Curtain of Death Read online

  “Mon Commandant,” Winters said, “I’m willing to take your word that the Church was involved in this, but I don’t understand why they would be.”

  “A variety of reasons, starting with, I suggest, what my mother was always saying about the first responsibility of the Church being its self-preservation. The most dangerous enemy of the Church was—is—the Soviet Union. The Nazis had fought the Communists. What’s that line in the Bible about enemies?”

  “It’s in Exodus,” Cronley said, and then quoted: “‘I will be an enemy to your enemies, and I will oppose those who oppose you.’”

  “Again, you surprise me, Jim,” Fortin said. “I would never have guessed you were a biblical scholar.”

  “When I was a choir boy at Saint Thomas, I used to read the Bible during the sermons to keep me awake. That line stuck in my mind.”

  “Philosophy aside,” Fortin went on, “there was—is—a great deal of money involved. I probably should say ‘treasure.’ The Church wanted to get its money—and to be fair, its holy relics, including those few not encased in solid gold—out of the areas it knew the Soviets would now control, especially in Hungary and elsewhere in Eastern Europe, before the Reds got their hands on any of it.

  “Anyway, that’s how it got started. When Germany surrendered, the worst of the Nazis—those who went into hiding to avoid being hung—took the Spider over from what few businessmen were still left in Germany. It became Odessa.”

  “But the Church is still involved?” Winters asked.

  “There is absolutely no question that it is involved. What is not clear is how deeply. That is one of the things I intend to find out.”

  “Can I ask how?” Winters said. “I mean, isn’t the CIC already doing that?”

  “I am told that they are, but with little success that I’m aware of,” Fortin replied, then looked at Cronley. “Jim?”

  “According to General Greene, they haven’t been at all successful,” Cronley said. “We know some names—that’s another list you should compare with yours—but we can’t find them. Which Greene attributes to their having lots of dollars.”

  “Dollars are still even more valuable in the current economy than Nescafé, cigarettes, and canned hams,” Fortin said. “Which brings us back to that. The last time Jim was here, Thomas, we were agreed that since infiltrating Odessa at the top was just about impossible—they don’t trust anyone they don’t know—the only way to do that is from the bottom.”

  “I don’t understand,” Winters said.

  “Luther Stauffer, we believe, thinks his cousin Jim is a pleasant, none-too-bright second lieutenant of the Quartermaster Corps, one who unknowingly controls a means to transport things—and things would include people—all over Occupied Germany, Austria, and this part of France without raising suspicion as he and his team renovate mess hall equipment.”

  “Clever,” Winters said.

  “I’m tempted to say ‘thank you,’” Cronley said, “but the truth is that it wasn’t planned. It just happened. Dumb luck. We were wearing that Quartermaster disguise to get us into Vienna without attracting the attention of the NKGB, not to fool my cousin Luther.”

  “Nevertheless, the situation exists,” Fortin said, “offering us a chance to, at the very least, track somebody being moved through Odessa, to see where he goes, and maybe even where he came from.”

  “What we talked about doing, Tom,” Cronley said, “is sending Sergeant Finney and some of Tiny’s Troopers back here to drop off more PX goodies from my mother, while he’s en route to Salzburg and then Vienna . . .”

  He paused, smiled, chuckled, and added: “We could put a couple of those refrigerators that won’t run on 220 volts in the ambulance. Who but the Quartermaster Corps would have new refrigerators that don’t work?”

  Winters chuckled.

  Fortin said, “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “Jean-Paul, I just happen to have a trailer-load of brand-new 110-volt refrigerators,” Cronley said, and told him why. “Would you like one?”

  “Oh, yes! Actually, I could use two. One to replace the one in my house, which is ancient, and another for Sergent Deladier.”

  Winters thought: He has to be kidding!

  “Then two you shall have,” Cronley said. “Any preference in color? How about pastel yellow?”

  “But,” Fortin said, “I would have to send for them . . .”

  I’ll be a sonofabitch, he’s not kidding! He wants the refrigerators!

  “. . . and questions would be asked if you unloaded them from your ambulance at the home of the chief of DST. I know Odessa is watching me, and I suspect so is the NKGB. Would two of them fit in a jeep trailer?”

  “I think so,” Cronley said.

  “We could have Jack take a couple of them to the Engineer Depot,” Winters said. “And the commandant’s people could pick them up there instead of from the Compound.”

  “Perhaps we could get the photographic supplies the same way,” Fortin said. “That way there would be only one supply mission.”

  “Lieutenant Winters will set it up, Mon Commandant,” Cronley said.

  “And Jack probably has 220-to-110 transformers,” Winters said.

  “Who is this Jack?” Fortin said. “Is he going to ask questions?”

  “Lieutenant Colonel Jack Bristol, who happens to be Lieutenant Winters’s wife’s cousin, is the Corps of Engineers officer charged with setting up and maintaining the Pullach Compound,” Cronley said. “He’s both in the loop and knows how to keep his mouth shut.”

  “Sergent Deladier,” Fortin said. “Two things.”

  “Oui, Mon Commandant?”

  “First, arrange a jeep with a trailer attached for Capitaine DuPres to drive first thing in the morning to Munich—where in Munich, Jim?”

  “The Engineer Depot.”

  “The Engineer Depot, to pick up our refrigerators and photographic supplies.”

  “Oui, Mon Commandant.”

  “And now, before DuPres shows up here with the Leica-ed Odessa material, load two cases of the Crémant d’Alsace into our car, so that our friends here can take them, as a gesture of our appreciation, with them in their airplane.”

  “Oui, Mon Commandant.”

  “There’s no way we can get two cases of champagne into an L-4,” Cronley said.

  “One case?”

  “One case’ll fit,” Winters said.

  “Then we’ll put one case in your airplane, and the second in Capitaine DuPres’s jeep,” Fortin said.

  As if on cue, the heavy curtain separating the alcove from the rest of the basement restaurant was suddenly pushed aside by a man so strange-looking that Cronley started to reach for his pistol.

  He was very tall, had a very dark complexion, large dark eyes, and was wearing a turban and what looked like a bathrobe. A Thompson submachine gun hung from his shoulder. Two stick magazines for the Thompson and a knife almost large enough to be called a sword were jammed behind his wide leather belt.

  Cronley relaxed when a second man came into the alcove.

  This one was a very short, very thin French Army officer, who, like Fortin, wore U.S. Army ODs with the insignia of his rank—in this case, the triple stripes of a capitaine—on shoulder boards.

  The capitaine marched up to Fortin, saluted crisply, and when it was returned, laid Cronley’s briefcase on the table.

  “Gentlemen, may I present Capitaine DuPres?” Fortin said.

  Captain DuPres exchanged salutes with Cronley and Winters separately before shaking their hands.

  “Capitaine DuPres is another of us who I think you should trust,” Fortin said. “In support of that argument, he ran off from Strasbourg in 1941 at age seventeen to join first the Underground, and then the Free French in Morocco. During the war, the Milice rounded up the Jews in Strasbourg
, DuPres’s entire family among them, and shipped them off to the ovens in Germany.”

  Without thinking about it, Cronley did the math.

  I’ll be damned.

  I am not the only twenty-two-year-old captain in the world!

  “May I ask who this fellow is?” Winters asked, nodding at the turbaned man.

  “When DuPres managed to get himself out of France,” Fortin went on, “he was given a commission as a sous-lieutenant and assigned to the 2nd Moroccan Tabors—these are mostly, as is Sergent-chef Ibn Tufail, Berbers from the Atlas Mountains. As the Goumiers were approaching Strasbourg—”

  “Tabors? Goumiers?” Winters interrupted.

  “Tabors are regiments, essentially, of Moroccan native troops, who are known as Goumiers. If I may continue?”

  “Sorry, sir. You told me I might ask questions.”

  “If you’re going to be in this business, Thomas, you’re going to have to learn not to take anything anyone tells you at face value.”

  Jesus, there he goes again with that Cronley-like sarcasm.

  “I’ll make a note of that, Mon Commandant,” Winters said.

  “To resume,” Fortin said, “as the Goumiers were working their way toward Alsace, DuPres came to my attention.”

  “How?” Cronley asked.

  “I was about to explain that before you interrupted me.”

  “Pray continue, Mon Commandant.”

  “DuPres—by then Capitaine DuPres—was having remarkable success in the interrogation of German officers. This came to my attention—”

  Cronley broke in: “As you were rolling across France with Leclerc’s 2nd Armored Division in the turret of your Sherman tank, right? Shouting, ‘Allons, mes enfants, allons au Rhin’?”

  Winters made the translation without thinking about it.

  Cronley just stuck it to him.

  There’s no way a major riding in a tank in Northern France shouting, “Come on, my children, on to the Rhine!” would know anything about a Goumier captain in southern France saying anything, much less about his skill at interrogation.

  Unless of course the major was something other than an armored major—say, a colonel in intelligence.

  “I thought you didn’t speak French,” Fortin said.

  “If you’re going to be in this business, Jean-Paul, you’re going to have to learn not to take anything anyone tells you at face value.”

  It was too much for Winters to contain. He laughed. And then DuPres did.

  “Actually, at the time I had been given certain other duties by General de Gaulle,” Fortin confessed.

  “I wouldn’t think of asking what those might have been,” Cronley said.

  “When I met Capitaine DuPres, he explained to me his interrogation technique,” Fortin said. “When he had captured, for example, an oberst, he would put him in a cell, where he would announce that he was a Jew and then order Herr Oberst to strip himself naked. He would then leave him alone for an hour or so to consider his plight. Then he would send Sergent-chef Ibn Tufail, whom he had taught to speak passable German, into the cell. Tufail would then smile at Herr Oberst in an intimate way and ask if the Herr Oberst was familiar with how friendly Lawrence of Arabia had become with his Turkish captors when he was in their custody.”

  Am I supposed to believe this? Winters wondered, and then realized, God, it’s probably true!

  “Whereupon Herr Oberst would do one of two things. He would either turn onto his stomach and spread his cheeks, or he would ask Sergent-chef Ibn Tufail if there was anything, anything at all, he’d like to know.”

  “Except for the Lawrence of Arabia business, that was clever,” Cronley said. “Once someone told me that there are almost no Negroes in Russia, I’ve been using my deputy to help in the interrogation of the NKGB people we’ve bagged. Captain Chauncey Dunwiddie is six feet five or six, weighs nearly three hundred pounds, is built like a Sherman tank, and is, literally, as black as coal.”

  And Cronley’s not kidding, either!

  Either about Dunwiddie’s size or using black people to intimidate the Russians.

  The NKGB officer I saw at the monastery was visibly afraid that Tiny’s Troopers were planning to boil him in a pot and have him for supper.

  “I shall look forward to meeting the captain,” Fortin said. “If I may continue?”

  “Pardon the interruption, Mon Colonel . . . excuse me . . . Mon Commandant.”

  “Shortly after I met Capitaine DuPres, higher authorities decided he would be of more value attached to General de Gaulle’s headquarters than he would be serving with the Goumiers. And so would Sergent-chef Ibn Tufail.”

  “You mean working for you,” Cronley said.

  “Refuting the common belief that higher headquarters are usually wrong, both Capitaine DuPres and Sergent-chef Ibn Tufail have proved themselves quite valuable to the DST.”

  “I was thinking,” Winters said, “that it would probably be very useful for Capitaine DuPres and Sergent-chef Tufail to meet Captain Dunwiddie and Sergeant Tedworth.”

  “Great minds walk similar paths,” Cronley said. “That can happen tomorrow. But right now, we have to get going. There’s no runway lighting at the Compound, and as you may have noticed, it gets dark early this time of year. Did you say something, Mon Colonel, about a case of champagne?”

  “That was before you started calling me ‘colonel,’” Fortin said. “But we Alsatians are well known for our compassion toward foolish Americans who say foolish things, so you may have the Crémant d’Alsace.”

  [ FIVE ]

  The South German Industrial Development Organization Compound

  Pullach, Bavaria

  American Zone of Occupation, Germany

  1705 25 January 1946

  “That was cutting it pretty close,” Tom Winters said to Cronley, when Cronley had shut down the L-4’s engine.

  “I’ve always found it exciting to land in the dark,” Cronley said, then turning serious, went on: “I was tempted to play it safe and go into Schleissheim, but I hate to land there.” He paused, and added in a mock thick German accent, “I think the NKGB is watching.”

  “What would they have seen?”

  “You and me and the tail number of this aircraft. If they were watching Strasbourg, they saw us take off. But where did we go? Since they can’t get close enough—especially when it’s getting dark—to the Compound strip to read the tail number, they don’t know we landed here. They can guess, but they don’t know, and the less they know about anything the better.”

  “It’s that bad?”

  “Write it on your forehead.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “To coin a phrase, ‘All’s well that ends well.’ We got in here all right, Tom—and with a case of champagne.”

  —

  Claudette Colbert pulled up in a Ford staff car just as they had finished taking the case of Crémant d’Alsace from the plane.

  “Welcome home,” she said. “How’d everything go?”

  “Very well. Where’s Freddy?”

  “He went into the office. You need him?”

  “I can tell him what and why when we get there.”

  Winters said: “Did my wife find quarters to her satisfaction?”

  “She did and she’s already moved into them. She and Mrs. Moriarty. They’re right next to each other.”

  —

  At the refurbished cottage that was now the quarters of Lieutenant and Mrs. Thomas Winters, the case of Crémant d’Alsace was divided. The Winterses got two bottles, both of which were promptly chilled and then consumed by Lieutenant Colonel and Mrs. Jack Bristol, the Moriartys, the Winterses, Miss Colbert, and Captain Cronley to “wet down” the Winterses’ new quarters.

  Two bottles went to Lieutenant and Mrs. Moriarty, who promised to save them for th
e wet-down supper she would have for her new quarters just as soon as she could, and to which she hoped her new friend Claudette would come. “With anyone Dette wishes to bring with her,” she said.

  When Cronley and Claudette left, he took the remaining two bottles with him.

  Cronley walked toward the driver’s door of the staff car.

  Dette said, “It would look better if I drove.”

  Cronley went and got in the front passenger seat.

  “Look better to whom?” he then asked.

  “Think about it,” she said as she started to drive off.

  Three minutes later, as they waited in line to be passed through the checkpoint in the center fence, she said, “Them,” and nodded toward the Pole and soldiers who were examining the identity cards of the people in the car ahead of them.

  Cronley didn’t reply.

  “What do you think they see?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” he said sarcastically, “maybe the commanding officer being driven somewhere by his administrative officer?”

  “Right. And if you were driving?”

  He didn’t reply immediately as it became their turn to have their identities checked.

  As they began rolling toward the next checkpoint, he said: “‘There goes the CO again. He likes to drive himself.’”

  “Or maybe,” Dette said, “‘There goes the CO again with that blond, quote, administrative officer, unquote, he’s probably screwing.’”

  Cronley couldn’t reply as they were now at the final checkpoint.

  As they moved away from the outer checkpoint, Cronley asked, “Why would they think that?”

  “That’s what Freddy thinks.”

  “What makes you think Freddy suspects anything?”

  “From the look on his face when I told him I was going to stick around to see if you were going to make it back from Strasbourg.”