Strindberg's Star (37 page)

The people closest to him out on the square were the shaved men
over by the restaurant table, and there were some schoolchildren doing something with a skateboard near a tobacco stand about fifty yards away.

A disheveled bum was sitting on a park bench, leaning his head back as though the sun were shining, and far over by the stairs up to the entry of the bank, there was a man in a wheelchair, surrounded by a group of men dressed in black.
They sure don’t skimp on care for the disabled, the Germans; they look after their own,
Don thought as he saw how the caretakers moved as though they were at the man’s beck and call.

But at least the man’s bald head was turned in the right direction, and it seemed as though he intended to watch the little scene alongside the taxi—a small assurance that a bystander would react if this entire deal went completely wrong.

D
on lost his breath for a second when he saw who was now standing in the doorway to Alter Hof. Eva’s face was black-and-blue and swollen, and there was an oval scab under her left eye; it was yellowish brown, on its way to turning black.

“Miss Strand, as you see,” said the woman in front of him. “I’m truly sorry, but she gave us no choice.”

“She didn’t?” asked Don, who really wanted to get out of this sick German city as fast as he possibly could.

“And you have … ?” the woman said, taking a few steps forward.

Don tried to keep his eyes on her while at the same time leaning into the backseat of the taxi and grabbing the string around the cardboard box. Behind the woman, he could see that Eva had started to come closer, led brusquely by the arms by the wrestler and another of the foundation’s men.

When the attorney was finally standing next to her, the woman asked how he had imagined the exchange would happen. Don held the package in his moist hands and couldn’t produce an answer.

“Eva …” Don began.

The attorney looked up at him with a grimace.

“What have they done to you?”

She didn’t answer, just stared at him.

Instead, alongside Eva, the woman said, “And now, if you could hand over what belongs to us.”

When he nodded toward the box, the woman just waved dismissively.

“Just the star, please.”

D
on undid the bow and let the string fall down onto the cobblestones. Then he opened the lid and gently removed the top layer of cotton. Strindberg’s star lay there, resting in the light, and he angled the box so that the woman could see.

“Happy?” he asked when they had been standing like that for a moment.

The woman tore her sooty eyes from the small object.

“I guess we’ll see,” she said. “May I … ?”

She extended a hand and picked up the five-pointed white star from the soft bed of cotton. She held it up before her and, irritated, brushed away a few white specks from the metal. Her mouth moved as she examined its winding inscription.

“You understand what the words mean?” Don couldn’t help but ask.

“Yes, but the star seems to be covered in something,” said the woman.

“It looked like that when we found it. Is there a problem?”

The woman shook her head and placed the star into the pocket of her jacket. Then her smile was back again.

“Not at all. Everything is as it should be.”

She signaled to the men in the military jackets that they should release their grip on the attorney. But Eva was ahead of them; she pulled herself free. Then she threw a glance at the empty box and
whispered as she slowly walked past Don, “How could you be so naive?”

Don’s mouth suddenly became dry, while at the same time he heard the door close on the other side of the taxi. The car’s motor was running, Eva sat in the backseat, but something still felt so wrong. For the woman, the matter seemed to be settled. She was on her way back toward Alter Hof with her hand in her jacket pocket, fingering the star. But the two shaved men were still standing there.

Don heard the woman call out to them to come along, but they didn’t seem to care about her instructions anymore. He realized he had forgotten to warn her about the star—everything had gone according to plans—but now he had enough of his own problems.

The wrestler had come very close, and he held a damp linen rag in his hand. Don smelled the sour scent of gas as the rag was suddenly pressed up against his mouth.

The grip on his neck was impossible to throw off, especially now that everything was becoming so foggy. An instant later his legs gave out and everything German mercifully faded away.

T
he Germans’ anesthetic seemed to have completely dissolved all the shock absorption inside his skull and left his brain scraping against the walls of the cavity, resulting in a splitting headache.

Don wondered, as he lay there with his cheek against an ice-cold stone floor, if they might have injected him with some type of ketamine after they had put him under with the rag. Because he recognized very well the waves of nausea when he tried to get up on one elbow, and in his mouth was the familiar taste of bitter almond and lemon. But he had never experienced a ketamine intoxication that left him blind. And yet he could see nothing.

There was a sting from his cornea as he tried to reassure himself by way of his fingers that he really had opened his eyes. But the world around him remained black, and in his mouth and nose was the scent of an earthen cellar and stuffy moisture.

H
e began to massage his knees to get them to loosen up after their stiffness from the cold, and there was a snap as he straightened his crooked back. He had no idea how long he had been lying knocked out on the floor. Presumably it had been several hours, because it took
him a number of very painful attempts to get up. When he finally regained some semblance of balance in his legs, Don began to move forward with very small steps.

Held his arms stretched out like a sleepwalker, in the bewildered hope that he would manage to feel his way out of this complete blackness by complete chance. But his fingers ran into a wall after only a few yards.

When he felt along the rough surface, he understood that he was standing at a brick wall. It arched out, as though it were circular, and he began to follow its stones from seam to seam.

While he moved along the wall, trying to keep count of his steps, he began to think about Eva and what had actually happened outside the Alter Hof restaurant. The warning about the star he’d never gotten out before the anesthetizing rag was pressed to his mouth. Don hadn’t had time to see what happened to the attorney afterward, and now that he thought about it, he preferred not to guess. He was already ridden with so much guilt about what he had put her through that he didn’t have the stamina to try to imagine what had been her final fate.

He had counted thirty steps in a half circle when there was a clatter from something he’d happened upon that seemed to be a large metal chain. He grabbed and managed to catch hold of it—and at the same instant, he knew that he was in the cellar under the west tower of Wewelsburg.

D
on tried in vain to stop the suffocating memory from taking over. But he already saw her before him again: the museum guide with her blond hair, drawn-on eyebrows, and wax-red mouth. She had been wearing a colorful scarf on that day so long ago, and he remembered that it had been adorned by a porcelain brooch in the shape of the three-cornered silhouette of the Nazi castle.

The guided tour of the castle’s museum had begun with Heinrich Himmler’s photography. They had both stood there contemplating
the SS leader’s face, whose lack of character made it so difficult to recall. His hair shaved high up on the sides, into a wet-combed skullcap. The middle-aged beginnings of a double chin, and above his lip something that looked like a mix between stubble and a mustache.

Under the photograph in the display case, some objects had been preserved like a still life. A belt with the inscription:

“My honor is called loyalty.” Beside the belt lay the SS honor ring and the sharp dagger.

D
espite his work on the Ahnenerbe and the symbols of Nazism, Don had tried to avoid Himmler’s castle for as long as possible. And now, in hindsight, he wished he had never set foot in its north tower. But because he had come there for a private tour, the museum guide had unlocked it and shown him in.

T
he first step into the Obergruppenführersaal was the longest one he had ever taken, and the airless room swam before his eyes. It had been so warm, too, July, and the heat had pressed in from the high windows.

He had forced himself to walk across the floor toward the black sun wheel in the mosaic, until he was standing with his boots on its center disc of gold. He looked out toward the twelve columns that ran along the tower room walls and understood that he had reached the core of Bubbe’s 1950s house.

Still he had felt absolutely nothing.

At least not until he turned to the museum guide and saw her hushing finger. The respectful gesture had filled him with such distaste that he considered cutting the tour short. But the blond guide must have completely misunderstood his expression, because she had whispered that this was the heroes’ indestructible hall.

Then she had led him to the crypt in the lower level of the tower. When his legs began to give way, Don had grabbed for the iron rail of the staircase.

He had dared to approach the grated door to the crypt, but hadn’t had the strength to go farther, even though the museum guide offered to open it. Through the grates he had been able to glimpse the swastika on the ceiling, and the guide had pointed out the gas pipe. The place for the eternal flame, he remembered that she had said.

When he had asked her whom the flame had been intended to burn, she had become quiet. Something about his appearance must have caused her to put it together, and she had said that the tour was now over. And he remembered that he had thought, as he walked back up the steep stairs to the upper room, that he had just seen the remains of a madman’s creation.

“W
iligut,” Don whispered to himself.

He let go of the metal chain and it clattered as it fell back against the stone floor in the cellar of the west tower. Through the sound he thought he heard someone snuffle. At first Don stood stiffly in the damned blindness, but then a hoarse voice asked, “Is someone here?”

With a rush of relief, he took a few steps forward, bent down, and fumbled around in the darkness. Came across fabric with buttons and lapels. Then he found the warm hand, at the end of the trench coat’s sleeve.

“Eva?”

She pulled him close without answering, and he felt her catch his head in an awkward hug.

“So you can’t see anything either?” he managed to whisper, when he had collected himself a bit.

“No, how could I?” she whispered back. “They’ve brought us to the castle, haven’t they?”

“They’ve locked us up in their museum,” mumbled Don. “At the very bottom of the west tower. I believe you have the informational
placard about the concentration camp Buchenwald directly above your head.”

“Buchenwald?”

“The SS locked the local Jews in here right after Kristallnacht. They had to crowd in here for a few weeks, until they were sent away to Buchenwald. That was a little footnote on the guided tour.”

“Have you been here?”

He sighed.

“Wewelsburg was Himmler’s dream of the knights’ castle Camelot. It was impossible for me not to travel here.”

“Voluntarily?”

“For research. Maybe to honor the prisoners of war who renovated the castle, too. A few thousand people, most of them Russians, who were worked to death, starved, hanged, or shot.
Vernichtung durch Arbeit,
as it was called, annihilation through work.”

The attorney just breathed quietly, without saying anything.

“The local concentration camp was called Niederhagen, and it was managed so effectively that the leader was promoted to a commander at Bergen-Belsen. His old gatehouse was converted into a two-family home, I’ve heard.”

“It sounds idiotic to lock someone up in a museum,” Eva mumbled.

Don shrugged.

“In any case, it will probably be difficult to get out.”

H
e touched her face lightly with his fingers. There were no longer any traces of the swelling under her eye.

“You really heal fast,” Don observed.

“They only beat me for the first few hours,” said Eva. “Once they got me to tell them the codes to Hex’s server, they seemed to assume they could lure you here. But now …”

She let the words glide out into silence, and asked instead, “What was that name you said, by the way?”

“When?”

“Just before you almost stepped on me.”

“Wiligut?”

“Yes … Wiligut. That sounds familiar somehow.”

“It’s his fault that the castle is still standing at all. It didn’t work to blow up the north tower, not even when the SS men tried themselves. He’s some sort of occult shadow figure within Nazism. An old Austrian army officer who was said to have worked in silence within the weapons industry during the interwar period, only to pop up with Himmler like an ancient Aryan oracle in the early thirties. No one knows very much about him, other than that he was once locked up in a mental hospital and that that was the reason Heinrich Himmler fired him. He …”

There was a clatter, a key being guided into and turned in a lock. A creaking sound, and then the tone of the darkness shifted. A beam of light was turned on and was directed first down at the floor, and then it swept slowly along the walls of the tower room. When it finally fell on their faces, Eva and Don were caught, blinking, in the powerful light.

“Don Titelman?” They heard a familiar voice.

Then the light out there in the stairwell was turned on and, squinting, Don could see the contours of the nonreflective glasses that could belong to no one other than Reinhard Eberlein. Just behind the German, he could glimpse an unwieldy figure who resembled a toad more than anything.