Traitor's Gate

by Charlie Newton

  She purposed a small shiver and then a smile. “A woman and her horse have a . . . rhythm, Herr Schroeder.” One finger toyed with a throat locket. “But a horse and a man’s leather saddle is not a man.” She showed him her teeth and her neck. “A horse would be better, if not for his weight.”

  Schroeder watched her lean back and sip the Riesling, and her husband sink deeper into the alcohol. She was flushed and only partly by the wine and tossing her red hair.

  “You have an interest in . . . art, Frau Koch?” He glanced at her table lamps. The rumors.

  “Tattoos.” She wet her lips. “Skin.”

  “And you have some to show me?”

  A wry red line smiled across her face. “We do not yet know each other that well.”

  “But we could?”

  She glanced toward her husband asleep in his chair. Her hand slipped below the table and her eyes locked on his at the table’s other end. “There is a . . . texture to skin.” Her breath shortened. “A taste.” The rhythmic movement of her hand beneath the table was mirrored in her shoulder. Schroeder watched her and she let him, working faster as she gained his full attention, the flush filling her face.

  “And you like this taste, Ilse?”

  “Yes.” She almost couldn’t get the word out. “Ja.”

  Schroeder’s participation was measured, enjoying Frau Ilse’s sexual gambit as one might a Berlin cabaret performance. She pressed forward hard against the table, her arm and hand feverish below. Schroeder felt the beginnings of an erection. Did Frau Ilse want him to rape her while her husband watched? Schroeder registered “rape” and retreated instantly into his military persona. Frau Ilse saw the anger in his eyes at his loss of control and mistook it for participation. She climaxed with a yelp, her blue eyes rolling almost to white.

  The commandant slurred unconscious nonsense in response, then screamed in a nightmare. Servants charged into the dining room. Ilse Koch was a brilliant red and unembarrassed. The servants assessed commandant and wife, then Schroeder. Ilse Koch beamed at him from across the table, a bitch satisfied that she had drained the strongest male, stronger now because she had prevailed.

  The commandant yelled again and was patted into quiet submission by the servants. Ilse allowed him to be led away by waving her hand. When the servants were gone, she said, “Reichsmarschall Göring should know the full possibilities of this camp and others. My husband struggles . . . ” She glanced at his wineglass. “I do not. We have learned there will be newer, more modern Vernichtungslagers, annihilation camps. I would be well placed there.”

  Schroeder nodded and concentrated on being king. His assessment of Frau Ilse had been accurate, but her possible participation as a spy in Himmler’s camp must be managed with due caution.

  “What do you know of these annihilation camps?”

  Ilse Koch leaned at him, uncompromised and bold, her breasts squashed against the table. “I know that only Himmler’s apostates are being considered to manage these camps.”

  Schroeder stared and she returned it, the heat still in her face but her interest transposed to matters beyond the reach of her fingers. Schroeder said, “These . . . special camps could be constructed throughout Germany or beyond . . .”

  Frau Ilse stiffened, defiant and proud. “And they will be . . . Wherever the Reich is forced to go in defense of the Fatherland, there will be Jews who own the banks and control the population.”

  “And?”

  “Those Jews will meet the same fate as Jews who come here to Buchenwald. Their property will revert to the Reich.”

  Schroeder nodded, his concern hidden. Either Frau Ilse had read his mind or she was bolder than even he had estimated. She was offering a partnership, a spy who would know Himmler’s and Eichmann’s gambits against a Palestine solution long before Schroeder would. Frau Ilse was willing to side with Göring against Himmler, a very, very risky proposition, and likely willing to sacrifice her husband in the process. Something she’d happily demonstrated at dinner.

  Schroeder stood to excuse himself. Whores were useful but rarely good partners. Ilse rose with him, smiled, and offered her hand. Schroeder grabbed her hair and slammed his free hand between her legs, then her against the wall. He spoke to her quietly and from one inch away. “I am . . . willing to consider your generous offer.” He squeezed at her crotch until she winced her eyes shut. “As will the next man through your generous bed. When you know Eichmann’s plans, we will do our business.” Schroeder let go and her knees buckled. There seemed to be a smile under the pain.

  CHAPTER 26

  November, 1938

  Erich Schroeder had flown all day and much of the night to America and now stood outside Madison Square Garden at the 50th Street entrance. Massed around him were twenty thousand American Nazis preparing to attend Fritz Kuhn’s German American Bund rally inside. Ringing the American Nazis were fifty thousand agitators of every color and political persuasion. They jeered with bats and clubs and placards. Two thousand armed New York City policemen formed a skirmish line, all of it being documented by reporters from every major paper in the United States.

  From the left: “Nazi bastards!”

  From the right: “Rosenfeld’s Jew Republic!”

  The early stages of riot. Schroeder had warned Fritz Kuhn earlier today in his Yorkville headquarters that tonight’s rally must not happen—a direct command from Reichsmarschall Göring. Kuhn had argued and lied and finished a fifth bier. Kuhn said his mandate came direct from Hitler, that the Führer wished America to know it need not kowtow to the Jews, that soon Roosevelt would be dead and his Communist-dominated Jew trade unions with him.

  “Nazi murderers!”

  Shoulder-to-shoulder with the police, German-Americans in storm trooper uniforms rushed past Schroeder to push back the Communists, Jews, and New Yorkers looking for trouble. The photographs would be front page. Schroeder did not see how the spectacle could be worse.

  Inside the hall, it was worse. The mammoth stage was backed by one hundred uniformed Nazis and a five-story banner of George Washington embraced by Bund flags. Martial music blared. It was Hitler’s Nuremberg rally recreated in New York. The crowd roared at Fritz Kuhn proud and bold on the stage:

  Sieg Heil!

  Sieg Heil!

  Salutes snapped—stiff arms, black uniforms, and red swastikas. Twenty-five thousand screamed, “Sieg Heil!”

  Fritz Kuhn boomed: “Henry Jew Morgenthau takes the place of George Washington! We are in trouble, my friends.”

  “Sieg Heil!”

  Kuhn shook his fist, mimicking Hitler. Schroeder scanned the crowd, as angry and bitter as the poorest sections of the Fatherland. A man lunged onto the platform, clawing toward Kuhn, and was beaten to the wood, subdued, then thrown off to the police.

  Kuhn railed: “The Jews! The Jews send their assassins!”

  Schroeder made a field decision amid the shouts and shoulders. It would be “Jews” who would murder Fritz Kuhn and his top lieutenants, the lieutenants first. Göring’s message would be clear within the Bund leadership. And the remainder of the world would see the International Jew defending “his” territory.

  Schroeder stopped at a new thought, stunned he hadn’t come to it previously—the same “Jew-Communist agitators” should injure Eddie Owen’s family. Burn down the farmhouse, kidnap or kill a sibling, possibly a parent in the hospitals. Eddie had not delivered the Jews their salvation, the Mendelssohn papers, and now, he could not. The Jew would punish Eddie mightily for this transgression and his work for the Fascist oil companies. Schroeder nodded, surrounded by bellowing American Nazis. Additional murders in America required sanction; Reichsmarschall Göring understood murder.

  Schroeder shoved through the hall toward the exit nearest Jack Dempsey’s restaurant on Broadway. Over dinner, a plan could be constructed, then a phone report to Berlin that Kuhn had not listened to reason. The sanction to kill or kidnap a member of the Owen family could then be requested, adding further pressure t
o the FBI’s threats Schroeder believed were about to land on Eddie on Tenerife. Collectively, that should be sufficient to push Eddie Owen gratefully to Berlin the day after Tenerife was finished. And once there, Erich Schroeder would again be Eddie Owen’s salvation.

  From his long set of windows at the St. Regis Hotel, Schroeder sipped a sherry and marveled at how Central Park resembled Tiergarten in Berlin. Jack Dempsey’s restaurant had proven too close to the rally and its inevitable riot. Behind Schroeder on his desk, CBS radio broadcasted Father Charles Coughlin and the final minutes of his Golden Hour of the Little Flower live from Royal Oak, Michigan. Schroeder was not a Christian, nor a devotee of radio preachers, but he listened anyway.

  The Catholic priest sounded much like Fritz Kuhn pounding his podium, the priest railing at a radio audience Father Coughlin claimed was 40 million: “Roosevelt is the great liar and betrayer! Must the entire world go to war for six hundred thousand German Jews? Jews who fail to use the press, the radio, and the banking house—where they stand so prominently—to fight communism as vigorously as they fight Nazism? These Jews invite the charge of being supporters of communism.”

  Schroeder snorted at the radio. Jews. They multiply like vermin; now there were six hundred thousand, not four. Always the Jews—Schroeder glanced at the briefcase that held the Nazi plan for the Jews. And smiled. The radio changed voices. A self-important newsman intoned that today had been a banner day for speeches: Adolf Hitler had spewed an astonishing anti-Semitic diatribe in the Reichstag, warning the world that he would “exterminate the Jewish race in Europe if another world war broke out—for they alone would be the cause.”

  Schroeder was dumbstruck. Impossible. Hitler, even in his rage, would not undertake such an enormous tactical risk. Yes, it was true the Jews would be the cause, but the concept of “extermination” was to forever be the “Zionist lie,” not Nazi policy. Nazi ambassadors and conspirators still had to deal with skittish Capitalist profiteers who lacked a commitment to solution, committed only to money. Schroeder palmed a letter opener as he would a fighting knife. He would swear Hitler had been misquoted, that was the answer. Misquoted by Jews who controlled the airwaves and newspapers.

  Thankfully, there were prominent Americans who agreed with Father Coughlin. On the front page and inside the three newspapers that covered the desk in Schroeder’s suite, Texas Congressman Martin Dies—chairman of the powerful House Un-American Activities Committee—strongly supported Hitler’s stance on the Bolshevik threat and said nothing to demean the Fascist agenda.

  A free thinker, Congressman Dies, unafraid of Jew influence. Illinois Congressman Stephen Day and Senator Burton Wheeler of Montana had waffled on their anticipated support but vehemently underwrote neutrality, adding that the globe already had 35 million men under arms and needed no more. Schroeder gouged the letter opener into the senator’s eye.

  Tomorrow, before boarding a train to Detroit, Hermann Schmitz would “pacify” his Jew bankers worried for their investments with steel magnate Fritz Thyssen and the remainder of the Ruhr Valley coal and steel monopolies, investments underwritten with the profit opportunities Hitler and Göring had promised in a war with Russia but had not delivered. And could not deliver without the final components for aviation gas. Schroeder smiled and kept the letter opener’s point in the senator’s eye. Schmitz and his Jew bankers and the Detroit industrialists would be a difficult mission. Rich men always feigned armor whether they had it or not. Mendelssohn’s papers and Eddie Owen would reduce that armor to fishnet.

  On Tenerife, Eddie was making his second call using Erich Schroeder’s billing number. There’d been a fair amount of anger over Eddie trashing the phone cabinet, but not enough that Foreman Paulsen felt like tossing Eddie to the PJs. After the refinery was final tested might be another matter. The foreman’s phone rang. Eddie jumped. The international operator said she had Eddie’s party on the line.

  “Pop! Dad? It’s Eddie. How are you?”

  The phone crackled. Newt’s voice was weak, almost a whisper, not the man behind the plow. “We’re fine, Eddie, just fine. Just fine.”

  “Mom? Is she okay?”

  Static. “She’s at the sanatorium. Good, I understand, but hard for her to talk, and I’m stuck in this machine. We’ll be good again, you’ll see. Lois and Howard were up yesterday. Good family they’re with. We’ll be good again, Eddie, don’t you worry. The farm, too.”

  “I love you, Pop.” Eddie was crying. “Tell Mom.”

  “We know, Eddie, we’re proud; you pulling these strings from so far away. Proud, Eddie, proud.”

  “I’ve got it, Pop. Don’t worry. Just get better. I’ve got everything else. Stay as long as you want. Just get better. I can call next week.”

  The operator said, “One minute remaining.”

  Newt coughed. The phone was silent. A woman’s voice said, “Mr. Owen, your father needs to rest now; thank you for calling long distance.”

  “Wait—” The phone went dead. Eddie wasn’t done; he needed to know more, to understand, to make it better—

  Forman Paulsen’s assistant shouted and pounded on the door. Eddie slowly cradled the receiver. His hand shook and he wiped his eyes. Since Schroeder had been gone, Eddie’d been on station sixteen hours a day. A series of his predecessor’s undiscovered, unsanctioned shortcuts had come close to killing everyone at the refinery three times. The cataclysmic possibilities kept Red Beret at bay and Eddie’s thoughts out of Doña Carmen’s basement where Saba had been trying not to die for thirteen days. After Foreman Paulsen’s repeated requests, the PJs had allowed Eddie to bury D.J. One of Tom Mendelssohn’s people may have been at the cemetery. The man attempted to engage Eddie. The PJs drew guns and arrested the man. Eddie asked after him the following day; the man had not made it to the jail. If the man were from Tom Mendelssohn and still alive, any further interest from Eddie would surely get him killed.

  The refinery’s three trips to catastrophic implosion also kept Eddie’s thoughts out of the file cabinet that no longer held Mendelssohn’s papers. The foreman’s assistant was the likely culprit—at the very least the little bastard was on somebody’s payroll to spy on the foreman. Or it was Foreman Paulsen himself who’d found the papers. He could’ve stumbled onto the file by accident. The trailer door bowed from the pounding. Eddie swept open the door, brushing Forman Paulsen’s assistant back. The assistant shouted rapid-fire demands at Eddie’s back as Eddie walked toward the canteen.

  Two sweaty blue suits arrived at Eddie’s table before he could inhale a fast lunch. The foreman’s assistant and two PJs escorted them. Both men showed IDs signed by J. Edgar Hoover. The taller of the two explained they were special agents of the FBI, sent here at the request of three United States senators, gentlemen from the nonindustrial South who held strong beliefs concerning the Dies Committee—the House Un-American Activities Committee.

  Eddie motioned the men to sit if they chose. “Never heard of the Dies Committee, sorry.”

  Both agents glanced at the German submariners at the next table, then sat, and the taller agent continued his introduction. “The three senators believe we face a Fascist threat wielded by major US business interests north of the Mason-Dixon Line. Mr. Dies and his committee are whitewashing this threat. The senators have evidence that you, Mr. Eddie Owen, late of Texas—as is Representative Dies—is in league with the Nazis to the expanding detriment of the American way of life. The senators demand your return to the US by consent, or otherwise, where you will testify in person.” The agent sat back. “While neither myself, nor Special Agent Johnson, are anxious to violate any US laws, in time of great peril to the nation we are Mr. Hoover’s to command.”

  Eddie considered the indictment, the fact he was the piñata, not the captains and the kings. “Tell Mr. Hoover I won’t be missing work to play political football.”

  “The choice isn’t yours to make.”

  Eddie felt the anger rising with the color in his face. “Thirty-five hundred mi
les is a long trip to threaten one engineer. Maybe you protectors of the nation should’ve gone to New York.”

  The shorter agent said, “Meaning?”

  “Where the goddamn money is.” Eddie went back to his lunch.

  The shorter agent tapped in front of Eddie’s plate. “We have bank records and hospital records from St. John’s hospital in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Start with those, Mr. Owen. Make us believe you won the money downtown at the casino.”

  Eddie narrowed his eyes at the connection to his family. “Can’t say I’m that interested in making you believe anything.” Eddie dropped his fork. “And if you’d like to finish today with all your teeth, I’d leave my family out of whatever else you have to say.”

  “I would’ve thought you smarter.” The agent’s Princeton accent matched his words. He flipped three pages of a folder. “Class president, valedictorian, top engineer, light heavyweight boxing champion. No trouble to speak of . . . Wait, what’s this, an oil derrick explosion? And you received substantial compensation?” He looked up. “Was that your first workplace explosion, Mr. Owen? Before the Sitra refinery and the Haifa refinery?”

  Eddie said fuck you with his eyes.

  The agent nodded and returned to his folder. “Then—Wait, what’s this?” The agent touched his partner’s arm. “An outstanding warrant in Montague County, Texas? And serious, too. Felony manslaughter. And damn, a fugitive warrant to boot. That’s federal, unless you haven’t left Texas.” He smiled at Eddie. “We’re not in Texas, are we?”

  Eddie nodded at the volcano. “Nope.”

  “Mr. Hoover will allow you to return by consent. Or in handcuffs if you decline.”

  Slight rumble from Mount Teide. No response from Eddie. Behind his anger, Eddie had just been hit with the last nail in the coffin. Like D.J. had said, Eddie Owen and AvGas could end up being everyone’s solution or everyone’s villain. The line would be so fine it wouldn’t bear trying to hold it.