The scientist’s smile was triumphant. Even in the pure and horrifying drama, he was helplessly exulting in his own cleverness.
‘I worked it out! There
is
something in this room from Germany.’
He turned and pointed. At the Herero Skulls.
‘Them?’
‘They were
repatriated
, from Berlin, in 1999. After years of wrangling. They used to be kept in the Kaiser Wilhem Institut. Now they are here.
They
have been to Germany. They were in Fischer’s possession throughout the war, and after at the Institut. The answer must be in them somehow.’
Angus moved quickly to the plinth and picked up the biggest skull. He turned the sad and smiling cranium in his hand.
‘An obscene joke. The Nazis loved obscene jokes, they paved Jewish ghettos with Jewish gravestones, so the Jews would trample their own dead. And –’ He was examining the skull, closely. ‘And where better to hide something very, very…important…than a skull like this? A sacred relic of a terrible genocide. Fischer must have known no one would
ever
smash it open, retrieve the secret, unless they
definitely
knew what they wanted, where they were seeking.’ He lifted up the skull, squinted inside, then he lifted it higher, talking quietly to the skull. ‘Sorry, brother, I am so very fucking sorry – but I have to do this. Forgive me.’
He dropped the skull on the floor. The dry aged bone shattered at once, almost gratefully. Crumbling in the dust, adding dust to orange dust.
A tiny steel cylinder glinted on the floorboards, amidst the scattered shards of bone. Angus picked it up.
‘Hidden in the olfactory cavity.’
Amy and David gathered around. Faces tensed, and perspiring.
Angus ripped the top off the slender metal tube, and pulled out a tiny, exquisitely rolled piece of paper, almost leathery in consistency, like parchment but somehow finer.
The Scotsman focussed and examined the yellowed slip of paper. Etched across the paper, in faded old ink, was a tiny map.
‘Zbiroh!’ A sigh of exultant relief. ‘
Zbiroh…’
Any explanation was truncated. A shadow had just
flickered the dusty light of the hut. A Namibian security guard had passed the window, and was standing at the door, pushing his way inside.
Angus shoved the map in the tube, pocketed the tube, and ran to the entrance; he flung the door open, and confronted the guard – waving his gun at the terrified guard’s chest.
The guard stepped back, retreating into the dazzling sun.
‘No! No trouble! Want no trouble!’
‘Good,’ said Angus, as he advanced, and patted the guard’s pockets. He drew out a pistol and phone, and handed them to David. And tilted a head at the sea.
Grabbing the items with gusto, David hurled the gun and the phone into the crashing waves, just metres away. Seagulls fluttered and shrieked in alarm.
Angus was gesturing at the guard. ‘OK. Stay here. Don’t move. We’re going. Take a staycation.
All-fucking-right?’
They sprinted down the path to the mainland; David glanced behind – the guard was indeed standing there, black and statuesque in the sun, staring at them, perplexed, immobile, a silhouette of doubt.
The path turned onto the road and they ran right into the traffic – Angus waved a wad of South African rand at the very first Toyota sedan. The driver grinned and squealed his brakes.
The three of them jumped in, sweating and cramped. Angus snapped.
‘Airport! Fast as you can.’
The drive took ten minutes: swerving and racing through the sun-dusted streets. They tilted past the Bank of Windhoek, an old pool hall, and a Shell garage – and then they were out of town: on the surrounding flats. David was remembering Miguel. The big black cars, roaring up the canyon.
The thought was horrifying. Miguel could be around here,
right now. Any minute he could just show. The big black car door flashing open.
Found you.
The whirring yellow sands were writhing across the road, making serpents of dust. They were out in the desert again. They were motoring through the wilderness. Angus took out the map and scrutinized it. And then he sat back. And yelled.
‘Look!’
Terrible panic filled David: he looked, and saw nothing.
Miguel?
Angus was still pointing: ‘Look at that. That’s a rare and precious sight.
Look at the horse!’
It wasn’t Miguel
. David felt absurd relief, as he and Amy stretched to see through the scratched car window. But what were they looking for?
At first there was nothing. And then he saw: a horse, thin and solitary and loping across the dirt road. Then David saw more – dozens, then hundreds. Curvetting and playing in the sandy heat-haze.
Angus was rhapsodizing.
‘The wild horses of the Namib. I
love
these animals. They’re the last remnants of the
Schutztruppe –
the German colonial army. The horses escaped and turned feral.’ He gazed, almost serene, at the dreamlike spectacle. ‘Now they are the only wild desert horses in the world – becoming a new species, specially adapted to dryness.’ Angus sat back. ‘I always think they look like the souls of horses, roaming free in the afterlife…That’s why this place is so hard to leave. Things like
that.
But here’s the airport. Just past the dunes.’
The car prowled around the last of the soft Barchan dunes. They were slowing onto a wide flat space. The driver stopped at the perimeter of a surreally bleak airstrip.
A small plane and two helicopters sat on some asphalt amidst acres of sun-scorched dust. One of the choppers had
Kellerman Namcorp
inscribed on the side. Its propellers were already turning.
David turned to Angus and said: ‘But where are we going?’
‘Amsterdam –’
‘Yes, but then?’
‘Zbiroh! An SS castle. Bohemia! I’ll explain later – mate, we gotta hurry,
Miguel is still out there –’
They ran across the flatness. A man with a low slung sub-machine gun was standing by the helicopter, he stared at them, astonished, as they ducked under the whumping blades.
‘Angus?’
‘Roger!’
The black man smiled.
‘Angus my man!’
Angus was shouting above the loud churn of the spinning chopper blades. Something passed between them. Something from the black velvet pouch? David guessed it was diamonds. Maybe. Roger did a nodding salute.
‘Get in!’ said Angus. Roger was shouting at all of them, gesturing them into the chopper.
Quickly!
David and Amy climbed in, and sat on the first seats they could find. Angus joined them, his face strained and exhausted. They strapped up, and even as their safety belts clicked, the chopper lifted up.
They were flying.
David stared down. Roger was a small figure now. Looking up at them with a hand to shield his eyes from the sand. David blinked and looked a kilometre south. A wild horse was cantering across the wasteland.
Then the clouds of dust intervened, and all was blank.
2.58, 2.59. 3.00.
There was no sign of him. David glanced warily at the station clock.
3.02, 3.03, 3.04.
Angus was by his side, saying nothing – for once. The tension evident in his face. Amy looked pensive to the point of depression.
What did she know? She had been noticeably
different
since they landed in Amsterdam and made their way across Germany, to Nuremburg Station where they had agreed to meet Simon. Why? Maybe she now suspected he was Cagot, or maybe she was merely reacting to his changed mood, his sudden intense anxiety. His distant chilliness, his violent moodswings, as he ransacked himself for answers or solace or quiescence.
He’d stopped making love to her. He couldn’t do it any more. Once they had been rough, playful, sharply passionate. And now? He could see himself biting her, that white female flesh, and drawing blood.
It was an abyss, and he had to look into it, he had to reach far inside his soul, to get a hold of his essential self.
Because he needed his last reserves of equanimity, for the crucial hours ahead. The crucial days, the crucial minutes.
3.07, 3.08, 3.09.
Maybe Simon wasn’t coming. They had sent one email from Amsterdam, and had got one quickly in return:
Yes.
There had also been one other email in David’s inbox, a very surprising email – from Frank Antonescu. His granddad’s old lawyer in Phoenix had been doing some research of his own, and, through a contact at the IRS – who apparently owed him a favour – had eventually, ‘after a lot of grafting and grifting!’ worked out where the money came from.
The Catholic church.
The money was, Antonescu wrote, ‘Paid not just to your grandfather but to a number of people immediately after the war. It was known as “Gurs money”. I have no idea why. The fellow at the IRS was similarly mystified.’
So that was another joist of an answer – in the rising structure of a solution. But the full edifice would only be revealed when they got to Zbiroh. And found the Fischer results.
3.16, 3.17, 3.18.
Was Simon ever coming? Maybe something terrible had happened to him. Maybe Miguel had got there first.
‘There!’ said Amy.
A slightly scruffy, breathless, freckled, fair-haired man of about forty came running along the concourse. He stared at Amy and David –
‘David Martinez!’
‘Simon Quinn?’
The older man, the Irish journalist, glanced at the three of them, and smiled, shyly.
‘You must be Amy. And you…’
‘Angus Nairn.’
Hands were shaken, formal introductions made. But then
David and Simon looked long and hard at each other and the absurdity of their formality became apparent to both of them – at the same time.
They hugged. David embraced this man he had never met – like a lost brother. Or like the sibling he’d never had.
And then the tension, the spiralling terror of the situation, recrudesced. Amy reminded them, as she had reminded them repeatedly for the last three days:
‘Miguel is still after us…’
Amy’s fear of Miguel seemed to have
grown
since they fled Namibia. And maybe, David surmised, that was adding to her depression. The relentlessness of their pursuer was destroying her will. Perhaps she was actually resigned to Miguel’s triumph. He always found them in the end; maybe the Wolf would find them this time, and finish the job.
Unless they got to the data first.
They went quickly to the hire car.
Angus was in charge of the map. He directed them out of the suburbs of Nuremburg, into the undulating countryside, and onto the Czech border. As they went, Simon confessed: he told them of his brother being held by the Society. Kidnapped and brutalized.
Even from the driver’s seat, David could see the grief in Simon’s eyes. The grief – and the guilt. No one spoke for a good few minutes when Simon finished his confession. The fate of this man, Tim, was also in their hands.
It was too much.
The frontier approached. The old Iron Curtain. In nearby fields, useless and rusting, stood derelict watchtowers and old coils of barbed wire. But the contemporary border was just one bright glass office – entirely empty. They didn’t even have to show passports.
Simon spoke:
‘Why Nuremburg? Why meet there?’
Angus explained that they wanted to convene in a big anonymous city, across the border from the Czech Republic. To confuse anyone who might be following.
Simon nodded.
‘And this castle?’
‘The map shows it’s in a town called Zbiroh. But the entrance is two miles away, a little village called Pskov. Some kind of tunnel. The tunnel itself leads from a synagogue in Pskov.’
Again Simon nodded. His demeanour was enormously subdued.
They drove on. The Czech side of the border was a notable change from the German prosperity next door. Everything was a little more hunched, grubby, and humble. And the road to Plzen was lined with thirty-something women in tiny skirts and blonde wigs.
Angus explained:
‘Prostitutes.’
‘Sorry?’
‘Came here for a conference a few years back, in Prague. The women here are working girls…the punters come over from Germany. Truck drivers and businessmen. They also sell gnomes.’
Amy queried this: ‘Gnomes?’
The Scotsman pointed at a shop by the road. An entire rank of garishly painted garden gnomes was set up in front of the store.
‘Because of some tax law, the gnomes are cheaper here, so again the Germans come over. For hookers and gnomes!’
He laughed drily. No one else laughed. But David was glad that Angus was laughing. The Scot was the only one amongst them who seemed to possess any positive energy, any real optimism. His intellectual need to know the Fischer results, his sheer curiosity, his selfish desire to know if
he’d been right, was – rather ironically – keeping them all going.
But soon the car was silent, once more, as they sped along the motorway to Plzen. Angus had the map on his lap. Thick forests encroached. The drizzle was turning into proper rain.
‘OK,’ said Angus. ‘Enough fucking
brooding.
Let’s do something. Let’s help Simon! Tell him the story so far. Poor guy’s a freelance hack, he needs a story, to help with the mortgage. Let’s pool everything we know.’
The mood in the car was so tense, so depressive, so frightened, David welcomed this impulsive idea. Talk. Just
talk.
Talk about anything. So they did: as David drove, they put together every segment of the puzzle, each adding their portion to the pot. And as they discussed, Simon scribbled in his notebook.
Then the journalist sat back. His voice was cracked with emotion, but at least he was managing to speak.
‘OK. This is, ah, how I see it. What we know so far.’
David felt the flutter of his own anguish; he had an absurd fear that Simon would turn and point to him, and say
You, of course, are a Cagot.
Simon began.
‘The beginnings of the mystery go back three thousand years, when the Bible was being written in Babylon. At various places in the Book of Genesis, there are passages which hint at human beings
other than Adam and Eve
.’
Amy was staring out of the window. Looking at the cars behind and ahead, with anxious intent. Looking for red cars, maybe.
Simon went on:
‘The problems caused by these insidious Biblical hints have always been with us. But they truly came to a head, in Christendom, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, during the persecutions of the Basques and the Cagots.’
He glanced at Angus. Then went on:
‘The Basques are truly a breed apart, with a unique language, culture and society, unusual blood type, and so forth. Their race possibly dates back to pre-Indo-European times – 30,000 BC. They have long suffered persecution for being…different. These persecutions peaked with the witch burnings of 1610–1611, the so-called Basque Dream Epidemic.’
Their hire car was speeding past a tiny Skoda, an old car from the communist era. A farmer sat in the front with his fat wife at his side. The Skoda was doing thirty kph.
Simon continued:
‘The case of the mysterious Cagots is similar – yet more severe. The Cagots are, or were, a crossbreed. They lived in the same region as the Basques. Indeed they probably descend from Basques who intermarried with dark Saracen soldiers in the eighth and ninth centuries. As such, they were, from the beginning, very isolated within Christendom – but with an additional and fatal taint of the infidel.
‘So they were persecuted. And by the seventeenth century these repressions were reaching homicidal levels: Cagots were being nailed to church doors. One byproduct of this persecution and isolation was the intensification of genetic problems within the Cagot community –’
David interrupted: ‘It wasn’t their fault.’
Simon replied, with a puzzled frown, ‘No, of course, it wasn’t their
fault.
However, the reputation they had for psychotic tendencies, cretinism, even cannibalism, was, tragically, not entirely unjustified. Many Cagots were afflicted with various syndromes which led to bizarre and even repellent behaviour.’
Amy asked: ‘That was why the King of Navarre instituted the tests – to see if the Cagots were truly “different”?’
‘Yes. Moreover, primitive though science was at the time,
it seems the King’s doctors did observe the syndactyly, the web-footed deformity, and other physical manifestations of the Cagots’ inbred genotype. They concluded that the Cagots
were
indeed different to the rest of humanity, in a very significant way.’
He flipped a page of the notebook.
‘The discovery alarmed the Pope and his cardinals in Rome. The idea that God would actually be creating Serpent Seed, new kinds of men,
different
kinds of men,
men who are not men
, was pure anathema. It threatened the very basis of accepted Catholic doctrine that mankind is made in God’s image. How can God have two images? Two kinds of children? Revelation of this truth would not only justify the worst persecution,
of a Christian and European people
– it would bring into question all of Catholic theology.’
‘All Christian theology,’ said Angus, ‘for that matter.’
‘This is why the church sought to end the persecution of the Cagots. For the very same reason the Spanish Inquisition decided to cease and suppress the Basque witch burnings. The Catholic elite wanted the “choir of Christendom” to remain “indivisible”. The Basques and Cagots would be returned to the fold of humanity.’
‘Yet there were, still, elements in the church that adhered to the bigoted, Curse of Cain philosophies. Especially amongst the lower clergy, the local peasantry, and some of the more rigorous church orders, like the Dominicans.
‘Ever eager to avoid schism, the Vatican agreed to a compromise. The relevant and most controversial documents – relating to the witch burnings, and the blood test on the Cagots, and the ensuing papal conciliations – were not destroyed: they were secretly housed in the ancient archives of the Dominican University in Rome, the Angelicum. Centuries later they were carefully rehoused in a brand new monastery in central France.’
‘Purpose-built,’ Angus interrupted, ‘by a far right architect, as a safe place to hide these documents. Correct?’
‘And a masterpiece of functionality,’ Simon replied. ‘So offputting it sends people mad.’
Amy was still gazing out of the window. Her cardigan had fallen from her shoulder, exposing her bare suntanned skin. Gold and soft, and yielding.
David fixed his eyes on the road. Simon lifted his notes.
‘Back in 1907 a brilliant young German anthropologist, Eugen Fischer, arrived in the desolate, diamond-rich German colony of Sud West Afrika, now Namibia. He was following in the footsteps of his hero, the great British scientist – and founder of modern eugenics – Francis Galton.
‘What Fischer found amazed him. By studying the khoisan – the “Bushmen” of the Kalahari, and their close cousins, the Basters, a crossbreed between Bushmen and Dutch settlers, Fischer discovered that in the very recent past mankind had…possibly
speciated.’
Amy said nothing. David said nothing. Angus was wearing a distant smile. Simon continued:
‘The process of
speciation –
the dividing of one species into new species – is of course crucial to evolution. Yet the process is itself ill defined. When does a new breed or strain of an organism become a subspecies, and when can it be termed a truly separate species? Geneticists, zoologists and taxonomists still argue this point; but no one denies that speciation occurs.’
Simon turned a page.
‘But hitherto nobody had expected that speciation might have happened to
Homo sapiens
within the last few thousand years. As Angus says, some experts believe a small form of human might have evolved
fairly
recently in Asia –
Homo floresiensis
. Hominids like this might even explain those Biblical myths of non-Adamite humans, implied in the first
verses of Genesis. A genuine folk memory of small, dwarvish, almost-men.
‘But that is still ten thousand years back. And yet, as Fischer investigated the Khoisan and the Basters he became convinced that something akin to speciation was
right now
taking place in Africa: either the Bushmen were a new species, or they were close to becoming so.
‘This discovery affirmed the racism already present in Fischer’s thinking. Like many scientists of his time, Fischer believed without embarrassment in a hierarchy of human races, with whites at the top, and aborigines and black Africans at the bottom. He now put the Bushman even lower than that, beyond the family of man.’
David changed gear to overtake a big red lorry with
Intereuropa
written on the side. He asked: ‘Yet this guy Eugen Fischer liked Jews? The Kellermans?’
‘Yes,’ Simon answered. ‘Fischer was, ironically, no anti-Semite. He appreciated the friendship of other clever men, especially if they were wealthy and glamorous. He became friends with the Kellerman dynasty, German-Jewish diamond merchants making millions from the mineral-rich sands of the Namibian desert. This friendship was to prove crucial in the following decades.’