Even with the end of his dream of von Braun’s company in a motorcycle’s sidecar or the cold empty reaches of space, and even with his horror at what had been done to the workers of the Mittelbau in the name of rocketry, my grandfather could not believe that the man was prepared to betray his country as smoothly as the shopkeeper his Nordhausen neighbors.
“So he can get to the Moon,” Stolzmann said. “The SS know it. Two years ago they arrested him because they thought he was trying to divert resources from weapon development to space flight. They don’t trust him.”
“And where are they holding him, please?”
“I haven’t the slightest idea.”
Frau Herzog raised the Browning again. Its eye maintained its lidless vigil. Her fingers looked admirably relaxed on the grip.
“In Bavaria, in the mountains, but I don’t know precisely where! Why would I know? Anna!” he appealed to Frau Herzog. Frau Herzog nodded and lowered the gun, looking disappointed. My grandfather grabbed the gun away from her and then she looked afraid.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“Please, Frau Herzog. I will get you the insulin. A six months’ supply.”
The Bavarian Alps. It was not enough, but it was something. A long way from Nordhausen, three hundred miles or more. He would have to check his maps, but even without looking he knew he would have to cross territory not yet occupied by the Allies to reach mountains where—according to rumor and U.S. intelligence reports alike—teenage Nazi fanatics known as Werwolf, bred to kill, had been equipped and provisioned to hold out for five years in an impregnable fortress called the Alpenfestung.* To the tally of crimes reckoned against von Braun by my grandfather, he added the offense of making oneself a pain in the ass to find. In his current state—which today would likely be diagnosed as post-traumatic shock—this felt like the most unpardonable offense of all. He told himself that he was only going to apprehend von Braun and turn him over to the authorities to be hanged as a war criminal, but offered the slightest pretext, my grandfather knew, he planned in his heart to shoot the bastard.
“I would have brought you the insulin anyway,” he told Frau Herzog and Martin. “Even if he had told me nothing at all.”
He had just adjusted his chinstrap and was pulling on his right glove when he heard a loping tread in the mud and turned, expecting to see the dog. It was Martin, in his rough woollen trousers and patched jumper. He had a plain face and watery eyes that narrowed to a pair of blue slits.
“He has a buried treasure,” Martin said.
“That sounds exciting.”
My grandfather pulled on the left glove. He grabbed the handlebars, the throttle, kicked the engine to life. If he could get hold of the insulin promptly, he could be in Nuremburg by dark.
The boy was standing there, talking over the motorbike’s rumble. My grandfather cut the engine. “What?”
“. . . because of the tall blond man.”
“A tall blond man.”
“He came with two other men and told them to bury the treasure. And Herr Stolzmann said maybe there was a cave where they could bury it.”
Stolzmann didn’t want to tell my grandfather about the buried treasure in the cave. When my grandfather and Martin went back into the barn, interrupting a quarrel between Stolzmann and Frau Herzog, Stolzmann tried to persuade my grandfather, Frau Herzog, and Martin himself that the boy was prattling and, he suggested, mentally defective.
“But I heard you talking to the tall blond man,” Martin said. “He told you to put it in a cave and bury it.”
“Nonsense.”
Frau Herzog went to a nearby stall, picked up a pitchfork and plunged it into Stolzmann’s thigh. It was done with grace in a single continuous motion. Three of the four tines found meat. She jerked them out, and holes in the fabric of Herzog’s coverall bloomed purple. Herzog grabbed at his leg and fell down.
“You are not mentally defective, Martin,” Frau Herzog said.
“I know,” said Martin.
In the kitchen my grandfather treated Stolzmann’s wounds. He found a bottle of apple brandy and poured a glass for Stolzmann, who drained it in one draft. My grandfather poured him a second one.
“There is no treasure,” Stolzmann said. “Just papers. Miles of them. Thousands of kilos. Enough to fill twenty file cabinets. All the documentation from the V-2 program. Every diagram, every report on research and testing. He asked me and two colleagues to hide it all just before he was evacuated to the south. I helped them load the documents, and then one of my colleagues found an old salt mine and they put them in there. They used some of the miners’ dynamite to seal the opening of the cave.”
“Did the SS know about this?”
“Of course not. Von Braun wanted something to bargain with. I imagine the United States of America would very much like to put their hands on these files.”
“I imagine you’re right,” my grandfather said bitterly.
He got out his map and had Stolzmann show him the location of the salt mine, but Stolzmann had not been there when the documents were buried and could give him only a vague location “around Bleicherode.”
My grandfather went out into the yard and lit a cigarette. He had to make a choice. The intelligence man with the 3rd Armored had told him that after the war, Nordhausen was due to be handed over to the Russians along with this whole chunk of Germany. The Russian Army was already on its way. If he went after von Braun, as his heart and his desire to punish von Braun urged him to do, then the documents—a virtual recipe for building a V-2 rocket—might fall into Russian hands before he could return. If he stayed to pursue the documents, then von Braun might elude capture, fall into Russian hands, or surrender to the Allies, but my grandfather would have had nothing to do with it, and there would be no chance for von Braun to give my grandfather the pretext he was hoping for. If von Braun surrendered to the Allies before my grandfather had managed to locate the documents, then the German would be able to negotiate the terms of his surrender and maybe avoid punishment entirely, and if the Russian Army overtook my grandfather in his efforts to find the salt mine, then there was a strong possibility that all would be lost. He could not report Stolzmann’s information and then take off after von Braun; people would want to know just where he thought he was going. When they heard, he would be ordered to stick around Bleicherode or sent after von Braun as part of a team. He did not want to hunt von Braun with a team.
When he finished his cigarette, he went back inside the farmhouse. Stolzmann had passed out in the bedroom. Martin and the dog were sharing a can of Vienna sausages. Frau Herzog scanned my grandfather’s face and picked up some bit of information that led her to reach for the bottle of applejack. She poured two fingers into the glass and handed it to my grandfather. It burned with a harsh and clarifying fire all the way.
“What will you do?” she asked him.
“My duty,” my grandfather said, and then added in English, “God fucking damn it.”
*