Dry Bones

by Peter Quinn

  “That got him in Dutch?”

  “That was the start. The decision on Gehlen had been made, so I had Dick reassigned to me in the research unit in Nuremberg preparing for the upcoming doctors’ trial, which won’t get going until the Nazi grandees’ has ended.”

  Finished with his drink, Bassante signaled the waiter. “Another sherry for me and a scotch for my friend.”

  “No thanks. I’m still working on mine.” Dunne rubbed his hands together. Across the room, the fireplace where he’d sat with Van Hull and discussed Operation Maxwell was out of commission. The wall directly above was scarred by a prominent crack, a consequence of the V-2 rocket that hit farther down the block and reduced a row of stately eighteenth-century town houses and their inhabitants into dust and debris.

  A downpour descended on the pedestrians outside, who seemed universally prepared, black umbrellas sprouting the length of the block.

  “Someday, I suppose, by dint of natural selection, the Englishman and his umbrella will evolve into a single organism.” Bassante tossed the newspaper on the table. “Homo britannicus: a subspecies distinguished by umbrella-like appendage, tight ass, and stiff upper lip.”

  “You were talking about the doctors’ trial,” Dunne said.

  The waiter returned with the glass of sherry.

  Bassante watched until he was out of earshot. “An odd affair: Twenty-three defendants are scheduled for indictment, including Karl Brandt, Hitler’s personal physician; a twenty-fourth is the subject of a jurisdictional tug-of-war. Van Hull is in the middle.”

  The various involvements of the defendant in question, SS-Hauptsturmführer Dr. Karsten Heinz, were ticked off by Bassante: participant in the T4 Program, assistant physician at the Auschwitz Concentration Camp, member of the Reich Research Council, fellow of the Berlin-Dahlem Research Institute for Racial Biology and Anthropology, and associate director of the Research and Teaching Community for the Ancestral Heritage, the Forschungs-und-Lehrgemeinshaft das Ahnererbe.

  Bassante recounted being present for the interview with Heinz conducted by Colonel Winfield Thomas, former head of psychiatry and neurology at Albany Medical College, at the prison in Nuremberg. Bassante liked Thomas—they were both “devotees of Sigmund Freud”—and agreed that Thomas would do the questioning.

  As Bassante told it, Heinz denied any awareness of Auschwitz’s role as an extermination camp. He had never participated in any of the “alleged selections of Jewish arrivals,” never witnessed any of the “alleged gassings,” never encountered American POWs at Mauthausen. He joined the Nazi Party and the SS for practical reasons. He was never a National Socialist fanatic.

  “Although it’s contradicted by everything we’ve found in his SS file, that’s the line he sticks to. In other words—at very best—he didn’t sell his soul; he merely rented it. Now it seems he’s looking to change landlords.” Instead of sipping his sherry, Bassante downed it in a single swallow. “Son of a bitch smirked the entire time. At the end, he let it slip he’d already had ‘extensive conversations with an American intelligence officer.’

  “Colonel Thomas asked, ‘Who?’

  “‘Someone I presume you know,’ Heinz responded. ‘Lieutenant Colonel Bartlett.’

  “Thomas looked at me quizzically. He presumed that since I was with the CIC, I’d have an idea who this Bartlett was. I shrugged, thinking to myself that the only Bartlett I knew was Carlton Bartlett, who must have finished up his work with the Strategic Services Unit by now and hurried back to the Stork Club’s Cub Room to wine and dine clients and regale them with war stories.

  “Heinz picked up on our confusion and savored it, noting with a less-than-subtle tone of glee, ‘When it comes to intelligence operations, Americans often seemed not to let the right hand know what the left is doing.’ Thomas asked if Bartlett had identified his unit. ‘The SSU,’ Heinz said, ‘which is being reorganized with Bartlett’s help into the Central Intelligence Group to counter Soviet espionage.’”

  “How would he know that?”

  Bassante surveyed the room. “Only one way he could know.”

  “Bartlett?”

  “Bingo, the Pear.”

  “But why?”

  “We know from other sources that under the pretext of establishing a biological link between Judaism and Bolshevism, Heinz made a special practice of extracting information from captured Soviet intelligence officers. Unlike Gehlen, an intelligence gourmand who indiscriminately amassed material—much of it inaccurate, out of date, or deliberately planted by the Soviets—Heinz was an epicure. He focused on quality over quantity, making a painstakingly accurate compilation of dossiers and constantly refining what he got. I’ve no doubt he’s proposing to trade what he has for immunity to prosecution and whatever else he can get.”

  “Can he pull it off?”

  “As well as testimony detailing his work at Auschwitz, we can also place him at Mauthausen. He was present when the commandant, Franz Ziereis, interrogated the prisoners from Operation Dawson. I’m also sure Heinz carried out the order to prepare Michael Jahn’s body for inclusion in the SS’s collection of Jewish skeletons.”

  “If that’s not enough to hang him, what is?” Dunne finished his scotch. He brought up the account he’d heard from Dr. Niskolczi of his experiences at Auschwitz and the work he’d been forced to do for Heinz. Bassante said Van Hull had already recounted their meeting with Niskolczi.

  “Let’s hope that if the doctor survived, his testimony has been taken down.” But, Bassante added, “Heinz has got another card to play. He undoubtedly regards it as his trump. Although he feigns ignorance, we know that along with being present for the interrogation of the OSS men, he assisted in that of Dr. Gerhard Schaefer. The real one.” Bassante signaled to the waiter for another round; this time Dunne joined him. “It’s like in that old spiritual: ‘Toe bone connected to the foot bone, foot bone connected to ankle bone.’”

  “Schaefer was brought to Mauthausen?” Dunne asked.

  Bassante put an index finger to the tip of his nose. “He was brought there along with Jahn and the others. We know that before murdering Schaefer, Ziereis—with Heinz present—extracted the location of the archive. This means Heinz is able to deliver the all-time double play of the intelligence game, one-of-a-kind Tinkers-to-Evers-to-Chance proposition that can provide a handle on Soviet spying and on Nazi war criminals.”

  “Including himself, no?”

  “That’s the point. He’ll give it up as long as it isn’t used against him.”

  “How do you know what Heinz told Bartlett?”

  “The Pear isn’t the only who knows how to play this game. He’s got his flies on my wall. I’ve got mine on his.”

  “Then you know where Heinz claims his materials are stored?”

  “That’s the sixty-four-dollar question. He’s got the Soviet material hidden in the American zone. Only he knows exactly where. The Schaefer material is another matter.”

  “How so?”

  “According to Heinz, Schaefer confessed that after fleeing Berlin, he stopped in Prague and deposited the microfiche in a safe-deposit box he held jointly with his former partner, Dr. Herschel Cernak.”

  “Herschel Cernak!” Dunne blurted out the name loud enough to draw a disapproving glance from the desk clerk.

  Bassante moved forefinger from nose to lips. “Keep it down. Schaefer succeeded in having word slipped to Cernak, who was being held in Theresienstadt.”

  “Van Hull and I flew out of Prague with Cernak.”

  “‘The ankle bone connected to the leg bone.’ That’s what’s taken me all this time: putting the connections together. Soon as Heinz was taken into custody and was interrogated by Bartlett, he offered to deliver the Schaefer archive. By that time, Van Hull and you had been given up for dead. Heinz described his information about the safe-deposit box as a ‘down payment’ to be followed by his trove on the Soviets. It was Bartlett’s idea to make the dash to Prague, not General Donovan’s.”


  “So Bartlett got Schaefer’s material?”

  “He got the safe-deposit box, but Schaefer’s microfiche was gone.”

  “Who has it?”

  “A member of the non-Communist resistance, Jan Horak.”

  “He helped Dick and me.”

  “‘The thigh bone connected to the hip bone.’ Horak also helped arrange the rescue of Cernak, who alerted him to the contents of the box. He wanted to ensure that Horak’s faction, the non-Communist partisans, had possession of it.”

  “Which means it’s still in Prague?”

  “For now. Horak conceived an instant dislike for Bartlett. Once Bartlett told him he’d learned about the safe-deposit box from an SS doctor, Horak suspected a deal was in the offing. He decided to take possession of the box’s contents. When he did, he got in touch and let Van Hull know. Unfortunately, Dick went to Bartlett and challenged him on his dealings with Heinz and what he intended to do with the information.”

  “Unfortunately? How could it be otherwise? It’s personal. Heinz abetted the murder of Dick’s best friend.”

  “Aye, there’s the rub—personal.” Bassante held the armrests so tightly his knuckles blanched. He sat up, frozen, rigid posture.

  “You look as if you were just strapped in the electric chair.”

  “Dick and Michael Jahn weren’t just friends, Fin.”

  “What were they?”

  Bassante cleared his throat. “The ancient Greeks referred to it as pareunos, meaning ‘lying beside’ or ‘bedfellows.’ But what was once second nature to men like Socrates, Plato, and Alexander the Great has become scandalously unnatural to us.”

  “What are you getting at?”

  “I don’t like saying it.”

  “Saying what?”

  Bassante’s hushed voice was hum/hiss: “Homos.”

  “Who?”

  “Dick Van Hull is and Mike Jahn was.”

  “Was what?”

  “Come on, Fin, now you look like the one in the hot seat. Queer, faggot, fairy, sissy. Impolite words for it galore. Pervert. Sodomite. Homo is about as polite as it gets.”

  Dunne resisted guzzling his scotch. At the Catholic Protectory, he didn’t know at first what the older boys meant when they hurled that word—“fairy”—at Jimmy Kelly, pulled down his pants, whipped him with knotted twine when they saw his erection. Jimmy the fairy / Cock long and hairy / Got a hard-on for us all.

  Jimmy cried himself to sleep at night. He tried to fight back. One or two friends stood by him. But his persecutors were relentless. Finally, he made a successful escape. The boys joked among themselves, “Jimmy’s gone to live with his fairy godfather.”

  Outside, a hole opened in the low-hanging ceiling of blanket-gray clouds. Sunlight poured through. Wet street glistened. Clouds the color of coal fumes crowded toward the leak. Rain or shine? Dunne pondered the questionable sky:

  Who’d have suspected Dick Van Hull?

  Suspected what?

  Suspected that he was in love with Michael Jahn.

  Stack it beside the mountains of bodies, ruined cities, death camps, sewers overflowing with pus and blood and shit of two wars, what difference does it make?

  On the NYPD, he knew cops who made a special racket of shaking down speakeasies that catered to queers. They kept up the practice when liquor went legit again and the speaks along Third Avenue in the upper forties and fifties became the “Bird Circuit,” a string of bars whose clientele was men seeking the company of other men.

  There were vice squad detectives who for the right price ignored whatever went on in cathouses or nightclubs, no matter how low or pornographic, but wouldn’t tolerate queers and made a practice of busting them on morals charges any chance they got.

  As lead detective on the vice squad, Bud Mulholland took the opposite tack. Despite his rep as a hard-ass, he framed his approach this way: “Seems to me, what queers want most of all is to be left alone, so until someone can explain the harm they do me or anyone else, I’ll do just that. Live and let live.”

  That photo with the Yeats quote, Dunne realized, the one he had returned to Van Hull, should have tipped him off. But it hadn’t. Maybe a lot of queers were like Van Hull. You wouldn’t know unless they told you.

  The clouds pressed forward and plugged the leak. The sky decided on rain.

  Dunne sensed what Bassante was thinking: Does Van Hull being queer make a difference? Would you rather have no part? It’s time to make up your mind, Fin.

  Live and let live.

  Is that an opinion or a conviction?

  Does it matter?

  It’s easier to change opinions than convictions.

  Sometimes opinions become convictions and seep into the marrow.

  In this case, which is it?

  An opinion that’s become a conviction and changed slightly in the process.

  Slightly how?

  Love and let love.

  “I wouldn’t be here except for Dick. He’s the best soldier I ever met. He should be getting a medal for what he did during Operation Maxwell.”

  “He lived with Jahn in Greenwich Village before the war. His sole purpose with Operation Maxwell, according to Bartlett, was to rescue his queer lover. That’s why he risked your life and got Lieutenant Bunde killed.”

  “That’s a goddamn lie. You and I know it. You’re the one who argued for a three-man mission. Dick Van Hull wanted to go alone. General Donovan was behind the drop. He told me so himself. It involved the honor of the OSS, he said.”

  “The reigning orthodoxy on Donovan is he was a lousy manager who ran a sloppy organization that not only tolerated a high degree of incompetence but was a home for queers and Reds.”

  “They’re claiming Dick is also a Red?”

  “Fairy is fatal enough. Bartlett is already a force in shaping whatever new intelligence organization comes into existence, and he’s making no secret he’s part of a team that isn’t going to allow a reconstituted agency to be built on Donovan’s lax, slapdash willingness to employ gumshoes, con men, eggheads, queers, radicals, and assorted riffraff. Bartlett and company are determined to root out ‘undesirables and unreliables.’”

  “Where’s Dick now?”

  “In Washington. He says he won’t resign as long as there’s any chance Heinz will escape prosecution.”

  “He saved my life. I’ll do anything I can.”

  “He doesn’t want you involved.”

  “He’s my friend.” He repeated the words: “My friend.”

  “Jan Horak is being watched by the Reds in the Czech security office. But I’m trying to arrange a military flight to Prague—no easy matter—to return a packet of files seized by the Nazis, innocuous stuff dressed up as urgent. When the clearances are in place, it’ll be in-and-out, the ‘in’ part a rendezvous with an associate of Horak to take possession of the Schaefer microfiche. Once we have that, I’m confident we can scuttle Bartlett’s scheme to excuse Heinz from prosecution and arrange for Van Hull to leave the service in honorable fashion.”

  “Will Dick go along?”

  “If Schaefer’s archive is actively employed in the prosecution of war criminals and Heinz is headed for the gallows, yes, he’ll resign. Like you, Dick’s had enough.”

  “And my part?”

  “If I went anywhere near a flight to Prague, Bartlett would be tipped off. You, on the other hand …”

  “When do I leave?”

  “Soon as I can arrange it. Lots of moving parts—flight clearances, weather, scarcity of aircraft.” Bassante caught the waiter’s attention, scribbled in the air, signaling for a bill.

  The waiter delivered it facedown, on a small, square filigreed silver tray. “Thank you, gentlemen.”

  Bassante paid it and left an American-size tip. They paused beneath the hotel’s green copper canopy. The doorman offered to call them a cab.

  Bassante stepped into the light drizzle. “Thanks, but we could use a bit of exercise.” As they strolled toward the corne
r, he related his Yuletide trip to Bolzano, in the South Tyrol, where his father had been born. Business masked as holiday, he brought relatives coffee, cigarettes, and scotch while investigating rumors of an expanding escape route SS veterans and their henchmen were following from Austria into Italy, with the goal of embarking for South America.

  The border, Bassante discovered, was a sieve; smuggling of SS personnel, an open secret. Allied supervision was chaotic at best. Red Cross travel papers as well as assistance from hard-core anti-Communist elements within the Vatican were readily available. He’d dispatched a report to Washington on these routes—British Intelligence dubbed them “ratlines”—but heard nothing back. Drizzle thickened into rain.

  Bassante flipped up the collar on his overcoat. “I spent time in Moscow, Fin. I’m not among the ‘useful idiots’ Lenin scoffed at—self-deluded naïfs like Ambassador Joe Davies or willfully blind journalists such as Duranty of the Times. I saw Stalin’s terror firsthand. I’ve no doubt a line must be drawn. But it’s equally clear our goal must be to prevent, not provoke, another war. This last one killed sixty million people. Sooner or later—probably sooner—the Russians will have an atom bomb of their own. Another war will spell the end of civilization. Our last hope is to be strong, resolute, and wage a guerre froide that prevents further expansion of the Soviet empire and awaits its collapse from the weight of its own contradictions, even if takes an entire decade.”

  Rain became downpour and splashed about their feet. The musty odor of wet ash from demolished town houses pervaded the street.

  “Either we go inside or hail a taxi,” Dunne said.

  Bassante paid no attention. “From a strategic point of view, relying on the likes of Gehlen and Heinz is unwise. They’ll never play down the menace we face. It’s not in their interest. They’ll always exaggerate to reinforce their own value. Their potential as double agents is rich. The greatest regret among many of them isn’t that Hitler waged the war but that he lost it. Yes, they despise the Soviets, and they despise us equally.

  “Beyond the practical is the moral. I was there when Van Hull confronted Bartlett. It was after Gehlen’s recruitment, when we learned about Operation Overcast, which also brought engineers and scientists from the Nazi rocket program to the U.S. There was no question about the thousands of Jews and inmates from the Dora concentration camp they’d worked to death as slave laborers at the Nordhausen rocket works. The official line was the Nazis were being brought over ‘purely for purposes of interrogation.’ But it was obvious there was more involved, that these were just the vanguard. This wasn’t a postscript to war crimes investigations but a prelude to a new arrangement.