The Doomsday Testament

XIV

Jamie’s heart beat faster as he studied the drawing. Something about it felt familiar. It was in the shape of a wheel, with nine articulated spokes that met in a geometric pattern in the centre. Below were three words — In Faust’s spuren — which, if Jamie had the translation correct meant, ‘In Faust’s footsteps’, and a date: 1357. They obviously had some sort of significance, but it was the larger significance of the symbol that drew Jamie’s attention. The composition looked vaguely South American; some sort of abstract solar symbol? But he wasn’t dealing with Aztecs or Mayans, he was dealing with Nazis. He ran a finger slowly down one of the articulated spokes and felt the room go cold. The almost savage way it changed course drew another shape in his mind; a sinister emblem that had brought terror and darkness to two continents.

He tapped a few words on the keyboard of his laptop and hit enter. Plenty of options. He placed the arrow of his mouse over the word ‘Images’ at the top of the screen, clicked and hit enter again. This time his screen filled with monochrome thumbnail pictures of soldiers. They stood in their long, orderly ranks, hard-eyed, unsmiling faces showing what? Determination? Discipline? Severity? The determination of the fanatic. The discipline of the automaton. The unbending severity of the executioner. He saw the picture he was looking for, but curiosity made him ignore it for the moment. He double-clicked to enlarge a photograph in the top row. Some kind of parade. They had been chosen for their square-jawed features and Nordic perfection; proud, confident, blood untainted by any undesirable element. Even a missing tooth would have denied a man a place in this picture, taken around 1939. Their defenders claimed that, man for man, they were the finest soldiers the world had ever known. Their detractors decried them as butchers who killed without a shred of conscience. Their superiors had demanded ‘unparalleled hardness’ and they had willingly provided it. They had died in their thousands and their tens of thousands in the snowy wastes of the Russian steppe, in the hedgerows of Normandy, the forests of the Ardennes and the burning ruins of Berlin.

The mouse hovered over two more photographs, but he didn’t have to enlarge them. He knew the precise wording that hung below the stark iron gateway in what had been some Polish backwater before it had become a factory of death. And who would ever forget the boy in flat cap and short trousers as he raised his hands in surrender to the laughing jackbooted warrior liquidating the Warsaw Ghetto?

One final picture. A close-up, head-and-shoulders shot of a uniformed man with wide-set eyes and narrow, fine-boned aesthetic features. It was a medieval face, the face of a scholar, or of a monk, but where a monk’s eyes might show compassion this man’s lacked any semblance of pity.

The men in the pictures all had one thing in common. They wore the twin silver lightning flashes of the SS — the Schutzstaffel — Heinrich Himmler’s private army.

Jamie looked again at the symbol on the back of the map. Yes, it was there. The same coarse, almost brutal, simplicity of design, as if they had been created by the same hand with the help of a blunt bayonet.

A sharp knock at the door interrupted his train of thought and he felt a momentary flutter of panic that he instantly dismissed. Idiot. They wouldn’t knock. If you’re not safe here where are you safe? Still. He picked up the heavy crystal whisky glass and wrapped it in his fist. With a last glance around the room he reached for the handle… hesitated, retraced his steps and retrieved the journal and the escape map and put them in the nearest drawer. Only then did he open the door.

‘Hey, how are you?’ A grinning face peered through the narrow gap and Jamie relaxed his death grip on the glass. Simon’s eyes were drawn to the movement and he waved a tawny bottle with a white label. ‘I see you’re prepared. Couldn’t manage the Macallan, but I thought you might fancy something a little more robust. Islay’s finest. Enough peat to bury you in.’

Jamie waved his friend inside, accepting a bottle of whisky almost as old as he was. Simon had always been generous, but even for him this was a little excessive. ‘I don’t suppose you’re here for a cup of tea?’

Simon surveyed the semi-organized chaos with a practised eye. ‘I doubt if you could find the pot even if I did, old boy. No, I’ll have whatever medicinal tincture you’re having. I just came round to make sure you were OK.’

Jamie searched for a second cleanish tumbler. Simon wandered the room casually, picking up a book here, surveying a painting there. His eye settled on a tank of tropical fish that Jamie had bought a few weeks earlier in a moment of misguided enthusiasm.

‘Haven’t these bloody things died yet? My goldfish never lasted more than a week.’

Jamie looked up. ‘They’re not goldfish, they’re freshwater exotics.’

‘Christ, what’s that?’ Simon’s attention had switched to a vividly coloured rural scene in a plain frame. ‘Planning to sell it?’

‘No. I like it.’

‘I would if I were you. The market for contemporary regional tosh is moving in the wrong direction.’

Even at university Simon’s interest in art had been purely economic. He treated it the way he now treated the stocks and bonds he dealt with each day at his bank, as a commodity to be bought and sold at a profit.

‘Are you still going to the gym?’ Jamie asked innocently.

‘What?’ Simon blinked like a startled owl behind his designer spectacles. ‘Oh, this?’ he said guiltily, running a hand over the bulge above his belt. ‘Couple of weeks of circuits will soon get rid of it. I’m considering hiring a personal trainer, what do you think?’

Jamie grinned. ‘Can’t do any harm, especially if she’s a looker. Who needs circuits when you could be chasing a plump Lycra-encased backside round the park for an hour? Cheers!’ He handed the other man a glass filled to halfway with glowing amber.

Simon sighed as he took his first sip of the malt. ‘Christ, I needed that. How’s your research going?’ The tone was casual enough, but the words gave Jamie the odd sensation he was in the room with someone else. It only lasted a split second before he mentally discarded the thought, but it had definitely existed. ‘Only I couldn’t help noticing the picture on your computer,’ Simon continued, waving his glass at the spare room. ‘The uniform seems familiar.’

Jamie led him through just as the screen-saver turned the monitor blank. He tapped the mouse and restored the aristocratic face with the cold, certain eyes and an expression a calculated millimetre from a sneer.

‘Fuck!’ Simon stepped away from the computer as if it was contaminated.

‘You recognize him, then?’

All the bonhomie had been stripped from Simon’s voice by the image on the screen. ‘The Devil Incarnate. I’m a true Brit, albeit of the mongrel variety, Jamie, but first and foremost I’m a fucking Jew. You’d never forget the man who sent your grandparents and eighteen of your other relatives to the gas chamber. Reinhard Heydrich. If Hitler was the chairman of Holocaust PLC, Heydrich was the chief executive. You know he was the first person to use the words Final Solution?’

‘No, I didn’t.’

Simon drained the rest of his whisky in a single swallow. ‘A complete bastard of the first water and a remarkably thorough man. Even Himmler feared him. Once he had his murder squads up and running in Poland and Russia, he banned Jews from the occupied western countries from emigrating and effectively made Europe their prison. When he had them trapped, he created an enormous Nazi killing machine that first processed, then murdered them. At the Wannsee Conference he estimated that they would have to “deal with” eleven million Jews. Fortunately, I suppose, he could only get his hands on half of them. When he was killed in Prague the Nazis murdered or deported thousands of innocent people in retaliation, but ask any Jew and he’ll tell you it was worth the sacrifice. Look,’ he placed his empty glass beside the computer, ‘this has put me off my liquor. I have to go now, but let me know if you need anything. Enjoy the whisky.’

Jamie held the door for him. ‘There was one point. Do you know anything about the relationship between Heydrich and a man called Hans Frank? Frank was an SS bigwig who ruled over most of Poland for four years of the war. He was hanged for war crimes at Nuremberg.’

Simon frowned. ‘No. But David would. You should stay in touch with him. He’s a handy man to know. Look after yourself, laddie.’

When he was gone, Jamie sat down at the computer and stared at the man on the screen. The words beneath the picture confirmed most of Simon’s chilling biography. Heydrich’s subordinates went in terror of him and had nicknamed him The Hangman. How he came by it was never properly explained, but Jamie could hazard a guess. Heydrich had been cleverer than Himmler, Goering and Goebbels combined, more cunning than Bormann and saner than Hitler, if your definition of sanity encompassed an anti-Semitic mass murderer with ice-water in his veins. If he hadn’t been killed he would undoubtedly have become one of the visionaries of the Nazi regime, taking his place among the coterie of thugs and bullies who clung to Hitler like lice, even a possible successor to the Führer himself. Where Hitler saw the destruction of the Jews as a means to an end, Heydrich had been taught to hate them from the cradle and approached their extermination like a Holy War. Kicked out of the German navy in 1931, for seduction of all things, he’d thrown in his lot with the Nazis, making himself indispensable to Himmler while the future Reichsführer-SS was still a Bavarian chicken farmer. Heydrich had created a political power base in the Sicherheitsdienst, Himmler’s feared security service, used the Night of the Long Knives and the corpse of Hitler’s former ally Ernst Rohm as stepping stones to help him up another few rungs of the ladder, before, with the Führer’s blessing, making it his business to rid the world of the Jewish race. When he had been rewarded with the Protectorship of Bohemia-Moravia, it must have seemed just another step in the right direction. But two British-trained Czech agents brought his career to an abrupt close with a couple of hand grenades on a warm spring morning in Prague. The date was 27 May 1942. No wonder Hans Frank’s interrogators hadn’t believed him. If he’d made a present of the Raphael to Heydrich early in 1942, surely it must have been in his possession when he died?

It was all very interesting, but it wasn’t getting him any closer to the painting or his grandfather’s mission. He retrieved the journal and the silk map from the drawer and placed them side by side on the desk in front of him. When he looked at it now he wondered why he hadn’t seen the similarity between the design of the wheel and the SS lightning-flash runes immediately. Runes? The word stirred something in his memory, something he’d read about Heinrich Himmler.

He brought up Google on the computer and typed in the words Schutzstaffel and symbolism.

There were thousands of hits, but a name and a place drew his attention as if they’d been written in lights. He clicked on the link and there it was: a large room with a marble floor surrounded by pillars. In the centre of the floor was a circular symbol identical to the one on the reverse of Matthew Sinclair’s silk map. The place was Wewelsburg Castle, the very heart of Himmler’s SS empire. The symbol was known as the Black Sun.

A few miles away the search results were replicated on another computer screen.