by Don Jacobson
“His role in the late war certainly confirms his nature. I have no doubt that he is behind all that has befallen us—the Martyring of the Three in Deauville, the Persephone sinking, Eileen’s programming as Richard’s would-be assassin, and the death of Sergeant Liebermann—in the past six years.”
He held up the photo and the neckcloth, “Manfred paid a high price to grant us this wisdom. See the criminal’s face. Commit it to memory, much as the Sergeant did. And, as an additional proof, know that the totem of the von Winterlichs is the head of a wild boar. How presumptuous and proud he must have been to wear this cravat into our house!
“He has had us on the back foot for years. If he remains true to his upbringing, he will become more and more arrogant in his belief in our ignorance and his own invulnerability. That veil which clouded our minds has been rent in two.
“There is but one other item you must know about him. This is something about which nothing has been written and about which nothing is known outside of the circle of Keepers and certain Life Directors of the Trust.
“Like you, Eileen, Winters is a lost Bennet, except he knows it not.
7:35 PM ART, November 14, 1950, San Fernando, Argentina
He had arrived at his house only in the past half hour. The long drive back from Tucumán Province in the mountains, where he had been securing another expatriate, Ricardo Klement, with enough reserves to begin life anew under the benevolently ignorant care of Juan Peron’s fascist state, had been twelve hours of jouncing hell along indifferently-paved roads[civ]
Having sluiced off the dust that billowed up from beneath his auto’s tires thanks to a series of dry late spring days, he stood beneath the grape arbor shielding his veranda from the day’s heat and prying eyes. Of course, the sunset reddening the western horizon only foretold another pleasant evening which would deepen into a stygian night: the heat had long since been cut by sea breezes rolling in from the East. Now, t’was just the sunset and the fine Uco Valley Malbec he was sipping to slake the powerful thirst that had been consuming him over the last six hours.
Marius Winters was content with this resting place even if it reminded him little of his ancestral home in the Swabian Jura. However, perhaps with time, t’would be safe for him to reinstall himself upon the near-black oaken throne with boar’s heads carved into the arms.
Chapter XL
December 5, 1950, Swabia, Federal Republic of Germany
The newly-minted Land Rover picked its way through the ruts that scarred the track penetrating ever more deeply into the forested ravines furrowing the age-old slope rising from the modern autobahn. Each of the car’s four occupants—two men and two women—clutched tightly to whichever handholds they could find. Denis Robard’s death-grip on the steering wheel mimicked the one from three years earlier. He threw a quick look at his wife’s features, tightened in anticipation of yet another pitching crash. She had one arm protectively draped across her middle; her face was milk-hued even in the dappled daylight filtering through the forest’s canopy. He could only imagine how Lizzy and Allie looked, crammed as they were in the smallish rear seat of the rough terrain vehicle.
Mon Dieu, rough terrain, indeed, Robard mused as he struggled to keep the wheel under control. There is far too much terrain here as far as I am concerned. This track is suitable, at best, for goats and donkeys.
If the Earl had not promised us that there was something up the mountain past the bunker, I would have stopped two miles back when this road forked off. Talk about a remote keep! Once the snows arrive, I would wager that nobody comes in or goes out until April.
Denis was certain that the road had last seen maintenance in the Thirties.
The Robards and Schillers were traveling disguised as English tourists doing that which English tourists had been doing for centuries: traveling about the world utterly oblivious to danger or their imposition into the sundry lives of the locals. For good measure, the quartet added a subtle impoliteness to all their dealings with “the natives:” usually evidenced by speaking too loudly to overcome language barriers and lamenting the seeming inability of anyone to produce “proper” food and drink. The foursome played the ugly Englishman to the hilt.
Today they were breaching the lair of their enemy, feigning innocence. However, as they were unsure if their quarry was in residence, they left the final two members of their party back at the Villa Diodati, the residence on the shores of the Lake which they had rented. The last thing needed was for Winters to recognize either Eileen or Richard and react violently.
Logically, there was little reason to assume that Winters was yet to be found in Bavaria. The Bonn government had been especially diligent over the years in their efforts to scrub the worst Nazi stains from the homeland. The Israelis had, likewise, been rather obsessive in their tracking of war criminals, although they tended to leave bodies behind rather than prisoners for prosecution. As a result, most diehard Nazis who had escaped Hitler’s Götterdämerung, had fled the Continent to evade capture, trial, and, frequently, execution.
The Robards and the Schillers, thus, expected to view a castle erected by a Holy Roman Empire Freiherr, most likely in utter disrepair and uninhabited.
Surprise, therefore, was the order of the day when the Land Rover lurched through the open gates and into the courtyard fronting the towering double doors, near black from centuries of trans-Alpine winters. An ancient man, bent from countless years at his labors, propped himself upright on the splintered and twisted handle of a tired straw broom. Lizzy, leaned against her husband to peer through the windscreen from her well-shielded backseat vantage point. Once she espied the doorman, she could not imagine which was modeled after the other—the broom or the man—both weathered to a greyness that seemed drawn directly from the Schloss’ massive stones, rough-hewn but still tightly mortared they were. He viewed the vehicle through rheumy eyes, scarcely moving a muscle until the Rover skidded to a stop, skipping across the damp granite cobbles, worn smooth by innumerable hooves and wheels.
Denis popped open the driver’s door and hopped out. He tilted the seat forward to hand Lizzy down onto the middling-sized piazza. By the time his cousin had assured herself that she still was in possession of all requisite limbs, Letty had exited to afford the lanky Schiller the same opportunity to unfold from his enforced captivity. The four then mounted their assault on the elderly retainer.
Schiller knew better than to play the buffoon with the crafty alter. Rather, he pulled out a few measures of Prussian Junker arrogance, all the better to establish the pecking order. He would, however, temper that with a touch of German superiority which would essentially say to the old peasant, “I am your better, but between you and I, we are both better than these fools…two of whom are French.”
Schiller’s ice-blue eyes pulled the man upright into a posture of respect.
“Wir sind aus Genf gekommen, um das Wildschweinhaus zu besichtigen. Ich riet meinen Begleitern, dass Touren wahrscheinlich unwahrscheinlich sind. Sie bestanden jedoch darauf, dass wir kommen. Sie müssen wissen, dass zwei von ihnen Französisch sind. Hol deinen Meister. ”
(“We have come from Geneva to tour the Wildschweinhaus. I told my companions that tours would be unlikely. They insisted that we come none-the-less. You must know that two of them are French. Fetch your master.”)
The command issued, the old man shuffled off around the corner of the building using the broom as a staff.
Denis leaned over to Alois and asked, “Do you think he’s going to get someone? I wonder if he even understood you.”
Schiller scoffed, “Don’t let the tired old man act fool you. I would wager that, as soon as he was out of sight, his pace picked up and he fairly ran to find the person in charge of this pile of stones. My guess t’will be some sort of housekeeper. I doubt if there is a steward or butler on the premises.
“European peasants have had 3,000 years to hone the fine art of deflecting aristocra
tic orders, all the better to avoid backbreaking labor. Even our dear Manfred discovered intermittent arthritis in his joints at the tender age of seventeen.
“But, they know that we know. The game is to see just how far they can push it before the Master or Mistress gets angry.”
The sound of a great bolt being pulled back cut off any further ruminations on his part.
One of the two great doors opened, the squealing of rusty hinges bearing testimony to the reduced circumstances of the owners of the lodge. The old man, standing upright, a shotgun held at porte arms, validated everything Schiller had said. By his side stood a tiny, black-clad, grey-haired woman.
A small purse of Swiss gold francs broke through the frosty reserve of the woman who did turn out to be the housekeeper. After shooing her protector off into the back of the house, she begrudgingly allowed the foursome into the great entry hall, its galleries rising into a blackness unrelieved by any lamps.
Schiller explained that the group wished to tour the Schloss; his promotion of this abode to something where an imperial margrave rather than a simple Freiherr would live was meant as a sop to the housekeeper’s pride. He offered that they had read of the home in a guidebook from the latter part of the previous century.
That was his entrée which allowed him to offer that he was, himself, the scion of one of the great Prussian houses, the Schillers of East Prussia. He averred that his grandfather had mentioned a time well before the First World War when he had, as a young man, gone boar hunting in these mountains as a guest of the von Winterlichs. Knowing that she was guiding a Graf, his Gräfin, and their friends…people who knew of her master’s family…led Frau Weis to become more voluble, replying to every query with the utmost candor.
The floodgates cracked open as years of near-solitary existence were relieved by an attentive audience.
No, her master, to her everlasting regret, still unmarried, had not been in residence for several years, since shortly after the war. He was traveling overseas.
The family had fallen on difficult times since Lord Junius had died after the rise of the Führer. Master Marius had done what he could, but the war, unfortunately, commanded much of his attention. Now, a small Swiss gentleman visited her and Johannes every six months, inspected the house to see if repairs were required, and, if so, he ordered them undertaken. He also saw to the provisions: shipments arriving every six weeks.
As she pointed out elements of the von Winterlich patrimony, each Anubis sought to ferret out clues that might offer whiffs as to Winters’ whereabouts.
After yet another receiving room, Schiller sought to split the party to cover more ground. Affecting boredom—not difficult as he was finding Frau Weis’ travelogue dry and uninformative—he reminded her of his grandfather’s hunting excursion and asked if he and Denis might explore the gunroom. His objective was to prowl about the lower levels.
If the old woman was concerned that they might get into trouble wandering off alone, no indication of it crossed her countenance. Lizzy murmured something to her, the German equivalent of ‘boys will be boys.’ Frau Weis nodded and guided Schiller and Robard to a doorway which led to a set of stairs dropping toward the back of the house. Then she ushered the women on toward the library.
Each man clutched a candlestick provided by the housekeeper. Once they had descended a few steps and felt that the others were out of sight, both pulled flashlights from their coat pockets and pushed onwards, leaving the candles guttering in an alcove carved into the stone.
In short order, they had attained the gunroom, its racks forlornly empty and layered in dust. Casting their torches’ beams around the room, the pair quickly arrived at the same conclusion: that this chamber was not destined to reveal much about Marius Winters. There were three access points…the stairwell, what was clearly a door to the rear mews and, perhaps, the stables, and another which offered no clue as to what was on the other side.
Robard addressed that latter door while Schiller opened the portal leading outside. Alois discovered nothing of interest while Denis pulled back the heavy panel to reveal a windowless chamber of indeterminable length. Playing his torch down the stretch revealed something which brought a whistle to his lips.
Schiller joined him, adding the power of his lamp to illuminate the room.
Robard said, “Looks like a target range, a shooting gallery.”
Schiller replied, “Indeed. I doubt if the old man was testing his skill with that blunderbuss he was carrying. I wager that Winters was the last one to unlimber his weapon down here. How long do you think it is?”
“Probably 50 meters, Olympic length. If we know anything about the Winters, they are a proud lot. Marius probably believed he could qualify for the ’36 Games, all the better to impress his Führer,” Denis sarcastically fired back.
He then reached up for the overhead cable snaking off into the darkness saying, “Let’s see how good a shot he is. Get an idea of our opponent’s capabilities, you know.”
Eventually a piece of white approached them from the gloom, fluttering as the line to which it was clipped jerked and swayed. Both Schiller and Robard narrowed their eyes in mutual squints trying to be the first to discern Winters’ last target.
Schiller, who had cut his hunting teeth on the family’s East Prussian estate tracking deer with his vater’s old five-shot Mauser K98 and its abysmal 1.5x scope, won the contest.
As the paper neared their position, he turned to Denis whose mouth was hanging open in shock and urgently said, “We need to get this to London. Gather the girls. I will meet you at the car!”
He carefully pulled the paper rectangle free from its clip, folded the cutting, and moved from the room.
Frau Weis cracked open the door to the library, a room with rich dark paneling glowing from regular applications of oil. Shelves filled with leather-bound tomes covered the walls, reminding Lizzy of the Guards standing at attention for His Majesty’s review. A desk dominated the center of the bookroom with a lace-maker’s oil lamp resting where it could be conveniently used. A tray filled with envelopes was the only other exception to the pristine work surface.
Elizabeth and Letty split up, each apparently finding different features of the room to be of great interest. After casually running her fingers over the spines occupying several shelves, the Gräfin used a drunkard’s walk to gradually bring her closer to the object of her attention—the great worktable and its correspondence—without alerting anyone that piece of furniture was her goal.
Lizzy innocently queried, “I thought you said that the master of the estate was not in residence? Yet, all seems in readiness. I would expect him to come in from the hall at any moment.”
The housekeeper neither bristled nor did she bridle. She accepted the question as the Countess’ prerogative to make…and her responsibility, as a servant, to answer. Lizzy’s touch was so gentle that only the most experienced agent would sense that an interrogation was under way, and Frau Weis was neither Gehlen Organization nor MI5. She was simply a lonely old woman engaged in a conversation with a beautiful young aristocrat who had deigned to recognize her existence, if only for a moment.
“Ach, meine Gräfin, the Master has been away for at least two years. We keep the library in order so that Herr Eisenherz, the Swiss gentleman who handles the Master’s affairs, may use it to conduct estate business and fulfill the Master’s orders.
“These letters,” she paused to point out the stack of unopened correspondence, “are from the master to Herr Eisenherz.”
Lizzy gently pounced as Letty began her own perambulation toward the center of gravity, “Oh? Why would not your Master write to Herr Eisenherz at his offices in Geneva? It must be quite difficult for the post rider to bring these in over the old road.”
Frau Weis sadly nodded, “If there is but one wish I would have, t’would be to re-shingle the road for it leaves such a bad impression of the house and family.
“No, the Master would not wish any to read his post, especially nosey people at a law office. So, Johannes takes the donkey cart down the mountain past the verdammte englishe Militärbaracken at the crossroads. He collects the mail and the supplies ordered by Herr Eisenherz.”
Letty now made her entry into the conversation, to misdirect the elder woman from the central purposes of Lizzy’s inquiries.
“Oh, Lizzy, look at the exotic stamps on these letters. Seeing such colorful squares puts me in the mind of a long journey to unusual places,” she enthused.
Lizzy broke away from Frau Weis and leaned over her friend’s shoulder, resting one hand on the desktop directly against the tray. As Letty pointed at, but pointedly did not touch, the stack of envelopes, Lizzy spied the grail! A hand’s subtle movement destabilized the stack of missives, causing it to slide sideways with two floating loose on invisible currents to drop to the floor.
Assaying a blush of embarrassment at their disturbance of Frau Weis’ Teutonic order, Lizzy bent to retrieve the wayward items. She sought to hide the enthusiasm that tightened her innards as she stole a closer look at the directions on both letters. They were addressed to Herr Eisenherz care of Wildschweinhaus.
You must admire German efficiency and the penchant to follow orders: t’is second nature. Click the heels, shout ‘jawohl,’ and march into the Gates of Hell. Form is drilled into the little ones the moment they are free of leading strings! T’is so ingrained that they forget to lie about something so minor.
For there on the upper left corner of each envelope, scribed in a precise, masculine hand, was an identical return address, unforgettable to Lizzy’s trained memory…and one which matched the nation of origin identified on the stamps: Republica Argentina.