Tom Knox - The Marks of Cain

Amy went to speak; David interrupted: 'Angus. Where was this guy living — before he came to Luderitz?'

'France. Provence.'

'There. That's it.' David gestured, fiercely, at the kneeling old Nazi. 'He recognized me when I walked through the door. I saw it in his eyes.' He leaned very close to Dresler's sweaty face. 'You know me, don't you? Because you met my father. He found you. Someone in the Basque Country, a Gurs survivor, gave my father your details, your name, and Dad traced you to Provence.' He was leaning even closer to the quailing old German. 'And my dad threatened to reveal your past to the world — so you confessed — or you helped him — I'm fucking right, aren't I?'

Dresler was shaking his head. Mute. Determined and mute. But his silence was unconvincing. Amy whispered: 'I think you're right. Look at him.'

David didn't need any encouragement.

'It's the only thing that makes sense. Someone must have told my father about the monastery, someone who knew secrets. Who had an interest in the story, like an old Nazi, from Gurs. Who became a member of the Society of Pius…He would know where the archives were kept. It was you. You told my father — and then you had to flee, to Namibia, and this — this here — '

David grabbed at the address book. He waved it under Dresler's face.

'I recognize this handwriting! This tiny precise scrawl. You wrote on the back of my father's map. Didn't you?'

Again Dresler shook his head. And again it was unconvincing.

Angus was visibly excited.

'OK. So let's say that's it. You must be right. Let's put the clues together — '

'How?'

'Shark Island. That's what this fucker said. Shark Island.'

'Where's that?'

'Just down the road. Luderitz! By the fish wharves.'

Angus swivelled on Dresler. For a second it seemed Angus would strike the bowed and silent head of the Nazi with the butt of the pistol. Then he seemed to think better of it. He spat with contempt, but lowered the gun.

'Come on — we haven't got much time and Miguel could be anywhere, that chopper leaves in two hours — '

They ran to the door, leaving Dresler burbling and shivering in his hallway. A Nazi kneeling in the contents of his own emptied bladder.

The brutal noon sun was like a punishment, a fierce chastisement. Angus gestured south. They ran down the dusty road which doubled back to the wharves.

Two black men were sifting listlessly through piles of white dust on a corner. The smell of fish and decay was overpowering. Bleak white dust and hot blue sky — and an old Nazi wetting himself. David's mind was alive with fears and anxieties, and hope. Maybe they would find the secret. He realized, now, at least he was beginning to realize, that he needed to find the secret. The secret of himself. The terror of ignorance was too much.

The road terminated at a gate.

'That is Shark Island.' Angus indicated a kind of peninsula, jutting out into the sea. 'We take this path…'

They paced along a hot burning track that hugged the shoreline, hemmed in by broken concrete walls. Then they paused. A windswept and derelict warehouse loomed to their left, providing shade. The smell of the cold rich Benguela current was intense in the burning air.

Swift and concise, Angus explained.

'Shark Island is where the Germans did a lot of their killing, in the 1900s. Used to be an island, now it's attached by a causeway. This is where the Germans herded all the Witboii to die. In the Holocaust.'

'Not the Herero?'

'Nah. Different Holocaust. Another Holocaust. I know. I know.'

'Jesus.'

'I'll explain sometime. Show me the map, with the writing.'

The precious old map. David pulled it from his jacket. The blue sad stars, the sad old creases. And the writing on the back.

Angus squinted at the tiny scrawl, and exhaled, his eyes barely an inch from the paper.

'You're quite right. It's his handwriting. Dresler.'

Seagulls wheeled above them; a Namsea fish-truck rumbled in the distance, backing into a vast warehouse.

'I think it might be an address,' David said. He pointed. 'See. Isn't that "strasse"?'

'Yes. But…' Angus frowned. He twisted, looking around, the sea-wind tousling his rusted hair. 'This is an address, a German name I don't recognize — there is no Zugspitzstrasse here. In fact, not anywhere in Luderitz. How does it link to Shark Island?'

Amy spoke: 'Maybe he was just…decoying. A lie?'

'No,' Angus replied, very firmly. 'Dresler was petrified when he coughed that info. You saw him. Pissed himself like a baby. That bit is true. There is something here…on Shark Island. But I don't see if it connects with what's written on the map…'

Again, he gazed around at the yellow scene, at the haze of dust, the scruffy grey road, the derelict sheds and wharves. The hot wind ferried the elegiac coughs of seals from beyond the cliffs. 'We need something German. Here. Connected with the Germans.' His gaze fixed. 'There. The Holocaust museum. That hut…must be.'

'Holocaust museum?'

Angus shrugged. 'I know. Doesn't look much. But yes, that's a museum, it's tiny, this is Africa — but it's very important to the Namibians. It's usually closed. I mean — so remote, they get no visitors. You book by appointment and — '

David advanced.

'Come on!'

The museum was a low wooden building, battered by the brutal Benguela winds, at the very end of the promontory. The museum door was shut. The air was somehow cold and hot at the same time. David could feel his skin burning, the sunshine was truly painful now.

Angus turned a handle and pushed. Locked. David stepped alongside, and briskly kicked at the door. It succumbed with ease, the lock shattered.

They were inside. The hot wooden space was full of shelves and cabinets and glass cases ranked along the walls; and three large skulls grinned at them from the top of a large plinth.

'Christ,' said Amy.

Angus explained: 'The Herero Skulls. Fischer had them scraped clean by Herero women, they had to flense the skulls of their own murdered husbands. He wanted to examine them, compare skull sizes. Bless his little callipers. But we need to find — I don't know — where would the Fischer data be — they are here — there must be something here — '

They searched. Frantic and determined, they searched and scoured, they ransacked the dusty display cases, they overturned shelves of old books with titles in Gothic script, flicking desperately through the pages. Die Rehobother Bastards und das Bastardierungsproblem beim Menschen.

But nothing. They sorted and sifted through scientific instruments, somehow gynaecological and ghastly in their pristine steeliness. Nothing. David shunted aside a box of desiccated human bones, feeling guilt and horror as he did so. He was mistreating the evidence of two forgotten genocides, the hideous relics of a lost racial empire.

There was nothing. They were confounded. It was done. The three of them knelt in the centre of the little hut and shared their despair: whispering and quick. Angus was looking at his watch.

'That chopper goes in forty minutes — if we don't get it — '

Amy stared around, her eyes bright and hostile. The Herero Skulls grinned at them, from the tragic plinth in the corner. She coughed the dust and said.

'Horrible place. Horrible. I don't understand, Angus. There is nothing here from Germany, nothing at all, it's all Namibian. German Empire but Namibian. How could the Fischer data be here anyway?'

Angus nodded, his voice low and resigned. 'You're right. It's all Namibian…'

David listened. Saying nothing. The skulls smiled at him, laughing at the Cagot. Was he a Cagot? They were mocking him. He tried to drive the thought from his mind. Focussed himself on the map. The clue.