“YOU’RE IN LUCK. We do have some documents under the name Isolda Varrick.” The Bundesarchiv researcher leaned closer to the screen. “Letters … aaahhh …” She squinted. “It looks like you are the first to ask about them. They’ve been in a private collection and just arrived. They’re being manually documented now.” She wrote down some numbers on a Post-It.
“What file will they be placed in?”
“The Red Army liberation of Auschwitz.”
“Auschwitz?” Stag felt the punch to his gut, but he wasn’t quite surprised. “Was Isolda Varrick taken there?”
“Let me see. We have the Death Books online in our database.” The researcher took up her glasses that dangled onto her blouse by a cord. She typed in a few more strokes. “No. Isolda Varrick is not among the names in the Death Books. But, as you know, given what went on at the time and the destruction of documents, our records are far from complete. She certainly could have been there.”
“Does it say in whose possession the letters were when they were found?”
She looked at the screen and cross-referenced a few items. “All it says here is that the letters were donated by the family of a Soviet liberator.”
Stag ruminated on the idea that Isolda was shipped off to Auschwitz. But where was the logic of her being caught there with letters written by herself to another? No, it was probably someone else who’d somehow had them on themselves in the final hour.
“The copies have been ordered. You may collect them at the desk.” The middle-aged woman gave him a smile. “Anything else?”
He shook his head. With a nod, he headed to the main desk.
He did not see the Interpol Special Agent behind him saunter to the desk and pull out his badge on the clerk.
Stag had the copies of the three Auschwitz letters tucked into Isolda’s Mein Kampf. They were all three addressed to a man named Eduard Schulte in Berlin. He burned to hole up somewhere and read them, study them, correlate them to the diary, but right now, he didn’t have time. He had people to evade and housekeeping to do. And a trip to plan.
He assumed he was being followed. The only way to shake it was to head to Alexanderplatz Station. He spent two hours getting on and off departing trains until he was sure no one could be on him. The next stop was back to Marzahn to get his supplies. He’d collected a large amount of cash at Deutschebank from a wire transfer of his US account. In exchange for a mere 15,000 Euros, he was able to collect all the documents he’d ordered when he’d gotten the P83.
He was now set.
He walked into Citibank with the rest of the cash of the wire transfer, and all the pages he’d translated out of the diary along with the copies of the white silk key. At the International Customer Desk, he whipped out his “British passport” under the ironic name of john Dedman, and said, “I’d like to open an account and safety deposit box.”
When the friendly young clerk asked if it would be cash or check, he answered, “Cash.” He dumped a stack of 500-euro notes on the desk. The clerk’s eyes widened, but she was only too happy to be of service.