Mitch Silver - The Bookworm

She had remembered reading about a book.

Now Lara went backward in time through the files from the war council on the 16th. The most massive air raid in the history of war, the Luftwaffe’s 1,000-plane multi-wave blitz that climaxed the Battle of Britain, was just returning to base after attacking the English capital on the night before. The men in the Adlerhorst were discussing the direct hits on Buckingham Palace and making rude jokes about the Royal Family.

Though the City around St. Paul’s Cathedral was in ruins and the East End docks were ablaze, Lara knew their hopes of achieving a dictated peace in 1940 would be thwarted. She thought she knew how God must feel, looking down and listening in on the puny dreams of men, their fates already determind for them.

The day earlier must have been a strange one in Germany. Those closest to Hitler knew the planes bound for London were just taking off, and there was little to do but wait. Around three in the afternoon Johanna Wolf typed up notes from Hitler’s working lunch on the terrace above the Obersalzberg.

One paragraph stood out like a seam of precious metal in a wall of dull rock. “At 13:43, Reichsführer-SS Himmler asked whether everyone was finished eating. He then gave a signal to Stürmbannführer Edlitz, who came forward with a heavy package that was wrapped and tied up with a ribbon. H.H. said, ‘For you, mein Führer,’ and placed the gift in A.H.’s hands. Then he and Edlitz simultaneously stepped back three paces. The Führer laughed and said, ‘What is it, a bomb?’

“Those around the table enjoyed the joke as the wrapping was removed to reveal a heavy book, very old, with a tooled leather cover. A.H. said, ‘This Bible will make an excellent doorstop.’ Again the others laughed. Himmler came forward and opened the book, indicating the writing on the flyleaf. A.H. studied it for a moment and said, ‘I do not understand this language.’

“Edlitz handed a sheet of paper to H.H., who gave it to A.H. ‘Here is a translation, mein Führer. You will see the significance.’ A.H. placed the translation inside the Bible without looking at it and put it down on the table. ‘I thank the Reichsführer-SS for his generosity, as always. I promise to read it when I get a chance.’ With that the luncheon adjourned.”

Lara leaned back, thinking it through. She had skipped over the incident when she was writing her history over the summer; it had seemed just an inside joke at the time. Clearly, it wasn’t the Bible that was important but what was written inside on the flyleaf. A certain prophecy, perhaps, that all this was about? She allowed herself the slightest smile of satisfaction: Lara Klimt, the last of the armchair detectives.

After returning the yashchik of wartime papers to its resting place in the stacks, Lara retraced her steps. One of the scholars working in the main room had packed up and left. Fortunately, the Listening Room was still unoccupied. Wherever the truth lay, she had to know the rest of Coward’s story.

Replacing the Dictaphone lever on the fifth cylinder, she went back to work.

Now, dear listeners, we’re up to a hot summer’s day in July 1940, the day Anthony rang me up to say he was ready to dip his quill in our homemade ink and did I want to watch?

I did not want to watch. As it was I was terrified his hand would slip and all our work would go for naught. Besides, I was trying my best to pull together something I’d dashed off on shipboard, a thing I was calling Time Remembered , and it was taking every waking moment. Anthony was good enough to call later in the day to say the writing had gone off without a hiccup.

Then, it took another forty-eight hours for the ink to dry. Two entire days before he would even take the baby beetles out of the box!

In summer of that year, remember, the overriding question for Anthony Blunt and me, as it was for you and all of Britain, was invasion. Was Hitler coming over, and if so, when? The French had given up, we’d left everything in the way of guns on the beach at Dunkirk, and the Lüftwaffe were making reconnaissance flights over the Channel.

Everyone knew the Home Guard marching in Hyde Park and the sandbags piled up in Westminster wouldn’t be nearly enough. It was a terribly trying time to be an Englishman, especially one who thought he might have a weapon against the Hun that wouldn’t be ready for a month and a half!

Fortunately for my sanity, there were a couple of tasks to keep us busy in the meanwhile. It fell to me, as our project’s “casting director,” to obtain the services of the man who would actually hide the Bible where the Germans would find it, just as it was Anthony’s job to identify the dupe who would be induced to do the finding.

His job first. Anthony had decided a man named Gerhard Bauer would be our appointed target. Bauer was—is—a collector of Renaissance paintings who also runs a tony German art magazine on his wife’s money. He befriended Blunt before the war, or maybe it was the other way round. At any rate, Anthony knew him now to be Procurator of the northern department of the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg , occupied at that moment with scooping up all the artworks of any value in the overrun territories… primarily (but not solely) those left behind by the Jews who been sent to the East.

Posting the letter immediately, even before Winston okayed our plan, was absolutely necessary due to the time required for it to reach Bauer by way of Lisbon, the only remaining conduit for communications with Germany. I have to hand the English translation Anthony made, which I will read into the recorder:

My Dear Gerhard,

Permit me to thank you in this roundabout way (London to Berlin via Portugal is nothing if not roundabout) for your kind mention of my trifle on Poussin in your brilliantly explicated piece in the Deutsches Kunstblatt of March of this year. I would have thanked you earlier but the postal service here, as you know, have decided to absent themselves from delivering any and all periodicals from Germany, even high-minded ones such as yours. So the March Kunstblatt has only just come my way.

Old friend, I know you will be traveling with your military through the Low Countries, overseeing the removal of certain pieces of our mutual European heritage back to Germany for safekeeping, as your publisher’s note puts it. Well, there is something a student here was working on before the war in what is now your neck of the woods, and I’m rather hoping you might keep a weather eye out when it is catalogued, so he may find it when hostilities are over.

Young Weidmann discovered the volume in the monastery at Villers-devant-Orval. It’s a rather ordinary late-fifteenth or early-sixteenth century Bible of little interest on its own, but with quite an intriguing notation on the flyleaf. He believes the writing may be from the pen of Michel de Nostradamus. If so, it would be the only extant example of the man’s own hand, and might fill for him some rather yawning lacunae for the year 1562.

Would you be a dear and put a tick mark or whatever you do on your list if and when your people find it? Weidmann made a note of its location when he was there in ’38: on the third shelf from the top, next to a quite nice and very early Book of Job.

I lift a glass of sherry to you now, absent friend, in the hope of seeing you in the not too distant future. Until then I remain…

Your colleague and friend, Anthony

Of course, there is no Weidmann. It was Anthony himself who visited Orval in ’38 and made a note of that Book of Job, in hopes the Courtauld might snatch it for themselves in the event of war. Our friend Gerhard would know Nostradamus isn’t Blunt’s line of goods, so we had to invent the studious young man.