Read Three Tales From the World of Cotton Malone Online
Authors: Steve Berry
Three Tales From the World of Cotton Malone (5 page)
“The man in the photograph Herr Combs showed me. He was the Brown Eminence, though by then he called himself Luis.”
“And the woman?”
“She called herself Rikka, though she was Hitler's widow.”
That name he knew. Eva Braun. She married Hitler in April 1945, shortly before they both committed suicide in the Führerbunker.
“What are you saying?”
Her watery eyes conveyed a look of annoyance. “Herr Combs was not as surprised as you.”
“What did he say about your information?”
“Did he cheat you?”
This old woman was good. A simple question, out of the blue, intended to elicit an emotional response.
“He's a liar.”
“I thought the same. He lied to me. But he wanted to know where the two in his photos had lived. His questions actually surprised me. There was a time when men searched for the Brown Eminence. No one cared about the widow, all thought she was dead. Few even knew her face or name. But him. That one many wanted. He was a quetrupillán.”
He did not recognize the term and asked what it meant.
“A local Chilean word,” she said. “Mute devil. A bit like yourself.”
He ignored her jab. “What happened to Bormann and Braun?”
“They eventually went to live where no one could find them.”
He realized that, decades ago, the world had been a different place. No satellites, television, global newspapers, or Internet. Hiding was much simpler, and many war criminals were successful at fading away.
Especially two people most of the world thought dead.
“Where did they go?”
She did not answer him.
“Did you ever speak of this before Combs' visit?”
“No one has ever asked these questions. Why would anyone? I am an old woman living quietly. Who would even know I exist?”
“Chris Combs.”
“Then you must ask yourself. How was I found?”
He had no idea.
“You do not believe me?” she asked. “I see it in your eyes. You come to my home and ask these questions. I have answered honestly, yet you do not believe.”
What he believed mattered not. “What did Combs say to your answers?”
“He wanted corroboration. As I can see you do, too.” She slowly hinged herself up to her feet. “I'll show you, as I did him.”
The day of Combs' appearance Wyatt had waited down the highway, in the woods, where he could watch the driveway. Combs had stayed a little over an hour, then had driven back to Santiago. Wyatt had no idea what had happened during the visit.
Isabel shuffled toward the door. “Strange, though.”
He fixed his eyes on her as she stopped.
“You don't look like a Nazi hunter.”
“I'm not.”
“But you are a hunter. That much I do know.”
He followed Isabel outside into a barn where farm equipment sat rusting in darkened shadows. Daws had chewed holes through the roof, and swallow nests occupied the crossbeams. From a rotting pile of cordwood a big gray cat greeted them with a long meow.
She shuffled toward an enclosure at the far end. A dirty dress hung from her spare frame like a coat on a nail, and rope-soled sandals covered her feet. She eased open a wooden door while old hinges screamed their resistance. Within a space about eight feet square, three trunks were stacked.
“Those have been here for decades,” she said.
He stepped inside. A mouse scurried away at his approach.
She smiled. “Evi loves the mice.”
He reached for the top trunk and opened the lid.
Dust cascaded off.
Inside lay an assortment of belongings. On top were clothesâa double-breasted windbreaker jacket, a pair of trench boots, and a swastika armband.
“My father's.”
“I thought he was a civil servant,” Wyatt said as he continued to sift through the trunk.
“You could not expect to rise in the government unless you were a party member.”
He lifted out a heart-shaped silver gorget upon which was affixed a gilded eight-point sunburst. Farther down he came across a bandolier and some ragged gauntlets.
Then it dawned on him. “Your father was SS?”
“Obviously.”
He was beginning to dislike her tone.
He noticed a stack of mildewed coupons bound together with a piece of brittle string. He studied the top coupon. Two sig-runes were imprinted in the left-hand corner beside the words
STANDORT-KANTINE
, beneath which was the ominous designation
BUCHENWALD
. At the lower right was the notation
RM 2
.
“What are these?” he asked.
“The guards in the camps were paid in tokens. They could use them to buy food and sundries in the camp canteen. Those were worth two reichsmarks each.”
“Buchenwald was an extermination camp. What was your father doing there?”
She shook her head. “My older brother. He was a guard in the Death's Head Unit. The SS-Totenkopfverbände.”
He caught the German pride in her voice.
“Did he die in the war?”
“The Russians slaughtered him.”
He eased the top trunk down to the earthen floor, then started searching the second. More clothes, children's keepsakes, and a curious itemâa typewriter, its black metal casing rusted and battered.
“My father's. Used during the war.”
He noticed the keys. The number row served the usual dual function. A semicolon appeared above the 1. Parentheses above 6 and 7. Other number keys likewise possessed punctuation as a second alternative. But above the 5 was a double sig-rune. SS. The typewriter had apparently been modified to accommodate the regime.
He was beginning to wonder about Isabel and her father.
He opened the last trunk.
Inside was crammed with letters and old newspapers. He lifted out one of the bundles.
The cat wandered in, and Isabel stroked the animal. “Such a good girl, Evi.”
He faced Isabel, who was still petting the cat. “Does Evi have any connection to Eva Braun?”
“Of course. Her closest friends used that nickname. I called her that myself. So I've named every cat I've owned since after her, in remembrance.”
His patience was wearing thin. “What's your game?”
She continued to stroke the cat. “Whatever do you mean?”
He stepped toward her. Not the slightest hint of fear filled her eyes. They remained icy green marbles.
“You and Herr Combs are being played for fools.”
“By who?”
“The Brown Eminence.”
He'd already done the math. “He's long dead.”
“Not his successors.”
Maybe they were Combs' objective? “What's their game?”
Her glare sharpened. “They are all we have left.”
“Who is we?”
“Those of us who believe.” Her eyes were hard with indignation.
“That was a long time ago. It's over.”
“Yet you and Herr Combs are both still interested. Herr Combs knew that my father worked for the Führer. That's why he came. He also knew it was Hitler's wish that Bormann survive the war. A letter from Hitler himself directed my father to do whatever the Brown Eminence desired. So my father spent his life hiding Martin Bormann.”
He waited for more.
“Bormanns appeared everywhere. Those who searched had plenty to look for, but never the actual man.”
He vaguely recalled reading about Bormann sightings throughout Brazil, Argentina, Bolivia, and Paraguay. A few Bormanns even turned themselves in to the authorities, claiming a need for justice in their old age, but all were eventually confirmed as either deranged or delirious.
“What does any of that matter anymore?”
“What you mean is, why did it matter to Herr Combs.”
That's exactly what he meant.
“Bormann was no Hitler. The Führer was special. Politicians before him talked down. Bormann talked down. Hitler talked to us.”
It seemed she wanted to speak her mind, so he let her.
“I've watched Hitler speak many times on film. He would parade into a hall to some lively military tune. Oh, I loved that music. He always wore his brownshirt uniform and had the shiniest boots. Such a sight.
People stood while he spoke, as they should. He loved them, and they loved him.”
She was clinging to a vicious fantasy. But if the memory loosened her tongue, he was willing to allow her the luxury.
“What happened to Bormann?” he asked again.
She spat on the floor. “He was a sloven bastard. The Führer made a horrible mistake trusting that one.”
“Why are you telling me all this?”
She shrugged. “Why not? As you say, it was a long time ago.”
“Could youâ”
“I'm through talking to you.”
She started to leave the barn, the cat nipping at her heels.
He tried, “You speak of the past with reverence. Are you a Nazi?”
She stopped, turned back, and surveyed him with an insolent air of triumph.
“I am a faithful follower of my Führer.”
And she ambled off.
His visit with the old woman disturbed him. It was not at all what he'd expected. Never had he thought Martin Bormann, Eva Braun, and Adolf Hitler would be the subjects of their conversation.
Before leaving Turingia he parked the car under some shade trees and used his smartphone to access the Internet. There he found a concise summary of Martin Bormann's life.
Born in Halberstadt on June 17, 1900, the son of a former Prussian regimental sergeant major, Bormann dropped out of school to work on a farming estate in Mecklenburg. After serving briefly as a cannoneer in a field artillery regiment at the end of World War I, he joined the rightist Rossbach Freikorps. He eventually entered the National Socialist Party, becoming its regional press officer in Thuringia and then business manager in 1928. From 1928 to 1930 he was attached to the SA Supreme Command and in October 1933 he became a Reichsleiter of the party. A month later he was elected as a Nazi delegate to the Reichstag. From July 1933 until 1941 he was the chief of cabinet in the office of the deputy Führer, Rudolf Hess, acting as his personal secretary.
There he began his imperceptible rise to the center of power, slowly acquiring mastery over the Nazi bureaucratic mechanism and gaining Hitler's personal trust. In addition to administering Hitler's personal finances, he controlled the Gauleiters and
Reichsleiters, the men who administered the various lands in the Reich. His brutality, coarseness, lack of culture, and apparent insignificance led top Nazis to underestimate his abilities. His mentor Rudolf Hess' flight to Britain opened the way for him to step into Hess' shoes.
In May 1941 he became head of the party. Until the end of the war, Bormann was the fierce guardian of Nazi orthodoxy. He was an archfanatic when it came to racial policy, anti-Semitism, and the Kirchenkampf, the war between the churches. By the end of 1942 he was Hitler's private secretary, taking care of tiresome administrative details and steering Hitler into approval of his own schemes. Ordered by Hitler “to put the interests of the nation before his own feelings and to save himself,” Bormann fled the Führerbunker on April 30, 1945, after Hitler was dead. Accounts of what happened afterward vary widely. According to some, Bormann was killed trying to cross Russian lines by an anti-tank shell. Doubts, however, have persisted and numerous sightings of Bormann have been reported, beginning in 1946. Having been sentenced to death in absentia at Nuremberg in October 1946, his true fate remains unknown.
All of the other sites he found confirmed the same information. Nobody really knew what happened. He then located what he could about Eva Braun.
Born in Munich in 1912 to a middle-class Catholic family, the daughter of a schoolteacher, Braun first met Hitler in the studio of his photographer friend Heinrich Hoffmann in 1929. She worked as Hoffmann's office assistant, later becoming a photo lab worker, helping to process pictures of Hitler. Blond, fresh-faced, and athletic, she was fond of skiing, mountain climbing, gymnastics, and dancing.
After the death of Geli Raubal, Hitler's niece with whom he maintained a long love affair, Braun became his mistress, living in his Munich flat. In 1935, after an abortive suicide attempt, Hitler brought her to a Munich villa, near his home. In 1936 she moved to Berchtesgaden where she acted as Hitler's hostess. Every effort was made to conceal her relationship with Hitler, since the Führer was supposedly devoted solely to the nation. Few Germans knew of her existence. Even Hitler's closest associates were not certain of the relationship, since Hitler avoided suggestions of intimacy and would often degrade and belittle her intelligence. She spent most of her time exercising, brooding, reading cheap novelettes, and watching romantic films. Her loyalty to Hitler, though, never wavered. In April 1945 she joined Hitler in the Führerbunker, and eventually died with him as part of a suicide pact.