by Iain King
Glenn looked back up to Zenyalena: as long as she held the gun, the American knew she was in control. ‘You want me to go down?’
Zenyalena considered the idea, then shook her head. ‘No. Myles: your turn.’
‘Down there?’
‘Yes, Englishman. Lead on.’
Myles tipped his head to one side, accepting the command but not sure how he was going to do it. Glenn shuffled aside, letting Myles through.
Still hobbling from his ruptured knee ligament, Myles edged towards the hole. He stepped down onto the first step, then the second, slowly descending into the dark. He had to duck his head to climb below the hole in the floorboards.
Downstairs was a basement like any other: the walls were damp and bare, there was a power socket and a cable, but nothing unusual. Then Myles noticed a hole in the concrete floor. It hadn’t been cut smoothly, probably just someone attacking the floor with a pickaxe. Stolz must have done it soon after he bought the flat, back in 1990. He would have been younger and fitter then. But he hadn’t needed to be strong: the concrete was thin, and – unusually for war concrete – it hadn’t been reinforced with steel.
It was a double floor…
Now Myles understood how Stolz had kept the bunker secret. In March or April 1945, when the Nazis knew the Russians were coming, they must have sealed the bunker with concrete. It had been done quickly – which was why there was no steel. But it was enough to fool the Soviets – they would have found only the basement with a concrete floor. Stolz’s secret would have remained hidden through the four decades of the Cold War. Then, in 1990, Stolz returned to break it open again. But to keep the bunker secret, he sealed off the whole basement with the floorboards at ground level. Not since the time of the Nazis would anybody but Stolz have seen whatever lay below.
Myles wondered what to do. He could go down, into the bunker - perhaps even try to escape. But would there be another exit? Unlikely: if there was, the bunker would have been discovered many years ago. Myles was probably standing over the only way in and the only way out.
He edged towards the cable and turned on the power at the socket. Electricity began to hum, and Myles saw light emerge from the void beneath him.
‘What’s going on down there?’ It was Zenyalena, calling from above.
Myles knew now wasn’t the time to lie. ‘There’s another level down, something below the basement.’
‘A bunker?’
‘I guess so,’ answered Myles, peering at vertical steps which led into whatever was beneath, a fixed ladder down through a manhole.
Zenyalena started to approach. She was still carrying the gun, and still looking suspicious. ‘Find out what’s down there,’ she ordered, tapping his side with the gun barrel.
Myles looked back at Zenyalena’s paranoid eyes. She had given up all pretence of being calm. Now she was pathological. There was no way Myles could refuse.
Careful to avoid sudden movements, Myles placed his good foot on the first rung, then lowered himself to allow his leg in a brace to take a lower rung. One step at a time, he kept descending until his whole body was inside the brightly lit bunker.
Zenyalena shouted down to him. ‘What’s inside?’
Myles tried to make it out. The first thing he saw was a bright yellow handle bearing the word ‘Vorsicht’ in Nazi-era lettering. He peered closer: it was the handle to some sort of emergency escape hatch. The small door had rusted, and had probably never been used.
The rest of the bunker was piled high with stacks of papers. Reams and reams, some filed between cardboard covers, others just stacked in rough piles. It was accompanied by the smell of old newspapers which had been allowed to become damp.
‘…. Looks like… just papers…. I think…’ He shook his head in disbelief. A storehouse for bureaucrats…
He stepped off at the bottom and saw one of the cardboard covers. He wiped off the dust to reveal a swastika. Nazi bureaucrats…
Zenyalena’s head was poking down from above. Her voice was edgy. ‘Well, what do the papers say?’
Myles picked up a file and opened it. The first sheet was titled ‘Hauptmann Gerhard Schnitzer, geb. 24. Februar 1910.’ Then there was a list of dates with a few words scribbled in German by each one. By the last date, 24, Dezember 1942, was simply a ‘†’ symbol, and the single word ‘Stalingrad’.
‘Myles, can you hear me? What do the papers say?’
‘Er, looks like old personnel records,’ he suggested. ‘German.’
He heard Zenyalena scuffle above him, but ignored it. He was too fascinated. What did these records mean? Why hadn’t the Nazis burned them, with all their other papers? And why had Stolz needed them so much?
He picked up the next file. Like the first, there was a large swastika on the front. Inside were papers for several soldiers – one page on each.
Leutnant Heinz Bruen, geb. 4.Dez 1919
4.März 1935 – registriert Hitler-Jugend
30. Juni 1939 – registriert Panzerdivision
10. Juni 1940 - verwundet, Frankreich
5. Juli 1940 – ausgezeichnet mit dem Eisernen Kreuz 2. Klasse
27. Juli 1943 - † Kursk
He turned the papers. Each page was a list of dates for a different soldier. Different birthdays, but always the same date of death. The file was a collection of people killed on 23rd of July 1943, at Kursk - the largest tank battle in history.
He stared at one of the rough piles of paper. No cardboard cover on this, just a box to hold the sheets together. The top page had decayed too much to read, so he lifted it to read the one below.
Hannah P. Rosenberg, geb. 4 Januar 1905, 9.30 Uhr, Hamburg.
21. Juli 1926 - Hochzeit
1. Juni 1927 - Geburt der ersten Tochter
28. September 1928 - Geburt der zweiten Tochter
13. September 1930 - Geburt des Sohnes
3. Mai 1941 – Ehemann im Krieg getötet
27 Januar 1944 - †
The page had been signed with an illegible scribble and the time ‘14.18 Uhr’ next to it. Different handwriting had added at the bottom:
† 14.35 Uhr
Myles wondered what the German text might mean. He lifted the next sheet.
Maryam Gold, geb 10. Juni 1910, 22.30 Uhr, Lüdenscheid
22. Juni 1932, Hochzeit
15. October 1932, Anstellung in Metzgerei
12. November 1938, Italienreise
27. Januar 1944 † (Existenz des Ehemannes beendet)
It had the same illegible signature with the time two minutes later – ‘14.20 Uhr’
And underneath, again:
† 14.35 Uhr
He flicked through the next page, and the next. All ended with exactly the same date, and the same time.
What happened to all these people on the 27th of January 1944, at two-thirty-five in the afternoon?
Then he noticed the ‘†’ symbol. The same symbol as on the Kursk and Stalingrad files of German soldiers.
Suddenly the realisation hit him. He felt his whole body judder, as he tried to contain his reaction to the pages he was holding.
Of course: all the people died. More precisely, they were executed. Myles was looking at interview notes taken minutes before these people were stampeded into gas chambers.
Part of him wanted to drop the pages in disgust – to get rid of them - but he knew he shouldn’t. There was something special about these records. All other records of the holocaust had been systematically destroyed. So why had a Nazi kept these?
Footsteps started clanging down from above. Glenn was descending the ladder to join him, followed by Frank and Pascal, who was helping Heike-Ann with the difficult steps. Heike-Ann was barely able to find her footing – she looked drowsy, and was paler than ever.
Then he saw Zenyalena above them all, herding them down with her gun.
Glenn reached the bottom first. ‘What is it Myles?’
Myles showed one of the papers to Glenn. ‘Death records.’
‘Death records?’
‘Yeah,’ said Myles, disgusted. ‘From the Nazis.’
Frank helped settle Heike-Ann on the floor, then leant towards one of the stacks of papers. ‘Well, what do they say?’
Myles waited until Zenyalena’s feet were on the ground before he explained. ‘They’re records from people who died. Some of them Nazis killed in battles, from Kursk and Stalingrad. But most from interviews with Jews just before they were….’ He didn’t say the last word – murdered. Somehow using normal words to describe the holocaust wasn’t right. All of them knew about the industrialised killing of so many millions of people. It couldn’t be described in any normal way.
The team gazed in awe at the musty room. The papers on all sides made it claustrophobic. Glenn checked two piles, then a third. Frank looked at one of the covers. Pascal tried to count how many columns of paper there were.
But Zenyalena was having none of it. ‘Just papers?’ she grunted. ‘Is that all?’ She lifted her boot and kicked a stack in frustration. It tumbled down, collapsing beside her. Dust lifted up into the air, and the smell of damp mould grew stronger.
As the papers fell, they revealed part of a machine, which had been hidden behind. With dials and numbers on the front, it looked like the mechanical desk from the underground cavern near Munich.
The team gazed closer.
Zenyalena sensed the others coming towards her. ‘Stay back.’
They obeyed: since firing at the floorboards, Zenyalena had seemed trigger-happy.
She gestured with the gun towards Pascal. ‘Well, don’t just wait: take off the papers. Show us what it is.’
Pascal duly began to peel away the stacks of loose files. He revealed a dull metal desk with a basic keyboard. There were several dials with arrows on each, and an automated teleprinter attached to one side. The whole machine was mechanical, made just like an Enigma code-making machine. It was a primitive computer. A Nazi computer.
Pascal lifted his head up. ‘I’ve found a switch.’ Pascal pressed the button, and lights appeared from the behind the keyboard. It began to buzz. Still looking down at the machine, the French colonel spoke, hesitant and unsure. ‘I… I think we have to enter data….’
‘What sort of data?’
‘I don’t know. Looks like… dates. Dates and times.’
Zenyalena’s fingers rippled around the gun barrel while she pondered what she would do next. ‘OK. Enter this: 5th September 1974.’
Pascal typed in the details, then waited. The machine seemed to want more data before it could work. ‘There’s still a light on for time and location.’
‘Then put in 0830 in the morning. Location: St Petersburg.’
Pascal queried it. ‘There’s a ‘Leningrad’ – the old name for St Petersburg.’
Zenyalena nodded her approval, and Pascal entered the city name.
Then, as if the machine were alive, it started whirring. Cogs and contraptions hummed inside, clicking and connecting. For almost a minute, the mechanical computer made loud, clockwork noises as small pieces of metal buzzed, whirred, rotated and settled inside. Then the tone changed. It was the hammer of the teleprinter. A page was being typed out.
Zenyalena’s eyes flickered nervously between the machine and the people in the room. Myles, Pascal, Frank, and Glenn watched transfixed while the most primitive computer any of them could imagine began to generate its result. Only Heike-Ann ignored it, lying semi-conscious on the floor.
Zenyalena waited for the teleprinter to finish, then lurched towards it and snatched off the paper with one hand, the other still clasping the machine gun. She held the page close, not letting anyone else read it. She seemed to read it twice as if she didn’t believe it the first time. She stared at it for several seconds more, as her grip on the gun seemed to loosen.
Then Zenyalena looked up. Her eyes were different now. She looked less mad, but also subdued, as though she had been confronted with a terrible reality.
Myles wondered if he had even seen tears in the Russian woman’s eyes. He tried to speak as softly as he could. ‘What does it say, Zenyalena?’
‘Predictions,’ she replied.
‘5th September 1974 – that’s your birthday?’
‘Yes,’ she said, turning the page to show them all.
Geb.5.Sept 1974
August-Oktober 1998 – Reise (80% Wahrscheinlichkeit)
Juni 2003 – Verwundet (60% Wahrscheinlichkeit)
Myles recognised the dates, but not the other words written in German. ‘What does it say?’
‘It says I travelled in 1998, and was injured in June 2003. The percentages are probabilities – 80% and 60% likely.’
‘And were you?’
Zenyalena nodded.
Myles scanned through the rest of the page. On the bottom line was today’s date. Beside it was a familiar symbol. A single symbol, all on its own.
†
Underneath, the words:
Plötzlich – 66% Wahrscheinlichkeit
Zenyalena and Myles looked at each other. Both of them understood what the machine was predicting.
Zenyalena wiped her face, clearing her eyes of any sadness. ‘ ‘Plötzlich’ means ‘sudden’,’ she explained.
Glenn tried to sidle close to her. ‘Oh, come on. This is just a fairground show. You don’t really believe it, do you?’
Zenyalena clutched the gun barrel tight in her hands. ‘Stay back.’ More calmly, she motioned to Myles. ‘Myles. Do you believe it?’
Myles wondered whether to lie, but decided it was better not to. ‘Yes, Zenyalena. I do. I do now. And I see how they did it.’ He gestured towards the paper stacked all around him. ‘These records. The Nazis gathered information from all these people. Soldiers who died, Jews they murdered – all of them. There could be more than a million sheets here. Then they found out which planets were significant when they died, identified a statistical link, and used it to make predictions.’
‘Predictions like mine?’
‘Yes, Zenyalena, I reckon so.’
Glenn was still shaking his head. ‘It doesn’t make the prediction right, though.’
Zenyalena was still on edge. She turned the Spandau gun back to Glenn. ‘When were you born, Glenn?’
Glenn pulled his passport from his back pocket and showed the birthdate to Zenyalena.
Zenyalena acknowledged it. ‘Good. What time?’
‘I don’t know. About eleven in the morning I think.’
‘Where?’
‘Maine.’
Zenyalena shot a look over to Pascal. Pascal understood, and dutifully entered the data.
Suddenly the machine was active again. It whirred and whizzed, as gears and cogs clunked together inside. They listened to the noise of little beads being shunted along an internal abacus, of circuits being formed, then broken, then connected again, and of life-decisions being calculated.
Then, as before, the tone changed as the printer started. Rippling her fingers on the air-cooling shaft of the gun barrel, Zenyalena invited Glenn to step forward.
Trying to pretend he didn’t care, Glenn extended his hand towards the paper. He picked it up and glanced at it. ‘I can’t read it. It’s in German.’
‘Well, show it to Heike-Ann.’
Glenn kneeled down and put the paper in front of Heike-Ann’s face. Heike-Ann – groggy and only half-awake – translated the paper. ‘It says the year you were born… a 70% chance of getting married in the year 2001. Then travel in May 2005 and November 2010. Some mention of travel for work this year. Then more stuff for 2018, 2028. Something about you retiring in 2030…’
Zenyalena called over to her. ‘Nothing for now?’
‘Just travel for work. That’s all.’
Zenyalena nodded, accepting the point. She nudged the gun sideways. ‘You.’
Frank looked round. ‘Me?’
‘Yes, you. Mr Museum Curator, or whatever it is you do. Tell me your birthday, place and time.’
Frank raised his eyebrows. ‘Er, right then. I was born in Birmingham, England. Born at dusk, on the 21st of March.’
Pascal entered the data, becoming familiar with the dials and controls. Again, the machine crunched the information and the wheels inside began to rotate and tumble.
Frank peered round, sweat collecting on his forehead, while he waited for the noise to change.
Then the teleprinter started. Careful to make sure no-one could approach her gun, Zenyalena ripped the paper from the machine.
She took time to study the page, as a half-grin spread on her face. ‘Were you injured when you were six-and-a-half?’
Frank frowned, puzzled. ‘Well, yes. If you’d call it an injury. That was when I contracted polio.’ He tapped his weak leg.
Zenyalena accepted the answer. ‘Heike-Ann,’ she called over. ‘What does ‘Wassertod’ mean?’
‘It means, literally ‘water-death’ - drowning,’ murmured Heike-Ann from the floor.
‘I’m going to drown?’ Frank seemed scared. Then a flicker of laughter appeared on his face, as if the prediction might be joke. ‘Well, the machine’s half-right and half-wrong. You see, my house boat sunk just a while ago. I almost did drown, actually…’ Frank looked for support from the other faces in the bunker. ‘The machine probably got the dates a little wrong.’
But Zenyalena shook her head, her voice still deadly. ‘There’s no mistake. According to this machine, you’re going to die the same day as me. Today. So don’t think you’ve escaped.’
Frank clutched his collar and loosened the shirt around his neck. ‘Does it really say that?’
Zenyalena threw the paper towards him.
Frank tried to grab it as it fluttered towards the floor. He stared at it, confirming that the last date was today, with the ‘†’ symbol next to it. Frank turned to his friend. ‘Myles, do you think this is true?’
Myles put his hand on Frank’s shoulder. ‘I don’t know.’
‘Well, do you think I have a choice?’
‘Yes, we all have a choice. You escaped when your boat sank, didn’t you? Just don’t take a bath today. Whatever these predictions say, we can still stay safe.’ Myles began directing his words at Zenyalena. ‘Come on, Zenyalena. Can’t we all go, now? None of us wants to die.’
