The Holcroft Covenant: A Novel Read online

  Manfredi held the envelope across the table, under the light. The dark circles were not coins but waxed seals. All were intact.

  “Following the instructions given to us thirty years ago, this envelope—unlike your father’s letter here—was not to be opened by directors in Geneva. It is separate from the document we prepared, and to the best of our knowledge, Clausen was never aware of it. His own words to you would tend to confirm that. It was brought to us within hours after the courier delivered your father’s letter, which was to be our final communication from Berlin.”

  “What is it?”

  “We don’t know. We were told it was written by several men aware of your father’s activities. Who believed in his cause with great fervor; who considered him in many ways a true martyr of Germany. We were instructed to give it to you with the seals unbroken. You were to read it before you saw your father’s letter.” Manfredi turned the envelope over. There was writing on the front side. The words were in German and written by hand. “You are to sign below, so to state that you received it in the proper condition.”

  Noel took the envelope and read the words he could not understand.

  DIESER BRIEF IST MIT UNGEBROCHENEM SIEGEL

  EMPFANGEN WORDEN. NEUAUFBAU ODER TOD.

  “What does it say?”

  “That you’ve examined the seals and are satisfied.”

  “How can I be sure?”

  “Young man, you’re talking with a director of La Grande Banque de Genève.” The Swiss did not raise his voice but the rebuke was clear. “You have my word. And, in any event, what difference does it make?”

  None, reasoned Holcroft, yet the obvious question bothered him. “If I sign the envelope, what do you do with it?”

  Manfredi was silent for several moments, as if deciding whether or not to answer. He removed his glasses, took a silk handkerchief from his breast pocket, and cleaned them. Finally he replied. “That is privileged information.…”

  “So’s my signature,” interrupted Noel. “Privileged, that is.”

  “Let me finish,” protested the banker, putting back his glasses. “I was about to say it was privileged information that can’t possibly be relevant any longer. Not after so many years. The envelope is to be sent to a post-office box in Sesimbra, Portugal. It is south of Lisbon, on the Cape of Espichel.”

  “Why isn’t it relevant?”

  Manfredi held up the palms of his hands. “The post-office box no longer exists. The envelope will find its way to a dead-letter office and eventually be returned to us.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “I believe it, yes.”

  Noel reached into his pocket for his pen, turning the envelope over to look once again at the waxed seals. They had not been tampered with; and, thought Holcroft, what difference did it make? He placed the envelope in front of him and signed his name.

  Manfredi held up his hand. “You understand, whatever is contained in that envelope can have no bearing on our participation in the document prepared by La Grande Banque de Genève. We were not consulted; nor were we apprised of the contents.”

  “You sound worried. I thought you said it didn’t make any difference. It was too long ago.”

  “Fanatics always worry me, Mr. Holcroft. Time and consequence cannot alter that judgment. It’s a banker’s caution.”

  Noel began cracking the wax; it had hardened over the years and took considerable force before it fell away. He tore the flap open, removed the single page, and unfolded it.

  The paper was brittle with age; the white had turned to a pale brownish yellow. The writing was in English, the letters printed in an odd block lettering that was Germanic in style. The ink was faded but legible. Holcroft looked at the bottom of the page for a signature. There was none. He started reading.

  The message was macabre, born in desperation thirty years ago. It was as though unbalanced men had sat in a darkened room, studying shadows on the wall for signs of the future, studying a man and a life not yet formed.

  FROM THIS MOMENT ON THE SON OF HEINRICH CLAUSEN IS TO BE TESTED. THERE ARE THOSE WHO MAY LEARN OF THE WORK IN GENEVA AND WHO WILL TRY TO STOP HIM, WHOSE ONLY PURPOSE IN LIFE WILL BE TO KILL HIM, THUS DESTROYING THE DREAM CONCEIVED BY THE GIANT THAT WAS HIS FATHER.

  THIS MUST NOT HAPPEN, FOR WE WERE BETRAYED—ALL OF US—AND THE WORLD MUST KNOW WHAT WE REALLY WERE, NOT WHAT THE BETRAYERS SHOWED US TO BE, FOR THOSE WERE THE PORTRAITS OF TRAITORS. NOT US. AND PARTICULARLY NOT HEINRICH CLAUSEN.

  WE ARE THE SURVIVORS OF WOLFSSCHANZE. WE SEEK THE CLEANSING OF OUR NAMES, THE RESTORATION OF THE HONOR THAT WAS STOLEN FROM US.

  THEREFORE THE MEN OF WOLFSSCHANZE WILL PROTECT THE SON FOR AS LONG AS THE SON PURSUES THE FATHER’S DREAM AND RETURNS OUR HONOR TO US. BUT SHOULD THE SON ABANDON THE DREAM, BETRAY THE FATHER, AND WITHHOLD OUR HONOR, HE WILL HAVE NO LIFE. HE WILL WITNESS THE ANGUISH OF LOVED ONES, OF FAMILY, CHILDREN, FRIENDS. NO ONE WILL BE SPARED.

  NONE MUST INTERFERE. GIVE US OUR HONOR. IT IS OUR RIGHT AND WE DEMAND IT.

  Noel shoved the chair back and stood up. “What the hell is this?”

  “I’ve no idea,” replied Manfredi quietly, his voice calm but his large, cold blue eyes conveying his alarm. “I told you we were not apprised.…”

  “Well, get apprised!” shouted Holcroft. “Read it! Who were these clowns? Certifiable lunatics?”

  The banker began reading. Without looking up, he answered softly. “First cousins to lunatics. Men who’d lost hope.”

  “What’s Wolfsschanze? What does it mean?”

  “It was the name of Hitler’s staff headquarters in East Prussia, where the attempt to assassinate him took place. It was a conspiracy of the generals: Von Stauffenberg, Kluge, Höpner—they were all implicated. All shot. Rommel took his own life.”

  Holcroft stared at the paper in Manfredi’s hands. “You mean it was written thirty years ago by people like that?”

  The banker nodded, his eyes narrowed in astonishment. “Yes, but it’s not the language one might have expected of them. This is nothing short of a threat; it’s unreasonable. Those men were not unreasonable. On the other hand, the times were unreasonable. Decent men, brave men, were stretched beyond the parameters of sanity. They were living through a hell none of us can picture today.”

  “Decent men?” asked Noel incredulously.

  “Have you any idea what it meant to be a part of the Wolfsschanze conspiracy? A bloodbath followed, thousands massacred everywhere, the vast majority never having heard of Wolfsschanze. It was yet another final solution, an excuse to still all dissent throughout Germany. What began as an act to rid the world of a madman ended in a holocaust all its own. The survivors of Wolfsschanze saw that happen.”

  “Those survivors,” replied Holcroft, “followed that madman for a long time.”

  “You must understand. And you will. These were desperate men. They were caught in a trap, and for them it was cataclysmic. A world they had helped create was revealed not to be the world they envisioned. Horrors they never dreamed of were uncovered, yet they couldn’t avoid their responsibility for them. They were appalled at what they saw but couldn’t deny the roles they played.”

  “The well-intentioned Nazi,” said Noel. “I’ve heard of that elusive breed.”

  “One would have to go back in history, to the economic disasters, to the Versailles Treaty, the Pact of Locarno, the Bolshevik encroachments—to a dozen different forces—to understand.”

  “I understand what I just read,” Holcroft said. “Your poor misunderstood storm troopers didn’t hesitate to threaten someone they couldn’t know! ‘He will have no life … no one spared … family, friends, children.’ That spells out murder. Don’t talk to me about well-intentioned killers.”

  “They’re the words of old, sick, desperate men. They have no meaning now. It was their way of expressing their own anguish, of seeking atonement. They’re gone. Leave them in peace. Read your father’s letter …”

  “He’s not my father!”
interrupted Noel.

  “Read Heinrich Clausen’s letter. Things will be clearer. Read it. We have several items to discuss and there isn’t much time.”

  * * *

  A man in a brown tweed overcoat and dark Tirolean hat stood by a pillar across from the seventh car. At first glance, there was nothing particularly distinguishing about him, except perhaps his eyebrows. They were thick, a mixture of black and light-gray hair that produced the effect of salt-and-pepper archways in the upper regions of a forgettable face.

  At first glance. Yet if one looked closer, one could see the blunted but not unrefined features of a very determined man. In spite of the pockets of wind that blew in gusts through the platform, he did not blink. His concentration on the seventh car was absolute.

  The American would come out of that doorway, thought the man by the pillar, a much different person from the American who went in. During the past few minutes his life had been changed in ways few men in this world would ever experience. Yet it was only the beginning; the journey he was about to embark on was beyond anything of which the present-day world could conceive. So it was important to observe his initial reaction. More than important. Vital.

  “Attention! Le train de sept heures …”

  The final announcement came over the speakers. Simultaneously, a train from Lausanne was arriving on the adjacent track. In moments the platform would be jammed with tourists flocking into Geneva for the weekend, the way Midlanders scrambled into Charing Cross for a brief fling in London, thought the man by the pillar.

  The train from Lausanne came to a stop. The passenger cars disgorged; the platform was again packed with bodies.

  The figure of the tall American was suddenly in the vestibule of car seven. He was blocked at the doorway by a porter carrying someone’s luggage. It was an irritating moment that might have provoked an argument under normal circumstances. But the circumstances were not normal for Holcroft. He expressed no annoyance; his face was set, unresponsive to the moment, his eyes aware of the physical confusion but not concerned with it. There was an air of detachment about him; he was in the grips of lingering astonishment. This was emphasized by the way he clutched the thick manila envelope between his arm and his chest, his hand curved around the edge, his fingers pressed into the paper with such force they formed a fist.

  It was the cause of his consternation, this document prepared a lifetime ago. It was the miracle they had waited for, lived for—the man by the pillar and those who had gone before him. More than thirty years of anticipation. And now it had surfaced at last!

  The journey had begun.

  Holcroft entered the flow of human traffic toward the ramp that led up to the gate. Although jostled by those around him, he was oblivious of the crowds, his eyes absently directed ahead. At nothing.

  Suddenly, the man by the pillar was alarmed. Years of training had taught him to look for the unexpected, the infinitesimal break in a normal pattern. He saw that break now. Two men, their faces unlike any around them, joyless, without curiosity or expectation, filled only with hostile intent.

  They were surging through the crowds, one man slightly ahead of the other. Their eyes were on the American; they were after him! The man in front had his right hand in his pocket. The man behind had his left hand concealed across his chest, beneath his unbuttoned overcoat. The hidden hands gripped weapons! The man by the pillar was convinced of that.

  He sprang away from the concrete column and crashed his way into the crowd. There were no seconds to be lost. The two men were gaining on Holcroft. They were after the envelope! It was the only possible explanation. And if that were the case, it meant that word of the miracle had leaked out of Geneva! The document inside that envelope was priceless, beyond value. Beside it, the American’s life was of such inconsequence that no thought would be expended taking that life. The men closing in on Holcroft would kill him for the envelope mindlessly, as if removing a disagreeable insect from a bar of gold. And that was mindless! What they did not know was that without the son of Heinrich Clausen the miracle would not happen!

  They were within yards of him now! The man with the black-and-white eyebrows lunged forward through the mass of tourists like a possessed animal. He crashed into people and luggage, throwing aside everything and everyone in his path. When he was within feet of the killer whose hand was concealed under his overcoat, he thrust his own hand into his pocket, clutching the gun inside, and screamed directly at the assailant:

  “Du suchst Clausens Sohn! Das Genfe Dokument!”

  The killer was partially up the ramp, separated from the American by only a few people. He heard the words roared at him by a stranger and spun around, his eyes wide in shock.

  The crowd pressed rapidly up the ramp, skirting the two obvious antagonists. Attacker and protector were in their own miniature arena, facing each other. The observer squeezed the trigger of the gun in his pocket, then squeezed it again. The spits could barely be heard as the fabric exploded. Two bullets entered the body of Holcroft’s would-be assailant, one in the lower stomach, the other far above, in the neck. The first caused the man to convulse forward; the second snapped his head back, the throat torn open.

  Blood burst from the neck with such force that it splattered surrounding faces, and the clothes and suitcases belonging to those faces. It cascaded downward, forming small pools and rivulets on the ramp. Screams of horror filled the walkway.

  The observer-protector felt a hand gripping his shoulder, digging into his flesh. He spun; the second attacker was on him, but there was no gun in his hand. Instead, the blade of a hunting knife came toward him.

  The man was an amateur, thought the observer, as his reactions—instincts born of years of training–came instantly into play. He stepped sideways quickly—a bull-fighter avoiding the horns—and clamped his left hand above his assailant’s wrist. He pulled his right hand from his pocket and gripped the fingers wrapped around the knife. He snapped the wrist downward, vising the fingers around the handle, tearing the cartilage of the attacker’s hand, forcing the blade inward. He plunged it into the soft flesh of the stomach and ripped the sharp steel diagonally up into the rib cage, severing the arteries of the heart. The man’s face contorted; a terrible scream was begun, cut off by death.

  The pandemonium had escalated into uncontrollable chaos; the screaming increased. The profusion of blood in the center of the rushing, colliding bodies fueled the hysteria. The observer-protector knew precisely what to do. He threw up his hands in frightened consternation, in sudden, total revulsion at the sight of the blood on his own clothes, and joined the hysterical crowd racing away like a herd of terrified cattle from the concrete killing ground.

  He rushed up the ramp past the American whose life he had just saved.

  Holcroft heard the screaming. It penetrated the numbing mists he felt engulfed in: clouds of vapor that swirled around him, obscuring his vision, inhibiting all thought.

  He tried to turn toward the commotion, but the hysterical crowd prevented him from doing so. He was swept farther up the ramp and pummeled into the three-foot-high cement wall that served as a railing. He gripped the stone and looked back, unable to see clearly what had happened; he did see a man below arch backward, blood erupting from his throat. He saw a second man lunging forward, his mouth stretched in agony, and then Noel could see no more, the onslaught of bodies sweeping him once again up the concrete ramp.

  A man rushed by, crashing into his shoulder. Holcroft turned in time to see frightened eyes beneath a pair of thick black-and-white brows.

  An act of violence had taken place. An attempted robbery had turned into an assault, into a killing, perhaps. Peaceful Geneva was no more immune to violence than were the wild streets of New York at night, or the impoverished alleyways of Marrakesh.

  But Noel could not dwell on such things; he could not be involved. He had other things to think about. The mists of numbness returned. Through them he vaguely understood that his life would never again be the
same.

  He gripped the envelope in his hand and joined the screaming mass racing up the ramp to the gate.

  3

  The huge aircraft passed over Cape Breton Island and dipped gently to the left, descending into its new altitude and heading. The route was now southwest, toward Halifax and Boston, then into New York.

  Holcroft had spent most of the time in the upstairs lounge, at a single chair in the right rear corner, his black attaché case against the bulkhead. It was easier to concentrate there; no straying eyes of an adjacent passenger could fall on the papers he read and reread, again and again.

  He had begun with the letter from Heinrich Clausen, that unknown but all-pervading presence. It was an incredible document in itself. The information contained in it was of such an alarming nature that Manfredi had expressed the collective wish of the Grande Banque’s directors that it be destroyed. For it detailed in general terms the sources of the millions banked in Geneva three decades ago. Although the majority of these sources were untouchable in any contemporary legal sense—thieves and murderers stealing the national funds of a government headed by thieves and murderers—other sources were not so immune to modern scrutiny. Throughout the war Germany had plundered. It had raped internally and externally. The dissenters within had been stripped; the conquered without, stolen from unmercifully. Should the memories of these thefts be dredged up, the international courts in The Hague could tie up the funds for years in protracted litigations.

  “Destroy the letter,” Manfredi had said in Geneva. “It’s necessary only that you understand why he did what he did. Not the methods; they are a complication without any conceivable resolution. But there are those who may try to stop you. Other thieves would move in; we’re dealing in hundreds of millions.”

  Noel reread the letter for perhaps the twentieth time. Each time he did so, he tried to picture the man who wrote it. His natural father. He had no idea what Heinrich Clausen looked like; his mother had destroyed all photographs, all communications, all references whatsoever to the man she loathed with all her being.