From the documents it emerged that the Seeds were helped by a special unit of analysts with all sorts of intelligence information at their disposal. This meant that the agents had access to unusual knowledge, thanks to which their European superiors must have regarded them as geniuses—perceptive, effective, farsighted, in possession of information on international relations and on the plans and intentions of other countries. No wonder they advanced within the Party structures at an incredible rate. Some of them had dropped out, while others had broken free, but in the 1930s, when hostilities were starting again in Europe, the United States had fifteen agents of the right age and with perfect experience, who either already had or could very soon influence European politics.
Stammers broke off his reading and stood to stretch. The material was fascinating, but suddenly he felt the toll of his twenty-four-hour journey, the lack of sleep, and above all his age. Everyone says fifty is the new forty, but he’d have disagreed.
He’d stopped thinking about the Pulitzer, figuring he had it in the bag. Now he was wondering how much this information would change the history books. The contents of the file very disturbingly harmonized with familiar historical events. In 1933 Adolf Hitler had become chancellor, dissolved Parliament, and deprived the world of any illusions about Germany’s direction. A month later, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was sworn in as the thirty-second president of the United States. By coincidence, the newly appointed leaders of both powers had to tackle major economic crises and the rage and disappointment of their citizens. Hitler had a simple and effective way of dealing with it: war. He didn’t hide it, but aspired to it—the development of the arms industry and the investments that followed effectively pulled the country out of its crisis.
Roosevelt must have watched that with envy. His New Deal, with its package of reforms and a program of public works, helped to some extent, but could not come close to the level of economic stimulation guaranteed by war. So nothing could be more useful for America at the time than a major European feud, from which American industry could earn money by supplying, financing, and supporting all sides in the conflict. The perfect situation: it didn’t have to fire a single bullet but could watch the slaughter indifferently from across the ocean, like a movie at the theater, and the money would come rolling in, employment would rise, and the crisis would end.
If this is true, thought Stammers, then the “land of the free and home of the brave” had played a large part in the affair that would result in the extermination of over seventy million people, including almost fifty million civilians.
Was it enough to rewrite the history books? Not necessarily. Major economies and big business had always profited from war, there were plenty of history books about it. Nowadays you could even come right out and say that America’s entry into the Second World War was prompted more by economics than wanting to bring peace to the world. In the recognition—quite rightly, however cynical it sounded—that this was the only way to get the country out of crisis for good. In the recognition that sacrificing three hundred thousand soldiers was worth the happiness of over one hundred million American citizens.
Those were different times, with a different morality, and a different perception of war.
He was feeling sleepy, so he put on his jacket and opened the window to let in some mountain air. He shivered—the first gust was truly icy. He could have done with that thermos of coffee now, but he didn’t want to go back to Boznański until he’d finished reading.
So he got on with it.
The next part consisted of the personal files of one of the Seeds. The agent was named Clive Lebrecht, born in Beaverton, Oregon, in 1900. In 1920 he’d been recruited by agents from the Department of State. He looked pleasant enough, with glasses and dark-brown hair; he reminded Stammers of an accountant. Less than a year after being recruited he was in Germany, and in 1923—not surprisingly—he joined the Nazi Party to investigate from the inside, and right after that he took part in the failed Munich Putsch, Hitler’s first attempt to seize power . . .
Stammers regretted coming here. After photographing all the pages with his phone—unaware that he was repeating Lisa’s action from a few weeks ago—he dressed at lightning speed and left the room.
He hesitated outside Boznański’s door. Then he took a Moleskine notebook from his pocket, tore out a page, wrote a note, and slipped it under the door.
Half an hour and a few falls on the icy stones later he was sitting in a cab, searching for a flight. If he could reach the airport in Kraków by dawn, he’d be in New York for lunch.
4
Karol woke early feeling stiff and with a terrible taste in his mouth after drinking coffee all night. He stood and groaned as his entire body ached.
David Stammers hadn’t returned, which meant he’d decided not to make use of the gift Karol had given him. Maybe that was a good thing, or maybe not; either way Karol was going to stick by the decision he’d made yesterday not to give a shit anymore. He’d done the right thing and reached out to the trusted journalist, and now he’d do his best to live a reasonably quiet life, safe and free of adventures.
On his way out of the bathroom, he noticed a note had been slipped under the door. It read:
Thank you so fucking much, Polak, for dumping this on me. My article, assuming they don’t rub me out first, will start like this: “We thought September 11, 2001, was the symbolic end of the twentieth century. We thought the collapse of the twin towers marked the start of a new era. An era of war between civilizations and of supranational revolutions, new tensions, new conflicts, and new ways of resolving them. We were wrong. The twentieth century ends today, on the day that the old century’s greatest secret comes to light.” Fuck you, and good luck. D.S.
Monday, February 17
I AM AN OPTIMIST
We thought September 11, 2001, was the symbolic end of the twentieth century. That the collapse of the twin towers marked the start of a new age. An era of war between civilizations and of supranational revolutions, new tensions, new conflicts, and new ways of resolving them. We were wrong.
The twentieth century ends today, on the day the old century’s greatest secret comes to light.
The material published across the American media today implies that all the history books will have to be rewritten.
As the world now knows, all the evidence points to the fact that Heinrich Himmler, the Nazi second in importance to Adolf Hitler alone, was really Clive Lebrecht from Oregon, an American spy.
On the pages that follow we present information sourced from documents dating from the 1930s and 1940s, recently discovered in Poland. Here I shall merely address two questions that every world citizen with access to global news is asking.
Question One: Is it really possible?
The revelations are as shocking as they are reliable. After the First World War the United States had every reason to fear a new conflict in Europe. Germany humiliated, several new countries (including Poland) fighting ruthlessly for their place, the threat of Communist revolution. Following events in Europe was like watching a thriller—trouble was bound to erupt soon, the only questions were when and why. And would we be caught up in it again? And if so, would that be to our advantage? From this perspective the “Bad Seeds” operation launched by the Wilson administration was entirely logical and well justified. It was probably the world’s best intelligence operation ever, the scale and long-term nature of which cannot fail to impress in times when no government would contemplate an enterprise unlikely to produce visible results in the current term of office. Yet from the very start Operation Bad Seeds was planned to last for decades.
Isn’t it a brilliant idea? To recruit immigrants or their offspring and place several dozen young agents, the so-called Seeds, as political activists in the major European countries, then help them to rise up the power structures to a point where they had access to the best sources of information and the opportunity to shape the policies of the relevant country. The do
cuments reveal that the Seeds were assisted by a special team of analysts provided with wide-ranging intelligence information, giving them access to extraordinary facts—thanks to which their European superiors must have regarded them as geniuses, insightful, effective, infinitely knowledgeable on international relations and other countries’ plans.
And so the fact that the Americans launched this operation seems to me entirely possible, not to say necessary.
I believe it really did happen.
With one reservation. The key, most-shocking sentence in one of the reports received from Clive Lebrecht reads as follows: “I had to believe I was doing this for my homeland. Otherwise I’d have gone insane.”
Horrifying. Cynical. Inhuman. But logical.
I’d very much like to believe that Clive Lebrecht was only fulfilling Washington’s orders up to a certain point. But then ceased to be an American agent and went over to the other side—his fanatical loyalty to the Nazis stopped being an intelligence game and became genuine. This is supported by the fact that the last of these documents are from 1941, before the United States declared war, and long before the Wannsee Conference of January 1942. Besides, the analysts and decision-makers for Operation Bad Seeds were most active during the 1930s, when their aim was to raise the nationalist and xenophobic mood in Europe.
The Wannsee Conference was where the German authorities planned the details of the Final Solution. Although Himmler was not present, it was convened on his orders. To the question whether Clive Lebrecht was still fulfilling American orders at this time, my answer is a firm no. By then Clive Lebrecht no longer existed—he was dead and buried deep within Himmler’s twisted psyche.
Question Two: What does this mean?
What is the significance of the fact that Heinrich Himmler, the main Nazi ideologue and architect of the Holocaust, was up to a certain point an American spy?
I have no idea.
I don’t believe in the kind of justice that says an entire nation must carry the can for the criminal actions of a few individuals several decades later. But the current US administration will surely have to decide on some symbolic compensation.
Now the commentators worldwide are loudly telling us it’s the end of the world as we know it—the US has been compromised and has lost its moral mandate to act indefinitely as sheriff for the Western world, so let’s rewrite the history books.
Maybe so, maybe not. Only in future decades will we be able to judge what we’re really witnessing today. And perhaps it’ll be a sad story.
But I am an optimist.
Because I do not believe in the power of nations and civilizations that arises out of despotism, waving guns around and sweeping secrets under the rug in the name of some fictional higher order. I believe in doing the right thing, in taking action with your head held high; I believe in being proud of the great things only when you’re also ashamed of the petty things.
This material has been revealed by the free media of a free nation. Not by Chinese state TV or Russia Today, not by a politically prejudiced cable channel. It’s American journalists who have recognized that even if they stir up confusion, in the final count the truth is better for our homeland than lies.
Because the truth is always best.
Karol’s farm at Mszczonów
Two weeks later
A month and a half had passed since the events at Kalatówki, but Zofia had not yet fully recovered. A short time ago they’d let her leave the hospital, but only because Karol had essentially transformed his farmhouse into a small-scale rehabilitation center. And she couldn’t wait to move from the hospital bed in the living room to the bedroom with its view of the fields.
Nor could she wait until she’d be able to do more than just sleep, read, or watch movies in bed. The doctor had told her she needed to wait at least eight weeks following her heart surgery before she could have intercourse again.
So as she watched Karol buzzing around, she counted the days to the end of those eight weeks as if waiting to be let out of jail. This celibacy both irritated and excited her, so out of boredom she fantasized a lot, and by now Karol only had to sit down beside her to read her the newspaper for her to get hot. Oh well, thirteen days to go.
Though Karol wasn’t there just now; he’d gone to Warsaw for yet another meeting with regard to the construction of the “Korwinarium,” as the new pavilion at the National Museum was to be called, specially erected to exhibit Count Korwin-Milewski’s collection.
Beside her lay a copy of yesterday’s New York Times with David Stammers’s article about the Bad Seeds, with the historic headline “The Twentieth Century Ends Today.” For Zofia, the article didn’t represent the symbolic end of the twentieth century. Firstly, she wasn’t too concerned about symbolic beginnings and endings. Secondly, she found the world’s outrage laughable. She believed the history of mankind was a history of wars, evil deeds, cynicism, and cruelty. Except that the victors presented their crimes as heroism, necessary change, and the struggle for a better future. After a short time, the victors changed, history changed, and so on, for thousands of years. What a bore.
She felt immense relief that after the publication of the article they were no longer the only people aware of what was ridiculously being called the “greatest secret of the twentieth century.”
She reached for the newspaper. Not to read about the adventures of Clive Lebrecht, to which a separate, sixteen-page supplement had been devoted, but to reread a short article in the culture section:
LOCOMOTIVE NUMBER 23 IS MISSING
Evidently, the world of art cannot live without mysteries; as each one is solved, several new ones appear. This time, the grounds for speculation have been provided by close analysis of the German documents found along with the collection of paintings that was recently discovered in the Polish mountains. These include a detailed inventory, with descriptions of the paintings, giving the names of the artists who painted them and the dates of their creation. Featuring as item number twenty-three on the list is Arrival of a Locomotive at a Station at Night by Claude Monet, oil on canvas, forty by thirty inches, 1896. Curiously, that same year in Paris the Lumière brothers screened their famous one-minute movie, Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station. Based on the year it was painted and the title of the work, we might assume that the great artist was picking up the gauntlet thrown down by the filmmakers, as if wanting to prove that he could achieve a better effect with his brush and paints than the French siblings had produced with moving pictures.
“I had shivers down my spine when I read this description,” says French art market expert Nadège Agullo. “Monet and the Impressionists have always been associated with light, sunshine, and color. A painting by the greatest Impressionist of all showing a locomotive gliding through the night, battling its way through blackness . . . that must be incredible. Without a doubt it would have been the pride of Count Milewski’s collection, or of any collection, with the Musée d’Orsay at the head of the line.”
It would have been, if it were here. Meanwhile, this painting was absent from the collection hidden in the Tatras. And once again, the questions mount. Perhaps it was not with the collection at the time when it was concealed in 1945? Or perhaps it has been stolen since the discovery of the Tatra treasure? The National Museum in Warsaw is silent on the matter, though according to Polish sources, an inquiry is already underway.
For now it appears that following the recovery of Raphael’s Portrait of a Young Man, the title of the World’s Most Wanted Painting will not be unclaimed for long. The smiling young man has been replaced by a dark, puffing locomotive.
Zofia put the newspaper down. And once again wondered why Karol hadn’t shown her this article. And also why he’d never mentioned it before. He must have known about it. And that she would be extremely interested.
Curious. Very curious.
Warsaw
Nineteen months later
There were only a few minutes left until the museum opened, an
d Lisa knew that soon she’d be surrounded by a crowd of tourists who’d been meekly standing in line for the past three hours, waiting for the chance to see Europe’s latest major tourist attraction. It didn’t bother her—on the contrary, she wanted to feel the presence of the crowd, hear their oohs and ahs, see the delight in the eyes of people who couldn’t tell the difference between a Giotto and a Pollock. She wanted to fool herself for a while that just brief contact with a masterpiece makes people into finer human beings who don’t start wondering half an hour later if it’s possible to get decent food in this weird city, get stoned, and get laid.
But for now she was alone. By some superhuman effort, Karol had managed to arrange for her to spend fifteen minutes alone in here, the most closely guarded place in Poland, supposedly better fortified and secured than the strong room at the National Bank of Poland. It occurred to Lisa that a message of this kind did not reflect well on the Polish central bank, and—she smiled, and winked at one of the security cameras—some might see it as a challenge.
Count Milewski’s pavilion, also known as the Korwinarium, was built in a park at the back of the National Museum in Warsaw, as a faithful copy of the exhibition hall at the mansion on Sveta Katarina Island—the room that for decades the Croatians had been calling a theater, which she and Anatol had entered through the mirrored double door coated in a patina of time. She remembered that door perfectly, the sharp Mediterranean sunlight, and the Adriatic Sea glittering outside the windows; the recesses decorated with cartouches and initials, the podium mysteriously marked “TLM”; she and Anatol as excited as children engrossed in an adventure novel, discovering the names of each artist in turn; the eccentric Croatian writer staring at them as if they were crazy and performing a dance with his child that had them clicking their heels in midair; the intense smell of the old building, of dust, salt, sea, and wind. She also remembered how she’d ached all over after their crazy night, after the sex amid pots clanging in the enormous kitchen, after—as she knew now—the best night of her life.
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