by TR Kenneth
“Are you telling me Isolda Varrick wrote to Schulte about the ingredients of a nuclear bomb?” The implications were just beginning to sink in. “In 1942?”
“All the materials are there. She mentions Norway and heavy water. And early in the war, Germany had huge resources of uranium under their control in the Belgian Congo—the sources of U-238 and the much rarer U-235. In fact, the bombs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki got their uranium from the Belgian Congo after the Germans lost it. But it’s a stone-cold fact the Germans most definitely got to the Congo’s uranium first.”
“Jesus. This can’t be—” Stag was numb.
“Before you panic, let me tell you the part that really concerns me. Our long-planned honeymoon for the Katanga shall bring us home great treasures, and we shall have our glorious union at our address at Vaterhimmelstrasse 235. Because it shall unite us so much more than our time spent at Vaterhimmelstrasse 238.’”
Jake’s breathing became erratic as if he were continually catching his breath. “U-235 was needed during the development of nuclear weapons but it was difficult and expensive to process. It occurs naturally but in minute amounts. The Katanga deposit in the Belgian Congo was supposed to be the world’s richest naturally occurring deposit of U-235, but we’ve only known it to be rumor. When we took control of the Congo and mined it for the uranium for the Trinity Bomb, we never found the fabled Katanga deposit, and in the end, we believed it never existed. That it remained strictly rumor. Well, I fear … I fear it may be true after all. If the Katanga treasure Isolda Varrick mentions was there, and was indeed U-235, then that would mean the Germans got it. Which would have put them leaps and bounds ahead of us in developing the bomb. In 1942.”
“But they didn’t have the bomb. We had the bomb,” Stag pointed out almost defensively.
“We were the first to use the bomb, but we weren’t the first to think of it. The Germans had the Uranverein, the Uranium Club, in 1939. In fact, it was in its second incarnation the day WWII began—September 1, 1939. After that, they had the Virus House—the name of the plutonium lab next to the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Physics. They named it that to discourage unwelcome visitors. I have to tell you, Stag, the Germans were extremely good with secrecy. Look at how much information they kept in the dark just on the Holocaust. They were master obfuscators.”
“It doesn’t follow they were able to develop a bomb and not use it.”
Jake was silent. He spoke his words slowly. “It follows, if it fell to a security organization expert in managing secret information to keep it under wraps till they planned to use it. And then, it follows that the information became lost when the head of this organization was unexpectedly and violently struck down. There was no more insidious organization anywhere than Heydrich’s SD. They managed to kill millions without us believing it. For years.”
Stag felt like he’d been knocked back on his heels. When he came to his senses, he said, “Look, this is getting a little crazy. I’m here looking for the diamonds she mentions in this letter. Not a bomb.”
“If there’d been a bomb, it does seem we’d have known about it by now,” Jake interjected.
“We’d have found it and decommissioned it after we took over Germany,” Stag said with a little more certainty than he felt.
“Except—” Jake left the word hanging in midair.
Except.
“Except Heydrich was assassinated in ’42. In the chaos of that, perhaps documents went missing. Perhaps crucial information was lost when he died.” Stag finished the thought. “But I can’t believe there could be some kind of nuclear device just hanging around—”
“Perhaps not hanging around. The Alpine Redoubt.”
Stag knew what Jake was referring to. The Germans in their hypothetical last stand had talked of storing ordinance high in the Alps in order to wage the final war against the Allies. Nothing came of it. The theory was the Alps would be easy for a decimated army to defend, and the Germans could use their cache of weapons to hold out until the mythical, much-talked-about “super weapon” promised by their Führer could be launched to save them.
“The Alpine Redoubt has been proven to be nothing but a fairy tale,” Stag said.
“Yes,” Jake agreed. “But what’s not a myth is that the Germans brought weapons and valuables to the Alps because of the many salt mines there that could preserve them. Salzburg, Austria, is salt fortress in English, if I may remind you. The Alps are littered with these mines, and they go back at least to the medieval period. We do not, by a long shot, know where they all are … or what may have been tucked into them.”
“Look,” Stag interjected, “I think no matter how well connected Isolda Varrick was, she could not be talking about a bomb. The materials to make a bomb, perhaps, but a bomb, no, it’s too unbelievable.”
“‘… it shall unite us so much more …’ A troubling sentence.” Jake grew quiet. “Unite what is essentially a hollow bullet of U-235 into a separate mass of U-235 and you get … well, you get a chain reaction. Fission. An unstoppable force.”
Stag lowered himself to a chair. Without even knowing it, he’d been pacing the room while he and Jake spoke.
“What are you in the middle of, Stag? You sure picked a time and place to revive your journalism career.”
He could almost hear Jake shaking his head. Stag released a deep breath he hadn’t known he was holding. “Right now, I have more immediate worries than a bomb that may or may not exist—and, nonetheless, hasn’t gone off—in decades now.” His gaze went to the copy of Mein Kampf in its raggedy Ziploc bag. There was still more to decipher there. He should get to it. “Are you going to be available should I have more questions?” he asked, rather ironically. After all, Jake was going nowhere. Stag was the one who might be rubbed out at any moment.
“Of course. Anything. Do you want me to come there?”
Stag was moved by the man’s concern. “Wherever I am these days, there is no here, here,” he answered. “But thanks. Look for my calls.”
“I’m concerned about you, Stag. This is dangerous. There may be a significant population at risk should this thing be real.”
Stag nodded to no one. “I’m doing everything I can. But I don’t know enough. I don’t know who to trust.”
“You can trust me.”
“Don’t talk to anyone. Don’t tell anyone you’ve talked to me.”
“I won’t. But let me hear from you, okay?”
Stag grunted. He looked at Mein Kampf, then disconnected the phone.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
THIS EVENING WE went to a private party at Horcher’s Restaurant. We dined on Viennese fried chicken—because even you agreed that a corpulent man like Goering couldn’t be wrong when it came to his favorite fare. The night was rare. You don’t like to take me anywhere. Instead we nest and idle in my apartment. But this was a secret party, your favorite kind, the room full of high-ranking SD and their Salon Kitty girlfriends awash in jewels and peroxide. So you arrived at my door and said we must attend to escape the boredom of the apartment.
Imagine Goebbels’ chagrin when he saw you there? The good doctor had his hand stroking the exiled actress Lida Baarová’s thigh, and when he saw you, the fear and distaste made his little troll face crumble like rubble. At one point, Joseph and his “pet” went to the wine room, an auspicious place for a man who loves not wine, but I don’t think he took Lida there to browse the vintages. And when they disappeared, you looked at me, the derisive tug on your lips for me alone. You tolerate Goebbels much better than Himmler, with his silly fascination for the occult and spurious Aryan folklore. While Goebbels has no interest in food, his face usually carries the sheen of Lida on it. You, in your inimitable way, always remarked it was too bad Lida’s juice couldn’t cure his bad skin.
Through all these antics, you drunkenly put your usual quell on the atmosphere. The band attempted to revive the crowd, and during a sweet little tune, you stroked your fingers against my palm, and then playe
d with my hand, as if a tender mood had caught you up in the music, and you couldn’t help yourself.
The whole time you held my hand I couldn’t help but think how intimate the simple gesture was. How much is communicated through the clasping of hands. The warmth comes through, the respect. Even more than a kiss, it seems. Perhaps it is the furtiveness of it, the lack of possession. It asks permission, it doesn’t demand. We sat together, holding hands, and the entire time I longed for the comfort of it, while you longed for the intimacy I shall never give.
But then I had my first laugh. Gigli, your favorite blond from the SS orchestra, turned to you, and in her solo, almost mockingly began to sing the old Johnny Mercer favorite from the Garrick Gaeties of 1930. She ended pointedly with the famous line:
All you had to do is say, “Boo.”
Out of breath (and scared to death of you)
Her song ended and a terrible silence filled the room. Everyone was frozen, waiting to see if our Hangman would get the joke.
It was then I began to laugh.
I laughed and laughed, unable to control myself, until tears streamed down my cheeks. My God but it felt good! To release all the black absurdities I’d been living with. To lose myself in a primal surge of rueful hilarity. I wanted more and more of the opiate until I finally came back to my senses and found the room had begun to laugh with me. And you even laughed, in a moment of self-knowledge that I rarely see in those cold, wretched eyes of yours. Then you took me home, and you made love, and I thought of clasped hands. Clasped hands and bleached bones.
Stag turned the page and continued reading. His leg throbbed. He stuffed a couple of pillows underneath it and kept going. It was difficult keeping his mind on the diary. He was exhausted, overwhelmed by Jake’s information and its implications. Tomorrow he was going to scope out Tarnhelm. After that, he would have to take it one limp at a time.
Against his will, he thought of Red Riding Hood. He couldn’t stop picturing her as she sat in his room holding that white rose, dressed in that degraded, beautiful suit, the suit that matched the degraded, worn look in her eyes. Eyes that had seen too much.
He wondered if his eyes looked the same. Perhaps they did to others. How could they not hold the reflections of all the sorrow he’d been through—and now held all the sorrow he knew was surely to come?
His thoughts went back to the idea of the bomb. He’d yet found no direct reference to heavy water or Vaterhimmelstrasse in the coded diary. It left him with an ill-defined nausea to imagine a bomb out there, decaying and unstable, but the nausea was constantly being overridden with frustration. After all, he couldn’t find those fucking diamonds and he had real clues to them; how the hell was he going to find a bomb that may or may not exist with no clues?
He had to keep plugging away to decode the diary. It seemed Isolda had written it for catharsis, and, perhaps, a grasp at immortality. She’d had to know her situation was as precarious as anyone’s could be. But so far, the diary mostly seemed to be a cry of, “I was here, damn it! I existed, and this is what happened to me!” Her secret war information, on the other hand, was imparted in these letters, and perhaps in silk messages she tucked into the back of the paintings.
He went through the apartment in his head—that strange, closed place that reeked of decades past. Something bothered him about it more than just the freak nature of a time capsule. The place was really more like a tomb. But what was buried there that he did not find?
He closed the diary and flipped off the light. He lay in the dark for a while, trying to figure things out in a rare moment of peace and solitude.
They wouldn’t come for him tonight. Not only had he secured his door, but he’d registered at the Swiss Star under the name of Maguire. At the Baur au Lac, he traveled under the name of Dedman. He figured this way he could unnerve them. Spring up, place to place, like that mole-and-mallet game, with hopefully enough lead-time to stay ahead of them. Under this system, it would take them a minute to realize he was even in town.
It was risky, taunting Goliath. But there was no other way to kick the chair out from under a man like Portier except to take the offensive. He was going to have to be bold and aggressive when he finally met Portier.
Then, he would disappear again. Nacht und nebel.
Tonight, he would sleep. He was damned tired. He needed to dream good, restful things, but his mind went back to the ominous picture of Red Riding Hood in his room at the Adlon, with her coat off and her legs gathered to the side of the chair. He wondered what her eyes would look like full of something more like joy rather than dread. She was at that woman’s age where her face had a kind of wasting to it. The bones had become more delicate and defined, the hollows more vulnerable. It now seemed much sexier than the plump, unworldly face of a younger woman.
But he knew he wouldn’t dream of her.
He would dream of Holly. And wake, alone and shrouded with grief.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
STAG WOKE AS he thought he would, bathed in sweat, clutching the twisted sheets like a life rope. He lay there for a long time, the shadow of his dreams still suffocating him. Skeletal men groped their way through the haze of a nuclear winter. Mushroom clouds dotted the Dali landscape like obscene trees. In the distance, a woman and her newborn stood stock still, staring at him. Only him. Then in an instant roll of hellfire, they were gone. Transformed into the mist.
He ordered coffee. When he was dressed and out, he bought a disposable GoFone to call Interpol.
He didn’t want to talk to Troost. Law enforcement was never going to provide him any information, but he’d promised he would report back every now and then. Besides, it didn’t hurt to have a few friends in high places.
“You left the Adlon, Mr. Maguire.” Troost didn’t bother hiding the frustration in his voice. “We’d like to protect you, but if you insist on—”
“Look, I appreciate the sentiments, but I have things to do.”
“Such as?” Troost asked.
“Business.”
“You’re going to need help. It’s foolish for you to be poking into Tarnhelm’s affairs without some kind of safety net. These people are very dangerous.”
“Yeah.”
“Stay where you are and we’ll send—”
“I have one question—Why would Tarnhelm have anything to do with NATO?”
There was a long pause at the end of the line. “Tarnhelm deals in secrets, Mr. Maguire. Regular people don’t understand the cost of secrets.”
“They rubbed out this Sir Roger so they could continue keeping whose secrets? NATO’s or Tarnhelm’s? Who is their client?”
“We don’t know.” Troost breathed into the phone. “That’s why we’d like to talk to Angelika Aradi. If we find that connection between client and Tarnhelm, we’ll be able to do something about it. But what we need is for you to stay alive. Stay alive so you can give us information.”
“The two are mutually exclusive.”
Stag hung up.
Stag stepped into the lobby of the Baur au Lac and again made the mental note to get some better clothes. The hotel, like the Adlon, was another relentlessly chic place, but between the probable recurring need to exit quickly and the fact that he was getting attached to his jacket that held Mein Kampf, he knew he wouldn’t bother. Shabby and limping was no way to impress the elite, but being a writer, telling folks to fuck off was.
He left the Baur au Lac in the rental car Dedman had ordered. He parked it on a random street, then walked to the Zurich Cantonal Bank. After he’d opened up a Maguire account there, he took a cab to Tarnhelm headquarters. At the huge oak door, he felt like he was infiltrating a very exclusive club. The building was eighteenth century. The stairway, marble. The secretaries looked like they’d been handpicked by Fox News—all of them capable, fat-free, and willing to work their way to the top by their knees and botox.
Yep. It was all just as he imagined. He looked as out of place in his cheap sagging jacket as a cockro
ach in a Junior League Show house.
“May I help you?” The sheath-clad receptionist barely contained her distaste at his appearance.
He looked at her. He swore there was a factory somewhere in Scandinavia that made women like her just to be wallpaper for men like Portier.
“Luc Portier.”
She looked doubtful. “Mr. Portier? I’m afraid I must ask if you have an appointment?” It didn’t take long to scratch down to the bitch in her.
“Oh, I don’t need an appointment.” He went to a bank of seating upholstered in thick silk damask. He sat and stared back at her. “Just tell him Stag Maguire wants to see him.”
He smiled. It wasn’t often that a scraggly cripple made demands on Luc Portier. But these were no longer normal times. No, these were extraordinary times, and it was best they all get up to speed. No time like the present.
Angelika watched Maguire enter the Tarnhelm building. Maguire didn’t know who or what he was dealing with or he’d never have been so bold. But she couldn’t help but be a little impressed by his steadfast, awkward gait. He walked into the dragon’s den without hesitation, and the sheer audacity of it left her wanting to hold her hand over her mouth, breathless.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
STAG SAT ACROSS from Portier’s spectacular glass desk in an office that looked more like a futuristic hall of mirrors. From his seat, Portier stared at him. He returned the favor. Finally, once the secretary had shut the double doors behind her, Portier spoke.
“What can I do for you, Mr. Maguire?”
The hostility gave Stag pause. He’d found Portier to be like his pictures, an older gentleman, handsome, well dressed, the ultimate flashy watch on his wrist, the Hermès alligator briefcase next to him as if it held the launch codes for the US arsenal. According to the picture with Bill Gates, Portier rattled people more than people rattled him.
“I have some information,” Stag said, never taking his eyes from Portier. “About Mein Kampf.”