The Whip Hand

talked, written about, and investigated this mystery. And the purpose behind it is very clear. No government ever found the body. But every government which had fought the Third Reich wished to know him dead. They wanted nothing left on which myth or legend could be built, no relics, no pilgrimages, no proof even that he died a soldier’s death, at his own hand, with a soldier’s weapon, rather than surrender. It is for this reason that it has been said that he poisoned himself, a coward’s refuge. My father shot himself.”

He paused, breathing hard. And he had reason. It was some performance.

Suddenly he raised the whip aloft, and went on, “Let it be frankly understood – my father died a soldier’s death, but he was a tyrant! It is not the Third Reich we wish to bring back – but a new Germany, a new Europe. My father’s death ended a tyranny. But when tyranny is done, there comes atonement. The atonement of a whole people, the demand of a people to be whole again, to seek their true destiny, their true greatness against odds no matter how great. And it is then that they demand the myth, the holy relic, the reminder of greatness, the shrine on which can be focused the memory of a black past and from which they can draw the strength for a glorious future. Be assured then that I, the returning son, shall give to the people of Germany the shrine they need, the tyrant soldier dead, the fires of oppression now turned to the ashes of atonement. This I promise to do. This I can do – for that shrine is here. Here is the body of my father!”

He stepped a little aside and turned to the catafalque. I felt Katerina shiver beside me, but whether it was from cold, excitement or fear I did not know.

The stage manager took over again and the velvet drapes slid away from the catafalque, revealing a large glass case. As the curtains fell away, lights came on inside the case.

He was lying there, raised on a small gold bed, dressed in full uniform.

I crouched there with Katerina and we watched them. Each man got up, one at a time with no rush, slowly, almost as though each were bowed with some great, unseen burden which they knew they would have to carry for a long time. Each man went up to the catafalque, looked, walked around it, and then went back to his gilt chair. And while it all went on the guards stood at the door, staring over the heads of the men, over the top of the catafalque, soldiers on duty, remote, but alert, crystallized by their last orders, waiting until the next should set them in motion.

I remembered Malacod saying to me about politicians, “Expediency is the only god they acknowledge.” The rally at Munich in a few days’ time would put a bomb under the table of every cabinet room in the world. Vadarci knew what he was talking about in Stigmata. “Atonement could be as good a rallying cry as ‘Death to all infidels!’ I knew then, too, why Manston and my friend with the tin leg had worked their passage into this company, understood why Howard Johnson and Frau Spiegel had been set on this trail. The news had leaked, but there wasn’t one security service that trusted another. They all wanted the same thing – to stop any shrine being set up. But they each worked separately for fear that, at the last moment, if one were successful in laying hands on the catafalque, then a moment of expediency might intervene, destruction of the body be delayed, maybe, even the shrine set up, for some suddenly burgeoning political advantage. And Malacod – he was a Jew. German Fascism, Atonement Party, Neo-Nazism ... the whole list of names only echoed other names right back through the ages, and he had seen the danger to his people, and now worked on his own account, bent on destruction of the shrine, just as the others were, but trusting none of them.

Down below Alois was talking again. Now, he was interrupted by question after question, as he set out the details of the way the body of Hitler had been taken from the Chancellery Bunker, the trail confused, the body embalmed and hidden.... The sound of the voices washed into my ears. I listened, fascinated, and knew – as though I hadn’t before – that the witness men give can never be truly checked.

But two things I knew without needing cast-iron proof; the body in that case was not Hitler’s, and Alois was no son of Hitler. Some things in life you know by instinct. The mind computes and rejects and then closes firm against the alien touch of a too bizarre probability, like a sea anemone prodded with a stick. If the whole thing was not a fake, then grass was really blue and the sky green and no one had noticed it so far.

Not that any of this mattered a damn. Professor Vadarci – it had to be him – had spared no expense to make the fake seem genuine, all the authentic proofs laid out in a row, and the body of some unknown, maybe one of Hitler’s old doubles, stretched out in uniform, and the whole package deal sold to Alois years and years ago when his voice began to break and the first hairs appeared on his chest. Alois believed. Watching him, listening to him made that clear. It really was a work of art – and Manston, by God, had said just that.

Put this masterpiece on exhibition at the Munich rally and trouble would spread from it. People would believe what they wanted to believe – so long as you could give them an inflammatory rallying cry, sell them a phoney relic ... anything that would sanctify the course that in their hearts they wanted to