“ ‘VILLAGERS SEE RELIGIOUS LINK IN RUINS’ is the headline… it’s a sidebar to Braun’s obituary. ‘Workers who arrived at the scene after the fire said the entire structure had been completely burned except for a patch of linoleum that had been identified as having covered the kitchen floor. The linoleum, some said, was in the shape of a woman.

“ ‘ “It had eyes, hands,” one worker was reported to have declared. “I swear I could see it. It’s a miracle, a sign from God.” ‘ ”

The image was dismissed by most as just one more instance of people seeing what they wanted to see in the random images on the side of a building or a warehouse, in shadows, stains, and light patterns shining through frosted glass. The Innsbruck fire chief was quoted by the paper as saying, “Fires can do some strange things. We’ve seen many instances where burned structures seem to have pictures of faces in them. But it’s like finding ships in the clouds or a face on the moon. It’s just a matter of human imagination.”

The bishop of Innsbruck issued a statement agreeing with the Innsbruck fire chief.

In later years, another Pope would have to contend with a small but zealous cadre of Innsbruck churchgoers demanding that the Vatican declare the site of the image a holy shrine. That Pope would make the same reply that had been given by the man who was Pope when the Cardinal’s Nest burned down: “Faith in the unseen is stronger than faith in things we can touch or see. The truest test of our faith in a supreme being is the willingness to believe without seeing. And in the long run, the Christian churches—all religions of all faiths, for that matter—are better off without such visible signs. Because there will always be those who will see and never believe. But God will especially bless those who believe without seeing.”

The Pope never Directly told anyone whether or not he believed in the sign.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

This is a work of fiction based on fact.

Hitler did set up an organization called the Sonderauftrag Linz, whose purpose was to loot the finest public and private collections of Europe. He planned to exhibit the stolen art in a magnificent museum he would construct in his hometown of linz, Austria. Plans for the Fuhrermuseum were drawn up by an architect, but the structure was never built

Hitler’s liaison with the Sonderauftrag Linz was a man called Heinrich Heim, with whom I spoke in Munich in December 1983. There was then a close-knit community of unrepentant Nazis still residing in Munich, a group that included two of Hitler’s former secretaries and his personal pilot At the time of my visit, they met with each other occasionally to console themselves on their losses, which they have never quite accepted.

Heim lived in an old World War II bomb shelter in the Schwabing section of the city, a few blocks from the Staatsbibliothek, the Bavarian equivalent of the Library of Congress. In addition to the meager royalties he collected from a book he wrote (that discussed his spying on Hitler for Hermann Goering), Heim generated a small amount of revenue by answering requests for information sent to him from all over the world. Most of his research was conducted at the Staatsbibliothek. Werner Meyer, the chief reporter at the time for Munich’s evening newspaper Abend Zeitung, introduced me to Heim one night just before Christmas.