The Isis Covenant (30 page)

It was still dark when they heard the soft knock on the door. Jamie switched on the bedside light and threw on the towelling dressing gown he’d found in a wardrobe. When he opened the door, Bernie Hartmann was standing there, fully dressed and grinning like a malignant sprite.

‘It’s an old man’s privilege or an old man’s curse, Mr Saintclair, that he doesn’t need much more than four hours’ sleep. I like to get up about now and watch the sun rise over the lake while I breakfast; I thought you
young
folks might like to join me and I can finish my little story. Shall we say twenty minutes?’

‘I hope you like eggs Benedict? The Swiss, they think tea, bread and butter is fine in the morning. When I was in the States I learned to enjoy starting the day with something more substantial.’

It was still dark outside, and at first all they could see in the picture window were their own reflections, but gradually Jamie became aware of a dull leaden grey beyond it, that grew imperceptibly lighter with each passing minute.

Bernie Hartmann finished his eggs and ham and wiped his lips with a napkin. Matthias, or his brother, removed the plates and brought another pot of coffee. ‘The Swiss may know nothing about breakfast, but they make a fine cup of coffee. Last night, I was telling you … what?’

Danny stifled a yawn, drawing a glare from the little man. Jamie grinned. ‘I do believe that Bodo Ritter had just shot you in the arse.’

‘That’s right, I landed in that heap of sand and I was heading for the hills when I felt this sting in my left butt cheek. Still got the scar, if you’re interested.’

Danny had a vision of something pale, scrawny and wrinkled and was glad she’d finished her breakfast. ‘No thank you,’ she said politely.

‘Your loss.’ Bernie’s eyes twinkled. Again, the narrative emerged in that curious mix of American
vowels
and German cadence, and it was punctuated by unlikely cackles of laughter.

‘Fortunately, it was just a nick, but maybe it saved my life. The Ivans thought it was fucking hilarious. So there I am, richer than I’ve ever been in my life and with a hole in my arse, running through the streets of Berlin in an SS uniform trying to avoid a hundred thousand Red Army
Frontoviks
who would like nothing better than to put another hole in me, only this time in the head. I had a pistol, but not a rifle, and what good was a rifle going to do me anyway? There’s tank fire ripping through the air, mortars dropping in the streets, long-range artillery with shells the size of a
kübelwagen
bringing down whole buildings. The Ivans are fighting their way to the centre street by street, house by house and room by room, and our boys are defending every cellar and every attic with machine guns, rifles, ’
fausts
: a Devil’s symphony of sudden death, and Bernie Hartmann’s right in the middle of it. Where was I going? The only thought in my head was:
West
. If there was a way out of Berlin, it was west. The first thing I did was get rid of my SS grey. I came to this corner and here was this kid standing like a signpost and staring at me. It was only when I looked again that I saw the hole below his right eye. The kid should have been at school, what was he doing looking round corners in the middle of a battle? By then the idiots in charge were calling up twelve- and thirteen-year-olds for the
Volkssturm
. Well, he’d looked round his last corner and he didn’t need his
feldgrau
any
more
. These kids, they gave them full-size uniforms and they just turned up the sleeves and trousers: one size fits all. So Bernie Hartmann’s one step from being a civilian again, eh? By now I’m somewhere near Potsdamer Station, trying to reach Tiergarten, because I reckon I can hide up there till dark and I’ll have a better chance of getting out that way towards Zossen. The last I’d heard they were still holding out in the Zoo flak tower. But the further west I went, the more Ivans I began to run into. Shit-brown uniforms and a 7.62 mm welcome on every corner. Any way you looked at it, Bernie is in trouble. I could have wept. I did fucking weep. When night came I found a shell hole in the garden of an apartment block. I was out of luck and out of options. The only chance I had of getting out alive was to take a chance and give myself up.’ He paused and wiped his eyes with a handkerchief. ‘Well, Bernie’s been in a lot of dark places, but this is the nearest he’s come to despair. I’ve got enough dough in that sparkler to last me ten lifetimes, but if I don’t surrender, I won’t even have one life. And if I surrender with it, some other bastard is going to take it away. The only thing I can do is hide it somewhere and hope that I get the chance to come back for it. Maybe, because I’m a kid, they’ll let me go? But in my heart I know that’s not true. We’d heard all about the camps and the salt mines. Siberia here I come. Only I won’t be coming back.’

By now, the darkness outside the window has been replaced by the pewter grey of old ashes. Bernie heaved
himself
out of his chair and dimmed the lights. ‘You’ll like this,’ he promised.

‘So you buried the Eye of Isis in Berlin and never went back for it?’ The disappointment was manifest in Danny’s voice. ‘It’s still there buried under a DDR office block or somebody’s new porch?’

Bernie ignored the implied rebuke and resumed his seat, with his back to the door and facing the window.

‘You never knew what would happen when you surrendered. Sometimes they’d just shoot you outright, because they had no idea what to do with you. Sometimes they’d ask you a few questions and pop you when they’d got as much as they could out of you. If you were unlucky, they’d kick you to death or bash your head in with a rifle butt. They were very unpredictable, the Ivans. They could give you vodka and be laughing with you one minute, then shoot you because they were bored the next. You didn’t want to surrender to no Russian women soldiers, know what I mean?’

Jamie had a feeling he did, but didn’t want to think about it too much. He nodded.

‘Anyway, I’m pretty much shitting myself when I walk towards this checkpoint with my hands up. An officer with blue shoulder boards and a few men, ragged and dirty with tired, lifeless eyes; maybe a dozen rifles on me all the way. They stand me against the wall, search through my clothes and slap me around a little, just for the fun of it, making my skull bounce off the brick. Eventually, the officer waves them away and
begins
to question me in pretty good German, considering. “Where your unit? Any tanks nearby? How far to Big House?” Big House was what they called the Reichstag. I told him everything I could. Said my unit was wiped out. Told him about two broken-down tanks dug in somewhere around Potsdamer. But by now I’d seen the feet, maybe six pairs, lying side by side and just visible by the corner of the truck. All the time the officer has been questioning me, he’s been smiling, but now the smile is replaced by a look almost of regret and his hand inches towards this big Tokarev pistol at his belt. Bernie, I says to myself, if you don’t do something quick, you’re a dead man. Now, while this guy has been interrogating me I notice something, without realizing what it is. Then it dawns on me, like a what-ya-call-it? An epiphany. He may look tough, but Comrade Tokarev is a crook. Comrade Tokarev is just another Bernie, trying to get through the war without too much inconvenience. A crook with a sense of humour. Very carefully I bring my hand down between us and I rub my thumb and forefingers together, like this.’ He demonstrated the international sign for money. ‘Maybe the Ivans do it, maybe the Ivans don’t, but this Ivan knew what I meant. He gives me the look. You know, that long look that says,
If you fuck with me I’ll have my boys cut your balls off
? Then he says, “How much?” “Diamonds,” I say, “jewels, gemstones. A million.” I don’t know how much he understood, but his eyes opened when I said million and he gave a look
at
his men that I recognized. I’d seen Bodo Ritter give our guys the same look when he was about to rip them off. “Not far,” I says. “I show you.” He takes out the big Tokarev and points it between my eyes. “Bang,” he says, just in case I don’t get the message. With a nod of the head we’re off, back the way I came, and he’s shouting at his men that it’s okay and probably that he’s going to shoot me somewhere quiet, which was prophetic, if you like. He pushed me ahead of him, crouching down, wary, so some sniper couldn’t shoot past me to get him. After five minutes we reached the street where I’d hidden and scrambled through a bombed-out house to get to the garden. The whole place was wrecked, with piles of rubble all around, and I had trouble getting my bearings. Was this the right block? The right garden? Eventually I realized we’d come in on the opposite side. I saw the bush and I pointed to it, making a digging action. It was only then I saw that he was as nervous as I was, with big drops of sweat running down his face onto that big nose. Why didn’t I try to take him, or at least make a break for it? I never gave it a thought. This was a big man, with a big gun, and he knew what he was doing. I’d have been dead before I could move. He motions with the gun and I go to the bush. Take two steps right and point to the ground. He liked that. Not the bush, but a certain distance from the bush. “You dig,” he says. I’d dug the hole with my bayonet, but it was easy to do the same with my hands in the disturbed earth. I pulled up the
sod
and it took me about ninety seconds to find the old can I’d put the diamond in, wrapped in a rifle-cleaning cloth. When I pulled it out, he waved at me to put it on the ground and back off. When I was far enough away he walked forward, still pointing the gun at me, picked up the can with one hand and emptied the contents on the ground. His eyes were a little wild when he looked at me, but they changed when he shook the cloth and saw what was in there. I heard a muttered curse in Russian and his hand was shaking when he reached to pick up the stone. I started to back away. The gun came up, but he smiled like I was his biggest pal and waved at me to go. I turned and slowly walked away in the opposite direction from where we’d come. I think I got to the top of the rubble before he shot me.’

The coffee was cold by now, but Bernie Hartmann didn’t seem to notice as he took a long drink from the cup. There was an orange cast to the grey beyond the window, but he didn’t notice that either.

‘The Tokarev’s a big pistol and when the bullet hit me in the small of the back, it punched me forward about six feet. At the same time, my head seemed to be in a red haze and I felt the strangest feeling, as if my neck had exploded. There was no pain, but my mind told me I was dead, so that didn’t matter too much. I think I was out before I hit the ground.’

He saw them staring at him and his face broke into a gentle smile.

‘So this is the first time you’ve met a dead man. I congratulate you. When I regained consciousness, it must have been an hour later, because my face was welded to the rock by dried blood. I can be fairly certain Captain Tokarev came over to make sure of me, he was that kind of man. But when he saw the mess my head was in, he must have decided not to waste a bullet. It was one of these curious ballistic irregularities, you see. We wore leather ammunition pouches on harness that crossed in the centre of the back. I didn’t even know there was a buckle, but that’s what deflected the bullet, so it penetrated the skin, but not the bone, and shot up my back taking nicks out of ribs along the way, before blowing a fucking great hole at the junction of my neck and shoulder. A hole that left a flap of bloody flesh over the base of my skull. He would have believed he had aimed a little high, but the result had been the same. Bernie was a goner. My arm was useless, blood leaking everywhere, and I wandered in a nightmare through burning Berlin, by some miracle was given succour, and by a greater miracle survived. So there you have it. The life and death of Berndt Hartmann. Ah, just in time.’

He walked to the window, where the rays of the rising sun had just clipped the top of the low mountains on the other side of the lake. As they watched, the land seemed to welcome them, and the slope was bathed in a patchwork of greens and browns of every hue, but it was the lake that drew them.

‘Yes,’ Bernie Hartmann encouraged. ‘Enjoy.’

The temperature of the water and the air had combined in some natural meteorological phenomenon to carpet the entire surface of the water in a milky band of fog two metres thick. As they watched, the sun’s rays raced across it, turning the white expanse into a sheet of molten gold, like the very centre of a volcano, or the heart of a raging inferno; a swirling, ever-changing canvas that no artist could ever emulate. Danny gasped and Bernie Hartmann turned to her.

‘Yes, a spectacle only God could fashion, and from the simplest of elements. Light and air.’ A low hum intruded on the silence. Bernie tutted. ‘Fishermen. As if anyone could catch fish in a fog.’

He was quiet then for a long time and Jamie tried to hide his disappointment as they prepared to leave. But the shadow was closing in and Bernie Hartmann’s face mirrored the shadow’s power.

He turned to Jamie. ‘Death brought you here, and it seems the possibility of my death concerns you, Mr Saintclair. But you have no need to fear for me. I have lived a lifetime that should have ended sixty years ago. Every second lived since has been stolen from God, and, as a thief, I find that quite satisfying. However, you must know what you are dealing with. You think of Bodo Ritter, or whoever is carrying out these murders, as a man, but you are wrong. Bodo Ritter was the Devil incarnate, and his creatures will carry his stamp. Let me tell you one last story.

‘We went to a concentration camp. Dachau, I think. This happened a dozen times. A hundred.’ The tone has become matter-of-fact, as if only by distancing himself from his subject can he bear to put words into it. ‘A Jewish family, some sort of collector. A relic, who knew what? Another Spear of Destiny or a Torah that talked. Whatever it was, it was lost, but Bodo Ritter didn’t believe that. He jokes with the children. Tells the family,
Let’s go for a walk
. To the furnaces.’ The words are now bound in iron, so controlled he can barely get them out. ‘
Where is it?
he asks.
I don’t know
, says the father. Ritter’s smiling as he picks up the boy and tosses him alive into the furnace mouth. Just a kid, maybe five. You ever heard somebody burn alive? You hate God for not striking you deaf. Ritter picks up the girl …’ His eyes turned puzzled as a high-pitched alarm sounded. ‘What …?’