The Isis Covenant

by Douglas, James

  ‘It’s been Danny for as long as I can remember. Only person calls me Daniella is my mom. Started out as a joke. I’ve always been tall and skinny and when I’m a kid there’s this short, fat actor; sorta borderline famous, right? So the other kids see me and they shout out, “Here comes Danny de Vito.” Funny, huh?’

  ‘Maybe not so funny.’

  ‘I hung out with a crowd of boys, could outjump ’em, outrun ’em and outfight ’em. So it kinda stuck. You thought I was a lesbian, right?’

  ‘Er, course not?’

  ‘Don’t worry, happens all the time. A gal tall as me and with no tits has either gotta be a clothes horse – what is a clothes horse, by the way?’ He explained: wooden, railing, hanging for the use of. ‘Right. I like that. Anyways, gal like me has to be some kind of model or a dyke.’

  ‘I like your tits. They’re small, but perfect. Like rosebuds.’ He leaned over her and took her left nipple in his mouth, sucking it long and slow. She gave a purr of pleasure. Reluctantly, he detached himself. ‘I bet you’re popular with all the girls, though?’

  ‘Sure.’ She grinned. ‘I have to fight ’em off.’

  ‘Er … ever not fight hard enough?’

  Her nose wrinkled and he thought he’d pushed it too far, but she was only considering what, or what not, to reveal. ‘It’s happened,’ she admitted. ‘Wanna hear about it.’

  Well, he did, but the abstract fact of it was already having an obvious effect. ‘Maybe another time.’ He took her hand and drew it to him. ‘But you like this, too.’

  ‘Oh, yes, I do like that.’ Her fingers closed over him and began to move; a soft fluttering like an angel’s wings. ‘And you like when I do this, right?’

  Something like an electric shock ran through him. ‘Mmmmhhh.’

  ‘And when I do this?’ She lowered her head so that the dark hair fell over his lower body like a silken veil and he couldn’t quite believe what was happening down there.

  ‘Maybe not too much of this,’ he choked. ‘It might spoil the fun for later.’

  But she was having far too much fun right at the present to listen to him.

  She came out of the shower room wearing his ragged dressing gown and a towel around her head and still managing to look like the Queen of Sheba.

  ‘So where do we go from here?’

  ‘You mean we as in us?’

  ‘No, idiot.’ She slapped him on the shoulder. ‘Just because you’ve had your wicked way with me doesn’t mean we have to get married. We are just doing a little fooling around to pass the time. I mean where do we intrepid investigators go next?’

  He picked up the book he’d been reading and showed her the image on the cover. It was a black-and-white shot of a soldier in the act of placing a flag on top of a large building. The flag was the only element in colour: a scarlet background with a yellow hammer and sickle.

  ‘Berlin: The Last Hundred Days,’ she read. ‘Any good?’

  ‘It has every last detail, but one in particular caught my eye.’ He opened it at the page he’d marked. ‘There.’

  ‘As the Russians closed in on the diplomatic quarter an astonishing, almost Medieval, barter system thrived. People would swap a sack of coal they had hoarded over the winter for a single egg or a bottle of clean water. A car would not buy a loaf of bread. In one instance, a Wilhelmstrasse jeweller reported how he had been approached by a soldier trying to sell an ancient artefact that could only have come from a museum. So? It could have been anything.’

  ‘I know, but Wilhelmstrasse is the street that runs close by Hitler’s bunker. I’ve tried to call Sir William Melrose to find out if he has any more information, but he’s out of the country for a week researching his latest masterpiece. In the meantime, I thought we might go out to Berlin and do a little sleuthing.’

  She was rubbing her hair with the towel. She stopped and stared at him. ‘You’re kidding, right?’

  ‘No, Danny. I’m not.’

  ‘Jesus, Saintclair, that’s what I call a long shot.’

  ‘Actually, a long shot is what I’m trying to avoid. I thought if I was in another country I might be a bloody sight harder to hit. Besides, Berlin is where Berndt Hartmann disappeared.’

  ‘Seventy years ago. You said he was around twenty back then? One way or another he’s old bones now.’

  ‘You mean you won’t come with me?’

  ‘I’m here to do a job, Jamie. I didn’t come equipped for a European tour. What would we do for money?’

  ‘While I was in hospital my lawyer called to let me know the Princess Czartoryski Foundation had agreed an interim payment for finding the Raphael. It’s not huge, but it means that, for once, I’m in funds. Look, let’s go. Think of it as a holiday.’

  Her eyes narrowed. ‘This isn’t just because you want to shack up with li’l ol’ me for a few days, is it?’

  Jamie grinned. ‘Guilty as charged, m’lud. To be honest, because of my past experiences, Germany wouldn’t be number one on my holiday destination list, but I’ve always fancied Berlin.’

  ‘In that case, when do we leave?’

  Two days later they were on an early-morning flight out of Gatwick for Berlin. Schonefeld airport caters mainly for budget airlines and is about ten miles from the city centre. It has few facilities that make it an attractive destination, but it does boast an excellent S-bahn link, and less than an hour after walking out of the terminal they reached Friedrichstrasse station. Jamie had chosen a hotel nearby and Danny surveyed the streets as they walked the two hundred yards there.

  ‘So where is the Berlin Wall from here?’

  ‘It’s about a quarter of a mile that way. We can go and see it if you like, once we’ve got rid of our luggage. It’s a little too early to check in; maybe we could have lunch?’

  ‘Sure. We’re in what was the East now, huh? I’d expected something a little greyer.’

  Jamie waited until they’d crossed the street. ‘Never underestimate German efficiency. It didn’t take them long to turn communist East Berlin into what passes for a capitalist paradise. Hotels, bars, boutiques, shopping malls; they all sprang up within a couple of years. I suspect the place is unrecognizable now to the people who used to live here. This is our hotel.’

  It didn’t look much from the outside, but the interior was modern and bright. They left their bags with reception and had a coffee while Jamie retrieved a guidebook from his backpack.

  ‘I thought we could go along the river, past the station and then come round until we reach the Unter den Linden, before we get back here and, er, freshen up for dinner.’

  She laughed at the hint of an invitation in his voice. ‘Freshen up, huh? Is that what we’re calling it?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, hefting the bag. ‘And the quicker we get going the quicker we get back.’

  They left the hotel and turned right towards the River Spree. ‘If Dornberger and Hartmann escaped from the bunker,’ Jamie explained, ‘the likelihood is they did it the day after Hitler’s suicide when the last survivors of the Charlemagne Division and the bunker guards broke out under the command of the Führer’s deputy, Martin Bormann. This is the road they would have taken.’ He pointed towards the river. ‘Imagine that bridge with a Tiger tank charging across it and hundreds, maybe more than a thousand people, right behind it. It blasts its way through a Russian barricade at the far end before being knocked out by an anti-tank gun, leaving all those behind it exposed to machine guns, mortars and artillery.’

  ‘It doesn’t seem possible.’ She struggled to equate the image of carnage – the dead and the dying sprawled across the narrow roadway, the tank burning in the distance – with the quaint cast-iron structure flanked by pretty riverside cafés. ‘It all just seems too … tranquil.’

  ‘Don’t be fooled. On May the first, nineteen forty-five, this was the centre of hell on earth.’

  They crossed the bridge and strolled along the riverside walkway westwards past busy bars and restaurants. The golden days of Au
tumn were just a memory, but it looked as if Berliners refused to be beaten by a little bit of cold and drizzle because the outside tables were all packed. To their left, the far side of the Spree was dominated by the bulk of Friedrichstrasse Bahnhof. The great brick, glass and iron structure looked like a leftover from an earlier industrial age, but Jamie recrossed towards it on a footway beneath the railway bridge.

  Danny gave him a look that he’d been getting used to. The one that said: What the hell are you doing now?

  ‘General Mohnke, the chap who organized the break-out, was no fool. While Bormann and the rest were trying to fight their way across the Weidendammer Bridge there, Mohnke quietly disappeared with a group of the bunker’s secretaries and walked across this completely unguarded footbridge.’

  ‘Every man for himself, huh?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘And did this guy live to fight another day?’

  He nodded. ‘I suppose you could say that, but just the one. They were all captured by the Russians the next night.’

  They continued round the great curve of the river until a landscape of modern structures in glass, concrete and stainless steel dominated their vision.

  ‘Wow,’ Fisher said. ‘I’m impressed. Does that building actually cross the river?’

  Jamie consulted the tourist guide. ‘I think so, but it’s maybe just an enclosed bridge. According to this, it’s all part of the new government district. The parliament, offices, that sort of thing.

  The one I’m really interested in is the big building with the dome. What’s up?’

  She’d seemed distracted since they’d crossed the river, stopping occasionally to glance in shop windows and loitering in places where there was nothing to see.

  ‘I’m not certain yet. Don’t worry. Just keep walking.’

  If one thing was guaranteed to make him worry, it was someone telling him not to, but he ignored the urge to look behind him and kept walking, past a broad avenue that opened up to their right, then a huge stone building that overshadowed everything around it.

  ‘Well, wow again, Saintclair. You make quite a tour guide.’

  ‘If you think this is good, just wait until we get to the front,’ he promised.

  They walked onto a damp lawn as wide as two football fields and stretching far into the distance, before turning back to stare at the enormous structure with its Romanesque frontage and glass dome.

  ‘This is the Reichstag,’ Jamie explained. ‘The building that’s on the cover of our book.’

  ‘Where Hartmann and Dornberger were fighting the tanks?’

  ‘No, that’s the Reichschancellery. It was across there.’ He pointed to his right. ‘Way beyond the Brandenburg Gate. This was what the Russians coveted most, though. Stalin had made it his aiming point and told his generals he wanted it by May the first. It turned into a crazy race between Zhukov and Konev that probably wasted the lives of tens of thousands of soldiers. The Germans fought for every room and every floor. When the fighting was over it was left a shattered ruin, but now they’ve completely restored it.’

  ‘You know you asked me what was wrong before?’ She kept her voice casual and her eyes fixed on the Reichstag dome. ‘Well, there are a couple of hot-looking chicks taking an awful lot of interest in us.’

  ‘That happens to me all the time. Do you think they’re following us?’ He smiled at her and turned to where two young blonde women in tailored jackets and tight jeans stood twenty yards away, openly staring at them.

  ‘Well,’ she said slowly, ‘they were at the airport. In the next carriage on the train, got off at the same station and followed us here from the hotel. What do you think?’

  He ignored her sarcasm. ‘I think this is a popular place. Maybe they’re staying at the hotel.’

  ‘Sure and they followed us across the bridge and then back over the footbridge and never took their eyes off us the once.’

  ‘What do you want to do about it?’

  Very deliberately, she looked the two women over. ‘I don’t take them for killers and besides, this isn’t the place you’d choose for it. Being the political heart of Berlin it has to be crawling with undercover cops. I figure that either they’re very dumb or they’re very badly trained in surveillance, or they wanted us to see them. Whichever is right, I think the professional thing to do is to go and ask them.’

  ‘Well, let’s do it.’

  They started to walk towards the two girls, but without changing expression, the pair walked quickly away in the direction of the Reichstag. Jamie and Danny ambled to a halt and watched them go.

  ‘You want to follow them?’

  He shook his head.

  ‘If they don’t want to speak to us, they don’t want to speak to us.’

  ‘And they might be leading us into an ambush.’ She smiled.

  He smiled back. ‘That too.’

  ‘Hey, you said you were going to show me the Berlin Wall.’

  He led her towards the Reichstag and as they crossed an area of tarmac in front of the building he pointed to the ground.

  She studied the area he indicated. ‘That’s it?’ she said incredulously. ‘That’s the Berlin Wall?’ She was looking at a twin line of bricks running to left and right.

  ‘That’s it. There are still a few small sections standing, but most of it was wiped off the landscape, if not the map.’

  Danny Fisher shook her head. ‘Well, I guess we should go back to the hotel and do some of that freshening up.’

  ‘I guess we should at that, young lady.’

  She punched him on the shoulder. ‘And later I want to see a bit of this fabled Berlin nightlife.’

  ‘I’m pretty sure we can arrange that, but we can’t be back too late.’

  ‘And why would that be?’ she demanded.

  ‘Because tomorrow we’re going to do what we came for. We’re going to see a man about a crown.’

  XIX

  I STOWED THE Crown in my rucksack and attempted in vain to follow Hartmann’s trail. Every road or alley I tried was blocked by either a Russian patrol or a Wehrmacht defence line. The artillery fire was almost constant now, with the whip-crack of the high-velocity Soviet tank guns much closer than before and Russian bombers flying low over the city entirely unmolested. Explosions rocked the ground and smoke filled every street. As I ran between the shell bursts I raged at Hartmann’s betrayal. The Crown of Isis was my sacred responsibility. Without the Eye would the Crown retain its power? Little by little I was forced back towards the bunker and found myself in Wilhelmstrasse. I took a last chance to search the rooms again, in the unlikely hope that Hartmann had hidden the jewel there before he fled, but found nothing. Close to despair, I stocked up on what supplies I could and prepared to head back towards the Reichschancellery. It was as I was leaving that I came across the boy.

  He was hunched in a doorway, terrified, a handsome blond child of not more than eight years old. Tears streamed down his face and he didn’t look up when I crouched beside him.

  ‘Where are your parents?’

  He shook his head.

  ‘Do you have somewhere to stay?’

  Again the shake of the head. I searched in my pack until I found some captured American chocolate and tore the wrapping from it.

  ‘Here, try this.’ His eyes widened as the scent of the sweet cocoa reached his nostrils. He snatched the chocolate and crammed it into his mouth as if he never expected to eat again. Gradually, a smile wreathed his face. ‘What is your name?’

  ‘Kurt.’

  I held out my hand. ‘Well, Kurt, come with me. I have somewhere you will be safe from all this.’

  His hand felt soft and warm in mine as I led him back to the apartment.

  When it was done, I felt nothing. It was confirmed. Without the Eye, the Crown of Isis was just a golden ornament. Hartmann had destroyed me and I vowed that I would hunt him down if it took until the end of time.

  There was no question of attempting to get out of the
city alone. The only people with the power to escape the cauldron of fire that Berlin had become were the men in the bunker. With a heart like stone I trudged back through the rubble to rejoin Adolf Hitler.

  No one questioned my absence; only a madman or one of the true faithful would seek refuge at the gates of hell. Inside, a lethargy hung over the occupants that had not been there a few hours earlier. Then, it seemed, hope still existed, however unlikely, of a rescue by Wenck’s Twelfth Army. Now, that hope was gone. Hitler had already sent out messengers with copies of his last will and testament and Rattenhuber, who was almost affable, revealed that the party’s Golden Pheasants were planning their escape, even as they were exhorting the men of the Berlin defence to fight to the last man.

  ‘You should join them, Dornberger,’ he said. ‘Break out and link up with Schorner.’

  I talked with Colonel Weiss, aide to General Burgdorf, and he said he would be glad to accept me, but when I heard his plan to find some kind of silent electric boat and sail to freedom down the Spree I knew that I was talking to a lunatic. I decided to stay where I was and wait for a better opportunity.

  Sometime in the night I woke under a table as a nervous little man in a brown uniform and a Volkssturm armband was led past and into Hitler’s private quarters.

  ‘What’s happening?’ I asked my companion, an SS doctor called Stumpfegger.

  ‘The boss is getting married.’ He grinned and the glaze in his eyes told me he was either drunk or taking his own medicine. ‘Do you think he’ll take us on honeymoon with him?’

  A few minutes later the bride and groom emerged into the conference room to be congratulated by Bormann and Hitler’s generals. It was the first time I had seen Eva Braun. Despite the circumstances, she was radiant in a black silk dress, cheerful and animated with a word for everyone. The Führer, his face lined and grey, looked more like a harassed father than her husband. In the hours after the wedding the air in the bunker grew thick with tension. SS and Wehrmacht officers vomited where they lay and the stench from the toilet block was intolerable. Everyone knew that the Russians were only a few blocks away. The next act in the tragedy would soon begin. In the meantime we could only wait.