Ghosts of the Past

CHAPTER 2

15 CHAPTER 2

Munich, Germany, the present dayAnja Berghoff looked out the window from her desk in the Ludwig Maximilian University library and saw blue sky. It was what passed for a warm summer’s day in Munich and while it would have been nice to be sitting outside in a park she wanted to be somewhere further away.

Namibia.

It was the land of her birth, but her parents had fled in 1990 fearing retribution at the hands of the new South West African People’s Organisation government. Even though SWAPO had proved to be magnanimous in its transition to majority rule, following the United Nations–supervised elections, her father, of Namibian-German stock, refused to ever return, and had died proclaiming he had made the right decision.

Anja felt differently. She had been taken from Africa at the age of ten, just old enough to mourn the loss of friends and to appreciate the beauty of the arid but enchanting land in which she had begun to come of age. Germany had been everything that her birth country was not – cold, wet, green, predictable. She had hated it.

16Of course, in time she had learned to appreciate her European life, but as impressive as the castles and rivers and snowfields and rich green grass were, they were not a patch on an African night sky awash with stars, the sight of a cheetah stalking its prey through dry golden grass, or the ghostly apparition of one of Etosha’s white-dusted elephants emerging from the dark onto the eerie canvas of a floodlit waterhole.

For Anja, the only thing to rival the fascination of Namibia’s landscapes and wildlife was its history. She was researching her master’s degree in history and her thesis was on the origins of another of Namibia’s natural attractions, the wild horses of the Namib Desert, sometimes called the ghost horses.

By a strange chain of events she had found herself wading through once highly classified intelligence documents, which she had obtained online from the national archives. The scans were of letters from a spy based in South Africa at the turn of the twentieth century. What was of interest to Anja was that the agent was a woman, Claire Martin, who, like her, had lived in Namibia, or German South West Africa, as the Kaiser’s colony was known at the time.

Claire Martin’s life story read like a movie screenplay. She had been born in Germany to an Irish father and a high-born Prussian mother. Her father had fled Ireland after being involved in the Fenian uprising against the British in 1867 and ended up serving on the Prussian side during the Franco–Prussian War. He had married the widow of a Prussian comrade and moved the family to America, where he’d tried to make his fortune on the goldfields in California. After failing there he had taken his wife and daughter to South Africa, and in the 1890s across the border to German South West Africa. There Claire had married the owner of a German shipping company, but he’d gone bankrupt and committed suicide.

In truth, Anja was interested in Claire Martin’s later life at around 1906 as a horse breeder in South West, where she and her second husband, Peter Kohl, had had a number of farms and a horse stud, but Claire’s early reports about her time as a spy 17for the Kaiser in 1902 made for fascinating reading. She would have been an unusual and very valuable spy, being a woman and speaking fluent German and English. Plus, while her letters were not directly relevant to Anja’s research into the origins of the desert horses, Anja had a theory that something had happened during Claire’s time as a spy in South Africa that had a direct bearing on her later life back in the German colony across the border.

Anja saw that Carla, the librarian she usually dealt with at LMU, had returned from her lunch break. She left her notes and laptop and went to the desk to ask Carla if the books she had ordered had been returned.

‘Yes, Anja, I have them here for you.’ Carla reached under the counter and slid the books over to her. ‘What did you say you were researching specifically?’

‘The desert horses of Namibia,’ Anja said. ‘Most people think they’re descended from military mounts that escaped or were let go during the First World War, but I’m working on a new theory, that the core group of horses from which the modern ones are descended arrived in the desert some time before then. It’s sensitive though; I can’t tell you more than that.’

Carla rolled her eyes. ‘No need to be so prickly.’

Anja frowned. This woman was not the first person to use that word to describe her. Anja’s mother was always saying she needed more friends, and Carla was nice and helpful.

She’d just opened her mouth to apologise when a young man, another student by the look of his ripped jeans and olive-green Bundeswehr surplus parka, came to the counter to ask for assistance. Looking away, Carla picked up a sheaf of printouts and passed them to him.

Anja instead thanked the librarian, took the books and went back to her desk, where she selected the next letter. It was another report from the last months of the Anglo-Boer War, dated 1902. What was becoming clearer in the letters was that Claire Martin had not been in South Africa only to gather intelligence for Germany on the course of the war – which was fascinating 18enough in its own right – but was also there to facilitate some kind of covert arms deal between Germany and the Boers in a last-minute bid to turn the tide of the war, in which the British had finally gained the upper hand.

This letter, like the others, was addressed to German Naval Intelligence, by way of the Kaiser’s embassy in neutral Portuguese East Africa.

On the fourteenth of the month I met with Kommandant Nathaniel Belvedere at an abandoned trading post on the banks of the Sabie River in the low country of the eastern part of the Transvaal. Belvedere is the commander of a battalion of Americans fighting for the Boers against the British. They call themselves the George Washington volunteers. Many are of Irish extraction and have a deep-seated hatred of the British.

Belvedere and a troop of his Americans were part of the Boer force that safeguarded President Paul Kruger out of South Africa when he left Pretoria by train in 1900. Belvedere, formerly a senior manager in a Transvaal goldmining company, was a close confidant of the President. He was to be my contact for the sale of the guns. He intimated to me, once we had established a rapport, that he did not have the funds on his person, but knew the location of enough currency to complete the transaction. I am yet to extract the whereabouts of his money.

Anja set down the letter and opened one of the books Carla had just given her. It was a German-language publication about foreign volunteers who served with the Boer forces. There were a good many of them, not only from America but also from Ireland, Holland, France, Sweden and Germany. Anja thumbed her way to the index and found the name Belvedere. On the listed page she found a photograph of a man with long fair hair, a drooping moustache and pointed beard. He stood in a stiff pose and wore a frown, but Anja detected a smile in his eye. Undeniably handsome, Colonel Nathaniel Belvedere looked like 19a Wild Bill Hickok character from the American Wild West. The few pictures she had sourced of Claire Martin told Anja that she, too, had been attractive. Anja let her mind wander as to the nature of the ‘rapport’ the pair had established.

There was no one in Anja’s life, romantically, and nor had there been for four years now. She had lived with a man for five years, but unlike her he had not wanted to have children. Eventually, he left. She was almost forty now and as difficult as it was for her she had almost resigned herself to the fact that she would not find a man and have a child. Maybe her mother was right, maybe she wasn’t trying hard enough, but for all her longing for a family Anja had become increasingly used to her own space and her own life, which she happily divided between Namibia and Germany.

Maybe, she told herself for perhaps the thousandth time, she would find an intelligent, financially secure safari guide in Namibia who was happy to live with her there during her regular visits. She forced the thought from her head and returned, instead, to the world of Claire Martin and her handsome American officer.