The Captains Read online

  “It would be our ass if we were caught,” Felter said. “You know that.”

  “I can really trust my man,” the bald man said. “Can you really trust yours?”

  Felter thought that over a moment.

  “Yes,” he said. “He reports that he’s had to break it off several times, for fear Neimayer would be too suspicious. I could put it to him that this would be a solution. They’d have to know each other.”

  “Deal?” the bald man asked. “They can take turns watching him?”

  “Deal,” Felter said.

  He wrote a name and a telephone number on a scrap of paper and handed it to the fat man. “He knows my handwriting. Have your man give him this.”

  “Dieter Stohl,” the bald man said, “is my man.”

  “Jesus,” Felter said. “I never would have guessed.”

  “Thank you,” the bald man said. “I thought you would have. Or are you attempting, again, to convince me how inept you are?”

  “Gunther…” Felter said, mockingly, holding his hands out before him in a gesture of helplessness.

  “You almost got away with it,” the bald man said. “As long as I have been in this business—and theoretically should know better—I constantly have to remind myself that you generally know three times as much as you want me to think you know.”

  “You overestimate me,” Felter said. “All I am, Gunther, is an American schlemiel playing spy.”

  “Sure, you are,” Gunther said and smiled. “And I am the Virgin Mary.”

  “If there’s nothing else, I have to get back,” Felter said. “Do I get a cab ride?”

  “There’s one other thing,” the bald man said. He laid a pinkish manila folder in Felter’s lap. Felter read it.

  “Oh, shit!” he said.

  It was an extract of criminal police records, from Kreis Marburg and Kreis Bad Nauheim, of Land Hesse. It detailed the arrest for soliciting for the purposes of prostitution, and for frequenting premises known to be used for prostitution, of Ilse von Greiffenberg, also known as Ilse Berg.

  “There’s no record of conviction for prostitution,” Felter said. “All this means is—”

  The bald man interrupted him: “That she was picked up for hanging around the Tannenburg Kaserne in Marburg and the officer’s hotel in Bad Nauheim, where she was trying to keep from starving. The countess had just killed herself. She was sixteen. I’m not condemning her, Sandy.”

  “Yes,” Felter said, “that’s all it means.” Then he looked at the stout German and met his eyes. “You owe me, Gunther,” he said. “I want this, every last goddamned copy of it, jerked from the files and burned.”

  “This is the next to the last copy of it,” Gunther said. He took it from Felter, walked to one of the cabinets along the wall, slid it open, and dropped it into the open mouth of a small gray machine. There was a whirring noise, and from the bottom of the machine, tiny chips of paper, no larger than a character on a typewriter, poured out in a stream into a paper bag with BURN printed in two-inch-high red letters on it.

  “‘The next to the last copy,’ is what you said,” Felter said.

  “You have it,” the bald man said.

  “I have it?”

  “The Americans. An application on behalf of the lady in question for accreditation as an authorized dependent was made.”

  “I made it,” Felter said. “Or I had it made. Her husband, who incidentally is my best friend—”

  “Then a very fortunate man,” Gunther interrupted him.

  “—is a reserve officer,” Felter went on, “who was recalled and shipped almost immediately to Korea.”

  “So I understand,” Gunther said. Felter looked at him in surprise.

  “How did you get involved?” he asked.

  “I must confess—and don’t be angry, Sandy—that I decided, from the way you got the count out of Germany, the rapidity with which he was given an entry visa to France, that you knew something about him that we didn’t.”

  “I explained that to you, Gunther,” Felter said. “He has high-placed friends. My involvement was personal, not in the line of business.”

  “So you told me. But you must admit that it is rather unusual for someone released from a Russian POW camp who crosses the East German border at four one afternoon, to be in a suite in the Hotel Continental in Paris at five thirty the next day.”

  “Do you also know what time I arrived?” Felter asked, dryly.

  “At eight twenty-five in the morning, the next day,” Gunther said.

  “I’m impressed,” Felter said. And then went on: “Ilse’s husband is a very wealthy, very powerful man, who generally gets what he wants, when he wants it. He wanted his wife reunited with her father in relaxing circumstances, and he was able to arrange that. That’s all there is to it. We’re not interested in the colonel, Gunther, really, we’re not.”

  “We are,” Gunther said.

  “Why? Will you tell me?”

  “He was about the only active participant in the von Klaussenberg bomb plot who wasn’t even suspected. A very clever man, Oberst Graf von Greiffenberg.”

  “Why are you interested?” Felter asked. He was surprised. He hadn’t known that von Greiffenberg had been in on the plot to blow up Hitler. Now that he heard he was and thought about it, he wasn’t surprised. But he was surprised that he didn’t know about it.

  “People like you and me and the count, my friend, are always in demand,” Gunther said.

  “I don’t think he’d be interested,” Felter said.

  “You can never tell, though, can you, until you ask? I don’t think he came home from five years in Siberia with a profound admiration for Marx, Lenin, or Peace Through Socialism.”

  “As you say,” Felter said, “you never can tell.”

  “Just as a precautionary measure, we flagged the count’s file,” the bald man said, “asking that we be notified of any activity. We have a reliable man in the Kreis office in Marburg an der Lahn. A devoted pensioner.”

  “And he’s the sonofabitch who dragged this out of the sewer?”

  “Your army, my friend,” the bald man said. “Your CID, Criminal Investigation Division, seems fascinated with prostitution and vice. They’re the ones who requested a records check on Frau von Greiffenberg-Lowell.”

  “And your sonofabitch self-righteously gave it to them.”

  “No, my sonofabitch found out about it, and sent me the copy we just shredded, and checked carefully to see that was all of it.”

  “Sorry,” Felter said. “I just…”

  “I think when the Graf gets his affairs in order, he’ll find that the man who has been so obliging to your CID has been helping himself to the Graf’s assets while the Graf was in Siberia. His motivation, apparently, was to keep the Graf from prosecuting and making public his daughter’s shameful past.”

  “Are we sure there’s only one copy left?”

  “There are no copies anywhere in German files,” the bald man said, flatly, so there could be no chance of misunderstanding him.

  “Now, I owe you one, Gunther,” Felter said. He reached over and picked up the .45 automatic and slipped it into the skeleton holster in the small of his back. He put his tunic on, and then his hat, and shook the bald man’s hand. “Thanks again, Gunther.”

  In English, the bald man said, “It’s always a pleasure doing business with you.” He wrapped an affectionate arm around Captain Felter’s shoulders, and walked with him through the two steel doors to the elevator.

  (Three)

  The Mercedes taxicab took Captain Felter to the former headquarters of the I. G. Farben chemical cartel, carefully spared from wartime bombing in order that it might serve as an American headquarters. A WAC sergeant at the visitor’s desk directed him to the Office of the European Command Provost Marshal General.

  From the relaxed attitude of the personnel in the provost marshal general’s outer office, he sensed the PMG was not in his office.

  “I’d like t
o see the provost marshal general, please,” Felter said to the Military Police Corps lieutenant colonel.

  “I don’t think you have an appointment, Captain,” the lieutenant colonel replied, almost gaily. “The PMG only makes appointments when he plans to be here.”

  Felter took a leather folder from his breast pocket and held it before the lieutenant colonel’s face.

  “Who is the most senior officer I can see?” he asked.

  “We don’t see very many of those around here,” said the lieutenant colonel. Unconscious that he was doing so, he stood up and nearly came to attention. “If you can tell me what you’re after, perhaps I could help you,” he said.

  Ten minutes later, a florid-faced man in uniform, but wearing the insignia of a Department of the Army civilian employee, carried a thick manila folder into the outer office of the provost marshal general.

  “Is this the entire file?” Felter asked. The florid-faced man looked to the lieutenant colonel for guidance. “I mean, is this all the notes, the drafts, leads, whatever?”

  “Answer the man,” the lieutenant colonel said. “He has reasons for asking.”

  “No, sir,” the florid-faced man said. “That’s not all. That’s as far as we got. I mean, we’re not finished.”

  “Get me the rest,” Felter said. “Everything. And if you prepare a receipt, Colonel, I’ll sign it.”

  “You’re taking the file with you?” the florid-faced man asked, surprised.

  “Yes, I am,” Felter said.

  “Colonel,” the florid-faced man said, “that’s a working file.” He looked at Felter. “You know what’s in it?”

  “Yes, I know what’s in it,” Felter said. “That’s why I came for it.”

  “Well, then, look. It’s not just one of those routine things where we don’t give this dame a clean bill and a PX card. The guy that married her’s an officer. We have to bring the CIC in on this. They’re going to want to see that file, too. To make their determination. In case he goes for a Top Secret clearance.”

  “And the CIC would bring it to our attention in good time,” Felter said. “The problem being that their good time would be far too late to do us any good.”

  “I see what you mean,” the lieutenant colonel said, solemnly.

  “Well, what do we do about not giving her a PX card?” the florid-faced man said.

  “If it would make things any easier for you, I’ll give you a memorandum—presuming you can have someone here type it up for me—”

  “Of course,” the lieutenant colonel said.

  “Stating that I have the file, and that there is nothing in it of a detrimental nature which would preclude the issuance of dependent credentials,” Felter went on.

  “And you’ll deal with the CIC?” the lieutenant colonel asked.

  “Yes, of course.”

  “But there is detrimental material,” the florid-faced man insisted.

  “No,” Felter said, slowly, carefully. “There is not.”

  “For Christ’s sake, Dannelly,” the lieutenant colonel said, “can’t you see there is more to this case than some fraulein peddling her ass before she got some stupid jackass to marry her?”

  Felter looked at Dannelly’s florid face and solemnly nodded his head.

  “I’ll go get the notes and stuff,” Dannelly said.

  Felter went directly from the Office of the Provost Marshal General to the basement of the Farben Building, to the Classified Documents Vault. They knew him there, but even though he was not seeking access to the vault itself, just to the general area, they first compared his signature and thumb print with the signature and thumb print on file.

  “We don’t see much of you guys,” the lieutenant colonel on duty said. “What can we do for you, Felter?”

  “I want to use your shredder,” Felter said, “and get rid of some stuff that’s overclassified.”

  “You need a witness to the destruction?”

  “No,” Felter said. “But I would like to witness the burning.”

  He walked to the shredder, a larger, noisier one than the shredder in the bald man’s office. He put a fresh burn bag under it, and fed the CID’s report on Lowell, Ilse Elizabeth (B. von Greiffenberg), German National (Dependent Wife of Captain LOWELL, Craig W. 0–495302 Armor, USAR) into the shredder. When it was shredded, he took the burn bag out behind the Farben Building and handed it to a burly uniformed MP who threw it into a raging fuel-oil incinerator.

  Then he walked over to the Frankfurt Military Post chapel and sat in the Buick and waited for Sharon and the others to come back from their tour of the rebuilt synagogue and the other cultural attractions of Frankfurt am Main.

  (Three)

  Sangju, South Korea

  11 September 1950

  The company clerk of Tank Company, 24th Infantry Regiment, 24th Infantry Division, walked into the Old Man’s office and laid two thin stacks of paper in front of him, the white original and the yellow carbon.

  “Here the sonofabitch is, sir,” he said.

  “Sit,” the company commander ordered. “I will read it. If there are no mistakes, strike-overs, or other manifestations of your gross incompetence as a company clerk, you may then have a beer, like the rest of those who are righteous and efficient in our assigned tasks.”

  The young, light-tan sergeant smiled at his huge company commander. The Old Man knew how much he hated being drafted to be company clerk.

  “You understand, of course,” the Old Man went on, “why you have to wait for your beer? If you can’t do it sober, what would it look like…”

  “That sonofabitch is perfect, sir,” the young tan sergeant said.

  The Old Man read it very carefully.

  MORNING REPORT TANK COMPANY 24TH INFANTRY REGIMENT 11 SEPT 1950

  ORGANIZATION RELIEVED VICINITY SANGJU KOREA AND PLACED IN EIGHTH ARMY RESERVE EFFECTIVE 0001 HOURS 11 SEPT 1950

  ABRAHAM, CHARLES W SGT RA 12379757 PREV REPORTED MIA CONFIRMED KIA 30AUG50

  FOLLOWING BREVET PROMOTION VERBAL ORDER COMMANDING GENERAL 24TH INFANTRY DIVISION CONFIRMED AND MADE MATTER OF RECORD:

  1ST LT PARKER, PHILIP S IV 0–230471 TO BE CAPT EFFECTIVE 10SEP50 THE EXIGENCIES OF THE SERVICE MAKING IT NECESSARY AND THERE BEING NO OTHER QUALIFIED OFFICER AVAILABLE, UNDER THE PROVISIONS OF AR 615–356

  FOLLOWING TWO BREVET PROMOTIONS VERBAL ORDER COMMANDING OFFICER 24TH INFANTRY REGIMENT CONFIRMED AND MADE MATTER OF RECORD:

  SFC WOODROW, AMOS J RA 36901989 TO BE 1ST SGT EFFECTIVE 29JUL50

  S/SGT SIDNEY, EDWARD B RA 16440102 TO BE M/SGT EFFECTIVE 29JUL50

  FOLLOWING FIFTY-THREE BREVET PROMOTIONS VERBAL ORDER COMMANDING OFFICER TANK COMPANY 24TH INFANTRY REGIMENT CONFIRMED AND MADE A MATTER OF RECORD SEE ATTACHMENT ONE HERETO

  FOLLOWING OFF ATTACHED AND JOINED FROM 8TH US ARMY REPLACEMENT COMPANY 11SEP50

  1ST LT STEVENS, CHARLES D 0–498566

  1ST LT DURBROC, CASPAR J 0–3490878

  1ST LT PORTERMAN, JAMES J 0–4017882

  2ND LT WITHERS, ALLAN F 0–4119782

  WOJG KENYON, ALGERNON D RW–39276

  FOLLOWING 102 EM ATTACHED AND JOINED FROM EIGHTH ARMY REPLACEMENT COMPANY 11SEP50 SEE ATTACHMENT TWO HERETO

  PHILIP SHERIDAN PARKER IV

  CAPTAIN, ARMOR

  COMMANDING

  The large black man looked at the small tan man.

  “I’m awed,” he said. “I am awed.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “But no beer,” Captain Parker said.

  “No beer?”

  Captain Parker reached into a duffle bag.

  “A literary type such as yourself deserves more than common beer,” he said. He handed him a bottle of scotch.

  “Ah, hell, I couldn’t take that, Captain. I know they only gave you three bottles.”

  “Don’t argue with me, Sergeant,” he replied. “I’m a captain now, you know.”

  As this exchange was taking place, the officers listed in the morning report were gathered in the
Operations Room of the S-3 section of the 24th Infantry Regiment.

  “I wanted to have a word with you gentlemen before your transport arrives,” the regimental commander said to Lieutenants Stevens, DuBroc, Porterman, and Withers.

  They were dressed identically in brand-new fatigue uniforms, still showing the creases from packaging. They also wore brand-new combat boots, and each carried a .45 Colt Model 1911A1 automatic pistol in a shoulder holster.

  “I’ll begin by saying that what I have to say to you is not to go any further than these walls.” The walls to which he referred were those of a stuccoed frame building, three stories high, which four months before had been the Pusan Normal School.

  “An officer, during his career, serves in many challenging assignments. There is no assignment more challenging, however, than service with colored troops. I can think of no test better designed to test the leadership qualifications of an officer. You may consider yourselves fortunate to have been given such an assignment, no matter what you may be thinking at the moment.

  “You may have heard certain rumors about the combat effectiveness of this regiment. Unfortunately, most of what you have heard, discounting the inevitable exaggeration as a story makes its way around, are true.

  “Some of our troops have run in the face of the enemy. Some of our troops have abandoned their positions and their equipment and given in to panic. There have been instances of outright cowardice. I will not deny there is a good deal of mud on the regiment’s colors.

  “Which brings us to the basic question, why? And the answer to that, gentlemen, not to mince words, is leadership. This regiment has been poorly led, from the platoon level to the command level. I am the fourth commander of this regiment since it was committed to this conflict, so the failures of leadership fall as heavily on senior officers as junior.

  “It is my intention, gentlemen, to restore the good name of this regiment. I regard my assignment here as a challenge, almost as a compliment to me. My superiors apparently feel that I am capable of leading this regiment in such a manner that what has happened so far will be ascribed by the historians to the confusion that is an inevitable by-product of turning a garrison duty unit into a combat unit.