Trophies of War Page 18

  “Alright,” Lyon replied. “So, we may be on to something. The Altaussee map was in her diary, so she probably had something to do with it.”

  “Well, yes … but that doesn’t mean there’s any connection between Zharova and that shipping manifest with G46 on it,” Beth explained. “We found the diary with those documents, but that could be a coincidence. That’s a pretty slender reed to base this trip to Altaussee on.”

  “Maybe, maybe not,” Lyon shrugged. “That weird diagram of lines and numbers was on both documents.”

  “That’s true,” Beth admitted

  Lyon glanced at the map on his phone.

  “We’ll be there in two hours,” he said.

  “Two hours and sixty years too late,” she replied. “It’s not like were going to find some hidden chamber in the mine with a crate of famous paintings in it.”

  Lyon gave her an annoyed look.

  “I realize that—I’m not delusional,” he said. “I want to walk around the place, see if there’s anything or anyone there that can help. Plus, it gives us something to do while your friend translates the diary.”

  “Whatever you say,” Beth answered. “I’m not going to argue with a first-class trip through Austria.”

  “That’s the spirit.”

  Beth punched him in the arm. “Maybe we should search Tahiti next?”

  Lyon snorted.

  Beth opened the diary, flipped through the pages and took some photos with her phone.

  “Okay, ten more pages to Michael,” she said, tapping the screen. “Now I’m going to take a nap. Wake me when we get there.”

  The Anvil bristled at the idea of being a chauffeur to the two FSB men. Luckily, they knew who he was and what he did for the Moscow bosses, so they didn’t speak to him. Or look him in the eye.

  His orders were to rent the car in his name so there would be nothing to link the FSB to this trip. As always, he followed orders.

  It was his first time outside Russia and he didn’t like it. His knives and pistol had to stay in Moscow, leaving him unarmed. The FSB agents had their guns somehow, so now he had to rely on them to make the kills—another indignity.

  The Anvil didn’t know where he was going, with the damned German roadsigns, but he maintained a constant speed, keeping the white Mercedes sedan in view.

  “Turn left,” Lyon’s phone said. He complied.

  Sandling Mountain loomed ahead with its sharp contrast between the green tree line and the gray limestone peak dotted with snow.

  They passed a sign that read “Salzwelten Altaussee” and soon they were in the main yard of the Altaussee salt mine. Lyon found a parking spot and brought the Mercedes to a stop next to several tour buses parked in a row. After spending so much time researching and reading about Merkers and Altaussee in the 1940s, it was jarring to see modern cars parked in the lot and tourists glued to their smartphones.

  Lyon looked over at Beth reclined in the passenger seat, sound asleep with her hair going in every direction. He thought about when he first met her in that hotel lobby and how she had looked in her workout clothes. Since that day, she had switched to jeans and a t-shirt, but the effect on him was the same.

  Several conflicting thoughts and emotions arose within him.

  Am I single? Am I interested? That’s a stupid question. Should I be interested?

  Beth opened her eyes.

  “What?” she asked, looking alarmed and instantly awake. “Something happen?”

  “Ah … nothing. I was checking to see if you were still asleep,” he mumbled. “We’re here.”

  They got out of the car and followed the throng of tourists toward a yellow building where Lyon bought two tickets for the next tour. Everyone was issued white coveralls to protect their clothes from the salt.

  While they waited for the tour to begin, Lyon took in his surroundings and imagined what it might have been like in 1945. Then, as now, it was a working salt mine, but instead of tourists the grounds would have been swarming with soldiers, trucks, wooden crates, sculptures wrapped in straw and blankets. An almost industrial scene—except that it was priceless art being pulled out of this mountain in the Austrian Alps, not salt.

  Beth straightened the collar of Lyon’s coverall.

  “Much better,” she said with a wink. “Now you look more like a … person who’s come here with no real specific purpose.”

  “Oh, shut up,” Lyon retorted, then had an idea. “Hey—let me see that map from the diary.”

  Beth pulled up the picture of it on her phone. Lyon compared it to the map he had been given with the tickets.

  Standing here at the base of Sandling Mountain with the mine entrance ahead, Lyon could now make sense of the old map. It was a cutaway view from above, with the main entrance shaft in the middle and many tunnels and chambers branching off deeper into the mine. The tourist map only had the main tunnel and a few of the chambers that were on the tour, but they looked the same.

  “Look,” Lyon said, holding the tour map next to Beth’s phone. “They match.”

  Beth nodded.

  “They do.” She swiped across the screen to focus on the corner of the map with the coded lines. “Now we just need to figure out what this is.”

  A bell rang to signify the start of the next tour. Lyon and Beth joined the crowd shuffling to the mine entrance.

  “Let’s hope your friend Michael comes through for us,” Lyon said.

  “Let’s hope Natalia Zharova comes through for us,” Beth corrected him.

  Lyon’s focus at Altaussee was on the artworks the Germans had stored in the mine, his mother’s painting possibly among them, but there was much more to the tour than that part of its history. The mine had been worked continuously for hundreds of years, sluicing water down massive tunnels to carry the salt away to the valley below. Some of these sluices were now part of the tour, converted into massive slides. The tunnels echoed with screaming and laughter as tourists sped down them.

  One tunnel opened up to an enormous chamber that held an underground lake, with a round island in the middle. Their guide explained that it was used as a stage for underground concerts and light shows. Another chamber contained an altar dedicated to Saint Barbara, made entirely out of brick-sized chunks of reddish salt.

  At last they came to a chamber that looked as it must have in 1945. The wooden floor and storage racks the Germans had build during the war were still there. The racks held large wooden crates with stenciled words the tour guide translated as ‘Attention - Marble - Do Not Drop.’ These once held, not marble, but the 500 kilogram bombs placed in the mine by August Eigruber, the Austrian Nazi who was determined to follow Hitler’s Nero Decree—his order to destroy everything.

  The guide spent a few minutes telling the story of how the Germans had used mines throughout the area to store art for safekeeping during the war. Lyon noted that the massive theft perpetrated by the Nazis was part of the presentation, as was the heroic role of the Monuments Men, but there was no mention of the Soviet Trophy Brigades.

  “Amazing,” Beth said as they came back out into the sunlight. “Imagine it’s 1945 and you’re one of the Monuments Men going down there for the first time. All you know is that there’s a tunnel going into a mountain. You don’t know who or what’s in there, and then you find room after room of masterpieces and treasures stacked up like cordwood—Michelangelos, Vermeers, Hitler’s whole fantasy museum down in a hole.”

  “Now aren’t you glad we came here?” Lyon asked.

  Beth nodded. “Oh, wait, I almost forgot.” She took her phone out. “No service down there.”

  She checked for a missed call or message.

  “Hold on—text from Michael. He says: ‘Not too much on the pages you sent. Zharova was at Altaussee. It says the Americans beat her again, the place was cleaned out before she got there. Bottom of last page I have says she sent SMERSH men to interrogate locals to see what they know. Send me the next few pages after that. Might be something there.’
”

  They handed in their coveralls and walked back to the car so Beth could send more diary pages to Michael.

  Lyon pressed the unlock button on the Mercedes key fob. As the door locks clicked, there was a rustling noise in the bushes beyond the parking lot.

  Lyon froze, unable to process what he was seeing.

  It was a face with a barbed wire tattoo across the forehead, writing under the eyes and a star on the chin.

  The killer from the Beer Tower at St. Sergius was running toward him. A foot away from Lyon, he raised his arm, bent with forearm extended, like he was going to crush Lyon’s windpipe with it.

  The second that Lyon stood frozen with incomprehension saved him.

  Just as the killer’s arm would have made contact with his throat, Lyon finally reacted and stepped away from the car. The Russian leapt with his final step and met nothing but air. He landed against the side of the Mercedes, his floating rib smashing into the side mirror. He let out a roar and stumbled.

  Beth shouted something Lyon couldn’t understand. His hearing had somehow become muffled. He yelled at her to get in the car. With a quick glance, he saw that none of the tourists had made their way back to the buses. They were alone in this remote corner of the parking lot.

  Time seemed to slow down for Lyon. He saw the killer start to recover from his stumble, his head turning as he sought to lunge again at Lyon.

  Before the Russian could regain his footing, Lyon reached back as far as his arm would go and struck the killer’s temple with the heel of his palm. The blow landed with more force than he thought possible, bouncing the killer’s head into the door of the Mercedes and leaving a dent in the metal.

  The Russian wasn’t knocked unconscious, but he was dazed and had a look of staring without seeing. On hands and knees in the dirt, he shook his head and blinked.

  Lyon didn’t wait—he kicked him in the ribs with all his strength, feeling the power of an adrenaline surge drive through his body, crunching bone and bruising flesh. He dropped his weight into an elbow aimed at the man’s kidneys.

  The Russian collapsed flat in the dirt, the impact with the ground forcing the air out of his lungs with an audible pop.

  Lyon jumped on his back, kneeling on the killer’s shoulders to pin him to the ground. With his fist he pounded the back of the man’s head, smashing his face into the dirt over and over.

  What had started out as instinctual self-defense—almost disconnected and emotionless—was now a beating driven by rage.

  Lyon punched the Russian in the head again and again—even as he felt the killer’s body go limp beneath him—not because he had attacked him here in a salt mine parking lot and not because he had murdered Sasha and the museum guard.

  Lyon felt an animal viciousness take over as he poured out his anger on the Russian. Anger that the world should go on when his daughter was dead. Anger over the end of his marriage. Anger that this quest for his mother’s painting was neither succeeding nor giving him any satisfaction of purpose or meaning.

  Lyon felt a pull on his shoulders. He ignored it and kept hitting the Russian. The pull got stronger until he realized it was Beth trying to stop him. She was screaming in his ear but he didn’t hear it until he saw her next to him.

  “David, stop!”

  Seeing her snapped him out of his tunnel-vision focus on the Russian. Lyon slid off the unconscious man and staggered to his feet.

  He looked down at his hands. They were bloodied, with ragged bits of skin hanging off of his knuckles.

  Lyon went to reach for the door handle of the Mercedes, but he couldn’t open the car door—his hands were shaking and his fingers didn't seem to work.

  “Get in on the other side,” Beth ordered. “I’ll drive.”

  He gave her the keys and walked to the passenger door, steadying himself with a hand that smeared a line of blood around the white car.

  Waiting a mile down the road, the two FSB agents sat in the car, pulled off into the woods. One looked at his watch and glanced at the other.

  “What should we do?” he asked. “It’s been too long.”

  “Do you want to find that beast and start asking questions?” the second man asked. “Because I don’t.”

  “Maybe he drove the Mercedes the wrong way down this road.”

  “I don’t see how. He walked straight through those woods there to get to the Americans. He knows to meet us back here.”

  They waited in silence for a few more minutes, neither wanting to be the first to suggest they search for The Anvil.

  Both men were looking back through the rear window, waiting for the Mercedes to appear with the tattooed killer behind the wheel.

  At last, the white car pulled out onto the road.

  “Finally,” said the FSB man behind the wheel.

  As he turned to start the car and follow, he jumped as he noticed The Anvil standing a foot away from their front bumper.

  The sight of the killer with his dusty, bloodied face and clothes was the most unexpected thing either man had ever seen.

  20

  Bad Goisern, Austria

  July, 1945

  Clark and DeLuca had followed the convoy of trucks as far as the market town of Bad Goisern, twenty kilometers west of Altaussee.

  Two hundred objects were on their way to Munich, wrapped in blankets and coats—even straw from a nearby dairy farm. At first Clark saw the order to empty the repository as ridiculous. It ended up being just the challenge they needed to finish the job. Now Clark had the time to pursue a more personal mission—Goering’s crates had been here, and now they just might be with von Weiding. If the G46 crate was with them, with its unknown Manet, Clark had to find it.

  Taking a chance, they spent the night at a small inn overlooking the Traun River rather than searching for an Army billet. They needn’t have worried—the innkeeper and his wife were both eager to be friendly and helpful to their only guests. Clark had wondered if they would have given them the same reception just a few short weeks ago.

  In the morning, they fended off the innkeeper’s offers of left-over bits of cake and black market sausages and got into the big Mercedes. Following the hand-drawn map Müller had made for them, along with some directions from the innkeeper, Clark and DeLuca headed north for the short drive to find Schloss Grasberg and Jürgen von Weiding.

  Soon they were speeding along Lake Traunsee with Traunstein Mountain in the background, towering above the blue-green water. They both enjoyed the sun’s warmth on their faces as the powerful black Cabriolet barreled down the road, top down.

  “It’s like the war never happened,” DeLuca shouted over the wind, slowing the car to enjoy the scenery. Small villages clung to the alpine slopes on the edge of the lake. None showed any signs of damage and there was not a soldier or military vehicle in sight.

  “Well, if this ends up in the Soviet zone of occupation, they’re going to feel like the war has come to them,” Clark replied.

  Zharova glared at the small man cowering before Chuzhoi, though she felt sorry for him. The other four SMERSH men stood around the man’s kitchen table, their rifles at the ready, fingers on triggers. None of them were in good spirits after spending the night sleeping on the floor of the Altaussee mine administration building, especially after losing to the Americans again. Chuzhoi was shouting.

  “We know you worked at the mine! Your neighbor told us as much before she pissed herself!”

  Uwe Aretz licked his lips. If it weren’t for his gray hair, his fat red cheeks would have made him look like a boy.

  “Yes, yes. I am a mining engineer,” he said in a quiet voice.

  “A mining engineer just back from raping our motherland?” Chuzhoi asked.

  “No!” Uwe half-answered, half-pleaded. He patted his chest. “I have a bad heart. They wouldn’t accept me for conscription. I have been here for the whole war, mining salt.”

  “Mining salt and helping the Americans plunder priceless art?”

  �
��They were not plundering, no,” Aretz replied. “They carefully removed everything and are protecting it in Munich.”

  Chuzhoi sneered and poked Aretz in the chest.

  “ ‘Protecting’? I don’t think so.” Chuzhoi said. Lowering his voice, he smiled and sat down next to Aretz. “Tell me friend, did they miss anything? Hmm? Maybe a room down there you didn’t tell them about? Something you were keeping just for yourself? Hoping to sell once you had the chance?”

  “No!”

  “We can examine the mine and see if what you are saying is true,” Zharova said. “Is there a map?”

  Aretz nodded but looked from Chuzhoi to Zharova to the SMERSH men with their Pepeshas. He looked afraid to move.

  “Get it!” Chuzhoi shouted.

  Aretz staggered to his feet and scurried off to his study in the next room. Chuzhoi followed him. He returned, Aretz’s collar in one hand, a folded map in the other. Shoving Aretz back in his chair, Chuzhoi spread the map out on the table.

  Zharova leaned in and looked the map over. It showed the face of the Sandling Mountain as a straight line, with a main tunnel leading deep into the mountain. Many more tunnels branched off the main line, with nearly two dozen irregular shapes that must be chambers.

  Zharova shook her head.

  “It’s too big,” she said. “We need more men—the six of us cannot possibly search the entire mine.”

  That meant notifying Veselovsky, something Zharova hoped to avoid, but she didn’t want to leave Altaussee without searching the mine. Maybe the Americans had missed something. There could be a masterpiece for her to find just as she had discovered the Sistine Madonna in Cotta.

  What else? she asked herself.

  A corner of the map was turned up at the crease in the paper. She smoothed it down.

  In the lower right corner of the map, the title block of the drawing contained a date and Aretz’s name. It was in black ink, as was the rest of the map, which was clearly a printed copy. Above the title block was a series of lines, hand-drawn in ink. Some were parallel, some intersecting, with numbers written at each end and a dot above one of the lines.