The young Dutch man at the counter looked as serious as a theology student. He was giving a German couple expert advice on growing magic mushrooms. “It’s all about the soil,” he said, sounding sententious. The couple had chosen twenty or so bags of spores, enough to fill an entire greenhouse.
Bashir picked a bag containing five specimens of a white-fringed mushroom with a phallic cap: Psilocybe semilanceata. He felt their texture and made a face. Not good enough. He waited for the salesman to finish with his customers and asked in English if he didn’t have something better. The employee came around the counter and pointed to another display of multicolored bags decorated with laughing elves. Bashir shook his head.
“I want the best quality. Money is not an issue.”
The salesman smiled and retreated to the back of the store. Bashir could see him removing a box from a refrigerator. There were no comic gnomes, just sturdy, bright-colored plastic boxes containing mushrooms that might have been collected the day before. The salesman returned, took out four mushrooms, and set them delicately on a brushed-aluminum tray.
“The nectar of the Gods, man. Takeoff guaranteed with no hard landing. But you have to be lying down.”
“How much?”
The young man put on a contrite look and said, “I don’t have many left, and you can’t grow these jewels just anywhere.”
“How much?”
“Three hundred euros, and I’m taking a loss, man.”
“Fine.”
Bashir paid and on his way out held the door for an elderly woman with snow-white hair and a fox terrier.
A strange country, he thought as he headed toward Dam Square, in front of the royal palace, where the queen never went. He thought about Sol and the macabre staging of the murder. He would probably never get an explanation.
21
The supple wooden bar sagged under the weight of her leg as she stretched over her thigh, reaching for her calf and making a final effort to grab her ankle. Sweat trickled down her forehead to her cheek, which was now pressed against the leg.
The pain shot up her leg and through her hips as she pushed her flexibility to the limit.
“Pain gives birth to dreams,” the French poet Louis Aragon had written, and for Helen, the more intense it was, the clearer her thoughts became. She had many techniques for emptying her mind, but nothing worked as well as torturing her body with extreme stretches.
Hvar’s neo-medieval building had twenty-five rooms, three meeting rooms, relaxation rooms, a Jacuzzi, an Olympic-sized swimming pool, a heliport, and a pier that could host large ships. It was Orden’s second-largest estate after the one in Asunción, Paraguay, which had a ranch and a golf course, as well. Orden had similar estates in Munich, Cannes, London, and five other cities in the Americas. Two palaces were under construction in Asia. Members used them for retreats and meetings far from prying eyes.
The castle, entirely renovated by the state in 1942, had served as offices for the German diplomatic delegation and had also housed an outpost of the Ahnenerbe, the Riech’s institute for archeological and cultural studies of the Aryan race. When Yugoslavia was liberated, the castle became a people’s palace under Josip Tito and was used solely by the aged statesman’s bodyguards.
After the fall of communism, a consortium of German and Croatian businessmen quietly bought the building to house the Adriatic Institute of Culture Research, one of Orden’s many retreats.
Surviving members of the Ahnenerbe, all with the Thule, chose the name Orden following the demise of Nazi Germany. “Before Hitler, we existed. After his death, we will continue to exist.”
Anyone looking for the owners of the castle would find a Zagreb-based real estate company held by a Cyprian trust and managed by three phantom foundations in Liechtenstein. The same setup was used for other properties the organization owned. Only the most astute observer would notice that all these luxury residences were cultural institutes whose focus varied from one location to the next: artistic symbolism in London, for example, or the working-class culture in Munich, or pre-Colombian musical instruments in Paraguay.
Unfolding from her position, Helen felt a rush as her body released the tension. She had the sensation of being weightless. She picked up the wall phone and called the front desk to schedule a massage. Grabbing a towel, Helen gazed at the sea outside the gym’s large window. The waves glistened in the moonlight. Three lit-up yachts passed in the distance, and a fishing boat was leaving the shore.
“Tired?”
She turned to see a man in the doorway. She felt his steel-gray eyes giving her a once-over.
“A bit. And you?”
“Same old routine. You must succeed this time. We are counting on you.”
“Yes. I won’t fail again.”
“I should hope not. Will you be joining us for dinner?”
“No. It’ll be an early night for me.”
“Good night, then,” the man said. After a moment, he added, “You bear such a resemblance to your mother. It’s like I’m seeing her all over again in you.”
“Good night, Father.”
He looked thoughtful, then turned and left.
Helen wiped her forehead and looked at herself in the mirror. The mention of her mother catapulted her back to a time when she wasn’t called Helen or any of the other names she used for her missions, a time when she was simply Joana, a child lost in a civil war. The last image she had of her mother was a Serbian officer shooting her between the eyes. Her skull had exploded before her body crumpled to the ground. The officer then put a gun to Helen’s head. He couldn’t have been more than twenty-five years old. He leaned in, and she felt the heat of his breath on her ear. “I’m not going to kill you,” he said. “I’m not a pig like your father, who massacred my village and killed my twelve-year-old sister. You’ll live to tell him that I’ll wring his neck with my own hands. Nod if you understand.”
She had nodded.
The man holstered his gun. It was over. Five minutes later, the Serbs were gone. Helen had fallen to her knees next to her mother’s body, howling in hatred and pain. But when her father returned, she was done crying. Without emotion, she gave him the message.
A year later, her commando unit captured a small band of Serbians. She recognized her mother’s murderer. Her father let him loose in an abandoned village and offered her a manhunt. She took half an hour to kill the man, first lodging bullets in his knees, then taking a knife to each part of his body. His shrieks echoed off the crumbling walls of the houses. “You made me the person I am today,” she whispered calmly in his ear. “You gave me a gift, that of granting death.” Then she shot him between the eyes. She was sixteen.
It took her only a few years to build her reputation as an efficient and ruthless killer. At the end of the war, she transitioned to working as a contract killer and brokering traffic of all kinds. There were few women in the field.
Croatia gained its independence, and her father became a respectable businessman who specialized in international tourism. But in the background, he stayed close to many former members of Ustaše. He made frequent trips to Germany for business and politics. Croatia maintained strong ties with Germany, and the Germans, in fact, had secretly underwritten the heavy artillery that the Croatians used against the more powerful Serbs.
Joana’s father had connections in a number of far-right groups in addition to Ustaše, and he introduced her to powerful people, initiates who had revealed to him both political and sacred secrets. The Orden brotherhood had for centuries guarded the secrets of Thule, the cradle of the pure Aryan race. Joana knew why fate had chosen her. Revenge and violence were nothing, compared with the feelings of potency and control they conveyed.