“You!” she said. “What are you doing here?”
Andros looked at his watch. It was nine o’clock on the dot. There was no time to have it out with the woman, so he started to take off his tuxedo.
“What on earth are you doing?” she said.
“Why, I’m about to propose to your daughter.”
Her hands came to her face in horror, and she left the room cursing. Andros locked the door behind her and immediately went to the dresser.
The SS dress uniform was tucked away underneath some silk nighties. He quickly slipped into the pants, buttoned up the tunic, and fastened the belt with the German eagle on the buckle. He had to admit it felt good to be in uniform again, even if it was the wrong side’s. He picked up the cap and put it on his head at a slight angle, just the way Hans had it on in the garden.
“Perfect,” he told himself.
It was then that he noticed his picture on the dresser, taken in the States four years ago. How often had Aphrodite looked at it, he thought, the way he had looked at hers at West Point? How did von Berg feel about it, knowing it was up here? Not now, he told himself, and shook off any emotion he was feeling in order to concentrate on the task at hand.
Andros slipped the camera Eliot had given him into the uniform’s pocket, along with Aphrodite’s lighter. Then he parted the curtains and walked out onto the balcony.
It was dark outside, music drifting from the gardens around the corner. He firmly gripped Mrs. Vasilis’s precious mango tree, for years his ladder to Aphrodite’s bedroom, and softly descended to the gardens.
As Andros turned the corner, he could see the black cutout of a sentry on the patio outside the library. It was Peter, smoking a cigarette, pacing impatiently and glancing back and forth between his watch and the gardens, obviously itching to go. Andros was about to step forward when, from behind him, came two dull thuds-mangoes falling to the ground from the shaken tree.
Peter spun around. “Hans, is that you?”
Andros nodded and tapped his watch.
“You’re late,” Peter scolded, and without waiting for a response, he darted off toward the gardens.
Andros watched him leave and took a quick look around. Satisfied that nobody was near, he walked up, pushed his hand against the French door, and felt the catch give way.
73
T he library was dark as Andros made his way to the bookshelves, careful to avoid running into von Berg’s desk. Fortunately, there was enough glow from the gardens to throw some light on the floor through the windows. Andros moved cautiously but quickly. It would be only a minute or two before Peter saw the real Hans dancing with Aphrodite.
He pushed aside the volumes of Greek dramas and German philosophy and found the metal door to the safe. Following the numbers Touchstone had given him, he turned the dial to the right, to the left, back to the right, and one final turn to the left. He turned the handle. Nothing happened.
He tried it again, and again the handle wouldn’t turn. Then he heard voices in the hallway. Through the slit of light beneath the door, he could see shadows moving on the other side. He held his breath, and after a moment, they passed.
Once more he gave the dial four swift turns. There was a wonderful click, and the handle turned smoothly. He pulled the heavy door, and it opened.
He flicked on his lighter, quickly scanned the contents of the safe, and pulled out three folders. The first was marked FLAMMENSCHWERT, the second LUDWIG VON BERG, and the third HUSKY. He realized he would have to skim them and choose what seemed important enough to photograph.
He opened the FLAMMENSCHWERT folder. In it, he found aerial photos of coastal fortifications, along with maps of minefields and artillery defenses. Also listed were various supply runs of Andros ships under Swiss registry, with their manifests, including metallic uranium from Brazil in crates marked for groundnuts. But he found nothing resembling an ancient text, only a report that was written in neither Greek nor even German but Danish.
The report’s title, from what Andros could make out, spoke of “the passage of charged particles through matter.” Scribbled on the cover was a note that said, “This manuscript must not fall into Nazi hands.” Signed Niels Bohr. The Nobel Prize-winning physicist? thought Andros, looking closer. On top of Bohr’s note was another note, typed on official Nazi stationery by an SS Oberfuhrer Werner Best, suggesting that “Bohr’s project be brought under our direction.” Further military orders addressed the question of “atomistics” and mentioned “the off-site laboratory Achillion.”
Andros looked again at the aerial photographs. On the back of one of the photos was writing that said it had been taken by an American B-17, and the word “Achillion.” Perhaps this was the pilot MacDonald had told him about, the one shot down over Greece.
A photograph of a photograph would never do, Andros realized. So he left the pictures but took one of the negatives in the folder, as this would be less likely to be missed by von Berg. He slipped the negative into his pocket and moved on to the second folder, the one marked LUDWIG VON BERG.
74
T he SD report on von Berg was quite thick. On the black cover was a square of white paper with the title spelled out in jetblack letters: LUDWIG VON BERG, ss no. 96669. Too long to read here, Andros thought, but he had to open the report and at least skim the first page. He did and was hooked. Baron Ludwig von Berg was born in 1904, the son of a certain Maximilian von Berg, an undistinguished professor of music at the University of Munich. What did distinguish Maximilian was that he had been orphaned at birth when his mother, a recently widowed Baroness Teresa von Berg, died during complications in his delivery. Or so Maximilian-and later his son, Ludwig-believed. Maximilian never knew the fantastic truth that he was none other than the illegitimate child of King Ludwig II of Bavaria and Empress Elizabeth of Austria. Neither would his son, were it not for a series of extraordinary circumstances. It was no secret that Ludwig II adored and idealized his cousin Elizabeth. The two had grown up together on Lake Starnberg, Elizabeth in a beautiful home at Possenhofen and Ludwig across the waters in Berg Castle. Whenever the empress returned from Austria on holiday to her family at Possenhofen the lonely Ludwig was there, reveling in her company. The summer of 1871 found the cousins especially intimate. Both were disenchanted with the aristocratic life and had secluded themselves from society. For the 33-year-old Empress Elizabeth, that meant escaping the intrigues of the Austrian court. For the 25-year-old King Ludwig II, that meant retreating from the politics of a new, united Germany. William, king of Prussia, was now hailed as emperor, and for the first time, King Ludwig feared for the future of his beloved Bavaria. He was particularly troubled that by refusing to marry and have children, he had failed to secure the succession of the Wittelsbach family line. Elizabeth understood, and one night in a fit of passion, the two cousins cast aside their platonic pretensions. Max was born the next spring, while Elizabeth continued her seclusion in Merano with her sisters. By now she had been absent from Austria for almost two years, and the clamor of court gossip had reached such malicious levels that she was forced to return in May. But not before she left young “Max von Berg” in the charge of a childhood friend in Munich, a spiritualist named Countess Irene Paumgarten. The countess saw to Max von Berg’s care and education. As a baron, he enjoyed enough social advantage to escape poverty but remained far enough away from a life in the court that had so disappointed his parents. For the next 14 years, Elizabeth would often visit the countess on the pretext of spiritual guidance, but in reality to check up on young Max, who was being trained for a life of music in the grand tradition of Wagner, the one person King Ludwig II claimed understood him besides Elizabeth. Nobody else, however, could understand the enigma that was the Bavarian monarch. For it was during this time that Ludwig II retreated into a netherworld of fantasy, chasing grandiose dreams and building his fabled castles of Neuschwanstein, Herrenchiemsee, and Linderhof. The “mad monarch,” as he was widely known by that time, was finally declared insane and removed from government at the age of 40. In 1886 he drowned in Lake Starnberg under mysterious circumstances, and to this day there is debate as to whether he committed suicide or was assassinated. Because Ludwig left no known successor and because nobody knew about the illegitimate Max or whether he would be accepted with his dubious pedigree, Prince Luitpold became regent of Bavaria within the United Germany. After Ludwig’s death, a grief-stricken Elizabeth retreated to the Greek island of Corfu. She cited health reasons, but it was really to escape her pretentious and altogether miserable existence in the Hapsburg court once and for all. She lived to see Max enjoy a brilliant career as a composer of music and a fortunate marriage to Johanna Guber, the daughter of a prosperous German industrialist. Only Max’s occasional acts of eccentricity, which charmed society but alarmed his family with their increasing frequency, gave her cause for concern. Elizabeth’s last thrill in life was to attend Max’s first Wagnerian production, staged by the Berlin court opera to critical acclaim, on September 10, 1898. At the age of 60, she was assassinated by the Italian anarchist Luzzeni on Lake Geneva in Switzerland. Max was 26. It was several years later, on June 2, 1903, that Max von Berg’s wife, Johanna, gave birth to their first and only child, a son whom they ironically chose to name Ludwig. When the child was christened in their local Catholic church in Munich, neither Max nor Johanna nor the priest nor any of the family friends attending had any idea that this was Ludwig III. From the beginning, Ludwig von Berg’s childhood was marred by tragedy. First there was his father’s descent into madness-a shocking and disturbing development to family and friends who knew nothing of Max’s heritage. Then came the outbreak of the Great War. To 11-year-old Ludwig, both seemed to occur simultaneously and with equal devastation. Even as he saw his father deteriorate into a state of insanity, he witnessed the power of the British blockade choking the life out of his country. By the time he was 15, his father had died in an insane asylum, and Kaiser Wilhelm II’s Reich had collapsed. At this point Ludwig von Berg himself started to show signs of mental imbalance, hearing loud voices and having hallucinations. The thought that the madness all around him could also be inside him so terrified Ludwig that he hurled himself into those athletics in which he could excel as an individuaclass="underline" fencing, hunting, horseback riding, swimming, sailing, and marksmanship. To assert himself, to dominate and conquer, was to somehow keep ahead of the encroaching darkness that could swallow his soul at any moment. Whenever he did this-pursued technical perfection in any endeavor for its own sake-the voices stopped. As a result, he could never be still but constantly had to keep moving forward, terrified the voices would return. In school he excelled in chemistry, physics, and mathematics, as well as classical and modern languages, but he found philosophy, morality, and his mother’s Catholicism to be rather worthless on the whole. They did little to answer his honest questions concerning a meaningless universe and offered little comfort for his isolation. Only Hegel, Nietzsche, and Heidegger aroused any sort of interest; the result was an odd synthesis of existential thought that reached its nadir when Ludwig concluded that learning was futile and knowledge vanity. He dropped out of the university in 1922 and, at the age of 19, joined the navy for what he hoped would be a life of adventure. He rose quickly through the ranks of the officer corps. After a brief tour of duty aboard the admiral’s flagship, the cruiser Berlin, he was attached to naval intelligence. He was posted to the top-secret signals interception and code-breaking unit at Kiel. There he used his superior technical and language skills to crack enemy ciphers in defiance of the Versailles Treaty. He also qualified for the navy pentathlon team and taught fencing at the military sports school at Wunsdorf. But to Ludwig von Berg, these were all mere games. The excitement of naval intelligence faded sooner than he expected, and worse, the voices returned. In need of an immediate remedy, he had his grandfather Guber pull strings with Admiral Raeder at fleet headquarters to secure him command of his own submarine. Ever since the Great War, Ludwig von Berg had been spellbound by the submarine’s ability to submerge and become invisible to the enemy. Such stealth offered not only protection but the offensive advantage of surprise. He could go anywhere in the world, even those parts of the sea dominated by the enemy, and launch an underwater torpedo attack without warning. This power, this independence, gave him a sense of control over his destiny. But destiny caught up with Ludwig von Berg one day in 1936. That was when the 33-year-old baron received an urgent call from Wilhelm Canaris, his former first officer from the Berlin. Canaris, now an admiral, wanted to “talk about things.” It had been several years since the two had met, and much had happened in Germany in the meantime. Three years earlier the Reichstag had passed an enabling act that did away with parliamentary government and granted absolute power to Adolf Hitler. Since then the Nazi Party had dismissed the Bavarian state government in Munich, consolidated power throughout the rest of Germany, and crushed all opposition. Ludwig von Berg spent most of his time at sea, so these were events he read about in the newspapers and did not concern him. But Admiral Canaris, who was head of the Abwehr-the German military secret service-looked troubled when he arrived at the Guber estate in Munich where Ludwig resided. There was a transcript from recorded surveillance: “These Nazis, they are bent on ruining Germany,” he told von Berg in the parlor. “Now they want me to give them the noose to hang us all. You must help me.” Von Berg had heard similar grumbling among the officer corps. “How does this concern me?” “You undoubtedly are aware of the SS?” “Smart black uniforms, twin lightning flashes of silver on the collars. How could I miss them? Schutzstaffel-Hitler’s so-called protection squad. Headed by that old schoolmaster and chicken farmer, Himmler.” “Well, in addition to protecting the Fuhrer and the Nazi Party, the SS now concerns itself with protecting the security of the entire Reich. The Reich Security Main Office-or RSHA, as they now call themselves-is usurping every function of the state and armed forces. They even have their own secret intelligence service-the Security Service, or SD. Its chief is Himmler’s deputy, Reinhard Heydrich.” “Heydrich?” said von Berg. “I know that name from somewhere. Wasn’t there a midshipman on the Berlin by that name?” “There was indeed.” “I saw him at the German officers’ fencing tournament at Dresden once,” von Berg recalled. “After he lost a match in the preliminary rounds, he smashed his saber to the floor and threw such a fit that the umpires had to restrain him.” Von Berg looked at Canaris. “I heard he was expelled from the navy altogether. Surely this can’t be the same man.” Canaris nodded. “Criminals, I tell you, from the top to the bottom. Now the military and political secret services are expected to ‘collaborate.’ I’m working with Heydrich to draw the lines of jurisdiction between his SD and my Abwehr.” “So again I ask you, Admiral, how does this concern me?” “To achieve a common platform, Heydrich is modeling his organization along Abwehr lines. The SD is looking for someone to head its industrial espionage section. Your background with the B-Dienst code-breaking unit at Kiel and your family’s connectio