Mitch Silver - The Bookworm

The image behind her changed once again, this time to the classic photograph of the president of the Russian Federation on horseback, shirtless and smiling.

“When and if it becomes necessary to ensure public order by imposing martial law, your supporting votes in the Presidium—in the face of what may prove to be strong, if uninformed opposition—will be crucial to bringing Russia back to the forefront of nations.

“Your consent to the entire plan we’ve just outlined is implicit in viewing this vodcast. Now, delete this file.”

Lara lay there in a rapidly cooling tub, wreathed in white Lily-of-the-Valley bubbles as the video’s implications sank in: The US and Russian leaders were planning to con the rest of the world into thinking they’d found new oil in Alaska? One of them was ready to sell his country’s future to stay in power while the other was planning to ensure his continuance in office by using the state oil company Lukoil… while the Lukoil Professor of Geohistory stood idly by?

She rose so abruptly it set off a small tidal wave of soapy water that would have engulfed her iPad if she hadn’t hurriedly snatched it up with slippery fingers and set it down almost as quickly in the sink.

She kept repeating the same four words to herself: “Over my dead body.”

Lara, her still-wet hair wrapped in a towel, sat down at the desk in her bedroom and tried to get past her anger so she could think. A fairly unsavory stranger hands her a half-dozen Dictaphone recordings and tells her there are clues in there that will lead her to a valuable book. Then a woman comes up to her and says she’ll pay double for it.

The same woman, obviously working for the party in power, describes an under-the-table deal with the Americans, whose head of state is in town at this very moment—the man Lara will be sitting beside in twenty-four hours.

And the “insurance policy” that would turn the Russian people against the U.S. if their leader reneged on his end of the bargain? Might it not concern a hoax hidden in a four-hundred-year-old book? A hoax perpetrated on Hitler… that had the effect of devastating Russia instead of Britain and, possibly, America?

Then and there, Lara determined to do everything in her power to find the Bible, and put it in the right hands. Once she figured out whose hands those were.

This was a job for Larissa Mendelova Klimt, the online Sherlock Holmes. Picking up her iPad, she began by searching the German government’s wartime archive with the keywords “prophecy” and “Nostradamus,” and got exactly what she expected: nothing.

Lara tried again, using “Hitler + Bible.” A half-dozen links all led to the same wrong thing, a crazy sort of replacement Bible the Nazis distributed during the war. “Honor thy Führer and master” was Commandment Number One. Not at all what Lara was after.

The archives of the various Allied powers came up blank, as well as more general searches on Google and Bing. By now it was late afternoon, her stomach was rumbling from a lack of food, and going through all the crackpot postings about Nostradamus on the Internet could take the rest of the day.

She leaned back in her chair and let her mind go blank. Himmler gives Hitler a heavy, leather-bound Bible swept up during the war by the Nazi art thieves. The Führer, occultist that he is, believes something written in it four centuries earlier is all about him, and that it foresees his coming triumph in the East. Does he toss it aside when he’s read it? Or send it to some warehouse to be stacked with a thousand other tomes?

No. He keeps it nearby, possibly to open it and reassure himself of the prophecy whenever times get tough, like after Stalingrad. She looked over at the goldfish, Mr. Russky, swimming in his bowl, and asked him, “So why didn’t the official sites, when they catalogued everything else they captured at war’s end, have any record of it?”

Whatever the goldfish had to say was lost in her eureka moment: grandfather’s German helmet on the other side of the fishbowl! The official archives weren’t the whole story; private soldiers the world over picked up stuff and took it home.

Quickly she scrolled through the major military memorabilia sites. There were thousands of listings on germanmilitaria.ru, ww2collectibles.com, and the others, including hundreds of books. Some of them were Bibles carried in the war by various soldiers, but nothing remotely like what she was looking for. An hour of that and she was almost ready to quit again.

But Lara had one or two more tricks up her sleeve, Russian search engines that sometimes got stuff the others overlooked. Lara typed in her query on Yandex.ru, hit Return, and scanned the results. Nada. She did the same with Rambler.ru.

Halfway down the page came her first real hit. It was a link to eBay.de, the German-language auction site. When she clicked on http://cgi.ebay.de/ HitlerBibel, the slow-loading connection showed just the website’s header at first. In German it said, “Great Deals on Hitler’s Bible on eBay!”

The fully loaded page was better, exciting, but still a disappointment. It read, “Hitler’s Personal Bible, item #Z280377684250. This listing has ended.”

How do you see something that was bid on years ago? Viktor, a whiz at all things electronic, once showed her how to navigate the site when she’d gone on eBay to buy Mr. Russky his bowl. It was coming back to her. Clicking her mouse on the button labeled Advanced Search, she typed in the item number and scrolled down to Completed Listings.

Ta-da! The original 2006 listing page for Hitler’s Bible appeared on the computer, with the description of a book posted by someone with the screen name WattsUp from Fort Myers in the U.S.

There were seven thumbnail photos across the bottom. Lara clicked on each one in turn, filling the screen. The first was of the cover, an old leather binding embossed in gold, taken straight on. The next was snapped from the side, showing how thick the book was. There were a couple of the centuries-old typeset pages, with crabbed handwriting in the margins that Lara recognized as Hitler’s own, ending in the initials “A.H.” A fifth picture showed a page penned in a kind of French poetry, and then another, this one typed on a separate sheet in German.

She moused over to the final image, a black-and-white snapshot of an American soldier in a Jeep with the Bavarian Alps looming far above, before going back to the German translation.

There they were, the same three stanzas of doggerel Coward had described, ending with, “Into a cage of iron is the usurper drawn/When the child of Germany overcomes him.”

Tseluyu! She scrolled back up to read the seller’s description.

“My grandfather, Delmer Watts, was a corporal in the 506th Parachute Infantry. In the last week of World War II, his unit was looking for German Army holdouts in the village of Berchtesgaden when he banged on a door with his rifle and it fell off its hinges. Inside, he found a 400-foot-long tunnel of polished stone with an elevator going up inside Kehlstein Mountain to the ‘Adlerhorst,’ Hitler’s ‘Eagle’s Nest.’

“The Airborne had fought their way up the face of the mountain the week before and they’d already taken the ceremonial swords and such. All that was left were a few things protected from the bombing and overlooked in a maintenance shaft behind the elevator. This Bible came home with Granddaddy. Now that he’s gone, it can go home with you.”

Excitedly, Lara dropped back down to the pictures and clicked on the one showing the original quatrains. She leaned in closer to the screen and peered at the image of the French writing. Was that a wormhole obliterating a couple of the letters? Da!!