The Abominable: A Novel

of England or any other country.”

Churchill shrugged his shoulders. Such a motion for such a heavy man wearing such a fancy robe gave a sort of vague Oliver Hardy feel to the gesture. “Those photographs may make a great difference,” said Churchill, and his voice changed. I sensed he was using his public voice on me—a goddamned radio voice. He reached for a book he’d been reading when I arrived and which he’d laid facedown to one side of a counter near the mahogany desk. “I have here an advance copy of the book that Herr Adolf Hitler spent his time in prison writing and months while you were in the Himalayas rewriting and copyediting and, in general, making perfect for his small but fanatical readership. Herr Hitler wanted to title this monstrous thing—and I assure you, it is monstrous, Mr. Perry—Vierinhalb Jahre Kampf gegen Luge, Dummheit und Feigheit, roughly translated as ‘Four and a Half Years of Struggle Against Lies, Stupidity, and Cowardice.’ As one writer to another, Mr. Perry, I could have told Herr Hitler that his title would not sell books. Luckily—for Hitler—his German publisher shortened the title of the actual published book to Mein Kampf, ‘My Struggle.’”

I waited for the punch line. There didn’t seem to be one.

Churchill held the book toward me. “Take it, Mr. Perry. Read it. Feel free to keep it. It may be on sale in England and America in a few years. In Germany, it may be required reading in a few years. See what mad plans Herr Hitler and his Nazi”—Churchill pronounced it Nah-zee —“goons have for Germany, for Europe, for the Jews, and for the world.”

“I don’t read or speak German,” I said coldly. I was holding the book in my free hand; I took another drink of the Scotch. Part of me wanted to thrust the volume back at him and just turn and walk out of the room, pack my bags, and get the hell out of this place even if I couldn’t find a taxi out here in the country in the middle of the night. I’d walk.

But I hesitated instead, still holding the heavy Hitler volume in one hand and my whisky glass in the other.

“Anyway,” I said, “even as a writer, you should know that books aren’t important. People’s lives are important.”

Churchill’s old slippers made their little hirff-hirff sound as he took a step closer. “Know this, then, before you leave, Mr. Perry. I knew and revered Richard Davis Deacon’s father and knew Richard himself before, during, and after the War. He understood what I…what we…were doing. Richard Deacon had seen the price of unchecked aggression.

“Know this also,” he continued, no bluster in the slow rumble of his somewhat singsong voice. “That I have known and loved young Reggie Bromley since she was nine years old. Her cousin Percy was not only loved and valued by me, but was the centerpiece of my Naval Intelligence network both during and after the Great War. He sacrificed much—including his reputation—for our nation, Mr. Perry. And now I weep, I actually and literally have wept, sir, that I cannot even let his valor and sacrifice be known…but such are the ways of intelligence services, Mr. Perry.”

I set the empty whisky glass on the inlaid leather of the mahogany desk—what years later I would read had been Churchill’s father’s desk—but I did not set down the heavy book he’d given me. The larger part of my mind wanted to lash out at this fat little man, sting him with words the way my memories of my three friends were stinging my heart, but another part of me only wanted to get away from here and think about what Churchill had just said. Reject it in the end, I was sure, but think about it nonetheless.

“Do you wish to leave this morning—when it gets light, of course, and the morning trains start running—or stay at Chartwell for the rest of the weekend so that we can chat again?”

“Leave,” I said. “I’ll have my things packed and ready to go by eight a.m.”

“I’ll have a breakfast laid on for you by seven and my driver take you to the station at your convenience,” said Churchill. “I’m afraid I shan’t see you in the morning since I sleep rather late and then do much of my day’s work in bed before rising for the day. Will you be in London for a while, Mr. Perry?”

“No. I’m leaving London and England as quickly as I can.”

“Back to the Alps, perhaps?” said Churchill with that red-cheeked baby’s smile.

“No,” I said sharply. “Home. To America. Away from Europe.”

“I wish you a safe trip, then, and I thank you for the extraordinary things you’ve done and for all you’ve sacrificed, along with our dear mutual friends,” said Churchill and finally extended his hand.

I paused only a few seconds before shaking it. He had a surprisingly firm and even calloused grip, perhaps from all that bricklaying, pond digging, and dam building.

As the car flowed almost silently down the long lane carrying me away from Chartwell later that morning— away from, what had he called it? The “Cosy Pig”? God, the Brits could be insufferably cute—past the giant old oaks and elms, the laurels and cut-back rhododendrons, then past the final thick clusters of conifers near the entrance gate, all gleaming from dew in the morning light, I resisted the impulse to turn and look back.

30.

In the second week of May in 1941—with America still seven months away from Pearl Harbor and our entering the war that had been going on in Europe for the better part of two years—I was climbing in the Grand Tetons with an American physician-climber friend, Charlie, and his newlywed wife, Dorcas (our joint campsite at Jenny Lake was Charlie and Dorcas’s honeymoon suite), when I read that Rudolf Hess, the so-called Deputy Fuhrer and second most powerful man in Germany’s new Third Reich after Hitler (and also the beetle-browed silent man who’d been at our dining table at the Bierhall in Munich, sitting next to SS Sturmbannfuhrer Bruno Sigl), had stolen a German Air Force plane and flown to England, bailing out over Scotland.

The facts in the newspaper were sketchy and seemed to make no sense.

Hess’s Messerschmitt Bf 110D had been specially rigged out with long-distance drop tanks, but he’d flown alone. Picked up by British radar and with Spitfires and other fighter aircraft vectored to intercept him, Hess had flown very low—evading the radar and eluding his pursuers—but had seemed to be flying an illogical course over Scotland: low over Kilmarnock, climbing up and over the Firth of Clyde, then banking inland again, ending up over Fenwick Moor. British interception radar—still top-secret apparatus at that point—then reported that the solo fighter had crashed somewhere south of Glasgow, but not before Rudolf Hess had parachuted from the plane, coming down in the village of Eaglesham, where he injured his ankle on landing.

Hess was taken into custody and thrown into some British prison and that’s all we learned about his strange flight to England that spring of 1941.

After Pearl Harbor, my climber friend Charlie enlisted to become an Army Air Force doctor. Being 38 years old, and having no special skills other than lots of travel and some mountain climbing under my belt, I ended up being rejected by several branches of the service but finally accepted into a very ad hoc American intelligence group with the alphabet soup name of OSS—the Office of Strategic Services. There I was taught Greek and eventually parachuted onto Greek islands with names like Cephalonia, Thassos, Kos, Spetses, and—my favorite— Hydra. There my modest job was to help organize and arm the partisans and to create as much mischief for the German occupiers as we could.

I’m ashamed to say that “creating mischief” mostly consisted of laying ambushes for German generals or other high-level officers and assassinating them. I’m both ashamed and proud to say that I became rather good at that job.

So it was in the OSS during the war that I stumbled upon more information, still classified then (as it still is now), about Rudolf Hess’s seemingly insane 1941 solo flight to England.

When he was first questioned by officers of the Royal Observer Corps in Giffnock after his capture near Eaglesham, Hess insisted that he had a “secret and vital message from the Fuhrer, Adolf Hitler,” but that he— Hess—would only speak to the Duke of Hamilton.

Hess was taken to the Maryhill Barracks in Glasgow, where he did indeed get a private audience with the Duke of Hamilton. Immediately after that conversation, the duke was flown by the RAF to Kidlington near Oxford, then driven to London, where he met secretly with Prime Minister Winston Churchill at Ditchley Park.

Remember that this was during the darkest days of the Battle of Britain. The British Army had been soundly defeated during its retreat to Dunkirk and was literally driven into the sea, leaving most of its heavy weapons and