I Am Pilgrim (65 page)

Wondering if I had been too worried about the swastikas and had deluded myself, I moved into the

changing rooms. Hope spiked when I found a switch under a wooden bench – only to crash when I

found it worked the underfloor heating.

From there, I headed towards the showers but decided to sweep the toilet first. I was fast running

out of possibilities.

The ceilings and floor were clear, as were three of the walls, but on the one which featured a handbasin and a mirrored cabinet above it, I got a signal.

There were no light switches or power points on that wall, but the flickering needle didn’t excite

me: I guessed there was a small light inside the cabinet. I opened the mirrored door and, apart from an old toothbrush, found nothing.

Using the meter, I traced the wiring along the plaster until I came to a right angle: the wall featuring the toilet and cistern stopped me. It was strange – an electrical cable ran straight along a side wall and disappeared into a corner. What was behind the toilet? I wondered. I tapped the wall – it was stone block or brick. Solid.

I went back to the cabinet and used the meter to search around it. The wire definitely terminated behind the cabinet. It was basically a wooden box, and I looked at it carefully: it was old, almost certainly fitted when the house was first built – but the mirror was new. I wondered if a maintenance guy – Gianfranco – had been asked to replace the mirror and, when he took the cabinet off the wall,

had found something far more interesting behind it.

Using the flashlight on my key-ring and feeling with my fingers, I searched the edges of the box –

if there was a switch behind it, there had to be a way to access it easily. It wasn’t apparent; and I was starting to think of unscrewing the cupboard from the wall – or just getting a hammer from the workshop and ripping it off – when I found a small, ingenious lever hidden under the bottom edge.

I pulled it, the cabinet moved out from the wall and I could hinge it upwards: a perfect piece of German engineering.

Recessed into the wall behind was a brass button with a swastika etched into it. I pressed it.

Chapter Fifty

AN ELECTRIC MOTOR whirred and the entire wall holding the toilet and cistern pivoted open. It was masterly in the way it was built – the wall itself was made of stone blocks and must have weighed a

ton, while all the water and sewage pipes were able to move without being torn apart.

Just inside the newly opened cavity was a large niche which housed the electric motor that operated

the mechanism. A set of stone steps – broad and beautifully constructed – led down into gloom. I saw three brass switches on the wall and figured they were for lights, but I didn’t flick them – I had no idea what might be ahead of me and, like any covert agent, I knew that, in darkness, lay safety. I considered finding the button which would close the wall behind me, but rejected the idea. It was safer to leave it open. If I had to run like hell back towards it, I didn’t want to waste time fumbling for a switch and waiting for a door to open. It was a mistake.

I walked silently down the steps and entered a tunnel tall enough to stand upright in, well built and properly drained, with flagstones on the floor and a ventilation shaft built into the roof. The air was fresh and sweet.

The thin beam of my flashlight shone ahead and, before it was swallowed by the blackness, I could

see that the tunnel was hewn out of solid rock. Somewhere ahead – through the cliff and far below the sweeping lawns – I was certain it would connect to the mansion.

I moved forward, and my weak finger of light caught a glint of bronze on the wall. As I got closer,

I realized it was a plaque set into the rock. My German was rusty but it was good enough for the purpose. With sinking heart, I read: ‘By the Grace of Almighty God, between the years 1946 and 1949, the following men – proud soldiers of the
Reich
– designed, engineered and built this house.’

It then listed their names, military rank and the job they had undertaken during the construction. I saw that most of them were members of the Waffen SS – the black-shirted, armed wing of the Nazi

Party – and as I stood a million miles from safety the photo of the mother and her kids on their way to the gas chamber rose before me. It was a section of the SS that had operated the death camps.

At the bottom of the plaque was the name of the group that had funded and organized the construction of the house. It was called Stille Hilfe – Silent Help – and it confirmed what I had suspected ever since I had seen the swastikas on the wall of the library.

Stille Hilfe was an organization – ODESSA was reputedly another – that had helped fugitive Nazis,

primarily senior members of the SS, to escape from Europe. It was one of the best clandestine networks ever established and you couldn’t have worked as an intelligence agent in Berlin and not have heard of it. My memory was that they had provided money, fake passports and transport along

secret routes that were known as ‘ratlines’. I was certain the mansion had been built as the terminus to one of those lines, an embarkation point to take the fugitives and their families to Egypt, America, Australia and, mostly, South America.

I took a breath and thought how wrong I had been: despite the ventilation system, the air wasn’t fresh and sweet at all. It was rank and foul, and I hurried forward, wanting to be done with the place and the terrible memory of the men who had once escaped down the tunnel.

Up ahead, the beam from the flashlight showed that I was approaching the end of the tunnel. I was

expecting flights of steep stairs, so it took me a moment to realize I had underestimated the German soldiers’ engineering skills: it was an elevator.

Chapter Fifty-one

THE SMALL ELEVATOR car rose up the shaft fast and silent. I was on edge – I had no idea where inside the house it would stop and if anyone would be at home.

It jerked to a halt and I heard the sound of an electric motor. When the door finally opened I saw

what it operated; the sheet-rock wall of a large linen closet concealing the elevator had slid aside. I stepped into the gloom, moved fast between shelves of neatly pressed sheets and quietly cracked open a door.

I looked out into a corridor. I was on the second floor, a part of the house I had never seen before. I could have left then – I had found the secret way into the mansion – but I heard a voice, muffled and unrecognizable because of the distance, and slipped into the long hallway.

The sound stopped, but I kept creeping forward until I found myself facing the grand staircase. On

the far side, a door into the master bedroom suite was partly open.

From inside, I heard the voice again: it was Cameron, and it occurred to me that she might be talking quietly to herself, spending time in the bedroom with the memory of her husband. I remembered how she had said that if she laid on the bed she could smell him and imagine that he would still be there. Then I heard a second voice.

It was a woman’s – a young American from the Midwest by the sound of it. She was saying something about a restaurant when she stopped abruptly.

‘What’s that?’ she asked.

‘I didn’t hear anything,’ Cameron replied.

‘No, not a sound – there’s a draught.’

She was right – the wind was coming along the tunnel, up the elevator shaft and seeping out of the

linen closet.

‘Did you leave the door in the boat shed open?’ Cameron asked.

‘Of course not,’ the other woman said.

They both knew about the tunnel – so much for Cameron’s Oscar-winning performance about loving her husband.

‘Maybe the wind’s blown open one of the doors downstairs,’ Cameron said. ‘There’s a storm coming in.’

‘I don’t know, I’m just gonna have a look around.’

‘I thought we were going to go to bed,’ Cameron replied.

‘We are – it’ll only take a minute.’

I heard a drawer being opened then a metallic click. From long and unhappy experience, I knew the

sound of a pistol being cocked when I heard it, and I turned and headed fast towards the linen closet.

The corridor was too long and I realized immediately that, when the unknown woman stepped out

of the bedroom, she would see me. I pivoted left, opened a door and stepped inside a guest bedroom. I closed the door silently and, with my heart racing, stood in the unlit space, hoping that she would go down the grand staircase.

She didn’t. I heard footsteps approaching, and I prepared myself to take her down and disarm her

the moment the door opened. She passed by – heading for the back stairs, I figured – and I gave her a minute before I slid back into the corridor.

It was empty, and I moved fast to the linen closet, watched the secret wall slide shut behind me and waited for the elevator to descend towards the tunnel. Only then did I lean against the wall and concentrate, trying to imprint the exact sound and tone of the woman’s voice on my memory.

In reality, I needn’t have bothered – strangely, it was the smell of gardenias that turned out to be significant.

Chapter Fifty-two

I WALKED ALONG the marina, shoulders bent into a fast-rising wind and my face hit by the spray being whipped off the ranks of advancing whitecaps. The summer storm – wild and unpredictable – was sweeping in, and already thunderheads were appearing overhead and flashes of lightning lit the horizon.

The ride back across the bay from the French House had been a battle against the wind and tide.

When we reached the marina, even the skipper had looked green around the edges and had told me,

laughing, that maybe I had got the better part of the bargain after all. I paid him and headed somewhat unsteadily towards the waterfront promenade.

At the end of the bay I found what I had seen a few days earlier: a ghetto of garages and down-at-

heel shops which specialized in renting scooters and mopeds to the legions of tourists. I walked into the busiest of the outfits – a man was far less likely to be remembered among a crowd – identified the most common of the bikes, a Vespa step-through, gave an overworked attendant my licence and passport details and rode out into the encroaching storm.

I made one stop – at a shop selling mobile phones and other small electronic devices. I scanned the

display counter, pointed out what I needed and bought two of them.

Around the corner, in a deserted alley, I halted at a rutted section of road and smeared the licence tags with mud to make them indecipherable. It was far safer than removing them – if a traffic cop were to stop me and complain that the tags were illegible, I would just shrug and say I had no idea.

The purpose of the scooter was simple: to provide a fast escape in case things went wrong.

For that reason, it had to be parked at the back of Cumali’s house, so, having made my way down to

the old port, I circled behind the huge building housing Gul & Sons, Marina and Shipwrights and turned into a narrow road which led to the loading bays at the rear. Everything was closed for the evening and, by good luck, there were no other buildings overlooking the area. I parked the Vespa behind a row of garbage skips hard up against the brick wall that formed the rear perimeter of Cumali’s property, and hidden by the night stood on the saddle.

As the first drops of rain splattered around me, the wind moaning through the steel roof of Gul’s

warehouse-style premises, I leapt up, grabbed the top of the wall, hauled myself up and moved fast along the top of it.

Twelve feet above the ground the wind was worse, and I had to use all my concentration to ignore

the peals of thunder and keep my footing as I headed for Cumali’s garage.

I clambered on to the roof, crouched low and crossed the rain-slicked tiles. From there, it was a jump across a small void to the back of the house and a grab on to an ornate iron grille that secured a second-floor window. I’m not as young as I used to be – or as fit – but I still had no difficulty in shimmying up a tangle of old pipes and getting on to the pitched roof of the home.

I knelt in the darkness, removed four terracotta tiles and dropped down into the attic space. It was unlined, unlived in, and I was pleased to see that Cumali used it as storage – that meant there would be an access panel, and it relieved me of the necessity of kicking my way through her ceiling.

Without replacing the tiles, I moved slowly through the attic and let my eyes become accustomed to

the gloom. Against one wall I saw a folding ladder and knew I had located the access panel. Gingerly, I lifted it a fraction and stared down into the stairwell. I was looking for the telltale red blink of a sensor, but there was nothing and I knew there was no burglar alarm.

I opened the panel, dropped the ladder silently and slipped down into Cumali’s dark and silent house.

I froze.

I wasn’t alone. It was the merest hint of movement, a muffled sound – maybe a foot falling on a wooden floor – but I registered it as coming from inside the room at the front of the house. Cumali’s bedroom, I figured.

Was it possible she hadn’t gone to Milas at all? In that case, where was her son? Could somebody

else be staying in the house – the nanny, for instance? I had no answers, but I had a stopgap solution –

I pulled the Beretta out of my waistband and crept silently towards the door.

It was open a crack, but there was next to no light coming from inside. If it was Cumali I was sunk, but anybody else and I had a fighting chance – the likelihood of someone being able to describe me in the dark, taken by surprise and with their heart in their throat, was so low as to be negligible. I just had to remember not to speak – my accent would narrow the field of suspects to a fraction.