“You’re fucking kidding me.”
“Not at all.”
Cronley then told her why he wanted her to craft a story that would appear on the front page of Stars and Stripes and possibly even the Paris edition of the Herald Tribune.
“You realize, Jimmy, that I couldn’t write such a piece without first having seen Castle Wewelsburg?”
“That poses problems.” He pointed to the table at which Max Ostrowski and the two Polish DCI agent/bodyguards had taken seats. “Not only them, but Justice Jackson just pointed out that when we ride around in my Horch, we look like Hitler en route to a Nazi rally. I don’t want whoever is watching the Wewelsburg to report that someone very important just showed up.”
“I can have an unmarked car here in thirty minutes,” Serov said. “Providing, of course, that I get to go along.”
“Your car, the one in the NO PARKING zone outside, will do just fine,” Cronley replied. “Whoever wants to know what’s going on at Wewelsburg will be confused by a report that a car of a senior Russian officer arrived at the castle accompanied by two jeeps full of DCI agents.”
“And Janice,” K. C. Wagner chimed in.
“And Miss Johansen. We leave immediately after breakfast.”
[FIVE]
Wewelsburg Castle
Near Paderborn, American Zone of Occupation, Germany
0915 25 April 1946
They found Cohen, Father McKenna, and the engineer officers in the castle kitchen, drinking coffee with Cohen’s CIC agents.
“This is General Serov,” Cronley announced to Dickinson and Lomax. “And Miss Janice Johansen of the Associated Press. And, last but not least, Casey Wagner of the DCI. I’ve promised them all a—”
“Of the what?” Major Lomax interrupted. “Did you say of the DCI?”
“Yes, I did. And, to clear the air, so am I. Of the DCI, I mean. Any other questions?”
“No . . . No, sir,” Lomax said.
“As I started to say, I’ve promised them all a tour of the castle. I was about to ask who’s best qualified to be the guide, but I think it would be better if we found our own way, and if Colonel Cohen, our de facto tour guide, should miss something, whoever else knows anything can speak up. Any objections?”
There were none.
The tour took just over two hours.
When they had returned to the kitchen and were all seated around the table, Cronley stood up.
“This question is directed to Lieutenant Colonel Dickinson,” he said. “But I want anybody who knows something to chime in. Got it?”
There were nods and murmured “Yes, sir”s.
“Colonel, what do you think the chances are that hidden passages and/or rooms in the castle exist that we haven’t found?”
Dickinson, without hesitation, replied, “There’s absolutely no question in my mind that there are both. The larger question is, how to find access to them.”
“No question at all?” Cronley asked, genuinely surprised.
“None,” Dickinson said with finality.
“Can I ask why you’re so sure?”
“Castles, fortifications, have always fascinated me. Going back to my days in Boston.”
“What’s in Boston?”
“The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a dozen lesser schools.”
“Can you give us a little lecture?” Cronley asked.
“It will be a short one,” Dickinson said. “Okay. Starting with the idea that castles like Wewelsburg were built primarily for defense. Not like Buckingham Palace, for example, which was designed to let royalty live high on the hog.
“Because places like this were designed for war, they were always making changes to them. Making a wall thicker, for example. Or higher. So how do you make a wall higher or thicker, or both? You try, of course, to use the existing wall. But often that doesn’t work out. So you build a new wall. Where? Most often, inside the old wall. That leaves a space between the walls. Am I getting through?”
“You are, but keep talking,” Cronley replied.
“Okay, here you are, about to lay the first stone of the new wall. Your back is to the old wall. So where do you try to lay that stone? At a distance that will allow you to work comfortably when the new wall is, say, three feet tall. Two or three feet inside the old wall. So you lay the first couple of stones.
“And then you have a look. And realize that if the old wall is only three feet distant from the new wall, no one will be able to get past the stonemason. So you move those first stones to five feet and have a look and decide, what the hell, it won’t cost any more if I put the new wall ten feet away from the old wall. And that’s what you do.
“So when you get the new wall as tall, or taller, than the old wall, you connect them, and no one remembers there’s ten feet between the walls.” He paused and glanced around at everyone. “Still with me?”
Cronley said, “What about inside the castle? For example, you want to make two small rooms out of a big one.”
Dickinson nodded. “Think about it. You’re building a new wall. Same rules apply, except you may now be thinking of the space between the walls as a passageway. Get it?”
“Got it,” Cronley replied. “So how do you find these hidden walls or passageways—whatever they’re called?”
“The easiest way would be to look for them on the original plans for the castle. I don’t suppose they’ve survived the centuries, but a lot of work has been done here. Even partials would be helpful.”
“Maybe we could find some of those,” Colonel Cohen said.
“Johann Strauss,” Cronley blurted. “If we can find him, and put the fear of God in him, that would probably help us find the plans. And a lot else.”
Cohen met his eyes, and said, “Yeah, but that’s a big if. I’ve got my people looking for him. About the only thing we’ve learned is that there was no SS-Truppführer Johann Strauss anywhere near either Himmler’s or von Dietelburg’s offices in Berlin.”
“Okay,” Cronley said, “but he doesn’t know you’ve learned that. When he sees the activity around here, he’s likely to walk right in.”
“I’m not holding my breath,” Cohen said.
“Then tell your guys to look harder.”
“Actually, Super Spook,” Cohen said, thickly sarcastic, “that thought occurred to me.”
Cronley turned to Dickinson.
“Without a floor plan, is there another way?”
“Sure. Tape measure.”
“Excuse me?”
“You measure a room. Then you go outside the castle’s wall, outside that room, and measure there. If there’s a significant difference—the outside measures twenty-eight feet, say, and the inside is twenty—you know there’s eight feet of something missing.”
“Dumb question: Do you have a tape measure?”
“Never leave home without it.”
“Okay, then you start measuring while Colonel Cohen gets on the telephone.”
“Who’s Colonel Cohen calling?” Colonel Cohen asked.
“General White.”
“And what am I going to say to General White?”
“You’re going to talk him out of a troop of Constabulary. We need to really guard this place.”
Cohen looked at Dickinson, and said, “The most annoying thing Captain Cronley does, Colonel, is think of something minutes before you do.”
XIII
[ONE]
Farber Palast
Stein, near Nuremberg, American Zone of Occupation, Germany
0805 26 April 1946
“Good morning, Miss Johansen,” Father McKenna greeted her as she strode into the palace dining room.
“I hate people who are cheerful in the morning.”
“My apologies. It comes naturally. Occupational hazard, you might say.”
“Sure. The Vatican is hiding the Nazis’ dirty money and you’re a fucking choirboy of cheerfulness.”
McKenna, shocked, was speechless.
She turned to Cronley, who looked up at her from his steak-and-eggs breakfast.
“I’m afraid to ask how you slept, Janice. You should be exhausted after our long day at the castle. Buy you some breakfast?”
She ignored the offer. “Your bright idea ain’t going to work, Jimmy.”
“To which of my many bright ideas do you refer?”
“This one,” she said, and handed him a sheet of paper that had a sheet of carbon paper and another sheet of paper stapled to it.”
His eyes went to the top page:
CONSTABULARY TO OPEN NCO ACADEMY
By Janice Johansen
ASSOCIATED PRESS FOREIGN CORRESPONDENT
Berlin, April 6—
Cronley said, “There’s nothing here.”
“Nothing gets past you, does it?”
“Why won’t it work?”
“Because that’s all there is.”
“A new NCO Academy is not news?”
“If I submitted that to Stars and Stripes, they would run it on page seventeen, somewhere buried under the WAC softball tournament highlights. Not that I would submit it to Stripes. The best I could do, sweetie, wasn’t good enough. It still read like what it was, a bullshit PIO press release, and ol’ Janice does not attach her name to bullshit press releases.”
“It’s important to me, to what we’re trying to do here.”
“And for that reason I’m off to Sonthofen.”
“For what?”
“To see if I can provoke good ol’ I. D. White into saying something outrageous onto which I can hang the rest of this lousy yarn.”
“If you ask me, that’s a really lousy idea.”
Janice forced a thin smile. “I don’t recall asking you, sweetie . . . See you when Casey and I get back from Sonthofen. He’s getting the car as we speak.”
“Whoa! You want to take Casey with you? I need him here.”
“More than you need that NCO Academy yarn on the front page of Stripes?”
After a pause, during which Cronley did not reply, Janice said, “I accept your surrender,” and walked out of the dining room.
“Interesting woman,” Father McKenna said.
“I thought people in your line of work weren’t supposed to notice things like magnificent boobs,” Cronley said, mock innocent.
“Why are you so determined to insult me, to pick a fight with me, Cronley?”
“To see what’s going on behind that white collar. In my profession, it’s called knowing your enemy.”
“While I don’t think I could claim to be your friend, even your ally, I most certainly am not your enemy.”
“Your primary purpose here, what the cardinal sent you to do, is to find out as much as you can about how much of a threat my organization poses to yours.”
“My ‘organization,’ as you put it, is the Church of Rome. And—I hope this isn’t too much of a blow to your ego—I don’t think you pose as much of a threat to it as a mosquito does to an elephant by stinging its hindquarters.”
“Got to you, haven’t I? Where’s that well-known I’m a Jesuit, there’s nothing you can say that will bother me attitude?”
Father McKenna didn’t reply.
“By now, Francis, you must understand that I’ve been spending a lot of time with General Serov and Colonel Cohen . . .”
McKenna nodded.
“. . . And I think you will acknowledge that both are senior intelligence officers with a great deal of experience . . .”
McKenna nodded again.
“. . . Therefore, as a very junior, inexperienced intelligence officer, I have always paid rapt attention to whatever they had to say.”
The priest chuckled and shook his head.
“Many times,” Cronley continued, “one or the other has referred to other intelligence agencies as ‘the best in the world.’ Better, in other words, than the CIC, the DCI, and the NKGB. Sometimes, one or the other of them so described General Gehlen’s organizations over his long career. At other times, they said the Zionist organization’s Mossad was not only the best, but vastly superior to ours. And at still other times, both said, separately, that the nameless organization run by your boss, His Holiness Pope Pius XII, was unquestionably the best.”
Father McKenna raised his eyebrows. “But the Church does not have an intelligence service like the NKGB or the DCI.”
“Hear me out. The entire Church is an intelligence service far more extensive and effective than any other.”
“We are agreeing to disagree,” the priest said.
“Intelligence is dumped in your lap, Francis, if you think about it. You don’t have to look for it. But intelligence is intelligence no matter where it comes from. I speak, of course, of the confessional.”
“What is spoken in the confessional remains in the confessional,” the priest said, coldly.
Cronley was undeterred. “Okay, fine. Let’s leave the confessional out of this. But the fact remains that Holy Mother Church has assets in place around the world, as well as a communications system from bottom to top. I don’t know the exact numbers here, but let’s say there is no other population in the world where, conservatively, one-third of the citizenry meets regularly with its officials. And the worst sin of all is action contrary to the best interests of Holy Mother Church.”
“This conversation is beginning to really offend me.”
“I’m simply trying to explain my position. So, let’s turn to Mossad. Why are they so efficient? Well, when they go somewhere—anywhere—the Hebrew population is already on their side—”
“Where are you going with this, James?”
“It’s quite simple: The reason we can’t find von Dietelburg and Burgdorf is because something like ninety-nine percent of the Germans are rooting for them—and against our success in returning them to prison and, ultimately, putting them on trial.”
“But it has to be common knowledge among the Germans that those two are really despicable people. And I’m not even getting into the Church of Saint Heinrich.”
“Francis, I don’t think it’s got anything to do with right or wrong.”
“What, then?”
“How about humiliation? Maybe even the humiliation of humiliation?”
“Now it sounds like you’re babbling again. What is your point?”
“Germany didn’t lose the First World War. They lost War Two.”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“Germany didn’t surrender in World War One. They came to an armistice with the Allies. The terms of the armistice, and of the Versailles Treaty which followed, were humiliating. They lost territory in Europe. They lost their foreign colonies.”
“We know that. Get to your point, if you have one.”
“They lost World War Two. They were forced to surrender unconditionally. That was even more humiliating than being forced to seek an armistice.”
“I still don’t get your point.”
“The best way to counter the depression that comes with humiliation is to give whoever is humiliating you the finger.”
He demonstrated, making a fist with middle finger extended. McKenna’s expression was one of mild displeasure.
“By doing nothing to help us bag von Dietelburg,” Cronley went on, dropping his hand, “or, even better, doing something that actually helps them avoid getting bagged, they have the satisfaction of giving the finger to the people that are humiliating them.”
“That’s possibly, even probably, true. But, so what?”
“The point is, if we want to bag von Dietelburg and Burgdorf, we’re going to have to do it ourselves, as no one is going to
help us. At least, not help us intentionally.”
“Any ideas on how you’re going to do that?”
“I’m headed into Nuremberg. Do you want to tag along?”
“What are we going to do in Nuremberg?”
“Try something I admit is desperate.”
[TWO]
“This is a magnificent automobile,” Father McKenna said as they cruised in the Horch Sport Cabriolet with its canvas top folded down. “I have never been in one.”
“I liked it better before Justice Jackson said he doesn’t care to ride in it because it makes him look like a Nazi big shot en route to a party rally.”
Cronley raised his right hand over his head and rotated it back and forth as if waving to the masses. The priest chuckled.
“That thought occurred to me, too. Where’d you get it?”
“It used to belong to a DCI colonel who got himself kidnapped by Serov. When I got him back, they sent him to the States, and I grabbed the car.”
“Why don’t you get rid of it?”
“That would be admitting I made a mistake. Like you Jesuits, I never admit to making a mistake.”
The priest ignored that.
“What are we going to do in Nuremberg?”
“We’re not going to do anything. I’m going to try to talk Justice Jackson into letting me take SS-Standartenführer Oskar Müller and SS-Brigadeführer Wilhelm Heimstadter out of their cells for a few days.”
Cronley looked at the priest as if trying to judge his reaction. When there was none, he said nothing.
Three minutes later—which seemed much longer—Father McKenna said, “I’m getting the impression that’s all you’re going to tell me. Can I get you to change your mind? Curiosity is killing me.”
“Okay. I don’t think it will work, but I’m going to make clear that their only chance to dodge the hangman—and instead win a trip to Argentina—is if they roll over on von Dietelburg and Burgdorf. I don’t expect them to, but I want to judge their reaction. To see if it’s as strong as it was the last time I offered them a deal.”
“Where are you going to put them when they’re out of their cells?”
The Enemy of My Enemy Page 23