The Nuremberg Puzzle
by
Laurence O’Bryan
“Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you -
Ye are many - they are few.”
Percy Bysshe Shelley
The Masque of Anarchy, 1819
Copyright © 2016 Laurence O”Bryan
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher. For permission requests, write to the publisher at the address below.
Ardua Publishing
5 Dame Lane,
Dublin 2,
Ireland
http://arduapublishing.com
Ordering Information: Contact the publisher.
First Ebook Edition, 2016.
This novel is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
1
Prickling moved up Doctor Brandt’s nostrils. He’d been right. It had worked perfectly.
The Plexiglas window was half an inch thick. No sound could be heard from the clean room beyond the glass. There wouldn’t be much noise, anyway. The ten-year-old boy lying on the stainless steel gurney was barely breathing, and the blood oozing from his orifices would create only the faintest dripping noise as it fell on the powder-blue floor tiles.
The boy had pulled at the leather straps holding him down when the doctor entered the room. As he’d stared, owl-eyed, at doctor Brandt he’d whispered the only word in English he seemed to know – father – before the doctor gave him the injection.
Doctor Brandt had whispered in the boy’s ear. He wouldn’t have understood the words, but he’d have understood the bed side tone.
Orphans were easy to fool, and there were so many these days. You could take your pick.
The Russian boy in the next experiment room was sleeping peacefully, his skin pearly white against the green sheet, his blond hair draped over his forehead. The contrast with the boy in the other room was striking. The Syrian boy’s hair was midnight black. Blood matting into it gave it a fiery sheen.
He checked his watch again. It was well over three hours since the boys had been injected. The results were indisputable. Europe’s future was assured.
He walked to the end of the concrete passageway, pressed the switches to pump the air from both experiment rooms. Then he flipped the switches to turn the lights out behind him.
He closed the steel door firmly. There would be no squeamishness.
“Dritten mal glück,” he whispered, to himself. Third time lucky.
He glanced again at his watch. The sweeping silver second hand crawled across the black face. It would take the pumps all of sixty seconds to extract the oxygen from the rooms. Death would come within another five minutes, as the boys’ lungs imploded.
He walked to the glass door that separated the test facility from the production area. There was a lot of work to do. Frau Sheer had requested industrial quantities of the pathogen as soon as the results were in. Targeting genetically modified organisms to specific gene-based subgroups was the cutting edge of 21st century cellular level medicine. But he’d achieved it. From this day on Europe could be inoculated against the flood of refugees infesting every city and town and village with ox stubborn, violent stupidity.
Mother nature, with his gentle nudging, would do the clean-up work. And this time the solution would be final.
2
Sean Ryan read the headline on his news app - Beer Hall Terrorist Caught. It was a relief that the madman who’d shot up a beer hall in Munich a week before had been arrested, but the image he’d seen of body bags being lined up, would not be easily forgotten.
German patience was being tested, again. The bomb at the train station in Hamburg earlier that month, would have been enough to have some countries threatening retaliation on a grand scale.
He put his scuffed black leather bag on the tightly tucked-in orange bedspread. There was a musty smell in the room, as if it had been unused for a long time. He pushed open the window onto Augustiner Strasse, looked down at the passing cars and pedestrians and took a breath of cool spring air. Had he made a mistake in his choice of hotel? He’d picked it because it was within easy walking distance of the following day’s conference.
No, he wasn’t going to judge it on first impressions. He was going to relax. No funny smell or orange headboard or headline about the turmoil in Germany was going to stop him.
It was Friday, March 29th, the end of another busy week. The taxi from the airport had brought him into Nuremberg city centre quicker than he’d expected. That gave him more time to enjoy the city.
He unpacked, went into the bathroom. The shower head offered a multitude of settings. As he experimented with it, the water sluicing over his body, he heard his mobile ring.
The call had gone to voicemail by the time he got to it. He played back the message as he dried himself. The voice belonged to Dr Beresford-Ellis, his boss at the Institute of Applied Research in Oxford.
“Sean, when you get this, text me immediately. I need to know if you’ll be at the management meeting Tuesday afternoon. As you well know, we’ll be deciding on whether to take the investment we all discussed last month. Your presence would be beneficial, even if you don’t agree with everything that we’re planning.”
Sean sat on the bed, naked. He sent a response. I’LL BE THERE. Dr Beresford-Ellis’ plan for the institute was the most stupid thing he’d heard about in a long time. He was probably hoping Sean’s weekend away meant he wouldn’t be able to attend the meeting, but there was no way he was going to miss it.
The meeting could be his best chance to shoot the whole stinking plan down. If no one stood up to the idiot, everything the Institute had achieved would be lost within a few months. Even if he had to walk back from Nuremberg on his hands, he’d be there.
He looked at the hotel restaurant menu on a laminated card on his bedside table. He read the first few items under each heading then put it down.
The hotel claimed the restaurant was one of the best in the city, but he wanted to have a look around the old town, the Altstadt. The famous Nuremberg Christkindlesmarkt was held in the market square in front of the Frauenkirche, the Church of Our Lady, infamous as the place where Hitler held his most important early rallies. Sean couldn’t resist seeing what the church and square were like, if there were still echoes of the Nazi era. He dressed quickly.
As he walked past busy shops and restaurants, he wondered how it had happened that Nuremberg became the city where millions of Germans had committed their lives to a cult that had drenched most of Europe in blood in the previous century.
At the far end of the market square there were a few stalls open under canvas and plastic canopies. As he walked across to them, the chink of glasses and the buzz of conversations drifted from restaurants at the edge of the square.
He shivered under an arctic breeze that blew across the cobblestones, then turned to walk back, heading to an Italian restaurant he’d seen. As he did, a shout rang out from a lane to his right. The lane was blocked at its far end by a tall steel-mesh barrier.
He stopped and stared down the lane. Half way down it, three shaven-headed neo-Nazi types were pushing a young couple around, jabbing at them with their hands. Then the boy was grabbed in a headlock by one of the skinheads. Sean’s chest and stomach tightened.
He walked fast towards the fight.
One of the attackers was six foot of bulging muscles. The other two were shorter, but stocky. Their victims were a small Arab-looking boy in glasses and a
young blonde woman.
He entered the lane and his thoughts speeded up. Was he being stupid? Maybe he should just report what was happening, leave it to the police?
The boy fell to the ground. The girl screamed.
The smaller of the boy’s tormentors launched a kick towards the boy’s head. It connected with a crunch that echoed off the high brick walls around them. The other two attackers were circling now, laughing and taunting.
Sean had no choice.
He approached the tormentors, his pulse beating hard in his neck. They had their backs to him. He did the only thing he could think of.
“Stop!” he shouted. How they’d react to someone shouting at them in English, with an American accent, he didn’t care.
The larger of the attackers turned, a knife suddenly visible in his hand. His grin leered fearlessly. Sean charged straight into his shoulder, elbow first, expecting to knock the thug over. The grins on the faces of the other two thugs disappeared as he connected.
3
The fluorescent light in the records examination room blinked. The Military Archives centre in Freiburg, fifty-four miles south of Strasbourg, a bone-white office building, was like a dozen others in that corner of Germany, nestled between France and Switzerland.
The tall African woman continued fingering through the files in the long box in front of her. She wore the typical office worker uniform of black skirt and matching jacket, and her hair was tied up in a tight bun. There were over two thousand yellowing Nazi party membership cards in the box. She’d looked through most of them. They were stored alphabetically, not one out of place. So far, she had found only two with the word Priester, priest in German, on them, where occupation was mentioned.
The door on the far side of the room opened and a small, rotund man with breath that smelled of coffee and pastries entered.
“I am sorry,” he said, stepping close to her. “There appears to be some problem with your letter of introduction.” A frown creased his forehead.
The African woman looked up at him, smiled. She leaned forward, giving him another glimpse down her shirt to the light brown globes of her breasts.
“A problem?” Her German was good, but her accent was clearly foreign. She put her hand on her thigh, felt for where the thin blade was strapped to the inside of her leg.
He wouldn’t be able to see her moving the hem upwards, so that she could slip the knife out.
“My colleague is having difficulty contacting the director of the archive centre, who signed your letter. He is not answering his phone.”
She smiled, shook her head, as if it baffled her too. A memory of how she’d left him, naked and hanging from the bannisters of his house with a large orange in his mouth, made her smile. The morphine she’d given him wouldn’t wear off for another few hours. It would take him that long again to free himself from her knots. He wouldn’t be answering his phone any time soon either. And as he lived alone, interruptions to his enjoyment of the game he’d been a willing participant in were unlikely. And if they did come, it was extremely unlikely he’d ever tell anyone how he’d ended up that way.
The official looked at the sheet of paper he was holding.
“Just a very small matter, Fraulein.”
She looked back down at the table. She only needed ten more minutes to look through the rest of these records. She glanced at the door. The corridor outside was quiet. No one had come down it in the hour she’d been there.
If something had gone wrong, her blade could go in between his ribs. She could lock the door behind her as soon as his heart stopped beating. That would give her enough time to get to the motorway south, the E35, and be half way to Basel before the alarm was sounded. He looked like the type who would squeal like a panicked piglet when it happened too, not even shout.
“There is no date on the director’s letter. I need a date for the records.” He licked his lips.
She smiled. “But he signed it for me yesterday.”
“Danke,” he said, as he exited the room.
Perhaps he would be back. Perhaps he had sensed something. She would have to finish quickly. She bent over the box again.
4
The older skinhead reacted with a snarl that a Rottweiler would have been proud of. He spun and lunged at Sean with his knife. The other two jeered.
“Auslander raus!” they shouted. From their mocking tone they clearly expected the confrontation to be one-sided and short.
Sean sucked in air, twisted away. He stepped back from another knife swing. Sweat popped on his forehead. His skin was tingling all over, as if he already felt the cut that was coming.
With another shout the older skinhead came straight at him, the knife swinging fast from side to side. Sean grabbed for the man’s wrist, gripped it, but it slipped away.
A jarring thud landed below Sean’s left ear. He blinked away the shock as pain exploded across his jaw.
The shouts around him, the playground taunts, grew dim. He stumbled back. A skinhead to the side launched a huge boot encrusted foot towards him. Before he went down Sean grabbed for it. It changed course. Its tip connected with his side.
Ignoring the pain, he swung around wildly, fists pumping fast. He connected. The contact sent a judder up his arm. The larger of the thugs groaned, stepped back. Sean followed. Hit him again, in the nose. Bone and cartilage crunched beneath his knuckles.
A whistle sounded. Just as suddenly as the fight had started, it was over. Backing away fast, the three skinheads disappeared through a gap in the mesh at the end of the lane.
He looked around. Two police officers in light brown uniforms with white peaked caps firmly on their heads were running towards them. Behind them was a shiny white police car with a green stripe, its blue light flashing fast.
His jaw ached and for a moment his knees wanted to give way. He leaned against the wall of the building beside him. The girl was cradling her boyfriend’s head. She turned to Sean.
“Danke, danke,” she said. She was crying, her voice trembling as sobs cut through.
The police came towards them with their batons up. One of them, in a whirl of action, pushed Sean up hard against the wall, the baton across his throat. The back of Sean’s head banged into the brick sending a shot of pain through his skull.
“Heh!” he shouted.
The girl was screaming at them in German. Someone else was too.
He twisted his head. An older woman was coming up the lane, a stout German woman, with short blond hair, tough looking. She was roaring at the police.
Seconds later the policeman let him go. Another police car had turned up. Its siren was blaring. The first officer shouted at him in German. Sean didn’t understand the words, but the message, for him not to go anywhere was clear from the man’s hand movements, pointing firmly down at the ground. The officer called the older woman over with gestures and began talking to her.
A half minute later, as Sean’s heaving chest began to calm, and the pain in his jaw was fading, a female officer appeared. She asked him some questions in English. As she spoke Sean checked himself for blood. He couldn’t see any. He put his hands up in front of him. The knuckles on his right hand were scratched and swollen. He bent his fingers. Thankfully nothing seemed broken.
Pointing at his hand, she said, “You must go to the hospital.”
Sean took a step to the right, looked at his reflection in a shop window. There was no blood anywhere. Not that he could see. He opened his jaw. It worked. He felt his arms and legs again, felt his side, twisted his body, slowly. Nothing broken. He’d have a headache, a few other aches, but he didn’t need a hospital.
“I’m okay,” he said. “Thanks for turning up. Your timing was perfect.”
He raised his hands. They were still shaking. He pressed them to his chest. His knuckles throbbed, but it seemed as if there would be no lasting injuries. He’d been lucky. He could have been killed. He took a deep breath, let it out slowly.
“It is better i
f you go to the hospital.”
The police woman spoke into her mobile phone, a clunky official-looking one. The blonde girl came up to Sean. Her boyfriend was clutching his side, and was on his feet behind her talking fast to a policeman, gesticulating as he spoke.
In the distance the wail of an ambulance grew louder.
“Danke, danke,” said the girl again. She smiled at Sean.
“Are either of you injured?” said Sean.
She put a hand on his arm, shook her head. The boy looked towards Sean.
“You saved us,” she said.
“No, I didn’t. The police did that. They saved us all.”
“No, no, you saved us. They would have killed us both.” Her eyes were brimming.
“A Syrian student died here last week,” she continued, in a rush.
Then she hugged him, tight, her breath hot in his ear for a few seconds before she stepped away.
The policewoman tapped Sean on the shoulder. She was asking more questions. The words echoed in his mind. It took a while for all the answers to come.
He gave her his name, showed his passport and the hotel room card. He turned around, to show her he had no obvious injuries.
She handed everything back to him. “You can go, sir, but our recommendation, even if you feel well, is that you visit a hospital,” she said in a blunt, no-nonsense tone. “We will find you if we need a statement.”
In the restaurant, half an hour later, he put his fork down after a few mouthfuls of spaghetti. It tasted rubbery. He couldn’t eat. He was about to text Isabel to tell her what had happened when he stopped himself. After everything that had gone on in the past few years, it was probably a good idea if he kept his little run-in with the skinheads quiet.
He examined his face in the mirror of the restaurant bathroom. There were scratches below his ear, but it could have been worse. The bruises wouldn’t be gone by Monday, but he could tell Isabel what happened then. In person. At least she wouldn’t be worrying about him all weekend. She had enough to worry about. As he exited the restaurant he noticed a sticker on a lamp post outside. It was circular, about six inches wide, with - Dritten Mal Glück – written in old Germanic style font written on it. Behind the text was a faded white skull. It was the sort of thing you’d find on the cover of a punk band’s latest website.
The Nuremberg Puzzle Page 1