Greg Iles - Spandau Phoenix

The Duke of Hamilton maintained his attitude of skepticism throughout the brief interview, but before he left the hospital, he issued orders that the prisoner be moved to a secret location and held under double guard.

A talebearer revealeth secrets: but he that is of a faithful spirit concealeth the matter.

PROVERBS 11.13

The wrecking ball arced slowly across the snow-carpeted courtyard and smashed into the last building left on the prison grounds, launching bricks through the air like moss-covered mortar rounds. Spandau Prison, the brooding red-brick fortress that had stood for over a century and housed the most notorious Nazi war criminals for the past forty years, was being leveled in a single day.

The last inmate of Spandau, Rudolf Hess, was dead. He had committed suicide just four weeks ago, relieving the West German government of the burden of one million pounds sterling it paid each year to maintain the aged Nazi’s isolated captivity. In a rare display of solidarity, France, Great Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union—the former Allies who guarded Spandau by monthly turns—had agreed that the prison should be destroyed as quickly as possible, to prevent its becoming a shrine to neo-Nazi fanatics.

Throughout the day, crowds had gathered in the cold to watch the demolition. Because Spandau stood in the British sector of Berlin, it fell to the Royal Engineers to carry out this formidable job. At first light an explosives team brought down the main structure like a collapsing house of cards. Then, after the dust settled into the snow, bulldozers and wrecking cranes moved in. They pulverized the prison’s masonry, dismembered its iron skeleton, and piled the remains into huge mounds that looked all too familiar to Berliners of a certain age.

This year Berlin was 750 years old. All across the city massive construction and restoration projects had been proceeding apace in celebration of the historic anniversary. Yet this grim fortress, the Berliners knew, would never rise again. For years they had passed this way as they went about their business, rarely giving a thought to this last stubborn symbol of what, in the glow of glasnost , seemed ancient history. But now that Spandau’s forbidding battlements no longer darkened the Wilhelmstrasse skyline, they stopped to ponder its ghosts.

By dusk, only the prison heating plant still stood, its smokestack painted in stark relief against the gunmetal clouds. A wrecking-crane drew back its mammoth concrete ball. The stack trembled, as if waiting for the final blow. The ball swung slowly through its arc, then struck like a bomb. The smokestack exploded into a cloud of brick and dust, showering what had been the prison kitchen only minutes before.

A sharp cheer cut through the din of heavy diesel motors. It came from beyond the cordoned perimeter. The cheer was not for the eradication of Spandau particularly, but rather a spontaneous human expression of awe at the sight of large-scale destruction. Irritated by the spectators, a French corporal gestured for some German policemen to help him disperse the crowd. Excellent hand signals quickly bridged the language barrier, and with trademark efficiency the Berlin Polizei went to work.

“ Achtung! ” they bellowed. “Go home! Haue ab! This area is clearly marked as dangerous! Move on! It’s too cold for gawking! Nothing here but brick and stone!”

These efforts convinced the casually curious, who continued home with a story of minor interest to tell over dinner. But others were not so easily diverted. Several old men lingered across the busy street, their breath steaming in the cold. Some feigned boredom, others stared openly at the wrecked prison or glanced furtively at the others who had stayed behind. A stubborn knot of young toughs—dubbed “skinheads” because of their ritually shaven scalps—swaggered up to the floodlit prison gate to shout Nazi slogans at the British troops.

They did not go unnoticed. Every passerby who had shown more than a casual interest in the wrecking operation had been photographed today. Inside the trailer being used to coordinate the demolition, a Russian corporal carefully clicked off two telephoto exposures of every person who remained on the block after the German police moved in. Within the hour these photographs would find their way into KGB caserooms in East Berlin, where they would be digitized, fed into a massive database, and run through a formidable electronic gauntlet. Intelligence agents, Jewish fanatics, radical journalists, surviving Nazis: each exotic species would be painstakingly identified and catalogued, and any unknowns handed over to the East German secret police—the notorious Stasi—to be manually compared against their files.

These steps would consume priceless computer time and many man-hours of work by the East Germans, but Moscow didn’t mind asking. The destruction of Spandau was anything but routine to the KGB. Lavrenti Beria himself, chief of the brutal NKVD under Stalin, had passed a special directive down through the successive heads of the cheka , defining the importance of Spandau’s inmates to unsolved cases. And on this evening—thirty-four years after Beria’s death by firing squad—only one of those cases remained open. Rudolf Hess. The current chief of the KGB did not intend to leave it that way.

A little way up the Wilhelmstrasse, perched motionless on a low brick wall, a sentinel even more vigilant than the Russians watched the Germans clear the street. Dressed as a laborer and almost seventy years old, the watcher had the chiseled face of a hawk, and he stared with bright, unblinking eyes. He needed no camera. His brain instantaneously recorded each face that appeared in the street, making associations and judgments no computer ever could.

His name was Jonas Stern. For twelve years Stern had not left the State of Israel; indeed, no one knew that he was in Germany now. But yesterday he had paid out of his own pocket to travel to this country he hated beyond all thought. He had known about Spandau’s destruction, of course, they all did. But something deeper had drawn him here. Three days ago—as he carried water from the kibbutz well to his small shack on the edge of the Negev desert—something bilious had risen from his core and driven him to this place. Stern had not resisted. Such premonitions came infrequently, and experience had taught him they were not to be ignored.

Watching the bulwarked prison being crushed into powder, he felt opposing waves of triumph and guilt roll through his chest. He had known—he knew —men and women who had passed through Spandau on their way to the death factories of Mauthausen and Birkenau. Part of him wished the prison could remain standing, as a monument to those souls, and to the punishment meted out to their murderers.

Punishment , he thought, but not justice. Never justice .

Stern reached into a worn leather bag at his side and withdrew an orange. He peeled it while he watched the demolition. The light was almost gone. In the distance a huge yellow crane backed too quickly across the prison courtyard. Stern tensed as the flagstones cracked like brittle bones.

Ten minutes later the mechanical monsters ground to a screeching halt. While the senior British officer issued his dismissal orders, a pale yellow Berlin city bus rumbled up to the prison, headlights cutting through the lightly falling snow. The moment it stopped, twenty-four soldiers dressed in a potpourri of uniforms spilled into the darkening prison yard and broke into four groups of six. These soldiers represented a compromise typical of the farcical Four Power administration of Spandau. The normal month-long guard tours were handled by rota, and went off with a minimum of friction. But the destruction of the prison, like every previous disruption of routine, had brought chaos. First the Russians had refused to accept German police security at the prison. Then—because no Allied nation trusted any of its “allies” to guard Spandau’s ruins alone—they decided they would all do it, with a token detachment of West Berlin police along to keep up appearances. While the Royal Engineers boarded the idling bus, the NCO’s of the four guard details deployed their men throughout the compound.