Blood of the Reich

by William Dietrich

6

  North of Seattle, United States

  September 4, Present Day

  You don’t think I’m Rominy Pickett?”

  “I’m sorry, I don’t want to shock you. But I know you’re not.”

  “Then either you’ve kidnapped the wrong woman or you’re even loonier than I thought.”

  Jake Barrow looked straight ahead, both hands on the wheel at ten and two, like a driving student, the pickup a careful six mph above the speed limit, just enough not to risk a ticket. He seemed to have a clear idea where he was going. The freeway north of Seattle was an artery, its cars corpuscles, the vessel walls dark evergreens. Broken overcast kept everything the habitual Northwest gray. “Look, I realize I should have broached this subject a little less dramatically,” he said. “Car bombings are not the way I usually meet my sources.”

  “I’m not your source, Mister Investigative Reporter, if that’s what you really are. I’m your victim, and you’ve probably committed about eighteen felonies to get me to this point. Do your editors approve your tactics?”

  His lips were tight. “My editors advised me to drop the whole thing.”

  “Touché.”

  “But they’re wrong.”

  “The lunatic creed.”

  “You’re the biggest story of my life, and I never dreamed it would play out this way. A skinhead wannabe spilled something about a car bomb. I realized I couldn’t just research any longer and had to check you out in person. Then I saw their Explorer across the parking lot near your vehicle and didn’t know what else to do. It was tackle or watch you blow up.” He sounded more embarrassed than triumphant. And less like a serial killer than she’d have expected. Was there a chance, however slight, that this guy wasn’t totally full of bullshit and homicidal intention? If he was behind the bomb, why tackle her?

  “But why would anyone—what, skinheads?—want to kill me?”

  “Because they’re Nazi knotheads who think you know a lot more than you do.”

  “About what?”

  “A seventy-year-old secret, a fairy story, about strange powers and a lost city.”

  “Jake—if that’s really what your name is—”

  “I have a press card . . .”

  “Whoopee. I’m sorry, but you’re not proving your sanity here. I mean, you’re getting goofier by the minute, I can’t open my truck door, your own editors don’t believe you, and we’re almost to Everett.” She held up her cell phone. “Sounds like it’s time for 911.”

  “Wait.” His look was pleading. “If the cops come and my editors get wind of this fiasco, I’m probably finished, I know it. No story, I’m trying to give answers I don’t have, and you still don’t know who you really are. I will look like a criminal, or a nut job. But if you give me a day—two days, at most, on your turf—you might get something that will turn your life around, I get the big scoop, and maybe the good guys even win. Maybe. But I need you to give me a chance to explain without holding that cell phone like it’s another bomb. And I’m serious, the skinheads can track us with that thing.”

  “Why do you keep saying I don’t know who I really am?”

  “Have you ever heard of a man named Benjamin Hood?”

  “No.”

  “Well, you’re his heir.”

  “I’m what?” Rominy glanced at her cell phone and noticed there were no bars. In fact, there was no display at all. Of all the times to have it off. She pushed the power button. She needed a backup plan instead of trusting Mr. Jake Barrow, and it involved the Washington State Patrol.

  She pushed and pushed.

  Nothing happened.

  “My cell won’t work.”

  Barrow looked relieved. “A sign from God, don’t you think?” He glanced in the rearview mirror. “Shit!” He slammed the accelerator and the pickup rocketed and swerved, throwing her against the door that wouldn’t open. “Shit, shit, shit!” They lurched across two lanes and back, cars honking, and then hung on the rear quarter of a tanker truck, its warnings of explosive cargo spattered with mud.

  “What, what!”

  “Get down, it’s them!” Another burst of speed and they shot ahead, pulling narrowly in front of the truck, its horn blaring. Barrow’s hand, wide and powerful, grabbed Rominy’s head and shoved it down on the bench seat so hard that her cheek bounced against the old vinyl, her only view his blue-jean thigh and the dirty floor of the pickup. “Stay down, they might shoot!”

  She didn’t dare look, imagining bullets puncturing the old truck as if it were aluminum foil. They were weaving like Road Warrior lunatics, and all Rominy’s attentions were focused on trying to recall half-forgotten Hail Marys for what she was convinced were the last seconds of her life. The nuns were right, she should have gone to Confession.

  “They’re coming . . .”

  She squeezed her eyes shut. She could hear the full-throated roar of a heavy SUV or truck and the answering whine of the old pickup. Then a pop, and a whistle of wind.

  “Damn.” He seemed resigned. “They’re shooting.”

  “Please, please, stop this thing . . .”

  “Cops!” He sounded exultant and their speed abruptly slackened. “They tried to keep up and the Patrol nailed them!” They swerved a final time and steadily decelerated. “Hallelujah yes, the cops are stopping them! Oh boy, they’d better get rid of that gun.”

  “Are the police following us, too?” she asked with hope.

  “No, thank God. They’re busy with skinheads.” The truck’s sound changed, and she sensed they’d taken an off-ramp. She was shaking in fear and confusion, humiliated at having her head almost in this bastard’s lap. Then they coasted to a stop.

  He put his hand on her head again. “Stay down, for a light or two.”

  Of course, maybe he’d saved her life once more. Or he was a complete schizoid. Hail Mary, what in heaven is going on? “Where are we?”

  “Everett. We’ll go through town to make sure we’ve shaken them before getting back on the freeway.”

  “Please go to the authorities.” She felt defeated, exhausted, hopeless.

  “I told you, the police can’t help us, not yet. Though I gotta say, three cheers for the Washington State Patrol. They nailed those bastards. That’s a big ticket, driving like we were. They’ll have to breathalyze, the whole nine yards. I think we’re safe, Rominy. At least for the next five minutes.”

  “I don’t feel safe. I thought we were going to crash.”

  “I’m a better driver than that.”

  “It felt like Mister Toad’s Wild Ride in Disneyland.”

  “I’ve done some amateur stock car.” He gently touched her shoulder. “You can sit up now.”

  They were on an avenue that ran by Puget Sound, still heading north, a bluff with houses to their right. Rominy felt sick, and light-headed from fear. Her cheeks were wet from tears, and she was ashamed of them. Shouldn’t she be braver?

  “I just want it to end.”

  “Sorry, it’s just beginning.” He gave her a sympathetic look, his features strong but not unkind. “But we’ll make it, you’ll see. It’s important, or I never would have involved you.”

  She groaned and noticed a draft of cool air by her neck and a thin whistling. She turned.

  There was a bullet hole in the pickup’s rear window and a web of radiating cracks.

  7

  New York, United States

  September 10, 1938

  The American Museum of Natural History was a castle of curiosities bordering New York’s Central Park, a national junk drawer of the sensational and the educational. Depression crowds still paid their quarter to see bone hunter Barnum Brown’s Tyrannosaur in the Jurassic Hall, the reconstructed Pueblo Indian village in the anthropological wing, or the speculative trip to the moon at Hayden Planetarium. There was a diorama of mountain gorillas against the volcanoes of the Belgian Congo, painted to re-create the spot where the museum’s Carl Akeley had succumbed to tropical disease. In adjacent halls were Carter’s m
ounted animals from the upper Zambezi, Inca relics from Bennett’s explorations of Peruvian ruins, and stuffed birds from Burma’s Irawadi River. And there was the magnificent bharal, or blue sheep, brought back and mounted by the Benjamin Hood Expedition of 1934. The horned male looked eternally over a high, rolling plateau toward the distant snowy crests of the painted Himalayas, school children viewing the Roof of the World through glass.

  Hood’s office was in the prestigious southeast tower overlooking Central Park, just one floor below the museum’s mercurial director, famed Gobi Desert explorer Roy Chapman Andrews. Hood’s family had the money to finance his explorations and contribute to museum coffers, meaning that he’d been given a higher ceiling and better view. Less favored (or less rich) curators sweated in tighter, darker rooms. The favoritism made Hood feel guilty, but not enough to give the office up.

  The flamboyantly self-promoting Andrews perched above them all. The museum director had led the first Dodge trucks into Mongolia and protected his dinosaur bones in shoot-outs with bandits. Since those cowboy days he’d proven to be as bad an administrator as he was good at finding bones and attracting publicity. He was erratic, demanding, and forgetful. It was no surprise, then, that Hood reacted with distrust when his boss telephoned to say he was sending down some government functionary to confer. The director had wasted Hood’s time before with political errands and donor meetings that came to nothing.

  “Can’t see him,” Hood lied. “I’ve got a meeting with a Rockefeller Foundation man on that Hudson Bay expedition I proposed.”

  “Forget Hudson Bay,” Chapman said in his brusque manner. “Hudson Bay isn’t happening. Even if you can afford it the rest of us can’t. The Depression won’t let up and our budget is bleeding. We need to gear up for next year’s world’s fair here in New York. You know that.”

  “Roy, I’m not a world’s fair type of guy.”

  “Which is why you need to speak with Mr. Duncan Hale. Don’t close doors just when they’re opening for you, Ben. This one will get your blood up, I promise.”

  Hood remained suspicious. “Then why’d you send him to me?”

  “Because it’s Agent Hale and you’re the expert he wants on loan. Oh, and by the way: we don’t have a choice.” Andrews hung up.

  The director asserted his authority over Hood because in truth he had little leverage; the millionaire had no need for a curator’s job. Hood’s family was rich from lumber, paper, and real estate. Ben could have been like a thousand wealthy sons, rampaging his way through private schools and plowing nubile debutantes before marrying the proper pedigree and managing an empire he’d not created.

  But Hood was different. He stayed outside even in foul weather while growing up at Palisade, the family estate in the Hudson Valley. He was fascinated by the natural world. His father taught him to hunt and fish—they’d hiked the Rockies and gone on safari in Africa—and he climbed and hiked on his own. Rich people were boring, he decided, knowing nothing but money, while scientists, who worked for pennies, were pursuing the secrets of the universe. The least rewarded had the most fascinating jobs.

  There’s snobbery in the sciences, as in all professions, and it was a reverse snobbery that would have discriminated against a rich man like Ben. But Hood bludgeoned his way into their fraternity by contributing to others’ causes and financing his own expeditions to unknown Tibet. He took along British, German, and Swiss companions and bore hunger, thirst, and insects without complaint.

  Like Andrews, he was featured in National Geographic, and it was quietly let known that the Hood family might make a donation to the hard-pressed New York museum if a permanent position could be made on its staff. The fact that Dr. Hood had published in the best peer-reviewed journals made such an appointment defensible to the museum employees he vaulted ahead of. So he’d been given the second-best office, a starving wage, and periodic reminders from Andrews that he must answer to the museum hierarchy. The subordination grated, but it also gave him something in common with the other curators. He’d become, through routine slights from his boss and quiet contributions to his rival’s projects—he was buying friendship, Hood knew—one of them.

  Too bad it didn’t satisfy.

  Hood led a double life. He was handsome, single, and circuited the New York clubs to bring home to Park Avenue the carefully coiffed women who were curious about his eccentricity. Everyone was betting on when he’d tire of the museum charade and buckle down to the family business. Women gambled on when he’d settle into domesticity, sleeping with him in hopes of timing his change of heart.

  But he didn’t buckle down. Hood’s scientific travels were the one place he could escape his birthright and reinvent himself as scientist, scholar, and explorer.

  So he met whomever Chapman told him to.

  Agent Hale reminded Hood of a dark lamp pole: a narrow, ink-haired man with a bulb-pale face who was dressed in that kind of cheap, somber suit that was the uniform of civil servants everywhere. The visitor let Hood study his credentials—Army Corps of Intelligence Police—while the agent examined the animal heads and Asian maps that decorated Hood’s office. There were Chinese flintlock firearms, Afghan scimitars, polished fossils of ancient ammonite shells, Persian pikes, and Victorian-era paintings of wilderness panoramas and women bathing naked in a stream. There were photographs of Hood with shahs, lamas, and movie stars.

  “You got more stuff than Woolworth’s,” Hale said, his flat tone making it unclear if he meant it as a criticism or a compliment.

  “It’s a curator’s office. We’re collectors.”

  Hale took in the view across Central Park, Manhattan’s towers rising like Oz. “I don’t even have a window.”

  “Yes, your agency,” Hood said, holding Hale’s identification card. “I’m afraid I’ve never heard of it.”

  “That’s the way we like it,” the agent replied. “Active in the Great War, and then down to as few as twenty officers this decade. However, with the Japanese at war in China, Italy in Abyssinia, and Hitler into Austria and hot for the Sudetenland, we’re back in fashion. Now we need your help with the Germans.”

  “You’re spies? And Hale, is that really your name? Like Nathan Hale, ‘I have but one life to give for my country’?”

  “It’s my name to you.”

  This was just the kind of cowboy intrigue that thrilled the flamboyant Andrews. They’d probably been comparing decoder rings upstairs. “And you’re here to see a museum employee, a curator of stuffed animals, because of Hitler?”

  Hale plopped into a fat leather chair without being invited. “I’m here to see an employee who has the means to get himself what he wants, including a trip back to Asia.” He took out a cigarette and lit it, without offering one to Hood. “The museum director agreed that you’re the one to help us.”

  “I’m an expert on Tibet, not Germany.”

  “You’re about to become an expert on both.” Hale took a drag and let out a long plume of silver smoke. “We understand you know a German explorer named Kurt Raeder.”

  Hood started. He thought he’d put that mess behind him. Best to be careful here. “Knowing Raeder might be an overstatement. He keeps his own counsel, and he’s an odd duck. But, yes, we journeyed together to Tibet four years ago, as I’m sure you’re aware. Difficult man to deal with, but a great hunter. He brought down a magnificent ibex for the Berlin collection at four hundred yards. Crack shot.”

  “Do you know he’s returning to Tibet?”

  “No, we don’t correspond. We had a falling-out.”

  “Over a woman.”

  Hood frowned. “How do you know that?”

  “You saved her.”

  The zoologist looked uncomfortable. “It’s complicated.”

  “I’ll bet.” Hale took a puff again. “A new SS expedition left Genoa in mid-April. Passed through Suez, Colombo, and on to Calcutta. The British tried to hold them up in India but they couldn’t come up with a good enough reason, and now the Nazis have pushe
d ahead for the Himalayas. Trying to reach the Tibetan capital at Lhasa, from all reports. Why do you think the SS is sending men to Tibet?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Did you know Raeder was a Nazi?”

  “He wasn’t overtly. Politics rarely came up.”

  Hale puffed again, considering. “Just the pair of happy hunters, were you?”

  “It was a scientific expedition, sponsored by this museum. Raeder had been to the Himalayas once before and was recommended. We didn’t always get along, but that’s normal among scientists. Why this interest in a German zoologist? Nazi or not, he’s hardly a prominent figure of Hitler’s regime.”

  Hale nodded, as if this was an entirely reasonable assessment. “Not yet.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Hood, we have information that Raeder is being sent back to Tibet by none other than Heinrich Himmler himself, director of the German secret police. Exactly why is unclear. Hunting for Shangri-la, for all we know.”

  The mythical utopia, invented by the British author James Hilton, had become a popular Hollywood movie the year before—a nice antidote to the Depression.

  “Which is fantasy. Hilton’s never even been to Asia.”

  “So were El Dorado and the Fountain of Youth, but the Spanish still looked for them. The krauts are up to something, and my office thinks war is on the horizon. If it comes, we think the United States will be dragged into it, and not on Hitler’s side. We can’t allow the Nazis any advantages.”

  “Tibet is not a strategic power, Agent Hale.”

  “The hell it isn’t. It squats between India, China, and the Soviet Union. It’s more inscrutable than Fu Manchu. It’s the high ground of any Asian contest. And Himmler is sending Raeder there for a purpose.”

  “What purpose?”

  “That’s what we want you to find out.”

  “And how am I to do that?”

  “Roy Chapman Andrews tells me you like the outdoors as much as he does, and you’re about as content in this curio closet as a ferret in a bag. Said he had to give you this grand chamber here to keep you from wandering off to the Smithsonian or Philly.”