Soldier Spies

by Griffin, W. E. B.

  He drove past a barracks compound and pulled the yellow roadster onto the cobblestones before a three-story, turn-of-the-century building that housed both the headquarters of the Kreis Polizei for Marburg and the regional office of the SS-SD. He got out of the car and walked into the building. There was a small Christmas tree sitting on a table in the lobby.

  The Scharführer on duty, visibly startled at the visit of so senior an officer on Christmas Eve, popped to attention. He didn’t at first recognize Müller, but Müller knew who he was. His name was Otto Zeiman. When Müller first joined the police as an Unterwachtmann, Zeiman had been his corporal. He, too, had joined the SS-SD and had risen to Scharführer.

  "Heil Hitler! ” Zeiman said. “How may I help the Standartenführer?”

  “How are you, Otto?” Müller asked, offering the older man his hand. “It’s nice to see you again.”

  “The Standartenführer is kind to remember me,” Zeiman said, beaming happily at him.

  “When no one’s around, Otto, it’s Johnny, like always.”

  The older man colored with pleasure. He would never, Müller knew, call him by anything but his rank, but the gesture had cost nothing, and it was always valuable for a man like Zeiman to think of himself as a special friend.

  "Hauptsturmführer Peis is the officer on duty,” Zeiman said. “Shall I tell him you’re here?”

  Peis, the SD officer-in-charge in Marburg and another face from a long time ago, was like Zeiman a professional, not a political, although Müller, who had checked his dossier in Berlin before leaving, had learned that Peis’s devotion to the National Socialist cause had recently become almost fervent. That was something to keep in mind.

  “The boss is working on Christmas Eve?” Müller asked, and then, before Zeiman could reply, added,“Please, Otto.”

  Wilhelm Peis, in what looked like a brand-new uniform, came into the foyer a moment later, gave the straight-armed salute, said “Heil Hitler!,” and asked how he could be of service to the Herr Standartenführer.

  He was surprised to see Müller, period, and even more surprised to see that he was now a Standartenführer. The approach he decided to take with him was, consequently, formal. As Standartenführer, Müller might resent any intimacy.

  “Heil Hitler!” Müller said. “I had hoped, if it would not interfere with your duty, that we might have a drink for Christmas.”

  "I regret that I have nothing to offer the Standartenführer,” Peis said.

  “Then why don’t we go to the Café Weitz?” Müller said.

  “If the Standartenführer will be good enough to wait, I will get my coat,” Peis said.

  When he was in the car, Peis said, “This is very nice. Standartenführer Kramer has one very much like it.”

  “This is Kramer’s,” Müller said. “He was good enough to give me the use of it.”

  “May I ask if the Standartenführer is here officially?” Peis asked.

  “Officially, Peis, I’m on leave,” Müller said.

  “I understand, Herr Standartenführer.”

  “It’s Christmas Eve, Wilhelm,” Müller said. “And we have known each other a long time. Don’t you think you could call me ‘Johann’?”

  “Yes, of course,” Peis said, pleased.

  The proprietor of the Café Weitz, a pale-faced man in his sixties who wore a frayed-at-the-collar dinner jacket, greeted them enthusiastically, and Peis obviously relished being able to introduce Müller as his “friend.”

  The proprietor said he was honored and asked if Müller had ever been to Marburg before.

  “I was born here,” Müller said, and regretted it. The café owner looked as though he had committed a terrible faux pas by not recognizing Müller. “I’ve been away for years,” Müller said. “But I came to see my mother at Christmas. ”

  Two bottles, one of Steinhager and one of French cognac, were promptly delivered to their table.

  “While I am here, as I say, unofficially,” Müller began when the café owner finally left them,“there are a few things I would like to make discreet inquiry about.”

  “I am at your service, Herr Standartenführer,” Peis said.

  “Johann,” Müller said with a smile.

  “Johann,” Peis parroted uncomfortably.

  “Tell me about Professor Friedrich Dyer,” Müller said.

  Peis grunted, as if the inquiry did not surprise him.

  “What do you want to know?” he asked. “We have a rather extensive file on him. If you had asked at the station, I could have shown it to you.”

  “Just tell me, Wilhelm,” Müller said.

  “Well, he knows Albert Speer pretty well,” Peis said.

  Müller was astonished to hear that, but he was a policeman, and his surprise showed neither on his face nor in his voice.

  “I know that,” he said impatiently. “What else is there?”

  “He’s a professor at the university, knows all about metal.”

  “Personally. What do you know about him?’’

  “Well, we caught him exporting money, for one thing,” Peis said. “Is that what this is all about?”

  Müller ignored the question. “Tell me about that. Why wasn’t he prosecuted? ”

  Peis, Müller saw, was uncomfortable. He would have to find out why.

  “You know how it is, Johann,” Peis said nervously. “Some you keep on a string.”

  “What can he do for you?”

  Peis was made even more uncomfortable by the question.

  "Family?” Müller asked.

  “One child,” Peis said. “His wife is dead.”

  “And the one child is female, right? And you’re fucking her?”

  There was alarm in Peis’s eyes, proving that was indeed the case.

  “We’re all human, Wilhelm,” Müller said.

  “I . . . uh . . . the way it happened, Johann, was before the war. We caught him shipping the money to Switzerland, and making anti-state remarks.”

  “She must be one hell of a woman,” Müller said with a smile. “This is almost 1943.”

  “We had two students of official interest, two in particular, at the university, ” Peis said.

  "Who?” Müller asked.

  “There was an Arab, the son of some Arab big shot—”

  “What was his name?” Müller interrupted. He had a very good idea, but he wanted to hear it from Peis.

  “El Ferruch,” Peis said triumphantly, after he had dredged the name from the recesses of his memory.

  “Sidi Hassan el Ferruch,” Müller said. “The son of the Pasha of Ksar es Souk. What about him?”

  Peis was uncomfortable but did not seem especially surprised that Müller knew about el Ferruch.

  “We had a request to build a dossier on him,” Peis said.

  “And did you?”

  “He was living with—”

  “Eric von Fulmar, Baron Kolbe,” Müller interrupted. “I asked you if you managed to build a dossier on el Ferruch?”

  “Yes, of course I did,” Peis said. “I sent it to Frankfurt, and I suppose they sent it to Berlin after he left here.”

  "What does this have to do with Professor Friedrich Dyer?” Müller asked.

  “His money business came up at the same time,” Peis said. “I called his daughter in for a little talk, and used her to keep an eye on them.”

  “And then, when they left, you kept her around for ‘possible use in the future,’ right?” Müller asked. “Wilhelm, you’re a rogue!”

  “Well, you see how it is,” Peis said, visibly relieved that Müller seemed to understand.

  “Wilhelm,” Müller said, “I’m going to be here for about a week. A week with my mother. Now, I love my mother, but a man sometimes gets a little bored. He needs a little excitement, if you take my meaning.”

  “You just say when and where, Johann,” Peis said.

  “I’ll say when,” Müller said. “And you say where.”

  V

  [ONE]
r />   Motor Pool, Naval Element, SHAEF London, England 1600 Hours 24 December 1942

  There were two white hats on duty in the small, corrugated-steel dispatcher’s shack when the tall, dark-haired lieutenant (j.g.) pushed open the door and stepped inside. He was wearing an overcoat and a scarf. His brimmed cap was perched cockily toward the back of his head.

  The white hats started to stand up.

  “Keep your seats,” the j.g. said quickly, and added, “Merry Christmas.”

  “Merry Christmas, sir,” the white hats said, almost in unison.

  "My name is Kennedy,” the j.g. said. “They were supposed to call?”

  “Yes, sir,” the older—at maybe twenty-two—of the white hats said. “You need wheels?”

  “That’s right,” Kennedy said.

  “I hate to do this to you, especially on Christmas Eve,” the white hat said. “But look around, there’s nothing else.”

  There were three vehicles in the motor pool, a three-quarter-ton wrecker, a Buick sedan, and a jeep with a canvas roof but no side curtains. Kennedy understood the jeep was for him. Lieutenants junior grade are not given Buick staff cars, especially at the brass-hat-heavy Naval Element, SHAEF.

  “Anytime you’re ready, Lieutenant,” the other white hat said. “Where we going?”

  “Atcham Air Corps Base,” Kennedy said. “In Staffordshire. You know where it is?”

  “Only that it’s a hell of a way from here,” the white hat said.

  Kennedy had a sudden thought, and acted on it.

  “There’s no reason that both of us have to freeze,” he said. “I’ll drive myself. ”

  “Oh, I don’t know, Lieutenant,” the older white hat said. “You’re supposed to have a driver.”

  “If anybody asks, tell them I gave you a hard time about it,” Kennedy said. “It’s gassed up, I suppose?”

  “Yes, sir, and there’s an authorization for gas with the trip ticket.”

  “Okay, then,” Kennedy said. “That’s it.”

  “Lieutenant, would you mind writing down that you wanted to drive yourself?”

  “Got a piece of paper?”

  It was half past four when he turned the jeep onto the Great North Road. He had lived in London for several years before the war and for the first couple of hours on the Great North Road, he knew where he was. But by half past seven—about the time it had grown dark and the rain blowing through the open sides had soaked through his woolen overcoat—he was in strange territory and had to admit (which angered him) that he was lost.

  He had a map, one he had drawn himself with care, even carefully listed the distance between turns in miles and tenths of a mile, but it had proved useless. And there were no road signs. They had been taken down in anticipation of a German invasion in the summer of 1940, and only a few of them had been replaced.

  At nine o’clock he reluctantly gave up, and spent the night on a tiny and uncomfortable bed in a small country inn. It was a hell of a way to spend Christmas Eve, he thought.

  At first light he started out again, unshaven, in a damp uniform. There had been a stove in the room, and he had hung his overcoat, jacket, and trousers over two chairs and a bedside table close to it. It had done almost no good.

  It took him two hours to reach Atcham. The MP at the gate was willing to accept his identity card and trip ticket as proof that he hadn’t stolen the jeep, but warned him that Atcham Air Force Station was “closed in.” Once he came inside, he would not be permitted to leave until 0600 hours 26 December.

  That strongly suggested that an operation was in progress, that he had come all this way only to find that the man he wanted to see was somewhere over France or Germany. Then he found a faintly glowing coal of hope. It was raining again. Visibility was about half a mile. There was a thick cloud cover at 1,000 feet. It was likely that an operation would not be able to get off the ground because of the weather.

  He decided that seeing Major Peter Douglass was worth a chance. He’d worry about getting off the base when it was time to leave.

  As he drove the jeep through an endless line of rain-soaked P-38s in sandbag revetments, a B-25 flashed low over him, so low that he could see the fire at the engine exhausts. It touched down and immediately disappeared in a cloud of its own making as it rolled down the rain-soaked runway.

  One of two things was true, Naval Aviator Kennedy thought professionally. Either his assessment of flying conditions was way off, or the pilot of the B-25 was a fucking fool flying in weather like this.

  Headquarters, 311th Fighter Group, U.S. Army Air Corps was a Quonset hut surrounded by tar-paper shacks with a frame building used for a mess, theater, and briefing room.

  There was no answer to his knock at the door, so he pushed it open. Inside, a baldheaded man was snoring under olive-drab blankets on a cot. The jacket with staff sergeant’s chevrons draped over a chair identified him as the charge of quarters.

  When he shook the sergeant’s shoulder and woke him, Kennedy expected the man would be upset that an officer had caught him asleep. But the reaction was annoyance rather than humiliation.

  “I would like to see Major Douglass,” the lieutenant said.

  “He’s asleep,” the sergeant said doubtfully as he reluctantly got off the cot and began pulling his trousers on. “He came in pretty late last night.”

  “It’s important, Sergeant,” the lieutenant said. “Would you please wake him?”

  “He’s in there,” the sergeant said, pointing to a closed door and leaving unspoken what else he meant: If you want to wake him, you wake him.

  Kennedy went to the door, knocked, got no response, and then pushed it open. Major Peter Douglass, Jr., Army Air Corps, was in a curtained alcove of the office. He lay on his back in a homemade wooden bed, his legs spread, his mouth open. A uniform was hung somewhat crookedly over a chair. The decorations on the tunic were a little unusual: A set of standard U.S. Army Air Corps pilot’s wings was where it was supposed to be. But there was another set, which the young naval officer recognized after a moment as Chinese, over the other pocket. And under the Army Air Corps wings were the ribbons of two Distinguished Flying Crosses. One of them was the striped ribbon of the British DFC. The other was American.

  Kennedy went to the cot and looked down at Douglass. He wondered how much truth there was to the story that Douglass had walked into the Plans and Training Division of Headquarters Eighth Air Force, politely asked the lieutenant colonel who had planned the disastrous P-38 raid on Saint-Lazare to stand up, and then coldcocked him.

  Kennedy leaned down and shook Douglass’s shoulder. Douglass angrily snorted and rolled onto his side.

  “Major Douglass,” Kennedy said.

  There was no response.

  Kennedy was about to shake him again when he heard voices in the outer office.

  “Merry Christmas, Sergeant, we’re the Eighth Air Force Clap Squad,” a voice said. “Where do we find a character named Douglass? He’s been infecting the sheep.”

  The charge of quarters laughed.

  “He’s right in there, sir,” the sergeant said. “And Merry Christmas to you, too.”

  Two officers, a major and a captain, walked into the room. They looked at the sleeping Douglass, then at Kennedy, and then at each other. They smiled and went to the bed, picked up one side of it, and rolled Major Douglass out onto the floor.

  Kennedy was suddenly sure that these guys were the ones who had just flown the B-25 through the soup.

  Major Douglass, now wide awake on the floor, was piqued.

  “You sonsofbitches!” he declaimed angrily.

  “Hark,” Captain James M. B. Whittaker said,“the herald angel sings!”

  “You bastards,” Major Douglass said, but he was now smiling.

  “Get dressed,”Canidy said.“We are going to spring you from durance vile.”

  “You know, I suppose,” Douglass said, as he rose to his feet and quickly stripped to change his underwear,“that now that you’re o
n the base, you’re restricted to it until 0600 tomorrow?”

  “Only the gate is closed,” Canidy said.

  “You’ve got an airplane? You’re not flying in this shit?”

  "Oh, ye of little faith! ” Whittaker said.

  “But get dressed, Doug, it’s getting worse,” Canidy said.

  Douglass looked at Kennedy as he pulled on clean Jockey shorts.

  “You realize, of course, Lieutenant,” he said, “that running around with these two is going to ruin your naval career?”

  “I don’t know who these gentlemen are,” Kennedy said somewhat stiffly, but smiling.

  “We thought he was a pal of yours,” Whittaker said.

  “My name is Kennedy,” the j.g. said. “I came here from London to talk to you, Major Douglass.”

  “Talk to me? About what?”

  “Saint-Lazare,” Kennedy said.

  “You drove from London in the rain in that jeep?” Whittaker said incredulously.

  “That’s right,” Kennedy said. “It’s really important.”

  “I don’t want to talk about Saint-Lazare,” Douglass said coldly as he put his arms in the sleeves of a shirt.

  "Your name is Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr.,” Canidy said. “Right?”

  “Yes, sir,” Kennedy said, visibly surprised that the major knew his name.

  “I thought you said you didn’t know him?” Douglass asked.

  “I know about him,” Canidy said.

  “May I ask how?” Kennedy asked.

  “I’m not sure you have the need to know,” Canidy said.

  “I know him,” Whittaker said. “You went to school in Cambridge, right?”

  “If you mean Harvard, yes, I did.”

  “Jim Whittaker,” Whittaker said, putting out his hand. “’Thirty-nine. I thought you looked familiar.”

  Kennedy shook the offered hand.

  “I can’t place you,” he said. “Sorry.”

  “You more than once knocked me on my ass playing lacrosse,” Whittaker said.

  Kennedy still didn’t make any connection. He shrugged and shook his head. “No.”

  “Well, I hate to cut off auld lang syne,” Canidy said, “but we have to get off the ground in the next ten minutes, or we will be stuck here until tomorrow. ”