The Isis Covenant

XV

‘So this Gerald Masterton died in a car crash?’

‘I’ve already checked.’ Danny answered the question in his voice. ‘No suspicious circumstances. He’d visited a bar after work. Hit a tree on a blind bend.’

‘Just bad luck, then?’

‘Uhuh, another of those coincidences.’

A waiter brought their first course. Jamie had chosen an upmarket Italian restaurant just off Portman Square, on the basis — he’d seen it in the movies — that all Americans like Italian food. When Danny Fisher arrived every eye in line of sight had checked her out. She wore a black silk suit with a slightly mannish cut, and she didn’t walk, so much as prowl. He wasn’t sure whether she reminded him of a film star or some sort of big cat.

‘Hey, this is great,’ she said through a mouthful of salt cod. ‘You do classy darn well, Jamie Saintclair.’

‘Comes with the job,’ he admitted cheerfully. ‘My clients are hardly likely to be impressed with the office, so I have to bring them to places like this, feed them fit to burst and get them drunk. Come to think of it, it’d probably be cheaper to rent a bigger office.’

‘I hope you’re not trying to get me drunk.’ She held up her glass for a refill of the Piedmontese red he’d selected to go with the grouse they’d both chosen.

He filled it within a quarter inch of the rim. ‘Never crossed my mind.’

The food was so good they waited until they’d finished eating before resuming their discussion.

‘So what do you think?’

‘You’re the detective.’ He shrugged. ‘But for me it begins to make more sense. The Eye of Isis may or may not exist, but if certain people believed they could lay their hands on a billion dollars’ worth of diamond that would give them more than enough motive to torture and kill. It provides a reason for the deaths of the Hartmanns and the Hartmans, even if it takes us no closer to finding out who did it.’

She nodded slowly. ‘I’ll go along with that. We have the symbol carved into the woman’s skull, which links us to the Eye of Isis, and that gives us our motive: greed. But where do Masterton and his theory fit in?’

‘Maybe, it was a coincidence?’

‘I refer you to my earlier answer, counsellor.’

‘It sounds like something out of a Dracula movie. Historical artefact keeps turning up through the ages and suddenly the local population starts being thinned out.’

‘She said kids, remember. And kids have died.’

‘True. But from what you’ve told me, the Hartmann children died for a reason, albeit a shitty, monstrous reason. They weren’t sacrificed, not in a sense that I’d understand it, because there was no evidence of ritual.’

She went silent and he could see her running the alternative scenarios through her mind. He waited until she was satisfied. ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘It’s progress, of a sort. Now tell me about your day.’

‘Firstly,’ he took a sip of water, ‘I think your initial instinct about Hartmann was correct. We have two sets of victims with a link to a man last seen in Berlin in nineteen forty-five. The Crown of Isis is exactly the kind of artefact that Geistjaeger 88 was set up to find. If it was hidden somewhere in Europe the most likely time for it to surface was in the chaos of war.’

‘Plunder, like the Koh-i-noor.’

‘That’s right. Plunder. Secondly, Hartmann was a thief. Let’s just say, for instance, Ritter, and Dornberger and Hartmann smash down the door to some mansion or chateau. Chances are they are there for a reason. A tip-off, or information collected from someone in a concentration camp by means we don’t want to think about? They search the place for whatever it is that they’ve been told they’ll find there. Probably take it apart. But Hartmann, the thief, stumbles on the Crown of Isis, with its whacking great diamond. Does he hand it over? Not on your life. This is his chance to make sure that, whoever wins, he has a very comfortable start to the post-war era.’

‘The Crown of Isis is a sizable object, remember.’ Danny giggled and it was odd to hear a little girl’s laugh from a full-grown woman. ‘He could hardly just put it down his pants.’

‘Don’t underestimate Hartmann. I have this mental picture of someone young, resourceful and cocky; a kind of Nazi Artful Dodger. He would have found a way. Maybe he broke it up. Anyway, the point is that whoever killed those people in Brooklyn and out in Docklands believed Hartmann had found the Crown of Isis. The question is, did he find it during the war, or after it?’

‘During, I think we’re agreed on that.’

‘Then Berlin is the key. And Berlin is where I’ve spent my day.’

The waiter approached their table, but Danny waved him away. ‘You said that Hartmann and this guy Dornberger took part in the defence of Berlin. I got the impression that maybe you knew more than you were telling me. Now how could that be?’

‘You didn’t pick up on the reference to the Reichschancellery, then?’

‘I thought it was some kinda Nazi telephone exchange.’

He smiled at that. Danny Fisher liked to play the wide-eyed Yank innocent on her first venture beyond Hoboken, but the reality was that she had a brain as sharp as a switchblade. He suspected she knew as much about the Reichschancellery as he did, but she wanted him to spell it out.

‘The Reichschancellery in Berlin was the official residence of Germany’s head of state. When the Russians closed in on the city in the spring of nineteen forty-five, the chancellery and the Reichstag, the parliament building that was nearby, were their primary targets.’

‘All right.’ She nodded. ‘I get that.’

‘The people who defended the Reichschancellery were billeted in a bunker nearby.’

‘So?’

‘Hitler’s bunker.’

‘Holy shit!’

‘Precisely.’

‘So Hartmann was there at the end?’

‘He was certainly there until the last week in April. Quite a few German units, particularly SS units, actually fought their way into Berlin as the Third Reich was collapsing around them and everybody else was trying to get out. Either they still had faith that Hitler would save Germany or they were prepared to defend him to the end, even if it meant their own deaths.’

‘The real fanatics, huh?’

Jamie shrugged. ‘Fanatics, but brave men. The SS knew exactly what their fate would be if they were captured by the Russians. If they surrendered to the Americans they might be roughed up a little and there was a chance they’d be shot, but the best they could hope for from the Red Army was a bullet in the back of the head.’

‘If you don’t mind me saying so, this doesn’t sound like our guys. Hartmann and Dornberger were Himmler’s licensed plunderers, not real soldiers. And from what you tell me about Ritter, he may have killed thousands of innocent people, but he was a bureaucrat at heart, a pen-pusher.’

‘You’re right,’ he admitted. ‘But in those final days of the war, the Nazis needed every able-bodied man they could lay their hands on. There’s a photograph of Hitler during the defence of Berlin, handing out the Iron Cross to soldiers who single-handedly destroyed Russian tanks. In the picture he’s patting the cheek of a boy who can’t be more than fourteen years old. The German equivalent of Dad’s Army.’ He saw her puzzled frown and smiled. ‘A sort of home defence force — it was called the Volkssturm and consisted of men between the ages of sixteen and sixty. By nineteen forty-five sailors and Luftwaffe ground crew were fighting as infantry. The chances are that the men of Geistjaeger 88 were reluctantly swept up into some SS battle group. The soldiers they ended up fighting beside in Berlin were a unit of French SS volunteers under the command of Brigadeführer Gustav Krukenberg. A month earlier, the Charlemagne Division had marched out of a station in Poland straight into the German defence line on the Eastern Front with more than seven thousand men, by the time they were forced back to Berlin there were fewer than a hundred of them.’

Danny Fisher held up her hand. ‘Hang on just a minute. I don’t know much about World War Two, but I do know that the French were on our side.’

‘Well, yes and no.’ Jamie smiled. ‘The Free French under General de Gaulle fought on the allied side, and so did the Resistance, though not as many of them as they’d like you to think. But until August nineteen forty-four, France was divided into the Occupied north and Vichy in the south, which was run as a German client state and actively collaborated in Nazi policies like rounding up the Jews. Marshall Petain, the Vichy leader, was a First World War hero and rabid anti-communist. He encouraged his young men and members of the milice, a kind of local militia, to fight for the Germans in Russia. For an organization that began life as the epitome of the Aryan ideal, the SS turned into a surprisingly cosmopolitan institution. It already had the Wiking Division, which was composed of Norwegians, Danes, Dutchmen and Belgians, Balts and even a few Britons. They would have welcomed the French with open arms, especially after they’d seen how they could fight. It seems that Ritter had already slipped away, probably on some concocted mission for Himmler, who was by now playing both ends against the middle and negotiating with the Allies, but Hartmann and Dornberger were trapped in some of the hardest, dirtiest and most dangerous battles of the war. They would have been battered by artillery, fighting day and night from burning ruins and cellars to counter Soviet probes, hungry, scared and entirely without hope. The men of the Charlemagne Division, or what little remained of it, made their name as tank killers. They’d stalk the Russian T-34s through the streets with magnetic mines and panzerfaust rocket launchers, kill the accompanying infantry and blow up the tanks. The Red Army lost at least a hundred tanks in the battle for central Berlin and those few Frenchmen are credited with destroying at least fifty. But gradually the noose tightened and the last remnants of the French SS and the men who fought with them withdrew to make a final stand at Hitler’s bunker in the garden behind the Reichschancellery.’

Danny chewed her lip as something occurred to her. ‘If Hartmann and Dornberger were caught up in that kind of horrendous battle, why are we so certain that they survived?’

‘Because we know exactly where they were on the morning of the twenty-ninth of April nineteen forty-five — the day before Hitler and Eva Braun committed suicide and three days before the final surrender.’ She took a deep breath and he realized he was stretching her patience. ‘The reason we know they were there is because our two heroes carved themselves their own little place in history. According to at least one source, Max Dornberger and Berndt Hartmann were the SS men who executed Hitler’s brother-in-law, Hermann Fegelein.’