Blood of the Reich

by William Dietrich

  Rominy had managed to regain some composure after their escape. Her cheeks were rubbed dry, annoyingly red, her posture as prim as a princess. With time to think, she’d decided to wait and observe, since Jake didn’t seem immediately threatening and she didn’t want to be abandoned somewhere, waiting for skinheads to drive by. Since the insanity on the freeway he’d been quieter, watchful, brooding, checking his mirrors like a fugitive on the lam. Occasionally he’d glance her way and give a half smile, as if reassuring a child or a dog, but he radiated tension the way a stove does heat. The unease made him seem more human, believable, persuadable. Maybe she could talk her way out of this, whatever “this” really was. She thought he’d take side roads, but he seemed more interested in making distance. Half an hour had passed.

  “Where are you taking me?” she finally tried. “Do you live up here?”

  “You do.”

  “What? No!”

  “I’m taking you to property you don’t know you own.”

  She groaned. “It might relax me a little more if you began making sense.”

  He adjusted the rearview mirror for the thousandth time, the little bullet hole in back sighing like a leaking tire. “I’m about to, but I get rattled by car bombs and bullets. I just wanted to get some distance from the skinheads so I have time to explain. What I’m going to tell you is more than a little surprising.” He tried the half smile again. “We could do this at a Starbucks.”

  The name conveyed a spark of reassurance. Steamed milk in public. She had a Starbucks card in her wallet.

  “But I’m going to suggest something more refined.”

  “Don’t go to any trouble.” She didn’t try to keep sarcasm from her voice.

  “There’re a couple of wineries up the valley. Your humble rescuer wants to share a bottle of pinot noir while we sort this out. Skagit’s an excellent terroir for that varietal.”

  Jesus H. Insanity. Kidnapped by a wine snob. Well, serves you right, Rominy. Should have gone for a Republican in the canned foods aisle. “You know, if you’d come on to me in wine or spices, this might have gone better.”

  Now it was Jake’s turn to be confused. “What?”

  “Never mind.” She winced. “My knees hurt.”

  “Oh, yeah, sorry. I should have said this before. There’s a first aid kit in back of the seat with some antiseptic pads.”

  At least the moron looked chagrined.

  The space behind the seats was piled with a mildewed tent, sleeping bags, pads, and other gear. “I like to camp,” Jake said as she rummaged.

  “You’re not taking us into the woods, are you?”

  “Not exactly. It’s a red plastic box.”

  She found the first aid packet, bandaged her own knees, and sat annoyed at her disarray. Rominy was no supermodel, but men had been known to give her a second glance. She took pride in looking good, and she’d worn a skirt to the store. Now she was dirty, scraped, and tear-stained, and she didn’t like Jake seeing her that way. Her eyes were an intriguing hazel, hair dark with an auburn tint, skin just slightly olive, which helped her avoid that Seattle winter-worm look, and she wasn’t afraid to be seen in a swimsuit. But now? She drew confidence from her appearance, and this weird flight from the Safeway parking lot had drained it.

  Was that part of Barrow’s plan?

  “Here, I’ll take that.” He held his hand out for the antiseptic pad she’d cleaned herself with and glanced at the stain. “Blood.”

  “Heck, yes, it’s blood.” She could still feel the sting.

  “I know you’re mad, but it will be worth it. You’ll see.” He dropped the pad into a plastic bag he had hanging from the dash. The truck had old-fashioned knobs instead of buttons. If this was what Jake could afford on his investigative reporter’s salary, how good could he be?

  Judging, Rominy. Right now she was a step or two behind this guy. She had to get a step or two ahead.

  They passed Mount Vernon and Burlington and took the Cook Road exit off the freeway, heading east up the valley. Barrow seemed to relax a little. The mountains began squeezing in toward the Skagit River like a funnel, piling up toward the rocky crests of North Cascades National Park. The foothills were snowless in late summer, the land somnolent and satisfied as the harvest came in before the autumn storms. Pasture hemmed by dark forest, the way she imagined a place like Germany might look. She’d never been to Europe. The Skagit River ran green to match the forest, thick and deep.

  Elk were grazing in one meadow.

  They passed through Sedro Woolley, Lyman, and Hamilton, each town smaller and each mile taking her deeper into the mountains and farther from the likelihood of any help. Her cell phone remained a useless paperweight, and he hadn’t even asked if she needed to pee. At some point he’d have to stop for gas . . .

  “Here we are.”

  They lurched off the highway onto a road called Challenger and coasted up past trim, modest frame homes set on a hillside above the river. Their lawns were brave bright badges against the darker forest. He braked at a small vineyard with a sign that said Challenger Ridge. Neat rows of grape vines led uphill to a wall of maple and fir. Old farm buildings, barn boards weathered and mossy, formed a cluster on either side of the road. Jake parked and got out, stretched, and walked around to jerk open Rominy’s door.

  It creaked, and Barrow took her hand to help her out. His own hand was large, hard, and callused for a newspaperman. He had an athlete’s easy poise. “You can run if you want, but you’ll get a glass of wine if you hear me out.”

  She stepped down stiffly. A sleepy collie came over to nose them. The tasting room was a cedar-roofed, single-gable house with wooden porch. It had twin American flags and flower planters made from wine barrels. Picnic tables tilted slightly on grass dotted with clover.

  “Where’s Norman Rockwell?”

  “The house dates from 1904,” Jake said. “Hobby farm turned medal-winning business. We did a story on them once in our weekend section, and I like their pinot. They do some nice blends with Yakima grapes as well.”

  Yep, she’d gotten her wine guy. “There’s no one else here.”

  “Kind of the point. It’s quiet on a Monday, and we need space to talk. It helps you had today off to go grocery shopping.”

  “That’s me, lucky girl.”

  “I know this is hard, Rominy.”

  “Comp time. We were working up a presentation until eight P.M. Saturday so the boss could give a presentation in the Bay Area while we stayed home. Canceled a date that night to clear my calendar for . . . this.” She shook her head. “I guess skinheads work Mondays.” Her ability to joke surprised her.

  “Was it a serious date?”

  She glanced. He was genuinely curious. “Not yet.” Her frown was wry. “Not after standing him up. Not now.”

  He swallowed. “Hope you like the wine.” He gestured to the buildings with his hand. “Challenger is on the way we need to go.”

  Rominy felt like a rabbit uncertain when the trapdoor is raised. The air was clean, insects hummed, birds tweeted. The world remained surprisingly normal. “Where’s the bathroom?”

  “This way.”

  It was a Porta-Potty—not exactly Napa—but then they went into the tasting room with its overstuffed couches, gas fire, and dark paneling. Cozy as a sleep sack. The young woman who sold them a bottle introduced herself as Cora and Jake chatted her up, almost flirting, which unexpectedly annoyed Rominy. Then the woman pointed them up the hill. “Nice view. Do you need a corkscrew?”

  “If you please.” Barrow smiled as if this whole thing was a lark.

  Cora gave them plastic drinking cups as well.

  Rominy and Jake ascended to a wooden table resting beneath the canopy of a three-trunked cedar tree, the painted planking littered with needles. The view was soothing; purposely so, she assumed. Vines marched in soldierly columns down to the main highway, trees, and the green Skagit beyond. Across the river, rank upon rank of forested hills receded. Early au
tumn gave everything that honey glow.

  Rominy was sore, tired, frustrated, and curious. She could run, she could scream, she could beg to use the winery phone . . . and she did none of these things. Watching Barrow work the corkscrew, the river and highway a distant murmur, the shade cool but not unpleasant, she felt oddly relaxed. Was this the Stockholm syndrome, where victims identify with their captor? Or had Barrow really saved her in order to tell her something important? Certainly nothing remotely this interesting occurred in her cubicle at work.

  Rominy spent most days staring at either pixels on a glass screen or the gray fabric of her office enclosure, and more evenings than she cared to admit staring at another glass screen at home. Her abode was an apartment on Seattle’s Queen Anne Hill she couldn’t really afford; she kept the heat at 65 to justify premium cable. She went to a gym three mornings a week, belonged to a book club, purposely limited her gossip magazine time to the monthly stint at the hairdresser, club-hopped with girlfriends, and dated with more wariness than excitement. She shopped at IKEA but waited for the Nordstrom sale. On a package to Mexico she’d used her high school Spanish, wore a swimsuit it took two weeks to select, and applied sunblock with religious zeal. She wrote press releases for software engineers who alternately treated her with disdain or flirted from boredom. Her ambitions were to buy a bungalow, own a significant piece of art, or visit Africa, but her dreams were hazy after that. If anyone had asked—and they didn’t—she would have said she was happy.

  Yes, something had at last happened.

  “A toast.” He poured the wine and hoisted his. “To your illustrious ancestor!”

  “My what?” She took a sip, eyeing Jake over the rim of her glass. Not bad, both him and the wine. Her moment of contentment confused her.

  “To your great-grandfather, Rominy. To the famous and infamous adventurer, explorer, curator, and secret agent Benjamin Hood.”

  “Whatever.”

  “Apparently disgraced, however. Stripped of his prerogatives and effectively exiled to the murk of Skagit County at a time, World War Two, when his country might have needed him most. If you think this is rural now, it was the end of the earth then. A man lost to history, and even to his own family. Meaning you.”

  “I have a great-grandfather?”

  “Everyone does, trust me.” He smiled. “You were adopted, correct?”

  “Yes. How do you know that?”

  “I told you, I’ve been investigating. It’s my job.”

  “My parents died in a car accident when I was a baby.”

  “And no other family that you knew about?”

  “There wasn’t any.”

  “But there had to be at one time, right? One’s parents have parents. Didn’t you ever wonder?”

  “Mom and Dad—my adopted parents—said they didn’t know. I haven’t dwelled on it, really. They never made me feel adopted—I was an only child, their child. We didn’t obsess on the accident. It’s not what you want to talk about, you know?”

  “Of course. Icy road. Mountain plunge. And you mysteriously found: abandoned, but bundled, in a cradle in a Forest Service campground . . .”

  “Not abandoned.” She flushed. All her old dread at the rumors, and her frustration at her adoptive parents’ evasions, was coming back. “No. Not a suicide. Something terrible must have been going on, and they left me for a moment to go get help, and the ice . . .” She felt the threat of tears again and willed them back. It didn’t make sense. It had never made sense. It annoyed her that he’d obviously looked at the old clippings. It seemed an invasion of her privacy, of a tragedy buried by time.

  “It wasn’t a suicide, Rominy, of course not.” He took a quick swallow. “So you know your name isn’t really Pickett?”

  “It is. This is what this is about? You bring this up now? Here?”

  “It’s your adoptive parents’ name.”

  “It’s my name, the one I’ve had as long as I can remember. And my poor dead parents were not named Hood.”

  “But your mother’s mother’s father was. I’m going to show you the genealogy, and your descent from him is on the female side. But that’s not my point. It wasn’t a suicide, I agree. But it was murder.”

  “What?”

  “By the same crazy fanatics who just tried to murder you.”

  She shook her head in bewilderment. “Skinheads killed my real parents?”

  “Not skinheads, Rominy. Nazis. Neo-Nazis.” He took out his own cell phone. “Which reminds me. I’ve got to make a call about your inheritance.”

  10

  Kangra La, Sikkim

  July 28, 1938

  Kurt Raeder looked back from the Himalayas to a flat world gauzed with haze, the steel of India’s great rivers faint threads of orientation. The Germans had escaped the hot, damp hell of the British Raj and were climbing toward their goal, the heaven promised by old Tibetan texts that Himmler had sent along in a steel box: Shambhala, the lost kingdom that would violently redeem the world.

  On Raeder’s neck, kept warm by his own body, was the vial that reputedly held the antique blood of Frederick Barbarossa.

  The explorer found himself lightening as they climbed. For more than a month he and his four companions had felt trapped in British India as news from Europe grew more ominous. Traveling through Calcutta and the Himalayan province of Sikkim was the quickest way to Tibet, but it was getting harder for both sides to pretend England’s relations with Germany weren’t fraying. Meanwhile, the monsoon came in full force, rain pouring down. The humidity on the Bengal plain became suffocating. Snakes slithered from drowned burrows. Mosquitoes rose in clouds. His companions chafed and quarreled. The heat, the bugs, and the sheer bureaucratic sloth of a dying empire all weighed on them. England was in decline and Calcutta was crowded and chaotic. As Hitler tried to reunite a Germany brutally disenfranchised after the Great War, the old enemies grew jealous again, seeking to hem in the Teutons. So had the German Tibetan Expedition been corralled by the arrogant, frightened English! For that, Raeder held them in contempt.

  Where, the officials in Calcutta had demanded of him, are your permits to travel to the Forbidden Kingdom of Tibet? Of course there could be no permits, since there was no permitted travel, and there could be no permission until the Germans met personally with the three-year-old god-king’s regent in Lhasa. But they could not meet, because none but the British consul was permitted to travel there. The Germans stewed under the circular and self-serving reasoning of Whitehall and Calcutta.

  What the British didn’t take into account was German will, coupled with advice from the kind of Englishman who’d first built the empire.

  Before sailing from Genoa in allied Italy, Raeder had received a peculiar letter from Sir Thomas Pickford, the octogenarian Himalaya explorer and hero of the siege of Gyantse, where thousands of Tibetans who believed themselves invulnerable to bullets had been slaughtered by British firepower. Pickford had served on Francis Younghusband’s military expedition to Tibet in 1904 that forced it into reluctant relations with the British. Now, thirty-four years later, Pickford had corresponded with the young German he’d heard lecture in London. Rumor of Raeder’s impending SS expedition had circulated in academic circles, and Pickford had advice.

  A few Englishmen understood what the Reich was trying to do, he explained, the racial spirit Germany was trying to revive. A few sympathized with the power of Hitler’s vision in this new, corrupt, decadent age called the twentieth century.

  Don’t wait out the bureaucratic intrigues, the crusty Englishman wrote. My country is giving up its civilizing mission, but yours is seizing it. Germany is alone in displaying the character of our race. We are cousins, after all, and Tibet must not be allowed to exist in seclusion and hide its secrets. Take any opportunity and simply go, borders be damned.

  If a German had written this to an Englishman, the Gestapo would have called it high treason. But the English, like the Americans, felt free to say anything to anyone. Curious ide
a.

  I have seen the sun set on the Potala Palace with a radiance that speaks of God, the old Englishman wrote. I know there are things to seek in that land we can scarcely dream. If you want to see them, make your own way across the border as Younghusband did in 1904.

  Now Raeder had.

  In Calcutta, the Germans had first falsely announced their intention, given the diplomatic delay, of returning home. Then, in the dead of night, monsoon thundering and streets awash, they’d loaded their theodolites, chronometers, earth inductors, shortwave radios, anthropological calipers, cameras, movie film, guns, cases of schnapps, and boxes of cigarettes into the specially designed, rubber-sealed cargo cases crafted in Hamburg. They’d hired trucks to taxi them to the station and bribed their way onto the express train north, arriving at its terminus a night and day ahead of any pursuit. Mountains rose as enticing as a mirage.

  Paying in Reich gold, the Germans swiftly bought two freight cars on the next conveyance, a popularly dubbed “toy train” with tracks just two feet apart that puffed its way, at twelve miles per hour, to the British hill station of Darjeeling and its warehouses of tea. This would elevate them to 7,000 feet. The Nazis were moving on this second leg of their escape by the time bemused authorities in Calcutta realized they were gone at all.

  “It’s Jew gold we use,” Raeder told his companions. “Confiscated from the rats fleeing Berlin. So does Providence assist our mission.”

  Up and up the locomotive crept, past banana plantations at first, and then through jungle so high that it arched over the tracks, the canopy shuddering in the downpours. The journey reeked of rotting orchids, foliage steaming.

  Indian laborers rode an open freight car pushed by the bow of the train. When monsoon landslides blocked the track, they dutifully clambered out to clear them. Raeder, impatient and restless while the coolies dug, took his rifle into the jungle to look for tigers.

  He saw not a living animal. The bamboo was still as death.

  Tea plantations hove into view as they neared Darjeeling. There, between Nepal and Bhutan, they could see the beckoning crest of the Himalaya through breaks in the rushing clouds. The peaks were topped by snowy Mount Kanchenjunga, which at 28,000 feet was almost as lofty as Everest.