They walked back down towards the car. ‘What did you say to her?’ he asked.
‘You wouldn’t understand.’
He stared up towards the north tower. ‘I’m going back tonight.’
‘I know. I’m coming with you.’
He shook his head. ‘It’s certainly illegal and it could very well be dangerous. You’re my researcher, remember, not my accomplice. And . . .’
‘And I’m only a girl?’
‘What?’
‘That’s what you were thinking. I could tell.’ He shook his head, but she continued before he could deny it. ‘How are you going to get inside? After all, it is a fortress and then there’s that big metal gate to get past.’
When she said big metal gate she mimicked a child’s voice. Christ, she could be infuriating. Not for the first time he decided he would never understand women.
‘I’ll make up my mind once I get here. There has to be a way. Maybe through one of the windows.’
‘Wow! What a master plan. The Pink Panther strikes again. Raffles has a rival.’
He turned to ask whether she had a better idea, and blinked.
‘Perhaps these would help.’ She held up a bunch of keys that were suspiciously similar to the ones the guide had carried.
‘How . . . ?’
‘I grew up in a rough neighborhood.’ Sarah smiled. ‘You had to be kinda tricky to get by. I didn’t think Magda would miss them for one night.’
‘But . . . ?’
‘Do you have a better idea?’
XXII
5 May 1945 We camped for the night on the outskirts of Ingolstadt. We were in the middle of the American sector now, but we kept our distance from any other units we met on the way. While we ate, the two other Nazis sat apart like ghosts at the feast. They despised Brohm and didn’t care that he knew it. The tall thin one is Gunther Klosse, some kind of medical genius. Klosse has the gloomy demeanour of an undertaker and is filled to bursting with suppressed fury. Strasser, the third of my precious charges, seldom speaks, even to Klosse, but cries out in his sleep in a language, Stan, our Polish paratrooper, says is Russian. Brohm pulled a bottle of brandy from somewhere – he is that kind of man, always finding a way to provide life’s little comforts – and insisted I share it. He teased me about the painting. ‘Perhaps, when it’s over, I will take you to see it, Leutnant Matt.’ ‘See what?’ I asked. ‘My masterpiece,’ he says. ‘It is beautiful, but to reach it you will face the traditional fearsome challenges. Where Goethe met his demon, avoid the witches’ trail. Below the water you will find it, but you must look beyond the veil.’
He grinned, a drunken Germanic bard, pleased with his atrocious poetry. I said I didn’t understand, but he only smiled and shook his head. I was a clever man; perhaps I would solve the riddle in time. It was not like any of the painter’s earlier works, but had the beautiful simplicity that characterized his best portraits. He tried to persuade me to guess the artist. I wouldn’t play his games, but by now I was close to knowing. Not Leonardo, but one of his contemporaries, the one he feared. It made me smile to think that he believed he could tempt me with his non-existent masterpiece. Art had once been my passion, but I had watched whole galleries burn and not felt a scratch on the flint surface of what was now my soul. When a man has seen people burn, what are a few scraps of oily canvas?
Later, Brohm got very drunk, perhaps we both did, but what he revealed that night was a stronger brew than the brandy, and I’d never felt more sober in my life. He began to speak about his work, about a force so powerful that even Hitler feared it, a force that could change the world or destroy it.
BACK IN HIS hotel room, hunched over the journal, Jamie frowned as he contemplated the two puzzles the short passage had spawned. Phrase by phrase, his unconscious mind worked its way through the words until it felt as if the blood was fizzing inside his head.
Where Goethe met his demon, avoid the witches’ trail. Below the water you will find it, but you must look beyond the veil.
Could this be it? The first real clue to to the Raphael’s location, rather than just its continued existence? But what kind of clue was it? What did it mean? Unless he could decipher it, he was no closer to the painting than he had been before he turned the first page of Matthew Sinclair’s journal. From across six decades it was as if he could hear Walter Brohm taunting him.
Reluctantly, he turned to the second mystery. A force so powerful that even Hitler feared it? This was something new. Or was it? David had said Walter Brohm had been involved in the Uranverein, the Uranium Club, and the project’s goal had been to create a force capable of changing the world or destroying it. But surely Hitler had been aware of the bomb’s potential? He had embraced it, not feared it, at least until it had become clear it wouldn’t win the war for him and he’d diverted the resources to other, more readily available, wunderwaffen. Perhaps Brohm had been closer to Hitler than anyone knew and had recognized something no one else had seen. After all, what was it Robert Oppenheimer had said about the Manhattan Project? Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds. In 1945, nobody, certainly in Germany, was aware of the bomb’s true power. Hitler would have been well within his rights to fear it.