The Suicide Exhibition

by Justin Richards

  Talk at the office was of the evacuation of British forces from Greece following the Greek army’s surrender. It reminded Guy of his own experiences at Dunkirk. The Greek government had already been taken by submarine to Crete and it was generally thought to be only a matter of days before the Germans marched into Athens. Another maddening reminder of his distance from the real action, especially as Guy knew Athens well from when his father worked at the embassy there.

  By the afternoon, the Whitehall offices were stifling. The warmer weather that came with the transition from April to May seemed to suck the air out of the building. Combined with the paperwork and translations which had built up in the time he was away, this made Guy desperate for any excuse to leave. If the Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden had an urgent message to be handed to Air Vice Marshal Keith Park in person, and no one else was free to go, then Guy was happy to see that as an invitation.

  “You sure you want to go all the way to Uxbridge?” Sir James Chivers asked for the third time. Chivers’ tone implied that he thought his subordinate could be better employed.

  “I’ve got nothing urgent this afternoon,” Guy assured him. “And I could do with a break from the paperwork.”

  “You see this as a break, do you?”

  Guy sighed. “Tell you what, I’ll stay late to make up the time. I just need some air, if I’m honest.”

  “Not much of that if he’s down in the bunker, Guy. Rather you than me.”

  If Chivers’ family had a motto, Guy suspected it was “Rather you than me.” Quite probably in Latin.

  * * *

  The ministry car threaded its way between piles of rubble now cleared to the roadside from the previous night’s bombing. The gutted, broken facades of buildings made some areas of London seem like a ghost town.

  The Air Vice Marshal was indeed down in the bunker. This housed the Operations Room for RAF Number 11 Group, responsible for defending London and the south east. Here, data from what was now called RADAR as well as other observation posts was recorded on a vast gridded map table. The color-coded counters that the girls of the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force moved round the map with magnetic rakes kept track of the position and timing of each enemy raid.

  “The Dowding System,” named after Air Chief Marshal Dowding (retired the previous October) was hugely effective. It provided up-to-date information that could be absorbed at a glance, enabling the Fighter Controller to deploy his forces quickly, accurately and with devastating effect.

  But to Guy, it always just looked like a mess. A well-organized mess, but chaotic nonetheless.

  Air Vice Marshal Park was in conference, so Guy had to wait at the side of the room. He could see Park on the gallery above the map table, staring down at it while engaged in a hushed and urgent conversation with a Wing Commander sporting a healthy mustache—the duty Fighter Controller.

  While he waited, Guy too examined the map table. There were relatively few markers on it today—and all Allied flights. He had been here during a major raid a few months back, and watched the calm efficiency of the women as they moved counters over the board as if this was a vast, complicated game of chess. In a way, he supposed, it was.

  Somewhere a telephone rang. The phones were ringing almost constantly, so there was no reason for Guy to remark this one. But he watched across the room as a WAAF lifted the receiver, cutting off the sound. Her face etched into a frown as she scribbled notes on a pad, then put the phone down.

  “I have a sighting in Sector D,” she called across the room. The general noise faded. “Possible UDT.”

  All noise stopped. The woman tore a sheet off her pad and handed it to another WAAF.

  “What’s a UDT?” Guy asked a girl with dark bobbed hair standing close to him.

  “Don’t ask.”

  “You mean you don’t know what it is?” He meant it as a joke.

  But she answered him seriously. “It’s an Unknown Detected Trace. None of us knows what it is.”

  Park and the Fighter Controller he’d been talking to were rapt, looking down at the map as a new counter was swept into position. It was jet black, and right in the middle of the board. Guy wondered how a plane could have got there without being picked up sooner.

  All eyes were on Park now. He nodded to the Fighter Controller. “It’s been a while. But you know what to do.”

  The Fighter Controller cleared his throat. “All right, we have a possible UDT, so we track it as long as we can. McAuley—scramble the nearest fighters, for all the good it will do. All non-essential personnel will please clear the Operations Room now.”

  Guy found himself caught up in the general exodus. It looked like he’d have to wait a while longer to deliver his message.

  Behind him he heard the calm, efficient voices of the girls at the table and manning the phones.

  “Three Hurricanes airborne from Hornchurch. Moving to intercept.”

  “UDT now moving west at approximately 400 knots.”

  “Sir—there’s another plane already up there. Hornchurch is trying to establish radio contact. Looks like it’s an Air Transport Auxiliary flight.”

  “Then it probably doesn’t have a radio,” another WAAF replied.

  “Call Station Z,” Guy heard Park order. “They’d better send someone over.”

  Then the door closed, and the sounds of the Operations Room were cut off.

  * * *

  There was nothing to do but wait. Most of the other personnel drifted away—perhaps to their offices, or to find the canteen. But Guy needed to deliver his message. He felt duty-bound to wait. That was the story of his life, he thought—“duty-bound.” Maybe just once he should forget about “duty” and do what he thought was right. But he was past the point where he could just run away and re-join his regiment.

  In fact, he didn’t have to wait long.

  As abruptly as everyone had been cleared out of the Operations Room, they were let back in. The black counter was gone from the map board. Park was talking urgently to someone on the gallery. The newcomer had his back to Guy, but he was surprised to see that the man wore the uniform of an army sergeant, not RAF.

  Guy made his way over, waiting where Park could see him over the soldier’s shoulder. All he needed to do was hand over an envelope and wait for any reply.

  Park glanced across, acknowledging that he’d seen Guy, and gesturing for him to hand over the envelope he was brandishing.

  He continued speaking as he opened it and scanned the brief letter inside.

  “Only one other plane in the vicinity. I’ll get you the details … Is he serious?”

  It took Guy a moment to realize this last remark was aimed at him.

  “Er, I assume so, sir.”

  Park refolded the letter and stuffed it back into the envelope. “I’ve barely enough aircraft to do the job here, and Eden wants me to back his request to divert new deliveries to North Africa?” Park’s New Zealand accent was more pronounced when he was angry.

  Guy felt he ought to say something. “I believe it’s pretty urgent, sir. They’ve got just thirteen Hurricanes left to defend the whole of Egypt.”

  “My heart bleeds.” Parks reached past the soldier to return the envelope. He sighed. “Tell him I’ll do what I can. But I won’t compromise on our own requirements. He should know that, after France.”

  “Of course, sir. I’ll pass that back.”

  As Guy spoke, the soldier turned and glanced at him. For a moment, their eyes met. It took Guy a moment to place the man, though if the sergeant recognized him, he didn’t show it but turned immediately back to Park.

  “Don’t worry,” Park said to the sergeant. “Colonel Brinkman will get the tracking data and reports. And good luck to him.”

  Guy made his way out of the bunker and back toward daylight. The car was waiting where he’d left it, and he climbed into the back.

  On the way back to Whitehall, he stared out of the window. Rain was starting to fall, spattering across his view and
running down the glass. But he didn’t see it.

  All he saw was the events of eight months ago playing out again in his memory, and one of his first tasks for the Foreign Office after recovering from his wounds.

  CHAPTER 4

  When Guy Pentecross had stepped off the train at Ipswich station eight months earlier, the weather was very different. Summer was fading but not yet gone as the September of 1940 arrived. It was a warm day, and rather than find a taxi he decided to walk to the hospital. From the directions he’d been given, it wasn’t far.

  It was a pleasant change to walk through streets that weren’t strewn with rubble. Just that morning he’d seen the wardens and the firemen pulling broken twisted bodies from the remains of a house. In the mid-afternoon sun, this place almost seemed normal. Except for the distant drone of bomber engines and the angry buzz of fighters heading out to intercept them.

  The front of the hospital was insulated with sandbags. Guy presented his identity card to a flustered nurse and asked where he could find Doctor Hugginson.

  “They’re still bringing people in from Felixstowe,” she said. “I don’t know where we’re going to put them.” There were dark rings under her tired eyes. “Doctor Hugginson will be doing what he can for them. Try Ward Three.”

  He tried Ward Three, doing his best not to stare at the patients. Trying not to think back to his own time in hospital. It was only a couple of months since he had been discharged and assigned to the Foreign Office. More than anything else, the antiseptic smell of the place brought it back to him. Eventually Guy found Hugginson hurrying along a corridor. The doctor made no effort to slow down as they spoke.

  “I haven’t got time for you now.” There was a trace of apology, but it was really a statement of fact.

  “It’s not you I came to see.”

  That earned a short laugh. “Good. So why are we talking?”

  “I’m here to question the German.”

  There was a break in his step. “Then you’ll have to be quick.”

  Hugginson grabbed a nurse who probably had better things to do. She led Guy to a small room that contained a single bed. There were bars across the window.

  “Not that he’s going anywhere. Not in this world, anyway,” she said. “We have to keep him separate.”

  “Security?” Guy guessed.

  “The other patients won’t have a German in the same room. Not fair to ask them really. Most of them would rather we dumped him back in the sea. There’s probably a few in the ward that his bombs put there.”

  “I doubt it,” Guy told her. “He’s not a flyer. That’s army uniform. What’s left of it.”

  “We can’t take it off him, the skin would come too,” the nurse said, sounding sympathetic for the first time. “It’s melted right into his flesh.”

  That went partway to explaining the different smell in here. Like burned meat. Guy forced himself to look closer at the man on the bed. One eye stared bloodshot at the ceiling. The other was gone, the whole of that side of the face a waxy mass of charred tissue.

  “It wasn’t just a fire,” the nurse went on. “Doctor Hugginson says the man was covered in some sort of accelerant. Fuel, most likely. Maybe a burst fuel tank, something like that.”

  “I wish I could say I’ve never seen anything like it,” Guy said.

  “Me too.”

  The only signs that the man was still alive were the shallow rise and fall of his shattered chest, and the dry rasp as he struggled to draw breath.

  “If he’s army, how did he get here?” the nurse asked.

  “Good question.” It was what Guy had been sent to find out.

  “Was he a passenger on a plane?”

  Guy shrugged. “Where was he found?”

  “Washed up at Bawdsey.”

  That meant nothing to him, but Guy nodded. He could look it up later. “Can he speak?”

  “Only in German.” She smiled, and instantly looked younger. Probably just out of school. “I have to go, I’m sorry.”

  He nodded, turning away before she was out of the room, attention focused on the blackened body.

  “Who are you?” he asked gently in German. No response. “Where are you from?” Nothing to indicate the man could even hear him. “Have they given you anything for the pain?”

  That got a reaction. Just a blink of the single eye, and a breath that might have been: “Ja.” Then, slightly more clearly: “Danke.”

  “How did you get here?”

  The man’s head turned slightly. The skin of his neck stretched and tore, oily liquid leaking out.

  “Why did you come?” Guy asked. His own voice was husky and raw.

  The answer was barely a whisper. A single word that was almost lost in the sound of the door opening.

  Guy spun round angrily. “What the hell are you doing?”

  “I could ask you the same thing, sir.”

  The man was tall and broad, with close-cropped dark hair and a nose that had been broken several times. He was wearing the uniform of an army sergeant, and had the gruff no-nonsense tone to go with it.

  “Pentecross, Foreign Office,” Guy told him. “I’m here to speak to the patient.”

  “Sergeant Green, sir. And I’m here to secure the prisoner. My orders are that no one is to have contact with him.”

  Obviously some local officiousness, Guy thought. “I doubt that applies to me.”

  “I doubt you’re an exception.” Then, almost as an afterthought: “Sir.”

  Green’s assurance annoyed Guy. “What unit are you with? Who gave you these orders?”

  If the sergeant was intending to answer, he was interrupted as the man on the bed struggled to sit up, hand clutching in the air in front of him. His whole body was shaking. His breath was a ghastly wheezing sound, ragged and desperate. Then he slumped back. The noise stopped. His body was deathly still.

  Guy and Sergeant Green stared down at the bed, united by another’s death.

  “Did he say anything?” Green asked.

  “Not really.”

  “So what did he say?”

  “It’ll be in my report,” Guy told him.

  “There’s no need for a report, sir. You can tell me.” When Guy didn’t answer, Green went on: “I’ll make sure the Foreign Office knows the man was already dead when you got here.”

  “But that’s not true.”

  “What did he say? Colonel Brinkman will want to know.”

  Guy had had enough. He’d wasted his time coming here, and now a sergeant was ordering him about. The sooner he got out of this stifling death-room the better.

  “He only said one word, apart from ‘yes’ and ‘thank you.’ And it didn’t make any sense.”

  Green nodded. “And the word was?”

  “The word was ‘Ubermensch.’ It means—”

  “That’s all right, sir.” Green turned away, looking back at the body. “Someone else can worry about what it means.”

  “Like Colonel Brinkman?”

  No reply.

  “Who is Colonel Brinkman, anyway?”

  Green turned, stepping closer to Guy. “If you need to ask, then you don’t need to know. Sir.”

  Guy was seething as he left the hospital. He had several questions, and no hope of getting an answer to any of them. The first was who was Colonel Brinkman? Then, who was the German, and how had he died? Why had he come here, and how?

  And when Sergeant Green stood close to Guy, why did the man’s uniform smell of smoke and fuel?

  CHAPTER 5

  Heinrich Himmler never tired of showing off his castle. It was rare that he had a visitor who was technically of a higher rank than himself, and he seemed determined to make the most of it, shunning the bright sunshine of early May for the cold stone interior of the edifice. An observer who knew neither man would have assumed that Himmler was the one in charge.

  His guest seemed happy to allow the misconception. In fact, Deputy Fuhrer Rudolf Hess knew very well that it was best to hum
or Himmler. The man deferred only to the Fuhrer himself, and occasionally not even to him.

  “There has been a castle here at Wewelsburg since the ninth century,” Himmler said proudly as he led the way out of the cellars.

  Although he was still reeling from what he had just seen, the Deputy Fuhrer was willing to bet that nothing of the original remained. He knew that Himmler had signed a 100-year lease on the castle at a cost of 100 marks, back in 1934. Since then he had in effect rebuilt it, if not in his own image then to his own design.

  “There is a very real possibility,” Himmler went on, “that the original castle was the bastion. You know about the bastion, of course.”

  “The fortress that legend foretells will stand fast against the forces of the East in the final confrontation,” Rudolf Hess said. He was familiar with the myth. In fact he was relieved that for all his delusions and credulities, Himmler accepted that war with Russia was inevitable.

  “Initially we used this castle as a training center for the SS,” Himmler said, apparently ignoring this. “A place where the elite can become versed in history, archaeology, astronomy, art and culture. Now it is much, much more than that.”

  Wewelsburg had become the Reichsfuhrer’s center of operations—a shrine and a cathedral for the quasi-religious order that he had created. But to Deputy Fuhrer Hess, though he said nothing, the whole castle reeked of pretense and affectation.

  Rudolf Hess himself was a committed occultist, a member of the Thule Society who believed that Hitler was the German Messiah; an astrologer who thought that our faults lie not in ourselves but in the stars. The Thule Society believed that German Aryans were the true descendants of a race of Nordic “supermen” from a long-lost landmass akin to Atlantis. Hess subscribed fully to this theory.

  But what Himmler had just showed him at Wewelsburg caused him to question everything he thought he knew.

  It was a disappointment that Hitler distrusted occult thinking and put little store in things that could not be proven. But once the Fuhrer saw what Himmler had at Wewelsburg, Hitler would have the proof he needed to believe. For the first time, the Deputy Fuhrer was forced to consider what that would lead to, and what reaction it might provoke from Hitler …