Jamie watched the exchange with interest. It told him two things. First, that whoever had made the offer on Adam Steele’s behalf to buy the codex had betrayed something of its true value and Rolf Ziegler had come to the correct conclusion that that value had something to do with the mention of Excalibur. Second, that father and son, for their own separate reasons, were keen to cash in further on any opportunity for potential profit. That didn’t really matter as long as they’d kept it to themselves, but if word spread …
Gault saw it too, and immediately stepped in to close one avenue. ‘I believe part of the agreement with your lawyer was a clause binding all parties to secrecy,’ he said in a bored voice. ‘Perhaps it would be better if I had the copy,’ he aimed the words at the father. ‘It might save you a lot of money in the long run.’
Rolf Ziegler glared at his son and shook his head in disgust. He got to his feet, extracted a file from a cabinet in the corner of the room and handed it to the former soldier. ‘All right, what do you want?’
Jamie allowed his eyes to wander round the room, taking in the peeling wallpaper and threadbare carpet. When he eventually spoke, he did his best to sound like a lawyer and as if this was just a simple legal quest for more information. ‘I’ll ask you questions about the codex and your father, and depending on the quality of your answer we may consider offering some kind of bonus payment above the agreed sum. Of course, we’ll already know some of the answers so be careful what you say. Agreed?’
The German nodded.
‘I think, firstly,’ Jamie pulled a small black diary and a pen from the inside pocket of his jacket and opened it ready to take notes, ‘we need to know what state of mind your father was in when he dictated the codex. He did dictate it, I understand, not write it himself.’
‘He was dying of cancer,’ Rolf’s head dropped between his shoulders, ‘what sort of state of mind do you think he was in? He wanted to make his peace with God.’
Jamie frowned. ‘Had he always been a church-goer?’
‘Mama said he turned to the Lord for help when he came back from the war. Never missed a Sunday mass at St Anna’s along the road. He helped rebuild the steelworks after you English knocked it down with your bastard bombs, then he got a job on the production line. Worked every hour he could get for his family, just like me. She used a word I didn’t know then: atonement. Sometimes I heard them whispering together and he would be crying, saying he was ashamed of what he’d done.’
‘He was a hero. He fought for the Fatherland.’
The Englishman ignored the voice from the kitchen doorway. ‘Did he say what he had done to be ashamed of?’
‘He was in the SS and he served in the East. Do you want me to draw you a picture?’ Rolf’s lips were a pale line and the words were forced through clenched teeth. ‘He joined the Deutsches Jungvolk on the day of his tenth birthday and the Hitler Jugend on his fourteenth. When he received orders for the SS-Junkerschule he wrote his mother that it was the best day of his life. He worshipped Adolf Hitler; would have done anything for him—’
‘Heil Hitler!’ Jamie looked up to find Otto Ziegler grinning at him, with his right arm raised in the Hitler salute. He felt Gault tense, but laid a hand on the former SBS man’s arm and he sat back on the sofa.
‘Why don’t you go and play with your toys?’ Rolf said wearily.
‘At your orders, Father,’ Otto laughed.
Mrs Ziegler’s concerned eyes followed her son up the stairs. When Otto was gone, she exchanged an anguished glance with Rolf. He shook his head and she closed the door.
‘I’m sorry,’ Jamie said.
‘Kids, eh?’ The German’s expression reminded Jamie of a smile on a corpse. ‘What can you do if they get in with the wrong crowd? They’re still your kids.’ He closed his eyes. ‘Let’s get this over, then I don’t want to hear another fucking word about this thing ever again.’
‘After your father dictated the codex, did he ever talk about what he’d written? I’m thinking of any information that might be relevant, but that he didn’t include. Did he say what the sword looked like? Where the meeting was?’
Rolf shrugged, ‘Sometimes he’d talk about the spying trip to England. A happy time, playing at soldiers, but not being in any danger. You have to understand that by now the morphine ruled him. One day he’d be lucid, the next … well, you never knew what to believe. I thought the swords only existed in his imagination, but he said he wished now he’d looked at the English sword. The only reason he didn’t was because he had orders to deliver what was in the hole exactly as he found it, and he found it in some kind of leather bag. One time he laughed when he told me they smuggled it back in a sack full of poles for an old bell tent and the English never even searched them. I’m certain he never said where the meeting was.’
‘What about the Gruppenführer he met in the ambulance? Did he ever mention his name?’
‘Not his full name, no, but I know what his first name was,’ Rolf’s smile was surprising and almost friendly, ‘because my father named me for the man who saved his life. Any other SS general would have kicked him out of that ambulance. If he hadn’t got on he would be old bones now on the Seelow Heights, along with the rest of them, he’d say. If I’m Rolf, so is he. Does that help?’
It was a step forward, but not the detailed information Jamie had hoped for. He bit back his disappointment and smiled his thanks as the German went back to the drawer where he’d picked up the copy of the codex, and pulled out a brown envelope.
‘This is my father on his wedding day in nineteen forty-nine.’ He showed them a monochrome picture of a slimmer version of Otto in a light-coloured suit standing proudly beside a pretty blonde girl in a white dress. ‘The suit was borrowed and the dress was made of Yankee parachute silk saved from the war. Dortmund was like that then. Ach …’ He sighed and slipped the picture back in the envelope.
‘Hey, English, you want to see a better picture of my Grandpa, the hero?’ Otto stood grinning at the top of the stairs where he must have been watching them. Rolf Ziegler went deathly pale and the envelope shook in his hands as he slumped into the chair.
‘No, Otto, please …’
‘You not proud of your old man, Father? Come on, English, it’s the only picture you’ll ever see of Wulf Ziegler in uniform, huh. Don’t worry, my bedroom’s not so much of a shithole today.’
Jamie looked to Rolf for permission, but the other man wouldn’t meet his eyes. Gault was already on the stairs and Otto was laughing. Jamie followed.
By the time they reached the top of the stairs where Otto waited by a painted door, puffed up and officious, taller and more threatening now that you were standing close to him. He had his hand outstretched ushering them inside. As they entered Jamie stopped dead on the threshold and he heard a growl of outrage from Gault. He hoped the former SBS man wouldn’t do anything silly, the kind of thing only an enormous amount of willpower was stopping Jamie from doing himself.
The room was a shrine to an age of infamy. A Nazi flag adorned one wall, beside a framed picture of Adolf Hitler. A coal-scuttle helmet with SS lightning flashes sat on a dresser beside an iPod dock. Pictures of marching formations of bright-eyed automatons vied with battle scenes showing hard-faced young men, festooned with stick grenades and machine pistols. But pride of place went to a single picture above the bed. On it, a gaunt figure in trousers and shirtsleeves sat on the edge of a large pit. His face showed no fear, only a weary resignation, but there was something terrible in his eyes, a raw emotion that no one would ever read. Behind him, to his right, stood a row of laughing men in grey uniforms and forage caps. On his left, the grinning figure with one arm outstretched holding the pistol that was about to put a bullet in his head.
‘My grandpa, the hero. What do you think now, English? I wish he was here so we could do the same thing to the stinking fucking Turks. Take your time. Enjoy.’ His mocking voice faded as he vanished downstairs. ‘Otto’s got something to celebrate.’
Gault would have gone after him, but Jamie held him back. He would have liked to tear the room apart, but Abbie’s face appeared in his head and suddenly he felt as resigned as the man in the picture and he relaxed. Gault looked at him with wild eyes. ‘Don’t ever do that to me again. I would have ripped his fucking guts out and strangled him with them.’
‘That’s what I was afraid of.’
When they returned to the lounge Rolf Ziegler’s wife hovered protectively over him, but he shrugged her aside.
‘So now you know.’ Ziegler’s voice was made brittle by anguish. ‘My father served with the einsatzgruppen. The photograph was taken at Minsk. I don’t even know where Otto found it. My son lives a lie, Herr Saintclair. Everything he believes in is wrong, yet nothing I can do or say will undermine his certainty that he is right and everyone else is wrong. He even lies about the picture. Father is not the one pulling the trigger. He’s among the men in the background. But it is enough that he is there. You asked what he had to atone for. Well, that is part of it.’
Jamie knew there was nothing he could say that would help. They had everything they were going to get; there was no point in staying.
Gault handed over a wad of notes that was far in excess of the two hundred euros Rolf was owed. The German looked at the money for a moment, his jaw working, before he dropped it to the ground as if it had burned his hand. He accompanied them from the room while his wife gathered up the fallen notes.
When they reached the door, Jamie stopped. ‘You said that is part of it?’
For a moment Rolf Ziegler looked as if he had been punched. His face crumpled like a burst football and Jamie had never witnessed such a terrible combination of despair and defeat.
‘My father was twenty-two years old when he came home from Russia on leave in September of nineteen forty-three. It took him a week to discover that his parents were feeding an old Jew who had set up home in the basement of a bombed-out factory. To them it was an act of Christian charity. To him it was an act of treason against his beloved Führer. What could a good Nazi do, but denounce them? My grandfather and grandmother, Hans and Martha Ziegler, were guillotined in Dortmund prison on the same Christmas Eve.’
XIII
‘Christ, that was—’
Gault didn’t get the chance to finish his sentence. They came out of the shadows in a screaming mob when he and Jamie were halfway across the car park. Jamie’s first glance took in dark clothing and faces masked by black scarves, a couple of pool cues and baseball bats at the head of the pack and the rest coming up fast behind. He counted eight before being forced to duck under a swinging cue and managed to land a straight right in his attacker’s middle, doubling him up and disabling him for the moment. Gault was similarly engaged, disarming his man with a twist of the wrist and throwing him with some kind of ju-jitsu move that left him with the baseball bat just as two more thugs arrived to batter him to the ground, their fists pumping like steam hammers. With bewildering speed Jamie found himself facing three wild-eyed young men jockeying for position, but too wary to rush him. He didn’t have time to wonder who their attackers were, but he had his suspicions. He ducked and weaved, using all the skills that had almost won him a boxing Blue at Cambridge, but was unable to avoid a lashing boot that sent a lightning bolt of pain through his thigh. The problem was keeping them all in his line of sight, because there was always one on the periphery of his vision. A scream of agony proved they weren’t having it all their own way with Gault and Jamie used the momentary diversion to dance forward and ram his fist into the centre man’s face, feeling a satisfying crunch of breaking cartilage as it landed plumb on the thug’s nose. All the time his mind had been screaming at him that the greatest danger wasn’t to his front. Where was the eighth man? The one with the second baseball bat. ‘Jamie!’ The only thing that saved him was the high-pitched scream. He ducked and turned in the same movement, the bat ruffling his hair as it missed his skull by a millimetre. Only one chance. He went in low, aiming his shoulder at the batsman’s midriff and keeping his legs pumping as he drove forward in a textbook rugby tackle. But the instant they were down the boots started to come in and he felt a savage blow and a lance of agony in his side that felt like someone had stove in a rib. ‘Fuck you, English.’ Someone gripped his hair and pulled his head up. The last thing he saw was a hand holding some kind of can, before his eyes caught fire and he could feel his eyelids melting. The men who were intent on maiming him were forgotten. All he could think about was saving his eyes. In the same instant, he’d inhaled some kind of gas that stopped the breath in his throat and made him choke, his whole body reacting to what was happening by having some kind of seizure.
His last conscious thought was: Please put me out of my bloody misery.
‘Pepper spray.’ The voice was Gault’s, but the hand applying something soothing and cool to his eyes wasn’t. ‘All you can do is let it pass.’
The hand moved away and Jamie protested, a sort of mooing sound in his throat. He tried to open his eyes, but it was like being underwater, a blur of light and shade that didn’t mean anything until one piece of shade moved.
‘Just lie back, Jamie,’ Charlotte said, and the soothing coolness returned. It didn’t help the pain so much as make him feel mothered, which was unusual and quite pleasant, because he hadn’t been mothered even when he had a mother.
Everything faded rapidly and he disappeared into a pain-filled, gasping half-sleep. When he opened his eyes again he could finally see, which was an improvement. He was lying on the soft sheets of the bed in his hotel room and he could hear voices murmuring not far away. The downside was that his lungs felt as if they had been scoured by acid, and when he tried to move someone stabbed him in the side with a skewer. He let out a groan of agony.
‘Stay still, we think one of your ribs might be broken.’
Charlotte’s head appeared on the right and Gault on the left.
‘Probably only popped cartilage. More painful, but it’ll heal quicker,’ the former soldier gave his opinion.
‘What happened?’
‘That little bastard Otto and some of his pals jumped us.’
‘Why the Christ would he do that?’
‘For fun? He seemed the type. But it appears he’s not the only one around here who’d like to see a Fourth Reich. According to the hotel manager, there are certain areas where groups of young Nazis can more or less get away with anything, and Dortsfeld where we were is one of them. They break up Turkish businesses and throw bricks through restaurant windows and the cops won’t touch them.’
Memories of the attack came flooding back and Jamie felt a cold sweat as he remembered the moment when the spray hit his eyes. ‘I thought I’d had it.’
‘You would have done. They were all set to put your lights out and I had my hands full when Charlie here …’
‘Charlie?’ Charlotte shrugged and Gault grinned.
‘Charlie came to the rescue. She rushes them, screaming, and Otto turns to take her out with a baseball bat. Next thing you know the Kick-Boxing Queen here …’
‘Tae kwon do, actually.’
‘… pivots and her size-six Jimmy Choo takes Otto right in the chops and his teeth are all over the Tarmac. Never seen it done better. With the head boy out of action and their casualties mounting – your man with the broken nose didn’t look too chipper – they decided they’d had enough fun and legged it, shouting compliments as they went. And that was that.’
‘Apart from you lying there clawing at your face and gasping your lungs out.’ Concern made Charlotte’s voice ragged. ‘I thought someone had thrown acid in your face, but Mr Gault, who knows a suspicious amount of detail about such things, diagnosed pepper spray, and said that there was no point in taking you to hospital, because the effects would fade eventually.’
‘That was very good of Mr Gault.’ Jamie was fairly certain that he’d read somewhere that pepper spray had killed several dozen people in the States when used to excess by law
enforcement agencies. Still, he’d survived. Just.
‘A pity we didn’t get anything from Ziegler,’ Gault complained. ‘Apart from the fact that his father was a murdering thug – and that was only because of his Nazi bastard of a son. It makes the whole trip a bit of a waste.’
‘We didn’t get any closer to the castle or the sword,’ Jamie admitted, ‘but we didn’t come away with nothing. Ziegler said he was named after the man who saved his father’s life on the Seelow Heights. I’m pretty certain there will only be one or two SS Gruppenführers called Rolf. So that’s your next job, Charlotte – track them down and cross reference them until you find one with links to the Hitler Youth, who was on the Seelow Heights and has some sort of connection to one of our twelve Angels of Death.’ Charlotte nodded. ‘And Charlotte?’
‘Yes, Jamie?’
‘I really appreciate you saving me, but I was just wondering why you didn’t drive the car at our Nazi kameraden with the lights blazing and the horn blowing, which would probably have been enough to scare them off?’
‘Oh, I wasn’t in the car. I was in the shop. You can’t leave a girl on her own for two hours in the cold and not expect her to go for a wee.’
Charlotte came off the phone the next morning with a look of what could only be called conspiratorial smugness. ‘Just the one match: Rolf Lauterbacher; born Halle, nineteen twenty. Adam’s having the details checked at the Berlin Document Centre where they hold all the captured SS personnel records, but he seems to fit. Joined the Hitler Youth when he was of age, and the Nazi party a few years later. By the time he was nineteen he was something called high area leader of the Hitler Youth West, which I’m told would have taken in Wulf Ziegler’s Dortmund unit. He was also close to Reinhard Heydrich, who took an interest in his career because the two families were friends. He didn’t join the SS until the start of the war, but by nineteen forty he was already a Sturmbannführer and on the staff of … guess?’
Gault looked as if he wanted to take her by the throat and shake her and Jamie thought he’d better play along if violence were to be avoided.
The Excalibur Codex Page 10
