'I swear it on the eyes of my daughter!'
Rahn nodded. 'Then I will tell you the truth - but only you, Dieter.'
Bachman considered his old friend quietly for a moment. 'If you are lying. . .'
'I am not lying. I owe you the truth, Dieter.'
'Leave us alone!' The soldiers backed off some fifteen metres, establishing a circle around the two men. On three sides the ground was reasonably level and covered with trees. On the fourth side the cliff waited. There were twelve men in all, each aiming his torch at Bachman and Rahn. The two men stood close to one another, their faces illuminated by the artificial light.
Rahn rubbed his wrists and stamped his feet, trying to restore his circulation. 'Where have you hidden the Lance?' Bachman asked him.
'You must understand something, Dieter. Once I tell you the truth you will end up lying to Himmler about it. It is really better for you not to know.'
'It is touching that you are so concerned for my well-being, Otto, but I will take my chances with the truth. Where have you hidden it?'
'Are you talking about the Lance of Antioch?'
'What else do you think?'
'I haven't hid it anywhere. How could I? I've never seen the thing!'
'You and I both know better!'
'Oh, that! You are talking about what we brought out of France! That isn't the Lance of Antioch, Dieter. What you thought was a reliquary I paid a Swiss metal worker to gild and then paste with jewels that I had bought in a shop. Why do you think I asked you for money? Credible forgeries cost a good deal! As for the piece of iron inside, what you are calling the Lance of Antioch, I had more luck. I dug it up by chance from your garden.'
Bachman stared at him without comprehending. 'What are you saying?'
'I am saying you killed those men - we killed them - for nothing! I planted Himmler's precious relic in that cave, Dieter. It's why I insisted I go ahead of the expedition, why I directed the search the way I did. All of it was a show so that we could deliver a piece of nonsense to a mad man and keep our precious status as his darlings!'
'I don't believe you!'
'You don't want to believe me, but I swear it is the truth. On the eyes of
my
child, I swear it.'
'No.' Bachman shook his head. He tried to smile. 'This is a tactic - a ruse! You will say anything to avoid being tortured! You
know
where it is!'
'I know the Lance of Antioch disappeared in Constantinople over eight hundred years ago, Dieter. No one knows where it is. As for the Blood Lance of the Cathars - that rests in the heart of every true knight!'
'But you said Raymond sent it back to the Languedoc with his infant son!'
'If he had possession of it and chose torture instead of surrendering it, then he was a greater fool than Peter Bartholomew, and this much I know: Raymond was no fool.' Rahn laughed suddenly at Bachman's utter consternation. 'I keep trying to imagine how Himmler is going to take it when you tell him this. You know he is going to blame
you
for it, don't you? No one likes being tricked - mad men least of all. My advice? Tell him I took the secret to my grave. Tell him you won't stop looking, but that I got away and there was nothing you could do. But on your life, my friend, do not tell him the truth or he will have you murdered!'
'True or not, what you stole is what I will take back to him!'
'I can't let you do that, Dieter.'
'You have no choice!'
'A man always has a choice.. . even if it isn't pretty.' In the next moment Rahn was running toward the ledge. Three of the men guarding it were close enough to move in to intercept him, but he had the size and the will to get through them. He drove hard toward the strongest of the three and stumbled when they collided. The other two tried to grab his coat as he kicked out two more steps.
In the next he was gone.
The Wilder Kaiser, Austria
March 16, 1939.
He heard the wind as he plunged. He saw the black face of the mountain blurring. He thought of Elise. She was sitting beside him on Montségur. Kissing his cheek lightly, she told him that she wanted to think of him always just as he was that day, the two of them high over the world and resting for a moment amongst the beautiful ghosts.
Berlin
April 11, 2008.
A couple of weeks after their return to Zürich, Ethan received a letter from Frau Sarah von Wittsberg, one of the paladins of the Order of the Knights of the Holy Lance. She invited him to visit her at her Berlin apartment on the afternoon of 11 April. She had, she said, a favour to ask.
Frau von Wittsberg lived in a nineteenth century flat that had been renovated without quite losing all of its original charm. Set in the former East Berlin, the neighbourhood had a friendly, Bohemian flavour to it, and Ethan was surprised to find that the former dame of Berlin society fit so easily into such unpretentious surroundings.
She was in her mid-seventies and still quite the beauty. She had silver hair, and round, intense black eyes. She possessed the posture and confidence of aristocracy, the manner of one who had hosted diplomats, the unflinching character of one who had survived the camps.
In her front hall and living room there were no photographs on her walls to commemorate her three-decade-long struggle to keep West Berlin free. Instead she had filled her walls with several canvases by different German artists who had been driven out of Berlin in the 1930s. Their art had been deemed by the Nazi authorities to be decadent. Ethan recognised the artists, but not these particular pieces, so he took a moment to study them whilst the lady prepared a pot of tea.
'Giancarlo tells me you used to steal paintings like these and got rich doing it,' she said as she set a silver service on a small table in front of a settee.
Ethan smiled affably. 'If you're worried I might come back and get these, don't be. I'm retired from that life.'
'He told me. He said you had got religion or something.' She studied the paintings as if looking at them for the first time in years. 'You know, I don't particularly
like
any of these. I don't understand them really, but I absolutely love what they stand for. These artists stayed true to their own vision even though it ruined them. These days artists sell out for money they don't even need.' After a moment of thoughtfulness, she added, 'I was in the camps, you know.'
'Yes, ma'am. I read about that in one of the early articles the Knights published about you.'
'My mother and I spent most of our first year at Buchenwald.'
'And today is the anniversary of its liberation?'
'Very good.
Very
good, Mr Brand.' She reflected for a moment. 'Giancarlo told me I would be impressed with you. I'm beginning to see why. My mother was still quite lovely at the start so they used her as a prostitute for the guards. After a year, when they had ruined her beauty, we got shuffled off to one of the sub-camps where they tried to kill us by hard work and starvation. They would have done so too if they had had a little more time. But Buchenwald was where it started. Buchenwald is where I go when I dream of Hell.
'Do you want to know a very cruel irony?' she asked after a moment of contemplative silence. When Ethan said nothing to this, she continued, 'Several years after the war my mother confessed to me that my father had served as a camp guard at Buchenwald. We were there at the end of 1943 and through most of 1944. My father had served only a few months in the fall of 1938.
'He was one of the people Himmler personally recruited - one of his historians, actually - sent to the camps to work as a guard for unspecified disciplinary reasons. For years after I found out, I imagined that
my
father must have been different from the guards my mother and I had encountered. I knew him as a decent, sweet tempered man. My mother told me he was the most honourable man she had ever known.
'As I have got older, Mr Brand, I have to admit to myself he probably behaved
exactly
as the rest of them did. It breaks my heart to believe it, but you see there were a great many decent, honourable men working in the camps. . . and every last one made God weep.
'But I will tell you one thing about my father that was different from the rest of them. Fact, Mr Brand, not a daughter's wistful speculation. When he had finished his three month tour at Buchenwald he resigned from the Order of the Skull. Himmler wouldn't have it, of course. They made it sound like it was a climbing accident - but it was murder. They gave out a press release about his death and covered him in praise even whilst they were disposing of his corpse somewhere without so much as a marker to commemorate his existence.
Exactly
as Himmler treated the victims of the camps.'
Frau von Wittsberg smiled, but there was no happiness in her expression. 'Are you familiar with the story of Percival?'
Ethan looked at her, wondering what could have inspired such a change in topic. 'Percival was the knight who encountered the Blood Lance and Chalice in the hall of the Fisher King,' he said when it was clear she wanted him to speak.
Frau von Wittsberg nodded and said, 'It is a lovely pagan legend the Christians appropriated, but good for all, I think. When he saw the Lance and Chalice carried by a procession of knights and ladies, Percival was obliged to ask, "Whom does one serve who follows this?" Had he asked that question, the Fisher King would have been healed of his lameness and the dying land would have bloomed into life again. Because he failed to say anything at all, Percival fell into a deep slumber and when he awakened he found himself alone in a wasteland.
'My father knew that legend better than any man of his generation. He was a scholar of the Grail, and yet he committed Percival's error. He saw the great show the Nazi's put on, the brilliant uniforms, the colourful banners, the great triumphal processions and he forgot to ask, "Whom does one serve who follows this?" Like a lot of Germans of that generation, I suppose. . .'
She walked over to the tea service and poured two cups, then signalled for Ethan to join her on the settee. 'I do not mean to speak to you in riddles, Mr Brand, but I find to my utter embarrassment I have committed my father's and Percival's error. The sin of omission, if you will. What is worse, I haven't even the comfort of blaming my youth and inexperience as they might have done if they had been the sort of men to make excuses. I was old enough to know better and had even the memory of my father's failing to remind me. More than that, I am a child of the camps. I know human nature's ugliest face. . . and still I failed to ask the essential question!'
'You're talking about the Council of the Paladins?'
'I fought for West Berlin's safety from the moment it stood in peril until the Wall came down. In all it was a twenty-eight-year-long siege that absolutely no one expected to end with victory. I spent lavishly on the cause. I spent the better part of my fortune, actually. Courting politicians and diplomats is not a game for the poor. I fought a war, Mr Brand, as surely as if I had carried a weapon, and I did not blanch at the alliances we made along the way. There is no other way to put it. We were
not choosey about our friends - not so long as they served our cause.
'When it was finished, when the Wall came down, I expected the Order of the Knights of the Holy Lance would quietly dissolve. We had no further reason to exist. I spoke my mind about so many things over the years, but not about that. Of course we had money and networks in place, and the Communists were on the verge of collapsing in the Soviet Union. So we could not stop with Germany reunified. We had to keep at it!
'And when the Soviets fell and war broke out in the Balkans it did not seem right to turn our backs on the genocide.
She shook her head slowly. 'It never occurred to me that my war had ended and I ought to resign my seat. I was proud of what we had accomplished, because I knew that we had resisted a great tyranny and we had won. My seat among the paladins meant I had made a difference. It was the brightness in my adult life that brought balance to the darkness of my childhood. It was proof I had done more with my life than just survive.
'Instead of offering my resignation, I stepped aside and let Johannes Diekmann represent me. I trusted Hans. I knew he would do the right thing. When he was no longer able to participate I let him give my vote to his nephew. We all did. Herr Ohlendorf was a tremendously persuasive man, Mr Brand. Very charismatic and bright. . . and as corrupt an individual as I have ever encountered. And I knew the Devil himself.
'We had become a humanitarian organisation - committing our good deeds in the sunshine and God knows what atrocities by the pale light of the moon. For nineteen years I did not ask to see the accounts, accounts I had a right and responsibility to examine. I did not even
consider
Percival's question, and now I find I have awakened in a wasteland. We sold weapons and mercenaries to the worst men on earth. We sent assassins against democratically elected leaders. We stole a great deal of money in a dozen different ways. We ran drugs, people, and goods for no other reason than to make money, and finally we began murdering our friends.