With a trembling finger the old man pointed ahead, but made no move to follow, until Toussaint gestured with his rifle. Lucas continued on, once or twice catching what he thought might have been movement among the crates and pedestals.
“Did you see that?” he asked, but Toussaint said, “See what?” and he chalked it up to nerves and shadows.
It was only when they reached the farthest end of the cavern and saw a ring of ore carts about twenty yards off, arranged as if to demarcate a separate area, that he stopped. “Is it in there?”
The mayor nodded, but would go no farther.
“Are you certain?”
“Ja. Ja.”
“I’m going to check it out,” Lucas said to Toussaint. “You stay here and keep an eye on grandpa.”
He stepped away from the cover of the crates and, gun drawn, approached the circle of wagons. On one, a placard dangled, bearing a printed black swastika. When he got close enough, he read the words. Bestimmungsort: Berchtesgaden/Kehlsteinhaus. (Destination: Berchtesgaden/the Eagle’s Nest.)
Hitler’s private mountain retreat.
No wonder the old man hadn’t wanted to come any farther. The idea of betraying the Führer himself, of turning over his hand-picked possessions, was a frightening one. God help him if he ever had to answer for it.
Lucas turned sideways to slip between two of the carts, set up as if they were bunkers to shield the unwary from a blast, and was surprised to find the enclosed area, no larger than a badminton court, occupied by a terrifying tableau.
At first, he thought he was looking at a scarecrow lying in the dirt. Arms and legs spread wide, it looked so hollow that it seemed as if only straw, not flesh, filled its sleeves and trousers. Even the head, facedown, looked like a rotting pumpkin — swollen and sickly orange in color, the visible skin strangely pitted and stained. How long, Lucas wondered, had the corpse been lying there, and what the hell had killed it?
Then something just beyond and above the figure drew his eye. Mounted on four sawhorses, as if they were an altar, squatted the sarcophagus. Lucas didn’t need to get any closer to know that he had found his quarry — even from this distance, he recognized the gabled lid and sharpened corners, the iron chains sealing it shut. But because of a trick of the lights overhead, he found it hard to see any more detail than that. It was as if the box was bathed in its own shadow.
Then he caught that glimpse again, of something swiftly darting to his right.
“Halt! Hände hoch!”—Stop! Hands up! — he shouted, swiveling and aiming his revolver.
He heard the crunch of gravel underfoot.
“Komm raus, oder ich schiesse!” Come out now, or I’ll shoot.
“No, please, do not shoot.” It was a child’s voice, quavering in German.
“What’s going on?” Toussaint called.
The blond boy, the one with the tinfoil, crept out from behind one of the wagons, his thin arms raised above his head. Lucas was reminded again of Paulie, holding up the arrowhead for all to see.
“Lieutenant?” Toussaint yelled, loping toward the circle with his carbine up. “You okay?”
Lucas lowered his own gun. “All clear!”
Toussaint shimmied between the carts, sweeping his rifle over the enclosure. “Jesus H. Christ,” he said when he saw the boy. “I coulda killed the kid.”
“What are you doing in there, Hansel?” the mayor demanded. He remained outside the ring of ore carts. “Didn’t I warn you not to go this far into the mine?”
Lucas almost had to laugh. Hansel. Could Gretel be far behind? Maybe he had stumbled into one of Grimm’s fairy tales.
The boy saw the corpse, and his eyes grew big as saucers.
“I just wanted some chocolate,” he blubbered.
Even the German kids knew that the GIs were good for a Hershey’s bar. Lucas had one in his shirt pocket right now; he’d been saving it for dinner, but it looked to him like Hansel needed it a whole lot more than he did. To divert the boy’s attention from the grisly scene, he took the candy out of his pocket and offered it to him.
“Come on,” he said, “you’ve earned it.”
“Don’t reward him,” the old man called out. “He was disobedient.”
Lucas was simply so pleased at discovering the ossuary, and not getting killed in the process, that he was happy to dispense some happiness. Meeting a CRC request was one thing; fulfilling a top-secret OSS mission was altogether another. The boy’s eyes were fixed on the candy bar, and he already had one hand out to grab it when he tripped over something hidden in the dirt.
Those shoes need laces, Lucas thought — just before the land mine detonated with such force that he was lifted off his feet and hurled through the air, his back slamming up against one of the carts so hard that his bones rattled, and he saw a blanket of exploding stars. Then everything went as black as midnight in the thick of a fairy-tale forest.
CHAPTER TWO
People were kind. Too kind.
Now that he was no longer Lieutenant Lucas Athan but merely a college professor again, all he wanted to do was to slip unnoticed into civilian life.
Even out of uniform, however, and wearing a rumpled brown corduroy suit and carrying a battered briefcase, he stood out from the crowd. How could he not? The black patch where his left eye had once been, the telltale scar along his forehead where a sliver of shrapnel had been embedded, made it plain he was a soldier who had done his patriotic duty, and been honorably discharged.
And everyone he met wanted to acknowledge his sacrifice.
At restaurants, people tried to pay his check for him. On buses, youngsters offered their seats. Once, in Central Park, a man in a homburg clasped his hands, and said that Lucas reminded him of his own son, lost on Omaha Beach, and that if he ever wanted to see a Broadway show, he should let him know. “Any show at all, you name it, and there’ll be two tickets waiting at the Will Call window.” The man tucked his business card into Lucas’s shirt pocket, and later, when Lucas finally looked at it, he saw that the man was the owner of a prominent theater chain.
He never took any of them up on their offers.
After the surgeries at New York Hospital, he spent the next couple of weeks in the city, living with his parents above the family’s diner, the Olympus, in Queens. It was a typical Greek diner, but his father, Stavros Athanasiadis, had built it from scratch. As so many immigrants did, his father had abbreviated the family name: “We’re American,” he’d often declared when Lucas was a boy, “and now we start over with a new American name.”
But Lucas hadn’t gone to all the trouble of getting his PhD so that he could live above the diner. He even had the distinct feeling that his father’s fondest wish, now that he was home and in almost one piece, was that he’d take over the place. And, truth be told, what could be better for business than a wounded soldier at the cash register?
Only it wasn’t going to be Lucas.
He was just beginning to wonder what his next move should be when, out of the blue, he received a letter from Princeton University saying that if he wished to resume his teaching duties at the beginning of the fall term, they would welcome him back. The university motto, as you know, is “In the Nation’s Service,” and the faculty and trustees are proud to acknowledge that service in every way afforded us. The dean helpfully mentioned that his old rooms were available in town.
It was like receiving an answer to his prayers.
At the little train station situated at the foot of campus, he disembarked from the train, loaded his bags into the trunk of the town cab, and returned to the Victorian boardinghouse on Mercer Street where he’d lived before being drafted. A black limousine, not the kind of thing normally seen in this quiet tree-lined neighborhood, idled at the curb across the street, but before he could give it any thought, Mrs. Caputo was scurrying across the front porch, wiping her hands on her apron, then rushing down the steps to embrace him. Tony Caputo was still serving somewhere in the Pacific, and Lucas knew that the hug, and the flood of tears, were meant as much for her absent husband as they were for him. Although she was only a few years older than Lucas, maybe thirty-three or thirty-four, she had always treated him like a mother, fretting over his late hours and bachelorhood. Once or twice, single women had shown up at the boardinghouse table, and Lucas had guessed they had been invited there to audition.