I groan as we drive past the clock tower a second time. “Ishould have met him someplace else.”
“We’ll get there,” Charlotte says, gently resting one of her hands over my fingers, which have begun drumming a beat on the steering wheel. We stop and wait for a horde of students to ramble across the street.
It’s three forty by the time we find a visitor’s space, at least two blocks from Dr. Nemeth’s office. Charlotte holds on to my arm as we rush toward the sprawling brick edifice that houses the history department. The admin at the front desk directs us to Dr.Nemeth’s office, but even though the light is on, his door is closed. And locked.
No surprise, I guess. It’s now two minutes after four.
Through the window, I see Dr. Nemeth’s desk cluttered with papers and notebooks and an assortment of scattered pens. Hanging above his desk, perfectly centered, is an eight-by-ten photograph of him with a stunning woman at his side and a toddler in his arms. The woman has straight blonde hair, and she’s wearing a floral sundress that matches her daughter’s attire. Picture perfect in the frame.
I lean against the doorpost in defeat. “I don’t know if he’ll come back to his office after class.”
Charlotte glances down the hallway. “We’ll have to find out where he’s teaching.”
“I’m not storming into his class!”
Charlotte puts one hand on her hip. “We came all this way, and now you’re going to quit?”
“It’s not quitting. I’ll just connect with him later.”
But Charlotte’s not waiting until later to find out about Annika and her list. “I’m going to speak with that young lady at the front desk.”
She turns away, but she doesn’t walk far. An older man, a fellow professor I assume, wheels his chair to the edge of his office door. “Are you the woman with the German book?”
I step toward him. “My name’s Callie.”
He doesn’t seem to care about my name. “Josh said to find him upstairs in room 240.”
Charlotte flashes a triumphant smile, and I thank the professor before following her back down the hall and then up a narrow flight of steps. Charlotte props open the door to the lecture hall as I eye the stacked rows of students. Several hundred of them.
At the bottom of the hall stands Dr. Nemeth, his brown hair swept to the side. His jeans, oxfords, and tan T-shirt make him lookmore like a student than a professor. He doesn’t seem to notice as Charlotte and I slip into the back row and fold down plastic chairs.
“Austria’s Salzkammergut was a mountain retreat for Nazi officers during World War II,” he tells his class, one hand on the side of a wooden podium. “The Nazi elite built villas on the shores of the seventy-six lakes in that district to entertain their mistresses. They also tested submarines and underwater rockets in the deepest lakes, three hundred or more feet below the surface.”
Charlotte seems to be as immersed in his lecture as the rest of the class, her chin propped up by her fist, the sleeve of her pale-pink blouse on the armrest. And I wonder—were Annika’s parents members of the Nazi Party? Her mother might have been the mistress of an officer, gifting Annika with theBambibook before it was banned.
“The Nazis stole and then hid countless pieces of art from the Jewish people, along with gold bullion and other relics, in their quest for wealth and, more important to many of them, power. The salt mines and tunnels in these mountains served as a sort of depository for such treasures during the war, but what happened after the war is just as shocking.”
No one moves in the room, and I wonder at the magic of this professor. He’s waved a wand of sorts, hypnotizing with his words. A map of Austria appears on the screen behind Dr. Nemeth, and he sweeps a circle around Hallstatt and several surrounding lakes with his hand.
“The Nazis planned to build a Fourth Reich here in what they dubbed the Alpine Fortress, but when the Allies infiltrated their fortress, they began throwing stuff in these lakes. Crates and crates of gold, weapons, thousands of counterfeit British banknotes that Hitler planned to use to destroy the British economy during the war.”
What if the Nazis used Annika’s book to record what they hid?
But then again, what Nazi, rushing from the Allied troops, would take the time to write out a detailed list in a children’s book?
Dr. Nemeth glances up at our row, and I lift my hand in an awkward wave. He nods and then returns to the matter at hand. “Some people call this region the Devil’s Dustbin, for it seems as if the devil himself swept across Austria and dumped whatever remained right here.”
I’ve done some research about the Nazis in both Germany and Austria over the years, in particular how they treated Felix Salten and other Jewish authors among them. My favorite monkey wouldn’t have existed if the Nazis had their way. His German authors, Margret and Hans Rey, were also Jewish. They fled by bicycle when the Nazis invaded their refuge in Paris, taking their treasured drafts of theCurious Georgemanuscript with them.
But I’ve never read anything about the Nazis hiding treasure in Austria’s lakes.
Dr. Nemeth gestures toward the region one more time, and I run my hands over the stone-colored tote in my lap, a cocoon of sorts forBambi.
Is it possible that Annika found treasure in one of these lakes or in a mine near Hallstatt? And if so, what happened to it?
“Let’s take a five-minute break,” Dr. Nemeth announces to the class. Chatter ripples across the room as he turns off the projector and hikes up the stairs, his hand stretching toward me as I stand. “You must be Callie.”
“That’s me,” I say, shaking his hand. “I’m sorry I’m so late. I—”
