The Nuremberg Puzzle

by Laurence O'Bryan

  12

  Sean scratched at the other sticker with a coin.

  A couple went past them. The woman made a tutting noise, disapproving of something. Sean turned to her, but she didn’t look back. Whether she had been disapproving of the stickers, or of Eleni and Sean trying to remove them was unclear.

  “This is crazy,” he said. “You mean these things keep coming back, even after you rip them off?”

  “Crazy is only a little piece of it. You try living here. You’d go stark raving mad.” She got the last section of her sticker off, as Sean peeled a big piece away from his.

  “Leave the rest. Come up. Jerome should be here. He’s from Rwanda. You’ll like him.”

  They took a small elevator. It rattled as it went up. Jerome was holding the door open when they reached her apartment. His red and yellow shirt hung loose outside his trousers. It had a giant picture of Nelson Mandela on its front. From behind him thumping African music reverberated into the corridor.

  Eleni smiled shyly, as she put her arm around her boyfriend’s waist.

  This is Jerome. He teaches at the university.”

  “I’m a professor of genetics.” Jerome smiled. On the wall behind him a double helix strand had been turned into a painting.

  “Turn down that music and bring Sean inside,” said Eleni.

  Jerome shook Sean’s hand, then led him into the main room of the apartment.

  “Heh, you didn’t go out?” said Eleni, when she joined them with a steaming pot of coffee and some red and yellow mugs on a tray a few minutes later.

  “I’ve been watching the demonstration. Did you see it?” Jerome, turned to Sean. His lips were pressed together and his eyes had widened.

  “We saw some of it on TV. I’d no idea it was this bad here.”

  “Something’s happened,” said Jerome. “This is the worst I’ve ever seen it. They’re even covering it on CNN. It’s at the Frauenkirche.” He pointed a remote control at the small TV screen on a table in the corner of the room. Wooden African masks and a red tapestry filled the wall behind the TV.

  The channel changed to CNN, the English version. They were covering the aftermath of the demonstration, replaying scenes of people running.

  “The demonstration is over, isn’t it?” said Eleni.

  “I don’t know, there’s been arrests,” said Jerome. “Some dick kopf attacked the march with his dogs. Windows were smashed. It brings back too many memories.” He looked at Eleni, shook his head, mouthed something, as if he was continuing some other conversation he’d been having with her.

  “I saw the stickers,” said Sean.

  Jerome grabbed Sean’s shoulder, squeezed it.

  “Maybe you can get Eleni to see sense. We have to move. We have to. I saw all this back home, in Kigali. They mark the houses when they’re going to kill people. Then they come for you.” He drew his hand across his throat.

  Eleni patted his back. He swung his arm around, pushed her away, hard.

  She backed up.

  “Calm down, there isn’t a civil war here, Jerome,” she said. “This is Germany. No one’s going around killing people because of what tribe they’re in.”

  He shook his head, fast. “You heard that, Sean. She won’t listen to me. Stubbornness, that’s what you call it in English, isn’t it?” He reached out, his fist tight. “Many people were murdered in this city because of who they were. You know some researchers are digging up the Frauenkirche! I expect they’ll find a lot of bodies under it. Those demonstrators probably went there to stop it!”

  “Pogroms don’t happen any more,” said Eleni.

  “No?” said Jerome. “But they’ve been arresting refugees. Did you know that? Last night a boy was arrested in the market square. He’d been attacked by these thugs.” He gestured at the TV. “He was arrested. A friend at the University told me about it. The police only released the boy this morning. Who will they come for next?”

  “I intervened in a fight in the old town last night,” said Sean. He told them everything that had happened.

  Jerome shook his hand. “You did good, my friend. You do know you were lucky?” He turned to Eleni. “We mightn’t be so lucky. We must leave this apartment soon as we can. Please, let’s go, Eleni.” There was desperation in his tone.

  Eleni shook her head. “We have to give proper notice. We can’t just up and leave. Anyway, order will be restored. Every German loves order. If we’re not safe here, we’re not safe anywhere in this country.”

  Jerome put his hands to his head, rocked back and forth. “I have a bad feeling in here,” he said. He pointed at his abdomen. “It’s eating at me.” His hand made a fist. He pressed it deep into his stomach.

  Eleni put her hand on his arm. Jerome looked sad now, his anger dissipating.

  Sean changed the subject. “Tell me about this book you’re working on, Eleni. Are you part of it, Jerome?”

  Eleni talked about the book. Jerome just wrung his hands. He didn’t get involved in the conversation. A few minutes later he went out of the room. The tension stayed though. Half an hour later Eleni offered to drive Sean back into the city.

  Jerome handed Sean his business card at the door. “If you come across any jobs for a couple of itinerant academics, please email me, please.” There was unsettling desperation in his voice.

  Sean put the card in his wallet. “I will, if I see anything.”

  Jerome smiled. “Forgive me for asking.” They shook hands.

  When they reached the front of the building there were three red stickers on the lamp post. A tingle ran up Sean’s back. These were new stickers. He looked around at the houses and shops. Had someone been watching them remove the other ones?

  He felt an odd sensation, as he looked at the rows of sightless windows. Was that twitching curtain some neo-Nazi neighbour trying to frighten Eleni and Jerome away?

  She waved her hand in the air. “Leave them, leave them,” she said. “I’ll clean them away tomorrow.”

  “Jerome worries me,” she said, as she drove him back through the city. “He finds it hard to escape the past.”

  “Maybe he has a point about what’s going on here.”

  She tutted. “We can’t move. You shouldn’t encourage him. I’m not going to run away.” They’d stopped at traffic lights. She spoke softly.

  “They cannot win, Sean. We’ve invested too much. Jerome is about to publish a paper on genetically matched medicine. It’ll be good for his career, a major breakthrough by a Rwandan scientist. It will establish his name. We’ve waited too long for this. If we leave Nuremberg, he will have to leave his job. His paper won’t be published. You can’t walk out on a professorship in this country. It would be the end for him. All he has worked for would be wasted.”

  “Can you not just move to another part of town?”

  “We tried that, last summer. There were stickers at our previous place too, though it wasn’t as bad as this. They’d find us quickly.”

  “Have you gone to the police?”

  She made a growling noise. “They always say they will do something, but then nothing happens.” She gestured dismissively.

  He felt powerless. “Maybe it’s just teenagers.”

  They talked about the old days in college as Eleni drove on. The streets were busy again. By the time he got back to the hotel everything seemed to be back to normal. The restaurants outside on the street were open, people were strolling around.

  Sean went up to his room, had a shower, then called Isabel in London. She was at home with their son. He spoke to Isabel, then to Alek for a few minutes.

  Then he read his emails on his phone and ran through his speech. The awards ceremony was starting at seven. He would have to leave the hotel by six-thirty to get there on time. The ceremony was in the Free University of Nuremberg in a northern suburb of the city. His speech, about how he’d discovered an unknown mass grave near Dachau, north of Munich, thanks to satellite image analysis, was as short as he could get away
with. Dachau was the first concentration camp the Nazis established. They’d used it to murder political opponents. The discovery of a new mass grave had not been universally welcomed. Trolls had attacked his Facebook page.

  If his paper inspired anyone to do more research on the site, he would consider it a success. His speech was billed as a highlight of the evening, but as it was his only speaking slot at the conference he suspected he was simply a time-filler, before the awards were announced afterwards.

  As he was getting ready to leave a knock sounded on his door. He looked through the viewfinder and was literally taken aback. Three German police officers were in the corridor. The officer directly in front of the door knocked again.

  His muscles tensed. For a second, while he watched the men through the spy hole, he wondered if they were police at all. Maybe he shouldn’t open the door? If they were only dressed up as policemen, they were certainly doing an amazing acting job. They had even got the slouching and the tight haircuts right.

  “Polizei!” the voice from the other side of the door echoed though the room.

  He pulled the door open.

  They pushed him back with the speed of their entry.

  “What the hell is this about?” he said.

  “Herr Ryan, ja?” said an older officer. His hair was almost pure white, except for a touch of yellow on his fringe, which looked like a nicotine stain.

  “Yes. What do you want?”

  One of the other officers flicked through the two books Sean had put on the bed side table.

  “We have a Durchsuchungsbefehl, a search warrant I believe you call it, for this room, Herr Ryan. I hope you will cooperate with us.”

  The third policeman, a blond, blue-eyed, thin young officer, had taken up position in front of the door out of the room and was watching Sean.

  “I’ve nothing to hide. What the hell is this all about?”

  “You recently had a shower, I see,” said the older officer. He’d poked his nose in the bathroom.

  “Yes, I did.” He restrained himself from commenting that it wouldn’t have taken Sherlock Holmes to deduce that. The mist on the mirror and the damp towel on the bed were the sort of clues a child could have followed.

  “Is there a reason you are having a shower in the afternoon?”

  “What? I’m going to an award ceremony this evening. That’s why I’m in Nuremberg. I’m getting ready. Is that illegal?” He spoke slowly, deliberately.

  “We will need to take these,” said the older policeman. He was pointing at a large see-through plastic Ziploc bag, which his colleague was holding out. Inside it was the light blue shirt and the navy trousers Sean had been wearing that morning. He had put on the black suit he had brought with him for the award ceremony.

  “This is freaking me out. Are you going to tell me what this is all about?” A tingle of anxiety twisted in his gut.

  “All in good time, Herr Ryan. All in good time.”

  Sean looked at his watch. Time was something he didn’t have much of.

  “I have to go soon,” he said. But he knew, with a sinking sensation enveloping him, that there was something serious going on, and that he’d be lucky to get away quickly.

  The older, white haired policeman stopped what he was doing, looking in a bedside cupboard, and looked up at Sean.

  “Herr Ryan, you will not be going anywhere soon. We are investigating a murder.”

  13

  Isabel gripped the arm of her chair. They had arrived at the Intercontinental Hyde Park Hotel only a few minutes before, and were now in a large double room on the sixth floor, overlooking the gardens of Buckingham Palace. The armchair she was sitting on was covered in a pale blue paisley fabric. It matched the carpet, the curtains and the bedspread.

  She had only agreed to come up to the room because Fred Corbett’s wife, Daisy, had begged her to not to make them talk in public. She had taken Isabel’s arm in the foyer and had guided her towards the elevators, while glancing from side to side and whispering about who might be watching them.

  When they were settled in the room, after Fred had checked the corridor to ensure no one had followed them, he sat opposite her, on the other side of the coffee table.

  “You seem a little paranoid,” said Isabel.

  Fred glanced at his wife before responding. “We have to be very careful,” he said. “We don’t want to be silenced.”

  “You really think someone wants to silence you?”

  “I do, young lady. The truth about all the people who supported Adolf Hitler’s rise to power has never been revealed.”

  Isabel took a long breath, sat back. “Isn’t it all a matter of public record? Historians have been crawling over the Nazi archives for decades.” Isabel looked from Fred to Daisy and back again. Daisy looked pale.

  Fred was shaking his head.

  “I am sorry, you are wrong. Most people are about all this. One archive at least is still missing. Pope Pius XII’s secretary destroyed all his letters when he died in nineteen fifty-eight. Most of his correspondence with Herr Hitler is not available for anyone to study. The Vatican has only opened up part of their general archive for the period to researchers, even all these years later.” He leaned across the coffee table to Isabel. His skin seemed to be pulled tight across his forehead, exposing a mesh of blue veins.

  “The most incriminating material is not even in Rome.”

  “So, where is it?”

  “We have some of it,” said Fred, in a low voice. He stared at Isabel, as if daring her to argue with him.

  Isabel looked around. “Don’t tell me you have this evidence here, with you.” She was starting to doubt her wisdom in coming up to their room. Were they both delusional?

  Fred pointed at the bed.

  Isabel suppressed a smile. She should have guessed they would hide something important under the mattress. Who would look there?

  Daisy, who had been sitting on the third chair, the one nearest the bed, turned and slid her hand under the corner of the mattress. She pulled out an old brown envelope. Its edges were a caramel colour and its flap was folded inside the opening.

  Fred took the envelope and reached inside.

  “I have not shown these photographs to anyone else, but my wife, since nineteen forty-nine, when I was demobbed.” As he spoke, he slid a few small yellowing photographs out of the envelope. He caressed them, as if they were alive, then passed them to Isabel. She took them carefully, her fingers holding their edge.

  The prints were rectangular, about the size of her hand. There were three of them. She brought them close to her face. The first showed the back of a square envelope. The image had a large yellow seal on it and above that a blue coat of arms. She wasn’t sure, but it looked like the Papal emblem on the coat of arms. It had two crossed keys in gold. The other two pictures showed the back and front of a letter. It had large, hand written script on it.

  There were flourishes on every word, spirals and swirls extending above and below each line. What caught her attention though, were the words, Reich Chancellor, at the top of the first page and, Pius PP XII, written in a large hand-written style, with a single line flourish below it, which was on the bottom of the second page.

  It certainly looked as if these were genuine photographs of a letter from Pope Pius XII, the pope during all of the Second World War. She moved one picture closer.

  “You won’t be able to read it, dear,” said Daisy. “It’s in German.”

  “The Vatican always wrote to foreign heads of state in their own language,” added Fred.

  Isabel put the pictures on the coffee table. “Have you translated the text?”

  Fred and Daisy looked at each other. “We did a rough translation fifty years ago, but we’ve never had it verified,” said Fred.

  “Why not?”

  Fred sat back, put his hand to his forehead. He opened his mouth, but he stopped and shook his head. A few seconds later Daisy spoke. Her tone was low, almost apologetic.


  “In this letter the Pope encourages Hitler to defeat Communism, to confront Russia.”

  Daisy coughed. Fred did too.

  Isabel peered at the picture. “You didn’t think a lot people would be interested in this?”

  Fred shrugged.

  Then another thought came to her. “Did you want to protect the church?”

  Daisy nodded, just slightly, but enough to make it clear that Isabel had guessed right.

  “I believed in the Church for most of my life. I told Fred to burn these a long time ago.” She pointed at the pictures.

  “Why?”

  “We were told that Communism was evil. That it wanted to enslave us all. Anything that was done to defeat it seemed a wonderful idea.”

  “What made you change your mind?”

  “My faith has been. . .” She hesitated. “Undermined.”

  Fred added. “Recently we got a phone call from a priest I met in Germany a long time ago. He was a young man then, hearing confessions.” He stopped, wiped a hand across his brow, then continued. “He called me from his death bed. He said he knew I had these photographs. He said he was the person who’d passed this letter to your grandfather. It was your grandfather who gave me these pictures. Before.” He paused. “You know.” He stopped. Isabel nodded.

  “The priest told me something else, too.” He looked pained.

  “What?”

  “He said there are other letters. Letters like this one. He said we he had a duty to reveal their existence, no matter what the consequences.”

  “Why would a priest want to undermine his own church?” It didn’t sound believable.

  Fred stared at her, his expression solemn. “He said there are plans.” He stopped, looked her in the eye. “For a new holocaust.”

  “A new holocaust? What the hell?” She wondered again whether to take any of this seriously.

  “I asked him to tell me more. He said he couldn’t break his vows, no matter what was at stake.”

  Daisy added. “I think he must have heard something in a confession. Priests are very strict about not revealing anything they heard in confession.”