The Parsifal Pursuit

by Michael McMenamin

  “Ready,” Weber said.

  Lanz did not like what came next. That was why two days ago, in the small village of Dolloch, he had rousted the parish priest at dawn from beneath his eiderdown comforter and made him hear his men‘s confessions. “Wake the men, Hans. Our Savior waits for them with open arms for their sacrifice in safeguarding the secret of the Spear.”

  Weber brought a whistle to his lips and gave three short blasts, the shrill sound echoing in the thin mountain air. One by one, the flaps on the five tents opened and the men mechanically stumbled out and arranged themselves in an orderly line, still wearing the white parkas in which they had slept. Without warning, Lanz opened fire and Weber did the same. The men‘s bodies danced like marionettes on a string, as the 9 mm rounds ripped into their chests and bellies, blowing out their backs with great gouts of blood. In twenty seconds, all the men had collapsed, their white parkas now stained red, their bodies twitching, a few still alive and moaning.

  They stopped, smoke still rising from the perforated barrels of their Bergmanns as they slung the weapons over their shoulders. They each withdrew from their holsters an M 1903 model Mannlicher lockedbreach automatic pistol and walked over to the bodies. Going down the row methodically, a coup de grace was delivered to the temple or forehead of each man, whichever was more convenient, until they discovered, to their dismay, only nine bodies.

  “Find the missing man,” Lanz ordered. “There can be no witnesses.”

  Moments later, a short burst of automatic weapons fire broke the silence and a frightened solider who had been answering a call of nature stumbled forward. The youngest unit member, Corporal Merz, was clutching his bleeding belly with both hands, as Weber prodded him with the Bergmann‘s snout and then forced him to his knees.

  “Excellent, Hans,” Lanz said. “This is all for the best. Corporal Merz, you have fulfilled your duty to our Lord and you shall stand guard over our sacred trust for eternity.” Lanz turned and walked over to an oblong canvas knapsack while Weber took a handful of the Corporal‘s hair and jerked his head back, exposing the neck.

  Lanz approached, carrying a sword and scabbard. He slowly pulled out a three foot long broadsword honed to razor sharpness on either side. Gripping it with two-hands, he stood on the wounded soldier‘s left as Weber held his head up, Merz‘s eyes closed, his consciousness fading.

  “Prepare him.” Lanz ordered. “You are about to meet your Savior, Corporal”.

  Weber slapped the man‘s face sharply and his eyes slowly opened as Lanz swung the edge of the sword in a wide arc, hitting Merz‘s neck barely an inch below his upraised chin and cleanly severing his head from his body, limbs twitching and blood spurting high in the air from the stump of his neck to stain the snow beneath, before it fell lifelessly to the ground.

  Weber held the head high in the air for Lanz to inspect. Its eyes were wide in terror and Lanz nodded his approval, as the eyes closed. “You‘re a good man, Merz” Lanz said and the eyes opened to focus on him, blinked a few times as if in recognition and closed for the last time.

  “Place the Corporal‘s head on a spike above the castle gate”, Lanz said. “It will serve as a warning to any curious mountain folk that Castle Lanz remains under the protection of the Holy Brotherhood.”

  The two men mounted the head on a spike above the main gate beside a large white flag with a blood red Celtic sun cross in its center. Then, they struck all of the tents and, in two trips, carried them and the men‘s rifles up to the castle, leaving them in the antechamber just inside the door. Strapping on their skis, they glided silently down to the carnage below. They paused by the stiffening bodies of their men, a light dusting of snow already beginning to obscure the blood on the men‘s parkas. Lanz and Weber each crossed himself again.

  “Does this mean war?” Weber asked but Lanz did not reply, his eyes fixed on the ten bodies whose souls had been sent to their Creator. “ Josef?” he asked, using Lanz‘s Christian name for the first time.

  “I am afraid so. The Archduke agrees with me. Serbia is becoming intolerable. The Slavs must be taught a lesson. Don‘t worry, my friend, it will be a short campaign.”

  “I wish we could give them a proper Christian burial.”

  “I share your sentiments, but the ground is frozen. By spring, the wolves in these mountains will have made away with our men and left no trace. It will be as if they were never here,” Lanz said as he looked back at the castle. “But what we have left here must never be disturbed nor discovered. You and I are the only ones who know. Anyone else who learns or even guesses about this location will forfeit his life. The secret of the Holy Spear must be preserved at all costs. ”

  Part I

  Germany

  5 November–6 November 1923

  People who knew him in Vienna [in 1911] could not understand the contradiction between his well-mannered appearance, his educated speech and self-assured bearing on the one hand, and the starveling existence that he led on the other, and judged him as haughty and pretentious. He was neither. He just did not fit into a bourgeois order…. In the midst of a corrupt City, my friend surrounded himself with a wall of unshakeable principles which enabled him to build an inner freedom in spite of all the temptations around him.

  August Kubizek,

  Young Hitler—The Story of our Friendship

  1.

  Interviewing Hitler

  Café Heck

  Munich

  Monday, 5 November 1923

  ADOLF Hitler was as nervous as a schoolboy on his first date. His hand actually shook as he poured tea for 23 year old Mattie McGary from a delicate Dresden china teapot, politely passing a heaped plate of cream-filled pastries to her before taking two for himself.

  The interview had gone well. Mattie‘s editor at London‘s Daily Mirror would be pleased. Hitler had been surprisingly open and candid, just as he had been in their first interview earlier in the year. She had all she needed for a good story and Hitler seemed to really like her. Once they finished the interview in his office at party headquarters, it was Hitler who suggested she join him for afternoon tea at the nearby smoke-filled Café Heck.

  Inside the dark-timbered coffee shop, she studied Hitler‘s face once again. His skin was a pasty white and his limp hair brown, but his eyes were a piercing blue, the color of a cloudless summer afternoon in the highlands of her native Scotland. Mattie could tell, by how often during the interview he had fixed her with a direct gaze, that he expected his eyes to captivate her. She had played along and it had worked. Men could be so stupid.

  She was ready to take the chance. Her father had told her the Celtic and Christian legends of the Holy Grail and how a spear played a prominent role in both. She was a Christian but not a devout one like her father. After he stepped down from Parliament, he had devoted the rest of his life to a study of the Grail legends culminating in his last book World History In the Light Of the Holy Grail. He never lived to see it in print. After his sudden death on a twisting mountain road, she arranged with the University of Edinburgh to have it published in 1921.

  Mattie adored her father. He was the one who always understood her. He might not always have approved of everything she did but he always encouraged her dream to be a journalist, something her mother never understood. But her father, bless his memory, never tried. He knew all about dreams and fairy tales and happy endings. Happy endings weren‘t always there, but the ones that were started with a dream.

  Mattie had to ask. She owed it to her father. Her source in Vienna had shown her a battered, leather-bound nineteenth century edition of Wolfram von Eschenbach‘s Parsifal covered on almost every page with handwritten notes. She had copied the more startling notes into her own edition of Parsifal on the corresponding pages, translated them into English, and then had them checked by a German scholar at Cambridge. Whoever made those notes in his own handwriting believed that Parsifal was an historic character; that the Lance of the Roman centurion, Gaius Cassius, which pierced the side of
Christ, was indeed possessed with magical powers, a talisman treasured by kings and conquerors over the centuries; and that it was actually on display at the Hofburg Museum in Vienna. The name she saw on the inside cover of the book was in penciled block letters, “Adolf Hitler, Vienna, 1911”.

  Mattie started cautiously. “Herr Hitler, have you been to the Hofburg Museum?”

  “Of course, Fraulein,” Hitler replied, his voice hoarse from relentless public speaking. “When I lived in Vienna before the war, I spent many hours there when I was not painting. I made my living that way. Painting. I painted every day. Five, six paintings a week. It was hard work, barely enough to keep the wolf from the door. So when I rested, I roamed through the Hofburg.”

  “Do you know the Lance of Longinus?”

  Hitler‘s eyes narrowed and then relaxed. “I do, indeed.”

  “Is it true you believe in its mystical powers as the Spear of Destiny?”

  Hitler‘s eyes flashed with anger but he quickly smiled and the moment vanished. “Fraulein McGary,” he said, shaking his head. “I was born and raised a Catholic. I could scarcely be unaware of the legend associated with the Longinus Spear. That whoever claims it and solves its secret holds the destiny of the world in his hands, for good or evil. I assure you I have long since outgrown the superstitions of my childhood. By the time I came to Vienna and first saw the Spear, I was no longer a child.”

  Mattie bored in. “Excuse me, Herr Hitler, but I have seen a copy of Parsifal with your name inside the front cover and the following passage handwritten in the margins on page 96:I knew with immediacy that this was an im portant moment in my life when I first saw the Spear. And I could not divine why an outwardly Christian symbol should make such an impression upon me. I felt as though I myself had held it in my hands before in some earlier century of history–that I myself had once claimed it as my talisman of power, held the destiny of the world in my hands. Yet how could this be possible? What sort of madness was this that was invading my mind and creating such turmoil in my breast?

  She read him the passage and his pale complexion turned red after she finished, but with anger or embarrassment, Mattie could not tell until Hitler spoke. Anger. It was definitely anger.

  “Lies! All lies! I have enemies, Fraulein, many enemies. They would like nothing better than to make me out the fool. But their days are numbered. I can assure you of that.”

  Mattie played her trump card. “I have a photostat of the page on which that passage appears. Here,” she said, sliding the page across the table, “isn‘t that your handwriting?”

  Hitler picked up the page and looked at it carefully. “A crude forgery, Fraulein.”

  Hitler‘s eyes locked on hers and he lowered his voice. “No German journalist would dare publish such ridiculous accusations. They would be taught a lesson they wouldn‘t forget. Don‘t make the mistake of assuming, because you are a woman and a visitor in our country, that you are immune from the consequences of your conduct.”

  2.

  Champagne or Me?

  Munich

  Tuesday, 6 November 1923

  MATTIE was worried. Back at her hotel one day later, watching the late afternoon sunset from her room‘s balcony, she was still kicking herself. Hitler was right. She wasn‘t immune. Something big was about to happen, and she knew it––the signs were everywhere. But she had no way of knowing exactly what or when. No Nazi would give her the time of day now.

  The word had spread fast and it was worse than Mattie imagined. She had good sources within the National Socialist Workers Party whom she had worked hard to develop. Günter, a young post-graduate in the Nazis‘ Economic Section, cancelled their dinner date for last night, barely two hours after she had left Hitler at the Café Heck. Today, Dietrich, a reporter for the Volkischer Beobachter, the Nazis‘ daily newspaper in Munich had cancelled lunch. Three other telephone calls to various midlevel functionaries she had charmed were still unanswered.

  Damn! She had pulled strings to get this assignment; to prove to her bosses that a woman could be just as good a foreign correspondent as a man. They had been skeptical. Politics and coups were more complicated, they told her, than battlefields. Even though the Daily Mirror employed more women reporters than other Fleet Street papers, it was only because it had started out as a women‘s paper, a mistake its owners soon rectified. She shook her head. That damn Spear and the Holy Grail! It wasn‘t a rookie mistake but she knew how it would look back in London. She was too young, they would say, and even though some women now had the vote, it didn‘t mean they were up to a man‘s job. Mattie had run out of options. And sources. This story could make her career and now there was only one source left.

  The man wasn‘t even a Nazi, for goodness sake. But he was close to Hitler, or at least he claimed to be. His mother was an American and he had gone to school there. Harvard, no less. He had been trying to seduce Mattie ever since they had been introduced two months before at the opera. Tristan and Isolde. Mattie had been tempted. He was tall, goodlooking, well-read and, by evening‘s end, the life of any party he attended, playing the piano well into the wee hours. There were two drawbacks to allowing him to succeed. First, he was a sometime source and Mattie tried to avoid romantic entanglements like that. More importantly, he was married and that bothered her, having met his beautiful wife on several social occasions.

  Mattie was neither a prude nor a virgin. In the years after the war, she had several brief affairs, typically on assignment, but “no strings” was her rule. A married man would seem to fit that rule but she had declined numerous such invitations. It just didn‘t seem right. But this story was too important. She wasn‘t going to give any male higher-up the satisfaction of saying that she wasn‘t up to covering something as big as the revolution in Bavaria she knew was coming.

  There were no guarantees it would work and if it didn‘t, she would be out of luck. But rules were made to be broken, even those she set for herself. Mattie left the balcony and began taking off her clothes as she walked to the bathroom and turned on the spigot. Naked, she looked at her body in the mirror and smiled. Ernst “Putzi” Hanfstaengl was about to get lucky.

  After her bath, she placed an order with room service for champagne and caviar and then she called him. The maid answered the telephone and Mattie asked for Putzi.

  “Hanfstaengl here,” he said in a deep baritone, speaking English with only the trace of a Bavarian accent.

  “Ernst, this is Mattie McGary,” she said, holding the telephone receiver in her left hand and toweling dry her short red hair with the other. “I wanted to thank you personally for arranging my interview with Herr Hitler yesterday. Have you heard about it?”

  There was a knock on the door. Telling Hanfstaengl to wait a moment, Mattie put the phone down. Slipping on a green silk robe, she walked to the door, opened it and stood aside as a white-coated waiter entered and set up her room service order. She handed the waiter an English pound note and went back to the phone, ignoring the waiter‘s profuse expressions of gratitude. “No?... Well, why don‘t you come over to my room then. I have some champagne chilling and I‘ll tell you all about it.”

  Mattie turned and smiled at the waiter who made an elaborate show of opening the champagne, pulling the silver dome off the caviar over ice, and then backing away from her, bowing as he left as if she were royalty. She smiled again. Tipping in a foreign currency which wasn‘t losing its value on an hourly basis often produced that effect.

  Hanfstaengl called up fifteen minutes later and Mattie heard the buzzer to her room a few minutes after that. Mattie paused and looked again at the floor-length mirror. Golden red hair, green eyes and a figure full of curves. She picked up the bottle of champagne and two flutes and walked towards the door, briefly looking back over her shoulder at her reflection in the mirror.

  Nice ass, McGary, she thought, as she opened the door, wearing nothing but a smile, to greet Adolf Hitler‘s foreign press secretary. “How nice to see you, Putzi. Please
come in.”

  Hanfstaengl was broad-shouldered, six feet four inches tall and in his mid-thirties, with dark brown hair slicked back. Mattie smiled as she saw his eyes grow wide in recognition of what was about to happen next. Satisfied at the effect her breasts had produced, Mattie turned and walked back across the room to the low table in front of a dark brown leather sofa and slowly bent over from the waist to place the flutes and champagne down. You are such a shameless hussy, she thought, as she poured their drinks. But ambition trumped her scruples. Women had enough obstacles to overcome as it was. A little harmless slap and tickle with Putzi wasn‘t going to get in the way of this story. Besides, it wouldn‘t become a habit. She looked back over her shoulder. “Where would you like to start? With champagne? Or me?”

  Part II

  America

  25 May–26 May 1931

  I have studied with great interest the laws of several American states concerning prevention of reproduction by people whose progeny would, in all probability, be of no value or be injurious to the racial stock. I‘m sure that occasionally mistakes occur as a result. But the possibility of excess and error is still no proof of the incorrectness of these laws.

  Adolf Hitler, 1931

  (Otto Wagener, Memoirs of a Confidant)

  3.

  Churchill’s Cable

  Court of Appeals

  New York City

  Monday, 25 May 1931

  BOURKE Cockran Jr. was tense. Churchill‘s cable that morning was part of it, but he was always this way before a battle, even a bloodless one like today in the Court of Appeals.

  He hated this part. The waiting. Ten more minutes. In the trenches, it wasn‘t the night raids he hated so much as the damned waiting. His CO would inform him of the raid hours in advance. That left nothing to do but sit there with his feet in water, stare at a wall of mud and let the sporadic thumps of artillery give him an idea of the fate that awaited him in No Man‘s Land.