Death at Nuremberg Read online

  “What else can I do for you, Super Spook?”

  “I’ve got to find a place for my people to live. Ultimately, there will be about thirty of them, mostly Poles.”

  “Go see the Nuremberg Military Post liaison officer. Colonel Steve Anderson. Pretty good guy for a quartermaster officer. Make sure he knows you’re on Cohen’s shit list. That’ll give you something in common.”

  “Thank you.”

  The door to the office opened and Master Sergeant Fuller put his head in.

  “Colonel, there’s another CIC guy out here, says he has to see this one right away.”

  Rasberry waved a hand as a signal to bring him in.

  Augie Ziegler came through the door.

  “Colonel Rasberry, this is my executive officer, Mr. Ziegler.”

  “How about a cup of coffee, Mr. Ziegler?”

  “Thank you, but no, sir.”

  “What’s up, Augie?” Cronley asked.

  Ziegler’s face showed that he was reluctant to talk in front of Colonel Rasberry.

  “He’s one of the good guys, Augie.”

  “Ziegler sounds more German than Polish,” Rasberry observed.

  “He’s a Pennsylvania Dutchman. Out with it, Augie.”

  “Right after you left, an ASA team showed up. They’d been driving all night.”

  “And?”

  “They installed a SIGABA. I had to flash the DCI credentials to the manager, Major Levin, to get him to allow putting the antenna on the roof. I had no choice, Jim.”

  “What’s a SIGABA?” Rasberry asked.

  “Your dirty little secret was going to come out anyway, Augie. So what’s the rush with the SIGABA?”

  “Which is a what?” Rasberry pursued.

  “A fancy radio they give to us Super Spooks,” Cronley answered.

  “As soon as it was up, Colonel Wallace was on it. He wants to talk to you immediately.”

  “About what?”

  “He didn’t say. What he said was find you and get you on the horn right goddamn now.”

  “Colonel, duty calls,” Cronley said.

  “That happens,” Rasberry said. “Two things, Super Spook. I’ll call Steve Anderson and tell him you’re coming and why. And I have just appointed you and your Pennsylvania Dutchman honorary members of the Blue Spade O Club. It’s next door. If you would like to buy me a drink, I am usually there every day from 1700 to 1800 and sometimes a little longer.”

  “We’ll be there, Colonel. Thank you, sir.”

  [THREE]

  The Duchess Suite

  Farber Palast

  Stein, near Nuremberg

  American Zone of Occupation, Germany

  1525 21 February 1946

  “There’s sort of a closet, Jim. They put it in there,” Ziegler said, as he walked across the room and opened a door.

  The SIGABA control board and telephone had been installed on a mirror vanity table that looked like it belonged in a museum.

  Cronley sat down on a fragile-looking matching chair, picked up the handset, and switched the device on.

  “ASA Fulda. The line is secure.”

  “J. D. Cronley Six Three One for Colonel Wallace.”

  “Hold One.”

  “Wallace.”

  “J. D. Cronley is on, sir. The line is secure.”

  “Where the hell have you been?”

  “Touring scenic Nuremberg. What’s going on, Colonel? I’m now allowed to call you ‘Colonel,’ right?”

  “Spare me your fucking wiseass wit. What’s going on is that sometime around 0300, person or persons unknown murdered Lieutenant Moriarty.”

  “Bonehead was murdered?”

  “In your bed, or what used to be your bed, in the Compound. Seven—they’re still counting—shots from a silenced Colt Woodmaster .22.”

  “Jesus Christ!”

  “Yeah. I’m sorry, Jim. But I thought you’d want to know.”

  “Winters is on his way to pick me up, right? When does he get here? Why isn’t he already here, for Christ’s sake?”

  “Because you have been ordered, by the President of the United States, to set up protection for Justice Jackson, and that’s the priority.”

  “I did that yesterday. At least two of Ostrowski’s people are sitting on him.”

  “There’s no reason for you to come here, Jim.”

  “Bullshit! Bonehead and I go back to A&M. I recruited him for DCI. Put Winters in a Storch and tell him to come get me.”

  “Winters is consoling the widow. And to repeat, there’s no reason for you to come here.”

  “Then put Kurt Schröder in a Storch.”

  “For the third or maybe fourth time, there’s no reason for you to come here.”

  “I’m coming. If you won’t, for some bullshit reason, send Schröder to get me, I’ll drive up there in Mattingly’s fucking Horch!”

  There was a long period of silence. Finally Wallace said, “I’ll call when Schröder gets off the ground.”

  [FOUR]

  Office of the Military Government Liaison Officer

  The South German Industrial Development Organization Compound

  Pullach, Bavaria

  American Zone of Occupation, Germany

  1805 21 February 1946

  Colonel Harold Wallace was sitting behind the desk that had been Cronley’s, when Cronley and Ziegler walked in. Captain “Tiny” Dunwiddie and Claudette Colbert sat on chairs facing it. Dunwiddie was wearing his captain’s insignia, and Colbert was wearing the triangles of a civilian employee of the Army.

  “Please don’t tell me you left Ostrowski in charge of guarding Jackson,” Wallace greeted them.

  “Ostrowski was playing chess with Justice Jackson when I called Jackson to tell him I was coming here.”

  “You’re supposed to be guarding Jackson,” Wallace said.

  Cronley was about to reply when the door opened and former Generalmajor Reinhard Gehlen, former Oberst Ludwig Mannberg, and former Major Konrad Bischoff came into the building.

  “We heard the Storch come in,” Gehlen said. “Jim, I’m very sorry about your friend.”

  “Thank you. Colonel Wallace was just about to tell me about it.”

  “And I will, just as soon as you tell me why you brought Ziegler with you. Which means Justice Jackson is now being guarded by a Polish displaced person. I don’t think that’s what the President had in mind when he ordered you to Nuremberg.”

  “Max Ostrowski is a DCI special agent, and I think he makes a better bodyguard than either me or Augie Ziegler. The President ordered me there because he trusts my judgment. I decided that I could leave Jackson in Ostrowski’s capable hands. Okay?”

  “Not okay. But there doesn’t seem to be much I can do about it, does there? You did it, it’s done.”

  Cronley didn’t reply.

  “What did you tell Jackson about your coming here?”

  “I told him that Moriarty, a good friend, had been murdered in the Compound, and that I was coming here to help find the bastards that did it.”

  “Jesus Christ, weren’t you thinking? That’s going to scare the shit out of him, and I don’t even want to think about what’s going to happen when he tells the President, which he damned sure will.”

  “What I think will happen is Jackson will now do what Max tells him to do. That, and as far as the President is concerned, I think he’ll see it as proof he did the right thing by sending me to Nuremberg.”

  “At the risk of further inflaming your temper,” Mannberg said to Wallace, “I think Jim has made his point.”

  “Let me get this off my chest before I forget it,” Cronley said. “I made my manners to Colonel Mortimer Cohen, who has the Tribunal CIC detachment—”

  “And?” Wallace demanded i
mpatiently.

  “Two things. First, he was upset when I told him I was taking over Justice Jackson’s security—”

  “Which I’m sure you did with your legendary tact,” Wallace said.

  “So he called General Greene—”

  “Who is on his way here and should be walking through the door at any moment,” Wallace said. “And?”

  “General Greene told him I had the authority to do so. Which pissed him off. And during the course of our chat, he let me know that he was a friend of Colonel and Mrs. Schumann and had been wondering if perhaps General Gehlen had something to do with that exploding water heater. And with Major Derwin’s falling under the train.”

  “Oh, Jesus!” Wallace said. “So what—I’m afraid to ask this—what did you say, Loose Cannon, when he told you this?”

  “I told him that both General Greene and General Schwarzkopf had personally investigated the water heater explosion and found nothing to suggest it wasn’t an accident. I don’t think he believes that.”

  Cronley glanced at Gehlen and Mannberg. Neither’s face showed anything.

  “And Derwin’s accident?”

  “We didn’t get into that, but I told you, he doesn’t think that was an accident, either.”

  “Why didn’t you get into it?”

  “Because I had pissed him off even further when I told him he didn’t have the Need to Know what really goes on here in the Compound. At that point, he made it clear our little chat was over.”

  Cronley had, without warning, an epiphany.

  Jesus, my mouth just ran away again!

  By telling Wallace, in front of Gehlen and Mannberg, that Cohen doesn’t believe that “an accident, nothing suspicious” bullshit, have I just as much as signed Cohen’s death warrant?

  If they took out the Schumanns and Derwin because they posed a threat to Operation Ost, why not one more guy they think poses a threat?

  “And at that point, Loose Cannon, did it enter your mind that getting into it with Colonel Cohen might cause a little problem or two for you while you’re doing what you were sent to Nuremberg to do?”

  “Actually, that did pass fleetingly through my mind.”

  “What I should do is relieve you!”

  “I think you’d have to explain why you did to Admiral Souers and maybe even the President. You sure you want to do that, Colonel?”

  “Gentlemen,” General Gehlen said softly, “may I suggest that before this gets out of hand, we discuss what’s happened to Lieutenant Moriarty?”

  Wallace, his face flushed, looked between Gehlen and Cronley.

  “I told Justice Jackson that I would tell him what happened,” Cronley said.

  Wallace took a deep breath and then exhaled between pursed lips.

  The door opened again and General Greene came into the room, followed by Major General Norman Schwarzkopf, the USFET provost marshal.

  “We’re late,” Greene said. “Sorry. The autobahn was icy. How much have we missed?”

  “We haven’t even started,” Wallace said. “Captain—excuse me, DCI Special Agent—Cronley was just telling us about his meeting with Colonel Cohen.”

  “I heard about that,” Greene said. “Morty Cohen is a good man, but sometimes he gets carried away. I made it clear to him, I think, that Cronley has the authority to do whatever he thinks he has to do. I don’t think there will be any more problems between them.”

  “Harold, I’m having some problems with you taking this thing out of my hands,” Schwarzkopf said.

  “General, I very much appreciate your cooperation. When you hear what went down, I think you’ll understand that what happened has to be kept under wraps.”

  Schwarzkopf nodded.

  “So, taking it from the top,” Wallace began, “Lieutenant Moriarty, who commanded the American troops who guard the Compound and Kloster Grünau and supervised the Poles—the Provisional Security Organization—elected last night to fill in for the PSO officer who was duty officer and had fallen ill. He did this routinely.

  “The PSO duty officer and the NCOIC of the Americans do their thing in here, which also serves to keep an eye on the SIGABA machine. Last night the American was Staff Sergeant Henry J. Phillips, a very good soldier who had been one of Tiny’s Troopers since the Battle of the Bulge.

  “Sergeant Phillips told me that after they inspected the guard at 0200, he suggested to Lieutenant Moriarty that since Cronley was no longer living in there”—Wallace pointed to what had been Cronley’s bedroom—“he could ‘crap out there while he minded the store.’ Moriarty at first rejected the suggestion, but then he changed his mind.

  “He told Sergeant Phillips that he had been up most of the previous night with his newborn son, who suffers from colic. Moriarty went into the bedroom to lie down on what had been Cronley’s bed. He ordered Phillips to wake him for the 0300 tour of the Compound.

  “Phillips did not do so. He said he felt sorry for Lieutenant Moriarty, who looked ‘really asleep on his feet.’ It has been protocol to have two people in the tour jeep since then Technical Sergeant Tedworth—now First Sergeant Tedworth—making a tour alone at Kloster Grünau nearly lost his life when persons we now believe to have been NKGB agents ambushed him. They had him on the ground with a garrote around his neck when a PSO officer—now DCI Special Agent Ostrowski—happened on the scene and disposed of all three.

  “So, to make the tour, Sergeant Phillips called the Pole barracks and had them send him a PSO sergeant—the equivalent thereof—and they made the tour. Phillips kept the PSO man after the tour, and together they made the 0400 and 0500 jeep tours of the Compound.

  “At approximately 0550, Phillips went to the bedroom to wake Lieutenant Moriarty. He found him lying on the bed, his bloody head on the pillow. Phillips went to the body and made the immediate judgment that Lieutenant Moriarty had been shot, twice, in the head, with a small-caliber weapon.

  “Phillips immediately called Captain Dunwiddie at the Vier Jahreszeiten. Dunwiddie called me. I then called Sergeant Phillips and told him to secure the area, and not, not, to call the military police until I came to the Compound.

  “On our arrival at the Compound, Sergeant Phillips told me that a search of the Compound perimeter had detected no signs of surreptitious entry. He said there were no footprints, or any other sign of disturbance of the snow. He then gave me a silenced Colt Woodsman .22 long rifle cartridge semi-automatic pistol that he had found in the snow outside the bedroom window.”

  “What kind of a gun?” General Schwarzkopf asked.

  Wallace opened the desk drawer and, using a pencil, raised the weapon by its trigger guard and laid it on the desk.

  “What the hell is that?” General Greene asked.

  “We had them in the OSS,” Wallace replied. “They were issued to our agents, primarily the Jedburgh people, but to others as well. They were dubbed ‘assassination specials.’ They are barely audible when fired. The last time I saw one was when OSS Forward was in Paris.”

  “‘Jedburgh people’?” Schwarzkopf parroted.

  “Three-man teams we dropped into France and other places. They were trained in Jedburgh, Scotland. The question now becomes where did Lieutenant Moriarty’s assassin get such a weapon? Not, I think, from the OSS. They were kept in safes in London and Paris, and I know for a fact that before OSS Forward moved to Schlosshotel Kronberg, all the pistols had been issued. That suggests this pistol came into the hands of the Germans, or the Italians, the Serbians, et cetera, via a lost Jedburgh. General Gehlen?”

  “We had two of them,” Gehlen replied. “We turned them—all our weapons—over to Colonel Mattingly when we arrived at Kloster Grünau. I’m sure there’s an inventory somewhere.”

  “I think I know where it is,” Claudette Colbert said. “And last week I was going over our current inventory of weapons and I’m sure—but I’ll c
heck—that nothing like that pistol is on it.”

  “Do that as soon as you can, please, after we break up here,” Wallace said.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “We’ve got a gottverdammt mole,” Major Konrad Bischoff said. “Most likely one of those gottverdammt Poles.”

  “What makes you think it’s one of the Poles?” Wallace asked.

  “I think we can presume the NKGB has rosters of Free Polish Army, or Air Force, officers and enlisted men. The NKGB was all over London during the war. The NKGB connects a family in Poland with a name on a roster. Then they connect that name with a name on a roster of Polish Security Organization personnel. They find out what the PSO man is guarding and where from that same roster. And they establish contact with him. ‘Do what we tell you, or we kill your family.’”

  “Possibly, Bischoff,” General Gehlen said. “But equally likely one of our own. Personally, with nothing to go on, I suspect the mole—or moles—is one of us. Same scenario, but run by Odessa.”

  “But why would either want to assassinate this lieutenant?” Schwarzkopf asked.

  “They wanted to take out Cronley, Norman,” Greene said. “To show us what happens to someone who has gotten in their way. That fits the NKGB—Cronley got Bob Mattingly back and they didn’t get their defected polkovnik—”

  “Colonel Sergei Likharev,” Wallace furnished.

  “—whom Cronley turned back, or his family. Or, so far as Odessa is concerned, DCI—Cronley—was responsible for the capture of SS-Brigadeführer Heimstadter and Standartenführer Oskar Müller, whom Odessa had spent a lot of effort to get out of Germany and to Spain. Both wanted to kill Cronley. Lieutenant Moriarty happened to be in Cronley’s bed.”

  “But as much as they might want to assassinate Cronley,” Schwarzkopf asked, “why would they want to cause the stink this is going to cause? As soon as Cronley’s friend Miss Johansen hears about this, it’ll be on the front page of Stars and Stripes.”

  “Miss Johansen is not going to hear about this,” Wallace said. “Or what she’s going to hear is that a tragic accident took Lieutenant Moriarty’s life. You understand that, Cronley?”

  “I heard what you said,” Cronley replied.