“Very well,” said Keller hoarsely. “Now give the paper to Alys, and let her approach me very slowly.”
Paul calmly put the map in his trouser pocket.
“No.”
“Did you not hear what I said?”
“I said no.”
“Paul, do what he’s telling you!” said Alys.
“This man killed my father.”
“And he’s going to kill our son!”
“You have to do as he says, Paul,” urged Manfred.
“Very well,” said Paul, putting his hand back in the pocket and retrieving the note. “In that case…”
With a quick movement he crumpled it up, put it in his mouth, and started to chew.
“Nooooo!”
Keller’s cry of rage echoed through the forest. The old bookseller stepped out of the shadows, dragging Julian with him, the gun still pointed at his skull. But as he approached Paul, he trained it on Paul’s chest.
“Damned son of a bitch!”
Come a little closer, thought Paul, getting ready to jump.
“You had no right!”
Keller stopped, still out of Paul’s reach.
Closer!
He began to squeeze the trigger. Paul tensed the muscles in his legs.
“Those diamonds were mine!”
That last word was transformed into a high-pitched, shapeless scream. The bullet left the gun, but Keller’s arm had jolted upward. He let go of Julian and spun around strangely, as though he were trying to reach something behind him. As he twisted, the light revealed a strange red-handled appendage in his back.
The hunting knife that, twenty-four hours earlier, had fallen from Jurgen von Schroeder’s hand.
Julian had kept the knife in his belt all this time, waiting for a moment when the gun was no longer pointing at his head. He had stuck the blade in with as much force as he could, but at a strange angle, so he hadn’t done much more than give Keller a superficial wound. Howling in pain, Keller aimed at the boy’s head.
Paul chose that moment to leap and his shoulder struck Keller’s waist. The bookseller toppled to the ground and tried to roll over, but Paul was already sitting on top of him, pinning his arms down with his knees and punching his face again and again.
He lashed out at the bookseller more than two dozen times, not noticing the pain in his hands-which the following day would be completely swollen-or his grazed knuckles. His conscience disappeared and the only thing that mattered to Paul was the pain he was causing. He didn’t stop until he couldn’t cause any more.
“Paul. That’s enough,” said Manfred, putting his hand on his shoulder. “He’s dead.”
Paul turned. Julian was in his mother’s arms, his head buried in her chest. He prayed to God that his son hadn’t seen what he had just done. He removed Jurgen’s jacket, which was soaked in Keller’s blood, and went over to hug Julian.
“Are you all right?”
“I’m sorry I disobeyed what you said about the knife,” said the boy, starting to cry.
“You were very brave, Julian. And you saved our lives.”
“Really?”
“Really. Now we have to go,” he said, heading toward the car. “Someone might have heard the shot.”
Alys and Julian got in the back, and Paul settled in the passenger seat. Manfred started the engine and they returned to the road.
They continued to glance nervously in the rearview mirror, but they weren’t being followed. No doubt someone was in pursuit of the Dachau fugitives. But it appeared that heading in the opposite direction of Munich was the right strategy. Still, it was a small victory. They would never be able to return to their old lives.
“There’s one thing I want to know, Paul,” whispered Manfred, breaking the silence half an hour later.
“What’s that?”
“Did that little piece of paper really lead to a trunk full of diamonds?”
“I believe it did. Buried somewhere in South-West Africa.”
“I see,” said Manfred, disappointed.
“Would you have liked to look for it?”
“We have to leave Germany. Going in search of treasure wouldn’t be such a bad idea. Shame you swallowed it.”
“The truth is,” said Paul, removing the map from his pocket, “what I swallowed was a note awarding my brother a medal. Though, given the circumstances, I’m not sure he’d mind.”
Epilogue
March 12, 1940
As the waves struck the improvised craft, Paul began to worry. The crossing should have been straightforward, just a few miles across a calm sea, under the cover of night.
Then everything became complicated.
Not that anything had been easy over the past few years, of course. They had escaped Germany across the Austrian border without too many setbacks, and had reached South Africa in early 1935.
It was a time of new beginnings. The smile returned to Alys’s face, and she went back to being the strong, stubborn woman she always used to be. Julian’s terrible fear of the dark began to abate. And Manfred developed a strong friendship with his brother-in-law, especially because Paul let him win at chess.
The search for Hans Reiner’s treasure proved to be more complicated than it might at first have seemed. Paul went back to work in a diamond mine for several months, now accompanied by Manfred-who, thanks to his qualification as an engineer, became Paul’s boss. Alys in turn wasted no time in becoming the unofficial photographer for every social event under the Mandate.
Between them, they managed to save up enough money to buy a small farm in the Orange River basin, the same one from which Hans and Nagel had stolen the diamonds thirty-two years earlier. The property had changed hands several times over the previous three decades, and many said it was cursed. A number of people warned Paul that he’d be throwing away his money if he bought the place.
“I’m not superstitious,” he said. “And I’ve a hunch that my luck might change.”
They were discreet about it. They let several months go by before they started looking for the diamonds. Then one night in the summer of 1936 the four of them set off under the light of a full moon. They knew the adjoining lands perfectly, having walked through them Sunday after Sunday with picnic baskets, pretending to be going on an outing.
Hans’s map was surprisingly precise, as might have been expected from a man who had spent half his life hunched over navigational charts. He had drawn a ravine and the course of a stream, and a rock shaped like an arrowhead at the place where they met. Thirty steps north of the rock, they began to dig. The earth was soft, and it didn’t take them long to find the chest. Manfred whistled in disbelief when they opened it and saw the coarse stones beneath the light of their torches. Julian started playing with them, and Alys danced a lively foxtrot with Paul, with no music other than that of the crickets in the ravine.
Three months later they celebrated their wedding in the town church. Six months after that, Paul showed up at the gemological appraisal office and said that he’d found a couple of stones in the stream on his land. He had taken some of the smaller ones and watched, with his heart in his mouth, as the appraiser examined them against the light, rubbed them on a piece of felt, and smoothed his moustache-all those unnecessary elements of sorcery that experts perform to make themselves seem important.
“They’re quite good quality. If I were you, I’d buy a sieve and start to drain that place, lad. I’ll buy whatever
