by Len Deighton
‘His name was …’ Sam Seymour looked at his papers, ‘his name was Bernard Lustig. He was some kind of movie executive. Nothing to do with the “pickle factory”: we put him through the computer every which way. No agency connection whatsoever.’ He looked up. ‘No, sincerely; no connection with CIA or FBI or any other government agency.’ He nodded to the FBI representative. ‘Right, Ben?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘So why was he killed?’ said Kalkhoven.
‘Well, let’s not get into that one for a moment,’ said the project chairman. ‘Sam is the file editor; he can only tell you what we know. Don’t ask him to make guesses. If you want me to make a really far-out guess, I’m going to say that Lustig might have been a KGB operative who went sour on them. But let’s keep to what happened … Sam!’
Sam Seymour continued, ‘The Brits have had a double slaying in London – just nine days ago – with all the same modus operandi as the Lustig killing. They’ve asked us to scan the computer for a man named Wilhelm Kleiber. Well, gentlemen, Kleiber has been on the computer for nearly three years. He came on to old Office of Strategic Services files back in 1945. He strolled up to the OSS desk of Third Army HQ and offered to show us where the Nazis had hidden foreign currency and suchlike, in exchange for a job with us. We already had the currency but we gave Kleiber an undercover job. He did OK. He went on to work for the Gehlen set-up back in the good old days, when it was the South German Industries Utilization Company …’
There was a responsive laugh. It seemed unlikely that the cover which Gehlen had used for mounting intelligence operations against Russia was ever very convincing; by today’s standard, it was nothing less than childish. ‘When Gehlen set up his cover organizations – and made money – in everything from wholesaling wine to public relations, Kleiber set up a security company for them. In 1958, Kleiber was pensioned off and allowed to buy the security company at a bargain price.’
‘Poor old US taxpayer,’ said Kalkhoven.
‘Right,’ said Sam Seymour. ‘It was that kind of deal. The security company was his “pension” from Gehlen, but the bottom line was that we picked up the tab. He was, in effect, working for us.’ He took off his spectacles. ‘But it still wasn’t good enough for Kleiber. He got into financial difficulties two or three times in the middle sixties. But he always seemed to survive.’
‘Moscow got to him?’ said Kalkhoven, who hated Seymour’s sort of double-talk. ‘Is that what you are implying?’
‘It’s what I’m trying to avoid saying,’ said Seymour, raising his hands in surrender to Kalkhoven’s critical tone. ‘It’s taken us a long time to get the message. But let’s not go jumping to conclusions until we’ve got the evidence. And let me make it clear. Kleiber was taken off the agency payroll in 1969.’
‘Don’t push, Melvin,’ the project chairman told Kalkhoven. ‘Sam here is a very cautious individual, you know that. But let me be the fool who rushes in where Seymours fear to tread. Sure, Kleiber was turned for money; it’s as clear as daylight. No evidence anywhere, but I’m telling you, that’s what happened. Kleiber is a Moscow Centre agent, and a damned dangerous one. There’s good indication that Kleiber was the hit man who helped Parker knock off Lustig in Los Angeles last May. It’s likely the Brits are right in thinking that Kleiber did the double killing in London last week.’
He nodded to Sam Seymour, who took up the story again. ‘We have something on him for the Los Angeles murder. We know he went through Los Angeles International two days before the killing and left on an intercontinental flight a mere three days after. A ground hostess and a flight purser recognized him as a passenger on the Frankfurt flight. He left his reading spectacles in the first-class lounge. A pretty dumb thing to do if you’re a KGB hit man, but people are like that, as we well know.’
‘And thank the Lord,’ said the project chairman.
‘Yes, indeed,’ said Sam Seymour. He looked again at his papers. ‘We’ve only had this material since Wednesday, so we’ve got a long way to go. TWA are checking the tickets for that flight, so we might get lucky. But what we have so far is enough to link Grechko, through the mysterious Mr Parker, with Kleiber and three killings.’ He rustled his papers on the table. ‘We’ve pink-starred Kleiber with customs and immigration. If he continues travelling on the same passport, we could nail him.’ He looked round the room to see the reaction. ‘He seems to travel everywhere alone.’
‘“Woe unto him who is alone when he falleth, for he hath not another to help him,”’ said Kalkhoven, whose father had been a lay preacher.
‘We think Parker might be the illegal,’ said the project chairman. ‘The resident illegal,’ he added in case there was any misunderstanding.
There were murmurs of surprise and congratulation round the table. The chairman smiled. ‘But we want something better out of this than swopping Parker for some American kid who got caught buying black-market bubble gum on Red Square. And I want something better than Grechko going PNG and winging his way home with a medal. Persona non grata means nothing any more. I want Grechko caught with his pants down. I want solid evidence to show that these decapitation killings were planned here in the goddamned Russian embassy. I want to see it spread good and big across the headlines. The Brits have given us Kleiber but the important targets are Grechko and Parker. Now don’t forget it.’
‘What do the Brits want out of it?’ asked Ben Krupnic, the FBI representative at the far end of the table.
‘Their SIS people are interested in a guy on the coast named Stein and a German-born US citizen named Max Breslow. We’ve had to give them a hands-off undertaking for both. They’ve given us a hands-off undertaking on Kleiber.’
‘Sounds like a fair deal,’ said Krupnic.
‘Yeah,’ said the project chairman. ‘Sounds like a fair bargain. Let’s see if anyone sticks to it.’
The FBI man smiled. He wondered whether that caustic aside was directed at his own bureau.
Chapter 31
Westlake Village was a habitat that exactly suited Max Breslow. It was far enough from the smog and noise of Los Angeles, and yet not so far that he could not be in Beverly Hills inside the hour. There was the lake and its sailing dinghies and the heated swimming pool which he shared with a few of his immediate neighbours. And if there was also a measure of pretension and pettiness, then it was no worse than he had known in such small towns in other parts of the world. And here there was the sunshine to compensate for everything.
Max Breslow sat by the pool, watching his daughter swim twenty lengths. She had the same sort of determination that he had found in himself at her age. Sometimes it frightened him to recognize that fixed expression on her face; he could see it now as she touched the edge of the pool and twisted back through the water with hardly a splash or a ripple to mark the place. She swam underwater for a long time. Max could do that when he was young; he remembered the discipline of Bad Tölz. The new big SS training establishment had only been open a few months. He remembered still the sour smell of damp cement mingled with that of the new paint. Day after day of boxing, rowing, running, jumping and swimming. Long days too; awake at four A.M. and falling into bed exhausted. It had been all right for the others – farm boys for the most part, who hardly dared believe that at the end of all this they were going to be able to return to their families and friends wearing the uniform of a German officer. Max sometimes wondered what had happened to them all; dead long since, he supposed. He remembered reading in one of the old comrades’ magazines that none of the men commissioned at the Junkerschule Bad Tölz in 1934 survived through 1942. Did anyone, Max wondered, really and truly regret the passing of the Third Reich? As much as he deplored the stupid self-indulgence of the young, he would not want to expose any of them to what he had gone through. Not even Billy Stein. Max Breslow paused for a moment – perhaps he was going too far to say not even Billy Stein; a few weeks at Bad Tölz might work wonders for that fellow.
‘Wake up, Papa!’
Breslow flinched as the cold water dropped on him, and he felt his daughter’s wet face and wet hair as she bent close and kissed him. ‘The water’s wonderful. How can you not swim?’
Breslow smiled and shook his head. He had left some toes behind in the snowy wastes outside Kharkov. It was ridiculous, but he was self-conscious about the deformity even in front of his own daughter. ‘They are building the sets in the workshops. I’m going downtown to inspect them at three P.M.’
‘I’m going to inspect them at three P.M.,’ she repeated in a funny nasal voice. ‘That all sounds very Teutonic, Papa.’
‘I have to maintain a schedule,’ he said, trying not to sound irritated, although in fact he was. ‘The cost of the workshop space is nothing compared with what we will be paying for studio time once the sets are erected there. I have to make sure they are exactly right.’
‘I read the script, you know.’ She rubbed her hair with a thick towel. ‘Have you found an actor to play the role of Hitler?’ She was very beautiful. Even allowing for his natural paternal pride, there was no denying that.
‘We have about three hundred to choose from,’ said Breslow. ‘Every agent in town seems to have someone he fancies for that part.’
‘It’s not much of a part, is it?’
‘It’s what the industry calls a “cameo”. Whoever plays Hitler will get press attention out of proportion to the importance of his role. All actors thrive on publicity; it could lead to something bigger.’
‘It’s all hokum, the Hitler sequence, isn’t it, Papa?’
‘We have to have some quick way to explain to the audience why all the treasures were taken and hidden in the Kaiseroda mine. The Hitler sequences were the quickest way to achieve this.’
‘And it will get a lot of press coverage,’ said Mary Breslow.
‘And it will get a lot of press coverage.’ They smiled at each other conspiratorially.
‘I’m going into the sauna now. Can I come with you to the workshops?’
‘I thought you weren’t interested in movies.’
She leant down and kissed his cheek. ‘I’m only interested in your movies, Papa,’ she said.
He smiled. He wanted to tell her not to bring Billy Stein, but it would only precipitate an exchange of feelings on a subject which, for the time being, he preferred to avoid. ‘I’d like to leave immediately after lunch.’
‘Yes, Papa,’ she said. In the Breslow house lunch was always served on the dot of one o’clock, and Max Breslow rose from the table at two whether he had finished his coffee or not. The Breslow women had got used to this by now. ‘At two P.M. precisely.’
The set was bigger than Max Breslow expected. He knew that art directors always sketch the human figures out of scale, when they prepare glamorized pastel renderings of their ideas. But this time the reality was even more overwhelming than the perspective drawings had suggested.
Max Breslow stood for a long time without speaking. The workshop was very high; in spite of the big lamps, its ceiling was lost in the darkness. There was a smell of freshly sawn wood, an aroma which took Breslow back to his family’s holiday home in the Eifel. As a small boy he had gone out to watch the foresters felling the huge trees and cutting them into segments. Now he smelt it once more. And here in the studio there was also that acrid smell of fast-drying paint and plastic glues. ‘Can you put the fans on?’ Breslow called. There was a distant rumbling and then the air-conditioning began to clatter. Max Breslow tilted back his head and tried to see to where the top of the newly built sets disappeared in the darkness. ‘They are big,’ said Breslow. ‘Very big.’
‘You’ve got a lot of height in that studio,’ the art director explained. ‘I talked to the director and he wants to use a big crane and start with a shot that majors on one of those Nazi eagles up there, and then pans round to Hitler’s desk.’
‘The conference shot,’ said Max Breslow.
‘Yes, the conference shot,’ said the art director. ‘Hitler and all his generals crowded round his desk looking at maps. We have built the set with four walls like this so that he can shoot the reverses in any way he wants. The two end walls float, of course.’
‘Of course,’ said Max Breslow, although he was not quite sure whether floating a wall was to move it, open it for a camera trolley or dismantle it quickly.
‘It’s quite a place,’ said Breslow’s daughter from the other end of the set. Her voice echoed in the rafters.
‘You’ll have more space than this in the studio,’ said the art director. ‘They’re a bit close together here in the workshop for ease of building.’
‘Was Hitler’s Chancellery really like this?’ called Mary Breslow.
Max Breslow did not answer. Eventually the art director said, ‘We are working from photos of the real thing, Miss Breslow.’ He turned back to her father. ‘There’s all the set dressing to be done yet. This is just the bare essentials, but I think it works OK.’ The art director couldn’t conceal his pride.
Max Breslow walked across to the wall and rapped his knuckles against the marble. It made the unmistakable sound of hollow plastic. The art director smiled. ‘It’s good, isn’t it? You wait until you see the polystyrene bust of Hitler, and the plastic floor. When we put the sound track on the film, so that you hear metal studs striking marble as the actors march about, no one will guess this wasn’t the real place.’
‘The real place was destroyed by Red Army artillery in 1945,’ said Max Breslow dryly.
‘You’d never know it,’ said the art director.
Max Breslow walked across to where his daughter was examining the doors and looked back to get the effect of the whole gigantic room.
‘This must have cost the earth, Papa.’
‘Only a fool tries to spread his spending over the whole production,’ said Max Breslow. ‘I looked at that script and I realized at once that the scenes inside the Kaiseroda mine could be filmed for practically nothing. It’s little more than a dark tunnel. I’m negotiating to go out and shoot some outdoor locations in Solvang village near Santa Barbara.’
‘Papa, that’s Danish.’
‘I’ve been up there to look at it, Mary. The director and I believe that with careful shooting we can make Solvang look like the village of Merkers in Thuringia. And of course we’ll get permission to take down the television antennae and remove the billboards and so on. And we’ll put up authentic-looking street signs and posters, and paint Nazi slogans on the walls. We can fit a couple of bomb-damaged buildings – just the fronts, of course – between the houses. These American villages are far more spread out than the German ones ever were. And those fronts we add will be complete with damage and so on.’
‘You’re so clever, Papa.’
‘My Hitler scenes will take place on this set, and we’ll see him outdoors in a small convoy of vehicles, using some big three-axle Mercedes that I’m arranging to rent.’
‘So this set we’re on is the only big one?’
‘No. If all goes well, I’ll have an even bigger one than this. I want to recreate Hitler’s private train for the sequence in which Hitler argues with Göring about whether the fighting should continue. If I can persuade this museum in Chicago to rent me the two Pullman cars they have, I will convert them into the Führersonderzug. Then I will woo the railroad company into letting me shoot five days in Union Station, right here in the city.’
‘In Union Station?’
‘It’s a wonderful building, Mary. Did you ever take a proper look at it? Can you imagine what that would look like draped with fifty-foot-tall red swastika banners, lined with German soldiers of the Führer Begleit Battalion, and packed with extras shouting and screaming the old Nazi slogans, while Hitler walks slowly past them to his train? Can you imagine what a great sequence that would be?’
‘I can imagine how many column inches you’d pick up in the local papers and TV news.’
Max Breslow permitted himself a thin smile. ‘There would be that too, Mary, of cours
e.’ He went out through the main workshop into the smaller rooms. All of them were putting together hastily constructed furniture for the Hitler Chancellery scene. His immense desk was receiving the plastic spray that would make it look, to the camera’s eye, like a masterpiece of French polishing. Only two chairs were so far constructed from the pile of ornate legs and seats.
‘Everything’s so oversize, Papa. Is that the way it was?’
‘They are working from photos,’ said Max Breslow. ‘All the original furnishings were deliberately made too large. They say it was intended to overawe the visitor, and make him feel insignificant in the presence of the Führer.’
Mary Breslow walked over to the part of the workshop where the working drawings were pinned to the walls, along with dozens of large glossy photo prints of the Reich Chancellery in its days of glory. ‘What a place,’ she said. ‘You can smell the megalomania.’ She turned to her father. ‘Were you ever there, Papa? Tell me truly. I want to know.’
‘I saw it,’ admitted Max Breslow. ‘More than once. And I saw the monster too.’
‘Was he a monster, Papa?’
‘Let history be the judge,’ said Breslow. ‘It is too early to rake over the reputations of those so recently dead.’
‘It’s thirty-five years ago, Papa,’ said Mary. She watched him closely and he knew he was being observed although he did not turn round, or even move his head.
‘It’s only yesterday for some of us,’ said Breslow. How did he ever get into this absurd situation? The money was welcome, of course, but this wretched film about Hitler, which he had never wanted to have anything to do with, might be the very thing to get him into trouble with the Americans. If the newspapers discovered that he had served with the Waffen SS that might be enough to have him deported. Damn Kleiber. Damn him, damn him, damn him.
‘Cheer up, Papa,’ said Mary.