was 'the lucky bastard.' Can't tell you how sorry I am.'
'Thanks.'
'Any ideas?'
'That's why I need a favor, George. Information, actually.'
'I'll see what I can do.'
Lang told him what he wanted.
Still another pause. 'That may take a while. I mean, shit, you want me to go back to the beginning of time, maybe further. Hell, maybe even before everything was computerized.'
Lang had barely gotten the IACD back into its compartment when Sara came in with a stack of file folders. 'Take a look and see what needs handling before you leave.'
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Washington, D. C.
National Archives (Pennsylvania Avenue)
That afternoon
Departing the United States from Washington had a double advantage: Once again, a familiar face on the Dulles-Rome leg would reveal any tail. Second, answerless questions buzzed around Lang's mind like aimless bees in search of the hive. He might answer a few here before departing in the morning. A quick call to the office of one of Georgia's senators and a reminder of the size of the nonprofit he headed produced the required documents allowing him into the nation ^7 s record room.
Passing the line of tourists waiting to see the glass-encased Declaration of Independence and slipping around the line for the movie theater, he found the desk he was looking for. Behind it, a matronly woman, her steely hair tied in a bun, examined his nonacademic credentials, her displeasure obvious. With the reluctance peculiar to a bureaucrat forced to do her job, she handed him a plastic visitor's badge and directed him to the third floor. She seemed slightly mollified by giving him an admonition that the records he sought were largely unindexed.
He found shelves of boxes, each containing batches of randomly arranged documents stuffed into containers in no particular sequence. The authors of those documents, the Germans, would have been horrified at the total lack of order in which their handiwork was stored. The cargo manifest and schedule of each train, the requisition of each liter of petrol, all crammed together. At no time in history had such complete records of a nation fallen into enemy hands as had the minutiae of the Third Reich. And nowhere in history had such records simply been packed up, willy-nilly, their total disorder untouched for over sixty years.
Well, perhaps there was some order, after all. A faded placard at the end of each row bore a year, and some a location, Italy, France, and so on.
When had the German army supplanted the Fascists in defense of the Italian boot? Lang selected two boxes from the Italy 1943-44 shelf and carried them to the nearest table, where a small sign instructed him not to attempt to return boxes to shelves. That would be done by Archives staff.
The Archives' very own public works program.
The smell of musty paper tickled his. nose. Fortunately, most of the documents were typed rather than in the old German script Hitler had resurrected and decreed to be used in handwritten papers, one of several less-than- successful efforts to take Germany back to its glory days.
Like the eighteenth century under Frederick the Great.
For the first hour, Lang glanced through mind numbing orders for train movements, distribution of food rations, and repairs to vehicles, the minutiae of Kesselring's army. He was tempted to read the dispatches but abandoned the idea. If he was going to find anything related to what he wanted, he had no time for the blame shifting that is the correspondence of an army in retreat.
Shoving the boxes aside, he replaced them with two more. It was halfway through the last Italy 1944 that he found it: an aged copy of a letter on unique letterhead. Instead of the usual spread-winged eagle with a circled swastika in its claws, this bird was a two-thirds profile, also spread-winged. In one talon it held a pair of lighting bolts, the crooked cross in the other. A motto circled the figure: Meine Ehre 1st Treu. My truth is honor, slogan of the SS.
Lang pulled his chair closer to the lamp to read the faded ink of a teletype flimsy. It translated as:
8 May 1944 URGENT amp; TOP SECRET
Sturmbahnfuhrer Otto Skorzeny
Via Rasslia 29
Rome
Herr Sturmbahnfuhrer!
You are hereby specifically relieved of duties imposed upon you by orders effective 1 April 1944. You are to report Berlin immediately for reassignment by most expeditious means available, aircraft included. Prior departure Rome, all documents concerning previous orders to be destroyed, repeat, destroyed.
Heil Hitler!
H. Himmler
Since he was looking at an order that had come by telegraph, there was no actual signature. Still, an order direct from Himmler was an order from Hitler himself, an order confirming that Skorzeny had been in Rome. It was a possibility, if not a good guess, that he had been searching the necropolis for Julian's joke on the Christians. Whatever Skorzeny had been doing there, it wasn't as important to Hitler in the late spring of '44 as having him somewhere else.
But where?
According to Professor Blucher, Skorzeny had been in Montsegur soon after the fall of France in 1940. Shortly thereafter, he'd led a parachute attack on-… Cyprus? He'd been around to rescue Mussolini in 1943, been in Rome in the spring of'44. When did Rome fall to the Allies? Same day as Normandy, June 6, 1944. That would explain one reason Skorzeny was ordered out. That must have been before he went to oust what government? Oh yeah, Hungary. No doubt the reassignment in Himmler's order. By winter of 1944-45, he'd been at the Bulge in Belgium.
Otto Skorzeny, man about Europe.
Rescue a dictator here, take over a government there, no big secrets. Except what he might have found at Montsegur. And Blucher hadn't mentioned what he was doing in Rome. Even so, how did the actions of a fervent Nazi sixty years ago relate to Don's death? The only answer Lang could see was that Skorzeny had found something, a long-buried secret that someone would kill to keep that way.
He looked at his watch. Ten till five. The archives would close in a few minutes. He had discovered all he was going to about Skorzeny and his secret today. He stood, stretched, and read again the sign forbidding return of boxes to shelves.
Tomorrow, he'd be on a flight for Italy. Tonight, he was headed to Kincade's for some Chesapeake oysters and, hopefully, soft-shell crabs. Anticipation turned sour as he recalled he'd be dining alone. Gurt had loved soft- shells.
He remembered the first time. It had been, what, Chops, one of Atlanta's more expensive steak and seafood houses? She had looked at the crab, including claws and shell, and then back at him.
'This is a Vitzen, joke, no?'
'The crab certainly doesn't think so,' he'd replied.
She looked at him suspiciously. 'It is a treat. You go first.'
'With pleasure.' He had severed a claw, the tastiest part, dipped it in heavy tartar sauce, and popped it into his mouth.
Gurt watched carefully, fully expecting him to try to spit it out. Or perhaps some sort of magic trick where he hadn't really put it in his mouth at all.
He put down his fork.
She was still staring.
''You ate it,' she finally said.
