by James Lepore
“At the Hilltop Inn,” Billie answered. “Just outside Deggendorf.”
“In separate rooms, of course,” said Fleming, his eyes twinkling. “By the way, Bauer, you don’t happen to have a cigarette handy by any chance, do you? Terrible habit.”
The young German officer looked at Fleming like he was insane.
“Father?” Fleming said.
“No, Mr. Fleming, I’m afraid not.”
“Any chance you can hear my confession?”
“Are you serious?”
“Yes, couldn’t be more serious.”
“Lieutenant?”
“No. Absolutely not. He and Miss Shroeder are leaving.”
“You can go to St. Peter’s in Deggendorf,” Father Wilfrid said. “Father Schneider hears confessions every Saturday night until seven-thirty. I will call him and tell him you are coming.”
“Thank you, Father. You are very kind.”
* * *
“Are you really going to confession?” Billie said. They were in the car on the way back to Deggendorf. Fleming was driving.
“Yes,” he replied. Then, handing her a small piece of paper folded in half, he said, “Here, look at this.” Billie took the two-inch by two-inch piece of lined notepaper, the kind a schoolboy might use, unfolded it, and read what was written there.
“What does it say?”
“It says, we need to talk. Where . . . ?”
“Did I get it?”
“Yes. Who . . .”
“Father Wilfrid.”
“Tonight?”
“Yes, when we shook hands.”
“He was taking an awful chance. What if you had been searched?”
“Nothing to it. I carry those little notes around all the time.”
Billie smiled. “Are you even Catholic?” she asked.
“Tonight I am.”
“But . . . Is that why you asked to have your confession heard?”
“Yes, course. He’s a quick thinker, our Abbot Wilfrid. He will relay his message to Father Schneider. Perhaps our abbot has a bit of the spy in him. We shall see. By the way, old girl, Dowling said he saw you in town this morning, bright and early.”
“Did he.”
“Yes.”
“He can be difficult, no? He was quite opposed to us visiting the abbey.”
“I think he’s got a crush on you.”
“Are you jealous?”
“A little.”
“First Kurt and now Dowling. But it’s you I love. Do you love me?”
“I do.”
“Even if I went into town this morning against your wishes?”
“That depends.”
“On what?”
“Your reason for going.”
“For this,” Billie said, smiling. She had pulled a slender box, tied with a red ribbon, out of her purse.
“What is it? A pen?”
“Shall I open it?”
“Please.”
Billie undid the ribbon, opened the box, and, using thumb and forefinger, took out a tortoiseshell cigarette holder. She smiled a wide, beautiful smile, a smile that men would cross oceans to see if it were meant for them.
“I bought you some cigarettes, too,” she said. “A special blend. I know how you like to smoke after . . .”
“Yes,” Fleming said, smiling. “I do. Thank you, my dear Billie.”
37.
Berlin
October 8, 1938, 10:00 p.m.
Reinhard Heydrich stood at the tall window behind his desk in his large and airy office at Gestapo Headquarters on Albrechtstrasse. There was no view here, just the building across the street where a hundred clerical drones worked to create the records necessary to keep track of his secret police’s doings. All of its windows were ablaze. In his right hand were three such documents. Behind him spread out on his desk was a topographical map of Germany. He had read the documents and now slowly read them again. The first was a telegram from Lazarus, received at 8:00 a.m. today. It simply said in plain text: HILLTOP INN DEGGENDORF. The second was from Lieutenant Bauer, a coded telex from Metten Abbey, decoded by his staff: MISS SHROEDER AND FLEMING IN DEGGENDORF WHAT ORDERS NO SIGN OF QUARRY. The last was the most intriguing. It was another coded telex, from another mole, the one who went regularly to Goering’s absurd parties in the Brandenburg Forest:
CHAOTIC SCENE HERE WHEN SMOKE BOMB (?) SET OFF LAST NIGHT. MANY SICK PARTY MEMBERS. RUMOR THAT TWO OF HG’S PET DWARFS ESCAPED. ALSO RUMOR THAT TWO FAMOUS PROFESSORS AND THEIR DWARF VALET WERE HERE AND ARE MISSING. TONIGHT’S PARTY CANCELLED. RETURNING BERLIN.
Heydrich turned and bent over the map, where Carinhall was marked with a red pin and Metten Abbey with a green pin. The distance between them, some five hundred kilometers, he had calculated earlier. His traced his index finger between the two pins and asked himself again, why north? Then he spotted the gentle curve in blue ink of the Oder River and followed it first with his eyes and then with the same index finger. Could they? He thought. Is it possible?
38.
The Oder River
October 8, 1938, 10:00 p.m.
Professor Tolkien did not know for sure if the two young people who were by turns poling and rowing the raft were male or female. Indeed, they may not have been young. Their faces were smooth and their complexions flawlessly white, almost translucent, but their eyes were dark and without mirth, neither young nor old. They concentrated on the river ahead, and sometimes behind, with such intensity that the Englishman felt they could see not only the river’s rippling black surface, but beneath it as well. In the middle of the large, flat vessel, the three dwarfs sat facing each other in a huddle, their heads down, their incongruously large hands wrapped around their knees. Like sleeping birds, Tolkien had said to himself when they assumed this position shortly after boarding. We don’t like traveling by boat, Korumak had said just before they all nodded off more or less at the same moment. At the stern, under a brown tarp, lay the man whom Tolkien had first met near the top branches of a thick old oak tree some three hours ago. Vaclav, he called himself, “or King Number One, if you wish to be formal.”
Franz Shroeder sat opposite, his back, like Tolkien’s, leaning against the stabilizing, strapped-on steel drums that formed a low wall port and starboard. They were all—except for Vaclav, who was in Czech Army fatigues and a severely battered leather bomber jacket—dressed in their woolen forest garb, their hoods up. The raft and its eight occupants formed the lowest, darkest possible profile against the night sky. The two sailors, who had been introduced by Trygg Korumak simply as his river dwelling friends, seemed to know where the current closest to the eastern bank was. All night they had avoided the main channel in the middle of the dark and mysterious Oder.
A rusted freighter going north had loomed ahead of them an hour earlier, forcing them to veer to the bank and take cover under the branches of the willows growing there in astonishing abundance. As the hulking freighter passed, perhaps fifty meters away, the sailing brothers—he assumed they were brothers because they looked so much alike—whispered to each other and nodded. After it passed they pushed away and resumed poling southward.
As the raft nudged along, Tolkien looked up for a bit, watching the half moon appear at intervals between scudding clouds. He should have been exhausted but he wasn’t. They had walked for twenty hours through dense forest, with only the shortest of rest breaks at the longest of intervals, and reached a gnarled old oak tree with three trunks by the side of a small stream that fed into a short but wide tributary of the Oder at about 7:00 p.m. “We will wait here,” Gylfi, who had led them with steady and unerring feet on their long journey, had said. But before they could settle down to rest and wait, they had heard an airplane overhead and dove for cover. A few minutes later came the sound of something crashing
into the top of the triple-trunked oak. And then, astonishingly, a man’s voice saying, I need a knife.
As he watched the moon and rehearsed the day’s events, the English professor retrieved the last hunk of the dark brown bread—dwarf bread he had come to call it—that Dagna had given him, and began nibbling at it, marveling once again at its rough texture and oddly pleasing sweet and salty taste. As he ate, he noticed one of the sailing brothers looking at him. Without thinking he broke off a piece of the bread and offered it to the boy, who took it and swallowed it in one gulp and then smiled, a first.
Still smiling, the boy reached inside his shirt and handed something wrapped in bright red cloth to the Englishman, who took it and asked, “What is it?”
“Honey wafers,” the boy said.
Tolkien unwrapped the wafers, broke a small piece off of one and ate it. Goodness, he said to himself, this is not honey, it’s nectar from Mount Olympus. He ate more, then, encouraged, munching happily, he smiled back and said, “Thank you. This is delicious. What is your name?”
“I am called Talagan.”
“And your brother?”
“He is called Narunir.”
“Where are you from?”
“Where are we from?”
“Where do you live?”
“We live in the river.”
In the river? Tolkien thought, and was about to say, you mean on the river, when Narunir tapped his brother on the shoulder from behind, and said, “It is safe, we will sail.”
Tolkien leaned back and watched as the boys quickly stepped a mast that had been lying under a canvas cover in the center of the raft and let out a strange octagonal-shaped sail, also red. Talagan took the sheet while Narunir went aft and, stepping over the still sleeping Vaclav/King Number One, inserted a wooden rudder into a slot in the transom. Suddenly, with Narunir sitting on the raft’s low transom, steering, and Talagan handling the sail, they were veering toward the middle of the river and making more headway than Tolkien, a landlubber, would have thought possible.
The cold breeze on his face and the swift movement of the raft were the last things the professor remembered before falling quietly and deeply asleep.
39.
Metten Abbey
October 8, 1938, 11:00 p.m.
“I just got off the phone with Heydrich.”
“Yes, Reichsfuhrer.”
“Do you have your map in front of you, Lieutenant? The standard issue topo of Germany?”
“No, Reichsfuhrer.”
“Get it, please, and open it.”
“Yes, Reichsfuhrer.”
Lieutenant Kurt Bauer had had a long day, topped off, or so he thought, by the surprise visit of Billie Shroeder and the English reporter, Ian Fleming. There had been something odd about that visit, an undercurrent he could sense but did not understand. He had no qualms about letting them roam around Deggendorf. He trusted Billie. Not Fleming of course, but Billie, yes, she could be trusted. He needed to speak to her, but that would not be easy to accomplish with the Englishman in tow. He had been contemplating sending a car for her on some pretext when Himmler rang through. Now what? He thought, as he spread his map on the rustic table he was using as a desk in the abbey kitchen.
“I have it, Herr Reichsfuhrer,” he said.
“Do you see how far the Oder River is from Carinhall?”
“Carinhall?”
“Yes, northeast of Berlin, near Lake Wuckersee. Do you see it?”
“Yes, Reichsfuhrer.”
“The river, do you see it?”
“Yes, Reichsfuhrer.”
“Do you see its route? In the south it becomes the Neisse.”
“Yes, Reichsfuhrer.”
“Do you see where it ends?”
“Yes, Reichsfuhrer.”
“Do you see how far that is from Prague?”
“Yes, Reichsfuhrer.”
“Our two professors were last seen in Carinhall.”
“Carinhall?”
“They are not heading your way, Lieutenant. They are heading to Prague, and from there to England.”
“Yes, Reichsfuhrer.”
“With the artifacts.”
Bauer did not reply. Using a red pencil, he was circling the area on the map where the professors might cross into Czechoslovakia, trying to estimate the distance from Metten Abbey. He was distracted by a knocking on the kitchen’s oaken door, blackened on his side by the smoke of a thousand years of fires in the massive fireplace behind him.
“Lieutenant?”
“Yes, Reichsfuhrer.”
“Do you know that Goering hates me and Himmler?”
Bauer did not answer.
“Surely you know we took the SS from him?”
Silence.
“He will never forgive us. He wants desperately to regain the Fuhrer’s favor.”
“Yes, Reichsfuhrer.”
“He will send a party out.”
“Yes, Reichsfuhrer.”
“If you see them, arrest them.”
“Herr . . .”
“That is a direct order.”
“Yes, Reichsfuhrer.”
“You are engaged now in an action that could advance your career by many years. Do you understand, Lieutenant?”
“Yes, Reichsfuhrer.”
“Good. I want you on the move tonight.”
“Yes, Reichsfuhrer.”
“Oh, and by the way, Lieutenant, there are likely two new members of the party, also dwarfs, a man and a woman. You are equal to the task of apprehending two flabby old men and three creatures under four feet tall, are you not, Lieutenant?”
“Yes, Reichsfuhrer.”
“I want Shroeder alive, with the artifacts. The others you can kill. I will give you twenty-four hours.”
“Yes, Reichsfuhrer.”
Himmler rang off with a loud clack.
“Come in,” Bauer yelled, realizing that the knocking had gotten louder and more insistent. The door swung open and Father Wilfrid stepped in.
“Yes?” Bauer said, his volume lowered, but his voice sharp.
“Father William has died,” the abbot said. “We will need permission to leave the abbey tomorrow morning to bury him.”
“You can leave the building and keep going to the North Pole for all I care,” Bauer replied. “My men and I are leaving within the hour.”
40.
The Oder River
October 9, 1938, 6:00 a.m.
Professor Tolkien, from his perch on a low perimeter wall, scanned the cave that he had been told by Trygg Korumak would be his home for the next thirteen hours. The shock of being in the Oder River, or rather under it, had worn off, but not completely. The sight before him was too strange. Fifteen minutes ago they had turned into what he thought was the mouth of a wide, flat stream as dawn was about to break, and within seconds had literally sailed down under the Oder into the largest, most immaculately habitable cave he could have ever conceived existed on the planet. It was roughly circular, about fifty or sixty feet in diameter, its walls and twenty-foot-high ceiling a smooth granite-like stone filled with thousands of tiny bits of quartz, from which reflected the light of a dozen fires burning brightly in alcoves evenly spaced along the perimeter. The fires reflecting on the quartz shards lit the entire cave with a warm, translucent glow, as if moonlight and sunlight were mixed together by gods or alchemists in proportions only they knew.
At his feet was a rectangular resting space, as it was called by Narunir, perhaps six feet by four feet, marked out by low rocks and containing a luxurious bearskin rug. Shroeder was asleep in his across the way. Vaclav, the man who had parachuted upon them yesterday, was sitting on his rug in his resting space next to Tolkien’s, staring at the cave. At his feet were his
radio, which he had been fidgeting with for the last twenty minutes, and a spread-out topographical map, with coordinates, of the Oder-Niesse River valley. The river-dwelling boys, the dwarfs trailing, had disappeared through an arched doorway. They had admonished them to rest, saying that they would soon bring food. The most astonishing things about the cave were the pools of water in its center, one steamy hot, the other ice cold, both surrounded by a smooth ledge of the same quartz-filled granite as the walls and ceiling. They had all used the hot water to clean their hands and faces when they first arrived, and drunk the cold water from wooden ladles laid out for them on the ledge. Off to the left, out of sight, the raft was beached on a scree of dry, sandy soil. Behind it, the stream they had sailed in on dipped under the cave, to emerge where, the professor could not guess. It could be heard coursing beneath the cave’s flat, carpet-covered stone floor, as could the Oder be heard above. These were sights and sounds that no writer could ever dream of seeing. But here he was.
“I never got the chance to properly thank you for climbing that tree,” said Vaclav, who had clambered onto the wall to sit next to the professor. “I would have thought one of those little monkeys would have done it.”
“They don’t like heights,” Tolkien replied. “And I’d be careful calling them monkeys. They are astonishingly smart and brave.”
“Sorry, no offense was meant. They are tiny, that’s the thing.” Vaclav stood over six feet tall himself.
“Their hearts are very large. They killed five Nazi soldiers in the forest yesterday with their axes.”
“That warms my heart. Who were these Nazi fuckheads?”
“They were chasing us with a pack of hounds.”
“What happened to the hounds?”
“They ran.”