The Isis Covenant

by Douglas, James

  Jamie took his time, disguising the confusion left by the second half of that statement. ‘Simple enough, Bernie, old boy. According to a book I read, Bernie Hartmann and Max Dornberger were in Hitler’s bunker just about right to the end. It also said that you were the two men who executed Hermann Fegelein, Hitler’s brother-in-law.’

  The smile never left Bernie Hartmann’s face, but his eyes hardened and humour was replaced with a look of calculation. ‘Wrong on both counts,’ he crowed, enjoying the confusion of his “guests”. ‘It’s true I was there and I helped bury Fegelein, but I didn’t fire a shot. And the man who did shoot him wasn’t Max Dornberger.’ He shook his head. ‘Bodo Ritter executed Hermann Fegelein.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’ Jamie’s puzzlement was clear. ‘Bodo Ritter had already left Berlin when Fegelein was killed.’

  Hartmann sat back and closed his eyes. For a few moments they wondered if he’d fallen asleep.

  ‘Ach, maybe it’s time to tell it all.’ The gnome’s eyes opened and the twinkle had returned. ‘Somebody should know and who’s going to arrest old Bernie now, eh? But I tell it my way, and I tell it from the start.’

  He began with his childhood in Hamburg before the war, the youngest of a family of seven children, runt of the litter and always in the shadows because his father blamed him for his mother’s death. The more he talked, the more his voice changed. The accent was still pure New York American, all drawn out syllables and Rs gone AWOL, but the cadence was taken over by the kid from Altona: sharp and rhythmic with the occasional crack of a bullwhip.

  ‘The old man worked ten hours a day as a blaster at the quarry, so it was Aunt Gerda who brought us up. Not that she got much thanks for it. We spent more time down the docks thieving than we ever did at school and both my sisters were on the game by the time they were sixteen.’ He shrugged. That was just the way life was back then. ‘Then one time, it must have been in ’thirty-seven around my thirteenth birthday, Aunt Gerda got ill and the old man had to take me with him to work. He taught me about stone and how it split, and about blasting caps and dynamite and how to make them work together. How much to use to get what effect. I was a natural, he said, I had good hands, steady and nimble, and I didn’t make mistakes. ’Course,’ he chortled, ‘you only got to make one mistake in the blasting game. Well, he was a Red, the old man, they were all Reds in the quarries and round the docks. They’d been fighting the Brown-shirts along the Breitestrasse on and off since ’thirty-one and he could see what was coming. So he started bringing his work home, in a manner of speaking; half a stick at a time and a couple of blasting caps under his hat. He thought I didn’t know where he kept it, but little Berndt wasn’t as dumb as he looked. Well, they came for him in ’forty. It’s the KZ at Neuengamme for you, Herr Hartmann; five years without the option, unless you’d prefer to use your skills in an infantry pioneer battalion? In the end, it didn’t make no difference. It wouldn’t, would it? A fifty-year-old man in the combat engineers. Last we heard was a postcard saying he’d made the ultimate sacrifice for Führer and Reich in a great German victory somewhere near Bryansk.’

  He sighed and closed his eyes again, as if he was trying to remember a face. ‘He wasn’t what you’d call likeable, the old man, but I always regret never having a beer with him.

  ‘So here’s little Bernie, underfed and scrawny, couldn’t get into the Hitler Youth if he wanted to because of the old man’s history, and that means no job. All he knows is explosives and how to steal and he has twelve sticks of dynamite and fifteen blasting caps buried down by the shithouse. He wants to help feed the family, but he doesn’t know how. Fortunately, his old pals down the docks have an idea. Why don’t we rob a store? So we do, the Alsterhaus on Jungfernstieg, and it’s a peach. They get me in, I do the safe. Everybody gets their share and nobody gets hurt. But this is at the height of Barbarossa, with the Wehrmacht outside Moscow and Stalin beginning to think maybe Siberia’s nice this time of year. One night there’s a knock at the door. Could have been the Gestapo, but instead, it’s Erich, the old man’s pal, come to ask a favour; only the Reds don’t ask favours. They’re short of funds, he says, and I don’t ask what for. Next thing, I’m knocking off banks all over the Third Reich and taking more risks than is good for me. Let me tell you about little Bernie, he’s no Red and he’s no hero. So little Bernie decides to do one last job – for little Bernie. Only this one goes wrong.

  ‘The crazy thing is that it saved my life. It was the Hamburg bulls picked me up, not the Gestapo, and when they put the screws on me I admitted to the Alsterhaus job as well. If they’d looked hard enough, they could have tagged me for what I’d done for the Reds, and that would have meant a guillotine haircut, but I was a seventeen-year-old kid and not worth the effort. So nobody looked, just then.

  ‘Two years later, I’m out in Neuengamme with the gypsies and the Jews and the Reds and with just about as much chance of staying alive. I thought it was Bernie Hartmann’s last hour when Max Dornberger walked into the barracks in his SS uniform and called out my name.’

  ‘You said Max Dornberger was a good friend to you?’

  He nodded. ‘That’s when it started; right there in a stinking barrack room in a concentration camp. Max, he looks me over – I was maybe seven stone back then – and says, “So you’re the kid who blows safes. You don’t look much.” Sure, I say, I blew a couple; no point in denying it. He grins, this kinda knowing way, and I get a cold feeling on the back of my neck. “Yeah, a couple, but I’m not here to take you to Heini’s barber for a haircut. I’ve got a job for a smart kid, if you’re interested?”

  ‘Now, don’t get me wrong. I wasn’t conned by Max, the smiling Schutzstaffel; these guys had a way of joshing with you just before they smashed your teeth out with a hammer. But after two years in the KZ and another five to go I knew that the only way Bernie Hartmann was getting out of Neuengamme was in a box. So I played along. Six weeks later I’m being measured up for an SS uniform and I’m cock of the dungheap.’

  He saw Danny’s look. ‘You’re asking yourself how Bernie Hartmann could sell his soul to the SS. Well, I’ll tell you, lady. Bernie Hartmann was nineteen years old and he was alive. Five feet fuck all and a record as long as my arm and it’s all forgiven and forgotten; as long as I do my job. So that’s what I did. Geistjaeger 88 was paradise after the camp. French champagne; and all the girls liked a uniform, even with an ugly little bastard like me in it. I’d looked into an open grave. I knew that life could be short and shitty, so I enjoyed every last minute of it. For three months we swanned around France, living it up and taking what we liked for Uncle Heini. Then everything changed. Bodo Ritter turned up. The Devil incarnate. A man made for a uniform with the Death’s Head on it.’

  Danny was itching to ask Bernie Hartmann about Berlin and the Crown and the odd references to Max Dornberger that didn’t quite fit, but she had a good cop’s sense to stay quiet. Hartmann would get there in his own time.

  When he talks of Bodo Ritter there is fear in his voice even now and his eyes flick towards the window as if his nemesis is out there among the trees. Ritter had a nose for the things Heini wanted and that made him important. Ritter garrotting one of his own men. Ritter and the Italian countess who wouldn’t cooperate. Ritter’s see-saw game with the Italian partisans and a pair of nooses. But always there is the shadow in the darkness. The Ritter story so awful he can’t tell it.

  ‘The families who were killed in New York and London were killed with a garrotte,’ Danny said quietly.

  ‘Oh, Christ,’ Bernie whispered. He looked up at her, the twinkling eyes now dull and confused. ‘How could it be? Bodo Ritter is at least ten years older than I am. If he’s still alive he must be close to a hundred.’

  Then it hits him.

  ‘The diamond. This is all about the Crown and the Eye.’

  XXXII

  ‘BODO RITTER HAD the coldest eyes of any man I’d ever seen and we were all scared shitless of him. Any man who stepped o
ut of line was sent straight to the Eastern Front and knew he could count himself lucky. From the first day I met him I knew that good job or not, one day Bodo Ritter would be my executioner. Sure, I was the unit mascot, but that wasn’t going to save Bernie. It was the way he watched me, like a snake watching a mouse and all the time its little brain is full of the details of the kill. But all the time he was watching me, I was watching him. I noticed that everywhere he went, Ritter carried a leather case with him, like an old-fashioned surgeon’s bag. He treated that case like it was his old man’s ashes and I knew that whatever was in it must be worth a fortune. But no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t get a look inside. Not until Berlin.’ He shook his head and his mood changed again. ‘The bastard tried to kill me, but I fucked him. I pinched the love of his fucking life.’

  ‘I still don’t understand.’ Jamie frowned. ‘Bodo Ritter’s testimony to the war crimes tribunal said he left Berlin on April the twentieth on a secret mission for Heinrich Himmler. Why would he say that if he was still in the city fighting one of the last battles of the war? Let’s face it, a battle which, enemy or not, won the admiration of most of the world apart from Joe Stalin and the Red Army.’

  To understand, you have to understand Bodo, Bernie Hartmann told them. Bodo with his animal cunning, always sniffing the wind, always looking for a new opportunity or a new threat.

  ‘He could see what was coming better than any of us and, looking back, he knew things, terrible things, that only a few dozen people in the Third Reich knew. Things that, when they came out, would be the death of him. The big shots, they all made their plans to get out. Bodo wasn’t a big shot, so he did the next best thing. He decided not to be Bodo any more. You have to understand that G88 wasn’t a real military unit and we weren’t real soldiers. We were a pinkelwurst of thieves and conmen, hucksters and pencil-pushers with machine guns. Sometimes we had to blend into the background, like chameleons. When Bodo and Max decided to swap identities while the world was burning down around us, it was almost normal.’

  ‘That’s impossible.’ Jamie didn’t try to hide his disbelief. ‘A man in Ritter’s position must have been known to dozens of people at the top of SS.’

  Bernie Hartmann snorted his disdain. ‘You don’t know how it worked and you don’t understand how it was back then. Chaos. Sure he might have been spotted wearing a different rank, but so what? All the top guys had different ranks in the Waffen SS and the Allgemeine SS. Fegelein was an Obergruppenführer in the Waffen SS, but when Bodo shot him he was wearing the uniform of an Allgemeine SS Gruppenführer. Bodo Ritter and G88 worked to Himmler and Himmler alone. Maybe a couple of secretaries at the hell house on Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse might have recognized him, but apart from that nobody in Berlin knew Max Dornberger from Adolf Hitler. I think maybe Rattenhuber, the bunker security boss, suspected something, but he had problems of his own right then.’

  ‘But he went on trial at Nuremberg,’ Danny pointed out. ‘He stood in the dock with the other commanders of the Einsatzgruppen. Surely they would have recognized him?’

  ‘Before the trial,’ Bernie explained patiently, ‘Max Dornberger spent eighteen months as a prisoner of the Russians, sometimes in solitary confinement, but mostly working down a salt mine. I saw the pictures. By the time he stood in the dock his own mother wouldn’t have recognized him.’

  Jamie took up the attack. ‘That still doesn’t explain why Max Dornberger would put his neck in a noose for Bodo Ritter?’

  The little German didn’t bat an eyelid. ‘Max hadn’t been looking too good for a couple of months. We thought it was the rations. but before he left Berlin Max told me it was stomach cancer. Bodo convinced Max that he would make sure his wife and kids would want for nothing if he did the swap. He was going to die anyway, what did he have to lose?

  ‘Max also told me to watch my back with Bodo, but maybe I wasn’t listening too hard, because the bastard had me cold, sharing a new-dug grave with Hermann Fegelein, and it was only luck or God saved me. When the shell hit the bunker and Bodo went down, I didn’t hang about. We had this house up in Wilhelmstrasse, nice big place with lots of rooms. Lots of hiding places, too. I’d been watching him with his bag since we’d got back to Berlin. Hell, it got so he talked to the fucking thing. Most of the time, it never left his side, even when we were playing tag with Soviet tanks. But he couldn’t take it to the bunker because everybody was searched on the way in. That meant he had to hide it. But you can’t hide anything from a thief.’

  He described how he’d run back to the building and searched the room where he knew Ritter had stashed the leather surgeon’s bag. It had taken him longer than he liked, but he’d eventually found it. Opened it.

  ‘At first, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. Some kind of crazy gold hat—’

  ‘Describe it.’ The words choked in Jamie’s throat.

  ‘I can see it as if it was yesterday.’ Bernie Hartmann grinned. ‘A circlet of gold, with two horns spiralling up from it, and at its centre, where your forehead would be, an eye that stared at you the way Bodo Ritter’s eyes did, but …’ He hesitated and Jamie wondered if the secret was too great to share. If the old mistrustful Bernie Hartmann had won the fight and they would never know the whole truth. But Bernie was only gathering his thoughts. ‘But the most wonderful thing about it was the stone. It wasn’t like any diamond you’d see today, not in a jeweller’s window. It was rough cut, opaque in places, and dazzlingly polished in others. But it was a diamond,’ his voice mirrored the wonder he’d felt on that day sixty-three years earlier, ‘a diamond as big as a goose egg. A great big hundred-million-dollar hand grenade and it was all Bernie Hartmann’s.

  ‘Thieves are greedy, but we’re not stupid.’ The old man looked to Danny for confirmation. ‘I wanted it all, the gold and everything, but I knew it would be tough to get something as big as the Crown out of Berlin. The first thing I did was take my trench knife and prise open the clasps to remove the stone. When I held it in my hand I’d never felt anything like it. As if I was floating. I’d expected it to be heavy and cold, like a lump of frozen snow, but it was light and warm, so warm that I could feel its energy creeping into my body. I don’t know how long I sat there with it in my hands, but it was too long, as if the rock had hypnotized me. Next thing I heard was a burst of machine-gun fire and the front door crashing open and I knew Bodo was coming for me. I stuffed the diamond in the pocket of my camo smock and buttoned it up real tight. I was on my way to the window when the glint of that golden crown drew me back, like a fish to a spinning lure.’ He shook his head at his own foolishness. ‘I had to have it. I couldn’t leave it for Bodo. That moment of greed almost killed me. Another burst of fire, the door splintered and Bodo charges in like the Angel of Death he was. He raises the gun and fires, but a second later he’s out of bullets. Bernie Hartmann, he doesn’t need no second invitation, he’s through the window, sash, splinters and all—’

  ‘Hang on,’ Danny interrupted. ‘You left the Crown behind? So when did you try to sell it?’

  ‘So you know about that, huh?’ Bernie gave her a sly sideways glance. ‘You’re a pretty clever detective lady.’

  ‘That’s right, Mr Har … Bernie. A clever detective lady who still wants an answer.’

  He shrugged. ‘So my memory’s a little off. It happens when you get as old as I am. Maybe it didn’t happen quite so quick. Maybe I went across Wilhelmstrasse to a jeweller’s shop. It was gold, worth thousands of marks; I couldn’t just leave it behind? Only the bastard stalled me. He told me to come back later, but I knew he was setting me up for a fall.’

  ‘Okay, you went back into the house and Ritter burst inside. What then?’

  ‘Just like I told you. Straight out the window. Death or fucking glory. I got lucky. Landed in a pile of builders’ sand. I got up, checked the diamond was still in my pocket and ran for the nearest alley. That’s when he shot me. Bodo Ritter shot me in the arse.’

  It was dusk by now, and one of the
twins came into the room and pressed a button that automatically closed the curtains and turned up the ceiling lights.

  ‘We’ll have dinner in the window room, Matthias,’ Bernie Hartmann instructed. ‘Do you have any preferences? Vegetarian?’ His face twisted into a mock grimace and Jamie and Danny shook their heads. ‘The veal then,’ he said gratefully. ‘And a bottle of the ’ninety-six Montrachet, and put another on ice.’

  The window room turned out to be exactly that and confirmed what Jamie had suspected. Bernie Hartmann’s home was an enormous mansion house set into a low hill overlooking the eastern edge of the lake.

  ‘Better if I turn off the lights,’ their host said. For the next five minutes they stood in silent wonder looking out over the darkening expanse of water as the flat hazy glow on the other side turned into a million twinkling sparks that covered the faraway hillside and coated the surface of the lake with shimmering bands of reds and pinks, oranges and yellows, purples and blues. Dinner came, and with it the finest white wine either of them had ever tasted. Jamie complimented Bernie and the wizened old man grinned.

  ‘You can thank Bodo Ritter and Heinrich Himmler.’

  Their puzzlement gave him obvious pleasure, and he continued with his story, except that they both noticed there was an important piece missing, a piece that sparkled like a star fallen from the sky.

  ‘Eventually, the Yanks got me, but they didn’t keep me for long and after I got out of hospital I headed for what had been a G88 safe house south of Munich. I wasn’t sure what to expect, but I’d been a regular visitor and the old couple who looked after the place seemed happy enough to see me. It wasn’t long before they put me in touch with some old comrades who got me out on a ratline to Italy, then Argentina. Maybe I could have stayed in Germany, but they were trawling the camps for SS then and the Heimat didn’t look too healthy for the likes of Bernie Hartmann. Argentina might have been great for the Golden Pheasants, but for the small fry like me it was a dump. Just heat and dust and flies so big they coulda had you for breakfast. I laid low for three years working on a farm outside Buenos Aires before I got the papers I needed to allow me to visit Europe legitimately.’