Chapters (50)
- Praise
- Title Page
- Copyright Page
- Dedication
- Epigraph
- ONE
- TWO
- THREE
- FOUR
- FIVE
- SIX
- SEVEN
- EIGHT
- NINE
- TEN
- ELEVEN
- TWELVE
- THIRTEEN
- FOURTEEN
- FIFTEEN
- SIXTEEN
- SEVENTEEN
- EIGHTEEN
- NINETEEN
- TWENTY
- TWENTY-ONE
- TWENTY-TWO
- TWENTY-THREE
- TWENTY-FOUR
- TWENTY-FIVE
- TWENTY-SIX
- TWENTY-SEVEN
- TWENTY-EIGHT
- TWENTY-NINE
- THIRTY
- THIRTY-ONE
- THIRTY-TWO
- THIRTY-THREE
- THIRTY-FOUR
- THIRTY-FIVE
- THIRTY-SIX
- THIRTY-SEVEN
- THIRTY-EIGHT
- THIRTY-NINE
- FORTY
- FORTY-ONE
- FORTY-TWO
- EPILOGUE
- AUTHOR’S NOTE
- Teaser chapter
A small part of my brain was telling me that maybe she was a better Roman Catholic than I had given her credit for. In which case, her meeting with Father Gotovina might just have been a coincidence. That maybe hers had been a genuine confession and that she could have been on the level all along. I paid attention to this part of my brain for a minute or two and then blew it off. After all, this was the part of my brain that still believed in the perfectibility of man. Thanks to Adolf Hitler we all know what that’s worth.
TWENTY-TWO
TWENTY-TWO
Days passed. I got a little better. The weekend came along and Dr. Henkell said I was fit to travel. He had a newish, maroon-colored Mercedes four-door sedan that he had gone all the way to the factory in Sindelfingen to collect, and of which he was very proud. He let me sit in the back so I would be more comfortable on the fifty-eight-mile journey to Garmisch-Partenkirchen. We left Munich on Autobahn Number 2, a very well-engineered highway that took us through Starnberg, where I told Henkell about the eponymous baron and the fabulous house where he lived and the Maybach Zeppelin he was using to run down to the shops. And, because he liked cars a lot, I also told him about the baron’s daughter, Helene Elisabeth, and the Porsche 356 she drove.
“That’s a nice car,” he said. “But I like Mercedes.” And he proceeded to tell me about some of the other cars that were stored in his Ramersdorf garage. These now included my own Hansa, which Henkell had kindly driven away from the place where I had left it on the night I had been picked up by the comrades.
“Cars are a bit of a hobby of mine,” he confessed as we drove on to Traubing and into the Alpine foothills. “So is climbing. I’ve climbed all of the big peaks in the Ammergau Alps.”
“Including the Zugspitze?” The Zugspitze, Germany’s highest mountain, was why most people went to Garmisch-Partenkirchen in the first place.
“That’s not a climb,” he said. “That’s a walk. You’ll be walking up it yourself, in a couple of weeks.” He shook his head. “But my real interest is tropical medicine. There’s a small laboratory in Partenkirchen that the Amis let me use. I’m rather friendly with one of their senior officers. He comes to play chess with Eric once or twice a week. You’ll like him. He speaks perfect German and he’s a damned good chess player.”
“How did you meet?”