“And what chingada would soldiers be doing here?” Cassie wondered. “I don’t understand.”
“Perhaps the Brazilian Army sent a detachment,” the professor said.
“And they never told anybody this place existed? Look, if a discovery like this was ever reported, there’s no way it could have been missed. No matter how incompetent the Brazilian military might have been.”
“Ms. Brooks,” the professor said defensively, “I’m only trying to suggest a theory that might explain what we’ve seen out there.”
While Cassie and the professor continued with their debate, an idea gradually filtered through my head.
“It seems to me that as we’ve found this submachine gun, we might find some other equipment the owners of this weapon left behind,” I said. “And they might be things that would come in handy for us.”
“True,” the professor said, “You may be absolutely right there.”
“Ándele, then,” Cassie agreed. She walked away into the darkness and added, “Maybe we’ll come across a few more surprises.”
44
As we went on we checked the ground for anything else that might be out of place or useful to us. For the moment we ignored the imposing columns and their incomprehensible inscriptions. Still, every once in a while, either Cassie or the professor would stop to gape at a particular engraving and swear out loud for not having pencil and paper to copy it.
We were walking close together, sweeping the floor with the light of the torches, trying to reach every corner like a hunting party, when suddenly Cassandra stopped on my right and moved away from us.
“I think there’s something there,” she said.
The professor and I followed her and saw she was right. There was certainly something, although it was hard to say exactly what.
It looked like a pile of rotten wooden crates. Most of them were broken and scattered on the floor, forming something like an improvised parapet. There were hundreds of shell casings spread all over the floor.
“What the hell’s happened here?” The professor picked up one of the copper shells.
“It looks like the remains of a shoot-out,” Cassie said.
“Have you noticed how those crates and sacks of sand are laid out?” I asked.
“A barricade,” the professor concluded.
“Exactly.”
“There must have been a terrible battle,” Cassie said as she stepped carefully over the parapet. “That would explain the crosses outside.”
“Maybe,” I said. “But there’s something odd about it.” I swept the floor with the torch and added, “There are hundreds of shells inside the barricade, but not a single one outside of it.”
Both of them looked inside and then outside to check the accuracy of my statement.
“That’s true,” the professor said. “Funny, isn’t it?”
Cassie scratched her neck thoughtfully with her free hand. At last she said, “It looks as if only the ones behind the parapet were armed. The question is, what were they defending themselves from if it wasn’t other armed men? There are no hostile tribes or wild animals here. Do you think they ended up fighting among themselves?”
“No, I don’t think so,” I said. “In that case there’d be shells on both sides. Besides, we have no idea whether there were angry natives in the area fifty years ago, even if there are none today. Although I don’t see arrows or spears anywhere either.”
“Or bodies…” the professor said, letting the sentence hang in the air.
“Bodies?” Cassie repeated. “You mean… dead bodies?”
Eduardo Castillo shrugged his shoulders. “Well, with so many bullets it would seem logical that there were casualties, right?”
“Don’t forget there’s a graveyard outside, less than a hundred yards away,” I said.
“And remember I said there were probably just crosses there, with no graves underneath.”
“So, what are you suggesting?” Cassie said. “Looking at all this wreckage, it doesn’t seem to have ended very well for the people inside. What could have become of them?”
“Maybe they ran away,” the professor said.
Following a vague intuition, I went on further into the ruins of the barricade. “Or maybe,” I said, “they never left.”
I carefully went over the end wall with the torch and found what looked like a long thin crack in the stone. My friends looked on with disbelief.
I took out my diving knife and wedged the blade into the crack. I traced its outline, and something the shape and size of a door was revealed.
A door that was blocked by a large slab of stone crudely jammed into it.
“On the count of three,” I said as I levered the muzzle of the submachine gun into the crack, “we all push. Okay?”
“Stop chattering and let’s get on with it,” Cassandra said as she and the professor set their shoulders against the rock.
We had left the torches on the floor behind us. It looked as though we would need all our strength to move a stone that must have weighed at least a ton.
We were not even sure we could move it, or that the effort would be worthwhile. But if there was anything we all shared, it was curiosity, and if we had to shift two thousand pounds of stone to satisfy it, we would.
“Ready, then? One, two… three!”
I pulled at the butt of the submachine gun as hard as I could. My muscles tightened, and I felt the muzzle begin to bend under the pressure. Cassie and the professor were breathing heavily behind me as they heaved with all their might.
“Keep going!” I harangued them. “Put a bit of strength into it!”
“Shut… up!” Cassie grunted between her teeth.
I was almost on the point of quitting, as the heavy slab had not given a single inch, when there came a crack on the other side followed by a sound like breaking boards. Quite unexpectedly, the stone door gave in abruptly and fell inward dragging us with it. We hit the floor hard, tumbling on top of one another amid a cloud of dust and shards.
The cloud of dust was so thick that the faint light of the torches barely penetrated. When I opened my eyes I could not see my own hand in front of my face.
“Are you all right?” I said, coughing.
“I think… I’m all in one piece,” the professor said.
“Cassie?” I felt unease at not hearing anything from her. And then I felt a huff beneath me and an elbow digging into my lower stomach.
“Will you please take your hand off my butt!”
“Oops, sorry. I didn’t know you were down there.”
“Yeah, sure…” she said as she pushed me aside.
“Can anybody see anything?” the professor asked as he tried in vain to disperse the dust.
I tried to stand up without stepping on anybody, wondering as I did so what exactly had happened.
“What on earth has happened?” Cassie asked as if she had read my mind.
I wiped my nose on my shirt sleeve so that I could breathe better. “Judging by the crack we heard before the slab gave way, maybe it wasn’t as heavy as we thought. And it might have been propped up from the other side.”
“And when the props gave in…” she said.
The professor had been looking around. “I think I can make something out,” he said, squinting his eyes behind his thick glasses. “I think there’s a circle on the wall, at the far end of the hall.”
We strained our sight. Sure enough, we could distinguish a lighter circle with a drawing inside it.
The dust was gradually setting, allowing me to see more clearly. But that did not mean I could understand what I saw.
The three of us stood under the lintel of the door we had just brought down. When the dust had finished setting, with the light of the torches we had left behind throwing dancing silhouettes of us in front, I could finally see what we were facing.
The problem was that what my eyes saw was so absurd that my brain refused to admit it.
There, hanging o
n the opposite wall of this room, a flag hung from the ceiling almost down to the floor.
It was a red flag, with an unmistakable black symbol inside a white circle.
A Nazi flag.
45
“Now I really don’t understand anything…” I said, stunned.
“Well, that makes two of us,” Cassie said beside me.
Professor Castillo had remained at the threshold in complete silence. I thought perhaps he was trying to come up with a reason for the presence of that flag in this place.
The hall we had burst into so abruptly was a wide room of some two thousand square feet. All around it were shelves, piles of wooden crates, and storage drums, with some large bottles of gas in one corner. Opposite the doorway, a rough old table slumbered under a layer of ancient dust. On it lay a few yellowed documents and, at the edge, what at first sight looked like a pile of books.
We picked up our torches again. Cassie was the first to venture into the cloud of dust which was still floating in the air. She examined everything closely as she moved carefully toward the far end wall until her gaze stopped just below the disturbing flag.
She then took a sudden step back and stifled a cry, covering her mouth with her hand.
“What is it?” I asked in alarm. I reached her side, looked down, and cried, “Fuck!”
By the time the professor joined us, our archeologist was already closely examining her finding. It was the mummified corpse of a soldier, still wearing his black uniform. There was a terrible expression of anguish on his eyeless face. In his parchment fingers he was holding the photograph of a woman.
“He was an SS officer,” the professor said with complete certainty.
Cassie and I turned to him, the same silent question on our lips. He pointed at the corpse.
“The black uniform and the symbol on his lapel are those of Hitler’s secret police. He was undoubtedly an officer of the Schutz Stafflel. A colonel to be precise, judging by the stripes in his uniform.”
The feeling of unreality was so oppressive that for a moment I felt sure that I was sleeping in my own bed in my penthouse in Barcelona and that this was some awful nightmare.
“Check this out,” Cassie said. And with a notable lack of inhibition, she put the tip of her index finger into a hole at the back of the mummified Nazi’s neck. “The man shot himself through the mouth.”
“He’s still holding the gun,” the professor said pointing at an old Luger in the lifeless hand.
“Why would he do that?” I asked in amazement. I went over to the shelves to confirm that besides old boxes of ammunition and tools, there were plenty of preserves and bags of flour and rice which were still sealed. “Food doesn’t seem to have been the problem.” I weighed in my hand what looked like a can of beans which had reached its sell-by date decades ago.
The professor shook his head. “He must have felt absolutely desperate.”
“Or terribly scared,” I said as I put the can back on the shelf. “The poor devil shut himself in here, sealed the only exit, and then shot himself. It doesn’t seem very logical.”
Cassandra stood up. Looking around, she said, “But what’s even more inconsistent is that there aren’t any other bodies. Don’t you think?”
“He might have been the last survivor.”
“Survivor? Of what?”
“Of whatever it is that happened out there,” I said as I turned to the black hole we had recently come out of.
Then, for the first time since we had arrived at that forgotten city, I had a feeling that something was very wrong.
I could not define it, nor did I want to share that oppressive feeling in the pit of my stomach with my friends. But that primitive instinct that has been with us ever since we lived in trees was warning me to get out of there at once.
I glanced at Cassie and the professor, but they were busy searching the hall and seemed quite calm. Excited by the unexpected discovery maybe, but calm.
I turned my back to them to avoid letting them see the worried look on my face and I tried to turn off the alarm in my head, convincing myself that it was just the darkest side of my imagination leading me astray.
Once he had searched every corner of the hall, Professor Castillo began to wander pensively about the room with his hands at his back.
“We’re forgetting the question that really matters,” he said, more to himself than to us. “What on earth were the Nazis doing here in 1940? Brazil supported the Allies during Second World War. That means they must have come in secret. But, how? And more important still, what for?”
“Spies?” I suggested.
Cassie’s laugh did not catch me by surprise.
“Okay, smart girl. Can you think of any other reason?”
“They were obviously archeologists.”
“Sure, the typical SS archeological site… But, if I remember correctly, these guys enjoyed burying people rather than unearthing them.”
“In fact, Ms. Brooks is not so far from the truth,” the professor said, to my surprise.
Cassie looked at me gleefully and poked out her tongue.
“It’s well known that the Nazis organized archeological expeditions to Tibet, North Africa, South America and even Antarctica, in search of archeological remains,” he said.
“That sounds like an Indiana Jones movie.”
“Well, that’s what really happened,” he said seriously. “That old loony Hitler was a devotee of the occult and of mythological civilizations. He was also obsessed with proving the ancient origin of the Aryan race which, according to him, Germans descended from. So, before and even during Second World War, he never stopped sending expeditions to every corner of the planet. What he was looking for was proof that would justify, in the eyes of the world, the dominion of the Aryans over what he considered inferior races.
“So, do you believe that’s what brought the Nazis here? Looking for evidence to justify their theories of racial superiority?” Cassandra asked as she sat down unconcernedly in one of the chairs.
“I wouldn’t rule it out. This was something of great importance to them.”
“But, how did they find this place?”
“Who knows?” He shrugged his shoulders. “The same way we did. Perhaps they heard the story of the ancient men and took it seriously. Or followed Fawcett in his search for Z. We’ll probably never know for sure.”
“Or maybe we will,” I whispered.
The two of them turned to me, realizing I was standing at the table and leafing through the documents on it.
There were some pages lying in disorder on the table in front of me. They were withered, but free of mold. In the center of the table an oil lamp leaned on a worn-out copy of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf, while at the top left-hand corner there was a neat stack of four books with shabby brown covers. On each of the four covers there was an embossed symbol I had never seen before: an erect sword inside an ellipse, surrounded by a ribbon and the motto Deutsches Ahnenerbe.
“Deutsches Ahnenerbe? Would it have been the deceased’s name?” Cassandra asked.
“I don’t think so,” the professor replied rubbing his neck. “That name rings a bell… I believe Ahnenerbe was a mystic faction of the SS, or something like that.”
“Perhaps they were the ones who dealt with archeology for Hitler,” she said. “It would make sense.”
“It’s quite possible. Although I’d have to consult some files to verify…”
The professor went on talking, but I was no longer paying attention. I opened one of the books and saw spidery handwriting, interspersed with elaborate drawings, unknown symbols and marginal notations. Although I did not understand a word, I knew immediately that this was a journal. It had probably belonged to the Nazi officer who lay behind me, mummified and with a bullet hole in his head.
46
“What a terrible handwriting he had! Even if we understood German there’s no way we’d be able to read these scrawls!” the professor grumbled as he care
fully examined the pages of one of the notebooks.
“Perhaps he was the doctor of the expedition,” Cassie said as she leafed through another one.
I closed the one I was holding. “Well, anyway, as we’re not getting anything out of them and the torches won’t last much longer, I suggest we get out of this place.”
“But there’s so much to see here!” the professor said. He pointed at the piles all around us. “Any of these boxes might have more information in them. Or even some equipment that might come in handy.”
“Maybe, but when the torches go out you won’t be able to find anything. Anyway, we can always come back and carry on the search.”
“I agree,” Cassie said. “Although I think we ought to take the notebooks with us to study. We might be able to make something out of them.”
“Right then, there’s nothing else to talk about,” I said putting the four notebooks in the little red backpack. “Let’s get out of here. I can’t wait to see daylight again.”
I was already walking out when I remembered something and went back in. I grabbed the Mein Kampf from the table and stuck it under my arm.
Cassandra and the professor looked at me with genuine surprise.
“Why on earth would you be interested in that damned book?” Cassie asked, shocked.
I glanced at Hitler’s book and said with a wink, “I’m tired of using banana leaves as toilet paper.”
Once we were outside the building (which had turned out to hold a secret as inexplicable as the one we had met with in front of it), we came upon Iak. He ran to greet us impatiently and with exaggerated relief, as if we had returned from a day trip to hell.
“You worry me a lot,” he scolded us sternly. “You too long to come back. Iak think not see you again.”
“You can’t imagine how long the line was,” I said, pointing my thumb behind me.
“Line?”
“Don’t pay any attention to him,” Cassie said giving me a disapproving look. “Everything’s gone well, Iak. We’re sorry we got you worrying.”
BLACK CITY (Ulysses Vidal Adventure Series Book 2) Page 19