Donavan frowned. “Are you sure? That was quite some time ago.”
“I was working as his legal assistant when he mentioned it in the class. I helped prepare his lecture notes. I’m sure it was this same organization. You say that Hans Frank was president of the academy?”
“He founded it.”
They were both silent for a long time as other things flitted through Adam’s memory, more bits and pieces, nothing that had ever seemed out of the ordinary—until now. “This academy, what was it all about?”
Donavan flipped through the file and pulled out another sheet. “The Academy of German Law… Frank organized it in the early thirties, I believe. Yes, here it is. That’s right, shortly after the National Socialists came to power. It included some of the most prominent legal scholars in Germany.” He scanned the document, speaking faster, as if he were warming up to the subject. “Their objective was to structure a legal framework that would preserve Germany’s independent judiciary within a totalitarian regime. The academy members consulted with other European legal scholars to safeguard these concepts within the National Socialist Government.”
Consulted with other legal scholars?
Donavan looked up from the paper. “What is it?… Mr. Nowak?”
“I think my uncle and Hans Frank knew each other,” Adam said. He could barely get the words out.
“Well, it’s possible they might have met, at this conference perhaps, but—”
“No, it’s more than that. This whole thing you just said, the part about an ‘independent judiciary within a totalitarian government.’ That was one of Banach’s major fields of expertise—the same kind of thing this academy was attempting to do. My uncle exchanged correspondence for years with some institution in Germany. I was his assistant, working in his office. I never paid much attention at the time, but I remember packets arriving with German postmarks.” He stared up at the ceiling. After a moment he looked back at the lanky Englishman. “My God, I think they really did know each other.”
Donavan got to his feet and shoved the files back in his briefcase. “We’d better arrange a secure telephone line to London.”
They telephoned Whitehall. Then, later in the day, Adam called him a second time, after spending several more hours with Donavan, digging through the stack of research files on Hans Frank. “We found something else,” Adam said.
“What is it?” Whitehall asked brusquely.
“A copy of a paper Hans Frank wrote in 1936 describing the circumvention of trial procedures in the Russian Bolshevik government, how the Russian courts were nothing more than pathetic pawns on the perilous chessboard of the NKVD.”
“Well, that’s damned poetic. But I don’t understand. What does it mean?”
“My uncle wrote a paper on the same subject a year earlier,” Adam replied. “The year he attended the conference in Germany.”
Whitehall grunted. “I still don’t—”
“He showed it to me,” Adam said quickly, recalling now with complete clarity a meeting one afternoon in his uncle’s office. “He kept the paper alongside a thick leather-bound book in his personal library—The Proceedings of the Academy of German Law. He wanted me to read the paper and give him my opinion. He didn’t do that very often.”
“Well, perhaps Frank was interested in the same subject, but—”
Adam interrupted. “It’s the phrase—pathetic pawns on the perilous chessboard—it all came back to me when I read Frank’s paper. Banach used the exact same phrase in his paper… a paper that was never published.”
Whitehall was silent for a long moment. “Well, that might explain something,” he said finally.
“What do you mean?”
“The Russians are causing some trouble. Our delegation in Berlin was contacted by Major Tarnov of the NKVD, damned nasty chap, I must say. They’ve slammed the door on any further visits to Sachsenhausen. And now Tarnov is demanding that all records relating to Hans Frank be off-limits until they complete their investigation.”
“Investigation of what?”
“The connection between Ludwik Banach and Hans Frank—and Banach’s activities after he returned to Krakow.”
Adam almost dropped the phone. “Oh Christ! They think Banach collaborated with the Nazis.” He slumped back in the leather desk chair and stared at the ornately carved wooden beams in the ceiling of the former Nazi’s study. “This whole thing is insane,” he snapped. “My uncle has been back in Krakow since 1940, and I never knew. I was gone, doing what you trained me to do. Doing things that—”
“He’ll start looking for him,” Whitehall said.
“What?”
“This NKVD agent, Tarnov. He’ll start looking for Banach.”
Adam suddenly felt dizzy. “We’ve got to find him first.”
“Do you have a contact?” Whitehall asked. “Someone in the AK who was in Krakow, someone who might know where to start?”
“I don’t know… they’re all gone… they’re…” Adam closed his eyes to let the dizziness subside. Slowly an image formed in his mind, an image of Natalia sprinting toward a sewer in Warsaw, wearing her blue railway conductor’s uniform. That was her code name, Conductor. She had mentioned it that last night in Warsaw, in the ammunition cellar. “Not very original as code names go,” she had said. Snatches of the conversation gradually came back to him. Just before the artillery shell hit and they bolted out of the cellar, Natalia had said, “I heard from a priest…”
And then… what else? There was something else, something he had been trying to remember for weeks. Adam forced himself to concentrate, trying to recall her exact words. “I heard from a priest, of all things… then someone I never met…”
It struck him like a thunderbolt.
“…someone I never met, called the Provider.”
Adam abruptly stood up, squeezing the telephone receiver, his knuckles turning white. Of course! How could I have missed it? Natalia had never finished the thought, but now it was suddenly clear.
The Conductor… The Provider.
She was part of the channel!
“There may be someone,” he said into the telephone. “Someone I knew…”
“What’s his name?” Whitehall asked.
“Her name,” Adam said. “Her name is Natalia.”
Thirty-Two
KRAKOW’S MEDIEVAL STARE MIASTO DISTRICT stretched for almost two kilometers along the Royal Way, from the Gothic tower of St. Florian’s Gate in the north to Wawel Castle, high above the banks of the Vistula River, in the south. And in the center of the district, encircled by the wide pathways and greenery of the Planty park, was the Rynek Glowny, the largest market square in Europe, and since the thirteenth century, the heart and soul of the City of Kings.
Natalia walked briskly across the Rynek Glowny and continued south, along the narrow, cobblestone streets of the Stare Miasto, struggling to suppress her anxiety about being back in the city after months of hiding out in forests and AK safe houses. She knew she should keep moving, blending in with the pedestrian flow so as not to attract attention.
But she paused for a moment at the base of Wawel Castle and glanced up at the towering edifice of the royal palace and the adjoining cathedral where every Polish monarch for a thousand years had been coronated. Flags fluttered from the towers high above the stone fortifications that surrounded the castle. They were Soviet flags now, the hammer-and-sickle having replaced the swastika since she’d last been here. The Russians had driven out the Germans, the flags had changed, and the black uniforms of the SS were replaced with the khaki uniforms of the NKVD.