The bottom half of the withered man’s face laughs. The top half doesn’t change. “I will pass your suggestion up the chain of command,” he says. “But, Herr Doktor, we are not here to instill fear. We have come at this inconvenient time because of the train schedules.”
“Am I to understand that I am getting on a train?”
“You have a few minutes,” the Gestapo man says, pulling back a cuff to divulge a hulking Swiss chronometer. Then he invites himself in and begins to pace up and down in front of Rudy’s bookshelves, hands clasped behind back, bending at the waist to peer at the titles. He seems disappointed to find that they are all mathematical texts—not a single copy of the Declaration of Independence in evidence, though you can never tell when a copy of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion might be hidden between the pages of a mathematical journal. When Rudy emerges, dressed but still unshaven, he finds the man displaying a pained expression while trying to read Turing’s dissertation on the Universal Machine. He looks like a lower primate trying to fly an aeroplane.
Half an hour later, they are at the train station. Rudy looks up at the departures board as they go in, and memorizes its contents, so that he will be able to deduce, from the track number, whether he’s being taken in the direction of Leipzig or Konigsberg or Warsaw.
It is a clever thing to do, but it turns out to be a waste of effort, because the Gestapo men lead him to a track that is not listed on the board. A short train waits there. It does not contain any boxcars, a relief to Rudy, since he thinks that during the last few years he may have glimpsed boxcars that appeared to be crammed full of human beings. These glimpses were brief and surreal, and he cannot really sort out whether they really happened, or were merely fragments of nightmares that got filed in the wrong cranial drawer.
But all of the cars on this train have doors, guarded by men in unfamiliar uniforms, and windows, shrouded on the inside with shutters and heavy curtains. The Gestapo lead him to a coach door without breaking stride, and just like that, he is through. And he is alone. No one checks his papers, and the Gestapo do not enter behind him. The door is closed behind his back.
Doktor Rudolf von Hacklheber is standing in a long skinny car decorated like the anteroom of an upper-class whorehouse, with Persian runners on the polished hardwood floor, heavy furniture upholstered in maroon velvet, and curtains so thick that they look bulletproof. At one end of the coach, a French maid hovers over a table set with breakfast: hard rolls, slices of meat and cheese, and coffee. Rudy’s nose tells him that it is real coffee, and the smell draws him down to the end of the car. The maid pours him a cup with trembling hands. She has plastered thick foundation beneath her eyes to conceal dark circles, and (he realizes, as she hands him the cup) she has also painted it onto her wrists.
Rudy savors the coffee, stirring cream into it with a golden spoon bearing the marque of a French family. He strolls up and down the length of the car, admiring the art on the walls: a series of Dürer engravings, and, unless his eyes deceive him, a couple of pages from a Leonardo da Vinci codex.
The door opens again and a man enters clumsily, as if thrown on board, and ends up sprawled over a velvet settee. By the time Rudy recognizes him, the train has already begun to pull out of the station.
“Angelo!” Rudy sets his coffee down on an end table and throws himself into the arms of his beloved.
Angelo returns the embrace weakly. He stinks, and he shudders uncontrollably. He is wearing a coarse, dirty, pajamalike garment, and is wrapped up in a grey wool blanket. His wrists are encircled by half-scabbed lacerations embedded in fields of yellow-green bruises.
“Don’t worry about it, Rudy,” Angelo says, clenching and opening his fists to prove that they still work. “They were not kind to me, but they took care with my hands.”
“Thou canst still fly?”
“I can still fly. But that is not why they were so careful with my hands.”
“Why, then?”
“Without hands, a man cannot sign a confession.”
Rudy and Angelo gaze into each other’s eyes. Angelo looks sad, exhausted, but still has some kind of serene confidence about him. Like a baptizing priest ready to receive the infant, he holds up his hands. He silently mouths the words: But I can still fly!
A suit of clothes is brought in by a valet. Angelo cleans up in one of the coach’s lavatories. Rudy tries to peer out between the curtains, but heavy shutters have been pulled down over the windows. They breakfast together as the train maneuvers through the switching-yards of greater Berlin, perhaps working its way around some bombed-out sections of track, and finally accelerates into the open territory beyond.
Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring makes his way through the car, headed towards the rear of the train, where the most ornate coach is located. His body is about as big as the hull of a torpedo boat, draped in a circus-tent-sized Chinese silk robe, the sash of which drags on the floor behind him, like a leash trailing behind a dog. He has the largest belly of any man Rudy has ever seen, and it is covered with golden hair that deepens as the belly curves under, until it becomes a tawny thicket that completely conceals his genitals. He is not really expecting to see two men sitting here eating breakfast, but seems to consider Rudy and Angelo’s presence here to be one of life’s small anomalies, not really worth noticing. Given that Göring is the number-two man in the Third Reich—the designated successor to Hitler himself—Rudy and Angelo really should jump to attention and give him a “Heil Hitler!” But they are too stunned to move. Göring stumbles down the middle of the coach, paying them no mind. Halfway down, he begins talking, but he’s talking to himself, and his words are slurred. He slams open the door at the end of the coach and proceeds into the next car.
Two hours later, a doctor in a white coat passes through, headed for Göring’s coach, carrying a silver tray with a white linen cloth on it. Tastefully arrayed on this, like caviar and champagne, are a blue bottle and a glass hypodermic syringe.
Half an hour after that, an aide in a Luftwaffe uniform passes through carrying a sheaf of papers, and favors Rudy and Angelo with a crisp “Heil, Hitler!”
Another hour goes by, and then Rudy and Angelo are escorted back through the train by a servant. The coach at the rear of the train is darker and more gentlemanly than the florid parlor where they have been cooling their heels. It is paneled in darkly stained wood and contains an actual desk—a baronial monstrosity carved out of a ton of Bavarian oak. At the moment, its sole function is to support a single sheet of paper, hand-written, and signed at the bottom. Even from a distance, Rudy recognizes Angelo’s handwriting.
They have to walk past the desk in order to reach Göring, who is spread across an equally massive couch at the end of the car, underneath a Matisse, and flanked between a couple of Roman busts on marble pedestals. He is dressed in red leather jodhpurs, red leather boots, a red leather uniform jacket, a red leather riding crop with a fat diamond set into the butt of the handle. Bracelet-sized gold rings, infected with big rubies, grip his pudgy fingers. A red leather officer’s cap is perched on his head, with a gold death’s head, with ruby eyes, centered above the bill. All of this is illuminated only by a few striations of dusty light that have forced their way in through tiny crevices between curtains and shutters; the sun is up now, but Göring’s blue eyes, dilated to dime-sized pits by the morphine, cannot face it. He has his cherry-colored boots up on an ottoman; no doubt he has trouble with circulation in his legs. He is drinking tea from a thimble-sized porcelain cup, encrusted with gold leaf, looted from a chateau somewhere. Heavy cologne fails to mask his odor: bad teeth, intestinal trouble, and necrotizing hemorrhoids.
“Good morning, gentlemen,” he says brightly. “Sorry to have kept you waiting. Heil Hitler! Would you like some tea?”
There is small talk. It goes on at length. Göring is fascinated with Angelo’s work as a test pilot. Not only that, he has any number of peculiar ideas adapted from the Bavarian Illuminati, and is groping for some way to ti
e these in with higher mathematics. Rudy is afraid, for a while, that this task is about to be placed on his shoulders. But even Göring himself seems impatient with this phase of the conversation. Once or twice he reaches out with his riding crop to part a curtain slightly. The outdoor light seems to cause him appalling pain and he quickly looks away.
But finally the train slows, maneuvers through more switches, and coasts to a gentle stop. They can see nothing, of course. Rudy strains his ears, and thinks he hears activity around them: many feet marching, and commands being shouted. Göring catches the eye of an aide and waves his riding crop towards the desk. The aide springs forward, snatches up the handwritten document, and bears it over to the Reichsmarschall, presenting it with a small, neat bow. Göring reads through it quickly. Then he looks up at Rudy and Angelo and makes tut-tut-tut noises, shaking his gigantic head from side to side. Various layers of jowls, folds, and wattles follow, always a few degrees out of phase. “Homosexuality,” Göring says. “You must be aware of the Führer’s policy regarding this sort of behavior.” He holds up the sheet and shakes it. “Shame on you! Both of you. A test pilot who is a guest in our country, and an eminent mathematician working on great secrets. You must have known that the Sicherheitsdienst would get wind of this.” He heaves an exhausted sigh. “How am I going to patch this up?”
When Göring says this, Rudy knows for the first time since the knock on his door that he is not going to die today. Göring has something else in mind.
But first his victims need to be properly terrified. “Do you know what could happen to you? Hmm? Do you?”
Neither Rudy nor Angelo answers. It is not the sort of question that really needs answering.
Göring answers it for them by reaching out with his riding crop and lifting up the curtain. Harsh blue light, reflected from snow, peals into the coach. Göring shuts his eyes and looks the other way.
They are in the middle of an open area, surrounded by tall barbed-wire fences, filled with long rows of dark barracks. In the center, a tall stack pours smoke into a white sky. SS troops in greatcoats and jackboots pace around, blowing into their hands. Just a few yards away from them, on an adjacent railway siding, a gang of wretches in striped clothing are at work in, and around, a boxcar, unloading pale cargo. A large number of naked human bodies have become all frozen together in a solid, tangled mass inside the boxcar, and the prisoners are at work with axes, bucksaws, and prybars, dismantling them and throwing the parts onto the ground. Because they are frozen solid, there is no blood, and so the entire operation is startlingly clean. The double-glazed windows of Göring’s coach block sound so effectively that the impact of a big fire ax on a frozen abdomen comes through as a nearly imperceptible thud.
One of the prisoners turns towards them, carrying a thigh toward a wheelbarrow, and risks a direct look at the Reichsmarschall’s train. This prisoner has a pink triangle sewn to the breast of his uniform. The prisoner’s eyes are trying to probe through the window, past the curtain, trying to make a human connection with someone on the inside of the coach. Rudy stiffens in panic for a moment, thinking that the prisoner sees him. Then Göring withdraws the riding crop and the curtain falls. A few moments later, the train begins to move again.
Rudy looks at his lover. Angelo is sitting frozen, just like one of those corpses, with his hands over his face.
Göring flicks his crop dismissively. “Get out,” he says.
“What?” ask Rudy and Angelo simultaneously.
Göring laughs heartily. “No, no! I don’t mean get out of the train! I mean, Angelo, get out of this coach. I want to talk to Herr Doktor Professor von Hacklheber in private. You may wait in the parlor car.”
Angelo leaves eagerly. Göring waves his crop at a couple of hovering aides, and they leave too. Göring and Rudy are alone together.
“I am sorry to show you these unpleasant things,” Göring says. “I simply wanted to impress upon you the importance of keeping secrets.”
“I can assure the Reichsmarschall that—”
Göring shushes him with a wave of the crop. “Don’t be tedious. I know that you have sworn any number of great oaths, and been through all of the indoctrination concerning secrecy. I have no doubt of your sincerity. But it is all just words, and not good enough for the work that I wish you to begin doing for me. To work for me, you must see the thing I have shown you, so that you can really understand the stakes.”
Rudy looks at the floor, takes a deep breath, and forces out the words: “It would be a great honor to work for you, Reichsmarschall. But since you have access to so many of the great museums and libraries of Europe, there is only one small favor I, as a scholar, might humbly request of you.”
Back in the church basement in Norrsbruck, Sweden, Rudy yells, and drops a cigarette on the floor, having allowed it to burn down to his fingers, like a slow fuse, while relating this story. He puts his hand to his mouth, sucks on the finger briefly, then remembers his manners and composes himself. “Göring knew a surprising amount about cryptology, and was aware of my work on the Enigma. He didn’t trust the machine. He told me that he wanted me to come up with the very best cryptosystem in the world, one that could never be broken—he wanted to communicate (he said) with U-boats at sea and with installations in Manila and Tokyo. And so, I came up with such a system.”
“And you handed it over,” Bischoff says.
“Yes,” Rudy says, and here, for the first time all day, he allows himself a slight smile. “And it is a reasonably good system, despite the fact that I crippled it before giving it to Göring.”
“Crippled it?” Root asks. “What do you mean?”
“Imagine a new engine for an aeroplane. Imagine it has sixteen cylinders. It is more powerful than any other engine in the world. Even so, a mechanic can do certain things—very simple things—to kill its performance. Such as pulling out half of the spark plug wires. Or tampering with the timing. This is an analogy to what I did with Göring’s cryptosystem.”
“So what went wrong?” Shaftoe asks. “They figured out that you had crippled it?”
Rudolf von Hacklheber laughs. “Not very likely. Maybe half a dozen people in the world could figure that out. No, what went wrong was that you fellows, you Allies, landed in Sicily, and then in Italy, and not long afterwards, Mussolini was overthrown, the Italians withdrew from the Axis, and Angelo, like all of the other hundreds of thousands of Italian nationals living and working in the Reich, fell under suspicion. His services were badly needed as a test pilot, but his situation was tenuous. He volunteered for the most dangerous work of all—flying the new Messerschmidt prototype, with the turbine-jet engine. This proved his loyalty in the eyes of some.
“Remember that, at the same time, I was decrypting the message traffic of Detachment 2702. I kept these results to myself, as I no longer felt any particular loyalty to the Third Reich. There had been a great burst of activity around the middle of April, and then no messages for a while—as if the detachment had ceased to exist. At exactly the same time, Göring’s people were very active for a few days—they were afraid that Bischoff was going to broadcast the secret of U-553.”
“So you know about that?” Bischoff asks.
“Natürlich. U-553 was Göring’s treasure ship. Its existence was supposed to be a secret. When you, Sergeant Shaftoe, turned up on board Bischoff’s U-boat, talking about this thing, Göring was very concerned for a few days. But then everything settled down, and there was no Detachment 2702 traffic through the late spring and early summer. Mussolini was overthrown in late June. Then the troubles began for me and Angelo. The Wehrmacht was defeated by the Russians at Kursk—absolute proof, for those who needed it, that the Eastern Front is lost. Since then Göring has redoubled his efforts to get his gold, jewels, and art out of the country.” Rudy looks at Bischoff. “I am frankly surprised that he has not tried to recruit you.”
“Dönitz has,” Bischoff admits.
Rudy nods; it all fits.
“
During all of this,” Rudy continues, “I received only one message intercept in the Detachment 2702 code. It took my machinery several weeks to break it. It was a message from Enoch Root, stating that he and Sergeant Shaftoe were in Norrsbruck, Sweden, and requesting further instructions. I was aware that Kapitänleutnant Bischoff was also in the same town, and became interested. I decided that this would be a good place for me and Angelo to escape to.”
“Why!?” Shaftoe says. “Of all the places—”
“Enoch and I had never met. But there are certain old family connections,” Rudy says, “and certain shared interests.”
Bischoff mutters something in German.
“The connections make a very long story. I would have to write a whole fucking book,” Rudy says irritably.
Bischoff looks only slightly appeased, but Rudy goes on anyway. “It took us several weeks to make preparations. I packed up the Leibniz-Archiv—”
“Hold on—the what?”
“Certain materials I use in my research. They had been scattered among many libraries, all over Europe. Göring brought them all together for me—it makes men like him feel powerful, to do these little favors for their slaves. I departed from Berlin last week, on the pretext of going to Hannover, to do my Leibniz research. Instead I made my way to Sweden through channels that were quite involved—”
“No shit! How’d you manage that little stunt?” Shaftoe asks.
Rudy looks at Enoch Root as if expecting him to answer the question. Root shakes his head minutely.
“It would be too tedious to explain here,” Rudy says, sounding mildly annoyed. “I found Enoch. We got a message to Angelo saying that I was safe here. Angelo then tried to make his escape in the Messerschmidt prototype, with the results that we have all seen.”