Читать книгу Spandau Phoenix - Greg Iles - Страница 10

The warm apartment air hit Hans in a wave, flushing his skin, enfolding him like a cocoon. Ilse had already left, he knew it instinctively. There was no movement in the kitchen, no sound of appliances, no running shower, nothing. Still jumpy, and half-starved, he walked hopefully into the kitchen. He found a note on the refrigerator door, written in Ilse’s hurried hand: Wurst in the oven. I love YOU. Back by 18:00.

Thank you, Liebchen, he thought, catching the pungent aroma of Weisswurst. Using one of his gloves as a potholder, he removed the hot dish from the oven and placed it on the counter to cool. Then he took a deep breath, bent over, rolled up his pants leg and dug the sheaf of onionskin out of his boot. His pulse quickened as he unfolded the pages in the light. He backed against the stove for heat, plopped a chunk of white sausage into his mouth, and picked up reading where the Russian soldier had surprised him.

… I only hope that long after these events cease to have immediate consequences in our insane world, someone will find these words and learn the obscene truth not only of Himmler, Heydrich, and the rest, but of England—of those who would have sold her honor and ultimately her existence for a chance to sit at Hitler’s blood-drenched table. The facts are few, but I have had more time to ponder them than most men would in ten lifetimes. I know how this mission was accomplished, but I do not know why. That is for someone else to learn. I can only point the way. You must follow the Eye. The Eye is the key to it all!

Hans stopped chewing and held the paper closer to his face. Sketched below this exhortation was a single, stylized eye. Gracefully curved, with a lid but no lashes, it stared out from the paper with a strange intensity. It seemed neither masculine nor feminine. It looked mystical somehow. Even a little creepy. He read on: What follows is my story, as best I can remember it.

Hans blinked his eyes. At the beginning of the next paragraph, the narrative suddenly switched to a language he could not understand. He didn’t even recognize it. He stared in puzzlement at the painstakingly blocked characters. Portuguese? he wondered. Italian maybe? He couldn’t tell. A few words of German were sprinkled through the gibberish—names mostly—but not enough to get any meaning from. Frustrated, he walked into the bedroom, folded the pages, and stuffed them underneath the mattress at the foot of his bed. He switched on the television from habit, then kicked his mud-caked boots into an empty corner and dropped his coat on top of them. Ilse would scold him for being lazy, he knew, but after two straight shifts he was simply too exhausted to care.

He ate his breakfast on the bed. As much as the Spandau papers, the thought of his father weighed on his mind. Captain Hauer had asked him why he’d come to Berlin. Hans often wondered that himself. Three years it had been now. He hardly thought of Munich anymore. He’d married Ilse after just five months here in Berlin. Christ, what a wedding it had been. His mother—still furious at him for becoming a policeman—had refused to attend, and Hauer had not been included in the plans. But he’d shown up anyway, Hans remembered. Hans had spied his rigid, uniformed figure outside the church, standing alone at the end of the block. Hans had pretended not to notice, but Ilse had waved quite deliberately to him as they climbed into the wedding car.

Angry again, Hans wolfed down another sausage and tried to concentrate on the television. A silver-haired windbag of a Frankfurt banker was dispensing financial advice to viewers saddled with the burden of surplus cash. Hans snorted in disgust. At fifteen hundred Deutschemarks per month, a Berlin policeman made barely enough money to pay rent and buy groceries. Without Ilse’s income, they would be shivering in a cold-water flat in Kreuzberg. He wanted to switch channels, but the old Siemens black-and-white had been built in the dark ages before remote control. He stayed where he was.

He took another bite of sausage and stared blankly at the screen. Beneath his stockinged feet, the wrinkled sheaf of papers waited, a tantalizing mystery beckoning him to explore. Yet he had already hit a dead end. The strange, staring eye hovered in his mind, taunting him. After breakfast, he decided, he would take a shower and then have another go at the papers.

He never made it off the bed. Exhaustion and the warm air overcame him even before he finished the sausage. He slid down the duvet, the unfinished plate balanced precariously on his lap, the Spandau papers hidden just beneath his feet.