by William Kerr
“Five’ll get you ten, that thing came from one of the concentration camps,” Matt said, his words full of disgust. “I’ll call Hannah. She should be able to tell me.”
Pulling a set of parallel rulers from the chart drawer beneath the console, Matt measured the ingot using the ruler’s marked edges.
“Five inches by…two and a half…by half an inch thick.” Putting the rulers to the side, he said, “Not very big, but a couple of crates of these things could throw one helluva party for whoever’s fingerprint that was, or it would’ve gone a long way toward resurrecting the Third Reich after the war.”
Park turned the bar over. “What’s this?”
Matt took the bar and held it up to the light. “Aw, Christ!”
“What?” Park demanded.
Matt lowered the bar for Park to see. Very lightly etched into one end of the bar was the ragged outline of…“You can barely see it, but it’s a tooth, a molar to be precise, and the words, ‘Erinnern der Juden.’ From what Hannah told me, this thing’s probably made from the gold in people’s mouths, people killed in the gas chambers. The Nazi death camps.”
A frown slowly crossed Park’s face. “And the words?”
“After the war, some of the survivors told of Jewish goldsmiths and jewelers forced to make ingots out of gold fillings and crowns. In this case, it looks like he carved the words, ‘Erinnern der Juden.’ He was telling the world, ‘Remember the Jews.’”
At the same time, in Sea Rover’s salon as the ship made its way toward the entrance to the St. Johns River and its berth at Alliance Industry’s Blount Island pier, Starla Shoemaker stood with arms akimbo, fists clenched in anger, legs spread wide apart. “Is this all?” The severely cut black pantsuit, the peaked collar of her blouse, the smear of dark red coloring on her lips and the demanding tone of her voice added to the impression she gave of a shrew.
Henry Shoemaker, Eric Bruder, and the Sea Rover’s captain appeared to have lost their collective voices as they stared in disbelief at the woman. Before them on the floor of the ship’s salon lay stacks of gold ingots as well as mounds of jewelry taken from ripped-open burlap bags.
“I asked, is this all?” Starla shouted. “Where are the documents?” Starla pounded on the table in front of her. “Answer me, damn it!”
Throwing up his hands, Bruder insisted, “This is everything we could find, Starla. Without plans to the submarine, we could search forever. I found what I’m sure is our grandfather’s body, still in uniform, but there was nothing else.”
Starla slammed both fists against the tabletop. “It’s there, damn it!”
“So what if it is, Starla?” Bruder argued. “Who gives a damn about the past? It’s now that counts. It’s the gold. It’s the jewelry. Dear old Uncle Franz, he’s gone, Starla. So are our mother and father. Get over it.”
Starla glared at her brother. “You’ve never cared, have you? Uncle Franz was the head of the family, the patriarch. His positions and service to Germany throughout the war saved the family, its name, and its wealth. We lost it all for what they did to him and the disgrace it brought to the family name.” Starla caught her breath before pointing an accusing finger at Bruder. “Our money, our influence. Everything lost because of them.”
She shook her head, the bitterness reflected in her face and eyes. “No, Eric, I cannot forget and I will not forgive. I’ve lived for the moment when I would see their faces and, yes, they will pay.”
Focusing on her husband, she said, “As always, you’ll keep the gold, I know that, but the last letter our grandfather sent his wife told of the document. It was to be used after the war. More powerful than any of this…” She waved her hand in the direction of the gold and jewelry. “…this stuff. We’ve got to find it, Henry. Have them go back tomorrow. Have them—”
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Shoemaker,” the ship’s captain interrupted, “but there’s a nor’easter coming in tomorrow morning. Ten-to-twelve-foot seas. I can’t risk the divers going down in that kind of weather.”
“Henry?” Starla wailed.
“We’ll do it, Starla,” Shoemaker answered. “You still haven’t told me exactly what’s in this document that you consider so important, but we’ll go just as soon as the weather clears. I’m sure Dr. Mason is as anxious as we are to clear everything off the sub before we tell the world we’ve found the thing.”
“And Berkeley and his friend, the Park man?” Starla demanded.
“Berkeley’s gone back to Charleston to bury or do whatever with his wife, and so far as I know, he’s still there. If he returns, Eric will make certain the detective keeps tabs on him, won’t you, Eric?”
“Yes, Henry, I’ll make contact first thing tomorrow morning.”
“I assure you, Mrs. Shoemaker,” the captain promised, “we’ll cover that submarine with a fine-toothed comb until every piece of paper that’s survived is in your hands.”
“You’d better, Captain,” Starla warned, “or Sea Rover will be the last command you’ll ever have with Alliance Industries if I have my way. As for you, Eric…”
“Whatever you want, Starla.”
“I don’t give a damn what they say, I’m tired of playing games just to satisfy Senator Jameson’s weaknesses and the Mason woman’s misdirected loyalties. I want Berkeley out of the way if he comes back to Jacksonville.”
“About time.” A sly grin spread across Eric’s face. “Anything else?”
“Yes!” Starla snapped. “I want those documents. According to our grandfather’s letter, they’re bound in a waterproof packet, and if they contain what I think they do…”
Shoemaker shook his head. “I’ve asked before and I’ll ask again. The document, what is it and who is they that you hate so much?”
“Quit asking, Henry,” Starla fired back. “For once, this is my secret. Mine and Eric’s. You’ll know when I decide it’s time for you to know.”
CHAPTER 39
Monday, 5 November 2001
For two days he’d been trying to reach her. Finally, someone picked up the phone. “Hannah? Hannah Richter?” Matt asked, the telephone mouthpiece pressed tightly against his lips. He realized his voice was louder than normal, as though Hannah couldn’t hear him in Koblenz, Germany, unless he shouted. “It’s Matt Berkeley in the U.S.”
Matt smiled as he heard her familiar voice. “Don’t shout, Matthew. We have good connection. This is Hannah.”
“I’m going to put you on speaker phone, Hannah, so the friend I told you about can hear. His name is Steve Park. If I lose you, I’ll call back.”
“Okay.”
Matt punched the button on the phone, then quickly turned up the volume on the speaker amplifier. “You hear me, Hannah?”
“Ja, again, not so loud, but I hear urgency in your voice. You have questions, no?”
“Ja, I mean yes, but, first, how are you doing?”
“I am a survivor,” she said matter-of-factly. “I will survive until my time comes to join Eduard. And you?”
“The people who killed Eddy, or at least the ones behind his death, killed my wife also.”
There was a moment of silence. With the bluntness in her voice suddenly softened, Hannah said, “I am sorry, Matthew. I know she meant much to you.” Again silence before adding, “But you did not call to tell me about your wife. Ask your questions.”
It was Park who spoke first. “Mrs. Richter, this is Steve Park. Matt and I were on the sub last night, the U-boat. Most of what we think was in there had already been removed, but we found a small gold ingot. A skull and crossbones was engraved on one side. It was superimposed over a swastika and what appears to be a fingerprint just below. Probably a thumbprint with the letters A and B beside it. From what Matt’s told me, we thought you might know what that means.”
Hannah sat very still, staring through the window of the small apartment on Neuendorfer Strasse at the late afternoon boat traffic on the Rhine. What she saw, however, were images from the past, pushing aside the cur
tain blocking her worst nightmares. Images of a young girl and her brother, Aleksander; of Josef Mengele and the colonel; of sweltering furnaces and steaming pots of molten gold; of ladles and iron molds; of three emaciated old men seated at the table with engraving punches and hammers.
As soon as the small bars of gold came from the cooling tubs and were still relatively soft, they were distributed evenly to the three men. How vividly she remembered the metallic taps of hammers against the flat end of the engraving punches. One quick, very precise tap, more like a sharp klaak against the flat end of the punch, then another klaak with the hammer against the second punch.
“What did they do, Uncle Pepi?” Hannah asked.
Mengele led her to the table. “You see?”
And she did see. The dreaded skull and cross bones over the center of a swastika and below that a fingerprint and the tiny letters A and B. “What are they for?”
“The death’s head insignia and swastika and the letters give the origin of the gold. When the bar is placed in the bank, the thumbprint identifies who may take it from the bank. Either that person or one with a copy of that same thumbprint may do so.”
“Whose thumbprint is it?” Aleksander asked.
The colonel held up his thumb and answered, “From here, my inquisitive ones.”
Hannah remembered her brother, Aleksander, questioning, “How would someone else be able to use your thumbprint? Would they cut off your thumb?”
The colonel laughed. “Oh, no. A wax impression has been made, and only one man has it—Reichsfuhrer-SS Himmler.” Hannah remembered the reverence in the colonel’s voice and the pride on his face at the mention of Himmler.
It was Matt’s voice, however, that brought her back to the present. “Still there, Hannah?”
“Ja, I am here. You will not let me forget, will you, Matthew?”
The voice that Matt heard over the speakerphone was soft-spoken, yet filled with the deep-felt bitterness he’d heard when she’d told him of her time in the concentration camp.
“I’m sorry, Hannah, but I have to know. I have to know everything I can if I’m going to stop the people that murdered your Eduard, my friend Eddy, and my wife.”
Matt heard Hannah sigh deeply before she continued. “The skull, crossbones, and swastika—Totenkopfverbände. Death’s Head Units. They ran the concentration camps. The letters A und B are the designation for Auschwitz Birkenau. The print, und ja, it is a thumbprint. It is that of Colonel Jürgen Krueger.”
“The man you told me about,” Matt said, “the colonel who traveled with you as far as Leipzig when you escaped from the Russians with Mengele. You said he was going on to Berlin and Hamburg, didn’t you?”
“That is the one.” There was a moment’s pause. “Colonel Jürgen Krueger, his thumbprint, the death’s head, the swastika—what you have on that piece of gold is surely the mark of the devil. It is cursed, and I will curse those responsible for the rest of my life.”
“Hannah, I have to ask. On the back of the ingot, someone scratched the outline of a tooth and the words, Erinnern der Juden. Remember the Jews. Any ideas?”
“The tooth would mean it was gold melted from fillings and crowns of those executed in the gas chambers. Those ingots were separate from the ones formed from jewelry, rings, bracelets, and such. There were several gold bars found with the tooth and those words etched on one side. The colonel had them melted and recast. There must have been some they missed.”
“Did they know who did it?” Park asked.
“He was one of three men, goldsmiths, I was told. I saw him the day Mengele showed my brother and me the process. Mengele said his name was Simon Geldstein.”
“Geldstein,” Matt repeated. “Translated literally, gold stone.”
“A fitting name, I suppose,” Hanna answered. “Colonel Krueger pulled him from the building, made him kneel in the dirt, and shot him in the back of the head.”
“You saw it?” Park asked in disbelief.
“My brother, he was there also. And that was the last time I see my brother. As for Colonel Jürgen Krueger, he was surely the devil’s own. I will—”
Matt cut in. “Hannah, you told me Krueger was to pick up some kind of papers in Berlin, papers that might help reestablish the Reich after the war.”
“That is so. Whether he did, I do not know.”
“Is there any way you can find out the contents of those papers? Anything in the German Archives there in Koblenz?”
“I…I don’t know. Eduard had many friends there and at the Archives in Berlin. If they would help…but so much is still kept secret.”
“Please try, Hannah. From a message my wife left before…it’s a long story, but the message indicated the people who murdered your Eddy and my Ashley, they know about some kind of document. A very important document they think is or was on that U-boat. There’s more to this than gold, and we’ve got to know.”
“I will try,” Hannah said. “I don’t want to get Eduard’s friends in trouble, but if the colonel was to be entrusted with this paper, it too must bear the mark of the devil, and we must not allow it to breathe life again.”
CHAPTER 40
Even after crossing the Acosta Bridge into downtown Jacksonville, the telephone call to Hannah that morning was still on Matt’s mind. That and one-way streets, the glare of auto lights and street lamps on rain-slick asphalt, hard-to-read street signs, and the back-and-forth swish of the Grand Cherokee’s windshield wipers against the light drizzle seemed to make everything just that much more difficult. Matt had been driving around the unfamiliar area for at least twenty minutes, looking for a parking space, before Park said, “Give it up, man. Half of Jacksonville must be down here tonight.”
“They should’ve stayed home on a night like this,” Matt grumbled. “Even the self-parking garages are full.”
“Probably a concert or something at the Times-Union. Finding a parking place, you might as well hang it up.”
They turned back onto Water Street and cruised slowly between their ultimate destination, the fifteen-story Omni Hotel, and the Times-Union Center for Performing Arts. For the first time, Matt noticed more closely the lighted marquee to his right on the front of the building: “Phantom of the Opera, Moran Theater.”
“Okay, you win,” Matt said with a sigh, “but you know what that means? Getting some flunky to park the car, then having to tip him to get it back. I hate that. Always have.”
Park laughed. “Either that or park a mile away and hoof it in the rain.”
“Shish!” Matt hissed through clenched teeth before slowing and turning left toward the short driveway leading to the Omni’s entrance and well-lighted porte corchere. Just as he turned, a low-slung, light-colored BMW convertible whipped in front of him, causing him to slam on the brakes, sending the Jeep in a sideways spin past the entrance. “Goddamn it!”
By the time Matt put the Jeep in reverse and backed to a point where he could turn toward the hotel, the convertible with a midnight-blue soft-top was still under the porte corchere, but the driver was gone. As one of three valet attendants was getting into the car, Park said, “Oh, no!”
“Oh, no, what?”
Park pointed at the BMW as it moved forward out of the light. “That car. The ice-blue BMW convertible. I haven’t seen it with the top up, but if it belongs to who I think it does, this little get-together you’re dragging me to is probably not going to be a real fun time.”
“Who is it?”
“Bruder, the guy from Tallahassee.”
A bell rang, just loud enough to be heard over the piped-in music, and the floor indicator lit up with the numeral 2 flashing as the elevator doors opened. “According to the floor plan in the lobby,” Matt said, “the Jacksonville Room oughta be to the right.”
Matt stepped out of the elevator with Park on his heels, both making a right turn before stopping, eyes searching for meeting room names. To their left, Pensacola Rooms A, B, and C.
To their right…
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“Bingo!” Park said. “Jacksonville Rooms A and B. Which do you think?”
“Let’s go with A,” Matt answered, turning the knob and opening the door onto a mixture of fifty to sixty well-dressed men and women. Many were gathered around a large, built-to-scale model of a wooden hulled, two-masted side-wheeler, rigging, and sails in place with a Confederate flag rigid at its mainmast.
A heavyset man with a beard and mustache held the group’s attention. “She is said to have been loaded with supplies from a British ship in the harbor of St. George, Bermuda. Painted the color of what the Confederates romantically called ‘Hatteras Fog’ and burning smokeless anthracite coal, she and others like her would make their way undetected into Southern ports on moonless nights or in fog.
“Unfortunately, the Port Royal, as we think she was called, never received word the port of Jacksonville had been sealed by Union forces in March, eigthteen sixty-two. Though successfully evading the seaward blockade by several Union gunboats, she was fatally wounded in the St. Johns River, just south of what we know as the I-Ninety-five or Fuller Warren Bridge.
“Now, if you’d like to refresh your drinks and taste the delicacies the hotel has prepared for us, we’ll take a few minutes before we unveil some of the artifacts brought up from the river, thanks to our generous benefactors from Antiquity Finders.”
Matt jerked his head in Park’s direction and in a low, but angry voice, said, “Damn it, Steve! Why didn’t you tell me this was AFI’s party?”
“Hey, man, don’t growl at me. Your buddy Dr. Mason never said.”
As the group broke up, their appetites carried them toward tables laden with trays of hors d’oeuvres, canapés, and cold drinks. It was then that Matt caught sight of Brandy Mason in an ankle-length, brightly colored caftan of interwoven purples, silver, and gold, the neckline an embroidered starburst design. “Brandy,” he called just loudly enough to get her attention. “Dr. Mason.”
Matt caught Brandy’s eye, and she nodded in Matt’s direction before excusing herself from the man called Bruder, state Senator Raleigh Jameson, and one of the most ravishingly beautiful women he had ever seen. In a gold and white pantsuit, the gold matching the color of her straight, shoulder-length hair, the woman looked like someone who had just stepped from the cover of Vanity Fair.