“Most of it wound up with Tío Juan, but Clete told me he suspected El Jefe took a finder’s fee from it before Tío Juan got his hands on it.”
“‘Tío Juan’?”
“Juan Domingo Perón. He likes to be called ‘Uncle Juan’ by Don Cletus Frade, his godson.”
“I didn’t know that Perón was Frade’s godfather,” Cohen said as he slipped back into his chair.
“I thought you said you were CIC and knew everything,” Janice said.
“I thought you said you wouldn’t ask questions.”
“I’m a woman and we get to change our minds.”
“Point taken. Will you wait until the lecture is over?”
“Sure, Morty.”
“The second theory vis-à-vis the missing twelve thousand gold rings,” Cohen began, “is that they were taken to a cave near Wewelsburg Castle, and then the mouth of the cave was blown closed. We so far have been unable to verify this.
“As I said, Wiligut was promoted in 1936 to SS-Brigadeführer, and with Himmler’s blessing undertook a number of projects, some of which made sense, and some which were . . . for lack of a better word, insane.
“Wiligut supervised the building by concentration camp inmates—again, no Jews who would contaminate the premises—of an SS-Stabsgebäude, a staff building, and a Wachgebäude, a guardhouse, at Wewelsburg. The North Tower was rebuilt, and a safe for Himmler was placed in the basement of the West Tower. We don’t know what was in it. When the castle fell into the hands of the 83rd Armored Reconnaissance Battalion, 3rd Armored Division, on April 3, 1945, the safe was open and empty.”
“Insane projects?” Janice asked.
“I will take that question,” Cohen said. “Men can change their minds, too, Janice. Many of the modifications Wiligut made to the castle had to do with the number twelve. Himmler apparently wanted to reincarnate the Knights of the Round Table.”
“As in King Arthur’s Knights of the Round Table?” Cronley asked.
“A German, or Teutonic, version thereof. If you didn’t spend all of your time in university reading naughty novels, perhaps you read something about them? How many of them there were, that sort of thing?”
“Actually, Colonel, sir, what stuck in my mind was that Sir Lancelot, one of the twelve knights, got caught fooling around with Guinevere.”
“I remember that, too,” Ziegler said. “Diddling the King’s wife was a no-no for a supposed-to-be-pure-and-noble knight.”
Both earned withering looks from Cohen.
“In Nordic mythology,” he went on after a significant pause, “there were twelve æsir—sort of gods, including Odin and Thor. When Himmler re-formed, enlarged, the SS, he set it up with twelve departments—SS-Hauptämter. What I have been thinking is that Himmler wanted the castle to serve as the stage for a Nazi version of the Knights of the Round Table. In this scenario, Himmler designated twelve senior SS officers as the knights of his round table.
“What I do know is that the number twelve played a major role in Wiligut’s design of the North Tower. Inside it, between 1938 and 1943, Wiligut built two rooms, the Obergruppenführersaal—SS Generals’ Hall—and the Gruft.”
“Gruft?” Ziegler asked.
“Vault, as in burial vault,” Hessinger clarified.
“Their ceilings were cast in concrete and faced with natural stone,” Cohen went on. “And he made plans for another hall on the upper floors. They wanted the North Tower to be the Mittelpunkt der Welt—the center of the world.”
“Morty, sweetheart, this is all for real, right?” Janice asked.
“Yes, it is, Miss Johansen. In the vault, which is held up by twelve pedestals, he had a swastika placed in the center of the ceiling. A gas line leading to the center of the floor was almost certainly going to fuel an eternal flame.
“In the Hall of the Obergruppenführers, there are twelve pillars and niches—the latter probably intended for the eventual interment of Himmler’s latter-day knights. There is also a sun w
heel with twelve spokes.”
“What’s a sun wheel?” Cronley asked.
“What looks like a wheel, with the sun in the center,” Cohen explained. “In this SS religion they were starting, the sun was the ‘strongest and most visible expression of God.’”