by Peter Golden
Taft came on the line, and he was angrier than I’d ever heard him. “You were supposed to stay put until we caught the bastards.”
“How’s that’s coming?”
“No change.”
“Then it doesn’t matter where I am.”
Taft snapped, “Stow the whimsy. This is more complicated than you know.”
“Who’s Joost Ter Horst?”
Taft didn’t answer.
“Joost Ter Horst. Who is he?”
Taft said, “Not on the phone.”
“Where?”
“Can you get to Paris?”
“Have you moved it?”
“Enough jokes, Michael. Lunch tomorrow. One o’clock. Come alone. Go to the desk at the Hôtel Régina and ask for my room. And goddamn it—watch yourself till then.”
When he had hung up, Yuli said, “I could hear him. Does Taft always shout at you?”
“Only when he’s being paranoid.”
“Is that a lot?”
“He’s CIA. That’s the worst-kept secret in Munich. Paranoia is in his job description.”
After giving Yuli the CliffsNotes version of my conversation with Taft, I dialed the hotel operator and asked her to connect me to Air France. I booked two seats on a nine A.M. flight to Orly and said I’d pick up the tickets at the airport counter. I’d told Eddie that I had things under control, and despite Taft’s spy nonsense, for the first time since flying to Germany, I believed it.
Yuli slid down the couch to sit beside me, and I asked her if there were any sights she wanted to see when we returned to Paris.
She said, “We’ll play by ears.”
I chuckled.
“I have spoken wrong?”
“Play it by ear.”
Yuli pressed her palms against my chest until I was on my back, and she leaned across me, her mouth circling my ear.
“Misha, is this playing by ear?”
“It’ll do.”
Part VII
32
Paris, France
January 29, 1965
Taft Mifflin was drunk. He wasn’t swing-on-the-chandelier drunk or smack-your-wife drunk, though this latter category was hypothetical because two wives had already divorced him with the same complaint—He doesn’t talk to me. Taft Mifflin was sitting-in-a-hotel-suite-alone drunk, a magnificent suite at the venerable Hôtel Régina with its own dining room and a view across the Jardin des Tuileries to the Eiffel Tower, the thousand feet of latticed iron giving off a coppery glow in the lilac twilight.
Taft refilled his tumbler with Glenlivet and told himself, once again, that he should’ve been a Congregational minister like his father, and lived on Cape Cod with his family and tended the flock at a whitewashed church in Barnstable. And Taft would’ve become a minister except the United States entered the war five months before his graduation from Yale, and the Office of Strategic Services deemed his Ivy League diploma and ability to read Blaise Pascal and Friedrich Nietzsche in the original to be superb qualifications for supervising arms drops to the French Resistance, sabotaging German supply trains, and playing hit-and-run with the Wehrmacht. After his discharge, Taft spent a listless semester at Union Theological Seminary before dropping out. How could he serve a God he’d quit believing in when, attached to the 45th Infantry Division to interrogate any captured SS or Nazi Party honchos, he entered Dachau and his definition of evil changed forever? In fact, after what Taft had done at the camp, he couldn’t envision much of a future for himself until discovering that ex-OSS captains were prized by the fledgling Central Intelligence Agency, where past sins enhanced your résumé.
His present round of drinking had started when Taft got off the phone with Michael. So he had heard about Joost Ter Horst. Resourceful kid, and he had that Yulianna Kosoy with him, and that girl was no slouch. Taft felt a twinge of guilt that he had set the whole thing in motion. He wouldn’t be the first agent to run an operation off-book and to use a civilian without his knowing it. He justified his plan by telling himself that in a career potholed with disappointments and moral compromises, he wanted, before he retired, to create one tangible moment of justice in a world of tragic unfairness, to compel the Lord to abide by His own rules, to reward the virtuous and punish the wicked. This goal, Taft knew, was unrealistic and grandiose, and he had no explanation for it beyond the fact that he was the son of a minister who had considered himself God’s earthly representative.
Funny, Taft thought, how the past shapes your future without you knowing it until that future becomes your present. He had met Julian Rose in the OSS and fought alongside him in the Ardennes during the winter bloodletting of 1944. After mustering out, the two men had stayed in touch—over twenty years of occasional phone calls, lunches, and dinners. Taft was in a meeting at the Four Freedoms office in Manhattan when a secretary gave him the message that Julian had to cancel their get-together at ‘21’ because his wife and daughter had been killed in a car accident. The funeral had been three days earlier, but the period of mourning was still being observed, and Taft rode out to New Jersey. The house was packed, and after offering his condolences to Julian, Taft went to the den with a beer and a corned beef sandwich and picked up a Star-Ledger that was in the wicker basket next to the Barcalounger.
The photograph and story were on the front page, below the fold. A woman smiling behind a soda fountain, the beloved owner of a popular candy store in South Orange, shot to death in an apparent robbery. Her name was Emma Dainov. Taft stared at the photo. Could it be her? The woman from Dachau, the one who had survived a mass shooting by hiding under the dead? He saw a resemblance around her eyes and mouth. Or was his mind welcoming him to middle age, when everyone began reminding you of someone else? He had often wondered about her. Taft glanced away from the photo, then stared at it again. It was her, he was sure of it, and checked her obituary for details. Emma was Jewish, born in the Ukraine, and emigrated to the United States in 1948. That fit, and though there was no mention of her having been in a camp, that also fit, because it wasn’t a background that people advertised. He saw one other detail, a stunning coincidence. Emma was survived by her grandson Michael Daniels, whose name Taft recognized as the deejay who did the music show in Russian and English that Four Freedoms was rebroadcasting in the Soviet Union.
Later that week, when Taft was down at Langley for meetings, he asked research to dig up the travel records of Emma Dainov. He was already familiar with the files on Joost Ter Horst and his wife, Hildegard. When he saw that every summer Emma had traveled to Europe—Munich, Geneva, Paris, and Nice—he became convinced that she was searching for someone, an intuition that was reinforced when he noticed that Emma had submitted a visa application to the Soviet embassy.
Who was it, Emma? Your daughters? Joost? Hildegard, who, according to her file, was dead?
His desire to answer these questions was why Taft had decided to bring Michael to Munich. When he met him at Eddie O’Rourke’s house and heard that no money had been stolen from the candy store and that Emma’s Rolex had been left on her wrist, Taft’s faith in his hypothesis increased exponentially, convincing him that somebody had murdered Emma, and her murder was connected to her summer travels in Europe. The shooting in Munich supported this theory. Taft had to keep Michael safe, so he put his plan on ice and had Der Schmuggler take him to Otvali. Once Michael took off for France and heard about Joost Ter Horst, Taft resolved to see his operation through to the end.
Until now, all of this had seemed logical to Taft. However, he hadn’t factored in the impact of finishing a fifth of eighteen-year-old single-malt Scotch. It gave his thinking an intolerable clarity, and as he drank the last of the Glenlivet, Taft grew despondent and believed that he was deluded about Emma.
Fortunately, he had the cure for this doubt. Taft kicked off his wing tips and went to sleep.
33
The next afternoon Taft Mifflin had lunch sent up, and the beef bourguignon was served by a tuxedoed waiter on a cloth-covered table. Mi
chael ate with gusto and talked about Gak, Emma, and their daughters, while Taft, hungover, chain-smoked.
Michael said, “And when Gak heard me say, ‘Joost Ter Horst,’ he flipped out.”
Taft waited until the waiter wheeled the cart out of the suite. Then he said, “We have a file on Joost. His father was Dutch—born in Rotterdam—but he married a German woman and moved to Schwanstetten, a village outside Nuremberg, when Joost was a kid. Before the war, Joost was a chef who owned one of the most famous restaurants in Bavaria.”
“How do you—”
“I was in the Office of Strategic Services and attached to an infantry division that liberated Dachau. Joost was captured in the area, and I interrogated him. Joost told me he was no fan of Hitler. I heard that a lot during interrogations. It was mostly bullshit.”
“Was there any connection between him and Emma?”
“Joost didn’t mention one. He was a bitter guy who bitched about his wife, Hildegard. Her father was a Nazi Party bigwig, and when Germany began to draft soldiers, Hildegard’s father got Joost into the SS, where he was given the rank of Obersturmbannführer—lieutenant colonel. She was ambitious for her husband, and after talking to Joost, I’d say he was ambitious for himself, so when an opening for a Reichskommissar came up—”
“A what?”
“When the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union, they set up administrative areas—Reichskommissariats—and each one had a man in charge, a Reichskommissar. Joost was supposed to oversee an area around the Don Basin, but it never got set up, and Joost became an assistant to the Reich Commissar of the Ukraine. The Poles put him on trial and threw him in prison. According to Joost, even the Reich Commissar loathed Hildegard and stuck them both in a Ukrainian hunting palace. Joost was around in the summer of 1942 when the Einsatzgruppen came through. The Ter Horsts assisted the killing squads that went to Rostov-on-Don and executed twenty-seven thousand Russians—the majority of them Jews.”
“At the Ravine of Snakes. I heard about it from Emma’s former neighbor in Rostov.”
Taft said, “The way Joost told it, his wife hated Jews and Russians, and she was more helpful than he was to the Einsatzgruppen. But when he brought up the executions—I’ll never forget this—he says that so many died because he did such a thorough job supervising the roundup. The prick was bragging and acting like he had no idea why the Einsatzgruppen wanted him to go get all those people.”
“What happened to Hildegard?”
“When the Red Army launched their counterattack, Joost sent her back to Germany. She went to live with her parents in Nuremberg, and she was killed when the Brits bombed the city in January of ’forty-five. Joost was wounded in the Ukraine, and he was lucky to get out on a plane before the Russians grabbed him.”
“Gak spent the war in France, so the only way he could’ve known Joost’s name was through Emma. Did Joost have something to do with their daughters dying?”
Taft couldn’t decide how to answer Michael, because he was positive that no remains were in the graves of Alexandra and Darya Gak. In Europe and the United States, it wasn’t uncommon for survivors to erect headstones over empty graves for the loved ones they had lost. Yet with Emma running around Europe every summer, Taft speculated that she didn’t accept that both of her daughters were dead. Let Michael meet Joost, and maybe they would learn more about the Gak girls.
Taft said, “Joost was in Russia, so who can say?”
“Could he have been involved in Emma’s murder? Or with the shooting in Munich?”
“Not a chance.”
“If you’re so sure, you must know where he is.”
“I do. And he’s been there since 1946.”
“Why wasn’t he tried for war crimes?”
“Lots of people worse than Joost won’t stand trial.”
“That’s a fact. Not a reason.”
Taft popped a Lucky from a cigarette pack, tamping down the tobacco by tapping one end on the table. Michael felt as if Taft were stalling. He was correct. Taft was tailoring his reply to help push along his plan. “Remember, in Munich, I told you that the policy of the American government was to leave ex-Nazis alone?”
“Because West Germany is an important ally against the Soviet Union.”
“Right. We also hired some of these guys.”
“Like Wernher von Braun?”
Taft fired up the cigarette with his Zippo. “Right again. But we also hired guys who weren’t rocket scientists. To bring us information.”
“Spies?”
Taft chuckled. “It’s not usually that dramatic. They keep their eyes open and our people talk to them or they write us reports. Joost is one of those. Of course, the Soviets would like to arrest Joost. They love trying Nazis. Revenge for the war, and who can blame them? But the KGB also likes to dig up war criminals and threaten them with trials unless they spy for the Soviets. West Germany wants everybody to forget Hitler, but another reason the Bundestag is leaning toward allowing the statute of limitations on war crimes to expire is to stop the Soviets from recruiting ex-Nazis. And most of the world, except the Russians and Israelis, is rooting for the Bundestag to do it.”
As Taft sat behind a hazy rampart of tobacco smoke, it occurred to Michael that Taft probably had a boss at the CIA who wouldn’t want him discussing these things.
“Why are you telling me this?” Michael asked.
Taft had an elaborate answer, but not only did he not want to tell Michael, he didn’t want to think about it—that cold spring morning he entered Dachau. Corpses everywhere, sprawled on the ground, stuffed into boxcars on a side track, heaped outside a crematorium. Breathing through his mouth to avoid the putrid odor of death, Taft watched soldiers lining up thirty or forty SS guards against a wall until he heard a muffled cry to his left, where bodies, riddled with bullet holes, were tangled up like after a gang tackle on a football field. A woman had crawled out from under the pile, and she stood up a foot from Taft. She was naked, and Taft noticed that she’d been beautiful once, but her face was speckled with lice bites, her dark gold hair matted with dried mud, and starvation had flattened every curve of her body. A rifle shot rang out, and Taft and the woman turned as an SS guard fell and a soldier lowered his Garand. The woman nodded toward the submachine gun in his hands—a request, he realized, and asked himself why a concentration-camp inmate whose bones were so etched into her skin that she resembled a human fossil shouldn’t be invited to the party. He flicked off the safety of the Thompson, retracted the bolt, and handed her the weapon. Taft saw her shoot three SS men in their chests before she returned the Thompson. He had just slung it over his shoulder when the woman grabbed the lapels of his field jacket and said in a scratchy, parched voice, “Bitte hilf mir. Hildegard Ter Horst stoul meyn tokhter.” It was Yiddish, but the words were almost identical to German: Please, help me Hildegard Ter Horst stole my daughter. Letting go of his lapels, she collapsed. He caught her before she hit the ground, shouting for a medic, and when one came with a blanket, Taft wrapped her in it, then wandered off, discovering that the eyes become more accustomed to horror than to beauty. In a stand of birch trees, he saw a husky crew-cut guard swapping his black SS uniform for the striped pajamas of a prisoner. He was pulling on the pants as Taft approached, leveling his Thompson at him. The guard greeted Taft with a sheepish grin, as if he’d been caught playing hooky. In German, Taft asked him what had happened here. The guard shrugged: “Die Juden sind unser Unglück.” Taft repeated the phrase in English: “The Jews are our misfortune.” When the guard responded with a big smile, saying, “I speak Amerikaner. I vant to learn more.” Taft answered, “No need to,” and the Thompson kicked and the guard flew back against the birches.
Taft waited for the memory to dissolve before putting out his cigarette and saying, “I’m telling you because somebody should pay for murdering your grandmother. And for Dmitry.”
“Where’s Joost?”
“You have to be careful, buddy boy.”
“Why�
�re you trying to scare me?”
“I’m trying to warn you. You might not be the only one looking for him. Remember, there’s the KGB. Joost is in Amsterdam.”
“We gave him a new identity?”
“We did.” Taft handed Michael a hotel pad and pen. “And a name that’s as common in the Netherlands as John Smith in the States—Johannes De Jong. Let me spell it for you.”
When Michael was done writing, Taft said, “Johannes De Jong owns a coffee shop, the Magic Dragon.”
“As in Puff the Magic?”
“Exactly. When I interviewed him, Joost was proud of his English. Claimed he should’ve been an American. The address of his place is 225 Prinsengracht.”
Taft laughed, and the disgust in his laughter unnerved Michael as he wrote out the address.
“Did I miss the joke?”
Taft said, “Not yet, you didn’t. But here it is. The coffee shop is a few doors down from the Anne Frank House.”
“That’s not funny.”
“No, it isn’t. And, Michael?”
“Yeah?”
“Try not to get yourself killed. Julian and Eddie wouldn’t like that.”
“Me either. Thanks for lunch.”
Taft was standing at the window when Michael exited the hotel. Watching him pass the gilded statue of Joan of Arc on horseback and blending into the shoppers on Rue de Rivoli, he wondered if he had told Michael too much or too little. No matter. Both of them would find out soon enough.
34
Yuli and I went shopping at the Galeries Lafayette after lunch because it was cold in Paris, and the weather report in Le Monde predicted that it would be colder in Amsterdam, so we needed warmer clothes. In Otvali, I’d wanted to pack the quilted jacket that Yuli had lent me, but she said that with her traveling under a false American identity and speaking with an unmistakable Eastern European accent, it would be safer if we didn’t bring any Soviet goods.