A leta lit the fire and poured herself a glass of wine. She was now determined to find the missing figurines and the Maya Codex, whatever it took; but first she would make the nine-hour train journey to Bad Arolsen, a spa town in central Germany. From there she would head to Mauthausen on the Danube, not far from Linz, where her beloved grandfather had last been seen alive. The Mauthausen concentration camp might not yield any clues, but she had to see it for herself.
Aleta retrieved her folder on the Bad Arolsen records from the bedside table. The six barrack buildings used by Himmler’s elite Waffen SS, who were stationed in Bad Arolsen during the war, now contained shelves of documents stretching for twenty-six kilometres. The card index system alone occupied three whole rooms, providing critical links to medical records, transport lists, registration books and myriad scraps of paper. The records were not yet fully digitised, and in any case, having come this far, Aleta was determined to check them personally.
Schindler’s list was there, with the records of more than a thousand Jewish prisoners whose lives Oskar Schindler had saved, convincing the Nazis he needed them to work on the production of enamel and munitions. So too were the records for ‘Frank, Annelise M.’ But even more important to Aleta than Anne Frank was her discovery that the Mauthausen concentration camp’s Totenbuchen, or Death Books, were also at Bad Arolsen. She shuddered involuntarily at the thought of finding her grandfather’s name. The Mauthausen Totenbuchen had been meticulously handwritten, and amongst the entries was one that was particularly chilling. Every two minutes, for ninety minutes, by order of the commandant, Obersturmbannfuhrer von Hei?en, a prisoner had been shot in the back of the head as a birthday present for Hitler. Had her grandfather met his fate on Hitler’s birthday?
Aleta rose and wandered over to one of the old heavy bookcases that held a framed photograph of her grandparents. Levi and his tall attractive wife, Ramona, together with Aleta’s father, Ariel, as a boy of ten, and his younger sister Rebekkah. It had been taken in 1937, when the Nazi juggernaut was already massing, but back then they were a smiling and happy family, standing on the deck of a riverboat cruising through a steeply rising gorge on the Danube. Behind them, the vineyards of the famous Wachau wine-growing region rose in rocky slate terraces above the church steeple of the village of Joching. Her father’s smile was mischievous, just as she remembered it.
Aleta wiped away a tear as the memories came flooding back: sitting on his shoulders as he jogged down to the shores of Lake Atitlan. Together they would paddle the family canoe over to a secret fishing spot. She knew now that it wasn’t secret, and she suspected some of the fish she’d pulled in on her line had been put there by her father when she wasn’t looking, but he had always been able to infuse her life with a sense of mystery and magic. Now, like her grandfather, he was gone. Weary and flat, she headed for the bathroom and shook a purple-pink capsule from the jar labelled Sarafem. The pills and a good night’s sleep would allow her to function, but she knew they would do nothing to help her lack of energy and the pervasive sense of hopelessness that was her constant companion.
Three floors below, Antonio Sodano quietly entered the courtyard to Aleta’s apartment block. Using a lock pick remarkably similar to O’Connor’s, he dealt with the steel security door at the bottom of the stairs. Sodano pulled a balaclava over his pockmarked, rugged face and soundlessly ascended to the landing outside Aleta’s door.