The Isis Covenant

XXXI

Jamie and Danny were lying on the safe floor gasping at the last of the oxygen when the door swung open to allow in a rush of cool air that was as reviving as champagne. They looked up to see three young men dressed in casual clothes and carrying automatic pistols. Two of the men were dark haired and pale skinned and appeared to be twins, but it was the third man, tall, spare and with a sandy complexion and pale blue eyes, who threw a pair of what looked like leather hoods in beside the prisoners.

‘Put these on.’

Jamie picked one up, but Danny stood her ground. ‘The last time somebody got me to wear one of these I ended up in a lot of trouble. You guarantee that won’t happen again?’

The man shrugged. ‘It’s up to you. You put on the hood and come with us or you don’t and we close the door again.’

‘When you put it that way …’

Another van and another blacked-out mystery tour. They drove for forty minutes before the vehicle eventually parked. But the journey held none of the menace of their trip with Frederick, and willing hands helped them out of their seats and across what felt like a gravel drive and into a building. When the masks were removed they were in a bright room with a view of a vegetable garden, but nothing else that would provide them with any clue to their location. Their passports and wallets had been removed during the trip. Now they were returned, which seemed reassuring. Blinking, they studied their surroundings. Set into the rear wall, which backed directly onto the hillside, was the steel door of a massive walk-in safe, which gave Jamie a shiver. Without a word the twins walked from the room and the third man took up position beside the door. A few moments later they were joined by a shrunken gnome of a man with a badly twisted neck, but cheerful, twinkling eyes and an expression of perpetual puzzlement, as if, despite his great age, each day confused him more than the last.

‘Thank you, Rolf. Send up the twins with some coffee, will ya?’ He waved Jamie and Danny to a pair of white leather chairs and took his place opposite them on a matching sofa. They stared at each other for what seemed like minutes before Danny broke the silence.

‘Berndt Hartmann, I presume.’

The old man laughed. ‘I like that. Stanley and Dr Livingstone, right? I haven’t heard that name in a long, long time, but sure, call me Hartmann, only make it Bernie. This is a day for memories. Bernie Hartmann. The Eye of Isis. And Max Dornberger.’

‘We’ve been looking for you for some time, Mr … Bernie. The last thing I expected to find was a fellow New Yorker.’

‘New York, Boston.’ He shrugged. ‘Fifteen years in the States makes an impression on a man—’

He was interrupted by the arrival of the twins. One of them carried a tray with a silver pot while the other served. There was something about the pale, unsmiling faces and dark hair that was unnervingly familiar. Bernie Hartmann saw Jamie’s look.

‘You ever see The Boys from Brazil, Mr Saintclair? Helluva film.’

Jamie had an image of Gregory Peck as Dr Josef Mengele and darted another startled look at the nearest twin. The old man laughed.

‘Just a joke, Mr Saintclair. But you English never did have much of a sense of humour. Too much stiff upper lip, huh?’

‘That depends on what we have to laugh about, Bernie. I could swear that about an hour ago you and the Children of the Damned here were hell bent on killing us. Or maybe I mistook that steel tomb for a sauna?’

Bernie Hartmann shrugged and sipped his coffee. ‘That was then. Right now I’m interested in how you came up with the name Max Dornberger. Max Dornberger was a good friend to Bernie Hartmann, but he’s been dead a long time.’

Jamie took his time, disguising the confusion left by the second half of that statement. ‘Simple enough, Bernie, old boy. According to a book I read, Bernie Hartmann and Max Dornberger were in Hitler’s bunker just about right to the end. It also said that you were the two men who executed Hermann Fegelein, Hitler’s brother-in-law.’

The smile never left Bernie Hartmann’s face, but his eyes hardened and humour was replaced with a look of calculation. ‘Wrong on both counts,’ he crowed, enjoying the confusion of his “guests”. ‘It’s true I was there and I helped bury Fegelein, but I didn’t fire a shot. And the man who did shoot him wasn’t Max Dornberger.’ He shook his head. ‘Bodo Ritter executed Hermann Fegelein.’

‘I don’t understand.’ Jamie’s puzzlement was clear. ‘Bodo Ritter had already left Berlin when Fegelein was killed.’

Hartmann sat back and closed his eyes. For a few moments they wondered if he’d fallen asleep.

‘Ach, maybe it’s time to tell it all.’ The gnome’s eyes opened and the twinkle had returned. ‘Somebody should know and who’s going to arrest old Bernie now, eh? But I tell it my way, and I tell it from the start.’

He began with his childhood in Hamburg before the war, the youngest of a family of seven children, runt of the litter and always in the shadows because his father blamed him for his mother’s death. The more he talked, the more his voice changed. The accent was still pure New York American, all drawn out syllables and Rs gone AWOL, but the cadence was taken over by the kid from Altona: sharp and rhythmic with the occasional crack of a bullwhip.

‘The old man worked ten hours a day as a blaster at the quarry, so it was Aunt Gerda who brought us up. Not that she got much thanks for it. We spent more time down the docks thieving than we ever did at school and both my sisters were on the game by the time they were sixteen.’ He shrugged. That was just the way life was back then. ‘Then one time, it must have been in ’thirty-seven around my thirteenth birthday, Aunt Gerda got ill and the old man had to take me with him to work. He taught me about stone and how it split, and about blasting caps and dynamite and how to make them work together. How much to use to get what effect. I was a natural, he said, I had good hands, steady and nimble, and I didn’t make mistakes. ’Course,’ he chortled, ‘you only got to make one mistake in the blasting game. Well, he was a Red, the old man, they were all Reds in the quarries and round the docks. They’d been fighting the Brown-shirts along the Breitestrasse on and off since ’thirty-one and he could see what was coming. So he started bringing his work home, in a manner of speaking; half a stick at a time and a couple of blasting caps under his hat. He thought I didn’t know where he kept it, but little Berndt wasn’t as dumb as he looked. Well, they came for him in ’forty. It’s the KZ at Neuengamme for you, Herr Hartmann; five years without the option, unless you’d prefer to use your skills in an infantry pioneer battalion? In the end, it didn’t make no difference. It wouldn’t, would it? A fifty-year-old man in the combat engineers. Last we heard was a postcard saying he’d made the ultimate sacrifice for Führer and Reich in a great German victory somewhere near Bryansk.’

He sighed and closed his eyes again, as if he was trying to remember a face. ‘He wasn’t what you’d call likeable, the old man, but I always regret never having a beer with him.

‘So here’s little Bernie, underfed and scrawny, couldn’t get into the Hitler Youth if he wanted to because of the old man’s history, and that means no job. All he knows is explosives and how to steal and he has twelve sticks of dynamite and fifteen blasting caps buried down by the shithouse. He wants to help feed the family, but he doesn’t know how. Fortunately, his old pals down the docks have an idea. Why don’t we rob a store? So we do, the Alsterhaus on Jungfernstieg, and it’s a peach. They get me in, I do the safe. Everybody gets their share and nobody gets hurt. But this is at the height of Barbarossa, with the Wehrmacht outside Moscow and Stalin beginning to think maybe Siberia’s nice this time of year. One night there’s a knock at the door. Could have been the Gestapo, but instead, it’s Erich, the old man’s pal, come to ask a favour; only the Reds don’t ask favours. They’re short of funds, he says, and I don’t ask what for. Next thing, I’m knocking off banks all over the Third Reich and taking more risks than is good for me. Let me tell you about little Bernie, he’s no Red and he’s no hero. So little Bernie decides to do one last job — for little Bernie. Only this one goes wrong.

‘The crazy thing is that it saved my life. It was the Hamburg bulls picked me up, not the Gestapo, and when they put the screws on me I admitted to the Alsterhaus job as well. If they’d looked hard enough, they could have tagged me for what I’d done for the Reds, and that would have meant a guillotine haircut, but I was a seventeen-year-old kid and not worth the effort. So nobody looked, just then.

‘Two years later, I’m out in Neuengamme with the gypsies and the Jews and the Reds and with just about as much chance of staying alive. I thought it was Bernie Hartmann’s last hour when Max Dornberger walked into the barracks in his SS uniform and called out my name.’

‘You said Max Dornberger was a good friend to you?’

He nodded. ‘That’s when it started; right there in a stinking barrack room in a concentration camp. Max, he looks me over — I was maybe seven stone back then — and says, “So you’re the kid who blows safes. You don’t look much.” Sure, I say, I blew a couple; no point in denying it. He grins, this kinda knowing way, and I get a cold feeling on the back of my neck. “Yeah, a couple, but I’m not here to take you to Heini’s barber for a haircut. I’ve got a job for a smart kid, if you’re interested?”

‘Now, don’t get me wrong. I wasn’t conned by Max, the smiling Schutzstaffel; these guys had a way of joshing with you just before they smashed your teeth out with a hammer. But after two years in the KZ and another five to go I knew that the only way Bernie Hartmann was getting out of Neuengamme was in a box. So I played along. Six weeks later I’m being measured up for an SS uniform and I’m cock of the dungheap.’

He saw Danny’s look. ‘You’re asking yourself how Bernie Hartmann could sell his soul to the SS. Well, I’ll tell you, lady. Bernie Hartmann was nineteen years old and he was alive. Five feet fuck all and a record as long as my arm and it’s all forgiven and forgotten; as long as I do my job. So that’s what I did. Geistjaeger 88 was paradise after the camp. French champagne; and all the girls liked a uniform, even with an ugly little bastard like me in it. I’d looked into an open grave. I knew that life could be short and shitty, so I enjoyed every last minute of it. For three months we swanned around France, living it up and taking what we liked for Uncle Heini. Then everything changed. Bodo Ritter turned up. The Devil incarnate. A man made for a uniform with the Death’s Head on it.’

Danny was itching to ask Bernie Hartmann about Berlin and the Crown and the odd references to Max Dornberger that didn’t quite fit, but she had a good cop’s sense to stay quiet. Hartmann would get there in his own time.

When he talks of Bodo Ritter there is fear in his voice even now and his eyes flick towards the window as if his nemesis is out there among the trees. Ritter had a nose for the things Heini wanted and that made him important. Ritter garrotting one of his own men. Ritter and the Italian countess who wouldn’t cooperate. Ritter’s see-saw game with the Italian partisans and a pair of nooses. But always there is the shadow in the darkness. The Ritter story so awful he can’t tell it.

‘The families who were killed in New York and London were killed with a garrotte,’ Danny said quietly.

‘Oh, Christ,’ Bernie whispered. He looked up at her, the twinkling eyes now dull and confused. ‘How could it be? Bodo Ritter is at least ten years older than I am. If he’s still alive he must be close to a hundred.’

Then it hits him.

‘The diamond. This is all about the Crown and the Eye.’