“Correct. And, third, Jimmy wants to ask you—”
“You have a cousin who was in the SS?” Ginger asked Cronley, incredulously.
“I did until Odessa got him to bite on a cyanide capsule in the Tribunal Prison.”
There was again a look of disbelief in her eyes, followed by a look of horrified acceptance.
It hurts seeing her react this way. Maybe I wasn’t thinking with my dick, which means I am in love with her . . .
If that’s true, I’ve got to get her away from me.
Get her and the baby away from me.
“What about his widow?” Ginger asked. “Do you know where she is? I’d like to see her.”
“I’m afraid that’s impossible, madame,” Fortin said. “She’s in the Sainte-Marguerite Prison.”
“Why?” Ginger said, her tone on the edge of unpleasantness.
“The Ministry of Justice is in the process of deciding whether she is to be tried for collaboration or turned over to the Americans for trial on charges of crimes against humanity. At the Nuremberg Tribunal. And when that decision is made, I’m going to inquire into her connection with Odessa.”
“She’s a Nazi?”
“There seems little question about that,” Fortin said. “She and her husband were given the privilege of being married in that castle, Wewelsburg, that James describes as the Church of Saint Heinrich the Divine. In a Nazi ceremony in accordance with the rituals of this new Nazi religion.”
“Jean-Paul,” Cronley said, “as much as I hate to leave this delightful subject, how about we bring you and Pierre up to date on the prison break, and then you tell us what you know, suspect, or have heard about said subject?”
“I was about to suggest that,” DuPres said.
“Oh, were you?” Fortin challenged. “And have you any other brilliant suggestions?”
“As a matter of fact, mon colonel, I do indeed. If you would buy us a bottle of good cognac, it might help to erase the opinion that James’s lady and the good Father must have evolved to your being, vis-à-vis good manners, the French equivalent of an SS-Unterscharführer.”
“That’s a corporal, Ginger,” Cronley said.
“So far as manners are concerned,” Fortin snapped, “I wonder how the hell someone as impertinent as you, DuPres, ever managed to graduate from Saint-Cyr, much less hold a commission for more than two weeks.”
“That’s the French West Point,” Cronley added, helpfully.
“Apparently,” DuPres said with a shrug, “they desperately needed junior officers to explain big words with multiple syllables to its colonels.”
“You may find this hard to believe, Father McGrath,” Cronley said, “but they’re really quite fond of each other.”
“You could have fooled me.”
Fortin glared at everybody, then asked, “Would you honor me with your presence at the bar, Madame Moriarty? For some decent cognac?”
[FOUR]
“When I heard about the breakout from James,” Fortin said, draining the cognac bottle into his snifter while waving for the bartender to bring another to the table, “I told my people to start looking for them here.”
“You think they’re coming here?” Cronley said, surprised.
“I think they’re headed for Spain, and then, more than likely, for South America.”
“And leave Odessa’s money behind?”
“I’m surprised Mr. Justice Jackson calls you Super Spook. You haven’t figured this out, have you?”
“Please, enlighten me.”
“For a price, the Vatican will provide documents that will get these bastards out of Spain.”
“Really?” Father McGrath said. “I heard that rumored, but . . .”
“It’s no rumor, Father,” Fortin said.
Cronley said, “You think that von Dietelburg and Burgdorf picked up money—enough to pay off the Vatican—from the Odessa guys who got them out and are now headed here?”
“No. I think they’re gone from here, and, if not in Spain, they will be shortly.”
“Then looking for them is a waste of time?”
Fortin ignored the question, and said, “Turning to scenario two: Serov, the NKGB, arranged the escape. It was a professional job, so probably the AVO was deeply involved.”
“Why would Serov want to bust them out?” Ginger asked.
“Money, primarily. He gets them to Budapest, and the AVO gets them to tell Serov where the money is. He grabs the money, then kills both of them as they try to escape. He brings the bodies back to Nuremberg and says, ‘Look what a good guy I am!’”
“How much money does Odessa have?” Father McGrath asked.
“Estimates range from a hundred million in currency to maybe five, ten times that much. And that doesn’t include the gold and jewels.”
“Where did they get it?” Ginger asked.
“The currency that they have—that they stole—came from banks. Most of the gold the same way. But some of the gold is—or was—from teeth . . .”
“From teeth?” Ginger parroted.
“Once they had gassed the Untermenschen in the shower rooms . . .”
“What are you talking about?” Ginger said. “Gassed? Shower rooms?”
“You don’t want to know,” Cronley said.
“Yes, damn it, I do!”
Cronley raised his eyebrows, then said, “Okay. In Dachau, for example, when the trains arrived—not passenger cars but boxcars packed with prisoners—they were greeted by SS officers holding the leashes of vicious German shepherds. The men were separated from the women and children, and the old from the young, and the healthy from the sick. The healthy were marched off to work as slave labor in the factories, et cetera.
“Everybody else was told they were to take a shower, after which they would be issued prison uniforms and taken to their barracks. This group then took off their clothes and went naked into the next room, which had a sign identifying it as a shower room. The doors closed. That was the cue for the SS men on the roof to pour a pesticide—it’s called Zyklon B—into the room. Depending on conditions, death came anywhere from five to fifteen minutes later.”
“Five to fifteen? How . . . How did they know?”
“They knew they were all dead when all the screaming stopped.” He saw the look in her eyes. “You want more, Ginger?”
“Finish,” she said.
“Next, after waiting a half hour before opening the death chamber doors, other inmates entered and started loading the corpses in wheelbarrows and on tables with wheels and rolled them out of the showers. Just outside were other inmates who were forced to inspect the corpses. They removed any jewelry, such as wedding rings. Then another team of specialists went to work. They pried open the mouths of the corpses. If they found gold false teeth, or gold bridgework, or fillings, they took a hammer and chisel . . .”
Ginger gasped involuntarily, covering her mouth with her hand. Her eyes glistened.
“. . . and removed the gold. I’m sorry, baby. You wanted to hear.”
She motioned for him to continue.
“You sure?”
She nodded.
“Okay. The wedding rings and the jewelry were put in one basket, the gold teeth in another. The idea was to melt down the rings and the dental work to make gold bars, which were then to be deposited in the Deutsche Bank.
“That sometimes—in fact, often—didn’t happen, as called for. Some clever SS officer reasoned that since the Deutsche Bank didn’t know how many wedding bands, say, had been minted as gold bars, some rings could be set aside and later converted and distributed among deserving SS officers. Or smuggled into Switzerland and sold, the cash from that again distributed among the deserving.
“From its beginning, the SS was corrupt to the core—criminally corrupt. One of the original big shots
, right under Himmler, was a man named Reinhard Heydrich. He had been cashiered from the Navy for moral turpitude.”
“Was?” Ginger said. “What happened to him?”
“Heydrich was taken out in Prague by Czech agents when he was ‘protector’ of what had been Czechoslovakia. To avenge his death, the Nazis, among other despicable acts, rounded up all the citizens—men, women, and children—of a village called Lidice. The bastards put them in a church and burned the church down with them in it. They then burned down the rest of the town and leveled it with bulldozers, sowing what was left with salt.”
Tears rolled down her cheeks.
“That’s so terrible, it’s hard to believe.”
“It’s true,” Cronley said. “But we’re getting off the subject.”
He turned to Fortin, and said, “Your scenario is, Odessa gave them enough money to buy phony papers from the Vatican to get them out of France and into Spain.”
Fortin shook his head.
“That’s not what I said. I’m saying Odessa gave the Vatican enough data—photographs, und so weiter—so that the Vatican can prepare the phony documents. They’ll hide somewhere in France until they get the documents and then they’re off to Spain, Portugal—wherever—and, ultimately, to South America.”
“Jesus,” Cronley said.
“No money will change hands. Odessa’s credit is good. They’ve been doing business with the Vatican for a long time. The Vatican will get paid when these bastards are in Buenos Aires or Montevideo.”
“I don’t think I understand,” Father McGrath said.
“To be truthful,” Fortin said, “I do not think that Super Spook does either, so I’ll walk you through it. This scenario is based on the premise that Odessa staged the prison break. But we don’t know that. As I said, I think it’s entirely possible that the NKGB—specifically, James, your pal Serov—was involved. The breakout was a little too classy for Odessa.
“But for sake of discussion, let us say Odessa was behind it. They wanted to get Brigadeführer Heimstadter and Standartenführer Oskar Müller out of the Tribunal Prison because they’re important to Odessa. And then they learned that you bagged von Dietelburg and Burgdorf in Vienna. Those two are more important to Odessa—you will recall that von Dietelburg was Himmler’s adjutant—so they decided to let Heimstadter and Müller stay locked up for the time being.”
Cronley said, “You think we’re wasting time looking for them here, or, for that matter, in Germany?”
“Never underestimate your enemy, James. I’m surprised you don’t know that. And now we come to the part where I tell you what you can do for me.”
“I’m going to check on Bruce,” Ginger said, getting to her feet, “and then get some sleep.”
Everyone got to their feet, too.
She nodded at the men, said good night, and walked out of the bar.
“What’s on your greedy mind, Jean-Paul?” Cronley said.
“I’d like to see this castle you’re always talking about.”
“As would I,” Father McGrath said.
“You have access to a light airplane?” Cronley said to Fortin.
“I have a Fieseler Storch.”
“That figures,” Cronley said. “I’ll talk to Cohen. But if I call, you’ll have to come right then.”
“Fair enough,” Fortin said, who then offered his hand to Father McGrath. “Pleasure meeting you.”
IV
[ONE]
The Mansion
Offenbach Platz 101
Nuremberg, American Zone of Occupation, Germany
1205 16 April 1946
“Where are we going?” Father McGrath asked as the lead car pulled off Offenbach and stopped before the twelve-foot-tall, sheet-metal-covered gate in the Compound’s fifteen-foot-high wall.
“This place used to belong to the local Gauleiter,” Cronley replied.
“The governor?” Ginger said.
“Yeah, the Nazi asshole in charge,” Cronley said. “Now that he’s in the Tribunal Prison, he doesn’t need this place anymore, so I took it over.”
The gate slid open and the convoy drove inside.
“Very nice,” Ginger said as the Mansion came into view.
“The Gauleiter lived well. Twenty-eight rooms, a swimming pool, and a sauna.”
“What are we going to do here?” Ginger asked.
“After we pick up fresh bodyguards, and Casey Wagner, we’re going to the Tribunal, where I will introduce Father McGrath to Colonel Cohen. He will arrange a tour of the Tribunal for you while he’s talking to Father McGrath about Saint Heinrich the Divine and his new religion.”
* * *
—
“Welcome back,” Tiny Dunwiddie said. “How was Strasbourg?”
“Believe it or not, Fortin actually bought us dinner,” Cronley said.
“Will wonders ever cease?”
Cronley looked at Wagner.
“Casey, are you up to speed on the escape?”
“Yes, sir. As soon as I got here, Mr. Justice Jackson sent for Captain Dunwiddie and me and let us read that message—the report of the Prison Escape Committee—that he sent to President Truman.”
Cronley nodded. “So, what happens next is, we start talking to people. Starting with SS-Brigadeführer Heimstadter and Standartenführer Müller. I have a gut feeling they’re the ones who staged the escape originally planned to get out. And, in that regard, I got one of my famously brilliant ideas as I walked in here just now.”
“Uh-oh,” Dunwiddie said.
“Thank you for that expression of confidence, Captain Dunwiddie. But hear me out so you can stop shaking your head in resignation. I’m betting that one of them, probably both, were frequent guests of the Gauleiter here in the Mansion. It might be helpful to have one of them, Brigadeführer Heimstadter, see for himself how things have changed since the glorious days of the Thousand-Year Reich.”
“You mean bring them here?” Wagner said.
“I think if the brigadier was taken from his cell without warning by several of our ugliest Polish agents—ones speaking nothing but Polish or maybe Russian—then brought here and installed in my windowless bedroom overnight, all that might serve as an inducement for him to talk to us tomorrow morning.”
“You’d have to take all of your furniture out of there,” Wagner said after a moment’s thought, “and put in a GI bed—a cot would be better—and nothing else, except a bucket for a toilet. Maybe strip him naked and give him a blanket to wear.”
“And that is why some people call him Super Spook Junior,” Dunwiddie said, drily. “Casey not only agrees with Jim’s wild ideas, he’s also full of ideas of his own on how to improve them.”
“So, what the hell is wrong with my—and Casey’s—ideas?”
“Well, for one thing, what makes you think Colonel Cohen is going to let you take Heimstadter out of prison?”
“He didn’t become chief of U.S. Counterintelligence for the Tribunal by not recognizing a clever idea when he hears one,” Cronley said. “And if he doesn’t give me Heimstadter, I’ll go to Jackson.”
“Who is going to say, especially after he hears Cohen has turned you down, ‘No way.’”
“There’s one way to find out,” Cronley said. “Let’s go. You, too, Tiny. I have a task for you that will require all your wisdom and expertise.”
“Really? What might that be?”
“I’ll tell you later.”
[TWO]
Office of Colonel Mortimer Cohen
International Tribunal Compound
Nuremberg, American Zone of Occupation, Germany
1355 18 April 1946
“Inasmuch as Justice Jackson would be subject to criticism if it came out that he had known Colonel Rasberry and myself had permitted Super Spook to take Brigadeführer Heimstadter
out of the Compound,” Colonel Cohen announced after some thought, “I think we have to invoke the Hotshot Billy Principle regarding this problem.”
“Two questions, Mort,” Colonel Rasberry said, glancing at Captain Cronley before turning to Cohen. “One, do you really think this is a good idea?”
“I’m fresh out of other ideas. How about you?”
“Point taken. Two, who is Hotshot Billy?”
“Lieutenant Colonel William W. Wilson. He is General White’s twenty-five-year-old aviation officer. He believes—as does General White—that he became a light bird eighteen months or so ago when his West Point classmates were hoping to make captain before the war was over—”
“He made light colonel at twenty-four?” Rasberry interrupted, his tone one of disbelief.
“Yes, he did. And he attributes this to applying what has become known as the Hotshot Billy Principle. To wit: When you must have permission to do something you know is right and you have good reason to believe that the officer with the power to give you such permission is going to say ‘Hell, no,’ do it anyway, as success washes away all sins.”
“My God! And I. D. White goes along with this?”
“Indeed. He and Billy, without asking the permission they know would be refused, are hard at work trying to establish what they call Army Aviation. Their argument is, light aircraft provide mobility on the battlefield, and when the Army Air Forces becomes a separate service next year, they don’t want it to control mobility. Ergo sum, the Army needs its own airplanes, its own air force.”
“Interesting,” Rasberry said.
“So, turning to Super Spook’s idea, are you willing to stick your neck out and walk over to the prison with me and tell the OD that Super Spook will be taking Brigadeführer Heimstadter out of the prison overnight?”
Rasberry considered this.
“Okay,” he said, finally.
“You heard ‘overnight,’ right, Jim? You have twenty-four hours from now to get him back in his cell.”
“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir. Both of you.”
The Enemy of My Enemy Page 8