The Witness Tree

by Brendan Howley

  Listening to Misha’s footfalls fade away, neither Gero nor Allen spoke. When the building was silent again, Allen tapped out his pipe on the tabletop and reached for the telephone. “He’s a temperamental sort, isn’t he?” he said as he cranked the old phone’s handle. He asked the operator for the Café Wettlaufers. “Hello, yes, it’s your regular from table six, recognize the voice?” Allen asked. “Yes? Good. What do you hear about die Giraffe?”

  Gero found a pulp novel in one of the boxes and examined its cover. “Is there really a place called the Everglades, full of alligators?” he asked, thumbing the pages. “How primitive. Fascinating place, your Florida.”

  Not moving, Allen listened to the telephone, then rang off. “That was Gossman at Wettlaufers. His daughter’s on the German consulate’s night switchboard. They’re on double shift—it’s raining cables, the phone never stops, Gossman says. And when the bomb at Hitler’s headquarters went off, Willi Gehrig was in Berlin, right in the Bendlerblock, the Wehrmacht headquarters. The Gestapo and the SS arrested everyone in sight and shot the ringleaders in the headlights of the staff cars.”

  “So. We wait,” Gaevernitz said.

  Allen thought of Gehrig and Eleanor and her old green leather address book. Those names, many of them, her friends’ names, were on the Gestapo’s list of the doomed now—of that Allen was sure. “We wait,” he agreed. They’d be at the coding machine well into the night, reading the entrails of the failed coup, piecing together the names of the dead and the disappeared.

  XLV

  AUBERJONOIS, FRANCE

  LATE SEPTEMBER 1944

  Auberjonois was no more than a dozen stone houses and a tired church dedicated to Saint Hippolyte, a freshly liberated tricolor hanging wetly at the good saint’s ankles. Allen waited for Donovan’s convoy at the Auberjonois crossroads, his brand new OSS-issue jeep parked in a mud lake, the canvas roof thrumming in the pelting rain. He was a man with much to digest about his future. He’d driven himself here; he didn’t want anyone with him when he turned over the microfilms of his Bern files. This was his moment, alone. He might be out of this job in a week’s time, if the military people who loathed him had their way. Bern, his cocoon for nearly two years, was any man’s town now. The era of the lone wolf was over.

  When the Swiss-French border had opened two days earlier and Patton’s tank troops met the Free French columns driving northward from Marseille, Allen had suffered a curious letdown. He lost his usual deft wit with his OSS subordinates, sulking in his office, staring at the maps on the wall for long stretches, his pipe gone cold. His appetite for his customary long, observant walks through Bern faded; for the first time in his life he didn’t care when the telephone rang. But it wasn’t only that Bern had lost its luster; the Safehaven investigators, Treasury Department second-guessers, were nosing around the Swiss banks and trading houses, looking for the bones of German flight capital. What do they know about espionage? He felt as if a contingent of out-of-town Rotarians had shanghaied the neighboring table at the Waldorf and spoilt his party. He had, he reminded himself, been the man who first reported the conspiracy to kill Hitler that summer; even if no one in Washington cared, he’d processed microfilms of a thousand German Foreign Office files, work of Wood, the best agent anyone in Bern ever ran, a Foreign Office documents man the Brits themselves had turned away.

  So what next?

  He smoked his pipe and waited. Never again stuck in a lawyer’s office, he swore, not among the papers and the corporate seals and the casebooks. No, he’d made a useful life for himself, a spy’s life. He’d caught the scent of a new kind of power, but the most pressing matter just now was the questionable survival of Donovan’s fragile OSS—and there Allen had an Italian gambit in mind.

  As for Allen’s reunion with Donovan, Kronthal had found a stone-and-terra-cotta farmhouse just outside Auberjonois with a magnifying glass on a Swiss army ordnance map. The parish priest, who kept an eye on the old house for the absent Monsieur Decarie, otherwise occupied scavenging parts from damaged German tanks in a forced labor factory outside Munich, had given Allen the key to the big front door’s rusted-out lock; the tumblers screamed when he turned the key. Allen now waited at the end of the farm laneway; he drew on his pipe, the smoke creeping out into the rain as he weighed how he’d pitch Donovan, whom he hadn’t seen for two long years.

  A convoy of Studebaker trucks soon broke Allen’s reverie, their wipers fighting a slashing rain that cut quick-running rills in the red earth of the village of Auberjonois. The trucks, curiously empty of troops, settled into the ooze as the engines switched off. The OSS general leapt out of the door of the first truck and shouted backwards at Allen, over his shoulder, into the rain. “Got a present for you, Colonel Dulles.” Donovan stepped to one side, hands on his hips beneath his rain poncho, legs akimbo like a circus master, a big Irish grin cracking his face.

  The last thing Allen expected to see was the enormously tall figure wearing round-lensed spectacles unfolding himself from the back of the lead Studebaker, dwarfing the pair of ponchoed MPs at his side. “We are in the mountains, my friend, so have a Bavarian hello—Tschüss, Herr Dulles,” called Willi Gehrig in English. Die Giraffe—anti-Hitler conspirator and walking dead man. The Bavarian slang was a leaden joke: no rustic with straw in his hair, the art collector from Hamburg had been Allen’s best source in the Abwehr—and a very cool customer indeed.

  They sat at the Decaries’ grand old table, worn by decades of hardworking trenchermen at their meals, the quiet of the place seeping out of the stone walls. Gehrig dominated the head of the table, a Brobdingnag in a banker’s tweeds, chain-smoking and demolishing a rhombus of farmer’s cheese, scraped onto torn crescents of baguette with a GI mess kit knife.

  “The CIC guys found him in the forest with a compass in his hand, looking for due north like an overgrown Boy Scout,” a beaming Donovan told Allen. “Told everybody to get him to Dulles. Nobody but Dulles. Show him the damn Gestapo identity disk.”

  Gehrig spread out the forged passport papers and the secret policeman’s steel identity disk that enabled him to walk out of the Reich. “Here I have my SD Kennkarte and Durchlaßschein too,” Gehrig said in his bass voice, his diplomat’s English clipped with a distinct north German accent. “Cost me every pfennig you sent, Allen, but it worked. I wasn’t strung up on a meat hook like the others.” He glanced at Allen as he dusted the baguette crumbs from his fingertips. “Now. About Italy. I can tell you”—Gehrig moved the papers to one side and drew a rough map of northwestern Italy on the back of one of Allen’s file sleeves with a pencil stub—“from the Swiss frontier south to Genoa, every building, every bridge of value, they will all be mined. Here is Torino, here Milano. I myself reviewed the sabotage plan, from the factories to the viaducts. The plan is well advanced. Although the Italian collaborators are hardly first quality, the munitions depots are well stocked. The Wehrmacht and Waffen SS engineering battalions will obey—what do they have to lose? They hate the Italians, no question.

  “There are hundreds of millions of marks in play in the region’s industrial facilities, bridges, rail links. Moreover, the Vatican, the chief negotiating intermediary, has sizable investments here. The partisans control the mountains, the Wehrmacht and the SS the valleys and rail lines.” He pulled a big manila envelope from his jacket pocket, opened it, and offered Allen a typescript nearly half an inch thick. “A memorandum, most useful. The Reich Foreign Office estimates, in the absence of an Italian government, that the Holy See is terrified of two outcomes: either the Nazis destroy the industrial heartland of Italy and ruin the economy for a decade—an open door for the Reds—or the Communists themselves will seize it for themselves. The Swiss are equally terrified: they lose their route to the sea if northern Italy is reduced to ruins.”

  Donovan gestured at Allen to proceed, but Gehrig wouldn’t be headed so easily. “This is how they will come at you, Allen,” die Giraffe predicted. “The SS is breaking up. Last month, one faction
—the realists, more or less—allowed the Party to convene conferences all over the Reich, to discuss flight capital and restoring the Party after the war. The other faction is delusional,” Gehrig observed drily. He turned over his envelope and examined his notes. “They believe a peace with the West against the Russians is possible. They may be fantasists, but they are rational enough to want to preserve the Reich’s wealth from Moscow. They have Himmler’s ear; they can travel and, within limits, speak for themselves. They will knock on your door first. You don’t want them—they are cutthroats, political policemen.

  “You want to wait for Schellenberg’s men, the economic types, looking to trade anything they can.” He ran a massive hand over his chin, pondering. “They have the run of the SS banking system, especially in the neutral countries. In Switzerland the Privatbanks are their banks of choice—all the Swiss shells and cloaks set up by the Reich’s commercial office in Davos. Schellenberg’s people are Amt VI, the foreign counterintelligence section. They know how to bargain, and they are going to make you offers you won’t believe—shares in banks and factories, patent agreements, insurance, gold and silver, art by the boxcar-load. They’ll offer it all, believe me. At the same time, they will be knocking on the Vatican’s door, promising to preserve the factories of the north from the demolition teams. They want the Vatican and the Swiss to broker an Italian peace with you … and save their necks into the bargain.”

  “Is Bormann backing this? How can Himmler and the SS move Party assets around without Bormann’s knowledge?” Donovan interposed.

  “That’s true,” Gehrig admitted. “Take one case: Thyssen, the steel tycoon. Thyssen and Bormann have been working together on a plan to move their holdings out. Since Stalingrad. I have a cold,” he said. Gehrig cleared his throat, a growl muted by an enormous fist at his lips. “For years Thyssen was under house arrest. He’d refused to support the attack on Russia—I know for a fact Bormann visited him.” The German had a child’s tiny hardback notebook in his hand, no bigger than a deck of cards. He looked down and shuffled a few pages; Allen could see the minuscule handwriting, dabbed with a fine-pointed pen. “The eighth of November, 1943. I made a note. You see, in even meeting Bormann, Thyssen was playing a very dangerous game. Thyssen had fooled the Reich’s tax collectors for years with all his shell companies and overseas cloaked companies—New York, Amsterdam, Zürich.” He was sketching a columned building with the side of his pencil lead, curls of smoke from chimneys, clouds above, looking down as he spoke. A bank, Allen thought. “This was dangerous also for your intelligence colleague Mr. Rockefeller. Mr. Rockefeller’s own bank owns tens of thousands of Thyssen shares, safe in Thyssen’s vault in Berlin. Bormann could have had Thyssen strung up as an American spy for that alone. But if you’re Martin Bormann and you want to hide a fortune, gentlemen, you don’t get rid of the man who knows how.”

  Gehrig continued at full throttle for nearly twenty minutes, while Allen and Donovan listened to the German empty himself after three months on the run from the hangman—Thyssen’s offshore banking schemes in the Netherlands and on Wall Street; how Goering’s oil monopoly made him millions reselling American oil; how the Spanish and Portuguese banks had taken the overflow Nazi loot from the Swiss for resale—the whole sordid endgame of the Nazis’ decade-long orgy of looting and money laundering and corporate perfidy.

  “You cannot,” Gehrig mused, his pencil held high for emphasis, “simply cannot conceive of how much money is at stake, in gold alone. Hundreds of millions of dollars. Even now, the SS are organizing to hide it all. That is the price of an early peace, you see: the seed capital of a Reich after Hitler. That’s what the SS wants. They’ll give up everything to keep that capital intact, in their hands. So when the Italian industrialists and the bankers and the quiet men from the Vatican come to you and ask for the keys to the factories of Milano and Torino—know what the price of surrender really is. Bormann loves that money more than his children. And I hear he’s very fond of his children.”

  With that, yawning an elephantine yawn, his eyes red-rimmed, Gehrig fell silent, his finale as abrupt as his beginning. “There. Now you can hang Bormann and Thyssen for all I care. I would like to go to sleep,” he announced.

  Donovan called the MPs, who locked the giant Abwehr man in the Decaries’ big low-ceilinged upstairs bedroom, a bright, white place under the roof beams. “He don’t fit, general,” one MP, a taciturn Oklahoman, reported to Donovan, “so we set him down across’t two beds. Some jeezly tall, ain’t he?”

  By four that afternoon, Gehrig’s intelligence digested and two strong Alsatian beers later, Allen and Donovan got to their OSS business. “What’s wanted,” Allen began, after cleaning up a roughed-together traveler’s meal of ham and cabbage and lentils and more of the local baguette, “is the means of keeping our work alive in peacetime.” He stacked the absent farmer’s thick crockery plates. “It’s going to take money, and that’s highly thought of over there in Washington.”

  “It’s highly thought of over there in Bern, judging from what the Treasury bean counters say the Nazis shipped out of Europe, just like Gehrig says,” Donovan replied quietly. “Go on.”

  Allen gave that sally a clean pass. “OSS has to produce political results or we’re dead as a post after the war,” he went on. It was past five now; the brim of the autumn sun edged below the mountain peaks. The MPs stood watch on the stone patio out back. Allen had a fire going, warming the place.

  The two old spies contemplated the flames for a moment, lulled by the peasant food and the stolen calm: the front lines lay only twenty miles to the east.

  “How’s this Italian idea of yours help our work?” Donovan demanded, his blue eyes sharp, and rose from his chair. He had bathed and shaved; he wore an old ski sweater over his uniform shirt. Allen had borrowed Monsieur Decarie’s coveralls and thick wool field jacket.

  “I want to do two things in Italy before the end of the war changes everything,” Allen said slowly. “First, I want a free hand to negotiate a secret surrender. Gehrig’s right: already the phone’s ringing off the hook from my anti-Nazi contacts who want to put a German surrender in play right now.”

  “Whoa, whoa. You can’t go freelancing a separate peace, much as I’d like to see the shooting war end. Stalin will scream blue bloody murder.”

  “Bill, I know these people,” Allen countered. “I go back a long way with these Germans—the last of the old socialists. They’re all over the Foreign Ministry and the Abwehr.”

  Donovan barked a sour laugh. “Allen, Gehrig’s just told us Hitler had those people strung up by the dozens this summer.” Donovan had propped himself against the mantelpiece, a hand dangling free, forming a fist he unconsciously opened and closed as he spoke. “No. The answer’s no. And don’t fight me on this, Allen,” he ordered. “You’ll cook your own goose and mine as well.” Donovan watched the fire for a moment. “You should see the cables I get from Treasury about you. They’re saying your German contacts are your old law clients, that you’re Berlin’s back door for flight capital. And the press is sniffing around—be damn careful. Wall Street was never one of the President’s dearest loves. You’d have no one covering your back.”

  Allen gave nothing away. “Careful about what, precisely?”

  “Those trucks outside?” Donovan inclined his head toward the thick glass window. “They’re loaded with records from our Safehaven teams in Lisbon and Madrid, heading for Bern. I’m delivering ’em.” He watched the fire, the muscles in his cheeks working. “One misstep and you’ll be page one, believe me. The Democrats would love to see your head on a platter. And mine: we’re Republican Wall Street lawyers, Allen. And if that wasn’t enough, I handed you and your brother most of my own German clients in ’35—anybody with an index to the New York Times knows that, never mind those Bolsheviks at Treasury these days.”

  Allen started to argue, but Donovan waved him off. “No. And I mean it—there’s no political cover at all. First off, I don’t see De
wey winning come November. I see four more years of Roosevelt, no matter what your brother writes in those disjointed letters to the Times.” He nudged a log with his boot tip; a shower of sparks danced up the chimney. “I’ve made myself clear?”

  “You have.”

  “Let me ask this delicately, because I don’t want you flying off the handle when you get back to Bern. A lot of those SS people Gehrig’s warned us about are already on the war crimes lists. Double-cross the SS, Allen, and you have my blessing. Hell, shoot ’em in cold blood, with my compliments. But don’t double-cross me. We need every last one of those sons of bitches as bargaining chips when the war crimes trials start, to show what the OSS did to bring the bastards to justice. That’s the way it’s going to play—clear?”

  Allen said it was.

  The fire ebbed low; Donovan added another log and watched the flames lick at the dry bark for a moment. “Have you or any of your staff used the public telex landlines from Switzerland?”

  “Of course,” Allen replied. “We know what we’re doing.”

  “What the hell do you mean, ‘of course’? Last count I saw, there were more wiretappers in Bern than holes in the goddamn cheese.”

  “We’re secure.”

  “Nobody is, Allen. Who’s your coding officer? Still Jim Kronthal?”

  “Yes. Jim’s my right hand.”

  “Then just you remind him that the landlines are tapped six ways from Sunday. We’re changing all the Bern codes in the next forty-eight hours.”

  “Is Safehaven wiretapping, that you know of?”

  “Does a frog have a waterproof asshole?” Donovan fixed Allen with a flat stare. Allen waited while Donovan cooled his Irish a little. “It’s nearly seven. Get your coat, Colonel Dulles,” Donovan ordered, whistling to rouse the MPs outside. “Time to sing for your supper. If we’re going to build the OSS into whatever we’re going to call this beast after the war, we’ll need you onside. Come on. The MPs will ride shotgun on Herr Gehrig. You and me, we’ve got a drive ahead of us, to the airfield at Entzheim. If we’re lucky we’ll get a B-25 with real seats. If not, we’re riding the mailbags all the way to London.”