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

No, she had not. A life of reason, ideals, and purpose had shifted in the blink of an eye into vengeance, fanaticism, and destiny. He thought of Voltaire’s words. Often the prudent, far from making their destinies, succumb to them. It is destiny which makes them prudent.

Gerhard Schüb had once again disappeared. No mention was made that he’d killed Theodor Pohl. That had been deemed best since what to do with him might have proven vexing. He wasn’t exactly a war criminal, but he wasn’t a bystander, either. He’d killed Pohl in cold blood. But a trial would only aggravate an already open sore. So they’d concocted a lie that Josef Engle murdered Pohl, Cotton killed Engle, and Marie Eisenhuth killed herself. Better to leave her death a suicide, as it cemented the already growing sentiment that she carried no blame for anything. Kurt Eisenhuth, though a witness to it all, had remained silent and pledged that he always would. He mourned his wife and regretted his mistakes, preferring now simply to be left alone.

Danny Daniels had been most appreciative, thanking them repeatedly and assuring them both that he owed them.

Big time.

That he did.

Of course, they could have walked away at any moment, but neither one of them had. It wasn’t their nature. And as much as he hated the risks, he loved the challenge and, secretly, he’d been grateful for the opportunity to play the game one more time. Stephanie Nelle once told him, Even if you’re down you can recover, as long as you’re in the game.

Damn right.

One thing was certain, though.

Everything ended with Marie Eisenhuth’s death.

Time had finally cleansed the world of all the demented souls Germany had spawned during the 1930s and ’40s. Those original participants were all dead. The legacy disgraced. The last vestige of some grandiose scheme now lying in the grave before him.

He thought back to 1933.

A Sunday in August when the German people were asked to elect a new leader. As in every election since, including the one that was now stalled, the voting was preceded by a cacophony of rhetoric, the tone then urging everyone to elect Adolf Hitler. What was lost from Hitler’s victory that Sunday, what history notes only in footnotes, was that four million Germans said nein. He marveled at the courage it took for those four million, doubtful of their future and afraid of retribution, to vote no.

Yet they had.

“Time to go,” he said.

He turned and started back to the car.

Cassiopeia walked beside him.

She looked lovely, her dark hair pulled back. He hadn’t liked her when they first met, her haughty allure too much trouble for a man his age. But he’d come to know that she was a good woman. Being with her was a pleasure. Thankfully, she wasn’t the type who required constant stroking.

Neither was he, for that matter.

They made it back to the car, and he took in the scene from the precipice. Mountains ringed the horizon to the south. Pinewoods framed spent fields, and a lake shimmered in the bright sun. The air was clean and fresh, as if nature were signaling that all of the maladies from the past were gone and a new day had arrived. In a few months winter would blanket everything with snow, then spring would remove the white shroud allowing, once again, the sun to work its magic.

A cycle.

As clear there as in politics.

Good, then bad, then good, then more bad, more good.

He remembered telling Stephanie when he retired that he was fed up with the nonsense. A change in habits must surely lead to a change of thoughts. There had to be a calmer place. She’d smiled at his naïveté and promptly explained that so long as the earth was inhabited by people, there would be no calm place. The game was the same everywhere: Only the players changed, not the rules, not the stakes, not the risks—only the players.

And again she was right.

He reached for the door handle and opened Cassiopeia’s door.

Before she climbed inside, he drew her close. She laid her hands against his chest, sliding them upward around his neck, placing her face in the hollow of his shoulder.

Which felt really good.

In her ear, he whispered, “I love you.”

WRITER’S NOTE

This book took advantage of the many trips Elizabeth and I have made to Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. I did not travel to Chile or South Africa. One day we’ll make it there, but others I know did visit both and I was able to learn a great deal from them. Overall, though, the various locales in the novel—Cologne, the Chilean lake district, Santiago, Hesse, Bremen, the Free State, Worms, Munich, Frankfurt, and Lugano—are faithfully represented. Astute readers will notice a similarity between this novel and The Devil’s Gold, a novella I published in 2011. That story was then intended as a lead-in to my novel The Jefferson Key, introducing the character Jonathan Wyatt. But I always planned for that novella to serve a double duty, becoming a prequel to another tale entirely.

That story is this one.

Time now to separate fact from fiction.

The swastika described in chapter 6 is based on one that existed in a remote pine forest of northeastern Germany, the trees planted sometime around 1938. Eventually they matured and each autumn revealed themselves in a distinct shape, only from the air, in multicolor. They were first noticed in 1992 and eventually destroyed in 2000.

All of the details regarding German elections (chapters 12 and 35) are accurate. Their political system is quite different from that in the United States.

The plane crash described in chapter 38 happened, just not on June 14, but on September 8, 1974, a direct result of a terrorist’s bomb.

The book Five Love Languages exists (chapter 13). Written by Gary Chapman, it was first published in 1992 and became a #1 New York Times hit. It remains popular, still appearing, from time to time, on the bestseller lists (Elizabeth and I have also taken the quiz at the end, with results similar to those of Cotton and Cassiopeia).

Dachau is located just north of Munich and was Hitler’s first concentration camp. All of the information detailed in chapter 21, including the newspaper accounts, the support local Germans showed for the camp, the contempt some of them showed for the prisoners, and the books denying the Holocaust are real.

The various letters from the Orange Free State depicting life there in the 1940s and ’50s were taken from actual accounts (chapters 29, 33, and 39).

The tale of what happened inside the Führerbunker (chapter 8) is based on historical record. It’s important to note that we will never know exactly what happened there. All of the eyewitnesses later contradicted one another, and many later totally recanted their statements. The most definitive source, Hugh Trevor-Roper’s Last Days of Hitler (1947), is flawed. Roper relied heavily on war reports filed by British, American, and Canadian intelligence officers. He never interviewed anyone who’d actually been in the bunker, save for a few German detainees in American custody, who had every reason to lie. He also had no access to the Soviet archives, which only became available after 1991. Subsequent investigations have shown that much of what Trevor-Roper reported may not be correct.

Did Hitler die in the bunker?

Some say no.

I went with yes for this novel. But the addition of a blue dress that was wet, then dry, is purely my invention (chapter 8). The presence of das Leck, a Soviet spy supposedly inside the bunker, has been postulated by historians for decades (chapter 64). I decided to agree with them. It would certainly explain how Stalin knew for certain that Hitler was dead.