William Tyree - The Fellowship

All was silent. Wolf got to his feet and crept closer. Now he saw that a piece of the man’s robe was caught on the woven screen surrounding the choir.

From his neck, a simple wooden cross hung from a strip of unrefined leather. Wolf crouched close to the body. The face framed within the hood was olive-toned and sun-weathered and, judging by the length of beard, had not been shaved for a very long time. The brown eyes were open, but they saw nothing. At his side was a Beretta Model 38 machine gun. Italian made.

A faint groan came from the sanctuary. It sounded like Hoffman.

Wolf got to his feet and entered the choir area. As he neared the high altar, which was smashed into pieces, he counted three bodies in gray SS uniforms. He recognized all as former upperclassman at the Reich School. They had all received their initiation tattoos with him at Wewelsburg Castle.

He found Hoffman in a prone firing position behind a broken section of statue that had been atop the altar. A pool of blood had bloomed beneath his chest, where he had been shot.

Wolf rolled him onto his back.

“They took it,” Hoffman said. The words were accompanied by a good deal of blood that seemed to have pooled in his mouth.

“Took what?” Wolf asked.

“The ossuary. The inscription…” He seemed at a loss for words.

Hoffman turned on his side, coughing up even more blood. He would be dead soon.

“Try harder,” Wolf urged, keenly aware that he, too, was losing blood from his gunshot shoulder. “What did the inscription say? Tell me now!”

The obersturmfuhrer’s throat seemed to tighten. He clasped it with his right hand, as if being choked by some unseen force. He gurgled as he struggled for breath. He brought the fingers of his left hand to his lips and wetted them with blood. Then, with great difficulty, he began drawing on the white piece of broken statuary. A series of jagged, angular strokes. Wolf strained to make out the blood-streaked shapes.

Suddenly Hoffman’s face turned purple, his expression one of shocked wonder. His eyes widened as he struggled for breath. Wolf grabbed the obersturmfuhrer by his chalk-speckled tunic. “What was it?”

Wolf focused all his attention on the drawings. So many seemingly disconnected lines. He could not make out any letters at all. Could they be pictographs? His gaze intensified, as if looking through it. For one split second, his eyes crossed. And then he saw.

Hotel-Dieu de Paris

Wolf woke in a clean hospital room with yellow walls. It was still dark outside, and he could hear rain beating against the window. His left arm rested in a sling at his side. The gunshot had passed through the muscle, narrowly missing the bone.

He rose up briefly before the pounding in his head forced him back into the pillow. His stomach gurgled, and then twitched. He turned on his side and promptly vomited over the edge of the bed. The foul-smelling goop stank of alcohol.

He wiped his mouth with his forearm, turned onto his back and tried to piece together how he had gotten here. He remembered being pulled away from Hoffman’s body. He sat up despite the pain in his shoulder, trying to remove the cobwebs from his mind.

He recalled meeting an elderly French surgeon whose breath smelled of strong liquor. He had only looked at Wolf’s shoulder for a moment before declaring that he would have to remove the bullet immediately.

“We’re out of penicillin,” he had warned. “And anesthetic. The Wehrmacht sent it to the eastern front.”

The surgeon cleaned the wound from the same bottle of homemade grain alcohol from which he had been drinking moments before. He then passed the bottle to Wolf and encouraged him to take several long drinks. “For the pain,” he said. That was the last thing Wolf remembered.

He had dreamt of Hoffman’s bloody scrawl. Unlike his other memories, the formations were crisp and clear in his mind.

A nurse entered the room and opened the window opposite the bed. Pretty, and thin, but with a hateful look in her eyes. Wolf felt vulnerable here under the medical care of the occupied French. Where were his clothes? He remembered what Dr. Seiler had said the night before. “ The resistance is always looking for opportunities to kill Germans. That goes double for those that threaten its cultural heritage .” Where was Lang? Why had he left him all alone here?

The nurse went to him and felt his forehead. “Too hot.” Then she removed the sling and the bandage to look at the wound. “Not infected.”

Wolf somehow doubted she would tell him if it was.

He fell back into a fitful sleep. He relived the cathedral firefight over and over in his dreams. In one dream, Himmler had been gunned down in the streets outside the cathedral. Or had that really happened? He could not know for sure.

He woke himself as he cried out for his mother. Judging by the light coming in through the shades, it was afternoon. Nobody seemed to be around. Was he the only patient in this hospital? Although still unwashed, his clothes were folded and placed near the bed. He wanted to look around, but still felt too weak.

The old surgeon returned sometime after dark. He was anxious and spoke of unrest in the streets. Notre Dame had been desecrated by occupation forces, he said. Three monks had been murdered inside.

Those so-called monks had been carrying machine guns, Wolf thought. He was pretty sure that had really happened.

The surgeon rambled on. It seemed that there had already been reprisals. A nightclub frequented by German officers had been blown up in the nearby 6th arrondissement. At least ten Wehrmacht soldiers had been killed in separate street attacks across the city.

Wolf sat up and reached for his clothes. “No,” the surgeon objected. “The wound has not been cleaned in hours! You could get an infection!”

Of course he would say that. The resistance is always looking for opportunities to kill Germans. Wolf pushed the doctor aside. He put on his pants. Then he put on his brown shirt, which was crisp with dried blood, and his tunic and overcoat. All three top layers had a hole in the left shoulder.

Waiving off the surgeon’s protests, he went downstairs to the hospital’s administration office. The dreary office was full of unhappy patients. When they saw Wolf’s black SS uniform, they slowly slipped out of the room, carefully avoiding eye contact.

Wolf sat at an empty desk. He picked up the telephone, connected with the local operator, and asked to be connected with Ahnenerbe headquarters in Berlin.

“Who is speaking?” the operator asked.

Wolf declined to say. “I just want to know whether Reichsfuhrer Himmler has returned safely from Paris,” he replied.

The question was self-serving. If Himmler had made it home safely, Wolf might be credited with ensuring his safety. On the other hand, if Himmler had been gunned down in the streets of Paris, Wolf imagined he would be held responsible. It would be his death warrant.

His question was met by a moment of silence. Suddenly the voice on the other end turned hostile, demanding to know his name and rank. Wolf hung up immediately.

German Barracks

11th Arrondissement

After leaving the hospital, Wolf recuperated in a former French military barracks that had been taken over by the German army. His pain had gradually subsided, but the low-grade fever had remained. The French surgeon’s claims had been true — all penicillin, and even the unit’s medic, had been shipped to the eastern front.

When he had arrived, he had shared the room with two other patients, both of whom were the victims of attacks by the French resistance. While under the care of a big-boned farm girl from the Loire Valley who had been sent by the foreign ministry, the other two had died in their sleep. She went about her business of tending to wounded Nazis dutifully, if not joyfully. Wolf welcomed the cold compresses she placed on his head, but refused her pots of herbal tea. He decided to eat only from the hand of another German, even if it meant starving to death.