The Manhattan Deception

by Simon Leighton-Porter

  Novak looked at him in bewilderment. ‘They’d do the same thing. Splash it all over the media.’

  ‘Wrong. What if they did and the public response was, “so what, poor guy, not his fault, give him a break”? Then what? The whole thing’s just blown up their face.’

  ‘I’m still not with you,’ said Novak.

  ‘It’s simple,’ said Pauli. ‘What you do is this. You drop in a few facts, hints, pointers, nudges, but nothing concrete enough to build the whole story and then you watch to see who bites. When you’ve got a big enough fish on the line – Lisa Greenberg, say – then you take them out. Then you get rid of the source, which we’re assuming was Reiss senior and for good measure you take out the son.’

  ‘But why not take out Hillman and Stenmark as well?’

  ‘Way too unsubtle. For the first time, they – whoever they are – haven’t tried to cover up one of their murders. At the moment, all three deaths appear totally unconnected but that’s until the story breaks. Now d’you see it?’

  Novak looked at him blankly. ‘Sorry, not a clue. You sure you haven’t already been drinking?’

  ‘Never been more sober. Just think for a moment. When it does break, that’s when it becomes obvious that the murders are linked because somebody – and the finger is going to point my way – has obviously been bumping people off to keep them quiet. So even if there’s nothing more than suspicion of my involvement in the murders, when the full story comes out, no one’s going to give me the benefit of the doubt. Game over for Eric Pauli. Now do you get it?’

  Novak looked at his chief in admiration. ‘Fuck, yeah. That’s genius – pure genius, but who’s trying to put you in the frame?’

  ‘That’s what we’ve got to find out before it’s too late,’ said Pauli.

  Chapter Twenty

  A. says he’s had enough and that we should escape. We have no money – what I don’t spend in the shops they take back from us – so how we would do it I don’t know. A. rambling on about it all day. Each scheme madder than the next. They’ve already told us many times what will happen if we don’t stick to our side of the bargain but A. says he no longer cares.

  *

  Eric Pauli had been a member of the US Senate for just over a year when it happened. It was during the time, eight years before the presidential campaign, when he and his wife Janet were renting a small apartment not far from Dupont Circle while they looked for somewhere to buy in DC. After months of searching, they found a place they loved. It was over budget but worth the wait: an elegant, red-brick house from the early twentieth century, not far from Mitchell Park and with all the space they needed. Good for entertaining too.

  Although Janet was having the time of her life, decorating and furnishing on a blank canvas for the first time in twenty years, they decided to move some of their furniture and books down from their constituency home and, as is often the way with house moves, items got dropped during the unpacking. Pauli was in his new study, invisible behind a pile of cardboard boxes when Janet broke the news to him. She stood in the doorway for a moment, the evening sun catching the highlights in her hair. ‘Got some bad news. We’ve had a breakage.’

  Pauli’s head appeared from behind the wall of boxes. The efforts of a day spent unpacking, arranging, drilling and hammering had left the pair of them tired and dishevelled. His dark hair had fallen over his face and he looked up from his unsuccessful hunt for the last of a trilogy of books whose absence threatened his meticulous alphabetical arrangement on the new shelves. ‘Anything valuable?’ he asked, wiping the sweat from his forehead.

  She smiled at the sight of her tousled husband. ‘Not valuable, irreplaceable maybe, but definitely not valuable.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘That old wooden box of yours. It had some tools in it and one of the removal guys dropped it on the garage floor.’ She put her head on one side and looked at him affectionately. ‘And you’ve got some explaining to do.’

  ‘What d’you mean?’

  ‘You never told me you kept a diary. Or is it the great American novel? It’s all in German so the suspense is killing me.’

  Pauli stopped rummaging around for the missing book and stood up, looking at his wife quizzically. ‘Sweetheart, I really don’t know what you’re talking about. That box was only good for firewood. I’d forgotten we still had it.’

  ‘Well it’s certainly only good for firewood now. And you’re telling me you didn’t know it had a kind of false bottom. It was full of notebooks, school exercise books, loose bits of paper: no wonder it was so heavy. And you had no idea?’ The smile began to fade from her face.

  Pauli shook his head. ‘Nothing to do with me. Must be something of Mom’s. Come on, let’s go take a look,’ he said, leading the way down the stairs and out through the hall towards the garage.

  ‘Sorry about the box, Senator Pauli,’ said the leader of the removals team, handing him a piece of paper. ‘One of my guys tripped and dropped it. If you just check the contents for damage and fill in the details of what’s bust on this form, I’ll make sure the office processes it straight away.’

  Pauli looked at the heap of tools that had been in the box: on top were two old hand drills, a plane with a rusty blade and an assortment of screwdrivers – the usual accumulation of a lifetime’s tinkering – and saw there was nothing of value. ‘Nah, don’t worry about it, just stuff I should’ve thrown in the trash long ago. Tell your guys it doesn’t matter.’

  ‘Appreciate that, Senator. I’ll let them know.’

  The removal man returned to the truck and the Paulis were left alone amidst the clutter of their new garage. On the workbench where Janet Pauli had left them were two neat piles of notebooks and loose sheets of paper. He picked up what looked like a school exercise book and started flicking through it, his face a mask of concentration. For several minutes he read in silence until Janet’s curiosity got the better of her. ‘So what is it, Eric? What’s it say?’

  ‘It’s not good. It’s my mother’s diary.’

  She rested her hand affectionately on his shoulder and with the other, adjusted her glasses so that she could see the spidery handwriting. ‘You still miss her, don’t you? You always pretend you don’t, but you do.’

  He closed the book and placed it down on top of the pile. Janet noticed his right hand was shaking. ‘It’s not that. It’s that what she says doesn’t make sense. Here, give me a hand, we’ll take it up to the study and I’ll take a closer look.’

  Easing their way past two removal men who were struggling with a sofa, they made their way back up to the study and its mountain of boxes. Pauli cleared a space for the diaries on his desk and began sorting through them. He frowned. ‘They don’t seem to be in any kind of order so I need to find out where they start and I’m out of practice at reading her writing.’

  Janet brushed the dust from the front of her jeans and pulled up a chair to join her husband at the desk. ‘You still haven’t told me what she said.’

  ‘Just hold on a second. The one I was reading was from 1949, I want to see if there’s anything earlier.’ He worked his way rapidly through the pile. ‘She always said she and Dad came out of Germany in the clothes they stood up in, but there’s a possibility these may go back to the war or even before.’

  ‘You said she wouldn’t talk much about your father,’ she said. ‘Maybe she saved it for her diary.’

  He read on. ‘Yeah. She did. That’s the trouble,’ his voice a flat monotone.

  Janet looked at her husband with concern. She knew the black dog of self-doubt was never far from his heels, and now she sensed its approach. ‘What’s the matter, Eric?’

  The colour drained from his face and his voice became hoarse and barely audible. Janet had only seen him cry once before and now it seemed about to happen again.

  ‘April 1945,’ he said. ‘She always said they arrived in the June.’

  She stroked his hair. ‘Come on, sweetie,’ she said. ‘I know finding t
his stuff is a shock, but in the big scheme of things that’s not exactly a betrayal. It’s not like she shot your puppy, is it? I mean, I’ll bet she told you there was a Santa Claus, didn’t she?’

  The joke fell flat. ‘No, it’s not that, it’s what she says about coming here.’ He flicked rapidly from one page to another, trying to devour the essentials of this stranger’s story, the stranger who’d given him life but about whom he knew so little. As he read on, each new revelation drove the knife deeper still. ‘Listen to this,’ he said. ‘It’s from April 1945. “I don’t understand why he ever agreed to this and I wish I was dead, that we’d at least had the courage to stay in Berlin with the others and fight to the end as they must be doing now. Instead, we face a living death, thousands of kilometres from home in an enemy country that swarms with Jews, negroes and other sub-human filth.” ….’ His voice trailed away.

  Janet stared at her husband open-mouthed. ‘My God,’ she said. ‘Those can’t be her diaries. You told me they were locked up for being anti-Nazi, but that’s just vile – ’

  Pauli’s eyes wouldn’t meet hers and he continued staring at the handwritten pages, a look of horror on his face. ‘It’s worse than vile but I’m afraid it is hers. There’s no doubt. It’s her writing and there’s other personal stuff too.’

  ‘But the tattoos on their arms, that proves they were in Auschwitz. She told you herself.’

  He shook his head. ‘Half an hour with a needle and a bottle of ink and anyone could have a concentration camp tattoo – some of the guards at Auschwitz used that stunt to try and fool the Russians. Now I guess I know why she didn’t want to talk about the war. It wasn’t because they were locked up, it was because their side lost.’

  Neither of them spoke. From somewhere downstairs came the sounds of heaving and grunting as the movers shifted another heavy box. The happiness and expectation with which they’d started their day had melted away like snow in the warm sunshine of the cloudless DC evening. It was too early in the day for ghosts.

  Pauli held up one of the notebooks. ‘I guess this explains why they turned the place upside-down when my mother died. I’d got it into my mind that it was because she was a communist. How wrong I was.’

  Janet rested her head on his shoulder. ‘But none of it’s your fault, Eric. There’s nothing you can do about it and nobody’s going to blame you for what your parents thought or did.’

  He inclined his head towards hers and silence fell in the warm room once again. Even the movers were quiet for the moment. ‘Yeah, I know all that. It’s called logic but it’s a thousand miles from how I feel right now,’ he said. ‘All those years wondering why she was so odd and sometimes so cold. And now I know why. I can’t simply airbrush the fact she was a monster, just like that.’ He snapped his fingers in the air. ‘And there’s worse. Each page I’ve read is viler than the last.’

  ‘What about your father?’

  ‘That’s what I’m talking about – I’ve got to find out how this happened.’

  ‘You’re talking in riddles, Eric. What did he do?’

  A look of despair settled on his face. ‘I’m coming to that. Just give me time – this isn’t easy. But first, I need to find out how they ended up in America rather than an Allied prison cell in Germany. Perhaps the guys she mentions can tell us. “First chance in ages to write so may have forgotten some details over last week. Spent our last night in shelter at Tempelhof. Terrible stink of drains and raids bad again. Awful man Colonel Böttger came in to say we can leave at last. Standfluss and Reiss to fly with us – according to B. the Allies can’t be trusted. In that case not sure why having Standfluss and Reiss with us will help. According to B. our things are being flown to Fürstenfeldbruck to be collected by Köcher and Gisevius from the Bern consulate. Hope we can trust them because impossible to get news from CH: being watched all the time”. Pauli looked at her over his glasses. ‘So all we have to do is find Messrs Böttger, Standfluss, Reiss, Köcher or Gisevius.’

  Janet frowned. ‘That’s if any of them are still alive. Even if they are and if they’ve kept quiet for all these years, do you really think they’d so much as talk to you, let alone answer any questions?’

  Pauli’s face fell. ‘No, but at least we’ve got somewhere to start.’

  ‘Well look on the bright side,’ said Janet, getting up from her seat. ‘We know who two of them are.’

  ‘We do?’

  ‘Sure we do – those of us who didn’t waste our time studying law.’ Janet knew that she’d get a bite and she wasn’t disappointed.

  ‘Just hold on a minute. It was my law practice that – ’

  ‘Teasing you, Eric. Just teasing,’ she said with a smile. ‘You need it. You were disappearing down your own personal black hole again. There’s a big difference between gravitas and gravity. Remember?.’

  He smiled at her weakly. ‘Yeah, so you keep saying, but it’s not every day that I find out that I’m the offspring of two Nazis. So who are these other guys?’ He joined her at the window, looking out on the overgrown garden that had taken advantage of the warm, wet summer and was fast returning to nature.

  ‘You must’ve heard of them,’ she said. ‘It’s on the Discovery Channel every other week.’ Pauli shook his head and his wife continued. ‘Georg Reiss: one of the scientists that the Allies rounded up after the war, you know, like Werner von Braun and Werner Heisenberg?’

  ‘Is this a lead-in to some corny Werner Brothers gag?’

  Janet’s face lit up. ‘Welcome back, Eric Pauli. Must’ve been real dark down there.’

  ‘Still is, but go on. Who were these guys?’

  ‘I told you; Georg Reiss. The allies captured him and a guy called….guess what?’

  ‘Somebody Standfulls or whatever his name was.’

  ‘Standfluss: ten out of ten. And they were the guys who helped Oppenheimer bring in the Manhattan Project in on schedule. Standfluss was murdered at Los Alamos by a couple of the Rosenbergs’ people and Reiss escaped to Europe via South America. Now do you remember?’

  ‘Vaguely, but what’s this got to do with my dear, jack-booted parents?’

  ‘Well, from what you’ve just read me they all caught the same flight out of Berlin and that can’t be a coincidence.’

  ‘I’m sure it wasn’t.’ The sun moved round and the room was suddenly dark. With the light, disappeared Pauli’s brief moment of good humour. ‘I’ve got more reading to do before I’m sure,’ he said. ‘But if I’m right then we’ve got big problems and I may need to start looking for a new job.’

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Haven’t been able to write for five days. House in turmoil after search – just lucky they never found you, dear diary. They kept going on about what will happen if we try to escape. The thought that they’ve been listening to everything we say and do is just too appalling for words. I hate them and their damned country.

  *

  The evening after Pauli’s interview with Cathy, Vince Novak worked late again. His wife had long ago accepted the reality of his job and on the rare days when he wasn’t on the campaign trail with Pauli, the maid no longer cooked anything that couldn’t subsequently be frozen and reheated. Their home in Chevy Chase reflected his financial success as did the holiday property in South Carolina, Novak’s home State.

  As he approached the Georgian-style building he slowed, turning the car into the driveway, an automatic security camera tracking his progress. He waited for the electric gates to open and the silver Mercedes passed between the tall, white-painted pillars. At the touch of another button, the garage door swung up and the sound of its mechanism told Louise Novak that her husband was home. She checked her watch: eleven PM. In bed by midnight if they were lucky and then he’d be up again at five to beat the traffic on the way in. Then the day after, she knew that it was a three AM start for the flight to Atlanta and a campaign breakfast with Pauli. As for anything approaching a sex life, forget it.

  ‘Good day, darling?’ she asked
as he walked into the living room. It was the same question she always asked.

  ‘No worse than usual.’ The reply he always gave. ‘No, actually, I lie,’ he said, flopping down into an armchair. ‘Eric’s got a bee in his bonnet about trivial shit again.’

  ‘Does that matter?’

  ‘Yeah, it does when it takes his focus off getting himself nominated, especially with the money that’s going into this campaign. If he worries this much now, he’s not going to have much fun when he moves into the White House.’

  She wrinkled her highly expensive nose. The original hadn’t been quite the right shape. ‘I didn’t think it was supposed to be fun. I’d sooner play golf, personally.’

  Novak helped himself to three fingers of Scotch. ‘Yeah, I’d noticed,’ the sneer in his voice unmistakable, but not to her. ‘Trouble is, you start doing anything for a living, even golf, and it stops being fun.’

  ‘If you say so, darling.’ The untroubled mind’s response to the threat of thought.

  Novak nodded almost imperceptibly but said nothing. Barely awake, he felt himself slowly unwinding as the effects of alcohol on an empty stomach kicked in. He’d long ago worked out that although his lust for her body would fade – had faded if he was honest – her lust for what his money could bring seemed to feed on itself and become ever more insatiable. He couldn’t afford a divorce, and, as for her, at her age she couldn’t take the risk of walking out – not if the courts upheld the terms of their pre-nup anyway. They both knew all about relying on lawyers and the pitfalls that lay along that road. Then there were the kids: two boys, aged thirteen and fifteen. Novak always said that they had his looks and his wife’s brains: she’d learned to laugh dutifully every time he said it, little knowing that he meant every word. Neither were A students and the older boy was already starting to show signs of the lack of drive so common among the children of the rich. Novak feigned interest. ‘How’re the kids?’ he asked.