by James Lepore
The thought of sacrificing young Bauer was disturbing, but not very. He had had other pleasures in mind concerning Bauer, but if he failed he would have to be killed, or perhaps placed with the scum in the nearby camp. Or perhaps he would succeed in locating the runaway Professor Shroeder and his friends. Either way, there was pleasure in store.
21.
Carinhall
October 7, 1938, 10:00 p.m.
“Are we fully prepared, Captain Drescher?”
“Yes, Generalfeldmarschall,” the Luftwaffe captain replied. “The keepers are ready, and the Messrs. Heck assure us the cow is in heat.”
“Is that correct, Heinz? Lutz?”
“Yes, Generalfeldmarschall,” the Messrs. Heck said in unison.
The four men—Hermann Goering, his adjutant, a square-jawed ex-paratrooper, and the Heck brothers, Lutz and Heinz, the directors of the Berlin and Munich zoos, respectively—were seated in oversized leather chairs in Goering’s loft study at Carinhall, the aviation marshal’s lavishly appointed hunting lodge in the forest north of Berlin.
“And our surprise guests, are they in hand?”
“They are resting in their rooms, Herr Generalfeldmarschall.”
“Good. We will let them watch the breeding, then place them under arrest.”
“Yes, Generalfeldmarschall.”
“We will then see what Himmler and Heydrich are up to.”
“Yes, Generalfeldmarschall.”
“Do you know, gentlemen,” Goering said to the Heck brothers, “that the Fuhrer will soon announce me as his successor?”
“No, Generalfeldmarschall,” they replied. The awed looks on their faces were quite genuine. Adolph Hitler had replaced Christ in 1938 Germany, and his coterie were not just apostles or saints, they were demigods. A full-blown ur-god had now appeared in their midst. “We . . .”
“Yes, I know, you are honored to be in my presence. I have given him Austria, you see, his native country, and soon, with your help, I will give him a wild forest where the aurochs is the dominant beast, just as we Germans will soon be the dominant beasts in Europe.”
The three men facing Goering—who was sitting in the deepest, plushest chair, as if on a throne—nodded in unison.
“And the dwarfs, Herr Generalfeldmarschall?” Captain Drescher said. “Shall we prepare them?”
“No,” Goering replied. “They will not have to perform tonight. Tonight is for science and the advancement of knowledge, not comedic entertainment.”
“Yes, Generalfeldmarschall.”
“Are your men still out hunting?”
“Yes, Generalfeldmarschall.”
“These two were difficult to capture, I understand.”
“They are clever creatures, Herr Generalfeldmarschall,” Drescher replied. “We caught them by blowing up a mine entrance and trapping them at the other end, in nets. We subdued them while they were slashing at the nets, trying to break free. Which was the more savage, the man or the woman, I do not know. The knives they used were quite extraordinary.”
“Do you think you’ve found their habitat?”
“If so, it’s a wild place, I’d say untouched since the Ice Age.”
“And when was that?”
“Perhaps two million years ago, Herr Generalfeldmarschall.”
“Are you serious?”
“Yes, Generalfeldmarschall.”
“And our two, are they able to copulate? That’s the primary thing.”
“Yes, we believe so.”
“Extraordinary knives, you say?”
“Yes, Generalfeldmarschall. Extremely sharp, razor sharp, and made of a metal I have never seen. The edges do not degrade, no matter what we do. And there are flecks of some kind of ore in them that we cannot identify.”
“Yet they seem so submissive.”
“Yes, Generalfeldmarschall, they have adapted to their new lives. The male is training as a footman, as you know, and the female in the kitchen.”
“The last pair was not so hard to catch.”
“Circus freaks. But alas . . .”
“Yes, I know, the human cannonballs have all deserted our circuses.”
“They must have heard somehow . . .”
“Heard what, captain? We treat our dwarfs well. Surely public copulation is not torture.”
“No, Generalfeldmarschall.”
“Perhaps they have all gone to ground in the Bialowieza Forest,” Goering said, smiling broadly, liking his own joke, “fashioning Ice Age tools and living in mines. A stroke of luck for us, no? The easier to round them up.”
“Yes, Generalfeldmarschall.”
At this moment, there was a knocking on the room’s oak door. “Yes,” Goering bellowed.
“Drinks, milord,” a man’s voice, deep and husky, said.
“Ah,” said the field marshal. “Our refreshments. Come in. Enter.”
A dwarf, in the red garb with gold epaulettes and buttons more fitting of a king’s servant, came in wheeling a glass and polished wood serving cart laden with liquor, champagne, and their accoutrements, including ice, silver tongs, and crystal glasses.
“Shall I pour, milord?” the dwarf asked.
“No, leave us.”
“Yes, milord.”
“One moment, Tor,” Goering said.
“Yes, milord.”
“Have you met your fellow dwarf?”
“No, milord.”
“Do all dwarfs wear beards?”
“Certain clans do, milord.”
“Why is that?”
“I don’t know, milord.”
“Your beard is different from our guest, Korumak’s.”
“Yes, milord.”
“Different clans, I suppose.”
“I don’t know, milord.”
“You may go.”
22.
Metten
October 7, 1938, 11:00 p.m.
“Our son is at school here,” Billie Shroeder said.
“The abbey is closed, madam,” said the SS corporal. As he spoke he shined a flashlight into the car, casting its stabbing beam first on Billie’s face, then Fleming’s, then doing a slow three-sixty of the interior. When he got to Billie’s legs, she lifted her skirt an inch above her knee and smiled.
“He has been ill,” Billie said.
“No one can enter.”
“Why all the fuss?” Fleming asked, leaning and ducking slightly so that he could see across Billie in the driver’s seat. Behind the corporal, four other soldiers were standing and warming their hands over a fire blazing out of a two-hundred-liter drum. Each had an Erma EMP-35 submachine gun slung over his shoulder, the elegant weapon that he knew Waffen SS Special Forces had recently been equipped with. Behind them the eighth-century abbey’s massive wrought iron gate was shut and padlocked. The spacious stone courtyard was nearly pitch black, its outline made barely visible by the yellow light from one window above the abbey’s imposing dome-shaped front entrance.
He and Billie had made it to Deggendorf by 9:00 p.m. and checked into an inn on the outskirts of the small city. Driving to the abbey, they had seen two SS staff cars parked in front of the Hotel Gasthof, the tallest building in the tiny town of Metten. Anticipating trouble, they had concocted their simple story and switched seats so that Billie could drive.
“Your husband?” the corporal said.
Fleming smiled and nodded.
“Yes, he’s American,” Billie said.
“No one can enter.”
“Of course. Sorry for the trouble. Can we come tomorrow?”
“No. Now you must leave. Now.”
23.
Carinhall
October 7, 1938, 11:00 p.m.
“That’s
the American bison on the left,” said Trygg Korumak, “the European on the right. The European is the female.”
“What in the world . . . ?” said Franz Shroeder.
“How do you know about this species?” Professor Tolkien asked.
“I have friends in the Great Last Forest, Dwerrow Forest, they call it,” Korumak replied. “Where there are still bison.”
“And what do men call it, this forest?” Tolkien asked.
“Bialowieza.”
What do men call it? Tolkien said to himself. Where did that come from?
There had been something from the very beginning about Korumak that had not just intrigued Tolkien, but haunted him somehow, as if they had met as children and forgotten each other, or perhaps known each other in distant past lives. In the long day they had just spent in each other’s presence, a day that was about to come to an obscene end, there had been little chance to converse, and when there had been a moment, Korumak had been singularly unforthcoming, his silence as solid and dense as a mountain. Now he seemed friendlier, but the scene below in the middle of Carinhall’s great central hall was irresistible. John Ronald’s questions would have to wait.
Looking down from the highly polished railing of the loft walkway that gave access to the bedrooms on the north side of the lodge, they could see two large, shaggy bison, one on the east side and the other on the west side of the immense room, each held in check by two muscular handlers gripping the ends of thick chains attached to metal collars on the animals’ necks. The American bison was snorting and pawing the hardwood floor, the European straining from side to side on her forged leash.
Below glowing chandeliers that hung from massive floating oaken beams, stood Goering’s guests for the weekend, perhaps fifty of what were obviously among Germany’s military and political crème de la crème. Champagne glasses in hand, they were gathered around a space that had been cleared of furniture in the center of the room. Korumak seemed to know who many of them were. “That’s Speer and his wife,” he said quietly, nodding toward a dim corner where a tall, thin, balding man in a tuxedo was standing next to a woman in a red satin gown. Both were sipping champagne. “Hitler’s best friend. And Bormann, another pig.” Now the dwarf nodded toward the room’s center, where a group of smartly dressed civilians and officers in beribboned uniforms were gathering along the velvet ropes and gold stanchions that marked off the makeshift arena.
Across the vast room—it was perhaps a hundred feet in length—they now saw Goering and his aide, a Luftwaffe captain, emerge from an inner room and approach the loft railing. The crowd acknowledged Hitler’s aviation chief with a roar, many raising their glasses to him as he waved down at them, blessing them like the devil’s vicar on earth.
Wagner could be heard from speakers concealed somewhere in the vast room, but only barely, as the cheering of the crowd was the dominant sound. That and the snorting and stamping of the bison as they strained toward each other on their leashes, the four handlers pulling hard along the flanks of the huffing creatures to hold them back. Goering raised his right hand high above his head, held it there for a long second or two, then swiftly brought it down, at which moment the handlers released the beasts.
“It can’t be?” said Professor Shroeder, but indeed it was. The bison circled each other once and then suddenly were mating in the center of ring, while the crowd cheered. Bormann tossed his champagne glass at the male’s head as he rutted, and many others followed suit.
Professor Tolkien looked on in horror at the scene below, at Bormann and his wife seizing full glasses of champagne from a passing servant, a dwarf with a beard like Korumak’s, and throwing them at the cow this time. And across the room to Goering, who was smiling like a hyena and raising both of his arms in the air to acknowledge the adoring crowd below. The quiet, unassuming professor from Oxford knew in his bones that he was witnessing human beings at their very worst. Over the long remaining years of his life he would often ask God to forgive him for not turning away. He couldn’t. He had to see and absorb and imprint on his brain the many faces of evil in that room.
24.
The Bergspitze Inn, Deggendorf
October 7, 1938, 11:00 p.m.
“So, do you still trust Kurt?” Fleming asked Billie.
“Yes, I do.”
“If only he knew that your father and Tolkien had fled, then how did those troops come to be at the abbey?”
“Someone else must have . . .”
“Who?”
“I don’t know. Honestly. But it can’t have been Kurt. I’m certain. Ian, do you think father is in the abbey? Has he been captured do you think?”
“I told you, I don’t think they’d go near the abbey. They may be college professors, but surely they must have realized that that would be the first place Himmler’s hounds would be sniffing around.”
“Perhaps they don’t know that they are being looked for.”
“I think they do.”
“Why?”
“Tolkien told me that your father was given an ultimatum. Perform the ritual on Monday or else.”
“Or else what?”
“You die.”
“I die?”
“Yes, you. Do you think Himmler would be squeamish about threatening to kill you? Or actually killing you if it came to it? That was how they managed to persuade your father in the first place. They are thugs, murderous thugs.”
Billie did not respond.
After seeing the troops at Metten Abbey’s gate, the ride back to their small inn on a hill on the outskirts of Deggendorf had been a silent one. The English gentleman in Fleming had kept him from denouncing Billie as a fool for ever trusting her so-called college friend. Now he was doubly glad he had kept his counsel. The shocked look on her beautiful face reminded him of just how much a child she was, a child thrown against her will into a pit of vipers, one of whom she felt surely was her friend. Perhaps her eyes were now opening.
“My dear Billie,” Fleming said, finally, “I envy your naïveté. I respect it, actually. There is a purity to it, a goodness that is rare in this world. But the Nazis have taken Austria, the Sudetenland, and made them into police states just as they have of Germany. Do you think Goering, Himmler, Goebbels and their ilk are patriots? No, far from it. They are indulging in personal fetishes and amassing fortunes, while gleefully enacting Hitler’s insane policies.”
“And Kurt?” Billie said. “You believe he is one of them?”
“Yes.”
“It can’t be . . .”
“He’s a Nazi through and through.”
“Ian . . .”
“I’m sorry.”
More silence, while Billie composed herself, pulled her face into a sort of mask of acceptance. Fleming’s heart melted at this effort of hers.
“I’ll light a fire,” Billie said at length, her voice low, close to a whisper. “It’s cold up here.”
“Good idea,” Ian said. “While you’re doing that I have something to attend to.”
Fleming had assumed that Himmler’s SS would be out in force looking for the Shroeder party, that Kurt Bauer was a liar and had played Billie for a fool. He had therefore insisted, despite Billie’s plea for speed, that they travel south via back roads. It would not do for the Nazis to intercept a car containing Franz Shroeder’s daughter and an English reporter heading toward Deggendorf. It had taken them almost eight hours as opposed to the five or six the trip south normally took, but he had been right. If troops were at the abbey, they were also covering the main roads and railroad stations along the way.
Putting these thoughts aside, the Englishman reached for the small canvas duffle bag he had lugged with him from Berlin and pulled out the two-way backpack radio that Bletchley had had made for him specially and that Hans the bartender had delivered to his room at the Adlon just befo
re he and Billie had headed south. He could hear Billie’s movements behind him and the crackling of the kindling that their ruddy-faced innkeeper had left in the room’s large stone fireplace for them. The attic room, which Ian had specifically asked for, was cold, but soon it would be warm, at least in the vicinity of the fireplace.
He lifted the heavy radio by its side handles and set it down in the middle of the small room. Then he pulled up the antenna and set the frequency selector to random. Hans had said that the dry cell battery, which made the bloody thing so heavy, was fresh, but had packed him an extra one anyway. They last only thirty minutes or so at the most, his lab trainer at Bletchley had told him, so make the most of your time. When the neon indicator turns red, change the battery. Otherwise, just push the on switch, and speak your caller ID into the handset.
“What are you doing?” Billie asked.
Fleming had lifted the handset, but not turned the radio on. The moment has come, he said to himself.
“Frequency hopping,” he said.
“Frequency hopping?” Billie was eyeing the radio like it was something that had landed in the room from outer space.
“Yes,” Fleming said. “Do you know Hedy Lamarr?”
Silence. Then, “Do you?”
“I do, in fact. I met her in Paris in the spring. She was going through a divorce at the time.”
“Ian . . . What is that machine?”
“It’s a two-way radio. Half-duplex, point-to-point.”
“What in the world . . . ?”
“It’s a long story, Billie. I’m going to get us help.”
“But won’t the Nazis be listening? I understand they monitor all of the frequencies all of the time.”