No Dawn for Men (4 page)

“He just appeared last night.”

“Where has he been? Who is he?”

“We are investigating, but it appears he has been with the old man on and off for many years.”

“Was he on the scene when we recruited Shroeder?”

“No, this is the first we’ve seen or heard of him.”

“A dwarf, you say?”

“Yes.”

“Another cancerous growth.”

“Yes.”

“Soon to be eliminated.”

“I could not agree more.”

“You are keeping an eye on him?”

“Of course.”

“And the excavation at Externsteine, what is the status?”

“They are working around the clock.”

“How much longer?”

“Perhaps a week. There are several deep caves that must still be breached and explored.”

“Perhaps Herr Professor Shroeder is toying with us,” said Himmler. “Perhaps he thinks he is being clever.” Himmler had kept his face expressionless, his eyes and voice flat as he took Heydrich through this interrogation. Though fully aware that he was short of stature and ghostly pale rather than fair of skin, the bespectacled Himmler saw himself as a modern Aryan god, to be feared, as Hitler was feared, precisely because he stood out from the blond crowd. He had the power, he knew, to induce not just fear, but crippling, paralyzing fear. Even Heydrich, favored by the Fuhrer, who called him the man with the iron heart, cowered in his presence.

“He knows the consequences,” Heydrich said, his lips taut.

Himmler’s face softened. He liked to keep Heydrich guessing and often played him off against Wolff and others. This tactic he had learned, and honed, by studying the top god in the Nordic pantheon, Adolph Hitler. He had heard that the Fuhrer did not think much of his efforts to aid the upcoming war effort. A body blow, this. Hitler had never spoken of a successor, but to bring him a weapon of such immense power would surely place him next in line. Professor Shroeder must be made to produce results, and very soon.

“You have handled him and the daughter well,” he said, finally. “But Externsteine will be their last chance. Shroeder will have to produce proof soon. Does he know this?”

“He has been told that if he cannot show us something positive in the next week or so, we will shut him down and keep our promise concerning the daughter.”

“
Gut
,” Himmler said. “We are nothing if not good at our word.”

“He is to have a visitor tomorrow, I understand,” said Wolff. “The Oxford don.”

“Yes, and all approved by Goebbels,” said Heydrich. “The meddler.” The word meddler—
unbefguter
—he spit out.

“He cannot meddle in something he knows nothing about,” said Himmler. “To defy him would be to alert him. And that we do not want.”

“I suppose we will have to lose a few days while the two professors talk their nonsense,” said Wolff.

“Perhaps Herr Professor Tolkien knows where the magic amulet is,” said Heydrich.

“Reinhard,” said Himmler, “do I detect a hint of sarcasm in your voice? Have you your doubts?”

“No, Reichsfuhrer. But I am suspicious of Shroeder for more basic reasons. He hates us, as you know. He could not hide his feelings when we first presented the project to him. He may have it in mind to actually use this magic against us.”

“My dear Reinhard,” said Himmler. “I don’t imagine he would be hard to control. He is seventy-eight and doddering.”

Himmler, trying not to blink, removed and cleaned his thick, rimless glasses while waiting for Heydrich to answer. It was all well and good that Heydrich was a favorite of Hitler’s, but it was
he
, Himmler, who had given him his start, elevated him swiftly through the SS ranks, and made him the head of the Gestapo when Goering was shunted aside.
He
who had pushed for the passage of the Gestapo Law in 1936, a law that allowed Heydrich’s people to arrest and detain indefinitely anyone they chose, on suspicion of criminal activity that they had unbridled power to define. No judicial review, no quaint concepts like
habeas corpus
. Many were never seen or heard of again. In Germany you could be arrested because the Gestapo did not like the way you looked. Or smelled. Or dressed. On the streets of Berlin one did not make eye contact with strangers, a state of affairs that made political control a simple matter.
My Honor Is Loyalty
was the SS’s motto. No, Heydrich would cooperate, no matter how much he loathed the intellectual, Nazi-hating Professor Shroeder.

“How can we be certain . . . ?” Heydrich spoke, finally.

“Of what,
mein fruend
? That these two old men will find a way to upset our plans, that they will suddenly become heroic?”

“And the English reporter?”

“Goebbels is right. It will be as if Mr. Fleming is working for us, such will be the tenor of the story he sends home.”

“And if he learns the truth?”

“Then he dies, and we place Herr Shroeder under house arrest until his work is done. You have your agent in place. Nothing will go wrong.”

Silence.

“Don’t worry, Gruppenfuhrer,” Himmler said. “I will take full responsibility.”
And also full credit, full glory,
Himmler said to himself, replacing his glasses on his nose and reaching for the hock.

6.

The Bavarian Forest, Near Deggendorf Germany

February 11, 1872, 4:00 p.m.

“Franz,” young Ernst said. “It’s cold.”

“It won’t be long.”

“He’s not coming.”

“You can go if you wish.”

“How will he get down there?”

“I told you, he comes in through that wall on the left.”

“It’s solid rock.”

“No, there, at that ledge where those scrubby bushes are growing, there’s a cave entrance. I saw him enter from there both times.”

“You mean there’s a tunnel from the forest floor.”

“There must be.”

“How did you find this place?”

“I told you, I was looking for cliffs to climb. This looked likely. Before I could start down, I saw Adelbert emerge with the lynx.”

“Have you seen the entrance?”

“No.
Shush
.”

 
I never should have brought him
, young Franz Shroeder said to himself. The boys, age twelve, were in the forest about a half-mile south of their gymnasium at Metten Abbey. Lying on their stomachs on the edge of a cliff, they were looking down perhaps fifty feet into what appeared to be a small, four-sided canyon, on the floor of which stood a circle of sapling oaks surrounding a black, anvil-shaped stone. Behind these slender young trees stood an oak tree of giant proportions. A ten-foot-in-diameter monster of a tree, it towered above the canyon, its naked branches so thick and spread so wide they nearly blocked out the sun setting behind it. Many thick branches reached like skeletal hands toward the boys. Franz could slide on his belly right into the heart of the mother oak if he were so inclined.

They were waiting for Father Adelbert, their Latin tutor.

“We have trekked out here for nothing,” Ernst said.

“He will come.”

“Why do you say that?”

“I told you what happened last week.”

“The lynx could not have been dead.”

“I saw the blood in the snow.”

“It was wounded.”

“You can’t deny that he has been slowly going mad.”

“People go mad. My aunt Hilda is in an asylum in Switzerland. She killed her baby.”

They had hiked through the fields behind the abbey and into the great forest, snow-covered and deadly silent this gray mid-winter Saturday, giving the canyon and its towering ancient oak a wide berth so as not to alert the young Benedictine monk with the pock-marked face and the glowing eyes of a martyr, or a lunatic.

“It will be dark soon.”

“Go.”

“No.

“Hush. There he is.”

Pressing themselves as flat as they could against the snow-covered earth, the boys watched Father Adelbert, his cowl hiding his face, emerge through a small arched opening on a ledge to the left, perhaps thirty feet above the canyon’s floor, stumble down the bramble-covered hillside, approach the tree circle then enter it. Something—a small animal—was slung around his neck like a stole. At the black stone he bowed his head and—with reverence it seemed, or fear—slowly uncoiled the animal and placed it on the stone. They saw now it was a dog, one of the mongrels that lived in and around the abbey’s stables. A spotted thing that they sometimes fed at a rear door when they had kitchen chores. Its head was bashed in, dried blood sticking to fur and bone where an ear had once been.

The monk knelt facing the stone. He turned his hood down, then removed what appeared to Franz to be a rolled parchment from inside his long brown habit. He untied its leather string, spread it open, and, raising his face to the mother oak, he began to read.

7.

Berlin

October 5, 1938, 6:00 p.m.

“Professor Shroeder.”

Professor Tolkien watched the elder don’s eyes refocus, as if he were emerging from a trance, which indeed seemed to be the case. Was it the music, a Wagner opera, ebbing and flowing quietly from the tin amplifying horn of Shroeder’s Victrola, that had carried him away? Or was he just getting more absentminded? John Ronald remembered how, during his lectures at St. Edward’s those many years ago, the German, then only in his forties, his accent thick and comical to his sixteen-year-old students, would often stop mid-sentence and look down at the floor, his train of thought uncoupled for an awkward moment or two.

“Ahem.”

“Yes, Professor. I am here.”

“What did you see?”

The two men were alone in Franz Shroeder’s study in his apartment on Hermann Goering Strasse, not far from the Adlon. Shroeder rose from his chair and went to the fireplace, where he pulled aside the protective screen and poked at the large fire blazing there. “I’ll add another log,” he said, raising his voice, as if Tolkien were far off someplace and not sitting in a chair a few feet away. “It’s cold in here.” After completing this task and replacing the screen, the German walked casually to the polished walnut bookcase on the far wall, on which sat his old fashioned talking machine, and slowly turned the horn toward the wall. Then he turned to face his English visitor.

“The dog stood up,” he said.

“Stood up? You mean he wasn’t dead.”

“He tottered a bit on the stone,” Shroeder said, “then howled at the tree, the giant oak. Then he bounded off.”

“Professor Shroeder . . .”

“I have never forgotten that howl.”

Professor Tolkien was familiar with all of the Norse mythology that concerned itself with the raising of the dead. Indeed, the rune that Arlen Cavanaugh had hidden under a rock as a juvenile way of piquing his interest was a spell that, legend had it, was used by the god Odin to resurrect a man who had recently been hanged. One interpretation suggested it may have been himself he was referring to. But of course, except for Jesus’ raising of Lazarus, no historical example of this occurring had ever been recorded.

“How old were you?”

“Twelve. Ernst ran off.”

“What did
you
do?”

“I hadn’t noticed that Father Adelbert had fallen, he lay sprawled in the snow.”

Professor Tolkien rose and crossed over the thickly carpeted floor to warm his hands at the fire. It
had
gotten cold in the room despite the roaring blaze. Shroeder joined him. Looking over, turning his not old, but no longer young-looking hands this way and that, Tolkien took a moment to observe the old German’s craggy face in profile, the large nose and protruding brow fighting for prominence, the chin square and proud, the one visible eye black and looking toward a distant, unseeable horizon. A thousand-mile stare. His long white hair seemed somehow windswept, or electrified, a ragged halo above his head rather than on it.
Is this me in thirty years?
Tolkien, who had turned forty-six in January, asked himself.
Shall I be distinguished looking but losing my wits when I am seventy-eight or so?

“What did you do, Franz?” the English professor gently asked. “May I call you Franz?”

“Of course. My friends call me Franz. Not that I have many. I feel you are my friend.”

Tolkien remained silent.

Shroeder turned to face Tolkien. “You will think me mad, if you do not already.”

Silence, except for the music, which was barely audible now. Tolkien longed for his pipe, which was on the small, ornately carved table next to the leather-cushioned chair he had been sitting on, a matter of a few steps. But it could wait.
The dog stood up
.