by Mitch Silver
He’d left his pad behind. Unable to help herself, Lara slid out from under her headphones and walked over to look at it. On the sheet of paper was a completely drawn hanged man now. Under it, written in the spaces where the solution to the game would go, he had entered, “L E V K L I M T.”
Chapter 25
Lara yanked the cylinder from the machine, dropped it and the iPad in the shopping bag and raced out of the double glass doors and down the Arkhiv corridors to her study carrel. She fumbled with the key and unlocked the door, hurriedly locking it again once she was inside. Still huffing and puffing, she called Lev’s number in Alaska on her mobile.
A sleepy voice answered on the seventh ring. In English he said, “Who … who is it? It’s nearly midnight!”
“Thank God you’re there. It’s your sister. Someone’s threatening you.”
He was instantly awake on the other end of the line. Shifting to Russian, he said, “Threatening … me? I can’t imagine anyone who’d—”
“Listen to me for a minute.” She told him of finding the pad the big man had left behind.
“Maybe it was a joke, someone we went to school with in Perm.”
“I’d have remembered this guy.”
“Okay, I hear the worry in your voice, Larashka. First, nobody’s been threatening me. Second, I’ve got a call in to Craig; we didn’t connect today, but I’m sure I’ll see him in a few hours. He’s a big guy, huge. If I need a bodyguard … just let me get a few more hours of shut-eye, okay?”
“Okay. Sorry I woke you up. Take care of yourself, Levishka.”
“You too. And don’t worry.”
Chapter 26
She took the bag of recordings from her cubicle and headed back down the corridor to the Listening Room. Lara wanted to sit there and figure it all out—Gerasimov, the woman from the flirt party, the moose of a guy right here in the Listening Room who had it in for Lev, everyone who’d come bursting through the protective shell of her quiet life. But she didn’t have enough data. Instead, she’d have to replay the wax cylinder she’d been too distracted to listen to, and take good notes. What else could she do?
No steroidal thugs were playing Hangman when Lara cautiously peered in from the main reading area. Three empty chairs sat in front of three idle Dictaphone machines. This time she took the seat nearest the glass doors, the better to keep tabs on the comings and goings in the main room beyond. A couple of the usual academics were engrossed in their work.
When she’d heard Coward’s Fifth up to the point where she’d left off before, she lifted the lever. While the man’s words were still fresh in her mind, Lara wanted to decode the writer’s poetry.
The first quatrain was easy. A child born in the heart of Europe who by his speech will lead a great multitude on the Rhine … that could be no one but Adolf himself. Check.
She typed “St. George” in the Google query box. It came back, “… adopted as the patron saint of England.” Helpful. She did the same with “Ligurian Sea,” and found it was the body of water off the northwest coast of Italy where Mussolini was born. She was starting to understand this particular brand of babble: some winged someone from England crossed the water only to be confronted by the sons of Austria—Hitler had been born in Linz, on the Danube—and Italy (the Ligurian Sea).
Who had flown from England to—Chamberlain! Neville Chamberlain had flown across the English Channel to Munich in 1938, only to be “subdued” by Hitler and the Axis into accepting their guarantee of “peace in our time” on a scrap of paper. Double check.
But was the Führer crazy enough to believe a French savant four centuries earlier would be writing his life story and get every detail right? Lara went to Google Maps and counted the rivers a German Army would have to cross eastward from Berlin. The twentieth was the Moskva that ran alongside the Arkhiv, the one she could see right outside her study area, guarding the western approach to the Soviet capital. What comes after double check?
There was another clue: Coward had used the phrase “Meacham for the Defense.” Full name, Sir Robert Meacham, apparently. Lara called up a site she’d used before in her research, burkespeerage.com. It came back with “SIR ROBERT MEACHAM, CBE (1938), born Headley, Surrey, 10 March, 1896; died, Inns of Court, London, 9 October, 1944.”
Wait a minute. Lara scrolled back through her notes; yes, there it was: Coward’s first day of testimony was October 2. Meacham, the man he was doing it all for, died just a week later. Hmmm.
Next problem: if Anthony Blunt turned an ordinary Bible into a vehicle to trick Hitler into attacking the Soviet Union, what happened to it after it did its job? Lara knew practically everything the Soviets had boxed up from the Führerbunker and his “Wolf’s Lair” in East Prussia, overrun by the Red Army in early 1945. She’d have remembered a Bible. The Americans had their own files of what came out of the Adlerhorst at Berchtesgaden. Unlike the Russians, they published what they found. No Bible there either.
Her brain was once again sending her a message, an email from her unconscious mind. Now she remembered where she’d read about a book.
Leaving the Listening Room, she strode across the main gallery’s polished wood floor, past the researchers engrossed in their own work, and slid her ID through the card reader that guarded the door to the “stacks” on the far side.
The box for September 1940 was on a higher shelf than Lara was used to, and she had to get one of the round, rolling library footstools and make sure not to kill herself taking it down.
In the strange German system, the last day of the month, the 30th, was the one in front. Lara stuck her hand into the middle of the box and came up with a memorandum from the 17th. Behind it was the very gold she was panning for, a paper summarizing a meeting of the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, the high command of the German armed forces. Hitler was thanking Heinrich Himmler for a book he had been given a few days earlier.
She had remembered reading about a book.
Now Lara went backward in time through the files from the war council on the 16th. The most massive air raid in the history of war, the Luftwaffe’s 1,000-plane multi-wave blitz that climaxed the Battle of Britain, was just returning to base after attacking the English capital on the night before. The men in the Adlerhorst were discussing the direct hits on Buckingham Palace and making rude jokes about the Royal Family.
Though the City around St. Paul’s Cathedral was in ruins and the East End docks were ablaze, Lara knew their hopes of achieving a dictated peace in 1940 would be thwarted. She thought she knew how God must feel, looking down and listening in on the puny dreams of men, their fates already determind for them.
The day earlier must have been a strange one in Germany. Those closest to Hitler knew the planes bound for London were just taking off, and there was little to do but wait. Around three in the afternoon Johanna Wolf typed up notes from Hitler’s working lunch on the terrace above the Obersalzberg.
One paragraph stood out like a seam of precious metal in a wall of dull rock. “At 13:43, Reichsführer-SS Himmler asked whether everyone was finished eating. He then gave a signal to Stürmbannführer Edlitz, who came forward with a heavy package that was wrapped and tied up with a ribbon. H.H. said, ‘For you, mein Führer,’ and placed the gift in A.H.’s hands. Then he and Edlitz simultaneously stepped back three paces. The Führer laughed and said, ‘What is it, a bomb?’
“Those around the table enjoyed the joke as the wrapping was removed to reveal a heavy book, very old, with a tooled leather cover. A.H. said, ‘This Bible will make an excellent doorstop.’ Again the others laughed. Himmler came forward and opened the book, indicating the writing on the flyleaf. A.H. studied it for a moment and said, ‘I do not understand this language.’
“Edlitz handed a sheet of paper to H.H., who gave it to A.H. ‘Here is a translation, mein Führer. You will see the significance.’ A.H. placed the translation inside the Bible without looking at it and put it down on the table. ‘I thank the Reichsführer-SS for his generosity,
as always. I promise to read it when I get a chance.’ With that the luncheon adjourned.”
Lara leaned back, thinking it through. She had skipped over the incident when she was writing her history over the summer; it had seemed just an inside joke at the time. Clearly, it wasn’t the Bible that was important but what was written inside on the flyleaf. A certain prophecy, perhaps, that all this was about? She allowed herself the slightest smile of satisfaction: Lara Klimt, the last of the armchair detectives.
After returning the yashchik of wartime papers to its resting place in the stacks, Lara retraced her steps. One of the scholars working in the main room had packed up and left. Fortunately, the Listening Room was still unoccupied. Wherever the truth lay, she had to know the rest of Coward’s story.
Replacing the Dictaphone lever on the fifth cylinder, she went back to work.
Now, dear listeners, we’re up to a hot summer’s day in July 1940, the day Anthony rang me up to say he was ready to dip his quill in our homemade ink and did I want to watch?
I did not want to watch. As it was I was terrified his hand would slip and all our work would go for naught. Besides, I was trying my best to pull together something I’d dashed off on shipboard, a thing I was calling Time Remembered, and it was taking every waking moment. Anthony was good enough to call later in the day to say the writing had gone off without a hiccup.
Then, it took another forty-eight hours for the ink to dry. Two entire days before he would even take the baby beetles out of the box!
In summer of that year, remember, the overriding question for Anthony Blunt and me, as it was for you and all of Britain, was invasion. Was Hitler coming over, and if so, when? The French had given up, we’d left everything in the way of guns on the beach at Dunkirk, and the Lüftwaffe were making reconnaissance flights over the Channel.
Everyone knew the Home Guard marching in Hyde Park and the sandbags piled up in Westminster wouldn’t be nearly enough. It was a terribly trying time to be an Englishman, especially one who thought he might have a weapon against the Hun that wouldn’t be ready for a month and a half!
Fortunately for my sanity, there were a couple of tasks to keep us busy in the meanwhile. It fell to me, as our project’s “casting director,” to obtain the services of the man who would actually hide the Bible where the Germans would find it, just as it was Anthony’s job to identify the dupe who would be induced to do the finding.
His job first. Anthony had decided a man named Gerhard Bauer would be our appointed target. Bauer was—is—a collector of Renaissance paintings who also runs a tony German art magazine on his wife’s money. He befriended Blunt before the war, or maybe it was the other way round. At any rate, Anthony knew him now to be Procurator of the northern department of the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg, occupied at that moment with scooping up all the artworks of any value in the overrun territories … primarily (but not solely) those left behind by the Jews who been sent to the East.
Posting the letter immediately, even before Winston okayed our plan, was absolutely necessary due to the time required for it to reach Bauer by way of Lisbon, the only remaining conduit for communications with Germany. I have to hand the English translation Anthony made, which I will read into the recorder:
My Dear Gerhard,
Permit me to thank you in this roundabout way (London to Berlin via Portugal is nothing if not roundabout) for your kind mention of my trifle on Poussin in your brilliantly explicated piece in the Deutsches Kunstblatt of March of this year. I would have thanked you earlier but the postal service here, as you know, have decided to absent themselves from delivering any and all periodicals from Germany, even high-minded ones such as yours. So the March Kunstblatt has only just come my way.
Old friend, I know you will be traveling with your military through the Low Countries, overseeing the removal of certain pieces of our mutual European heritage back to Germany for safekeeping, as your publisher’s note puts it. Well, there is something a student here was working on before the war in what is now your neck of the woods, and I’m rather hoping you might keep a weather eye out when it is catalogued, so he may find it when hostilities are over.
Young Weidmann discovered the volume in the monastery at Villers-devant-Orval. It’s a rather ordinary late-fifteenth or early-sixteenth century Bible of little interest on its own, but with quite an intriguing notation on the flyleaf. He believes the writing may be from the pen of Michel de Nostradamus. If so, it would be the only extant example of the man’s own hand, and might fill for him some rather yawning lacunae for the year 1562.
Would you be a dear and put a tick mark or whatever you do on your list if and when your people find it? Weidmann made a note of its location when he was there in ’38: on the third shelf from the top, next to a quite nice and very early Book of Job.
I lift a glass of sherry to you now, absent friend, in the hope of seeing you in the not too distant future. Until then I remain …
Your colleague and friend, Anthony
Of course, there is no Weidmann. It was Anthony himself who visited Orval in ’38 and made a note of that Book of Job, in hopes the Courtauld might snatch it for themselves in the event of war. Our friend Gerhard would know Nostradamus isn’t Blunt’s line of goods, so we had to invent the studious young man.
I personally saw the letter being put in the diplomatic bag at the Ministry to be forwarded on to Lisbon so it could be placed in the post over there.
Now I had a casting call to conduct, if our little scheme was to succeed.
Chapter 27
An incoming video call on her iPad brought Lara back to the present. The digital clock in the upper right corner showed it was nearly 2:15; she’d been listening to Noël Coward for a good part of the day.
It was Lev. She told him to hold and hurried out of the Listening Room with her brother’s face bouncing along on her iPad. The Ladies Room was unoccupied and she sat down in the last stall. Lev’s image was distorted with worry.
“Levishka, are you all right?
“I, I don’t know. I’m totally sleep-deprived, but I have to talk to someone who understands.”
His raspy voice was bouncing off the tiles. She lowered the volume. “What’s happened?”
“I couldn’t get back to sleep after you called, so I watched the last ten minutes of some old movie on TV. I still wasn’t sleepy and I started channel surfing. One of the local stations had something typed across the bottom of the screen, a breaking-news thing, you know?”
“Uh huh.”
“A few hours ago, a guy jumped off the Knik Arm Bridge. The whole thing’s crazy. The jumper … it was Craig, the American I work with … worked with. He’s dead.”
“Bozhe moî! Your friend killed himself? I’m so sorry.”
“Best friend, I guess. But I don’t think he really did. When I called the police, told them I was a colleague, all they would tell me was that he left a note in his apartment …”
“Then … it was a suicide.”
“… typed out, to someone named Melissa. Said he couldn’t go on without her.”
“I see … then why do you—”
“Craig was gay! Totally, completely. Still in the closet, but … there couldn’t be a Melissa. And there’s something else. He keeps his iPad at the test station, turned on. After the news, I drove out there and downloaded his latest emails and stuff. They aren’t password protected.”
Lara waited for her brother to continue.
“Apparently, the Americans are all set to announce an oil strike up here, a big one, in the Wildlife Refuge. They were offering Craig a huge raise and a promotion somehow because of it. The crazy thing is, he turned them down. Said he ‘wouldn’t be a party to it.’”
“Lev, listen to me, this is important.”
“You don’t have to tell me. That’s why I’m gonna … early flight … to find out.”
“Listen, I’m worried that—What?”
“… getting … plane out … to Prud
hoe. Catch a … winks … and head out to the strike. Nose around. Find out … made Craig so upset.”
“Lev, you’re breaking up.”
“Crap! … battery’s just about—”
Then he was gone. Lara tried three more times, but she couldn’t get him back. He was gone before she could tell him everything that was going on at her end, so she hurriedly put it down in an email and sent it. He’d get it when his phone was back up and running.
Lara gave herself a pep talk. Everybody gets bad news; everybody deals with it. She shouldn’t have bothered him with the Hangman thing. Lev was going to be fine. Everything was fine.
She did her best to believe it.
Chapter 28
Lev’s call started her worrying about him all over again. His friend was dead, and in murky circumstances. What made it especially troubling was the knowledge there was nothing she could do from seven thousand kilometers away.
Then, as she sat there alone in the stall, the one-hour-to-closing bell shrilly rang from the speaker in the ceiling, as it was doing throughout the Arkhiv. Damn, she remembered, the place closed early for staff meetings on Wednesdays.
Lara left the Ladies’ Room and headed back along the hall toward the Listening Room. She was being pulled in too many directions. There was the end of Coward’s tale still to listen to, with his talk of Germans and art historians. And her brother to fret over. And the bullnecked man, who might still be lurking around.
She couldn’t have picked a worse time to have one of her eureka moments.
Chapter 29
That business about German art historians and their scientific tests had tripped a wire connected to something she’d read months or years ago. Not in the humidity-controlled wartime files, but right out there on the postwar shelves lining the reading area.
