A Room Full of Night

by TR Kenneth

  “I understand the constraints now. We will keep our secrets. After all, it’s what we do,” Portier offered.

  “Yes. It’s what we do,” Doyle repeated, toasting him with his snifter of Henri IV cognac.

  Kronbauer looked up expectantly. He sat in the Arema Cafe on the Birkenstrasse in Moabit, a nice little island of old-school refuge in the bustle of modern Berlin. The cafe was a butcher shop from the 1800s and now was a jewel of original art nouveau tile.

  Stag sat down at the table.

  “I don’t have much time,” Kronbauer said, looking at his watch.

  Stag looked around. Kronbauer was too dressed up and fussy for the casual cafe, but it was the perfect place to meet. It was unlikely any of his rich cronies would happen in on them. It was this or stand on the street eating Döner Kebab.

  “I was surprised you called me back. I don’t take you for a spy,” Stag said.

  “By default, everyone who works with Tarnhelm is a spy,” Kronbauer answered.

  “Yeah. I got that.” Which was why Dedman had the apartment in Sony Center and why he refrained from inviting Jake to their meeting. Tarnhelm didn’t need to know about him. He’d been pretty scrupulous in making sure there was no connection between them for Tarnhelm to sniff out. He didn’t want Jake to go the way of Harry. Ice and Micotil made a hellacious cocktail.

  “Mr. Maguire, I am taking a chance meeting with you. Not only do I value my job, but my neck as well.”

  “I think they’ve got a bomb. A really bad bomb.”

  Kronbauer looked unsurprised. “Certainly, they protect that apartment as if it held the Holy Grail.”

  “They will sell it to the highest bidder. Unlikely anyone will bother detonating it in Berlin—”

  “My son is a lobbyist for Krupp in Washington, DC.”

  Stag suddenly knew where Kronbauer’s disjointed loyalties came from.

  “We’re all kind of spread out these days, aren’t we? Hard to decide what place to protect and what to let go.”

  “I don’t get involved in the workings of Tarnhelm. But that apartment … Well, it has me worried.”

  “I need to get back inside of it. There’s something I’m missing there. If I could figure out what, I think I could solve this whole problem.” Stag silenced as the waitress came with their drinks. When she left, he said, “I’d like to know the history of the place.”

  Kronbauer frowned. “There actually isn’t much to tell. My family’s been maintaining it with the Dresdenhof since before the war. The only one who had any real experience with the occupants was my grandfather. He’d met the woman in the portrait.”

  “Isolda Varrick?”

  “Yes. But as I’m sure you know, the apartment didn’t actually belong to her. It was Heydrich’s. He kept her, you see.”

  “Yes.”

  “There are only two things I know about the last days of the occupants. My grandfather spoke of these stories in hushed tones with the promise they were not to be repeated. He was very loyal, you see. SD himself. Quite patriotic.”

  Stag nodded.

  “My grandfather had a bit of a crush on Isolda, I believe. As a child, I can remember accompanying him on his inspections of the apartment. He would stand very still, for long moments, and stare at her portrait. Sometimes, I think there were tears in his eyes.

  “The only thing I ever heard about her at all was that, one day, she went up to the apartment after greeting my grandfather at the concierge with mausebär, her little endearment for him—he loved the silly name because he was so smitten with her.”

  Kronbauer paused for effect. “She never came back down.”

  Stag wasn’t exactly shocked by the revelation. It could mean anything really. Where the SD was involved, people just disappeared. Nacht und nabel.

  “The other story he told me concerned the mirror. When Heydrich had placed the empty apartment in his trust, he walked through it with my grandfather, pointing out how everything must be exactly maintained. Then he did the most unsettling thing. Heydrich caught the reflection of the portrait in the mirror that hung opposite. He stared into the mirror for a very long time. Then, in a rage, he drew his pistol, and fired the shot that shattered it.”

  The waitress returned to ask if they needed anything. Kronbauer politely waved her away. When she was gone, he leaned in and said, “The thing that got to my grandfather, you see, wasn’t that he had to maintain the apartment, nor was it that he could never figure out what had happened to its occupant. I think deep down he half-dreamed Isolda Varrick would show up again, and be pleased her apartment was well cared for, and call him mausebär.

  “No, the thing that ultimately placed a wedge between my grandfather and his patriotism to the SD was Heydrich’s behavior. He was never sure if Heydrich was unhinged by the image of Isolda—or the image of himself.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  STAG WOKE WITH a start. This time, the trauma of Holly was fractured with shards of mirror, her last words echoing though his dreams, scratchy and far away. As if recorded on an old shellac 78.

  He sat on the edge of the bed, his head in his hands, trying to wake up and pull himself out of the loop of his nightmare. He and Jake had stayed up late while Stag brought him up to speed on the diary, Tarnhelm, and all the strange happenings since they’d last seen each other. Now the comforting smell of freshly brewed coffee was wafting in. When he looked up, Jake appeared at his door with a steamy cup, in the same old wrinkled clothes he’d arrived in.

  The one thing Jake could do was pack light.

  “I thought I heard you. Rough night?” the older man said.

  Stag grunted and gratefully accepted the mug.

  “While you explore that strange apartment, I’ll do a bit of research.” Jake raised an eyebrow. “You never know what a little academic digging can turn up.”

  “Where the fuck do you start?” Stag asked, rhetorically.

  “I think I should start at the German Resistance Memorial Center. We’ve got a rebel on our hands in Isolda Varrick. Maybe there’s something there that can be useful.”

  “She probably deserves her own damned memorial. But I don’t know that we’ll ever even know her real name.”

  Jake said nothing. There was nothing to say.

  Jake stood in the hall of the new exhibit at the German Resistance Memorial Center, in front of the glass display case of uniforms on the mannequins. There they were, the tailored uniforms of the rogues’ gallery: the Gestapo, the SS, the SD. Letters in code, along with their translations, were posted along the narrow walls. To make for an eerie effect, the museum piped in the sound of people whispering in order to create the dread and paranoia one must have felt as a lone resister against the Third Reich.

  Reading one letter, he went back and forth several times to the display case where the uniforms were. Something clearly bothered him. He stopped in front of the SD uniform, his gaze riveted to the left sleeve. He took as good a picture as he could with his GoFone, then he returned to the wall of letters, one in particular holding his attention. When the photo of it was taken, he hastily placed the phone back in his wrinkled khakis, zipped up his overcoat, and departed, not even noticing it had begun to rain until he was back in the apartment and it pelted against the large plate-glass windows.

  Stag waited in the rear of the Dresdenhof for the service entrance to click. Dressed in workman’s overalls and a toolbox he’d snagged from under the sink at the Airbnb, he couldn’t shove down the trepidation tightening his throat. Kronbauer was cooperating, and for some strange reason, Stag had trusted him. Perhaps it was the recognition of a fellow conflicted soul, or perhaps it was just that he really was running out of options. But when the service door lock released, Stag knew he’d made the right choice. Kronbauer had done his part and gotten him back in. Now it was Stag’s turn.

  He stepped inside.

  He held the key to 12A in one hand and the P-83 in the other. He met no one as he rode the service elevator. Inside the
hallway, he found he didn’t even need the key. Kronbauer had kindly left the door to 12A unlocked.

  PART FIVE

  Most of you know what it means when a hundred corpses are lying side by side, or five hundred, or a thousand. To have stuck it out, and at the same time—apart from exceptions caused by human weakness—to have remained decent fellows, that is what has made us hard. This is a page of glory in our history, which has never been written and is never to be written…

  SS REICHSFUHRER HEINRICH HIMMLER

  in a secret speech about the extermination of Jews in death camps to his men at Posen, German-occupied Poland

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  IT HAUNTED HIM. There was something wrong with the apartment, but every walk through was just like the last. There was the kitchen, the painter’s nook, the portrait. Isolda’s sensual bedroom of satin and lace, and her large bathroom, full of luxuries to pamper the body. Her clothes were still in the drawers of her bureau. The perfume bottle of Je Reviens still sat on her dressing table.

  In the living room, the glass shards of the mirror twinkled on the rug, giving the room a surreal star shine in the morning light. In the bookcase, he perused the titles again, making note of the empty space where Mein Kampf had been.

  If Isolda had come up to the apartment and been taken by the SD, they could have gotten her out of the apartment many ways without being seen. Kronbauer’s grandfather could have just missed her exit, somehow. Perhaps he’d been distracted by the agents. Perhaps he’d just stepped away as they escorted her through the lobby on their way to the Gestapo or the train station.

  And yet, there was the niggling problem of what was missing. It was there at the edges of his conscious, ebbing and flowing like a tide, never quite still enough to be captured.

  He went to the portrait and took it down. Between the stretcher bars and canvas, he checked for any silk messages stuck in there that others might have missed. There was nothing.

  Slowly he sat down on the sofa that faced the wide-open double doors of the bedroom. Logically, he reviewed everything he knew. If she had come up to the apartment and was never seen to leave, then it was reasonable to wonder if she was still there. But where? The apartment was sumptuous but small. The spaces were all accounted for …

  Except.

  He stood, the realization running though him like a bolt of electricity. The bedroom, the bath, the bureau. All as they should be. But there was no wardrobe, and no closet. A woman of her means would have gowns and dresses. And goddamnit. A woman would have realized right away the closet was missing.

  Stepping into the bedroom, he drew out the apartment’s floor plan in his head. The bathroom door was off to the right, with the huge Biedermeier bureau on the wall to the right of it.

  The bathroom didn’t abut the living room wall. There was a space between them. Unless that space was taken up by the apartment next door, that was exactly where he figured a closet would be if the apartment had one.

  He shoved the tall bureau aside, straining with its weight. Beyond, the plaster wall looked undisturbed. Not sure what there might be behind it, he got the toolbox he’d brought with him. He took out the large hammer and chisel, and went to the smooth plaster wall.

  If there had been a closet there, perhaps he would find the outline. Perhaps there was even a hallway to an entirely new set of rooms. He wouldn’t know until the plaster came off.

  Working diligently, he cracked away at the plaster where he supposed a door might have been. The more he chipped away, the more damning the evidence. Finally, when all the plaster had been removed, he stepped back amongst the dust, and stood in awe at his finding. There was the outline of a doorway, its door missing. And in its place was a wall of red brick.

  “The SD had its own salt mines, like much of the Reich’s bureaucracy. They were acquired for document storage.” Rikhardsson referred to the dossier in his hand. “After the war, everyone was looking for valuables. They still look for Nazi gold and such. But the real gold for the SD was its files. Heydrich kept these little cards on everyone. And he protected them fiercely.”

  “We have all the files, don’t we?” Sadler asked, irritated and weary that he’d been summoned to Zurich again. He was getting damn tired of being a lapdog.

  “Not even close,” Portier said. “Between Heydrich’s nefarious little file cards and then Ernst Kaltenbrunner, who took over after Heydrich’s assassination, there’s a lot we don’t have.”

  “We have the Berghof Memo in which Heydrich tells the Führer about a shipment of documents to be stored somewhere in the area, but it’s unclear where it is referring to. No other records survive that we know of.”

  “Do you know how big an area that is? Berchtesgaden is a national park, not to mention all the surrounding mountains.” Portier was becoming annoyed as he so often did these days.

  “And the fact that a lot of the entrances to these mines were dynamited in order to seal them when they knew the war was being lost. The chances of finding anything Heydrich might have hidden there is extremely slim.” Rikhardsson, with his cold logic, irritated Portier further.

  “If Maguire is in Berlin, it’s because he knows something. We will find it. We have him covered,” Sadler said.

  “Unless we have another incident.” Portier looked at Sadler.

  Sadler didn’t miss the reference. “We’ve recalled every agent that Vanderloos sent out.”

  “Every agent that you know of,” Portier shot back.

  Sadler looked extremely uncomfortable. Rikhardsson, too.

  “This is chaos,” Portier sighed. Wearily, he picked up his briefcase and buzzed for his car. “Until we have that bomb, I don’t want anyone leaving Zurich.”

  “But I have several deals—” Sadler began.

  “No one is leaving. If this thing’s around, I want everyone to have the full incentive of it being found.”

  Sadler looked vaguely ill, as he usually looked.

  Portier’s assistant arrived at the door to walk him to his limo. After he was gone, Rikhardsson said, “Let’s hope to God the thing is closer to Berchtesgaden than here.”

  “If it exists,” Sadler snapped.

  “Oh, it exists. Heydrich was power-hungry and no fool.”

  “Then let’s hope it is nearer the North Sea.”

  “Portier won’t bet on it.”

  “And why not?” Sadler clenched his jaw in frustration. “Why does he insist on staying here if there’s a danger?”

  “Because he doesn’t care.”

  “Oh, he doesn’t? The man with the million-dollar watch, every luxury, every comfort, doesn’t care that he might one day be desperately licking the black rain off his briefcase in a search for water?”

  “No, he does not.”

  “And why would that be?” Sadler couldn’t control his anger any longer.

  “Because he is dying,” Rikhardsson said.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  DREAD WEIGHED DOWN on him. Stag gripped the chisel and began removing the bricks. He vaguely wondered if others in the apartments around him could hear him banging, but he didn’t stop. He was driven to see the other side.

  The bricks piled up on the Aubusson rug, the dust swirled in the morning light. Slowly the hole became large enough for him to reach through.

  He shoved his hand into the darkness beyond, and touched a strange, unexpected barrier. In the time it took him to draw back, horror slowly seeped into his blood. He knew what he’d found. Clawing, clinging hair; coarse black ropes of it; red, fuzzy piles of it; here and there, sprinkled with the barest wisps of caramel and blond. When he looked down at his hand, several baby curls clung to his fingers, the color of a fawn.

  He found himself on his knees.

  The strands of nameless victims were saved and matted into a felt, thick enough to form batting insulation for a German submarine. This was Heydrich’s fitting end for his own U-boat. Not a sound would escape.

  It took a long time for him to find
the courage to stand, and pick up the hammer and chisel again. His heart hammered rebelliously in his chest.

  God, he didn’t want to know.

  She was there in the corner of the closet. She’d mummified, and there were piles of hair around her where she must’ve clawed at the felt in moments of despair and terror. His heart seized up. He couldn’t figure out which was worse at the moment: finding Isolda’s body slumped down in the corner of a sealed tomb, or the fact that the very substance that had sealed her inside was the hair of a thousand murdered people.

  He knelt down gently to look at her.

  She wore the Blood Eagle on the ring finger of her right hand, as many Germans did when signifying a wedding ring. In her other hand, as if tossed in as an afterthought by her tormentor, was a note, perhaps the last she’d ever written, perhaps the thing that Heydrich had caught her with and sealed her fate, the silk hanging limply from her skeletal fingers. To him, it was as if she held out her death warrant.

  He gently took the note from her and decoded it then and there. It was another attempt to reach the old man at the paint store. Perhaps he’d been her traitor all along; lost to history now. But she implored him to give the warning.

  The diamonds did not go in the lake. I beg you to reach Shulte and tell him the information is wrong! They ran off the road and went down the mountain to land on a ledge. I’ve no location yet. Do not search the lake. It is not there. It is on the mountain!

  She gave no more pleas for help in this one. She knew.

  “I’m sure of it,” Jake said, sitting at the apartment table. “The museum’s evidence was slight, but compelling. In our case, I think there can be no other conclusion.”

  Stag sat facing him, still stunned by his own discovery. The coffee in front of him had gone cold.

  “Diamonds, don’t you see? It always struck me as frivolous to be worried about some diamonds instead of a nuke.” Jake, as if in nervous reflex, emptied his cold cup in the sink and poured him another. “But this answered it. I saw it in the underground letters. I’d never heard it before.”