by Tom Knox
Swift and concise, Angus explained.
‘Shark Island is where the Germans did a lot of their killing, in the 1900s. Used to be an island, now it’s attached by a causeway. This is where the Germans herded all the Witboii to die. In the Holocaust.’
‘Not the Herero?’
‘Nah. Different Holocaust. Another Holocaust. I know. I know.’
‘Jesus.’
‘I’ll explain sometime. Show me the map, with the writing.’
The precious old map. David pulled it from his jacket. The blue sad stars, the sad old creases. And the writing on the back.
Angus squinted at the tiny scrawl, and exhaled, his eyes barely an inch from the paper.
‘You’re quite right. It’s his handwriting. Dresler.’
Seagulls wheeled above them; a Namsea fish-truck rumbled in the distance, backing into a vast warehouse.
‘I think it might be an address,’ David said. He pointed. ‘See. Isn’t that “strasse”?’
‘Yes. But…’ Angus frowned. He twisted, looking around, the sea-wind tousling his rusted hair. ‘This is an address, a German name I don’t recognize – there is no Zugspitzstrasse here. In fact, not anywhere in Luderitz. How does it link to Shark Island?’
Amy spoke: ‘Maybe he was just…decoying. A lie?’
‘No,’ Angus replied, very firmly. ‘Dresler was petrified when he coughed that info. You saw him. Pissed himself like a baby. That bit is true. There is something here…on Shark Island. But I don’t see if it connects with what’s written on the map…’
Again, he gazed around at the yellow scene, at the haze of dust, the scruffy grey road, the derelict sheds and wharves. The hot wind ferried the elegiac coughs of seals from beyond the cliffs. ‘We need something German. Here. Connected with the Germans.’ His gaze fixed. ‘There. The Holocaust museum. That hut…must be.’
‘Holocaust museum?’
Angus shrugged. ‘I know. Doesn’t look much. But yes, that’s a museum, it’s tiny, this is Africa – but it’s very important to the Namibians. It’s usually closed. I mean – so remote, they get no visitors. You book by appointment and –’
David advanced.
‘Come on!’
The museum was a low wooden building, battered by the brutal Benguela winds, at the very end of the promontory. The museum door was shut. The air was somehow cold and hot at the same time. David could feel his skin burning, the sunshine was truly painful now.
Angus turned a handle and pushed. Locked. David stepped alongside, and briskly kicked at the door. It succumbed with ease, the lock shattered.
They were inside. The hot wooden space was full of shelves and cabinets and glass cases ranked along the walls; and three large skulls grinned at them from the top of a large plinth.
‘Christ,’ said Amy.
Angus explained: ‘The Herero Skulls. Fischer had them scraped clean by Herero women, they had to flense the skulls of their own murdered husbands. He wanted to examine them, compare skull sizes. Bless his little callipers. But we need to find – I don’t know – where would the Fischer data be – they are here – there must be something here –’
They searched. Frantic and determined, they searched and scoured, they ransacked the dusty display cases, they overturned shelves of old books with titles in Gothic script, flicking desperately through the pages. Die Rehobother Bastards und das Bastardierungsproblem beim Menschen.
But nothing. They sorted and sifted through scientific instruments, somehow gynaecological and ghastly in their pristine steeliness. Nothing. David shunted aside a box of desiccated human bones, feeling guilt and horror as he did so. He was mistreating the evidence of two forgotten genocides, the hideous relics of a lost racial empire.
There was nothing. They were confounded. It was done. The three of them knelt in the centre of the little hut and shared their despair: whispering and quick. Angus was looking at his watch.
‘That chopper goes in forty minutes – if we don’t get it –’
Amy stared around, her eyes bright and hostile. The Herero Skulls grinned at them, from the tragic plinth in the corner. She coughed the dust and said.
‘Horrible place. Horrible. I don’t understand, Angus. There is nothing here from Germany, nothing at all, it’s all Namibian. German Empire but Namibian. How could the Fischer data be here anyway?’
Angus nodded, his voice low and resigned. ‘You’re right. It’s all Namibian…’
David listened. Saying nothing. The skulls smiled at him, laughing at the Cagot. Was he a Cagot? They were mocking him. He tried to drive the thought from his mind. Focussed himself on the map. The clue.
‘Zugspitzstrasse. What does it mean?’
‘Nothing obvious.’ Angus sighed, and shook his head. ‘It’s a common German street name. I’ve heard it before…’ His expression stilled, and changed, and flashed, and was transformed. ‘I’ve heard it before! Jesus!’ He stood up. ‘I’ve heard the name before. David. The map! One more time, yes yes, this is it –’
They all stood. Life quickening in the veins.
The map was unfolded in the dusty light. Angus held the paper a fraction from his face, reading the tiny line of writing.
‘It’s the address of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institut. In Berlin! Zugspitzstrasse. 93. The store rooms.’
‘How –’
‘Famous in…eugenic circles. Not really known to anyone else. This was a note made by Dresler for your father, right?’
‘Yes.’
‘So he’s given him an address. Where to find the Fischer data, maybe, or some clue as to where the data might be…This is the Institut.’
‘But it’s in Berlin. How does it relate to here –’
The scientist’s smile was triumphant. Even in the pure and horrifying drama, he was helplessly exulting in his own cleverness.
‘I worked it out! There is something in this room from Germany.’
He turned and pointed. At the Herero Skulls.
‘Them?’
‘They were repatriated, from Berlin, in 1999. After years of wrangling. They used to be kept in the Kaiser Wilhem Institut. Now they are here. They have been to Germany. They were in Fischer’s possession throughout the war, and after at the Institut. The answer must be in them somehow.’
Angus moved quickly to the plinth and picked up the biggest skull. He turned the sad and smiling cranium in his hand.
‘An obscene joke. The Nazis loved obscene jokes, they paved Jewish ghettos with Jewish gravestones, so the Jews would trample their own dead. And –’ He was examining the skull, closely. ‘And where better to hide something very, very…important…than a skull like this? A sacred relic of a terrible genocide. Fischer must have known no one would ever smash it open, retrieve the secret, unless they definitely knew what they wanted, where they were seeking.’ He lifted up the skull, squinted inside, then he lifted it higher, talking quietly to the skull. ‘Sorry, brother, I am so very fucking sorry – but I have to do this. Forgive me.’
He dropped the skull on the floor. The dry aged bone shattered at once, almost gratefully. Crumbling in the dust, adding dust to orange dust.
A tiny steel cylinder glinted on the floorboards, amidst the scattered shards of bone. Angus picked it up.
‘Hidden in the olfactory cavity.’
Amy and David gathered around. Faces tensed, and perspiring.
Angus ripped the top off the slender metal tube, and pulled out a tiny, exquisitely rolled piece of paper, almost leathery in consistency, like parchment but somehow finer.
The Scotsman focussed and examined the yellowed slip of paper. Etched across the paper, in faded old ink, was a tiny map.
‘Zbiroh!’ A sigh of exultant relief. ‘Zbiroh…’
Any explanation was truncated. A shadow had just flickered the dusty light of the hut. A Namibian security guard had passed the window, and was standing at the door, pushing his way inside.
Angus shoved the map in the tube, pocketed the tube, and ran t
o the entrance; he flung the door open, and confronted the guard – waving his gun at the terrified guard’s chest.
The guard stepped back, retreating into the dazzling sun.
‘No! No trouble! Want no trouble!’
‘Good,’ said Angus, as he advanced, and patted the guard’s pockets. He drew out a pistol and phone, and handed them to David. And tilted a head at the sea.
Grabbing the items with gusto, David hurled the gun and the phone into the crashing waves, just metres away. Seagulls fluttered and shrieked in alarm.
Angus was gesturing at the guard. ‘OK. Stay here. Don’t move. We’re going. Take a staycation. All-fucking-right?’
They sprinted down the path to the mainland; David glanced behind – the guard was indeed standing there, black and statuesque in the sun, staring at them, perplexed, immobile, a silhouette of doubt.
The path turned onto the road and they ran right into the traffic – Angus waved a wad of South African rand at the very first Toyota sedan. The driver grinned and squealed his brakes.
The three of them jumped in, sweating and cramped. Angus snapped.
‘Airport! Fast as you can.’
The drive took ten minutes: swerving and racing through the sun-dusted streets. They tilted past the Bank of Windhoek, an old pool hall, and a Shell garage – and then they were out of town: on the surrounding flats. David was remembering Miguel. The big black cars, roaring up the canyon.
The thought was horrifying. Miguel could be around here, right now. Any minute he could just show. The big black car door flashing open.
Found you.
The whirring yellow sands were writhing across the road, making serpents of dust. They were out in the desert again. They were motoring through the wilderness. Angus took out the map and scrutinized it. And then he sat back. And yelled.
‘Look!’
Terrible panic filled David: he looked, and saw nothing. Miguel?
Angus was still pointing: ‘Look at that. That’s a rare and precious sight. Look at the horse!’
It wasn’t Miguel. David felt absurd relief, as he and Amy stretched to see through the scratched car window. But what were they looking for?
At first there was nothing. And then he saw: a horse, thin and solitary and loping across the dirt road. Then David saw more – dozens, then hundreds. Curvetting and playing in the sandy heat-haze.
Angus was rhapsodizing.
‘The wild horses of the Namib. I love these animals. They’re the last remnants of the Schutztruppe – the German colonial army. The horses escaped and turned feral.’ He gazed, almost serene, at the dreamlike spectacle. ‘Now they are the only wild desert horses in the world – becoming a new species, specially adapted to dryness.’ Angus sat back. ‘I always think they look like the souls of horses, roaming free in the afterlife…That’s why this place is so hard to leave. Things like that. But here’s the airport. Just past the dunes.’
The car prowled around the last of the soft Barchan dunes. They were slowing onto a wide flat space. The driver stopped at the perimeter of a surreally bleak airstrip.
A small plane and two helicopters sat on some asphalt amidst acres of sun-scorched dust. One of the choppers had Kellerman Namcorp inscribed on the side. Its propellers were already turning.
David turned to Angus and said: ‘But where are we going?’
‘Amsterdam –’
‘Yes, but then?’
‘Zbiroh! An SS castle. Bohemia! I’ll explain later – mate, we gotta hurry, Miguel is still out there –’
They ran across the flatness. A man with a low slung sub-machine gun was standing by the helicopter, he stared at them, astonished, as they ducked under the whumping blades.
‘Angus?’
‘Roger!’
The black man smiled.
‘Angus my man!’
Angus was shouting above the loud churn of the spinning chopper blades. Something passed between them. Something from the black velvet pouch? David guessed it was diamonds. Maybe. Roger did a nodding salute.
‘Get in!’ said Angus. Roger was shouting at all of them, gesturing them into the chopper. Quickly!
David and Amy climbed in, and sat on the first seats they could find. Angus joined them, his face strained and exhausted. They strapped up, and even as their safety belts clicked, the chopper lifted up.
They were flying.
David stared down. Roger was a small figure now. Looking up at them with a hand to shield his eyes from the sand. David blinked and looked a kilometre south. A wild horse was cantering across the wasteland.
Then the clouds of dust intervened, and all was blank.
45
2.58, 2.59. 3.00.
There was no sign of him. David glanced warily at the station clock.
3.02, 3.03, 3.04.
Angus was by his side, saying nothing – for once. The tension evident in his face. Amy looked pensive to the point of depression.
What did she know? She had been noticeably different since they landed in Amsterdam and made their way across Germany, to Nuremburg Station where they had agreed to meet Simon. Why? Maybe she now suspected he was Cagot, or maybe she was merely reacting to his changed mood, his sudden intense anxiety. His distant chilliness, his violent moodswings, as he ransacked himself for answers or solace or quiescence.
He’d stopped making love to her. He couldn’t do it any more. Once they had been rough, playful, sharply passionate. And now? He could see himself biting her, that white female flesh, and drawing blood.
It was an abyss, and he had to look into it, he had to reach far inside his soul, to get a hold of his essential self. Because he needed his last reserves of equanimity, for the crucial hours ahead. The crucial days, the crucial minutes.
3.07, 3.08, 3.09.
Maybe Simon wasn’t coming. They had sent one email from Amsterdam, and had got one quickly in return: Yes.
There had also been one other email in David’s inbox, a very surprising email – from Frank Antonescu. His granddad’s old lawyer in Phoenix had been doing some research of his own, and, through a contact at the IRS – who apparently owed him a favour – had eventually, ‘after a lot of grafting and grifting!’ worked out where the money came from.
The Catholic church.
The money was, Antonescu wrote, ‘Paid not just to your grandfather but to a number of people immediately after the war. It was known as “Gurs money”. I have no idea why. The fellow at the IRS was similarly mystified.’
So that was another joist of an answer – in the rising structure of a solution. But the full edifice would only be revealed when they got to Zbiroh. And found the Fischer results.
3.16, 3.17, 3.18.
Was Simon ever coming? Maybe something terrible had happened to him. Maybe Miguel had got there first.
‘There!’ said Amy.
A slightly scruffy, breathless, freckled, fair-haired man of about forty came running along the concourse. He stared at Amy and David –
‘David Martinez!’
‘Simon Quinn?’
The older man, the Irish journalist, glanced at the three of them, and smiled, shyly.
‘You must be Amy. And you…’
‘Angus Nairn.’
Hands were shaken, formal introductions made. But then David and Simon looked long and hard at each other and the absurdity of their formality became apparent to both of them – at the same time.
They hugged. David embraced this man he had never met – like a lost brother. Or like the sibling he’d never had.
And then the tension, the spiralling terror of the situation, recrudesced. Amy reminded them, as she had reminded them repeatedly for the last three days:
‘Miguel is still after us…’
Amy’s fear of Miguel seemed to have grown since they fled Namibia. And maybe, David surmised, that was adding to her depression. The relentlessness of their pursuer was destroying her will. Perhaps she was actually resigned to Miguel’s triumph. He always found
them in the end; maybe the Wolf would find them this time, and finish the job.
Unless they got to the data first.
They went quickly to the hire car.
Angus was in charge of the map. He directed them out of the suburbs of Nuremburg, into the undulating countryside, and onto the Czech border. As they went, Simon confessed: he told them of his brother being held by the Society. Kidnapped and brutalized.
Even from the driver’s seat, David could see the grief in Simon’s eyes. The grief – and the guilt. No one spoke for a good few minutes when Simon finished his confession. The fate of this man, Tim, was also in their hands.
It was too much.
The frontier approached. The old Iron Curtain. In nearby fields, useless and rusting, stood derelict watchtowers and old coils of barbed wire. But the contemporary border was just one bright glass office – entirely empty. They didn’t even have to show passports.
Simon spoke:
‘Why Nuremburg? Why meet there?’
Angus explained that they wanted to convene in a big anonymous city, across the border from the Czech Republic. To confuse anyone who might be following.
Simon nodded.
‘And this castle?’
‘The map shows it’s in a town called Zbiroh. But the entrance is two miles away, a little village called Pskov. Some kind of tunnel. The tunnel itself leads from a synagogue in Pskov.’
Again Simon nodded. His demeanour was enormously subdued.
They drove on. The Czech side of the border was a notable change from the German prosperity next door. Everything was a little more hunched, grubby, and humble. And the road to Plzen was lined with thirty-something women in tiny skirts and blonde wigs.
Angus explained:
‘Prostitutes.’
‘Sorry?’
‘Came here for a conference a few years back, in Prague. The women here are working girls…the punters come over from Germany. Truck drivers and businessmen. They also sell gnomes.’
Amy queried this: ‘Gnomes?’
The Scotsman pointed at a shop by the road. An entire rank of garishly painted garden gnomes was set up in front of the store.
