Crucified (27 page)

The cannons were for Catholics and Napoleon.

Catholics in case they tried to invade on behalf of the pope.

As for Old Bony, he failed to show.

Tick-tock ...

Far from the madding and the maddening crowd, the clifftop path was all but deserted. Armed with a hand-drawn map, Wyatt snaked along the undulating cliff edge as the hungry tide below undercut the terra firma beneath his shoes.

The Sussex shore had been a haunt for smugglers. Towered over by the humps of the Seven Sisters and the knob of Beachy Head, pirates of old had hauled their contraband in through gaps in the cliff. The tales of these buccaneers provided J. M. Barrie with the inspiration for Captain Hook, and they also underpinned "Little Bo Peep." The "sheep" in that nursery rhyme were in fact Sussex smugglers, and their wagging "tails" were casks of French brandy being dragged in from the sea.

Lore like that cluttered Wyatt's mind as he closed on the lonely cottage ahead. This small home had once stood inland, but a sudden crumbling of the chalk had moved the seaside drop to its front yard. The yard was marked by stone walls that left just enough open space along the new edge for amblers to pass. Unaware that the clock was ticking toward devilry, Wyatt paused at the precipice to experience an epiphany.

Tick-tock . . .

The smell of the sea was in the crisp air. The offshore breeze was bracing. The sky was noisy with the cries of migrant birds landing to rest and feed on shrub berries. There had been a land bridge from here to Europe, until the English Channel relentlessly ate it away. Gazing down at the high tide eighty feet below, Wyatt wondered how deep the water was.

His epiphany was to recall John Donne, whose poem took on deeper meaning here at the rim:

No man is an island,

Entire of itself;

Every man is a piece of the continent,
 

A part of the main.

If a clod be washed away by the sea,
 

Europe is the less.

As well as if a promontory were.

As well as if a manner of thine own
 

Or of thine friend's were.

Each man's death diminishes me,

For I am involved in mankind.

Therefore, send not to know

For whom the bell tolls,

It tolls for thee.

Tick-tock . . .

Turning his back on the sea, Wyatt fished one of his calling cards from his wallet as he walked across the yard toward the front door. The cottage was what the locals called a tile-hung house. Rows of scallop-edged tiles hung like armor over the wood and plaster to protect it against the weather. Set in the door was an eye-level Judas window, like a spyhole into a cell.

Wyatt wondered why it was called a Judas window. Because it betrayed what went on within?

Tick-tock . . .

He reached the door and peeked inside.

Tick . . .

"Bloody hell!"

    
 GERMANY, 1944

Shortly before noon on October 14, Erwin Rommel went to his room in his villa at Herrlingen and changed from the brown jacket he usually wore over his riding breeches into his favorite uniform, his open-collared Afrika Korps tunic. He put on his Blue Max medal, its enamel chipped from the car crash that had nearly killed him four months earlier, and examined the scars left by the crushing of his skull.

At twelve o'clock precisely, a dark green car with a Berlin number plate stopped at the gate to the house. The driver wore the black uniform of the SS. The jackboots of his passengers crunched on the gravel driveway that led to the door.

One was General Wilhelm Burgdorf, a big, red-faced man who came with orders from Hitler. The other was General Ernst Maisel, who was short and skinny, with a long, pointed nose and suspicious eyes.

On July 20, three days after Rommel's car crash, Colonel Graf Schenk von Stauffenberg had planted a briefcase bomb under the conference table at Hitler's Rastenburg headquarters. Luckily for the Fiihrer, someone had inadvertently kicked the case behind a stout oak table leg that shielded him from the blast. Since then, Burgdorf and Maisel had been stalking officers suspected of taking part in the July Plot.

Thousands had died in the purge.

The generals rang the bell and entered the house. In the hall, they exchanged salutes with Rommel.

"Will you stay for lunch?" asked the field marshal's wife.

"No," replied Burgdorf. "This is official business. May we talk in private, Herr Feldmarschall?"

Rommel ushered the men into his ground-floor study.

As soon as the door closed, Burgdorf stated the purpose of their visit: "You have been accused of complicity in the plot on the Fiihrer's life." Then he read out a number of damning statements made by army assassins under Gestapo arrest.

"The Fiihrer offers you a choice between trial for treason and the officer's way out. If you choose public humiliation, you will die at the end of a rope, and your family and staff will suffer. If you choose suicide, your death will be called natural, you'll be given a state funeral and burial at home, and your family will receive a pension. I have the poison with me. It works in three seconds."

Rommel was shaken. So it had come to this. Yes, he had planned to negotiate peace with Churchill to save the Fatherland. But he was not involved in the failed assassination. That, however, meant nothing now. Both acts were considered treason.

Tired and still unsteady from his injuries, he slowly climbed the stairs to his wife's bedroom. "In fifteen minutes, I will be dead," he said calmly, then explained the ultimatum.

Lucie looked faint, but she held back her tears. The former teenage sweethearts embraced for the last time, then Rommel heard her sobbing as he went to inform their son.

Downstairs, a servant helped him into his topcoat and handed him his cap and field marshal's baton. Months ago, back in France, he'd been given a dachshund puppy, and now the dog jumped at him with a bark of joy.

"Shut him in the study," Rommel told his son.

The Desert Fox stepped out into a fine afternoon of autumn colors. The generals were waiting by the garden gate, and as he approached, they snapped their right arms in the Nazi salute.

"Heil
Hitler!" they said.

The SS driver swung open the rear door and stood at attention. Rommel shook hands with his son, then climbed into the back of the Opel. Burgdorf and Maisel joined him, and the doors slammed shut. The driver engaged the clutch and drove up the hill and around the bend toward the next village.

Rommel didn't look back. His eyes stared forward. To occupy his mind, he recalled the stormy night seven months ago when he'd knocked on the door of a house in Munich and solved the Tobruk puzzle . . .

+ + + 

The son of a schoolmaster who taught "modern side" subjects instead of classics, Rommel took no interest in books. He was drawn to the army—he enlisted at eighteen—and after serving in the First World War, he wrote
Infantry Attacks,
a manual on military tactics. When he read, it was always a book on soldierly subjects. While in North Africa, however, he took some interest in local history, and was mildly curious about the Greek and Roman ruins of Cyrenaica. A photograph was snapped of him gazing at bits of Roman pottery dug up by war correspondents. Nazi propagandists spun that into a story that he'd kept up his classics and was a keen archeologist who spent his leisure moments digging for ancient relics. In reality, he'd asked the reporters, "What the hell do you want with all that junk?"

But even if Rommel had been a classical history buff, he wouldn't have known what to make of the relics found in Tobruk. He realized that only an expert versed in the languages of biblical times could unravel the puzzle hidden in the papyrus scrolls he'd brought home with him. That's why he took advantage of this trip to Munich and ventured out on a stormy night to seek the opinion of the Art Historian to the Vatican.

His knock on the door of a well-maintained old Bavarian mansion was answered by a fretting man with a well-groomed Vandyke beard. It was evident from the puffy bags weighing down his bloodshot eyes that he had gone with too little sleep for too many days. Listlessly, the wretch welcomed the visitor into his house, leading him to a magnificent library burnished by its hearth.

"Thank you for seeing me, Herr Professor."

"The honor is mine, Herr Feldmarschall. Excuse my appearance, but I have a dying son. You must have passed the doctor on the road. I'm told my boy will not survive the night."

"I'm sorry."

"You have a son, I believe?"

"Manfred. He's fifteen. If you prefer to be alone, I'll return later this week."

"I'd rather keep occupied. There'll be time enough to worry once you leave."

A flash of lightning electrified the room. Thunder rattled the windows and shook the art in the nooks between the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. As near as Rommel could tell, the miniature galleries advanced through time from prehistoric carvings to paintings by Dali. The gramophone murmured chamber music by Mozart.

"You have something to show me, Herr Feldmarschall?"

The waterproof case was basically a flatfish rectangle hanging from a handle. Opening it, Rommel extracted a page in a glass frame.

"Our bombing of Tobruk cracked apart an ancient wall. Inside was a pottery jar surrounded by sand. The jar contained a papyrus map in a script unknown to me. I brought it to Germany and would like to know what it says."

The art historian donned a pince-nez. He set the papyrus down on a table and turned on a gooseneck lamp. When he looked up, amazement creased his face.

"The script is Aramaic, the colloquial language of Jews in the time of Jesus. The city is Jerusalem in the Second Temple Period."

"What's the purpose of the map?"

"That's intriguing. This document," the art historian said,

"appears to be a treasure map."

A blackboard on an easel sloped beside the table. With a piece of chalk, the art historian sketched a rough version of the city drawn on the papyrus:

"Jerusalem sits in the Hills of Judea, where the Hinnom Valley and the Kidron Valley meet. The city was raised on the crest of the ridge that forms the watershed between those hills and the Judean Desert to the east. The site made Jerusalem easy to defend.

Rommel nodded. He was an expert at selecting a battle-ground.

"The number 1 marks the Garden of Gethsemane, at the foot of the Mount of Olives. That's where Judas betrayed Jesus with a kiss. The rectangle to the left is the Temple Mount as it was on the day Christ was crucified. The map says the Roman governor condemned him to death at the Praetorium, which I've marked with a 2. The arc to the north is the Second Wall of Jerusalem. It turns south to join the First Wall after it jogs around points 3 and 4. Though it's not on your papyrus, I've dotted in the present-day route of the Via Dolorosa, the path that we believe Jesus followed to his execution on Golgotha, outside the city walls.

"I've marked Golgotha as number 3, and the nearby tomb of Jesus is number 4."

"Are they on the papyrus?"

"Both are described in the script. The quarry outside Jerusalem's walls dates back to the First Temple. The hill on the edge of the gouge in the ground was ideal for executions, and burial caves were bored into the slopes of the pit. Those tombs were sealed with stones rolled across their mouths."

"Is that the focus of the map? The spots where Jesus was betrayed, crucified, and buried?"

"No, the map centers on what I've marked as number 5.

That place is Haceldama, the site where both the Bible and this papyrus say Judas Iscariot died."

The art expert fetched a leather-bound Bible from his bookshelves and flipped through its pages.

"We have two versions of how Judas Iscariot died. The Gospel of Matthew says:

And when morning was come, all the chief priests and
ancients of the people took counsel against Jesus, that they
might put him to death.