Traitor's Gate

by Charlie Newton

  Erich Schroeder was stunned. Impossible, but his plan for dominion had been derailed. Worse, he’d been reported. Where had the American Capitalists found the nerve? Jew lovers! He would bury them, let the genteel aristocracy of Detroit’s Grosse Pointe and New York’s Hamptons watch their children fucked to death. He would build camps in America and burn the Jew lovers alive! Schroeder ripped open the sealed letter from the first courier and read instructions under Reichsmarschall Göring’s seal. The prose was curt: Immediately after Tenerife’s AvGas equipment is tested with success, bring Eddie Owen by submarine to Bremerhaven where he will begin converting the Reich’s refineries. Included in the order was the long-awaited sanction to deal with Eddie Owen’s family in Oklahoma. Schroeder thin-lipped a smile, not the least bit calm or happy. Himmler’s representatives, the SS Sturmbannführer and his courier, should go missing, now, tonight—

  Schroeder bit into his lip. Killing Himmler’s SS envoy would solve nothing. Himmler may be a “chicken farmer,” but at heart he was a butcher, a grinder of meat who never shut down the slaughter line once the process had begun. The term “race treason” had a special meaning to the Reichsführer, nothing Himmler hated more. To be classed as one who might violate those laws was to invite a public or private death sentence that could not be overturned. Even by Göring.

  Schroeder chewed at a plan, then replanned. He paced, kicking furniture debris, and sidestepped out onto his balcony. Palm fronds whisked his railing; the air had more sulfur. He cold-eyed the volcano, then the suite behind him and the hole he’d put in the wall. A shadow? Behind the hole—The balcony shook hard under his feet; Schroeder’s eyes cut to the volcano, then Eddie’s refinery to the north. Now that the sanction was in place, Eddie’s family could be abducted by “Jews” and taken to Mexico. This would be better than a killing and undertaken as soon as the refinery modifications were finished and he and Eddie had left Tenerife for Bremerhaven. When Hitler’s Blitzkrieg scorched across Europe, Eddie would develop a conscience. His family would be the lever.

  At Bremerhaven, Eddie would spend a sandy resort stay at the Villa Aegir on the island of Rügen under the watchful eye and propaganda of Schroeder’s best people. Schroeder and the Mendelssohn papers would immediately continue on to Göring in Berlin where their use could be explained . . . The papers were a test for the American industrialists that they had failed.

  Tested for what? For what?

  Schroeder slammed the balcony table, levitating the oil lamp. It crashed and set the table afire. Mount Teide rumbled the building, shaking the oil fire onto his shoes. His shoes ignited. Then his pants cuffs. Schroeder ran for the bath, stumbled and fell, and saw the shadow move this time. Fire crawled up his hip, both legs flaming. He charged for the shower, twisted knobs, and grabbed the showerhead. Water blasted. Hot water. His hands slapped at the flames; fire bit into his shirt, then died under water. Steam. From the hot water. Schroeder bolted out of the shower onto the tile.

  Smoke. The papers.

  Smoke filled half the suite—the balcony table was burning. Schroeder ran blind and coughing through the smoke, grabbed the one table leg without flames, and threw the table over the railing into the celebration below. Puddle-fire nipped at his feet and he stamped it dead with soggy shoes. He spun, saw the papers were safe. What about the shadow? Schroeder drew his Luger and focused on the jagged hole he’d put in the wall. He stepped through the remnants of his living room to his door and eased it open. Straddling the doorjamb, he glanced at his suite’s side of the hole, then on the other side of the jamb at the door that now faced him. Through that door would lead to the other side of the hole.

  No number on the door—a maid’s closet, the door slightly ajar. Schroeder had noticed the door when shown this suite but had forgotten to inspect it. He stiff-armed the Luger at the maid’s closet and squeezed the trigger. Then stopped. Better to interrogate, see what tonight’s occupant knew, then shoot. First a knee, then an elbow, cut out an eye . . .

  The closet was empty. Down the hall, the elevator engaged. Schroeder ran to the cage. It was rising, not lowering. He hid the Luger. A uniformed bellman was in the elevator cab with the operator. He bowed three inches; made no comment on Schroeder’s singed, wet clothes; and handed him a note. The note was from the SS Sturmbannführer. A satisfactory agreement could be made between them. Could they meet again on the hour?

  After telling the taxi driver “no thanks,” Eddie had walked into the street party celebrating the Fascist victory in mainland Spain, then decided to get blind drunk. The submariners weren’t happy. The PJs had looked ecstatic. Eddie didn’t give a fuck. His second final test was scheduled for tomorrow morning. The CEPSA bigwigs would be in on the first seaplane at nine a.m., then the christening celebration a day later on March 31. Then it’s auf Wiedersehen, for and to, everybody. Eddie sighed, searching for sympathy pills—in truth his modifications were already done and tested, but he hadn’t shared his results. Why? Who the fuck knew? Something was wrong—with him. Really, really wrong.

  Eddie veered through the street crowd, coughed sulfuric air that hurt his eyes, rubbed his face, and turned toward the bottom of Calle Miraflores. Might as well go out in flames. He waved the submariners to keep up, then began snaking faster through the mob, hoping to lose the PJs. It took five blocks, three turns past clots of drunken soldiers firing pistols in the air, and a fast climb over two courtyard walls.

  Outside Les Demoiselles, Calle Miraflores was packed in both directions. Inside was no different, Carnaval for Nationalists. Doña Carmen stood on the third tread of the stairway, saw Eddie trying to crowd in at the door, and glared. Eddie shouldered through to the stairway end of the bar like he wanted a drink, waved at the bartender with several others wanting drinks, then settled for the patrona at his shoulder. Doña Carmen leaned over the stair railing to his ear and said, “Go away. Find an American girl to marry.”

  Eddie pointed at the bartender like he wanted help but told her ear, “No. I want to see her. I told you, before I go.”

  “You betrayed her. She is dead.”

  “I didn’t betray her. What’re you talking about?” Eddie cocked his head, fearing the worst. “What happened? Where is she?”

  “Dead. The Nazi.”

  Eddie rocked on his heels. Gunshots at the doorway.

  The submariners turned to the gun blasts. Eddie leaped over the stair railing and ran up the stairs. Down the hall, he tried the door he’d been in before and it opened an inch. A girl smiled but shook her head. Eddie pushed her aside, apologized, and Doña Carmen rushed in behind him. She spoke to the girl and hurried her out. Eddie opened the armoire, unlocked the false wall behind the clothes, ran down the narrow hall, through the second false wall, down the back steps, and ripped open Saba’s door—Saba lurched. Her knife arched to her blind side and buried in the wall directly behind her. She spun away from a threat that wasn’t there, a pistol stiff-armed at Eddie.

  Doña Carmen yelled, “No!” from the doorway.

  Saba’s pistol was in Eddie’s face. Eddie didn’t move, his hands open at his sides. Saba stepped back and into the wall, the buried knife vibrating chest-high at her shoulder. Had a man been there, the blade and hilt would have broken his sternum. She glared. So did Eddie.

  Doña Carmen said, “His Nazi guards are in the bar. He would not leave.”

  Saba growled behind the pistol.

  Eddie barked: “Tell me you didn’t mean what you said.”

  Saba looked like she might lunge. “Give me to the Nazi? Will that be today? Tomorrow?” One hand ripped the knife out of the wall. Her eyes and pistol stayed tight in Eddie’s face. “Tell me now about our life together in America.”

  Eddie had no idea what she meant.

  She screamed, “I heard your words!”

  Eddie flinched. “What? What words?”

  “Is he here?” Her eyes blazed. “Outside? In my hall? Is my life over, Eddie?”

  “What? No. I haven’t told anyone . .
.”

  Saba glanced hard at Doña Carmen, then back, the breath coming fast, the pistol still rock steady.

  Eddie had to know. “Tell me you didn’t shoot D.J.”

  “And if I did? What then, Eddie Owen betrayer? What then would you do?”

  “I didn’t betray you, goddammit—”

  “I heard your words!” Saba lunged. Eddie ducked. She stopped short. He looked ridiculous; she looked like an assassin. Eddie retreated two steps. “What words? Okay? Whatever you think I said, I didn’t. And if I did, whatever you heard you didn’t understand.”

  “In Schroeder’s suite. Me for the ‘Mendelssohn papers,’ your salvation for my enemies and a way home for you.”

  “What? Would I be here if that’s all it took? Ask yourself that. They’d be here. I’d have the papers; you’d be dead.” Eddie scanned the room, didn’t move his hands. “But the Nazis aren’t here and I am. Unarmed. Hoping you’re not the killer you said you were.”

  “I am your killer.”

  “Bullshit. If it’s true you killed D.J., then shoot me. If not, then come back to Texas—”

  “You can’t return to America—”

  “Okay, then come to anywhere in the fucking world you wanna go and I’ll go with you. Pick and I’m there.”

  “These Mendelssohn papers, the Jewish Question—”

  “Did you kill D.J.?”

  “The papers. Explain them.”

  “Why the fuck won’t you answer me?” Eddie’d replaced fear with anger. “Just say you did or didn’t, okay? Just say it.”

  “Stand back.”

  “You gonna shoot me, too?”

  She glared like she was considering it.

  “Just say it or shoot me.” Eddie put his chest on the end of her pistol and his eyes as deep in hers as they’d go.

  The pistol didn’t budge. They were ten inches apart, both ready to die. She said, “No.”

  “No what?”

  “I did not shoot him—You sold me to the Nazi. When does he collect?”

  Eddie took a flyer. “If you somehow heard me with Schroeder, you know that I never told him yes or no. There is no time, Saba, that I ever, ever, mean to give you up—”

  “If I had killed your friend?”

  Eddie swallowed words he’d thought but hadn’t admitted. “Maybe I’d have killed us both. But I wouldn’t have given you up.”

  Saba hesitated, then glanced at Doña Carmen. The patrona nodded a small frown and slowly lowered her own pistol. She said, “He will kill you both. That, I will believe. I will be in the bar, telling his Nazi guards he takes a woman. Be quick.” And she left.

  Saba stared. Eddie stared back. She didn’t shoot D.J.

  They began by not moving apart. Slowly Saba lowered her pistol. Eddie’s eyes glistened, but his posture was rock strong. He fumbled for words and settled on, “I love you.”

  Saba blinked and seemed to . . . recoil . . . Angry . . . Confused.

  “I love you.”

  Saba blinked again. A smile trembled to her lips and softened the hardest edges of her eyes. “You do not know me; how can you love—”

  Eddie smothered her. All of her, the gun, knife, violence, anger, chestnut hair, shoulders, and chest. She stood rigid in his arms, her knife hand a fist pinned to her hip . . . until the arm circled Eddie’s back. Her fist quit and she dug fingers into his shirt. Eddie squeezed her forever. Finally he said, “We can do this.”

  Her breath was short and hot on his neck.

  “We can.”

  “What?” Breathless into his neck: “What can we do?”

  Eddie hurdled them forward to happily ever after, somewhere, anywhere.

  Saba pulled away, her skin scarlet, and pointed him to the small divan. He kissed her without thinking, didn’t want to risk moving. Eddie kept one of her hands. They stepped to the divan. Her smile was forced, almost tired. She faced the door, took her hand back, inhaled, and said, “Your benefactor, the man who feeds and protects your family, who protects you here, he shot D.J. Bennett. An execution, no mercy, no accident. An execution.”

  Eddie shut his eyes, saw D.J. cold and yellow on the table. And there it was. Eddie took the gut punch, one that in his darkest hours he had suspected would be coming. The revelation was what he’d felt, what he’d sensed deep down but wouldn’t admit or face. Eddie swallowed bile, rocked on his hips, and used the divan to steady.

  “Your friend was my bait. Schroeder paid me to kidnap him in exchange for funding my partisans in Palestine. But Schroeder murdered Haifa, for some reason sooner than he likely wished. He knew I would kill him, no matter what lies he told me. He knew my exchange of your friend was bait and he bettered me in the exchange. My death here was his plan from the beginning.”

  Eddie looked up, his eyes blurry. “Bettered you?”

  Saba nodded an inch. “I am sorry, but that is my world. Schroeder executed your friend while Bennett and I spoke of you, then Schroeder shot me to death, he thought . . . but because of you, I did not die.”

  Eddie blinked his eyes clear but not his head. Erich Schroeder was a cold-blooded replica of a human being. And my family—here and Oklahoma—I have placed in his hands. Eddie pushed forward to stand. “I gotta do something. Get my family—”

  “Wait.” Saba tugged him back. “There are things you must know. I believe Schroeder kills me in a trade with King Faisal in Iraq. I am a woman and not of Allah, and therefore a threat. Faisal has a plan with the Nazis. I do not know this plan, but I suspect it has to do with something the Nazis call the ‘Jewish Question’ and ‘the Mendelssohn papers.’” Saba searched Eddie’s eyes.

  Eddie nodded small and rubbed at the fear in his face, the realizations of just how bad things were about to get in Oklahoma and elsewhere. “There are documents, the ‘Mendelssohn papers.’ Let me explain.” And Eddie did, carefully, eyes on Saba’s reaction after every sentence. Eddie finished by detailing the system plans for how the Nazis would efficiently dispose of eleven million bodies, making diagrams with his index fingers on the divan fabric at Saba’s knee.

  Saba shook her head. “It is not possible. Even the European is not capable of slaughter on this scale, not even the English.”

  Eddie explained his meeting with Mendelssohn and Dinah Rosen and their bombing deaths in Haifa.

  Neither seemed news to her. “And you believe this . . . impossible plan to be fact? That you are not being used for Zionist propaganda? Both Rosen and Mendelssohn were Zionists, yes?”

  Eddie nodded. “Schroeder said the documents were propaganda. Offered to take me to Germany to prove it.”

  Saba cut her eyes like she was thinking. “But a Nazi would have no choice but to deny. He cannot have the world pity the Jews of Europe; better the Jews are despised as pariahs.”

  “The whole ‘extermination camp’ story could be bullshit. It’s that terrible. And the Jews seem to want Palestine bad enough that any lie now would be worth the cost later.” Eddie visualized the detail in the plans, the seals, the signatures, the pride. “You’ve seen what the English are capable of firsthand, and they’re Europeans. The Nazis could—” Eddie shied and wished he’d said it softer. “I’m sorry”—and leaned to kiss her cheek—“I’m sorry.”

  Saba didn’t move or frown. “Schroeder’s business here finishes when you do. After you left his suite, he met with an SS officer and an SS courier. The men argued. Schroeder dismissed them, but they met again.” Saba’s tone militarized. “The Nazis are certain of war in Europe. England’s prime minister and France’s president have agreed to defend Poland if Hitler attacks as he has promised. The SS officer predicts this attack and England’s defense will happen very soon, before the winter of this year.”

  Eddie reached for her hand.

  Saba pulled it back. “You must listen. The SS man ordered Schroeder to produce the papers about the Jewish Question.” Saba struggled with her English or the content, or both. “The SS man inferred that the papers depict what is true.”r />
  “You heard ’em say it was true? That they’re gonna murder eleven million?”

  “Had I not heard the words from their mouths, it would be impossible to believe. Even now I am not certain.”

  “But you heard two Nazis say it was?”

  “Yes. And in a meeting one half hour later, I heard Schroeder speak in German on the telephone with a ‘Reichsführer Himmler.’ I do not know what was said. After the call, Schroeder agreed to trust the papers to the SS man and the safety of the courier’s diplomatic pouch. They leave on the seaplane the day of the christening.”

  “Schroeder has the papers? Mendelssohn’s papers?”

  “So he said.”

  Eddie shook his head; he’d let Schroeder play him for a fool every step of the way. “We can . . . grab the papers from the courier, then—”

  “My plans are for Schroeder. I stay . . . to kidnap him as before, ransom for arms. My fight is for Palestine, not for Europe’s Jews.”

  Eddie didn’t have a great answer. She seemed to notice, or had known from the start that they wouldn’t leave Tenerife together. “I gotta bunch to figure out, a whole bunch. Whatever I do, I’m not letting go of you. Work backward from ‘we’re staying together.’ Everything we have to figure, we’ll figure it from there.”

  Saba smiled, but there was no participation in it.

  Eddie squeezed her hands. “C’mon. There’s a way.”

  Saba didn’t answer.

  Erich Schroeder drew tight, hard circles with the Luger’s barrel and swallowed an overfull tumbler of Pernod. Two hours ago he had finished the second meeting with Himmler’s SS colonel, their dance a two-pawn exercise in entrapment and blackmail.

  Schroeder’s way out of Himmler’s trap—if there was a way out—would be AvGas for the Luftwaffe and a plausible denial of the Americans’ blackmail charges. A tightrope, but possible. But even if the rope were walked, the only true safety rested in Göring’s triumph over Himmler. And Heinrich Himmler was a dangerous man on the scale of no other Schroeder had met. Schroeder poured another Pernod. His Luger continued to groove Frau Ilse’s signature. In dull euphemisms, her airmail letter of last week described Reichsführer Himmler’s renewed and serious interest in Buchenwald. It had been Himmler’s first camp, built and named by him in 1933. She said her husband was touring other sites in Germany with a small SS contingent. There had been extensive discussion of the railway systems in Central and Eastern Europe. Her husband’s conversations with her—more guarded with her than usual—suggested that these railways would likely decide the locations of the camps. Poland was frequently mentioned.