Chapter One Thousand Six Hundred Twenty
29th March 1964
Mitte, Berlin
Maria had been hoping for a restful weekend, then the phone started ringing. An earthquake in Alaska and the death of General Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck had apparently happened within minutes of each other on Friday. Then word had started trickling out about a raid that had been conducted on the Hohenzollern Trust, most of the Trustees and their Senior Staff had been arrested. The laundry list of charges was just staggering. Maria spent all day Saturday back at the BT as the Sunday Edition was put together.
By prior agreement, the artwork that was a signature of the Sunday Edition of the Berliner Tageblatt was focused on General von Lettow-Vorbeck. The Alaska story and Hohenzollern Trust were both developing stories. Large amounts of money and several corporations as well as the Imperial Bank of Germany were all involved.
Then on Sunday morning, something happened that changed the way that Maria saw her daughter by accident. Walter, while he wasn’t nearly the troublemaker that his older sister was, loved to wind Zella even though at eighteen he should have been long past that. He had stolen an envelope that he had found in one of Zella’s notebooks and had caused a big argument with her yelling at him to give it back before she had tried to take it by force. While Zella couldn’t overpower her much larger brother, she had years of experience as a gutter fighter and wasn’t interested in playing nice over whatever was in that envelope.
Emil had broken up the fight, the look of disappointment on his face that he was having to do it the entire time he was yelling at them to get their attention. Zella was adamant that the envelope was a part of something that she was working on and she needed it back. Frustrated by the interruption, Maria had opened the envelope, immediately seeing a large amount of money and the picture of Jack Kennedy, the Lawyer from Ireland who had been appointed by the Emperor to conduct an independent audit of the Hohenzollern Trust. Every instinct Maria had as a Reporter and Editor told her that Zella had somehow stumbled into an aspect of one of the stories that she had been wrestling with over the weekend.
“Where did you get this?” Maria demanded, and Zella had the same look on her face that she’d had frequently as a little girl whenever she had been caught doing something she had been told not to do. “Out with it, Marcella Marie and don’t you dare try to tell me any half-truths or lies.”
Zella hesitated. The risk as always was that she would just clam up, she had certainly done that enough times in the past. Maria knew that if she did then nothing could drag that information out of her, Zella was as stubborn as Emil in that regard. She realized that she needed to change her tact, by not treating Zella like her daughter, but as a reporter.
“You say that this is from something that you are working” Maria said, “Can you explain it to me?”
Zella went back to her notebook and pulled out a series of photographs. Maria’s mouth went dry as she saw Franz von Papen meeting with an unknown young man Zella’s age. In one of the photos, an envelope, the same one in Zella’s possession was passed across.
“Who is that?” Maria asked.
“Kiki was told by the Russian Sisters just who that creep Mithras was” Zella said, “We were following him before he went to that meeting.”
Maria had heard rumors of the Russian women who felt they owed Katherine von Mischner and Jehane Thomas-Romanova a personal debt for how they were treated during the Second World War. Supposedly, they had people everywhere. It was hardly a surprise that they would attempt to cultivate a similar arrangement with the Emperor’s eldest daughter. Still, Mithras. Maria had also heard who and what he supposedly was. That Zella had been shadowing someone so dangerous…
“Just how did you get this envelope?” Maria asked.
Zella hesitated again.
“Marcella…” Maria said, knowing how she thought.
“I said that we were following Mithras and he walked into the street against the light” Zella said, “Aurora was driving, and she sort of hit him with her mother’s car. It was an accident and we didn’t see him until he stepped out in front of us. I might have taken the opportunity to get the envelope away from him.”
“How many times have I told you not to make yourself a part of the story?” Maria asked sharply, “You picked his pocket after your friend ran over him with her car?”
“Aurora didn’t run over him. It was more like he bounced off the bonnet and grill” Zella said in a rush “I was trying to figure out how to write this but…”
Maria held up her hand silencing her daughter. This was beyond belief. Zella had the sort of story that made a journalist’s entire career just fall into her lap and she may have screwed it up with her impulsive actions. The worst part was that Zella’s instincts were exactly the sort of thing that Maria tried to foster among her cub reporters. Thirty years earlier, Maria wouldn’t have put it past herself not to do what her daughter had done. Already, the headline was forming in her mind to go with this story, Mithras Unmasked in massive print. It would be a blockbuster of a story and in order to protect her, Zella had to be a source and her name couldn’t appear anywhere in the byline. As Maria thought about it, she realized that it would be the perfect punishment for her daughter.