by James Lepore
“What’s the message?” Fleming asked.
“You need to extract three people.”
“Yes. By Sunday.”
“There is a farm in Meppen, on the Muhlenberg road, near the Dutch border. A kilometer after an abandoned rail spur, on the right. The farmhouse is right on the road. Two yellow lights will be on above the front door. Your plane will land between ten and midnight. The pilot will only wait five minutes. You are to board as well.”
“Thank you.”
“You are to ask for Baron Rilke. ‘I am here to call on Baron Rilke. Baron Maximilian Rilke? No, Baron Laurens Rilke.’ If the two lights are not on, do not turn in. You are to contact your embassy about getting up to Meppen. It’s a haul.”
“How do I contact you? In an emergency, I mean.”
“Tell Hans you are looking for the handsome American from Chicago.”
“And you’ll appear.”
“Or someone in my place. He or she will want to know what time it is London.”
“Simple.”
“Yes.”
“Thank you again.”
“Good luck.”
Fleming did not answer. Schmidt and Schmeling had entered the ring, both wearing headgear. He eyed Schmeling—six foot tall, heavy browed, perhaps a hundred ninety pounds, thirty-two inch waist, muscular but slim for a heavyweight. He was bouncing on his toes, staying warm. Schmidt was perhaps two-ten, all muscle, but a lumberer, easily out-maneuvered. It occurred to Fleming that Schmeling could kill Schmidt if he wanted to. Send him to the Norse version of Hades. He remembered what his boxing instructor at Bletchley, a gnarled, retired middleweight from the East End, his cockney accent thick and garbled, had told him: it’s the element of surprise, milord. You’re bound to get into a scuffle or two. Don’t waste time. A right to the bridge of the nose will kill a man just as soon as one of them fancy karate chops or judo kicks. Karate he had pronounced karayty, judo jew-dough, like Cary Grant’s Jew-dy, Jew-dy, Jew-dy. Of all the hand-to-hand training Fleming had done at Bletchley, he liked boxing the best. No sneakiness to it, just square off and pound away.
“You surprise me old boy,” he said finally.
“I couldn’t resist not bringing an umbrella.”
“Quite. You could still get pneumonia. It’s damp and chilly in here.”
“Americans don’t get sick, you know that. They need to stay healthy so they can save the world from evil.”
“Again.”
“Correct.”
“I suppose we should stay for the show.” Follow through.
“Of course.”
“What’s Miss Ondra’s story?”
“Mrs. Schmeling?”
“Yes.”
“They say she loves him.”
“More’s the pity.”
“Don’t you have your hands full?”
Fleming did not respond. Billie.
“She’s a beauty.”
“I don’t disagree.”
“A gentleman wouldn’t.”
“No.” Meaning what, precisely?
“She seems thick with that square-jawed young SS fellow. Stout as an oak.”
Fleming did not answer. The green-eyed monster eats at Mr. Hayseed. And me too.
“I saw them getting into one of those Nazi Daimlers this morning.”
Again Fleming did not reply. He pretended he was scribbling on his pad. Not interested.
“Fleming,” Dowling said, “he’s SS for Christsake.”
The Englishman looked up at Dowling, keeping his face composed. “I’m aware of that,” said.
The American paused a second, staring at his fellow reporter-cum-spy. “Of course,” he said.
“She’s not a Nazi, Dowling.”
“Of course not.”
“There are things I can’t tell you.”
“Of course.”
“I have a favor to ask.”
“Go ahead, no harm in asking.”
“I need to get someone out of Germany, an engineer working on a secret anti-mine material. He wants to defect.”
“A Nazi?”
“No, a Jew.”
“I will leave a message with Hans. ‘Any messages from the handsome American from Chicago?’”
“Fond of that ‘handsome American’ bit, are we?”
“The agent I replaced had his dick cut off by the Gestapo before they killed him. I may as well have some fun while I’m alive.”
“How many have there been?” Fleming asked.
“Reporter types you mean?”
“Yes.”
“I’m the third so far. And you, which number are you?”
“They don’t tell us such things, but I’m led to believe I’m the seventh.”
“Lucky number.”
“If you say so.”
“Not me. Look it up, you’ll be amazed.”
* * *
After the uneventful spar, Fleming and Dowling left together. The rain had stopped and the sun was breaking through rapidly thinning clouds. “I’ll walk for a while,” Fleming said curtly, heading east on Bismarkstrasse back toward the Adlon. Bloody Americans, he thought. Getting into a Nazi Daimler indeed. Bloody women. Lost in these thoughts, he did not notice the hulking black Daimler gliding along next to him at the curb, looking up only when two men, one tall and thin, the other short and stocky, both in overcoats and fedoras, blocked his path.
“Herr Fleming,” the stocky one said.
“The very same,” Fleming answered.
“You will come with us, please.”
17.
Berlin
October 7, 1938, 1:00 p.m.
“You have some interesting things in your pockets, Herr Fleming.”
“In England we don’t do searches without good cause.”
“That is why you are in decay.”
Fleming remained silent.
“A list, for example, of various German government agencies, addresses, and telephone numbers.”
“I’m a reporter. I often need to get quotes.”
“Department of Raw Materials, Office for Racial and Settlement Questions, Waffen Supply Office, many others.”
“My God, do you think I’m a spy?” Shock, Fleming said to himself, that’s the ticket.
“Perhaps.”
“I’d be the worst spy in history, then, carrying around a list of my contacts. You’re joking of course.”
“We don’t joke here.”
Here? Where is here? The Englishman knew where he was, the combined SS and Gestapo Headquarters on Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse. They had taken him in through a side entrance, but he had recognized the forbidding building, a former palace, then art school, then hotel—a short walk from his beloved Adlon—from the many times he had reconnoitered it on his visits to Berlin. It housed the Office of Surveillance and Prosecution in National Socialist Germany, the heart of the SS, as well as the notorious Hausgefangnis, what the Gestapo endearingly called its House Prison. He was pretty sure that’s where he was, in a basement holding room, a cliché, really, with its cement floor, metal desk, and two metal chairs. His interlocutor, a man of about Fleming’s age, thirty or so, was also a cliché: sallow skin, moist lips, a steady, undifferentiated look of contempt in his pale eyes. He wore the black uniform of the Gestapo, a lieutenant, small potatoes, but very dangerous for all that.
“You should, I daresay,” Fleming responded, smiling. “Life is short and brutish otherwise.”
“I will ask you again, where is your Professor Tolkien?”
“Do you think my answer will change from the one I gave you two minutes ago?”
“We have ways of getting the truth out of prisoners.”
“Am I a
prisoner?”
Before the lieutenant could answer, the phone on his desk rang. He picked it up, “Ja, sind Sie bereit? . . . Gut.” He returned the phone to its cradle, looked at Fleming, and, a gleam of delight appearing in his eyes, said, “Soon, Herr Fleming, your comedic act will cease.”
* * *
Ten minutes later Fleming found himself naked, strapped to a chair with, oddly enough, its seat missing. While being strapped in by two nasty guards, he had noticed what looked like a tennis racquet on the floor beneath the chair. He had indeed lost his sense of humor. Nothing at Bletchley House had quite prepared him for this. Was he going to be buggered in some strange Germanic way? The desk across from him was empty except for a telephone and a small black metal box with a wire coming out of it and going down to the floor and heading ominously toward him.
The room was chilly, the cement floor damp and hard beneath his bare feet, his wrists and ankles already sore from the tight leather straps binding him to the chair. Worse than all this, his arse and balls and cock felt uniquely, uncomfortably, exposed as they hung down in close proximity to the thing he was beginning to realize was surely not a tennis racquet. Though the room was cold, he was sweating.
He was relieved for a second when the door swung open, but then he saw the look on the Gestapo lieutenant’s face, a look of pure anticipatory delight, of ecstasy. The lieutenant withdrew an eight-by-ten photograph from a brown folder and held it in front of Fleming. He couldn’t decipher it at first. Was it a skinned rabbit? Then he knew what the tennis racquet was. The photograph was of a man’s mangled, bloody genitals. So much raw meat, swollen, but not quite beyond all recognition.
“I have several more here,” the lieutenant said. “Would you like to see his face? He died shortly after.”
Fleming stared in the lieutenant’s eyes and saw in them nothing but pure sadism. He had found his calling, and not only was it legal, but it was highly prized by his superiors. Fleming did not answer.
“If you do not tell me where Professor Tolkien is, then I will push the red button on that little box,” the lieutenant said, pointing at the box. “The wire mesh paddle beneath your chair will rise swiftly and with great force. After a few incorrect answers you will no longer be a man, and perhaps will be dead. I will take pictures and add them to my collection. On the other hand . . .”
The phone rang at this instant. Frowning, the lieutenant picked it up and placed it to his ear.
“Nien,” he said after listening for a second or two, and then, “Ja.”
* * *
They let him out at the same side entrance, an alley off of Wilhelmstrasse, that they brought him in through. Waiting for him on the cobblestones, his hands in his overcoat pockets, his collar turned up, was Kurt Bauer.
“Bauer,” Fleming said.
“You are lucky, Herr Fleming.”
“Lucky you say?”
“I heard by chance you were in the building.”
“In the building? I was about to get my balls strafed off.”
Bauer paused before answering. He’s waiting for a danke, the prick, Fleming thought. He’s not what he says he is, I can tell by those heavy eyelids, always a giveaway.
“Billie is waiting,” said the young German.
“Where?”
“There.” Bauer nodded toward Wilhelmstrasse, where another sleek black Daimler stood running at the curb, its windows darkened.
“Let’s go.”
“Did you get your belongings?”
“Yes.”
“All there?”
Fleming’s coat wallet, an aged leather affair from Smythsons of Bond Street, given to him by his brother Peter when he entered Sandhurst in 1927, was back in its usual place. The list of German government agencies was missing, as was the cash, a few hundred reichsmarks, and a hundred pounds or so.
“They took my cash.”
Bauer shook his head and pursed his lips slightly, but said nothing. Fleming fingered his wallet through his cashmere coat at his breast. He had not had a chance to look into its hidden, silk-lined compartment, where he kept a medallion that was very dear to him, perhaps the only sentimental gesture he had ever allowed himself. He hoped it was still there. It would do the Germans no good at all.
At the top of the alley he could now see that Billie had emerged from the car and was waving him to her.
“Are you coming?” Fleming said to Bauer.
“No. Go. The car will return you to your hotel.”
18.
Berlin
October 7, 1938, 3:00 p.m.
“Can I see the note?”
“Of course.” Billie handed the sheet of plain white notepaper to Fleming. Embossed at the top was Franz Shroeder’s name and title at Heidelberg University. Fleming read the note and passed it back to Billie. They were in the Professor’s study in his apartment on Hermann Goering Strasse.
“He’s taken the parchment,” Billie said, “and the amulet is missing.”
“The amulet?”
“Yes. He kept it in a secret compartment in his desk. It’s gone.”
“What amulet?”
“The beast.”
“I see. The beast. He does not mention Tolkien.”
“They must be together.”
“Billie,” Fleming said. “My dear girl. You are distraught. They’re probably out for a jaunt. Tolkien has three days left on his visa. He mentioned he wanted to see the Black Forest.”
“My father has never done anything like this. Since I can remember he has either been at university, in his study, or with me. He does not take jaunts, as you call them.”
Fleming remained silent. Tolkien had never mentioned the Black Forest. He had a good idea of where he was really headed. He remembered now the angelic look in the don’s eyes when they parted company last night. He was planning to flee. Bloody hell.
“What is this amulet you speak of?” Fleming asked.
“It’s a stone carving with ruby eyes.”
“What does it mean?”
“It’s what my father is really working on for Himmler. A ritual that, when done in the right way in the right place with the right artifacts, is supposed the raise the dead.”
“Raise the dead you say?”
“Yes.”
“For Himmler?”
“Yes. Himmler wants to present Hitler with an unconquerable army.”
“And the parchment, what is that?”
“The parchment has an incantation written on it. It and the amulet are the artifacts.”
“How do you know this?”
“My father told me of course. You can’t write about any of this, Ian. We’d all be killed. It is Himmler’s project, you understand.”
“I do, but tell me, it can’t be true, can it? That the dead can be raised by this ritual?”
“I believe so.”
“You believe so?”
“Yes.”
Ian Fleming’s interest in the paranormal extended perhaps to unusual sexual positions, nothing more, but now, seeing the grim set of Billie’s beautiful face, a chill ran down his spine. She was serious, as serious as death.
“You seem so certain,” he said.
“I am. There is a witness that is spoken of.”
“A witness?”
“My father’s schoolmate. He was with him when it first happened. They were twelve. Just boys. He spoke of it before he died recently.”
“Is that how Himmler came to know?”
“I believe so.”
“What do you mean by ‘spoken of’?”
“Kurt told me there is a report on file.”
“Ah, Kurt. Any details?”
“No. Just that. You won’t write about this, will you?”
“Of course not. I do need to understand what’s going on, though. I want to help you find your father, if indeed he’s off on some adventure with the faeries. And I feel responsible for Professor Tolkien. If he overstays his visit, if he’s off on some murky escapade inside Germany, there will be hell to pay.”
“You were with Professor Tolkien last night. Did he mention any of this?”
“No,” Fleming lied. “He told me he’d turned down Loening’s offer to publish his book, that he was looking forward to returning to England, he missed his wife and children.”
“My father doesn’t even drive a car,” said Billie. “I’m baffled.”
“I doubt Tolkien does, either. Does your father have friends? Other professors, perhaps?”
“No, only Trygg.”
“Where is Trygg, by the way?”
“I don’t know.”
“Does he drive?”
“Yes, he does.”
“Does he own a car?”
“No. Not that I know of.”
“Can he reach the steering wheel?”
“He sits on cushions.”
“I see, it shouldn’t be hard to find two absentminded professors in tweed suits and a dwarf who looks like an ape but dresses like a toff scurrying about Germany. When do you think your father wrote this note?”
“Sometime after he left you last night, I assume.”