“Come on, Luther, use your head. You did your duty to the end. But the end is here. The Thousand-Year Reich lasted . . . what? Eleven, twelve years. You’re going to spend more time than that staring at the walls of your cell unless you give me von Dietelburg.”
“Stauffer, Luther. Sturmführer, 4848329.”
“Oh, come on, Luther!”
“Stauffer, Luther. Sturmführer, 4848329.”
“Well, I tried.”
I really did.
And I failed.
And my reaction to my failure isn’t mostly disappointment, or anger, although God knows there’s that.
What I’m really feeling most now is sympathy for my cousin Luther, the miserable stupid sonofabitch.
And for me. How the hell am I going to tell my mother that I looked into her nephew’s welfare in his cell?
Where I put him, and where he’s going to be for the next decade or so.
Cronley walked to the door of the cell and gestured to the eighteen-year-old soldier looking through the window to let him out.
[SIX]
Suite 407
The Hotel Bristol
Kaerntner Ring 1
Vienna, Austria
1930 27 February 1946
When there was a knock at the door, Cronley got off a couch and went to open it.
“Hello, Charley,” he said, and then, “Good evening, sir. Thank you for coming. Please come in.”
Colonel Carl Wasserman, who commanded the Vienna CIC, and Lieutenant Charles Spurgeon walked into the suite, shaking Cronley’s hand as they passed him.
Otto Niedermeyer and Cezar Zieliński rose from the couch. Zieliński was wearing pinks and greens, as was Cronley. Niedermeyer was wearing a superbly tailored double-breasted suit made for him by a tailor on Buenos Aires’ Avenida Florida.
“Colonel Carl Wasserman, Lieutenant Charley Spurgeon, these are DCI agents Otto Niedermeyer and Cezar Zieliński.”
The men shook hands.
“As you may have guessed from Otto’s absolutely gorgeous suit, all DCI agents are not created equal. Otto, formerly Oberst of Abwehr Ost, and formerly General Gehlen’s man in Argentina, is now working there for Cletus Frade. Cezar, formerly captain of the Free Polish Army, now has the unpleasant duty of being my bodyguard.”
“I heard you need one,” Wasserman said. “And, to judge from those violin cases, which I don’t think hold violins, you are taking appropriate precautions.”
“Those are actually violoncello cases,” Zieliński said. “Thompsons don’t really fit in violin cases. So I bought these on the free market, and now have two really beautiful violoncellos that I have absolutely no idea how to play.”
“On the other hand, we didn’t terrify the people in the lobby by walking in with Thompsons slung from our shoulders.”
Wasserman chuckled and then asked, “What brings you to Vienna?”
“Brigadeführer Franz von Dietelburg,” Cronley replied. “And it’s probably a wild-goose chase, but I’m desperate. What happened was that Cletus Frade told me Otto was at the Compound doing some business with General Gehlen, so I went to see him, to see if he could help. He told me that he hadn’t seen von Dietelburg since before the war, when he left here to become Himmler’s adjutant.”
“I actually knew von Dietelburg rather well,” Niedermeyer said. “Well enough to remember his lady friend, a strikingly beautiful ballerina, and that he had set her up in a villa on the Cobenzl. Unfortunately, I can’t remember her name, or the address on Cobenzl. But I thought if I was in Vienna, my memory might be triggered, and knowing how much Jim wants von Dietelburg, I thought it would be worth coming here.”
He’s lying—we’re both lying—to one of the good guys.
Who is also a damned good intelligence officer, and damned good intelligence officers can generally tell when people are lying.
But we certainly can’t tell him he’s in Vienna trying to help Gehlen get his wife and her brother out of the AVO jail in Budapest. Gehlen has to get Wallace’s permission to stage any kind of an operation, and Gehlen knows that Wallace would judge—with justification—that since Otto’s wife and her brother contribute zilch to DCI, the risk of DCI getting caught breaking them out of an AVO jail in Budapest was not justified.
So we have no choice but to lie to one of the good guys.
“And have you had any luck with your memory?” Wasserman asked.
“Not so far. But just now I was thinking of walking over to the Hotel Sacher to see if that triggers anything. I used to spend many hours drinking there with von Dietelburg and his lady friends. Friends, plural. There were many.”
“Any names you could come up with might be helpful,” Cronley said.
“Unfortunately, Jim, in those days they were called Schatzi or Liebchen. And won’t be in the telephone book.”
“Well, at least we can have a Sachertorte,” Wasserman said.
“You’ve apparently been here long enough to know about Sachertorte,” Niedermeyer said.
“I had my own version of ‘What to do in Vienna.’ Written by my mother. ‘Eat Sachertorte. Do not drink Slivovitz.’ She was raised here. My mother’s an Austro-Hungarian.”
“So is my wife,” Niedermeyer said.
“She’s with you in Argentina?”
“My wife has grown very fond of Lomo and Cabernet Sauvignon from Clete’s vineyards.”
“Let me propose this,” Wasserman said. “We walk over to the Sacher—you can leave the fiddle cases here. When you called, I decided to bring some of my guys with me. We’ll have a snort of Slivovitz and have a piece of Sachertorte and see if that triggers your memory. Then we’ll get something to eat. And tomorrow, say eleven-fifteen, Charley and I will pick you up and take you to lunch. There’s a nice restaurant atop the Cobenzl. And as we drive slowly up the Cobenzlgasse, you can spot the villa where von Dietelburg stashed whatsername, his Schatzi.”
“You’re more than kind, Colonel,” Niedermeyer said.
XIII
[ONE]
The Hotel Bristol
Kaerntner Ring 1
Vienna, Austria
1120 28 February 1946
As Cronley, Zieliński, and Niedermeyer walked out of the revolving door of the hotel to get in Wasserman’s staff car, Cronley saw a well-dressed Viennese matron, a woman pushing sixty, coming toward the hotel. She was wearing an ornate feathered hat, a Persian lamb coat, and was leading a dachshund on a leash.
But Cronley knew she was not really a Viennese matron, but rather an NKGB colonel known to the Gehlen Organization as Rahil—Rachel—who had been given the code name Seven-K.
Seven-K, for $200,000, had smuggled Natalia Likharev and her sons, Sergei and Pavel, out of their Leningrad apartment to East Germany, where Cronley and Kurt Schröder had flown across the border and picked them up in Storchs.
Gehlen had told Cronley Seven-K would, in her dual role as an agent of Mossad, the Jewish intelligence organization, use the money to smuggle Zionists out of the Soviet Union and to Palestine.
Cronley had last seen her when he had been in Vienna to meet Ivan Serov, who wanted to swap Colonel Robert Mattingly for Colonel Sergei Likharev and his family.
When they came back from their dinner meeting at the Drei Husaren restaurant, Seven-K had been sitting, dachshund in lap, having a coffee in the Bristol lobby.
Although their eyes had met—for no more than two seconds—Cronley knew she had recognized him. But that had not been the time to cry, Well, look who’s here!
And Cronley instantly decided neither was this.
If she wants to see me, she’ll be taking coffee in the lobby again.
And maybe I’ll have the chance to ask her if another $200,000 will get Otto’s wife and her brother out of the AVO prison in Budapest. If DCI won’t spring for that, Cletus and I wil
l.
Otto Niedermeyer got in the front passenger seat beside Charley Spurgeon, and Cronley got in the back with Colonel Wasserman, and Spurgeon started off down Ringstrasse past the ruins of the Vienna Opera.
“Somebody got to the Ford family,” Wasserman said.
“Excuse me?”
“The Fords are going to pay for the rebuilding of the Opera.”
“Really?”
“And they started a fund to rebuild St. Stephen’s Cathedral. I guess this city really gets to people. It’s gotten to me.”
“It got to my wife,” Niedermeyer said, turning in the front seat. “I met Carol here, proposed to her here, and we got married in St. Stephen’s. We were supposed to go to Venice for the wedding trip, but we never got further than the Imperial Hotel, where she had made reservations.”
“Pity you couldn’t have brought her here with you,” Wasserman said.
“Yeah, it is.”
Niedermeyer was still sitting so he could look into the backseat. Cronley averted his eyes. He didn’t want to look at him.
—
“Well, here we are in Grinzing,” Spurgeon said. “And there’s Cobenzlgasse.”
Cronley saw they were in a sort of square. To the left, the streetcar tracks leading from Vienna ended. There was a circular section of track that permitted the streetcars to turn around for return to Vienna.
The square was lined with stores, many of which had hanging signs reading HEURIGER.
“What’s a Heuriger?” he asked.
“A place where you can get a monumental headache drinking wine made from grapes that last week were hanging from the vine,” Niedermeyer said. “It’s a sacred Viennese custom.”
Spurgeon started driving up the cobblestones of Cobenzlgasse. Almost immediately he saw that the left side of the road was lined with very large houses behind fences. To the right there were snow-covered vineyards.
“Not too slow, Charley,” Colonel Wasserman cautioned, “we don’t want to appear too curious.”
Spurgeon accelerated.
Cronley had just noticed a Heuriger on the left side of the road, apparently closed for the winter, when Niedermeyer said, “Olga Reithoffer, her name was Olga Reithoffer. And there it is! Number 71.”
“Bingo!” Zieliński said.
“No wonder you had trouble remembering it,” Cronley said.
He looked at number 71 Cobenzlgasse and saw that it was a large masonry building behind a fence. He saw that the fence had sheet metal attached to it, which blocked a good view of the lower floor of the building. The closed French doors opening on the building-wide balcony were heavily draped, except for one, which was half open.
“Damn! A privacy fence,” Wasserman said. “Which makes me wonder how long it’s been up.”
They continued up Cobenzlgasse to the top and pulled into the parking lot of a restaurant whose wrought iron grape-bedecked sign identified it as the Restaurant Cobenzl.
“They used to serve a nice Wiener Schnitzel mit Ei in here,” Niedermeyer said.
“They still do,” Wasserman said. “But I hope you brought a lot of money.”
“I thought Charley invited us,” Cronley said.
“Charley doesn’t have any money,” Wasserman said. “He has his own ballerina, and they don’t come cheap.”
“Colonel,” Spurgeon protested, “I don’t have my own ballerina. I happened to meet a young lady who was a ballerina and is helping to support herself by helping me improve my German and by showing me around Vienna.”
“That’s why I said you don’t have money,” Wasserman said. “That sort of service can’t be cheap.”
“Charley,” Cronley asked, “why do I get the idea this is the first you knew Colonel Wasserman knows about your ballerina slash tour guide?”
Spurgeon didn’t answer.
“A word of advice, Charley,” Cronley went on. “If things go the way I’m sure you’re hoping they will with your ‘tour guide,’ make sure nobody’s making movies of your mattress gymnastics.”
“Screw you, Cronley.”
“Maybe Cronley is speaking from experience,” Wasserman said.
“Under the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States . . .”
Niedermeyer, Wasserman, and Zieliński laughed.
—
They were shown to a table by the windows that provided a spectacular view of Vienna.
When the waiter appeared, Wasserman said, “I think Wiener Schnitzel mit Ei for everybody, right?”
“Thank God it’s winter and I can’t be tempted into a Heuriger,” Niedermeyer said. “But I think a nip of Slivovitz is in order to celebrate the return of my memory.”
“What did you say was the name of von Dietelburg’s ‘tour guide’?” Wasserman asked.
Cronley saw that he had taken a notebook and pencil from his pocket.
“Olga Reithoffer.”
“Spell it, so I can write it down.”
Niedermeyer did so.
“Charley,” Wasserman ordered, “go fetch that telephone.”
He pointed to a socket in the center of the table, and then to a telephone sitting on a sideboard. He saw Cronley’s curiosity.
“Plug-in telephones. Very convenient. We would have them in the States if Bell Telephone, for reasons I can’t imagine, didn’t insist that their telephones be securely wired to the wall.”
Spurgeon delivered the telephone. Wasserman plugged it in and dialed a number.
“Write this down,” he said, without any preliminaries. A moment later, “Olga Reithoffer. I’ll spell . . .
“. . . She used to live at 71 Cobenzlgasse in Grinzing. Find out everything you can about her and that address. I’ll ask Wangermann to do the same. Which brings us to him. Get on the radio to him and tell him I’d like to buy him lunch. Right now. I’m at the Restaurant Cobenzl. And prioritize a list of our guys according to the importance of what they’re doing. I’m going to need a bunch of people to handle what I’ve got going. Other things are going to have to wait. Got all that?”
There was a reply, which Wasserman didn’t acknowledge. He simply hung up.
“Wangermann?” Niedermeyer asked.
“Walter Wangermann, the Vienna cops’ chief of intelligence. Good man. The Russians and the Organisation der Ehemaligen SS-Angehörigen like him about as much as they like Cronley. About a month ago, one or the other put a bomb in his Mercedes.”
Thirty minutes later, a muscular man in his late thirties stepped into the room, looked around carefully, and then made a Come ahead gesture. A stocky, florid-faced man in his fifties, in a suit that looked two sizes too small for him, came into the room, followed by another well-dressed, muscular man in his thirties, this one holding a Schmeisser along his trouser seam.
The older man walked to the table and sat down. One of his bodyguards sat at a nearby table. The one with the Schmeisser pulled a chair near the door, turned it around, and then sat down on it.
“Walter, these are my friends Otto Niedermeyer, Cezar Zieliński, and James Cronley,” Wasserman said. “And this is my friend Walter Wangermann.”
Wangermann offered his hand first to Niedermeyer and then to Cronley, both of whom politely said, “Wie geht es Ihnen?”
“I can’t decide if you’re a Berliner or a Viennese,” Wangermann said to Niedermeyer. “The boy is obviously a Strasbourger. He has a worse accent than my sister-in-law. And this one’s obviously an Englishman.”
“The boy”?
Fuck you!
Why is this guy so rude?
“Actually, I’m a Pole,” Zieliński said.
“And I’m a Texan, Herr Wangermann,” Cronley said. “My mother is from Strasbourg.”
“Well, at least she taught you to speak German. Most Amis can’t.”
There he
goes again!
Is he just naturally a rude sonofabitch?
Or does he have an agenda?
“A bit of each, actually, Herr Wangermann,” Niedermeyer said.
“Been traveling, have you? That suit didn’t come from either Berlin or here.”
And once more!
Is he trying to show us how clever he is?
Or to make the point that he can say anything he wants to us because he knows we want something from him?
“No, it didn’t,” Niedermeyer said coldly.
And now Otto is getting pissed off!
“And what brings you to Vienna, Captain Strasbourger?”
“I’m looking for former SS-Brigadeführer Franz von Dietelburg.”
“A lot of people are looking for that Hurensohn. Maybe if your people sent somebody a little older and more experienced looking for him—”
“Hurensohn, Jim,” Niedermeyer said, “is Viennese patois for ‘sonofabitch.’”
“Actually, ‘son of a whore’ is grammatically correct German.” Cronley’s mouth ran away with him. “But for all we know, that jämmerlich Missgeburt’s mother could be as pure as the driven snow.”
“Despicable monster?” Wangermann said. “I agree, but hearing that from you, Captain Strasbourger, is a little surprising.”
“Because I’m young? We Americans are quick learners, Herr Wiener Schnitzel.”
“I like him!” Wangermann exclaimed. “I’m very surprised, but I like him.”
“Jim is a very surprising fellow,” Wasserman said. “Jim, why don’t you show Chief Inspector Wangermann your credentials?”
Wangermann examined them carefully.
“Very impressive,” he said. “But what do they mean?”
“They mean when Jim comes to Vienna to see me and asks for something, I am under orders from General Greene to give him everything he asks for. And everything includes calling in all favors you owe to me.”
“Carl, you know how much I would love to see von Dietelburg hanging from a noose,” Wangermann said. “But I don’t have a clue where the bastard is.”
“Jim may have found him, Walter,” Wasserman said.
Death at Nuremberg Page 27