The Fellowship (37 page)

Wolf was the first to hear the
approaching footsteps on the brickwork. Far too light for someone in jackboots.

A sickening crun
ch cut through the white noise. Wolf did not see what heavy object struck Fleischer, but he heard the man’s blood spatter on the ground near him. Zimmer aimed his Luger and fired several shots where Fleischer had last stood. A swarm of shadows emerged from the archways on the far side of the plaza.

“Into the church,” the
Gestapo agent commanded with genuine fear in his voice. Wolf obeyed before he could think, pulling Lang with him toward the center of the portico, groping blindly for the oversized arched doorway. His right hand found the latch on the right-most door, and to his relief, it opened.

The three survivors
found themselves inside a modest house of worship. Rows of lit prayer candles provided the only source of light. Several marble Greek-style columns flanked a handful of wooden pews. Rambling assortments of crucifixes were mounted on the walls. Bronze, silver, copper, wood. Wolf had never seen so many in one place.

Zimmer
sealed the doors behind them, quickly locating the barricade plank and heaving it across a pair of enormous steel brackets. He turned, walking past the boys, reloading his Luger with a fresh clip. His eyes searched the far end of the sanctuary. “It’s here,” he said. “Hidden beneath the altar, probably. Tear the place apart.”

Zimmer would not be content, it seemed, to escape with his life. He would deliver Himmler’s prize at all costs.

The door groaned behind them as some outside force pushed against the barricade. Zimmer spun, firing two shots through the double doors. Lang, having narrowly missed being shot, lost his balance, falling backwards against the wall.

Wolf’s chance was now. He unsheathed the dagger
from his belt.  The one that Nagel had awarded him upon his sudden graduation from the Reich School. The blade shimmered in the candlelight, as did the inscription. 

The
glint of steel flickered in the Gestapo agent’s peripheral vision. Zimmer swayed left as Wolf lunged forward – fast, but not quite fast enough. A rush of warmth on his hand and wrists confirmed that the blade had found its mark. The inspector stumbled backwards.

Wolf turned and straighten
ed himself, looking Zimmer in the eye. A flicker of hatred flashed in the Nazi’s eyes. Zimmer exhaled unnaturally. His chin dropped, and Wolf watched as his chest ventilated for the last time.

The inspector dropped to the floor.
A hooded figure stood behind his corpse, cradling a machine gun. A simple wooden cross hung from his neck. Others emerged from the sanctuary shadows.

Wolf had no fear. His core was filled with
indescribable warmth. He unstrapped his helmet and let it fall to the floor. His mind was suddenly filled with light. He staggered, blinded, groping for a wooden pew with which to stabilize himself. His ears filled with a chorus of excited voices, although they sounded as if they were far away.

In the
next moment he was somehow outside himself. He saw the top of his own head, white-blonde hair drenched with sweat. Arms outstretched at his sides, palms facing the altar, as if warming himself by some unseen fire. He went higher, hovering near the ceiling. He floated over the church’s center aisle. He watched as the witnesses laid down their weapons and, one by one, removed their hoods in wonder.

And now he could see his own face. Streaks of red
flowed from his eyes. Coin-sized wounds opened in the center of his palms. And he heard their cries. “
Stimmate
!” they cried out. “Stigmata!”

Vatican City

January
4, 1943

Sebastian Wolf woke in a room filled with canary-hued sunlight. The palms of his hands stung.  A balding man stood over him, pressing a cool cloth against his forehead. He wore expensive-looking wire-frame glasses and a stethoscope around his neck.

“
Good morning,” he said in English. “Can you understand me?”

Wolf lifted his head. He was on a hospital bed, dressed in a white linen gown. The smell of the man’s
cologne made him woozy. He rested his head back on the pillow, noting the fine tailoring on the man’s gray double-breasted suit.

Wolf cleared his throat and found his voice.
“Where am I?” he asked, staying in English.

“
Vatican City. I am Dr. Enzo Marchesi.”

Vatican City? That was several hours southwest of Venice. The last thing Wolf remembered, he had been floating above himself in S
an Giacometto, the old market church.

A nurse appeared at his side, holding something that looked like a crop duster. She poked the tip under his gown and began pumping white powder that immediately went airborne, covering Wolf’s
torso, neck and face with white flakes.

“She spray you with DDT,” the doctor explained as the woman blasted Wolf’s scalp. “It’s a…a
chimica
.”

Wolf knew what it was. Farmers used it for pest control.
He could only guess that this was some sort of routine delousing procedure for new hospital patients.

He
drew his arms over his eyes, shielding himself with the white linen fabric until the powder had settled and the nurse had gone. As he uncrossed his arms, he took note of his hands. Scabs were forming in the center of his palms.

He remembered the
hooded men in the old church. The Black Order? They had pointed at him and shouted,
stigmata
. It was like a dream.

He looked up at Dr.
Enzo Marchesi. “Am I sick?”

The doctor
shrugged. “Difficult to say. Every year I must travel to see people like you. The Holy See wants to know the reason for the bleeding. Sometimes they have skin disease. Sometimes they are fakers. So far, only one that I could not explain.”

“Who was that?”

“Padre Pio. You have heard of him?”

Wolf shook his head
wearily.

“
Very famous priest. For 27 years Padre Pio has had the bleeding in his hands and eyes. And yet, I cannot find anything wrong with him. So they think it is a real stigmata. He is like a living saint. Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t.”

The doctor bent low, holding his stethoscope to Wolf’s chest for several moments before
rising up again. He turned, retrieving something from a nearby table.

“
And then there is you,” the doctor went on. “The bleeding comes in a very humble but very old church. In front of many credible witnesses. They drop guns, fall to their knees and pray. They spare your life. And the most horrible thing? You are a Nazi.”

“My friend,” Wolf said. “
Where is he?”

“Shhh.
Just rest.” The doctor shook his head, took Wolf’s right hand in his, and turned it so that the wounds faced the ceiling. “These I will treat with almond oil, just like in the time of Jesus.”  He held an oil dropper over the hand and squeezed two drops over the wound. A shock of pain went up Wolf’s hand and wrist.  He bolted up, straining against leather straps that bound him to the bed.

“Why am I restrained?” he demanded
. “Germany and Italy are allies!”

The doctor
shrugged. “They tell me nothing,” he said as he seized Wolf’s other hand and dropped oil onto it. “But you are not in Italy. You are in Vatican City. Inside Rome, yes, but Vatican City is a sovereign nation.”

Wolf
tried to protest, but the doctor seized the opportunity to slip a spoonful of foul, pulpy goop into his mouth. Wolf leaned to the side to spit it out. The doctor pressed one hand over Wolf’s mouth, and the other behind his head. He was deceptively strong.

Wolf finally swallowed. The doctor released him, leaving Wolf gasping for breath.

“Opium poppy,” the doctor explained. He picked up his medical bag and grinned as he headed for the door. “You will have good dreams now.”

*

He was in a vast library, surrounded by overflowing bookshelves that spiraled upwards toward a massive domed ceiling. Sunlight streamed in from an oval oculus in the dome’s center. Wind rushed in and out of the room every few seconds with regularity, its force gently rattling the bookshelves as if the structure itself were alive and breathing. 

“Excuse me,” someone said.
Wolf looked up. The voice belonged to a raven-haired librarian standing behind a reference desk.

He
straightened himself and puffed up his chest a little. He felt naked in the white linens. Where was his uniform?

“I remember you,” she
said.

Wolf could not place her.
“Where did we meet?”

“Here, silly. You were outside bur
ning books with your friends.”

She was mistaken. Wolf was very young during the time of the book burnings, and his mother would not let him go. He
blushed nevertheless. He surveyed the girl’s straight teeth and thin, symmetrical eyebrows that had been plucked into gentle curves over her green eyes. He leaned over the desk so that he did not have to speak so loudly.

“Excuse me,” he said.
“I’m looking for something.”

Gazing
into her eyes made him forget why he had come. Girls were not allowed at the academy, and he had never even had a girlfriend.

“What do you want?”

“I’m looking for books by Karl Landsteiner,” Wolf said in a quiet voice.

“The
scientist?”

“
You know him?”

“Everyone knows who Landsteiner is.” The girl walked to a large set of files and opened the drawer marked “K.” Ten seconds later, she shook her head. “I’m
sorry. He’s still on the list.”

“List?”

“You know. The forbidden authors list.”

“Are you positive? All the German researchers talk about Landsteiner.”

“They’re probably not supposed to.”

“True.
It’s forbidden.”

She shrugged. “One minute an author is on the shelf, and the next minute, they are on the list. A few minutes later, they are in the room
.”

“The room?”

“Where books go when their authors are on the list.”

“Then I should b
e authorized to see the room.”

“You
should?”

“Yes. I’m with the
Ahnenerbe.”

She looked him up and down.
“Then why aren’t you in uniform?”

“
I don’t know.”

“That’s
strange.”

“Listen, you’ve got to help me.
I’ve been assigned to research breakthroughs in the blood sciences. It’s classified.”

She smirked, as if amused by his lie
. Her hand shook slightly as she grabbed a set of keys on a large brass ring.

Wolf
followed her to the spiral staircase, watching the way she walked – painfully careful, highly aware of how every movement of her body might be interpreted.

“And where is your family from?” Wolf said. He had meant to simply make small talk and put her at ease, but he saw by her posture th
at the question had made her tense.

“Bavaria,” she said. “Our family is one of the oldest a
nd most famous in our village.”

“Unquestionably German, then.”

“Unquestionably.”

They came to a set of double doors. The girl unlocked it and held the door for Wolf. He found himself amidst piles of books, some of them above eye level. “Most of the books on the list were burned,” she assured him. “I was told that the books in this room have been preserved for archival purposes only.”

Wolf looked around in wonder, daunted by the enormity of the mess. “How do you find anything?”

She let out a small laugh and led him to an area where books about science had been stacked into piles that resembled roman columns. She quickly located a book by Karl Landsteiner in the middle of a pile and began
rifling through the books on top. Wolf pitched in to help, removing a large portion of the stack in one chunk. When he turned and bent down again, he head-butted her by accident, sending her to the ground with her hands covering her forehead.

“Are you all right?”
He removed his cap and got down on one knee.

“I’m okay,” she
replied in an unconvincing voice.

Wolf took her by the wrist
s and pried her hands apart. A small bump was forming just above her right eyebrow.

He bent a little lower. He kissed the bump on her eyebrow. She did not move. She stopped breathing. But when he began to stand, she grabbed his face and pulled his lips to hers. He did not know how or why, but kissing came natural
ly to him.

And then
suddenly he was high in the dome, sitting alone at a table on the observation platform. The girl was gone. The light shining in from the oculus was hotter and more intense now, much like the searchlights in the guard towers at Wewelsburg Castle. The sound of the building’s ventilation was louder too. The wind rushed in, then out, in an endless pattern.

He
picked up the book the librarian had found for him and unwrapped the brown covering she had protected it in. The book’s title was written in English:
The Specificity of Serological Reactions.
Although Wolf’s English was quite advanced, he had no idea what
serological
or
specificity
meant.

He flipped through the opening page
s until he found the biography:

Karl Landsteiner is a Nobel Laureate and considered one of the world’s foremost pathologists, with specialties in anatomy, histology and immunology. He was born in Vienna in 1868, and graduated from the University of Vienna. He spent the next several years in the world’s finest laboratories in Germany and Switzerland. Between 1901 and 1909, he revolutionized the medical world by developing a classification system for blood into types A, B, AB and O, paving the way for the first reliably successful blood transfusions. His work also led to resolving questions of paternity. When he was 21, he converted from Judaism to Catholicism, later serving at a Catholic war hospital during World War I. In the 1920s, he left Europe to work at the Rockefeller Institute in New York. He cut ties with Europe by becoming an American Citizen in 1929. In 1930, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. In 1937, he discovered the Rh factor in blood.

Now Wolf understood Himmler’s repugnance at the mere mention of Landsteiner’s name. The world’s foremost blood researcher had once brought glory to Germany, but now embodied everything Himmler
hated: Landsteiner was a Jew, a Catholic and an American all at once. And Wolf admired Landsteiner all the more for it.

Goose pimples
rose on the young stormtrooper’s arms as he saw the photograph of Landsteiner in his laboratory. The big, inquisitive, forbidding eyes. The gray mustache, aerodynamic, like the wings of a diving bird.

“Read the first
chapter,” a man’s voice said.

Wolf looked around. He saw no one. “
Father?” he asked. No one answered.

He turned to the first chapter. The text was not what he expected. It
did not appear to be a science book. There were no formulas or diagrams. It was scripture, and yet it was not the scripture that he had been taught as a boy. He began to read.

I.
                          
And the LORD said, I am God, and I have made you in my likeness.

II.
                       
And the LORD asked all people to apply their hearts to seek and to search out all the wisdom on Earth.

III.
                    
For to know wisdom, said the LORD, is to bring truth to light, so that all people might know the essence of God. 

IV.
                      
And so there were many who sought wisdom, collecting and deciphering all of the languages and solving all of the mathematics in the world, and charting all of the stars in the sky, and dissecting and reassembling every living creature, so that all of the knowledge in Heaven might be distributed on Earth.

V.
                         
And it came to pass that there were men who sought to keep knowledge for themselves. Would it not be better, they asked, if we alone had the means to communicate with Heaven? Would our communion with the Holy Spirit not be more pure if it were channeled through but a few learned men?