The Valhalla Exchange

‘I employ an agent in Brazil who has a list of certain names. Any mention of any of them anywhere in South America and he informs me. I flew straight down.’

‘Now that I find truly remarkable.’

‘What do you want to know, son? What he looked like? Will that do? Five foot six inches, bull neck, prominent cheekbones, broad, rather brutal face. You could lose him in any crowd because he looked so damned ordinary. Just another working stiff off the waterfront or whatever. He was virtually unknown to the German public and press. Honours, medals meant nothing to him. Power was all.’ It was as if he was talking to himself as he sat there, staring into the fire. ‘He was the most powerful man in Germany and nobody appreciated it until after the war.’

‘A butcher,’ I said, ‘who condoned the final solution and the deaths of millions of Jews.’

‘Who also sent war orphans to his wife in Bavaria to look after,’ Canning said. ‘You know what Göring said at Nuremberg when they asked him if he knew where Bormann was? He said, “I hope he’s frying in hell, but I don’t know.”’

He heaved himself out of the chair, went behind the bar and reached for a bottle of Scotch. ‘Can I get you another?’

‘Why not?’ I got up and sat on one of the bar stools. ‘Brandy.’

As he poured some into my glass he said,

‘I was once a prisoner-of-war, did you know that?’

‘That’s a reasonably well-known fact, General,’ I said. ‘You were captured in Korea. The Chinese had you for two years in Manchuria. Isn’t that why Nixon hauled you out of retirement the other year to go to Peking with him?’

‘No, I mean way, way back. I was a prisoner once before. Towards the end of the Second World War, the Germans had me. At Schloss Arlberg in Bavaria. A special set-up for prominent prisoners.’

And I genuinely hadn’t known, although it was so far back it was hardly surprising, and then his real, enduring fame had been gained in Korea, after all.

I said. ‘I didn’t know that, General.’

He dropped ice into his glass and a very large measure of whisky. ‘Yes, I was there right to the bitter end. In the area erroneously known as the Alpine Fortress. One of Dr Goebbels’s smarter pieces of propaganda. He actually had the Allies believing there was such a place. It meant the troops were very cautious about probing into that area at first, which made it a safe resting place for big Nazis on the run from Berlin in those last few days.’

‘Hitler could have gone, but didn’t.’

‘That’s right.’

‘And Bormann?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘The one thing that’s never made any sense to me,’ I said. ‘He was a brilliant man. Too clever by half to leave his chances of survival to a mad scramble at the final end of things. If he’d really wanted to escape he’d have gone to Berchtesgaden when he had the chance instead of staying in the bunker till the end. He’d have had a plan.’

‘Oh, but he did, son.’ Canning nodded slowly. ‘You can bet your sweet life on that.’

‘And how would you know, General?’ I asked softly.

And at that he exploded, came apart at the seams.

‘Because I saw him, damn you,’ he cried harshly. ‘Because I stood as close to him as I am to you, traded shots with him, had my hands on his throat, do you understand?’ He paused, hands held out, looking at them in a kind of wonder. ‘And lost him,’ he whispered.

He leaned on the bar, head down. There was a long, long moment in which I couldn’t think of a thing to say, but waited, my stomach hollow with excitement. When he finally raised his head, he was calm again.

‘You know what’s so strange, O’Hagan? So bloody incredible? I kept it to myself all these years. Never mentioned it to a soul until now.’

2 (#uf8ee78d0-58a9-5ae4-8993-7620fb9e51ca)

It began, if it may be said to have begun anywhere, on the morning of Wednesday, 25 April 1945, a few miles north of Innsbruck.

When Jack Howard emerged from the truck at the rear of the column just after first light, it was bitterly cold, a powdering of dry snow on the ground, for the valley in which they had halted for the night was high in the Bavarian Alps, although he couldn’t see much of the mountains because of the heavy clinging mist which had settled among the trees. It reminded him too much of the Ardennes for comfort. He stamped his feet to induce a little warmth and lit a cigarette.

Sergeant Hoover had started a wood fire, and the men, only five of them now, crouched beside it. Anderson, O’Grady, Garland and Finebaum who’d once played clarinet with Glenn Miller and never let anyone forget it. Just now he was on his face trying to blow fresh life into the flames. He was the first to notice Howard.

‘Heh, the captain’s up and he don’t look too good.’

‘Why don’t you try a mirror?’ Garland inquired. ‘You think you look like a daisy or something?’

‘Stinkweed – that’s the only flower he ever resembled,’ O’Grady said.

‘That’s it, hotshot,’ Finebaum told him. ‘You’re out. From here on in you find your own beans.’ He turned to Hoover. ‘I ask you, Sarge. I appeal to your better nature. Is that the best these mothers can offer after all I’ve done for them?’

‘That’s a truly lousy act, Finebaum, did I ever tell you that?’ Hoover poured coffee into an aluminium cup. ‘You’re going to need plenty of practice, boy, if you’re ever going to get back into vaudeville.’

‘Well, I’ll tell you,’ Finebaum said. ‘I’ve had kind of a special problem lately. I ran out of audience. Most of them died on me.’

Hoover took the coffee across to the truck and gave it to Howard without a word. Somewhere thunder rumbled on the horizon.

‘Eighty-eights?’ the captain said.

Hoover nodded. ‘Don’t they ever give up? It don’t make any kind of sense to me. Every time we turn on the radio they tell us this war’s as good as finished.’

‘Maybe they forgot to tell the Germans.’

‘That makes sense. Any chance of submitting it through channels?’

Howard shook his head. ‘It wouldn’t do any good, Harry. Those krauts don’t intend to give in until they get you. That’s what it’s all about.’

Hoover grunted. ‘Those mothers better be quick or they’re going to miss out, that’s all I can say. You want to eat now? We still got plenty of K-rations and Finebaum traded some smokes last night for half a dozen cans of beans from some of those Limey tank guys up the column.’

‘The coffee’s just fine, Harry,’ Howard said. ‘Maybe later.’

The sergeant moved back to the fire and Howard paced up and down beside the truck, stamping his feet and clutching the hot cup tightly in mittened fingers. He was twenty-three years of age, young to be a captain of Rangers, but that was the circumstances of war. He wore a crumpled Mackinaw coat, woolknit muffler at his throat and a knitted cap. There were times when he could have passed for nineteen, but this was not one of them, not with the four-day growth of dark beard on his chin, the sunken eyes.

But once he had been nineteen, an Ohio farmer’s son with some pretensions to being a poet and the desire to write for a living which had sent him to Columbia to study journalism. That was a long time ago – before the flood. Before the further circumstances of war which had brought him to his present situation in charge of the reconnaissance element for a column of the British 7th Armoured Division, probing into Bavaria towards Berchtesgaden.

Hoover squatted beside the fire. Finebaum passed him a plate of beans. ‘The captain not eating?’

‘Not right now.’

‘Jesus,’ Finebaum said. ‘What kind of way is that to carry on?’

‘Respect, Finebaum.’ Hoover prodded him with his knife. ‘Just a little more respect when you speak about him.’

‘Sure, I respect him,’ Finebaum said. ‘I respect him like crazy and I know how you and he went in at Salerno together and how those Krauts jumped you outside Anzio with those machine guns flat zeroed in and took out three-quarters of the battalion and how our gracious captain saved the rest. So he’s God’s gift to soldiery; so he should eat occasionally. He ain’t swallowed more than a couple of mouthfuls since Sunday.’