by Allan Folsom
“I am glad to see you, McVey. Happy to see you well and joyful to hear you were coming,” Remmer said as he fishtailed a silver unmarked Mercedes off the meadowland and onto a dirt road. “Because I turned up a little information on your friends inside Interpol, Herren Klass and Halder. Not easy to get. Better to tell you in person than on the telephone—He’s okay, yes?” Remmer threw a glance over his shoulder at Osborn sitting in back with Noble.
“He’s okay, yes,” McVey said, with a wink at Osborn. There was no longer need to keep him in the dark about what else was going on.
“Herr Hugo Klass was born in Munich in 1937. After the war he went with his mother to Mexico City. Later they moved to Brazil. Rio de Janeiro, later São Paulo.” Remmer banged the Mercedes hard through a drainage ditch and accelerated onto a paved road. Ahead of them he sky was brightening, and with it came just a hint of the baroque Havelberg skyline.
“In 1958, he came back to Germany and joined the German Air Force and then the Bundesnachrichtendienst, West German Intelligence, where he developed a reputation as a fingerprint expert. Then he—”
Noble leaned over the front seat. “Went to work for Interpol at headquarters. Precisely what we got from MI6.”
“Very good.” Remmer smiled. “Now tell us the rest.”
“What rest? That’s all there is to tell.”
“No background information? No family history?”
Noble sat back. “Sorry, that’s all i have,” he said dryly.
“Don’t keep us guessing.” McVey put on his sunglasses as the rising sun filled the horizon.
In the distance, Osborn saw a gray Mercedes sedan pull out of a side road and turn onto the highway in the same direction they were going. It was moving slower than they were, but when they caught up to it, accelerated to speed and Remmer stayed directly behind it. A moment later he was aware the same kind of car had pulled in behind them and was holding there. Turning, he could see two men in the front seat. Then, for the first time, he noticed the submachine gun in a holder on the door at Remmer’s left elbow. The men in the cars in front and behind were obviously federal police. Remmer was taking no chances.
“Klass is not his birth name. It’s Haussmann. During the war his father, Erich Haussmann, was a member of the Schutzstaffel, the SS. Identification number 337795. He was also a member of the Sicherheitsdienst, the SD. The security service of the Nazi party.” Remmer followed the lead Mercedes south onto the Uberregionale Fern-verkehrsstrasse, the interregional through-route highway, and all three cars picked up speed.
“Two months before the war ended, Herr Haussmann vanished. Frau Bertha Haussmann then took her maiden name, Klass. Frau Haussmann was not a wealthy woman when she and her son left Germany for Mexico City in 1946. Yet she lived in a villa there with a cook and a maid and took them with her when she went to Brazil.”
“You think she was supported by expatriate Nazis after the war?” McVey asked.
“Maybe, but who’s to prove it? She was killed in a 1966 automobile accident outside Rio. I can tell you, however, Erich Haussmann visited her and her son on more than two dozen occasions while she lived in Brazil.”
“You said the old man vanished before the war ended.” Noble foble leaned forward again.
“And headed straight for South America, along with the father and older brother of Herr Rudolf Halder, your man in charge of Interpol, Vienna. The man who helped Klass so deftly reconstruct Albert Merriman’s fingerprint from the piece of glass found in the Paris apartment of the dead private investigator, Jean Packard.” Remmer took a pack of cigarettes from the dashboard, shook one out and lit it.
“Halder’s real name was Otto,” he said, exhaling. “His father and older brother were both in the SS and the SD, the same as Klass’ father. Halder and Klass are the same age, fifty-five. Their formative years were spent not just in Nazi Germany, but in the households of Nazi fanatics. .Their teen years were spent in South America, where they were educated, overseen and funded by expatriate Nazis.”
Noble looked at McVey. “You don’t think we’re looking at a neo-Nazi conspiracy—”
“Interesting idea, you add it all up. The killing of Merriman by a Stasi agent the day after he’s discovered alive by a man strategically positioned in a place where worldwide police inquiries come and go a hundred times a day. The hunting down of Merriman’s girlfriend and the killing of his wife and family in Marseilles. The shooting of Lebrun and his brother when they started looking into what Klass was doing in Lyon, pulling the Merriman file from the NYPD by using old Interpol codes most people don’t even know exist. Blowing up the train Osborn and I were on. The gunning down of Benny Grossman in his house in Queens after he collects and passes information to Noble about people Erwin Scholl allegedly had killed thirty years ago.
“You’re right, Ian. Put it all together and it sounds like the work of an espionage unit, a KGB kind of operation.” McVey turned to Remmer.
“What do you think, Manny? Does the Klass-Halder connection turn this into some kind of neo-Nazi thing?”
“What the hell do you mean, neo-Nazi?” Remmer snapped. “Head-busting, sieg-heiling, skinheads with potatoes in their pockets filled with nails? Assholes who beat up immigrants and burn them out of their camps and are TV news every night?” Remmer looked from McVey to Noble behind him and then to Osborn. He was angry.
“Merriman, Lebrun, the Paris-Meaux train, Benny Grossman, who, when I called him for where to stay when I took the kids to New York, said, ‘Stay at my house!’ You say KGB like I think we should be saying not neo-Nazi but neo-Nazi working with old Nazi! A continuum of the thing that murdered six fucking million Jews and destroyed Europe. Neo-Nazis are the nipple on the tit, they’re bullshit. For the moment, a nuisance. Nothing. It’s underneath where the sickness still lives, lying behind the blinking faces of bank clerks and cocktail waitresses without them even knowing it, like a seed waiting for the right time, the right mixture of elements to give it rebirth. You spend the time I have on the streets and in the back halls of Germany and you know it. Nobody will ever say it, but it’s there, like the wind.” Remmer glared at McVey, then-stamped out his cigarette and looked back to the road in front of him.
“Manny,” McVey said quietly. “I hear you talking your private war. Guilt and shame and everything else thrown at you by another generation. What happened was their doing, not yours, but you bought the ticket anyway. Maybe you had to. And I’m not arguing with you about what you’re saying. But, Manny, emotion is not fact.”
“You’re asking if I have firsthand information. The answer is no, I don’t.”
“What about the Bundeskriminalamt or Bundesnach christ and dice—or however the hell you pronounce the name for German Intelligence.”
Remmer looked back. “Has hard evidence been found of an organized pro-Nazi movement large enough to have influence?” . . .
“Has it?”
“Same answer. No. At least not that I or my superiors are aware of, because such things are discussed all the time between police agencies. It is government policy to Remain je wachsam. That means ever alert, ever vigilant.”
McVey studied him for a moment. “But personally, you say what? The mood is ripe—”
Remmer hesitated, then nodded. “It will never be spoken of. When it comes, you will never hear the word Nazi. But they will have the power just the same. I give it two, three years, five on the outside.”
On that pronouncement, the men in the car fell silent, and Osborn thought of what Vera had said about the resignation of Francois Christian and the new Europe. Her grandmother’s haunted memories of the Nazi occupation of France: people taken away for no reason and never seen again, neighbor spying on neighbor, family on family, and everywhere, men with guns. “I feel that same shadow now—” The sound of her voice was as clear as if she were there beside him, and the fear in it chilled him.
The cars slowed as they reached the outskirts of a small town and started through it. Looking
out, Osborn saw the early sun reaching across rooftops. Saw autumn leaves carpeting the village in bright red and gold. Schoolchildren waited on street corners, and an elderly couple walked along the sidewalk, the old woman leaning on a cane, her free arm tucked proudly into that of her husband. A traffic cop stood near an intersection arguing with a truck driver, and everywhere shopkeepers were setting out their goods.
It was hard to tell how big the town was. Two or three thousand maybe, if you counted the side streets and neighborhoods you couldn’t see but knew were there. How many more like it were waking throughout Germany this morning? Hundreds, thousands? Towns, villages, small cities; each with its people going about their daily lives somewhere on the arc from birth to death. Was it possible that any of them still secretly yearned for the sight of goose-stepping storm troopers in tight shirts and swastika armbands, or hungered for the sound of their polished jackboots ringing off every door and window in the Fatherland?
How could they? The terrible era was a half century past. The moral right and wrong of it were worn and everyday themes. Collective guilt and shame still weighed on generations born decades after it was over. The Third Reich and what it stood for was dead. Maybe the rest of the world wanted always to remember, but Germany, Osborn was certain as he looked around, wanted to forget. Remmer had to be wrong.
“I have another name for you,” Remmer said, breaking the silence. “The man who was instrumental in securing permanent positions for Klass and Halder within Interpol. Its current assignment director, a former officer in the Paris Prefecture of Police. I think you know him.”
“Cadoux? No. It can’t be! I’ve known him for years!” Noble was shocked.
“Yes, that’s right.” Remmer leaned back from the wheel and lit another cigarette. “Cadoux.”
87
* * *
AT 6:45 AM., Erwin Scholl stood at the window in the office of his top-floor suite in the Grand Hotel Berlin watching the morning sun come up over the city. A gray Angora cat was in his arms and he stroked it absently.
Behind him Von Holden was on the phone to Salettl in Anlegeplatz. Through the closed door to the outer office, he could hear his secretaries fielding a battery of international calls, none of which he was taking.
Outside, on the balcony, Viktor Shevchenko smoked a cigarette and looked out over what had been East Berlin, waiting for instructions. Shevchenko was thirty-two, with the tough, wiry build of a street brawler. He, like Bern-hard Oven, had been recruited from the Soviet Army and brought into the Stasi as an enforcer by Von Holden. Then, with reunification, he had moved over and joined the Organization as chief of the Berlin sector.
“Nein!” Von Holden said sharply, and Scholl turned around.
“No. Not necessary!” he said in German and shook his head.
Scholl turned back to the window, still stroking the cat. He’d heard the only words he’d needed at the beginning of Von Holden’s conversation: Elton Lybarger was resting comfortably and would arrive in Berlin tomorrow as scheduled.
In thirty-six hours, one hundred of Germany’s most influential citizens would have come from across the country and gather at Charlottenburg Palace to see him. At a little after nine, the doors to the private dining room would be opened, the room would hush and Lybarger would make his grand entrance. Resplendent in formal dress, no cane at his side, he would walk alone down the beribboned center aisle, wholly aloof from those who watched him. At room’s end, he would climb the half dozen stairs to the podium, and there, to a thunderous ovation, he would turn like a monarch to face them. Finally, he would raise his arms for silence and then would deliver the most important -and magnificent address of his life.
Hearing Von Holden sign off, Scholl came out of his reverie. Dropping the cat on an overstuffed chair, he sat down at his desk.
“Mr. Lybarger found the video by accident and showed it to Joanna,” Von Holden said. “This morning he has little or no memory of it. She, however, is still causing some trouble. Salettl will take care of it.”
“He wanted you to do it, to come there to smooth it over. That was the argument?”
“Yes, but it is not necessary.”
“Pascal, Dr. Salettl is correct. If the girl continues to be disturbed, it will carry over to Lybarger, which is something quite unacceptable. Salettl may assuage her but hardly to the extent you can. It’s the difference between thinking and feeling. Consider how much more difficult it is to change an emotion than a thought. Even if he changes her mind, she can simply change it back again and cause the kind of disruption we cannot have. But if she’s soothed and stroked, she will end up purring and content like the cat who now sleeps peacefully on the chair.”
“That may be so, Mr. Scholl, but right now my place is here in Berlin.” Von Holden looked at Scholl squarely. “You were concerned our system might not be as efficient as we thought. Well, it is and it isn’t. London sector has found the wounded French policeman, Lebrun, at Westminster Hospital in London. He’s protected around the clock by the London police. London sector working with Paris traced a phone call made in London by the American, Osborn, to a farmhouse outside Nancy. Vera Monneray is there, under the guard of the French Secret Service.” Scholl sat motionless, listening, his hands clasped on the desk in front of him.
“Osborn and McVey have been joined, by a Special Branch commander of the Metropolitan Police,” Von Holden continued. “His name is Noble. They came into Havelberg by private aircraft just before dawn and were picked up and driven off by a Bundeskriminalamt inspector named Remmer. They were escorted by two unmarked Bundeskriminalamt police cars. We have to assume they are coming here, to Berlin.”
Von Holden stood up and crossed to a sideboard where he filled a glass with mineral water. “Not the best of news but timely and factual just the same. The problem with it is that they have managed to get this far. That’s where our system is no longer working. Bernhard Oven should have shot them both in Paris. Instead, it was the American policeman who shot him. They should have been killed in the train explosion or by the Paris sector operatives who were with me in Meaux waiting for the list of survivors to make our move. It didn’t happen. Now they are coming here a day and a half before Mr. Lybarger is to be presented.”
Von Holden drained the glass and set it back on the sideboard. “It is a problem I cannot resolve if I am in Zurich.”
Scholl leaned back and studied Von Holden. As he did, the cat slid out of the chair where it had been sleeping, and with a feathery leap, jumped into his lap.
“If you leave now, Pascal, you will be back by evening.”
Von Holden stared at him as if he were crazy. “Mr. Scholl, these men are dangerous. Isn’t that clear?”
“Do you know why they are coming to Berlin, Pascal? I can, tell you why in two words: Albert Merriman. He told them about me.” Scholl effected a smile—the idea seemed to flatter him.
“When I first came to Palm Springs in the summer of 1946,I met a man who was then ninety. As a youth in the 1870s, he had been an Indian fighter. One of the many things he told me was that the Indian fighters always killed the young Indian boys whenever they found them. Because, he said, they knew that if they didn’t, one day the boys would grow up to be men.”
“Mr. Scholl, what’s the point of this?”
“The point, Pascal, is that I should have remembered that story when I first hired Albert Merriman.” Scholl’s long fingers stroked through the cat’s silky coat like delicate razors. “A short while ago I went back through my personal files. One of the people Herr Merriman took care of for me was a man who designed medical instruments. His name was Osborn. I have to believe it is his son who is with the policemen coming to Berlin.”
Pushing back from his desk, with the cat cradled in one arm, Scholl got up and walked to the door that opened onto the balcony. As he reached for the handle, Viktor Shevchenko opened it from the outside.
“Leave us,” Scholl said, stepping past him and into the sunshine.
/> To the outside world Erwin Scholl was an elegant, self-made man, alive with charisma. His own persona all but impenetrable, he had an almost mystical ability to see what motivated others. To presidents and statesmen, it was a gift beyond value because it provided critical insight into the most guarded ambitions of their adversaries. But to those he chose not to charm, he was cold and arrogant, choosing to manipulate through intimidation and fear. And the handful of people close to him—Von Holden among them—he made servile to the darkest side of his nature.
Scholl looked over his shoulder to see that Von Holden had come out onto the balcony and was standing behind him, and for a moment let his gaze fall to the traffic on Friedrichstrasse, eight stories below. He wondered why he. valued young men and at the same time distrusted them. Perhaps it was the reason he could never show himself to them sexually. In fewer years than he cared to count, he would be eighty, and his sexual desire was as strong as ever. Yet, the fact was, he had never in his life had unclothed sex with anyone, man or woman. His partner would disrobe, of course, but for him to do so would be unthinkable because it would involve a degree of trust and vulnerability it was utterly impossible for him to express. It was a truth that he had never been totally naked with another human being since he was a child. And the one child who had seen him that way he later bludgeoned to death with a hammer and hid the body in a cave, and that had been at the age of six.