It didn’t feel all that safe to Lucas, either, but what choice did he have? He had his orders, and his commanding officer had made it plain that he wasn’t to come back empty-handed.
Using his broom to help clear the brush, the elderly mayor brought them to a rusty rail line, now half buried in the earth. They followed it for a quarter mile, until the trees began to thin out, exposing a massive pair of steel doors, like the portal to some grand cathedral, improbably embedded in the slope of a hill. Now it felt even more like a fairy tale, but not a happy one — more like one of those dark Teutonic tales that this ragtag bunch of kids trailing him through the woods had most likely been raised on. The mayor clanged the broom handle three times on the metal doors, then paused and knocked three times again.
Lucas heard him mutter something to someone on the other side — it sounded like he’d simply said, “It’s me, open up”—and a second later he could hear the sound of heavy iron bars sliding to one side. With the screech of unoiled pulleys, wheels, and chains, the doors slowly opened outward, revealing a smoothly hewn and vaulted tunnel into which the rusty tracks descended.
A man bundled in a beaver coat stood there, mouth agape at the sight of Lucas and Toussaint, whose rifle was pointed right at him.
“Who are they?” the gatekeeper blurted out. “Why have you brought them here?”
“They only want the art.”
“The art is for the Führer! We will be held responsible if it’s gone.”
“Let me be the judge of that, Emil.”
Emil scowled. “Fine. Then let it be on your head.”
The mayor turned to Lucas and angled his head toward the tunnel. “Come — I will show you.”
With the old man leading the way, they skirted past the glowering Emil and started down the tunnel. The air grew cold and clammy, and the only light was provided by weak electric bulbs, strung along a ceiling wire. A generator thrummed somewhere in the shadows. It took Lucas at least a minute or two before he realized that he was passing dozens of people, huddled against the walls, silent, clinging to each other in fear. He turned his flashlight on a white-haired couple who fell to their knees on a threadbare blanket, crossing themselves.
“Amerikaner!” he heard in whispers and gasps, passing up and down the tunnel.
“What the hell?” Toussaint said. “Do they think we’re gonna shoot ’em?”
“Probably,” Lucas replied. Why wouldn’t they? The horrors of the war never ended. He had seen things that he could never have imagined: captured resistance fighters strung up in trees; whole towns herded into barns that had then been set ablaze. These people huddled here undoubtedly believed that the Allies were capable of the same atrocities that the Nazis had committed. One day, he thought, they would learn the truth, and hang their heads in shame.
He kept his eyes straight ahead, following the mayor deeper and deeper into the mine. They passed an alcove where several ore trucks were shunted off on a separate track. No people were around; wooden crates and boxes lined both sides of the tunnel. Most had writing on their sides — Lucas could read the names of the museums and cathedrals and private collections from which their contents had been looted — along with cardboard tags identifying where they were supposed to go next. Leave it to the Germans, he thought, to be organized even when it came to grand theft. On many of the tags, he caught sight of the word Carinhall — Hermann Göring’s grand chalet in the Schorfheide Forest, outside Berlin. It was satisfying to know that this art would never get there.
But so far he had seen nothing that resembled the ossuary he had been dispatched to find. He clutched the old man’s elbow — it felt like a knob of petrified wood — stopping him, then Lucas dug the photo out of his inside pocket.
“Have you seen anything like this?”
The mayor studied the photo, labeled, in reference to the image of a bearded shepherd faintly chiseled on the ossuary’s lid, Der Hirte.
“It’s a stone box,” Lucas said in German, as he held out his arms to indicate that it might be five or six feet long and a few feet high.
The old man didn’t raise his head for several seconds, and Lucas could sense the debate going on inside him.
“You recognize it, don’t you?”
He didn’t answer.
Lucas repeated the question.
“Is there a problem, Lieutenant?” Toussaint asked, spitting a jet of tobacco juice into the dirt. He raised the barrel of his carbine. “You want me to throw the fear of God into him?”
Lucas shook his head and with one hand nudged the rifle barrel to one side. “Show me where it is,” he told the mayor.
The old man took a filthy red rag from his pocket and wiped his lips. Then, nodding resignedly, he turned back down the mine. The air grew even colder and the tunnel darker as they continued their descent. The stony walls were scratched and scraped by decades of pickaxes and dynamite charges, and the floor was increasingly sloped and uneven. Even the light bulbs were more distantly spaced, so that by the time they came to a bend in the tunnel, Lucas felt as if he were about to turn the corner into Hell itself.
For a moment he thought he had. A vast empty space, black as coal, opened before him. Even his flashlight beam failed to penetrate the inky depths. The old man was suddenly gone, and before Lucas could even think to alert Toussaint, he heard a lever being pulled and saw a shower of blue sparks. He jumped back, instinctively pulling his sidearm from its holster, but before he could fire — and at what? — a bank of overhead lights came on, blinding him.
When his eyes adjusted to the sudden glare, he saw the old man leaning against the wall, the lever still in his hand. In front of them lay a vast chamber, lit like a railroad yard and just as big, its ceiling so high it could barely be seen. There were dozens of crisscrossing tracks, hobbled wheelbarrows, and dilapidated conveyor belts.
In the center of it all, stacked like cordwood, there must have been a thousand canvases in ornate frames, surrounded by hundreds of sculptures, some bound with straw as if they were only now being packed for shipping. Lucas had been informed that there were similar stashes being compiled at Buxheim and Heilbronn, but this one probably put all of them to shame.
“Holy smokes,” Toussaint said.
“When was all of this brought here?” Lucas asked. The mayor shrugged.
“The trucks came and went. The soldiers did the work,” he said. “We didn’t ask questions.”
The German national anthem, Lucas thought, as he went closer; we didn’t ask questions. He glanced at the paintings — mostly domestic scenes of Dutch or Flemish origin — and the statues, chiefly classical. They were his specialty — ancient Greek and Roman art. He was able to identify several of them at a glance, even without looking at the tags affixed to their feet or pedestals. Only four years before, while earning his PhD, he had studied their pictures in his textbooks.
Descending into their midst was like walking into a dream — every piece was something he wanted to linger over and admire. All of them would have to be painstakingly carted out of this cavern and shipped, once the war was over, back to their original homes. It would be a monumental task, and he wondered if he might volunteer to spearhead it; it didn’t even matter if he’d have to reenlist in the army — what could be more exciting or worthwhile?
“How the hell you gonna find one damn box in all this mess?” Toussaint said from behind him. He kept his rifle casually trained in the mayor’s direction.
Lucas, still holding the photograph, walked down a sort of aisle, scanning the statues and urns and clay amphorae. Locating any one item in here could take days. Turning to the mayor, he brandished the photo again. “Where is it?”