Library Limelights 249

 

David Downing. Zoo Station. USA: Soho Press, 2007.

A gift to fill the gap while awaiting incoming TPL orders; an author I didn’t know, and subject matter – Berlin, 1939 – not bigly appealing, but Downing made this novel a pleasure to read. If one can use the word pleasure related to a tense city preparing for war. It’s that our narrator, freelance Brit journalist John Russell, manages to keep not only his cool but also his compassion under exigent circumstances while society crumbles around him. Russell has been in Germany long enough to have credentials acceptable to the authorities, and to have an eleven-year-old German son, being raised by his ex-wife and her now husband. Love for Paul keeps him in the country as long as possible, despite his loathing for the brutal Nazi regime. Russell never professionally expresses his contempt, to keep his status safe; his personal life offers alleviating opportunities.

Then Pravda hires him to write a series about the stellar achievements of the Third Reich. It’s political of course, a Russian attempt to appease Hitler. It doesn’t surprise the journalist that an NKVD officer expects a bit of useful information along with his articles, from all the interviews Russell will need to do. Getting wind of the job, the Germans expect Russell’s regular contact with the Russians will work similarly to their benefit, while Russell will secretly keep the British embassy in the loop. And so a spy is born, all taken in stride by Russell. What he especially can’t take are the inhumane policies against Jews and the disabled; privately he finds quietly heroic ways to help. Risky, dangerous ways.

Russell has a social group with long-term girlfriend Effi first and foremost, and a variety of international newspaper colleagues. The author carries us deep into contemporary Berlin streetscapes, train journeys, other European cities, and the fraught politics of winter and spring 1939, while the preordained drama dictates all the action. In the “Bernie” traditions of Len Deighton and Phillip Kerr, Downing is another welcome master. Zoo Station is the first in a series about John Russell’s adventures.

One-liners

▪ “Intelligence services,” the man had said, “are prone to looking up their own arses and wondering why it’s dark.” (118)

▪ “McKinley’s dead, Effi. And he didn’t commit suicide. He was murdered.” (162)

▪ “I’m not saying it’s bad being half-English—it’s not like being half-Jewish or half-Polish or anything like that―and if there’s a war with England I can tell everyone I’m loyal to the Führer, but you won’t be able to do that.” (165)

▪ If the Eskimos had fifty words for snow, the Nazis probably had fifty for dried blood. (202)

▪ A kilometer or so down the access road he pulled to a stop, slumped forward with his head against the wheel, and let the waves of rage wash over him. (204)

▪ It wasn’t every week he delivered a fugitive from the Gestapo to the communist underground, went looking for military secrets in a dockside bar, and played some lethal form of hunt the parcel with the border police. (251)

Multi-liners

▪ One woman, her eyes closed, was kneeling in the snow, a low keening noise rising up from inside her. The sound stayed with Russell as he was led out of the station. The sound of a heart caving in. (12)

▪ “Why did you come to Danzig, Herr Russell? To write a story about the Jewish children?” (15)

▪ He only half-bought the argument that by helping the Soviets he’d be hurting the Nazis. If he really wanted to take Hitler on there were more effective ways, but most of them depressingly self-sacrificial. (18)

▪ What did he have that they valued? Freedom to move around Germany. Freedom to ask questions without arousing suspicion. (117)

▪ Gazing back down the brightly lit Berlinerstrasse toward Zembski’s studio, he wondered whether he’d just crossed a very dangerous line. No, he reassured himself, all he’d done was commission a false passport. He would cross the line when he made use of it. (155-6)

More

▪ Russell sometimes enjoyed listening to Hitler. The man’s sheer effrontery was entertaining, and knowing that millions were being taken in by his ludicrous bloodlust gave the whole experience a deplorably thrilling edge. If the Führer told them that gravity was a Jewish trick then millions of Germans would be practicing levitation before the sun set. (16)

▪ “Listen to this,” the doctor said, adjusting his glasses on his nose and holding the page at arm’s length. “‘Even if a Jew slept with an Aryan woman once, the membranes of her vagina would be so impregnated with alien semen that the woman would never again be able to bear pure blooded Aryans.’” He lowered the paper and looked at Russell. “Who could believe such pre-scientific nonsense?” (31)

▪ At the end of the spit they took to the sandy beach, walking a kilometer or more and back again, watching the wind raising whitecaps on the water and the clouds scudding eastward across the blue-gray Baltic. No cars went by. No walkers. No ships appeared on the horizon. The earth was theirs. (193)

▪ But what did he know? There could be ruses within ruses; this could be some ludicrously Machiavellian plot the NKVD had thought up on some drunken weekend and set in motion before they sobered up. Or everyone concerned could be an incompetent. Or just having a bad day. (240)

▪ From time to time, over the last six weeks, he had found himself wondering why they had killed the young American. It was the wrong question to ask, he realized. It was like asking why they had killed Felix Wiesner. They might have had, or thought they had, particular motives, but the real reason was much simpler—they were killers. It was what they were. It was, in truth, all that they were. (287)

Michael Connelly. The Law of Innocence. Ebook download from TPL. USA: Little, Brown and Company/Hachette, 2020.

No easing into the plot here, no preparing us with a backstory scene. Bam! Mickey Haller, the normally cocky “Lincoln Lawyer,” is arrested right off the bat in a traffic stop. It’s a matter of the leaking dead body in the trunk of his car; no one is more surprised than Mickey. He is deeply shaken by incarceration in the notorious L.A. county jail while his assistants scramble. The victim was Sam Scales, a scuzzy former client, the charge is first degree murder, and Mickey is going to be his own defense lawyer, not knowing who has cleverly framed him. But jail and its transit buses are a very bad place for a man who’s managed to piss off a variety of people over the years. But he does get bail for a period, followed by nonstop courtroom drama—in my opinion, Connelly’s best yet―between Dana Berg, the rigid prosecutor, and our resourceful hero. In hearing after hearing, surprises threaten to derail his legal strategies and one wonders if a trial will actually happen (it does, and coincides with coronavirus fears).

On Mickey’s support team are daughter, Hayley, in first year law school; ex-wife Maggie who takes time off from her own prosecution work; his second ex-wife Lorna who manages his office; excellent colleague Jennifer who shares the casework; loyal investigator Cisco; and help from his half-brother Harry Bosch (of so many fab Connelly novels). Oh – and Bishop, ex-con turned chauffeur. Naturally, the best defense is to find the real killer, which elicits warning visits from the FBI and hints of dubious government contracts worth millions. From page to page, as Mickey desperately strives to present himself as innocent through a series of small victories and major defeats, it’s hard to put this one down.

Bits and Pieces

▪ On my first night [in jail], Bishop had offered to protect me or hurt me. I didn’t negotiate. (28)

▪ I resolved at that moment that I had to win the case because there was no way I was going to go back into lockup. (107)

▪ “But you have to remember, the feds only respond to threats. Threat of exposure. Whatever they’ve got going on down there, they want to keep it quiet and they’ll only take you seriously if they see you as endangering their secrecy or their investigation.” (143)

▪ “You know what they say: the FBI doesn’t share. It eats like an elephant and shits like a mouse.” (145)

▪ “It’s called bleeding the beast,” I said. “Scamming the government—the beast, that is―out of federal subsidies for producing green gold: recycled oil.” (220-1)

▪ This had gotten personal, with Berg repeatedly seeking to take away my freedom to prepare my case unfettered. (253)

▪ My eyes were swollen and the rash of exploded blood vessels extended from the corners of my eyes and across both cheeks. (291)

▪ “I’m not going anywhere. I mean, my mom and dad on the same team—what could be better than that?” (322)

▪ “Somebody did this to me and you bought it hook, line, and sinker. You’re pathetic.” (375)

▪ Prosecutors could afford to be unimaginative, even stodgy. They trotted out their cases to the jury like furniture instructions from Ikea. Step-by-step with big illustrations, all the tools you needed included. (383)

▪ Incarceration does that. Makes you think about what is beyond the last wall. They can take your belt and shoelaces away but they can’t stop you from going over it. (415)

Viet Thanh Nguyen. The Committed. Ebook download from TPL. USA: Grove Press, 2021.

This was a difficult read. And I was definitely not as enamoured with this sequel as I was with The Sympathizer (LL246). The protagonist of the first book, former ADC to a losing general in the Vietnam war, but a secret communist agent at the time, is now in Paris after his “reeducation” by the victorious Viet Cong. But sympathies from his past double life continue, “a man of two faces and two minds, one of which might perhaps yet still be intact.” In America for a while, he had been an immigrant, in France he is an immigrant, experiences that add extra stress to his existential torment. Vo Danh is his name here—although new acquaintances call him Crazy Bastard―and through his foster aunt he is more or less assimilated into the Vietnamese community. He is also introduced to drug distribution with an employer called “Boss,” the supplier; Le Cao Boi manages the grubby restaurant where he purportedly works. His best friend and blood brother, Bon, is right there along with him, having also survived reeducation and relocation. Nonetheless, Bon is ferociously anti-communist, obsessed with killing them, with no clue of the guilty weight that Vo Danh bears of his own espionage.

As apprentice gangsters—embracing capitalism, Vo would say―the two men adapt to the lifestyle, becoming particularly fond of the remedy, their euphemism for cocaine. It’s downhill from there as Vo Danh struggles with defining himself: “me, myself, and I.” A rival gang of Algerians attacks them; Man, the Commissar of the communist prison camp where both were tortured, arrives in Paris; Lana, Vo’s lost love, also arrives in Paris. Vo goes raving bonkers with mental pain, his mind(s) swirling with turmoiled concepts of colonization, racism, bastardy. He turns often to the classic conundrum, finding his own answer: What is more precious than independence and freedom?

Bits

▪ On that day when he learned of my secret, Bon would render justice on me, regardless of the blood we shared. (29)

▪ He could see that I had a screw loose, the trusty screw that had, for years, held together my two minds. (39)

▪ Some of us loved the French, our patrons, and some hated the French, our colonizers, but all of us had been seduced by them. (54)

▪ Here I was in the land of my father, infecting it with Eastern drugs, a small payback for how his country had infected mine with Western civilization. (89)

▪ Was I a revolutionary or a reactionary? And if I was a revolutionary, what did I believe in? To what was I committed? And was I myself or another? (181)

▪ A man with no name cannot be killed by a bullet with his name on it! (218)

▪ What took you so long, the faceless man says. I’ve been waiting for you. (403)

▪ And there I stood before him, both in one, blood brother and mortal enemy. (434)

Offsetting the grim

▪ The other sofa faced a behemoth television set, approximately the weight of an adult gorilla and flanked by speakers the size of teenagers. (134)

▪ The last naked woman I had seen was Lana, three years ago. An eternity, given how the average man experiences sexual fantasy every three minutes, or so I speculate, based on over two decades of experience. (150)

▪ I packed up my negligible belongings, hardly enough for a capitalist but not too bad for an ex-communist who was now watered down enough to pass for a socialist. (172)

▪ For someone who never said anything, God certainly spoke to a lot of people. (204)

▪ I’m Catholic, I said, opening my door, as if being Catholic explained everything, which it usually did. (275)