Weaver

by Stephen Baxter

  A man, an SS-schutze waving a torch, stopped him a hundred yards from the site. ‘Halt, Herr Obergefreiter. You have your card?’

  Ernst got off the bike, and fumbled in his jacket pocket for his papers.

  The schutze inspected them by torchlight. ‘What are you doing here, Herr Obergefreiter?’

  ‘There is somebody here I know,’ Ernst said. ‘Not British - French. A mistake.’

  Another volley of gunfire.

  ‘I wouldn’t go down there if I were you,’ the schutze said. ‘It is nearly done, the work. If your friend was ever there, well... The einsatzgruppen are not fond of being interrupted.’

  Ernst took a step forward. ‘But—’

  The schutze put a gloved hand on his chest. ‘Please.’

  Another group was lined up. They stood at the edge of a pit. Ernst wondered how it had been dug out, for the ground was frozen. Perhaps it had been prepared in advance; the SS were nothing if not efficient. Ernst saw the silhouettes of the men with their pistols, standing behind their targets. When the order came to fire there was a spray of blood and brains, you could clearly see it, vivid crimson by the glow of the trucks’ lamps. Some of the victims fell cleanly, others quivered and trembled before they dropped, and some screamed, not yet dead. Men stepped forward and pistols cracked, as the work of clean-up was finished.

  The schutze watched this impassively. ‘Would you like a cigarette, Herr Obergefreiter?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Um. Then, do you have one to spare?’

  Ernst dug a packet out of his greatcoat pocket.

  The man took a cigarette gratefully. He lit it within cupped fingers, and the glow illuminated his face. He was very young, Ernst saw. ‘It is not as easy as you might think,’ the schutze said slowly, ‘to kill a man.’

  ‘It is a mistake,’ Ernst said. ‘She should not be there.’

  The schutze nodded. ‘Such things happen. I once read of a pope who, when receiving complaints about the unfairness of the Inquisition, said that he would leave it to Saint Peter to sort out saints from sinners. Do you believe in God?’

  ‘Do you?’

  ‘Not any more, Herr Obergefreiter.’

  The men dispersed from the edge of the pit, and the trucks’ engines roared.

  XXV

  24 December

  The Sea Lion monument was already astonishing, Mary thought as she was driven up with George. Even incomplete, it was a henge of concrete and scaffolding that utterly dominated the Richborough site. All around its base the ground was churned into ruts, and rainwater stood everywhere, glimmering, scummy.

  ‘All this must be playing merry hell with the archaeology,’ she said.

  George sat beside her in the car, the buttons on his uniform polished to a gleam. He twisted his head to see the arch. ‘Look at that bloody thing. These Germans really are crackers.’

  ‘The SS scholars know their history, though. Claudius would have been impressed. But I’m surprised the RAF haven’t bombed this monstrosity to bits.’

  George grinned. ‘Oh, their way is to wait until the thing is nearly finished, then bomb it to bits.’

  New buildings huddled at the feet of the arch, neat but boxy. Staff stood in rows, mostly uniformed. As Mary’s car drew up, flashbulbs popped. Evidently they were expected.

  And Gary was here, somewhere in this strange complex.

  Mary would have been nervous anyhow, even if not for Gary. She’d never been involved in an operation like this before, and the fact that Germany and the US had gone to war with each other since Mackie had cooked up his plan had made things ‘a tad more complicated’, in Mackie’s dry words. Still here she was, the show was on the road. But when she thought of Gary being close by, the day seemed distant, unreal, even the mass of the unfinished monument transient and illusory.

  The car drew up at the base of the arch. The SS driver opened the door and Mary got out. The driver took a package from the car trunk. It was Mackie’s Roman spear, preserved within a beautifully crafted wooden box. The box was heavy, but George carried it easily.

  Under lumpy cloud it was dark, Christmas Eve turning out to be one of those English midwinter days that never seem to gather the strength to break into full, honest daylight; at noon this was about as bright as it was going to get. But the monument somehow looked right under such a sky, four mighty silhouetted stumps. She could smell the sea, and that reminded her that Tom Mackie was not far away, standing offshore in a motor boat, waiting to take her to safety.

  A small party of SS officers approached, trailed by photographers.

  ‘We’ll get through this,’ George said to Mary. ‘Just a couple of hours and it will be done.’

  ‘I’m glad you’re here,’ she whispered.

  One SS man closed on her, hand outstretched; he was not tall, but slim and unreasonably good-looking. ‘Mrs Wooler? I am Standartenfuhrer Josef Trojan. Merry Christmas! I am really so delighted to see you again. We have worked together a long time now, haven’t we?’ Trojan took Mary’s hand and shook it; the grip of his gloved hand was firm, warm. He turned with practised ease to face the little party of photographers. There was a blizzard of popping bulbs. ‘And Constable Tanner, we meet again.’

  ‘Sergeant Tanner now, thanks very much.’

  The photographers were close enough for Mary to make out their accreditation. Some of them worked for Reich information agencies, but there were reporters from neutral-country newspapers - Swiss, Spanish, Irish. She knew that part of Trojan’s objective today must be to bind her up in a Reich-friendly story that might mitigate the impact of her report of the Peter’s Well atrocity. Let him think that. One way or another the day wasn’t going to unfold as Trojan expected. She smiled for the cameras.

  Now Trojan made more introductions. ‘Mrs Wooler, you have met my colleague Unterscharfuhrer Julia Fiveash. And this is my brother, Obergefreiter Ernst Trojan.’

  The obergefreiter wore a Wehrmacht uniform. He bowed to Mary crisply. He was a younger, paler version of his brother, she thought, less vivid - less certain - a more interesting character, perhaps. But there was no time to speak to him.

  And Julia Fiveash, when she walked up to Mary, was extraordinary, a mass of contradictions, a beautiful Englishwoman in a mannish SS uniform. ‘Mrs Wooler? I’m delighted to meet you again.’ She bowed to George, who nodded back, more stiffly.

  Josef Trojan clapped his brother’s back. ‘I dragged Ernst here, away from his other vital duties for the protectorate, because this is Christmas! A time of friendship and family. A time to demonstrate loyalties that transcend the temporary barriers of wartime. And today here we are, American, German and English, all gathered to celebrate intellectual endeavour.’

  Mary thought she ought to say something. ‘You do understand I’m not representing my nation.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘I’m here for the scholarship. Whichever sides we find ourselves on temporarily, your work here deserves praise and encouragement,’ she deadpanned. ‘For it is only scholarship, education, learning, that will ultimately remove the shadow of war from mankind.’

  ‘I could not have put it better myself,’ Trojan said. ‘I won’t keep you waiting any longer. Come now.’ He turned and led the group back towards the largest of the new buildings.

  George and Julia walked together, stiff, not looking at each other. Mary knew there was something going on between them, unlikely as it seemed. And George in fact was troubled by his ‘betrayal’ of Julia today. Mary didn’t understand it. She had always thought of war as a simplifying process, a lining-up of good against evil. But on the ground things were messy, in just about every way you could imagine. Mary couldn’t figure out George and this Julia, and maybe she never would; it was best to look away.

  The brick building was unprepossessing, a couple of storeys with a flat roof, like an office building. But once they passed through the big double doors Mary found herself in a grand space, with a floor of polished pink granite and oak
-panelled walls. A rather over-ornate staircase led up to the upper storey, and down to a basement. The hall was dominated by an enormous Christmas tree, a towering affair covered with silver balls and tinsel and little swastika medallions. The Nazis did everything big, it seemed, even Christmas.

  Once they were out of sight of the cameras, just for a minute, Trojan asked them to submit to a search. Their bags were opened, their bodies briskly patted down.

  Then the party was lined up for more photos, before a wall which bore a proud name plaque - ‘Richborough College - SS Ahnenerbe - 1941’ - and an embossed swastika and various other insignia. Above all this clutter Mary made out two hooks, neatly fixed.

  Trojan grinned. ‘You can see we are ready for your gift.’

  ‘I think that’s your cue, George,’ Mary murmured.

  George stepped forward, and made a ceremony of handing Trojan his wooden box. Trojan opened it to reveal the battered Roman spear that had once graced a farmhouse wall at Birdoswald. For the sake of the cameras Trojan cradled the spear, earnestly inspecting it. All this as the flashbulbs popped, and the photographers called him to look this way and that.

  ‘And the provenance - this is authentic, a spear that witnessed the Crucifixion, so to speak.’ Trojan stroked the spear tip, caressing it, almost sexually. ‘Astonishing to think, isn’t it? The Reichsfuhrer will be delighted! Here, Ernst. See if you can get this mounted. It will make another good picture.’ He passed the spear to his brother.

  The young obergefreiter sent another soldier running; he returned with two short step-ladders.

  ‘I don’t know what the Nazis want with an old spear,’ George murmured.

  Mary whispered back, ‘It’s quite neat. Tom Mackie did his own research about Birdoswald, since it seems to be so pivotal to this whole saga. There is a fragmentary story that the fort served as headquarters to one of the officials involved in the construction of Hadrian’s Wall. An auxiliary commander called Tullio, a Bavarian. And this Tullio had some kind of contact who was present at the Crucifixion.’

  That jolted George. ‘Really? What’s this based on?’

  She grinned. ‘A good historian’s question. Very little. Grave markers, that sort of thing, and a lot of speculation. But Christ had died less than a century earlier. Given that, it’s at least plausible that Tullio would have had in his possession some sort of relic of the Crucifixion. A soldier’s trophy. A spear, perhaps - like the Spear of Longinus, said to have been used to wound the dying Christ.’

  ‘Ah. Hitler’s got that, hasn’t he? And Himmler and his crew are always on the look-out for holy relics.’

  ‘Yep. But if Tullio did have such a spear, and he was stationed at the Wall, and his descendants stayed on after him—’

  ‘It might have finished up buried at Birdoswald. Only to be dug up by a Navy bloke two thousand years later.’

  ‘That’s the general idea.’

  ‘This is an utter pack of lies, isn’t it, Mary?’

  ‘Absolutely. But Himmler’s toadies have been fooled by much less convincing frauds.’

  The photographers took more snaps, of the party as a whole under the spear, then of Josef Trojan and Mary together, and Trojan alone. He had the photographers crouch, so they looked up at his handsome face, his crossed arms, the spear on the wall behind him.

  Mary watched this, fretting, light-headed. Knowing what was to follow, she felt furiously impatient with this buffoon and his show-boating, even though she knew it was that quality about him that had got her in here in the first place.

  At last Trojan was done. He straightened his uniform and approached Mary again. ‘This day is perfect, for me - perfect. And now let me make it perfect for you, my dear Mary Wooler.’ He turned and nodded to his brother, who, looking a bit embarrassed by all the song and dance, opened a door to a staff room.

  And Gary walked out. There was a young woman as his side. He wore a smart suit and tie, his shoes were polished, his hair cut and combed.

  Mary ran to her son and grabbed him. She hadn’t seen him since the invasion, since his capture. Gary hugged her back, hard; she felt his strength, an echo of his father’s. Flashbulbs popped. Trojan and the other Germans applauded. Mary ignored them all.

  Gary drew back and held her arms. ‘Mom. Hey, no tears. You’ll mess up the suit.’

  ‘I wasn’t expecting— when I thought of you, I imagined you in your uniform. Seeing you in a suit, it’s as if the war never happened.’

  ‘Yeah, but my uniform don’t look so good after a year in the stalag, believe me.’

  She looked at him intently. ‘And you’re well?’

  He shrugged. ‘Life in Rutupiae is pretty good. Their doctors gave me a good check-over. Compared to the stalag, I’m well off.’

  ‘And of course he has me.’ The young woman approached tentatively. She was dressed in white, attractively if soberly; her face was square, sensible, and quite well made up. This was Doris Keeler, and one eye flickered, a subtle wink at Mary, her old friend from Colchester. ‘Sophie Silver,’ she said boldly. She held up her left hand and waggled her ring finger. It bore a band of silver. ‘Though, with your blessing, it will soon be Mrs Sophie Wooler. And hopefully before any little Aryans come along.’

  ‘Oh, my dear.’ Mary embraced her. ‘It’s so good to meet you. Gary told me all about you in his mail.’

  ‘All good, I hope.’ She plucked at Gary’s lapel. ‘Though he didn’t listen to me about this suit. A bit spiwy, don’t you think?’

  More flashbulbs popped as they talked. Gary Wooler, American veteran of the invasion, was now the poster boy of Himmler’s crackpot breeding programme. It had all been perfect, Mary thought, immaculately set up by MI-14 and the resistance - a trap of publicity and achievement this vain, ambitious Josef Trojan couldn’t resist falling into.

  But Julia Fiveash was staring intently at them, her eyes narrow, her face expressionless. Trojan might have taken the bait, Mary reminded herself, but he wasn’t the only player here.

  Delicately Trojan approached them. ‘I am delighted to have been the agent of this long overdue reunion,’ he said. ‘But now I must ask you to come with me. Mrs Wooler, I have a number of scholars eager to discuss with you their work on the implications for the medieval age of the Norman Conquest - I know that is an interest of yours. Many of our scholars are English, you know - indeed many have come into the protectorate specifically to work at this institute! And we have good links with several English universities, including both Oxford and Cambridge. As you remarked, there are bonds of scholarship which, eternal, transcend the petty political squabbles of the day. And then you must let me treat you to lunch ...’

  He walked on with Mary, with George, Doris and Gary following, the rest of the German staff and the patient photographers, on deeper into the bowels of his brand-new college, their footsteps echoing on the granite floor tiles.

  XXVI

  The space under the floor was only about three feet deep, and full of water and gas pipes and electricity cables. Gary had to climb through this jungle from joist to joist, ducking past the pipes and cables, fearful that at any moment he would put his foot through the basement ceiling under him and ruin everything.

  Doris seemed able to squirm through it all with remarkable ease. By the light of the torch strapped to his head, Gary saw her wriggling away ahead of him, her legs bare save for her stockings, her skirt tucked up without self-consciousness into her belt. She wasn’t even getting her white outfit dirty. ‘Come on, keep up,’ she whispered back at him.

  ‘I haven’t had your training.’