The hotel was small, but comfortable. It was apparently used mostly by mid-level businessmen, the ones whose companies wouldn’t pay the price for a room at the Intercontinental. The night clerk, a young man in his early twenties who spoke impeccable English, checked me in. I used a false name. The clerk asked for my passport. I whispered to him that I didn’t have a passport with me and that I wasn’t supposed to be with the woman who accompanied me. I winked. I told him, between a couple of men of the world, that I would think fifty euros might make up for the lack of a passport. The clerk beamed and held out his hand.
I paid from my dwindling cash reserves. I had no idea who was after me or what resources they had. If they had access to credit-card records, they could track me in real time. I knew that every morning the hotels gave the police a list of the foreigners who had spent the night. I didn’t want my name on that list. Who knew who had access to it.
Jess and I retrieved our bags from the concierge and walked to the small elevator. I punched the button for the third floor. “Are we on the same floor?” she asked.
“Same room,” I said, and explained my subterfuge. “Plus, I’ll feel better about your safety if we’re together. I’ll sleep on the floor.”
And that’s what I did. Regrettably.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
The next day, a cold and blustery Tuesday, Jess and I were sitting at a table in the Dornbuscher Bierstube waiting for Jock’s man. I’d gotten a call first thing in the morning from Burke Winn. Olenski had told him about my call the evening before, and he was worried.
“I’m all right, Burke,” I’d said. “I’ve got a friend who works for the government, and he’s seeing to it that I’m armed.”
“Be careful, Matt. If you get caught with a gun in Germany, there’s going to be very little I or anyone else at the embassy can do for you.”
“I know, but I’ve got to have some protection. Did you get in touch with Speer?”
“Yes.” Winn gave me a phone number. “He’s waiting for your call. He’ll get you into the archives, but he’s not sure how much help that’ll be. The records are indexed, but he said you have to know what you’re looking for.”
“Thanks. I’ll give him a call when I get to Bonn.”
Jess was sipping a hot cider and I was nursing a pilsner in a tall glass. She put the small mug on the table. “I’ve been thinking about that list of names. One of them jumped out at me, Robert Brasillach. During World War II, he was a leader of what might be called literary fascism. He was a writer and perhaps the best known Nazi collaborator during the Vichy years in France. He was editor in chief of an anti-Semitic weekly newspaper and was executed by the French after the war.”
“The young man who brought the money to Banchori to pay for Wyatt’s murder had the same name. He would have been too young to be Brasillach’s son. Grandson maybe?”
“No. Brasillach didn’t have any children. He was openly gay.”
“It was some kind of twisted joke. Robert Brasillach, a dead man, from Odessa. Not the city, but the SS organization. Banchori just assumed that the drunken ramblings about ratlines had to do with a sailboat. What could he have meant when he said he was rolling up the ratlines?”
“I don’t know. Maybe he was trying to protect some of the people involved in them after the war. Not many of them would be alive today.”
“Did you recognize any of the other names?”
“Yes. Your information was pretty good about who most of these people were. I’ll have to do some research on others. I’m not very knowledgeable about the postwar activities.”
I looked up every time the door opened, but it was just another local coming in for lunch or a beer. The clock ticked past noon, and on around to twelve thirty. I was about to give up when the door opened and a wiry man about six feet tall walked in, carrying a black attaché case. He wore a black leather jacket, black designer tee shirt, black slacks, silk socks, and black Italian loafers. A Houston Astros baseball cap topped out his attire. It took me a second to realize that the man was Jock Algren.
I was too stunned to open my mouth. He looked at Jess, and said, “You can do better than this guy.”
I was out of my chair, enveloped in a bear hug from my oldest friend. “Jock,” I said, “this is Jessica Connor. Leave her alone. Jess, this is Jock Algren, a truly dangerous man.”
She laughed. “I heard all about you last night, Jock. He said I wasn’t supposed to tell you he slept on the floor. Something about his manhood, I think.”
Jock laughed. “Such as it is.”
“I hate to break up a good conversation, but what are you doing here, Jock?”
“It sounded as if you needed backup. I was able to get the last flight out of Houston. It was running late, so that’s why I’m late.”
“I’m glad you’re here, but it’s a long way to come.”
“No sweat. What’s going on?”
Jock had known Wyatt for a number of years and had flown to Longboat Key for the funeral. He’d arrived on the morning of the memorial and left the same night. He was often a busy man, but he loved our key, and when he had time, he visited often.
I told him what I’d learned about Wyatt’s death, leaving out the execution of Chardone. I’d tell him about that privately. I didn’t want Jess to know that I was capable of such a thing. Hell, I didn’t want myself to know I was capable of such a thing. I explained how I’d met Jess, my meeting with the general, the attempt on my life, and the aborted kidnapping of Jessica.
He looked perplexed. “What do you think you’ll find in these archives?”
“I don’t know, but I don’t know where else to start. Wyatt and Sauer were working on something to do with that period of history, and somebody is dead set on burying whatever it was they’d discovered. Jess has a Ph.D. in history and did her dissertation on the Vichy government. She’s fluent in German and French. I’m hoping she can find something in the records that makes sense.”
“Not much of a plan, podner.”
“You got that right.”
“Mind if I tag along?”
“Not at all. I can always use a boy like you.”
He punched me in the arm.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
We had a lunch of goulash soup and weisswurst, washed down with beer. I told Jock that I thought whoever was after me was using some sophisticated methods. “I’m afraid to use my credit cards in case they’re tracking me that way.”
“I’ve got a snub-nosed thirty-eight and five thousand in euros in the briefcase. If you need more cash, we can get it.”
“I need to get to Bonn. There’s a guy there who’s willing to help. He works for the German government and is a curator at the archives.”
“I’ve got a rental car,” said Jock. “That’s an easy trip.”
I paid the check, and we walked out into the early afternoon. A cold wind was blowing across the river, and the air was tinged with the smell of snow. The sky was dark with low-hanging clouds. I pulled up the collar of my jacket and settled the hat more securely on my head. Jess sunk further into her heavy overcoat, a scarf pulled over her ears, hands in her pockets.
We walked down Schifferstrasse for a couple of blocks to where Jock had parked the rental in a curbside parking space. He was driving a midsize Mercedes, light gray in color. It would be virtually invisible in a country where thousands of gray Mercedes sedans plied the roads.
We left Frankfurt for the two-hour trip on the A-3 highway to Bonn, an ancient town on the Rhine River. Snow was hitting the windshield, the wipers working hard to clear it. The wind was up and the Mercedes was buffeted by the occasional gust. The car’s heater chugged along, creating a cocoon of warmth as we traveled through the dismal afternoon.
I was in the back, Jess in the front. We were talking about our visit to the archives.
“What are you hoping to find?” asked Jess.
“I’m not sure. I’d like to know if there’s a connection among the people
on Wyatt’s list,” I said.
“That’s a pretty tall order. There’re likely to be a lot of documents dealing with each one of the people. And there won’t be any information on the ratlines. At least from the postwar period. The records we’ll be looking at stopped with the fall of Germany in the spring of 1945.”
I hadn’t really thought that through. Obviously, the records of the German Reich would have stopped when the Reich fell. “There were a lot of Germans who knew their country was in big trouble, especially after the allied invasion in June of 1944. Maybe there’ll be some records about these people setting up escape routes.”
“Probably. We’ll just have to see.”
“Tell me about Vichy,” I said. “I know it was Germany’s puppet government in France after the fall of Paris, but that’s about it.”
She sat quietly for a few moments, a look of concentration playing on her face. “You have to understand the times and the French psyche. Paris had fallen to Germany in the Franco-Prussian War in 1871, had come close to falling again in 1914 at the outset of World War I, and finally in June 1940, the Germans marched into the capital without firing a shot. The French had been shocked by the slaughter of the First World War, and in the 1930s many were afraid that the Communists were about to take power. The country was in turmoil. France was the center of European anti-Semitism and the Fascist organizations had more members than the Communists and Socialists combined.”
She took a breath and paused for a minute. “Many of the leading French literary figures of the period were Fascists and virulent antiSemites. Fascism promised a stable society ruled by men of vision and charisma. It was an easy trap to fall into.
“The Third Republic had been formed after the Franco-Prussian War. It grew out of an inability of the Monarchists to decide on who should be king. Since the Monarchists were a majority of the politicians, the republic never was entirely secure. In 1940, after the fall of Paris, the old Monarchist head of the military forces, General Weygand, was able to force Premier Reynaud to cede power to the hero of the Great War, Marshal Petain. Petain immediately put his own people into the cabinet and the government was dominated by the military. They decided to surrender. It was called an armistice, but the French agreed to surrender all Jews living in France to the Germans and to pay the occupation costs of the Germans.
“Petain moved the government to the city of Vichy. Under the terms of the surrender with Germany, this government controlled about two-fifths of France bordering on Spain. The Royalists had taken over the government, and many of the cabinet members were Fascists. They operated as a puppet for their German masters until the end of the war.
“Vichy even had its own secret police called the Milice, run by a Frenchman named Darnand who held the SS rank of Sturmbannfuehrer and took a personal oath of loyalty to Adolf Hitler. The Vichy government turned over as many as seven hundred fifty thousand Jews to the Germans. Most of those went straight to the death camps.”
“That’s not generally known, is it?”
“No. The French did their best to cover it up after the war. Most of the people involved in the government were allowed to go on with their lives as if nothing had happened. The Vichy bureaucrats became the functionaries of the postwar governments.”
“Doesn’t seem fair,” I said.
We were quiet for awhile, the air close in the warm car, each of us lost in his own thoughts. I wondered what I’d gotten myself into.
Bonn, the birthplace of Beethoven, is graced with many eighteenth-century Baroque buildings, standing proudly among the modern structures that house the federal bureaucracy. For many years, beginning in 1949, Bonn was the capital of the Federal Republic of Germany, what we knew as West Germany. Some years after the reunification of West and East Germany, the government and parliament moved to Berlin, but most of the ministries remained in Bonn.
We found a small hotel and booked three rooms for the night. For an extra one hundred euros, the desk clerk was happy to put all three rooms in Jock’s name. I called Herr Speer in Dusseldorf and arranged to meet him at his office at ten the next morning. He recommended a restaurant for dinner, but in my paranoia, I suggested that we find our own place. One never knows where danger lurks.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Speer was a large man, not tall, but strapping. He had a ruddy face and blond hair going to gray, a sharp nose, toothy smile. He was wearing a blue pinstripe suit, white shirt, and a paisley tie. Not all that fashionable. He greeted us in fluent English, and nodded as I introduced myself, Jock, and Jess. I emphasized Jess’s title, Frau Doktor, because in Germany that seems to be very important. He asked his secretary to bring us all coffee.
His office was small as befitted a bureaucrat, but it was nicely appointed. His windows overlooked the Rhine, and an original oil painting of a hunt scene took up most of one wall. His desk was large, and with the exception of a computer monitor, was absolutely clean; not a scrap of paper, pencil, paper clip, or outbox on the surface. It filled the room, leaving only enough space for two side chairs and a small table. The table contained a picture of a pretty blonde woman and a young man.
He saw me looking at the photograph. “My wife Kim and our son,” he said. “He’s in college in the States. I’ll get another chair.” He left us for a minute and returned, rolling a desk chair into the office. He took his seat, a large leather executive chair, and made small talk while we waited for the coffee.
“My wife’s from Pennsylvania,” he said. “I’m used to Americans. I like them.”
It sounded as if he were talking about some sort of pets that he tolerated for the benefit of his wife. I wasn’t sure I was going to like him. I must have frowned.
“That came out wrong,” he said, smiling. “What I meant was that I understand the American psyche, the need to get things done without a lot of beating around the bush. I’m that way myself, so I understand it. Tell me what I can do for you.”
I smiled back. He was okay. “Did General Winn tell you why I am here?”
“No. He just asked me to help you. He’s a good friend.”
“Dr. Connor is a historian,” I said, “and she’s helping me do some research on some people who were involved in getting Nazis out of Germany after the war.”
Speer nodded. “A lot of them stayed, you know. Even some of the really bad ones went right back into government and stayed there until they retired. It was only the worst of them that had to get out.”
Jess shifted in her chair. “Herr Speer, we’re not sure exactly who we’re looking for. We have a list of names that may or may not be important. Tell me about how your files are indexed.”
“First,” Speer said, “you have to understand that I am only a repository for the documents that have been digitized so far. The actual documents are in archives spread all over the country, and a vast number of them have never been released or digitized. The copies on the computers are scanned from the originals, most of them handwritten, and not a few of them in Old German script. We do have an index of some seventeen million names, and if you can find the names, you should be able to go to the document. Here, I’ll show you.”
He turned the computer monitor around on the desk so that we could all see it. He pulled a wireless keyboard from a drawer, set it on the desktop, and stroked the keys. An image came up on the screen, some text in German that I couldn’t read. He stroked again, and a list of names appeared in alphabetical order. After each name, there was a series of numbers punctuated with hyphens.
Speer pointed to one of the names on the screen. “The numbers tell us where to find the documents with this person’s name on them.” He gave us a short course in how to use the search engine, none of which I understood. Jessica nodded her head as if she understood everything he was saying. I hoped she did.
Jock had been sitting quietly, sipping his coffee, taking it all in. He hadn’t said a word since he shook hands with Speer. “What if we wanted to see the original documents?” he asked, finally
.
“You couldn’t,” said Speer. “They’re too fragile to be handled. The government spent enormous amounts of money putting them all on computer disks so that no one would have to touch the originals.”
“Makes sense,” Jock said, and disappeared back into his coffee cup.
Speer stood up. “I’ll get you to a room with a computer terminal. If you need anything, just dial zero on the phone and my secretary will come to you.”
We were being dismissed. We trooped down the hall to a bare room with one computer terminal and several straight-back chairs. Speer said he had some things to attend to, and that he would send his secretary in with fresh coffee and notepads. He shook hands all around and left.
Jessica sat down in front of the computer. “This is going to take a while. Why don’t you two go and find something to do. Come back at lunchtime.”
Jock and I left the building and stepped out into the wet cold blowing off the Rhine. We found a coffee shop in the next block and went in. The space was small and warm, with heat blowing out of ceiling vents and a fireplace at one end of the room. The floors were aged hardwood partially covered by large Oriental rugs. Oil paintings depicting river scenes hung on dark paneled walls. Upholstered chairs and sofas were arranged about the room. The place appeared more like a gentlemen’s club than a coffee shop.
A young blonde hostess dressed in a business suit and high heels escorted us to a sofa and took our order. A waiter appeared with our coffee and left. We sat quietly, sipping our drinks, savoring the strong blend.
The door opened and a man entered, hung his overcoat on a peg beside the door, and came directly to us. He was wearing a blue suit, white shirt, and solid blue tie. He had dark skin and black hair, a prominent nose. He sat in the chair facing the sofa. He scowled at us, and said in accented English, “What do you want?”
Wyatt's Revenge: A Matt Royal Mystery Page 9