The Grave of Truth (25 page)

He held out his hand to Max. ‘You can't get any further,' he said. ‘Take her away till it's safe.' He took Minna's hand and bowed over it.

‘I'm not going,' she said.

‘You may change your mind,' Holler answered. ‘I hope so. For both your sakes.' Then he was gone.

Curt Andrews found what he was looking for in the files of the
Munchener Merkur
. They were old and yellow, and the newspaper was dated September 1945. It was a small item low down on an inside page devoted to unimportant home news of a non-political nature. The paper operated under the guidance of the Control Commission. It was headed
TRAGIC ACCIDENT
. Andrews read it, and took down the name and address supplied. 1945. It was a very long time ago, but there was just a chance that the family were still living there.… He drove to the modest suburb, and his hopes began to fade as he saw the new houses and the evidence of extensive rebuilding. But the street name hadn't been changed, and there it was, right at the end of the road on the corner, a double-fronted house with a small garden. He parked the car, went to the door and pressed the bell. It chimed instead of ringing. Nobody came and he pressed again, longer and harder so that the maddening little tune repeated itself. The door opened so quickly that he was taken by surprise. He put on his ingratiating smile and said, ‘I'm looking for a Frau Inge Brandt. Does she still live here?'

The woman was in her early forties, her dress was neat but drab and she wore no make-up. ‘You didn't have to ring like that,' she said aggressively. ‘I was round the back. Yes, my mother's still here. Who are you?'

‘I'm a reporter from the American
Daily News
,' he said. ‘I'm doing a story on your city and its growth since the war. Seen from the human angle. I'd like to get some impressions from your mother of what it was like after the war. I was told she'd been in Munich right through. We're paying very well for information,' he added.

She didn't hesitate. ‘Come in,' she said. ‘My mother's in the back garden. She's old, you understand, but her mind's very clear. We could do with some extra cash—everything's got so expensive these days!'

The old woman was sitting in a garden chair with a rug spread over her knees; she had white hair done up in a bun, and a wrinkled, sharp featured face which made Andrews think of a bird with spectacles balanced on its beak. Her daughter bent down and spoke quickly to her; the mother glanced over to him, and nodded. ‘There's a chair over there,' the daugher said. ‘I'll bring out some coffee. My mother wants to know what you're prepared to pay.'

‘Two hundred marks,' Andrews said. Inge Brandt had the broken voice of old age; it was throaty and masculine. She was very clear in her mind, just as her daughter said. Andrews guessed that she must be close to eighty. He spent the first fifteen minutes asking questions about the wartime conditions she had lived through, making notes, meaningless scribbles masquerading as shorthand. He was sympathetic and interested as she described the hardships of the last years of the war. Bombing, food shortages, living in shelters, the terrible casualties on the Russian front.

‘And then,' he said. ‘I heard you lost your little boy. Was that due to the war in any way?' The eyes were bright and they darted a shrewd look at him.

‘No,' she said. ‘It was a terrible thing; we were out shopping and he got knocked down by a man running past him; there were crowds everywhere, it was so quick I never even saw what happened. But my boy fell over, and when I picked him up he was dead. He'd broken his neck in some way. They never found the man who bumped into him.'

‘How terrible for you,' Curt Andrews said. He knew exactly the blow the Russian agent had used to kill the child.

‘In fact,' the old woman said, ‘he wasn't really mine. Irma is, and I've a son living in America now, but Frederick was a foster-child. I took him in, you see, during the war. I think he was the son of someone high up in the Nazi Party. Not that I had anything to do with them myself. You must be sure to say that.'

‘Oh, I will,' Andrews assured her. ‘Of course.'

‘I was sorry for the little fellow,' she said. ‘People had no morals in those days. Children were being born all over the place. He was a lovely child, big blue eyes, and very bright. Quite a mischievious little boy.… I was very upset over it.'

Curt Andrews put his notepad in his pocket and pulled out his wallet.

‘I'm sure you were,' he said. The bright little eyes were fixed on his wallet, and the withered lips moved as he counted the notes. ‘Thank you, Frau Brandt,' he said. He laid the money on her knee, and she fastened a hand like a claw over the notes. ‘This will make excellent copy. Especially the part about you taking in children. People love the human interest. Did you have any others besides Frederick?'

‘No,' she said. ‘He was the only one. A lady brought him to me when he was a few weeks old. I don't think he was hers, though. You can tell a mother when she handles her own child. Very well dressed, she was, I remember. She had a lot of fox furs.'

‘And you never saw her again?' Andrews was on his feet. He shook hands without waiting for the negative answer. ‘Good-bye, and thanks again. I'll send you a copy when it comes out.'

‘She'd like that,' her daughter Irma said. ‘She reads a lot.'

He waved good-bye to her as she stood at the front door. He got into his car and drove to his hotel; he was whistling. The first part of Günther Mühlhauser's story was true. He had to decide what to do next, and he rejected the idea that he could handle the problem alone. Or even with CIA assistants, who could be sent to join him. He needed Heinrich Holler. He went upstairs to his room, opened the fridge and took out two miniature bourbons, and mixed them with ice and soda. He kicked off his shoes and stretched out on the bed, sipping the drink. It was all so obvious once you knew where to look. A monument of lies marked the grave of truth. The phrase appealed to him, and he couldn't remember where he'd heard it. He was a trader in lies, as adept as any of his colleagues in the game of secrets. He saw no moral dilemma in twisting facts into fiction, any more than in killing a human being to achieve a political end. It was the idealists he disliked, with their moral overtones intact; they could be bloody to the elbows, and still look down upon the pragmatists like himself. He hadn't forgotten the jibe of Heinrich Holler that he, Andrews, didn't care about the life of Mühlhauser's daughter Beatrix. He was going to enjoy squeezing the German until it was
his
finger on the trigger this time.

In his office Heinrich Holler issued instructions.

‘I want copies of those indentiphotos given to every hotel and boardinghouse in the city. And the same in Hamburg. All proprietors are to report to this office if anyone answering the descriptions takes a room. Circulate to Immigration at the airports.' He put down the phone. It was possible that the killers calling themselves Kesler and Franconi had already left the country, but he didn't think it likely.

The pieces were fitting together but the picture was not complete. The murder of Albert Kramer proved that. He was not even known as a former member of the Hitler Jugend; there was nothing to connect him with the Bunker, or with the mystery of Eva Braun's child. Unless he had been one of the men who kidnapped Mühlhauser, and spared his life because of the information Mühlhauser gave him. That information had sentenced him to death. But who knew that he was in possession of it, except the betrayer himself? And the betrayer had betrayed again, and sent a warning to his Russian masters. No wonder they had freed Günther Mühlhauser from the labour camp. And now, by some brilliant opportunism, he had settled himself in Washington, the protégé of Curt Andrews and the CIA. He was going to enjoy telling Andrews that he had actually put a Soviet agent into place.

The pattern that was emerging made sense to Holler now; he had been quicker to follow the lead given him by Mühlhauser than Curt Andrews. He had checked the accident to Inge Brandt's foster-son with the Munich police, and the details were hall-marked Soviet Intelligence. So Hitler's son was dead. Janus was solved. He had said that to Mühlhauser and known by the readiness of his agreement that he was lying. Minna Walther had seen Gretl Fegelein's grave in the Convent of the Immaculate Conception. She believed it was the end of the search. No doubt the Reverend Mother intended her to think so. He lit another cigarette; smoking was bad for him. He was always told to stop when he had his regular medical check-up. Unfortunately it helped him to concentrate; also he enjoyed it. There was nothing he could do about his crippled leg, the result of Gestapo beatings, or the scars left on his mind by what he had suffered. At least his lungs were his own affair.

He drew a pad towards him and began to drawn a circle. He added details and the circle changed its shape. When he finished he sat and looked at it. Two heads, back to back, united. Janus, one of the oldest gods of mythology … Janus … Janus.… And suddenly he understood. He pushed his chair back in excitement and struggled awkwardly to his feet. ‘My God,' he said out loud. ‘My God, that's what it means—not Hitler himself, but the twin forms of Janus and Jana!'

Not one child, but two. Eva Braun had given birth to twins. The boy was dead, but there was a daughter that Gretl Fegelein had separated from her brother as a precaution. And she was still alive.

That was what Mühlhauser had told Kramer and his undercover Nazis; because of this they had forgiven him his betrayal of the boy to the Russians. And then Mühlhauser had warned his Russian contact that he had been forced to reveal the boy's death. Kramer's knowledge of that was the reason for his elimination. And that meant that the chain of murders beginning with Sigmund Walther and anyone else who might have known what Janus represented had been a Soviet operation aimed at concealment, not discovery. Men and women had been killed, not to find the heir Hitler had left behind him, but to hide the fact that he had already been found and was dead.

Holler sat down again; he crumpled the drawing of Janus into a ball. Now the puzzle was coming into frightening focus. The Russians had a candidate of their own, primed and ready to step on to the stage of European politics as the puppet of the Soviet Union who had manufactured him. The evidence they had suppressed all those years ago would be produced as proof of his authenticity.

They weren't trying to find Eva Braun's daughter by the Führer, because Mühlhauser had withheld that last piece of information. He had bought his life by telling them about the boy, holding the girl in reserve for just the emergency which arose when Kramer questioned him. Very clever; Holler had underestimated the man's cunning and will to survive. Now the knowledge of Hitler's daughter was possessed by the neo-Nazi movement in West Germany.… Mühlhauser had lied to him, passing the information of the boy's fate as if it were the only secret left. He had withheld the truth not only from the Russians, to whom he was bound by treachery, but also from the democracy of Western Germany. Holler could follow the twisted motives of a man who had been the friend of Heinrich Himmler; he knew from terrible experience, the power of the Black Knights' oath. Mühlhauser had tried to keep faith with it by hiding the daughter of his Führer until she could be of use to those who were working for a resurgence of National Socialism. The threat to his own child Beatrix had forced him to protect her at all costs, and by making a deal with Curt Andrews he had placed himself and his family in safety, and averted Russian vengeance by giving them Kramer as a victim. He would be very valuable to his controller when he was established in Washington as the protégé of the CIA.

The Vatican had taken Eva Braun's sister under its protection because she was seeking shelter for Eva Braun's child; the significance of a direct descendant of Adolf Hitler had brought the considerable diplomatic power of the Papacy into operation. They wanted to keep her hidden from the world, and the solution was so obvious that Holler couldn't forgive himself for being blind to it.

The girl was never coming out; the Reverend Mother of the Munich convent and her predecessor had instructions to keep her beyond the reach of outside contact. She could never be allowed to marry, produce children—it didn't need much imagination to see that she had been persuaded to become a nun.

Holler sighed in relief. The political acumen of the Vatican had seen the problems many years before they could become reality, and found a wise solution. He couldn't have wished for a better one himself. Let her stay in peaceful anonymity; nuns were happy people, possessed by a childlike trust in God and His goodness. He didn't need to fear her any more. His duty was to inform his Chancellor of her existence; it might be advisable to approach the Vatican with the object of moving her to a less vulnerable place and obliterating the links between her and the convent. Kramer's people could search for her in vain. The possibility of a Russian imposter posing as her brother was far more serious. Only the highest authority in Bonn could authorize the action Holler wanted to take to frustrate the Soviet manoeuvre. He would have to consult with his government about the plans he had in mind. There was plenty of time; evidence had to be collected and prepared for public scrutiny; the timing was vital.

He thought of his old friend Sigmund Walther, murdered to perpetuate a lie that had still to be told, and he remembered Minna and the journalist. Their danger was acute. They had followed the killers without knowing it, and their involvement with the search for Janus must sentence them to death. He reached for the phone to call their hotel and order them to leave, when there was a knock at his door. It opened and he saw Curt Andrews; the American looked bigger and more menacing. Holler put the phone down.

‘Curt? I thought you were in Hamburg, nursing the Mühlhauser family.'