Soul Intent
Copyright © 2009 by Dennis Batchelder
Published by NetLeaves at Smashwords
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Ebook ISBN 978-0-9798056-3-9
Printed in the United States of America
prologue
October 15, 1946
Nuremberg, Germany
Archibald Morgan withdrew his hand from the prisoner’s clammy grasp and wiped it on the sleeve of his brown robe. “The deposit has been made,” he said.
The prisoner, a large man in a larger baggy uniform, licked his lips and spoke in a whisper. “Everything left was accepted? My gold and my papers?”
“All of it.” Morgan dipped his hand into his pocket and pulled out a small sheet of flimsy paper. “Your depositary receipt.”
The prisoner took it and used his finger to caress the listed items. “Sleep well, my little darlings.” He handed the receipt back to Morgan. “Please destroy this. If the guards discovered it after they…” His voice trailed off.
“Neither of us would want that to happen.” Morgan secreted the paper inside his robe. “Good luck, sir.”
“I believe my luck has, how do you Americans put it? Run out.” The man frowned. “Keep everything safe for my return.” His voice rose in volume. “When I shall gaze upon the marble monument the Berliners erect in my memory.”
The white-helmeted guard banged his stick on the door. The sound bounced off the stark walls. “Enough already with that monument crap,” he said. “Keep the noise down, Nazi.”
The prisoner bowed his head to the guard, then glanced at Morgan. “Since the verdict two weeks ago, they have become unbearably rude,” he whispered.
As the guard let Morgan out of the cell, the prisoner called out, “I won’t forget this, Archibald Morgan. I shall find you once I return, and I shall reward you for your good work.”
The Soul Identity overseer shuddered at the thought. He shuffled as fast as he dared out of Nuremberg Prison’s Cellblock C and almost tripped on his robe. He climbed the two flights of stairs, nodded at the soldier behind the desk, and escaped into the brisk October evening.
As far as Morgan was concerned, Reichsmarschall Hermann Goering’s promises had fallen upon deaf ears. The Nazi general should rot in hell; his soul should never return.
He paused after he crossed the platz and stepped onto the sidewalk. Spotlights mounted on the Palais du Justice walls cast an array of sinister shadows in front of him. He had done his despicable duty. He alone had understood that the journey to a better world required distasteful compromises. Maybe someday Flora would also understand…
He shook his head. Enough. The journalists he had met in the Nuremberg Grand Hotel bar were giving four to one odds that the eleven condemned Nazis would hang before sunrise. He had finished the deposit just in time. His work was finally over—he could flee this war-torn country and return to his own battles in Sterling.
one
Present Day
Kent Island, Maryland
“They exploit people who believe in reincarnation,” Lester the reporter said. He glanced up at me, pen poised over his pad. “Did I get that right?”
“I didn’t say that, Lester.” If I squinted just right, the white streaks of scalp poking through his greasy combed-over hairdo looked like a bunch of tiny bananas.
Val sat next to me with her arms crossed. Her smile looked decidedly more forced than it did ten minutes ago, when this interview started.
The reporter gave me an oily smile. “I’m sorry, Mr. Waverly. Maybe you could repeat it for me.”
“Soul Identity assists people who like the concepts behind reincarnation,” I said. This was my fourth rendition.
He wrote that down again. “Got it. Exploits people who like the concepts behind reincarnation.”
“I said assists. Not exploits.” I pointed at him. “You put all kinds of words in my mouth last year, and it’s not going to happen again. Either get it right, or get out.”
He flashed that used-car salesman’s smile again. “Assists. That’s what I said.”
Val uncrossed her arms and rubbed her palms on her tanned legs, just below her white shorts. “Let’s just show him how it works, Scott,” she said.
“You think that’s wise?” I asked.
She shrugged. “We’ve got only twenty minutes until your picnic, and Lester seems tireless in his search for dirt.” She smiled at him. “No offense.”
He smiled back, showing off a gap between his front teeth. “None taken, Ms. Nikolskaya.”
“Do you have a reader?” I asked her.
“I always have a reader.” She dug into her purse and pulled out a yellow device about half the size of a matchbox car. It had a tiny lens on one end and a big button on its side.
“What’s that?” Lester asked.
“A camera,” I said. “Let Val take your picture, and we’ll use it to explain how everything works.”
Lester licked his palm and used it to smooth his hair. He sat up straight on the couch, sucked in his gut, and attempted to pull tight the gap in his shirt where his belly hair poked through. Then he smiled at Val. “Ready when you are.”
She looked at him steadily. “I’m taking a picture of your eyes, Lester. It’s not a portrait.” She brought the reader to six inches in front of his right eye and clicked the button.
“My eyes?”
“Keep still.” Val held the reader in front of his left eye and clicked again. “Okay, I’m done.” She tossed me the reader. “Work your magic.”
I caught it and beckoned to Lester. “Come with me as I uncover your soul.” I followed that with the opening notes of Beethoven’s Fifth: Da-da-da-dum.
The three of us walked out of my living room and into the office.
Lester headed for the windows. “You waste this scenery on your workplace?” He gestured at the panoramic view of the Chesapeake Bay. “Why not make this your living room?”
“Because this way we get to enjoy the view all day long.” I flipped open the top of the reader, exposed its USB port, and plugged it into my laptop. “Now watch carefully.”
I clicked on my latest Soul Identity icon. Images of two brown eyes appeared on opposite sides of the screen.
Lester stood next to me. “Those are my eyes?” he asked.
I nodded. “Pay attention.”
The eye images cut away all but the two brown irises and pupils, then sprouted grid lines on their outside edges. The right iris rotated clockwise until it aligned with the left.
“You’ve improved your program,” Val said. She stood behind my chair, her arms on my shoulders.
I leaned my head back and looked up at her. Her red hair caught the sunlight. “One hundred percent automated,” I said.
She smiled, which upside-down looked like a frown.
“Is this some kind of way to steal my identity?” Lester asked.
I straightened up. “So far it’s just a photo of your eyes. It’s not yet your soul identity.”
The two irises moved toward each other, but instead of colliding, the left slid over the right. The screen filled with an enlarged view of the resulting single image.
“Now it’ll calculate the differences between your two irises,” I said.
A few dozen arcs, whorls, lines, and starbursts glowed on the screen, and the overlapped irises faded to a very light brown. The computer beeped.
I pointed at the image. “And there you have it,” I said to Lester. “That’s your soul identity.”
“Is it like a fingerprint?” he asked.
“If you mean, is it unique, then yes, it’s the only one just like it in the whole wide world.”
“At least for now,” Val said. “But after you die, that identity will come back in somebody else’s eyes.”
He turned to her. “What does that mean?”
She smiled. “Your soul identity repeats. Before you were born, another person carried it in their eyes. And after you die, somebody else will get it.”
He narrowed his eyes. “Can you prove this?”
She sighed. “It’s a matter of faith, not proof.”
He smiled and pulled out his pad. “So Soul Identity is tricking people into thinking they’re reincarnated.”
“Hold on a second,” Val said. “It’s faith, but there’s some science behind it. We’ve read over fifty million sets of eyes, and we’ve never found two living people sharing the same soul identity.”
He shrugged. “So?”
I spun in my chair to face him. “Lester, you’re missing the point. These guys have been tracking soul identities for almost twenty-six hundred years. They have examples of identities repeating eight, ten, and even twelve times over the centuries. If you like reincarnation, you’ll love Soul Identity.”
“I still don’t get it. What’s there to love?” he asked.
“What they offer you,” I said. “Are you married?”
He shook his head.
“Any kids?”
“Nope.”
“So what happens to your wealth when you die?”
“I don’t care. I’ll be dead.”
“But if you knew you were coming back in the future, wouldn’t you want to give yourself a head start in your next life?” I asked. “Soul Identity can hold onto your money and memories until you reclaim them.”
He scratched his head. “You’re saying I could give my future life an unfair advantage? I could’ve used a leg up this time around.”
“Check with the folks at Soul Identity,” I said. “Maybe your previous soul carrier left you something.”
“I can do that?”
He looked like somebody just told him he might have won the lottery. But I didn’t want to raise his hopes, or his greed level, too high; if he found nothing in his soul line collection, he’d pen a nasty piece about us.
So I smiled and said, “Of course you can. The chances of having a recorded past are slim, but you can at least plan for a bright future.”
Lester scratched his chin, and after a minute he nodded his head. “I’ll do that.”
Val handed him a card as she let him out the front door. “Give Madame Flora a call,” she said. “She’ll get you started.”
As I straightened up the office for the party, I thought about how easy it was to seduce Lester with Soul Identity’s promise.
Like everybody in the world, Lester’s identity in his eyes will remain unique as long as he is alive, and then after he dies, somebody else will be born with it. That new person and Lester will share a soul line, and they each will take their turn being the carrier of the line. Soul Identity’s first job is to keep these identities and soul lines connected—they maintain the bridges between Lester’s past and future carriers.
Their second job is to be the world’s largest bank. Once they calculate Lester’s identity, they check to see if any previous carriers have left him any money, memories, and lessons in his soul line collection, stored in Soul Identity’s depositary. Soul Identity invests the money on his soul line’s behalf. They’ve been doing this for almost twenty-six hundred years. They have several million soul lines, and they’re managing over two trillion dollars’ worth of investments.
Over the past year, I’ve noticed quite a range in the way Soul Identity members think about their soul lines. Some become deeply religious: they attribute a grand plan to God, and they bask in the glory of how special they are. Others treat it as their proof of immortality. Neither of these approaches sits well with me. I prefer the way Val sees it—she hopes to pass on her memories and lessons to others who’d feel she was significant. This makes her relevant far into the future.
I sighed. I didn’t think Lester was searching for relevancy. He probably was just gold digging.
two
Present Day
Kent Island, Maryland
My parents arrived five minutes after Lester bolted in search of his destiny. They wore shorts, our company polo shirts, and sandals. Dad carried a stack of red folders, and Mom wheeled a large cooler up to the front door.
She poked her head inside. “Yoo-hoo! You guys decent?”
“Of course we are,” I said. I pulled the door open. “Come on in.”
“Are the girls here?” she asked.
“Not yet,” Val said. She reached for the handle on the cooler. “Let me take this to the kitchen.”
Dad followed Mom inside. He dropped the red folders on his desk. He went to the refrigerator and helped himself to a beer. Then he and I headed out back.
“You got any bait?” he asked.
“It’s all ready,” I said. We walked out to the end of the dock, and I chopped two bloodworms in half. We baited, cast out, set the rods into their holders, and parked ourselves on the bench.
“Bluefish are running, I read online this morning,” he said.
I grunted.
He drained his beer. “Something bugging you?”
I nodded. “Lester the reporter just left. He was back digging up dirt on Soul Identity.”
“What’d he want, an anniversary story?”
“I can’t believe it’s been a year already.”
Dad smiled. “His exposé was yellow journalism at its worst.”
Last summer our tiny security company contracted with Soul Identity, and we helped save them from insolvency while we unraveled an insider attack. That took a little more than a week, and it took me a little less than a week to fall for Valentina Nikolskaya, the gorgeous redhead in charge of writing the software Soul Identity used.
At the time I had thought Soul Identity was some kind of wacky, New Age cult. But they’re not. They don’t force any religious accoutrements on top of their identification and depositary. They let people focus on spiritual questions without having to cater to any one group’s thoughts on what the Almighty or the Everlasting is all about. Instead of acting like another religion, they foster personal spiritual thinking.
At least now they do. Some time in the last decade they had stopped paying attention to personal growth, and they left themselves open to a nasty insider attack. It came from someone they thought was a leader: Andre Feret. He started his own religion called WorldWideSouls, and he conned many Soul Identity members into transferring their deposits to his new church. Val and I helped to catch and expose him as a fraud. Now Feret rots at the bottom of a Venetian canal, WorldWideSouls languishes at a fraction of its former size, and Soul Identity flourishes as a place where spiritual thinking is encouraged.
Lester the reporter got involved because some of Feret’s WorldWideSouls goons had shot at my parents, Val, and me. We escaped on my boat, but while we were out of town in India, Iceland, and Italy, Lester’s paper ran wild with speculations on a mob invasion of Kent Island. His exaggerated tales of mayhem brought in more work for our security consulting firm, but it also made my number one client nervous about our notoriety.
“If he writes any more dirt, Archie’s gonna be pissed,” I said. Archibald Morgan was Soul Identity’s octogenarian executive overseer.
My cell phone rang, and I glanced at the caller ID. “Speak of the devil,” I said as I thumbed the answer button. “Archie, we were just talking about you.”
“Scott, I require your immediate services,” Archie said. “Can you come to Sterling right away?”
I threw the call on speakerphone so Dad could hear. “We’re in the middle of our company picnic, and then Val and I were going to celebrate our first year together with a week off somewhere.” Not that I had planned anything yet, but I should have. “What’s the emergency?”
“Our depositary has been robbed!” Archie’s voice shrieked out of the phone.
Soul Identity’s huge investment pool made its depositary quite a target. It explained why they preferred anonymity over notoriety.
“The whole depositary?” I asked, glancing over at Dad.
Heavy breathing over the phone.
“Archie?”
“I may have overstated the problem,” he said.
I looked at Dad, and he shrugged. We waited until Archie continued.
“During the Nuremberg trials in 1946, I helped a Nazi general establish his soul line collection. Today I happened to look inside the account, and the items I helped him deposit are missing.”
“Does the account have a current carrier?” I asked.
“It does not.”
“Has anybody opened the collection since 1946?”
“The depositary has no records of any activity.”
I scratched my head. “A soul line collection was broken into sometime in the last sixty-four years, and you want me to solve it?”
“I want you to find out who broke in and how they did it, and then make sure they cannot do it again,” he said.
I glanced at Dad as I spoke into the phone. “You do realize how cold the trail could be.”
A big sigh over the speaker. “Of course I do. But you must realize how important this is. Please come to Sterling, Scott. I need your help.”
He did pay the bills, and a depositary break-in, no matter how long ago it happened, sounded interesting. “How about we fly up in the morning?” I asked.
“I will await your arrival,” he said, the relief evident in his voice.
I disconnected and turned to Dad. “I never would have guessed that Soul Identity deposited Nazi money,” I said.
“You’d better not tell Lester.”
Val came down the dock. “Have you seen the girls?” she asked.
I cupped my hands around my eyes to reduce the glare bouncing off the water, and I tracked the closest boat heading south from the Bay Bridge. “That’s them coming now.”
“You let them use your boat?” Dad asked.
“They needed to get their diving credentials re-certified,” I said. “They’ve been taking it out all week.”
“Let’s hope they sail better than they cook,” he said. He got up and lowered the boatlift into the water.
While Dad readied the lift, I told Val about Archie’s call. “He’s acting kind of strange,” I said. “I told him we’d fly up tomorrow.”
She smiled. “I’d love to meet with my team again before our big launch.”
“Then I’ll book us a room at the guest house.”
Rose and Marie waved to us and brought the boat close to the dock. Rose sat in the cockpit, and Marie stood at the bow, a coil of rope in her hands. The twins wore huge sunglasses and tiny bikinis. They each sported an official company baseball hat, their long dark hair pulled back into ponytails through the hats’ fasteners.
“That’s quite the summer uniform,” Dad said. “What if we distributed a company calendar featuring the twins? It would be great advertising for the business.”
Rose and Marie worked part-time with us, mostly on weekend assignments, as this fit into their freshman-year university schedule. Their exotic Gypsy beauty, happy laughter, and earnest acting made them perfect for their assignments.
Rose steered the boat into the slip, and Dad raised the boatlift.
Marie jumped onto the dock. “Sorry we’re late, Scott,” she said. “We had to drive Grandma to the airport this morning.”
“She’s taking a vacation?” I asked.
She shook her head. “Mr. Morgan asked her to come up to Sterling. Some problem with an old account from the forties that they both worked on.”
Madame Flora, the twins’ grandmother, operated a palm reading joint here on Kent Island. She recruited Soul Identity members, earning commissions when they matched existing soul lines. My parents and I met her and the twins last year as we started our Soul Identity work.
Madame Flora’s involvement in Archie’s current predicament didn’t surprise me. The old Gypsy lady’s entanglements with the organization appeared to run deep.
“Your grandmother’s been working with Archie for a long time,” I said.
Rose hopped onto the deck. “She told us she first met Mr. Morgan in Germany, right after World War II,” she said.
“It’s amazing how everybody’s so connected,” Val said to me.
“What did you girls make for the picnic?” Dad asked.
“Pasta salad,” Rose said. “Only Marie forgot to peel the onions before she chopped them up.”
“I was pulling out the little bits of onion paper all morning, bawling my eyes out,” Marie said.
“And I soaked the pasta all night long, but it never did get soft,” Rose said. “Good thing salad’s supposed to be crunchy.”
I looked down at the dock, biting my lip and trying not to laugh. Then Rose poked Marie, and the two burst out in giggles.
“What’s the joke?” I asked.
“We know you guys never trust our cooking,” Marie said. “We didn’t really make a pasta salad. We ordered pizza.”
And our fourth annual company picnic was a success. Rose and Marie whipped us all at badminton, Dad and I held court at the barbeque, and Mom and Val cooked up a storm. We sat out under a large maple and told stories about the adventures we had over the past year. When we all were full, Dad got us arranged into a semicircle and handed each of us a red folder.
“Why so formal?” I asked.
“It’s our annual report,” Mom said. “Your father worked on it most of the night.”
Dad had us flip to the first page. “Look at the graph,” he said. “Our business grew by seventeen hundred percent this year.”
“Your Soul Identity work made up almost half the increase,” Mom said. “But my testing business did even better.”
Last fall Mom and the twins established a girls-only penetration testing service. The three went out on weekends to various banks and government facilities. They used low-tech hacking to break in, and they held seminars on making security improvements. Every now and then they’d invite Val, Dad, and me to join them on their escapades. Mom had made friends with a bunch of commercial insurance underwriters, and those guys fiercely promoted her services.
I flipped the page. “How about our costs, Dad?”
“That’s even better news,” he said. “Our profits are way up. Even after tripling our bonuses, paying taxes, and buying new equipment, our five person company has a little over a million dollars in cash reserves.”
Smiles all around.
Val raised her hand. “Have you thought about donating to charity? It’s a great way to give something back to the community.”
I shrugged. “Honestly, no.” I wasn’t that thrilled with the idea, either. I looked around the circle. “What do you guys think?”
“It sounds like a good idea,” Mom said, and everybody nodded.
“If we do this, it has to be a charity that actually uses the money wisely,” I said. “Not some group that eats it up in administrative costs.”
“You could give us each fifty grand, and let us choose where to donate it,” Dad said.
Everybody nodded again.
“I know Grandma gives money to help the Roma in Croatia,” Marie said. “That’s where she grew up.”
“Those Gypsies don’t waste a dime,” Rose said. “We spent the summer after our junior year over there, helping them build a community center.”
“Rose and I will donate our portions to Grandma’s fund,” Marie said.
Rose nodded.
“I can support that,” Mom said. She nudged Dad with her elbow. “So can you.”
“It appears I can too,” Dad said.
I looked at Val, and she nodded. “Let’s make it unanimous,” I said. I turned to the girls. “Find out from your Grandma where we should send the check.”
“And see if you can get them to write us a press release,” Dad said. “A quarter of a million should buy us some good will.”
three
Present Day
Kent Island, Maryland
The next morning Val and I caught the early flight from Baltimore to Providence. Ninety minutes later I drove the rental car up to the Soul Identity headquarters gates in Sterling, Massachusetts and whipped out my shiny gold membership card.
“It’s my first time using this,” I said to the guard.
After dragging my feet for almost a year, I had finally signed on as a full-fledged Soul Identity member. Bob, our local Soul Identity delivery person, dropped off my membership card and welcome package just last week.
Val reached out and straightened my collar. “But you’re still wearing black.”
“Because it pays so much more.” At headquarters, employees wore green and contractors wore black. My agreement had Soul Identity paying my outrageously high contractor wages around the clock while I was on assignment. “And because I look better in black,” I added.
“Don’t you feel guilty, now that you’re a member?”
Val and I had been having this conversation for the past few months. She felt I was taking advantage of the organization.
I thought they owed it to me. “I consider it hazard pay,” I said. Last year Andre Feret’s henchmen had blown up our guesthouse in Sterling, shot at us in Maryland, and almost suffocated us in India. Feret himself had threatened to kill us in Venice.
“Good point,” she said. She leaned over and kissed my cheek. “Maybe this assignment will be nice and boring, and then you’ll start wearing green to work.”
“Let’s hope not.” I parked the car in the underground garage of the three-story, giant yellow clapboard building that was Soul Identity’s world headquarters.
I punched the “3” on the elevator panel. James’s stool stood empty and dusty in the corner, so I wiped it off, climbed on it, and shouted, “All aboard—next stop overseer floor and depositary!”
“You do sound like him,” Val said. “I wonder if he’s enjoying his retirement.”
James had been Soul Identity’s elevator operator until he retired and left for Florida last year. He had provided Val and me with some crucial help and comic relief as we fought against Feret’s shenanigans.
“My guess is he got bored and took a job on the Disney train,” I said.
We walked into Archie’s office and saw him sitting around his coffee table with Berry, Ann, and Madame Flora. Berry, once my neighbor on Kent Island, was now Soul Identity’s other overseer. Ann ran the depositary. Madame Flora, still a palm reader, was Rose and Marie’s grandmother and the person who shot Feret. These four made up the organization’s leadership.
After we greeted everybody, I looked at Ann. “So your impregnable depositary has finally cracked. Somebody broke in?”
“Back up, Scott,” she said. She sat with her arms crossed and her forehead wrinkled by her scowl. “All our records are in order. There’s been no break-in.”
“But you know the gold is gone and the documents are missing,” Archie said. His bowtie hung askew, and tufts of his usually neat and trim white hair pointed in all directions. “Tell them, Flora—you were there when we deposited it.”
“I was there, but all I know is what you told me,” Madame Flora said. “As you will recall, that wasn’t much at all.”
The two of them glared at each other.
After a minute of silence, Berry turned to face me. “These three have been going at it all morning. Mr. Morgan says somebody robbed a soul line collection, and Ann says there’s no way anybody broke in. Flora’s acting mysterious as usual.” He let out a sigh and stood up. “Glad you made it, Scott. You can get to the bottom of this, and I can get back to my work.”
Val patted me on the shoulder. “I’m going too—my team’s waiting in the dungeon.”
As the door closed behind them, I took Berry’s chair and looked at Ann. “Whose soul line collection was it?” I asked.
“We’ve been waiting for you to get here so he’d start spilling the beans,” she said.
Madame Flora gripped the arms of her chair, and I could see her wiry arm muscles straining against her wrinkled forearms. “There should be no bean-spilling,” she said. “I strongly suggest that we let those sleeping dogs lie.”
“Relax, Flora,” Archie said. “Scott will perform his investigation with discretion.” He looked at me.
“You have my word on it,” I said.
Archie nodded. “Then I shall start at the point where I stepped off the Swiss ferry and entered post-war Germany.”
four
July 1946
Freidrichshafen, Occupied Germany
Archibald Morgan hopped onto the hot front seat of the green Willys-Overland Jeep. His green bowtie, white shirt, and green slacks were still spotless, but badly wrinkled, after three days of travel.
He rocked back and forth until the springs fit properly against his legs and back. The map showed a three hundred kilometer journey from the shores of Lake Bodensee to Nuremberg, and with Germany’s vaunted autobahns still a mess, he expected the trip to last most of the day.
The driver tossed Morgan’s luggage into the back of the Jeep. Then he buttoned the tarp and climbed behind the steering wheel. He wiped his brow, smoothed the wrinkles out of his green uniform, and jabbed the starter button. “We’re all set, Mr. Morgan,” he said. “Next stop, Nuremberg.”
Morgan cocked his head at the driver. “It appears you worked for the railroads before the war.”
“Assistant conductor on the Toledo—Cleveland line until forty-one, when I joined Soul Identity.” The driver stuck out his hand. “First Sergeant James Little, Mr. Morgan.”
Morgan looked at his hand. “First Sergeant?”
The driver’s eyes widened. Then he shook his head and chuckled. “I’ve got to remember I’m back to deliveries now that the war’s over. James Little, sir. My own line’s got fifty-six years of service.”
They shook hands.
“How long a drive is it, Mr. Little?” Morgan asked.
“It’s James, sir,” he said. “Four hours, if there’s no truck accidents, so call it six to be safe.”
“That is faster than I had hoped for.”
James shook his head. “And then we have two more hours for the American checkpoint.”
Morgan nodded. “We had better get going then.”
“Yes sir.” James pulled the Jeep onto the road and steered around the potholes. He reached behind the bench and brought out a dull green steel case the size of a lunchbox. A small brass padlock dangled from the front of it. “Mr. Morgan, this package arrived in the Nuremberg office yesterday afternoon.”
Morgan took the case and examined it. It weighed only a pound or so. The wax seal covering the padlock’s keyhole showed no signs of tampering, and he carefully peeled it off.
Morgan unknotted his bowtie, unbuttoned his collar, reached inside his shirt, and withdrew a key on a long chain necklace. He unlocked the padlock, then turned and used his body to shield the case from James. The hinges screeched as he opened the lid. He took a deep breath, then reached inside and pulled out a green velvet cloth bag.
A tap on his shoulder caused Morgan to whirl around and slam the lid shut. “Mr. Little, I must request privacy.” His words cut through the stifling hot air.
James pulled back and frowned. “Sorry, Mr. Morgan. I’m supposed to watch you at all times.”
Morgan narrowed his eyes. “Watch from a distance.” He turned back to examine the contents.
five
Present Day
Sterling, Massachusetts
“And that was how my first European overseer assignment started,” Archie said.
I thought about the last few wars we fought, and how long it took for the violence to quell even after we declared it over. “Germany must have been a mess in 1946,” I said.
He nodded. “James told me that when he arrived in Nuremberg that June, the local resistance still strung telephone wires across the highways at night. They decapitated many of our soldiers before they were caught.”
I remembered learning about Nuremberg in school. The Allies held the Nazi war crimes trials there because the city’s courthouse was one of the few to survive the Allied bombings.
“Why would Soul Identity send an overseer to collect a deposit?” I asked. “Especially to such a dangerous place.”
“The size of the deposit and the significance of the member,” Archie said. He frowned. “Also, I was the youngest, and I suppose the most expendable, overseer.”
That made sense. Now on to the driver. “Is First Sergeant Little also known as James the elevator man?”
Archie smiled. “The one and the same.”
“After he was injured in Nuremberg,” Madame Flora said, “Archibald let him run the elevator. He rode that little box-cage up and down until he retired last year.”
Archie frowned. “Please, Flora, your out-of-sequence comments only serve to complicate my story.”
I hoped she’d continue. Fortunately she appeared to agree with me.
“Complicate your story?” she asked. “You’re about to bore us with your long road trip and introduce us to each pothole James drove you through.” She pointed at him. “Maybe you’re right—Scott can help us with a thorough investigation. I’ll tell the next part.”
six
July 1946
Nuremberg, Occupied Germany
Flora straddled the window sill, sitting where the glass would have been if the house hadn’t been bombed. She let her right leg dangle out over the patch of scorched earth below. Her left leg rested inside, her foot on top of the remaining glass shards she had plucked out of the frame.
While she waited, she leafed through the pages of an overseas January issue of Life Magazine that she had found at the last refugee camp. “Baba, you wouldn’t believe what they’re saying here,” she said.
Baba sat on the dirty floor in the corner of the room with her head tucked tight against her chest. She had been dozing much more often since they reached Germany. Her heart just couldn’t keep up, and even on this stifling hot summer day, she shivered in her sleep.
She’d just have to keep shivering until the overseer finally arrived and the suspicious housekeeper across the street let them inside the big house.
If the overseer actually did arrive. It had taken four weeks for Flora and her grandmother to stumble their way from the Istrian city of Umag to Nuremberg—and though Baba still claimed they would eventually make it to America, Flora remained convinced they were chasing yet another broken dream.
Just a week ago their last hope of finding Flora’s father had been dashed at Dachau. The bearer of the dreaded news: a now-imprisoned concentration camp guard. He gleefully told them how a Nazi doctor and an SS officer had killed a hundred Jews and Gypsies to better understand how downed Luftwaffe pilots could survive a prolonged ice-water submersion. Apparently the method they used for Papa’s resuscitation failed, and he was gone. Unfixable. Just like the glass pane in whose space she now sat.
When the prisoner leered as he told how he forced Gypsy women to have sex with the almost-frozen men, Flora hefted a discarded brick and smashed it in his face. His cheekbone broke; she heard the crack. She wanted to kill him, and she would have too, if the American soldiers hadn’t pulled her away.
Baba’s heart had given up that afternoon when the fate of her only son was confirmed. The two of them remained the only survivors of their Gypsy tribe. Baba spent every night telling Flora more of the old Roma stories. Knowing she would soon be the family’s last surviving member, Flora struggled to swallow her anger, pay attention, and learn.
Where was the overseer, anyway? She leaned out and looked up and down the street. A family dressed in rags even more threadbare than hers and Baba’s poked through the rubble of what must have been their former home. No overseer.
She turned back to the magazine. “Grim Europe Faces Winter of Misery,” blared one article; the next read “Americans Are Losing the Victory.” Flora couldn’t understand why the Americans obsessed over finding and reporting bad news. Did they think they could just snap their fingers and make centuries of strife disappear overnight?
Now seventeen years old, Flora was born in a land overly familiar with strife. Istria suffered under Mussolini’s forced Italianization program, which was the latest in a series of indignities inflicted upon the peninsula by her hungry European neighbors. Centuries ago during the Holy Roman Empire, the Venetians took control and remained Istria’s overlords until Napoleon established his Italian Kingdom. Then the Austrians took charge, until they lost the Great War and Italy grabbed the reins. In 1943, after Mussolini’s dismissal and Italy’s capitulation, the new Italian Socialist Republic, Germany, and Croatia each claimed Istria. Finally Tito’s Yugoslavian Army “freed” them last May.
During the early years of the war, Mussolini had successfully protected Jews and Gypsies from deportation. Life then was hard but bearable. But that was before il Duce capitulated—Flora vividly remembered her and Baba’s return from a week-long food-gathering trip, when they discovered the rest of their family had been loaded on railroad cars and sent to Jasenovac, a Croatian concentration camp. Flora and Baba had been hiding in the forest ever since—even after the war ended—because apparently Tito’s Yugoslavian Communists hated Gypsies just as much as Pavelic’s Croatian Ustasi.
It was only by chance that the Soul Identity letter had reached them at all. A former Ustasi member had hiked into the forest to deliver it. He spent a month evading bands of Istrian freedom fighters and almost died when they shot and wounded him, but he eventually delivered the letter. That set in motion the chain of events that brought the two of them to Nuremberg.
Baba kept the letter in a waterproof pouch pinned to her skirt, but Flora had read it to her so many times that she could recite the words from its blood-spattered pages.
22 March 1946
Soul Identity Headquarters
Sterling, Massachusetts, USA
Violca Drabarni
Soul Identity Reader
Umag, Istria, Yugoslavia
Dear Mrs. Drabarni:
We have an urgent need of your services in Nuremberg, Germany. A Nazi leader wishes to join Soul Identity and establish a soul line collection, and as his war crimes trial is already underway, it is important that we get him read and enrolled before his likely execution.
Since the war ended, we have found it impossible to locate a qualified reader in Germany. We have requested other European readers to help, but all have refused.
Therefore I am willing to make an extraordinary offer: if you travel to Nuremberg and perform the reading, and you assist in the enrollment and subsequent depositary transfers, Soul Identity will help you and two of your family members to immigrate to the United States. We expect the work in Nuremberg to last for as long as six months. We will provide you with a salary, room, and board during the assignment and for one year after arriving in America.
If you wish to avail yourself of this offer, you must be present in Nuremberg by 8 July 1946, when our overseer, Archibald Morgan, arrives. Please contact me to accept these terms no later than 5 June 1946. I will provide you with more details at that time.
Sincerely,
Alexei Ivanov
Depositary Chief
Soul Identity
The Ustasi member gave them the letter in the middle of May, and Flora and Baba went through a mad scramble to contact Mr. Ivanov in time. They finally reached him on an dissident-controlled shortwave radio on the fourth of June, and Baba had accepted the offer.
Flora argued they should stay in the forest, but Baba held firm: the Roma were almost exterminated from Istria, and America would become their tribe’s new homeland, their amaro baro them. Besides, traveling would give them a chance to locate Flora’s father.
So Flora had given in, and she and Baba assembled their packs and set off on foot to the Jasenovac concentration camp. This led them to Dachau and the realization that only they from their tribe had survived.
They reached Nuremberg early this morning, two days after their last scraps of food ran out. They found the Soul Identity residence, but they could not convince the housekeeper to let them in, even after showing her the letter. “Wait for Mr. Little,” she repeated as she closed the door.
Flora saw some movement at the end of the road. She leaned out the window and saw a Jeep with two men inside: the driver in a green uniform, and the passenger wearing a long sleeved white shirt and a green bowtie. Could it be them? The Jeep pulled in front of the Soul Identity residence, and the driver got out and unloaded the luggage.
“Mr. Morgan, I’m pleased to welcome you to our final stop, the Nuremberg Soul Identity residence,” she heard the driver say.
“Thank you, Mr. Little,” came the reply from the man wearing the bowtie.
The overseer had arrived.
seven
Present Day
Sterling, Massachusetts
“Thank you, Flora,” Archie said. He shook his head. “When you and your grandmother walked out of that bombed-out shell of a house across the street, I thought you were beggars.”
“Until you arrived, we were beggars,” Madame Flora said. “Half-starved and filthy.”
I tried to picture Madame Flora as anything but a well-dressed, classy older lady. “Did you look like Rose and Marie do now?” I asked.
She shrugged. “I guess if the girls had to live with their own cooking and cleaning for a few years, then I’d have looked like them.”
“From the moment I saw her, I thought Flora was…” Archie closed his eyes for a minute and frowned while we waited. “Striking,” he said, opening his eyes and looking at me. “Flora was a striking and a most intense young lady.”
Madame Flora shook her head and sighed.
“Which Nazi was joining?,” I asked.
“The second-in-command, right up until almost the end of the war. Reichsmarschall Hermann Goering,” Archie said.
“And you welcomed him with open arms,” Madame Flora said. “What was it you told me? Nazi gold shines as bright as any other.”
Archie sighed. “We have discussed this many times over the years, Flora. Soul Identity never discriminates against its members.”
Apparently not even against Nazis. I wondered about the general problem of depositing stolen money. “Could I rob a bank and deposit the loot in my soul line collection?” I asked.
“You could try, Scott,” Ann said. “People often attempt to deposit other people’s money, and we usually catch them right away. But even if we don’t, when you make your deposit, you first attest that the money belongs to you, and then you must agree that we’re the sole arbiter on any claims against it.”
Madame Flora crossed her arms and stared at Archie. “Archibald and I both knew Goering’s gold was looted from the bodies and the belongings of the Jews and the Roma. Yet somehow it was deposited anyway.”
Archie held up his hands. “You seem to have forgotten that we spent months cataloging and rejecting every piece of artwork and jewelry he sent us,” he said. “I only deposited what we could not trace.”
“The gold was traceable.”
“No, it was not.” He pointed at a brooch Ann wore on her green suit jacket. “May I borrow that piece?”
Ann unpinned the gold brooch and handed it to him.
Archie smiled as he took it. “The handiwork is beautiful,” he said.
“Thanks,” Ann said.
He held it out at arm’s length, three tiny golden rosebuds with their stems entwined. He looked at Madame Flora. “How do we know where the gold in this brooch comes from?”
Madame Flora shrugged. “What does it matter?”
“Because,” he said, “for all you know, it came from the fillings of dead people. This could even be made out of Nazi gold.”
“That’s disgusting,” Ann said.
Archie nodded. “I agree—it is better not to think about it. Once you re-factor gold, it loses its provenance and becomes untraceable.”
Madame Flora looked at Ann. “Where did you get that brooch?”
“It was a gift from my daughter,” Ann said.
Madame Flora held out her hand. “If there’s any chance at all that it’s made out of Nazi gold, I want it back in the hands of its rightful owners. Give it here, Archibald.”
As he was handing Ann’s brooch to Madame Flora, Ann stood up and snatched it. “You two need to stop acting so ridiculous,” she said as she fastened it back onto her jacket.
Archie shrugged. “Nevertheless, my point holds. Gold is untraceable.”
Madame Flora glared at him. “Goering’s gold and Ann’s brooch are different, and you damn well know it.” She twisted her body away from us, crossed her arms, and stared at the wall behind Archie’s desk.
Ann turned to me. “These issues of provenance come up every now and again,” she said. “Before we make the final deposit, we investigate all suspicious funds. I myself reject several transactions every year.”
I had read many legends about Nazi treasures, including some scandals. I could easily imagine how an organization like Soul Identity had been involved.
But I had a hard time imagining how that organization could reach the Nazis in their prison cells. That took some serious clout.
“Wasn’t Goering locked up tight during the Nuremberg trials?” I asked Archie.
“He was.”
“So how did you read his identity?”
“We found a way,” Madame Flora said, still staring at the wall.
“I’ll need to hear that story,” I said. “But first I want to know why Archie decided to open Goering’s collection yesterday.”
“I want to know that too,” Madame Flora said.
Archie looked down at the coffee table.
I waited a minute for him to speak, and when he remained silent, I asked, “Did the new carrier show up?”
He shook his head. He glanced up at me, then back down at the table. “Yesterday was the sixty-fourth anniversary of that deposit,” he said quietly. “I felt it was time to right an old wrong.”
“So you admit you were wrong,” Madame Flora said.
Archie stared at her for a long moment, then nodded. “Yes, Flora, I admit it.”
He stood up and walked over to the window, then turned back to face us. “When our adventure with Mr. Feret ended last year, those old Nuremberg memories started haunting my dreams. Hermann Goering condoned and committed repugnant acts of evil. He looted treasuries and museums all over Europe. And I was the unlucky new overseer whose job it was to make him a member. I was the one who had to swallow my pride and do the dirty work.”
Archie’s voice rose in volume and he shook his finger at Madame Flora. “Contrary to what you may think, I despised that man, and I hated what I had to do. I could not wait to complete my task and return to Sterling.”
He started coughing, and he bent over nearly double with his hands covering his face. After a minute he caught his breath, wiped his eyes, and sat back down.
“Back then,” Madame Flora said, “you told me I was an idealistic child who should stay out of grownup problems. You may now say you hated what you did, but I hated you then for doing it.”
Archie muttered something under his breath.
“What was that?” Madame Flora’s voice was sharp.
He narrowed his eyes. “You did it too, right alongside me.”
“You made me do it,” she said, her mouth in a snarl. “Your threats against my grandmother left me no choice.”
Another drawn-out period of silence.
“But that’s all water under the bridge,” Ann said. “You two have patched that up over the last six decades, haven’t you?”
Archie and Madame Flora looked at each other, then eventually they both nodded.
“Good,” I said. “Now quit your bickering and tell me how you got Goering enrolled.”
“I’ll tell it,” Madame Flora said. “It’s faster this way.”
Archie smiled.
eight
August 1946
Nuremberg, Occupied Germany
“I still don’t think we can do it,” James said for what Flora thought was at least the fifth time that night. “The guards are right outside his door, peeking in every thirty seconds. His lights never dim, and thanks to Robert Ley strangling himself on the john last October, they won’t let him sleep with his hands under the bedcovers. We can’t sneak the old gal in to read him, and we sure as heck can’t sneak Goering out.”
“I am sure we will find a way,” Archibald Morgan repeated.
It was a little past two in the morning. Mr. Morgan and James had been poring over a set of architectural blueprints of the Nuremberg Palais du Justice while Flora sat on the floor in the corner of the front room and watched them.
James ran his fingers through his close-cropped brown hair and glanced over at Flora. “How about another cuppa joe, hon?” He held out his chipped coffee cup.
Flora stood up and took the cup, then headed to the small kitchen in the back of the house. She took an American “K” ration breakfast package from the cupboard and slid out the inner wax carton. She emptied the coffee packet and sugar tablets into the cup and filled it with water from the kettle on the coal-fired stove.
As she stirred the coffee, Flora poked through the rest of the food in the package. No wonder the Allies won the war—the GIs consumed twice the calories of the Axis soldiers. Flora saved the gum for Baba, tucked the cigarettes in her skirt pocket, and left the biscuits, cereal bar, and ham and eggs for the housekeeper to bring to her family.
James was right—she had grown tired of the rations after only a month. When Flora and her grandmother first arrived in Nuremberg, he laughed at the way they exclaimed over the chocolate bars and canned meats. The Gypsies had wolfed down the food on that first day, barely noticing the two men gaping at them.
“Eat all you want,” James had told them. “Soul Identity has rations a-plenty, and none of us will touch them.”
Flora ran her hands over her hips. The bones no longer jutted out the way they did four weeks ago. Sitting was now less painful with some padding covering her pelvis and tailbone. And with her clean new clothes and shiny black hair, the soldiers around town were perking up and nudging each other as she ran her errands.
Even Baba had gained weight. She was back to her old self—except for her unrecovered heart.
Flora had spent the last month helping Mr. Morgan sort through Goering’s paperwork. They completed the final documents that afternoon, which was why the overseer turned his attention to breaking into the prison.
Hermann Goering needed his soul identity read, but for that to happen, either Baba had to get to him inside the prison, or the Nazi had to get out.
It sure didn’t seem like Goering would be getting out. The trials had uncovered so many evil deeds that Flora didn’t think any Nazi deserved to live. James reminded her to keep an open mind, as only the prosecution had presented their case, but Flora’s had been shut ever since she and Baba learned of her father’s fate in Dachau.
Hating the Nazis only made her job harder. She rinsed the spoon with some hot water from the kettle. How did she let herself get roped into helping Goering join Soul Identity?
It must be her awe of the mighty organization Mr. Morgan worked for—awe of their vast funds, and their ability to obtain food in a city where many German inhabitants were still dying of starvation. How did they obtain their unlimited rations, anyway?
It was more than awe—it was the new clothes she wore, and it was the vitamins and medicine they supplied Baba. Flora had been seduced by the easy life. Every day she found herself drawn deeper into the comfort Soul Identity offered.
But she wasn’t drawn into their plan—Goering’s Last Shot, James called it—the Nazi leader’s grasp at immortality by entrusting his memories and what remained of his fortune to Soul Identity’s depositary, in the hope that one day his reincarnated soul would return in a fresh body to take up the Nazi mantle.
Flora shivered as she imagined a future Soul Identity member, excited to see what a previous soul line carrier had left for them, only to be burdened with Goering’s evil Nazi machinations.
She knew what she wanted—what she needed—to do. She must destroy Goering’s memories and return the money to its rightful owners, the Jewish and Gypsy survivors.
Mr. Morgan had pointed out that it wasn’t that straightforward. “Our number one job is to protect our members,” he declared. “Whether we agree with their philosophies or not, we must safeguard their collections until future carriers are found.”
Would the depositary accept ill-gotten riches? Mr. Morgan said they wouldn’t. He said their lengthy investigation into Hermann Goering’s belongings was precisely because of this concern. “We will not accept goods to which others have a claim,” he promised. “We will not be a knowing party in any theft.”
So Flora had helped the overseer catalog and research Goering’s treasures. The paintings and jewels were deemed too risky to deposit, and James arranged for them to be “discovered” by the OSS’s Art Looting Investigation Unit. Those riches now sat in Munich, part of over one million other recovered works of art and gemstones slated to be returned to their rightful owners.
The gold, however, still lingered. All seventy-two bars of it.
Mr. Morgan unwrapped the bars last week, after they arrived as a special delivery from Goering’s lawyer. Flora shrank from the hated German eagle and swastika stamped on the top of each bar, but she copied down the serial numbers and dates of each one.
A gold bar weighed four hundred troy ounces, exactly twelve and a half kilograms. At thirty-five dollars an ounce, the seventy-two bars were worth more than a million dollars.
At the trials, the prosecution showed how the Nazis pulled the gold teeth and fillings from the bodies of their concentration camp victims and sent them to the Reichsbank for re-smelting. Flora was convinced that her father’s teeth made up part of Goering’s gold now housed in the basement.
But Mr. Morgan had no such fears. After researching the serial numbers, he claimed it was impossible to identify the bullion’s source, and therefore it would remain as part of Hermann Goering’s wealth. So they had repacked the gold in sawdust, six bars to a keg. The gold and three boxes of Goering’s papers sat locked in the basement, and as soon as the Nazi pig became a certified Soul Identity member, they would be transported to the depositary’s Swiss facility.
The thought that the bad guys always seem to win was stuck in her head as Flora returned to the front room. “Your coffee, James,” she said.
“Thanks, doll.” James glanced up, then back at the drawing. “Just leave it on the desk,” he said. “We’re onto something here.”
“You found a way to get Baba inside?” Despite her misgivings, the challenge of breaking into a prison intrigued her.
“No,” Mr. Morgan said. “James is correct on that point—it is quite impossible.”
“Then Mr. Goering cannot join Soul Identity?” she asked. Maybe the world still had some justice left in it.
Mr. Morgan frowned. “He will join. And you will help us.”
“Haven’t I helped enough?”
The overseer took a deep breath. “Miss Drabarni—”
“Flora,” she said.
“Miss Drabarni.” His words were cold. “You will continue to help us until Hermann Goering is a member and his remaining collection is safe in the depositary. I should not have to remind you that your grandmother is counting on you. Am I clear?”
She stared at him, unblinking, and forced herself to regain control before her tears betrayed her. “Yes, Mr. Morgan,” she said without a tremble.
“Thank you, Flora.” He spoke with a warmer voice. “Now, have you ever used a camera?”
nine
September 1946
Nuremberg, Occupied Germany
James reached up and massaged his brow with his fingertips. “How many more pictures are you going to take?” he asked Flora.
She attached the new portrait lens onto the camera. “As many as it takes to get one that works,” she answered.
Despite how the overseer had manipulated her, Flora had enjoyed the last month with her Kodak Six-16. The camera was a mechanical marvel, and she loved loading the film by turning the winding key slowly until the bubble indicator showed a ‘1’. She loved opening the front of the box and drawing down the bed until the lens and shutter clicked into position. She loved determining the f-stop and shutter speed, and revolving the lens mount to the right focus.
Most of all, Flora loved capturing moments within her photographs. Every time she looked through the view finder and pressed the exposure lever, she felt as if she was stopping time in its tracks and recording a piece of history.