They locked eyes, and then Cronley said, “Well, it’s been nice chatting with you, Herr Standartenführer, but now I must have a chat with SS-Brigadeführer Heimstadter to see how his morale is holding up.”
He turned and left the cell. He heard Müller mutter something bitterly but couldn’t understand what it was.
Well, I managed to upset the bastard.
And when—tomorrow—he gets together with Heimstadter and asks him what we talked about and Heimstadter tells him he never talked with anybody named Feibleman, that will upset both of them.
So, what I do now is go to the Mansion and tell my guys to tell Heimstadter that Müller is singing like a canary.
And then I’ll go out to the Farber Palast and have a well-deserved drink.
And then I’ll go find Ginger and maybe get lucky.
[TWO]
Farber Palast
Stein, near Nuremberg, American Zone of Occupation, Germany
1645 18 April 1946
Colonel Ivan Serov was sitting in one of the armchairs in the lobby when Cronley walked in. He stood up, holding a bottle of Haig & Haig scotch by the neck, when he saw Cronley.
“Thank you, Ivan, but no thanks. I have plans.”
“There are developments you really have to hear.”
“If I go in there with you,” Cronley said, nodding toward the entrance of the bar, “you will have as long as it takes for me to down one drink.”
“We can’t discuss what I’ve come up with in the bar.”
Cronley looked at him.
Jesus, Cronley thought, he’s serious!
Duty, damn it, calls.
Cronley pointed toward the elevator bank.
“This better be good, Ivan. You’re interfering with my love life.”
* * *
—
There were four DCI bodyguards outside the Duchess Suite. One of them opened the door, and Cronley and Serov walked into the suite.
“Shit,” Cronley muttered when he saw that Father McGrath, Tiny Dunwiddie, and Ginger were in the room.
“And hello to you, too,” Ginger said.
“I’m sorry, but I have to have a private word with Colonel Serov,” Cronley said. “We’ll be right back.”
“Actually, James,” Serov said, “I’d hoped to have a word with Father McGrath. In fact, with everybody. I’ve been thinking—”
The door opened again, and Colonel Mortimer Cohen entered the suite.
When he saw Serov, Cohen said, “I wonder why the phrase ‘fox in the henhouse’ suddenly popped into my head.”
“Ivan’s been thinking, Colonel,” Cronley said. “And you’re just in time to hear what.”
Cohen motioned toward the Haig & Haig. “While I am a devout believer in beware of Russians bearing gifts, if I were offered a taste from that bottle the colonel is holding in a death grip, I might be inclined to listen to what he wants to say.”
“How kind of you. James, why don’t you find a glass for the colonel?”
* * *
—
“I’ve been thinking . . .” Serov began when Cronley finished serving the drinks.
“So you keep telling us,” Cronley said.
“I was about to go to Budapest . . .”
“Why?” Cohen asked.
“I came into reliable information that Gábor Péter had von Dietelburg and Burgdorf.”
“So it was the AVO who handled their escape?” Cohen asked.
“That would be a reasonable conclusion to draw.”
Cronley thought, As if you didn’t know.
“I didn’t think I could get Gábor to hand them over to me, but I thought their changed circumstances—and Gábor’s interrogation techniques—might get them to tell me who has Odessa’s money. If we can get our hands on that, it would put Odessa out of business.”
Both Cohen and Cronley nodded in agreement.
“And it might cut Himmler’s new religion off at the knees,” Serov went on, “which I now regard as God’s mission for me in this life.”
That sounds like pure bullshit.
But why do I believe him?
“I went from that,” Serov said, “to thinking that Burgdorf and von Dietelburg were not going to tell me or Gábor anything. I think they realize that sooner or later—most likely, rather soon—we’re going to kill them and that they would rather die, and be remembered, as martyrs to the cause of the Thousand-Year Reich and the heretical religion of Saint Heinrich the Divine.
“And then I had an epiphany. I began to think of the money itself, which I had never done before. I realized that it was millions, perhaps even tens of millions, of dollars, pounds, Swiss francs, plus gold and precious stones.
“It would not fit in fifty trunks. It is not readily transportable, and I don’t think it’s buried in the basement of some ruin in Berlin or Vienna, or elsewhere.”
He paused, then finished. “So where is it stored?”
“Damn good question, Ivan,” Cohen said, “one that never occurred to me. Where do you think it is?”
“When one has a fortune that won’t fit in one’s hip pocket, one puts it in the bank. It’s in a bank somewhere.”
“Somewhere in Europe,” Cohen said, nodding in agreement. “The first place that comes to mind is Switzerland. But the last I heard, we had a hundred FBI agents—probably more—in Switzerland looking for Nazi money. So where else?”
“Father McGrath,” Serov said. “Would you please tell us all you can about Pope Pius XII?”
“Seriously?”
“Quite seriously.”
“Okay. So, Eugenio Maria Giuseppe Pacelli became Pius XII in March of 1939. Prior to that, he was papal nuncio to Germany and later cardinal secretary of state. You want more?”
“What would you say, Father,” Serov asked, “was the cardinal secretary’s most significant diplomatic achievement?”
“Oh, I see where you’re going,” McGrath said.
“I think I do, too,” Cohen said. “And it never entered my goddamn mind!”
Cronley thought, And stupid Super Spook has no idea what the hell they’re even talking about.
“I believe you’re talking about the Reichskonkordat?” McGrath said.
“Yes, I am,” Serov said. “Tell us about it.”
“The Pope made a deal with the Nazis,” Cohen furnished. “They agreed to leave the Catholic Church alone and the Pope stopped criticizing the Nazis.”
“There was a good deal more to the Reichskonkordat than that, wasn’t there, Father?” Serov said.
“The Vatican State,” McGrath replied. “I don’t know the details, but Mussolini went along.”
“Yes, he did,” Cohen said. “He declared the less than a half square kilometer of the Vatican an independent country free of Italy.”
“With all the same sovereign rights as the Soviet Union,” Serov added, “and the United States of America, and every other independent country. Correct?”
“When Mark Clarke’s Fifth Army took Rome,” Cohen said, “they were under strict orders not to enter the Vatican. And as soon as Hotshot Billy landed Clarke next to the Colosseum—”
“Our Hotshot Billy?” Cronley interrupted.
“I know of only one Lieutenant Colonel William Wilson,” Cohen replied. “That Hotshot Billy. Before being General White’s aviation officer, when Clarke took Rome Wilson was Clarke’s twenty-one-year-old—maybe twenty-two—personal pilot. Anyway, as soon as Billy dropped Clarke off next to the Colosseum, he flew back to Fifth Army headquarters, where he picked up the Fifth Army’s Catholic chaplain and transported him to Rome. The chaplain then got in a jeep and drove to the Vatican, politely asked to be admitted, and then assured the cardinal secretary of state that the Fifth Army and the United States were going to respect the sovereignty of the
Vatican.”
“I never heard any of this,” Father McGrath said. “Fascinating.”
“It gets even more interesting,” Serov said. “Can any of you students of international affairs tell me what every sovereign state has in common with its peers?”
“A national bank,” Cohen said after some consideration. “Christ! Why didn’t anyone come up with this?”
“Into which, I suggest,” Serov said, “just before the Germans departed Rome, or probably earlier, the disciples of Saint Heinrich the Divine deposited just about all of their worldly goods.”
“Why would the Pope—the Vatican—let them do that?” Ginger asked, a second before Cronley was about to ask the same question.
She’s about to be told to butt out, Cronley thought, and not politely.
She wasn’t.
“A very good question, my dear,” Serov said. “One to which I have given much thought.”
“And what did you come up with?” Cohen asked.
“How about,” Cronley said, “quote, the first duty of a Catholic priest is to protect the Holy Mother Church, unquote.”
“You want to explain that?” Cohen said.
Cronley nodded. “There was a priest in Strasbourg, a parish priest—more important, the priest from the parish in which our friend Kommandant Jean-Paul Fortin had been raised. When the Germans moved into Strasbourg, the priest promptly began to collaborate with them. That collaboration resulted in the torture, then deaths, of Fortin’s family, after which their bodies were thrown into the Rhine. The SS had learned that Fortin was in England, serving as an intelligence officer on De Gaulle’s staff, and the bastards wanted to send him—and Strasbourgers generally—a message.
“After the war, Fortin looked the priest up and demanded to know why he had done absolutely nothing to aid his family. The priest was unrepentant. He told Fortin sorry, his first duty as a priest was to protect the Holy Mother Church. And, as we know, Fortin put .22 caliber rounds in his elbows and knees before throwing him in the Rhine and watching him try to swim.”
Serov said, “I think we safely can assume that Pius XII thinks of himself as a priest with a similar first duty.”
“You aren’t suggesting,” Ginger said, more than a little unpleasantly, “that the Pope knowingly went along with hiding the Nazi money?”
“What I’m suggesting is several things, none of which suggests the Pope is anything but a devout servant of God. But I think we have to consider that he was in Germany for many years as papal nuncio, which means ‘speaker for the Pope.’ He speaks German fluently. During that period, he met many decent Germans who were both devout Catholics and opposed to Nazism. He also met many devout Catholics who were also devout Nazis, some of whom were in the SS.
“All of these people hated communism, as did the Pope. The Pope regarded—regards—communism as the greatest threat to the Holy Mother Church.”
“And it is,” Father McGrath said, thoughtfully.
“They thus became allies of the Church, the Vatican,” Serov went on. “And by 1945, it became clear to His Holiness that the Germans were about to lose the war. The Vatican has its own intelligence service—”
“Every priest is a Vatican special agent,” Cohen put in. “I’d say their intelligence service makes everybody else’s, including ours, look like bumbling amateurs.”
“That is not an exaggeration,” Serov said. “I think we can safely presume that Pius knew all about the mass murders in the extermination camps and, more important, about Odessa. And that as a man of God—now, this is pure conjecture—he was worried about the retribution the Allies—particularly, perhaps, the retribution of the Jews, but even more particularly that of the Soviet Union—were about to wreak on the Thousand-Year Reich.”
“If I can go off at a tangent, Colonel,” Father McGrath said, “how much do you think the Vatican—the Pope—knew about this heretical religion Himmler was trying to start?”
“Had started,” Serov corrected. “And, again, this is pure speculation. I’m sure he heard something about it and dismissed it as harmless Nazi nonsense. Like that elevator shaft they were digging to reach the underworld.”
“That was really loony tunes, wasn’t it?” McGrath said, chuckling.
“Father, with all due respect, if you really believe in something, it’s not—what was that charming phrase you just used?—loony tunes. That is what’s so dangerous about the religion of Saint Heinrich the Divine. They’re true believers, as devout as any monk in one of those mountaintop monasteries in Greece who spend eight hours a day on their knees praying.”
“You really believe that, Ivan?” Cronley asked.
“Devoutly,” Serov said.
Cronley sighed. “Okay. Let’s say your theory is right on the money. What do we do about it?”
“Odessa, like any organization, has routine expenses. They have to make withdrawals from their account at the Vatican Bank to pay them. One way they can do this is to send someone into Rome, into the Vatican. That would pose the problem for them of getting their agent back across the border with a briefcase, or even a suitcase, full of money.
“I think it far more likely that when one of their largest depositors needs to make a withdrawal, the Vatican Bank sends a courier to them with the funds.”
“A courier?” Cohen asked, dubiously.
“Perhaps a lowly priest whose luggage is unlikely to be searched by customs officials when he is crossing a border. But I think the courier is most likely to rank higher in the Vatican hierarchy. At first, I was thinking of a monsignor or a bishop, of whom there is a plethora in Rome, and especially within the Vatican bureaucracy. But then, letting my imagination run wild, I thought the couriers are probably red hats.”
“What are red hats?” Ginger asked.
“Cardinals,” Serov said.
“Cardinals?” Cohen parroted, dubiously.
“Cardinals,” Serov repeated. “Let your imagination run free, Colonel, after I propose this scenario: Let us suppose that Odessa needs some cash—say, a million dollars in U.S. or pounds or francs, or a mix thereof. But a briefcaseful? The Vatican Bank is notified, either by Odessa’s man in Rome—and I think we can presume they have one—or by other means. They don’t want it in Rome, of course, but in Berlin.”
“Why Berlin?” Cohen challenged.
“It seems logical to assume that Odessa’s leadership is there,” Serov said. “There’s a lot of places for them to hide. I’m not saying they have a headquarters in the normal sense. I think the head of Odessa at any time is a former senior SS officer. His deputy is the next-senior former SS officer. Und so weiter. They hold their staff meetings in the back room of a bar, or a bordello, never twice in the same place.”
Cohen looked thoughtfully at him, nodded, then said, “Okay. Go on with your scenario.”
“In the American Zone of Berlin,” Serov said, “on the Kurfürstendamm, are the ruins of the Protestant church, the Kaiser Wilhelm. The lord mayor of Berlin, Oberbürgermeister Arthur Werner, who enjoys the respect of U.S. High Commissioner John Jay McCloy, has recently announced he thinks that rather than spending all the money it would take to rebuild the church, it should be left as it is as a monument to all the Berliners who died in the war.
“As a general rule of thumb,” Serov went on, “whatever the lord mayor wants, McCloy gives him. So there sits the Kaiser Wilhelm Gedächtniskirche on the K’damm. The Vatican hears of this and is not overjoyed. Far better for them to have a usable, functioning Catholic church than a monument for the masses.
“What to do? They decide to make an offer that Werner and McCloy might find hard to refuse. They will pay for the restoration of the Kaiser Wilhelm if they can turn it into a Roman Catholic place of worship.”
“Why the hell would Werner or McCloy go along with that?” Cronley asked.
“Agreed. And they al
most certainly, politely, would decline the cardinal’s kind offer. One is always polite to a prince of the Church. Especially one with credentials as a diplomatic representative of the Vatican.”
“And,” Cronley added, “one who travels as a member of the Vatican royalty is expected to travel: on a private railroad car.”
“A private railroad car bearing the insignia of the Vatican,” Serov said, “with the Vatican flags flapping on the front of the locomotive.”
“And the cardinal’s entourage,” Cronley went on, “at least one archbishop, several bishops, and a platoon of monsignors and priests. All of whom are carrying briefcases to assist them in carrying out their priestly duties. And in one of those briefcases is the million-dollar withdrawal.”
“Mrs. Moriarty,” Serov said. “I’ve heard it said that your fiancé is known in the intelligence community as Super Spook because he figures things out before his superiors.”
“So,” Cronley said, ignoring that, “all we have to do is keep an eye on the entire entourage to see which one is going to hand the briefcase with the money in it to somebody from Odessa. Which is going to be damned difficult for us.”
“Ivan,” Cohen said. “Why do I suspect that you already know that a cardinal is going to Berlin?”
“Because I’m NKGB. We know everything.”
Cronley grunted.
Serov said, “His Eminence Cardinal Heinrich von Hassburger—”
“He’s German?” Cronley asked.
“You see what I mean, Mrs. Moriarty?” Serov said. “Super Spook figured that out before Colonel Cohen did.”
“Will you please stop calling me Mrs. Moriarty?” Ginger blurted, bitter anger evident in her voice.
Cronley wondered, Now, what the hell is that suddenly all about?
Ginger, her voice rising, went on. “I know—Jimmy told me—that he believes you had my husband killed, thinking he was Jimmy. And here we sit, acting like we’re all best friends.”
There followed a long, awkward silence.
“Strange bedfellows,” Father McGrath then mused aloud.
The Enemy of My Enemy Page 11