THE ISLAND OF THE DEAD
51
Who is Who?
‘I fear there is some dark ending to our quest,’ said he, ‘it cannot be long before we know it!’
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, ‘The Adventure of the Missing Three-Quarter’
Venice, 2012
I realised that we had come to be standing before the grave with the Leoncetophaline, the figure of the lion-headed man holding a key and entwined with two snakes. This was the grave that the old monk had been cleaning . . . the grave without a name, the grave Eva had told Rahn to find. I looked at the Writer of Letters.
‘So, Rahn did come here to Venice?’
‘This is your story, what do you think?
I considered it. ‘I say he never had the chance . . .’
‘Why not?’
‘Because on the train back to Paris he sat next to a man.’
‘Who?’
‘A man he recognised from the Schloss on Lake Malchow, a Russian who belonged to the order of Black Swans . . .’
‘Grigol Robakidze?’
‘Yes, the one who handed him the card with a phone number he was to ring if he was ever in need of a friend. Do you remember Rahn’s old girlfriend Etienne? She was also a member of the Black Swans. It had been her job to assess Rahn’s suitability for the order.’
‘Oh, yes! The Russian cigarettes, the sudden departure.’
‘At any rate, Robakidze told Rahn that within the Nazi organisation there was a kernel of men working against Hitler, the foremost of which was, ironically, the head of military intelligence, that man called Canaris. Robakidze also told Rahn that the only way forward now for Germany was to eliminate Hitler, and various groups were uniting around this cause. He then proposed to Rahn, that if he was inclined to join in this effort the Black Swans would allow him entry into their circle and provide him with protection. But before he could do so, he would have to prove himself by returning to Germany in order to carry out a mission for them. He warned Rahn that it would be risky, not only because he had failed in his mission to find the key, but also because some SS members had come forward to denounce him as a homosexual. If he agreed to return, the Russian advised him to immediately confess his crime to Himmler and to ask for his forgiveness before they seized him. Rahn laughed then, and told the Russian that he was mad; Himmler would send him to Buchenwald and that would be the end of him. What good would he be to the Black Swans then? The Russian reminded him of Canaris and his influence on Himmler.’
‘And is that what happened?’ the Writer of Letters asked. ‘Did he go back to Germany?’
‘Yes. In the end Rahn decided to take the risk but when he arrived in Berlin, he found that Weisthor had disappeared and he was now directly under the command of SS-Gruppenführer Wolff. After Rahn’s confession, Wolff sent him directly to Buchenwald for reserve duty to wear away his homosexuality – in other words, to toughen him up. In the meantime, at Buchenwald he saw new heights of atrocities and this steeled his desire to work for the Black Swans in any capacity.’
‘So what did he do?’
‘When he was allowed to return to Berlin,’ I said, ‘Rahn continued his duties while managing to help fifteen young Jews escape to Switzerland. He also gathered highly valuable information on Himmler and others in his circle for Canaris. When things began to get too hot, however, with more accusations from diverse quarters, this time about his genealogy and a possible Jewish heritage, he was advised to ask Himmler to approve his immediate dismissal from the SS.’
‘And?’ the Writer of Letters asked.
‘Himmler looked him in the eye and reminded him of Wewelsburg. He told him that a member of the Inner Circle could never resign. He had only two choices – an enforced death in a concentration camp, or suicide.’
‘Which one did he choose?’
‘He chose the latter . . .’
‘He committed suicide?’
I nodded, having read it in a translator’s note in that copy of Rahn’s book in the library. ‘It was March 1939,’ I continued. ‘He took a bus to Söll, a village in the Austrian Alps, and checked into a small hotel. Here he wrote two letters, one to La Dame and another to Deodat.’
‘La Dame?’ the Writer of Letters looked surprised.
‘Yes, they had been corresponding for some time . . . The next day he travelled deeper into the mountains by bus and alighted at a stop known as Der Steinerne Steg, where he took a path that led into the forest. After that, no one ever saw him alive again.’
‘So, the official line was that he was caught in a snowstorm?’ the Writer of Letters asked.
‘That’s right.’
‘But was he?’
The night hung heavy and it was cold; I could barely see the Writer of Letters smiling at me, anxious to hear the rest. ‘On the twenty-fifth of May 1939, in an edition of the SS Newspaper Das Schwarzes Korps, there appeared a notice which read:
During a blizzard in the mountains SS Obersturmführer Otto Rahn died tragically. We regret his death and we have lost a decent SS member and the creator of marvellous historic and scientific works.
‘It was signed by the head of personnel, SS-Gruppenführer Wolff,’ I said. ‘In the inner circles his suicide was viewed as a declaration of his faithfulness, even in death, to the SS.’ I felt like I needed a brandy.
‘Do you mean that Rahn became a member of the undead?’ the Writer of Letters asked.
‘The body is, to this day, interred at Worgl Söll. It was badly decomposed when it was found on the eleventh of May 1939. Rahn was reported to have died on the anniversary of the fall of Montsegur – the thirteenth of March. However, his parents were never allowed to identify the body.’
‘So what do you think . . . did he commit suicide or not?’ the Writer of Letters asked.
‘Personally, I don’t know.’
He nodded his head, pensive. ‘Do you know who this grave belongs to?’
I blinked. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know. ‘It can’t be Rahn’s.’
‘I’m not asking you about Rahn.’ He paused for a moment. ‘Cros is the one who is buried in this cemetery. If you recall, he wanted to be buried in secret and no one was to know where his grave was; there was to be no name, no date,’ the Writer of Letters said.
‘Because he was afraid they would snatch away his soul?’ I asked.
The Writer of Letters shook his head slowly. ‘No.’
‘Why the elaborate arrangements then, and all the secrecy?’
‘Cros had very good reasons for his concern and I think it’s time we take a closer look at him,’ the Writer of Letters said.
To my great relief he now took up the reigns of the story and began to illuminate it for me. ‘Cros was only a young man just out of the seminary when he was asked to investigate matters pertaining to the priest Saunière. The Bishop of Carcassonne had chosen him precisely because he was young and precisely because he belonged to no group and owed allegiance to no order. In the beginning, Cros had no idea about Le Serpent Rouge and had never heard of the Cathar treasure. He thought he was investigating corruption among a number of priests who were allegedly selling masses for the dead. He only realised what lay behind the investigation when Gélis approached him secretly, offering to sell him a parchment he had found in his church. Gélis told him he feared for his life and needed money to leave the country. At first Cros had refused but when Gélis told him the whole story, about what Saunière had found, he realised what the Bishop of Carcassonne was after, and that things were far more complicated than he realised. He bought the parchment from Gélis hoping to glean from it some information. But when Gélis was murdered soon after, Cros, now afraid, lay low, realising the danger he was in.
‘Cros waited patiently as one by one, the priests involved in the matter died, leaving only Grassaud, who Cros knew was a member of AGLA. In the meantime Cros quietly set about solving the cipher in the parchment and eventually his pertinacity won out. He managed to find one parchment a
fter another, in churches that were by now old and empty of priests. The last parchment pointed to the church at Bugarach, where the royal seal of AA was inscribed on its walls – the anchor and the snake. The treasure had been hidden right under their noses! With a word in the right ear he was made the priest of Bugarach, where he could look for the treasure unperturbed. Bugarach was the sixth church and he had now become the sixth priest, just as Deodat had figured out. When Cros finally found the treasure, he understood what they were all after – the key, the sign of Sorat. But he also discovered an unknown part to the treasure, a far more important part. He understood that he had to safeguard this part from the brotherhoods, even if it meant giving up the key.’
‘What do you mean “another part to the treasure”?’
‘There were three parts to the treasure of the Cathars: the first part was Isobel’s child, the reincarnation of Saint John, the child that was whisked away to the Monastery of Saint Lazarus by Matteu; the second part of the treasure was the original Apocalypse of Saint John and its key; and the third part was what Bertrand Marty gave to Matteu, a roll of parchments, which he asked him to take away with him at the last minute – do you recall that?’
‘Yes.’
‘This roll of parchments that Bertrand Marty gave Matteu centuries ago was of utmost significance because, although the Apocalypse of Saint John and its “sign” was the Sixth Key, the third part of the Cathar treasure was the last key, the Seventh Key. And as Eva told Rahn, a clue to its whereabouts is secreted here on this island in Venice.’
‘So is the clue inscribed on this headstone?’
‘What do you think?’
‘I think it is. I think that if the Sixth Key was found in the Apocalypse of John, the Seventh must have something to do with the Holy Grail, and this inscription points to it, am I right?’
He smiled. He wasn’t going to give too much away. ‘It was Rahn’s task to come here to find it.’
‘But Rahn never found it, did he? Because he committed suicide.’ I thought that I had it all now . . . until the Writer of Letters shook his head again.
‘Fortunately for Rahn, your account of his last moments was not completely correct. You’re right in so far that he did travel to Söll. It was late afternoon by the time he neared a farmstead on the outskirts of the town. He saw some children playing and he spoke to them a moment. It had been snowing earlier and he asked the children if they thought it would snow again. They said that it looked like it would, and then he continued walking.
You see, he wanted the children to be able to say, when questioned, that they had seen an SS officer. Now, the snow was a metre deep in places and it was cold but he kept up his walk. When he came to a large fir tree he took off his uniform, folded it neatly and placed it on a rock. From a bag he retrieved his pot-holing clothes and, after he had dressed again, he backtracked to a brook, covering his footsteps as he went. He walked part of the way through the water and then left again for Söll.’
‘Just like Sherlock Holmes in “The Empty House!” He faked his own death, didn’t he? But they found a body, so whose body was it?’
‘Rahn had to tell Himmler exactly where he was going to commit suicide. You see, Himmler wasn’t just going to let him walk away, he had him closely watched. But let us not forget that Rahn was a good potholer and he knew the area he chose very well. He was astute in ways of covering his tracks. When the search party looked for him and found only his clothes, neatly folded, Himmler was incensed. He realised that he’d been duped. Having to save face at all costs – Himmler had numerous enemies who would have made much of this blunder to Hitler – he organised two of his men to go to Dachau in search of a prisoner Rahn’s age and size and colouring. It was then a simple matter to crush a cyanide capsule in the prisoner’s mouth and to spirit him away. Stranger things happened all the time in the camps. Anyway, it was relatively easy then for Himmler’s men to plant the body back in the forest along with the clothes and to place a bottle of pills beside it. By the time they found the body of the dead man that spring, it was so decomposed it had to be buried in haste before the parents could identify it. Those SS men who planted the body were later sent to the Russian front and were never heard from again.’
‘So where did Rahn go?’ I asked.
‘He made his way to a predetermined location near Söll where he was met by his friend Dietmar Lauermann, who had arranged a Swiss passport for him. Lauermann drove Rahn over the border to Italy, to a place where La Dame was waiting for him. Rahn’s death had been well publicised and so he was now free, not only of the Nazis, but of the brotherhoods as well.’
‘He and La Dame did break open that numbered bottle that La Dame had offered as a peace offering in the car just before they parted ways. That is how their friendship was revived. In truth, Rahn had never meant to hold a grudge against him, and besides, La Dame had won his esteem by helping to smuggle those Jewish youths over the border to Switzerland. He had earned Rahn’s respect again and La Dame, as a gesture of penitence, offered him something that touched his heart.’
‘The Mexican edition of Don Quixote?’
‘How did you guess? Yes, the one in that bookshop in Berlin, the very reason for their first meeting.’
‘And?’
‘We do know that Rahn went to France again to meet with Deodat. It was near a small village called Oradour-sur-Glane where he figured no one would recognise him. Incidentally, in 1944 a Nazi unit arrived at Oradour-sur-Glane supposedly looking for forbidden merchandise, or members of the resistance. The villagers were summarily rounded up and murdered, all in all, six hundred and forty-two men, women and children. These days the whole town is a memorial to those who died.’
‘Were they looking for Rahn?’
‘Who knows? The Nazis also sent a team to Montsegur and another, led by a man called Skorzeny, went to the Corbieres to search about in the mountains and caves. Perhaps they thought Rahn was hiding in them. In fact, legends told of him wandering about the mountains. But Rahn was long gone. He became an expert in disguise and he did live long enough to laugh out loud at all the conjectures about his death . . . Long enough to go to the cinema and to see himself portrayed as an American with a gun at his belt and a wry smile on his face. How he laughed! The scriptwriters even had their hero wearing a fedora and a leather jacket – just like that jacket Rahn had taken from the Pabst film set, but they didn’t know that it was La Dame who was afraid of snakes, not Rahn.
‘He also lived to learn from Deodat that Madame Dénarnaud had returned from her experience at the hermitage in a similar condition to that priest Albert Fonçay – the man who ventured into those tunnels under the hermitage years earlier. She had no recall of the events that had transpired that night in the gallery. Some say that the Cénacle placed her in an occult prison – as the American brotherhoods had done to Madame Blavatsky. Sometime later she willed the Villa Bethany and its grounds to a businessman from Paris, who agreed in return to look after her in her old age. Was he a member of one order or another, sent to keep an eye on her? Who knows? Whatever the case, she died at Rennes-les-Château after suffering a stroke. After that the businessman transformed the Villa Bethany into a hotel and the old cistern under the covered way of the Tour Magdala, into a restaurant, and began to attract tourists to the village.
‘Do you remember that sour-faced youth, Pierre Plantard? Well, he became a grand master of his own order, an order he concocted from thin air, which he called the Priory of Sion. Together with a certain Monsieur De Cherissy, Plantard encrypted parchments carrying some aspects of the truth hidden behind an entire smoke screen of lies. He then placed these parchments strategically within genuine documents at the Bibliothèque National and waited to see who would take the bait. There were a few who did, and as a result, a number of books were written which called much attention to Rennes-le-Château.
‘Monsieur Plantard now began calling himself a Saint Clair, and therefore from the lineage of Merovingians –
the supposed true kings of France. These, he then postulated, were related to Jesus, making him a descendant of Jesus. What a load of nonsense!
‘At about this time another parchment was found at the Bibliothèque National, called Le Serpent Rouge. Yes, don’t look amazed. It is a poem containing thirteen stanzas, each devoted to one sign of the zodiac. If one reads it carefully one can discern Rahn’s entire adventure in the South of France locked between its lines. Moreover it was officially published on the seventeenth of January. At any rate its discovery caused a great stir. Unfortunately for the three men who co-authored the parchment – Louis St Maxent, Gaston de Koker and Pierre Feugere – they all died within twenty-four hours of each other, in different locations; all three supposedly committing suicide by hanging. An associate of theirs, a certain Janjua Fakharul-Islam, a Pakistani, was found a month before, lying at the side of the railway line near Melun. Apparently, he had fallen from the train travelling between Paris and Geneva, though no luggage belonging to him was ever found. Unnoticed by the gendarmes was a strange tattoo on the man’s right wrist, a serpent and an anchor – the sign of AA, as we know.’
I was shaking my head with amazement. ‘Who killed them, the Cénacle?’
‘It is obvious that there are some who will stop at nothing to keep Rahn’s time in the South of France out of the limelight. In any event, the intoxication of the world with the enigma of that small circle of churches, remains even to this day. The brotherhoods will continue to proliferate and to squabble like children, to taunt one another, and to assassinate one another. These brotherhoods are completely oblivious to the fact that they are living in an endless performance of metatheatre where they, as both actors and audience, allude to a redundant secret, and in their collusion they perpetuate a reality that is really nothing more than an illusion.’
‘But it’s an illusion based on the truth,’ I said.
‘Most illusions are.’
‘So, did Rahn eventually make it to Venice? Did he find this tomb?’
The Sixth Key Page 39