Someone whispered his name. A girl was standing in front of him – a figure in a white dress, stained with blood. The girl had dark hair cascading like strands of black velvet from a central parting: her face was a dark triangle: prominent cheekbones, haughty, high-arched nose, smooth café-au-lait skin, amber-coloured eyes tilted slightly at the corners to give her a mysterious oriental look: one of her eyelids was a touch lazy. Her neck bore red-purple bruises: her hands were bound in front of her. She held them up, eyed him imploringly: her lips worked but her words seemed to be inside his head:
‘The man in the mirror is not himself. The five dandelion seeds are buried in the forest, at the place marked “B”. What is sought lies in a room with no doors or windows. I am the door. Another holds the key.’
Caine wanted to ask what she meant, but she was no longer there: instead he was in a graveyard, where five graves stood, crumbled, cracked, green with moss. There were names carved on the stones. Caine tried to read them: the carving was too worn and ancient to make out.
A priest in dark robes was gliding towards him, leading a solemn procession of five black-and-white birds – sacred ibises, with mutilated beaks and broken wings, tied neck to neck with string. The priest slid past Caine without seeing him. Another disembodied voice droned: ‘Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.’ The birds trotted past dejectedly, curved beaks dragging dirt.
Caine felt a featherlike touch on his cheek, saw a rain of dandelion seeds floating down. He was in a dimly lit room, staring at a fish-tank on a pedestal. The severed head of an old woman was immersed inside the tank, amid a swirl of lank, grey hair that wafted in the water like sea-grass. Her skin was shrivelled, her mouth slack. Her eyes snapped open like trap doors: the toothless mouth gold-fished. ‘Whoever kills a sacred ibis shall die.’
Reeling back in shock, Caine staggered through an open door into another room: he found a butcher there, a black-bearded man in a leather apron working at a chopping-block, slicing the heads off live fowls. The man chortled to himself as the birds fluttered and squawked. He worked eagerly, his bare biceps flexing, flinging the lopped-off heads into a basket on one side, hurling the carcasses on to the floor. There were thousands of headless birds in the room, piled up in heaps, lying in serried ranks in a river of blood. The butcher fixed malevolent eyes on him, grinned through white teeth: a voice from nowhere said ‘Special handling.’
Caine blinked, found himself standing in a dark cavern, a pit of darkness with a floor covered in skulls and bones, rock walls like living matter, pressing inwards, and the light falling down an endless staircase that reached up into the darkness. A figure was descending the stairs with slow, ponderous steps: a man cowled in shadow, a corpulent, pork-hog shape, a head like a dark pumpkin, eyes like burning yellow coals on a face masked by a mummy’s winding-cloth. Caine felt rigid with dread: the corpulent figure seemed to bring with him a chill that seeped into his bones, moving towards him endlessly, never seeming to get any closer.
‘Wake up. We are almost there.’
Caine opened his eyes, saw a Kraut soldier staring at him over the seat. The car had stopped at a checkpoint: Jerries in battledress and chamber-pot helmets were chatting with the driver. Caine tried to recall his dream: a dark forest, graves and dandelion seeds. A talking head in a fish-tank: a butcher decapitating fowls: a jumbo-shaped figure coming downstairs towards him. A procession of sacred ibises with broken wings: a girl in a bloodstained dress. It lies in a room with no doors or windows. What did? How was that even possible? And special handling – what was that about?
It hadn’t been an ordinary dream: it had given him a different feeling, a sweet-sour taste that the future had happened already. Almost like the time back in Cairo when he’d dreamed about Betty Nolan and the spy Johann Eisner. He hadn’t dreamed like that for months, not since the last op in Tunisia, probably not even when he’d been delirious in hospital. It might be that he’d just survived a bloody contact, of course, but it made him wonder about the disorienting agent Olzon-13 that the Abwehr-man, Rohde, had once given him. Rohde was dead now, but he’d claimed that he’d given Caine enough of the stuff to cause lasting nerve damage. It might have been a lie: the medical tests they’d given him had been inconclusive – but with things like that you couldn’t be certain. You just can’t see some wounds, that’s all.
Chapter Eight
Near Orsini, Le Marche, Italy
2 October 1943
Stengel’s car threaded down the switchback road through woods of ash and Aleppo pine, with the barren shelves of mountains behind, ranging out of a faded chiffon sky. Grapevines grew in staggered ranks along the scarps, blazing in bursts of flame-red and Italian pink: fields of yellow sunflowers tilted like beaming faces in a valley where meadows intermingled with wedges of woodland, and a collage of ploughed and fallow plots lay like a quilt on the skirts of scrub-covered hills. The hillsides were criss-crossed by pathways and cart-tracks, scattered with slate-roofed cottages, cut with gorges where stony drawers caught running water in silver light.
Stengel’s detachment had searched the villa as thoroughly as possible: they’d found paintings and books, but not the one thing he wanted. The villa was vast and dilapidated – who knew how many tunnels, hidden chambers and underground passages it contained? A real search would take weeks: it would mean ripping the whole place apart. He hadn’t been successful with the countess: she was just a girl, but her family had kept the whereabouts of the Codex a secret for generations: one of her forebears had even been a saint. He couldn’t stop thinking about what she’d said as she slipped out of consciousness, though. ‘What is sought lies in a room with no doors or windows. I am the door. Another holds the key.’
Was there anything in it? No, it was psychopathic rambling: nothing could lie in a room without doors or windows. He shrugged: childish nonsense. But then, if he really thought so, why couldn’t he stop thinking about it?
He forced himself to remember instead how Reichsführer Himmler had requested him personally to bring back the Codex, recalled the tea in delicate china cups, the rich aroma of fat German cigars in the SS chief’s inner sanctum. The excitement in Himmler’s eyes. This is a project close to my heart, Reichsgeschäftsführer. I have dreamed of possessing this book for many years – ever since I first read the translation. The Codex will be the jewel in the crown of the new Germany. It will be an everlasting symbol of the honour, courage and purity of the German race. This is the task I am entrusting to you, Wolfram. Bring back this book and you will have performed a very special service for the Reich.
Wolfram. Himmler had actually called him Wolfram. Even now, the singularity of the honour brought a flush to his face. For some reason, though, another vivid memory clashed with it: of the day he’d been hauled out in front of his class at school in Hildesheim, told by the headmaster that he was being expelled, ‘because your pathetic piano-tinkler of a father can’t pay the school fee. Poverty is the fault of the inadequate. You are unworthy of this school, unworthy even of life, unless you can pay.’ Nothing had ever compared with the humiliation he’d experienced at that moment: despite all the honours he’d been given since, he’d never quite managed to erase the jeers of the other boys from his mind.
That was before the Führer. Things are different now. There were great things to be done, a new Germany to be built: life had started for him the day he’d joined the SS. Now, as director of the Ahnenerbe – the SS division for racial and cultural purity – he was one of the elite. His expeditions had brought back evidence demonstrating the major part Germanic peoples had played in world history. The Codex, though, was the key to understanding why their race was superior – generous, loyal, brave, and pure, ready to die for Blut und Boden – blood and soil. The Codex would be no less than a blueprint for the new Reich. Himmler wouldn’t rest till he had the original Latin text: that was the gift which he, Wolfram Stengel, was going to give him.
The hills levelled out, the road meandered through low, wooded ridges
, hamlets of cottages, some falling into ruin, rolling green fields where dun-coloured cows and rag-coated sheep grazed: denuded grey trees, reed-edged streams, ploughed fields, small farms standing amid poplars and grapevines, and the light coming in long beams through fleets of cloud. The car passed ox-carts driven by old men with weather-pickled faces, in waistcoats and cloth caps: women in dour dresses and headscarves hefting firewood, boys on bicycles balancing milk-churns on their handlebars.
There were work-parties from the Jesi concentration camp on the road, too – Jews and Gypsies in pyjama-like prison-garb, Allied POWs in tattered uniforms – carting ballast, breaking ground with picks, shovelling soil. Sipo-SD guards with rifles stood over them. Stengel found himself counting the number of prisoners in each party, then the number of guards, then the number of pickaxes, spades and wheelbarrows.
At the junction leading up to the hill-top town of Orsini, Sipo-SD troops had erected a barrier of oildrums. As the car approached the turnoff, a rat-faced Feldwebel waved them down.
Stengel wound down the window. ‘What’s going on up there?’
‘You haven’t heard, sir? Two of our men were shot dead by partisans near Montefalcone yesterday. Two British saboteurs escaped. Sturmbannführer Grolsch is up there carrying out reprisals.’
‘That’s Sipo-SD business, Feldwebel. I’m on my way to Jesi. Why did you stop me?’
‘The Sturmbannführer asked me to look out for you, sir. He sent a message asking me to direct you up to the town – said you might find something of interest there.’
Chapter Nine
Orsini, Le Marche, Italy
2 October 1943
Orsini was an apricot-coloured sprawl that seemed to have sprouted organically around the skirts of the mountain: close-packed stone dwellings spread along steep alleys that branched out from a main street like a dark gorge, pink-tiled roofs arranged in overlapping tiers rising like shallow steps up to the cobbled square of San Giuseppe da Copertino. It was there, in front of the church, that Stengel found almost the entire male population of the town crowded together under the guns of a Sipo-SD platoon. Six youths, singled out from the crowd, were facing the church wall with their hands on their heads. A gunner in an open Kubelwagen had a Spandau trained on them.
The San Giuseppe church was remarkable, Stengel thought. Built of the same burnt-ochre stone as the rest of the town, it had two asymmetrical wings with circular windows and angled roofs, an ornate bell-tower on one side. Between the wings, a set of precipitous steps – he counted twelve of them – rose up to an unusual tiled portico, supported by slim arches, extending either side of the main door.
Stengel found SS-Sturmbannführer Grolsch inside the church, standing alone before the altar, contemplating what appeared to be a dark bundle slumped on the chequered flagstones. The interior was lit only by flickering candles: Stengel took in the holy-water stoup – a seashell held by cherubs – disordered wooden benches, fresco-covered walls, the altar with its white hangings, gold crucifixes, statues of saints and angels, the smell of incense. On the wall behind the altar was a triptych – a three-panelled painting centred around the Virgin Mary holding an infant.
Stengel advanced down the aisle: Grolsch saw him coming, snapped to attention, gave him a Heil Hitler salute. Stengel didn’t return it: his gaze was held by the bundle on the floor. It was the body of a priest in a black cassock, lying with one leg drawn up and arms extended either side of his body, as if demonstrating the crucifixion. Where the head should have been there was a shapeless mess of gory tissue and grey-matter flecked with bone fragments: the body lay in a spreading pool of blood. An odd-looking iron bar with a head like three curving claws lay next to him.
Stengel glanced at Grolsch, registered the fact that his field-grey tunic was splashed with crimson. ‘Killing priests now, Sturmbannführer?’ he said. ‘Surely you didn’t bring me here to look at this?’
Grolsch tilted back his peaked cap: his hand was sticky with blood. ‘He came at me with that iron claw thing,’ he said, his tone flat. ‘I had no choice but to tackle him. In the struggle –’
‘– you accidentally smashed his skull to a pulp?’
Grolsch swallowed. ‘It was self-defence, Reichsgeschäftsführer. Someone took a pot-shot at us from the church tower: an SS-man was killed. When I came to demand the name of the person responsible, the priest attacked me.’
Stengel shook his head, made a tut-tutting sound. ‘This won’t look good, Sturmbannführer. First you let two British saboteurs escape, now you beat a priest to death.’
‘A priest who attacked a German officer.’
Stengel picked up the claw-like instrument, examined it. It was a fork of some kind: three prongs like crooked fingers, moulded to a long iron shaft. The claws were greasy with gore. The murder-weapon, Stengel thought wryly. He turned it over, examined it with interest. ‘This, I would hazard a guess, is a tool used by Catholic priests for torturing heretics in medieval times – must be three or four hundred years old. Most appropriate, don’t you think?’
Grolsch clamped his jaw.
Stengel gave a soulless laugh, turned to look at the Madonna triptych behind the altar. He realized with a shock that he’d been mistaken. The central panel didn’t feature the Virgin Mary, as he’d thought: in fact, it wasn’t a painting at all but a mirror. In the mirror stood a man in prison-garb, so emaciated that his face looked like a skull with paper-thin hide stretched over it: the head was shaven, the nose bulbous, the front teeth rabbit-like and protruding. The eyes, unnaturally bright and large, were fixed on Stengel: there was an amused expression on the death-like face. The Reichsgeschäftsführer stared back, unable to tear his eyes away: suddenly, the apparition winked at him with insinuating slowness: almost at the same time, a lisping voice whispered in his ear: ‘Behold the ravishing beast.’
A cold flush spread up Stengel’s spine: he dropped the bar, heard it hit the stone flags with a clang. He lifted his fingers, saw there was blood on them, saw them twitch.
Grolsch was gaping at him. ‘What’s wrong?’ he said.
Stengel jerked a trembling a finger at the mirror. ‘One hundred and five Jew-Bolshevik commissars,’ he stammered.
Grolsch eyed the triptych, confused. ‘It’s a painting of the Virgin,’ he said. ‘Quite famous, actually – the Madonna del Soccorso of Niccolò Alunno, from the late fifteenth century. Lacks a certain finesse, perhaps, but beautiful in its way, and, of course, worth a fortune.’
Stengel followed his gaze: there was no mirror, he realized – it was a picture of the Virgin Mary, just as he’d thought in the first place. It’s a painting, of course it is. But I saw that Jew. I saw him wink at me.
He glanced at the dead priest on the floor, then at Grolsch. ‘You were a priest once, weren’t you? Isn’t it bad form to kill one of your own?’
Grolsch watched his superior warily.
Stengel swivelled round ‘Better have the body brought outside. At least we can make an example of him.’
He walked back down the aisle: Grolsch paused for a last look at the dead priest. Don Michele had been an old man: he wouldn’t have had much longer to live anyway. But I didn’t have to kill him, he thought. I could have just disarmed him. He was twice my age. Once I’d got the iron bar off him, I could have subdued him easily.
The truth was that he wasn’t sure why he’d killed the old man. True, he’d refused to give up the name of the person who’d taken that fatal pot-shot, but perhaps he didn’t know it. No, it was something else – that infuriating, placid, sincere expression Don Michele had worn whenever Grolsch had had dealings with him – the look priests assumed in order to inspire trust and confidence. From bitter experience, Grolsch knew the falseness, the hypocrisy of that look.
It was five years since he’d been expelled from the church for disgracing himself with a girl, but somehow even he had never quite managed to get rid of that worthy expression: he saw it in the mirror every time he shaved. As a young ordinand he’d b
een full of religious fervour, full of enthusiasm for the Christian message. True, he’d been ambitious, determined to end up a cardinal, but he’d certainly believed. The doubts had started to accumulate during the early years, when he’d realized how many members of the church fell short of its ideals. It took some time for him to understand the full extent of the corruption, and in particular how many ordained priests, sworn to celibacy, regularly misbehaved themselves with both girls and boys.
He’d even thought of exposing the scandal, but it was impossible: they used the old-pals network, covered each other’s backs. Since he couldn’t beat them, he’d joined them: he’d had sex with a girl. The story had got out, though: her parents had complained to the authorities, and he’d been carpeted. The argument that almost everybody else was doing it hadn’t cut much ice: the establishment looked after its own, but he wasn’t one of them. When they’d told him he was being expelled, he’d stared at those tranquil, worthy, self-important faces and wanted to smash them. He’d sworn at them, called them two-faced swine. All right, so the girl had only been fourteen years old – but in the end, what difference did it make?
Now, though, he wished he hadn’t killed the priest. He’d been irritated, perhaps, by the loss of another Sipo-SD soldier: casualties had been unacceptably high these past few weeks. He was also angry with himself for letting those two saboteurs get away. Shooting unarmed POWs in cold blood was bad enough, but having eyewitnesses escape was worse. It was enough to get him transferred to the Russian front: he guessed it would be only a matter of time before the axe fell. Unless he could make himself useful to Stengel, that was.
Code of Combat Page 5