by Ross Thomas
“The Empire’s in trouble,” Jackson said. “When the League of Nations handed you the mandate for Palestine back in—when, 1920?”
“Officially, it was ’23.”
“Okay, ’23. That was when you promised the Jews a national homeland. That was in one breath. But in the next you swore to the Arabs that the Jews wouldn’t create any problem. But the Hitler started in on the Jews, and those who could get out decided to take you up on your promise. The Arabs didn’t much like it.”
“I was there,” Baker-Bates said.
“Where?”
“In Palestine during the troubles. I went out with Orde Wingate in ’36 in the Fifth Division. In ’38 I helped him organize the Jews into special night squads. He spoke it—you know, Arabic. But he turned into a bloody Zionist. He also proved that Jews make damn fine soldiers. Or terrorists. You were in Burma; you ever know him there?”
“Wingate?” Jackson said, not bothering to ask how Baker-Bates knew about Burma.
“Mmm.”
“He was before my time.”
Baker-Bates nodded—rather gloomily, Jackson thought. “Some of those chaps that Wingate and I trained are probably in the Irgun now—or the Stern Gang,” Baker-Bates said, his tone as gloomy as his nod.
“Group,” Jackson said automatically.
“What?”
“Stern Group. They don’t like to be called gang.”
“Now, that’s too bloody bad, isn’t it? You know what they’re doing, don’t you—your precious Irgun Svai Leumi and your Stern Gang?”
“They’re blowing up your hotels and killing your soldiers.”
“Last July, the King David Hotel. Ninety-one killed; forty-five wounded.”
“So I read.”
“But that’s not all. There’s a rumor.”
“What kind of rumor?”
“That the Irgun’s recruiting in Europe. That they’re looking for killers, good ones. That they don’t even have to be Jewish—if they’re good enough.” Baker-Bates paused and then went on. “As I said, that’s rumor. But this isn’t. This is fact; they’re looking for Oppenheimer.”
Jackson finished his beer. “Do his father and sister know?”
“I might have mentioned it to them.”
“What did they say?”
“We only had our one little chat. That was earlier this month, and then they turned mysterious on me. It took only a few quids’ worth of pesos to find out why. A certain telephone operator on the hotel switchboard is frightfully underpaid. But that’s how I got on to you and that rotten little dwarf. I ran a check on you. You’re rather harmless. But he’s bad company, you know—very bad.”
“Probably.”
“Not to be trusted.”
“No.”
“Actually, the little bastard’s a menace.”
“But he’s good at it, isn’t he?”
“At what?” Baker-Bates said.
“At finding people. If you weren’t afraid that he might turn up Oppenheimer before you do, then you wouldn’t be romancing me.”
Baker-Bates sighed. “And I thought I was just being rather nice.”
“You are. You’re paying for the beer.”
Again, Baker-Bates nodded slowly as he stared at Jackson. “You haven’t been in Germany since the war, have you?”
“No.”
“It’s a little murky there now. A bit unsettled. You might even say it’s a bit like Palestine. No one’s sure what’s going to happen, what with the Russians and all. Some feel it could go one way, some another. But if the Oppenheimer heir decides to take out the wrong chap, it could send up the balloon. So that’s why we’re looking for him—that and the fact that we damned well don’t want him in Palestine either. But we and the Irgun aren’t the only ones looking for him, of course. So are your people. But even more interesting, so are the Bolshies.”
“Why’s that so interesting?”
This time when Baker-Bates smiled, he showed some teeth. They were slightly gray.
“Why? Because, dear boy, they probably want to hire him.”
With that he rose, started toward the door, paused, and turned back. “You might tell the rotten little dwarf that. It just might scare him off.”
“It won’t scare him,” Jackson said.
“No, but tell him anyway.”
“All right,” Jackson said. “I will.”
Leah Oppenheimer entered the dark hotel sitting room and switched on a lamp. Her father, still seated in the same chair, smiled. “It’s grown quite dark, hasn’t it?”
“Perhaps another cigar.”
She again went over to the box, took one out, and lit it for him. He took several puffs and smiled again in what he thought was his daughter’s direction. He was only slightly off.
“I’ve been sitting here thinking,” he said.
“About Kurt?”
“Yes, about him. But mostly about being German. I’m rather an anachronism, you know, although our Zionist friends think I’m worse than that. They think I’m somewhere between a fool and a traitor.”
“We’ve been over all this before, Father.”
“Yes, we have, haven’t we? But young Mr. Jackson started me thinking again. I will always be a Jew, of course. And I will always be a German. I’m too old to change, even if I wished to. One does not shed one’s nationality like a suit of old clothes. But you and Kurt are young. There is no reason why either of you should follow my example.”
“You know my feelings.”
“Do I really?” he asked, and puffed on his cigar again. “Well, I suppose I do. But we don’t know Kurt’s, do we?”
“He was never a Zionist.”
Oppenheimer’s mouth twisted itself into a wry smile. “No; his peculiar politics precluded that. But no matter. Our responsibility is to find him before the authorities do. Do you really think he’s quite mad?”
Leah Oppenheimer replied with a shrug, but then realized that her father couldn’t see it. “I don’t know,” she said. “We’ve been over it so many times, I no longer know what to think.”
“If the British or American authorities find him before Jackson and Ploscaru do, they will simply lock him away. If they don’t hang him.”
Concern seemed almost to ripple over Leah Oppenheimer’s face. “They couldn’t,” she said. “He’s—well, he’s ill.”
“Is he?”
“He must be.”
“Nevertheless, we have to consider it as a possibility. Therefore, we must have a contingent plan should Ploscaru and Jackson fail. And that is what I’ve been thinking about. If you will bring me my wallet, I will give you the address of those you must reach.”
Leah Oppenheimer rose. “The ones in Cologne?”
“Yes,” her father said. “The ones in Cologne.”
It was shortly before midnight when Jackson arrived back in San Diego at the El Cortez Hotel, where the dwarf had booked them adjoining rooms. He got his key from the desk, learned that the bar was still open, and went in for a nightcap.
The bar was called the Shore Leave Room, and it was deserted save for the bartender and two Navy lieutenants who were with a pair of coy blondes who didn’t seem to be their wives. Jackson ordered a bourbon and water and carried it to a far table. After sampling his drink, he took from his inside breast pocket the envelope that Leah Oppenheimer had given him. The envelope was sealed, and Jackson slit it open raggedly with a pencil.
He took the money out first and counted it on his knee beneath the table. It was all there. He counted out ten $100 bills, folded them once, and stuffed them into his pants pocket. He put the remaining $500 back into the envelope, after removing four photographs and two folded sheets of paper.
The photographs seemed to have been taken with a box camera. One of them showed a young man, possibly twenty-two, seated astride a bicycle. From the height of the bicycle, Jackson judged him to be about six feet tall. His sleeves were rolled up above the elbows, his shirt was open at the throat, and he
wore shorts that might have been leather. On his feet were heavy shoes with thick white socks. The young man looked fit and lean and possibly tanned. His mouth was open as though he were saying something jocular, and there was a half-humorous expression on his face. Jackson turned the photograph over. On the back was written, “Kurt, Darmstadt, 1936.”
The other photographs seemed to have been taken later, although there were no dates. In all of them Kurt Oppenheimer wore a white shirt, a tie, and a coat. In only one of them was he smiling, and Jackson thought that the smile seemed forced. Jackson also thought that Kurt Oppenheimer looked very much like his sister, although he had his father’s thin, wide mouth. Jackson studied the photographs carefully, but made no attempt to memorize them. He tried to detect signs of brutality, or animal cunning, or even dedication, but all that the photographs revealed was a pleasant-faced young man, almost handsome, with light-colored, not quite blond hair, who looked quick and clever, but not especially happy.
Jackson put the photographs back into the envelope and unfolded the two sheets of paper. Both were covered with jagged, Germanic script written in dark blue ink. The heading was “My Brother, Kurt Oppenheimer.” The body of the two pages, like the heading, was written in German and began, “On the first of August, 1914, the day the terrible war began, my brother, Kurt Oppenheimer, was born in Frankfurt.”
The essay, for that was how Jackson came to think of it, went on to describe an uneventful, not particularly religious childhood composed mostly of school, sports, stamp collecting, and vacations in Italy, France, and Scotland. A paragraph was devoted to the death of the mother “in that sad spring of 1926 when Kurt was 11 and I was 7.” Their mother’s death, Leah Oppenheimer wrote, “was a deeply felt loss that somehow drew our small family even closer together.”
Leah Oppenheimer went on to recount how her brother had been graduated from a Gymnasium in Frankfurt, “where he was a brilliant student, though given to many high-spirited pranks.” From the Gymnasium he had gone on to attend the university at Bonn, “where he developed his deep interest in politics.” Jackson interpreted that to mean he had joined the Communist Party, sometime around 1933, when he was 19. From what Jackson had heard, the university at Bonn had been a rather stodgy place at that time, not much given to radical politics, although it had developed a nicely virulent case of anti-Semitism, which may have explained why Kurt Oppenheimer had wanted to chuck everything in 1936 and head for Spain and the Loyalist cause.
The elder Oppenheimer, according to his daughter, had had his hands full trying to convince his son that Spain wasn’t such a good idea. “The impossible political situation that had developed in our own country was my father’s telling argument,” she wrote. “Kurt agreed to return to Bonn to continue his studies, at least while Father dealt with his increasingly difficult business problems, which he solved in late 1936.” Jackson wondered if the zipper king had managed to get a good price for his business.
It was in early 1937 that Kurt Oppenheimer had left Bonn for the last time. Whether he had earned his degree his sister didn’t say. But it was then, she wrote, “that the three of us departed Frankfurt, in the dead of night, almost stealthily, forsaking our many friends, and journeyed to Switzerland.” For the next three years her brother had grown “increasingly unhappy, restless, and even bitter, especially in 1939 when Von Ribbentrop signed the evil pact with Russia. Although retaining his fierce ideals, Kurt grew ever more critical of the Soviet leaders while retaining, of course, his steadfast opposition to the Hitler regime.”
Jackson was growing impatient both with Leah Oppenheimer’s florid prose and with her brother’s quirky politics. He scanned the rest of the letter quickly. There wasn’t much. After the war had started in 1939, her brother had joined an organization that smuggled Jews into Switzerland. He had made a number of trips back into Germany which his sister described as being “fraught with peril, although my brother withstood these dangerous journeys with cool resolve and quiet bravery.”
Jackson sighed and read on. In 1940, just before Paris fell, Father Oppenheimer had decided to get to England while the getting was good. Between father and son there had been what Leah Oppenheimer described as a “terse debate,” but which Jackson interpreted as a shouting match. Father and daughter had packed off to London, leaving elder brother behind—a sad parting, Leah Oppenheimer wrote, where “the tears flowed unashamedly.” And that was the last they had heard from elder brother, except for a few letters that were, she said, “understandably guarded in content, but nevertheless brimming with confidence.” After that, Leah’s portrait of her brother ended abruptly except for a half page listing the names of Kurt Oppenheimer’s friends and acquaintances in Germany and their last known addresses.
Jackson sighed again, folded the two pages, and put them back into the envelope. It hadn’t been much of a dossier. Rather, it had been a younger sister’s romantic notions of her idealized brother. Jackson felt that she might just as well have been writing about the Scarlet Pimpernel. Well, perhaps she was. He only wished that she hadn’t developed such a wretched style.
He finished his drink, put the envelope away in his pocket, and headed for the elevator. On the fifth floor, he found room 514, opened it with a key, went in, moved over to the door that joined the two rooms, and tried it. It was unlocked. He opened it. A night-light was burning, In the large double bed was the dwarf, fast asleep. Next to the dwarf lay a brunette of about thirty who might have been rather pretty except for her smeared lipstick. She was also asleep and snoring, although not enough to complain about. Neither the dwarf nor the brunette seemed to have any clothes on.
Jackson went over to the bed and bent down until his mouth was only a few inches from the dwarf’s left ear. What came out of Jackson’s mouth came out half shout, half roar:
“Baker-Bates wants his money back!”
5
The dwarf, barefoot and fuming, but wearing his rich green dressing gown, stalked into Jackson’s room with a glare in his eyes and a scowl on his face. “You damned near frightened Dorothy to death,” he snapped.
“Poor Dorothy.”
“You didn’t have to yell in my ear. It made her cry. I can’t stand it when they cry.”
“What was her last name—Dorothy’s?”
“I don’t remember.”
“Is she gone?”
“She’s gone. What’s this about Baker-Bates? I don’t know any Baker-Bates.”
“Sure you do, Nick. Gilbert Baker-Bates. A British chappie. He dropped you and your fist man back into Romania with a hundred thousand bucks in gold.”
“He lied. It wasn’t anywhere near that much. More like fifty.”
“Still a tidy sum.”
The scowl left Ploscaru’s face. In its place spread some lines of what Jackson took to be apprehension or even fear. “He wants the money back?”
“Not really. They’ve written you off, Nick. You’re old hat. Ancient history.”
“Did he say that?”
“His very words.”
The dwarf relaxed, and the lines of apprehension—or fear—left his face, which reassumed its normal look of benevolent cunning. He studied Jackson for a moment. Then without a word he turned and, not stalking this time, went back into his own room. When he returned, he was carrying two glasses and a bottle. “Bourbon,” he said. “Bonded stuff. Green label. See?” He held up a bottle of Old Forester. Jackson realized that it was more than a bottle of bourbon. It was a peace offering, a mollifying gift that would help to smooth over some of the lies the dwarf had told him.
Ploscaru used a carafe of water to mix two drinks and handed one to Jackson, who was sitting in an armchair. The dwarf hopped up onto the bed and wriggled back. “How’d he get on to you—Baker-Bates?” Ploscaru tried to make it a casual question and almost succeeded.
“He wants the assassin.”
“Assassin? What assassin?”
“What assassin? Why, the one that slipped your mind, Nick. The one yo
u forgot to mention. The one you described as being just a lost boy strayed from home whose kinfolk would pay us a little money to see if we could get him back. Kurt Oppenheimer. That assassin.”
“I know nothing of it. Nothing.”
“Come off it, Nick.”
The dwarf shrugged. “I may have heard some wild rumor. Idle gossip, perhaps. But—phht.” He shrugged again—an eloquent Balkan shrug that dismissed the notion. “How was your meeting with the Oppenheimers?”
Jackson took the envelope from his pocket and tossed it to Ploscaru, who caught it with one hand. “Your cut’s in there,” Jackson said, “along with Leah Oppenheimer’s schoolgirl version of her brother, the brave underground hero. Read it and I’ll tell you how our meeting went.”
“Tell me now,” the dwarf said, counting the money. “I can read and listen at the same time. I have that kind of mind.”
As a matter of fact, he did. By the time Jackson had described his meeting with the Oppenheimers, Ploscaru had read Leah Oppenheimer’s essay twice, counted the money three times, and made a careful study of the four snapshots.
“And Baker-Bates?”
“He picked me up outside the hotel. We went to a bar and had a drink and talked about you. He doesn’t like you.”
“No,” Ploscaru murmured, “I suppose he doesn’t.”
“He called you names.”
Ploscaru nodded sadly. “Yes, he probably would. How did he look, poor chap—a trifle seedy?”
Jackson stared at him. “A little.”
“A bit down on his luck?”
“He paid for the drinks.”
“Still claiming to be with the old firm?”
“He implied as much.”
Ploscaru sighed—a long, breathy sigh full of sorrowful commiseration. “He’s not, you know. They cashiered him back in—let’s see—early ’44, I believe it was.”
“Why—because of you?”
The dwarf smiled unpleasantly. “Not really. It was a number of things—although I may have been the last straw. He must be free-lancing now, poor old dear. He’s seen the Oppenheimers, of course.”