by Paul Sussman
'An interesting question. And one to which, so far as I am aware, no-one has yet provided a satisfactory answer.'
He took a final puff on his cigarillo and, crossing to the workbench, tamped the butt out into an ashtray and heaved himself up onto a rickety swivel stool. From somewhere above them came the cooing of pigeons and the scratch of talons on tiles. There was a long pause.
'To understand Hoth's career you have to appreciate the extent to which the Nazis were obsessed with history,' said the Frenchman eventually. 'For Hitler et al it wasn't sufficient that the Third Reich should be militarily powerful. Like all despotic regimes they wished to justify and validate their power by wrapping it in an aura of historical legitimacy.'
He pulled a small flat tin from the pocket of his smock, removed another cigarillo and lit it.
'From the outset archaeology, and archaeologists, played a crucial role in that process. Himmler in particular realized their significance. In 1935 he set up Das Ahnenerbe, the Ancestral Heritage Society, a special department within the SS charged with finding material to bolster the ideal of German historical supremacy. Expeditions were sent all over the world – to Iran, Greece, Egypt, even Tibet.'
'To dig?'
'In part, yes. Himmler was determined to uncover evidence that Aryan Germanic culture wasn't just confined to northern Europe but was in fact the prime moving force behind the whole of modern civilization. The Ahnenerbe also stole, however. Looted on an unprecedented scale. Shipped thousands, tens of thousands of artefacts back to Berlin for the greater glory of the Third Reich. If they were obsessed with the past, the Nazis were doubly so when it came to the remains of the past. Because of course if you control its remains, then in a sense you control history itself.'
'And Hoth?' she asked. 'How does he fit into all of this?'
'Well, as I told you, he was a brilliant archaeologist. He was also a devoted and enthusiastic supporter of the Nazi Party; his father, the industrialist Ludwig Hoth, was a close friend of Goebbels. So it was only a matter of time before Hoth junior was asked – or volunteered, we're not sure which – to deploy his skills for the benefit of the Nazi machine. He was only twenty-three when the Ahnenerbe was formed, but Himmler personally appointed him head of its Egyptian unit, with a special brief to dig up and loot as many ancient Egyptian artefacts as he possibly could.'
Dupont dragged on his cigarillo, wafting a hand back and forth in front of his face to dispel the sheets of blue-grey tobacco smoke.
'For the next three years Hoth travelled all over Egypt, ostensibly carrying out legitimate excavations under the guise of the Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft, but in fact stealing anything he could lay his hands on and smuggling it back to Germany. We're talking thousands of objects here. A letter exists from Himmler to Hans Reinerth, another Nazi archaeologist, in which he jokingly complains that thanks to Hoth the Castle of Wewelsburg – the headquarters of the SS – was starting to look like something out of a Boris Karloff mummy film.'
'But how does all this lead to Castelombres?' asked Layla, butting in. 'I don't see the connection.'
'That's the whole point,' said Dupont. 'There doesn't seem to be a connection. Which is what makes the story so intriguing. Until 1938, Hoth's career is focused exclusively on ancient Egyptian archaeology. He displays no interest whatsoever in any other branch of history, least of all the sort of credulous, quasi-mystical hokum that appealed to people like Himmler – the Holy Grail, Atlantis, that sort of rubbish. He might have been a thief and a looter, but unlike many Nazi archaeologists, Hoth was never a fantasist.
'Yet in November 1938 this man for whom the Land of the Pharaohs has been everything, who is widely regarded as the finest Egyptian excavator of his generation, who has shown no previous interest in any other subject, suddenly abandons Egypt altogether and instead devotes himself to investigating what can best be described as a series of half-baked medieval legends about buried treasure. It's extraordinary – not just a change of direction, but an apparently complete change of character. I'm surprised it hasn't attracted more attention.'
Layla frowned, tapping her pen on her pad.
'So what happened in 1938? What prompted this sudden change of interest?'
Dupont shrugged. 'No-one seems to know. One minute Hoth and his team are excavating in Egypt, at a site just outside Alexandria; the next he's rushing back to Berlin for some top-secret meeting with Himmler – a meeting, incidentally, that is deemed so important Himmler actually puts off a dinner date with the Führer in order to attend it. And then a couple of days after that Hoth turns up in Jerusalem taking measurements in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and asking questions about some eight-hundred-year-old legend of buried gold.'
'William de Relincourt,' Layla said.
The Frenchman nodded.
'That's just the start of it, however. For the next five years Hoth zig-zags back and forth across Europe and the Levant investigating what seems like every madcap treasure story known to man. He visits libraries, goes through private manuscript collections, digs holes everywhere from Turkey to the Canary Islands before eventually turning up at Castelombres in September 1943, which somehow seems to be the culmination of the whole bizarre episode.'
'And there's no indication of why he was doing any of this?' she pressed. 'What he was looking for?'
Dupont shook his head. 'Of course it's possible he was simply acting under orders. Fulfilling some quixotic fantasy of Himmler's. He was a devoted Nazi after all. Would have done whatever his superior told him. Or maybe he simply lost the plot. He wouldn't have been the first academic to be driven mad by his work.'
'But you don't think so.'
'No,' replied Dupont, 'I don't. I think he was genuinely on to something. Something so important, of such immense significance to the whole Nazi history machine, that he was prepared to turn his entire life upside down in order to pursue it.'
He contemplated the end of his cigarillo, then looked up at her.
'And whatever he was looking for, I think he found it at Castelombres.'
He held her eyes for a moment, then, with a wry smile, slipped off his stool and went over to the kettle, switching it on again.
'I can't prove it, sadly. From the outset the Castelombres excavation was shrouded in a degree of secrecy that was intense even by Nazi standards. All we know is that Hoth arrived there in mid-September 1943, bringing with him heavy digging equipment and a crack unit of the Sonderkommando Jankuhn, an SS division specializing in excavation and looting. And he left three weeks later taking with him some sort of mysterious box or crate.'
Layla leant forward, her chest tight with excitement.
'Do we know what was in it?'
Dupont shook his head. 'Unfortunately not. We do know where it was taken, though, because three days after they left Castelombres, Hoth and the crate turned up at Wewelsburg Castle in north-west Germany where they were met by no less a welcoming party than Heinrich Himmler and the Führer himself.'
'No!'
'It was certainly most unusual,' concurred Dupont, puffing on his cigarillo. 'We have a diary entry from one of Himmler's adjutants recording how the moment he arrived Hoth was presented with the Knight's Cross you saw earlier, after which Hitler made a speech in which he declared that the contents of the crate were a clear sign that what Titus had started he, the Führer, was destined to finish.'
Layla's eyes narrowed.
'Meaning?'
'Well, the diary entry is somewhat short on detail, but I'd say it's almost certainly a reference to the Holocaust. Titus was the man who in AD 70 conquered Jerusalem and expelled the Jews from the Holy Land, and in a sense the concentration camps and gas chambers were the logical extension of that act. How precisely Hoth's discovery was relevant to the Final Solution . . .' He threw up his hands as if to say 'I have absolutely no idea'. 'One of the many fascinating elements of Hoth's five-year excursion into the world of medieval arcana, however, is the sudden interest he starts to show in Judaism an
d Jewish history. He even taught himself to read Hebrew. This from a man renowned for his virulent anti-semitism.'
There was a click behind him as the kettle came to the boil.
'More coffee?'
Layla shook her head, leaving him to spoon Nescafe into a cup for himself while she stared down at her pad, spooling everything she'd just heard through her mind, trying to fit it into the framework of what she had already discovered over the last few days. Hitler's Wewelsburg speech struck her as particularly significant. If the object at the centre of this whole mystery was in some albeit obscure way tied up with the expulsion of the Jews from the Holy Land and their subsequent persecution by the Nazis, then that would explain something that had been perplexing her from the very outset – why it should be of any interest to someone such as al-Mulatham. She was still no closer to discovering what the damn thing was, however.
'So what happened then?' she asked. 'After Hoth arrived at Wewelsburg?'
Dupont was pouring water into his mug, cigarillo clamped between his teeth.
'So far as we can tell, nothing. The mysterious crate disappears into the depths of the castle; Hoth returns to Berlin where he takes up a desk job with the Ahnenerbe; the whole strange affair seems to come to a rather abrupt end.'
He stirred the cup, removed the cigarillo, took a sip.
'Although there is one rather curious coda, which may or may not be linked. It occurred just over a year after Hoth arrived at Wewelsburg, at the end of 1944. By this point the tide of war had turned well and truly against the Nazis. The Americans and British were pushing into Germany from the west, the Russians from the east, and although the Führer was still insisting they could recover the situation, deep down the Nazi high command knew the Third Reich's days were numbered. They started moving gold and looted art treasures out of the path of the advancing Allied armies and either spiriting them abroad or else hiding them in secret locations within Germany, usually inside abandoned mines.'
He took another slurp of his coffee and returned to his swivel stool, cup in one hand, cigarillo in the other.
'In the middle of all this, in December 1944, Dieter Hoth suddenly appears at Dachau concentration camp in southern Germany, bringing with him, according to a deposition given by the deputy camp commandant Heinz Detmers, two trucks, one containing some sort of large wooden crate.'
Layla's eyes widened. 'The—'
'Maybe, maybe not,' said Dupont, anticipating the question. 'It must have been something pretty important for Hoth to have come all that way in person, but whether it was the same crate he brought back from Castelombres . . .' He shrugged. 'All we know is that he commandeered a work party of six prisoners and left again. It's possible he was taking the crate to hide it somewhere nearby, or maybe to have it shipped abroad. Then again, he might have had some wholly different purpose. We simply don't know. The following day he was back at his desk in Berlin. The crate is never heard of again.'
'And he was killed at the end of the war? Is that right?'
Dupont nodded. 'He and a group of other SS officials were trying to get out of Berlin before it fell to the Russians. Got hit by a katusha rocket as they tried to sneak across the Weidendammer Bridge. Wasn't much left of him, by all accounts – head blown off, both legs. They only managed to identify him because he was wearing his Knight's Cross and was carrying a number of artefacts from a site he was known to have looted in Egypt.'
He took a final puff on the cigarillo and ground it out in the ashtray.
'No more than he deserved, I imagine. Fascinating man, brilliant scholar, but a deeply flawed human being. Tragic, when you think about it – such a great mind harnessed to such terrible ends.'
He sighed and, clasping his hands behind his neck, gazed up at the skylight overhead. Layla sat back in her chair and rubbed her eyes, suddenly overcome with weariness. Whatever William de Relincourt had found in Jerusalem, whatever he had sent to his sister at Castelombres, whatever had been taken to Montségur for safekeeping, whatever Dieter Hoth had subsequently dug up and carried back to Germany, it now seemed to be lost again. So near and yet so far.
'If you've got time you really should visit the St Sernin,' Dupont was saying. 'Parts of it date all the way back to the time of the First Crusade, you know.'
Layla mumbled a distant 'yes' but wasn't really listening. All she could think of was where the hell she should go from here.
CAIRO
After leaving the Gratzes' apartment block Khalifa wandered around El-Maadi for a while, gazing at the plush houses, stopping to peruse a street vendor's stall where, on a whim, he bought a carved wooden statue of the hawk-god Horus, thinking it would make a nice present for his wife Zenab. Then, still with the best part of four hours to kill, he turned his feet back to the Metro station and took a train towards the centre of town.
Whenever he found himself in Cairo with time to spare he invariably gravitated towards the Museum of Egyptian Antiquities on Midan Tahrir, and it was where he thought he'd go now, hoping to lose himself, if only for a while, in its wondrous collection of ancient artefacts. His old friend and mentor Professor Mohammed al-Habibi, the museum's chief curator, was away lecturing in Europe, which was a shame, because there were few things in the world he enjoyed more than wandering around the museum's galleries in the professor's company. Even without him, though, it was still a magical place, and as his train rattled its way northwards through the dusty suburbs he felt an excited tingle of expectation at the prospect of the distractions ahead.
It was eight stops from El-Maadi to Sadat, the station closest to the museum. Precisely why he got out four stops short of his intended destination he had no idea. One minute he was swaying back and forth in the packed carriage, staring at the higgledy-piggledy tenements juddering past outside the window, the next, without any conscious awareness of having actually left the train, he was on a deserted street outside Mar Girgus Metro station, clutching his wooden Horus statue and gazing across at a neatly dressed stone wall behind which were corralled an asymmetrical jumble of houses, monasteries and churches – Masr al-Qadimah, the Old City of Cairo.
Although he knew most of the capital like the back of his hand, this was one quarter he had never visited before – a curious gap in his geography given his fascination with history, since, as its name implied, it was the most antiquated section of the metropolis, with buildings, or parts of buildings, dating right the way back to the Roman era (there had been no town here in ancient Egyptian times, when the capital had been further south, at Memphis).
For almost a minute Khalifa stood where he was, blinking, disorientated, as if he had woken from a heavy slumber to find himself in a wholly different location from that in which he had originally gone to sleep. Then, propelled by an imperative he could neither explain nor resist, he crossed the street and descended a set of worn stone steps that led him beneath the enclosure's perimeter wall and into the tight honeycomb of buildings within.
It was silent in here, unnaturally so, and very still, the air dense and musty, timeless, as if the physical laws that held sway throughout the rest of the city had in this particular corner of it somehow fallen into abeyance, leaving everything suspended in a sort of hushed, immutable vacuum. He stopped, uncertain what on earth he was doing there, yet at the same time struck by a sudden curious sense that his presence was perhaps after all not entirely random, that rather it had some underlying purpose to it. Then he started forward again, following a narrow paved street that ran away in front of him like a deep scalpel-stroke cut through the quarter's tangled entrails. Crumbling brick and stone buildings rose in walls on either side of him, punctuated here and there with thick wooden doors, like leathery mouths, most of them closed tight but a few slightly ajar, affording fleeting glimpses into secret worlds beyond – a neatly tended courtyard garden; a room piled high with lumber; a shadowy Coptic chapel, its fluted pillars wound round with soft skeins of candlelight.
Every now and then other streets opened up to
his left or right, silent, deserted, inviting him to divert to some other part of the quarter. He held his course, following the paved avenue as it dog-legged back and forth until eventually, like a stream issuing into a large pool, it emerged into a dusty open space at the centre of which stood a square, two-storey building in yellow stone, with arched windows and a band of carved cornicing around the edge of its flat roof. A sign outside read BEN EZRA SYNAGOGUE – PROPERTY OF THE JEWISH COMMUNITY OF CAIRO.
He had never seen a synagogue before, let alone been inside one, and for a moment he hesitated, part of him wanting to turn right round and go back the way he had come. The feeling that he was somehow meant to be there, however, that he had, in some inexplicable manner, been called, was by now so strong that it overcame whatever doubts he had. Clasping his wooden statuette, he walked up to the building and passed through its arched entrance.
The interior was cool and softly lit, silent, with a grey-white marble floor, a row of brass lamps suspended from the ceiling and, to either side, a procession of pillars supporting a low wooden gallery. The walls were painted with geometric patterns in green, gold, red and white, while at the far end of the room, beyond an octagonal marble pulpit, a set of five steps led up to an exquisitely decorated wooden shrine, its surface inlaid with ivory and mother-of-pearl, its doors inscribed with lines of Hebrew lettering.