“Take it easy,” said Ruthie. “All we need is an Enigma machine, and I know just where we can find one.”

VI

VI

Alex Lansdowne had spent the morning sandblasting a red swastika off the back garden wall at his home in Buckinghamshire. Considering the contents of his garden and of the warehouse-sized building that occupied nearly half of the three acres behind his house, he was, frankly, surprised he didn’t have to do this more often. He never knew, on those days when he woke to a swastika on the garden wall or a crude portrait of Hitler in the post, whether he was being attacked by people repulsed by what he kept in that garden or encouraged by those who thought they understood his motivations. Somewhere between the progressives and the skinheads lay the garden, and the world, of Alex Lansdowne.

Alex felt only apathy for those who decorated his garden wall, regardless of their motivation. A man who amasses the world’s largest collection of Nazi artifacts and memorabilia is bound to make some enemies along the way and that fact didn’t much bother him. He had sandblasted his garden wall before and he would do it again. What the hell, he thought, it gave him a little exercise.

Despite what the neo-Nazis and the town council thought, Alex had no interest in glorifying the Third Reich. His interest in Nazi Germany was historical and intellectual, not political. History fascinated Alex, particularly the Second World War, and he believed if one did not study and understand that war in all its minutiae the world would repeat that unhappy chapter, this time with nuclear weapons at the ready from day one. So to the chagrin of his neighbors, Alex kept four restored Panzer tanks at the bottom of the garden and a machine gun cannon mounted on top of his shed.

Most of his collection, however, remained invisible to those who objected to it—stashed away in his prefabricated aluminum warehouse and crammed into every nook and cranny of his crumbling home. After nearly forty years of collecting, Nazi uniforms, posters, books, sculptures, documents, vehicles, weaponry, and even office equipment crowded in on Lansdowne from every side. His collection had subsumed his house, leaving him only a bit of kitchen and a corner of a bedroom; it had annexed his garden; it had depleted his inheritance; it had driven away his wife; but it had never dampened his enthusiasm or sapped his strength. He believed one day the world would understand the importance of his passion, and until that day arrived he happily sacrificed his home, his money, his family, and his time to preserve and protect this collection that told a story no mere history book could re-create.

So he had sandblasted his wall and retreated to clean and polish his latest acquisition—a four-rotor Naval Enigma machine.