Blood of the Reich (9 page)

“If you please.” Barrow smiled as if this whole thing was a lark.

Cora gave them plastic drinking cups as well.

Rominy and Jake ascended to a wooden table resting beneath the canopy of a three-trunked cedar tree, the painted planking littered with needles. The view was soothing; purposely so, she assumed. Vines marched in soldierly columns down to the main highway, trees, and the green Skagit beyond. Across the river, rank upon rank of forested hills receded. Early autumn gave everything that honey glow.

Rominy was sore, tired, frustrated, and curious. She could run, she could scream, she could beg to use the winery phone . . . and she did none of these things. Watching Barrow work the corkscrew, the river and highway a distant murmur, the shade cool but not unpleasant, she felt oddly relaxed. Was this the Stockholm syndrome, where victims identify with their captor? Or had Barrow really saved her in order to tell her something important? Certainly nothing remotely this interesting occurred in her cubicle at work.

Rominy spent most days staring at either pixels on a glass screen or the gray fabric of her office enclosure, and more evenings than she cared to admit staring at another glass screen at home. Her abode was an apartment on Seattle’s Queen Anne Hill she couldn’t really afford; she kept the heat at 65 to justify premium cable. She went to a gym three mornings a week, belonged to a book club, purposely limited her gossip magazine time to the monthly stint at the hairdresser, club-hopped with girlfriends, and dated with more wariness than excitement. She shopped at IKEA but waited for the Nordstrom sale. On a package to Mexico she’d used her high school Spanish, wore a swimsuit it took two weeks to select, and applied sunblock with religious zeal. She wrote press releases for software engineers who alternately treated her with disdain or flirted from boredom. Her ambitions were to buy a bungalow, own a significant piece of art, or visit Africa, but her dreams were hazy after that. If anyone had asked—and they didn’t—she would have said she was happy.

Yes, something had at last happened.

“A toast.” He poured the wine and hoisted his. “To your illustrious ancestor!”

“My what?” She took a sip, eyeing Jake over the rim of her glass. Not bad, both him and the wine. Her moment of contentment confused her.

“To your great-grandfather, Rominy. To the famous and infamous adventurer, explorer, curator, and secret agent Benjamin Hood.”

“Whatever.”

“Apparently disgraced, however. Stripped of his prerogatives and effectively exiled to the murk of Skagit County at a time, World War Two, when his country might have needed him most. If you think this is rural now, it was the end of the earth then. A man lost to history, and even to his own family. Meaning you.”

“I have a great-grandfather?”

“Everyone does, trust me.” He smiled. “You were adopted, correct?”

“Yes. How do you know that?”

“I told you, I’ve been investigating. It’s my job.”

“My parents died in a car accident when I was a baby.”

“And no other family that you knew about?”

“There wasn’t any.”

“But there had to be at one time, right? One’s parents have parents. Didn’t you ever wonder?”

“Mom and Dad—my adopted parents—said they didn’t know. I haven’t dwelled on it, really. They never made me feel adopted—I was an only child,
their
child. We didn’t obsess on the accident. It’s not what you want to talk about, you know?”

“Of course. Icy road. Mountain plunge. And you mysteriously found: abandoned, but bundled, in a cradle in a Forest Service campground . . .”

“Not abandoned.” She flushed. All her old dread at the rumors, and her frustration at her adoptive parents’ evasions, was coming back. “No. Not a suicide. Something terrible must have been going on, and they left me for a moment to go get help, and the ice . . .” She felt the threat of tears again and willed them back. It didn’t make sense. It had never made sense. It annoyed her that he’d obviously looked at the old clippings. It seemed an invasion of her privacy, of a tragedy buried by time.

“It wasn’t a suicide, Rominy, of course not.” He took a quick swallow. “So you know your name isn’t really Pickett?”

“It
is
. This is what this is about? You bring this up
now
?
Here
?”

“It’s your adoptive parents’ name.”

“It’s
my
name, the one I’ve had as long as I can remember. And my poor dead parents were not named Hood.”

“But your mother’s mother’s father was. I’m going to show you the genealogy, and your descent from him is on the female side. But that’s not my point. It wasn’t a suicide, I agree. But it
was
murder.”

“What?”

“By the same crazy fanatics who just tried to murder you.”

She shook her head in bewilderment. “Skinheads killed my real parents?”

“Not skinheads, Rominy. Nazis. Neo-Nazis.” He took out his own cell phone. “Which reminds me. I’ve got to make a call about your inheritance.”

10

Kangra La, Sikkim

July 28, 1938

K
urt Raeder looked back from the Himalayas to a flat world gauzed with haze, the steel of India’s great rivers faint threads of orientation. The Germans had escaped the hot, damp hell of the British Raj and were climbing toward their goal, the heaven promised by old Tibetan texts that Himmler had sent along in a steel box: Shambhala, the lost kingdom that would violently redeem the world.

On Raeder’s neck, kept warm by his own body, was the vial that reputedly held the antique blood of Frederick Barbarossa.

The explorer found himself lightening as they climbed. For more than a month he and his four companions had felt trapped in British India as news from Europe grew more ominous. Traveling through Calcutta and the Himalayan province of Sikkim was the quickest way to Tibet, but it was getting harder for both sides to pretend England’s relations with Germany weren’t fraying. Meanwhile, the monsoon came in full force, rain pouring down. The humidity on the Bengal plain became suffocating. Snakes slithered from drowned burrows. Mosquitoes rose in clouds. His companions chafed and quarreled. The heat, the bugs, and the sheer bureaucratic sloth of a dying empire all weighed on them. England was in decline and Calcutta was crowded and chaotic. As Hitler tried to reunite a Germany brutally disenfranchised after the Great War, the old enemies grew jealous again, seeking to hem in the Teutons. So had the German Tibetan Expedition been corralled by the arrogant, frightened English! For that, Raeder held them in contempt.

Where, the officials in Calcutta had demanded of him, are your permits to travel to the Forbidden Kingdom of Tibet? Of course there could be no permits, since there was no permitted travel, and there could be no permission until the Germans met personally with the three-year-old god-king’s regent in Lhasa. But they could not meet, because none but the British consul was permitted to travel there. The Germans stewed under the circular and self-serving reasoning of Whitehall and Calcutta.

What the British didn’t take into account was German will, coupled with advice from the kind of Englishman who’d first built the empire.

Before sailing from Genoa in allied Italy, Raeder had received a peculiar letter from Sir Thomas Pickford, the octogenarian Himalaya explorer and hero of the siege of Gyantse, where thousands of Tibetans who believed themselves invulnerable to bullets had been slaughtered by British firepower. Pickford had served on Francis Younghusband’s military expedition to Tibet in 1904 that forced it into reluctant relations with the British. Now, thirty-four years later, Pickford had corresponded with the young German he’d heard lecture in London. Rumor of Raeder’s impending SS expedition had circulated in academic circles, and Pickford had advice.

A few Englishmen understood what the Reich was trying to do, he explained, the racial spirit Germany was trying to revive. A few sympathized with the power of Hitler’s vision in this new, corrupt, decadent age called the twentieth century.

Don’t wait out the bureaucratic intrigues
, the crusty Englishman wrote.
My country is giving up its civilizing mission, but yours is seizing it. Germany is alone in displaying the character of our race. We are cousins, after all, and Tibet must not be allowed to exist in seclusion and hide its secrets. Take any opportunity and simply go, borders be damned.

If a German had written this to an Englishman, the Gestapo would have called it high treason. But the English, like the Americans, felt free to say anything to anyone. Curious idea.

I have seen the sun set on the Potala Palace with a radiance that speaks of God
, the old Englishman wrote.
I know there are things to seek in that land we can scarcely dream
.
If you want to see them, make your own way across the border as Younghusband did in 1904.

Now Raeder had.

In Calcutta, the Germans had first falsely announced their intention, given the diplomatic delay, of returning home. Then, in the dead of night, monsoon thundering and streets awash, they’d loaded their theodolites, chronometers, earth inductors, shortwave radios, anthropological calipers, cameras, movie film, guns, cases of schnapps, and boxes of cigarettes into the specially designed, rubber-sealed cargo cases crafted in Hamburg. They’d hired trucks to taxi them to the station and bribed their way onto the express train north, arriving at its terminus a night and day ahead of any pursuit. Mountains rose as enticing as a mirage.

Paying in Reich gold, the Germans swiftly bought two freight cars on the next conveyance, a popularly dubbed “toy train” with tracks just two feet apart that puffed its way, at twelve miles per hour, to the British hill station of Darjeeling and its warehouses of tea. This would elevate them to 7,000 feet. The Nazis were moving on this second leg of their escape by the time bemused authorities in Calcutta realized they were gone at all.

“It’s Jew gold we use,” Raeder told his companions. “Confiscated from the rats fleeing Berlin. So does Providence assist our mission.”

Up and up the locomotive crept, past banana plantations at first, and then through jungle so high that it arched over the tracks, the canopy shuddering in the downpours. The journey reeked of rotting orchids, foliage steaming.

Indian laborers rode an open freight car pushed by the bow of the train. When monsoon landslides blocked the track, they dutifully clambered out to clear them. Raeder, impatient and restless while the coolies dug, took his rifle into the jungle to look for tigers.

He saw not a living animal. The bamboo was still as death.

Tea plantations hove into view as they neared Darjeeling. There, between Nepal and Bhutan, they could see the beckoning crest of the Himalaya through breaks in the rushing clouds. The peaks were topped by snowy Mount Kanchenjunga, which at 28,000 feet was almost as lofty as Everest.

Diplomatic telegrams awaited Raeder, protesting their progress and demanding a return to Calcutta. But the German Foreign Office was putting pressure on the English to leave the Germans alone and it sent its own telegrams, seeking to bog the debate down in an exchange of diplomatic notes. While consuls argued, Raeder bluffed his way past the British constabulary, hired a train of oxen, and pushed on toward the Sikkim capital of Gangtok.

He knew how Asia worked. You butted your way, arrogant and impatient, or got nowhere. Now he marched up the hairpin turns of the riotously green Tista Valley with their animals, each ox plodding from four cases of equipment strapped to its back.

Still the monsoon sluiced down.

From every slope sprung a hundred white waterfalls, and in the gorges the rivers roared with chocolate fury. The Germans cut upward, first through birch and dark fir and then through whole forests of rhododendron, clouds of bright butterflies hovering over every puddle and wet leaf. The air was so thick with moisture that climbing was like rising from the bottom of a pool. They struggled through mud, crossed precarious log and vine-cable bridges, and drove their oxen along cliff ledges. The men were smeared with goo, lard of the earth. At the end of the day they’d stand under cataracts to sluice it off, roaring out beer hall anthems.

The rain cooled as they climbed, a promising sign of progress.

The British were fools to let them get this far, Raeder thought.

The oxen, powerful but ungainly, were exchanged at Gangtok for nimbler mules, better adapted to the narrower trail ahead. It took twice as many animals to carry the cases. Mounted with brilliantly colored saddles and blankets, and tethered by yak-hair ropes, the cantankerous animals brayed in chorus to the ominous throbbing of the drums and long
dungchen
trumpets of the Gangtok monastery. Hooves clacked on the muddy route’s rocks. German boots splashed through brimming puddles. Higher and higher they climbed, whole hillsides seeming to peel away in the deluge. Sometimes they had to halt to build a new trail across a slide.

At Dikchu, the Devil’s Water, the old rope bridge had fallen away. They winched a new one across its thundering chute, then hauled and whipped the balking animals across and up it toward the snowy crests above. The trail seemed evermore narrow, evermore wet, evermore slippery. When the rains paused it was foggy. At each stop they spent several minutes peeling leeches from each other, the odious creatures bloated with blood. Most clustered on calves and ankles, sucking greedily, but a few fell from overhanging limbs or ledges to feast on shoulder and neck.