Spandau Phoenix (8 page)

The Chainnan's Obsession. That's what the KGB chiefs in Berlin had called Rudolf Hess ever since the Nuremberg trials, when he was sentenced to life imprisonment in Spandau.

Four weeks ago Kosov had thought he had received his last call about Spandau's famous Prisoner Number Seven. That was when the Americans had found the old Nazi dead, a lamp cord wrapped around his neck. Suicide, Kosov remembered with a chuckle. That's what the Allied board of inquiry had ruled it. Kosov thought it a damned remarkable suicide for a ninety-three-year-old man. Hess had supposedly hanged himself from a rafter, yet all his doctors agreed that the arthritic old Nazi couldn't lift his arms any higher than his shoulders. The German press had screamed murder, of course. Kosov didn't give a damn if it was murder.

One less German in the world made for a better world, in his view. He was just grateful the old man hadn't died during a Soviet guard month.

Another sharp chest pain made Kosov wince. It was thinking about the damned Germans that caused it. He hated them. The fact that both his father and his grandfather had been killed by Germans probably had something to do with it, but that wasn't all. Behind the Germans'

arrogance, Kosov knew, lurked a childish insecurity, a desperate desire to be liked. But Kosov never gratified it. Because beneath that insecurity seethed something else, something darker. An ancient, tribal desire-a warlike need to dominate. He'd heard the rumors that Gorbachev was softening on the reunification issue, and it made him want to puke.

As far as Kosov was concerned, the day the spineless politicians in Moscow decided to let the Germans reunite was the day the Red army should roll across both Germanys like a tidal wave, smashing everything in its path.

Thinking about Moscow brought Kosov back to Hess. Because on that subject, Moscow Centre was like a shrewish old woman. The Rudolf Hess case held a security classification unique in Kosov's experience; it dated all the way back to the NKVD. And in a bureaucracy where access to information was the very lifeblood of survival, no one he had ever met had ever seen the Hess file. No one but the chairman.

Kosov had no idea why this was so. What he did have was a very short list-a list of names and potential events relating in responses.

to Rudolf Hess which mandated certa' One of those events was illegal entry into Spandau Prison; and the response: immediate notification of the chairman. Kosov felt sure that the fact that Spandau now lay in ruins did not affect his orders at all. He glanced one last time at the scrawled letters on his pad: Hauer, Polizei Captain. Then he stubbed out his cigarette and lifted the red phone.

6.-25 A.M. British Sector. West Berlin

The warm apartment air hit Hans in a wave, flushing his skin, enfolding him like a cocoon. Ilse had already left, he knew it instinctively.

There was no movement in the kitchen, no sound of appliances, no running shower, nothing. Still jumpy, and half-starved, he walked hopefully into the kitchen. He found a note on the refrigerator door, written in Ilse's hurried hand: Wurst in the oven. I love YOU. Back by 18:00-Thank you, Liebchen, he thought, catching the pungent aroma of Weisswurst-Using one of his gloves as a potholder, he removed the hot dish from the oven and placed it on the counter to cool. Then he took a deep breath, bent over, rolled up his pants leg and dug the sheaf of onionskin out of his boot. His pulse quickened as he unfolded the pages in the light. He backed against the stove for heat, plopped a chunk of white sausage into his mouth, and picked up reading where the Russian soldier had surprised him.

... I only hope that long after these events cease to have immediate consequences in our insane world, someone will find these words and learn the obscene truth not only of Himmler, Heydrich, and the rest, but of England@f those who would have sold her honor and ultimately her existence for a chance to sit at Hitler's blood-drenched table. The facts are few, but I have had more time to ponder them than most men would in ten lifetimes. I know how this mission was accomplished, but I do not know why. That is for someone else to learn. I can only point the way. You must follow the Eye.

The Eye is the key to it all!

Hans stopped chewing and held the paper closer to his face.

Sketched below this exhortation was a single, stylized eye.

Gracefully curved, with a lid but no lashes, it stared out from the paper with a strange intensity. It seemed neither masculine nor feminine. It looked mystical somehow. Even a little creepy. He read on: Whatfollows is my story, as best I can remember it.

Hans blinked his eyes. At the beginning of the next paragraph, the narrative suddenly switched to a language he could not understand.

He didn't even recognize it. He stared in puzzlement at the painstakingly blocked characters. Portuguese? he wondered. Italian maybe? He couldn't tell. A few words of German were sprinkled through the gibberish-names mostly-but not enough to get any meaning from.

Frustrated, he walked into the bedroom, folded the pages, and stuffed them underneath the mattress at the foot of his bed. He switched on the television from habit, then kicked his mud-caked boots into an empty corner and dropped his coat on top of them. Ilse would scold him for being lazy, he knew, but after two straight shifts he was simply too exhausted to care.

He ate his breakfast on the bed. As much as the Spandau papers, the thought of his father weighed on his mind. Captain Hauer had asked him why he'd come to Berlin. Hans often wondered that himself Three years it had been now. He hardly thought of Munich anymore. He'd married ilse after just five months here in Berlin. Christ, what a wedding it had been. His mother-still furious at him for becoming a policeman-had refused to attend, and Hauer had not been included in the plans. But he'd shown up anyway, Hans remembered. Hans had spied his rigid, uniformed figure outside the church, standing alone at the end of the block. Hans had pretended not to notice, but Ilse had waved quite deliberately to him as they climbed into the wedding car.

Angry again, Hans wolfed down another sausage and tried to concentrate on the television. A silver-haired windbag of a Frankfurt banker was dispensing financial advice to viewers saddled with the burden of surplus cash. Hans snorted in disgust. At fifteen hundred Deutschemarks per month, a Berlin policeman made barely enough money to pay rent and buy groceries. Without Ilse's income, they would be shivering in a cold-water flat in Kreuzberg. He wanted to switch channels, but the old Siemens black-and-white had been built in the dark ages before remote control. He stayed where he was.

He took another bite of sausage and stared blankly at the screen.

Beneath his stockinged feet, the wrinkled sheaf of papers waited, a tantalizing mystery beckoning him to explore. Yet he had already hit a dead end. The strange, staring eye hovered in his mind, taunting him.

After breakfast, he decided, he would take a shower and then have another go at the papers.

He never made it off the bed. Exhaustion and the warm air overcame him even before he finished the sausage. He slid down the duvet, the unfinished plate balanced precariously on his lap, the Spandau papers hidden just beneath his feet.

10.15 A.m. French Sector. West Berlin

Ilse hated these visits. No matter how many times she saw her Gynakologe, she never got used to it. Ever. The astringent smell of alcohol, the gleaming stainless steel, the cold table, palpating fingers, the overly solicitous voice of the physician, who sometimes peered directly into her eyes from between her upraised legs: all these combined to produce a primal anxiety that solidified like ice in the hollow of her chest. Ilse knew about the necessity of annual checkups, but until she and Hans had begun trying to have a child, she'd skipped more exams than she would care to admit.

All that had changed eighteen months ago. She had been up in the stirrups so many times now that the stress of the ordeal had almost diminished to that of a visit to the dentist-but not quite. Unlike many German women, Ilse possessed an extreme sense of modesty about her body.

She suspected it was because she had never known her mother, but whatever the reason, being forced to expose herself to a stranger, albeit a doctor, for her required a considerable act of will. Only her strong desire to have children allowed her to endure the interminable series of examinations and therapies designed to enhance fertility.

"All done, Frau Apfel," Doctor Grauber said. He handed a slide to his waiting nurse. Ilse heard that hard snap as he stripped off his surgical gloves and raised the lid of the waste bin with his foot. It crashed down, sending gooseflesh racing across her neck and shoulders.

"I'll see you in my office after you've dressed."

Ilse heard the door open and close. The nurse started to help her out of the stirrups, but she quickly raised herself and reached for her clothes.

Dr. Grauber's office was messy but well-appointed, full of books and old medical instruments and framed degrees and the smell of cigars.

Ilse noticed none of this. She was here for one thing-an answer.

Was she pregnant or was she sick? The two possibilities wrestled in her mind. Her instinct said pregnant. She and Hans had been trying for so long now, and the other option was too unnatural to think about.

Her body was strong and supple, lean and hard. Like the flanks of a lioness, Hans said once (as if he knew what a lioness felt like).

How could she be sick? She felt so well.

But she knew. Exterior health was no guarantee of immunity. Ilse had seen two friends younger than she stricken with cancer. One had died, the other had lost a breast. She wondered how Hans would react to something like that. Disfigurement. He would never admit to revulsion, of course, but it would matter. Hans loved her body-worshipped it, really. Ever since their first night together, he had slowly encouraged her until she felt comfortable before him naked.

Now she could turn gracefully about the room like a ballerina, or sometimes just stand silently, still as alabaster.

"That was quick!" Dr. Grauber boomed, striding in and taking a seat behind his chaotic desk.

Ilse pressed her back into the tufted leather sofa. She wanted to be ready, no matter what the diagnosis. As she met the doctor's eyes, a nurse stepped into the office.

She handed him a slip of paper and went out. Grauber glanced at it, sighed, then looked up.

What he saw startled him. The poise and concentration with which Ilse watched him made him forget the slip of paper in his hand. Her blue eyes shone with frank and disarming curiosity, her skin with luminous vitality. She wore little or no makeup-the luxury of youth, Grauber thought-and her hair had that transparent blondness that makes the hands tingle to touch it. But it wasn't all that, he decided.

Ilse Apfel was no film star. He knew a dozen women as striking as she.

It was something other than fine features, deeper than the glow of youth. Not elegance, or earthiness, or even a hint of that intangible scent Grauber called availability.

No, it was, quite simply, grace. Ilse possessed that rare beauty made rarer still by apparent unconsciousness of itself.

When Grauber caught himself admiring her breasts-high and round, more Gallic than Teutonic, he thought-he flushed and looked quickly back at the slip of paper in his hand.

"Well," he coughed. "That's that."

Ilse waited expectantly, too anxious to ask for the verdict.

"Your urine indicates pregnancy," Grauber announced.

"I'd like to draw some blood, of course,'confirm the urine with a beta-subunit test, but I'd say that's just a formality.

Would you like to bring Hans in? I know he'll be excited."

Ilse colored. "Hans didn't come this time."

Grauber raised his eyebrows in surprise. "That's a first.

He's got to be the most concerned husband I've ever met."

The smile faded. "Are you all right, Ilse? You look as though I'd just given you three months to live."

Ilse felt wings beating within her chest. After all her anxiety, she found it hard to accept fulfillment of her deepest hope. "I really didn't expect this," she murmured. "I was afraid to hope for it. My mother died when I was born, you know, and it's ... it's just very important, to me to have a child of my own."

"Well, you've got one started," said Grauber. "Now our job is to see that he-or she-arrives as ordered. I've got a copy of the standard visiting schedule, and there's the matter of . . ."

Ilse heard nothing else. The doctor's news had lifted her spirit to a plane where no mundane detail could intrude.

When the lab technician drew her blood, she felt no needle prick, and on her way out of the office the receptionist had to call her name three times to prevent her leaving without scheduling her next visit.

At the age of twenty-six, her happiness was complete.

11:27 A.M. Pretoria, The Republic of South Africa

Five thousand miles to the south of Germany, two thousand of those below the equator, an old man sentenced to spend half his waking hours in a wheelchair spoke acidly into the intercom recessed into his oaken office desk.

"This is not the time to bother me with business, Pieter."

The man's name was Alfred Horn, and though it was not his native language, he spoke Afrikaans.

"I'm sorry, sir," the intercom replied, "but I believe you might prefer to take this call. It's from Berlin."