Traitor's Gate

by Charlie Newton

  The barman smiled his own practiced smile, straightening his shirt too late to hide a Star of David, and asked Schroeder if he’d enjoy another. Schroeder declined with a laugh and sparkling blue eyes, displaying manners learned postwar at the third-best schools of Germany and Austria and survival instincts forged in the bloody alleys of Berlin and Munich. A bastard nephew to the Krupp Dynasty, Erich Schroeder had spent most of the 1920s (and his twenties as well) defending the Krupp factories and foundries by any means necessary, helping the armaments and steel giant decapitate a fledgling labor movement they depicted as “Jews and Communists threatening one of Europe’s preeminent industrial empires.”

  Schroeder had done the dirtiest of the dynasty’s business to be acknowledged a Krupp, but in the end the family monarchs chose not to allow a bastard at their table. The great inflation and the rise of the Nazis had offered Schroeder another option: Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring. Göring’s professional and personal interests were the reason Erich Schroeder tolerated transatlantic travel and New York. This week those interests included accompanying the Reich’s leading industrialist now stripping the bones of a Cornish hen with his teeth. That stubby and dour man’s name was Hermann Schmitz, president of the Nazi chemical and drug consortium I.G. Farben. With the assistance of the Nazis, I.G. Farben had surpassed Krupp and now reigned as the industrial colossus of Germany. The company was driven internally by Heinrich Himmler’s Gestapo and externally by powerful foreign stockholders and sponsors. Schroeder frowned at the thought of Himmler, an emotionless chicken-farmer opportunist whose unwavering quest for Aryan racial purity had made him the most feared man in Germany.

  The bombastic American seated next to I.G. Farben’s Herr Schmitz was both an I.G. Farben sponsor and stockholder, and still waving his amber cigar holder. Born to wealthy parents in Cleveland, Ohio, the American had graduated from Cornell before going to work for the Rockefellers. His name was Walter C. Teagle, chairman of the largest petroleum corporation on earth.

  Standard Oil of New Jersey.

  While most of New York and his charge slept, Erich Schroeder had his driver slowly recircle the block of midtown Manhattan. Schroeder was much less familiar with Manhattan than Detroit, having assisted Irénée du Pont there in 1936 shortly after du Pont’s acquisition of General Motors. Schroeder had helped du Pont form the American Liberty League and the now unfortunately infamous Black Legion, the latter to terrorize GM’s autoworkers away from unionizing and any possible connection to the Communists. The campaign had gone well, partially because Schroeder and du Pont had worked together since 1933 when Irénée and his father began smuggling arms to Hitler in partnership with I.G. Farben.

  Schroeder nodded to himself. Profit had been simpler then. He had piloted barges of war materiel up the unpatrolled rivers of Holland, the risk minimal. Tonight was different, the Luger in his hand no small proof. Schroeder’s concern lay with Hermann Schmitz and the English banker with whom the president of I.G. Farben had dined in the Cloud Club.

  The English banker was a representative of powerful British banking and chemical interests. According to Reichsmarschall Göring, the banker was also a user of morphine and an unexposed homosexual whose lover was a London actor in the private employ of the Communists. The actor was passing the English banker’s most private information directly to Moscow, and that could include I.G. Farben’s plans.

  Schroeder’s black Mercedes touring sedan eased west, slick with cold rain and almost invisible without its headlights. This was a touchy business—the English banker had powerful sponsors in the Reich, Germany’s ambassador to England, Joachim von Ribbentrop, being the highest placed and most vocal. Schroeder’s German driver reflected Schroeder’s caution, but for different reasons. The narrow streets he drove were mostly mud and overworked sewers. Construction debris littered the stoops of brick tenements fronting the site of the new Lincoln Tunnel. According to the newspapers, Hell’s Kitchen had been selected for the tunnel’s terminus because it housed Manhattan’s poorest and most desperate citizens in a city rapidly filling with the same. The driver slowed. Three prostitutes huddled at the edge of an iron streetlamp’s murky light. Their cigarettes glowed in the mist, dingy coats held open as Schroeder’s Mercedes passed.

  Schroeder waved his driver on without speaking, then tapped the driver’s broad shoulder and pointed him at a doorway announced only by a small blue light. The English banker’s car waited twenty feet beyond. A man in a raincoat sat smoking on the car’s fender, his eyes on Schroeder’s Mercedes as it approached. Schroeder frowned. There were much better neighborhoods for homosexuals less than a mile north. The banker’s stop here was either business or morphine. Either way, Reichsmarschall Göring had spoken.

  “The man on the fender?” Schroeder asked his driver. “He is the one you paid for our Englishman’s location?”

  “Nein, Oberstleutnant. He drives the Englishman.”

  “Carefully, then.”

  Schroeder’s driver rolled to a stop midstreet and dropped his window. He spoke German, his right hand hiding a Luger that matched Schroeder’s. The man on the fender shrugged. Schroeder’s driver switched to abrupt English. “This is the place?”

  The man drew on his cigarette.

  “The bridge? We seek the bridge to Brooklyn.”

  The man pushed off his fender, shook his head, and pointed around the corner as if the bridge were a long way off. His hands were visible and empty and the driver shot him in the chest.

  He fit nicely in the large trunk, as did the English banker when Erich Schroeder felt he understood all the banker’s secrets that might assist a bastard who one day would be king. The English banker’s segmented body was found in Manhattan’s Five Points, his mutton-chop sideburns hacked out of his face. Six days later, Erich Schroeder’s driver died at sea, as did the actor in London the day after Schroeder arrived. London was abloom in an uncommonly beautiful May. Schroeder had the good fortune to remain a few days and enjoy a grimy industrial city suddenly festooned with multicolor flora. Paying him a silent, but much appreciated, homage to his skill as an assassin, England and the rest of Europe had not focused on Schroeder’s murder of the English banker in Manhattan nor the murder of his actor boyfriend in London. Europe’s focus—and Schroeder agreed—was on England’s soon-to-be monarch, George VI—new king of England, emperor of India.

  George VI would be the replacement for his older brother, Edward VIII, abdicating the throne under mounting rumors of treason. The House of Windsor countered the rumors every hour or two with “affairs of the heart,” constantly refocusing the public on the American divorcée Wallis Simpson. And as one would expect, it was working.

  Schroeder found his way to the coronation while half the world enjoyed the fairy tale and the other half held its breath, hoping the new sovereign of the most powerful empire on earth could force calm and reason on the world’s flashpoints. Schroeder saw no basis for such hope. The coronation, though, was wonderfully entertaining pageantry/propaganda, much cheerier than the gothic epics produced by Goebbels, and Schroeder was thrilled to have seen England in all her finery.

  On July 7th, two months later, Schroeder was in the blast-furnace heat of Iraq. At noon, while waiting on his meeting with King Ghazi bin Faisal, the newly militarized Japan attacked China. First Peking, then Shanghai. According to the radio broadcasts and newspapers that arrived Baghdad, the Japanese Imperial Army had manufactured an incident on the Marco Polo Bridge, then went on to commit the Rape of Nanking, “the blood of raped and butchered Chinese women so deep it overflowed the Yangtze River.” Schroeder tried to picture slaughter on that scale but could not. He could, however, picture the Communists of the world press corps twisting Japan’s self-defense into an indictment that only the noble Communists could adjudicate.

  The Nazi Reichstag answered the press on Japan’s behalf, stating that Germany also had a right to protect its borders and citizens. Reichsmarschall Göring added an announcement—the opening of Buchenw
ald concentration camp—then demanded further political concessions from Austria, or Germany—like Japan at the Yangtze River—would be forced to invade. As anticipated, the world press had vomited their disapproval and recriminations. Schroeder did not relish the negative publicity of open war with Austria, but the intellectuals and illuminati of Vienna and their deepening flirtation with communism could not go unanswered indefinitely.

  Fortunately, Austria was not his theater; his summer and autumn had been busy with problems and opportunities in the desert state of Iraq and the Mediterranean states of Lebanon and Palestine. While he had been busy building the Reich’s influence in the desert, the Reich and Imperial Japan had signed a political and military treaty. The new king of England chose not to comment on the treaty or his deposed brother—the now retitled duke of Windsor—or the duke’s trip to Germany, or the clandestine meetings held there with Joachim von Ribbentrop, Hermann Göring, and Rudolph Hess, meetings designed to forge an alliance between England and Germany, a masterstroke of statesmanship from a dethroned king that Schroeder and his superior, Hermann Göring, believed could avert a world war.

  The new king of England did, however, choose to comment on the issue of Palestine and the Zionist movement. With his parliament and prime minister’s guidance, Great Britain’s King George VI forced the dissolution of all Palestinian political organizations.

  Schroeder was sipping coffee in a Beirut seaside café, thrilled to be out of Iraq’s sandstorms and religion maze, when George VI’s decree was reported. Schroeder was stunned silent. Two royal brothers—the dethroned king a master statesman, the new king a fool almost beyond understanding. Schroeder loved the new king. In George VI’s single stroke of blind British hubris, the new king had delivered Erich Schroeder his empire.

  CHAPTER 7

  December, 1937

  Dried blood spotted the London Times in Saba’s hand. If the yellowed pages of England’s newspaper were to be believed, the “Christmas season” had begun a month ago and brought snow, sleigh bells, and a “blind man’s nervous peace” in Great Britain. Palestine, the Times reported, was open war.

  Saba frowned her assessment of England’s venerated newspaper, a propagandist’s lie of bad faith and colonial hypocrisy from first page to last. England knew nothing of the conditions or people here. Their king’s dissolution of all Palestinian political organizations had silenced the Arab leaders as desired, but it had not shrunk the war nor silenced the partisans. Only the king’s bounties had risen. And with them, the death toll on both sides. It was Saba’s deepest hope that England’s cold-hearted arrogance would one day kill the English in their cottages and homes the way the English killed the Palestinians in theirs.

  The partisan stronghold where Saba camped—like all the battered but surviving partisan enclaves—was held together by a tenuous bond of food, ammunition, and hate. Tribal animosity ran especially deep in this camp, as did clashing objectives should the English ever be driven out. The camp was financed and controlled by the Pan-Arab Army of God, the same Iraqis who had betrayed Saba and her partisans eighteen months ago on the East Desert Road. The Iraqis remained the strongest and best financed of the AHC factions, ruling by zealot religion and Pan-Arab nationalism.

  Her association with the camp and its commanders was a marriage of convenience both would end at the first opportunity. As Saba had vowed after the betrayal at East Desert Road, she had returned to find those responsible. Fourteen days after the Zionist militias and Iraqi mullahs had declared her killed in the ambush, Saba rose from the dead and killed the two Pan-Arab Army of God commanders responsible for the betrayal/ambush. Both men were killed in their tents inside their heavily fortified camp, their throats cut, Palestinian daggers left in their hearts. Saba and her surviving partisans then made camp inside the stronghold and waited to be discovered behind the camp’s defensive perimeter.

  Within the hour, Iraqi sentries discovered her partisans at their fire. The sentries inspected the partisans at gunpoint. Saba rose behind them, weapons in both hands. The sentries realized it was a dead woman they faced in the firelight, some kind of Samarian demon, and ran screaming into the night. Saba and her ten partisans filtered through the sprawling camp, then regrouped to confront the remaining commanders and their mullahs at the morning meal. Rifles to their shoulders, she challenged the seated men to die with her, today, if reprisal was what the brave and devout wished.

  The brave and devout did not wish to die. The murders of the two commanders were deemed tribal assassinations, physically impossible to have been committed by a woman, even this woman. The Army of God’s surviving Iraqi leadership stated unequivocally that it was so, because King Ghazi bin Faisal said it was so. The men of the camp faithfully repeated the same words, but none of the mullahs nor their righteous soldiers strayed anywhere near Saba’s section of the camp.

  Saba had spared King Ghazi bin Faisal . . . but not forever.

  Outside her goat-hair tent, Saba considered the geography in every direction, then sat away from the other partisans, as was her custom. The night sky was clear, sharp, and she scanned for the three brightest stars, whispering names as she found them. The sky was her cemetery, the stars her gravestones, the names her nightly ritual.

  On her lap, she smoothed the crumpled copy of the London Times two weeks after its stilted articles made news in the western world. Using the brilliant moon, she read every page aloud, stopping to consider why Japanese aircraft would attack an American oil tanker convoy being escorted up China’s Yangtze River. The American boat had been sunk and the Japanese pilot had machine-gunned the survivors. Why would Japan wish to fight with a power so great as America?

  Her eyes drifted to the paper’s edges; she noticed her hands, the desert grit caked under her nails, and the roughness of her skin. In truth, the reading was only part practice; she still longed to know of the world outside Palestine, to feel its pulse and someday see its people. The irony did not escape her, that what she could know of the world would be filtered through the liars and slave owners of England. In her darkest moments, she wondered if that would change, if she and her people had the will, if Arab leaders could see past the centuries of tribal war to focus on a single enemy.

  England’s formal dissolution of the Arab Higher Committee and open support of the Zionists had helped. The Times seemed to agree and predicted a bloody year in the desert, blood that could reach well beyond Palestine. By reading all the books and newspapers she captured, Saba had begun to understand why. Oil. The recent discovery of oil in Bahrain, and the expectation that huge amounts would be found in Arabia, had changed the value of the southern desert from sand to gold. England, France, and Holland were competing with one another and the Americans for control of the desert. Germany was new to the competition. Saba had not encountered Germany’s efforts but she had heard them spoken. The Germans labeled Zionism the new Crusades and England its colonial pope. If this comparison were well presented, it would be a persuasive argument with the sheikhs, emirs, and their mullahs. Especially persuasive in places like Iraq if accompanied by weapons and ammunition.

  The Times on Saba’s lap accused the Germans of just that, offering Arab factions munitions from the outlawed Krupp armament factories, gold from the Reichsbank, and intelligence from the Abwehr. In return, the Germans would want dead English soldiers, something many misguided locals—Arab and Zionist—were already pleased to provide. Saba considered the word “misguided.” Had the readers in the great and powerful England ever wondered if they would become “misguided” should their land and families again fall under the boot of another king, another nation? The sound of footsteps broke her concentration. One hand quit the paper for the pistol under it. Three heads appeared at the ridge below her low hill, then their torsos. The three men stopped at forty feet, hands clearly visible in the moonlight—two armed Palestinians from her unit and an unarmed blond European wearing a dusty suit and fedora hat. Saba covered her face. The Palestinian on the left approac
hed to twenty feet and used Arabic to break the silence. “We have the visitor.”

  Saba nodded. She’d been instructed to talk with this man, had watched him inspect their camp during the day, following him at a discreet distance. He had inquired about her personally, asking the Iraqi commanders to arrange this meeting. Saba cocked her head in invitation, the pistol still aimed from under the paper. At seven feet, the Palestinians dropped comfortably to the rocky marl; the European remained standing, removing his hat.

  “I am Erich Schroeder,” he said in courtly English. “An honor.” He bowed only his blond head, none of his six-foot athletic frame. “I extend personal greetings from our Reich president, Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring. Your long list of successes, including Dhār el Baidar, is the subject of much envy and appreciation.”

  Saba smiled at the German’s eyes, blue as Circassian cloth. She had not seen blue eyes before. The smile quit as she read the remainder of him.

  He said, “May I continue?”

  “Our custom is to share our tents.” Saba bent her empty hand to the low stool on her right. “Not our lands. Do you come to speak of this, Herr Schroeder? Or is it something else that matters to the butchers of Europe and not to me?”