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By Root 760 0

actually stood, I think intent on facing off the fellow. But Fischer merely chuckled and murmured something to Dennis. Dennis sat back down. Deprived of confrontation, the sailor spat on the floor between his spread feet and walked away. Fischer took a carton of toothpicks from a waistcoat pocket. My God, I thought, he isn’t so ill-bred, surely, as to start picking his teeth in our company. He tapped a toothpick from the carton and fingered it. They were of the wooden disposable kind. He grinned. But instead of lifting the toothpick towards his mouth, he looked over to where the sailor railed, now, among his shipmates. And Fischer held the little wooden spear between his fingers and, with his grin turning savage, snapped it. And forty feet away, the sailor convulsed, stricken, his agonised howl keening through the drunken hubbub so loudly that it wholly silenced the place.

Dennis ushered us out. He conjured a taxi from somewhere and it took us back to our hotel. They tried to persuade me to have a nightcap with them when we got there but there was nowhere in the hotel a woman could enjoy a drink in male company respectably. Instead, I left them to it over billiards in a games room and retired, sleepless, uncomfortable with Fischer’s mirth in our cab over the bar-room insult, and his retribution.

Far from being a Jew he is a Jew-hater, one of the new breed of Germans apt to blame obscure conspiracies for their defeat in the war. And I was surprised at how tolerant Dennis seemed of his views, having seen the slaughter on the Western Front first hand. But there is a charm about Fischer, a magnetic quality in the face of which one is apt to forgive his brutality. He tears the tips from his cigars with his teeth. I saw him hawk and spit in the street while we waited for our cab. He curses, albeit in German, at great length and irrespective of the company he finds himself in. He is physically obese and the smell of fat, alive and labouring, is always there under his expensive soaps and colognes. But he has energy and the charismatic quality of someone who absorbs attention and at the same time seems to radiate his own kind of dark light. It’s almost as though with him, you share his orbit. It isn’t a quality one could photograph, I don’t think. It’s something invisible, almost hypnotic. It’s like a parlour trick, but played with enormous power. He has power. Though I don’t believe he is wise to use it in the vindictive playful way he did with that hapless sailor. The charisma might be entirely lost on Dennis, who was drunk again after the restaurant. But Fischer’s wealth and influence have made a deep impression. Klaus Fischer is an important, influential man. And then there is his mystery, a quality which is not lost on Dennis, one feels, at all.

I don’t believe Dennis really shares Fischer’s conspiratorial beliefs about the origins and outcome of the war. It’s just that there’s a general cynicism about him that makes him a sympathetic audience for this kind of talk. He won’t challenge it because he lacks any strong principles or even beliefs of his own. He has no religion. Certainly politics provides him with no hope. Perhaps that’s the attraction for him of Fischer. Perhaps Klaus Fischer can provide Dennis Wheatley with a kind of faith. And perhaps he craves that. Along with power, which he certainly covets enormously.

On the morning of the crossing I joined them both for breakfast, early, the gaslights in the hotel restaurant lit to defeat the darkness and the unaired smell of the previous evening’s cigars still present in the chair fabric and curtains there, and in the air above us beneath the dark crystal of the chandeliers. And when Fischer went to settle the bill, Dennis boasted about the way Fischer had felled the insolent sailor of the night before with no more than a vindictive gesture. He had inflicted a crippling blow on the man, Dennis said, with some relish, cutting bacon and slicing sausages on his plate. He had done it with nothing more concrete than a thought. That was power, he said. But sitting there, listening