Kingdom (17 page)

What should she pack? And where was she going to go? To a hotel? To the mountains? To Tibet? It would be cold there, she guessed. The truth was she didn’t know what she was doing. As she threw a sweater and a fleece into her bag, her stomach tightened, as if her body was tensing up, becoming more alert as danger approached. She rolled up a set of thermals and stuffed them into a side pocket. Then there was the Oracle. She flicked through its pages and then carefully slid it down the back of the bag. Herzog must be missing it, she decided. She would give it to him when they finally met. If they ever met – but she couldn’t contemplate failure, not when the odds were so clearly stacked against her.

A siren in the night jolted her and she stood up. She left the suitcase, still lying on the floor of the bedroom, exactly where she had dumped it when she first arrived from the airport. It had been roughly disembowelled by her frantic repacking, clothes spilling everywhere. She stepped into the hall and glanced for a second into the living room, glancing briefly at Herzog’s fantastic hoard of antiques again. The apartment would be a lovely place to live, she thought – a great place for parties, elegant soirées. She felt a spasm of regret for the glamorous expat life she might have had in Delhi – but now she was preparing to become a fugitive, and she dismissed such musings before they ran on and sapped her resolve.

Before she left the apartment she had one more line of inquiry that she wanted to pursue. She hadn’t wanted to make this particular call in front of Krishna, but now she was all alone she felt she could do it. She walked across the cluttered living room and took a seat at Herzog’s writing desk, then turned on his computer and logged on as a visitor. In a second she had the number she was looking for. She paused briefly to collect her thoughts and then, inhaling deeply, she dialled. The phone rang for a minute and she was just about to give up when it was answered by a male voice with an American accent. For a split second she dithered and almost deciding to hang up. She had not been sure how she would respond when she heard the voice, and now she knew: she felt incredibly confused.

‘Hi, James, it’s me, Nancy. Sorry to call so early.’ ‘Nancy – I thought we’d agreed not to talk.’ She could hear the tension and anxiety in his voice and she knew exactly what he was thinking.

‘Listen, James – I’m not calling about us. This is a professional call. Our relationship is over – I know that too.’

But even as she said the words she knew he’d never believe her. She could picture him holding the phone, his handsome face wearing a frown, his green eyes narrowing with doubt. He was already worried about her state of mind. She had taken the break-up very badly at first and he was bound to doubt her words.

‘Listen, James, I’m serious. I need your help. I need to ask you something about South America.’

She could hear the suspicion creeping into his voice. ‘I thought you were off to Delhi.’

‘I’m there now.’

‘What? Then why are you doing a South American piece?’

‘I need some information about a person in Buenos Aires. Can you help?’

Silence, followed by a terse question:

‘Who?’

‘Anton. Anton Herzog. You probably know already – he’s gone missing, in Tibet. I need you to find out all you can about his family and his early days in Buenos Aires.’

‘What! You want me to investigate Anton’s family? Nancy, are you serious?’

‘Yes. Absolutely serious.’

‘Look, I don’t know what you mean by this. I just think this might not be a good idea. Perhaps we should stop this conversation.’

Now she was furious. ‘James, I agree, we shouldn’t speak. But you’re the only person I know in the right place, with the necessary expertise. And you’re the only person I can trust in this. So I’m begging you to do this. Do it for me, for whatever we were. Please.’

There was another pause, and when he spoke his voice was softer.

‘OK. OK, I’ll have a look. What exactly do you want to know?’

‘Anything. Anything you can find. I’m convinced Anton’s background will throw light on his disappearance. But his background might be more complicated than it first appears. I can’t explain, I haven’t much time. I need the information now. Or some information. Something.’

She was calmer now and she could hear that James was relieved by this.

‘OK. I’ll see what I can do. But it’s early here – some people don’t come in until later in the morning. I’ll make some initial calls and get back to you in twenty minutes or so. But I might not have much to report.’

‘That’s great, James, just get me anything you can. Thank you.’

Silently Nancy paced the room, waiting for the call. Twenty minutes passed, then thirty. It seemed like an eternity. At one point she went over to the street-side window and lifting one slat on the blinds saw the ominous black car, waiting patiently below. A shiver of terror ran down her spine. If it was indeed the police they would surely be tapping her calls. She would have to be careful what she said if she wanted to stay out of prison. But then again, she thought, surely her conversations would demonstrate her innocence? She didn’t want to put this theory to the test. She doubted very much she’d be given the benefit of the doubt.

Finally the phone rang.

‘Nancy.’

‘James. Thank God.’

She wondered for a second if he was going to say he’d had second thoughts.

‘I found some stuff on Anton . . .’

He sounded as though he was in a state of shock.

‘Go on.’

With immaculate timing an ambulance passed slowly down the road beneath the apartment window, sirens blaring. James said something, but she couldn’t hear his words.

‘One second, James, hang on . . .’

She walked through into Herzog’s spotlessly clean kitchen, which overlooked a quiet courtyard.

‘What were you saying?’

‘I did some searches on Anna Herzog. Hang on, where are my notes?’

There was a pause. She shut her eyes in frustration. She could picture him in the cluttered office, sitting at his untidy desk, digging through piles of paper. She wished that he would hurry. After a few seconds, he began again:

‘Anna Herzog of Boulevard de Recoleta, Buenos Aires, married a man called Gustav Deutsch in 1954. He was a German émigré who arrived in Buenos Aires that same year.’

‘So Deutsch was Anton’s stepfather?’

But what about the photo then, she thought to herself; the mysterious photo of Felix Koenig on the steps of a hotel in BA, back from the dead – allegedly taken in 1957?

‘Wait, not so fast,’ James said. ‘I couldn’t get anything more from the usual sources. There are no photos anywhere of either Anna Herzog or Gustav Deutsch. So I called our contact at the Simon Wiesenthal Centre: you know, the Nazi-hunters. They have an office in Buenos Aires. It’s always a long shot, but with stories about German émigrés of that age it’s always worth trying; lots of Nazis ended up in Argentina. Now and then something comes up. To cut a long story short, I’ve just got off the phone with this man – one of the most prolific Nazi-hunters of them all. He says they have a record for Deutsch. He’s dead now – he died in 1972 – but back in the Fifties they opened a file on him because there was a suspicion that he was in reality a man named Felix Koenig, an eminent academic and a member of something called the Thule Gesellschaft, a sort of occult society with links to the Nazi regime.’

‘My God.’

‘Extraordinary, isn’t it? I never knew Anton had such a dark past.’

‘But why did the Wiesenthal Centre even suspect that Felix Koenig survived the war? Anton always claimed he’d died at Stalingrad.’

‘Well, yes – but this is where it starts to get really strange. The Wiesenthal Centre knows about Felix Koenig’s war record and it’s true that officially he is down as “missing in action, presumed dead”. He was last seen leading a platoon of men into a derelict building on the front line. Hundreds of thousands of Germans died at Stalingrad. But war records for Stalingrad are a bit of a waste of time – either you made it back to Germany, or you were killed in the battle, or you were taken prisoner by the Russians. Since being taken prisoner was as good as being dead, the soldiers who didn’t make it home were routinely described in the war records as “missing presumed dead”, just like Felix Koenig. Now, Herr Deutsch, on the other hand, arrived in Argentina in 1954, having served nine years in a Siberian gulag. There is no war record for him but that is not completely unusual. The story he gave was that he’d been one of the hundred thousand German soldiers who had been captured at Stalingrad and that he was one of the very few lucky ones who were ever seen again – most prisoners disappeared into the gulag and vanished for ever. At the time of Deutsch’s arrival in 1954 Anna Herzog was living with another German man named Freddie Klaus, who worked as a mechanic in a garage in Recoleta. But here comes the important bit: as soon as Deutsch turned up on the scene, Anna Herzog kicked Klaus out and married Deutsch. That’s why the Wiesenthal Centre suspected that Deutsch was really Felix Koenig, Anna Herzog’s original husband . . .’

Nancy could hardly believe what she was hearing. She stared out through the kitchen window, across the rooftops of Delhi. The lights of the city lit up the sky to the south. There wasn’t a star to be seen, just an orange cape of pollution and then, far above it, the black night.

‘It’s almost romantic,’ she said. ‘She still loved him all those years later. She had been waiting for him.’

What a thought – love even there, pure love, amidst the criminals and the lost souls of the Nazi revolution. And what did that mean for the world? That love was prepared to forgive absolutely anything; that it could turn a blind eye to anything; that it was in the end essentially – even diabolically – amoral? She could see the lights of an aeroplane in the distance, gradually rising up above the distant Delhi rooftops. Any second now, it would begin its ponderous journey to the clouds.

‘But do they have any other proof?’

‘Yes – you’re not going to believe it. “Deutsch”, or perhaps I should say Koenig, ended his life as a librarian at Buenos Aires library. He was in charge of the oriental languages section. He could read and write Chinese and Tibetan, and this is why the Simon Wiesenthal Centre was so sure that Deutsch and Koenig were the same man. You see the Thule Gesellschaft, the Nazi organization that Felix Koenig was a member of, sent expeditions to Tibet in search of lost Aryan knowledge. Felix Koenig was chosen to join the expeditions because he could read and write Tibetan – a rare skill, I think you would agree.’

‘Incredible. So Anton’s lifelong interest in Tibet—’

‘Must be bound up with his relationship with his father, I should think, yes,’ said James, finishing a sentence Nancy was hesitating over. She was in a state of complete shock. Anton’s own father had been a member of a strange esoteric cult and a Tibetologist – esteemed by his deranged peers. She wasn’t sure if she wanted to learn any more and now she was far from certain that she wanted to step on to the plane, now that the night seemed to be filling up with dark shadows and horrible ghosts from Europe’s past.

For a second neither of them spoke. Finally, she said, ‘But what on earth were the Nazis doing in Tibet looking for lost Aryan knowledge – and what does that really mean? What the hell was the Thule Gesellschaft?’

‘I don’t know but I’ll try to find out. Our guy at the Simon Wiesenthal Centre is pretty dismissive; all he said was that it was just one of the many crackpot occult societies that flourished in Europe between the wars. I haven’t had a chance to have a proper snoop around. I wanted to call you straight away. I typed it into the Internet and got millions of links and articles but I haven’t had time to check them out. I had no idea that anything like this would ever come up . . . What’s going on, Nancy? What is Anton doing?’

Nancy was already struggling to make sense of all the new information. She was too busy even to enjoy the fact that James’s tone had changed from pitying scepticism to eager curiosity.

‘James, I just don’t know yet.’

Then suddenly she heard a noise outside the flat. It was coming from the communal staircase, a knock or a bang of some kind, then silence again. She was petrified with fear.

‘I’ve got to go.’

‘Nancy, what’s going on? Are you all right?’

‘I can’t talk. Something’s come up. Thanks for your help.’

She dropped the phone into its cradle, then tiptoed across the room into the corridor and over to the front door of the apartment. There was a spyhole that looked on to the stairwell. She peered through, her pulse racing. Nothing. Perhaps it was just a neighbour coming home. But then again, perhaps someone was lying in wait, pressed against the wall, right next to the door, just out of sight. She couldn’t believe she had been so short with James; a few months ago she would have done anything to talk to him on the phone. But she didn’t have time to think about that now. She wanted desperately to get away from the apartment. She inhaled deeply and steeled her resolve. She had one more thing to do, then she would be gone.

She went straight back and sat down at the computer. As her fingers traced the keys, she wondered if anyone else in India had ever typed in the words ‘Thule Gesellschaft’, the name of what the man at the Wiesenthal Centre had described as a bizarre cult; a cult from halfway round the other side of the world no less, and half a century ago. Anyone else except Anton Herzog, that is. She waited as the painstakingly slow connection froze for a second and then began to click and hum.

Finally, a page of assorted links appeared on the screen. There were, as James had said, thousands of sites to choose from. But that in itself meant nothing. You could type anything into the Internet and you would almost be guaranteed a couple of thousand links. Nancy needed a reputable source, not just any old article. She scanned the links, clicked through to a few, and then finally her eyes fell on an old
Guardian
article – a reliable British newspaper.

To the left of the story was an accompanying image, titled, ‘Symbol of the Thule Gesellschaft’. It was a dagger emblazoned on a swastika, identical to the medal and the detail on the bone trumpet. Nancy’s throat tightened. It was as if a previously distant evil was beginning to pour into her world, and this was her own doing, and with every step she took to investigate the Herzog affair the evil was rising all around her. She wanted to turn off the computer and run away. But in a state of horrified fascination she read though the article to the end: