“You are an interesting chap,” Hawk told me. “Speaking German over the phone, using a ludicrously transparent alias, threatening me with the Mossad, and after all that, coming here to dinner all alone and putting yourself in my power. Why?”
“Just clumsy, I guess,” I said, speaking truth.
Again he flashed his thin, knowing smile. “Do you know what I think, my dear Horace?” Hawk said. “I think you wanted me to believe you were stupid and clumsy.”
“Why ever would I want that?”
“To make me think I’m smarter than you are. To manipulate the well-known psychological need of my type to have the upper hand, the need to know more than his adversary, to outwit, then crush.”
Sitting in feeble lamplight, one skinny white-trousered leg thrown over the other, tobacco-stain toenails in full view, Hawk looked even more sallow than before. Beside him on a table stood the Martell bottle, and next to that a large straw hat. Hawk reached for the bottle, then deftly slid his hand under the hat and produced a nine-millimeter Walther automatic. He pointed it at my chest.
“As you see, it would be quite easy,” he said. “A short march down a hidden path, a tiny sound in a vast jungle already filled with inexplicable noises, then a grave in this amazing Amazonian soil that digests human flesh and turns it into something quite unrecognizable in a matter of days. Rather like a stomach at work on a big steak.”
My, but this fellow could talk English. He cocked the pistol. I was seriously concerned. Hawk might have been bluffing, making a show. But for all I knew this urbane old nut had shot Paul and fed him to the worms and now intended to do the same to me. Certainly he had every reason to prevent people who had found him from telling others where he was, and as a chum of the Mossad I was living (for the moment) proof that rubbing out uninvited visitors was good policy.
We were seated about three feet apart. I am, as I have said, a tall man. My torso was just about long enough to bridge the gap. With trembling hand, I took a large mouthful of cognac, leaned forward, and spat it in Hawk’s eyes. Then I took the pistol away from him, picked him up, and shook him hard. So hard that the cocked pistol in my hand went off, the bullet blasting a crater in the concrete wall. Hawk was quite light, all bones except for a few pounds of wasted muscle. His flaccid face quivered like Jell-O, his head snapped back and forth, his long gray hair flew. I was afraid that I might have gone on too long and broken something. So much for adrenaline and being out of practice.
Despite the gunshot and a loud glottal outcry from Hawk, Joaõ did not appear. This either meant that Hawk had given the only possible witness to whatever he’d had in mind for me the rest of the night off, or that Joaõ was not the sort of fellow to intrude on a private moment.
There is nothing like a good shaking to improve conversation. Generally no physical harm is done, but it does seem to awaken fundamental collective memories of encounters with cave bears. Only a moment ago Hawk had mentioned my being in his power. He now had a better understanding of who was in whose power, and was no doubt kicking himself for not just shooting me between the eyes without warning instead of making a fancy speech. Had I been a smaller man he might have done just that, but perhaps he doubted his ability to carry or drag a hulk like me to that churning stomach of a last resting place that he had mentioned. On the other hand, maybe he’d just been kidding. But in that case, why cock the pistol?
I poured him another glass of cognac. He lay sprawled in his chair where I had thrown him, twitching and gasping for breath. Apart from these involuntary movements he looked dead or close to it—eyes staring, skin a paler shade of yellow, nervous system apparently shut down. He was quite old. Perhaps he was dying.
“Sorry about that,” I said. “But I don’t know you well enough to have you pointing a gun at me.”
His eyes regained some expression. Putting the glass to his lips I said, “Here, drink this. It’ll do you good.”
Hawk, eager to obey, took more brandy than he could swallow and went off into a coughing fit. I pounded him on the back. He recovered. I put the glass down on the table beside him and refilled it. He was living now in a world of surprise, and I believed that he was looking at me in an entirely different way. What I had done to him was, I admit, the act of a bully. I was a foot taller and probably forty pounds heavier than he was, not to mention at least twenty years younger. But playing the bully was the whole point, if you leave aside the element of self-defense. Hawk, after all, had belonged to a culture of bullies—people who punched old men into submission, set fire to rabbis’ beards, shot children for sport, kicked women into filthy railroad cars. Bullying was something he understood. He was still in his chair, seemingly too subdued to move without permission.
This was hardly the moment to reassure him. I laid his Walther on the table beside me.
“Now I hope we can talk business,” I said.
Hawk, avoiding my eyes, nodded his head. He was, as they used to say in the Schutzstaffel, at my orders.
12
When the interview began my intention was to help Simon Hawk calm down, so I chose what I thought would be a neutral subject.
“Why don’t we begin with something that truly interests me?” I said. “May I ask where you picked up your amazing command of English?”
“I grew up in England,” Hawk replied. “I was sent to the best schools.”
“Which ones?”
He sensed a trap. This was vital information. If I knew his school and his approximate age I could ferret out his true name. And wouldn’t the Mossad be delighted to have that information?
“Simon,” I said. “Relax. I mean you no harm.”
“Worksop College,” he said at last, in tremolo, as if divulging the key to the innermost code of the Third Reich.
This was a new one on me. Where was it exactly?
“Nottinghamshire,” he said.
“Ah, Sherwood Forest. You must have fond memories.”
“Right,” said Hawk with deep sarcasm. “Filthy weather, vile food, the jolly old birch drawing blood. Slaps, kicks, punches. Pimply nancy boys fumbling at one’s bedclothes. Five years of that.”
“But you did learn to be an English gentleman, or a reasonable facsimile thereof.”
“Oh, quite. Monkey see monkey do, as my schoolmates used to put it. They knew I was a Jerry, you see. My father was posted to Manchester for many years as a representative of the German steel industry. Naturally the British regarded him as a spy.”
You see what I mean about the benefits of a good shake. He would never have been this frank had he not made the mistake of pointing that pistol at me. You never know in an interrogation what will open the floodgates. Out of dumb luck I had pushed the right button by going around Robin Hood’s barn to the gates of Worksop College instead of coming right to the point.
“Rings true,” I said. “But it must give you deep satisfaction to know that passing through this ordeal made it possible for you to serve the Reich.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“Obviously your command of English, your ability to pass as an Englishman if necessary—knowing how to dress, how to joke, knowing enough to eat your fish with two forks instead of a knife and fork like a navvy. Surely that attracted the notice of persons in high places?”
“It was people in high places who sent me to Worksop in the first place. I was regarded as an investment in the future.”
He had stopped playing the eccentric Brit and was now quite openly his real self, a German Anglophobe with a bad past and a light conscience.
I will paraphrase what he told me by way of introduction. Hawk came back to Germany in the summer of 1934 as a nineteen-yearold. His father had given him a letter of introduction to a chum at ThyssenKrupp AG who was a secret member of the Nazi Party. Notwithstanding the disadvantage that Hawk’s English education represented in German eyes, this man arranged for his admittance to Marburg University. In due course Hawk was awarded, with honors, a doctorate in what Americ
ans would now call the history of art. By this time he was a dedicated member of the Nazi party. An assistant to the Gauleiter of Hessen took a liking to Hawk and gave him a letter of introduction to an art lover in Berlin. He was invited to dinner at a grand house near Unter den Linden and spent the greater part of the evening talking about art to the guest of honor, a tall blond long-faced man who, except for his rather large bottom, could have posed as the ideal Aryan for a Nazi poster.
“I need not tell you who this man was,” said Hawk.
“Ah, Simon, but I’m afraid you must.”
He hesitated for seconds before he spoke the name. “Reinhard Heydrich, head of the Reich security police and chief deputy to Himmler,” Hawk said at last. “He wore evening clothes, not his uniform. He was perfectly charming, but a relentless questioner. He extracted fact after fact as if my mind were a safe to which he knew the secret combination. Mainly he wanted to know what were the most beautiful, what were the most valuable art objects in the world. And where, exactly, were they?”
Next morning, early, Heydrich sent two men to fetch Hawk to Gestapo headquarters in the Prinz-Albrechtstrasse. After an interminable wait he was marched into Heydrich’s office, where the great man greeted him with a curt nod. He was all business today in a pinch-waist black uniform whose short tunic and tight riding breeches unfortunately emphasized his wide, almost feminine hips. Without preamble but with impressive solemnity, he offered Hawk the equivalent of an Oberleutnant’s commission in the Schutzstaffel.
“Heydrich wanted me to join his personal staff as his artistic consultant,” Hawk said. “My first job was to draw up a complete annotated list of great and near-great paintings and sculptures in private hands in Czechoslovakia and Poland. After that, Belgium, Holland and France.”
“And by ‘private hands’ Heydrich meant Jews?”
“Not exclusively, but primarily, yes,” Hawk replied. “It could hardly be otherwise since Jews owned a disproportionate number of the best European paintings and sculptures. Most of the rest were in America.”
For which Hawk had not yet been asked to prepare an inventory.
Heydrich sent Hawk to his own tailor for uniforms, then to an SS officers’ training camp for several weeks of military basic training and indoctrination plus instruction in secret police arts. He returned to Berlin inspired and ready to go to work. Hawk was allowed to hand-pick a small staff. The best art experts in Germany were Jewish, of course. He gave Heydrich a list of candidates for the project, all of them scholars of the first rank. Heydrich arrested the ones that were not already in custody and provided a large sunny workroom in Gestapo headquarters, complete with a firstrate library. According to Hawk, his helpers were quite happy in their work. It was infinitely less frightening than the fate they had imagined for themselves when the Gestapo knocked on their doors. Though young, Hawk was a genuine scholar, a rare bird among Nazis, and he took certain measures to keep up morale— for example, not wearing his SS uniform during working hours and letting his helpers wear ordinary civilian clothes rather than prison clothes. He also arranged for family visits and kosher meals.
Kosher meals in a Nazi prison?
“Heydrich had given me absolute authority, in writing, to manage the project as I thought best. His signature and stamp made anything possible.” Hawk started to smile in fond memory, caught himself, but could not resist the pleasantry that had popped into his head. “We just ordered the arrest of a Jewish cook or two,” he said. “Heydrich was a man who thought in spirals but acted in straight lines.”
The lists of art objects for France and the Low Countries, complete with estimates of current market value, were completed in a couple of months. The combined value of works of art in private hands ran into hundreds of millions of reichsmarks. Heydrich ordered Hawk to form his own personal special unit of SS troopers and began training them to locate the houses where the paintings on Heydrich’s list were hanging, and to know these pictures when they saw them. Hawk’s men spent their days memorizing works of art in the way that Luftwaffe trainees learned to recognize the silhouettes of Allied aircraft. When the war came, they would be among the first German troops into the target cities, and also among the first out as they sped back to Berlin with truckloads of treasure for Heydrich’s art collection.
It was from one of his Jewish scholars, a specialist in ancient manuscripts who had done groundbreaking work in Jerusalem and in the Vatican library, that Hawk first heard about the possible existence of Roman manuscripts secreted in amphorae by confidential agents of the emperor for shipment back to Rome from the far corners of the empire.
“This man had a sort of informed obsession that such manuscripts must still be preserved in amphorae that had gone to the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea as a result of Roman shipwrecks,” Hawk said.
Hawk kept this fellow upstairs for a few more days after the other scholars had been locked up. After exhaustive conversation and much consultation of Latin sources, Hawk made a trip to the Vatican library. There he found plausible evidence in ancient records that amphorae had in fact been used as moving dead drops aboard Roman ships, and that certain of those ships had sunk— many of them in relatively shallow waters off Crete while bound for Ostia or Brindisi from ports in Egypt, Phoenicia and Samaria.
“Any such manuscript would, of course, be a thing of great beauty as well as an object of inestimable value,” said Hawk.
Hawk took his findings to Heydrich, who was tremendously pleased by his news.
“He saw the possibilities immediately,” Hawk said. “Beyond that, he was quite moved by the romance of the thing. Imagine, from his point of view, the prospect of owning an authentic dispatch from a secret policeman who had worked for Caligula.”
Imagine it, indeed. The harmonies must have been deafening. In short order Hawk found himself on a small motor yacht off the sunny coast of Crete, commanding a dozen young troopers who could not believe their luck.
“My Jew had a pretty shrewd idea of where wrecks might be found,” said Hawk, “and by a mixture of his scholarship and Heydrich’s incredible luck, we found one in a matter of weeks. It had been a galley. Human bones had long since been dissolved by the salt, but the ship’s keel and ribs were still intact. Coins bearing the head of Augustus and all sorts of corroded bronze objects were scattered about. And of course, masses of perfectly preserved amphorae.”
The Roman amphora, smaller than the Greek one on which it was modeled, was an object whose combination of beauty and utility moved Hawk’s soul. He had seen them in museums, of course, but it was quite another matter to descend three or four fathoms into the murk and behold by the bent light of the sun these marvels of ancient handicraft, so shapely, so perfectly symmetrical. They lay in profusion on the bed of the sea where they had rested since the time of Christ. The divers hauled the amphorae to the surface one by one. Except for a few empty or broken ones, they were still watertight and still held precisely 25.5 liters of whatever the Romans had put into them before setting sail. Under Hawk’s personal supervision the beautiful jugs were carefully opened. Their contents included thick, sour wine that was sometimes still drinkable, water, grain and other foodstuffs, all duly numbered.
Number eighty-seven was filled with wheat (“so fragrant still that it made me sneeze,” said Hawk).
And buried in the wheat was the Amphora Scroll.
“The scroll was sealed in thick red wax,” said Hawk. “My heart has never before or since beaten so fast as when I loosened the seal with my razor.”
Unrolled, the scroll was almost a meter in length. It was written in Greek, filled from edge to edge with the dense handwriting of a Roman official who signed himself Septimus Arcanus. Although Hawk had learned the rudiments of ancient Greek at Worksop College and improved his knowledge of the language at Marburg, he was unable to puzzle out the text. Once he got used to the handwriting, he realized that the manuscript was written in cipher. Decoding it was beyond his abilities, so at this point he had no inkl
ing that he held in his hands a world-shaking document that was beyond price. The fact that it was in cipher suggested that it was a secret communication, and that alone made it an even greater object of fascination than a decipherable manuscript would have been.
He was terrified that exposure to air and sunshine would fade the ink or cause the parchment to disintegrate. After all, it had been made from the skin of a kid that had been slaughtered almost exactly nineteen hundred years before.
Heydrich promoted Hawk to Haupsturmführer, the SS rank equivalent to captain, decorated him, and presented him with an engraved pistol. Heydrich was tremendously excited by the fact that the manuscript was in Greek and in code. He wanted to know without delay what it said.
The Jewish scholar whose brilliant theory had just been vindicated by his worst enemies was brought upstairs once again.
“It turned out that he had a good knowledge of ancient ciphers, and in no time at all he cracked the code,” said Hawk. “It was a very simple one, based on a key that was easily deduced. Naturally he was also perfectly fluent in ancient Greek, so we soon had a complete translation. When I read it, I did not believe it.”
Hawk had another scholar, even more eminent than the first man, arrested. His decipherment and translation matched the first man’s almost exactly.
“It was all there, dated in the year we call A.D. 36—names, places, mysterious events,” Hawk said. “Which of the disciples was the handler, the lot. What Roman purposes were.”
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