Mattie turned her back on Cockran and watched the sun rise higher in the east. She had come all this way, sacrificed so much, risked her life many times, cost others‘ lives, maybe lost the man she loved, all for what? To find the Spear which had consumed her father‘s life and led to his death. Could she give it up now? Especially to people like these blood-thirsty Templars, one of whom had murdered her father?
Mattie closed her eyes and saw, in her mind‘s eye, the pale, doughy face of Heinrich Himmler, eyes squinting behind the pince-nez, handing the Spear to Hoch. She saw again the Spear poised above her, Harmony‘s blood dripping from its tip to form a red circle over her heart; the Spear tip glowing incandescently while Hoch tried in vain to pierce her body. And then she saw it as if it were right in front of her. The scribbled handwriting of the impoverished young Viennese artist churning out painting after painting, tourist scene after tourist scene, hoping against hope that his portfolio would finally qualify him for his life‘s ambition—the treasured admission to the Academy of Fine Arts. I knew with immediacy that this was an im portant moment in my life when I first saw the Spear. I felt as though I myself had held it in my hand before in some earlier century of history—that I myself had once claimed it as my talisman of power, that I held the destiny of the world in my hands.”
The vision faded and soon melded into the hypnotic blue eyes of a mature Adolf Hitler, less than three weeks earlier. “The idea of a state built on the principles of a medieval order is one that for years has struck me as thoroughly feasible. Parsifal represents a model of what I want to create in Germany. I intend to form my religion for Germany on Parsifal. The man who sees National Socialism as nothing but a political movement knows hardly the first thing about it. It is more even than a religion—it is the collective will of a new race of men.”
Mattie knew what she had to do. Mattie knew what her father would have wanted her to do. She walked with Cockran and a recovering Sturm back to the other autogiros where Sullivan and Churchill still held the Templars at gunpoint.
“Herr Lanz,” Mattie said, “the Spear belongs in the hands of those who believe in the divinity of Christ and the healing powers of this Spear. Taking the Spear to a church in Britain or leaving it with you would fulfill that condition. But more importantly, the Spear must be kept out of the hands of people who would wield the powers of the Spear for evil purposes. It is best if men like that never know the Spear‘s location. In Britain, it would be too tempting a target for men who are sworn enemies of Christ.” Mattie turned to Rankin and asked him for the Spear. Holding it in both hands, parallel to the ground, she extended it to Lanz, who knelt before her, took the Spear, bowed his head, his lips moving silently as if in prayer for a few moments, and then stood up.
Mattie watched Lanz and the other two Templars wrap the Spear in a long woolen cloak and prepare to leave. She walked over to Churchill and gave him a hug while she spoke softly in his ear. “Thank you, Winston, for your wise advice earlier about me and Bourke. I‘m going to take it. I‘m sure my father would have told me the same thing. I love you, dear Godfather.” she said, kissing him on the cheek.
Churchill returned the hug, then held her at arms‘ length. “I have little experience as a matchmaker, my dear, but Clemmie assures me I have done well with you and Bourke.”
“You have Winston, you most certainly have.” Mattie said and hugged him again.
When she released him, Lanz approached, the hood of his coat leaving his forehead in shadow. “Thank you, my dear. You have done a service for our Lord for which he will be grateful.” He then lifted his right hand and made the Sign of the Cross in the air.
“Go with God, Martha McGary. Go with God.”
Mattie turned, linked her arm through Cockran‘s, put her lips to his ear and whispered. “Come on sailor, I‘d rather go with you to Venice.
After donning a snug, white pilot‘s helmet, Mattie climbed into the autogiro‘s passenger compartment and turned around and looked at Cockran. “There are two things I especially wish to do while we‘re in Venice and I need to know whether you‘ll be up for them.”
“Try me. What‘s the first?”
Mattie smiled. “How much trouble do you suppose we‘d be in with Mussolini if we landed this flying windmill smack in the middle of Piazza San Marco and strolled over to have martinis on the terrace at Harry‘s Bar?”
Cockran nodded. “And the second?”
“Given your weakened condition, not to mention mine, will you still be able to shag me silly every single day we‘re in Venice?” Mattie asked with a grin.
“As to both, there‘s only one way to find out,” Cockran said, grinning back, as he fired up the Wright Whirlwind engine. Mattie watched the rotor blades above her slowly begin to rotate, glistening in the morning sun, and imagined her lover beside her at Harry‘s Bar on the Grand Canal as she savored the first sip of what would surely be more than one icy martini.
KURT von Sturm stood below the autogiros as they leaped swiftly into the air. It might not be flattering, but Sturm thought he knew why he and Cockran had been so attracted to the McGary woman. Her lover, Cockran, may have been a lawyer just as Kurt thought of himself as a airshipman but, under the skin, they were brothers. Honorable—but deadly—brothers.
Having watched Cockran at Castle Lanz, at Wewelsburg castle, in the air over the twisting roads of Westphalia, and the final knife thrust up Hoch‘s throat, Sturm knew that, like him, Cockran was a man capable of killing when necessary without hesitation. An assassin. And, like him, a moth to Mattie‘s flame. Her will was as strong as she was passionate. A fierce and loyal lover. But for her imagined belief in Cockran‘s infidelity, she would have cut Sturm dead in the Alps as surely as she did in the air over the Atlantic. He and Cockran shared other traits as well. But for loving the same woman, they might have become friends.
His one hand on the handlebar of the BMW R39, his other shielding his eyes from the sun‘s early glow, Sturm watched the three aircrafts‘ rotor blades sharply outlined against the warm orange circle. Gradually, they faded into dark specks which soon disappeared altogether, carrying out of his life the beautiful woman whom he had loved and lost.
Historical Note
The Parsifal Pursuit is a work of fiction but there are certain historical elements which provide a foundation and framework for the story.
Winston Churchill. Churchill did not travel to Germany in 1931 to research his biography of his great ancestor, the first Duke of Marlborough, as depicted in the novel. He had written his American publisher Charles Scribner in May, 1931 of his plans to travel to Berlin and Vienna that year for this purpose but the controversy over self-rule for India caused a change in those plans. Churchill did travel to Germany for this purpose the following year where Hitler backed out of a dinner with Churchill arranged by Putzi Hanfstaengl and, as Churchill later wrote, “Thus Hitler lost his only chance of meeting me.”
Those with only a casual knowledge of Winston Churchill may question his being cast as a key character in an historical thriller. They shouldn‘t. Saving the world tends to overshadow lesser accomplishments but Churchill was a first-class athlete in his youth, an all-public schools fencing champion, and a championship polo player, a sport he played into his 50s. His detractors––of which there were many before 1940––dismissed him as an “adventurer” and a “half-breed American.” He was both of those things and more. He fought Islamic warriors on the Afghan border and in the Sudan in the late 1890s, bloody no-quarter battles where he killed many men at close range. He escaped from a prison in South Africa during the Boer war in 1899 and made his way over hundreds of miles of enemy territory to freedom. He bagged a rare white rhino in Africa in 1908, drawing the admiration and envy of Theodore Roosevelt who tried to do the same but was not so fortunate. He became a seaplane pilot in the early 1910s after becoming, at age 38, the First Lord of the British Admiralty. In the First World War and temporarily out of office, he commanded a battalion in the trenches i
n the bloody Ypres salient where Corporal Adolf Hitler also served and where both men drew sketches in their spare time of the same bombed-out Belgian church.
Bourke Cockran (1854-1923). Winston Churchill‘s real life mentor and oratorical role model was the prominent turn-of-the century New York lawyer, statesman and Congressman William Bourke Cockran whose fictional son‘s exploits (Cockran was childless) are depicted in The Parsifal Pursuit. Churchill‘s feelings and comments about his mentor in Chapter 4 are accurately portrayed. A Democrat, a close adviser to President Grover Cleveland in his second term, and contemporary of William Jennings Bryan, Cockran was acclaimed by members of both parties, including his friend Theodore Roosevelt, as America‘s greatest orator. Churchill was only 20 years old when the two men were brought together in 1895 by Churchill‘s mother, the American-born heiress Jennie Jerome, with whom Cockran had an affair in Paris in the spring of that year following the death of their respective spouses. Sixty years later, Churchill could still recite from memory the speeches of Bourke Cockran he had learned as a young man. “He was my model,” Churchill said, “I learned from him how to hold thousands in thrall.”
Those wishing to know more about the Churchill-Cockran relationship are referred to Becoming Winston Churchill: the Untold Story of Young Winston and His American Mentor, by Michael McMenamin and Curt Zoller, originally published in hardcover in the U.K. and the U.S. in 2007 by Greenwood World Publishing and in trade paperback in 2009 by Enigma Books.
The Kaiser. Plans to restore the Hohenzollerns, either the Kaiser himself or the Crown Prince, to the throne of Germany as part of a constitutional monarchy and as an antidote to Hitler‘s National Socialists were underway at various times during the late 1920s and early 1930s, especially after the Nazis became Germany‘s second largest party in August, 1930. Even Winston Churchill once suggested a constitutional monarchy in Germany during the 1920s as the best way to nurture democracy and the best antidote to a Bolshevik takeover.
The Spear of Destiny. A spear once thought to be the lance with which the Roman centurion Longinus pierced the side of Christ to end his agony on the cross is on display today in the Hofburg Museum in Vienna where it was located for most of the twentieth century. It is the same spear which in the past was possessed by Constantine, Charlemagne, Frederick Barbarossa, and Frederick the Great. Its possession had been unsuccessfully sought by other world-historic figures including Napoleon and Kaiser Wilhelm II. All of these men believed the sacred spear to be a talisman of power, the Spear of Destiny.
Adolf Hitler. Hitler‘s views on the Spear and the legend of Parsifal are accurately portrayed. Hitler took possession of the Spear of Longinus in March, 1938, after the Austrian Anschluss, and had it removed from the Hofburg and given a place of honor in the Hall of St. Katherine‘s Church in Nuremberg. The only objection was voiced by SS Reichsfuhrer Heinrich Himmler who had renovated Wewelsburg Castle (not actually purchased until 1933) specifically to serve as the true home of the SS as well as a shrine for the sacred relic of the Spear of Destiny, dedicating separate rooms within the Castle to each of the world leaders who had possessed the Spear. With the Spear in his hands less than six months, Hitler bloodlessly regained the German Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia and a year later invaded Poland. The Spear of Destiny remained in Nuremberg throughout the Second World War until 1945 when it was taken by the American armies of General George Patton who returned it to the Hofburg where it still resides.
Reinhard Tristan Hoch. Hoch is a fictional character whose background, appearance and characteristics mirror his real-life namesake, SS Intelligence Chief Reinhard Tristan Heydrich. Hoch‘s monologue on “the Jew as Parasite”, however, is not derived from Heydrich––who undoubtedly shared those views. Instead, Hoch‘s words are reproduced almost verbatim from private conversations of Adolf Hitler in 1931 as recounted by a close confidant, Otto Wagener. Hitler was a skilled politician during the years 1930 to 1932 when he was on the cusp of power, tailoring his public and private comments to fit his audience. The fact that he did not utter anti-Semitic comments in private to people like Mattie and Kurt who did not share his racial views is accurately portrayed in the novel as was the absence of overt anti-Semitism in his speeches during this period when he led the second largest party in Germany and was on the cusp of power only 18 months away.
The Order of the New Templars. Adolf Josef Lanz, a former Cistercian monk who renounced his vows in 1899, founded Ordi Novi Templi in 1905 and served as its Prior through the end of World War II. The Order of the New Templars reached its peak between 1925 and 1935 with seven priories and over 300 monks in Austria, Hungary and Germany. While the New Templars were indeed inspired by the medieval order whose name they bore, their blood-thirsty role in hiding and protecting the Holy Spear as depicted in the novel is entirely fictional.
Born in 1874, Lanz was one of the principal theorists of Ariosophy, an odd combination of pan-Germanic nationalism, racism and mysticism. In fact, the ideas of Ariosophy and National Socialism share many common tenets. One scholar has written that the “ultimate aim” of the New Templars was “world salvation through eugenic selection and the extermination of racial inferiors.” While a young man in Vienna, Hitler met Lanz and was greatly influenced by his ideas. Hitler was an avid reader of the pan-Germanic periodical Ostara, a selfdescribed “racial-economic” magazine published by Lanz and the New Templars. Nevertheless, after Hitler came to power in 1933, the New Templars were officially dissolved by Heinrich Himmler‘s Gestapo and Lanz was forbidden to publish.
Eugenics. The pseudo-science of eugenics flourished in America during the first thirty years of the twentieth century as nowhere else, frequently supported by prominent religious leaders, Protestant, Catholic and Jew alike. The Nazi eugenics laws passed early in 1933 after their ascension to power provided, among other things, for the involuntary sterilization of mental defectives. The Nazis based these laws almost exclusively on model state legislation drafted by American eugenics supporters who had persuaded over half the states to adopt comparable legislation. And an aging Oliver Wendell Holmes did write such a shameful passage in Buck v. Bell, the underlying facts of which are accurately portrayed in Chapter 5.
Nazi V-men. A source of fund raising for the National Socialists in Germany during the late 1920s and early 1930s was extortion from businesses paying protection money to the SA and SS, who would otherwise terrorize their owners and their property, crimes winked at by “V-men,” [Vertrauensmannen] secret Nazi sympathizers in state and local governments.
Alfred Eisendstadt. The German- born photographer who served as Mattie McGary‘s photographic mentor emigrated to America in the mid-1930s and became one of Henry Luce‘s top photographers on Life magazine. He is most well-known for the iconic photograph of the unknown sailor and girl kissing on V-J Day in Times Square in New York. A less well-known Eisenstadt photograph perfectly illustrated his “not good enough…not close enough” motto and served as the inspiration for Mattie‘s misadventure on top of the Graf Zeppelin. In the photograph, three zeppelin crewmen are on top of the ship over the Atlantic, clutching ropes and lowering a fourth crewman down the side of the massive airship to repair damaged fabric. It is impossible to tell Eisenstadt‘s vanatage point from the photograph but it certainly appears as if he was outside on top of the zeppelin hanging on to a rope running along the airship‘s spine just like Mattie was.
The Graf Zeppelin. The famed German airship made an historic around-the-world voyage in 1929 sponsored by the media empire of William Randolph Hearst. In the spring of 1931, the Graf Zeppelin flew a round-trip voyage from its base in southern Germany to Alexandria, Egypt as depicted in the novel. From 1930 through the crash of the Hindenburg in 1937, it conducted regular passenger service between Germany and Brazil, safely flying well over a million miles. The Graf Zeppelin, however, was never used for regular passenger service between Germany and America as depicted in the novel.
Autogiros. The Juan de la Cierva-designed autogiro w
as the next big thing in aviation when it was commercially introduced in the early 1930s. Fortune magazine devoted two articles to it in its March, 1931 edition, describing it as “a complex if not revolutionary addition to the science of aerodynamics.” It flew and handled like an airplane but could take off and land in short spaces at safe, slow speeds. Lift was provided solely by the blades of its huge hinged rotor, a common feature on today‘s helicopters.
Michael McMenamin
Patrick McMenamin
January, 2011
Acknowledgements
We owe a debt of gratitude to many people who helped bring this book, our second Winston Churchill Thriller, to light. Katie McMenamin Sabo, our daughter and sister and the first writing teacher either of us ever had. With an MFA in Creative Writing from NYU, she really is, as she often reminds us, Rose Wilder Lane to our Laura Ingalls. Kelly McMenamin Wang, our other daughter and sister who, with her MBA from Dartmouth, is a really good writer herself and the engine behind the sisters‘ website www.pixiesdidit.com which offers home and life organization advice based on Myers-Briggs personality types. Patrick‘s wife Rebecca Perkins, the head make-up artist on Law and Order SVU and Michael‘s wife and Patrick‘s mom, Carol Breckenridge, an artist and art therapist, both of whom read and offered critical advice on numerous iterations of the book. Mystery writer Les Roberts, our close friend and ever-patient writing mentor, from whom Patrick took a college screen-writing course when he was a junior in high school and who, like any good mentor, validated our dream while continuing to give us candid and insightful advice. Robert Miller, the editor and publisher of Enigma Books who published the first paperback edition of Michael‘s book Becoming Winston Churchill and who agreed with us that the world really needed a series of historical thrillers set in the 1930s featuring Winston Churchill. Josh Beatman and the other creative folks at Brainchild Studios/NYC who came up with another killer cover design. Alexis Dragony, Michael‘s former assistant who typed many iterations of the book; her successor Bonnie Daanish who did the same as did Jo Ann Chapman, none of whom were shy on offering helpful advice. And, finally, to all our good friends and relatives who read and offered thir comments on this book as well as our third Churchill Thriller, The Gemini Agenda [to be published in late 2011 by Enigma Books].
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