“It’s in my suitcase.”
“No it’s not. I’ve searched it from top to bottom.”
“I’m telling you, that’s where it is.”
There were a few seconds of silence.
“Very well,” said Keller at last. “This is what we’re going to do. Fräulein Tannenbaum will take a few steps toward me and she will follow my instructions. She will drag the suitcase into the light and then you will crouch down and show me where the map is. Is that clear?”
Paul nodded.
“I repeat, is that clear?” Keller insisted, raising his voice.
“Alys,” said Paul.
“Yes, it’s clear,” she said in a steady voice, stepping forward.
Concerned by her tone, Paul caught her arm.
“Alys, don’t do anything silly.”
“She won’t, Paul. Don’t you worry,” said Keller.
Alys freed her arm. There was something in the way she walked, in her apparent passivity—in the way she entered the shadows without revealing the tiniest hint of emotion—that made Paul’s heart constrict. All of a sudden he felt a desperate certainty that it had all been useless. That in a few minutes there would be four loud bangs, four bodies laid out on a bed of pine needles, seven dead, cold eyes contemplating the dark silhouette of the trees.
Alys was too horrified by Julian’s predicament to try anything. She followed Keller’s short, dry instructions to the letter and immediately reappeared in the illuminated area, walking backward and dragging an open suitcase full of clothes.
Paul crouched down and began to rummage through the tangle of his belongings.
“Be very careful with what you’re doing,” said Keller.
Paul didn’t reply. He had found what he was looking for, the clue to which his father’s words had led him.
Sometimes the greatest treasure is hidden in the same place as the greatest destruction.
The mahogany box where his father kept his pistol.
With slow movements and keeping his hands in sight, Paul opened it. He stuck his fingers into the fine red felt lining and yanked hard. The cloth tore away with a ripping sound, revealing a little square of paper. On it were various drawings and numbers, handwritten in India ink.
“Well, Keller? How does it feel to know the map was under your nose all these years?” he said, holding up the piece of paper.
There was another silence. Paul enjoyed seeing the disappointment cross the old bookseller’s face.
“Very well,” said Keller hoarsely. “Now give the paper to Alys, and let her approach me very slowly.”
Paul calmly put the map in his trouser pocket.
“No.”
“Did you not hear what I said?”
“I said no.”
“Paul, do what he’s telling you!” said Alys.
“This man killed my father.”
“And he’s going to kill our son!”
“You have to do as he says, Paul,” urged Manfred.
“Very well,” said Paul, putting his hand back in the pocket and retrieving the note. “In that case . . .”
With a quick movement he crumpled it up, put it in his mouth, and started to chew.
“Nooooo!”
Keller’s cry of rage echoed through the forest. The old bookseller stepped out of the shadows, dragging Julian with him, the gun still pointed at his skull. But as he approached Paul, he trained it on Paul’s chest.
“Damned son of a bitch!”
Come a little closer, thought Paul, getting ready to jump.
“You had no right!”
Keller stopped, still out of Paul’s reach.
Closer!
He began to squeeze the trigger. Paul tensed the muscles in his legs.
“Those diamonds were mine!”
That last word was transformed into a high-pitched, shapeless scream. The bullet left the gun, but Keller’s arm had jolted upward. He let go of Julian and spun around strangely, as though he were trying to reach something behind him. As he twisted, the light revealed a strange red-handled appendage in his back.
The hunting knife that, twenty-four hours earlier, had fallen from Jürgen von Schroeder’s hand.
Julian had kept the knife in his belt all this time, waiting for a moment when the gun was no longer pointing at his head. He had stuck the blade in with as much force as he could, but at a strange angle, so he hadn’t done much more than give Keller a superficial wound. Howling in pain, Keller aimed at the boy’s head.
Paul chose that moment to leap and his shoulder struck Keller’s waist. The bookseller toppled to the ground and tried to roll over, but Paul was already sitting on top of him, pinning his arms down with his knees and punching his face again and again.
He lashed out at the bookseller more than two dozen times, not noticing the pain in his hands—which the following day would be completely swollen—or his grazed knuckles. His conscience disappeared and the only thing that mattered to Paul was the pain he was causing. He didn’t stop until he couldn’t cause any more.
“Paul. That’s enough,” said Manfred, putting his hand on his shoulder. “He’s dead.”
Paul turned. Julian was in his mother’s arms, his head buried in her chest. He prayed to God that his son hadn’t seen what he had just done. He removed Jürgen’s jacket, which was soaked in Keller’s blood, and went over to hug Julian.
“Are you all right?”
“I’m sorry I disobeyed what you said about the knife,” said the boy, starting to cry.
“You were very brave, Julian. And you saved our lives.”
“Really?”
“Really. Now we have to go,” he said, heading toward the car. “Someone might have heard the shot.”
Alys and Julian got in the back, and Paul settled in the passenger seat. Manfred started the engine and they returned to the road.
They continued to glance nervously in the rearview mirror, but they weren’t being followed. No doubt someone was in pursuit of the Dachau fugitives. But it appeared that heading in the opposite direction of Munich was the right strategy. Still, it was a small victory. They would never be able to return to their old lives.
“There’s one thing I want to know, Paul,” whispered Manfred, breaking the silence half an hour later.
“What’s that?”
“Did that little piece of paper really lead to a trunk full of diamonds?”
“I believe it did. Buried somewhere in South-West Africa.”
“I see,” said Manfred, disappointed.
“Would you have liked to look for it?”
“We have to leave Germany. Going in search of treasure wouldn’t be such a bad idea. Shame you swallowed it.”
“The truth is,” said Paul, removing the map from his pocket, “what I swallowed was a note awarding my brother a medal. Though, given the circumstances, I’m not sure he’d mind.”
Epilogue
THE STRAITS OF GIBRALTAR
March 12, 1940
As the waves struck the improvised craft, Paul began to worry. The crossing should have been straightforward, just a few miles across a calm sea, under the cover of night.
Then everything became complicated.
Not that anything had been easy over the past few years, of course. They had escaped Germany across the Austrian border without too many setbacks, and had reached South Africa in early 1935.
It was a time of new beginnings. The smile returned to Alys’s face, and she went back to being the strong, stubborn woman she always used to be. Julian’s terrible fear of the dark began to abate. And Manfred developed a strong friendship with his brother-in-law, especially because Paul let him win at chess.
The search for Hans Reiner’s treasure proved to be more complicated than it might at first have seemed. Paul went back to work in a diamond mine for several months, now accompanied by Manfred—who, thanks to his qualification as an engineer, became Paul’s boss. Alys in turn wasted no time in becoming the unofficial photograph
er for every social event under the Mandate.
Between them, they managed to save up enough money to buy a small farm in the Orange River basin, the same one from which Hans and Nagel had stolen the diamonds thirty-two years earlier. The property had changed hands several times over the previous three decades, and many said it was cursed. A number of people warned Paul that he’d be throwing away his money if he bought the place.
“I’m not superstitious,” he said. “And I’ve a hunch that my luck might change.”
They were discreet about it. They let several months go by before they started looking for the diamonds. Then one night in the summer of 1936 the four of them set off under the light of a full moon. They knew the adjoining lands perfectly, having walked through them Sunday after Sunday with picnic baskets, pretending to be going on an outing.
Hans’s map was surprisingly precise, as might have been expected from a man who had spent half his life hunched over navigational charts. He had drawn a ravine and the course of a stream, and a rock shaped like an arrowhead at the place where they met. Thirty steps north of the rock, they began to dig. The earth was soft, and it didn’t take them long to find the chest. Manfred whistled in disbelief when they opened it and saw the coarse stones beneath the light of their torches. Julian started playing with them, and Alys danced a lively foxtrot with Paul, with no music other than that of the crickets in the ravine.
Three months later they celebrated their wedding in the town church. Six months after that, Paul showed up at the gemological appraisal office and said that he’d found a couple of stones in the stream on his land. He had taken some of the smaller ones and watched, with his heart in his mouth, as the appraiser examined them against the light, rubbed them on a piece of felt, and smoothed his moustache—all those unnecessary elements of sorcery that experts perform to make themselves seem important.
“They’re quite good quality. If I were you, I’d buy a sieve and start to drain that place, lad. I’ll buy whatever you bring me.”
They continued to “remove” diamonds from the stream for two years. In the spring of 1939, Alys learned that the situation in Europe was turning very ugly.
“The South Africans are on the side of the English. Soon we won’t be welcome in the colonies.”
Paul understood that the time had come to leave. They sold a bigger batch of stones than usual—so many that the appraiser had to call the mine administrator to send him cash—and one night they left without saying good-bye to anyone, bringing only a few personal effects and five horses.
They had made an important decision about what to do with the money. They headed north, to the Waterberg Plateau. That was where the Herero survivors lived, the people whom his father had tried to eradicate and with whom Paul had lived for a long time during his first stay in Africa. When Paul rode back into the village, the medicine man greeted him with a song of welcome.
“Paul Mahaleba has returned, Paul the white hunter,” he said, waving his feathered wand.
Paul went straight over to speak to the chief and handed him a huge pouch containing three quarters of what they had made from the sale of the diamonds.
“This is for the Herero. To return the dignity to your people.”
“You are the one who recovers his dignity through this act, Paul Mahaleba,” the medicine man stated. “But your gift shall be welcome among our people.”
Paul nodded humbly at the wisdom of those words.
They spent several wonderful months in the village, helping as best they could to rebuild it to what it had once been. Until the day Alys heard the terrible news from one of the traders who passed through Windhoek from time to time.
“War has broken out in Europe.”
“We have done enough here,” said Paul pensively, looking at his son. “Now it’s time to think about Julian. He’s fifteen and he needs a normal life, somewhere with a future.”
Which was how they came to begin their long pilgrimage toward the far side of the Atlantic. First to Mauritania by boat, then on to French Morocco, from where they had been forced to escape when the borders were closed to anyone who didn’t have a visa. This was a formality not easy to accomplish for a Jewish woman without papers or a man who was officially dead and who had no other identification but an old card belonging to a vanished SS officer.
After speaking to a number of refugees, Paul decided to attempt the crossing to Portugal from a place on the outskirts of Tangier.
“It won’t be hard. Conditions are good, and it isn’t too far.”
The sea loves to contradict the foolish words of men who are overconfident, and that night a storm blew up. They fought against it for a long time, and Paul even tied his family to the raft so that the waves could not rip them away from the pathetic craft they’d bought for an arm and a leg from a crook in Tangier.
If the Spanish patrol had not appeared just in time, the four of them would undoubtedly have drowned.
Ironically, Paul was more frightened in the hold than during his spectacular attempt to board, when he had hung against the side of the patrol boat for seconds that seemed never-ending. Once on board, they were all afraid that they would be taken to Cádiz, from where they could easily be dispatched back to Germany. Paul cursed himself for not having tried to learn even a few words of Spanish.
His plan had been to get to a beach east of Tarifa, where apparently someone—a contact of the crook who’d sold them the craft—would be waiting for them. This man was to take them across to Portugal in a truck. But they never got the chance to find out if he turned up.
Paul spent many hours in the hold, trying to think of a solution. His fingers brushed against the secret pocket in his shirt where he had hidden a dozen diamonds, the last of Hans Reiner’s treasure. Alys, Manfred, and Julian each carried a similar consignment in their clothes. Perhaps if they bribed the crew with a handful . . .
Paul was extremely surprised when the Spanish captain took them out of the hold in the middle of the night, gave them a rowboat, and pointed them toward the Portuguese coast.
By the light of the lantern on deck, Paul examined the face of this man, who must have been his age. The same age his father had been when he died, and the same profession. Paul wondered how things would have turned out if his father had not been a murderer, if he himself hadn’t spent the best part of his youth trying to find out who’d killed him.
He rummaged in his clothes and took out the only memento he still had of that time: the fruit of Hans’s wickedness, the emblem of his brother’s treachery.
Perhaps things would have been different for Jürgen if his father had been an honorable man, he thought.
Paul wondered how he might make this Spaniard understand. He put the emblem in his hand and repeated two simple words.
“Betrayal,” he said, touching his own chest with his index finger. “Salvation,” he said, touching the chest of the Spaniard.
Perhaps someday the captain would meet someone who could explain to him what the two words meant.
He jumped onto the little boat, and the four of them began to row. Within a few minutes they could hear the water lapping against the bank, and the boat scraped lightly against the gravel of the riverbed.
They were in Portugal.
He looked around before getting out of the boat, just to make sure that there was no danger, but he could see none.
It’s strange, thought Paul. Since I pulled my eye out I see everything much more clearly.
Author’s Note
The novel, dear reader, is over now, but the story of the traitor’s emblem is not quite finished, and that deserves an explanation.
Three years ago, when I first met Juan Carlos González, I never imagined the course our friendship would take. At that time he was already running a famous bookshop in Vigo, which I shall not name so as to preserve its intimacy. One afternoon I told him—very roughly—the plot of the novel I was researching at the time, and which could have been the book you are holding in your
hands now. That’s what would have happened if he hadn’t opened his mouth and said:
“Do you want me to tell you a story that really deserves to be turned into a novel?”
I nodded, politely resigned. If I had ten pence for each time I’ve heard that line, I could take my family out for a nice dinner.
But this time was different.
This time it was true.
Juan Carlos told me the story of how the patrol boat on which his father had served had saved four mysterious Germans from drowning in the straits, and how one of them paid him back with a gold emblem. His story went further than mine, as his father and the man who had given him the emblem did meet again, though five thousand miles away and twenty years later. But that’s another story, and perhaps one day I’ll find myself wanting to tell you that one too.
When I said good-bye to Juan Carlos, before getting into the car with a good journalist friend of mine, Moncho Paz, I told both of them that, though it was a good story, it would never be enough to sustain a whole novel. When I arrived home I told the story to my wife, Katuxa.
“I can tell you’re going to change your mind,” she said, shaking her head.
“It’s impossible to write a story with only those elements. There’s no human interest, no conflict. It’s just an anecdote. Besides, I’ve already finalized the paperwork for {...}.”
“Trust me . . . you’ll write this one,” said Katuxa with the patronizing certainty that makes me hate and love her so very much.
I’ve discovered, thanks to her, that when I insist on how little I want something or how little something interests me, everyone around me immediately knows that it is the only thing on my mind. So I spent the next ten weeks trying to demonstrate to everyone how wrong they were.
I was, of course, the last person to understand that the only one who was wrong was me.
Fortunately, by then I had already read a hundred books and taken a thousand pages of notes. Most important of all were the following two paragraphs: