But one simply didn’t decline such an invitation from Goering the avid hunter, the second in command under Hitler.
The only Nazi with a distinguished service record in the First World War, Goering was born in Rosenheim and became one of Hitler’s followers in the early 1920s. It was Goering who created the secret state police, the Gestapo, in 1933. It was Goering who had ordered a ‘general solution of the Jewish question’ in 1941. However, his image had been tarnished once the Luftwaffe, of which he was the Commander-in-Chief, had failed to prevent Allied bombings of German cities. But he was still a force within the Nazi hierarchy to be dealt with. He loved extravagant entertainment and delighted in lavish uniforms.
Now the buoyant, theatrical leader sat at the table seemingly oblivious that the world was crashing in around them. Pig hunting, indeed, Richter thought with disgust.
A staff car came directly toward them through the open field, stopping at the edge of the trees. A messenger exited and walked quickly up to the men gathered at the table. He saluted Richter, and produced an envelope from a leather pouch at his side.
Taking the envelope, Richter stood and walked away from the table. When he had finished reading, he glanced up to see Frick coming toward him. His cheeks were flushed red from the cold and the beer, a stare of anticipation in his eyes. “Word from Traveler?”
“She appears to be making progress in understanding happenings in Tehran, Frick. Slowly, she admits, but progress.”
Richter folded the message and placed it in the pocket of his hunting jacket. He stomped his boots on the frozen ground and rammed his gloved hands in his pockets. Excitement stirred in his mind. “It’s rather like her nature to be cautious. The Americans and British are in a quandary over the Intelligence officer’s death.”
They will eventually make a mistake, won’t they?”
“I certainly hope so, Frick, just as the British officer already has. To think, the destiny of the world turns on such a small event as an affair in a cheap hotel.” It was a delightful thought that came to Richter, tantalizing at the least. Here was the world locked in an enormous struggle, and the balance of power could hinge on one agent in Tehran. “At times the English amaze me.”
Richter took Frick by the arm and led him to the edge of the woods. The chilled wind stirred the top of the black trees. “I have an amazing story to tell you, Frick, one that will clear up matters . . . to a point . . . and explain why Traveler remains in Iran. A theory I came to a good while ago that causes me great concern.”
Frick’s face changed.
“It unfolded in August of this year. I flew to Amsterdam when one of our agents phoned and said that he had a matter he would only discuss with me in person. The only reason I took the matter seriously is that he was one of our better agents in the European theater. William Ruyter was recruited to infiltrate the SOE’s Dutch resistance after he offered his services to obtain the release of his mistress and younger brother. Both of whom were members of the Dutch resistance.
“I arrived in Amsterdam on a late August afternoon and driven to Ultecht twenty miles south of the city. There, I was placed in a boat with one of our agents posing as a grocer delivering his goods to homes along the canal. In short order, I was dropped off where a walking trail followed the canal. Thick hedges grew on the other side of the trail blocking anyone’s view from the large homes along the way. In several minutes Ruyter came along. He was a large man in his late twenties, well over six feet and two hundred pounds, wearing a cap pulled down on his face, his hands jammed in his pockets. I fell in alongside him as we continued walking, never looking at one another. But after a stroll of perhaps five hundred yards, the ‘grocer’ picked me up again and off I went back to Amsterdam, convinced that what the Dutchman had told me was true.”
“And what did he tell you?”
Richter removed a tin from his pocket and lit a cigarette. He offered one to Frick. “I believe beyond any doubt British intelligence has broken our military codes.”
“What? And the Dutch agent convinced you of that?”
Richter said, “You see Ruyter was trusted by the allies as much as he was trusted by us. He wasn’t a loyal fellow by any means, at least not to our cause. He only worked for us because we had his lover locked away. In the past he had worked for the resistance because his lover was a loyal resistance fighter. Before we bought him, Ruyter had made contact with British Intelligence officers and members of the staff of Prince Bernhard of The Netherlands, who now commanded the Dutch Forces of the Interior,” he said. “Ruyter’s contact with British Intelligence is what he bargained with the day we walked along the canal.”
“But what could one agent have known?”
“What he had done was drawn a conclusion, one that I can now accept as a possibility. Ruyter was sent by British Intelligence back into Holland to warn Dutch underground resistance leaders not to send downed Allied pilots over an escape line penetrated by our intelligence people.”
Frick’s eyes widened. “And the only way they would have known we had breached the escape route was if they had broken our code.”
“Not a certainty by any means,” he said. “Ruyter could have his own personal motives for telling me his suspicions—it did get his lover released by the way—but he had presented a premise I had to consider.”
Richter flipped the spent cigarette to the ground and smothered it with a thick boot. “Frick, since that meeting in Amsterdam that day . . . I have operated under the assumption that the British are reading our mail.”
-Fourteen-
The next afternoon, a mild pleasant Sunday, Roosevelt was moved from the American Legation into his temporary villa. Stalin had handed over the main residence, the only steam-heated building in the city, and moved his party into a smaller villa to accommodate his guest.
Once the President was settled in, Stalin visited.
The Soviet leader was a compact figure, five-foot six and two hundred pounds. He wore a plain but well-tailored brown uniform with wide red stripes down the sides of his trousers. A single medal, a gold star hanging from a red and gold ribbon, decorated his wide chest.
A big difference from the Bolshevik tunic worn by the Russian leader the previous day, the basic uniform served the purpose of putting an aristocratic President at ease. Later Hopkins would write that ‘there was no waste of word, gesture, nor mannerism . . . it was like talking to a perfectly coordinated machine . . . no man could forget the picture of the dictator of Russia.”
Despite Stalin’s hospitality, it was suspected by the President’s security people that the comfortable villa was bugged by hidden microphone.
----
Security measures in Tehran were handled by the British in cooperation with the Iranian authorities, such as Chubok, chief of Gendarmes, who was unofficially assisting Salinger in his investigation. This created a situation where officially the Russians had no authority concerning police matters in the city.
Despite that fact, there existed a house on Syroos Street in the eastern part of the city. A labyrinth of rooms, some complete with tables and chairs and banks of radio systems; other tables accompanied with only two chairs where severe interrogations took place. Here, in the cellar of this house is where those suspected of assisting Nazis, were quietly executed.
On the south side of the house, facing a narrow alleyway was a heavily guarded rear entrance. It was through this door that Goli Faqiri entered Soviet Intelligence Headquarters. At three-thirty Sunday evening Goli was escorted to a room on the second floor where Joseph Shepilov listened in on the movement of the German commandos.
The Russian sat at a small wooden table. A typewriter sat in front of him, a stack of white paper at this elbow. He looked up when she entered and his face turned from one of serious concentration to delight. “Goli, I have wonderful news,” he said standing and dragging a chair from beneath a window and placing it at the table. Once she sat, then Shepilov returned to his seat behind the table.
&n
bsp; “Of the two teams of men the Germans sent in, one has been picked up near the holy city of Qom within hours of their landing. Another forty men have been surrounded at a house in Kakh Street but chose to shoot it out. There were no survivors.”
Goli leaned forward. “But the others? The six?”
“Unaccounted for, officially.”
“And Heuss?” She asked. “He is here?”
“He arrived in Tehran last night along with five other commandoes.” Shepilov leaned over the typewriter. “They are staying at a safe house. According to the radio transmissions we’ve intercepted they realize their situation has turned desperate.”
“And the British—they are onto them also?”
“From the moment of their arrival they have been watched by no less than a dozen British Intelligence Service agents,” he said. “Our surveillance has been a little more discreet.”
“You’re certain?”
“Heuss has attempted to use his contacts now that they are aware that the German operation is blown,” Shepilov said. He seeks assistance from the Kashgai fighters to provide an avenue of escape.”
Goli sat back and took it all in. She honestly never believed that she’d be this close to finding the men responsible for husband’s death. And now the man who could tell them . . . was coming to them. “I want to know everything about him, Joseph.”
Shepilov opened the table drawer and removed a folder. “Paul Heuss. From Darmstadt, the first of his family to join the military in 1937. Promoted to the position of SS Hauptsturmfuhrer in the Brandenburg Division. Once he proved to be a fast learner of languages, he was trained as a Persian interpreter. Our young captain has lived a bloody past. He was in Lithuania when the Germans were organizing the liquidation of the Jews. He participated in the execution of Soviet partisans in the Ukrainian when he was only seventeen.”
“Train them young to hate,” Goli interrupted. “And when was he in Tehran?”
Shepilov removed a single sheet of paper from the file. “Arrived in Tehran March 1942 as an interpreter. Participated in patrols in the mountains outside of the city where in many cases the Germans were as brutal as their reputation elsewhere.”
“And the Soviets are totally innocent of such actions,” she said mockingly. “I’ve heard of such.”
Shepilov sat the paper down. “Then why do you work for us, Goli?”
Goli didn’t answer. She had long ago accepted the premise that every purpose demands appropriate action, no matter how repulsive at times. “Where was he on February 6, 1942?”
“Assigned to a secret unit in Isafahan.”
“Then he was there,” she half whispered.
Shepilov placed a photograph in front of her. “He was in the vicinity. The odds are we have our man.” It was a black and white grained photograph. A young man, still a boy really, stared calmly into the camera. So handsome in his uniform. Someone’s hero. “He’s so young,” she said.
“He won’t tell us what he knows very easily when the time comes to question him. Not a seventeen-year-old-boy who lined up old women and children against a wall in the Ukraine and shot them without remorse.”
“How do you know he and others don’t regret what they did?”
“Look at the eyes, Goli, a smile in his young face—but the eyes are stone cold.”
Goli stared at the photograph.
“You have another decision to make, Goli,” Shepilov said. “These commandoes know their operation is blown, but they are dedicated to succeed for their Fuhrer. With help from Pro-German Iranians they have designed a last desperate plan to breach the British Embassy through a water supply channel and assassinate Churchill.”
“Churchill? When?”
“November 30. On his birthday no less.”
“What are the odds such an attempt would succeed?”
“British Intelligence isn’t aware of this.”
Goli considered what Shepilov had told her. “So, if we do nothing and give up my mission to find out who ordered my husband’s death, then Churchill could be in great danger?” Goli thought back on all the sleepless nights, when she cried herself to sleep; the terror of waking up alone in the dark, and when she did there was the stinging hollowness aching in her stomach because her beloved Bozorg would no longer lie beside her. “No, I have to know for certain, Joseph. Nothing else really matters.”
“I thought you’d say as much,” Shepilov said. “I’ll have the pleasure of introducing you to Captain Paul Heuss within twenty four hours.”
When Goli walked to the door, Shepilov followed and took her elbow. “What about Salinger?”
“He is my concern, and I’ve given it a lot of thought,” she said. “In fact, if events turn as we think they will, he could be of use to us.”
-Fifteen-
Dustan Tappeh.
It was the grounds of a former military barracks of the Iranian Air Force outside Tehran and the scene of the one cause that gave Julia and Goli an opportunity to reconcile their differences.
Living in the camp were the Tehran Children, the name that referred to a group of Polish Jewish children, mostly orphans, who had escaped the German occupation. In 1941 among the chaos of war many of these children were displaced and relocated to the Soviet Union. In the spring of 1942 they were evacuated from temporary orphanages and shelters in Russia to Tehran by train and then by ship to the port of Pahlavi on the eastern shore of the Caspian Sea.
----
When Goli drove into the camp, the sun was at a bank of clouds anchored to the horizon. She walked through the tent camp and toward the barracks serving as the operation headquarters.
On the porch, shielded from the sun by a striped awning, several young girls sat around the table coloring in notebooks as Julia poured lemonade from a glass pitcher and smiled down at the children. When Julia noticed her, she stood upright holding the pitcher close to her.
Goli walked up on the porch. “They tell me that Anna has departed.”
“Let’s walk away from the children,” Julia said leading her back toward the porch steps.
“Is it true?”
“I tried to phone you, but you were out of your office.”
Goli placed her hand at her forehead. “I didn’t get to tell her goodbye.”
“It all happened rather quickly when a truck caravan was assembled last night. It seems negotiations between the Jewish agency and the British administration in Palestine reached an agreement. Some of the children received certificates permitting them their immigration to Palestine.”
“But I didn’t get to tell her goodbye.”
“We were aware, weren’t we one day they would leave us? I know you were attracted to Anna, but there are others who need your love until they are gone.”
“That’s the nasty part of this business,” Goli said. “We become attached to the children knowing all the while they’ll be out of our lives. Is . . . is Penina still here in the camp?”
Penina was special, a cute girl of eight from Lublin, Poland who had escaped with twelve other girls across the eastern border into Russia. “She is,” Julia said. “But you should know another group will soon depart for the gulf by truck in several nights. There is a list posted on the board inside the main door. The last group of the children will be gone by the end of the week.”
“Thank you, Julia.”
Goli walked off several steps and then came back. “Soon all the children will be gone and that will be sad. But, I’m glad we found this opportunity to work together and be friends again.”
“Me too, Goli.”
Goli hesitated. “I want to let you know Booth will eventually want to talk to me.”
“It’s really no business of mine, is it? Not any longer.”
“Yes it is, Julia,” she said. “We’ll discuss business and he’ll want to know why I’m working for the Russians. And that’s all. I thought you should know that.”
She watched Goli walk down the long porch and inside the main door.
As Julia turned back to the girls sitting at the table, she noticed a blue convertible pulling out of the camp. Several of the children ran through the dust boiling up behind the Chevrolet. From the driver’s seat the woman waved and laughed at the children.
Julia knew that it was Colonel Boland’s wife. Leni. Another woman who, in the midst of war, found time to comfort lost and hurting children.
----
Mayfield drove to Qolhak Street and parked at the south side of the large semi-park courtyard flanking the British Embassy summerhouses.
The sky was gray-metal with clouds as he rounded the thick hedge boundary along the walkway. He wore a suit of expensive Donegal tweed with hints of brown and black and walked by the cemetery.
Mayfield paused at a wrought-iron fence beneath a large fir tree and stared at the gravestones . . . Britons killed in Iran during the First World War and now the ongoing conflicts
. . . his past suddenly echoed toward him . . . the rumbling sounds of bugles over the rough hills of India. And as if by the lifting of a fog, he remembered the names of comrades left behind there in the Argonne Forest a many years ago. They came to him in white clicks, all the names. All the faces.
The sun slipped through the clouds as he walked down the path through the garden and glanced through the trees toward the homes. A blonde woman stood at a balcony staring out toward the cemetery.
He thought of how sad she appeared, supposing that the cemetery haunted her as much as it did him.
----
Ten minutes later, a gray sedan picked him up on the boulevard on the other side of the cemetery. They drove west, then pulled off the main road and continued down a narrow driveway finally stopping in a circular drive.
A Spy in the Shadows (Spy Noir Series Book 1) Page 11