The Charlemagne Murders

by Douglass, Carl;

  “As soon as you can, José and Manuel, get your team in contact with Davido and set up a round-the-clock surveillance schedule of the newcomer Argentinians. We want photos on all of them, wiretaps, and information about known associates. We are particularly interested in photographs of the man called Don Pedro Altenhofen.

  “Grégoire, Sylvain, and Marianne: concentrate on the Vatican, Nazi, and German interconnections having to do with Nazis escaping into Switzerland and depositing their money in that nice neutral country. Follow the money; find out the accounts where physical treasures are being stored as well as the cash. Use the French government—as many branches as necessary—and call in favors or twist arms but get that money trail. Where was the money sent initially and where is it being funneled to now? INTERPOL knows for a certainty that the USB holds a great deal of ill-gotten Nazi money. Furthermore, we have certain knowledge about a slippery French-Swiss collaborator with the Nazis and facilitator for sham bank accounts as well as émigré assistance by the name of François Gaspard Caussidière who will be easy to find, but a tough nut to crack. He is an inveterate liar and a double agent. He can be bought if the price offered is high enough. He often works with a Swiss banker employed by the Union Swiss Bank of Geneva by the name of Liert Beili Amstutz. He is brilliant, cunning, and ruthless. However, our Mossad friends have certain information about his personal life that should prove useful. Don’t hesitate to use that information.

  “Also, put a task force on Indochina because we know that many ex-SS made it to Viet Nam and Laos as planters and with the foreign legion.

  “Lincoln and Angela: get your team working on the Middle East; those nice Muslims have extended both arms and a big hug to the escaping Nazis, especially those with weapons expertise. It is possible that some survivors of both the gulags and the Allied slave labor POW camps finally made it to the warm and sunny climes of those deserts. Find them and squeeze them for information on our quarries. We will let sleeping dogs lie about their past crimes and their current benefactors and employers for all who cooperate. Get MI-5 and MI-6 to work on their records of any Germans who were taken into service in the British defense programs. You will need to interrogate them. Try and overlook the fact that both the British and the Germans committed uncounted and unconscionable atrocities and concentrate on what you can learn about the Germans or any possible members of the French unit that served in the SS. Do they know their current whereabouts?

  “Trushin, Ivan, and Katrinka—please do two difficult things: get Colonel-General Boris Vadimovich Ilyushin, your old war commander, on board to get every record available on our suspects. And it will be a considerable stretch; but get Alexander Shelepin, the current head of the KGB, to clear the way to let you see all of the records about the released SS officer corps POWs especially–of course–those who served in the Charlemagne Division. There can’t be many of them left; and, if anyone knows who or where they are, it will be the KGB. The other difficult thing I ask is that you get along with your German counterparts. And Friedrich, Horst, and Eberhard: please give the same cooperation to the Soviets. Your principal tasks will be to squeeze the ODESSA; call in any old markers, bribe, lie to, extort, cajole, or anything else you can think of to get what we need. They are key. Your defense, security, diplomatic, and intelligence services know where the money is. Bring to bear everything all of our organizations have to get that information. We must become able to freeze their assets. That is an imperative.”

  Eugène paused for a good draught of cold water and then finished with the query to open up the discussion of his panel of dedicated experts, “Any questions?”

  There were a great many, and it was late evening before they finished and adjourned for a well-earned dinner at the La Cave d’à Côté. It was a frequent haunt of Eugène’s not well known to any but the elite locals and rare gourmand tourists who learned of it by word of mouth. It was located down a dark, narrow alleyway which would give the faint of heart a moment of pause. The eighteenth century restaurant and soaring vaulted wine cellar—now a trendy wine bar—made it one of Lyon’s most popular evening meeting places. The visiting law enforcement officers lounged on a leather sofas to drink before dinner cocktails that sat around a large communal tables and shared plates of charcuterie and cheese, rosette de Lyon sausage, Saint-Marcellin cheese, and saucisse à la pistache accompanied by specialty wines. The officers shared bottles of Côtes-du-Rhônes and Beaujolais—the favorite being a crisp aged Beaujolais Blanc that the owner produced in his own vineyard. La Cave d’à Côté served to solidify Lyon’s reputation as France’s gastronomic capital. They were all nicely drunk by the time Eugène deposited them in their rooms in the Hotel Foch. Lieutenant of Soviet militsiya Trushin Vasilyovich Stepanovich thought he had died and gone to the heaven he so vigorously did not believe in.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-THREE

  Construction Headquarters, Pueblo Parque National Nahuel Huapi Project, Bariloche, Argentina, September 23, 1963, 0900

  Antoine had a mixed day. The bad news was learning that his oldest friend, Michaele Dupont, had died. That information came from Switzerland by way of a terse note from François Gaspard Caussidière, his go-between for his business dealings in Switzerland, both legal and illegal. The news was frustratingly slow in coming. Michaele died of his tuberculosis March 6, 1963; but it was not news in the US State of Texas, and went almost entirely unnoticed except for an automatic notification to the UBS in Geneva that one of their major customers had died. Caussidière learned about the death from the banker—Liert Beili Amstutz—nearly two weeks previously, but the Argentine postal service was notoriously slow and inefficient. Antoine had had very few friends during his life as a Nazi sympathizer in France, then as an SS general, then as a POW, and now as a fugitive.

  There was good news, however, and he was receiving it now from the ever optimistic and enthusiastic developer, Daniel Urquiza.

  “I am pleased to report, Don Pedro, that we are well underway and should be done with construction in eighteen months. That puts us well ahead of schedule and also under budget, which is almost unheard of in one of my projects. I must not be doing something right.”

  He laughed; and Antoine laughed with him, glad to have something to lighten his barely suppressed gloom.

  “Are you suggesting that I might not be a bankrupt by the time this project is completed, Daniel?”

  “Far from it, Don Pedro. I predict for you a long and happy life as a very rich billionaire.”

  He smiled broadly.

  “Thank you. Even if you are lying, Daniel. Thank you for giving me a bright spot in my day.”

  §§§§§§§

  Chocolatería Más Rico de Bariloche, No. 669 Avenida General José de San Martin, San Carlos de Bariloche, September 23, 1963, 0910

  Moises Silverman and Davido Parades spread out an array of fifty-seven surveillance photographs on the marble chocolate cutting table in the factory section of the chocolatería alongside the letter from “C” at the Institute. The photos were front, side, and oblique views of twelve men whom the Mossad operatives had targeted as possible suspects in the serial murders of military officers as well as being Nazi war criminals.

  Moises said, “‘C’ had Elie Wiesel and his cohorts on the International Commission for the Study of the Holocaust go over the pictures, his own files, and those of the Algemeiner Journal and the Yedioth Ahronoth. They felt fairly sure about six of the fourteen men whose pictures were submitted. They know them only by their German names.”

  Davido Scotch taped a name on the corresponding photograph for the six: Pedro T. Rodriguez, Gonzalez Martin Sanchez, Dominico Lobos, Antonio de Castro, Guglielmo Pardini, and Humberto Garrido. Moises put a tag on each of the photos with at least a preliminary agreement that he was an SS criminal. Those tagged were: Gruppenführer und Generalleutnant der Waffen-SS Antoine Duvalier, Waffen SS-Obersturmbannführer Serge Alain Rounsavall, Waffen SS-Sturmbannführer Hugues Beauchamp, Waffen SS-Hauptsturmführer Jérôme Chris
tophe Mailhot, SS officers of uncertain rank Berthold Küppers, Rolf Kohns, and Clause Fischer. Davido attached a second tag to each of the photos using the information forwarded by Senior INTERPOL technician, Forensic Specialist Marianne de la Reynie.

  They now could match the SS officer with his current alias: Antoine Duvalier was Don Pedro T. Rodriguez; Hugues Beauchamp was Gonzalez Martin Sanchez; Jérôme Christophe Mailhot was Dominico Lobos; Berthold Küppers was Antonio de Castro; Rolf Kohns was Guglielmo Pardini; and Clause Fischer was Humberto Garrido. There were three additional men whose photographs were taken in various conversations or activities in association with the six identified by Marianne: Ismael García-Iglesias, Augustín Ruiz-Rubalcaba, and José María Zapatero according to their passport photos, which Marianne had been given access to by the Argentine customs service through the intercession of the Argentine police partners, Manuel de Jesus, José Emanuel de Corsos, Gerhardt Möller, and Adolf Henckel. It had taken all four of them working around the clock to obtain the passport photos, and they all had to give up a number of their personal markers to get that access.

  An enlarged copy of each passport photo was attached to the corresponding surveillance photo, and from Marianne, a copy of each man’s official SS photo obtained from ODESSA with promises of immunity that exceeded anything INTERPOL wanted to grant to the Nazi rescue and export organization. While they worked, Emilia Glücksmann—the Sayanim who had alerted the Mossad and started the entire process—entered a side door quietly and escorted José Emanuel de Corsos and Manuel de Jesus—the Córdoba police officers—into the small room. The Mossad operatives were informed that the two police officers had spearheaded the passport search and had participated in the around-the-clock surveillance of the new Bariloche businessmen which had produced the photos spread out on the marble chocolate cutting table. The owner of the chocolataria was aware of and sympathetic to the Israelis and their Argentine counterparts’ cause, but was too afraid to be in close contact with the conspirators. He strongly preferred to maintain plausible deniability and to be the lookout for unwanted visitors from the safety of his comfortable shop front location. That suited Moises and Davido’s purposes well also.

  “Anything new?” Moises asked Manuel.

  “Nothing.”

  Emilie observed, “Our covers seem to be intact. I overheard two of our suspects talking about coming by to get chocolates for their girl friends this afternoon. All seemed to be routine.”

  “Good,” Davido said. “We should get to work and to commit these names to the photos and into our memories; so, we can be long gone when our nice Nazi friends come by for chocolates from ‘la chocolatería más rica de Argentina’ as the advertisement says.”

  Emilia served as instructor and quizzed each man by showing him a photo and having him give the name, or showing him a name and having him pick out the correct passport photo or current surveillance photo. This took two hours.

  Moises asked, “Emilia, how about you go down to Boehme’s delicatessen and get us some sandwiches and beer for lunch while the rest of us strategize about our next moves?”

  She was about to protest, but she knew well enough not to question orders from the Mossad leader. She had been drilled on the necessity of the ‘need-to-know’ principle of tradecraft. She was content with the knowledge that she was becoming something of a good amateur agent and let it go at that.

  Moises was so stereotypical Jewish in appearance—dark hair, dark olive skin, bushy eyebrows, narrow face with a large hooked nose occupying its center—that it hampered his undercover work. He had the body of a power lifter and the agile movements of a gymnast. He smiled often, revealing crooked teeth, the result of poor dental care in the Kibbutz during his formative years. From those years, he became a dedicated Israeli soldier and then a Mossad agent.

  Davido was anybody’s and everybody’s stereotypical western European. In fact, his family was among the first Zionists to pour into Palestine in the early 1900s. He was tall, slim, and had blond curly hair. His features were fine and symmetrical. He—unlike Moises—had benefited from European dentistry when he attended Cambridge during his college years. He habitually wore desert khakis and boots. He played the role of a bon vivant when he needed to while undercover; but by nature, he was rather shy and retiring. He had taken a liking to Emilia and had been warned by Moises not to let that cloud his thinking or his dedication.

  Emilia was young, slim, and had red hair and freckles like a rather sizable minority of Israeli Jews. She was flat-chested which caused her dismay, but it seemed that a skimpy figure was become more the style of late; so, she stopped complaining about her physique to her girl friends. She dressed in casual denim shirts, Levi five-button jeans, and desert boots for her size-four feet. She was small and seemed delicate or fragile. She was neither. And she had taken a shine to Davido, which is how she came to be involved in the current Mossad mission.

  Moises took the lead, and he and Davido outlined the plan they had honed down to the finest detail during wireless communications with “C.” It was a conservative operation designed to create as little stir in the growing town as possible and with as little overt violence as possible. They took great pains to stress how crucial it was to avoid tipping off the group of suspects by doing anything premature or public.

  §§§§§§

  Le Bureau Central National (BCN) d’INTERPOL pour la France, Office of Senior Detective Chief Superintendent Eugène Léon Dentremont, 200 Quai Charles de Gaulle, 69006 Lyon, France, 1300, the same day.

  Because of the sensitivity of what they were about to do—or attempt to do—DCS Dentremont enlisted the official aid of his superior, INTERPOL Secretary General Ronald Swing, to smooth the way and to be present when the questioning of two prominent Swiss citizens took place in Lyon. Swing had gone promptly to Melchior Martin Dubs, Head of the Département fédéral de justice et police, and to Jakob Furrer, president of the Swiss Confederation, to obtain their written approval. They were reluctant and took their time—three weeks—to grant INTERPOL the right to pursue its investigation into Swiss banking as it pertained to the murders of important military officers.

  The interrogators in the office that day were Dentremont, General Secretary Swing, Superintendent Guy Mutz, chief of the INTERPOL office in the western suburb of St. Cloud in Paris, Antoine Louis Comtessa, superintendent of the Geneva INTERPOL office, Friedrich Schneider Graf von der Lippe, Der Polizeipräsident in Wiesbaden representing the Bundeskriminalamt [BKA-Federal Criminal Police Office], and Enquêteur Grégoire Laurent De Vincent, Paris police detective. Also present were two attorneys: Arnold Blocher, representing INTERPOL, and Camille von Steiger, representing the two men being questioned: François Gaspard Caussidière and Liert Beili Amstutz.

  After introductions, DCS Dentremont asked if anyone would like to take a drink of water from the crystal pitcher set in the middle of the conference table. Everyone shook their heads to indicate “no.”

  “Herr Amstutz, no doubt you are wondering why you have been asked here for questioning. And, you may also question the need for such strict formality. The reason is that at least six very prominent former military generals have been assassinated in the past several years, all by the same gang of criminals, and all funded by illegal accounts held in the Union Bank of Switzerland in Geneva. There may have been as many as a couple of dozen.”

  Before Attorney von Steiger or bank officer Amstutz could launch into an objection or a protest, Dentremont held up his hand and said, “In due time, in due time. You will be able to voice your denials and defenses. Right now, we are going to lay out our case; so, you will be fully aware of your precarious predicament. That goes double for you, Monsieur Caussidière. You are a Swiss collaborator with the Nazis and facilitator for sham bank accounts and émigré assistance. Be patient and learn.”

  Camille started to raise her hand to demand proof, but thought better of it and held her peace. Eugène gestured to Antoine Comtessa, and the INTERPOL superintend
ent for Geneva stood and passed out a set of bound documents.

  “You may peruse these handouts at your leisure, including as I speak. You will find that everything I have said is borne out by evidence, facts, and provable assertions. The purpose of this meeting is to give you advance notice that charges will be filed. As we speak, INTERPOL, FBI, BKA, magistrates of the Sûreté Nationale, and investigators from the United Nations International Court of Justice are waiting in the lobby of the Union Bank of Switzerland in Geneva with warrants. A similar set of officials are waiting in the Vatican. They will move in force once I give the signal.

  “This is what will happen to you Herr Amstutz, Monsieur Caussidière, and to your bank: the records of the bank will be made fully public, especially those with regards to collaborating with the Nazis to rob Jewish victims of the Holocaust. It will be necessary to examine and make public all bank records to be certain that nothing is overlooked. The relationship of the Vatican and the Nazis and your bank will be part of that public record. We have arrest warrants already prepared for high-ranking bank officials, members of the ODESSA whom we can identify and about whom we have stacks of evidence. In the end, your careers will be ruined, your property confiscated, and you will go to prison. It will be a long and complicated process–undoubtedly–but a thorough one with an inevitable conclusion.”

  Camille von Steiger hurriedly conferred with her clients, François Caussidière and Liert Amstutz. The three nodded their heads in agreement as the DCS of INTERPOL waited patiently, his face a mask of placid indifference.