Michelangelo_s Notebook

25

Lieutenant James Cornwall of the Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives unit attached to the ALIU-the art-looting division of the OSS-in western Germany sat on a rock with his sergeant trying to find a way into the farmhouse hidden behind the screen of trees. He wasn’t having very much success. His group was running out of food, there were dozens of retreating German patrols in the area, and according to the sergeant, they were sitting ducks if even one German tank decided to move in their direction. He lit a Lucky, pushed his metal-rimmed glasses up on his forehead and wondered how a man who’d completed two years of study at the Sorbonne in Paris and graduated summa cum laude from Yale could wind up sitting on a rock in Bavaria beside a man who stank of sweat and cigarettes and who carried a Garand rifle strapped to his back. He was assistant curator of prints and drawings at the Parker-Hale Museum. Right now he should have been having breakfast at the Hotel Brevoort and palling around with Rorimer and Henry Taylor from the Met, not getting shot at in Bavaria.

“So what do you think, Sergeant?”

“I don’t get paid to think, sir.”

“Don’t be an ass.”

“Yes, sir.” The sergeant paused and lit a smoke from the crumpled pack he kept in the well of his combat boot and looked out over the early-morning mist that lay on the hillside and filtered in through the trees. “Well, sir, except for the sniper, I don’t think we’re dealing with combat troops. It’s something else, sir.”

“Like what?”

“Some kind of special mission. Six trucks-Opels, not Mercedes. That means they’re gas, not diesel, and that means they’re meant to move fast. Six trucks like that wouldn’t be used to guard troops, and they wouldn’t waste more gas on them lights like they were doing last night. It’s maybe bigwig Krauts taking a powder, but you’d think they’d be in staff cars. The officer I saw was wearing a general’s uniform but he was too young, no more than thirty-five. He’s gotta be a phony.”

“Your conclusion?”

“Like I said, some kind of secret thing, hot-footing it, you know. They’re carrying something-loot, papers, something valuable.” He paused and cleared his throat. “And then there’s the broad.”

“The woman you mentioned.”

“Yes, sir.”

“A phantom perhaps, wishful thinking?” Cornwall said with a faint smile.

“No, sir. She was real enough.”

“You mentioned before that it might have been some relation to the occupant of the farm. What about the hypothesis?”

I don’t know about any hypo thing, but I know she was real and if she was some farmer’s wife or something she wouldn’t have been walking around free like that in the middle of the night.”

“Do you think it might be important? Tactically.”

“Tactics aren’t my business any more than hypo-watsits. I saw a broad. I thought you should know, that’s all.”

“All right,” said Cornwall. “Now I know.”

“So what do you want to do?” the sergeant asked. “The sniper saw us coming. They’ll make a move before we do, try to break out, maybe.”

“What would you do?”

The sergeant smiled. He knew that Cornwall was looking for more than just advice. He was asking for some kind of plan because he didn’t have any fucking idea of what he was doing.

“Depends on whether or not you want to keep those trucks from getting blown to shit or not.”

“That would be preferable.”

“Then we hit them first, before they can do anything. Hold them down with the fifty-caliber, blowing the fucking sniper out of his fucking tower with Terhune’s M9 and go in hard.”

“Day or night?”

The sergeant resisted the urge to tell Cornwall not to be an asshole. “Night.”

“All right,” the lieutenant said again. “Let me think about it.”

Just so long as you don’t think about it for too fucking long, thought the sergeant, but he kept his mouth shut and thought about the broad and the bogus general instead.

He reached out and let his long, bony index finger play over the faded photograph pasted neatly into the Great Book beside the careful drawing of the farm: Stabsfuhrer Gerhard Utikal of Einsatzstab Rosenberg, last seen in the early spring of 1945 near Fussen and Schloss Neuschwanstein in the Bavarian Alps. In the picture he was in his early thirties, wearing, illegally as it turned out, the uniform of a Wehrmacht Hauptman, squinting into the sunlight in three-quarter profile, trees and a large ornamental pool behind him, the snapshot probably taken at Versailles or the Tuileries Gardens in Paris sometime between 1941 and 1943, his years of duty there.

The naked, gray-haired man smiled vaguely, remembering. Gerhard Utikal had been the first, so long ago now. According to all the files Utikal had vanished like smoke, but in time he’d found him, living in Uruguay, dividing his time between an apartment on the Playa Ramirez in Montevideo and a huge ranch in Argentina on the far side of the River Platte. By then Eichmann had been taken and the Butcher of Riga, Herberts Cukurs, had been liquidated by an Israeli death squad after boasting to journalist Jack Anderson that he was “invincible.”

Utikal wasn’t invincible, just smarter. Instead of keeping a set of neatly pressed Nazi uniforms in his closet like the Latvian had, he had chosen instead to hide in plain sight, adopting the identity of one of the interned sailors from the scuttled battleship Graf Spee. It worked for the better part of twenty-five years, but not quite long enough or well enough.

The naked man put the tip of his finger over the face in the photograph. The first of many, and more to come. Utikal had screamed as the first tenpenny nail was pushed slowly into his left eye, then died, twisting horribly in the chair as the second three-inch sliver was pushed into the right. The naked man closed the Great Book.

“Mirabile Dictu,” he whispered softly. Miraculous to say. “Kyrie eleison.” Lord, have mercy on our souls.