Blood of the Reich

7

New York, United States

September 10, 1938

T he American Museum of Natural History was a castle of curiosities bordering New York’s Central Park, a national junk drawer of the sensational and the educational. Depression crowds still paid their quarter to see bone hunter Barnum Brown’s Tyrannosaur in the Jurassic Hall, the reconstructed Pueblo Indian village in the anthropological wing, or the speculative trip to the moon at Hayden Planetarium. There was a diorama of mountain gorillas against the volcanoes of the Belgian Congo, painted to re-create the spot where the museum’s Carl Akeley had succumbed to tropical disease. In adjacent halls were Carter’s mounted animals from the upper Zambezi, Inca relics from Bennett’s explorations of Peruvian ruins, and stuffed birds from Burma’s Irawadi River. And there was the magnificent bharal , or blue sheep, brought back and mounted by the Benjamin Hood Expedition of 1934. The horned male looked eternally over a high, rolling plateau toward the distant snowy crests of the painted Himalayas, school children viewing the Roof of the World through glass.

Hood’s office was in the prestigious southeast tower overlooking Central Park, just one floor below the museum’s mercurial director, famed Gobi Desert explorer Roy Chapman Andrews. Hood’s family had the money to finance his explorations and contribute to museum coffers, meaning that he’d been given a higher ceiling and better view. Less favored (or less rich) curators sweated in tighter, darker rooms. The favoritism made Hood feel guilty, but not enough to give the office up.

The flamboyantly self-promoting Andrews perched above them all. The museum director had led the first Dodge trucks into Mongolia and protected his dinosaur bones in shoot-outs with bandits. Since those cowboy days he’d proven to be as bad an administrator as he was good at finding bones and attracting publicity. He was erratic, demanding, and forgetful. It was no surprise, then, that Hood reacted with distrust when his boss telephoned to say he was sending down some government functionary to confer. The director had wasted Hood’s time before with political errands and donor meetings that came to nothing.

“Can’t see him,” Hood lied. “I’ve got a meeting with a Rockefeller Foundation man on that Hudson Bay expedition I proposed.”

“Forget Hudson Bay,” Chapman said in his brusque manner. “Hudson Bay isn’t happening. Even if you can afford it the rest of us can’t. The Depression won’t let up and our budget is bleeding. We need to gear up for next year’s world’s fair here in New York. You know that.”

“Roy, I’m not a world’s fair type of guy.”

“Which is why you need to speak with Mr. Duncan Hale. Don’t close doors just when they’re opening for you, Ben. This one will get your blood up, I promise.”

Hood remained suspicious. “Then why’d you send him to me?”

“Because it’s Agent Hale and you’re the expert he wants on loan. Oh, and by the way: we don’t have a choice.” Andrews hung up.

The director asserted his authority over Hood because in truth he had little leverage; the millionaire had no need for a curator’s job. Hood’s family was rich from lumber, paper, and real estate. Ben could have been like a thousand wealthy sons, rampaging his way through private schools and plowing nubile debutantes before marrying the proper pedigree and managing an empire he’d not created.

But Hood was different. He stayed outside even in foul weather while growing up at Palisade, the family estate in the Hudson Valley. He was fascinated by the natural world. His father taught him to hunt and fish-they’d hiked the Rockies and gone on safari in Africa-and he climbed and hiked on his own. Rich people were boring, he decided, knowing nothing but money, while scientists, who worked for pennies, were pursuing the secrets of the universe. The least rewarded had the most fascinating jobs.

There’s snobbery in the sciences, as in all professions, and it was a reverse snobbery that would have discriminated against a rich man like Ben. But Hood bludgeoned his way into their fraternity by contributing to others’ causes and financing his own expeditions to unknown Tibet. He took along British, German, and Swiss companions and bore hunger, thirst, and insects without complaint.

Like Andrews, he was featured in National Geographic, and it was quietly let known that the Hood family might make a donation to the hard-pressed New York museum if a permanent position could be made on its staff. The fact that Dr. Hood had published in the best peer-reviewed journals made such an appointment defensible to the museum employees he vaulted ahead of. So he’d been given the second-best office, a starving wage, and periodic reminders from Andrews that he must answer to the museum hierarchy. The subordination grated, but it also gave him something in common with the other curators. He’d become, through routine slights from his boss and quiet contributions to his rival’s projects-he was buying friendship, Hood knew-one of them.

Too bad it didn’t satisfy.

Hood led a double life. He was handsome, single, and circuited the New York clubs to bring home to Park Avenue the carefully coiffed women who were curious about his eccentricity. Everyone was betting on when he’d tire of the museum charade and buckle down to the family business. Women gambled on when he’d settle into domesticity, sleeping with him in hopes of timing his change of heart.

But he didn’t buckle down. Hood’s scientific travels were the one place he could escape his birthright and reinvent himself as scientist, scholar, and explorer.

So he met whomever Chapman told him to.

Agent Hale reminded Hood of a dark lamp pole: a narrow, ink-haired man with a bulb-pale face who was dressed in that kind of cheap, somber suit that was the uniform of civil servants everywhere. The visitor let Hood study his credentials-Army Corps of Intelligence Police-while the agent examined the animal heads and Asian maps that decorated Hood’s office. There were Chinese flintlock firearms, Afghan scimitars, polished fossils of ancient ammonite shells, Persian pikes, and Victorian-era paintings of wilderness panoramas and women bathing naked in a stream. There were photographs of Hood with shahs, lamas, and movie stars.

“You got more stuff than Woolworth’s,” Hale said, his flat tone making it unclear if he meant it as a criticism or a compliment.

“It’s a curator’s office. We’re collectors.”

Hale took in the view across Central Park, Manhattan’s towers rising like Oz. “I don’t even have a window.”

“Yes, your agency,” Hood said, holding Hale’s identification card. “I’m afraid I’ve never heard of it.”

“That’s the way we like it,” the agent replied. “Active in the Great War, and then down to as few as twenty officers this decade. However, with the Japanese at war in China, Italy in Abyssinia, and Hitler into Austria and hot for the Sudetenland, we’re back in fashion. Now we need your help with the Germans.”

“You’re spies? And Hale, is that really your name? Like Nathan Hale, ‘I have but one life to give for my country’?”

“It’s my name to you.”

This was just the kind of cowboy intrigue that thrilled the flamboyant Andrews. They’d probably been comparing decoder rings upstairs. “And you’re here to see a museum employee, a curator of stuffed animals, because of Hitler?”

Hale plopped into a fat leather chair without being invited. “I’m here to see an employee who has the means to get himself what he wants, including a trip back to Asia.” He took out a cigarette and lit it, without offering one to Hood. “The museum director agreed that you’re the one to help us.”

“I’m an expert on Tibet, not Germany.”

“You’re about to become an expert on both.” Hale took a drag and let out a long plume of silver smoke. “We understand you know a German explorer named Kurt Raeder.”

Hood started. He thought he’d put that mess behind him. Best to be careful here. “ Knowing Raeder might be an overstatement. He keeps his own counsel, and he’s an odd duck. But, yes, we journeyed together to Tibet four years ago, as I’m sure you’re aware. Difficult man to deal with, but a great hunter. He brought down a magnificent ibex for the Berlin collection at four hundred yards. Crack shot.”

“Do you know he’s returning to Tibet?”

“No, we don’t correspond. We had a falling-out.”

“Over a woman.”

Hood frowned. “How do you know that?”

“You saved her.”

The zoologist looked uncomfortable. “It’s complicated.”

“I’ll bet.” Hale took a puff again. “A new SS expedition left Genoa in mid-April. Passed through Suez, Colombo, and on to Calcutta. The British tried to hold them up in India but they couldn’t come up with a good enough reason, and now the Nazis have pushed ahead for the Himalayas. Trying to reach the Tibetan capital at Lhasa, from all reports. Why do you think the SS is sending men to Tibet?”

“I have no idea.”

“Did you know Raeder was a Nazi?”

“He wasn’t overtly. Politics rarely came up.”

Hale puffed again, considering. “Just the pair of happy hunters, were you?”

“It was a scientific expedition, sponsored by this museum. Raeder had been to the Himalayas once before and was recommended. We didn’t always get along, but that’s normal among scientists. Why this interest in a German zoologist? Nazi or not, he’s hardly a prominent figure of Hitler’s regime.”

Hale nodded, as if this was an entirely reasonable assessment. “Not yet.”

“What does that mean?”

“Hood, we have information that Raeder is being sent back to Tibet by none other than Heinrich Himmler himself, director of the German secret police. Exactly why is unclear. Hunting for Shangri-la, for all we know.”

The mythical utopia, invented by the British author James Hilton, had become a popular Hollywood movie the year before-a nice antidote to the Depression.

“Which is fantasy. Hilton’s never even been to Asia.”

“So were El Dorado and the Fountain of Youth, but the Spanish still looked for them. The krauts are up to something, and my office thinks war is on the horizon. If it comes, we think the United States will be dragged into it, and not on Hitler’s side. We can’t allow the Nazis any advantages.”

“Tibet is not a strategic power, Agent Hale.”

“The hell it isn’t. It squats between India, China, and the Soviet Union. It’s more inscrutable than Fu Manchu. It’s the high ground of any Asian contest. And Himmler is sending Raeder there for a purpose.”

“What purpose?”

“That’s what we want you to find out.”

“And how am I to do that?”

“Roy Chapman Andrews tells me you like the outdoors as much as he does, and you’re about as content in this curio closet as a ferret in a bag. Said he had to give you this grand chamber here to keep you from wandering off to the Smithsonian or Philly.”

How had Andrews known that? Hood had talked with rival museums but thought he’d kept it a secret.

“The United States government, Mr. Hood, is offering to give you the necessary paperwork and introductions for your next trip to Tibet, including a reserved flight on the China Clipper, a genuine government-issue Colt. 45 automatic, and letters of introduction to the Chinese government, such as it is. We’re giving you diplomatic status to go to Lhasa and, if possible, see this Buddhist pope I understand is cooped up there. Lama, they call him. I thought that was some goat in South America.”

“The current lama is just a child. There’s a regent, the Reting Rinpoche, or the regent from the Rinpoche monastery.”

“So we’ll help you see this Reting.”

“If I track down Raeder and find out what he’s up to.”

Hale nodded and stubbed out his cigarette on a side table. There was no ashtray; Hood didn’t smoke. “Exactly. Find him, learn what he’s after, and get it first for Uncle Sam. You get an excuse to get out of this mausoleum and serve your country.”

“At Uncle Sam’s expense?”

“Actually, we need you to help out with that, given your personal resources and presumed patriotism. America’s wallet is tight. You’ve heard of the Great Depression?”

“Why, I think that’s the thing that cost my family millions. You want me to spy for you and pay my own way?”

“I’ve looked at your tax return, Hood. You can afford it. If Vanity Fair was still on the newsstand, you’d be on the cover.”

The magazine had suspended publication in the depth of the downturn, but Hood got the point. His London coat and tie cost several times that of Hale’s suit, his shoes were Italian, and the dark hair and strong chin gave him, women said, the dash of a matinee idol. He enjoyed looking good. He enjoyed spending money on travel and research. He enjoyed sleeping on the ground while knowing he didn’t have to.

“You’ve got nerve, Mr. Hale.”

“I just got a hunch that you’ll jump at a chance to go back to Tibet. Because it’s there, and all that mountaineering crap.”

Hood was annoyed this obnoxious bureaucrat knew anything about him, but such was the modern world. Privacy eroded, the income tax a plague, gangsters glorified. “What if Raeder’s purpose is innocent? Scientific and cultural?”

“Put it in your report. But if it isn’t…”

“What?”

“Then hunt him down. It’s imperative that Germany not win any advantage over there. Kill him, if necessary.”

“Kill him!”

Hale stood and brushed ashes from his lap. “We understand that might not be as difficult for you as it sounds.”