by By Jon Land
“Not yet.”
“Why?”
“Something strange is going on here, Inspector, and I don’t understand what it is. Even if it doesn’t include Israel directly, anything involving remnants of the Saddam regime is cause for great concern in our world.” Vordi looked closer at Ben. “But, under the circumstances, it’s an even greater concern in yours.”
“Mine?”
“Your current employer, Inspector. The United Nations. I don’t have to tell you there is no love lost between my country and that organization. Finding evidence of U.N. complicity in the murder of Israeli nationals, never mind one as well known as Sammy Barr, would be a political coup.”
“Definitely good for someone’s career.”
“As would bringing those responsible for the Bureij massacre to justice. That is what you came to Israel for, isn’t it?” Vordi challenged, twisting Ben’s words back at him.
“You want me to find who’s behind these Iraqis.”
“I believe it would be in both our best interests. I’m prepared to contact your friend General Arguayo. Tell him of your tragic passing at the hands of men impersonating U.N. officials who perished in the attack. That should provide you a few days of safe going.”
“I’ll need to get into the West Bank,” Ben said, thinking fast.
“That can be arranged.”
“Quickly.”
“Just say the word, Inspector.”
* * * *
Chapter 52
T
he city of Berlin, Danielle knew, was half the size of New York. Three and a half million people belonging to nearly two hundred nationalities work and live there, many in the modern housing projects that have sprung up everywhere since the city’s reunification. The city spreads out in seemingly haphazard fashion in every direction, crisscrossed by wide boulevards and elevated rail lines of arguably the world’s most advanced public transportation system.
She had only visited Berlin twice before, but the memories were etched on her brain. On both occasions the city had seemed so much a dichotomy to her: compellingly up-to-date with the elegant spires of recently constructed corporate towers rising into the sky, and yet mired stubbornly in the past. The reminders of that past were everywhere, interspersed with the glimmering steel and glass.
Danielle had made it a point on her prior visits to stop by the plaque near Zoo Station that listed the names of all the concentration camps, including Buchenwald. There were other sights she had taken in as well, but somehow she had missed the Jewish Museum on both occasions.
The museum was located on Lindenstrasse in what used to be called the eastern sector, and contained the most complete history of Germany’s Jewish community anywhere. Originally the museum was housed in a reconstructed eighteenth-century courthouse. But over the years a steadily rising inventory, coupled with ever-increasing attendance, led to the addition of more exhibit areas in a new building accessible to the old one by an underground tunnel that finished at the Holocaust Tower.
Danielle had figured her visit to the Jewish Museum, to meet its curator Klaus Hauptman, would have to wait until the following morning. After all, even under the best of circumstances, her flight into Berlin wasn’t scheduled to land until nine o’clock that night. She had arranged for a hotel room within walking distance of the museum but, upon arriving, noticed lights burning in a pair of windows in the fourth floor wing housing the building’s offices.
Acting on a whim, Danielle had the driver drop her off. The main entrance contained an after-hours call bell and she rang it, gazing up at the lit windows above for a trace of movement.
“You’re late,” a voice said in German through a tiny speaker. “I’m in my office.”
Danielle heard a buzz, then the sound of the main entrance to the museum clicking electronically open. She slid through the door and proceeded straight for the elevator, touching 4 as soon as she was inside the compartment. The elevator whisked her upward and seconds later the doors opened again on the fourth floor.
The suite of offices where she had noticed lights burning was located a few doors down on the right. Danielle walked toward it and peered inside. The office suite was actually one large room, crammed with tables and shelves, all of them full to bursting with boxes and files. The shelves looked so overstuffed that several seemed on the verge of toppling and many sagged in the middle from bearing too much weight for too long. Against the near wall, a large wooden desk was all but buried beneath an avalanche of paper. The office smelled of must, linseed oil, and something else, something not easily identifiable but that reminded Danielle of the scent of sodden newsprint.
A small roundish man with his sleeves rolled up past his elbows to reveal plump forearms stood on a step stool sorting through the contents of a shelf crammed with notebooks.
“Herr Hauptman?” Danielle said finally.
The roundish man twirled on the step stool fast enough to ruffle the stiff hairs of an ill-fitting toupee. “Who are you? What are you doing here?” he asked in German.
“You buzzed me in.”
“I buzzed in a FedEx man with a promised delivery that’s already hours late,” Hauptman responded, switching easily to English.
“I doubt whatever you were expecting is anywhere near as interesting as what I’ve brought with me,” Danielle said, and held Walter Henley’s lockbox up for Hauptman to see.
“What is it you’ve got there?”
“It’s what’s inside you’ll find interesting. I believe you were expecting a visit from an American named Walter Henley. I’ve come in his place.”
Hauptman’s eyes widened as he gazed at the lockbox again, climbing awkwardly down from the step stool.
“And just who are you?”
“Inspector Danielle Barnea. Former commander of Israel’s National Police, currently with the United Nations Safety and Security Service.”
Hauptman folded the stool up and leaned it against the nearest shelf. “Barnea. The name is familiar. . . .”
“My father was on the Israeli consulting committee chartered prior to the Jewish Museum’s founding.”
“And how do you know Walter Henley?” Hauptman asked suspiciously, his eyes darting back and forth from the lockbox to Danielle’s face. “Why could he not come himself?”
“He’s dead, Herr Hauptman, killed for what’s inside this box.”
The breath seemed to catch in Hauptman’s throat, but his gaze quickly regained its suspicious air. “Men are seldom killed over historical artifacts, Inspector.”
“But this particular artifact is different, isn’t it?”
“That’s what Henley was trying to find out, as I recall, when we talked two months ago.”
“He told me,” Danielle said, calculating in her mind. It was two months back that Walter Henley’s son Matthew had completed his translation of the last prophecy.
“Henley was seeking confirmation that the manuscript in the box was authentic,” Hauptman explained. “Then I didn’t hear from him again until three weeks ago, I think.”
Just before Henley’s untimely visit to the ATM machine, Danielle surmised. “Then he shared with you what he had found.”
Hauptman stood there stiffly, his toupee shining in the naked spray of light. “He shared with me what he believed he had found. But plenty of professional collectors have been fooled over the years by clever Nostradamus forgeries, never mind amateurs.”
“The circumstances of the box’s recovery didn’t intrigue you?”
“Of course they did. But taken on their own, they prove nothing. A firsthand inspection of the document in question is the only way to determine authenticity, Inspector.”
Danielle proceeded further into the room and laid the lockbox down on a narrow ribbon of available table space. “In that case, Herr Hauptman,” she said, lifting the box open, “why don’t you take a look and tell me what you think?”
* * * *
Chapter 53
T
he magnifying glass began trembling in Hauptman’s hand before he’d read less than three pages of the manuscript recovered at Buchenwald sixty years before. But his eyes remained transfixed, almost unblinking for the next half hour as he paged through the manuscript. Finally, he leaned back and gazed at Danielle with a glazed expression.
“It’s genuine, isn’t it?” she asked.
Hauptman shrugged. “It would take days, even weeks to be sure. I’d have to analyze the paper, the handwriting ...”
“It is genuine, isn’t it?”
“Yes, I believe it is,” Hauptman said reluctantly. “Genuine and yet, well. . .”
“What?”
“How much do you know about Nostradamus, Inspector?”
“Other than what he wrote in these quatrains and that he claimed to be able to see the future, not very much.”
“I was skeptical too once.”
“That’s the same thing Henley said.”
“He must have realized the same thing I did, that too many of Nostradamus’s prophecies ring true to be coincidence or random strokes of fortune. His use of the word ‘Hister,’ for example, ‘who by his speech will seduce a great multitude’ and ‘will launch thunderbolts—so many and in such an array near, and far, then deep into the West.’ Or ‘Mabus,’ who is clearly Saddam Hussein or Osama bin Laden.”
“Which one?”
“Either, maybe both. That’s the point. Nostradamus’s visions in the volumes of predictions that encompass his collection called The Centuries are seldom clear or precise. Instead they’re vague, often obtuse. Complicating matters further was the fact that in his time the v and the u were interchangeable and the f was read as an s. That’s why I find this manuscript so fascinating,” Hauptman continued, running a finger down the top page almost reverently. “It may be genuine but it’s markedly different from Nostradamus’s other works.”
“How?”
“For one thing, the lines of the quatrains are longer, as if Nostradamus’s vision of the future sharpened during his final days on earth. For another, these quatrains are much more specific with regard to dates and places. For instance, I notice several of this lost manuscript’s predictions mention Hitler by his actual name.”
“And yet you’re still convinced the manuscript is genuine.”
“I didn’t say I was convinced. I’m speaking of indications and instinct. For every Nostradamus expert, there’s a different theory of the secret to unlock his code. Anagrams, reverse image word play, time patterns, synecdoches—either individually or in groups, all these have played a role at one time or another. Which is correct? All, maybe none, most likely a combination. It’s a matter of interpretation. For instance, the fifth quatrain in the second book of Centuries includes the phrase ‘When weapons and plans are enclosed in a fish.’ This could be interpreted as ‘When Mars and Mercury are in conjunction with Pisces’ to set up a time sequence.”
Hauptman gazed back at the manuscript in fascination. “But the prophecies in this lost manuscript seem to be much clearer in meaning, as if Nostradamus no longer felt the need to disguise or cloud what he saw. I’ve never seen anything like them before, even in the numerous fakes that have crossed my desk over the years.”
“And how many years is that, Herr Hauptman?”
The curator held his gaze somewhere between the manuscript and Danielle. “Almost as long as I can remember. Because of my father, Inspector. You see, my father was the man responsible for finding this lost Nostradamus manuscript in the first place.”
Danielle recalled Henley’s tale of agents for Hitler and the Third Reich scouring the globe in search of supernatural and mystical artifacts. A large portion of what they found had ultimately ended up buried in a trench at Buchenwald. Clearly, Hauptman’s father had been one of these men.
“Do not mistake what I am saying for pride,” the curator continued. “I bear no esteem for what my father did or the manner, I learned later, in which he did it. I was born just before the war, about the time he embarked on his travels.” Hauptman looked away from the manuscript cradled before him, seeming to forget it for the first time. “I have very little memory of him. He died when I was barely a toddler.”
“Then how did you—”
“Learn of what he found on his travels? From my mother years later, at the same time she finally confessed his true fate to me.” Hauptman stopped and stared into the thickly scented air before him. “She’d always told me he died heroically at the front. That’s what everyone thought.”
“Go on,” Danielle prodded.
“My father was executed.”
“For failing to complete his mission satisfactorily?” Danielle asked, recalling the mass of documents and findings no one had ever shared with Hitler.
“No, Inspector: for completing it too well. Henley must have told you that much, at least alluded to it.”
“He told me the original assumption was that the documents had been buried in Buchenwald for safekeeping. Only later did they realize their placement likely indicated they’d actually been hidden there before the war even started, because people like your father had found something they didn’t want Hitler to see.”
“Precisely,” Hauptman acknowledged. “Plenty of the materials men like my father gathered for Hitler were ultimately delivered to an information ministry overseen by Goebbels that was directly responsible for following them up. But the leads that hadn’t panned out or, worse, were accompanied by news Hitler wouldn’t want to hear, were hidden away.”
“Like a series of prophecies foretelling his eventual fall,” Danielle added.
Hauptman looked down at the ancient pages, then back up at her. “Even a brief inspection of Nostradamus’s lost manuscript revealed that much, which made my father a threat since he may well have known the ultimate fate of the Reich.” Hauptman studied Danielle’s expression. “You think me a fool, Inspector? Even after you personally witnessed this manuscript cost another man his life, you don’t believe?”
“It’s not just Henley, Herr Hauptman. Someone is killing off the surviving members of his unit that uncovered the lockbox sixty years ago.”
Hauptman’s eyes widened in surprise. “And that wasn’t enough to convince you?”
“It convinces me that someone is planning a strike that this manuscript seems to foretell.”
“ ‘Seems,’ Inspector?”
“The final line of the manuscript’s last prophecy is missing. Henley wasn’t looking for authentication. He was hoping you might have some knowledge as to what the missing line said.”
Hauptman turned back to the table and carefully flipped the pages of the manuscript to the final page.
“ ‘In an age of two’s four, in a land of many,’” Danielle recited from memory, “ ‘an army rises from midland afar on a day of equal light and dark. Beneath the flames of the bringer of fire, a darkness will reign eternal...’”
“For someone who doesn’t believe, you seem to have mastered a difficult translation,” the curator said, still reading the original prophecy himself.
“Thanks only to the linguistics software created by Henley’s son, Herr Hauptman. He was killed too.”
Hauptman shook his head, frowning in disbelief. “All this for . . .”
“For what? A prophecy that can’t possibly be real? Now who sounds like the skeptic?”
“You believe all these people died for nothing, Inspector?”
“I believe they were murdered because the group behind this panicked. Became terrified their plot was about to be revealed.”
Hauptman nodded smugly. “But thanks to the missing line you don’t know the substance of this plot, so you came to me.”
“I’m after the only remaining clue, yes. I don’t care whether I get it from Nostradamus, the Delphic Oracle, gypsies, or you, Herr Hauptman.”
Hauptman rose and lumbered stiff-shouldered back toward the shelves that carried the sum total of his life’s work. “I assure you, Inspector, Nostradamus
belongs in a category all his own. Look around you. This entire room is filled with historical mysteries that defy logic and reason. Nostradamus is no different.”
“Except he claimed to be able to see the future.”
“And did his best to discourage the exploitation of his prophecies by casting them in confusing, contradictory, and even coded language. But it wasn’t just prophecies. While in Italy, Nostradamus once walked toward a group of Franciscan monks, including one named Brother Felice Peretti. As he drew even with Peretti, he bowed and knelt to him. The friars, aware that Peretti had been born a peasant, were puzzled by such reverence and asked Nostradamus to explain, to which he replied, ‘I must yield myself and bend a knee before his Holiness.’ The friars walked off laughing, but forty years later Brother Peretti became Pope Sixtus V.”