The Bormann Testament

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Book: Read The Bormann Testament for Free Online
Authors: Jack Higgins
and why—Lilli Pahl.”
    “I’ll go along with that,” Chavasse said. “It sounds reasonable enough. But it still doesn’t explain why they shot him.”
    Hardt shrugged. “Muller could have been carrying the manuscript, but I don’t think that’s very likely. I should imagine the shooting was an accident. Muller probably jumped the person who was waiting for him in your compartment and was killed in the struggle.”
    Chavasse frowned, considering everything Hardt had told him. After a while, he said, “There’s still one thing which puzzles me. Muller is dead and that means I’ve come to a dead end as far as finding Bormann goes. I can’t be of any possible use to you, so what made you go to the trouble of saving my skin?”
    “You could say I’m sentimental,” Hardt told him. “I have a soft spot for Israeli sympathizers.”
    “And how would you know that is what I am?”
    “Do you recall a man named Joel ben David?” Hardt asked. “He was an Israeli intelligence agent in Cairo in 1956. You saved his life and enabled him to return to Israel with information which was of great service to our Army during the Sinai campaign.”
    “I remember,” Chavasse said. “But I wish you’d forget about it. It could get me into hot water in certain quarters. I wasn’t supposed to be quite so violently partisan at the time.”
    “But we Jews do not forget our friends,” Hardt said quietly.
    Chavasse was suddenly uncomfortable. “Why are you so keen to get hold of Bormann? He isn’t another Eichmann. There’s bound to be an outcry for an international trial. Even the Russians would want a hand in it.”
    Hardt shook his head. “I don’t think so. In any case, we aren’t too happy about the idea of leaving him in Germany for trial, for this reason. There’s a statute of limitations in force under German law. Cases of manslaughter must be tried within fifteen years of the crime—murder, within twenty years.”
    Chavasse frowned. “You mean Bormann might not even come to trial?”
    Hardt shrugged. “Who knows? Anything might happen.” He got to his feet and paced restlessly across the compartment. “We are not butchers, Chavasse. We don’t intend to lead Bormann to the sacrificial stone with the whole of Jewry shouting hosannas. We want to try him for the same reason we have tried Eichmann. So that his monstrous crimes might be revealed to the world. So that people will not forget how men treat their brothers.”
    His eyes sparkled with fire. He was held in the grip of a fervor that seemed almost religious, something that possessed his heart and soul so that all other things were of no importance to him.
    “A dedicated man,” Chavasse said softly. “I thought they’d gone out of fashion.”
    Hardt paused, one hand raised in the air, and stared at him, and then he laughed and color flooded his face. “I’m sorry, at times I get carried away. But there are worse things for a man to do than something he believes in.”
    “How did you come to get mixed up in this sort of thing?” Chavasse asked.
    Hardt sat down on the bunk. “My people were German Jews. Luckily, my father had the foresight in 1933 to see what was coming. He moved to England with my mother and me, and he prospered. I was never particularly religious—I don’t think I am now. It was a wild, adolescent impulse which made me leave Cambridge in 1947 and journey to Palestine by way of an illegal immigrants’ boat from Marseilles. I joined Haganah and fought in the first Arab war.”
    “And that turned you into a Zionist?”
    Hardt smiled and shook his head. “It turned me into an Israeli—there’s a difference, you know. I saw young men dying for a belief; I saw girls who should have been in school, sitting behind machine guns. Until that time, my life hadn’t meant a great deal. After that, it had a sense of purpose.”
    Chavasse sighed and offered him a cigarette. “You know, in some ways I think I envy you.”
    Hardt looked

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