DREAD WEIGHED DOWN on him. Stag gripped the chisel and began removing the bricks. He vaguely wondered if others in the apartments around him could hear him banging, but he didn’t stop. He was driven to see the other side.
The bricks piled up on the Aubusson rug, the dust swirled in the morning light. Slowly the hole became large enough for him to reach through.
He shoved his hand into the darkness beyond, and touched a strange, unexpected barrier. In the time it took him to draw back, horror slowly seeped into his blood. He knew what he’d found. Clawing, clinging hair; coarse black ropes of it; red, fuzzy piles of it; here and there, sprinkled with the barest wisps of caramel and blond. When he looked down at his hand, several baby curls clung to his fingers, the color of a fawn.
He found himself on his knees.
The strands of nameless victims were saved and matted into a felt, thick enough to form batting insulation for a German submarine. This was Heydrich’s fitting end for his own U-boat. Not a sound would escape.
It took a long time for him to find the courage to stand, and pick up the hammer and chisel again. His heart hammered rebelliously in his chest.
She was there in the corner of the closet. She’d mummified, and there were piles of hair around her where she must’ve clawed at the felt in moments of despair and terror. His heart seized up. He couldn’t figure out which was worse at the moment: finding Isolda’s body slumped down in the corner of a sealed tomb, or the fact that the very substance that had sealed her inside was the hair of a thousand murdered people.
He knelt down gently to look at her.
She wore the Blood Eagle on the ring finger of her right hand, as many Germans did when signifying a wedding ring. In her other hand, as if tossed in as an afterthought by her tormentor, was a note, perhaps the last she’d ever written, perhaps the thing that Heydrich had caught her with and sealed her fate, the silk hanging limply from her skeletal fingers. To him, it was as if she held out her death warrant.
He gently took the note from her and decoded it then and there. It was another attempt to reach the old man at the paint store. Perhaps he’d been her traitor all along; lost to history now. But she implored him to give the warning.
The diamonds did not go in the lake. I beg you to reach Shulte and tell him the information is wrong! They ran off the road and went down the mountain to land on a ledge. I’ve no location yet. Do not search the lake. It is not there. It is on the mountain!
She gave no more pleas for help in this one. She knew.
“I’m sure of it,” Jake said, sitting at the apartment table. “The museum’s evidence was slight, but compelling. In our case, I think there can be no other conclusion.”
Stag sat facing him, still stunned by his own discovery. The coffee in front of him had gone cold.
“Diamonds, don’t you see? It always struck me as frivolous to be worried about some diamonds instead of a nuke.” Jake, as if in nervous reflex, emptied his cold cup in the sink and poured him another. “But this answered it. I saw it in the underground letters. I’d never heard it before.”
Jake went to his phone and brought up a picture.
“This is what they were talking about. It was slang used to refer to the SD, the Sicherheitsdienst. Heydrich’s security service. The SD’s uniform patch was the initials SD framed in a diamond.”
Stag looked down at the photo. There it was, a distinct black diamond as the background with the embroidered letters SD in white. A patch identifying the wearer as one of Heydrich’s goons. Worn on the left sleeve of the uniform. So obvious that, even in the portrait they had of Heydrich, the SD lozenge patch was up front and center.
“The diamonds in the lake was an oblique reference to the SD men tapped to secure the transport of this bomb. It was her code way of saying they were taken out by the crash,” Jake said. “All the diamonds she referred to in the diary are SD men. She was surrounded by them. Watching them, reporting on them. The goddamned bomb and Heydrich were surrounded by them!”
Stag took another long moment to absorb what Jake had told him.
“We’ve got to reassess that diary now,” Jake continued. “I suspect the bomb went into a cliff somewhere. It’s probably still there. The transporting was probably so secret that when the truck had an accident, no one knew about it but perhaps Heydrich. Then he was assassinated before he could do anything. The diamonds have all been a red herring.” Jake sat down, facing him. Ready for his conclusions.
“Not all of them,” Stag said. He stuck his fingers in his coat pocket and gingerly placed the Blood Eagle on the table like it was radioactive.