Curtain of Death Read online

  Wallace was sitting on the other side of the table beside Cronley. Jack Hammersmith was sitting next to Wallace. Scattered elsewhere around the table were former Oberst Ludwig Mannberg, a tall, aristocratic-looking man who had been Gehlen’s deputy in Abwehr Ost and now held the same position in the Süd-Deutsche Industrielle Entwicklungsorganisation, who was wearing a well-cut single-breasted glen plaid suit; Max Ostrowski; and Captain “Tiny” Dunwiddie.

  The table was just about covered with documents of all kinds, photographs, ashtrays, and coffee mugs.

  “My stomach just told me for the third time that it needs to be fed,” Cronley announced. “And my watch just told me it’s the noon hour. And all we’re doing here is kicking the same thoughts around.”

  “I think Jim is suggesting we adjourn for lunch,” Mannberg said, lightly sarcastic.

  Mannberg had a pronounced upper-class British accent. It was the result of his having spent four years in London, the first two (1933–1935) as a junior military attaché of the German embassy, and the last two, ending in 1939, as the military attaché. He had spent most of 1936 and 1937 in Russia, with the result being that his Russian was nearly as fluent as his English.

  “We didn’t get to discuss two things,” General Gehlen said, his English also fluent, sounding almost American, but with a pronounced accent. “What was the motive for the attempted kidnapping and who did it? Depending on who did it, the NKGB or Odessa, the motive, I suggest, may be different.”

  “I’ve been holding off on that, General,” Wallace said. “The admiral has some thoughts on Odessa he wants me to share with you during our deliberations.”

  “In that case, may I vote with Jim?” Gehlen asked, and got to his feet.

  The others followed, then started to walk out of the room. Wallace made a discreet gesture to Hammersmith not to rush.

  When they were the last in the room, Wallace gestured again, signaling Hammersmith to slow down.

  Outside the cottage, as the others walked ahead of them toward the nearest of the three kasernen, Wallace put his hand on Hammersmith’s arm.

  “We need a quick word,” he said. “Which I would rather have had before that meeting got started. But you weren’t here, then.”

  “Yes, sir?”

  “But, since you were there, give me a quick take on what you thought.”

  “About what, sir?”

  “Start with Cronley.”

  “He acts like he’s in charge,” Hammersmith said.

  “He is.”

  “I should have said, he acts like he’s Gehlen’s chief of staff. Gehlen was running that meeting.”

  “No. Cronley was running it. He was just being polite to General Gehlen. Mannberg is Gehlen’s chief of staff.”

  “General Greene told me you’re really the man in charge.”

  “Officially, I’m the CIC representative at the table. I make suggestions to Captain Cronley only when I think it’s necessary.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “What about the CID guy? Ziegler?”

  “He struck me as a good deal smarter than most of them.”

  “What about Captain Dunwiddie?”

  “Interesting guy. Real regular Army, if you know what I mean.”

  “I’ll tell you about that when there’s time. What I’m asking now, Jack, is whether you would be comfortable working for Cronley, who is both only twenty-two years old and can be damned difficult, and Gehlen, who has not forgotten he was a generalmajor, and Ziegler, who knows he’s smart and doesn’t think much of CIC special agents. You know what I’m asking?”

  “I really don’t have much choice, do I?”

  “Yeah, you do. Which brings me to the real point of this little chat. General Greene told me he told you if you played your cards right, you could probably get recalled to active duty as Major Hammersmith.”

  Hammersmith nodded.

  “He was wrong to tell you that. He should have known better.”

  “That’s not in the cards?”

  “The only general officer—or colonel—in the Army intelligence establishment in Europe who doesn’t seriously think that DCI is a dangerous bastard organization that should be gotten rid of—‘for the good of the service’—as soon as possible by any means required is Greene.”

  “It’s that bad, huh?”

  “And they are encouraged by G-2 in the Pentagon. Homer Greene should have known, and told you, that the better job you do here, the more it will piss off the G-2 establishment. Especially if you refuse to be their mole in DCI—and, trust me, you will be asked—they will see you as a traitor, and they are not going to see somebody they perceive as a traitor to the establishment rewarded by pinning his gold leaf back on him.

  “And I’ve got one more thing to say that will probably piss you off. Right now, we really don’t need you here.”

  “General Greene told me you asked for a good agent.”

  “I did. I asked for his best agent and hoped he’d send me you. That was before I knew that Cronley had found and drafted Ziegler. My take on Ziegler—based on what we saw just now of his investigation of the shooting—is that he’s a first-class investigator. You agree?”

  Hammersmith nodded. “He’s very good.”

  “We don’t need two investigators right now.”

  “So I’m fired before I get started?”

  “Your call. If you want, I’ll send you back to the CIC, where Greene can probably figure out some other way to get you your commission back, and nobody ever has to know you were ever even in Pullach.

  “Or you can stay here, where, because Cronley likes him and doesn’t know you, you’ll probably be working for Ziegler until Cronley, or I, come up with something appropriate to your talents. And where you can forget your commission, unless you do something spectacular that comes to the attention of the admiral, or better yet, El Jefe, which would cause them to lean on the Pentagon to get you your commission back. Frankly, I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for that to happen. And, if you stay here, and the intelligence establishment does manage to flush us down the toilet, which is a real possibility, you go down the hole with the rest of us.”

  “How much time do I have to think this over?”

  “Ten seconds.”

  “How come so long?”

  “Because when we get to the senior officers’ mess”—Wallace pointed to the nearest kaserne—“there will be two officers there, Lieutenant Colonel George H. Parsons and Major Warren W. Ashley, having their lunch. They are the liaison officers between DCI-Europe and the Pentagon G-2. Once they see you, it will take them probably at least thirty minutes to let their superiors know there’s a new pariah.”

  Hammersmith considered his options for perhaps five seconds, and verbalized his conclusion by saying “Shit!” and then asking: “How am I going to get my things down here from Marburg?”

  [ FOUR ]

  The South German Industrial Development Organization Compound

  Pullach, Bavaria

  American Zone of Occupation, Germany

  1310 24 January 1946

  When Cronley, Gehlen, and the others walked back to the cottage from the kaserne, they found an MP jeep among the others. In it, looking annoyed, were two MPs, a sergeant and a master sergeant in full MP regalia.

  They were annoyed because they had been told by a large Negro staff sergeant sitting in a jeep with a pedestal-mounted Browning .50 to “stay in the jeep until they come back from lunch.”

  Augie Ziegler walked up to the jeep and extended his hand to the master sergeant.

  “Hey, Phil,” he said.

  “I’ve got your pictures, Augie,” he said. “What the hell is this place?”

  “Read the sign,” Ziegler said, pointing to the OFFICE OF THE OMGUS LIAISON OFFICER sign, and then put his hand out for the large manila envelo
pe on the sergeant’s lap.

  The sergeant handed him the envelope.

  “I guess you’re not going to tell me,” the sergeant said.

  “I just did. Come with me.”

  The sergeant followed him into the building, where Augie laid the envelope before Cronley.

  “Master Sergeant Phillips has brought us the pictures, sir.”

  “Thanks,” Cronley said to the sergeant. “Stick around a minute, please.”

  He took an inch-and-a-half-thick stack of 8×10-inch black-and-white photographs from it and then quickly flipped through them.

  “I’m glad you brought these after I had my lunch,” Cronley said.

  “They are pretty grim, sir,” the MP said.

  “Negatives?”

  “Sorry,” the MP said, and took several 4×5-inch envelopes from his breast pocket and handed them over.

  “And the fingerprints?” Cronley asked.

  “The hospital won’t hand them over until they finish the autopsies,” the MP said. “Then they’ll give us both the autopsies and the prints.”

  “Damn!”

  “How important are the fingerprints right now?” Ziegler asked.

  “Excuse me?” Cronley asked.

  “They won’t be much use to us until we identify those people, Jim,” Mannberg answered for him. “And then all we’ll have is confirmation that ‘Body A’ is really so-and-so.”

  “I see that my monumental ignorance has once again surfaced,” Cronley said. “But then, Ziegler, why did you ask for them ‘as soon as we can have them’?”

  “I think they call that ‘dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s,’” Claudette said.

  Ziegler looked at her and they smiled.

  “The thing to do, I suggest,” Mannberg said, “is to see if General Gehlen or I can identify these people—which is unlikely—and then send them over to Kaserne Two and see if anyone there can. Unlikely, but possible.”

  “You obviously think identifying these people is very important,” Cronley said, as he shoved the stack of photographs and the negatives to the center of the table. He then added, “I don’t think you want to see those, Dette.”

  “I don’t want to, but . . .”

  “As the victim you think you should?”

  “As both the victim and the administrative officer, I think I should,” she said, and pulled the stack of photographs to her.

  “I thought Freddy was the administrative officer,” Mannberg said.

  “Freddy is now the ‘executive assistant to the chief, DCI-Europe,’” Cronley said.

  “What’s that all about?” Wallace asked.

  “You were there when Freddy let us know he thought he was unappreciated,” Cronley said.

  “Yes, I was,” Wallace said, smiling.

  “I thought giving him that title might please him,” Cronley said. “And it did. He now thinks of himself as the DCI-Europe version of El Jefe.”

  “Good thinking,” Wallace said, chuckling.

  “This is the guy who had the knife at my throat,” Claudette said, sliding one 8×10 over to Mannberg, who studied it and shook his head, and then slid it over to Gehlen, who also shook his head.

  “You asked a moment ago why I think identifying these people is important,” Mannberg said.

  “I’m betting they’re NKGB. Both Ostrowski and I are convinced the guy at the monastery speaks Russian.”

  Mannberg said something in Russian.

  “I don’t speak Russian,” Cronley said. “But I’ll bet I can translate that: So do a number of Germans who used to be in the SS and just might be involved with Odessa. How close did I come?”

  “You obviously have a flair for the language,” Mannberg said.

  “I don’t think that’s true,” Cronley said. “What I do have a real flair for is overlooking the obvious.” He paused, then said: “Tiny, where’s Sergeant Finney?”

  “Probably in the sergeants’ mess.”

  “Just as soon as Dette, the general, and Colonel Mannberg finish going through those pictures, why don’t you take them over to Kaserne Two. Who should he give them to, Colonel?”

  “Oberstleutnant Schulberg,” Mannberg said. “I’ll call and tell him what to do.”

  He reached for the telephone.

  “And give them to Oberstleutnant Schulberg, telling him that identifying these people is really important. And then run down Finney and send him here. On the way to the sergeants’ mess—where you will see they are well fed, it’s after the noon meal and the mess sergeant may have to be encouraged—make sure the sergeants understand why regaling anyone with tales of what they saw here would be ill-advised.”

  “Yes, sir,” Dunwiddie said with a smile. “I will encourage the mess sergeant to do his best despite the hour.”

  Cronley turned to the MP master sergeant.

  “Sergeant, you didn’t hear anything that was said in here just now. You understand that? It’s important.”

  “I’m getting the message, sir,” the MP said.

  [ FIVE ]

  Staff Sergeant Albert Finney, a very large, very black twenty-four-year-old, came into the room ten minutes later. He marched up to Cronley and saluted.

  “Come on in, Al,” Cronley said, casually returning his salute. “Have a seat. We’re about to talk about Odessa.”

  “Yes, sir,” Finney said, and then, “Guten Tag, Herr General, Herr Oberst.”

  “And good afternoon to you, too, Finney,” Wallace said, smiling.

  “No offense meant, sir.”

  “I took none, Al, but Dette thinks you don’t like her.”

  “She knows better than that, Major. How you doing, Dette?”

  “A lot better than Florence. She’s still in the 98th.”

  “But just shook up, right? Not cut or shot?”

  “Shook up is bad enough,” Dette said.

  “Before we get into the subject of Odessa,” Wallace said, “when I called El Jefe to tell him what happened to Dette and Florence, he said that he had been thinking—which I believe means that the admiral had been thinking—that those scurrilous rumors saying we’ve been sending people the CIC has been looking for to Argentina could be put to rest if we had proof that Odessa is the villain.”

  “Hmm,” General Gehlen said. “Interesting point.”

  “Schultz said, ‘If there was proof that three or four former senior SS officers the CIC is already looking for turned out to be the culprits.’”

  “Yeah,” Cronley agreed thoughtfully.

  “Which suggests to me, Jim, that your previously made decision to put those sleeping dogs—your cousin Luther and Commandant Jean-Paul Fortin of the Strasbourg office of the Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire—on the back burner has been overridden by El Jefe.”

  “Looks that way, doesn’t it?”

  “And with that in mind, and seeing you have two new members of your staff who have no idea what we’re talking about, may I suggest that you do a recap, starting at the beginning, of what has gone before?”

  “Let Finney do it,” Cronley said. “I’m personally involved.”

  “Sergeant Finney, you have the podium,” Wallace said.

  Finney stood up, looking a bit uncomfortable.

  Understanding why, Cronley said, “I’ve done it again. Sergeant Finney, that’s CID Supervisory Special Agent Ziegler and that’s CIC Supervisory Special Agent Hammersmith, both of whom saw the error of their ways and begged to be taken in by us. In other words, Al, they’re in the loop.”

  Hammersmith thought: Wiseass!

  The men nodded at each other.

  “From the beginning, Al,” Cronley ordered. “Whoops, one more thing. I should have introduced you as DCI Special Agent Finney. Which raises the question, why are you wearing stripes?”


  “Fat Freddy said I should ask you if you wanted me in stripes or triangles.”

  “Your call, Al. Whichever is right at the time. Please proceed.”

  “I guess it goes back to when the CIC guy brought the black market packages that the CID grabbed”—Finney looked at Hammersmith and Ziegler—“that was you guys, right?”

  “That was me,” Hammersmith said.

  Ziegler shook his head and said, “This is all new to me.”

  “The captain’s mother,” Finney went on, “had sent him several packages of black market goodies—canned hams, coffee, cigarettes—which somebody in the CID grabbed in the APO. Because they had the captain’s CIC address on them, the CID turned them over to the CIC . . .”

  Where, Wallace thought, good ol’ Bob Mattingly, seeing his chance to stick it to Cronley, grabbed it.

  “. . . who sent a CIC agent to deliver the packages to Captain Cronley with a letter saying ‘please let us know in advance if you are going to require such materials in connection with your DCI activities.’”

  Wallace thought: And made damned sure Greene and everybody else in USFET G-2 and provost marshal’s office got a copy.

  “When . . .” Finley went on, and looked at Hammersmith. “What would you like me to call you?”

  In a just and fair world, Sergeant, I would be able to tell you to call me “Major Hammersmith, sir.”

  “Jack will work,” Hammersmith said.

  “When Jack walked in here . . . this room . . . with the packages, he had another letter—”

  “One from my father to me,” Cronley interrupted. “It explained the packages. My father reminded me that when he married my mother, who’s from Strasbourg, right after World War One, there had been some trouble with her family and that after they went to the States, she’d had little, practically no, contact with then.

  “Then, Dad said, one of them, her nephew—which makes him my cousin—Herr Luther Stauffer, apparently decided his aunt might be a warmhearted sucker who would take pity on him and his poor family, and send them stuff, so he wrote her a letter. She sent me four boxes of black market goodies, which I was supposed to give to him.