The room was furnished in rustic Spanish style: thick wooden furniture, white-washed walls, uneven tiled floor. There were no signed photographs of Adolf Hitler, no SS insignia: just a couple of framed prints of Spanish knights-in-armour, and some earthenware jugs and vases on a side table.
The dog was still barking, until someone shouted at it, and it went into a low growl. It sounded like a big dog. It was the only German thing about the house. They waited.
Five minutes later, the door was opened again by the peasant. He beckoned to them, and they followed him out, back down the passage to a heavy mahogany door. A clock began chiming somewhere. The peasant knocked and turned the handle. Hawn and Anna walked past him.
It was an unusual room for such a house. They both had the sense of entering some ecclesiastical library. Except for a Gothic stained-glass window, hideously bloodshot and jaundiced in the evening sun, the walls were covered in uniform leather volumes behind glass cases. In one of the armchairs sat the frail old man with the white crooked nose, whom they had met half-an-hour ago in the bar. He was dressed in the same dungarees and espadrilles.
He grinned at them both with his stained teeth. ‘You are the first English visitors I have had in ten years. My English is not very perfect. Would you prefer that I spoke Spanish?’
‘My Spanish is not good,’ Hawn said. ‘And Miss Admiral here does not speak German.’
Anna said, ‘You go ahead. Don’t worry about me.’
‘We can speak German,’ Hawn said.
‘So you know German?’
‘I studied for a year at Heidelberg.’
The old face brightened. ‘Ach, Heidelberg! What a fine city. So you know all the old drinking songs? “Ich habe mein Herz in Heidelberg verloren, auf einer lauen Sommernacht…!” How sweet, how sentimental. I am an old man now, and like all old men I live on my memories.’ (What memories? Hawn wondered.) ‘But stop, we have not yet been formally introduced! It is most incorrect of me to talk to you so, without the proper formalities.’
Hawn duly introduced Anna and himself, and Mönch got up and fetched them three glasses of good Spanish brandy. He was not an obviously wealthy man, but what money he did have he had certainly lavished on this room. Hawn tried to read some of the titles in the bookcases, but most of the bindings were so old that the lettering had faded. He did read one title, however: The Christian Man in the Modern World.
Mönch toasted them both. ‘Herr Hawn, I understood your ladyfriend here said that you are a journalist? That is correct? So I must presume that this meeting is a professional one. Now let me be honest. I have lived here for a long time, and I have lived in peace, without problems. As you will no doubt know, I spent two years after the war in an American prison. Not because I was a war criminal — I had not murdered Jewish babies and burnt synagogues — but because I had been a functionary of the State. The Americans were not very discriminating in those days.
‘However, during my duties for the Reich, I was privy to certain secrets. I served, as you may know, in a department under the Ministry of War Production. There are many things I know which I have never told, and which have never been told. But I hear that the young generation of Europeans have become very interested in the history of the Third Reich. I presume, therefore, that you have come to interview me in order to further enlighten that generation?’
‘More or less. It would depend, Herr Doktor, on what you have to say.’
‘That I appreciate. But you too must appreciate that I am a very old man now, I am sick, and I have little in this world besides this house, my books and my chickens. And God the Father, through the Blessed Saviour, the Lord Buddha. You are not, by any remote chance, Herr Hawn, a Buddhist?’
‘No.’
‘No, quite.’ The old man nodded. ‘It is most indelicate of me to mention the subject. But if I recount my memories to you I must expect some reward.’
‘Certainly — I wouldn’t presume on your hospitality for nothing. But of course, it will depend on the material.’
‘You will not be disappointed,’ Mönch said, with a rapine grin. ‘For instance, you may know that Hitler was something of a mystic. He was against the Established Church, which he saw as a spiritual irrelevance to his Modern Germany. But he was not altogether against Christ. Christ had been murdered by the Jews, the apostles of Satan. But although Hitler had much wisdom, despite his mistakes, there was one thing he did not know. Christ was a Buddhist.
‘I surprise you? But the evidence is not only strong, it is conclusive! It is only the arrogance and fanaticism of Christianity which prevents the truth being known. I ask you, what was Our Lord doing between the ages of twelve and thirty? History does not tell us. History is silent. The Church is silent.’ He was leaning forward, squeezing his brandy glass so tightly that Hawn feared it might break in his hands. ‘During those lost twenty-one years, Christ was studying the teachings of the mighty Buddha! He travelled widely, and he listened to many wise tongues. Christ was the reincarnation of Buddha.’
Hawn nodded with a patient despair. He was listening not to a dangerous ex-war criminal, but to a sad senile man whose mind had wandered into the fantasies of religion. He hadn’t the heart to point out that until recently Buddhism had been an exclusively oriental religion, and that the first Westerner to penetrate the Far East had
