Mitch Silver - The Bookworm

I’ve got my little ditty still, scribbled on a sheet of copybook paper, one I carry around in my pocket to this day. Here it is:

To sum up, Anthony and I intended Hitler to believe a mystic four centuries earlier had foretold his rise. And that he would unite the Germans, pick up their hero’s fallen sword, and lead an army to the gates of Moscow, where he would imprison the Communist leader, Joseph Stalin.

Neat trick, if we could pull it off.

With a start, Lara realized she’d been so distracted by the strange man sitting next to her that she hadn’t taken any notes. Or heard a word Coward had said. She’d have to replay the recording. Risking a look out of the corner of her eye, she was shocked to see the interloper was gone. Now she was really confused.

He’d left his pad behind. Unable to help herself, Lara slid out from under her headphones and walked over to look at it. On the sheet of paper was a completely drawn hanged man now. Under it, written in the spaces where the solution to the game would go, he had entered, “L E V K L I M T.”

Lara yanked the cylinder from the machine, dropped it and the iPad in the shopping bag and raced out of the double glass doors and down the Arkhiv corridors to her study carrel. She fumbled with the key and unlocked the door, hurriedly locking it again once she was inside. Still huffing and puffing, she called Lev’s number in Alaska on her mobile.

A sleepy voice answered on the seventh ring. In English he said, “Who… who is it? It’s nearly midnight!”

“Thank God you’re there. It’s your sister. Someone’s threatening you.”

He was instantly awake on the other end of the line. Shifting to Russian, he said, “Threatening… me? I can’t imagine anyone who’d—”

“Listen to me for a minute.” She told him of finding the pad the big man had left behind.

“Maybe it was a joke, someone we went to school with in Perm.”

“I’d have remembered this guy.”

“Okay, I hear the worry in your voice, Larashka. First, nobody’s been threatening me. Second, I’ve got a call in to Craig; we didn’t connect today, but I’m sure I’ll see him in a few hours. He’s a big guy, huge. If I need a bodyguard… just let me get a few more hours of shut-eye, okay?”

“Okay. Sorry I woke you up. Take care of yourself, Levishka.”

“You too. And don’t worry.”

She took the bag of recordings from her cubicle and headed back down the corridor to the Listening Room. Lara wanted to sit there and figure it all out—Gerasimov, the woman from the flirt party, the moose of a guy right here in the Listening Room who had it in for Lev, everyone who’d come bursting through the protective shell of her quiet life. But she didn’t have enough data. Instead, she’d have to replay the wax cylinder she’d been too distracted to listen to, and take good notes. What else could she do?

No steroidal thugs were playing Hangman when Lara cautiously peered in from the main reading area. Three empty chairs sat in front of three idle Dictaphone machines. This time she took the seat nearest the glass doors, the better to keep tabs on the comings and goings in the main room beyond. A couple of the usual academics were engrossed in their work.

When she’d heard Coward’s Fifth up to the point where she’d left off before, she lifted the lever. While the man’s words were still fresh in her mind, Lara wanted to decode the writer’s poetry.

The first quatrain was easy. A child born in the heart of Europe who by his speech will lead a great multitude on the Rhine … that could be no one but Adolf himself. Check.

She typed “St. George” in the Google query box. It came back, “…adopted as the patron saint of England.” Helpful. She did the same with “Ligurian Sea,” and found it was the body of water off the northwest coast of Italy where Mussolini was born. She was starting to understand this particular brand of babble: some winged someone from England crossed the water only to be confronted by the sons of Austria—Hitler had been born in Linz, on the Danube—and Italy (the Ligurian Sea).

Who had flown from England to—Chamberlain! Neville Chamberlain had flown across the English Channel to Munich in 1938, only to be “subdued” by Hitler and the Axis into accepting their guarantee of “peace in our time” on a scrap of paper. Double check.

But was the Führer crazy enough to believe a French savant four centuries earlier would be writing his life story and get every detail right? Lara went to Google Maps and counted the rivers a German Army would have to cross eastward from Berlin. The twentieth was the Moskva that ran alongside the Arkhiv, the one she could see right outside her study area, guarding the western approach to the Soviet capital. What comes after double check?

There was another clue: Coward had used the phrase “Meacham for the Defense.” Full name, Sir Robert Meacham, apparently. Lara called up a site she’d used before in her research, burkespeerage.com. It came back with “SIR ROBERT MEACHAM, CBE (1938), born Headley, Surrey, 10 March, 1896; died, Inns of Court, London, 9 October, 1944.”

Wait a minute. Lara scrolled back through her notes; yes, there it was: Coward’s first day of testimony was October 2. Meacham, the man he was doing it all for, died just a week later. Hmmm.

Next problem: if Anthony Blunt turned an ordinary Bible into a vehicle to trick Hitler into attacking the Soviet Union, what happened to it after it did its job? Lara knew practically everything the Soviets had boxed up from the Führerbunker and his “Wolf’s Lair” in East Prussia, overrun by the Red Army in early 1945. She’d have remembered a Bible. The Americans had their own files of what came out of the Adlerhorst at Berchtesgaden. Unlike the Russians, they published what they found. No Bible there either.

Her brain was once again sending her a message, an email from her unconscious mind. Now she remembered where she’d read about a book.

Leaving the Listening Room, she strode across the main gallery’s polished wood floor, past the researchers engrossed in their own work, and slid her ID through the card reader that guarded the door to the “stacks” on the far side.

The box for September 1940 was on a higher shelf than Lara was used to, and she had to get one of the round, rolling library footstools and make sure not to kill herself taking it down.

In the strange German system, the last day of the month, the 30th, was the one in front. Lara stuck her hand into the middle of the box and came up with a memorandum from the 17th. Behind it was the very gold she was panning for, a paper summarizing a meeting of the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht , the high command of the German armed forces. Hitler was thanking Heinrich Himmler for a book he had been given a few days earlier.