“Are you suggesting that Himmler thought of himself as divine?” Serov asked. “Or royalty?”
“I don’t think royalty, perhaps because he didn’t have a son to whom he could pass his crown. But divine? After you take a good look at Castle Wewelsburg, you tell me if you think it’s possible he was trying to set himself up as the founder of a new religion.”
“You do?” Cronley asked.
“Why don’t you wait until you see the castle and then ask yourself that?”
“Political regimes are, relatively speaking, easy to topple,” Serov said. “Religions are not, as Stalin and Beria have learned to their chagrin.”
And that doesn’t sound as if you’re unhappy that they’ve failed.
Is he actually a Christian?
Or is the sonofabitch just trying to make us believe he is, for God only knows what reason?
“How’s that going, Ivan?” Cronley asked. “Have Stalin and Beria stopped trying to rid the Soviet Union of the ‘opiate of the masses’?”
“They’re still working on it.”
“And do you think they’ll eventually succeed?”
“No,” Serov said, with finality.
[FOUR]
“And there it is,” Cohen said, pointing out the windshield.
Cronley looked and saw a massive building at the top of a tree-covered hill. At one end, atop a round corner, was a domed tower. At the other end there was a much larger round corner. If there had been a domed top, it was now gone.
He decided, just before Cohen turned on a narrow road and he lost sight of the castle, that the larger round corner had to be the North Tower.
After winding through the trees, they came to the castle. The North Tower was now on the right, connected to the Left Tower by first a two-story structure, and then a three-story structure.
Leading to a tunnel in the center of the two-story structure was sort of a bridge. Two Provisional Security Organization guards armed with Thompson submachine guns stood at the near end of the bridge beside a large wooden sign in German and English: RESTRICTED AREA—ABSOLUTELY NO ADMITTANCE.
Cronley just had time to idly wonder what rank in the Free Polish Forces the guards in shabby dyed black U.S. Army overcoats had once held when he realized the bridge was over what, in bygone times, had been the castle’s moat.
They found themselves in a courtyard. There was a three-quarter-ton weapons carrier, two jeeps, and a staff car parked close to the corner of the courtyard, close to a door leading to the interior of the building.
There were at least fifty or sixty five-gallon jerry cans—Cronley thought a weapons-carrier load—stacked near the door. What are they doing with all that gas?
Cohen led them into a building and then into a makeshift kitchen. There were two middle-aged women tending two U.S. Army field stoves, and there was a Cannon heater, glowing red, in a corner of the room.
“As soon as I have a cup of coffee,” Cohen announced, “the tour will begin. Help yourselves.”
“Colonel, you said you were CIC an
d know everything,” Cronley said, as he filled a china mug.
“So?”
“So tell me about that Cannon heater. Is that a trade name, or was it intended to heat cannons?”
“You’ve got me. I’ve been wondering about that myself, for lo these many years.”
“It never occurred to me,” Serov said, “how uncomfortable a castle must be in the winter. How do your men put up with it? Do they live here? Or?”
“They live here with stoic devotion to a noble cause.”