by James Lepore
“I believe he does.”
“Why is Tolkien with him?”
“I’m afraid I’m to blame. I told him we wanted this abracadabra for ourselves.”
“What are they up to?”
“I think they’ve set out to destroy the artifacts.”
“Are we supposed to bring them back with their toys? Is that it?”
“That’s the idea. Does Washington know you’re here, by the by?”
“Afraid they’ll steal the magic trinkets, are you?”
“It’s England that’s just a short boat ride from the continent,” Fleming replied. “America won’t be invaded any time soon. Do they?”
“No,” Rex Dowling answered. “But I don’t work for Washington. I work for one person in OSS.”
“Does he know?”
“No. He just authorized me to help.”
“Can he send more people?”
“No, we’re it.” Dowling nodded toward Hans and Jonas, who had not said a word. They watched as Hans smiled, and Jonas stood and walked over to a window. Soon they could hear the splash of his urine in the stream below.
“Can your man provide intelligence?” Fleming asked.”
“Do you know the Three Kings Group, in Prague? František Moravec’s outfit?”
“No.”
“They know the Germans will be invading soon. They run recon flights across the border all the time. Very dangerous, as you can imagine.”
“I can.”
“All the pilots carry cyanide. A half dozen have not returned.”
“Can they help?”
“They already have. They say there is a large Waffen unit, battalion strength, in the woods just west of the abbey.”
“How many is that in Germany.”
“The same as anywhere. Four to six hundred, maybe more.”
“Christ.”
“Yes, and they took pictures of recon foot patrols in all directions within a two-mile perimeter of the abbey.”
“They must be wondering what’s going on.”
“They’ll extract us if we need them to.”
“We’re a long way from that.”
“Let me guess, you have no idea where Shroeder and Tolkien are?”
“And the dwarf.”
“The dwarf?”
“Yes, Shroeder’s valet. He’s with them.”
“A real dwarf?”
“It’s a birth defect, Dowling.”
“I know what it is.”
Fleming smiled and put his hands up, palms forward, after saying this, a peace offering. He enjoyed teasing the American, but did not doubt his toughness. After all, he had just trekked two hundred kilometers to help out in a fight involving the four men in the mill against a Waffen SS battalion.
“Billie’s with us,” Fleming said, changing the subject, happy that Dowling had returned his smile. Their relationship would remain the same, even under stress. That was a good thing to know. “I’ll be leaving to collect her.”
“I thought as much,” Dowling replied. “I saw her in town this morning.”
“Saw her in town?” Fleming immediately regretted the precipitousness of this question.
“Yes,” Dowling said. “Coming out of a chemist’s.”
Now Fleming remained silent. He had told Billie to stay in their room at the Hilltop Inn. Or had he just suggested it? She was a German citizen—not a Jew—free to wander about the country. They had made love all night and at six a.m. his head, well, it was filled with the scent and feel of her. He couldn’t remember exactly what he had said.
“I decided to take a quick look,” Dowling continued, eying Fleming a bit more carefully now, “to see if there were any Nazis about.”
“I believe you’re mistaken,” said the Englishman.
Now it was Dowling’s turn to pause. During this brief interval, Jonas returned to his place on the floor.
“Yes,” Dowling replied at length, glancing casually at Hans and Jonas, “I may have been. The light was not good and I just caught a glimpse.” The brothers remained silent, their faces passive, as if they were not interested in this part of the conversation.
Fleming was wearing a woolen sweater under a weather-beaten leather flyer’s jacket and khaki field pants left over from his brief and unhappy matriculation at Sandhurst. On his feet were sturdy Alpine hiking boots. In the inside pocket of the silk-lined bomber jacket were his last pack of Morland’s Specials. In his haste yesterday he had forgotten to take the carton from the drawer of his room’s night table. He had forgotten his tortoiseshell holder as well. He wanted a Morland’s now, badly, but did not reach for the pack. He stood up and glared at Dowling until the American looked away.
“Can you give me a description?”
“Two men—the two professors—both average height, one old with white hair, the other middle-aged. And a dwarf, redheaded, with a long braided red beard.”
Dowling nodded, absorbing this information, then said, “Should they assist?”
“Yes, by all means.”
“One more thing.”
“Yes?”
The American pointed to the map. “This angel and dragon, what is it supposed to mean?”
“It’s St. Michael slaying Satan. The abbey is officially called St. Michael’s Abbey at Metten. Have you forgotten your Sunday School lessons, Dowling?”
Dowling smiled. “I suppose you had your own chapel on the manor grounds.”
“We did.”
“I skipped all that. I worked on Sundays.”
“I see. Doing what?”
“Hawking newspapers, shoveling coal.”
“How did you come to this?”
“We weren’t allowed to take a paper home. They counted before and after. But before I turned my leftovers in, I read the whole edition, start to finish. It didn’t take me long to figure out I could write a better news story than what they were printing. I applied when I was fifteen and they took me on, running copy. Now here I am.”
“And OSS?”
“I got bored. I knew a guy who knew a guy. And you?”
“I lost a bet.”
“Lost a bet?”
“Yes, I’ll tell you about it someday. I’m off.”
* * *
“What do you think, Hans?” Dowling said to the one-eyed brother after Fleming left.
“It was Miss Lillian.”
“And this magic ritual?”
“I wore a St. Michael medal all through the war. They told us the English and the French were the devil.”
“Did they tell you how to get in touch with him? We may need him after all is said and done.”
Hans’ reply was a shrug and an attempt at a wry smile, not easy with a cicatrix covering half his face.
“Jonas?” Dowling said.
“It was her.”
“And the magic? Can it be real?”
The brothers shrugged in unison.
“We want to kill Nazis,” Hans said, his smile gone. “Show us the way.”
34.
Metten Abbey
October 8, 1938, 5:00 p.m.
“I lied to the lieutenant.”
“Absolvo te.”
“There is no tunnel here, but there is one just a hundred meters away, just south of our orchard, near the Roman wall.”
“I see. What are they looking for, Father?”
“The tunnel leads to a small meadow, with sheer rock walls on all sides.”
Father Wilfrid and Father William were sitting across from each other on rough-hewn but sturdy ladder-back chairs in Father William’s cell located on the top floor front of Metten Abbey. The room’s single twenty-four-inch by twenty-four-inch leaded glass window was a square blaze of brigh
t yellow sunshine, a portal to heaven just above their heads as it were, that they might, if they only could, slip through, leaving Nazi Germany and the woes it had brought on their tonsured heads behind forever.
“How do you know this?” Father Wilfrid, the younger man by thirty years, asked.
“One of our monks took me there. Father Adelbert.”
“When?”
“Soon after I arrived.”
“In 1872?”
“Yes. I was seventeen.”
“Why?”
“He told me he had been working in the archives, researching manuscripts over a thousand years old. He came upon a canto that, that . . .”
“Yes, that what?”
“That called upon Satan.”
“Called upon Satan?”
“Yes, and that he had found an amulet in the forest, a black stone beast with ruby eyes that was spoken of in other manuscripts. That with the canto and the amulet he could . . .”
“He could what?”
“He could raise the dead.”
The abbot realized deep in his soul, and with a sick feeling in his stomach that went far beyond mere nausea, that the tingling of the hair at the back of his neck and the sudden sweat on his brow were signs from God that the old priest sitting across from him was telling the simple, but horrific, truth. Despite this message from his soul, Father Wilfrid took a moment to look carefully into Father William’s eyes. It cannot be, dear Lord, he murmured, please take this from us. Raising the dead? Only Christ, or Satan, could do that. But the old man’s blue eyes were clear and calm, tinged only with the sadness of this burden he had been carrying for three quarters of a century. He was the sanest, the most even tempered of all the monks in the abbey. I am sorry I doubted you, Lord, the abbot said to himself.
“What happened to him?” Father Wilfrid asked. “Father Adelbert.”
“No one knows. A few weeks after he showed me the walled meadow he disappeared.”
“Disappeared?”
“He was seen in the kitchen yard one morning playing with Bridget, the yard dog, and then he was never seen or heard from again.”
“Was there a search? His family?”
“He had no family. There was a search. He was never heard from again.”
“Did you tell the abbot about the tunnel?”
“No. We were forbidden to leave the grounds. I was afraid I would be expelled. I wanted to serve God. I sinned.”
“So this walled meadow was never searched.”
“No.”
“You have not sinned, Father.”
“I would like you to hear my confession,” said Father William.
“That’s why I interrupted your day.”
“I . . .”
“That’s the excuse I gave the guard at your door.”
“Ah, yes.”
Coming through the window they now heard the chanting of the fourteen-hundred-year-old service that marked the beginning of vespers, the evening prayer.
Domine, ad adiuvandum me festina. Gloria Patri, et Filio, et Spiritui Sancto. Sicut erat in principio, et nunc et semper, et in saecula saeculorum. Amen. Alleluia. O God, come to my assistance. O Lord, make haste to help me . . .
In the good weather, the chapel doors, two stories below them, were swung open to make it easier for God and all of the angels, archangels, and saints in heaven to hear the evening prayer, a prayer of supplication and gratitude for the day that was coming to an end. In recent years, seeing what Hitler and his madmen were doing, Father Wilfrid had sometimes despaired that God was listening to any of his prayers. He hoped He was listening now.
The priests looked up at the glowing window and listened for a moment, then turned to face each other. “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned,” said Father William.
35.
The Oder River
October 8, 1938, 7:00 p.m.
“Can it be?” the passenger in the Aero A14, whose name was Vaclav, but who called himself, deprecatingly, King Number One, said. He had lowered his binoculars to yell at the pilot in the open cockpit in front of him over the roar of the ancient bi-plane’s engine.
“Can it be what?” the pilot, a nineteen-year-old aristocrat who had learned to fly at a rich man’s flying club at a private airfield outside Prague, yelled back.
“At three o’clock,” said Vaclav, “I saw something flashing a few miles up a tributary. Then I saw people in a clearing. I think the small ones had beards.”
The boy pilot banked and descended. They had been cruising at two-thousand feet and would soon be at an altitude of only five hundred feet, close enough for the old bi-plane’s Fairchild K19 aerial recon camera bolted to its belly—a gift from Vaclav’s British friends—to take amazingly clear photographs. They were heading away from the setting sun, with a clear view of the earth below, but they saw nothing but the surprisingly wide tributary of the Oder as it glistened a dark green-brown in the last slanting light of the day. That and thick forest on either side.
“There was more than one small one?” the pilot said.
“Yes.”
“This tributary is not on the map,” the pilot said.
“It’s an old map.”
“Yes, or a new tributary.”
“There, at one o’clock,” Vaclav said, “There they are.”
“I see nothing but water and trees.”
“I’ll be leaving you,” Vaclav said, reaching to the floor at his feet for his parachute.
“What?”
“Crisscross this area taking pictures,” Vaclav said. “Note your position. Tell Frantisek to expect to hear from me.”
“Have you jumped before?”
“No, but it doesn’t seem difficult.”
“I will ascend first.”
King Number One, age thirty-four, and with less than four years left to live, was already halfway out of his seat. After putting on his parachute, he reached to the floor again and pulled up the bulky rucksack containing a two-way radio similar to the one MI-6 had given Ian Fleming. This he strapped to his chest.
“Go at my signal,” the young pilot said, holding his right thumb up and then closing it back into his fist. “I will level off. Count to three, then pull the cord.”
As the plane rose they both looked below. There was no sign of the two professors and the red-bearded dwarf they had been instructed to be on the lookout for. Nor of any clearing. Neither spoke of the forest of tall trees that spanned the earth below as far as the eye could see. Only bad things, the least of which might be broken limbs, could happen from landing in one of them.
When the pilot gave him the thumbs up, Vaclav, who now had one leg out of his co-pilot’s seat, smiled, returned the gesture, stepped out onto the bi-plane’s lower wing, and leapt. He was carrying two CZ 27 semi-automatic pistols on his service belt and twenty extra clips in the pockets of his leather flight jacket. Although he had been in airplanes many times, he had never jumped out of one. His two partners in the unit they called the Three Kings had been to jump school, but he had been traveling around Germany at the time as a ball bearing manufacturer’s representative and had had to give that training a miss. No need to go into all that with the pilot.
In open space, watching the light-blue painted plane banking away, Vaclav continued smiling. He counted quickly to three and pulled the cord on his parachute. When the chute was open and he was drifting to earth, he gripped the radio to his chest, freed one hand, and waved goodbye to the young boy who he was fairly certain he would never see again.
36.
Metten Abbey
October 8, 1938, 7:00 p.m.
“You are lucky you weren’t shot,” said Kurt Bauer.
“I don’t understand, Kurt,” Billie Shroeder replied. “I am worried about my father. This was a logical place to look. I expected to find you here. I hoped to find you here, actually. Is my
father here?”
“No, he is not,” the young lieutenant replied.
Ian Fleming looked at Bauer’s face, at his cold blue eyes, at the thin line of his mouth. He wants her to call him lieutenant, he thought. And lover as well, I’ll bet.
He and Billie were standing in the abbey’s vaulted entry hall. The Waffen corporal who had, at Billie’s fierce insistence, called from the front gate to tell Bauer that Fraulein Lillian Shroeder, his old college chum, was asking to be admitted, stood off to the side. Two Waffen privates, machine guns unslung, stood on either side of them. Bauer, in a Waffen SS black waist jacket, his Walther P38 in a leather case on his web belt, faced them. In his officer’s jodhpurs and shiny black boots, the lieutenant looked to Fleming every bit the iconic image of the German menace that would soon be unleashed on Europe: young, humorless, fanatic, soulless, eager to kill. If these warriors, these creatures, could be raised from the dead, then in a few years, all of Europe, and perhaps the world, would be on its knees before Adolph Hitler.
Out of the corner of his eye, Fleming saw a door open and a tonsured priest in a simple brown habit come out. He was relieved to have something else to think about. Whose side was this priest on?
“May I be of assistance?” the priest said, joining them, “I am the abbot here.”
“You said the SS would not be involved,” Billie said to Bauer, ignoring the priest. “There were troops at the front gate.”
“They are here to help me search. Tolkien is missing as well. I believe they are . . .”
“They are what, Kurt?” Billie said. “My father is a German citizen, not a criminal.”
Bauer looked from face to face, then said to the two guards, “You are dismissed.”
When the guards were gone, Father Wilfrid introduced himself to Fleming and Billie, shaking Fleming’s hand and nodding in deference to the beautiful Lillian Shroeder. “Can I offer you food or drink?” he said. “Or beds for the night?”
“No, you cannot,” said Bauer. Then to Billie, “Where are you staying?”