Then Lew Cassidy heard the door opening behind him and right away he smelled the pipe.
The library was a huge room. It had to be twenty-five feet square with seas of Oriental rugs, eighteen-foot ceilings, furniture from the den of the Mountain King. Yet it seemed too small to hold the man who’d just come in. Cassidy had once known a gangster’s iceman called Bennie the Brute who had been a very large man in anybody’s league, but this guy seemed to have six inches on Bennie in every direction. He was wearing full warm-weather officer’s kit with enough ribbons on his left breast to stock the notions counter at Macy’s. He was the biggest damn thing on two legs Cassidy had ever seen. He crossed the room in a couple of huge strides.
“Hiya, pard,” he said. “Good to see you. I’m Sam MacMurdo, sorry to keep you cooling your heels this way. Take a pew. You must wonder what’s going on and I don’t blame you one damn bit. I won’t waste your time with a lot of bullshit, but listen, pard, I gotta tell you I was at the Polo Grounds on December 7, 1941, when you got your leg torn up. I was sitting next to DiMaggio. Said he’d never seen anything like it.” He placed the buff folder he was carrying on the leather-edged blotter and sat down behind the massive desk. He still looked like he was standing up. An immense black pipe was stuck in the corner of his mouth.
Cassidy sank into a club chair with cracks of age in the burgundy leather arms. “Well, he was right. I’d never seen anything like it either.”
“How’s the leg now?”
“Okay most of the time. Sometimes I use a walking stick, not often.”
“But you’re still in the detective business with your pal Leary?”
“Sure.” Cassidy shrugged. “But Terry owns Max Bauman’s old nightclub now—”
“That would be Heliotrope, right? Story I heard is that Leary shot Bauman full of holes and Bauman left him Heliotrope in his will. That true?”
“You’ve done your homework,” Cassidy said, wondering what MacMurdo had on his mind. Some birds were twittering beyond the open windows, warning of the coming rain. Was Karin still watching the darkening sky? Was she still holding the man’s hand? MacMurdo slowly filled his pipe from a yellow oilskin pouch.
“Now, when do I see my wife? And what’s Leary got to do with this—”
“All your questions will be answered, Mr. Cassidy. We got a real situation here and I’m going to have to beg your indulgence. Couple things I’ve got to find out, get the lay of the land.” He struck a wooden match on the side of a pewter holder and slowly sucked the flame down into the bowl. “So,” he puffed, “you and Leary, you’ve still got Dependable Detective. …”
“Terry’s still one of the owners, if that’s what you mean.”
“Interesting man. All those years he was a cop he was Max Bauman’s boy. … That’s a man who can walk a tightrope.” He smiled easily. “I like that in a man. Enlightened duplicity. He’d have been right at home with the rest of us in OSS.”
“Terry’s the best friend I’ve ever had.”
“I hear you’ve got another partner—”
“Harry Madrid. Another ex-cop.”
“Sure, Harry Madrid goes way back. I heard Bat Masterson taught him a thing or two when Bat came back to New York to be a newspaperman. Good teacher.” He smiled again. The large-featured face had a boyish cast, signifying a man who was used to being liked and trusted. “Harry must be sixty.”
“Harry doesn’t worry much about his age.” Cassidy felt the sweat running down his face again. “But what has this got to do with Karin and me? I don’t have much patience these days.”
“I know. I’m sorry.” MacMurdo smiled calmly through the wavering pillar of smoke. It was a clean, woodsy-smelling English blend. His eyes were narrowed, blue as summer’s best skies, his nose long and fine with flared nostrils. His teeth were so white they looked like bad dentures but somehow you knew this guy was all original equipment. His skin was pale, with a slight flush of color in his cheeks. He looked like the biggest graduate in the history of Groton. He was trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, and kind, at the very least. Cassidy had done some research of his own. He’d felt somewhat humbled because, according to those records that were not classified Sam MacMurdo had a shot at Most Valuable Player for World War II. Paul Cassidy had asked around and Clem Witt, who was close to Wild Bill Donovan at OSS, said Sam MacMurdo was the bravest son of a gun he’d ever known. MacMurdo had spent two years working with the Norwegian, French, and Greek resistance fighters. He’d spent the better part of a month in Berlin being a Wehrmacht officer and came out with a German rocket man who’d been one of the Peenemunde bunch working on the V-bombs. “He doesn’t have ice water in his veins,” Clem Witt told Paul who told Lew, “He doesn’t have veins. He’s all muscle and brains. No emotion, no fear, no blood to spill. He just goes in and does the job. He’s the only hero I’ve ever seen who never takes a day off. Thank sweet Jesus he’s on our side.”
MacMurdo pressed a flathead nail down on top of the ash in the bowl, puffed slowly, deliberately, then applied another match. Halfway through the operation Cassidy was nearly overcome by an impulse to leap across the desk and make him eat the goddamn pipe, no matter how big and brave he was. He wisely fought off the inclination.
“I’m not going to pose as something I surely am not,” MacMurdo drawled, “which is a doctor. I’m not going to talk about your wife’s condition. We’ve got someone here who can do it in detail before you leave. Believe me, you’ll see her, you’ll talk to her, and you’ll get the whole story. Here and now. Today.” He looked down at the contents of the file folder and for the first time Cassidy got a look at the top of his head. A wide white scar slid like a knife’s path from the hairline through the thick hair that was layered in waves back from his forehead. MacMurdo raised his eyes from the papers and noticed Cassidy’s stare. He tapped his pipestem against the huge white slabs of teeth.
“I’m here to brief you on the military situation. I’m running something called Operation Hangover, a name you probably won’t hear again because code names are boring and silly. I’m working for Allen Dulles and Bill Donovan, who has been my boss at OSS for a long time. The other fella I’m working for is President Harry S Truman himself. I met with him a week ago at the White House and I’m telling you this because you’re supposed to get the idea that my mission is damned important, as important as the atomic bomb. More important because I’m of the mind that we’ve just dropped the only two atomic bombs anybody’ll ever drop on anybody else.
“More important. So you wonder what could be more important than the old atom whammy? Well, some folks say the commies over there. I myself had dinner with General George S. Patton not long ago and you know what he said? He said we’ve spent all these years beating the shit out of the wrong enemy—he believes we should have just kept on fighting over there and whipped the Russians while we were at it. Well, I’ll tell you, Lew, I’m not so sure we could whip ’em unless we took the bomb to ’em and damned if I don’t think that’d be a bad habit to get into. So, what’s more important than the bomb and the reds? The damn old Nazis, that’s who.” He flashed the sincere, disarming, boyish smile. “That’s my job. The Nazis. I’m in charge of catching the bastards and it’s looking like a hell of a big job, I promise you.
“They’re coming to America, They’re coming in through this whole Northeast corridor. They’re coming in to Florida, smuggled in from Cuba and the Bahamas and you name it. The Tortugas, for all I know. They’re coming in from Martinique, coming up from the Gulf Coast. Some will try to stay here, in New York and in the backwoods country in New England. Some will head for safety in Texas, damn big place Texas. Some will go to California. There’ll be escape routes from the West Coast fanning out to Central America, South America. Argentina, Brazil, Peru, anywhere they can lose themselves among folks who agree with their politics.
“Now, there are two kinds of Nazis. … First, there are those who want to forget the war and what they did, who want
to take up ordinary lives, never pay up for their crimes, and pray to God no one ever finds them. Lots of them will succeed for a while but when you and I are old men, forty, fifty years from now, in the 1980s and 1990s, there are still going to be Nazi war criminals turning up, potbellied old duffers in Waco and Dubuque and Waltham who’ve lived all those years in total anonymity, and some fine day they’re gonna come out of the hardware store or the cigar stand and they’re gonna bump right into some other old duffer, probably an old Jew who can’t ever forget the face of the Devil who killed his wife and kids, and there’s gonna be one of those moments of recognition … and that rheumy old Nazi is gonna have to face the music, pay the piper for what he did back in ’forty-two at Auschwitz or Treblinka or Belsen … the world ain’t never gonna forget these old guys. …
“And I for one,” MacMurdo said, tapping his pipe on the blotter and sprinkling dead ash, “frankly don’t give a hoot in Hades for these guys. They’ve pretty near done all the bad stuff—the real villainy—they’re gonna do. From now on they’re just harmless old farts who had their day as monsters. … Lew, m’boy, it’s the other ones I’m after. …”
“‘The other ones,’” Cassidy said. The breeze had freshened at the window. He was still stuck to his shirt but the clouds had blocked out the sun. Where was Karin? Was the man in the brown suit her husband … ?
MacMurdo reached behind his desk chair and tugged at a cord dangling beside the heavy drapery. The door opened almost at once and the soldier who’d welcomed Cassidy brought in a tray with bottles of tonic, a bottle of Gordon’s gin, a gleaming ice bucket, glasses, and a plate of sliced limes. Everything perfect, the way it always was at Terry’s place on Park Avenue, or in the movies.
MacMurdo got up, built two drinks in the tall glasses, handed one to Cassidy, and said: “Chin-chin, Lew. Here’s to doing our job together and doing it right!”
“About this job,” Cassidy said, but MacMurdo held up his bear paw of a hand.
“I’m just about there,” he said, moving back behind the desk, sitting down again. “You’ve been very patient, Lew, but this is all necessary, the big picture, y’know.”
“I’ve heard about that.”
“Ain’t we all, pard, ain’t we all.” MacMurdo was shaking his head. He took a pull on the gin and tonic. “I want the ones who are trying to keep the Reich alive … the Fourth Reich. These guys are already laying the foundations for the Fourth Reich. I’ve just come from Germany, Lew, and we’ve got to accept some hard truths. We’ve got to rebuild Germany, we’ve got to have a strong Germany to stand up to the reds … it’s the frying pan and the fire over there. A new era has already begun. We’re in the postwar world already and old George Patton had a point, we can’t let the reds swallow up Western Europe. And the only way to rebuild Germany is to use a whole wagonload of the guys who were running it before. Which means we’ve got to use the Nazis, get right into bed with some of ’em. Oh, we’re trying to sanitize them, delouse them in a political sense, lie about ’em if we have to, but facts are facts and we need ’em. We need ’em to make the country start working again—judges, industrialists, scientists, politicians, police officials, academics, civil servants. We need them and they need us. You read me on this, Lew? So these Nazis are just part of the new equation and we’re all gonna have to look the other way. We let them survive and they do what we need them to do. They’re scared of the reds and so are we. … Funny old world, pard, but there it is.
“And then there are these other Nazi coots who are filtering into our country—our country, damn it—and these are the ones who don’t want to just disappear and be forgotten, and they don’t want to run their own country for us … they’re the unreconstructed Nazi bastards who honest to God think they’ve just suffered a slight setback. And they’re organized, they’re financed, they’ve got networks backing them up. The Condor Legion operating out of Madrid … Die Spinne, do you know German? Well, I do, I spent some time in the Fatherland during the recent hostilities.” He fixed Cassidy’s eyes with his own and the little smile played across his wide mouth. “I saw you sneaking a gentlemanly peek at my little scar. Let me digress for just half a mo’ and I’ll tell you how I got it. It’s a long story which I may bore you with some other time if we wind up in a foxhole together, but sufficeth to say, I was deep inside the Reich a while back trying my hand at kidnapping and, hell, look at me, I look like Hitler’s perfect Aryan asshole, right? So I cut a pretty wide swath over there, pulled a lot of hijinks, as my daddy used to say. So I was up to my hind end in Nazis, lyin’ my ass off, all fitted out with phony papers, the works, but like a jerk I did something dumb and an SS officer realized I was not quite what I seemed … well, hell, it looked pretty dark for the Mudville nine all of a sudden.” He smiled at the memory, relishing it. “So, this SS guy got his Luger out and told me the jig was up. His hand was shaking like a little old widder woman in a cyclone and I made a move he didn’t like and he squeezed off a round, point blank. … He’d have missed me entirely if I wasn’t the big economy size, but as it was he shot me in the head—the one place he couldn’t hurt me!” His laugh suddenly boomed through the room, a physical kind of thing. A deaf person would have felt it. “Lew, you should have seen the look on that kraut’s face when he pulled the trigger again and nothing happened! Luger jammed. … I’ll never forget his face. He suddenly realized it was just him and me, there I was, this big blond bastard, face covered in blood, and I was unhappy with him—man, he was lookin’ his destiny right in the eye! Well, pard, when I finished him off there wasn’t enough left to wipe up. …” His hand momentarily went to the scar on his scalp, stroked it. “I call it my dueling scar.” He looked away for a moment, staring out the window and bringing himself back from Nazi Germany to Westchester County.
“Just another war story. The world’s full of ’em, better ones. Hell, I got better ones myself.” MacMurdo flashed the wide grin. “Now, back to these Nazi diehards coming our way. There’s a whole lot of money involved here, Lew. Hell, these people looted Europe … you wouldn’t believe how much money we’re talking about.”
He leaned back and his weight brought a squeak from the chair. He stared at Cassidy, his pipe engulfed in one hand. “Now we’re getting down to the short strokes, Lew. I stumbled onto one of these escape networks during the course of some researches I was carrying out a few months ago—it’s like God having his say, pard, putting the right man in the right place at the right time. It isn’t big, not like the Condor Legion or Die Spinne, but it’s real and I’ve got a handle on it. I’ve made this one my own private preserve. I found it, I don’t think we’d ever have known of its existence had it not been for Sam’s sheer dumb luck … and it all happened mainly because I’m a movie fan, Lew, if you can believe that. History gets made in funny ways. Now this network, this modest enterprise I’m intending to bring to grief, with your help—hell, look at it this way, Lew Cassidy’s finally gonna get his chance to win World War II … this one’s got another funny name, it’s called Ludwig’s Minotaur. Y’know, it was Allen Dulles himself who gave it the name. Ludwig’s Minotaur.”
Cassidy had found himself wrapped up in MacMurdo’s story, almost against his will. For a moment he’d forgotten that there was a point to it, that it was coming back to himself, and to Karin. “So how do I fit in? Do I have any choice about any of this?”
“Oh, I’ll leave that up to you, Lew. You remember King Ludwig, the Mad King of Bavaria. Fella who was Wagner’s patron, same fella who built himself all those fairyland castles and whatnot. I saw a movie about the old boy once and now I know more. For instance, I know he had this minotaur statue, like something in a movie. Sometimes I get the feeling I’m in a movie … like that time with the Luger jamming. This minotaur makes me think about The Maltese Falcon. You catch that one at the Bijou, Lew?” Cassidy nodded. “Well, Ludwig had this Italian craftsman sculpt a minotaur out of gold—then Ludwig had the whole statue encrusted with diamonds, emeralds, rubies, the w
orks; then he just put it on a table and looked at it. Who knows what he was thinking? But Wagner saw it, mentions it in some of his correspondence … then it wound up in a museum in Munich, then the Kaiser glommed onto it for a time, then it turns up again when Reichsmarshal Göring got hold of it. When he built Karinhall, to memorialize his first wife, he made a big show of installing the minotaur there. … And then once it began to look really bad last winter—the Battle of the Bulge, the Breakout in the Ardennes, whatever you call it, it didn’t fool Hermann into thinking the outcome of the war was gonna be any different, he knew they were whipped. So Göring wanted to set up his own private, personal, first-class escape route. He figured that America was the place to go. He figured that no one could use the Jewish thing against him because he’d smuggled Jews out of Germany, friends of his wife Emmy’s from the theater, and he thought what the hell, maybe his old pal Lindbergh could take care of him. Well, he was nuts and full of drugs by then, but that was his idea.” MacMurdo leaned back, took another long drink, and went back to the tray of fixings. The heat had melted the ice in Cassidy’s and MacMurdo freshened both drinks. “Don’t ya just love this stuff, Lew? Here we are, two old boys sittin’ around bustin’ our gums about Göring and King Ludwig and Charlie ‘Lone Eagle’ Lindbergh. … Well, Göring decided to finance his escape route with plenty of do-re-mi, some real, some forged from plates the Nazis had, all in dollars, and something else negotiable anywhere … the Ludwig Minotaur.
“And he picked an SS man he happened to like, to trust, a man he knew could build his escape route. He gave the money and the statue to Manfred Moller. One very tough galoot who’d been around, all over Europe for the last ten years, a swashbuckler, used to hang around with Otto Skorzeny—Skorzeny’s the only guy in the war big as me!” He chuckled at the improbability of such a thing. “So, anyways, Manfred Moller took off across the North Atlantic by U-boat on his special mission and the Reich collapsed and Göring never got to make his escape … and Manfred Moller was out there somewhere with his money and the minotaur and no Reichsmarshal. …
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