The Crook Factory

by Dan Simmons

  Becker was twenty-eight, close to my age. He had been born in Leipzig on October 21, 1912, and had joined the Nazi Party immediately after graduating from high school in Leipzig. He was admitted into the SS in 1931. It was highly unusual for a nineteen-year-old to be inducted into the dreaded, black-uniformed Schutz-Staffel, the Nazi “protection squadron”—Hitler’s original private group of bodyguards from the 1920s, now grown into the most frightening of all frightening Nazi organizations, identified with the Gestapo and death camps and the SS’s own intelligence service, the SD—but Johann Siegfried Becker was an unusual young man. Nazi Party documents attested to the fact that he was a superb organizer and an indefatigable worker. On April 20, 1937, Becker was promoted to an SS second lieutenant and was immediately shipped off to Buenos Aires, where he arrived on May 9 aboard the Monte Pascoal. There he worked undercover as a representative of the Berlin-based firm Centro de Exportacion del Comercio Aleman until the previous month, when he had been recalled to Berlin for another promotion and further orders.

  The FBI and SIS in Central and South America knew Johann Becker as the finest Nazi agent in the Western Hemisphere. The Argentine police had almost closed the circle on Becker in 1940, but the SS man had moved to Brazil, where he had offered his services to the flailing Abwehr operation there run by Albrecht Gustav Engels—Theodor Schlegel’s boss and the “Alfredo” of our decoded radio transmission. In a Berlin-bound communiqué intercepted by ONI in 1941, Engels himself had described Becker as the “only real professional agent” in both his network and South America and admitted that the SS man had “supplied the brains and energy” necessary to make the complicated Rio-based spy network viable. What made this so unusual that it had come to my attention in Colombia and Mexico was that Becker was SD—the intelligence arm of the SS—and Engels’s network was an Abwehr operation.

  The SD and the Abwehr hated and loathed one another almost as much as their respective chiefs—Reinhard Heydrich and Admiral William Canaris—hated and loathed each other. Each man wanted his own agency to be the one, true intelligence organization of the Third Reich. The competition was similar to the BSC’s rivalry with MI5, or the FBI’s unrelenting dislike for what was now the OSS, only in Germany such rivalry had been known to end up in machine gun massacres and literal backstabbings.

  And now Johann Siegfried Becker—SS man, SD spy—had been newly promoted to captain by the Führer and presumably given much more responsibility. In fact, an unprecedented kind of responsibility that actually united Abwehr and SD espionage efforts in South America under the auspices of Becker’s directorship. And now this man was meeting in a Havana cigar factory with my liaison and only lifeline to the Bureau, Special Agent Delgado.

  I had to think about this.

  Forty-five minutes of thinking later, I realized that there were still only four possibilities:

  First, Delgado had turned double agent and was meeting with Becker to arrange some sort of betrayal of me, of Hemingway, of the Bureau, and of the United States.

  Second, Delgado was working a much more important mission than overseeing my vacation with the Crook Factory—a more important mission that somehow included turning Hauptsturmführer Johann Siegfried Becker into a double agent working against the Reich.

  Third, Delgado was working under cover himself, possibly posing as an agent or paid informant working under Becker, or offering himself as a double agent in order to pass along misinformation to the German.

  Fourth, some other scenario that I could not puzzle out.

  Of these choices, the third was the most plausible—I had just stumbled on Delgado doing what we SIS agents do, what I had done many times myself when working under deep cover—but I was still uneasy.

  Much of the uneasiness, I realized, came from the timing of things and this strange cooperation between the SD and the Abwehr. The timing was strange not only because of the almost absurd concentration of intelligence operatives in Cuba and around Hemingway’s amateur operation but also because both Schlegel and Becker were carrying out their Cuba operation—whatever the hell it was—several months after almost being nabbed in the Brazilian/FBI crackdown on their networks there. It was possible that neither man knew about the arrests and phony transmissions now coming from Rio, but it seemed unlikely. On the other hand, Schlegel had left Brazil before the arrests had come too close to him, and SIS intercepts had reported that Becker was having trouble getting back to Berlin this spring because the Italian transatlantic airline had suspended flights after Pearl Harbor.

  More troubling was this cooperation between the Sicherheitsdienst—the SD, Security Service—and Abwehr intelligence. Over the past six years, I had done more reading and investigation on this matter than most SIS field agents. Hell, I had probably studied it about as much as anyone in this hemisphere outside of Donovan’s OSS specialists. If nothing else, it made use of my study of German in college and law school.

  On the surface, the separation of missions and jurisdiction between the SD and the Abwehr seemed logical enough: Heydrich’s SD had been in charge of all political espionage worldwide; Canaris’s military Abwehr had exclusive responsibility for all military intelligence. This modus vivendi had been arrived at late in 1936, when the rivalry between Himmler’s SS and the traditional Abwehr intelligence apparatus had reached such a frenzy that Hitler himself had been forced to demand a peace. The “peace” was actually another huge step in the growing power of the SS and its intelligence wing, the SD.

  Heinrich Himmler had originally consolidated the SS’s power on the last day of June 1934, during the Night of the Long Knives, when—under Hitler’s direct command—the SS had assassinated Ernst Rohm and hundreds of other leaders of the SA, the Sturmabteilung brownshirts who had been Hitler’s shock troops all through his rise to power. On that one bloody night, Himmler had taken the SS from a minor power to the single, terrifying power of the Nazi Reich, assassinating not only the homosexual leaders of the brownshirts but destroying the power of the two-million-man street army. Less than three weeks after the massacre, Himmler had appointed young Reinhard Heydrich as the new leader of the party’s intelligence branch, the Sicherheitsdienst.

  Since 1934, Heydrich’s chief enemy had not been foreign intelligence services but Canaris’s venerable Abwehr. After the 1936 pact was signed, both groups had agreed to abide by the Zehn Gebote—the Ten Commandments of German Intelligence—separating the responsibility of the two agencies. In practice, Heydrich and his boss, Himmler, worked constantly to undermine and destroy Canaris’s credibility with the Führer. Their ultimate goal was to dissolve the hundred-year-old Abwehr and bring all police, intelligence, and counterintelligence power under the Nazi Party security umbrella.

  Heinrich Himmler ran the SS as well as the SD. Reinhard Heydrich had—until his assassination in June—headed up the Reichsicherheitshauptamt, the RSHA, the Reich Security Administration. Heydrich’s RSHA consisted of several key departments:

  RSHA I was personnel. RSHA II was administration. RSHA III was domestic intelligence. RSHA IV was the dreaded Gestapo. RSHA V consisted of detectives. RSHA AMT VI was foreign intelligence.

  Since 1941, the director of AMT VI had been a handsome young SS brigadier named Walter Schellenberg. Only thirty-two years old, Schellenberg seemed much more urbane and sane than his recently murdered boss—Heydrich had been known as a whoremaster, a cold-blooded schemer with spidery hands, and had been called “the Butcher of Prague” during his brief reign as acting protector of Bohemia and Moravia—but reports suggested that Schellenberg was every bit as determined to dominate and destroy the Abwehr as Heydrich had been. In espionage circles, Schellenberg was famous for his daring kidnapping of two British agents in Holland in 1939. The Nazi had disguised himself as a “Major Schemmel,” interested in joining a plot of German generals planning to overthrow Hitler and make peace with England. British Intelligence had bought the ruse and had sent two agents to meet with Schellenberg in the Dutch town of Venlo on the mor
ning of November 9, 1939. Schellenberg had signaled his men, who had crashed through the frontier barricades in a rushing automobile, and then he had handcuffed the two surprised British agents and dragged them off to Germany for interrogation, after fending off pistol fire from other British operatives.

  The incident had done little to hurt Schellenberg’s standing with either Heydrich or Hitler.

  In 1940, Schellenberg had almost pulled off another kidnapping—this one of the Duke of Windsor, the former King Edward VIII of England. Because of the duke’s pro-Hitler statements, the Germans thought that the idiot would make a good mouthpiece for the Third Reich. Schellenberg planned an elaborate scheme to kidnap the duke and duchess in Spain while the former king and the woman he loved traveled to their post-in-exile in the Bahamas. Despite elaborate attempts only discovered later by BSC and the SIS, Schellenberg missed the duke when the royal changed his plans at the last moment and did not return to Spain.

  This failure had not visibly slowed Schellenberg’s rise to power, however, and Heydrich had made him his favorite, finally appointing him to command of RSHA AMT VI just a year before, in June 1941.

  I had been curious about Schellenberg and AMT VI. While the Abwehr had blundered repeatedly in Mexico and South America, leading to the arrests of most of its agents, the SD operatives had been much more successful. Schellenberg evidently trusted no one and admired boldness. The Department VI headquarters was set apart from most of the other SD offices, quartered in the southwest-central section of Berlin at Berkaerstrasse 32, on the corner of the Hohenzollerndamm. Schellenberg’s office there was—according to debriefings of British agents who had been there—equipped with two machine guns hidden in his desk, ready to murder anyone attempting to assassinate him.

  This was the man who had called Johann Siegfried Becker back to Berlin in May to reassign him to some special operation in South America or the Caribbean. Presumably, that operation had been authorized—and perhaps designed—by Becker’s chief, Heydrich, or the head of the SS himself, Heinrich Himmler.

  Why are they cooperating with the Abwehr on this operation? What the hell does it have to do with the Southern Cross and Hemingway’s farce? Where does Delgado fit in?

  A noise cutting through static made my eyes snap open. I quickly tugged the earphones tighter and reached for my notebook and the watertight bag.

  Somebody was transmitting on the frequency reserved for the Southern Cross. And it was in the same cipher used in the dead radio operator’s codebook.

  THERE WAS NO TIME to talk to Hemingway in private about the radio transmissions that afternoon or evening. And I had no intention of telling him with the others around.

  We anchored off Cayo Confites just before nightfall. The spit of land was too small to be called an island, almost too small for the term “key.” Young Gregory said that it looked like the skating rink at Rockefeller Center—only about a hundred yards in diameter and quite flat, featureless except for the shack in the center. The Cuban navy had built the shack as a communications post and resupply center for Hemingway’s Operation Friendless and a few other naval projects, but the only signs that it was a military outpost were the tall radio antenna atop the shack and an oversized flagpole next to it. The Cuban flag was flapping as we raised the key, but just as we dropped anchor, three Cubans in naval uniforms marched out of the shack in tight formation. One stood at attention by the ropes as the officer stared at his watch, then signaled the third man, who blew a ragged cascade of notes on a rusty trumpet.

  “Papa, look,” said Gregory, “only the officer has an old ragged tunic on. Those other two are just wearing khaki shorts.”

  “Shhh, Gigi,” said Hemingway. “They wear what they have. It doesn’t matter what they wear.”

  The youngest boy looked crestfallen at his faux pas, but Patrick said in a stage whisper, “What is that rusty rope on the officer’s shoulder, Papa?”

  “I think it’s supposed to be braid,” said Hemingway.

  The three Cubans had hauled down their flag. The awful trumpeting ended. One man carried the flag into the shack while the officer and the other enlisted man in shorts watched us drop anchor.

  Ibarlucia, Herrera, and Guest had the Tin Kid free and were rowing for the beach before the Pilar’s anchor had kicked up silt. Ten minutes later they rowed back, and one glance at their faces showed that the base had not stocked any beer for us. A strange wailing was coming from the dinghy, but I could not believe that it was actually coming from the three men.

  “Any beer?” called Hemingway from the stern.

  “No!” The voices of the three men blended with the caterwauling. They seemed to be struggling with something.

  “Any orders?” yelled the writer.

  “No.” It was Roberto Herrera in the bow of the dinghy. Guest and the jai-alai star were still wrestling with what sounded like a child being strangled, but Herrera’s body blocked our view.

  “Any sightings of the Southern Cross?” queried Hemingway.

  “Uh-uh,” called Herrera. They were within twenty feet now. The noise from the dinghy was incredible.

  “Any provisions for us?” shouted Fuentes from the bow.

  “Just beans,” yelled Ibarlucia. “Twenty-three cans of beans. And this.” He and Winston Guest held up a squealing pig.

  Patrick and Gregory were laughing and slapping their bare legs. Their father looked disgusted. “Why are you bringing it aboard tonight? We don’t want the goddamn pig sleeping with us.”

  Ibarlucia grinned up at us. His teeth were very white in the twilight. “If we leave our pig on the island tonight, Ernesto, the soldiers here will be having bacon for breakfast and ham sandwiches at noon. I do not think they will share with us.”

  Hemingway sighed. “Leave the damned thing in the dinghy. And you,” he snapped, turning to the Basque named Sinsky, who was laughing and guffawing next to him. “You get to clean out the dinghy in the morning.”

  WITH A SQUEALING PIG in the dinghy and nine snoring, grumbling, farting men taking up every available horizontal surface on the Pilar, sleep was problematical that night. Around three A.M., I went up the ladder to the flying bridge, where Winston Guest was leaning against the railing, staying upright and alert for his watch. What we were watching for, I will never know. Perhaps Hemingway feared that a U-boat would come in close to the reef and attempt to sink the Cuban’s shack.

  “Nice night,” whispered Guest as I leaned on the railing opposite him. It was a nice night: the sound of the waves breaking on the surf, the phosphorescent curl where they broke almost blending with the glow of the Milky Way spilling across the dome of black above us. There was not a cloud in the sky.

  “Can’t sleep?” whispered the millionaire. We were only six feet above the heads of the men sleeping on the cushions surrounding the cockpit, but because of the breeze, the waves lapping against the hull, and the surf breaking on the reef, no one could hear a whisper from the flying bridge.

  I shook my head.

  “Worried about the caves tomorrow?” he whispered. “That maybe the U-boat could still be there?”

  “No,” I said softly.

  Guest nodded. Even with just the starlight for illumination, I could make out his sunburned cheeks and nose and his easy smile. “I guess I’m not either,” he whispered. “I wish they would be there. I wish we could catch just one.”

  The way he said that made me think of a child wishing on a star. If Winston Guest was an agent, British or otherwise, he was one hell of a good actor. But then, as I had already noted, aren’t we all who follow this trade?

  “Did you see Ernest reading by flashlight when the others were sleeping?” whispered Guest.

  I nodded.

  “Do you know what he was reading?”

  “No.” I hoped that this would not be more melodramatic garbage about secret orders or somesuch.

  “One of Martha’s manuscripts,” whispered Guest, his voice so low now that even I could barely make it out above t
he surf noise. “A book she’s working on that she sent in from her goddamn cruise. The Purple Orchid, or some damn title. She wants Ernest to read it and tell her what he thinks, and he does… after fourteen hours at the wheel today.”

  I nodded and looked at the Cuban shack, glowing in the starlight. There had been lantern light for a while after dark, but the garrison of three had turned in early.

  Guest said, “Yeah, those poor sons of bitches are stuck out here for the duration. Ernest said that the officer was probably assigned to this shithole of a key because he’d been screwing the commandant’s wife and the other two were serving their sentences here for petty thievery.”

  I nodded. I had not come up to the flying bridge for conversation, but if Guest wanted to talk, I did not mind. I was still thinking about the two radio transmissions I had intercepted earlier.

  “Speaking of wives,” whispered Guest. “What do you think of her?”

  “Who?” I said. I had no idea what he was talking about.

  “Martha. Ernest’s third.”

  I shrugged in the dark. “She has a lot of nerve,” I said, “if she’s still trolling around the Caribbean in that small boat.”

  Guest made a noise. “Balls, you mean,” he whispered very softly. “Martha’s always thought that she ought to wear the balls in the family.”

  I looked at the bulk of the sportsman, silhouetted against the glowing waves breaking across the reef. After a moment, Guest went on in a rapid whisper. “Ernest has shown me a few pages of this book she’s writing… Liana, I think it’s called. It’s all about a man and his wife living in a place a lot like the finca. And the man’s always barefoot and in shorts and dirty and drinking too much and saying stupid things and this damn thing and the other. It makes me mad, Lucas. She’s obviously writing about Ernest, painting this ugly picture of him. And here he is, dog tired, his belly hurting, his head aching from fourteen hours of sub patrol in the sun today, and he’s making notes and treating her stuff like literature and she’s just taking advantage of him, that’s all.”