The Day After Tomorrow_ A Novel - Allan Folsom [297]
“Hey, mister, you’re all wet!” a young boy yelled from the shore. But Osborn didn’t hear. He was on the Jungfrau, and Von Holden was falling toward him, the box he had brought with him from Berlin still cradled in his arms.
“Für Übermorgen! For the day after tomorrow!” He heard Von Holden scream and then the box slipped from his grasp and Von Holden plunged over the side, swallowed by the icy blackness as if he had been airbrushed out of existence. But the box landed near where Osborn lay in the snow, rolling over with its own weight and momentum. As it did, it came open and what was inside was revealed. And in the instant before it vanished over the edge, Osborn saw clearly what it was. It was the thing Salettl had left out. The thing Osborn could tell no one because no one would believe him. It was the real reason for Übermorgen. Its driving essence. Its center core. The severed, deep-frozen head of Adolf Hitler.
Acknowledgments
For technical information and advice I am especially indebted to Detective John “Jigsaw” St. John, Los Angeles Police Department Homicide, retired, Lieutenant John Dunkin of the Los Angeles Police Department, Danny Bacher of the Swiss National Tourist Office, Robert Abrams of San Francisco, Imara of Denver, and James W. Howatt, M.D., Bert R. Mandelbaum, M.D., Robert N. Mohr, D.P.M., Herbert G. Resnick, M.D., and Norton F. Kristy, Ph.D.
For suggestions and corrections to the manuscript, I am indebted to Fredrica S. Friedman, Hilary Hale, and most especially to Frances Jalet-Miller. Further, my deepest appreciation to Marion Rosenberg, and to Aaron Priest, the magician who made it all happen. Finally, my most sincere gratitude to Leon I. Bender, M.D., without whose extraordinary skills this book never would have been written.
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PROLOGUE
Rome. Sunday, June 28.
Today he called himself 5 and looked startlingly like Miguel Valera, the thirty-seven-year-old Spaniard spinning in a light, drug-induced sleep across the room. The apartment they were in was nothing, just two rooms with a tiny kitchen and bath, the fifth floor up from the street. The furnishings were worn and inexpensive, common in a place rented by the week. The most prominent pieces were the faded velvet couch on which the Spaniard reclined and the small drop leaf table under the front window, where S stood looking out.
So the apartment was nothing. What sold it was the view—the green of the Piazza San Giovanni and across it, the imposing medieval Basilica of St. John in the Lateran, the Cathedral of Rome and “mother of all churches,” founded by the Emperor Constantine in the year 313- Today the view from the window was even better than its promise. Inside the basilica, Giacomo Pecci, Pope Leo XIV, was celebrating mass on his seventy-fifth birthday, and an enormous crowd overflowed the piazza, making it seem as if all Rome were celebrating with him.
Running a hand through his dyed-black hair, S glanced at Valera. In ten minutes his eyes would open. In twenty he would be alert and functional. Abruptly, 5 turned and let his gaze fall on an ancient black-and-white television in the corner. On its screen was a live broadcast from the mass inside the basilica.
The pope, in white liturgical vestments, watched the faces of the worshipers in front of him as he spoke, his eyes meeting theirs energetically, hopefully, spiritually. He loved and they loved in return, and it seemed to give him a youthful renewal despite his age and slowly declining health.
Now the television cameras cut away, finding familiar faces of politicians, celebrities, and business leaders among those inside the packed basilica. Then the cameras moved on, fixing briefly on five clergymen seated behind the pontiff. These were his longtime advisers. His uomini di fiducia. Men of trust. As a group, probably the most influential