'That's a drink to help you find oblivion,' said Father Bandolini. 'Nothing to do with God at all.'
But none of this was as interesting as what he told me next. Which was that the monastery's beer truck was leaving for Garmisch-Partenkirchen later that same morning. And that I was welcome to accompany it.
I fetched my coat and my gun, but I left the bag with my money in my room. It would have looked odd to have taken it with me. Besides, I had a key to the door. And I was coming back for my new passport. Then I followed the Father to the brewery where the truck was already being loaded with beer crates.
There were two monks manning the truck, which was an old two-cylinder Framo. Each man was a testament to the mesomorphic, manly qualities of the beer. Father Stoiber, bearded and quite obviously bibulous, had a belly like a millstone. Father Seehofer was as burly as a kiln-dried barrel. There was room for the three of us in the cab of the truck, but only when we exhaled. By the time we reached Garmisch-Partenkirchen, I felt as thin as the sausage in a Saxon pastor's sandwich. But it wasn't just a tight squeeze. The Framo's small, 490cc engine delivered only fifteen-brake horsepower and, with my extra weight, we struggled a bit on some of the icy mountain roads. And it was just as well that Stoiber, who had seen action in the Ukraine through the worst of a Russian winter, was an excellent driver.
We drove into town, not from the north through Sonnenbichl, but up from the southwest, along Griesemer Strasse and in the cold shadow of the Zugspitze, to that part of Partenkirchen where most of the Americans were based. The two monks told me they had deliveries for the Elbsee Hotel, the Crystal Springs Hotel, the Officers' Club, the Patton Hotel, and the Green Arrow Ski Lodge. They dropped me at the junction of Zugspitzstrasse and Bahnhofstrasse, and looked slightly relieved when I told them I would try to make my own way back to the monastery.
I found the street of old Alpine-style villas where Gruen and Henkell had performed some of their more recent experiments. I couldn't remember the number, but the villa, with its Olympic skier fresco, was easy enough to find. In the distance I heard the muffled gunshots from the skeet range, just like before. The only difference was that there was a lot more snow on the ground. It was heaped on top of and around the gingerbread houses like powdered icing sugar. There was no sign of Jacobs's Buick Roadmaster, just a pile of horse dung on the street where it had been parked. I had seen several sleighs around town and I was banking on getting one to take me up to Monch, at Sonnenbichl, when I'd finished snooping around the villa.
I wasn't exactly sure of what I thought I might find. From the tenor of my last conversation with Eric Gruen, it was hard for me to know if he and the others had already left the area. But the possibility that they hadn't was strong, since they could hardly have expected me to effect an escape from Vienna so quickly. Vienna was a closed city and not easy to get in or out of. Gruen had been right about that. All the same, he would surely have been aware that the money he had given me, by way of compensation, made my return to Garmisch, at the very least, reasonably possible. And if they were still in the area they would certainly have taken some precautions with their security. I tightened my hand on the gun in my pocket and went around to the back of the house to look in the window of the laboratory. With the snow in the garden up to my knees, it was just as well I had bought boots and gaiters in Vienna. The snow around Monch would be even deeper.
There were no lights on in the villa. And there was no one in the lab. I pressed my nose closer to the window, close enough to see through the double glass doors into the office beyond. That was deserted, too. I selected a handy-looking log from a neat pile of fire-wood underneath the balcony and glanced around for a window to knock in. The piles of snow behind me muffled the noise of breaking glass nicely. Deep snow is a burglar's best friend. Carefully I chipped out a few jagged edges that had stayed in the frame and then put my hand in, lifted the catch, opened the window, and climbed inside. Glass crunched under my feet as I jumped down to the laboratory floor. Everything was just as it had been before. Nothing had been moved. All was hot and still. Except the mosquitoes, of course. These became more agitated as I laid the palm of my hand on the glass side of their habitat to check how warm it was. It felt just right, which is to say even warmer than the room, which was saying something, of course. They were all doing just fine. But I could fix that. And reaching behind each tank I switched off the heaters that kept these deadly little bugs alive. With a broken window letting freezing cold air into the lab, I figured they would all be dead in a few hours.
I opened and closed both sets of glass doors and went into the office. Straightaway I understood that I had not come too late. Far from it. On the blotter in the center of Gruen's desk were four new American passports. I picked one up and opened it. The woman I had known as Frau Warzok, Gruen's wife, was now Mrs. Ingrid Hoffman. I looked at the others. Heinrich Henkell was now Mr. Gus Braun. Engelbertina was Mrs. Bertha Braun. And Eric Gruen was now Eduard Hoffman. I started to write down the new names. Then I just pocketed all four passports. They could hardly go anywhere without them. Nor without their air tickets, which were also on the blotter. These were U.S. military tickets. I checked the date, the time, and the destination. Mr. and Mrs. Braun and Mr. and Mrs. Hoffman were leaving Germany that night. They were all booked on a midnight flight to Langley Air Force Base in Virginia. All I had to do was sit down and wait. Someone--Jacobs, probably--would surely be along quite soon to collect these tickets and the passports. And when he came, I would make him drive me up to Monch, where, with three fugitives from Allied Justice cornered, I would take my chances and call the police in Munich. Let them sort it out.
I sat down, took out my gun--the one given to me in Vienna by Father Lajolo--worked the slide to put one up the spout, thumbed off the safety, and laid the weapon on the desk in front of me. I was looking forward to seeing my old friends again. I thought about smoking a cigarette and then decided against it. I didn't want Major Jacobs smelling the smoke as he came through the front door.
Half an hour passed and, becoming a little bored, I decided to poke around the filing cabinet; when, eventually, I spoke to the police, it might look better if I had some documentary evidence to support what I was going to tell them. Not that Gruen and Henkell had experimented on Jews at Dachau. But that they had continued their medical experiments on local German POWs. They wouldn't like that any more than I did. If, by some chance, a court wasn't inclined to indict Gruen, Henkell, and Zehner for what they had done during the war, no German court could have ignored the murders of German servicemen.
The manila files were quite meticulous, being neatly arranged in alphabetical order. There were no records of what had happened before 1945, but for every person who had been infected with malaria since then, there was a detailed set of case notes. The first one I examined from the top drawer of the cabinet was for a Lieutenant Fritz Ansbach, who had been a German POW receiving treatment for nervous hysteria in the Partenkirchen hospital. He had been injected with malaria in the last days of November 1947. Within twenty-one days he had developed the full-blown disease, at which point the test vaccine, Sporovax, had been injected into his bloodstream. Ansbach was dead seventeen days later. Cause of death: malaria. Official cause of death: viral meningitis. I read several other files from that drawer. They were all the same. I left them out on the desk, ready to take with me when I went to Monch. I had all that I needed. And I almost didn't open the middle drawer in that evil filing cabinet at all. In which case I would never have come across the file labeled 'Handloser.'
I read the file slowly. And then I read it again. It used a lot of medical words that I didn't understand and one or two that I did. There were lots of graphs showing the 'subject's' temperature and heart rate before and after they had put her arms inside a box containing up to a hundred infected mosquitoes. I remembered how I had thought she had been bitten by fleas or bed lice. And all that time, Henkell had been turning up at the Max Planck psychiatric hospital with his little box of death. They had given her the test vaccine, Sporovax IV, but it hadn't worked. The way it hadn't worked for any of the others. And so Kirsten had died. It was easily done. And very easily explained. Malaria could be written off as influenza just as easily as viral meningitis, especially in Germany, in a hospital where facilities were few. My wife had been murdered. I felt my stomach collapse in upon itself like an imploding balloon. The bastards had murdered my wife, just as surely as if they'd put a gun to her head and blown out her brains.
I looked again at her case notes. Mistakenly booked into the hospital as a single woman, and wrongly described as mentally retarded, it had been assumed that no one would really miss her. There was no mention of me. Only that she had been transferred to the General Hospital, where she had 'succumbed' to the disease. 'Succumbed.' They made it sound like she had just gotten tired and gone to sleep, instead of having died. As if they didn't know the one from the other any more than they knew that I had been this poor woman's husband. Otherwise they would surely have recorded my name in their damned file.
I closed my eyes. Not fleas or bed lice at all. But
