The Black Sun

by James Twining

  “No, nothing,” she said, sounding disappointed. “I must have got it wrong.”

  the black sun 229

  “I’m not so sure,” said Archie, peering down at the glittering array of medals pinned to the jacket Dominique had just unbuttoned. “He’s wearing a Knight’s Cross.”

  He pulled on the remains of the red, white, and black striped ribbon and drew the medal out from under the uni-form’s collar.

  “Does it have any markings on the back?” asked Tom.

  Archie flipped the medal over. “Just like the others,” he confirmed with a nod.

  “Dom, have you got the other two?”

  She nodded and removed them from her coat pocket, placing them facedown on the table so that the markings were visible. Archie laid the one they’d just found alongside the other two.

  “They must mean or do something,” Tom said. “They must go together somehow.”

  “Maybe it’s a picture,” Dominique suggested. “Maybe the lines meet up to show you something that you can’t see when they’re apart . . .”

  She grabbed the medals and began to slide them around, placing them against each other in a variety of positions to see if any of the lines matched up. It was a fruitless exercise. And after ten minutes exhausting every positional combination they could think of, Tom was on the verge of suggesting they try something else when Dominique suddenly clicked her fingers.

  “Of course! It must be three-dimensional.”

  “What?”

  “The medals. They don’t go next to each other, like a normal flat puzzle. They go on top of each other.”

  She grabbed one medal and placed it on top of another, sliding it this way and that to see if a pattern emerged. Then she tried changing one of the medals, and then changing the other to make a third combination, until finally she looked up with a smile. “Here you go.”

  By sliding the second medal over to the left and up from the center of the bottom one, she’d managed to align several of the marks. Then she took the final medal, placed it on top

  of

  the

  others,

  slid

  it

  to

  the

  right

  and

  then

  up

  from

  the

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  second medal. As she moved it into place, the lines suddenly came together to form an image that could only be seen by looking down from above. Two elaborate crossed keys.

  “The keys of Saint Peter,” Tom said in a hushed voice.

  “Saint Peter? As in Rome?” asked Archie. “Well, it can’t be there.”

  “It’s unlikely, I agree,” Tom said pensively. “Crossed keys. What else could that mean?”

  “Your father said the portrait was the key. Maybe this relates to that particular painting,” suggested Dominique.

  “Or maybe it refers to the key on a map? Like our railway map?” Tom ventured.

  “Well, while you two think that one through,” Archie said, stooping to pick up the lantern where he had placed it on the ground, “I’ll see whether our friends here have got anything else interesting on them. You never know—hang on,” he interrupted himself as he raised his head level with the table. “What’s that?”

  He pointed at the side of the table where a small shape had been cut into the wood. A very distinctive shape.

  “I wonder . . . Here, give me one of those . . .”

  Dominique handed him one of the medals and he lined it up with the hole. It was a perfect fit. He slipped the medal inside.

  “I’ll bet you any money you like there are two more holes just like this one,” Archie said excitedly.

  “Here’s one!” said Dominique, pointing at a section of the table’s edge to Archie’s right.

  “And here,” Tom confirmed, having moved around to the other side of the table so that they were now standing at three points of a large triangle.

  “Put them in,” Archie said, sliding the remaining two medals across the table. Both Tom and Dominique did as he suggested and then straightened up, waiting for something to happen. Nothing did.

  “Well,

  they

  must

  do

  something,”

  Archie

  insisted.

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  “What about if we press them in?” said Dominique. “They might release something.”

  They duly pressed, but still nothing happened.

  “Let’s try pressing at the same time,” said Tom. “On three. One, two, three—”

  Again they all pressed on the medals, and a firm click echoed around the chamber.

  “Where did that come from?” asked Archie.

  “The table,” said Tom. “Look at the middle of the table.”

  He shone his light at a roundel in the center of the table that had popped a few millimeters higher than the surrounding surface. Kneeling on the table, Tom pulled out his knife and levered the roundel free, revealing a small but deep recess. He reached inside with the tips of his fingers and removed a dagger that the table had apparently been designed to house. From the way the blade had been elaborately engraved with a series of runic symbols, Tom guessed that it must once have fulfilled some long-forgotten ceremonial function. A piece of paper had been carefully wrapped around its ivory hilt. The others crowded around him as he hopped to the floor.

  “What does it say?” demanded Archie.

  Tom unscrolled it gently, not wanting to rip it.

  “It’s a telegram,” he said. “Here, Dom, you read it. Your German’s better than mine.”

  He handed the piece of paper to her and shone his flashlight on it so she could read.

  “ ‘All is lost. Stop. Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse overrun. Stop. Gudrun kidnapped. Stop.’ ”

  She looked up questioningly. “Gudrun? Wasn’t that Himmler’s daughter’s name? The one in the portrait?”

  “Yes,” Tom confirmed with a nod. “And Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse was Himmler’s HQ. What else does it say?”

  “ ‘Hermitage most likely destination. Stop. Heil Hitler.’” She looked up. “It’s dated April 1945. It’s addressed to Himmler.”

  “The Hermitage,” Tom said, shaking his head in frustration. “That’s what the keys of Saint

  Peter

  meant.

  It’s

  got

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  nothing to do with maps or Rome—we’re meant to be looking in St. Petersburg.” He looked up excitedly and locked eyes with first Archie and then Dominique. “My father was wrong. The missing Bellak isn’t in a private collection. It’s in the Hermitage Museum.”

  I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia. inside an enigma. PART III It is a riddle wrapped in a mystery Winston Churchill, 1 October 1939

  CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

  NEVSKY PROSPEKT, ST. PETERSBURG, RUSSIA

  January 9—3:21 p.m.

  Tom and Dominique made their way down the Nevsky Prospekt toward the Admiralty’s honeyed bulk, occasional dark veins forming along the pavement where it had emerged from under the snow’s white marble. They passed two drunks lying slumped over each other in a doorway, each with one hand lovingly wrapped around a half-empty bottle of vodka. As they watched, a stray dog ambled up to the two men and sniffed gingerly around their feet until a flailing kick sent it yelping down the street. A veil of gray clouds clung stubbornly to the sky, torn by icicles of dirty yellow light.

  “So when do you think Archie will get here?” Dominique asked, her eyes focused on where she was treading.

  “You missing him already?” Tom laughed, his voice muffled by a thick scarf. Although allegedly a mild winter by Russian standards, it still felt dangerously cold. “Don’t worry, he should be here by this evening.”

  “I’m not sure it was worth him traveling separately. I mean, if someone is looking for him, they’re just as likely to spot him on
his own as with us, aren’t they?”

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  “True,” said Tom. “But he seemed to think he’d have a better chance with only himself to worry about.”

  “And Turnbull? Did you get through in the end?”

  “I updated him on everything we’ve found so far. Well, everything he needed to know, at least. He’s due here tomorrow. I’ll have to break it to Archie gently.”

  Reaching the end of the Nevsky Prospekt, they turned right into Dvortsovaya Ploshchad, or Palace Square. The Admiralty’s gilded spike sat atop a white marble colonnaded cube that resembled the top layer of a gaudy wedding cake. To their right was the Alexander Column, while behind them, the curved sweep of the General Staff Building hugged them into its shadow. Here and there, through gaps in the buildings or over their rooftops came the unforgiving glint of concrete; ugly Soviet-era scars that the city was still trying unsuccessfully to heal over.

  Dominique slipped her arm through Tom’s, feeling strangely warm and content, despite the icy wind whipping against her cheeks. The events of the past few days, while exhausting, had also been exhilarating. She had always been a bit jealous of Tom and Archie, with their crazy stories of places they’d been or jobs they’d pulled. Now, far from sitting on the sidelines, she felt that she was finally part of the team. It gave her a sense of belonging that she had not had for a while. Not since Tom’s father died.

  “You’ve been here before, right?” she asked.

  “No.”

  “No? Why not?”

  “I guess I just never got round to it.”

  Something in his tone told her not to probe further. Not now, at least. She decided to change the subject. “That must be it—the Hermitage.”

  “That’s it,” Tom confirmed.

  “So that one’s the Winter Palace.” She pointed at the extravagant Baroque building on the left, its white-and-pista-chio-colored façade adorned with gleaming sculptures and covered with an intricate pattern of decorative motifs that flickered with the golden sparkle

  of

  a

  thousand

  tiny

  candles.

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  “I think so.”

  “It’s huge.” She shook her head in disbelief.

  “I read that if you spent eight hours a day here, it would take seventy years just to glance at every single one of its exhibits.”

  “That long?”

  “Thirteen miles of galleries, three million items . . . Actually, that sounds pretty quick.”

  “And you really think the missing Bellak painting is in there?” she asked skeptically. Even now, she wasn’t sure that their combined logic had led them to the right place. They had reached the riverbank and were standing on the Palace Bridge, looking out toward the Peter and Paul Fortress. Tom leaned against the parapet, deep in thought, before answering.

  “Have you ever heard of Schliemann’s Gold?”

  Dominique nodded. From what she could remember, back in the 1870s, Schliemann had been a pioneering archaeologist. Obsessed with The Iliad, he had set about finding the site of Troy, using Homer’s text as his map. In 1873 he had finally hit pay dirt, uncovering the remains of the city and a hoard of bronze, silver, and gold objects that he christened Priam’s Treasure, after the ancient King of Troy.

  “Just before he died,” Tom explained, “he gave the treasure he had found in Troy to the National Museum in Berlin, where it stayed until 1945.”

  “Until 1945? You mean the Russians took it?” Dominique guessed.

  “Exactly. The Soviets were almost as obsessed with securing valuables and art as the Nazis. When Berlin fell, Stalin sent in his ‘Trophy Squad,’ a team specially trained to search out and confiscate as much Nazi loot as possible. They found Priam’s Treasure in a bunker beneath the Berlin Zoo, along with thousands of other artifacts. Of course, no one knew all this until recently. The treasure was thought to have been lost or destroyed in the war. Only in 1993 did the Russians finally admit that they had it, only to claim ownership in lieu of reparations. It’s on display now in the Pushkin Museum in Moscow.”

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  “And you think something similar must have happened to the painting?”

  “That’s certainly what the telegram was saying,” Tom confirmed with a nod. “It makes sense. Himmler’s headquarters would have been one of the Russians’ key strategic targets. If Himmler really couldn’t bring himself to destroy Bellak’s painting of his daughter, I think there’s every chance the Russians found it there and carried it back here as a trophy. The problem is going to be finding it.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “You know I said there are three million items in there?” She nodded. “Well, only one hundred and fifty thousand are actually on display. The other two million eight hundred and fifty thousand are housed in vast attic storerooms and underground depositories. What’s more, most of what they’ve got down there is so poorly catalogued that they probably don’t even know they’ve got it themselves.”

  “I still don’t understand why Bellak would have cooperated with the Order by hiding messages in his paintings?”

  Tom shook his head. “As far as I know, Bellak was already dead by the time the Gold Train set out, so he can’t have been involved. Besides, the clue you found wasn’t hidden in the painting itself but had been added later by making those holes. I imagine they chose his paintings precisely because of who he was and their subject matter. After all, who would have suspected that a painting of a synagogue by a Jewish artist would have led us to a hidden SS crypt?”

  There was a long silence. As she stared pensively out over the water, Dominique was suddenly struck by how, apart from the isolated perpendicular thrust of the Admiralty spires, the Peter and Paul Fortress, and the Mikhailovsky Castle, the city seemed to be dominated by horizontal rather than vertical lines, like layers of rock strata. Partly this was due to the matching rooflines that had largely been kept strictly to that of the Winter Palace or below, but principally it was due to the incredible abundance of water. Everywhere that the flat surfaces of St. Petersburg’s forty rivers and twenty canals touched the shore, it created the illusion of a perfectly straight line. the black sun 239

  She was about to point this out to Tom when she caught the distant look in his eye and thought better of it.

  “Tom, what’s really kept you from coming here before?”

  He didn’t answer right away, his eyes firmly fixed on the far shore. “When I was eight, my father bought me a book about St. Petersburg. We used to read it together—well, look at the pictures, mainly. He told me that he’d bring me here one day. That we’d organize a trip, just the two of us. That he’d show me all its secrets. I guess I was waiting for him to ask me. I never thought I’d come here without him.”

  Dominique was silent. Then, surprising herself more than anyone, she reached up and gave

  him

  a

  kiss

  on

  the

  cheek.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

  DECEMBRIST’S SQUARE, ST. PETERSBURG

  January 9—4:03 p.m.

  Boris Kristenko felt guilty. It wasn’t just that he had slipped out of the office and that if his boss found out there would be questions. He was more worried about letting his colleagues down. With only three weeks to go till the grand opening of the new Rembrandt exhibition, they were working flat out. He should have been back at the museum, coordinating the hanging. But he’d made a promise and he liked to keep his promises—especially when they were to his mother.

  So he hurried along, head bowed, trying not to make eye contact for fear someone from work might recognize him, although he could just as well have asked them what they were doing out themselves. That realization emboldened him somewhat, and he allowed himself to look up, although he quickened his step to compensate for his bravery as he crossed the Neva and headed along the Leytenanta Schmidta embankment. Hi
s mother wanted three Russian dolls. Apparently she couldn’t get such nice pieces out in the suburbs, although Kristenko doubted she’d even looked. He knew his mother; the black sun 241

  this was her way of getting him to both pay for the items and deliver them. Not that they were for her, of course. The matryoshka were intended as gifts for her nephews and nieces over in America, her brother having swapped the cold Russian winters for humid Miami summers about fifteen years ago. God, how Kristenko envied him. It was a small shop, catering mainly for tourists, with a fine selection of Russian souvenirs. He purchased the dolls and emerged back onto the street, checking his watch. He’d been away twenty minutes. Maybe if he ran he’d be back before anyone had noticed he’d even gone.

  The first punch, to the side of the head, caught him completely unawares. The second, he saw coming, although it still winded him as it slammed into his stomach. He dropped to the ground, gasping for air, his head ringing.

  “Get him over there.” He registered a voice, then felt himself being dragged by his arms and hair into an alleyway. He didn’t have the strength or the will to fight them. He knew who they were and he knew he couldn’t win.

  They threw him to the filthy cobblestones, smeared with rotting food and dog excrement. His head bounced off a wall, and he felt a tooth break as his chin connected with the bricks.

  “Where’s our money, Boris Ivanovich?” came the voice. He looked up and saw three of them, looming over him like upended coffins.

  “It’s coming,” he mumbled, finding it difficult to move his jaw.

  “It had better be. Two weeks. You’ve got two weeks. And next time, just so you know, it won’t be you we come for. It’ll be your mother.”

  One of the men kicked him hard in the head, the boot catching his nose. He felt the warm trickle of blood down his face as the shadows faded, their cruel laughter rising through the air like steam.

  Lying there, his head supported by the cold brick wall, he looked down at his bruised knees,

  his

  ripped

  and

  soiled

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