Стив Берри - The Kaiser's Web--A Novel

This just kept getting worse.

“Anything interesting?” he asked the carabinero in Spanish, adding a smile.

“ Sí, Senor. Much. The writer of these was a German woman. Proud. But so unhappy.”

He could not care less, except for the fact this stranger knew more than he should. He faced Vergara. “Tell me about Malone and Vitt.”

“They went upstairs when we arrived from Santiago and talked privately. I assume Vitt was reporting what she learned in Santiago. Then they left, saying they were going to see Ada again.”

“Tell me about Santiago.”

“Vitt found the financial records, as you wanted, and the bank confirmed the information. Senor Donoso at Banco del Estado performed perfectly, as I knew he would.”

“And what was your reaction?”

“I told her that Chilean law requires that I make official inquiries to anything that relates to Nazis. I then contacted the Bundesnachrichtendienst and informed them of what had been discovered. I provided them documents by email and requested an official BND inquiry.”

Precisely what he wanted to happen. Federal Intelligence Service experts in Berlin would quickly confirm that all of the information was accurate. Since, after all, it was. Which would add more fuel to the wildfire he was quickly spreading.

Finally, something had gone right.

He’d first met Vergara five years ago and had disliked the Chilean from the start. Men of vague principle and excessive greed disgusted him, and Vergara possessed an overabundance of both.

Not to mention an uncontrollable curiosity.

Vergara would not even have his post but for Theodor Pohl’s intervention with certain Chilean officials. Nowhere, though, in their arrangement was Vergara, or any Chilean, to be privy to so many intimate details, especially those not part of the original plan, like letters kept by an old woman fueled by revenge.

“There is something else,” Vergara said. The minister handed him a handwritten sheet. “This was in the bottom of the container.”

He read Ada’s handwritten words.

Dammit.

What a disaster.

The house adjacent to Lago Girasol was strictly off limits, not something Cotton Malone and Cassiopeia Vitt should ever go near.

Africa the same.

Ada had truly sabotaged everything.

He made a decision.

The kind the East Germans had taught him to make when risk far outweighed reward. A lesson he’d learned long ago.

Nothing is ever gained from recklessness.

So the course was clear.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

Cotton headed into one room, Cassiopeia another.

The house was less than a thousand square feet.

He noticed more of the German décor. A faded porcelain pitcher, painted with a gristmill in a white-and-brown motif. Lamps with Hummel shades in needlepoint. Painted candlesticks. A wooden crucifix on the wall, beneath a little peaked roof, made of cypress or cedar. He’d seen similar memorials across Bavaria.

In the bedroom they found an antique dressing table with a mounted oval mirror. Toiletries and creams lined the top. A dresser was covered in knickknacks that obviously had meaning. Cotton started there, rummaging through the drawers. Lots of clothes but, in the bottom one, he found an old scrapbook with a tattered leather cover. The pages were a stiff linen, the pictures held in place with little black glued corners. He hadn’t seen those in a while. His grandmother had similarly glued old pictures in scrapbooks back in Georgia.

He scanned through the pages.

One immediately caught his attention.

A black-and-white of Adolf Hitler, striking a defiant pose. Not a manufactured image or something created for PR.

A personal photograph.

Ada had said that Hitler once came to her father’s house.

A popular lampoon from the early 1940s came to mind, one that accurately described the exalted German leader. He who rules in the Russian manner, dresses his hair in the French style, trims his moustache English-fashion, and wasn’t born in Germany himself, who teaches us the Roman salute, asks our wives for lots of children but can’t produce any himself—he is the leader of Germany.

Cassiopeia came into the room and saw the photo. “You don’t see that every day.”

He agreed, and kept paging through.

There were lots of old black-and-white pictures of people and places, many fading away with time. One recurring image was of a tall, virile man wearing an SS uniform. No emotion showed on his face, only a blank stare, as if a smile would almost be painful. The shore of a lake loomed in the background, tall trees surrounding him.

Another image caught his eye.

Of children, each around seven to eight years old. Two boys and three girls, dressed as if going to church in suits and skirts, posing together in a happy gathering. He studied their young faces, but none were recognizable as Bormann’s supposed son from the other photos in the hacienda.

He kept perusing.

Another picture dominated a single page.

Two men. The first was the same face from the other photo, this time minus his SS uniform. He wore lederhosen, the leather shorts supported by suspenders joined by an ornamented breast band that displayed a shiny swastika. A light-colored shirt covered his chest, knee-high stockings embraced his legs, a woolen cape draped his shoulders.

This time he flashed a smile.

The other man was short and heavy-chested with sparse black hair. He wore a double-breasted suit with a Nazi armband wrapping his left biceps. Cotton studied the older face closely, noting a contrived smile that showed no teeth, a tight jaw, and a cagey gaze.

He’d seen it before. “Am I right?”

“That’s Marie Eisenhuth’s father, Albert Herzog.”

Which they’d seen at Eisenhuth’s schlöss .

“First the money transfers. Now this.” He stared around at the bedroom. “Chancellor Eisenhuth is not going to like any of this.”

“We need to talk with her.”

“I think we ought to check one more thing first. Ada went to a lot of trouble to steer us to Lago Girasol. We owe her a visit to that house by the lake. Let’s do that tomorrow.”

“You realize it could be a trap.”

The thought had already occurred to him. “We do live a dangerous life.”

She smiled. “That we do.”

They finished their search and left the house, taking the scrapbook with them. Back at the vehicle he noticed something lying on the driver’s seat. Something not there a few minutes ago when they arrived.

A stack of envelopes.

His senses went alert. “Seems our return here was anticipated, too. We were meant to find that body, the scrapbook, and these.”

He removed the rubber band and counted fifty-three. All with South African postmarks, this time in a masculine hand, addressed to Ada in Tilcara. He opened one and, in the cabin lights of the jeep, scanned the handwritten page.

“It’s signed Gerhard.”

“The dates on the envelopes?”

He shuffled through the stack. “All over the place, from the late 1940s to the ’60s.”

“Clearly, she wants us to read these, too,” Cassiopeia said.

He agreed.

But the question for the night was, why?

Cotton woke from a fitful sleep, surfacing through layers of wobbling dreams, and glanced at the luminous dial of his watch: 3:45 A.M. He’d been asleep about two hours, ever since he and Cassiopeia had returned from Tilcara. They’d reported the corpse but decided to keep the scrapbook and the new envelopes to themselves, secreting them within a canvas knapsack found in the jeep and hiding them beneath the bed.

Cassiopeia slept peacefully beside him.

A lot was happening here, and he could not seem to unscramble his thoughts. Why did he persist in spending the prime years of his life traipsing across the globe solving other people’s problems? He’d once been a lawyer in the strangest sense. His clients were not people with problems sitting across from a desk. Instead, he’d represented causes, policies, nations.