by G S Eli
“OK, young lady,” Sabina said, glancing over at Casey with a warm look on her face. “Would you like to help an old woman make a traditional Gypsy dinner?”
“Sure. I would love to,” Casey replied.
XXII
The Lost Inscriptions
Morton Alexander walked from his small kitchen into his darkly-lit living room holding two short crystal glasses half-filled with cognac. As he entered, he handed one of the glasses to a woman he had not seen in years.
“Hennessy?” Deborah asked.
“Of course,” he replied.
Morton noticed Deborah’s slight smile. He knew that she was pleased that he remembered her favorite drink. He also knew that she was not here to rekindle their romance, an affair both passionate and forbidden at the same time. He knew this because their passion had turned into much more and as a result compromised an important assassination mission. She was too stubborn to let a thing like that go. Besides, sappy emotional love reunions were not her style, and he knew they never would be. Still, some part of him was hoping she was there for just that. Or maybe she just wants sex, he thought. She looked so beautiful sitting next to the window; the strong June sunbeams highlighted the curves of her face.
“How are you?” he asked.
Deborah took a sip of Hennessy while she gazed out of the flat window to the bustling street that ran through downtown Berlin. “Do you have a cigarette?” she asked, ignoring his question.
Morton retrieved cigarettes and a lighter from a nearby drawer. He handed a cigarette to her and struck the flame from the lighter, igniting the cigarette while she took a drag.
“Morton, for the first time, I’m lost and…confused,” she said.
A less observant man who was unfamiliar with Deborah might have found innuendo in that statement. Morton’s instincts, however, were much keener than that. Now he knew this wasn’t a social call. Matters of the heart never worried her. This was something infinitely more far-reaching.
“If you didn’t need help you wouldn’t be here,” he said. “What’s going on, Deborah?”
“I’m not sure. That’s why I’m here,” she said, then downed her drink in one shot and set the glass down on an end table.
“If this has anything to do with your previous employer and my current employer, you realize that my hands are tied and I can’t tell you—”
“Cut the crap,” Deborah interrupted. She took a drag from the cigarette. “Morton, I knew you kept investigating the new Nazi movement after I left. Hell, you were on the mission way before I ever arrived in Berlin.”
Morton was not eager to be interrogated by his former partner, so he stood up and headed to the kitchen. “I’m not doing this,” he said.
Deborah rose as well and followed him into the kitchen, not letting him avoid this line of questioning. “What if I told you I know why we were sent to kill Victor Strauss?” she asked.
Morton stopped dead in his tracks. She knew that this would get his attention. Nonetheless, he continued again to the kitchen, trying to avoid the discussion.
“What if I told you I know the real purpose of the True Nationalist Coalition?” she continued.
Morton did not say a word. He reached his small galley kitchen, returning to the bottle of Hennessy for another round. Deborah positioned herself closer to him, now taking short, nervous drags from her cigarette as she watched him refill his glass. She stared deep into his eyes. He knew she would never stop until she got the information she needed. She was relentless, driven, unstoppable, just like she always was. He glared back, and with a swift yet graceful move took her into his arms and passionately kissed her. After what seemed like forever, she pulled her mouth away and exhaled a puff of smoke, a drag she’d taken before the sudden kiss.
“I’m sorry. I had to,” Morton said.
She pulled away from him but paused before letting go. She looked away, as if looking at him might be too much.
“Morton, a spy never apologizes for kissing a girl,” she cunningly said, breaking the mood. She stepped back, leaned against a granite counter, and continued her pleading. “I need to put this puzzle together,” she said desperately.
“Deborah, you know I can’t tell you anything anymore,” he said. He took a shot of Hennessy for himself and tried to figure out why she would ask about this. She never thought the TNC Party was a credible threat before. What was it she’d always said? he asked himself. “We’re on the wrong continent, baby-sitting a bunch of racists with an occult fetish when there are people on our borders with warehouses full of rockets and bombs.” Yeah, that’s it, he thought, remembering Deborah’s words as clearly as if they’d been spoken yesterday.
“Remember all those files we collected on the TNC’s occult beliefs? What if I told you there’s truth to those tales?” she asked.
Morton headed back into the living room, took a seat in an armchair, and looked out the window. Deborah sat across from him. “I never thought I would come back to Berlin again,” she said. “A bizarre set of circumstances led me into the exact thing we were sent here years ago to investigate. I need your help.”
“What bizarre circumstances?” he asked, knowing he was going to regret that question.
Deborah stood and then knelt down next to him, pulling out a cell phone with a cracked screen. “This phone belonged to Casey Richards, the girl I was assigned to protect. It’s too complicated to explain right now, but to cut to the chase, I had to neutralize an imposter. Luckily, before his body was removed, I recovered this phone from his person, and thank God I did.”
“Wait, I’m confused—why did he have it?”
“He and his comrade posed as health workers and confiscated it from the hotel her class was staying at. They said it needed to be quarantined.”
“What would they want with this girl? Ransom? Blackmail?”
“That’s just it, Morton. I don’t think they even knew about Casey or all the money her late aunt left her. When I recovered the phone, the screen was opened to a bunch of selfies of her.”
“Ah, I see. So, they were using her pictures to identify her.”
“Exactly.”
“These were just foot soldiers?” Morton understood now what Deborah was getting at.
“Remember all those records we lifted from European art galleries? The TNC was obsessed with finding paintings from Hitler’s personal collection,” Deborah reminded him.
He nodded in agreement and took the phone to get a closer look. Deborah assisted him and scrolled to the most recent photo reel. The image was of a large painting hanging in a train station. It had been severely vandalized. The painting seemed familiar, but he couldn’t quite place where he might have seen it before. Thinking back while gazing deeper into the painting, it suddenly hit him.
“Stalingrad!” he announced. He looked at Deborah as she smiled back, realizing that they both had discovered something.
“Do you still have the files from our investigation?” she asked.
Morton looked at her suspiciously and pulled the glass to his lips, intending to take a quick sip. Instead, he downed the whole thing in a single shot, then set the empty crystal glass on the coffee table. “You’re not going to shut up about this, are you?”
“I don’t see how I can. The girl is in danger.”
Morton got up with a sigh and walked to the other side of the living room where an oak table sat against the wall. The table had an old copper coffee pot and two silver candleholders on either end. A large mirror with an ornate frame hung above the table. With one swift motion, he pushed the table, causing it to slide along the wall in an unnatural way. The piece of furniture must have been on wheels or a track. Next, Morton tapped a seemingly random spot on the mirror’s frame, causing it to slide down to where the table once sat. This exposed a large safe built into the wall.
Morton placed his thumb
on the dial. After a few seconds, the safe beeped and a green light came on. He opened the safe, revealing stacks of European currency, gold coins, a few handguns, rifles disassembled for easy storage, and endless stacks of files. He grabbed all of the files and brought them over to the coffee table next to Deborah. She stepped out to grab the Hennessy from the kitchen, and they refilled their glasses before searching through the intel.
Deborah gazed at her past work: hundreds of documents filled with notes, reports, and photographs from the Cold War and prior to that. Within minutes, the small living room was covered with papers and files. Some read “Nazi Propaganda,” some were marked with red marker reading “Decoded Intel from CIA,” and a few were redacted, little more than scattered words blotted out by black ink. These had all come to light shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The CIA had gotten their hands on all sorts of previously classified KGB documents, and they were willing to share. That’s when Morton and Deborah, young, rookie agents at the time, were sent in, and he found some unusual activity linked to the newly-formed Strauss Company, particularly the artistic tastes of owner and CEO, Victor Strauss.
Both of them examined the files. There were pictures of a young Strauss, along with records and receipts for hundreds of paintings. Under the Iron Curtain, he requisitioned them through a ministry he oversaw. After Germany reunited, he went to great lengths to purchase all those paintings for his private collection. Every one of them was once in Nazi possession, and many were in the personal collection of Adolf Hitler.
“What are we looking for, exactly?” Morton asked.
“I’ll know when I see it,” Deborah assured him as she shuffled through files and boxes.
“I believe it’s important for you to know that the Mossad eighty-sixed the project years ago. Our official position is that this neo-Nazi party poses no credible threat to our national security. They’re no longer concerned with this new political movement.”
“Then why are you here?” Deborah asked.
“Nostalgia, I guess. Besides, I never bought that this Victor, his company, or his organization were clean. I keep an eye on them from time to time. It’s not as if I’m a valuable enough agent for this to be considered a waste of manpower.”
“Why doesn’t the agency feel that this is a matter of national security any longer?”
“We launched one final investigation after you were sent back to Israel. With the help of the CIA, we tracked a series of rent payments being made by one of Strauss’s holding companies,” Morton explained. “They led us to an apartment in Munich. The place was filled with lost artwork stolen by the Nazis. There was an old man living there and breeding white pigeons out of the back window. Stoker was his name, if I recall,” he thought back. “…Yes, that was it. Paul Stoker. He was part of the Hitler Youth years ago and a brilliant painter and artist, a hermit of some sort. He basically laid low for the past forty years living in that apartment like a prisoner with those birds as his only friends.”
“Was Strauss ever charged for hoarding the paintings?” Deborah asked.
“Of course not. You remember; this guy was untouchable. He claimed the old man was a former employee and he didn’t keep track of the thousands of people that worked for him, and that he had no idea he’d been in possession of illicit antiquities. He pulled a few strings, and the courts bought it. That worked out well for us because the old man agreed to be our informant.”
Deborah sat up straight, listening more intently now.
“He confirmed all the rumors about their obsessions with the occult and the Thule Society, as well as their interest in stolen art. What surprised us was he insisted the party had no interest in interfering with the State of Israel. All our theories about them funneling funds to Hamas were refuted. Don’t get me wrong—they’re anti-Semites, but it’s all talk. They have little to no active hostility toward the Jewish people. It’s the Gypsies they target, very actively, and with considerable brutality. The man even claimed there was a secret Romani tribe they wanted to wipe out entirely, but then again, he was nuts. As soon as we submitted our report, Israel withdrew everyone but me from Berlin and put me on sleeper status.”
“And so, Israel’s official position on the TNC Party…”
“…is that it’s no longer a threat to our national security,” Morton finished.
“Well, what happened to Stoker?”
“I’m not sure. He was an eccentric old man, and he was obsessed with the idea that some priest was targeting his life force. That’s why he kept the birds. He claimed they warded off the priest’s spells and that if he drank little drops of their blood it would keep him from dying. He was a real whack job sitting on priceless works of art. The agency kept him for as long as we could, but legally, we couldn’t get any charges to stick.”
“Where is he now?”
“Not really sure. Istanbul, I would assume.”
“Why Istanbul?”
“It’s a guess, really. Our only clues to his whereabouts were several magazine clippings on his desk about pieces of the true cross of Christ discovered in Turkey.”
Deborah was lost in her thoughts. Morton knew that she was putting a puzzle together in her head. “Those paintings they found in the apartment—did any have depictions of a spike or a nail, perhaps?” she asked.
“Wait a minute…” Morton began to think back. “He did. But why? What difference do the illustrations make?”
Deborah looked off into space, thinking.
“What did he say?” she asked.
“Who?” Morton asked.
“The man I got the phone from. He said… I can’t remember. Something about lost text that can unleash more evil or something.”
Deborah pulled a small cardboard box from the pile and placed it between them. “Strauss CO Files/Bio” was written on the front of it. She opened it like a magician unveiling a trick. Inside was a collection of old microfilm and a projector. She sorted through them with enthusiasm. Deborah loaded up a reel and turned on the projector, using a manila folder as a makeshift screen. The first picture was an old black-and-white photo taken from a surveillance system in the eighties. It showed a much younger Victor Strauss bidding on a painting in an auction house.
“We knew all along that Victor had an obsession with art once held by the Nazis,” Deborah began. She flipped through some similar images. “For a long time, we thought they were using them to funnel money to terror cells, but every lead we found refuted that.”
“Right…” Morton replied, not following.
Deborah flipped to an older black-and-white war photo. It showed the ruins of Stalingrad. In the foreground was the wall of an otherwise demolished building. On the wall hung the Proclamation painting. Standing before it was a young man, blond-haired and fair-skinned, in a German chaplain’s uniform. Beside him were two Hitler Youth, boys not much older than ten. All three stood giving the iconic Nazi salute.
“Do you remember finding these?” Deborah asked.
“Yes, it was in Victor’s personal album,” Morton replied. “We found it…” He trailed off as he realized the implication. Deborah finished for him.
“We found it and submitted it to our government the day before we got the order to take out Strauss,” she recalled.
Morton ran his fingers through his hair and stared off into space, trying to get a grip on the situation.
“You were always a history buff. Let’s talk about Stalingrad,” Deborah said.
What is she getting at? Morton wondered as he raised an eyebrow. “What about it?”
“Why attack Stalingrad? Hitler could have gone straight for Moscow and taken the Kremlin. That would have guaranteed him victory on the Eastern Front,” Deborah pointed out.
Morton’s brow furrowed at this strange line of thought. “He wanted to humiliate Stalin by taking the city that bore his name,” he stated. “Any
history book will tell you that.”
“Now, does that answer make sense to you? He sacrificed thousands of soldiers and let the war turn against him all because of the city’s name?”
This elicited a shrug from Morton. “Hitler was nuts,” he countered.
“Or maybe not. Hold this,” Deborah said, passing Morton the microfilm projector. She rummaged through another file. This one was labeled Decrypted Nazi Communications. There were hundreds of papers all filed by year. She searched for what seemed like forever, and then finally she pulled out an old scrap of paper. It was stained yellow with age and bore the print of a military telegram. It was dated February 1st, 1943, the day before the Germans finally withdrew from Stalingrad. The message read: “Mission accomplished STOP Proclamation recovered STOP We are clear to withdraw all forces STOP.”
“We thought ‘Proclamation recovered’ was a code phrase. That’s why we overlooked it before,” Deborah said, handing it over to Morton to examine. “It’s no code. That painting is called The Proclamation.”
“So, what are you saying, Deborah? That Adolf Hitler sent his army into certain death in Stalingrad to retrieve a magic painting?” he said sarcastically.
“I know this sounds crazy,” she said, taking a drink from the last of the bottle.
Morton just stared at the telegram and shook his head.
“You remember my grandfather, don’t you?” she asked.
“Of course! He was a hero of mine.”
“He used to always tell me that World War II was a holy war, that Hitler was waging war against God himself.”
“And you believe that now?”
“I don’t know what to believe, but I know what I’ve seen.” She flipped through the microfilm until she found one that zoomed in on the scepter in the hand of the Austrian queen.
“I’ve seen this scepter,” Deborah said, “and I’m not talking about in another painting. I’m talking about the real thing.”
There on the floor covered in mountains of files and old photographs, she told him the story of the hospital and Casey’s healing. She explained how Casey got sick after falling into the Führer’s bunker and how Jack and a Gypsy boy retrieved the scepter and brought it to the hospital. Morton tried to hide his skepticism when she explained how the nail seemed to save Casey from certain death. Deborah went on to explain how Casey was missing and being hunted at that very moment. She told him everything about their encounters with the TNC, even the bits that might incriminate her. She finished by saying, “All of this started because a reproduction of that painting hung in the train station.”
