Emerald Decision

new. And Emerald Necklace, a name in a dusty Pentagon file of agents' reports from 1940, a name overheard or dimly remembered by a handful of Germans still living — and a reference in a letter dated October 1940 from Oberst Karl Menschler, a name he already knew dimly from his researches on Fall Gelb, the invasion of France, and from the planning group of Seelowe, Hitler's proposed and abandoned invasion of Britain.

McBride knew the war held few beneficial secrets to ambitious historians, especially one who had chosen the market-place to make his mark rather than the groves of academe that had seemed to slight and undervalue him for so long. All the bodies had been dug up. Babi Yar, the Cossacks handed over to Stalin's mercy, Katyn, the Final Solution, the atom bomb, had all received their popular historical exploitation. But — Emerald Necklace. If it was real, then it was new. No one had done it, no one even knew of it—

His hand had quivered, his breath seeming to be held throughout, as he read and re-read Menschler's letter to his cousin.

Now, Menschler seemed to subside like a kettle gone off the boil. He sat stiff-backed in the chair, staring at McBride's features as if he could read their expression, or as if demanding that he make some comment on what he had heard. McBride coughed, watched a seagull lifted then plucked from its course by the wind off the sea, and picked out the painted dark strip of the German mainland subsiding into shadow five miles away on the horizon.

'Herr Menschler, thank you. Perhaps I could take you — unless you're tired — back to France in 1940?' McBride wondered whether his voice betrayed his excitement, his anxiety. Menschler's face was partly in shadow, but he was certain that the head moved slightly, a small flinch at the tone or subject.

'Yes, Herr Professor?'

McBride paused on the edge of the moment. His journey in a rented blue Audi from Koblenz up the Rhine into flatter and flatter northern Germany the previous day had effectively depressed his tension and anticipation. The short ferry journey, leaving the Audi on the jetty at Norddeich, in the company of a few late holiday-makers from Hamburg and the Ruhr crossing to Norderney for an off-season, cheap-rate ten days, had increased his sense of possible foolishness, of chasing after a whim and looking very, very dumb. The flat, uninteresting Frisian island held no promise as the ferry neared the old village and its tiny jetty.

Yet Menschler was real, and alive, and he had written the letters in the Bundesarchiv. He could be a few minutes away from the new heart of his book, and its probable status as a best-seller — including the six-figure, maybe seven-figure softcover advance—

On the edge of the moment, he indulged the comforting, comfortable prognostications. Print-runs, contracts, sales figures. A new, unknown invasion— a rewriting of history? A strange, bubbling excitement in him was compounded by the clear memory of his telephone conversation with Menschler two days earlier; the Oberst had been frostily polite, but reluctant, as if for him, too, the proposed meeting was heavy with significance.

'You were on the support planning staff for Fall Gelb, and later for Seelowe?' Menschler nodded, but after a pause. Had the facts come back only slowly, or did he anticipate what might follow the slightest admission? 'What happened, Herr Oberst, after Seelowe was postponed indefinitely on October 12th, 1940?'

'What do you mean, Herr Professor, what happened? We did not invade England, that is what happened.'

'I mentioned a letter you had written — one of three or four — to your second cousin, Generalleutnant Alfred von Kass on—'

' The 23rd of October.'

'Yes. Could I ask you about that?'

The silence seemed to continue for a long time, and the room's weight of furniture and memory pressed upon McBride with a tangible presence. He felt enclosed.

'Why? It was a private letter. Much better to ask concerning Fall Gelb, or Seelowe — I can give you many insights, my memory is excellent.'

'Yes, Herr Menschler. I appreciate that. But I'm interested in Smaragdenhalskette, the Emerald Necklace you referred to in the letter. It wasn't a family heirloom.'

Menschler's face remained unmoved at the remark.

'Perhaps not—'

'You said, and I quote—'

'I recollect exactly what I wrote.' The voice placed McBride, made him a reporter, an amanuensis and nothing more. It canceled the inbred German esteem for his academic title. Now he was little more than a busybody from the gutter press.

'Why are you reluctant, sir? It's forty years ago.'

'Reluctant?'

'There is something — but you won't talk about it.' McBride suppressed a rising irritation sharp as bile.

'This is the first time you have come across this, this — halskette?' McBride was certain of a fervent hope in the question.

'No, sir, it is not. I have maybe another dozen references to it, always by the same name, verbal and written. In files in America, and here in Germany. Maybe in England, too, though I haven't checked it out. But at second, third, fourth hand, I admit. You were there—'

Menschler shifted in his chair. A parody of relaxation, yet McBride sensed the German had removed himself further from his guest, and from emotions that guest might initially have aroused. A thin cut of a smile on his face, giving the accusing lines of scar-tissue a more recent vivacity on his white face.

'Ah, I am to be impressed by such notoriety as you imply in your tone, mm?' The thin smile broke the planes of his face again. 'You suggest that I — tell all? — to you, you will create your sensationalizing book around it and make, no doubt, a great deal of money. Who will play my part in the film, Herr Professor McBride?' The blind man had perceived the ego lurking behind the mask of the bland, sober historian. Probably knew of Gates of Hell.

'I am pursuing only the truth, Herr Menschler.' It sounded palpably untrue, impossible, pompous. McBride wanted to laugh at himself, but Menschler did it for him, a sharp, barking sound, something long unused.

'And the truth will make you rich, mm? I believe there is a vogue for such books at the moment. My daughters tell me so. They are very often surprised to discover that my tales to their children are not merely an old man's dreams. They are products of the Socialist wirtschaftwunder, of course. Who was Adolf Hitler? And so on.' Menschler waved his arms, dismissing his descendants perhaps for generations to come, but not forever. McBride felt it was unfair for an ex-Nazi to be so perceptive about his world. Especially unfair in a man blinded by a shell fragment in the Chancellery grounds and who had exiled himself- probably on his state pension — from the post-war Germany.

'And they show such films, such programmes — !' Menschler continued, his face entirely perspective lines towards the blind eyes. He was deeply angry. The hands polished the wooden arms of his chair in deep, massaging movements. 'The filthy lies — these new Germans accept them, spit on the past as if it had nothing to do with them—'

McBride was appalled. He was losing Menschler.

'Very well, Herr Oberst. You wrote from Guernsey in the Channel Islands, from France, and from Belgium to Alfred von Kass during the second half of 1940. What were you doing in the support planning staff after the postponement of Seelowe? McBride leaned forward in his chair towards the blind man, urging him to answer, wishing for a loose senility of tongue or an avarice that might take a fee as a bribe.

'I was acting the part — rather well — of a German staff officer, Meinherr. That is what I was doing.' McBride was incensed by the lordliness of the response, angry that the man was determined to retain secrets to which McBride felt he had some admissible rights of acquisition.

'What was Emerald Necklace?' he almost shouted. 'Was it Fall Smaragdenhalskette?' He felt hot and angry and blocked in that cold room. The man would see nothing, give nothing away—

Menschler was smiling with superiority.

'It was — nothing at all. As you admit, there are no records, Herr Professor, and no one will tell you. In fact,