Read Three Tales From the World of Cotton Malone Online
Authors: Steve Berry
Three Tales From the World of Cotton Malone (9 page)
“He killed them?”
“He is a difficult man. He attacks our common problem in a different manner. Killing is easy for him. He is much like his father.”
“And who is that?”
“Martin Bormann. He was the child born while they lived in Africa.”
He had another question but held it for the moment.
“My brother became heir to the family fortune. During the war, Bormann controlled the Adolf Hitler Endowment Fund of German Industry. Or, as history as labeled it, Hitler's Bounty. The moneys came from German industrialists. Some paid willingly, others required encouragement. It was the price the wealthy paid for the privilege of profiting from the Reich. Bormann ruled that fund, and many believed that he diverted much of those assets into foreign accounts. They were right. Gamero's file cabinets contained records of those transfers.”
“A bit stupid, wasn't it? Keeping records.”
Schüb smiled. “Such was their fallacy. Nazis loved to write things down. Like that memo you hold. It records the transfer of much wealth at a time when it would have been far better to say nothing.”
He could not argue with that.
“Gamero was the son of a German immigrant. His father, along with countless others, filtered into Chile after the war. Some had relatives in the area, descendants of the original German émigrés who came, with the encouragement of the government, into central Chile during the 19th century. Gamero's father had been a high-level diplomat in the foreign service, blessed with living abroad during the war, capable afterward of denying, with impunity, any involvement with war crimes.”
“Who are you?” he asked, truly wanting to know.
Schüb stared at the fire, still sitting slouched in the chair. “I am a man who bears a heavy burden. I think you can understand that, can't you?”
“I came here to right a personal wrong. I don't care about your problems.”
“I wish mine were as simple as yours.”
Silence passed between them.
“My brother is dead,” Schüb said. “I killed him myself a little while ago.”
“Why am I still alive?”
“I want to show you something.”
He followed Schüb across the grass, back into the woods, and onto a wide path. After ten minutes of walking, during which his host said nothing, he spied the citadel, the long ponderous edifice clinging to the mount of a sharply rising slope, its gray walls splashed with a sodium vapor glow.
They found a paved lane and followed the incline up to the main entrance. A solitary guard stood outside the wall, armed with a rifle.
“My brother's castle,” Schüb said. “My guard.”
“Where do you live?”
“Not here.”
He surveyed the burg and its assortment of buildings, the walls dotted with mullion, dormer, and oriel windows. They walked into an inner courtyard. Several cars sat idle. Some of the windows above glowed with light, but most loomed dark and silent.
A lighted entrance seemed the way in. They started across the cobbles, passing the dark cars.
Inside was opulent, German, and medieval. Exactly what he would have expected.
“My brother clung to his heritage.”
Schüb led them upstairs to a sleeping chamber. Wyatt noticed the enormous bed with bulbous Jacobean legs. Above its head hung a massive oil painting that depicted the archangel Michael with his sword directing anxious wayfarers toward heaven.
Then he noticed the panel. On the far side, in an alcove.
A slab of stone, hinged open.
They walked over and stepped inside. Stone stairs lined with a red carpet runner wound down in a tight circle. They slowly descended and finished standing on a polished gray slate floor, staring at a Nazi uniform. The dry air was clearly climate-controlled and humidified. The coarse stone walls, plastered and also painted gray, bore evidence
from when they were hacked out of the bedrock. The chamber cut a twisting path, one room dissolving into another. There were flags, banners, even a replica of some SS altar. Countless figurines, a toy soldier set laid out on a colorful map of early-20th-century Europe, helmets, swords, daggers, caps, uniforms, windbreakers, pistols, rifles, gorgets, bandoliers, rings, jewelry, gauntlets, photographs, and a respectable number of paintings signed by Hitler himself.
“There are about three thousand items in all,” Schüb said. “A lifetime of effort. Perhaps the greatest collection of Nazism on the planet. As I said, my brother loved his heritage.”
Wyatt's attention drifted ahead, where he spied more memorabilia. Schüb stopped at a headless mannequin, one of many that displayed a variety of 1930s-period clothing.
“This was the summer dress of a Sturmbannführer. A handsome white coat dotted with silver buttons, an Iron Cross, a scarlet armband, and a gold Horseman's Badge affixed to the left breast pocket. By Hitler's order the coat was worn only between April 1 and September 30, adorning the highest-ranking officers during ceremonial occasions at Berchtesgaden. To wear it any other time or place was unthinkable. Impressive, isn't it? The Nazis were good at coating the rotten with a handsome veneer.”
He'd entered a macabre world, his mind reeling at the spectacle. And though he'd seen worse, he'd never seen stranger.
“When I see all this,” Schüb said, “I think of my childhood. Men, in secret, wearing armbands adorned with swastikas. Gorgets. Bandoliers. Gauntlets.” The older man pointed to a porcelain basset hound on display. “Prisoners at Dachau made those for the SS.”
He stared at the shiny white dog.
The subterranean labyrinth ended, ahead, at a solitary wooden door.
Schüb faced him. “Before we go in there, there's something you must know.”
Bormann watched as Eva Braun writhed and screamed in agony. She was fighting the birth, though the midwife had cautioned her to relax. Her legs stiffened as another contraction racked her. She'd been nothing but difficult for the past few months. But their constant movement had clearly complicated things. They'd met up finally in Barcelona. He'd left Germany from the north, through Denmark and the Netherlands. She arrived from the south, starting in Switzerland and moving by rail into Italy, then across France. The Barcelona house had been used during the war as a secure location. Not taking any chances, he'd moved them farther into Spain, to an anonymous spot that he alone chose. The Führer was dead. He was in charge now.
And things were going to be different.
Braun screamed again.
He was tired of listening to her weakness.
She screamed again.
“When will this end?” he asked the midwife. She was a Spaniard who thankfully spoke German.
“The baby is coming now.”
Bormann stood behind the woman, whose head was plunged between Braun's spread legs, each ankle tied to a post of the bed. Braun stretched the bindings, but the thick posts held firm.
“Hurry it,” he said.
“Talk to God about that,” the midwife said, never turning her head.
Another scream pierced the room. Thankfully, the farmhouse was isolated.
The midwife reached out as Braun gritted her teeth. “Now. Push with all you can muster.”
Braun's head came up from the bed. For a moment Bormann's gaze locked with hers. He wanted to tell her to shut up and finish, but it seemed that the end was at hand. Braun's teeth were clenched tight, her face contorted, all her focus seemingly on expelling the baby from her womb.
“Yes,” the midwife said. “Yes.”
Braun pushed harder. Her breaths came short and shallow. Sweat soaked her. The woman grappled between Braun's legs and Bormann watched as a head came into view, then shoulders, arms, chest, and finally legs as the fetus emerged.
“What is the sex?” he asked.
The midwife ignored him. Her attention remained on the infant now cradled in her arms, the umbilical cord tracing a path back inside the womb. Braun had relaxed and appeared unconscious.
He could not see the baby clearly, so he moved closer.
“The sex. Tell me,” he demanded.
“A boy.”
Had he heard right? “Truly?”
“You sound amazed.”
He recovered his emotions. No one must know what he thought. “I only speak of the joy he will bring to the mother.”
“It is good to have a son.”
The midwife turned her attention back to Braun as the afterbirth was expelled. He stepped away. A son. Hitler's son. He recalled what his former supreme leader had told him after Braun had revealed in the Führerbunker that she was pregnant. There had been no anger, no joy. Just a placid acceptance. But Hitler had wanted the baby to survive, harboring a dream that his issue would one day resurrect the movement. So he released Bormann from his duty and instructed him to ensure that both Braun and the baby survived. Bormann had accepted the charge only as a way of escaping the death sentence that was Berlin. He hadn't wanted to stay in the first place and had urged Hitler to flee south to the Alps. The fanatical idiot refused. Hitler had actually thought that he could rally enough military might to thwart the advancing American and Russian armies.
He glanced down and noticed that the midwife had tied the umbilical cord and cut away the tissue. The infant started to cry, and the woman swiped the tiny face with a wet rag.
“He is a beauty,” the midwife said.
“No flaws?”
“None I can see.”
Not what he wanted to hear.
“Give him to me.”
The woman laid the screaming baby in his arms. Sparse wisps of black hair matted the scalp. He wondered what Adolf Hitler would have thought to be here, holding his son, admiring what he and Eva Braun had conceived. Most likely he would have felt nothing. Hitler had been drawn to children, but only because they represented the perfect canvas for his political image.
He laid the baby beside a still-unconscious Eva Braun.
He then removed the Luger he'd carried since leaving the Führerbunker and fired one bullet into the midwife's skull.
The fat woman's body slammed to the floor.
Eva Braun never moved. Exhaustion claimed her. She would be told that the baby died at birth and the midwife was killed for incompetence. There would be no argument from her. Why should there be? They were now bound together. Their lives forever intertwined.
And that was fine.
She wasn't altogether unpleasant, and he realized that his ability to enjoy female companionship in the years ahead would be limited. He must be careful. He'd watched how a woman could undo a man. That was not going to happen to him. Eva Braun would do as she was told or he'd plant a bullet in her skull, too.
He carried the infant from the room.
Outside, in the shade of a porch that jutted from the front of the farmhouse sat a man. Bormann walked over and handed him the baby. “Raise him as your own.”
The man's eyes were misty with pride. “He is his?”
“Absolutely.”
“I heard a shot.”
“The midwife's duty.”
The man nodded. “There can be no witnesses.”
“Just you and I, old friend.”
“I will raise him well.”
“It is of no matter to me any longer. I have done my duty.”
A lie. He was supposed to raise the child himself. But he wanted no more reminders of Adolf Hitler.
The man rose from his chair and said, “Live long, old friend.”
“I plan to.”
And Bormann watched as his visitor headed for a car parked under the shade of a sprawling elm, the infant in his arms.