The Isis Covenant

XXXVIII

Leon Rosenthal’s red-brick house was set within its own grounds in the upmarket suburb of Aartselaar, about five miles south of the city centre. A housekeeper showed them into the main room where a nurse was just packing up her equipment, and it was a few moments before a heavy-set man with thick white hair and a neat moustache appeared in a wheelchair. At the age of eighty-six, Leon Rosenthal still radiated the fearsome energy that Sam Meyer’s history had hinted at. He used the chair like a battering ram, impatiently pushing aside chairs and bulldozing through doors. Narrow-rimmed spectacles with thick lenses framed his milky blue eyes and magnified them until it seemed they were dissecting you.

Like Meyer, the old man spoke impeccable English, and despite the chill he waved them towards a paved area beyond a set of wide patio doors. On the way, he picked up a stone jar and carried it to where Jamie and Danny had taken their seats at a wooden table.

‘My only vice in sixty years,’ he growled, snipping the end from a large cigar and lighting it. ‘They say it will kill me, but what difference is that going to make now? Even when the Americans were blockading Cuba, Fidel Castro would send me a box every month as a gift.’

For a few moments the Belgian sat, oblivious of his guests, savouring the taste of the cigar and contemplating the fading light beyond the edge of the sparse parkland that surrounded the house. Eventually he emerged from his reverie and turned to Danny Fisher. ‘Forgive an old man his moment of pleasure, Miss Fisher, and welcome to my home. It is not often these days that this house is graced by the presence of a beautiful woman, although please don’t tell my housekeeper that. Claudette still believes she’s the same as she was thirty years ago. One of the benefits of poor eyesight and a refusal to wear spectacles.’ Danny smiled acknowledgement. ‘Mr Saintclair, you will be wondering why I asked young Samuel to invite you here?’

‘We’re visiting Antwerp because we are interested in diamonds, monsieur. Naturally, it was a great honour to hear that you wanted to meet us.’

Leon Rosenthal gave a grunt of laughter. ‘You should have been a diplomat, Jamie — may I call you Jamie? It’s my guess that you would have much preferred to be on the flight to London right at this moment. But I have my reasons for wishing to see you, and perhaps you will find some profit in your visit.’ He pressed a button on the arm of the chair and a few moments later the housekeeper appeared with a tray on which sat a decanter and three stubby crystal glasses. Rosenthal waved her away and poured three generous measures of glowing amber. ‘Please,’ he said, indicating the glasses. ‘Seventeen-year-old single malt whisky is not a vice, but a simple pleasure, and you would always regret not at least tasting this particular whisky. It is distilled on the banks of a river where I once fished for salmon and every sip brings back memories.’ All three drank and automatically sat back as the rich golden glow of the liquor suffused their nerve ends. Leon Rosenthal issued a long sigh. ‘Now, Jamie, if you would be kind enough to tell me about the bunker and what you found there?’

Jamie had told the story so often in the past year that it was a request he had no trouble fulfilling. He left out the machine-gun toting neo-Nazis who had hunted them through the Harz Mountains, concentrating on how he and Sarah Grant had unravelled the clues in his grandfather’s diary to discover the waterfall behind which lay the secret entrance to the bunker. Leon Rosenthal sat back and closed his eyes as he was led upwards into the darkness, and into the concrete tunnel that held the offices and laboratories of Walter Brohm’s research facility. Jamie assumed that, like everyone who asked him to recount the story, the Belgian was only interested in the Raphael painting that had made the bunker famous, and that was where he stopped. But Rosenthal opened his eyes and pinned him with his round-eyed stare.

‘Please, continue. Do not miss out a detail.’

The metal stair, and long echoing corridors, until at last they came to the great steel doors, twisted and buckled by the massive explosion that had been meant to obliterate the entire complex. Beyond them, a vast room the size of a football field, and Brohm’s engineering equipment, turned into the world’s largest indoor junkyard. Now he had no choice, but to tell of the pursuit that had driven them there, and into the room. Rosenthal’s breathing became a rasping tear and Jamie’s voice faltered for fear of the old man’s health, but the Belgian waved him on.

The room. ‘Behind the door we discovered the remains of three hundred scientists and slave workers who had been killed at their workplaces.’ He moved on, to the escape, but without opening his eyes, Leon Rosenthal raised a hand.

‘Do not cheat me, Mr Saintclair, I beg you. I wish to hear every detail of it as you remember it, please.’

Jamie exchanged a puzzled glance with Danny Fisher. Where was this going? Remember it? He had spent the last year trying to forget what they had found in the room. A sea of bones. Men and women contorted in every form of agony or mere heaps of disarticulated white. And, closest to the door, the girl. The silent scream in the tormented, eyeless face that had reflected the terror of her end, the jagged hole in her skull that was clear proof of the method they had used to snuff out her life. He had reached forward to touch her shoulder.

‘Describe her.’ Leon Rosenthal’s voice had turned savage.

How to describe a skeleton with a hole where the face had been? ‘She had long fingers. A piano player’s fingers.’ An image came to him of a girl. ‘She was tall and slim, graceful. She wore a striped grey shift.’

Rosenthal sniffed. ‘Yes, they would make her do that.’ He turned the chair away from the table and wheeled it back into the room to a large desk, opening a drawer to withdraw a small slip of paper. For a moment he held it in his hands, staring at it, with his shoulders slumped, looking somehow even older than his years.

When he returned to the balcony he handed Jamie a sepia-tinted picture.

‘My Hannah.’

At first the name didn’t register, then the face swam into focus. A young girl with an almost spiritual beauty, serious, in the photograph, but with a hint of amusement in her eyes that made you wonder how lovely she must have looked when she smiled. Suddenly he was in the back of Lotte Muller’s car on the way to the bunker and the German policewoman’s voice echoed in his ears. Another of the victims is his niece, Hannah Schulmann, a laboratory technician who worked closely with him. She was nineteen years old. In that picture she had been smiling.

‘She was working with her uncle, Abraham, on their nuclear programme. I wanted her to come away, to be with me in Belgium, but she wouldn’t leave him. He could never survive without her, she said. When she stopped answering my letters I went to Germany to look for her. You can imagine how that was. Brown-shirts and SS men on every corner, strutting and crowing. Jewish businesses closed, their windows smashed and their owners branded with yellow stars. Fear, everywhere. Of course, I couldn’t find her. They would have taken them all away to some guarded laboratory, then … Well, we know what happened then. It was what I learned in Germany that made me resolve to fight them when they came. It was because of what happened to Hannah that I survived the war. I never forgot her. I married and had children, but I always wondered what happened to my Hannah. And then you found her for me. I will never forget that, Jamie, and as long as I live I will always be in your debt.’

Jamie felt Danny Fisher’s hand on his. He remembered again the eyeless skull with teeth that sixty years later were still like flawless pearls. Gently, she slipped the photograph from his fingers and studied it. Eventually, he found his voice.

‘There’s no question of debt, monsieur. When we found Hannah and her friends murdered in the bunker, it was a scene I will remember for the rest of my life. It changed me. It is one thing to read of these things, another to see them. To know that some good has come of it helps take away some of the awfulness.’

Leon Rosenthal nodded gravely. ‘Yet, perhaps there is some way that I can repay you, at least in part, for finding Hannah. You came to Antwerp for a reason, I understand, not unconnected with those times? Samuel mentioned a Soviet official. I am afraid I know nothing of that. Yet, I have taken an interest since our Russian friends abandoned Communism for the KGB.’ He smiled at Jamie’s puzzlement. The Englishman opened his mouth to say something, but Danny Fisher kicked his foot under the table. ‘We have to call it the flowering of capitalism and it is true that many things have changed. Russians, as I am sure Samuel mentioned, are some of Antwerp’s biggest customers. After so many years of austerity they covet things that sparkle. And, of course, should the situation change, diamonds are an ideal, easily transportable currency in times of crisis.’ He stopped to take another sip of whisky, leaving the table to return a moment later with a newspaper, which he left folded in front of him. ‘From time to time,’ he continued absently, ‘certain favoured former clients still ask me for their advice. A few years ago, for instance, I spent some time in St Petersburg — a beautiful city; if you have not visited it, you surely must — as a guest of one such client. I was given what you would call the movie-star treatment.’ He smiled at the memory. ‘Of course, I cannot betray a business confidence by naming the gentleman in question, I have a reputation to protect even now.’ He closed his eyes and his voice faded, then recovered slightly. ‘I had the oddest dream a few nights ago, about a diamond, a diamond to take your breath away. Imagine it, a man like me, who has seen everything the diamond world has to offer, from the Koh-i-noor to the Cullinan, being so impressed. A white diamond, flawless, yet, in the way it was presented, flawed, because it had never been cut or polished by an expert. My hands itched to cut it, how they itched. I can feel them now, reaching out for it. But, in the dream, the owner would not have it cut. I could polish it, all seventy-five facets, to make the most of what it was, but the integrity must remain unchanged. Of course, I protested. To make the most of what it was, it must be cut. It was a slightly offset oval, but to reach the very heart of it, to bring out the pure diamond that was its soul, it must be cut pear. I cajoled, I even pleaded, but he would not be moved. If the dream was true, Leon Rosenthal would go to his grave regretting that moment.’ He opened his eyes with a tired smile. ‘Fortunately, it was only a dream.’

‘How much would a stone like that be worth?’ Danny asked, winning a look of scorn from their host.

‘It is not a question of worth, Miss Fisher, but of glory. Even in its cut state, it would have remained at least 275 carats, and would have outsized and outshone the greatest clear pear the world has yet seen by at least one hundred carats. When it was exhibited in London that diamond was insured for one hundred million pounds, which was a fraction of its worth. In monetary terms, my diamond would be worth ten times as much.’

‘Then the man who owned it would have been worth a great deal?’

Leon Rosenthal turned to Jamie with a shrug. ‘He treasured the stone purely for its sentimental value. A gift from his father, I understand. Perhaps a leftover from the time of the Tsars, which if it came to light, might be the subject of some dispute with the remaining remnants of the Romanovs. Who knows? Of course,’ he opened the newspaper in front of him and flicked through the pages, ‘there are many rich men in Russia today. Look at this one, for instance.’ He pointed to a picture of a man disembarking from an enormous yacht. ‘He gives rich men a bad name …’ Jamie craned forward to see the name. Leon removed the newspaper with a knowing smile. ‘… unlike the gentleman who invited me to St Petersburg.’

‘Did he just do what I think he just did?’ Danny demanded as they sat in the back of the taxi taking them to their hotel.

‘I think so. To mix a couple of metaphors, he led us up the garden path, then pulled the rug out from under us.’

‘After all that bullshit about my Hannah and how grateful he was, he had the name and he wouldn’t give it to us.’

Jamie smiled and shook his head. ‘That wasn’t bullshit. Leon Rosenthal meant every word he said, but Leon’s personal integrity wouldn’t allow him to give us the name. He’s lived all his life by a code of honour as strict as any Samurai. If you look at it from his point of view, everything he’d gained from finally discovering what happened to Hannah Schulmann would have been lost.’

‘I’d still like to go back there and hang the old bastard up by the heels till he spilled.’

‘I doubt that would work. He may be old, but he was one tough old bastard. I think he liked the idea of challenging us.’

‘Yeah. The old bastard.’

Suddenly they were laughing and he took her in his arms and kissed her, feeling the odd mix of hardness and softness that was like an aphrodisiac to his senses.

‘Anyway, how many billionaire Russian oligarchs can there be?’

‘More than you’d think.’

‘Probably,’ he mused, ‘but I’m betting that only one of them has a father who was an NKVD lieutenant serving in Berlin under Marshal Zhukov on the twenty-ninth of April nineteen forty-five.’