Crucified

by Michael Slade

  "Gas!"

  There was no mistaking this pepper-and-pineapple smell.

  Chlorine gas—the chemical weapon used in the Second Battle of Ypres during the First World War—billowed up through the floor plates from the storage trough below. As the Black Devil struggled to claw toward the surface, the greenish-yellow poisonous haze overpowered the crew.

  The metallic taste of the gas stung Stunner's throat and lungs. One by one, the men around him crumpled to their knees, suffocating in agony. Their rudimentary oxygen masks were of little use to those stumbling to strap them on, for just then, a depth charge exploded beside the sub, hurling the men still standing against metal edges.

  Every bone in Stunner's face smashed to splinters.

  The sub broke the surface.

  But no one escaped.

  By the time the Royal Navy pried open the hatches, fourteen corpses manned the sub.

  The date was July 19, 1944.

  Two days after Rommel was wounded by the Spitfire attack in France, and one day before the July Plot bombers would fail to assassinate Hitler.

  TICK-TOCK

  GERMANY, NOW

  The next day

  From the window of a tower, Wyatt looks down at a bonfire blazing on an island in a pond. Through the flames, he glimpses Joan of Arc, lashed to a stake, cross in hand, as she's burned alive.

  Masked by hoods, Catholic Inquisitors ring the heretic. Only when she screams his name does Wyatt identify the doomed witch as Liz Hannah. The upside-down crucifix she holds comes from the beam above the Judas chair in Balsdon's cottage.

  Recoiling in horror, Wyatt sees iron bars on the window.

  "Wyatt!

  "Wyatt!

  "Wyyyatt!"

  Vertigo assaults him as he whirls about in this cell high up in the turret of a castle. He rushes to the only door in the circular wall, gives it a frantic rattle, and learns he's imprisoned in a locked room. Dropping to his knees, he peers through the Judas window in the door. His jailors are playing chess. Detective Inspector Ramsey, who suspects Wyatt of killing Mick Balsdon, and Detective Inspector Stritzel, who has him in the frame for the murder of Lenny Jones, make the same move.

  Both castle their rooks . . .

  Wyatt jerked awake to find himself in bed. The clock on the nightstand said it was 4:13.

  Tick-tock . . .

  He tried to go back to sleep, but sleep eluded him. So Wyatt rolled onto his back, locked his fingers behind his neck, and plumbed the anxiety that had stalked him out of dreamland.

  Whoever had skewered Balsdon on the Judas chair wasn't hunting for decades-old atomic secrets. The killer had to be after the biblical relics rumored to be in the missing Judas package.

  The only clue to the location of the relics hid in the recollections of the crewmen of the Ace of Clubs. Had Balsdon believed Trent Jones was the agent? Having extracted that from the old man by torture and reading his pilfered archive, had the killer flown to Germany to steal Trent Jones's papers from his grandson, Lenny?

  But if Jones wasn't the Judas agent—and Wyatt had proved he wasn't by solving the locked-turret puzzle—then the killer had yet to find what he was looking for. That meant he was still on the hunt. Would he go after Sweaty and Liz next?

  Tick-tock . . .

  Unless the religious signature left at the Balsdon murder was a red herring to blindside the police, the killer exhibited symptoms of paranoid psychosis fueled by Catholicism.

  The crucifix and the Inquisition instrument found in the cottage indicated that the killer was a religious nut.

  There's nothing more dangerous, Wyatt thought as he threw back the covers, sat up in bed, and glanced at the clock.

  Tick-tock . . .

  Better safe than sorry.

  Though it was ultra early, Wyatt phoned Liz's London flat.

  Her machine answered.

  "Hi. It's Wyatt. Call me on my cell."

  He left his number.

  For a moment, Wyatt pondered going to the German federal police with his concern about Sweaty's and Liz's safety.

  He could ask them to contact the British police. But both forces viewed him as their prime suspect. Before the cops turned their attention to phantom killers, would they not wish to eliminate the only person who had appeared mysteriously at both murder scenes? Particularly if that suspect tried to elbow into the investigations like Raskolnikov did in Crime and Punishment?

  You bet your booty they would, Wyatt concluded.

  He decided that the German half of the Judas puzzle was best left to Rutger, who'd now returned to Berlin. There was nothing to keep Wyatt here, so he packed his bags, checked out of the hotel, drove to the airport, turned in the car, and caught the first available flight to London. From Gatwick, he hopped a train to the Achilles heel.

  Tick-tock . . .

  + + +

  Trundling along in this train carriage brought Alfred Hitchcock to Wyatt's mind. Hitch made a number of train movies: The 39 Steps, The Lady Vanishes, Strangers on a Train, North by Northwest. And in explaining the "MacGuffin"—the generic, non-specific engine that sets a film in motion—Hitch had two men traveling on a train from London to Scotland. On the lug-gage rack above their heads jiggled an oddly shaped package.

  "What's in the package?" asked one of the men.

  "That's a MacGuffin," replied his companion.

  "What's a MacGuffin?"

  "It's a device for trapping lions in the Scottish Highlands."

  "But there aren't any lions in the Scottish Highlands!"

  "Well, then, I guess that's no MacGuffin."

  For Hitchcock, the MacGuffin could be anything from a strip of microfilm ( North by Northwest) to a coded message in a piece of music (The Lady Vanishes). All that mattered was that it seemed to be of vital importance to the characters in the film.

  Well, that's what Wyatt had here. A MacGuffin that was valuable enough to someone that he was willing to slaughter Balsdon and Lenny Jones to get it.

  Of course, Wyatt had no inkling what the MacGuffin was.

  But he sensed he was closing in on the secret by concluding that Judas was Erwin Rommel. Rommel's battles in North Africa, Wyatt knew, took him to the border of the Holy Land, where he might have chanced across some biblical relics.

  Tick-tock . . .

  As the train slinked southeast toward the Achilles heel of England, Wyatt passed the time by leafing through Rutger's files on U-boats sent to Britain between the night the Ace was shot down and the day the July Plot to assassinate Hitler failed.

  Each file included a group photograph of the crew snapped before the sea wolves went hunting.

  For a man whose life centered on books, Wyatt wondered why he never had a bookmark at hand. As always, he had to dig out his business cards and slot them into places that he would revisit later. As he looked over the men in each picture—their young faces frozen in time—he wondered which one was Ack-Ack DuBoulay.

  + + +

  Wyatt checked his bags at the station and walked into town. He was here to accomplish several tasks. The relatives of the Ace's crew had kept in touch, and two of them—the son of the flight engineer, Hugh "Ox" Oxley, and the daughter of the bomb-aimer, Russ "Nelson" Trafalgar—were married to each other and lived by the sea. Wyatt figured they'd have phone numbers for Liz's mother and grandmother, and he could call them to see if she was with them. He'd also be able to get a look at any archives kept by Ox and Nelson during the war. And he could borrow a photo of Ack-Ack DuBoulay to compare with the faces of the sea wolves in the U-boat files.

  Tick-tock . . .

  The Achilles heel of England was the weak spot where the invaders stormed in. Six centuries before the Romans landed, Celts from northern Europe had opened the gateway to pre-Christian Britain. Julius Caesar came, saw, and didn't conquer in 55 B.C. But the legions returned to stay a decade later, and refused to leave for four hundred years. When the Romans withdrew to defend Rome against pillaging heathens, the Angles and the Saxons—a
nd later the Vikings and the Normans—sought out gaps in the coastline as their entry points. Each group of invaders threw up fortifications to bulwark themselves from the next, and today the shores bristle with forts, castles, moats, cannons, draw-bridges, and portcullises resembling fangs about to chomp. In 1940, the bluebirds over the white cliffs of Dover were chewed by Nazi planes attacking during the Battle of Britain. Now, foreign conquerors came in by ferries and Chunnel trains, then fanned out to overrun England's teashops.

  The cannons were for Catholics and Napoleon.

  Catholics in case they tried to invade on behalf of the pope.

  As for Old Bony, he failed to show.

  Tick-tock ...

  Far from the madding and the maddening crowd, the clifftop path was all but deserted. Armed with a hand-drawn map, Wyatt snaked along the undulating cliff edge as the hungry tide below undercut the terra firma beneath his shoes.

  The Sussex shore had been a haunt for smugglers. Towered over by the humps of the Seven Sisters and the knob of Beachy Head, pirates of old had hauled their contraband in through gaps in the cliff. The tales of these buccaneers provided J. M. Barrie with the inspiration for Captain Hook, and they also underpinned "Little Bo Peep." The "sheep" in that nursery rhyme were in fact Sussex smugglers, and their wagging "tails"

  were casks of French brandy being dragged in from the sea.

  Lore like that cluttered Wyatt's mind as he closed on the lonely cottage ahead. This small home had once stood inland, but a sudden crumbling of the chalk had moved the seaside drop to its front yard. The yard was marked by stone walls that left just enough open space along the new edge for amblers to pass. Unaware that the clock was ticking toward devilry, Wyatt paused at the precipice to experience an epiphany.

  Tick-tock . . .

  The smell of the sea was in the crisp air. The offshore breeze was bracing. The sky was noisy with the cries of migrant birds landing to rest and feed on shrub berries. There had been a land bridge from here to Europe, until the English Channel relentlessly ate it away. Gazing down at the high tide eighty feet below, Wyatt wondered how deep the water was.

  His epiphany was to recall John Donne, whose poem took on deeper meaning here at the rim:

  No man is an island,

  Entire of itself;

  Every man is a piece of the continent,

  A part of the main.

  If a clod be washed away by the sea,

  Europe is the less.

  As well as if a promontory were.

  As well as if a manner of thine own

  Or of thine friend's were.

  Each man's death diminishes me,

  For I am involved in mankind.

  Therefore, send not to know

  For whom the bell tolls,

  It tolls for thee.

  Tick-tock . . .

  Turning his back on the sea, Wyatt fished one of his calling cards from his wallet as he walked across the yard toward the front door. The cottage was what the locals called a tile-hung house. Rows of scallop-edged tiles hung like armor over the wood and plaster to protect it against the weather. Set in the door was an eye-level Judas window, like a spyhole into a cell.

  Wyatt wondered why it was called a Judas window. Because it betrayed what went on within?

  Tick-tock . . .

  He reached the door and peeked inside.

  Tick . . .

  "Bloody hell!"

  HACELDAMA

  GERMANY, 1944

  Shortly before noon on October 14, Erwin Rommel went to his room in his villa at Herrlingen and changed from the brown jacket he usually wore over his riding breeches into his favorite uniform, his open-collared Afrika Korps tunic. He put on his Blue Max medal, its enamel chipped from the car crash that had nearly killed him four months earlier, and examined the scars left by the crushing of his skull.

  At twelve o'clock precisely, a dark green car with a Berlin number plate stopped at the gate to the house. The driver wore the black uniform of the SS. The jackboots of his passengers crunched on the gravel driveway that led to the door.

  One was General Wilhelm Burgdorf, a big, red-faced man who came with orders from Hitler. The other was General Ernst Maisel, who was short and skinny, with a long, pointed nose and suspicious eyes.

  On July 20, three days after Rommel's car crash, Colonel Graf Schenk von Stauffenberg had planted a briefcase bomb under the conference table at Hitler's Rastenburg headquarters. Luckily for the Fiihrer, someone had inadvertently kicked the case behind a stout oak table leg that shielded him from the blast. Since then, Burgdorf and Maisel had been stalking officers suspected of taking part in the July Plot.

  Thousands had died in the purge.

  The generals rang the bell and entered the house. In the hall, they exchanged salutes with Rommel.

  "Will you stay for lunch?" asked the field marshal's wife.

  "No," replied Burgdorf. "This is official business. May we talk in private, Herr Feldmarschall?"

  Rommel ushered the men into his ground-floor study.

  As soon as the door closed, Burgdorf stated the purpose of their visit: "You have been accused of complicity in the plot on the Fiihrer's life." Then he read out a number of damning statements made by army assassins under Gestapo arrest.

  "The Fiihrer offers you a choice between trial for treason and the officer's way out. If you choose public humiliation, you will die at the end of a rope, and your family and staff will suffer. If you choose suicide, your death will be called natural, you'll be given a state funeral and burial at home, and your family will receive a pension. I have the poison with me. It works in three seconds."

  Rommel was shaken. So it had come to this. Yes, he had planned to negotiate peace with Churchill to save the Fatherland. But he was not involved in the failed assassination. That, however, meant nothing now. Both acts were considered treason.

  Tired and still unsteady from his injuries, he slowly climbed the stairs to his wife's bedroom. "In fifteen minutes, I will be dead," he said calmly, then explained the ultimatum.

  Lucie looked faint, but she held back her tears. The former teenage sweethearts embraced for the last time, then Rommel heard her sobbing as he went to inform their son.

  Downstairs, a servant helped him into his topcoat and handed him his cap and field marshal's baton. Months ago, back in France, he'd been given a dachshund puppy, and now the dog jumped at him with a bark of joy.

  "Shut him in the study," Rommel told his son.

  The Desert Fox stepped out into a fine afternoon of autumn colors. The generals were waiting by the garden gate, and as he approached, they snapped their right arms in the Nazi salute.

  "Heil Hitler!" they said.

  The SS driver swung open the rear door and stood at attention. Rommel shook hands with his son, then climbed into the back of the Opel. Burgdorf and Maisel joined him, and the doors slammed shut. The driver engaged the clutch and drove up the hill and around the bend toward the next village.

  Rommel didn't look back. His eyes stared forward. To occupy his mind, he recalled the stormy night seven months ago when he'd knocked on the door of a house in Munich and solved the Tobruk puzzle . . .

  + + +

  The son of a schoolmaster who taught "modern side" subjects instead of classics, Rommel took no interest in books. He was drawn to the army—he enlisted at eighteen—and after serving in the First World War, he wrote Infantry Attacks, a manual on military tactics. When he read, it was always a book on soldierly subjects. While in North Africa, however, he took some interest in local history, and was mildly curious about the Greek and Roman ruins of Cyrenaica. A photograph was snapped of him gazing at bits of Roman pottery dug up by war correspondents. Nazi propagandists spun that into a story that he'd kept up his classics and was a keen archeologist who spent his leisure moments digging for ancient relics. In reality, he'd asked the reporters, "What the hell do you want with all that junk?"

  But even if Rommel had been a classical history buff, he wo
uldn't have known what to make of the relics found in Tobruk. He realized that only an expert versed in the languages of biblical times could unravel the puzzle hidden in the papyrus scrolls he'd brought home with him. That's why he took advantage of this trip to Munich and ventured out on a stormy night to seek the opinion of the Art Historian to the Vatican.

  His knock on the door of a well-maintained old Bavarian mansion was answered by a fretting man with a well-groomed Vandyke beard. It was evident from the puffy bags weighing down his bloodshot eyes that he had gone with too little sleep for too many days. Listlessly, the wretch welcomed the visitor into his house, leading him to a magnificent library burnished by its hearth.

  "Thank you for seeing me, Herr Professor."

  "The honor is mine, Herr Feldmarschall. Excuse my appearance, but I have a dying son. You must have passed the doctor on the road. I'm told my boy will not survive the night."

  "I'm sorry."

  "You have a son, I believe?"

  "Manfred. He's fifteen. If you prefer to be alone, I'll return later this week."

  "I'd rather keep occupied. There'll be time enough to worry once you leave."

  A flash of lightning electrified the room. Thunder rattled the windows and shook the art in the nooks between the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. As near as Rommel could tell, the miniature galleries advanced through time from prehistoric carvings to paintings by Dali. The gramophone murmured chamber music by Mozart.

  "You have something to show me, Herr Feldmarschall?"

  The waterproof case was basically a flatfish rectangle hanging from a handle. Opening it, Rommel extracted a page in a glass frame.

  "Our bombing of Tobruk cracked apart an ancient wall. Inside was a pottery jar surrounded by sand. The jar contained a papyrus map in a script unknown to me. I brought it to Germany and would like to know what it says."