Chapter 1: Rain and the Broken Wall

The rain turned the ruins of Freiburg’s Old Town into a wash of dark grey. Searchlights sweeping the cleanup site swung back and forth through the water curtain, while an excavator sat idle beside a half-standing wall, its treads churning mud that continually seeped into the accumulated puddles. Just as Friedrich Junge turned to leave, a faint sound came from beneath his feet—like metal being tapped against concrete. He stopped and looked back at the heap of broken walls covered in canvas. The sound did not repeat, but a thin line of water could be seen seeping from deep within the wall’s foundation, defying the slope of the terrain.

He did not approach immediately. The first lesson a war journalist learns is not how to shoot, but how to judge whether a second observer is present on the scene. Friedrich pressed his camera against his chest, using the noise of the rain as cover, and moved past the wooden stakes on the outside of the warning tape. In the distance, a security guard was arguing with a cleanup crew member, his flashlight beam angled toward the temporary storage shed. Friedrich crouched low, switched his tactical flashlight to red mode, and slowly scanned along the base of the wall. Broken bricks, rebar, and old mortar passed under the beam until the corner of a half-buried concrete block became visible.

The concrete block was darker than the surrounding material, its surface marked with several shallow channels worn by muddy water. Friedrich brushed away the loose silt with his gloved hand, and a number gradually emerged: 103. Below it was a set of letters obscured by rust, arranged in a manner that did not resemble local construction markings. He did not touch the engravings; instead, he lowered the light, letting the shadows do the work of magnifying the details. Leftover military items from World War II were not rare; what was truly unusual was that this object was embedded inside the old wall’s foundation rather than scattered on the surface.

Friedrich crouched down, first examining the joint between the concrete block and the wall foundation, then inspecting the cross-section. A natural collapse would leave radial cracks, and friction near rebar would create rough edges; the break before him was so unnaturally flat it seemed deliberate. The horizontal texture was cut off by some hard tool, and the edges bore only fine, parallel abrasion marks. He extended his calipers to compare the width, and the error between the two ends of the cross-section was less than two millimeters. If this piece of concrete had fallen with the wall, the impact would never have tightened the cracks into such a uniform shape.

He swapped the standard lens for a macro lens, first stopping down the aperture to a smaller value, then pushing the shutter speed fast enough to freeze the raindrops. Macro photography was not just about sharpness; the angle of the light determined whether the texture told the truth. Friedrich fixed the flashlight on the left side, creating diagonal shadows on the cut edge, then used the camera’s peaking focus to check the dust accumulation around the rebar. On the screen, the concrete grains looked like a city that had been hollowed out, and from the deep interior of the cross-section, an arched scratch that did not belong to natural rupture emerged.

Friedrich murmured, “It didn’t fall here. It was cut first, then pushed into the wall.”

Footsteps suddenly approached from behind. A security guard crunched over gravel and shone his flashlight directly into Friedrich’s lens. In the rain, the man’s waterproof coat bore no insignia; a walkie-talkie hung at his waist, but an old-style metal badge was tucked into his cuff. He stopped inside the warning line, did not approach the number, and did not check the site registration board. His first word was an order.

The security guard said in a low voice, “Put down the camera and leave.”

Friedrich did not stand up. He simply aimed the lens at the cross-section, his tone even. “This is non-invasive documentation. I haven’t moved any stones, I haven’t crossed the lines, and the subject of the photos is part of the visible structure of the cleanup site.”

The security guard said, “This is private property.”

Friedrich looked up at him. “Private property does not mean you can obstruct the recording of evidence. You should first present your site authorization, then explain the basis for the restrictions.”

The guard’s gaze dropped to the concrete block, lingering for a fraction of a second longer than a normal check. That moment confirmed to Friedrich that the guard understood the significance of the number. The guard took a step forward, the tip of his shoe pressing an old brick into the standing water, as if he wanted to crush a point of reflection into the mud. Friedrich lowered his camera, intentionally letting the strap block the screen, while keeping his other hand resting on the shutter.

The security guard reached out. “Hand over the equipment.”

Friedrich stood up. “You can ask me to stop filming, but you cannot simply seize the camera.”

The security guard said, “Do not use your press card as a pass. Nothing from here can be taken away by anyone.”

Before he had finished speaking, the guard grabbed the camera shoulder strap and gave it a sharp yank. Friedrich released his grip smoothly to prevent the body from slamming into the wall foundation, but in that half-second of transition, he pressed the hidden transfer button. The camera’s built-in low-power Bluetooth was already paired with his phone, which was hidden in his coat’s inner pocket with the screen off, but the background was receiving compressed preview images. The raw files were too large to transfer immediately, but the nine crucial macro photos had already begun uploading to the encrypted cloud.

The security guard flipped the camera over, skillfully opened the battery compartment, and then pulled out the memory card. His movements did not look like those of a man checking a journalist’s equipment for the first time; they resembled someone searching for a location they already knew existed. Friedrich stared at his hands. “The card doesn’t contain what you’re looking for.”

The security guard frowned. “How do you know what I’m looking for?”

Friedrich said, “Because a regular guard only checks the body, not the storage card first. Are you trying to delete the photos, or are you trying to confirm if the photos captured what’s inside?”

The sound of the rain briefly filled the space between the two men. The security guard inserted the memory card into a reader; the screen lit up. The folders were arranged chronologically, with no unusual names. He clicked through several wide shots of the site; the frames contained only mud and broken walls. The macro photos were still sitting in the background transfer queue. The file names had been automatically rewritten by the camera into sequential numbers, and preview thumbnails had not yet been generated.

The security guard said coldly, “Delete them.”

Friedrich looked at the card reader. "Delete the wrong one, and the device log will time the operation. The demolition team's full video record is going to the insurers and the city registry anyway. If you force this, the blame lands on you."

The security guard didn't move at once. He clearly wasn't afraid of a reporter, but he couldn't be sure the photos hadn't already synced elsewhere. Friedrich slid his hand into his inner pocket, brushed the edge of his phone, and let the man see the motion—without taking it out. He knew a threat had to stay vague; too specific, and it would expose a bluff.

The guard asked, "Who did you send it to?"

Friedrich said, "Who I sent it to doesn't matter. What matters is that tomorrow, someone will know there's a slab of cement here with an abnormal number."

The guard said, "Don't dig up old business. The war's been over for a long time. Dead men won't testify for you."

Friedrich said, "What my father left behind proves that some people are alive, yet spend their lives keeping secrets for the dead."

That remark changed the man's expression. Not surprise—more like an old file suddenly flipped open to its front page. Friedrich seized the moment and took the camera back from his hands. The guard didn't stop him, only tossed the memory card into his palm. Rainwater clung to the card's edge; the metal contacts were intact, unbroken. Friedrich lowered his gaze to check the body, confirmed the transfer light had gone dark, then pulled up the photo upload status. The last three frames still showed as pending; the first six had completed.

He memorized every parallel scratch on the broken face, and the unnatural gray-white gap beside the number. During the shot, the macro frame's bottom edge had caught something dark and fibrous, pressed into a thin line by the cement grains. Not rust from rebar—more like fabric or paper residue. If the block had been recast, it might seal away documents, banknotes, or some kind of evidence that explained why it had been hidden in the wall's foundation.

Friedrich remembered the note among his father's belongings. The paper had gone brittle, and only one sentence remained legible: *Wealth has no owner, only custodians.* That fortune of unknown origin had appeared once in the family records—no amount written, but the location scratched out. After Karl Richter read the note, he refused to dig further.

Karl Richter said, "Old archives aren't treasure maps, Junker. First and foremost they're a chain of evidence. Lose a single page, and the whole story gets rewritten."

Friedrich asked, "Why did you tell me pages were missing?"

Karl Richter said, "Because someone tampered with the archive before it was sealed. And because your father's name appears in a transfer record where it shouldn't be."

After that conversation, Johanna Drechsler spread an old map across the long table in the museum basement. Its edges were curled from damp. On the west side of the old city, the foundation line was circled in pencil with three overlapping strokes, no caption beside them—only a square that had been erased many times. Johanna didn't explain what the circles meant. She just pushed the map toward Friedrich.

Johanna Drechsler said, "In all my years running this museum, that area never appeared in the public exhibition records."

Friedrich asked, "Because it's a former military zone?"

Johanna Drechsler said, "No. Because every time someone asked to examine the old objects there, the request vanished before it could be catalogued."

Johanna Drechsler added, "If you keep going, don't just look for wealth. First find out who had the power to seal an old case shut."

Back in the rainy night, Friedrich stood outside the cordon, fingers pressing his phone through his coat. The upload was complete—nine photos split into encrypted fragments, timestamps unchanged. He closed his eyes and replayed the final frame in his mind: the slanted light cutting across the broken face, and on the inner side, near the wall, a thin dark-red line. At first it looked like rust; magnified, it revealed irregular strokes.

He reopened the phone and looked only at the low-resolution preview, not returning to the site. The image was blurred by raindrops bending the light. Below the number 103, the cement grains formed a field of gray-white noise. Friedrich raised the brightness, dropped the color saturation, and pushed the contrast to its limit. The dark red finally rose out of the noise—as if someone had dipped a fingertip in blood and written a date on the inner surface before it dried.

April 30, 1945.

Friedrich didn't immediately think of the wealth, or of his father. He only stared at the thin mark extending downward beside the last digit, confirming it wasn't a crack but the tail of a pen stroke. On the day after Berlin fell, this cement, stamped with the number of the U.S. 103rd Division, was cut, sealed, and mortared into the base of Freiburg's old wall. Rain kept washing over the screen, but the dark-red letters didn't fade—as if someone, across eighty years of darkness, had just slipped a testimony into his hands.