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Ordnung
muss sein.
And yet what order are they making out here? The suitcases, the queues, the wailing babies, the
soldiers pouring back into the cities with eternity in their eyes—in what system is order
increasing? Surely not in Kiev, or Lvov, or Warsaw. It’s all Hades. There are just so many humans,
as if huge Russian factories cast new men every minute. Kill a thousand and we’ll make ten
thousand more.
February finds them in mountains. Werner shivers in the back of the truck while Neumann One
grinds down switchbacks. Trenches snake below them in an endless net, German positions on one
side, Russian positions beyond. Thick ribbons of smoke stripe the valley; occasional flares of
ordnance fly like shuttlecocks.
Volkheimer unfolds a blanket and wraps it around Werner’s shoulders. His blood sloshes back
and forth inside him like mercury, and out the windows, in a gap in the mist, the network of
trenches and artillery below shows itself very clearly for a moment, and Werner feels he is gazing
down into the circuitry of an enormous radio, each soldier down there an electron flowing single
file down his own electrical path, with no more say in the matter than an electron has. Then they’re
around a bend and he feels only the presence of Volkheimer next to him, a cold dusk out the
windows, bridge after bridge, hill after hill, all the time descending. Metallic, tattered moonlight
shatters across the road, and a white horse stands chewing in a field, and a searchlight rakes the
sky, and in the lit window of a mountain cabin, for a split second as they rumble past, Werner sees
Jutta seated at a table, the bright faces of other children around her, Frau Elena’s needlepoint over
the sink, the corpses of a dozen infants heaped in a bin beside the stove.
The Third Stone
H
e stands in a château outside Amiens, north of Paris. The big old house moans in the dark. The
home belongs to a retired paleontologist and von Rumpel believes it is here that the chief of
security at the museum in Paris fled during the chaos following the invasion of France three years
ago. A peaceful place, insulated by fields, enwombed in hedges. He climbs a staircase to a library.
A bookshelf has been peeled open; the strongbox is behind it. The Gestapo safecracker is good:
wears a stethoscope, does not bother with a flashlight. In a few minutes, he has it open.
An old handgun, a box of certificates, a stack of tarnished silver coins. And inside a velvet box,
a blue pear-cut diamond.
The red heart inside the stone shows itself one second, becomes completely inaccessible the
next. Inside von Rumpel, hope braids with desperation; he is almost there. The odds are in his
favor, aren’t they? But he knows before he sets it under the lamp. That same elation crashing out of
him. The diamond is not real; it too is the work of Dupont.
He has found all three fakes. All his luck is spent. The doctor says the tumor is growing again.
The prospects of the war are nosediving—Germany retreats across Russia, across the Ukraine, up
the ankle of Italy. Before long, everyone in the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg—the men out
there scouring the continent for hidden libraries, concealed prayer scrolls, closeted impressionist
paintings—will be handed rifles and sent into the fire. Including von Rumpel.
So long as he keeps it, the keeper of the stone will live forever.
He cannot give up. And yet his hands grow so heavy. His head is a boulder.
One at the museum, one to the home of a museum supporter, one sent with a chief of security.
What sort of man would they choose for a third courier? The Gestapo man watches him, his
attention on the stone, his left hand on the door of the strongbox. Not for the first time, von Rumpel
thinks of the extraordinary jewel safe at the museum. Like a puzzle box. In all his travels, he has
seen nothing else like it. Who could have conceived of it?
The Bridge
I
n a French village far to the south of Saint-Malo, a German truck crossing a bridge is blown up.
Six German soldiers die. Terrorists are blamed.
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