head, and his eyes gleamed with a sullen defiance. Or maybe it was just a different kind of fear, maybe he was more scared of talking, of confessing, because of what might happen to him then.
Amy was protesting.
‘Angus – you just can’t shoot him –’
Angus swore, and waved the gun.
‘But Kellerman said, fuck this, Kellerman said –’
It was an impasse. They were stuck. Angus had the gun aimed at Dresler’s head but David knew the German was right, Angus couldn’t do this. Not in cold blood. Couldn’t kill this sad old man with his spidery writing.
The spidery writing? With a well-oiled click the mental machinery of the puzzle began to turn. He gasped aloud. Of course. The address book.
‘Stop!’
Faces turned. David explained:
‘He knows me.’
Angus was incredulous: ‘What?’
‘I’ve worked it out. This guy Dresler. He knows me. He must recognize me.’
Amy went to speak; David interrupted: ‘Angus. Where
was this guy living – before he came to Luderitz?’
‘France. Provence.’
‘There. That’s it.’ David gestured, fiercely, at the kneeling old Nazi. ‘He recognized me when I walked through the door. I saw it in his eyes.’ He leaned very close to Dresler’s sweaty face. ‘You know me, don’t you? Because you met my father. He found you. Someone in the Basque Country, a Gurs survivor, gave my father your details, your name, and Dad traced you to Provence.’ He was leaning even closer to the quailing old German. ‘And my dad threatened to reveal your past to the world – so you confessed – or you helped him – I’m fucking right, aren’t I?’
Dresler was shaking his head. Mute. Determined and mute. But his silence was unconvincing. Amy whispered: ‘I think you’re right. Look at him.’
David didn’t need any encouragement.
‘It’s the only thing that makes sense. Someone must have told my father about the monastery, someone who knew secrets. Who had an interest in the story, like an old Nazi, from Gurs. Who became a member of the Society of Pius…He would know where the archives were kept. It was you. You told my father – and then you had to flee, to Namibia, and this – this here –’
David grabbed at the address book. He waved it under Dresler’s face.
‘I recognize this handwriting! This tiny precise scrawl. You wrote on the back of my father’s map. Didn’t you?’
Again Dresler shook his head. And again it was unconvincing.
Angus was visibly excited.
‘OK. So let’s say that’s it. You must be right. Let’s put the clues together –’
‘How?’
‘Shark Island. That’s what this fucker said. Shark Island.’
‘Where’s that?’
‘Just down the road. Luderitz! By the fish wharves.’
Angus swivelled on Dresler. For a second it seemed Angus would strike the bowed and silent head of the Nazi with the butt of the pistol. Then he seemed to think better of it. He spat with contempt, but lowered the gun.
‘Come on – we haven’t got much time and Miguel could be anywhere, that chopper leaves in two hours –’
They ran to the door, leaving Dresler burbling and shivering in his hallway. A Nazi kneeling in the contents of his own emptied bladder.
The brutal noon sun was like a punishment, a fierce chastisement. Angus gestured south. They ran down the dusty road which doubled back to the wharves.
Two black men were sifting listlessly through piles of white dust on a corner. The smell of fish and decay was overpowering. Bleak white dust and hot blue sky – and an old Nazi wetting himself. David’s mind was alive with fears and anxieties, and hope. Maybe they would find the secret. He realized, now, at least he was beginning to realize, that he needed to find the secret. The secret of himself. The terror of ignorance was too much.
The road terminated at a gate.
‘That is Shark Island.’ Angus indicated a kind of peninsula, jutting out into the sea. ‘We take this path…’
They paced along a hot burning track that hugged the shoreline, hemmed in by broken concrete walls. Then they paused. A windswept and derelict warehouse loomed to their left, providing shade. The smell of the cold rich Benguela current was intense in the burning air.
Swift and concise, Angus explained.
‘Shark Island is where the Germans did a lot of their killing, in the 1900s. Used to be an island, now it’s attached by a causeway. This is where the Germans herded all the Witboii to die. In the Holocaust.’
‘Not the Herero?’
‘Nah. Different Holocaust. Another Holocaust. I know. I know.’
‘Jesus.’
‘I’ll explain sometime. Show me the map, with the writing.’
The precious old map. David pulled