The Excalibur Codex

XII

‘Herr Ziegler? Jamie Saintclair, and this is Mr Gault.’

Rolf Ziegler studied them in the doorway without inviting them inside. Lank grey hair hung across his forehead to combine with a pair of eyebrows that seemed about to take flight. He must have been close to sixty, with suspicious, deep-set eyes in a worn-out, pinched face, but the muscles beneath his T-shirt were threaded with whipcord tendons, and the thick fingers of his workers’ hands were tipped with black crescents under the nails and looked capable of tearing telephone directories in half. ‘You said something about money?’

Gault counted off five ten-euro notes. ‘That’s a down payment,’ he said in his featureless military school German. ‘You get the other two hundred when we’re satisfied.’

The German’s glance flicked from the money in his hand to Gault, but saw nothing there to give him hope that he could extract any more for now. He stepped aside. ‘You’d better come in.’

Jamie almost gagged on the thick scent of curry that filled the apartment, but Gault grinned appreciatively at their host. ‘I do like a nice hot bhuna.’

Ziegler ushered them through to a small lounge dominated by a large and plainly very new flat-screen television that stood to the right of an open stairway. A thin, worn-out woman in cardigan and jeans looked up warily from the magazine she was reading, before rising to push her way past a sturdy youth of about seventeen into the kitchen. Rolf made a movement with his head that told the boy to leave them alone, but the teenager glared and stood his ground. He wore his dark hair cropped short and his father’s features were just recognizable in a puffy, slightly overweight face. Jamie felt a shiver of anticipation as he realized where the opposition in this house would come from. Everything about the kid said: I don’t want you here and I don’t give a shit who knows it.

‘My son Otto.’ Rolf shrugged a parent’s resignation that there was sometimes no point in pushing it and ushered them to one of a pair of matching cloth sofas. ‘You want coffee?’

‘Thank you.’

Ziegler relayed an order to his wife and waited until she appeared with three large cups. The coffee was thick, black and strong enough that you could stand a spoon in it. Jamie drank appreciatively and Gault took a tentative sip.

‘You said this was something about my father’s will?’

Jamie hesitated, but they’d already decided there was no mileage in trying to deceive Rolf Ziegler if they wanted his cooperation. At the first sign he was being used he would clam up and they’d be as well walking out of the door. ‘We are more interested in the … ah, codex, than the will itself.’

‘So you’re here about the old man’s crazy sword story, huh?’ Rolf glanced at the TV and smiled for the first time. ‘Maybe two hundred and fifty isn’t enough.’

‘I told you we should have sold the thing ourselves instead of getting that lawyer to do it.’ Otto layered every word with contempt for his father, the visitors and his life in general.

‘Shut it, boy,’ his father snarled.

‘We’ve got the copy and—’

‘I said shut it.’ This time the voice was like the crack of a bullwhip and Otto sullenly resumed his place against the doorframe, his mouth twitching with anger.

Jamie watched the exchange with interest. It told him two things. First, that whoever had made the offer on Adam Steele’s behalf to buy the codex had betrayed something of its true value and Rolf Ziegler had come to the correct conclusion that that value had something to do with the mention of Excalibur. Second, that father and son, for their own separate reasons, were keen to cash in further on any opportunity for potential profit. That didn’t really matter as long as they’d kept it to themselves, but if word spread …

Gault saw it too, and immediately stepped in to close one avenue. ‘I believe part of the agreement with your lawyer was a clause binding all parties to secrecy,’ he said in a bored voice. ‘Perhaps it would be better if I had the copy,’ he aimed the words at the father. ‘It might save you a lot of money in the long run.’

Rolf Ziegler glared at his son and shook his head in disgust. He got to his feet, extracted a file from a cabinet in the corner of the room and handed it to the former soldier. ‘All right, what do you want?’

Jamie allowed his eyes to wander round the room, taking in the peeling wallpaper and threadbare carpet. When he eventually spoke, he did his best to sound like a lawyer and as if this was just a simple legal quest for more information. ‘I’ll ask you questions about the codex and your father, and depending on the quality of your answer we may consider offering some kind of bonus payment above the agreed sum. Of course, we’ll already know some of the answers so be careful what you say. Agreed?’

The German nodded.

‘I think, firstly,’ Jamie pulled a small black diary and a pen from the inside pocket of his jacket and opened it ready to take notes, ‘we need to know what state of mind your father was in when he dictated the codex. He did dictate it, I understand, not write it himself.’

‘He was dying of cancer,’ Rolf’s head dropped between his shoulders, ‘what sort of state of mind do you think he was in? He wanted to make his peace with God.’

Jamie frowned. ‘Had he always been a church-goer?’

‘Mama said he turned to the Lord for help when he came back from the war. Never missed a Sunday mass at St Anna’s along the road. He helped rebuild the steelworks after you English knocked it down with your bastard bombs, then he got a job on the production line. Worked every hour he could get for his family, just like me. She used a word I didn’t know then: atonement. Sometimes I heard them whispering together and he would be crying, saying he was ashamed of what he’d done.’

‘He was a hero. He fought for the Fatherland.’

The Englishman ignored the voice from the kitchen doorway. ‘Did he say what he had done to be ashamed of?’

‘He was in the SS and he served in the East. Do you want me to draw you a picture?’ Rolf’s lips were a pale line and the words were forced through clenched teeth. ‘He joined the Deutsches Jungvolk on the day of his tenth birthday and the Hitler Jugend on his fourteenth. When he received orders for the SS-Junkerschule he wrote his mother that it was the best day of his life. He worshipped Adolf Hitler; would have done anything for him—’

‘Heil Hitler!’ Jamie looked up to find Otto Ziegler grinning at him, with his right arm raised in the Hitler salute. He felt Gault tense, but laid a hand on the former SBS man’s arm and he sat back on the sofa.

‘Why don’t you go and play with your toys?’ Rolf said wearily.

‘At your orders, Father,’ Otto laughed.

Mrs Ziegler’s concerned eyes followed her son up the stairs. When Otto was gone, she exchanged an anguished glance with Rolf. He shook his head and she closed the door.

‘I’m sorry,’ Jamie said.

‘Kids, eh?’ The German’s expression reminded Jamie of a smile on a corpse. ‘What can you do if they get in with the wrong crowd? They’re still your kids.’ He closed his eyes. ‘Let’s get this over, then I don’t want to hear another fucking word about this thing ever again.’

‘After your father dictated the codex, did he ever talk about what he’d written? I’m thinking of any information that might be relevant, but that he didn’t include. Did he say what the sword looked like? Where the meeting was?’

Rolf shrugged, ‘Sometimes he’d talk about the spying trip to England. A happy time, playing at soldiers, but not being in any danger. You have to understand that by now the morphine ruled him. One day he’d be lucid, the next … well, you never knew what to believe. I thought the swords only existed in his imagination, but he said he wished now he’d looked at the English sword. The only reason he didn’t was because he had orders to deliver what was in the hole exactly as he found it, and he found it in some kind of leather bag. One time he laughed when he told me they smuggled it back in a sack full of poles for an old bell tent and the English never even searched them. I’m certain he never said where the meeting was.’

‘What about the Gruppenführer he met in the ambulance? Did he ever mention his name?’

‘Not his full name, no, but I know what his first name was,’ Rolf’s smile was surprising and almost friendly, ‘because my father named me for the man who saved his life. Any other SS general would have kicked him out of that ambulance. If he hadn’t got on he would be old bones now on the Seelow Heights, along with the rest of them, he’d say. If I’m Rolf, so is he. Does that help?’

It was a step forward, but not the detailed information Jamie had hoped for. He bit back his disappointment and smiled his thanks as the German went back to the drawer where he’d picked up the copy of the codex, and pulled out a brown envelope.

‘This is my father on his wedding day in nineteen forty-nine.’ He showed them a monochrome picture of a slimmer version of Otto in a light-coloured suit standing proudly beside a pretty blonde girl in a white dress. ‘The suit was borrowed and the dress was made of Yankee parachute silk saved from the war. Dortmund was like that then. Ach …’ He sighed and slipped the picture back in the envelope.

‘Hey, English, you want to see a better picture of my Grandpa, the hero?’ Otto stood grinning at the top of the stairs where he must have been watching them. Rolf Ziegler went deathly pale and the envelope shook in his hands as he slumped into the chair.

‘No, Otto, please …’

‘You not proud of your old man, Father? Come on, English, it’s the only picture you’ll ever see of Wulf Ziegler in uniform, huh. Don’t worry, my bedroom’s not so much of a shithole today.’

Jamie looked to Rolf for permission, but the other man wouldn’t meet his eyes. Gault was already on the stairs and Otto was laughing. Jamie followed.

By the time they reached the top of the stairs where Otto waited by a painted door, puffed up and officious, taller and more threatening now that you were standing close to him. He had his hand outstretched ushering them inside. As they entered Jamie stopped dead on the threshold and he heard a growl of outrage from Gault. He hoped the former SBS man wouldn’t do anything silly, the kind of thing only an enormous amount of willpower was stopping Jamie from doing himself.

The room was a shrine to an age of infamy. A Nazi flag adorned one wall, beside a framed picture of Adolf Hitler. A coal-scuttle helmet with SS lightning flashes sat on a dresser beside an iPod dock. Pictures of marching formations of bright-eyed automatons vied with battle scenes showing hard-faced young men, festooned with stick grenades and machine pistols. But pride of place went to a single picture above the bed. On it, a gaunt figure in trousers and shirtsleeves sat on the edge of a large pit. His face showed no fear, only a weary resignation, but there was something terrible in his eyes, a raw emotion that no one would ever read. Behind him, to his right, stood a row of laughing men in grey uniforms and forage caps. On his left, the grinning figure with one arm outstretched holding the pistol that was about to put a bullet in his head.

‘My grandpa, the hero. What do you think now, English? I wish he was here so we could do the same thing to the stinking fucking Turks. Take your time. Enjoy.’ His mocking voice faded as he vanished downstairs. ‘Otto’s got something to celebrate.’

Gault would have gone after him, but Jamie held him back. He would have liked to tear the room apart, but Abbie’s face appeared in his head and suddenly he felt as resigned as the man in the picture and he relaxed. Gault looked at him with wild eyes. ‘Don’t ever do that to me again. I would have ripped his fucking guts out and strangled him with them.’

‘That’s what I was afraid of.’

When they returned to the lounge Rolf Ziegler’s wife hovered protectively over him, but he shrugged her aside.

‘So now you know.’ Ziegler’s voice was made brittle by anguish. ‘My father served with the einsatzgruppen. The photograph was taken at Minsk. I don’t even know where Otto found it. My son lives a lie, Herr Saintclair. Everything he believes in is wrong, yet nothing I can do or say will undermine his certainty that he is right and everyone else is wrong. He even lies about the picture. Father is not the one pulling the trigger. He’s among the men in the background. But it is enough that he is there. You asked what he had to atone for. Well, that is part of it.’

Jamie knew there was nothing he could say that would help. They had everything they were going to get; there was no point in staying.

Gault handed over a wad of notes that was far in excess of the two hundred euros Rolf was owed. The German looked at the money for a moment, his jaw working, before he dropped it to the ground as if it had burned his hand. He accompanied them from the room while his wife gathered up the fallen notes.

When they reached the door, Jamie stopped. ‘You said that is part of it?’

For a moment Rolf Ziegler looked as if he had been punched. His face crumpled like a burst football and Jamie had never witnessed such a terrible combination of despair and defeat.

‘My father was twenty-two years old when he came home from Russia on leave in September of nineteen forty-three. It took him a week to discover that his parents were feeding an old Jew who had set up home in the basement of a bombed-out factory. To them it was an act of Christian charity. To him it was an act of treason against his beloved Führer. What could a good Nazi do, but denounce them? My grandfather and grandmother, Hans and Martha Ziegler, were guillotined in Dortmund prison on the same Christmas Eve.’