The Black Sun (11 page)

“Why are you telling me all this?” There was a slightly hysterical edge to her voice now. Tom sensed that this time she really was on the verge of breaking down.

“Because the number on your father’s arm didn’t follow any of the known Auschwitz numbering series.”

“What?” Even her makeup couldn’t disguise how white she had gone.

“It was a ten-digit number with no alphabetical or geometric prefix. Auschwitz numbers never rose to ten digits . . .” He paused. “You see, Miss Weissman, it is possible that

your

father

was

never

actually

in

a

concentration

camp.”

3:16 p.m.

They sat there in embarrassed silence as she rocked gently in her seat, hands covering her face, shoulders shaking. Tom gently laid his hand on her arm.

“Miss Weissman, I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay,” she said, her voice muffled by her fingers. “I’ve almost been expecting something like this.” “What do you mean?” Turnbull leaned forward, his brow creased in curiosity.

She lowered her hands and they could see now that, far from the tears they’d been expecting, her face shone with a dark and terrifying anger. With rage.

“There’s something I have to show you . . .” She got up and led them out into the hall, her heels clip-clipping on the tiles.

“I haven’t touched anything in here since I found it.” Her voice was strangled as she paused outside the next door down. “I think part of me was hoping that one day I would come in and it would all just be gone as if it had never been here.”

She opened the door and led them inside. Compared to the rest of the house, it was dark and smelled of pipe smoke and dust and dogs. Boxes of books were stacked in one corner of

the

room,

their

sides

compressing

and

collapsing

under

the

93 the black sun

weight. At the other end, in front of the window, stood a desk, its empty drawers halfopen and forming a small wooden staircase up to its stained and scratched surface. She walked over to the window and pulled the curtain open. A thick cloud of dust billowed out from the heavy material and danced through the beams of sunlight that were struggling to get through the filthy panes.

“Miss Weissman . . .” Turnbull began. She ignored him.

“I found it by accident.”

As she approached the bookcase, Tom saw that it was empty apart from one book. She pushed against the book’s spine. With a click, the middle section of the bookcase edged forward slightly.

Tom sensed Archie stiffen next to him.

She tugged on the bookcase and it swung open to reveal a flaking green door set into the wall. She stepped forward and then paused, her hand on the door handle, flashing them a weak smile over her shoulder.

“It’s funny, isn’t it? You love someone all your life. You think you know them. And then you find out it’s all been a lie.” Her voice was flat and unfeeling. “You never knew them at all. And it makes you wonder about yourself. About who you really are. About whether all this”—she waved her arm around her—“is just some big joke.”

Tom had to stop himself from nodding in agreement, for she had described, far more coherently than he’d ever managed, the way he’d felt when he unmasked Renwick. It wasn’t just that he’d lost a friend and a mentor that day. He’d lost a good part of himself. The door swung open and Tom gave a start as a featureless white face suddenly loomed out of the darkness. It took a moment for him to realize that it was a mannequin in full SS

dress uniform. Behind it, on the far wall of what appeared to be a small chamber, a vast swastika flag had been pinned, the excess material fanning out across the floor like a sinister bridal train. The right-hand wall, meanwhile, was lined with metal shelving that groaned under the weight of a vast collection of guns, photographs, daggers, swords, identity

cards,

books,

badges,

leaflets,

and

armbands.

94 james twining

Turnbull gave a low whistle and Tom immediately wished he hadn’t. The sound seemed strangely inappropriate.

“You never knew about this?” Tom asked.

She shook her head. “He would lock himself in his office for hours. I thought he was reading. But all the time he must have been in here.”

“It’s possible this was some sort of post-traumatic reaction,” Tom suggested. “A morbid fascination brought about by what happened to him. Stress, shock . . . they make people do strange things.”

“That’s what I hoped and prayed too,” she said. “Until I saw this—”

She reached past them and removed a photograph from the top shelf, then took it across to the window. Tom and Turnbull followed her. As she angled it to the light, the photo revealed three young men in SS uniform standing stiffly in front of a bookcase. They looked rather serious, even a little aloof.

“I’ve no idea who the other two are, but the man in the middle . . . the man in the middle is . . . is my father.” Her voice was completely expressionless now.

“Your father? But he’s wearing . . .” Tom trailed off at the pained expression on her face. “When was this taken?”

“In 1944, I think. There’s something else written on the back, but I can’t read it. I think it’s Cyrillic.”

“
December
—that’s Russian for December,” said Turn-bull, peering over Tom’s shoulder.

“Tom, we should take this . . .” Archie’s voice came, slightly muffled, from inside the chamber. He appeared a moment later, carrying the mannequin’s jacket and peaked hat.

“Why?” Turnbull asked.

“You ever seen anything like this before?” He pointed at the circular cap badge, which appeared to show a swastika with twelve arms rather than the usual four, each shaped like an SS lightning flash. “I know I haven’t.”

“You think Lasche can help?” Tom asked.

“If he’ll see us,” said Archie, sounding unhopeful.

“Who?” Turnbull butted in.

“Wolfgang

Lasche,”

Tom

explained.

“He

used

to

be

one

95 the black sun

of the biggest dealers in military memorabilia. Uniforms,

guns, swords, flags, medals, planes, even whole ships.”

“Used to be?”

“He’s been a semi-recluse for years. Lives on the top floor of the Hotel Drei Könige in Zurich. He trained as a lawyer originally. Eventually made a name for himself pursuing German, Swiss, and even American companies for alleged involvement in war crimes.”

“What sort of war crimes?”

“The usual—facilitating the Holocaust; helping finance the Nazi war effort; taking advantage of slave labor to turn a profit.”

“And he was successful?”

“Very. He won hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation payments for Holocaust survivors. Then, rumor has it, he hit the jackpot. He uncovered a scam by one of the big Swiss banks to slowly appropriate unclaimed funds deposited by Holocaust victims and shred the evidence. It ran to tens of billions of dollars and went all the way to the top. So they bought him off. The Hotel Drei Könige belongs to the bank he investigated. He gets to live on the top floor and they pay him just to keep quiet.”

“So his antiques dealership . . . ?”

“Part of the deal was that he got out of the Nazi blame game. With his contacts and backing, it was an easy switch. He’s a major collector in his own right now. Nobody knows that market better than him.”

“And he never goes out?”

“He’s sick. Confined to a wheelchair with twenty-four-seven nursing care.”

“And you think he might be able to identify that?” Turn-bull indicated the jacket and cap.

“If anyone can, he can,” said Tom.

“I could have forgiven him, you know . . .” While they had been talking, Elena Weissman had disappeared into the chamber. “I loved him so much. I could have forgiven him anything if he’d told me . . .” she sobbed as she reemerged. Tom saw that she was clutching a Luger pistol in her right hand. 96 james twining

“Even this,” she continued, her strained voice rising to a hysterical scream as she raised her eyes to the heavens. “You could have told me.”

She lifted the gun to her mouth, the black barrel slipping between her lips, bright red lipstick smearing along it.

“No!” Tom leapt to knock the gun out of her hand before she could pull the trigger. But he was too late. The back of her head exploded across the room, a fine mist of blood spraying in short bursts from the severed blood vessels as her body slumped to the floor.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

FBI HEADQUARTERS, SALT LAKE CITY DIVISION, UTAH

January 6—8:17 a.m.

Paul Viggiano fetched himself another cup of filter coffee from the machine. There was a tidemark in the glass jug where the coffee had evaporated since the last fresh pot had been made that morning. The remaining liquid looked dark and thick, like molasses. With scientific precision, he poured in one and a half servings of creamer, added one level teaspoon of sugar, then stirred it three times. Satisfied with his handiwork, he turned to face Sheriff Hennessy and his attorney, Jeremiah Walton. A wiry, aggressive man with a thin face, hornbill nose, and sunken cheeks, Walton seemed unable to sit still on the molded plastic seats, forever shifting his weight from one bony buttock to the other. Bailey was sitting on the opposite side of a flimsy-looking table that had been screwed to the floor, staring at Hennessy with hostile intensity, his pen suspended motionlessly over a notepad. A tape recorder hummed gently to his right.

“Face it, Hennessy, it’s over,” Viggiano said, trying to sound calm but struggling to contain the excitement in his voice. Less than forty-eight hours ago he’d been wondering what he was doing with his life. Now here he was running a multiple homicide investigation.

Funny

how

someone

else’s

98 james twining

bad luck could be just the break you’ve been praying for. “Whatever little scam you’ve been running up there is finished now. So you might as well tell us what you know and make this a whole lot easier on yourself.”

Hennessy stared at Viggiano stonily, dabbing himself every so often with a handkerchief that his sweat had turned from pale red to deep vermilion.

“My client wants to talk about immunity,” Walton said in a high-pitched, nasal whine, pinching his right earlobe between finger and thumb as he spoke.

“Your client can go to hell,” Viggiano snapped. “I got twenty-six corpses out there.”

He waved in what he assumed to be the direction of Malta, Idaho, although in the small windowless room it was difficult to be sure. “Women. Kids. Whole families. That’s twenty-six people—dead. Immunity isn’t even in the dictionary as far as your client is concerned.” His fingers made quote marks in the air.

“You got nothing. Just one man’s word against another.” Walton glanced at Bailey. “A throwaway comment made in the heat of the moment that has been taken completely out of context. A pillar of the local community has seen his integrity questioned and his reputation dragged—”

“For an innocent man, he sure got you down here pretty damn quick,” Viggiano interrupted.

“My client has a right—”

“Hell, maybe you’re right,” said Viggiano. “Maybe we don’t have much. But we’ll find it.” He leaned across the table toward Hennessy. “You see, we’re going to go through your bank records and high school reports and college files. We’re gonna turn your life upside down and shake it real hard and have a good long look at everything that drops out. We’re gonna go through that farmhouse that you claim you’ve never been to before with a ten-man forensic team that’ll find out if you even so much as farted in its general direction in the last six months. Whatever we need, we’ll find it.”

Walton flashed a questioning glance at Hennessy, who raised his eyebrows in response and then gave a brief shrug, suggesting that they had planned for this outcome. 99 the black sun

“Very well, then,” Walton conceded, pinching his left earlobe now. “We want a deal.”

“This is the biggest homicide investigation in Idaho since the Bear River Massacre in 1863,” Bailey reminded him in a cold voice, his eyes never leaving Hennessy.

“The best deal he’ll get is avoiding the Row,” Viggiano added. “Accessory to multiple homicides before and after the fact. Criminal conspiracy. Armed robbery. Hell, by the time you get out,
if
you ever get out, the Jets might have won the Super Bowl again.”

“And if he cooperates?” Walton whined, licking the corners of his mouth.

“If he cooperates, we won’t push for the death sentence. And there may be the chance of parole down the line.”

“A minimum-security facility?”

“We can do that,” said Viggiano. “But we want every-thing—names, dates, locations.”

“I want this in writing.”

“You tell me what you got, then I’ll tell you if it’s enough. You know how it works.”

Hennessy glanced at Walton, who bent toward him and whispered a few words in his ear. Hennessy straightened and nodded slowly. “Okay, I’ll talk.”

“Good.” Viggiano pulled a chair away from the table and sat on it back to front. “Let’s start with some names.”

“I don’t know his name,” Hennessy began. “Not his real one, at least. Everyone just called him Blondi.”

“This is the guy who you think did this?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Where was he from?”

“Not sure. He approached us.”

“Who’s us?”

“The Sons of American Liberty.”

“Now, Bill,” Walton cautioned him, with a nervous twitch of his wrist, “let’s not get into details.”