His breathing quickened, rasping and sucking through the regulator, and he stopped to calm himself. Penn veered left between two rows of wooden crates of identical dimensions, each about a metre and a half high. They looked unopened and sealed up except for one at the back, its lid slightly ajar. Hiebermeyer followed, his heart pounding. It could be an absolute treasure trove. Penn had told him about a crate he had seen containing what looked like paintings, and now they both stood in front of one isolated from the rest and narrower, with no cover. Propped up on the back was a panel that looked as if it might have been the lid, but made up of a single board rather than joined planks. Penn pointed inside. ‘I saw this on the way out this morning. Looking at it now, they’re definitely paintings, their frames removed and the canvases encased in plywood.’ He jerked his thumb at the propped-up panel. ‘That one’s a portrait. Someone must have taken it out to have a look in 1945. You can just make out the image, though I think there’s been some kind of reaction between that mould and the oil from the paint, which has oozed out. It looks irrecoverable, I’m afraid.’
Hiebermeyer could see what Penn meant. The colour definition had gone, as if someone had squeezed all the paints into one bowl and then applied the resulting mess without mixing it together properly, leaving streaks of individual colours through the layer of yellow-green. As he stood back and angled his beam, he could just make out a portrait, like a shallow relief carving, as if the form within were pressing through the panel. He looked hard, mentally checking the image against dozens of lost masterpieces that he had worked through in a catalogue before coming here, in preparation for a moment like this. He shook his head and turned away, then turned back. Still nothing. He tried again, closing his eyes this time.
‘Let’s move on,’ Penn said, pointing at the crate with the lid that was slightly ajar. ‘Whatever that painting was, it’s history now. And my guess is these bigger crates are what you’re going to want to see, more likely to contain antiquities.’
Hiebermeyer stayed rooted to the spot. Suddenly it clicked. He recognized it. ‘ Mein Gott.’
‘What is it?’
‘It’s the Portrait of a Young Man, 1516, stolen from the Czartoryski Museum, Krakow, Poland. It’s so famous that I hadn’t even bothered to look at it again when I was researching lost art before coming here. It’s ritratto di Raffaello, meaning either by Raphael or of Raphael, or both. Nobody knows for sure, because it’s been impossible to study the original using modern analytical techniques. It was one of the most exquisite portraits of the Renaissance and until now the most important painting still lost from the war.’
‘Well you can tick that off the list, in more ways than one. I don’t think there’s any chance of restoration. Another legacy of the Nazis. Come on.’
Hiebermeyer stared at the panel, trying to see what he had remembered from those pre-war photographs of the painting: the sensitive face, the long hair and rakish beret, the languid, confident pose of the young man, the luxurious fur shawl draped over one shoulder. If those two Allied officers really had got inside the bunker – Major Mayne and Colonel Stein – he wondered whether they had stood where he was now, and had seen the painting in its original glory: whether it had given the American, Stein, an art historian at the Courtauld before the war, a thrill of recognition and a shaft of hope before they went on to whatever darkness lay ahead, or whether they too had seen an image forever tainted by the Nazi horror they must have witnessed in the death camp in the forest. Hiebermeyer suddenly lost the image of the young man in his mind’s eye and saw only a mess of colour streaked with red, rivulets of paint at the base of the panel where oil had oozed like blood. He remembered years before when he’d realized that resurrecting the artefacts collected by the Nazi Ahnenerbe would never be possible, that they were best left as part of the ghastly history that Himmler had created for them. The image he saw now seemed to vindicate that, but he had not expected it to be so visceral, as if what this painting had become was more than just a lesson from history; rather an excrescence that could never heal.
Penn went forward to the unopened crates and knelt down, wiping a painted label on the side with the back of his glove and then doing the same to the next two crates. Hiebermeyer knelt down beside the first. One word stood out: Ahnenerbe. For a moment all he heard was his own breathing, as if it were disembodied. All those years he had dreamed of searching for these treasures, they had been here under his very nose, only a few kilometres from where he had grown up. He felt light-headed, as if the regulator were no longer giving him enough oxygen. He reached out to one of the crates to steady himself and then withdrew his hand at the last moment, remembering the awful smear of decomposition that had stained his glove when he had slipped at the entrance.
Penn came back to him. ‘That’s it, all of the crates. They look like identical markings.’
‘It all makes sense,’ Hiebermeyer murmured. ‘ It all fits.’
‘You’d better explain.’
Hiebermeyer remained squatting. His long conversation with Dillen and Jack the day before about the events of 1945 was still fresh in his mind. He peered at Penn. ‘Those two officers in 1945, Major Mayne and Colonel Stein, they’re the key. Stein was in the Monuments and Fine Arts section, a genuine art expert, but the MFA was really a cover for a unit searching for Nazi secrets. Major Mayne was in 30 Commando Assault Unit, a deliberately misleading name for another one of those outfits. These two men only came together in the last hours on the way to this place, after Captain Frazer had returned from his visit to the camp and tipped off his friend Mayne at British HQ that there was something worth investigating here. We pieced all this together after Jack and his daughter talked to Frazer last year. A Jewish girl in the camp had drawn Frazer a picture. She’d been tortured and raped in the forest, in this bunker, but had managed to escape in the final days and was back in the camp immediately after liberation under the care of British nurses. The picture showed something she’d seen in the bunker, a golden reverse swastika that Frazer recognized as a lost antiquity from Troy. He and Mayne had excavated together at Mycenae before the war and had heard from an old Greek foreman the story of how the object had been found by Heinrich Schliemann and his wife Sophia in the Tomb of Agamemnon, and then secretly taken back to Germany. Frazer and Mayne were convinced it was the lost palladion, the sacred symbol of Troy taken by Agamemnon after he had defeated the Trojans. And now, knowing what is in these other crates, I understand,’ Hiebermeyer murmured. ‘It makes sense that the palladion should have ended up here. Absolute sense.’
‘Go on,’ Penn said. ‘These inscriptions?’
‘Look at the dates on these crates.’ Hiebermeyer pointed at the stencilled lettering and stamps where Penn had revealed them. ‘They’re all the same: 13 April 1945. That’s only two weeks before the Allies arrived here. Two weeks. We know that in the final months of the war Hitler ordered the treasures of the Berlin museums to be taken to secret storage outside the city. Franz Bormann went to the Zoo flak tower in Berlin and took away most of the crates stored there. A lot went to Austria, to the salt mines at Merkers, well away from Allied bombing and where the salt provided a good atmosphere for storage. So I ask myself the question: if there were still much better storage sites accessible, what on earth were the Nazis doing sending art and antiquities to this place, to a bunker in Lower Saxony, in early April 1945, right into the path of the Allied advance?’
‘Maybe into the eye of the storm,’ Penn suggested. ‘Maybe that was the calculation. Send them to the least likely place, and they might have the greatest chance of surviving undetected. When the Nazis built this bunker in 1942, they went to extraordinary lengths to conceal it. We think the entrance tunnel was rigged to self-destruct, but in the event, the British bomber raid on the night of 25 April did it for them. The self-destruct button may have been a final measure planned by someone who’d actually intended to remove this stuff beforehand and wanted all evidence destroyed. Take a look beyond the final crate. There’s a row of heavy-duty suitcases on the floor. I think someone may have been about to break down the contents of the crates into manageable packages, but events overtook them and the Allied front line moved faster than they’d expected.’