Secrets of the Last Nazi (2 page)

T
he breakfast maid
who discovered Werner Stolz’s body was not shocked by it. It was the third dead body she had found in three weeks. People came here to die, she’d been told, so dead bodies were only to be expected.

Still, she didn’t want to look at the corpse too closely. That was for the nurse. Calmly, she pressed the buzzer and waited.

Stolz hadn’t left much, so there wasn’t much for her to tidy. There were a few framed pictures on his desk. She made sure they were arranged neatly. She recognised America in one – the middle-aged Stolz seemed to be enjoying a holiday. She tilted her head to see the pictures of Stolz as a young man in military uniform. He had been quite handsome back then, she thought.

Then she saw his computer, and his ‘ephemeris’ book. She flicked through it: lots of tables and numbers, with dates and funny symbols. Old Werner had been reading some odd things before he died.

Her thoughts were disturbed by footsteps in the corridor. A nurse appeared.

The nurse acknowledged the maid with a nod, then moved straight to the body. She knelt down, ready to place two fingers on his neck and check for a pulse. It was a routine confirmation: the old man was obviously dead, but she had to follow procedure, just to make sure …

Then she noticed his ear. It was bloody. And behind it was a small dark red hole. She turned Stolz’s corpse on the floor, to reveal a much greater mass of body fluids on the carpet underneath him.

A gun tumbled from the dead man’s hand: an old 7.65 mm Luger pistol with a long silencer.

The breakfast maid felt the need to leave immediately. ‘Entschuldigen Sie,’ she apologised, hiding her eyes from the sight by staring down at her cleaning trolley.

The nurse held the door open for her, and waited until the maid had gone. Then she began the next test on Werner Stolz’s body.

Quietly, she bent down to examine the dead man’s mouth. She peered closely and, as she expected, the dead man’s lips were blue and covered in a white froth.

She nodded to herself, her diagnosis confirmed. Like so many men of his generation, one-time SS Captain Werner Stolz had chosen to die a short time before death was inevitable. And his preferred method of death, a cyanide pill followed closely by a self-administered bullet through the brain copied the most famous suicide in history: Adolf Hitler’s.

It was only as the nurse was leaving that she noticed a scratch on the door frame. The nurse looked closer: the mark looked clean. It must have been made recently. Then she saw the metal doorframe was buckled, as if the door had been barged open.

Someone had broken in.

F
ather Samuel lowered
his knees onto the cold marble, and allowed his ample midriff to flop into his lap. Eyes closed, he bowed his head, and kept the rosary wrapped tightly around his wrists. He was sure he didn’t have long to wait.

Faintly, he heard the chapel door open, and heard the clipped sound of shoes approaching.

‘Father Samuel.’

Samuel concluded his prayer, pocketed his rosary, then turned to see the familiar face. He judged the man’s expression, and guessed his prayers were being answered even sooner than he had hoped. ‘So, how is the Last Nazi?’

‘Dead, Father.’

Samuel absorbed the information, celebrating silently to himself. Then he sensed the man had more to tell. ‘Anything else?’

‘Stolz killed himself.’

Father Samuel stared at the man, trying to understand the news.

The man nodded slowly.

Father Samuel paused and frowned. ‘Why would a man who has already lived such a long life choose to cut it short?’ He closed his eyes in contemplation, tensing his jaw as he thought. Then he stared directly at the man obediently waiting for his next instructions. ‘We’re still missing something – you understand?’

The man bowed his head in acknowledgement and walked briskly out of the chapel once again.

Father Samuel returned to prayer, far less happy at the announcement of Stolz’s death than he had expected to be.

T
he accident had happened not
long before the peak of the morning rush hour. The A3202, the main road outside the Imperial War Museum and one of London’s main thoroughfares, was blocked.

Within a minute, traffic had backed up half a mile to the river Thames. Several of the drivers stuck in the jam had called for an ambulance, and just four minutes later a team of paramedics was on the scene.

Myles was checked, loaded onto a stretcher and quickly driven to nearby St Thomas’ Hospital. Then he was rushed through a series of procedures: X-rays, an MRI scan, blood tests, an injection, a drip … Finally, Myles’ trolley was pushed into a private room.

Myles was oblivious to it all – he could only think about the thief. What had the man been trying to steal? What had been worth rushing into the traffic to protect?

The door creaked open. Frank poked his head in. ‘Myles, I’m so sorry.’ Frank’s face was sweaty and apologetic.

Myles waved his hand. ‘No need to apologise.’

‘What do the doctors reckon?’

‘Might just be a ligament thing,’ said Myles, looking down at his leg. ‘No real damage. But there’s also something to do with the brain scan. They won’t say what.’

‘If that’s your only injury, then you’ll just be limping around like me.’ Frank raised his own polio-ridden leg, trying to make a joke of it.

Myles smiled, then felt a shot of pain from his tibia.

Frank looked apologetic again. ‘You better stay still,’ he said. ‘They’ll put something on it soon.’ Frank was about to tap Myles’ leg in sympathy but, when his hand was mid-air, he decided not to – just as both of them realised it would hurt.

Frank looked embarrassed again, still out of his depth. Same old Frank - he’d always been that way, ever since Myles first met him.

‘Frank, can you get Helen for me?’

‘Your American woman? Yes, I’ll get her,’ nodded Frank.

Myles watched as Frank limped off to make the call, then wondered exactly what it was about his brain scan which had interested the doctors so much.

Z
enyalena Androvsky stopped
in the middle of Smolenskaya Square to admire the twenty-seven-storey building in front of her. She felt comforted by the Stalinist architecture: it was a steadfast monument to Soviet glory which had never compromised with capitalism; a single finger poking up into the Moscow skyline, telling the defeatists where to go.

Then she felt her orange trousers swish in the wind, and saw the security men at the entrance to the Ministry react to her femininity. She flirted back. It felt good to be home.

She was soon in her new office, back in the European Affairs Directorate after assignments in Cuba and Venezuela which had seemed more like distractions than proper foreign affairs work. Anonymous staff had already unpacked her effects, right down to the picture taken in 1987 of her father in his full uniform kissing goodbye to Zenyalena, then a gawky teenager. The photograph was the last image of Colonel Androvsky alive. Just ten days later, his helicopter had been eviscerated by a shoulder-launched surface-to-air missile, fired up by a lucky Mujahedeen guerrilla. Zenyalena had never blamed the Afghan who pressed the initiator. Responsibility for her father’s death, she was sure, lay with the cowardly organisation which had supplied the hardware: the CIA.

Eager to work and to make her mark as quickly as she could, Zenyalena Androvsky spent just a few moments leafing through the general briefing pack which had been left for her. Then she pressed a buzzer.

An older man entered, grey-suited and pale, refusing to notice Zenyalena’s bright clothing. ‘Ms Androvsky – welcome to your new post.’

‘Don’t tell me what I know already.’ She tossed the briefing pack to a distant part of her desk. ‘What’s happening in Europe today?’

Trying not to undermine his new boss’s authority, the man reached into the discarded briefing pack to pull out a one-page list of news items. ‘Your headlines for today, Madam.’

Zenyalena ignored the slight – her eyes were already devouring the list. Single-sentence headlines outlined events in Ukraine, Spain, Liechtenstein … she stopped when she reached an item two-thirds of the way down the page. ‘What’s this? And who was ‘Werner Stolz’?’

The older man turned the page towards him to check the name, ‘Er, I can find out for you, Ms Androvsky.’

‘Please do – this morning.’

It took only an hour for the pale man to return clutching a hefty pile of documents. Some looked even older than him, their yellowed edges straying out of the tattered cardboard.

Zenyalena swiftly filleted the files. Within minutes she had spotted yet another opportunity to embarrass the Americans. She called her secretary back in.

‘Ludchovic. You read the stuff in these files about Lieutenant Kirov, right?’

Ludchovic indicated that he had.

‘Tell me - how do you think he died?’

The grey-suited man looked at Zenyalena’s desk as he answered. ‘On balance, I think the American report is probably true, Ms Androvsky. Soviet interrogators also experienced SS captives grabbing weapons and going wild.’

Zenyalena’s eyes narrowed. ‘Yes, but we never let one kill a liaison officer working for a foreign power.’ She pulled out another sheet with Soviet-era typewriting on it. ‘And look: Kirov died just days before he flagged this Captain Stolz as “special interest”. The Nazi even spent time living in the States after the war. I tell you: this one smells.’

Ludchovic accepted her superior logic. ‘How do you want to proceed, Madam?’

Zenyalena sank in her chair, fully aware that the best information about Stolz would have been lost in the turmoil of post-war Germany, seventy years ago. But there was still a chance to win one over on the Yanks.

‘Ludchovic: I want you to prepare a Demarche. Demand a full investigation of Stolz. If the Americans refuse, we’ll know they’re hiding something. Send it today.’

The secretary understood. ‘To be delivered by our embassy in DC?’

Zenyalena was about to agree, but then stopped herself, her lips pursing into a mischievous grin. ‘No – New York. We’re going to do this through the United Nations. The
old
United Nations.’

A
serious-looking
man in an open shirt and white coat breezed into Myles’s room, then paused before he spoke. ‘Mr Munro?’

Myles nodded.

The doctor approached Myles’ trolley-bed, then exhaled, as if he had some difficult news to tell. Myles remained silent.

‘Mr Munro – er, can I call you Myles?’ asked the doctor.

‘If it makes it easier. Yes. Myles is fine.’

More silence.

‘How do you feel, Myles?’

Myles raised his eyebrows – how
did
he feel? ‘Er, well, I feel pain. I feel a little thirsty. I feel like I don’t like hospitals much …’ He mused some more. ‘… I feel you’re about to tell me.’

Myles watched as the doctor tried to explain.

‘You see, Mr Munro, we did a scan,’ began the doctor, barely managing to speak to Myles’ face. ‘Two scans, actually – an X-ray of your leg, and an MRI. A brain scan …’ The doctor paused again. ‘Well, Mr Munro, in a way it’s fortunate that you broke your leg, because it allowed us to look inside your head.’

Myles nodded, thoughtfully. ‘So what did you find there?’

‘Mr Munro – Myles – you see, I’ve heard of you. You’re the military history guy with the unusual theories about war, right?’

Myles didn’t respond. He didn’t care about his reputation. His silence confirmed the doctor was right.

The doctor checked Myles’ bandages as he continued. ‘… And you see, Mr Munro, every brain is different. They’re unique – like fingerprints. And yours is unique too.’

Myles tried to understand the diagnosis. ‘So my brain is unique, like everybody else’s?’

‘Yes. But yours is very unique – different,’ said the doctor. ‘Let me show you the images, to explain.’

Myles waved his hand, ‘Don’t bother with that, just tell me what it means.’

‘Well, you might think in an unusual way, Mr Munro.’ The doctor watched to see Myles’ reaction. There was none; Myles just stared back at the doctor.

Myles already knew he was odd. ‘Highly gifted but too ready to challenge authority’, was one official description. Some had said he was a misfit. Others said he was clumsy, couldn’t spell and had a problem reading aloud. His memory was extraordinarily good for abstract facts and dates, but hopeless for normal things, like where he’d left his keys.

‘So I’m different. So?’ asked Myles.

The doctor nodded, calmly observing Myles’ face. Then he tried to cushion his words. ‘It means, Mr Munro, that you may experience life a little differently to other people.’

‘Everybody experiences life differently – don’t they?’

The doctor was stumped, and started picking at his white coat. ‘If we may, we’d like to put you on a research programme. We think there might be a link between the shape of people’s brains and the lives they lead. We want to study you – to see if there’s a match between your brain and your behaviour …’ The doctor could see Myles was unsure about the idea. ‘…Oh, and we’d pay you.’

The offer of money had no impact on Myles. ‘Would I have to come back here?’

‘Probably,’ confirmed the doctor. ‘Yes.’

Myles started shaking his head. ‘Then, Doctor, the answer is no.’

The doctor nodded his understanding. ‘You’re probably still in shock from your accident. Let me know if you change your mind. It’s actually quite amazing that you’ve not had problems before. Anyway, I think you’re booked for another examination in about half an hour, in the fracture unit in the east wing, ground floor. I’ll check.’ The doctor retreated from the room, humbled.

Alone again, Myles thought more about the doctor’s offer. Research – Myles did enough of that in his university job. But research for him meant reading – or at least trying to read, since he was not very good at it. Myles would dig up old military facts from obscure sources and try to make sense of them. He’d never been the
subject
of research before. Apart from that one time, when the media had decided to research everything about him.

Although Myles was usually curious, nothing made him curious about himself. There were so many more interesting things to discover.

But deep down, Myles knew the real reason he didn’t want to be ‘researched’.

He looked up at the hospital ceiling. It was antiseptic white. Dead white.

He remembered coming to a room just like this one when his mother was thin. Deathly thin, like all those concentration camp survivors liberated from the horrors in 1945. His mother had died just a few days later – at the hands of the medical establishment. Cancer. They had said it was treatable. All the statistics, all the odds, all the numbers said she should have survived. It was a minor cancer – treatable, removable. Curable.

Yet they had all failed.

They’d put her on a drug trial. A
double-blind, randomised control
trial – funny pills twice a day, given to her and lots of other desperate people. Only after his mother was dead did Myles learn her pills were only placebos. Fakes. Had her death helped to prove something? Had she helped the numbers? To the teenage Myles, it seemed more like his mother had been sacrificed for the statistics.

No calculus of chance and statistics was going to dictate his life. Not any more – the drug trial had already dictated his mother’s death, and that was enough. As the nurses came to collect his trolley, Myles knew he would refuse to take part in the research.

And if the doctors really could use a scan of his brain to predict his behaviour, then they should have predicted his answer already.