” “It’s taken him a long time to be troubled. What has he been doing all these years not to be troubled before?” Jean-Pierre wondered aloud.

“Escaping from justice. Running away here and there.

He had friends.”

“And Interpol? How does he know you won’t hand him over?”

“Neither of them knows,” she said. “That’s what I can’t understand.”

“Oh,” he said, “I can. People generally have faith in the discretion of a psychiatrist, as they do with a priest.” “Professionally, I was quite happy working with Walker,” she said. “But now, with this new one . . . Sooner or later I’ll have to come to grips with him.” “What does he call himself?”

“Lucan,” she said. “Just that.”

“What do his friends call him?”

“He says he’s called Lucky. His friends have always called him Lucky Lucan. That was in the papers.” “Which of your two patients,” said Jean-Pierre, “resembles his photographs most?”

“Both of them,” said Hildegard.

“Hildegard,” he said, “could either of them have anything on you? Something from your past, anything?” “Oh, my God,” she said. “There is always that possibility. Anyone any time could have something in their past. I can’t think . . . but it would be unlikely, unbelievable. What would such people want with my past?”

“Perhaps nothing,” he said.

“Perhaps-what do you mean, Jean-Pierre?” “Well, I don’t mean exactly that you yourself might be wanted by Interpol. On the other hand . . .”

“On the other hand, what?” She had become uneasy, menacing. Jean-Pierre decided to back off. “There is no other hand,” he said, “since you are not on the wanted list.” He smiled very fetchingly at her. His affection was real. “If one of these men is the missing Lucan he might feel it safe to confide in you if he knew of something in your past life that you wanted to hide. But as that is not so, since you say it isn’t, that theory is ruled out, isn’t it?”

“No,” she said. “If one of them is the real Lucan he might imagine that he had something on me. Anyone might get that idea. They are probably in it together, is all I say.”

Walker kept his appointment with Hildegard.

“I am not really interested in whether you are Lord Lucan or not,” she told him. “I am interested in you, what you are doing here, why you need a psychiatrist, why your nerve has failed you if that is so. I am interested in a number of important factors, but not greatly in what your name may have been in 1974. You are prompted to see me now, in these weeks. Why?”

“In England,” he said, “I have been declared officially dead in order to wind up my estate. I have come to think of myself as a dead man. It distresses me.”

“It is believed by some people,” she said, “that the real Lord Lucan committed suicide shortly after he had murdered a girl over twenty years ago. It is a rational belief.”

“His body was never found,” said Walker. “Naturally.

Because I am Lucan.”

“You are not the only claimant,” she said.

“Really? Who is the other?”

“There could be many others. Several, at least. At what scope or advantage I can’t imagine. I should have thought you’d want to keep it quiet.”

“I am keeping it quiet,” said Walker. “My secret is safe with you.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes, I’m sure.”

“I have only to ring Interpol.”

“So have I.”

“To give yourself up?” she said.

“No, to give you up, Dr.Wolf.”

“Me? What do you mean?” Her voice had changed as if she had difficulty swallowing, as if her mouth was dry. “You are Beate Pappenheim, the fake stigmatic from Bavaria who was exposed in 1986, who disappeared with so many millions of marks from the Pappenheim Catholic Fund that nobody knew how many, who-” “What you are saying,” she said, “means nothing to me. Let’s return to your problem, which, as I see it, is one of identity.”

“I know who I am,” he said. “I have friends. Helpers.

People who know who I am.”

“Perhaps, then, you don’t need me,” she said, arranging the pens on her desk a little more neatly than they had been. “Beate Pappenheim,” he said, “how long does a warrant for arrest last? A whole lifetime?”

“My name is not Pappenheim,” she said, “and I am not a lawyer. I imagine a warrant for arrest in most countries lasts a lifetime or until the event of an arrest being made, but surely among your friends and helpers there is one who knows or practices criminal law?”

“My friends are getting old and some have died,” said Walker the so-called Lucan. “None of them has practiced the law. They are gentlemen, they are millionaires, but not lawyers.”

“You come here,” said Dr. Wolf, “with your story of being Robert Walker alias the seventh Earl of Lucan, a fugitive from British law, wanted for murder. What proof can you offer that any of this story is true?” “I don’t need to prove anything.”

“If you wish to continue as my patient you do,” she said. “Especially since I have another patient, Lucan, who claims that he did do the murder; in fact, is almost proud of it.”

“Dr. Pappenheim . . .”

“Mr. Walker, it’s money you want, isn’t it?”

“Partly.”

“Bring me proof that you are Lucan and I’ll pay you, partly. And now your time is up, for which you pay me. You pay at the desk and no fooling.”

“Next Friday, Dr. Pappenheim?”

“Get out.” She glared at him but he smiled at her as he rose, suave, casually dressed, rich, manicured, simply awful.

Hildegard took out of her handbag a small scent-spray which she puffed on either side of her neck. She put the spray back in her bag, thinking, I’m an animal trying to put that man off the scent. Where did he come from, that muckraker? She phoned Jean-Pierre, knowing confidently of his admiration for her methods and his respect for her fame. “Yes, I am being threatened,” she said, “about some past life of mine, something in another world. It’s upsetting me. Not rationally, of course. But I don’t know quite what to do.”

“We can discuss it tonight, Hildegard. Why are you upset? Don’t you expect your patients to be nuts?” “It’s that first Lord Lucan, Walker by name. Who do you suppose Walker really is?”

“A private detective,” said Jean-Pierre. “Someone making enquiries about the real Lucan, it could be.” “See you later,” she said.

Jean-Pierre was seven years her junior. Their difference in age was not apparent. Hildegard had a charming face and form, with dark well-cared-for hair, a pale skin and large gray eyes. Jean-Pierre was a man of big build, already grisly-gray with a beard. For over five years now he had shared his life with Hildegard. He could think of no one else, practically nothing else, but Hildegard.

Jean-Pierre was a metal and wood worker, with a workshop and foundry where he spent his working days. Jean-Pierre had a genius for making things, such as bells, fire irons, horse brasses, doors, windows, and especially adjustable bookcases. He also restored objects which had been broken; he made lamps out of vases and mended good china jugs. His workshop was like a junk heap of Europe, a history of antiquity, with its corner cabinets and consoles filled and littered with little boxes, primitive telephones, shells, ancient coins, everything. He used coins for eyes, frequently, when he felt in the mood to make up a mask in wood and iron. He liked wooden shoe-forms. This place or business was in the suburbs, by road (he had a Fiat van) half an hour from the center outside of the rush hour. He now lived with Hildegard in the rue du Dragon on the Left Bank.

Do not lose hold of the name Hildegard Wolf. Her real name, Beate Pappenheim, now comes into this story, but she leads us inevitably to Hildegard.

Beate was a young student in Munich in the seventies when she suddenly got tired, very, very tired, of being poor. This happens to a great number of impoverished people. Not all can do something about that condition.

Beate, a medical student who hoped to specialize in feminist psychology, was having a very hard time. She attended her university classes in the mornings and early afternoon she studied English. But from 4 P.M. to 8 P.M. she had to work a four hour shift in the handbag department of a department store. It was the only way she could make a living, earning enough to pay for her cheap bed-sitting room and meager food. Her parents lived in the country on a pig farm. She went to see them by bus one weekend a month, taking with her an offering of tinned foods, oatmeal or pickled cucumber. Her studies fascinated her. The job at the handbag department of the store wearied her heart out. She was tired of women who came to buy handbags and who tried the capacity of their purchases by first emptying their own bags to see if the contents would fit into the new one. It was then that Beate Pappenheim would frequently catch sight of the fat, bulging notecases of some of these women. Sometimes the money, solid packets of Deutshe marks, was not even enclosed in a wallet. Beate coveted this money. She would have stolen had she been able to do so without detection. She was tired, tired. Still in her twenties, she felt worn out. Her need for money was continual. Her boyfriend was a theological student, of the Protestant faith. He spoke English fluently, made her speak to him in English so that she could read the English-language textbooks in psychology. He would have loved to be a Catholic, the churches were so much more cheerful than any others, so full of color and glitter, incense and images.

One day on a Saturday when she was not visiting the farm, her boyfriend, Heinrich, came to visit her. It was three in the afternoon. He had a key. He found her on the bed covered in blood. She was having a menstrual hemorrhage. Blood all over the sheets, the floor, her hands. Heinrich ran for the landlady, who screamed when she saw Beate. Meanwhile the young man located a doctor who came and gave Beate an injection and the landlady orders to clean up the mess. Heinrich took over the job from the trembling woman who was also concerned about her bed sheets and the curtains, for blood had even spread to the windows, somehow. Much later Beate was able to sit up. The landlady, to Beate’s surprise, was now sympathetic and brought her some soup which Heinrich heated up on the spirit stove in the corner of the room. “You reminded me,” said the landlady, who was a Catholic, “of a picture I saw as a child of Sister Anastasia of the Five Wounds. She was a stigmatic. She worked miracles, so they said. But the Church never recognized her as a saint. When the Bishop came to visit the churches in the diocese we had to run and put the picture out of sight. But we often had a collection for Sister Anastasia. She was good to the poor.”

This was how Beate got her idea of being a holy stigmatic. She changed her address. Every monthly menstrual cycle she covered herself in blood and bandaged her hands so that blood appeared to seep through. She was stricken every month, as the phenomenon is traditionally represented, with at least one of the five wounds of Christ (a nail wound on each hand and foot, and a sword wound in the side). In between the cycles she wrote out testimonies to her healing powers, aided and abetted by Heinrich who appeared so much to believe in Beate’s claims that possibly, on interrogation, it would have emerged that he truly believed them. The nature of belief is very strange.

Beate had arranged for thousands of leaflets to be printed:

blessed Beate Pappenheim

the stigmatic of Munich

Please repeat the following prayer seven mornings a week for seven weeks. Beate Pappenheim prays and suffers for you.

O Lord, bless us through the good offices of our sister Beate Pappenheim. We Beseech Thee to hear her prayer on behalf of our sick/suffering brother/sister [delete as appropriate] N. In the name of the Five Wounds of Jesus Christ Our Lord.

Underneath was a picture of Beate holding up her blood-stained hands.

Below this was printed a brief biography of Beate with emphasis on her churchgoing insistence from childhood upwards.

The pamphlet concluded:

I enclose the sum of ……… for the aid of Beate Pappenheim’s Poor. Please send what you can afford. No gift is too small.

Heinrich had some friends in the theological college on whom he tried this pamphlet. “She really works miracles.”

Nearly all of them laughed it off. But not all. After a while the news of Beate’s miracle-working reached the nursing profession and somehow or other got to the shores of Ireland, the great land of believers. There it exploded into a real cult, so that when eventually (it took eight years) she was exposed as a fraud by analysis of her menstrual blood, more money in Irish currency than any other was found to have been placed in her account. Meanwhile, she had escaped, disappeared.

Beate during that time had been able to live in comfort. Every month she took to her bed and bloodily received pilgrims. Miracles did happen, as in fact they sometimes do. When she was finally exposed, a great number of her followers, mainly poor people, refused to believe what the newspapers reported.

Beate herself fled abroad. She changed her name to Hildegard Wolf. She moved, later, to Paris and set up as a psychiatrist there. With her change of name her personality expanded; it changed considerably. She would have sworn that the Beate Pappenheim of her past was a “different person” from herself; but she had never for the past twelve years been obliged to consider the question. She had just put Beate out of her mind, destroying her old birth certificate and replacing it with a new one obtained from a lawyer in Marseilles.

She had not been forgotten altogether by the acquaintances,

the friends, enemies and hangers-on of her old life, those who had profited by the cult of Blessed Beate Pappenheim. And many a poor and aging Catholic devotee of France and the British Isles remembered her name, remembered the sacrifices of their youth-the small sums, to them large, sent to Germany each month in the form of postal orders, or simple ten-shilling notes put into an envelope with a prayerful letter. Because they had sent the money they mostly continued to believe in her, long after the Catholic Herald and The Tablet, for instance, have published reports of Beate’s scientifically proved fraud. “Beate, you have got to be true. I believe in you because I sent you all my savings and I prayed your Novena” were the words of one typical letter subsequently Returned to Sender, Address Unknown. Heinrich returned to his theological college keeping quiet. Walker, the first so-called Lord Lucan, arrived in time for his next appointment, and was shown in. He sat down and lit a cigarette without permission.