Empire and Honor Page 8

  He told Elsa this, and added, “Maybe I better go with you.”

  She nodded.

  A middle-aged German woman answered their knock. She had a worried look when she saw what she understandably mistook for two Americans. The look was replaced by one of surprise and confusion when Elsa told her, in German, that she was looking for Family Hofstadter.

  “They are no longer here,” the woman said.

  “Where are they?” Elsa asked.

  “How would I know?” the woman replied, unpleasantly.

  “This was their house?” Cronley asked.

  “It was forfeited,” the woman said.

  “Why was it forfeited?” Cronley asked. “Forfeited to whom?”

  “To the state,” the woman said. “After the attempt to murder Adolf Hitler, Oberst Hofstadter was arrested. On his conviction for treason, all of his property was forfeited to the Reich.”

  “And you, being a good Nazi,” Cronley said sarcastically, “got to buy it for next to nothing?”

  “Jimmy!” Elsa said warningly.

  The woman’s face whitened, but she said nothing.

  Elsa turned and stepped quickly down the walk to the Kapitän.

  Cronley followed, then got behind the wheel.

  “I can probably find these people for you,” he said.

  She looked at him. He thought he could see tears forming.

  “Can you?”

  “I think so,” he said, and started the engine.

  —

  There was a thirty-five-year-old military police captain on duty in the offices of the Polizeidistrikt fur Kreis Marburg.

  Relations between the MP and the CIC were usually frosty, and icicles quickly formed when the young CIC special agent—who the captain knew was probably a sergeant and certainly no more than a lieutenant—told the MP captain that he was sorry but the captain did not have the need to know why he wanted to know where the Hofstadter family, formerly of 233 Heinrichstein Strasse, could now be found.

  If he calls Connell, Jimmy thought, I’m fucked.

  “I’ll see what I can do, Sergeant . . . excuse me . . . Mister Cronley,” the captain said sarcastically. “It’s always a pleasure to cooperate with the CIC. When do you need it?”

  Cronley remembered something from A&M: The best defense is the attack.

  “Major Connell told me to get that information now.”

  Ten minutes later, in the Kapitän, Jimmy handed Elsa a slip of paper on which was written: 4-E, 73 Obtierstrasse.

  Elsa smiled her gratitude.

  73 Obtierstrasse turned out to be a shabby apartment block.

  “I think it would be best if I went in here alone, Jimmy.”

  “You’re sure?”

  She nodded. “Please.”

  When he saw her enter the building, Cronley settled down for what he was sure would be a long wait by lighting a cigar.

  Elsa was back in the car before there was enough ash on the cigar to knock off.

  “Not there?” he said.

  “Frau Hofstadter was there. Jimmy, please take me back to the hotel. Now.”

  “Is there something I can do?”

  “Just take me back to the hotel.”

  —

  At the corridor door to the Goethe Suite, she smiled quickly at him, said, “Thank you,” and went inside.

  It was obvious that he was no longer welcome in the Goethe Suite.

  “I’ll be next door,” he said to the closed corridor door.

  He had been in the armchair with his cigar and the new Stars & Stripes perhaps five minutes when the connecting door opened and Elsa came in.

  “Do you mind?” she asked. “I don’t want to be alone.”

  There were tear tracks running down her cheeks.

  He stood up and put his arms around her.

  You are not going to make a pass at a crying woman.

  Just comfort her.

  Nature overrode that noble determination.

  Her breasts were soft against him, and the smell of the Chanel No. 5 intoxicating.

  He felt the stirring at his groin and pulled his midsection modestly away from hers.

  Not quickly enough.

  She pulled her head back and smiled up at him through her tears.

  “Oh, sweet Jimmy, you never get enough, do you? You remind me of a bull in a field.”

  “What would you like me to do with it?”

  “What you did with it the last time,” she said, and pulled his face down to hers.

  —

  “So much for firm resolve,” she said three minutes later.

  “To hell with firm resolve.”

  “Look at me. At us.”

  They were lying on the cover of his bed. Her skirt was again up above her waist and his trousers again around his ankles.

  “God, I love you,” Jimmy said.

  “If you start that again, I’ll pull my skirt down and leave. Once and for all. I mean it, Jimmy.”

  “And if I don’t start that again, then what?”

  “I told you, I don’t want to be alone,” she said. “I want to be held.”

  “Naked or clothed?”

  She sat up and started to unbutton her uniform shirt.

  —

  Jimmy ran his fingers up her backbone.

  She was lying on him. He could feel the warmth of her breasts against his chest, and the bristle of her crotch against his leg.

  “You want to tell me what happened in the apartment house?” he asked.

  “I don’t want to. It’s not your concern.”

  “Tell me, Elsa.”

  She exhaled audibly.

  “Tell me,” Jimmy repeated.

  “Frau Hofstadter said that I had my nerve, showing up in an American uniform at her door, and that she really had nothing to say to me.”

  “Why?”

  “She said that if it wasn’t for the treason of my father and Graf von Wachtstein, her husband would still be alive and she wouldn’t be living in a two-room apartment struggling to find enough to eat. She said she wasn’t surprised that I was a whore . . . and fucking Americans . . . and hoped I would burn in hell.”

  “Jesus Christ!”

  “And she’s right, Jimmy. Oberst Hofstadter was never involved with Claus von Stauffenberg and the others. He was a loyal officer to the end.”

  “Then what happened?”

  “Hitler arrested everybody who even knew anybody involved. There were eight thousand trials and executions, and at least half, maybe three-quarters, of them were of innocent people.”

  “Why is she holding you responsible?”

  “Because I’m my father’s daughter. And I showed up at her door in an American uniform.”

  “Baby, I’m sorry.”

  “In there,” Elsa said, gesturing toward the Goethe Suite, “before I came in here, I realized she was right. I am a whore. I’m sorry, but I can’t find any shame in what happened between us. It was stupid of me, but it wasn’t wrong.”

  “Well, you’re not a whore. What you are is a fool.”

  “I know.”

  “For not letting a man who loves you take care of you.”

  “Stop! Not one more word!”

  She started to sob then, and he held her, stroking her back and her arms until he realized that she had both stopped sobbing and fallen asleep.

  What the hell am I going to do?

  [THREE]

  Rhine-Main Airfield

  Frankfurt am Main, Germany

  0755 8 October 1945

  “Rhine-Main,” the pilot of South American Airways Ciudad de Rosario, a Lockheed Constellation aircraft, announced, “South American Double Zero Five on the ground at five to the hour. Please close us out.”

  The “Connie” was arguably—perhaps inarguably—the best transport aircraft flying. Designed by the legendary aviator Howard Hughes, it carried forty passengers in a pressurized cabin as high as thirty-five thousand feet at a cruising speed of three hundred knots
, and could do so for 4,300 miles. Its wing design was nearly identical to that of the single-seat Lockheed “Lightning” P-38 fighter, which Hughes had also designed.

  “Roger, Double Zero Five. You are closed out.”

  Immediately, there was a fresh voice: “South American Double Zero Five, Rhine-Main ground control.”

  “Good morning, ground control,” the pilot replied cheerfully, even unctuously. “And how may South American Airways be of service to you this morning?”

  It was not the response the ground control operator expected. This was, after all, a U.S. Army Air Forces base. There were rules, a protocol, to be followed.

  The pilot of SAA 005 knew this. In another life, he had been a Naval Aviator, and was still carried on a Classified Top Secret “Roster of Personnel on Duty with the Office of Strategic Services” as “Frade, Cletus H., Lt. Col., USMCR.”

  Once a Marine . . . as the saying goes.

  This was not the first time he had tweaked the tail of control tower operators. In his sealed records at Headquarters, USMC, there was a copy of a Letter of Reprimand alleging that First Lieutenant Frade, of Marine Fighter Squadron VMF-211, in an act prejudicial to good order and discipline, had buzzed the tower at Fighter One on Guadalcanal in his Grumman F4F Wildcat fighter, causing the occupants to jump therefrom.

  The ground control operator regained his aplomb.

  “South American Double Zero Five, Rhine-Main ground control. Take taxiway two and stop. A Follow-Me will meet you. Acknowledge.”

  “Roger, ground control. It will be my pleasure,” Frade said to his microphone, and then switched it to INTERCOM.

  “You get that, Hansel?” he asked.

  The co-pilot, a trim blond twenty-seven-year-old who in another life had been Major Freiherr Hans-Peter von Wachtstein of the Luftwaffe, nodded.

  “Try not to run over the Follow-Me,” Frade said.

  Von Wachtstein shook his head resignedly.

  Both were wearing the uniforms prescribed for pilots of South American Airways. Frade was a captain. There were four inch-wide golden stripes sewn to his dark blue, double-breasted, brass-buttoned tunic. Von Wachtstein, a first officer, had three such stripes. The trousers of both were a powder blue and had an inch-and-a-half-wide gold stripe down the leg seams. Both wore SAA pilot’s wings, about twice the size of Frade’s Naval Aviator’s Wings of Gold, and which had what looked like a sunburst in their centers. It had actually been taken from the flag of the Argentine Republic. SAA was an Argentine airline.

  Frade had once confided to his wife that the uniforms reminded him of those worn by bandmasters of a traveling circus, except the SAA uniforms were a bit more flamboyant.

  —

  The Follow-Me, a ton-and-a-half weapons carrier painted in a black-and-yellow checkerboard pattern and flying two checkerboard flags, appeared. The Constellation began to follow it far across the airfield.

  “Where the hell are they taking us? Italy?” Frade asked.

  Von Wachtstein did not reply.

  Eventually they were led to a remote corner of the airfield, where a collection of vehicles were waiting for them. There were two Mercedes-Benz buses; two fuel trucks; five jeeps (each carrying a pair of MPs); two Ford pickup trucks with stairways built on their beds; and two German passenger cars, now bearing U.S. Army markings. One was an Opel Admiral, a GM vehicle about the size of a Buick that was produced in Germany. The other was a Horch.

  Frade knew that the Horch was the car of Colonel Robert Mattingly, who commanded OSS Forward. He had taught him how to get it out of low gear.

  Every time Frade saw the Horch, he was painfully reminded of his father, el Coronel Jorge Frade, Cavalry, Ejército Argentino, who had brought one of the cars to Argentina before the war, loved it, and had died in it on his estancia, assassinated at the orders of the SS.

  As soon as the aircraft engines had been stopped, one of the pickup trucks moved its stairs to the passenger door while the second pickup went to the smaller crew door behind the cockpit.

  Colonel Mattingly rose from the Horch and walked—more accurately marched—toward the stairs leading to the crew door.

  Mattingly was a tall, startlingly handsome, nattily uniformed officer. He had a yellow scarf around his neck. His sharply creased trousers were tucked into a pair of highly shined “tanker” boots. He carried a Model 1911-A1 Colt .45 ACP semiautomatic pistol in a shoulder holster. The eagles of a full colonel were pinned to his epaulets, and the triangular insignia of the Second Armored Division was sewn on his sleeve.

  On the aircraft, a stocky, middle-aged man in a business suit entered the area behind the pilots’ seats and opened the crew door. He was Suboficial Mayor Enrico Rodríguez, Cavalry, Ejército Argentino, Retired. He had served the late el Coronel Frade most of their lives, had been gravely wounded and left for dead when el Coronel Frade had been assassinated, and now regarded his mission in life as protecting el Coronel Frade’s only son, Cletus, from the same fate.

  Mattingly entered the flight deck as Frade climbed out of the pilot’s seat.

  “How did things go?” Mattingly said, as they shook hands.

  “Well, we had Yak-9s for company most of the time,” Frade said. “But I was not afraid, as we have half of the Vatican in the back.”

  Mattingly chuckled. “Don’t be cynical, Colonel.”

  “What I was wondering is where they got all the—what do you call it?—clerical garb.”

  “Never underestimate Holy Mother Church,” Mattingly said.

  Von Wachtstein climbed out of the co-pilot’s seat and offered his hand to Mattingly.

  “There is some interesting news to report,” Mattingly said. “The ASA intercepted a message to Pavel Egorov, the NKVD’s man in Mexico City . . .”

  Frade formed a “T” with his hands, making a time-out gesture.

  “Explanation needed, Bob,” Frade said. “You’re dealing with a couple of simple airplane drivers.”

  “The NKVD is the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs,” Mattingly explained. “Pavel Egorov has been running things—dealing with both the Mexicans and us—in Mexico City.”

  “Okay.”

  “He was ordered to Buenos Aires to assume command of OPERATION G. OPERATION G is ‘find out what’s going on with the Americans and Gehlen.’”

  “Assume command from whom?” Frade asked. “The Russians don’t even have an embassy in Buenos Aires.”

  “They’re working on that,” Mattingly said. “In the meantime, they have a trade mission, one man working on buying things from Argentina, one man working on selling things to Argentina, and about forty people—including a dozen women—spying on Argentina. The man in charge has been Oleg Fedoseev.”

  “I never heard any of this from Bernardo Martín.”

  “I’m sure that even a simple airplane driver such as yourself,” Mattingly said sarcastically, “has considered the remote possibility that General Martín doesn’t tell you everything he knows.”

  “He didn’t,” Frade said, just as sarcastically. “Does that mean I’ll have to turn in my cloak and dagger? Or will bowing my head and beating my breast in shame suffice?”

  “Anyway,” Mattingly said, smiling, “Egorov has been ordered to take over from Fedoseev. That may pose some problems for you, as we can’t—can we?—have the Soviets learn what you’re doing.”

  “I always thought that the Russians here already knew what we’re doing,” Frade said, now seriously. “The problem is going to be keeping them from finding out which of the Gehlens—Good Gehlens and Bad Gehlens—we have in Argentina and where we have them stashed.”

  “To do that you may have to take out not only Egorov and Fedoseev, but whoever else is getting too close.”

  “All forty of them?”

  “If it comes down to that, all forty of them, meanwhile making sure that Egorov and Company don’t take you out.”

  “Jesus!” Frade blurted. “You’re just a fountain of good news, aren’t you, Bob?�
��

  “I do have a little of that, but let’s finish this part first. Have you room on this Argentine estancia I hear so much about to place—more precisely place and hide—an antenna farm?”

  “What kind of an antenna farm?”

  “Whatever kind the ASA needs to listen to the Russians.”

  “And who would operate this antenna farm?”

  “A nine-man team from Vint Hill.”

  “Black, I presume?”

  “The antenna farm would be black. But the operators could be technicians from Collins and Aircraft Radio Corporation sent down there to maintain SAA’s radios.”

  Frade considered the request a moment.

  “Just as long as they understand they’ll be working for me, not the ASA.”

  “Agreed.”

  “And now the good news?” Frade said.

  Mattingly looked at von Wachtstein.

  “The MPs picked up your sister-in-law, Peter.”

  “What?” von Wachtstein said, his tone incredulous.

  “I spoke with her on the telephone,” Mattingly went on. “She said she was the widow of Major Karl von Wachtstein. I think it’s her, but we’ve had experiences with people taking other people’s identification. Would you be willing to go have a look at her?”

  “What a stupid fucking question!” Frade flared.

  “Where is she?” von Wachtstein asked softly.

  “In Marburg an der Lahn,” Mattingly said. “It’s here in Hesse.”

  “I went to university there,” von Wachtstein said.

  “And I was there with el Coronel,” Rodríguez said. “We went there to hunt wild boar.”

  “Clete,” von Wachtstein said, “I know it’ll screw up our flight plan but—”

  “Another stupid fucking question,” Frade interrupted. “Of course we go! Screw the flight plan.”

  “And presuming it is her, then what?” Mattingly said. “What would you like me to do with her?”

  “Three stupid fucking questions in a row,” Frade said. “We take her with us, that’s what we’ll do with her.”

  “I thought that might be the case,” Mattingly said. “That’s what the buses are for. To take your passengers for a long, long breakfast while we go to Marburg an der Lahn.”

  [FOUR]