by Allan Folsom
Taking a sip of iced tea, Osborn looked back out at the bay. In Paris it was seven in the morning. In an hour Vera would be on the train to Calais to meet her grandmother. Together they would take the Hoverspeed to Dover and from there the train to London. And at eleven the next morning they would fly out of Heathrow Airport on British Airways for Los Angeles. Vera had been to the United States once, with Francois Christian. Her grandmother had never been. What the old Frenchwoman would think of Christmas in Los Angeles he had no idea but there was no doubt she’d make her sentiments known. About tinsel and sunshine and about him, as well.
That Vera was coming was excitement enough. That she was bringing her grandmother gave it legitimacy. If she was going to stay and become a physician in the U.S., it meant, in essence, she would have to satisfy the strict requirements of the Educational Commission for Foreign Medical Graduates. For some things she might have to return to school, for others there would be a strict and tedious internship. It would be a grueling and difficult commitment in time and energy, one that she did not have to make because for all intents she was already a doctor in France. The trouble was he’d asked her to marry him. To come to California to live happily ever after.
Her answer to his proposal, given in his hospital room with a smile, was that—she’d “see.” Those were her words.
“I’ll see. . . .”
See what? he’d asked. If she wanted to marry him? Live in the U.S.? In California?—But all he could get out of her was the same “I’ll see. . . .” Then she’d kissed him and left Berlin for Paris.
The package Vera had brought him from McVey had been his passport, retrieved from the First Paris Prefecture of Police. With it had been a note, written in French and signed by Parisian detectives Barras and Maitrot, wishing him good luck and sincerely hoping that in the future he would do everything in his power to stay out of France. Then, a week to the day after he’d been brought down off the Jungfrau and flown to Berlin, two days after Vera had left for Paris, he’d been released from the hospital.
Remmer, in from Bad Godesberg, had driven him to the airport and brought him up to date. Noble, he learned, had been airlifted back to London and was in a burn rehabilitation center. It would be months and a number of skin graft operations before he could return to a normal life, if that would be possible at all. Remmer himself, broken wrist and all, was back at work full-time, assigned to the investigation of the events leading up to the Charlottenburg fire and the shootout at the Hotel Borggreve. Joanna Marsh, Lybarger’s American therapist, had been found at a Berlin hotel. Questioned extensively and released, she’d ? been escorted back to the U.S. by McVey. What had happened to her after that Remmer didn’t know. He assumed she’d gone home.
“Remmer—” Osborn remembered asking carefully as memories of the last night on the Jungfrau came back. “Do you know where she called the Swiss police from? Which station. Kleine Scheidegg or Jungfraujoch?”
Remmer turned from the wheel to look at him. “You’re talking about Vera Monneray.”
“Yes.”
“It wasn’t she who called the Swiss police.”
“What do you mean?” Osborn was startled.
“The call was made by another American. A woman. She was a tourist. . . . Connie something, I think. . . .”
Connie?”
“That’s right.”
“You’re saying Vera knew where I was out there? That she told them where to find me?”
“The dogs found you,” Remmer wrinkled his brow. “Why would you think it was Ms. Monneray?”
“She was at Jungfraujoch station when they brought me in . . . ,” Osborn said, uncertainly.
“So were a number of other people.”
Osborn looked off. Dogs. All right, let it go at that. Let his image of Vera standing on the trail just after Von Holden fell, an enormous bloody icicle in her hands, remain only that, an illusion. Part of his hallucinatory dreams. Nothing else.
“You’re really asking if she’s innocent. You want to believe she is, but you’re still not sure.”
Osborn looked back. “I am sure.”
“Well, you’re right. We found the printing equipment used to make Von Holden’s false BKA I.D. It was in the apartment of the mole the Organization had working as a supervisor in the jail, the one who released her in Von Holden’s custody. She did believe he was taking her to you. He knew too much for her to expect otherwise until just before the end.”
Osborn didn’t need the confirmation. If he hadn’t believed it on the mountain, he certainly had by the time Vera left Berlin for Paris.
“What about Joanna Marsh?” he asked. “Did she give any indication why Salettl sent us after her?”
Remmer was silent for a long moment, then shook his head. “Maybe one day we will find out, yes?” There was something about Remmer’s manner that suggested he knew more than he was telling. And he had to remember that no matter how much they’d been through together, Remmer was still police. Look what they had done to Vera even when they knew, probably within a few hours, maybe even right away, that she’d had nothing to do with the Organization and that she was not Avril Rocard. It was a frightening power to have because it was so easy to misuse.
“What about McVey?” Osborn said.
“I told you. He escorted Ms. Marsh back home.”
“He sent me my passport.”
“You couldn’t leave Germany without it.” Remmer smiled.
“He never talked to me. Even when he came to the hospital in Grindelwald, he never said a word.”
‘Bern.”
“What?”
‘You were brought to the hospital in Bern.”
Osborn’ expression went blank. “You’re sure?”
“Yes. We were with the Bern police when the call came in they’d found you up on the mountain.”
“You were in Bern? How—?”
“McVey had your track.” Remmer smiled. “You bought a Eurail pass in Bern. You paid for it with a credit card. McVey had an eye on all your accounts, just in case. When you used it it told him where you were and what time you’d been there.”
Osborn was astonished. “That can’t be legal.”
“You took his gun, his personal papers, his badge.” Remmer hardened. “You were not authorized to impersonate a police officer.”
“Where would Von Holden be now if I didn’t?” Osborn pushed back. Remmer said nothing. “What happens now?”
“It’s not for me to say. It’s not my case. It’s McVey’s.”
157
* * *
“IT’S NOT my case. It’s McVey’s.” A day hadn’t passed that Remmer’s words didn’t ring in Osborn’s ears. What was the penalty for doing what he had done? Not only had he taken a police officer’s gun and identification, he’d used them to cross an international border. He could be ried in L.A. and then extradited to Germany or Switzerland to face charges there. Maybe even France if Interpol wanted to get involved. Or maybe, God forbid, those would be secondary charges, incidentals. The real one would be the attempted murder of Albert Merriman. Hiding in Paris or not, Merriman had still been an American citizen. Those were things McVey would not forget.
By now it was almost Christmas and Osborn hadn’t heard so much as a word from him. Yet every time he saw a police car he jumped. He was driving himself crazy with guilt and fear, and he didn’t know what to do about it. He could call a lawyer and prepare a defense but that could make it worse if McVey felt he’d been through enough and decided to let it go at that. Purposely he stopped thinking about it and concentrated on his patients. Three nights a week he spent in physical therapy working his broken leg back to normal. It would be a month before he could get rid of the crutches and two more before he could walk without a limp. But he could live with it, thank you, considering what the alternative might have been.
And daily, time itself was beginning to heal the deeper things. A great deal of the mystery of his father’s death had been answered, thoug
h the real why and purpose still drifted. Von Holden’s answer—”Für Übermorgen, for the day after tomorrow”—if, in truth, that part of Osborn’s experience on the Jungfrau had been real and not an hallucination—seemed a meaningless abstract that told him nothing.
For his own sanity, for his future, for Vera, he had to put it, and Merriman and Von Holden and Scholl, in the past. Just as he had to let go of the tragic memory of his father, which, little by little, he was finding himself able to do.
Then, at five minutes to noon, on the day before Vera and her grandmother were to arrive, McVey called.
“I want to show you something. Can you come down?”
“Where—?”
“Headquarters. Parker Center.” McVey was matter-of-fact, as if they talked like this every day.
“—When?”
“An hour.”
Jesus Christ, what does he want? Sweat stood out on Osborn’s forehead. “I’ll be there,” he said. When he hung up, his hand was shaking.
The drive from Santa Monica to downtown took twenty-five minutes. It was hot and smoggy and the city skyline was nonexistent. That Osborn was scared to death didn’t help it any.
McVey met him as he came through the door. They said hello without shaking hands, then went up in an elevator with half a dozen others. Osborn leaned on his crutches arid looked at the floor. McVey had said nothing more than that he wanted to show him something.
“How’s the leg?” McVey said as the elevator doors opened and he led the way down a hallway. The burn on his face was healing well and he seemed rested. He even had a little color, as if he might have been playing some golf.
“Getting there. . . . You look good.” Osborn was trying to sound easy, friendly.
“I’m all right for an old guy.” McVey glanced at him without smiling, then led him through a ganglia of corridors peopled with faces that looked at once tired and confused and angry.
At the end of a hallway, McVey pushed through a door and into a room cut in half by a wire cage. Inside were two uniformed cops and shelf upon shelf of sealed evidence bags. McVey signed a sheet and was given a bag that held what looked like a video cassette. Then they crossed the corridor and went into an empty squad room. McVey closed the door and they were alone.
Osborn had no idea what McVey was doing, but what ever it was, he’d had enough. He wanted it out in the open and now.
“Why am I here?”
McVey walked over and closed the Venetian blinds. “You see the TV this morning? Vietnamese family, out in the valley.”
“Yeah, sort of . . . ,” Osborn said, vacantly. He’d seen something as he was shaving. An entire Vietnamese family in an upscale neighborhood in the San Fernando Valley had been found murdered. Parents, grandparents, children.
“It’s my case. I’m on my way to autopsy so let’s do this fast.” McVey opened the plastic bag and took out the video cassette. “There are only two copies in existence. This is the original. The other is with Remmer in Bad Godesberg. The FBI wants this one yesterday. I told them they could have it tomorrow. It’s why Salettl sent us after Joanna Marsh. He’d given her a present. It was a key to a box hidden inside a dog cage. A puppy Von Holden had given her in Switzerland and she’d had shipped to L.A. Inside the box was another key. To a safe deposit box in a Beverly Hills bank. The cassette was in the box.”
McVey popped the cassette into a VCR under the TV set.
“I don’t get it.” Osborn was completely thrown off.
“You will. But there are a couple of things you ought to know first. You said that when Von Holden fell off the Jungfrau and disappeared over the side you never saw him land.”
“It was pitch-black.”
“Well, he fell, or we think he fell, into what’s called a dark ice crevasse. A deep hole in the glacier. A Swiss mountain team went, down as far as they could but found no sign of him. That means he’s either still down there somewhere and will be for the next two thousand years or—he’s not. By that I mean we can’t say for certain he’s, dead.
“The second thing has to do with Lybarger’s fingerprints. Or the fingerprints of the man calling himself Lybarger. The man both Remmer and Schneider saw and, talked to a half hour before Charlottenburg went up in smoke.” McVey coughed, and when he did, he winced a little. His burn still bothered him. “BKA fingerprint experts matched Lybarger’s prints with those of Timothy Ashford, the decapitated housepainter from London.”
“Jesus God.” The hairs stood straight out from Osborn’s neck. “You were right. . . .”
“Yeah,” McVey nodded. “The trouble is Lybarger is now like everybody else who was in that room. Ashes. So all we have is an assumption that the head of one man was successfully joined to the body of another and that the creature lived. And walked and thought and talked as if he were as real as you and I. And with no visible scars as far as either Remmer or Schneider could tell. Or Joanna Marsh, either, for that matter. She told us that in a deposition yesterday morning. As his physical therapist, she spent a great deal of time with him and saw nothing that would indicate surgery of any kind had been done.”
“The symptoms of a man recovering from a stroke,” Osborn mused, “were caused not by a stroke at all, but by recovery from a phenomenal surgical procedure.” He looked up at McVey. “Is that what the tape is about?”
“What the tape is about is between you and me and the fencepost. If anybody says anything at all, it will come from Washington or Bad Godesberg.” McVey picked up a remote and handed it to Osborn. “This time, Doctor, nobody does anything on his own. Personal reasons or anything else. I hope you understand that because there are other things we can come back to. I’m sure you know what I mean.”
For a moment the two men stood facing each other in silence. Then McVey abruptly opened the door and walked out. Osborn watched him cross an outer office and push through a wooden gate. Then he was gone. Like that, he’d taken him off the hook and let him go.
158
* * *
OSBORN SAT for a long moment in silence, then raised the remote, pointed it toward the VCR in the cart under the TV and hit “play.” There was a click and a whirring sound, then the television screen flickered and an image appeared. The scene was a formal study with a straight-backed leather chair prominent in the foreground. A large desk was to the left with a wall of books to the right. A window, only partially visible behind the desk, provided most of the light. Several seconds passed and then Salettl walked in. He was wearing a dark blue suit and had his back to the camera. When he reached the chair, he turned and sat down.
“Please excuse this primitive introduction,” he said. “But I am alone and am operating the video camera myself.” Crossing his legs, he sat back and became more formal. “My name is Helmuth Salettl. I am a physician. My home is Salzburg, Austria, but I am, by birth, German. My age, as of this taping, is seventy-nine. When you view this, I will no longer be living.” Pausing, Salettl’s gaze into the camera sharpened. Seemingly to underscore the seriousness of what he had to say. The idea of his own death seemed to have no effect on him.
“What follows is a confession. To murder. To fanaticism. To invention. I hope you will excuse my English.
“In 1939 I was a young surgeon at Berlin University. Optimistic and perhaps arrogant, I was approached by a representative of the Reich chancellor and asked to become a member of an advisory council on advanced surgical practices. Later, as a member of the Nazi party and a group leader in the Schutzstaffel, the SS, I was promoted to the office of commissioner for public health. Some of this you may be aware of because it is public record. More detailed information can be found in the Federal Archives at Koblenz.”
Salettl paused and reached for a glass of water. Taking a sip, he put the glass down and turned back to the camera.
“In 1946,1 was put on trial at Nuremberg, charged with the crime of having prepared and carried out aggressive warfare. I was acquitted of those charges and soon after located to Austria, wher
e I practiced internal medicine until my retirement at age seventy. Or, so it appeared. In truth, I continued to be a minister of the Reich, even though it had officially ceased to exist.
“In 1938, under the direction of Martin Bormann, Hitler’s secretary, and later deputy Führer, a man who believed as Hitler believed that God will only help a nation that does not give up, set about doing just that—preserving the Third Reich. To that end he both created a program and a means to carry it out.
“It began with a costly, elaborate, and highly detailed socioeconomic and political projection of the future. Commissioning a wide range of experts who were told little or nothing about what they were working on or toward, Bormann was able, within two years, to make a highly speculative, yet, in hindsight, remarkably accurate forecast of the world situation from 1940 until the year 2000.
“Without going into detail, I will say, simply, that the work predicted the defeat of the Reich by the Allied armies, followed by the partition of Germany. The rise of the superpowers, the United States of America and the Soviet Union, and the inevitable ‘Cold War’ and arms race that ensued. The development of Japan as an economic might, powered by a worldwide demand for superior automobiles and advanced technology. Included in this were four extremely important elements that would take place over nearly five decades: the ascent from the ashes of war of a West Germany that would become an industrial and economic bulwark with perhaps the most solid economy in the Western Hemisphere; a realized necessity of economic cooperation between the European states; the reunification of Germany, and lastly, that the arms race would bankrupt the Soviet Union and cause not only it, but the entire Soviet Bloc built in its wake, to crumble. In those studied assumptions, vastly oversimplified here, the seeds for the secret preservation of the Third Reich were sown.