The Bookworm

by Mitch Silver

  THE

  BOOKWORM

  A Novel

  MITCH SILVER

  To Claiborne, for believing in me.

  All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.

  —Edmund Burke

  Prologue

  Villers-devant-Orval, Occupied Belgium

  August 1940

  The monk walked out of the cool woods from the French side of the road. On the tall man’s back, weighing him down, was the sort of rucksack the Dominicans use, fraying almost to the point of tearing where the canvas straps crossed his shoulders. He walked with a slight limp and carried a poplar walking stick that had seen years of hard use.

  The grizzled man of the cloth looked back once and then set foot on the gravel road pilgrims had trod for centuries. The large wooden door of the abbey at Orval loomed ahead in the torpid summer twilight, and he made for it. A hundred and fifty years ago this was the cloister’s side entrance, but that was before the French revolutionaries burned down most of the original abbey in 1793.

  The traveler withdrew his letter of introduction from the Monsignor of Liège and, using the head of his walking stick, banged on the heavy oak door. An onlooker standing back in the forest with binoculars would have observed a member of the friary come to the door and, having been given the letter, usher the visitor within.

  Once inside, he was greeted warmly by the brethren at their evening meal. Though not of their order, he was invited to break bread with them and, later, was given a place to say his devotions and spend the night before traveling on.

  But their guest wouldn’t be spending the night. Instead, a little after three in the morning, he slipped down to the abbey library where the medieval manuscripts were kept, dusty tomes that represented the labors of hundreds of the faithful over the eons. Placing his rucksack on the cold stone floor, he pulled on a pair of cotton gloves. Then he took out a flashlight and passed the beam over the bookshelves until he found what he was looking for.

  Were any of the monks, unable to sleep, to wander down to the library now, what would they make of such a visitor? First, he used his hands to make a little more room on the shelf by sliding an illuminated thirteenth century Book of Job over from its centuries-long resting place. Then, from his sack, he carefully lifted the heavy cowhide-and-parchment volume he’d brought and slid it onto the shelf.

  He took a little atomizer a woman might use to perfume herself. With it he carefully sprayed fine dust onto the book, the volume next to it, and all the nearby manuscripts—even the shelf itself. Returning the empty sprayer to his sack and dropping the gloves and the light in after it, he took up his walking stick and made his way, as quietly as he could, out of the abbey.

  There was no moon to silhouette the tall man against the trees as he hurried back, without sign of a limp, up the road to the woods. Once there, he tapped on a tree trunk with his stick and was gratified to hear the same tapped-out signal played back to him. Five minutes later, standing in the clearing with the woman who had been his lookout, he took off the false beard.

  So ended the first great Allied victory of World War II.

  Chapter 1

  Moscow, Russia

  Monday

  In a vast Stalin-era granite box several kilometers north of the capital’s outer ring road, Larissa Mendelova Klimt checked her cell phone one last time—nothing—before packing up the box for the return leg of her “daily commute.” Her routine never varied: pick up the yashchik in the morning, walk it along two rows of the Osobyi Arkhiv and then three rows over. Unlock the door to her carrel and set the box of old papers down on the desk. Turn on the light. Be seated. At night, pick up the box, lock up, and walk her burden back to its parking place with the other wartime files on the archive’s shelf.

  She was feeling pretty good about herself. Other people went away for the summer, enjoyed the weather, swam at the seaside or in a lake, maybe. But Lara the Good Girl worked right here while Russia’s brief summer came and went. Unencumbered by her teaching load, she had waded through the captured Nazi documents in the box like an explorer. No, a cosmonaut—she was the Yuri Gagarin of academics, soaring through the unknown.

  Take that day when she found two of the daily logs stuck together. Two not terribly significant days in May 1942, recorded down to the last, absurd detail by one of Hitler’s secretaries at the time, probably Johanna Wolf. Even as she carefully unstuck May 15 from May 16, she realized no Russian eyes had ever seen the page underneath; no Russian fingers had ever touched it. Of 150 million people, only Lara knew that Hitler had visited Wewelsburg to promote a cadre of SS officers at Himmler’s castle there before returning the same evening to Berlin by special train for a briefing on the Crimean offensive driving toward Baku. Okay, it was nothing special. Trivial, even. But it was all hers.

  She knew what her friends called her: knižnyj červ. The “bookworm.” All they could see was the huge iron door of the Russian State Military Archive that closed behind her in the morning, never the enlightenment to be found within the heavily guarded Special, or Osobyi, section inside.

  For the past eleven weeks, she had been doing exactly what she wanted to do. She spent nearly every waking minute plowing through the yellowed pages in this single box in the vast climate-controlled archive. Or else hunched over one of the preserved ’40s-era Dictaphone machines in the Listening Room twenty meters down the hall, as the voices of Hitler, Himmler, and Bormann dictated letters and summarized staff meetings on the hundreds of recordings liberated from the Führerbunker.

  Even so, Lara had her reasons for being euphoric. She could tick off at least five of them on her fingers, starting with her thumb: with this last page, she had the whole dusty job of reading and translating behind her for another year. Index finger: she had her big definitive book, her Origins of the Great Patriotic War, all but written on the desk in front of her. Middle finger: Viktor was finally served with the divorce papers and she could move on with her life. Ring finger: Over the summer she had been named to fill the vacant chair in her department and would teach her initial class tomorrow as the country’s first full professor of geopolitical history. And pinkie: She had planned this summer’s work with her usual care, and had been rewarded by arriving at the last page of the Chronologies on September 8, the final allotted day. She had calculated it perfectly, which just went to prove how weird the newly minted Lukoil Professor of Geohistory Larissa Mendelova Klimt—Lara to her friends—really was.

  Still, as she gazed out the big, grimy window at the handful of people hurrying along the pedestrian walk of the Leningradskoye shosse on their way home and then down at the notes she’d tapped out on her iPad, she could feel the same old niggling doubt creeping back in. Is it worth it? Is this any way to spend a life, shutting yourself away in a musty archive?

  Viktor certainly didn’t think so. One time she’d read him something she’d written and he’d given that little deprecating snort of his. “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. What difference does it make?”

  Was she divorcing Viktor because he was a no-good unfaithful bastard, or because she couldn’t bear to have him putting down her work? Did she surround herself with dead men talking because the actual live ones out there in the world were unknowable? From the time she’d been the tallest preteen in her srednyaya shkola in the closed city of Perm, Larissa had attracted the male gaze. But what, really, had they seen in her? Her nose was clearly too long, her teeth—though perfectly white and even—had a space in the middle, and her inky-black hair would never stay where she brushed it. Worse, out of her mouth would come whatever she was thinking.

  Lara returned her gaze to the single-spaced German record in front of her; she would read the last of the pages and deal with her life some
other time. By now she knew Traudl Junge’s machine, the typewriter with the chipped apostrophe. Guess they couldn’t get new typewriters in the bunker by 1945.

  And what was “A.H.” doing on April 21, the day after his birthday party and the last day of the Chronologies? Was he in the map room, planning to move up his nonexistent Southern Army to block the Russians at the gates to Berlin? No, he did that yesterday. Was he in the radio room, directing waves of nonexistent V-2s to wipe out the Red Army’s advance units (and most of the Berlin population)? He’d already tried that too.

  Today he was playing with the Goebbels children. On other days he’d show them Speer’s plans for the complete redesign of Linz, the Führer’s birthplace, into the new seat of Germanic culture. Today, though, he was back to playing with Tibet.

  Fraulein Junge recorded it on the same onionskin paper she once used for councils of war: “1100 hrs. to 1215: A.H. again had us roll out the scale model of Lhasa to instruct the children on the beginnings of their race. How the gods had lived on the continent of Atlantis and how, when it succumbed to the Great Flood, they had moved to the lands of Thule and Ultima Thule far to the north. Then, when some of them had had carnal knowledge of mortal women, an elite priesthood of Nordics had taken refuge in another icy stronghold, in the Himalayas, and established their kingdom far beneath the surface of the earth.

  “With that he delighted the children by lifting up the model’s mountains to reveal the magical city of the Aryans, the master race, as it had been recreated below. The little one, Heide, clapped her hands in joy as always.”

  Lara shivered and let the flimsy paper drop from her hands. She knew that ten days later, her mother would crush cyanide capsules into the mouths of little Heide and her five brothers and sisters so they might all perish with the Führer.

  Did Germany’s desire for lebensraum make the war inevitable? Or was it simply about one twisted, murderous man with unlimited power? One thing she did know: it was time to put the box back on the shelf and leave pure, unadulterated evil behind her for another year.

  Chapter 2

  Aboard Air Force One, En Route to Moscow

  Okay, listen up, folks. The stewards will be serving dinner in a couple of minutes.”

  The press secretary took her work phone out of her purse and hefted it up to her eyes. All the encryption software made it heavy as hell. “Coupla things. I’m not naming names, but two of you filed stuff yesterday with the same mistake. This meeting in Moscow is with the G20; the World Trade Organization’s a different, bigger group. Keep making these bonehead moves, and people might start to believe the campaign beat on the press for a reason.”

  She smiled her not-altogether-friendly smile. No one smiled back.

  “Second: got an addition to the printed schedule. Mogul and the other bigs are invited to a celebration Friday night in Red Square. The bus for the airport leaves three hours later than it says … can’t be helped.”

  She waited for the groans to subside and smiled again. “There’s a new ETA for Andrews Saturday morning, so if someone’s picking you up … we’ll hand out revised schedules as soon as they’re printed, okay?

  “Now, the president needs to rest before we kick off the Q&A, so I’m going to ask you to hold it down out here during the meal.” The secretary looked at her watch. “Let’s reset to Moscow time.” She twisted the stem of her Rolex for several seconds. “Right. Everybody, it’s now 1748 hours. Thank you and bon app.”

  The two people on the far side of the bulkhead door and up a level from the press corps were in bed, true, but a nap was the last thing on their minds. It had been eight months since the inauguration and this was the administration’s first full-scale trip abroad. Not many couples get to punch their membership in the mile-high club in America’s most heavily armed aircraft … okay, renew their membership … and they’d vowed to make the most of it.

  “Mogul” was a fairly big man, beefy in his nakedness but not bad for an older guy. She told him that his hair going from blond to gray reminded her of Kenneth Branagh in Wallander, which he’d decided to take as a compliment. Now he hoisted himself up on one elbow and looked over at her in her little lace “sleep teddy,” the matching bottoms buried somewhere under the covers.

  In the dim light, with all the cabin’s shades down, there was still no missing that she was a former beauty queen and model, even now, on the far side of forty-five and after having had kids. She was looking back at him with that expectant grin he knew so well, her hair loose around her face and one long leg lying provocatively over the other.

  She turned away from him briefly and shut off the little reading lamp built into the headboard. “This time, let’s do it with the lights off. More romantic.”

  He could just make out the dimples in the small of her back, the ones right above her cheeks, that came and went as she rolled first away and then back toward him, dropping her reading glasses next to the tray of hurriedly eaten dinner on the carpeted floor. He knew he should be concentrating on their lovemaking, but he couldn’t help himself.

  “Not more romantic than our own plane, sweetie.” He looked around at the bedroom cabin. “Where’s the wood paneling, the gold fixtures, the silk pillows? And I wouldn’t exactly call that dinky lamp mood lighting, not like our 757.”

  She ran one manicured finger over his chest, and then down, her grin becoming something a little more. “As I said …” She reached up and flicked the rest of the lights off. “More romantic.”

  After a few moments she murmurred, “So, that’s how they do it in the Air Force.”

  Chapter 3

  Lara’s mobile rang as she was packing up. Or rather, it vibrated, so as not to disturb the others in the Arkhiv. Not surprisingly, it was Pavel. Very surprisingly, he was calling to ask her to lunch tomorrow in the hotel restaurant beside the Moscow River’s Crystal Bridge.

  Lara remembered seeing the menu posted outside in a glass case. “Russian salad” (cucumbers and beets, no lettuce) all by itself cost more than Lara usually paid for her entire meal. Pavel said there would be three of them, and that the surprise guest (“Well, host, if I have to be honest”) would be paying.

  All right, then. Her summer’s work behind her, a new job looming ahead, a fancy meal complete with mystery man—it was enough to make Lara put aside the way she felt about Pavel. “I’ll be there,” she answered. “But only if it’s on the late side; remember, I teach my class tomorrow at noon.”

  He said, “Da, Professor, I’ll make it for thirteen-thirty,” and rang off.

  Lara looked at her watch. Cooped up every day in a world of the dead, a world without seasons, she needed to walk a little before going home.

  You wouldn’t call Moscow a pedestrian-friendly city. Not with its concentric ring roads breaking up the cityscape every other kilometer. At the end of the day, most of the office workers out here in the northwest of the city made for the nearest Metro, but Lara liked to decompress by cutting through the park of spruce trees that ran beside the water on the other side of the shosse. Not only was it quiet and fragrant in the woods, the path eventually found its way to Pokrovskoe-Streshnevo Manor, a forgotten three-hundred-year-old brick-and-stone curiosity that was once home to relatives of the Romanovs. From there it was a short stroll to the Shchukinskaya stop on the Number Seven line that led home.

  Leaving the park, Lara was surprised to find the rush hour roads were emptier than usual. It was strange, too, not to be jostled on her way down the Metro steps. She was almost to the bottom when it hit her: this was Monday of Conception Week, Russia’s annual attempt to reverse its declining birthrate.

  The thing had started in one of the Volga River districts as a local contest. Make a baby on September 12 and, if he or she is born nine months later on Russia Day—the holiday celebrating the end of the Soviet Union—you could win a refrigerator, or even a car.

  More and more employers started giving their workers the day off to procreate. Soon, the festivities worked their w
ay back to dominate the whole week leading up to the big Friday night celebration, the one that was supposed to put everyone in the mood to conceive babies.

  Lara slowed her pace. There was no one at home to win a refrigerator with.

  Chapter 4

  Farther south, on the Kremlin side of the ring, the Broadcast Center’s English-language tour guide planted herself in front of the ten-meter-high wall of TV monitors and began her last tour of the day. “Good afternoon, and welcome to the tallest man-made structure in Europe. The Ostankino Tower that rises above you the equivalent of 120 floors is now home to the most modern broadcast facility anywhere, the Television Technical Center, a state-of-the-art production and broadcast hub that transmits or retransmits more than five hundred domestic and international channels to every home in Russia and the four corners of the world.

  “We employ nearly four thousand technicians, managers and on-camera personalities in this building. Look around; you may spot someone famous.”

  Dutifully, the tourists looked around before turning back to their guide.

  “Behind me are 108 international networks, each playing on its own monitor. At the top are the American channels, as you can see. Beneath them, clearly labeled, are each of the European, Asian, and other foreign networks, a modern Tower of Babel, as you are about to discover.”

  With that, she produced an ordinary-looking TV remote and nonchalantly un-muted the 108 screens behind her. Instantly, twenty-seven languages began jabbering away, competing with each other for the visitors’ attention.

  The guide laughed before muting them again. “I could have turned them on one at a time, but it’s more fun this way, no? Now if you’ll follow me …”