Mitch Silver - The Bookworm

I personally saw the letter being put in the diplomatic bag at the Ministry to be forwarded on to Lisbon so it could be placed in the post over there.

Now I had a casting call to conduct, if our little scheme was to succeed.

An incoming video call on her iPad brought Lara back to the present. The digital clock in the upper right corner showed it was nearly 2:15; she’d been listening to Noël Coward for a good part of the day.

It was Lev. She told him to hold and hurried out of the Listening Room with her brother’s face bouncing along on her iPad. The Ladies Room was unoccupied and she sat down in the last stall. Lev’s image was distorted with worry.

“Levishka, are you all right?

“I, I don’t know. I’m totally sleep-deprived, but I have to talk to someone who understands.”

His raspy voice was bouncing off the tiles. She lowered the volume. “What’s happened?”

“I couldn’t get back to sleep after you called, so I watched the last ten minutes of some old movie on TV. I still wasn’t sleepy and I started channel surfing. One of the local stations had something typed across the bottom of the screen, a breaking-news thing, you know?”

“Uh huh.”

“A few hours ago, a guy jumped off the Knik Arm Bridge. The whole thing’s crazy. The jumper… it was Craig, the American I work with… worked with. He’s dead.”

“ Bozhe moî ! Your friend killed himself? I’m so sorry.”

“Best friend, I guess. But I don’t think he really did. When I called the police, told them I was a colleague, all they would tell me was that he left a note in his apartment…”

“Then… it was a suicide.”

“…typed out, to someone named Melissa. Said he couldn’t go on without her.”

“I see… then why do you—”

“Craig was gay! Totally, completely. Still in the closet, but… there couldn’t be a Melissa. And there’s something else. He keeps his iPad at the test station, turned on. After the news, I drove out there and downloaded his latest emails and stuff. They aren’t password protected.”

Lara waited for her brother to continue.

“Apparently, the Americans are all set to announce an oil strike up here, a big one, in the Wildlife Refuge. They were offering Craig a huge raise and a promotion somehow because of it. The crazy thing is, he turned them down. Said he ‘wouldn’t be a party to it.’”

“Lev, listen to me, this is important.”

“You don’t have to tell me. That’s why I’m gonna… early flight… to find out.”

“Listen, I’m worried that—What?”

“…getting… plane out… to Prudhoe. Catch a… winks… and head out to the strike. Nose around. Find out… made Craig so upset.”

“Lev, you’re breaking up.”

“Crap!… battery’s just about—”

Then he was gone. Lara tried three more times, but she couldn’t get him back. He was gone before she could tell him everything that was going on at her end, so she hurriedly put it down in an email and sent it. He’d get it when his phone was back up and running.

Lara gave herself a pep talk. Everybody gets bad news; everybody deals with it. She shouldn’t have bothered him with the Hangman thing. Lev was going to be fine. Everything was fine.

She did her best to believe it.

Lev’s call started her worrying about him all over again. His friend was dead, and in murky circumstances. What made it especially troubling was the knowledge there was nothing she could do from seven thousand kilometers away.

Then, as she sat there alone in the stall, the one-hour-to-closing bell shrilly rang from the speaker in the ceiling, as it was doing throughout the Arkhiv. Damn, she remembered, the place closed early for staff meetings on Wednesdays.

Lara left the Ladies’ Room and headed back along the hall toward the Listening Room. She was being pulled in too many directions. There was the end of Coward’s tale still to listen to, with his talk of Germans and art historians. And her brother to fret over. And the bullnecked man, who might still be lurking around.

She couldn’t have picked a worse time to have one of her eureka moments.

That business about German art historians and their scientific tests had tripped a wire connected to something she’d read months or years ago. Not in the humidity-controlled wartime files, but right out there on the postwar shelves lining the reading area.

Her footsteps again echoed off the Arkhiv’s wood floor as she hurried over to the section marked “Nuremberg.” Here were stored the official transcripts taken down by Allied stenographers, translated, printed on color-coded onionskin, and distributed to the non-German-speaking judges and prosecutors of the four countries that defeated Germany: light blue for the Americans and British, yellow for the French, light green for the Russians.

Luckily, the box marked “Albert Speer 4” was on a low shelf. Speer was a special case: sentenced to twenty years in Spandau prison, he freely discussed his case with his captors and admitted his complicity in Nazi war crimes. Yashchiks 2–5 contained conversations held after the trial was over; in the case of number four, long after—the conversations recorded by hidden microphones.

She had read something in this box when she was researching an earlier book, something that hadn’t computed at the time. The green-colored flimsies flew under her fingers until she found the one she wanted.

None of you believe me when I say it, but the Führer had a wonderful sense of humor, even in times of great moment.

I remember being summoned in the middle of the night to his office in the Old Reichschancellory. He hated the place; called it “Bismarck’s soap factory.” So I had four thousand men working around the clock, building him a new one. The clanging of the ironworkers sent the others, the light sleepers, off to get their earplugs. But not Hitler. He worked right through the din. And then slept the sleep of the just.

I found him looking out the window toward the east. He didn’t turn around when he heard me come in. “Speer,” he said, “what if you know for certain something is going to happen? You know it for a fact, the way you know the sun will come up tomorrow? And what if, at the same time, you know equally well that it is impossible, that it can never be? What would you do? Would you go crazy?”

“Yes, mein Führer,” I answered. “I probably would.”

He kept staring out the window. His voice was very low. “You see? A lesser man can’t deal with contradiction. Only the great are able to believe two entirely opposed ideas at the same time. It isn’t a question of intelligence, but of the will.”

“I can see that.”

He turned back from the window and fingered the little brass paperweight on the writing desk, the one I’d given him after the rally in ’37, engraved with, EIN VOLK, EIN REICH, EIN FÜHRER. He sighed. “Ah well, someone has to be in charge.”

There were two invasion plans on his desk. The latest from the Luftwaffe had the 11th Corps capturing airfields twenty-five to thirty-five miles from the English coast and then landing infantry divisions on them, avoiding the beaches altogether. The other was Unternehmen Grün , Field Marshal Bock’s Plan Green, a full-scale invasion of Ireland in support of Sea Lion.