The Gemini Agenda

by Michael McMenamin

  “Keep me posted on your progress,” Sturm told him. “I will check messages every day.”

  After hanging up the telephone, Sturm walked back into the kitchen where Ingrid and Franka were still chatting away like schoolgirls. Ingrid turned to eye him playfully.

  “Time for this woman-talk to end,” Sturm said. “Franka, I need to speak with Ingrid privately. You can tell her all about your precious boyfriends later.”

  “Boys?” Franka said, rising from her seat with an air of haughtiness. “Who says we were talking about my boyfriends?” She guided herself out of the room, a wicked smile crossing her lips.

  Sturm turned back to Ingrid. “Then who were you talking about?”

  “Well, wouldn’t you like to know?” Ingrid said.

  Sturm didn’t understand. “Of course I would. That’s why I’m asking.”

  Ingrid laughed, a delightful sound. “It’s an American expression. I know you’re curious, but I won’t tell you. You’ll have to ask Franka. A girl must have her secrets.”

  Sturm nodded, understanding the joke, but he sat down without smiling. “It’s time to call your brother and sister,” he said. “I just got off the telephone with one of my agents.”

  Ingrid visibly stiffened at the words. “What did he want?” she asked.

  “The names of a few contacts I have in Bavaria,” he said. “They have given up trying to find you directly. Now they have turned their attention to your brother and sister.”

  “Are they in danger?” Ingrid asked, growing tense.

  “No,” Sturm answered quickly. “But you are. I do not think the agents pose any danger to your siblings, but they might use them to find you. You need to call them and tell them to leave at once for any town not on their itinerary.”

  It was her brother Thomas who answered. She spoke calmly at first, explaining what must be done but then she stopped. Something was wrong. Sturm could hear the raised voice on the other end of the phone. “What? What do you mean she’s gone? She hasn’t come back? Where did she go?”

  “What is it?” Sturm asked gently.

  Ingrid held the receiver away from her mouth and turned to Sturm. “Tom says they can’t leave because Beatrice hasn’t returned from her hike yet.”

  “When did she leave?”

  “Yesterday afternoon. Tom stayed behind to work on his senior thesis and she left to hike with some of the friends they’ve made there. He thinks she just spent the night with them, probably to be near a boy on whom she has an eye. She should have returned by now. This isn’t right.”

  “We can’t know anything until he looks for her,” Sturm said. “Tell him to get his belongings ready and then go out to find your sister. Whether he finds her or not, he should be in his room by five o’clock when we will call him to confirm if he’s found her. If he has, they must leave immediately.”

  Ingrid nodded and relayed the instructions to her brother. There still appeared to be some disagreement, presumably Tom’s objections to a forced change in plans for reasons that Ingrid would not explain. “I don’t care what your friends will say!” Ingrid said. “Find Beatrice and be at this phone today at five o’clock! That’s all you have to do!”

  Ingrid sighed in frustration after she hung up the phone.

  Sturm placed a gentle hand on her shoulder. “He is young, as you say,” Sturm said. “He will come around. Clearly, they’ve made friends and we’re asking that they leave them behind on a moment’s notice. Of course it will be difficult for them.”

  “I know, I know,” Ingrid said with a sigh and straightening in her chair. “I just can’t help worrying. I’m their big sister. What if something terrible has happened?”

  “You don’t know that,” he said. “And even if something happened, there is nothing you can do about it until we speak with Tom. The best part of the day is still before us. You shouldn’t waste it fretting about something you can’t control.”

  “What do you propose?” Ingrid asked, attempting to force a smile.

  “Sailing.”

  “Sailing?”

  “Nothing helps clear the mind more than a few hours at sea.”

  47.

  Cathedral in the Sky

  On board the Graf Zeppelin

  Friday, 27 May, 1932

  COCKRAN and Mattie stood inside an immense circular cathedral in the sky, the thin duralumin girders and bracing wires like a huge spider web extending the length of the airship. The outer skin was translucent so that the light flowing through and around the sixteen huge gas cells lining the ship’s interior between the girders and wires made him appreciate the immense sense of space. It was like nothing else he had ever seen, nothing else ever built by man. Cockran and Mattie were walking on a catwalk which ran along the base of the ship. They were wearing shoes made of cotton and canvas that were designed specifically for use on zeppelins so that they would not generate any sparks. Cockran was nervous. The zeppelin’s catwalk was barely two feet wide. It formed the base of an inverted triangle of duralumin, thicker than the girders, the duralumin struts flaring out on either side of him and coming back to a point two feet above his head.

  The steward took them the entire length of the ship. Cockran was surprised at how many men were at work wherever they walked. The men were high on the framework, adjusting the tension of wires, tending to the large Maybach engines. They even saw men sewing and splicing fabric as if they were making a sail.

  “What are those men doing?” Cockran asked.

  “You can’t see it because the gas cells block the view,” Mattie replied, “but there’s undoubtedly a small tear in the ship’s outer canvas fabric. The canvas is coated with a mixture of resins and aluminum flakes which gives it a silvery appearance. These men are stitching together a patch. Once they have it the right size, they’ll climb up the vertical ladder closest to the tear. Then, using harnesses and cable, they will lower a rigger over the outer skin of the ship until he reaches the tear. He will slash the torn fabric away and then, like a seamstress, he will sew the patch into place.”

  “That sounds dangerous.”

  Mattie smiled. “Very dangerous. I was taking photographs of the riggers doing the same thing last year when I climbed out too far and almost …,” Mattie said, her voice faltering. “Well, you remember.”

  Oh, yes, he remembered. All too well. She had told him all about it and they had argued over her impulsive recklessness right before she left on the assignment that brought her together again with the man who had saved her life on the airship. An assignment that led eventually into an affair with him as well.

  Cockran listened as Mattie resumed her conversation with Karl. “That horrid man at lunch yesterday. What’s his name on this voyage, Karl?” she asked.

  “Vogel. Herr Otmar Vogel.”

  “And his name before?”

  Karl hesitated as if he knew he shouldn’t be talking about one passenger with another. “I really shouldn’t say but seeing as how this is your fourth trip with us, you’re practically a member of the crew. I trust you will be discreet?”

  “Of course, Karl,” Mattie said.

  “Verschuer. Herr Doktor Otmar von Verschuer of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin.”

  48.

  Something Has Gone Wrong

  Norden, Germany

  Friday, 27 May 1932

  KURT von Sturm felt the wind pick up, rustling his hair and battering his shirt as his 15 meter sloop glided past the buoys that marked the end of the breakwall into the stronger currents of the Nordsee. The water here was relatively gentle, a string of islands and sandbars protecting the shores of Norden from the rougher waves of the open sea, but the wind was strong.

  Ingrid had been quiet so far, settled back in her seat in the stern several feet from Sturm at the tiller, pensive as she watched him adjusting the sails.

  Now that they were out of the inlet and the sloop was gaining speed, Ingrid moved closer to Sturm. “You were an airship pilot in the war?” she sho
uted the question over the wind.

  Sturm glanced back at her and into the wind. Long tendrils of yellow hair escaped from the scarf wrapped around her head and twisted in the breeze. “How did you know that?”

  “I’m living in your family’s home,” she said, standing beside him now. “It’s not very hard to miss the displays of medals or the photographs of you with your father.”

  Sturm smiled. She had been paying attention. “I flew in the Naval Airship Service. I’ve sailed since I was young but sky sailors, like those on water, are still at the mercy of the wind.

  “A ‘sky sailor.’ I like that. Do you miss it?”

  You have no idea, Sturm thought. “I hope one day to return to the sky as a commercial airship pilot. Until then, my days of sailing the skies are as old as the medals you’ve seen.”

  “Yes, about those medals,” she said, walking past Sturm’s position at the helm to face him. “All of the medals are for men named von Strasser. Why no medals for von Sturm?”

  Sturm met her gaze and then turned his eyes back to the sea. He was not used to women being so forward. Intelligent? Interesting? Of course. Pushing where he didn’t want to go? No. But Ingrid wasn’t so much pushy as slippery. Stop one question and she simply flowed around it like water and asked another seemingly unrelated question. Sturm took his eyes from the sea to look at her and decided there was no great risk in explaining it.

  “It was after the war,” Sturm finally said. “The 23rd of June, 1919. The Allies had awarded all eighteen of our naval airships as reparations. Two days earlier, the officers of the German High Seas Fleet interned at Scapa Flow in Scotland opened the sea valves of their ships and sank them all. I persuaded my fellow naval airshipmen to emulate the bravery of our seafaring brothers. When the sun rose, most of the naval zeppelins had been destroyed.”

  He could still picture them in his mind, a twisted mass of blackened duralumin, patches of canvas still smoldering in the warm morning light. That sense of justice washing over him, the sense that he had fought his own battle here and fought it well. He remembered it all. Including the two Allied sentries he had killed with his own hands, his knife slicing deeply across their throats. The first men he had ever killed up close.

  The first men, yes, but not the last. “The military awarded me the Blue Max for my actions as well as the whole of my wartime service. But the new Socialist government in Germany did not reward me. They called me a ‘war criminal.’ They issued a warrant for the arrest of Kurt von Strasser. So I changed my name to Kurt von Sturm and, courtesy of an introduction from Hugo Eckener, went to work for Fritz von Thyssen and his United Steel Works. Germany takes care of its heroes, even if its spineless Socialist government did not.”

  “So you named yourself after the family dog?”

  “Our government would do well to emulate his courage and loyalty.” Sturm said as he scanned the horizon for the sand-bar ahead.

  “But it’s a different government in Germany now, isn’t it?”

  He turned back to Ingrid. “Yes. The Socialists are no longer in power. The National Socialists are now the second largest party in Germany. They soon will be the largest.”

  “So why don’t you change your name back?”

  “I suppose I’ve grown attached to it over the years,” he said. “Mostly it is a promise I made to myself. And to the memory of my father.”

  “What sort of promise?”

  “The Allies seized entire swaths of German land after the war and gave it to our enemies. Our family estate in Pomerania near Posen was part of that land-grab by the Poles. After my own government turned on me, I swore I would not reclaim my name until things had been set right. The von Strasser name died with my father in the war and it will not return until our family estate is restored to Germany and the Versailles Treaty is on the ash heap of history.”

  “You really loved your father,” she said. A statement, not a question.

  Sturm noted her change of subject. He had been talking about righting wrongs. Revenge. She talked of love. “Of course. But more importantly, I admired my father.” he said. “He taught me the three principles by which a good German must lead his life: Respect, honor, and strength. A good German shows respect to his adversaries and those less fortunate than him. His honor requires that he always keep his word. And strength means he must always be prepared to defend his family, his country and his honor.”

  “And you think the National Socialists will be the ones to restore these principles?”

  “Yes.” Sturm said. “They are the only party that knows about honor. They know to whom Germany owes its past greatness. They know how to honor its heroes.”

  “What do you think about this man Hitler, their leader? What does he stand for?”

  “You’ve already named one thing I admire about him,” he said. “Hitler is a leader. He does not beg for votes, or change his principles to pander for popularity. He is popular because he challenges people to cast aside their petty personal interests and unite as Germans.

  “Funny, all I heard when my husband talked about him is that he hates Jews.”

  “No. Only the others. Toads like Goebbels and Himmler blame everything on the Jews.” Sturm said. “Hitler never speaks of Jews except as Germans. I’ve met him several times. He’s never displayed anti-Semitism to me. ‘A man cannot help how he is born,’ is what he said.”

  “But what does that tell you?” Ingrid said. “People say Hitler is a master politician so he must be well versed at masking his true feelings. He can be all things to all people if men like you are willing to ignore what his associates say about Jews in his name.”

  Sturm had no answer to that, none that he could voice freely. Sturm was aware of his own ability to manipulate others just as he was also adept at spotting attempts to manipulate him. His life often depended on that ability. Having met and spoken to Hitler on a number of occasions, he had never picked up a hint or sign that Hitler was anything but genuine. It would be disturbing on many levels if it turned out that Sturm had simply missed those signs.

  “I don’t sense that with Hitler.” he said, his eyes scanning the approaching sandbar.

  “But then why does he keep people like that around him?”

  Sturm ignored the question and in the distance, he saw what he was looking for. “Look,” he said, pointing at the sandbar. She shifted in her seat to look in that direction. “Do you see them?”

  “Those lumps on the sand?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Look closer.”

  “Goodness, is it garbage?” Her sentence died in her throat as what appeared to be a lump of debris leaned its head back and yawned. “Oh!”

  Sturm lowered the sails and stood beside her. “I think you call them ‘seals.’”

  “Yes, that’s what we call them,” she said in astonishment. Scores of white and gray seals stretched out in the sun, lounging on the thin strip of sand that emerged from the sea. She leaned back into his shoulder and Sturm let her. “What do you call them?”

  “Der seehund.”

  “Sea hounds?”

  “Yes, that’s quite close to the literal meaning. Sea dogs.”

  “They’re adorable.” Ingrid looked at him. “I forgive you for changing the subject.”

  “It is a time-honored tactic for German men to distract their women.”

  Ingrid laughed. “I apologize. I can see you don’t like to talk about yourself but how else am I to learn what lies beneath your defenses?”

  Sturm turned her to face him and kissed her deeply. He pulled back and said, “I can think of a way.” He kissed her again and this time she kissed him back. Sturm had wanted to make love to her from the first time he saw her again but he had been inhibited by his mother’s and sister’s presence. Now he had no such worries. He didn’t think the seals would mind.

  UPON returning to the house from their sail, Ingrid had been relaxed, comfortable with herself and her surroundings, and especially comfortable with Sturm. She n
o longer looked like a grateful prisoner. She seemed happy to be hiding from her vengeful husband with her once and future German lover.

  When the time came to call her brother, Sturm placed the call and handed her the phone.

  She asked for Room 525 and waited. And waited. “No one is answering,” she said.

  “Try it again,” Sturm said but again, no one answered.

  “I’ll try the front desk,” Sturm said. He had the operator place the call and waited.

  “Palast-Hotel Regensburg,” the receptionist said.

  “I am looking for a gentleman staying at your hotel by the name of Thomas Johansson. He’s in Room 525.”

  “No, Sir,” the receptionist said. “We have no guest registered here by that name.”

  “When did he check out?” Sturm said, glancing towards Ingrid who was growing more tense by the minute.

  “He didn’t,” the receptionist said curtly. “There has never been anyone here by that name. You are looking in the wrong place and I strongly advise you search elsewhere.”

  “Perhaps you don’t understand,” Sturm began, but the receiver clicked loudly in his ear and the line went dead. The man had hung up on him. Slowly, he replaced the receiver in its cradle and turned to Ingrid.

  “Well?” she demanded. “What happened? Where is he?”

  “Something has gone wrong,” Sturm said. “The receptionist claimed your brother was never registered at the hotel.”

  “That’s impossible! He was there this morning! I talked to him,” she cried. “What is going on? First my sister. Now my brother. Where are they? Both of them are missing.”

  She looked up and Sturm could see the anguish on her face.

  “The twins are missing.”

  PART III

  Germany

  28 May — 31 May 1932