The Isis Covenant (28 page)

He sighed and closed his eyes again, as if he was trying to remember a face. ‘He wasn’t what you’d call likeable, the old man, but I always regret never having a beer with him.

‘So here’s little Bernie, underfed and scrawny, couldn’t get into the Hitler Youth if he wanted to because of the old man’s history, and that means no job. All he knows is explosives and how to steal and he has twelve sticks of dynamite and fifteen blasting caps buried down by the shithouse. He wants to help feed the family, but he doesn’t know how. Fortunately, his old pals down the docks have an idea. Why don’t we rob a store? So we do, the Alsterhaus on
Jungfernstieg
, and it’s a peach. They get me in, I do the safe. Everybody gets their share and nobody gets hurt. But this is at the height of Barbarossa, with the Wehrmacht outside Moscow and Stalin beginning to think maybe Siberia’s nice this time of year. One night there’s a knock at the door. Could have been the Gestapo, but instead, it’s Erich, the old man’s pal, come to ask a favour; only the
Reds
don’t ask favours. They’re short of funds, he says, and I don’t ask what for. Next thing, I’m knocking off banks all over the Third Reich and taking more risks than is good for me. Let me tell you about little Bernie, he’s no Red and he’s no hero. So little Bernie decides to do one last job – for little Bernie. Only this one goes wrong.

‘The crazy thing is that it saved my life. It was the Hamburg bulls picked me up, not the Gestapo, and when they put the screws on me I admitted to the Alsterhaus job as well. If they’d looked hard enough, they could have tagged me for what I’d done for the Reds, and that would have meant a guillotine haircut, but I was a seventeen-year-old kid and not worth the effort. So nobody looked, just then.

‘Two years later, I’m out in Neuengamme with the gypsies and the Jews and the Reds and with just about as much chance of staying alive. I thought it was Bernie Hartmann’s last hour when Max Dornberger walked into the barracks in his SS uniform and called out my name.’

‘You said Max Dornberger was a good friend to you?’

He nodded. ‘That’s when it started; right there in a stinking barrack room in a concentration camp. Max, he looks me over – I was maybe seven stone back then – and says, “So you’re the kid who blows safes. You don’t look much.” Sure, I say, I blew a couple; no point in denying it. He grins, this kinda knowing way, and I
get
a cold feeling on the back of my neck. “Yeah, a couple, but I’m not here to take you to Heini’s barber for a haircut. I’ve got a job for a smart kid, if you’re interested?”

‘Now, don’t get me wrong. I wasn’t conned by Max, the smiling
Schutzstaffel
; these guys had a way of joshing with you just before they smashed your teeth out with a hammer. But after two years in the KZ and another five to go I knew that the only way Bernie Hartmann was getting out of Neuengamme was in a box. So I played along. Six weeks later I’m being measured up for an SS uniform and I’m cock of the dungheap.’

He saw Danny’s look. ‘You’re asking yourself how Bernie Hartmann could sell his soul to the SS. Well, I’ll tell you, lady. Bernie Hartmann was nineteen years old and he was alive. Five feet fuck all and a record as long as my arm and it’s all forgiven and forgotten; as long as I do my job. So that’s what I did.
Geistjaeger 88
was paradise after the camp. French champagne; and all the girls liked a uniform, even with an ugly little bastard like me in it. I’d looked into an open grave. I knew that life could be short and shitty, so I enjoyed every last minute of it. For three months we swanned around France, living it up and taking what we liked for Uncle Heini. Then everything changed. Bodo Ritter turned up. The Devil incarnate. A man made for a uniform with the Death’s Head on it.’

Danny was itching to ask Bernie Hartmann about
Berlin
and the Crown and the odd references to Max Dornberger that didn’t quite fit, but she had a good cop’s sense to stay quiet. Hartmann would get there in his own time.

When he talks of Bodo Ritter there is fear in his voice even now and his eyes flick towards the window as if his nemesis is out there among the trees. Ritter had a nose for the things Heini wanted and that made him important. Ritter garrotting one of his own men. Ritter and the Italian countess who wouldn’t cooperate. Ritter’s see-saw game with the Italian partisans and a pair of nooses. But always there is the shadow in the darkness. The Ritter story so awful he can’t tell it.

‘The families who were killed in New York and London were killed with a garrotte,’ Danny said quietly.

‘Oh, Christ,’ Bernie whispered. He looked up at her, the twinkling eyes now dull and confused. ‘How could it be? Bodo Ritter is at least ten years older than I am. If he’s still alive he must be close to a hundred.’

Then it hits him.

‘The diamond. This is all about the Crown and the Eye.’

XXXII

‘BODO RITTER HAD
the coldest eyes of any man I’d ever seen and we were all scared shitless of him. Any man who stepped out of line was sent straight to the Eastern Front and knew he could count himself lucky. From the first day I met him I knew that good job or not, one day Bodo Ritter would be my executioner. Sure, I was the unit mascot, but that wasn’t going to save Bernie. It was the way he watched me, like a snake watching a mouse and all the time its little brain is full of the details of the kill. But all the time he was watching me, I was watching him. I noticed that everywhere he went, Ritter carried a leather case with him, like an old-fashioned surgeon’s bag. He treated that case like it was his old man’s ashes and I knew that whatever was in it must be worth a fortune. But no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t get a look inside. Not until Berlin.’ He shook his head and his mood changed again. ‘The bastard tried to kill me, but I
fucked
him. I pinched the love of his fucking life.’

‘I still don’t understand.’ Jamie frowned. ‘Bodo Ritter’s testimony to the war crimes tribunal said he left Berlin on April the twentieth on a secret mission for Heinrich Himmler. Why would he say that if he was still in the city fighting one of the last battles of the war? Let’s face it, a battle which, enemy or not, won the admiration of most of the world apart from Joe Stalin and the Red Army.’

To understand, you have to understand Bodo, Bernie Hartmann told them. Bodo with his animal cunning, always sniffing the wind, always looking for a new opportunity or a new threat.

‘He could see what was coming better than any of us and, looking back, he knew things, terrible things, that only a few dozen people in the Third Reich knew. Things that, when they came out, would be the death of him. The big shots, they all made their plans to get out. Bodo wasn’t a big shot, so he did the next best thing. He decided not to be Bodo any more. You have to understand that
G88
wasn’t a real military unit and we weren’t real soldiers. We were a
pinkelwurst
of thieves and conmen, hucksters and pencil-pushers with machine guns. Sometimes we had to blend into the background, like chameleons. When Bodo and Max decided to swap identities while the world was burning down around us, it was almost normal.’

‘That’s impossible.’ Jamie didn’t try to hide his disbelief. ‘A man in Ritter’s position must have been
known
to dozens of people at the top of SS.’

Bernie Hartmann snorted his disdain. ‘
You
don’t know how it worked and you don’t understand how it was back then. Chaos. Sure he might have been spotted wearing a different rank, but so what? All the top guys had different ranks in the Waffen SS and the Allgemeine SS. Fegelein was an
Obergruppenführer
in the Waffen SS, but when Bodo shot him he was wearing the uniform of an Allgemeine SS
Gruppenführer
. Bodo Ritter and
G88
worked to Himmler and Himmler alone. Maybe a couple of secretaries at the hell house on
Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse
might have recognized him, but apart from that nobody in Berlin knew Max Dornberger from Adolf Hitler. I think maybe Rattenhuber, the bunker security boss, suspected something, but he had problems of his own right then.’

‘But he went on trial at Nuremberg,’ Danny pointed out. ‘He stood in the dock with the other commanders of the
Einsatzgruppen
. Surely they would have recognized him?’

‘Before the trial,’ Bernie explained patiently, ‘Max Dornberger spent eighteen months as a prisoner of the Russians, sometimes in solitary confinement, but mostly working down a salt mine. I saw the pictures. By the time he stood in the dock his own mother wouldn’t have recognized him.’

Jamie took up the attack. ‘That still doesn’t explain why Max Dornberger would put his neck in a noose for Bodo Ritter?’

The little German didn’t bat an eyelid. ‘Max hadn’t been looking too good for a couple of months. We thought it was the rations. but before he left Berlin Max told me it was stomach cancer. Bodo convinced Max that he would make sure his wife and kids would want for nothing if he did the swap. He was going to die anyway, what did he have to lose?

‘Max also told me to watch my back with Bodo, but maybe I wasn’t listening too hard, because the bastard had me cold, sharing a new-dug grave with Hermann Fegelein, and it was only luck or God saved me. When the shell hit the bunker and Bodo went down, I didn’t hang about. We had this house up in Wilhelmstrasse, nice big place with lots of rooms. Lots of hiding places, too. I’d been watching him with his bag since we’d got back to Berlin. Hell, it got so he talked to the fucking thing. Most of the time, it never left his side, even when we were playing tag with Soviet tanks. But he couldn’t take it to the bunker because everybody was searched on the way in. That meant he had to hide it. But you can’t hide anything from a thief.’

He described how he’d run back to the building and searched the room where he knew Ritter had stashed the leather surgeon’s bag. It had taken him longer than he liked, but he’d eventually found it. Opened it.

‘At first, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. Some kind of crazy gold hat—’

‘Describe it.’ The words choked in Jamie’s throat.

‘I can see it as if it was yesterday.’ Bernie Hartmann
grinned
. ‘A circlet of gold, with two horns spiralling up from it, and at its centre, where your forehead would be, an eye that stared at you the way Bodo Ritter’s eyes did, but …’ He hesitated and Jamie wondered if the secret was too great to share. If the old mistrustful Bernie Hartmann had won the fight and they would never know the whole truth. But Bernie was only gathering his thoughts. ‘But the most wonderful thing about it was the stone. It wasn’t like any diamond you’d see today, not in a jeweller’s window. It was rough cut, opaque in places, and dazzlingly polished in others. But it was a diamond,’ his voice mirrored the wonder he’d felt on that day sixty-three years earlier, ‘a diamond as big as a goose egg. A great big hundred-million-dollar hand grenade and it was all Bernie Hartmann’s.

‘Thieves are greedy, but we’re not stupid.’ The old man looked to Danny for confirmation. ‘I wanted it all, the gold and everything, but I knew it would be tough to get something as big as the Crown out of Berlin. The first thing I did was take my trench knife and prise open the clasps to remove the stone. When I held it in my hand I’d never felt anything like it. As if I was floating. I’d expected it to be heavy and cold, like a lump of frozen snow, but it was light and warm, so warm that I could feel its energy creeping into my body. I don’t know how long I sat there with it in my hands, but it was too long, as if the rock had hypnotized me. Next thing I heard was a burst of machine-gun fire and the front door crashing open and I knew Bodo was coming
for
me. I stuffed the diamond in the pocket of my camo smock and buttoned it up real tight. I was on my way to the window when the glint of that golden crown drew me back, like a fish to a spinning lure.’ He shook his head at his own foolishness. ‘I had to have it. I couldn’t leave it for Bodo. That moment of greed almost killed me. Another burst of fire, the door splintered and Bodo charges in like the Angel of Death he was. He raises the gun and fires, but a second later he’s out of bullets. Bernie Hartmann, he doesn’t need no second invitation, he’s through the window, sash, splinters and all—’

‘Hang on,’ Danny interrupted. ‘You left the Crown behind? So when did you try to sell it?’

‘So you know about that, huh?’ Bernie gave her a sly sideways glance. ‘You’re a pretty clever detective lady.’

‘That’s right, Mr Har … Bernie. A clever detective lady who still wants an answer.’

He shrugged. ‘So my memory’s a little off. It happens when you get as old as I am. Maybe it didn’t happen quite so quick. Maybe I went across Wilhelmstrasse to a jeweller’s shop. It was gold, worth thousands of marks; I couldn’t just leave it behind? Only the bastard stalled me. He told me to come back later, but I knew he was setting me up for a fall.’

‘Okay, you went back into the house and Ritter burst inside. What then?’

‘Just like I told you. Straight out the window. Death or fucking glory. I got lucky. Landed in a pile of
builders
’ sand. I got up, checked the diamond was still in my pocket and ran for the nearest alley. That’s when he shot me. Bodo Ritter shot me in the arse.’

It was dusk by now, and one of the twins came into the room and pressed a button that automatically closed the curtains and turned up the ceiling lights.

‘We’ll have dinner in the window room, Matthias,’ Bernie Hartmann instructed. ‘Do you have any preferences? Vegetarian?’ His face twisted into a mock grimace and Jamie and Danny shook their heads. ‘The veal then,’ he said gratefully. ‘And a bottle of the ’ninety-six Montrachet, and put another on ice.’

The window room turned out to be exactly that and confirmed what Jamie had suspected. Bernie Hartmann’s home was an enormous mansion house set into a low hill overlooking the eastern edge of the lake.

‘Better if I turn off the lights,’ their host said. For the next five minutes they stood in silent wonder looking out over the darkening expanse of water as the flat hazy glow on the other side turned into a million twinkling sparks that covered the faraway hillside and coated the surface of the lake with shimmering bands of reds and pinks, oranges and yellows, purples and blues. Dinner came, and with it the finest white wine either of them had ever tasted. Jamie complimented Bernie and the wizened old man grinned.