The Mask of Atreus (38 page)

The remains never reached Magdeburg . . .
Still she felt the link, like something just out sight, like a picture that had to be held in just the right way for its lines to make sense.

"You said your father was always talking about the same things," she said. "That he was obsessed with old ideas and issues."

"Obsessed," Alexandra said, liking the word. "Yes."

"Were there particular cases, events that he was obsessed with?"

Alexandra hesitated.

"Just general," she said. "Not particular."

She looked away and, for the first time, Deborah felt sure she was not being told the truth.

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* * *

Alexandra and her husband lived in a gray and decrepit Brezhnev-era tower block a good half hour outside the city center, the final approach to which was made down a path through a small wood of silver birches, their bark white and shining. They ascended to the fourteenth floor in a rickety elevator which was painted a virulent acid green and smelled of stale urine. The inside of the apartment was as sparse and small as the outside was moldering, but it was clean, and Alexandra showed no great embarrassment for it. Indeed, she showed Deborah in with an almost imperial grace, proud of what she had and how she kept it. From the window Deborah counted four other identical buildings and countless similar ones stretching back the way they had come.

Alexandra's husband, Vasily, a burly man in shirtsleeves who looked to be in his early fifties, spoke--or professed to speak--no English. He gave her a long, appraising look, taking in her gawky stature as she entered the living room like some lost, flightless bird. Alexandra babbled to him in Russian, her expression stern, her voice matter-of-fact, and he grunted agreement several times. Finally, he greeted Deborah more warmly than she had thought likely, and went out whistling.

"Shopping for dinner," said Alexandra. "You eat here."

It was an invitation, of a sort, and Deborah thanked her, thinking also that Alexandra's banishment of her husband had at least as much to do with what Deborah wanted to discuss as it did shopping for dinner. There were five large cardboard boxes, labeled only with what Deborah took to be the apartment address.

"There," said Alexandra, gesturing dismissively to where they nestled in the corner. "Open them."

She went into the kitchen to make coffee, leaving Deborah alone with the boxes and with a distinct impression that the dead man's daughter would just as happily burn them all. She opened them and found them full of old manila files and 321

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papers, some punctiliously typed and methodically organized, others just packets of paper covered in seemingly random scribblings. Deborah blew out a long breath. Everything, not surprisingly, was in Russian, and she couldn't make sense of a single word.

"Could you help me read some of this?" she said to Alexandra as the woman returned, balancing a tray of coffee and small cakes.

"It is not important," she said, scowling.

"If you could just tell me what the words on the files mean . . ."

Alexandra's frown deepened, then she grunted like a large animal and eased herself into a squat beside the closest box. Deborah wasn't sure what to expect. It was, after all, unlikely that Sergei Voloshinov would have kept official files in his own home, less likely still that whoever had found them after his death would have sent them to his surviving family if they were in any way sensitive. As Alexandra thumbed through the first file, her face, always masklike and restrained, seemed to tighten, close down.

"Nothing," she said. "All nonsense."

From what Deborah could see, a large amount of the file seemed to contain letters, many of them on official-looking stationery marked by the state emblems of the Soviet Union.

"What are they about?" she said.

"His . . ." She searched for the word.
"Obsessions."

"Is this all classified?" Deborah asked. "I mean, is it secret? Is it dangerous for you to tell me about them?"

Unexpectedly, Alexandra's face split into a dark smile.

"No," she said. "My father worked for Border Guards Directorate. He was a soldier and small official, a bureaucrat. He worked with men who did secret and dangerous work. Men with power. But he? No."

"Then, I don't understand. What is in here that you don't want to tell me?"

Alexandra got to her feet so quickly that Deborah winced, sure the big woman was going to throw a punch. Instead, the 322

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woman kicked at the first box, twice, overturning and spilling its contents, crying out some fractured Russian phrases. Her normally still face was suddenly flushed with anger. Deborah got hurriedly to her feet, babbling apologies.

"No," said Alexandra, still furious. "It is not you who should be sorry. It is him."

She kicked again at the box, tearing it.

"Your father? Why?"

"For this. This foolish . . . shameful nonsense."

"I don't understand," Deborah said again, taking Alexandra's hands as if to steady her. "Please tell me. What are all those letters about?"

Alexandra calmed slowly, but her face was still hot with rage.

"My father was a fool," she said, and the bitterness had turned to hurt and shame. "For years he was a good soldier for his country, working for the old Communists in East Germany."

"In Magdeburg," Deborah prompted.

"In Magdeburg, yes. They gave him medals, awards. But then he was moved back to Russia and his . . .
status
?"

"Rank?"

"Rank. His rank was lowered. They did not trust him then. For fifteen years he kept working for KGB, but he was never the same. When he finished . . . When he
retired,
he was still of lower status--
rank
--than when he was in DDR, in East Germany."

"What did he do?" Deborah asked, cautious now, sure she was on the edge of something important.

"He wrote these," she said, grabbing a handful of the letters in her fist and holding them up.

"What are they about?"

Alexandra became very still, and her head tipped forward a little, her eyes half closing as if she was in prayer. Her hands moved by themselves, sensing apparently by touch alone, and drew a single sheet out of the stack. 323

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It was different from the others, glossy, and clustered with images: a black-and-white photograph which had been marked by red lines, arrows, and scribbled Cyrillic letters in felt pen. She placed it on the thin carpet carefully, delicately, as if it might be very fragile or somehow explosive, her eyes still half shut and sightless, and pushed it across the floor to Deborah.

"What is this?" said Deborah, picking it up and flashing a look at the Russian woman, who squatted there still in silence. When she did not answer, Deborah considered the photograph. It was actually four pictures, the same subject shot from four slightly different positions. The subject was a man lying on his back, his eyes closed, his mouth slightly open. Two of the pictures were gray and fuzzy images from head to waist, the others were close-ups of his face, sharper and with higher contrast. Both showed a dot on the man's forehead, very slightly off center. It looked like a bullet hole.

"I don't get it," said Deborah, a hint of impatience creeping into her voice. The Russian woman was being overly dramatic. "Who is it?"

Alexandra still said nothing, and Deborah had the strange sense that the Russian woman was waiting for something. Deborah frowned and looked back at the picture.

"What?" she said. "Who is . . . ?"

But even as she started to ask, the details of the face began to slot into place in her head: the thin black hair brushed clean of the face and ears, the pallor of the skin, the eyebrows, the chin, the shape of the mouth, the thick wedge of the tightly cropped toothbrush mustache . . .

"No," she said. "It can't be."

She stared at the picture and the red lines and pointers that had been overlaid onto it.

"It can't be," she repeated. "It looks like . . ."

"Hitler," Alexandra said, not looking at Deborah. "It looks like Hitler."

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"Adolf Hitler," said Deborah. "Yes. But . . ."

"At the end of the war," said Alexandra, her voice whispering now, "Hitler killed himself in his concrete . . .
bunker,
yes?"

"Yes," said Deborah. She wasn't thinking clearly. It was like she was in a fog or, and this was somehow worse, was emerging from a fog. What awaited her on the other side, she could not imagine.

"The Russians got there and found his body, with others,"

said Alexandra. "They were taken for examination and burial, but they were badly damaged and it was very hot. So they were not taken to Moscow. They were taken to SMERSH--

that is Military Intelligence--headquarters as ordered by NKVD . . ."

"In Magdeburg," Deborah added. She spoke slowly. The fog was melting away, but now she was falling, turning head over heels, plummeting as she had imagined she might plummet through the darkness of the Mycenaean cistern, dropping through impossible distance in agonizing slowness.

"Yes, Magdeburg," said Alexandra. "It was all straightforward. True. Everyone knows this. Except my father. My crazy father went to work there, and he became obsessed with the idea . . ."

"That his body never reached Magdeburg," said Deborah, her own voice sounding like a distant bell in her head. She rephrased it, inserting the word from the letter Sergei Voloshinov had been carrying the night he died. "Adolf Hitler's
remains
never reached Magdeburg."

But that would mean that the body you had carbon
dated . . . ?

No. Richard had Hitler's body in a secret room in Atlanta?

It was impossible. How could he have? How could it have gotten there?

The same way Priam's Treasure finished up in the
Pushkin,
said a voice in her head.

CHAPTER 66

It was three hours later. Vasily was back and unpacking their dinner supplies in the kitchen as Alexandra cooked. Deborah sat in a chintz armchair and stared at the boxes they had sorted through, as the new possibilities settled in her brain. If Sergei Voloshinov had been right, she and--for that matter--Richard, Marcus, and his father--had been off track all along. Deborah had assumed the note he had been carrying when he died had referred to the body in the box, the body which had been moved by German convoy and had wound up in a secret room behind Richard's bookcase, and in that she now believed she was right. She had been wrong, however, to assume that it was the Germans who had intended the body to reach Magdeburg. They had meant it to reach Switzerland and safety. It was the Russians who had sent it to Magdeburg, though that was later, and by then, if Voloshinov was right, they were dealing with an altogether different corpse.

Voloshinov believed--and he was not alone in so doing--

that the body taken for Hitler which the Russians found in Berlin had belonged to one of several men who were employed as the fuhrer's body doubles. It was this body which was taken to Magdeburg for investigation, verification, and eventual burial, while the real one was spirited away. It took Voloshinov a decade of research to happen on the story of an American unit hitting a German convoy only miles from the Swiss border, longer even than that to determine what happened to the contents of that convoy thereafter. When he believed he had isolated its final resting place, he got a visa and flew to Atlanta.

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But it was all, surely, mere insanity?

That was how his superiors had treated his theories, so much so that his refusal to drop them had resulted in a stripping of his medals and reassignment to a desk job in Moscow. But Deborah--thanks to Alexandra's grudging help as a translator--had gone through the gist of his argument, and she was not so sure that it was all just conspiracy-theory craziness. There was, to begin with, considerable evidence that Voloshinov had been alone only in pursuing his theories long after he had been told to drop them. Plenty of other people had had their doubts about the remains buried in Magdeburg. Stalin himself had accused the British and Americans of allowing Hitler to escape, even of setting him up in some foreign--probably South American--country. This was probably just misinformation designed to paint the Western allies as soft--even friendly--toward the man every Russian had good reason to despise. But it was also clear that Stalin was far from sure that the Russians had found the right body. The story, as Deborah was able to unravel it, was derived from a combination of official records, eyewitness accounts, and hearsay, the final picture being inconsistent and sometimes even contradictory. Voloshinov apparently had no problem with such inconsistency, actually drawing attention to the holes and problems with the account as if these pointed to flaws in the official version of the events themselves. One particular strand of the argument came from an MVD colonel called Menshikov, and whose handwritten testimony was addressed in letters directly to Voloshinov, letters very like the one he had been carrying the night he died. Menshikov, it seemed, before his meeting with Alexandra's father, then a young recruit just learning the ropes of his East German posting, had been an infantryman with the seventy-ninth SMERSH unit on the front lines during the fall of Berlin. He had, he claimed, been present when the bunker was searched. He had heard the testimony of the survivors and had watched as--based on that testimony--the charred bodies of Hitler 327

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and Eva Braun were dug out of a shallow grave in the chancellery garden. Hitler had died on the thirtieth of April, 1945, the victim, according to that same testimony, of a self-administered gunshot wound to the head fired from his own Mauser pistol. His new bride took cyanide. The two corpses were then taken outside, doused with gasoline bought for the purpose several days earlier, and burned, under the supervision of Hitler adjutant, SS Major Otto Gunsche. The cremation was witnessed by Gunsche, Martin Bormann, Joseph Goebbels, Heinz Linge (Hitler's valet), and Erich Kempka (his chauffeur), but owing to heavy Soviet bombardment, the pyre had to be abandoned before the cremation was complete. Guards in the building--including Ewald Lindloff and Hans Reisser, who buried them--testified that the bodies were burned beyond recognition. Other members of the German high command also committed suicide, including the entire Goebbels family, Joseph, Magda, and their six children.