‘I’m sorry,’ said Carter.
‘People always say that,’ replied Teresa, ‘and what they really mean is that they’re sorry they asked. So are you sorry you asked, Mr Carter?’
‘No,’ he told her. ‘Keep going.’
‘When the fire died down,’ she continued, ‘my father went back into the wreckage of the train, found her body and carried her out, wrapped in a blanket. We buried her in the field. Until yesterday, I’d never known he took the ring from her finger. At the end of that day, trucks from a passing army convoy stopped and told us we could climb aboard. By then, my father had stolen the identity cards of a man who had died of his wounds. His name was Hanno Dasch. My own passbook had already been lost, but nobody cared as long as he had his.’
‘So what is his real name? And yours?’
‘None of that matters,’ she said. ‘Those people are dead now, and we should let them stay that way.’
‘And who else knows about this?’ asked Carter.
‘No one,’ she said. ‘Aside from my father, only you.’
‘Not even Ritter? I wouldn’t think he’d object to what your father used to do.’
‘It’s not the job he’d mind. It’s the fact that my father deserted. A man like Ritter sees the world in black and white. Each German soldier took an oath of loyalty, and for Ritter such things become a part of you, as real as the bones beneath your skin. It cannot be removed. It cannot be undone.’
‘Not even at the end of the war?’
She shook her head. ‘This might be hard for you to understand, but it has nothing to do with the war, or even the fact that Hitler is finally gone. An oath is a sacred thing. It is a line you have drawn in the sand. Break it, and the world dissolves into a pack of lies.’
Her words felt like needles jabbed into his flesh. This whole idea of loyalty, which men like Ritter thought of as their greatest strength, could be transformed by men like Carter into their greatest weakness without them even knowing what had changed. Carter thought of all the times that he had pierced through the armour of such people, just as he was doing now, and how he had learned to accept the collateral damage to those whose lives had been caught up in the crime rings he’d helped to break apart.
This time, it was different. Teresa was the only person he had ever met who had lived so long with her secrets that, like the oaths of Ritter’s comrades, whose bones lay strewn across the Russian steppe, they had become a part of her. It seemed so unfair to Carter that the thing they had most in common he would never be able to reveal. He did not know the precise moment when he had begun to care about the woman who sat before him. If he had known, perhaps he might have been able to prevent it, and to strangle those emotions before they ever reached the surface of his mind. But it was too late now.
‘On the day the war ended,’ continued Teresa, ‘we had passed through the Allied lines as refugees. We finally reached Cologne, and that was where my father began to reinvent himself as the man he has become.’
‘But why did you pick Cologne?’ asked Carter. ‘The place was in ruins, after all.’
She smiled at him. ‘Because that’s where the treasure had been buried.’
‘What treasure?’
‘Everything he has been selling since the war ended. The champagne. The wine. The cigars.’
‘He buried it?’
She laughed. ‘No. Hitler did. He had ordered the construction of various fortresses scattered around the Reich. Some, like the one at Rastenburg he called the Wolf’s Lair, were completed. Others, like one in the Alps he called the Giant, were never used, even though kilometres of tunnel had already been dug into the sides of the mountains. And some, like the underground complex Hitler had ordered to be constructed beneath the city of Cologne, were destroyed before they could ever be completed. My father never even knew of it until one evening late in the war, after Hitler had gone down into the bunker, bringing his entourage with him. My father was expected to cook for them, but he had trouble finding any ingredients. When my father apologised for the quality of the meal, Hitler remarked that if they had been in Cologne instead of Berlin, they could have had anything they wanted. He explained that the construction of a bunker complex beneath Cologne, similar to that in Berlin, had been permanently derailed by a single bomb which had fallen on the Eisengasse, causing all four levels of the complex to collapse.’
Carter thought of the crater where Galton had been shot, and he tried to imagine the tunnels and the rooms below, one crashing down into another as the Eisengasse was cremated above it.
‘By the time the fires had burned out,’ said Teresa, ‘the builders of the Cologne complex decided that the damage was so severe it made no sense to re-start the excavation. Instead, they began work on a different fortress in Belgium and the Cologne project was forgotten. Or almost forgotten. Hitler told my father that night that an underground storage facility, which had been created to supply the Cologne bunker, had actually survived the bombing. He unrolled a great blueprint, which showed where the complex was located and how it would have looked if it had ever been completed. The entrance to the storage area had been blocked by rubble, but Hitler’s engineers had confirmed that the contents had almost certainly remained intact. The plan was that at some point in the future it would all be retrieved, but for now it was safe and Hitler had other things on his mind. In the end, Hitler’s engineers never reopened the storage facility. But my father did.
‘It took him a month to locate the entrance and another month to dig his way down through the rubble, but finally he found his way inside. Until that moment, he wasn’t even sure if Hitler had been right about the contents of the facility. He gambled everything on the chance that it might have been true, and it turned out he was right. He woke me in the middle of the night to tell me the good news. Until then, we had been living in an abandoned rail car in a siding not far from the field where the Eisengasse had once stood. We were starving. He led me out across the field and down into a tunnel, lighting the way with a candle in a jar. We came to a set of huge iron doors, one of which had been bent almost in half by the weight of stone that had come down upon it in the cave-in caused by the bomb. We stepped through into a huge room, and there I saw row after row of wine crates, food crates◦– tobacco, chocolate, canned fruit, canned vegetables. Anything you could have wanted was there. We sat down on the dusty floor, and my father opened up a tin of cherries and we ate them with our fingers. The next day, my father began selling small amounts of what he had found. Not too much, you understand. A bottle of wine. A box of cigars. The sort of thing any scavenger might turn up if he was lucky. Within a few weeks, he had bought a truck for moving things around the city. We rented a house. He bribed city officials to give him contracts transporting construction materials around. He bought more trucks. Within a year, he had become the most successful dealer in black market goods that this part of the country had ever seen.’
‘But how did he do it?’ asked Carter. ‘The police raided the compound. They searched the trucks dozens of times. Your father told me so himself, and they always went home empty-handed.’
‘Because they were looking in the wrong place,’ explained Teresa. ‘He never used the trucks to move black market merchandise.’
‘Then how?’
‘The trains,’ she said. ‘On the far side of the Eisengasse, trains were constantly moving wagons through those sidings. That’s how he did it, and they never thought to look.’
‘Then why did he need me?’ asked Carter. ‘If he had it all worked out, why take the risk of bringing someone new on board?’
‘He had to,’ explained Teresa. ‘The storage area was almost empty◦– at least the part that he could reach.’