The Hess Cross (3 page)

Hamilton was pushed not so much by loyalty to the Empire as his desperate desire for revenge. For weeks London and other English cities had been the bombers' targets, and duty argued for his efforts. Now Scotland too was on fire, and loyalty became a burning. When the alarm bell rang, Hamilton was always first to his plane and first in the air. Rarely did he return with ammunition in the belts. His ground crew was perpetually overworked, because Hamilton's plane required more service and care than any other at the airfield. The reason: Hamilton flew harder, longer, and with more ferocity than any other pilot in the squadron.

"Sir, wake up." The controller rounded the corner from
the ops room and approached the duke's cot. His boots echoed in the hallway. "Wake up. It's urgent."

"What's urgent, Corporal?" Hamilton responded without moving in the bed. If it wasn't the alarm, it wasn't urgent.

"A German pilot has parachuted down near Eaglesham. He's asked to speak to you."

Hamilton lifted his head off the pillow to look at the controller, but still didn't commit himself to leaving the bed. "Corporal, I suggest you mix a little water with it next time."

"His name is Captain Alfred Horn, and he's asked to see you personally."

"I don't know a Captain Alfred Horn. I don't know any German pilots, for God's sake. Can't this wait, Corporal? It's four in the morning."

"No, Sir. The chief wants you at Maryhill Barracks immediately."

The corporal was not usually this insistent, and Hamilton could see he was not leaving until the duke's feet were on the ground.

"All right, all right. Get the staff car ready and out front."

"It's already there. So's the driver."

The efficiency by his subordinates was typical. The Duke of Hamilton had been appointed RAF wing commander at the outbreak of the war. Because he was the premier peer of Scotland, many airmen believed Hamilton would treat the position as an honorarium. They joked that any man who could trace his ancestors back to the thirteenth century must be genetically adept at staying alive long enough to procreate. The duke hadn't.

His detractors didn't know him. Hamilton had been in love with flying since age fourteen, when he spent hours watching the British pilots train in their biplanes. At age eighteen he was a skilled pilot. In 1933, as chief pilot on the
Houston Everest Expedition, he became the first man to fly over Mount Everest. He had owned several planes before the war and flew them incessantly. He was now respected throughout the RAF as one of the most capable fighter pilots. His origins and reputation commingled and produced a mystique which caused junior officers and airmen to revere him.

Hamilton sat upright on the cot. The tension that had kept him awake did nothing to revitalize him. He was so exhausted he seemed as if in a cloud. The cot pulled at him, begging his return. His feet were a hundred miles away, and the lines of communication were scrambled by fatigue. The duke switched his mind off and began the routine. Feet into the pants already open and in position on the floor. Shirt off the wall hook. Flight jacket. Leather helmet. The helmet was almost strapped when his brain caught and he remembered that a car, not his Hurricane, waited for him. He threw the helmet onto the bed and numbly marched out the ops-room door toward the waiting automobile.

Since the outbreak of the war, Maryhill Barracks had grown from a single barracks to a small encampment of soldiers training for the front. No one considered dropping the name "barracks," however, because it so aptly described the camp. Everything was single-ply—the walls, paint, blankets, barbed-wire fence, and toilet paper. Maryhill Barracks had been designed to last for the duration of the war, and the Army Architect Corps had great faith in Britain's war machine. Five seconds after England's victory, the barracks would crumble to the ground in a fine, forgettable powder.

There was an affinity between the barracks and his stables, thought the Duke of Hamilton as the staff car slid to a stop in front of the Barracks' headquarters' door. He stepped out into a knee deep haze of dust churned up by the
car's abrupt halt. The dust was the driver's last effort to break the land-speed record on the road from Turnhouse to Maryhill Barracks. From the car's squealing start Hamilton knew he would not catch up on his sleep during the jolting ride. An authority superior to the duke had ordered the driver to get the duke to the barracks as fast as possible. The lane-and-a-half-wide twisting country roads had become a Grand Prix circuit. When Hamilton had ordered the driver to slow, the private had grinned fiendishly and embedded the accelerator pedal even farther into the fire wall. Now it was over, and Hamilton was intact.

"Will that be all, sir?" called the private from the driver's seat. Without looking, Hamilton knew the driver was still wearing the wolf's grin and probably checking his watch for an elasped time.

"Yes, Private. Thank God."

The car shot away, raising another film of dirt, which clung to Hamilton's pants and gave his uniform a two-tone appearance. An RAF interrogation officer met him at the barracks' headquarters' door.

"Thank you for coming, sir. At 2200 hours, May 10, a Messerschmitt 110 crashed into a field in Lanark County, six miles from Eaglesham. The pilot bailed out and has suffered a broken ankle."

The officer was well trained. His welcome had been short, rudely short from anyone other than an interrogation officer. Within thirty seconds the duke knew all the officer knew about the flight.

"Here's what the pilot carried with him," said the officer as he pointed to an assortment of objects on the table in the middle of the room. There were several photographs, a gold wristwatch, a camera, a flight purse, and an identification card. More interestingly, there was a small syringe with several needles. Hamilton opened a small, ornately carved
wood box that contained an assortment of vials and capsules.

"Is the man ill?" asked Hamilton, nodding to the needles and bottles.

"No, sir. Our company doctor said those are homeopathic drugs."

"Homeopathic?"

"Yes. The capsules and bottles contain extremely weak toxins that in large doses produce symptoms of diseases the man who takes them is trying to avoid. In the seventeenth century, people believed that by taking these drugs the diseases could be escaped."

"Is Horn a kook?"

"I don't believe so. He's lucid and acts with a purpose. That purpose is to speak with you."

"Perhaps I should see this Captain Horn."

Horn had spent the night in the Maryhill stockade, the official title for a six-by-ten-foot room fastened to the headquarters building seemingly as an afterthought. The only furniture was a wood-and-canvas cot. He had slept with his flight uniform on. And slept well. The rigors of his cross-channel flight and night jump, combined with the interrogation officer's incessant late-night questions, had taken their toll. He had been asleep before the door on his cell closed that night.

The sound of the bolt grating against its catch propelled Horn from sleep. The importance of his mission cleared his head like a breath of ammonia. He immediately knew where he was and whom he was expecting.

Nor was he disappointed. Horn had studied numerous photographs of the Duke of Hamilton, and the duke now stood before him in the open doorway. The duke's strikingly handsome face was unmistakable. He was the highest-ranking Scottish nobleman and he looked it.

Hamilton entered the cell and closed the door behind him without saying anything. Horn stood, stepped gingerly forward, and said, "We met, sir, during the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. I have come as Adolf Hitler's emissary, with proposals for peace. I am Deputy Führer Rudolf Hess."

If Rudolf Hess had been expecting to be treated as a visiting dignitary, he was immediately and sorely disappointed. Rather than the prime minister or foreign secretary, Hess was visited by a series of psychiatrists, intelligence agents, and other assorted interrogators. When he wasn't being questioned, Hess was confined in tiny cells in various prisons and secret houses.

Two weeks after his flight, Hess stopped jumping off his cot every time the cell door opened, expecting an emissary from Churchill coming to negotiate the future of Europe. His captors took his shoe laces and belt and returned his pill kit only when he stopped eating in protest. He was allowed to shave only when a guard hovered over him. The dim light bulb in his cell was always on, so that intent eyes could watch him twenty-four hours a day through the brick-size slot in the iron door. He was given only a spoon to eat with, which was taken from him as soon as he swallowed his last bite of each meal. When the doctors found spectacularly unsuccessful slashes on his wrists, the MP's searched his cell for an hour and finally removed his bed springs. Then they pulled out the light fixture and lit the cell with a spotlight shining through a thick glass shield in the ceiling. He was shown how to salute his guards and how to properly address his superiors, which included everyone who visited his cell. His diet, exercise routine, and toilet habits were rigidly controlled.

Thus the British professionally and thoroughly reduced Germany's deputy führer to a prisoner of war. The world thought it had heard the last of Rudolf Hess.

II

November 6, 1942

C
HICAGO IS THE GRAY CITY,
and Hyde Park is the grayest of the Gray City. This neighborhood eight miles south of the Loop is downwind of the steel mills and foundries in Gary, Indiana, and other steel towns along the southwest shore of Lake Michigan. The sky above Hyde Park is the repository of the mills' airborne effluent. The neighborhood suffers from the worst sulfur-dioxide smog in the country.

The air is gray. On most days, anything over a block away appears through a mist. Smog completely hides buildings four blocks away. Lines are vague and subdued. Edges and corners in Hyde Park have an ethereal blur, like the French Impressionist paintings in the Art Institute on Michigan Avenue. The shroud seldom lifts.

The University of Chicago dominates Hyde Park. Its immense neo-Gothic buildings stretch from Washington Park ten blocks west to Lake Michigan. The hub of the university is the Quadrangle, several acres of grass dotted with small trees surrounded by the five-and six-story classroom
buildings, dormitories, and libraries. Here is the Class of 1904 Drinking Fountain and Senior Bench and other college necessities.

"Neo-Gothic" is a pleasant euphemism for "confused." The university buildings rise six stories, unadorned by the least bit of frivolousness. The walls are plain gray block. But the buildings go berserk when they reach roof level. Most have circular towers at each corner, the conical roofs of which rise to sharp points festooned with flags or crosses. Medieval parapets with archers' slits ring the roofs. Gargoyles peer from entrenched positions near the parapets.

It is unlikely that Marshall Field foresaw the future value of the property when he gave several acres of Hyde Park swamp to the Baptists in 1890. Nor did John D. Rockefeller foresee the growth of the university when he succumbed to three years of subtle pressure and endowed the university with start-up grants. The Baptists, being pure of heart as Baptists are, had been appealing to Rockefeller's philanthropy and could not find it. Finally, William Rainey Harper, later president of the university, asked Rockefeller if he was going to be outdone by Leland Stanford, who was building a college in California. He was not, and in 1890 the founder of Standard Oil Company gave one million dollars to the University of Chicago and continued to grant it large sums of money over the next three decades.

The transition from swampland to one of the world's leading universities was not without its travails. Hyde Park never became part of corrupt Mayor Big Bill Thompson's machine, and therefore fights for garbage collection and street repair were constant and bitter during his tenure as mayor from 1915 to 1931. Hyde Parkers also feared that the Levee, a boiling pot of street violence, prostitution, drugs, and illegal gambling situated between Hyde Park and the Loop, would spill over into Hyde Park. The university prayed that the Everleigh sisters, Bathhouse John
Coughlin, and Hinky Dink Kenna could be contained in the Levee. And the poor were coming. In 1937 most Hyde Parkers opposed funding of the federal low-income-housing project on the South Parkway two miles west of the university. The university had no official position, but it began buying land around the campus as a buffer zone against encroachment.

Many alumni attributed the declining neighborhood to the University of Chicago's withdrawal from Big Ten football. In the early 1900s, Amos Alonzo Stagg built the most powerful college football team in the nation. He invented the T formation, the end-around play, and man-in-motion, and many others. In 1905, the Chicago Maroons scored 245 points against 5 points for all their opponents combined. They remained the Big Ten powerhouse in the 1920s, but after Stagg retired in 1933, the Monsters of the Midway began to slide. Nineteen thirty-nine proved fatal for the team. Scores were unbearable; Illinois trounced Chicago 46–0; Virginia 47–0, Ohio State 61–0, Michigan 85–0, and Harvard 61–0. President Robert Hutchins withdrew the university from the Big Ten and announced that his school would concentrate on scholastics. Loyal alums blamed the pullout for the climbing crime rate in Hyde Park, for the increase in social diseases in South Chicago, and for the bad winters.

John Crown dipped his chin against the bite of this year's bad winter and turned his back to the blowing cold. He fingered the car's door handle, tempted to climb in and hide from the icy blast. But he was waiting for Miguel, and he owed Miguel a lot, so he stayed out in the wind, where his friend could see him. Tiny, needle-tipped ice shards, which Chicagoans blithely called hail, blew down his collar and burned his chest. He stamped back and forth, trying to push the blood through his feet. His teeth began to rattle. Elm trees played with the streetlight and sent shadows
across Crown's face, emphasizing its angular features, the sharp nose and thin face, making him look almost gaunt. Only the full head of brown hair mitigated this harshness. He popped his elbow several times. Got to get that fixed, he thought.