He munched more tart, licking plum and cream from the corners of his mouth.
“Each could carry nearly three hundred tons of cargo. And there were supposed to be one hundred such ships.”
“Supposed to be?” Peterson wheezed from the end of the table.
“Officially, they were never built. Stalin was sure that they had been built. We—the British and the Americans—told him that they were only scheduled to be built, that they existed only on paper, that air raids on the production facilities had made their construction physically impossible.
“There were no documents at all beyond those plans—no indications of completion, no stop orders. And we told Stalin that there were no stop orders because the plants were destroyed and stop orders were thereby rendered superfluous.
“Stalin did not believe us.
“Stalin was right.”
Steynes stopped for effect. Peterson shook his head. Dawson offered us cigars and Steynes took one, clipped the end, warmed it, lit it slowly, ritualistically.
“Do you realize what the existence of these ships meant? The survival of Nazism, nothing less—not an offshoot, not an ideological neo-Nazi movement. But a direct lineal continuation. Not only in the person of Bormann and others but in the survival of the documents, whether you call them the ‘Bormann papers’ or something less dramatic.
“The survival of these textual bases for the Fourth Reich frightened the Russkies, who had sound ideological justifications for fearing them. After all, Nazism and Communism are conflicting ways of ordering things, quite unlike the Allies’ reasons for joining the battle.
“There were Englishmen and Americans, among others, who were eager and receptive, who wanted this testament—rather like the Dead Sea Scrolls of National Socialism, only more so.
“And now you know”—Steynes sighed through a cloud of blue smoke—“what was in those precious boxes your unfortunate librarian found.”
Peterson had a low-grade fever the next morning when we set off in the Audi from Land’s End. I let him sleep and drove slowly through the shifting gusts of fog and rain. There was no hurry and I wanted to think, to sift through the mountain of information Colonel Steynes had provided. It was hard to shake the feel of the island but it was crucial to make sense of it all.
As Steynes had continued well on into the morning hours, I had jotted some notes on a pad Dawson had given me. I fished it from my shirt pocket and rested it on top of the steering wheel, watching it jiggle.
Apparently, according to the Colonel, a power struggle was going on within the Fourth Reich, as it was called, Steynes said, “in certain circles.” On the one hand was the Old Guard, the men who had lived through the Second World War, who may have known Hitler and others at the top. Martin Bormann would be included in this group and Steynes felt he was probably still alive in South America somewhere though he had no reported sightings of him for nearly three years. Alfried Kottmann, Professor Dolldorf, my grandfather—these men were part of the old bunch, cogs in the old machinery.
There were new, younger faces, Steynes had said, but he was cautious about discussing them. Peterson felt that Steynes simply did not know who they were, that his information was confined to those left over from the Hitler period.
Between the two groups were certain key figures, bridging the gap, holding the factions together. Both groups were commonly financed out of Nazi treasure which was continually being increased. Holding that middle, Steynes said, were Martin St. John and Gunter Brendel, natural placaters and compromisers.
Brendel’s postwar activities had not been confined to showing up, shadowy and unnoticed, at party rallies in the provinces. In addition to expanding the family import-export business, which was a convenient cover for almost any land of transaction, Brendel had moved deep within the inner circles of the SS revival organizations, the HIAG and the Sicherheitsdienst (SD). His activities, and those of these and several other related groups, included forgery of foreign banknotes and passports, the control of factories and management in key industries, ownership of nightclubs and brothels used as fronts and sources of blackmail, on and on. The arms and legs of the Spider were everywhere: there was no escaping its reach.
Brendel’s influence had extended, as well, into the judiciary and law enforcement facilities of West Germany, both of which were liberally stocked with old Nazis, the faithful who had with the Spider’s help covered their tracks. It was Steynes’ opinion that no single individual was more responsible for the Nazification of the New Germany than Gunter Brendel.
Peterson had asked him why, if that were the case, had he not sent one of his avenging angels to murder Brendel? Steynes had pursed his white, cold lips and poked at the remains of his plum tart. Brendel was still alive, he said finally, because he was more of the postwar world rather than a criminal of the war itself. Vengeance was the fate of the old Nazis: Brendel was in the gap and Ivor Steynes had other business to finish.
“What really pisses me right off,” Peterson croaked across the rich roast beef that room service provided us that evening at the Grosvenor, “is that we still don’t know who is doing all this killing. It’s all well and good to say, hell, it’s the Nazis, and be done with it—but that won’t cut a lot of ice with the rest of the world. The sane world, out there,” he snorted, motioning past the rain-streaked window at the street below. “The Nazis are just a little out of date to them, a bit of mid-century exotica. Christ! They’d lock us up.” He thrust an inhaler into his nose and pulled in until his face matched his ascot and his eyes crossed.
“Nazis,” he said again. The room smelled of Vicks and Benzedrine and an English throat spray. “And who the hell was the gaunt man and his little round helper? Did the gaunt man kill Cyril? We could have a different murderer for each body, do you realize that? Do you? Wake up, Cooper—”
“I am awake. I’m resting my eyes.” I heard him eating. He was having a hard time breathing and eating since his nose was plugged.
“And I wish I felt better about Steynes. I just decide he’s sane and I start to remember him and I figure he must be nuts. Which makes us nuts for spending all that time listening to him.” He pushed the rolling tray of food away. “I mean, can he be absolutely for real? Somebody has got to have a line on him. I’ve got an old friend at the Yard. I’m going to make inquiries.” He sniffed and sneezed mightily, bringing me fully back to consciousness. “At the same time, while I’m at the Yard, I’m going to get hold of Roca and see if those bastards, Kottmann and St. John, have been found. And call Cooper’s Falls and the Bureau.” He yawned. “They’re going to be wondering where the hell I am, I suppose. Unless they’re following us.
“And the Feds,” Peterson mused, reaching for a chocolate mousse. He peered up, curious. “Look, Cooper, if they are interested, really interested—and federal records have been destroyed in this mess, even if the murders didn’t attract them—they may be watching us. It’s a fact of life. The problem is, you’re never quite sure why until it’s too late. Sometimes they’ve got their own axes to grind. The Bureau or the CIA or some Special Branch guys—they all operate with just as much power and authority as they need to do what they want to do.” He bolted the mousse and licked remnants out of his mustache. “Fact of life.”
I said I wanted to check on the addresses Steynes had given us for Brendel’s office and for the Belgravia flat, where Brendel and his wife lived.
“So, she’s ‘Brendel’s wife’ now, is she?” Peterson’s eyes glittered at me as he wiped linen across his mouth. “Having doubts, are you?”
“I don’t know.”
“Maybe she just looks like your mother,” he said.
The next morning I came out of the Grosvenor, through the Grecian lobby onto the paving of Park Lane, into a steady drizzle, persisting from a light gray sky not unlike the Cheviot pinstripe Peterson had been wearing at breakfast. I’d never seen him dressed so formally: he was heading for the Yard and I suppose he wanted to look the part. Watchi
ng him move from costume to costume was an impressive series of changes. Just perceptibly, his character changed too. This morning there was no sniffling, no ornate whining. Regardless of how he was feeling, he was quick and businesslike and a trifle fearsome. “I’m going to cut through some of this bullshit, Cooper,” he said as we parted. “I’ve been coasting and I goddamn hate coasting.”
Beneath my umbrella I entered the rainy quiet of Hyde Park. Dawdling because my mission was so unnerving—mechanically, the closer I got to Lee the more I wanted to wait, reconsider—I slowly made my way through the park, unaware except peripherally of others, heading for Kensington Gardens. The Serpentine got in my way and I turned left, winding with it, turning right as it ended, crossed Rotten Row, stood on Knightsbridge staring through the rain at Hyde Park Corner and the corner of Wilton Place. There was nothing for it but to push on.
The town house fronted up against the street in Belgravia Place. The building was brick, pristinely trimmed in white with a bow window, a brass knocker on the gleaming white door, an elegant, uneventful-looking, quiet exterior. I waited and after a half hour they came out and I caught my breath.
Frau Brendel led the way: tall, honey-colored hair, a waist-length leather jacket, tan baggy slacks with thick cuffs and platform shoes with soles two inches thick. She waited at the top of the narrow steps, hands in pockets, shoulders hunched forward, tinted aviator glasses. Behind her Brendel came into view, tall and broad in a Chesterfield and homburg and gray gloves. He turned, picked up a tan overnight bag with a blue-green stripe around it, said something to her, and followed her down the steps to a black Mercedes sedan. It struck me as odd: they might easily have been mistaken for father and daughter. At that distance she looked twenty. I felt odd: I’d expected someone older somehow, not this Vogue fashion model.
Quickly they were into the Mercedes. Brendel pulled it away from the curb and they passed directly in front of me, slid around the bend toward Knightsbridge, and were gone.
I walked back through Hyde Park feeling weak and tired although it was not yet midmorning. I wasn’t thinking of the Fourth Reich or Ivor Steynes or Lee or any of the people who had died. I was just tired and wet and empty.
I picked up the Audi at the Grosvenor and clumsily thrashed my way through London until I found Brendel’s office, the address Steynes had provided. I slid the car into a space near the entrance and waited.
Within ten minutes the black Mercedes appeared in my rearview mirror, oiled its way past my shoulder, and parked ahead of me in a no-parking zone directly in front of his office. She opened her own door, turned to face me for an instant, brushing her hair back, went in to the building with him. His arm circled her shoulders, broad and square, and they were gone again.
An hour later they came back out. He took the small tan bag out of the car and together they set off down the street, briskly, purposefully.
I got out of the Audi and followed them. The rain had subsided to a fine mist. There was no wind and it was balmy. Stopping at a corner, Brendel bought her a spring bouquet of flowers and she carried them in a paper spill, color between them as they walked, his umbrella tip clicking on the sidewalk.
They turned in at a restaurant, Eduardo’s, and I paused, figured the hell with it, and went in.
Eduardo’s, despite its name, could not have been less Italian. It was in fact an oldish pub, full of old varnish and mahogany and the smell of lemon polish, appointed with yards and yards of etched Victorian glass, a stack of the days Financial Times, and men in white shirts with spread collars and agonized little knots in their ties. There weren’t many women in the dining room and I spotted her at once, sitting by a front window, leaning forward for Brendel to light her cigarette.
I got a table on the side wall, which provided a good view of them, opened my own Financial Times, ordered a grilled chop and stout, and watched them through the jumble of businessmen going at their briskets like trenchermen.
There was nothing for me to do but observe. Brendel had a look of well-tailored fitness. The spill of flowers lay on the table. She spoke, sipped wine, ate small bites, methodically cut her beef and speared her salad. My mind spun treacherously, one moment drawing me into a feeling of kinship with this woman I’d thought about so intensely, the next turning me cold and distant and uncaring. She was not what I had expected—but then whatever I had expected was blurred by emotion and had possibly never existed at all. But the fact was that this woman seemed unmarked by fate, not a sorrowing, fey, remote creature, a romantic heroine, if that was what I’d been expecting. She was instead a real woman; perhaps that fact frightened me a little. The thoughts I had lived with, the turning of Lee into the object of a quest and the key to several murders, seemed faintly absurd when related to this woman lunching with her husband. Yet, the dead were nonetheless dead and the subterranean world Peterson and I had stumbled upon was—apparently—real.
She lit a cigarette and leaned back, hooking a long arm over the back of her chair. Her eyes were moving across the room and the thought of meeting them terrified me quite suddenly.
Abruptly I got up, left money on the table, and went back outside and across the street to a tobacconist. Being in the same room with her had somehow struck me as a risk; and I had panicked.
They came out of Eduardo’s within a few minutes and stood talking by the entrance.
Brendel handed his wife the tan bag. She squeezed his arm and they went off in opposite directions. Adrenaline pumping, I waited until she was half a block away and crossed the street. She was tall. It was easy to see the streaked hair moving through the noontime crowds.
She went first to Kutchinsky, the jeweler, in New Bond Street and emerged with a tiny package she slid into the pocket of her jacket. Then to Jaeger in Regent Street. I followed her inside. Suddenly I was sure I’d lost her in the acres of woolens. Fearing the worst, that she’d somehow eluded me, I turned a corner and bumped into her.
Her eyes behind the large, ominous glasses flicked across me as I looked downward, muttering my excuses, trying to retain my anonymity. Backing away, fumbling, I felt myself dismissed by her. Fortunately, she couldn’t have cared less about the clumsy oaf who had bumped into her.
On her way out she floated an air current past me, leaving a scent of garden flowers unlike any other perfume I’d ever smelled. She didn’t stop but nodded faintly as she passed, acknowledging our collision. I pretended I hadn’t seen.
On the street I lagged farther behind her and waited across the street, just another man in a raincoat, when she went in to Christian Dior on Conduit Street.
She polished off Dior in a few minutes and set off back down Regent Street, across Piccadilly Circus, through Trafalgar Square and past Nelson’s Column to The Strand. I was wearing out when she stopped before a run-down building on a slightly disreputable side street angling back from The Strand toward Leicester Square and Covent Garden. She checked her watch, took a deep breath, and disappeared into a narrow doorway.
The ancient wooden stairs creaked beneath me. Their centers were hollowed out and worn smooth from centuries of panting climbers. They seemed endless, mounting two stories, surrounded by shabby, smudged walls and the smell of sweat. At the top of the stairs a lettered door stood ajar, a gray, unlit room beyond. I tilted the door enough to read the inscription: MACOMBER SCHOOL OF DANCE. And as I read it, I heard a piano begin banging away, drilling.
I walked toward it, came to another door with BALCONY lettered in tattered gold paint. The balcony was dark, deep in shadow, and the theater seats, four rows of them, were empty. Below me the class was in session.
Twenty or thirty girls who looked to be ten years old or so stood at the bar along the side wall limbering up. A gray-haired woman with glasses on a chain was at the piano. Frau Brendel walked slowly along beside the girls, stopping to speak with each one, pointing, advising, demonstrating. Her hair was pulled back tightly into a bun and she wore a black leotard over pink ballet tights. She was too tall for a
ballerina but her body looked fuller than I’d expected. Her legs were muscular, her buttocks firm and powerful, her chest boyish, flat. She moved slowly, gracefully, controlled, her arms liquid in the air. The music stopped and she spoke to the girls in French.
She was very good with the girls. They clustered around her eagerly when she called a break, and I almost forgot who she was, why I was there. Near the end of the hour three women in raincoats joined me, mothers come to watch their daughters.
When the class ended I got out quickly, down the creaking stairway, into a doorway across the street. The sky was growing orange-gray toward the Thames and the afternoon was dwindling. The girls came tumbling out, met mothers and nannies, and melted away toward The Strand. I knew she would follow and I waited, skulking as I had been all day, feeling more and more like a ferret sneaking after its prey. Then she was on the sidewalk again and I set off after her. Her hair was still in the bun, she still carried the tan bag with her dancing gear.
She retraced her steps back to Trafalgar Square, took a left, and headed toward Charing Cross and the Embankment. Finally she slowed, stood staring down into the Thames and across at the Royal Festival Hall, and strolled slowly along the riverside. Leafless trees like stick men kept her company along the Embankment. Ahead of us—I was only fifteen yards behind her now—Westminster Bridge loomed in the haze turned orange by the late afternoon suns glow beneath low-hanging clouds. The Houses of Parliament just beyond, the Thames dark brown. …
Watching Lee again leaning over the river, watching her as her gaze traveled from the water up to the bridge and to the huge low buildings which housed Parliament and on to the sky, I remembered as a child looking in awe at Turner’s paintings of the rioting sky over the dark and muddy Thames, seeing how Pissarro and Manet and Monet had gone to school on his canvases. Watching Lee and watching the sky change and burn beneath the rainclouds, I remembered that it was a battlefield, a battlefield where my father—and hers, I felt sure in that instant—had died defending Britain from the Hun. …
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