Flying Without Wings

by Paula Wynne

  Suddenly a voice bellowed out, ‘Johan!’

  36

  Growing up, we saw that prejudices never really went away, no matter where we went. A series of knockbacks led to us taking on mercenary quests and slowly we were drawn into a nasty and illegal trade. But this was our right. Our right to right the wrongs.

  John leapt up. Aron hardly ever called him that name nowadays. Only in moments of extreme stress.

  Running towards his brother in the cave entrance, John could see that Aron had finished the job of hacking through the old oak door barricading the cave entrance.

  They pushed through the door, John lit a match, and, beside his brother, he stared at the floor covered in thousands of old, rotting sacks that were leaking coins, gold bars and other valuables. Another sack hung open and his torchlight glinted on tiny circles of gold: thousands upon thousands of stolen rings.

  He blew the dank odour of moulding earth out of his nostrils. Dust settled on his tongue, with the smell of sulphur from the match burning in his nostrils.

  Sinking to his knees, his throat choked with pent-up emotion from a lifetime of seeking revenge.

  Almost forty years ago soldiers had begun to storm Jewish homes, ordering the owners, at gunpoint, to hand in all their valuables. They had ransacked personal jewellery and even taken sentimental items like gold wedding bands. And their thievery had not reached its limit there. Another sack held a macabre sight: gold teeth and fillings. He could only imagine how many people it took to fill a sack with these things.

  During the war, thousands of prisoners died without even the comfort of their most precious thin band of gold encircling their finger. Now, in this abandoned mine shaft, he lifted out handful after handful of these wedding bands. They fell through his fingers and tinkled back onto the pile. He dug his hand deeper, to the bottom of the sack and lifted it level with his face.

  Hundreds of gold bands, some plain, some engraved or embossed glinted in his palms. He remembered Ima turning her imaginary ring every time she worried about their survival in Terezín and fretted over the whereabouts of Papa and Aron.

  He’d never know where his parents’ wedding bands were. If they were even in this sack of gold.

  John squeezed his eyes shut for a moment. He hadn’t cried a single time since the day Terezín had been liberated, but tears were close now.

  He straightened and gaped again at the bags lining the mine shaft’s floor. When he and Aron had climbed through the remains of the door the first few bags had been right in front of them. They had been unable to walk further into the large tunnel on the floor, instead having to climb over sacks tinkling with jewels, ornaments and trophies.

  Aron’ voice echoed down the mine shaft, ‘Come quick!’

  At the back of the cave, a lone messenger satchel sat isolated from the rest of the bags. Aron leant over it with his torchlight focused on sheets of paper. As he knelt beside him, he watched Aron open out a map.

  ‘Look!’ Circles had been marked in different locations across Germany and neighbouring countries. ‘Is this what I think it is?’

  John grinned. ‘No way of knowing until we visit all those circles.’

  Anyone else would have been whooping with excitement. This rich find wouldn’t satiate him, though. Nor that the map, the stuff of legend amongst treasure hunters, could make him the most famous of all his peers.

  ‘We’ll keep it quiet. The cartel doesn’t need to know yet.’

  Aron tucked the map and a few other papers inside his thick black polar coat. He didn’t need to be told the map’s value.

  They sat on their haunches for a moment.

  John’s tongue toyed with his dark moustache, which reached the same level on his jaw as his thick sideburns.

  Aron ran his hand through his bristled hair and held it there as he gazed, still dumbfounded, at the stash. ‘It’ll take some doing to get all this gold removed.’

  John nodded. This find might be too large to hide, but he’d leave his clients to sort that out with the Polish government.

  ‘What’s that?’ John squinted at a round, white object the size of a ball leaning up against the rocky wall.

  ‘Don’t go near it!’ Aron warned, ‘you know the sacred code.’

  37

  Although we had never adopted religion, the local church taught of getting rid of all rage and anger. We only went to bring little Sweet-Pea up as a good person. Yet every now and then a sharp, acrid reminder brought back the memories. Like the biting taste of vinegar, anger and a lasting sorrow keeps the bitterness close to heart. How could we forget what happened in the past?

  Ever since he’d started treasure hunting, John had always stuck to one sacred code. No matter what, that code was honoured.

  Years of watching people tortured and dying, and the pain and guilt he’d felt having to steal old crusts of bread from them, had instilled it in him.

  Never steal from the dead.

  Nor did they touch anything from a graveyard or tamper with tombstones. Even if there were bags of gold buried there.

  Never, ever steal from the dead. He’d had to do it once, but never again.

  Now, curious as to what had caught his eye, John rose to his feet and picked his way over to the object. His eyes narrowed as he looked at a whitened skull. The rest of the skeleton sat at an awkward angle. Below his gaping jaw, one of his arms rested on a sack to his right.

  John yanked the rotting sack.

  Bones cracked and fell into a jumbled heap.

  John grimaced to see the skeleton’s arm had broken off and fallen into a pile of bones.

  ‘I told you to leave it!’ Aron bellowed.

  John’s head spun around. He hadn’t heard such venom in his brother’s voice since the day he’d found that lost boy in the guard hut crying for his stolen aeroplane.

  That day, Aron had staggered down the valley after the truck, yelling and screaming venomous curses at the Wolf until he had fallen in the road and the Russians had carried him back.

  Now, the skeleton stared back at him, with a macabre grin and only one arm.

  It reminded him of another bone. Her bone.

  Suddenly, he slumped against the cave wall and whispered, ‘I never told you about Elza’s bone?’

  Startled, Aron looked up at him.

  Before his brother could answer, he recounted finding the finger bone with the matching, healed break in it soon after Elza’s body had been dumped in the oven room. He explained how the Wolf had forced him and other children to sweep up the dust, and he had found a bone in the ashes.

  ‘Oh, God,’ Aron let out a horrified groan.

  ‘I had it all those years, even after the war.’

  ‘Where…’ Aron croaked, ‘where is it now?’

  ‘Ima found it. That month you worked at the printing press. I carried it in my clothes and the only time I ever forgot to hide it, when she washed my clothes, she found it.’

  Aron let out another keening whimper.

  John pressed his fists into his eye sockets. ‘It broke her heart…all over again. She took the bone and I never saw it again while she lived. She never asked me about it…she must have known.’

  Aron struggled to get his words out, ‘Where is it now?’

  ‘When Ima died, I…I found it under her pillow, hidden in the pillowcase.’ Finally, after all these years, tears flowed readily down his cheeks. ‘I buried it with her. I placed it in a velvet pouch and put it into her hands so she could go to her God in heaven holding her daughter’s bone.’ He turned to face the cave wall and kicked it several times with his boot. His spat out in a bitter tone, ‘I hope she questioned Him about it and asked how He could do such a thing to a young girl!’

  Aron moaned, ‘Oh, Johan, it’s not like that. God―’

  ‘Please, don’t!’ With his back still turned away from Aron, John threw his hands in the air. ‘I do not want to get another lecture on that. You know my feelings. Let it be.’

  He spun aroun
d to face the skeleton and flashed his torchlight over it. ‘He must have been left here to guard this horde, watching over the old homeland’s buried treasures, and he never left the mine.’

  Aron nodded. ‘The poor soul died doing his duty.’

  ‘He was a Nazi!’

  ‘I know,’ still on his haunches, Aron sunk onto his buttocks. He placed his head between his raised knees and groaned, ‘But let him rest in peace.’

  ‘Rest in peace?’ John exploded. ‘He’s a fucking Nazi!’

  ‘I don’t care who he is, don’t break our code.’

  ‘I carried my sister’s bone like a treasure. I lost one treasure, my aeroplane, and replaced it with another. I’m not about to respect this pile of Nazi bones. Not after what they did to her, to our family.’

  ‘At some point you will have to start getting over it and start trying to let your heart heal.’

  ‘Hah!’ John wanted to kick the skeleton, but he knew it would disgust Aron and possibly make him leave.

  Something glinted in the skeleton’s palm.

  John leaned down and examined a tiny piece of metal tucked between the finger bones. He held his torch close and gasped. An eagle, with spread wings, clutched at the swastika emblem in its claws.

  Luftwaffe wings.

  John mused, ‘That’s a German pilot’s badge. How did it get here, to this guard?’

  ‘Don’t know and don’t care, just don’t touch it.’ Aron persisted.

  Ignoring him, John leaned forward and eased the old badge out from amongst the bones.

  Life after the war was all about survival. There was no place for dreams. Or daring to achieve one. Even now, John did not dare to dream.

  Once again, John shook himself to rid himself of the agonising memories.

  Aron still pleaded, ‘Don’t, Johan!’

  John swivelled his shoulders and glared at Aron.

  ‘Johan, you will be punished.’

  John turned away from Aron. Even with all the German war memorabilia they’d found, they’d never come across the winged emblem.

  ‘When Grandma gave me that Kellerman aeroplane, I imagined myself to be a pilot for Germany. Not for the Nazis, for the real German air force. Before I was ripped from my home and my parents' love, I had a future and great ambitions. Until they sent us to Terezín.’

  ‘Johan―’

  ‘Wait, let me finish. After it was stolen, I’d stare at it through that tiny window for hours, imagining it became a full-size plane and I had landed it to save the prisoners. Many, many times I dared to fly,’ he tapped his temple, ‘but only in my child’s mind.’

  Aron dropped his head into his hands and groaned.

  Ignoring him, John stroked the wings, turning it in his fingers.

  ’That tiny little badge could have been this bastard’s dream, too,’ came Aron’s muffled reply.

  ‘He does not deserve it!’

  Aron’s voice was hoarse, ‘Remember when Klaus took home a discarded Jewish gravestone? He broke the sacred code and look what happened to him.’

  Their fellow treasure hunter’s son had died soon after in a car crash. Then his wife developed pneumonia and died. And finally the curse had manifested itself in Klaus, by riddling him with skin cancer.

  ‘That was all mythology.’

  ‘Put it back. I beg you on Ima’s life, put it back.’

  John eyeballed Aron. Every time Aron had to emphasise his point, he always swore on Ima’s life, even though it had ebbed away.

  Aron stared at him for a long while, until he finally gazed down, threw his hands in the air and stormed off, scrambling over the sacks in the mine shaft and out through the broken door.

  John inhaled sharply. His own, long held resolution resounded in his head: Never, ever steal from the dead.

  Well, maybe just this once. The wings intrigued him too much to stick to the code this time.

  38

  September, Lake Toplitz, Austria

  The war made us its victim. We were challenged, betrayed, beaten, defeated and our spirit broken. Our long-lived anger has shattered us into small fragmented pieces with no recovery in sight.

  The overgrown trees lined both sides of the muddy path, trodden only by wild animals and mountain goats. Down at the lake, water tumbled over mossy rocks.

  John listened. His slate-grey, beady eyes darting everywhere.

  Misery hung in the air with the alpine silence. When they’d started hiking into the mountains yesterday, laden with diving equipment and climbing gear, the three men had enjoyed the peace and tranquillity of birdsong. For most of the way, anyway.

  Earlier in the year, he’d pinpointed this site, from his own memory of hearing the Wolf discussing his cousin’s work hiding treasures in combination with the maps he and Aron had found in Poland.

  Who knew what else was down there? Even his clients were in the dark about this find. Only Aron, his brother, and Rick, his most trusted man, were in on the secret.

  For now, he’d keep it that way. When he discovered more, he might change his mind and bring one of his richest clients in. Only to deal, one way or another, with the legalities. For a start, treasure hunters needed the landowner’s permission, and many got very greedy very quickly.

  Then there were the upfront expenses. In places as remote as this, he could do the initial recce, but digging a huge site like this would be costly, especially if they needed earthmoving equipment and crews of men with shovels.

  And, under Austrian property law, they were obliged to report everything found to the authorities, who would then graciously allow them to keep ten percent.

  Like hell!

  The Nazis stole from him and the Austrian government hadn’t tried to stop them. His parents, his home, his life and his own prized possession. It may have only been a toy, but it had been something he treasured. They’d stripped everything else, his mother’s jewels and even his father’s gold teeth.

  He wasn’t about to give the good burghers of Austria, the country that had raised Hitler, ninety percent of everything he found here. Not after they had meekly surrendered their country to the Nazis in the Anschluss and just watched, or even cheered, Kristallnacht.

  Not after what they did to him.

  It was his right to take back.

  Nearing this remote part of the ravine had become eerie, almost spooky. He didn’t believe in ghosts, but if there ever were any they’d be here.

  And in Terezín.

  Even birds didn’t seem to want to nest in the lush woodlands. Yet the ground was teeming with animal life.

  Suddenly an alarm call shrieked above them. John stopped dead in his tracks. His head jerked up. High above them a falcon soared in a thermal, crying out in a harsh ‘kak, kak, kak.’

  He smiled. And visibly relaxed.

  Only his namesake calling to its mate. Either that or telling him he wasn’t welcome here.

  He could see the richness in finding strange objects that other people wanted, but this one was for him. For his family’s future. He had to get out of the business because it was causing too much heat.

  Ever since they’d found the stash of ageing maps, he had studied them to find out what those German soldiers had been marking out with circles, crosses and triangles.

  What he couldn’t understand he had visited historical archives and interviewed survivors of the war to augment, especially in the regions from the maps.

  Long before that find, over the years, he had amassed heaps of documents and even plastered his garage walls with them. There had come a time when the car couldn’t fit into its own room. But since finding those maps in the Polish mine he had been driven with a relentless fire and had insisted they come to this location first. Because he still remembered The Wolf saying its name. Lake Toplitz.

  John stopped a moment to wipe the sweat off his forehead with the back of his hand. He stared out over the lake. The scars of the navy testing station, which he knew had been on the other side were already faint, and
within just a few more years the trees would have swallowed all traces completely.

  Aron joined him. ‘You know, brother, it’s ironic that I spent my time during the war making money, British and American paper bank notes. Now here I am at the very place that the Nazis were supposed to have dumped all those crates full of them, yet I don’t expect to see a single pound or dollar.’

  John grunted, his eyes sharp and roving like the hawk’s. ‘And why would we want to, anyway? That money was fake, and its only value is to go in a museum as a curiosity piece. No, leave that for the likes of the Stern magazine financed search back in ’59.’

  Aron’s gaze was far away for a moment. ‘Yes. They even found one of the printing presses, perhaps the same one Papa and I worked. It’s so strange they brought it all this way to dump it, rather than just burn it all where it was.’

  ‘It is and it isn’t, brother. You know how I feel about the Nazis, but they were clever and also efficient, as we’ve seen enough times on our expeditions. Even though the rumour was that money was hidden here to be retrieved by the new Reich, the Nazis would have predicted the UK and US would change their banknote designs as soon as they found out about the fakes. No, the more I’ve thought about it, the surer I am that all that fake currency was dumped here for one reason only: as a distraction.’

  Aron looked at him, eyebrows raised.

  John pointed to the remains of the naval station. ‘An odd and difficult place to build a naval test station when you have the whole northern coast available. Unless, of course, you want to explain away blasting and construction teams in this area. And then all that money. Well, of course there would have been rumours about hidden treasure here. It was too big a project for there not to have been. But by dumping those useless banknotes in the lake, the rumours attach themselves to that, and suddenly all the questions have been conveniently answered,. It could be coincidence, but I think it’s a very clever smokescreen.’