These thoughts were rolling around in Toby’s head as the staff car pulled at last into Kaufungen, retracing the hectic journey they’d made earlier in the day. As before, the adjutant pulled up in front of the police station and stopped the car in the middle of the road. As before, Kohlwasser jumped out straightaway—maybe a tad more zestfully this time around—while Toby took his own sweet time about it, pausing on the sidewalk to stare wistfully at the little crowd enjoying lunch in the Biergarten across the street. There was a fine-looking woman at a table there, thin as a chopstick and so pale that if you stripped off her clothes she’d probably glow in the dark. She was laughing with two fellows who didn’t deserve her—one short and dark like a dago, the other resembling a baboon stuffed into an evening suit. Master race, my bonny Irish ass.
Toby might have strolled over—here was a case for American intervention if ever he’d seen one—but some kind of ruckus had erupted inside the station. It didn’t seem unreasonable to theorize that Kohlwasser was murdering someone. Toby exchanged glances with the adjutant and got the impression that he was thinking along similar lines. They’d better go have a look.
Inside, things were better and worse than Toby had imagined. Better in that no one was lying dead on the floor. Worse in that Kohlwasser was so hopping mad his face had turned a color unknown to modern cosmetology, a bruise purple with crimson highlights and black webbing that might have been exploded veins. He was shouting, and Toby thought himself lucky that his Deutsch derived from a Catholic education and he understood almost none of it. The Standartenführer’s wrath was directed mainly at a senior police officer, whose career, Toby thought he heard, was vernichtet. Or possibly everyone present was vernichtet. The whole town of Kaufungen, vernichtet. Whatever had happened here was so awful that no one could live to speak of it. Toby had an idea what that might have been.
He caught the eye of the desk sergeant, the phlegmatic chap he recalled from his previous visit. “The American boy,” he said, just loud enough to make himself heard. “He’s gone, is he?”
“Left ten minutes ago,” the man said, his tone studiously bland.
“Just…set loose? Free as a bird?”
“Along with his companions. Four of them altogether.”
“On their own?”
“A great lady took them in her automobile. A Baroness.”
Toby chewed this over. He couldn’t tell if it was good news or bad. “Listen, was there a big German fellow, a military type—blond and blue-eyed, that sort?”
“Obersturmführer von Ewigholz.”
“Right. And would you say…did he and the American boy strike you as…”
The sergeant raised his chin a notch. Toby divined that the man understood what he was asking but it was something a German policeman was not going to talk about.
“Well, thanks,” said Toby.
He turned to see that Kohlwasser had apparently run through his list of threats and calumnies and dire guarantees as to the fate of everyone involved. Now he was turning to leave.
“Come!” he ordered the adjutant. “It’s not too late, we can overtake them.”
Back in the staff car, they made an unusual discovery: on the back seat lay a box about the size of, say, a cookbook, wrapped in gold foil and tied with a bright red bow.
“What the hell is this?” said Toby. “Chocolates? Is this a joke? Look, it’s got your name here on the tag.”
Kohlwasser’s reaction was as peculiar as the box itself. He stared at it with an expression that seemed partly disbelieving and partly delighted, like a kid who’d found a present under the Christmas tree and was afraid to believe it was what he thought it was, the thing he’d been dreaming about, that he wanted more than anything else. He reached out gingerly, inch by inch—then he hesitated, drew his hand back.
“Later,” he said. “We’ll open it later. This kind of thing needs to be done very carefully. There’s evidence here, and we must be careful to preserve it.”
The change in him was remarkable. Toby tried to think of something to say but couldn’t tell what was appropriate under the circumstances. Nor did he understand what the circumstances were, exactly.
Kohlwasser sensed his confusion. “He’s gone too far now,” he said, as if this was any sort of explanation. “He thinks I can’t touch him. Now he even dares to taunt me! Well, I knew this would happen. He can’t stop himself—he’s so arrogant, he insists on leaving a signature. This”—passing his hand over the box, a hierophantic blessing—“is as good as a…what do you say, Fingerabdruck.”
“Fingerprint.”
“Yes! But better, really. He reveals his thinking here. This is a mind-print.”
Toby might have asked whose mind-print this was, but he didn’t care. His own mind was on Clairborne, that smart-ass simperer, and his special Aryan friend. Wreaking holy havoc everywhere he went. Causing Bull no end of anguish, with untold anguish still to come. And even worse: scandal, public embarrassment, political ground-shifting. A contagion that would spread to Toby—that would seek him out like a radio homing device—and fuck him over royally as well. Odious little Clairborne, doing all this and getting away with it. Sashaying along on his merry way. And why? Just because. No reason. No justification. No right or wrong.
Maybe these Nazi fellows had the right idea. Cleanse the world with fire and steel. Crush the feeble, the sick, the corrupt, the degenerate. Rette sich wer kann.
Toby became aware again—funny how you could forget a thing like this—of the leather case he’d been carrying since yesterday. That was a sort of mind-print too; it had to be. If you knew how to read it, you could deduce who had stolen these war plans and why they’d been dropped in a United States senator’s tennis bag. It was out of Toby’s league—and for that he was thankful. From where he stood now, the matter of the leather case seemed curiously of a piece with that of Clairborne: another despicable betrayal, another symptom of some grave national malignancy, a tumor in the body politic. He was sick of carrying the thing around.
“Here, Helmut,” he said, speaking hurriedly, not giving himself a chance for second thoughts, “here’s another little gift for you. Sorry I didn’t get around to wrapping it. But I think you’ll—”
—
Step back now. The Baroness is just entering the police station, the beefy gentleman holding the door for her. The job is almost done, and she will either succeed or fail. Meanwhile, these last few steps require an exquisite sense of timing, and who has better timing than a percussionist?
Instead of returning to the Mercedes, the beefy gentleman remained on the sidewalk for more than a minute, enjoying the sunshine, scanning the block for any sign of the opposition. He saw nothing out of order. Shouldering his travel bag, he crossed the road at a leisured pace, making for the Biergarten and ignoring the stares of a couple of upright and unimaginative pedestrians. He didn’t mind, knowing full well what sort of impression he made; he’d come to regard it as a positive attribute. People glance at you and see one thing, and it satisfies them; they don’t go looking for anything deeper.
His contacts had chosen a table near the road. There were three of them: a happy sign. Everyone had made it. As he approached, the ensign-cum-sharpshooter stood up to trade places.
The beefy man removed his cap and held it out ceremonially. “You’ll need petrol. There’s a place near Kassel, just before the autobahn.”
The ensign nodded, donned the cap and hurried across the street, taking his position by the huge Mercedes. And now we wait.
“Relax,” said Guido. “Order something. Just three friends enjoying the weather, eating and drinking. Everything normal.”
The beefy gentleman scowled—he knew how it was done. He eased the travel bag off his shoulder and set it down by his feet.
“What do you think?” said Cissy. “Shall we have champagne?” She waved for a waiter.
“It’s a bit early,” said Guido, consulting his watch. “But yes, why not?”
Only
there was no champagne on offer. This was a Biergarten in a small town in Hesse. The waiter gave them a look that made his feelings about city folk stridently clear.
Just as well: things began to happen rather quickly. The door of the police station flew open and out breezed the Baroness with the chief watchmaster close behind, eyeing her with almost canine attentiveness. The grande dame wore a beneficent smile but her manner was brisk, her stride rapid and purposeful. Disregarding the ensign waiting to help her into the car, she stood there anxiously while the others emerged from the station, one by one. First the Yankee boy with a tall blond friend. Then a woman, fair-skinned, mid-twenties. Then the young Abwehr officer, called Fogel now. Lastly the Brigadier. There was confusion about who should sit where, but the old general barked at them and they got settled. The ensign pushed the Mercedes into gear and they were safely off, danken Sie Gott.
And with little time to spare. A second car, long and gray and menacing, drew up a few minutes later.
“There’s three of them,” said the beefy man. It was a question, basically.
Guido fielded it. “Yes, we know. It’s all right—no change of plan.”
They watched the Standartenführer exit the car and storm into the building. The other two—the driver and the third man, a civilian—lingered outside for a while. This wasn’t good, it was a deviation from the script, and soon it got worse: the civilian was staring over precisely, not at just the Biergarten but at this table in particular. Had he recognized one of them? Did he sense something? The beefy gentleman began considering the available recourses—none of them attractive—but then things got noisy at the police station and the man turned away from them, he and the driver disappearing inside.
“I know who that was!” said Cissy. “I just got it. Remember yesterday, at the tennis—”
“Not now,” Guido said.
The beefy gentleman grabbed his travel bag from under the table and hustled across the road with it. He opened the back door of the staff car, removed a brightly colored item from the bag and laid it gently on the rear seat. He was back at the table a few seconds later.
“That was the one,” said Cissy, resuming exactly where she’d left off, “who picked up the tennis bag. With the other thing in it.”
The beefy man had no idea what she was talking about. Guido’s expression changed by degrees from doubtful to alarmed.
“And now,” said Cissy, “he’s with that horrible SS man. What does it mean?”
They might have gone on fretting about that, but time was pressing and too many pieces were in play. The Standartenführer appeared at the door of the station in an agitated state, the other two soon afterward. They climbed into the staff car and sped off in pursuit of the big, lumbering Mercedes.
“It doesn’t matter now,” said Guido.
“No,” said Cissy, “but we should still tell Jaapi. When we get home.”
The beefy gentleman said nothing. He looked up at the sky and began to hum.
The others didn’t notice at first. Cissy was fidgeting, toying with her necklace, one of the few possessions she hadn’t sold off; Guido was making a painful effort not to pull out his pocket watch. But the humming grew louder and, even worse, the man accompanied himself by thumping periodically on the table.
“Would you stop that?” Guido finally said.
The beefy gentleman ignored him. The humming was a technique of his own invention, a means of keeping track of the time. He’d played with many orchestras under many conductors, and so, being a percussionist, he’d counted off hundreds of thousands of rests. After a while he’d realized that with certain conductors, every performance was the same; you didn’t need to count rests, since you could do as well setting a stopwatch. So the reverse must also be true: counting off certain performances from memory was as accurate as any timepiece. Which came in handy if, say, you moonlighted as a cabaret bouncer, working in places where the light was too poor to read a watch. When the owner told you to get him at such-and-such a time, you just chose a piece of the proper duration and played it in your head.
Last night with Herr Saxo it had been “Give them five minutes. Long enough to get clear of the town—assuming he can restrain himself that long. If not, well…”
Five minutes. That was easy. Any number of pieces would have fit, but for this occasion he’d chosen a personal favorite: Turandot, Act I, “Ah! per l’ultima volta!”
Oh, for the last time! Though the beefy gentleman hoped it wasn’t the last; he rather enjoyed this kind of work. At the start of the climactic quatrain, he reached for his travel bag and pulled out an odd sort of instrument, a tin box with a handle on top and a wire serving as an antenna. Gamely he raced through the frenetic tenor line, recalling the last performance he’d played in, at the Staatsoper: a rainy autumn night, the week’s pay barely covering his gambling debts. As the imaginary trumpets faded, he eased the plunger down.
On the road north of Kaufungen, the Standartenführer’s staff car expanded to cover an egg-shaped area with chunks of gray shell surrounding a charred, bloody yolk. The contents of the leather case were consumed by the fireball, except for a few half-legible tatters that would puzzle the chief watchmaster for days to come. He would make no sense of them.
But what sense could you make of anything, nowadays? This was Germany in the sixth year of the Millennial Reich. Unbelievable things were happening everywhere. Soon the story of the senator’s missing son, rescued by hikers after some vague calamity in a Naturpark, faded from the newspapers. Now Czechoslovakia was back again: atrocities suffered by ethnic Germans in the Sudetenland, vows to restore national honor, a conference to be held in Munich, the last chance for peace. You shuddered to think of it; you couldn’t keep your mind on anything else. It was a magnificent and a terrible moment to be alive. And yet somehow life ran on—you couldn’t stop it, any of it. There would never be a last time.
EPILOGUE
SEVERAL LIFETIMES LATER
LÜBECK, BRITISH OCCUPATION ZONE: APRIL 1948
The field had been planted over in apple trees. The earth was black from having been cratered in a bombing run, then regraded and plowed and sown with wild rye in the autumn after the war by the Corps of Royal Engineers. The rye had stood for two seasons before being turned under and the field resown with grass. And now the apple trees, no more than saplings, really, were blooming this spring for the first time. The blossoms were brilliantly white above the soft green grass, and their stamens picked up the yellow light of afternoon—a stirring vision. But this was ten kilometers from the Baltic Sea and frost was expected by morning. Likely there’d be no apples this year.
Jaap Saxo, director of the Michael Group and, for official eyes only, a special adviser to the Control Commission for Germany, British Element, turned from the window and tossed his hat toward the rack by the office door, scoring a perfect ringer: one thing he’d gotten right today. He hung up his jacket, a nondescript item that marked him as nobody in particular, and went down the row of portraits on the wall, straightening as required: Clement Attlee, Kurt Schumacher, an American classical musician (autographed), the late Admiral Wilhelm Canaris and a man known as Tusk, founder of the dj.1.11.
Saxo had just returned from a funeral in Berlin. He rarely visited Berlin these days—he rarely went anywhere, especially outside the British Zone. The Soviet sector was impossible; people vanished there. The French were punctilious about identification, and Saxo had too many identities for their liking. And the American Zone was crawling with Gehlen people, several of whom he’d tried to kill. He even avoided Bremen, because the Yanks ran the port there, and wherever the Yanks went, their trusted and thoroughly de-Nazified German helpers went with them. Nonetheless, Saxo had broken his habit and gone to this funeral because…it was hard to explain why, even to himself, but something demanded it. Not honor—that was the curse of Germany. Not loyalty, either; in this business, the notion of loyalty was too fraught. Truth, then: the absolute value of getting the stor
y right. This funeral was the last chapter of a story that had begun, as it now seemed, several lifetimes ago.
But that was Berlin; this was Lübeck. Saxo had work to do, a meeting tomorrow with his SIS contact, frost or no frost, to prepare for. The contact—like Saxo, a former navy man; it was odd how these fraternities persisted—was flying out from London. He would bring many questions, and Saxo could offer precious few answers. But perhaps that would change. He had an operative coming in today, a man he’d worked with before the war and right through it, a man he liked and trusted. Saxo employed a number of such people, his own little network, paying them from an account the Brits had set up for him, a nominal shipping concern. A few had been in the Abwehr before the SD finally broke that up. Most of them he’d just fallen in with—exiles, artists, bons vivants, people you happened to meet along the way. The Americans had no use for them, nor for Saxo himself; they had their thousand de-Nazified specialists. But the Brits had been sympathetic. They couldn’t fund an operation on the scale of the Gehlen Org, but they could afford Saxo and his closetful of eccentrics. Why they’d named it the Michael Group, he had no idea. Maybe someone at Century House had lost his boy Mike in the war.
The man he was waiting for came in shortly after six. Like Saxo, he was dressed in the sort of clothing nobody remembers. He hooked his jacket on the rack and spent a minute or so looking at the photographs, as Saxo had expected. Poor Canaris! They’d gotten him in the end, held him at Flossenbürg for a while and then hanged him a few days before the U.S. Third Army arrived. The newcomer paused before the photo of the musician. When at last he turned to face Saxo, he was smiling.
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