Chapter 4

San Angelo, Texas, 1950

 

 

Fogerty pulled into the graveled drive alongside Lucy’s car. I motioned him to join us.

“Did you find out anything?” I asked.

He looked at Lucy and then back at me.

“It’s okay, you can talk. You can tell her.” I said, after introducing her.

Lucy saw the look on Fogarty’s face and excused herself to go to the bathroom inside. When she closed the car door, he started to tell me what he had been doing. But before he started, he let me know, if he was going to be of any help, he wanted to deal with me only. No third parties, he said. I agreed.

“Well, the Miller family has changed their name from Muller. They came from the Frankfurt area. And his brother was in the German Army.”

“What branch?” I asked him.

“He told some friends of mine a couple of years ago how some of his family were killed in the War, and that his brother emigrated to South America. Also, I found out he paid cash for his home and his auto repair business. I have no idea where he got the money.”

“Did he ever talk to you about your meeting any suspicious fares? I mean, people like me asking a lot of seemingly meaningless questions, drawing attention to themselves?”

“No, I’ve never talked to him.”

“Could he have asked you this question through another person? Has anybody asked you any questions like this? Does any of this conversation ring a bell?”

“No,” he said, again. And then he stopped and got an odd expression on his face before continuing. “Come to think of it, there was a guy around here a year or so ago. But I had the idea he was a private detective looking into some phony business deal or maybe a marital problem. I thought at the time, the questions he asked me were off the wall and really peculiar. Another thing, he was staying with the Miller family. He might have been a relative or something. He stayed around the area acting like he was visiting his family. I later found out he had been in our army. Whether he was a citizen or not, I don’t know. A lot of our troops were not citizens, but then you knew that.”

Fogerty was doing his best not to patronize me; but then again he might have been making conversation just to earn his money. But it would turn out that what he just told me would be worth all the money I had paid him.

“What did he want to know?”

“Among other things, he was interested in whether I had picked up a fare at the airport and driven them out to one of the farms on the other side of town….”

Before he could fully explain, Lucy approached the car and sat down in the front seat again.

“Did you boys have a nice little chat about me?” she asked.

Fogerty looked surprised at her innocuous statement. I could see his curiosity was about to get the better of him. He wanted to ask me in the worst way what was going on. But he was bright enough to know I hadn’t given him all that money for just a couple of hours of easy work. He knew he was being paid to keep his mouth shut and to mind his own business.

And he also understood there might be more coming, maybe lots more, if he played his cards right. He was correct; there would be. Before he left, I took him around the side of his cab and told him I wanted to hire him permanently.

“What do I have to do?” He asked me.

“Keep your eye on her,” I said.

“For any particular reason? I mean, what am I watching her for?”

“Check on her once in a while and make sure she’s all right. If you see any newcomers in town, check them out and let me know the score. Here’s a number you can call. I’ll give them your name. Tell them who you are and they’ll call me. I’ll get back to you at your home or at your cabstand as soon as I can. If she needs anything, you take care of it. But don’t let on we had this chat. Here is an additional few hundred. I’ll slip you some more when I see you again, but it will appear to be a tip. I don’t want any mail coming from me to you, okay?”

“Okay,” he said. But just before he left, he acted like he had something he wanted to say.

“Mr. Adair, there is something, maybe…. Never mind, it isn’t important. I’ll tell you some other time.”

Looking back on it now, I wish he had told me. Later was almost too late. But he wasn’t sure what was going on, so he decided to mind his own business and keep his mouth shut. That’s what I liked about him. That’s why I trusted him to do what I told him.

“I suspect you paid Fogarty to look out for me. But it’s not necessary, you know. I can take care of myself.”

“I gave him a number where he could reach my service in an emergency.”

“Why don’t you give it to me and cut out the middle man?” she asked.

“I have my reasons, the main one being I don’t want to involve you any more than I have.” She seemed satisfied with this explanation, and we dropped the subject. Still, she looked at me as though she thought it was rather odd. But then, I couldn’t fault her for thinking that most of my behavior since she met me was odd.

We sat in the car and talked for another hour or so and then went inside to go to the bathroom and ended up staying still another hour. I had given up on catching the last bus at four, and had sent Fogerty away with instructions and more words of caution to keep things to himself. I repeated before he left about how Lucy might need his services, without defining exactly what those services might be. He was not of much further help; he couldn’t remember the name of the farm in which his fare had been interested. But he told me this outside the car, where she couldn’t hear him. I figured he didn’t want her thinking it might be her farm and getting her all upset.

Before he left, I ask him to drop around to the bus station and tag Eric’s bag for San Antonio, and to tell them to hold it for me until tomorrow.

After supper at her place, we sat at the table and talked. She came right out and asked me what I was afraid of. I guess my behavior and the look on my face most of the time had given me away.

“The way you hand money around indicates to me you have dipped into that sack of diamonds you swiped. You did say you were rich; are you still rich?

“I’m curious, how did you get them out of the mine, and how did you get them back to the States. A sack that large wouldn’t fit into your pocket. Besides being a thief, you’re some kind of an accomplished smuggler, aren’t you?”

Coming from her, with that perpetual smile on her face, I took no offense. But it was another clear indicator of how the general public might disapprove of what we did. To most everybody, we would be judged as thieves rather than as liberators. Still, there were millions who would have seen it our way and given us the benefit of any doubt. But obviously Lucy was not one of them–not yet anyway.

“I had to get them out. I mean, neither Carl nor Eric could have sent them home by mail. And before they left Europe, the two of them would have been searched several times. The army would have gone over them and their belongings with a fine-tooth comb, before they were allowed to board a troopship. They were mainly looking for souvenirs. Everybody wanted a Luger or a Walther. And some of the troops had them. But I never knew an enlisted man who managed to make it into civilian life with one.

“Officers were not searched. And as far as the mails were concerned, they simply signed a piece of paper swearing they were not sending out any contraband souvenirs.

“You know those bronzed baby shoes you sometimes see hanging from automobile mirrors?” I asked her. “Well, I hit on the idea of having my old combat boots bronzed as souvenirs of my trip across Europe. I found a guy in Frankfurt who did the job. He didn’t bronze them exactly. I mean he didn’t dip them in bronze the way they usually do; he washed them good, and then he painted them with a light coat of liquid bronze. The way he did it, it hardly added to the weight….”

“I get it,” she interrupted, “you stuffed your shoes with diamonds and newspapers and sent them home in the mail. Nobody was going to question an old pair of boots. They figured you were going to give them to your grandkids or somebody; old worn out shoes were not exactly pistols, now were they?

“And people at the military post office had no idea how much a real bronzed boot would weigh, did they? A twenty-pound bronzed shoe would not have been suspicious.” She looked at me as though I was a little boy who had just gotten caught with his hand in the cookie jar.

She started to laugh at the expression on my face. It was infectious, and I joined her. We both laughed like couples often do who genuinely like each other.

“So tell me,” she said, bringing me back sharply to reality. “Who’s after you, and what are they going to do if they catch you? Why can’t you just give them back the jewels? Hey, I said jewels, but I really meant diamonds. Oh, oh, by the look on your face just now, it might be more then diamonds–what?” She strung the last word out, and then said with an all-knowing look on her face. “Did you guys walk off with more than diamonds? How about the Kaiser’s crown jewels?

“Before you answer, let me ask you again. If you’re able to get shed of what’s left, will they leave you alone? Is it the military people who are after you or the government–who?”

“I don’t really know,” I answered. “I mean, I don’t have a clue. There was an incident that happened a few years back while I was on a fishing trip by myself. Somebody tried to kill me. There was no mistaking it for an accident; somebody was really after me. I won’t go into the details now. Another time maybe.

“When I came home, I enrolled at LSU to finish up my degree. I wanted to do the expected thing, to blend in with everybody else. I wasn’t exactly looking forward to working for an oil company. I had other things on my mind. I just wanted to appear normal and wait out the next few years until we made the split. So I figured I would go back to school and finish a degree in geology, and then stay on and study more physics, something I was always interested in. It was the natural thing to do for a graduate in geology in those days. Then my first semester back, this incident happened. It really shook me up, and I have been on the run ever since.

“For a long time, I thought Carl might have been behind it. And then my focus shifted to Eric. I never had any intentions of cheating either of them out of anything. But looking back on it now, I can see why Carl might have thought so. We had an agreement to stay in touch but to do nothing for five years, something like bank robbers do who make off with a big haul. We didn’t want to draw attention to ourselves. I got rid of a couple of the larger diamonds at eighty percent of their value. I had to; I had to have money to live on after I quit school. I couldn’t settle down with a real job and pay Social Security. It wouldn’t have worked. I had to keep moving. But even at eighty percent, they were so valuable that I ended up with a fortune. My problem, believe it or not, was to locate the others and make the split. I tried to contact them via our mail scheme, but you never forwarded my letters. And you never had a telephone. Now, I realize I would’ve only been able to find Carl. But I was unable to get back to him. I tried, but apparently he had moved a couple of times and I lost track. It’s easy to see why, when his letters were not answered, it would have seemed to him as though I had reneged on our agreement. I can see why he might have been really upset, and he would have figured I cheated him.” This was only part of the story. But I hesitated to tell her any more.

“What made you think you could get the diamonds out of the mine without being discovered? And why didn’t you go for some of the gold ingots?”

“The gold was too closely guarded. I might have been able to get some out under the Jeep before Colonel Bernstein set up his security program. But we didn’t try. Actually, we planned on getting assigned as monitors on one of his teams removing the gold. We were naturals for the job, since we had already been tentatively assigned to accompany him on his sorties into the heartland looking for more stashes. We really anticipated getting our hands on a large quantity, when they carried the ingots by Jeep trailers between Room Eight and the trucks at one of the entranceways. But we didn’t anticipate the thoroughness of Bernstein’s checking and control system. As it turned out, there was just no way to pull it off.

“When we first started talking about the diamonds, we didn’t think we could get away with taking any of them. It was just talk, something to pass the time. But we changed our minds when we went inside the vault and saw all those suitcases full of jewelry. And Eric and Carl, of course, easily located the Melmer sack. We also saw an inventory list made by this guy named Thoms, who I later found out was in charge of the bank’s precious metals department. The diamonds and the jewelry were not on his list, probably because there was not much by way of metal involved.

“It dawned on the three of us at the same time: there had been no accounting made of the jewelry or the diamonds. Unless one of the generals had remembered seeing the open Melmer bag, we knew we were home free. None of the Germans were going to say anything. If the diamonds were not on some inventory list, and they were reported as missing, the Germans would have been more suspect then we were.

“We knew the generals saw some of the jewelry, but not all of it. Thoms only opened a couple of the suitcases to show them, and there were half a hundred or more stacked in the back. You see, the Germans kept precise records of the precious metals. But what we didn’t know at the time, they had also inventoried the suitcases full of jewelry and the diamonds. They just didn’t carry the jewels and the diamonds on the same list with the gold. I have always thought Thoms believed we took the diamonds. However, he was afraid of telling anybody because he might have been accused himself. It was his word against ours, and I was a friend of Patton’s, while he was an enemy with the taint of the criminal about him. Later, he couldn’t say anything because they would have wanted to know how come he didn’t say something the first day when he discovered they were missing.

“And another thing, as long as I’m telling you everything: We did make off with a double-handful of American coins. I carried them out in the pockets of my field jacket. It was cold outside and hot below in the shaft and tunnel. That’s the way it is with deep rock mines. It can be freezing outside in winter and hot as blazes at the bottom of a deep shaft. Nobody thought anything of my not wearing my jacket, which allowed me to fill the pockets. As for the diamonds, they were easy. We simply tied the sack to the undercarriage of our Jeep and drove off.

“I gave the coins to the other two, but it wasn’t really any part of what the diamonds were worth. They might have been under the impression that I thought the coins were supposed to compensate for the diamonds. If so, then they had a right to believe they were cheated.

“As I said, we assumed there was no record of the diamonds or the coins.”

“Why was that?” she asked.

I answered her: “ Thoms was on site the day after we got there. It was his inventory list we saw the first night, which caused us to believe they hadn’t had time to count and record anything but the gold, silver, and the paintings; no one was really monitoring the jewelry, coins, or the diamonds or so we thought.

“It was the impetus we needed. If they were not recorded, they were not going to be missed in all the confusion.

“Lucy, when you told me yesterday about Eric, it was the first I heard he hadn’t survived more than a few weeks after the War. It came as quite a shock, not only because he was a good friend, but now it means somebody whom I don’t know is after me. And that somebody may very well have killed both Carl and Eric.”

It was still early, about an hour before bedtime. Lucy and I spent it speculating about who it was who was searching for me. We made a list, obviously leaving off Carl and Eric. I told her about Carl’s widow and what she told me on the phone. I even told Lucy about the statement she made, which at the time struck me as being curious. I mean the one about the childish games you and your other Army buddy have been playing have gotten him killed.

“She did say buddy in the singular. And if Carl had really told her everything, as she said he did, then his widow knew there was only the three of us conspirators. It meant, according to Carl, the others in the squad were not involved. In fact, it was confirmation they never knew there were any diamonds missing, let alone that we took them. And she wouldn’t have known that Eric was dead.”

This might not be exactly the truth. I wanted to change the subject. Lucy was just too sharp. I suspected she was capable of deducing the truth of something rather quickly from just a small amount of information. I wanted to talk about something else, but she wanted to continue.

Our list included the FBI and the Army Counter Intelligence Command, and even the Army Criminal Investigation people. We even considered undercover operatives in the Office of Strategic Services, the OSS. They were known to be operating in the area. In fact, I understood they were the first to pick up on rumors of the mine and to pass it on to the CIC.

The German Reichsbank surely had an interest, since they considered the missing property belonged to them; it’s a definite possibility. They might have suspected us all along. We had to consider they might have hired private investigators to watch us and then to finally do away with Carl and Eric after they tortured them.

We even talked about members of the Waffen SS, and others still loyal to the memory of Adolph Hitler. Those people could surely lay claim to the loot. And it wasn’t hard to make a case favoring them; after all, they were career assassins. And then there were those in the know from within the ranks of the Army Finance and Accounting Department who might have suspected us. In short: there were a lot of people who knew there was a shortage of Merkers treasure, and they knew we had been the closest to it at one time. And knowing how much was missing, they might have chosen to cut themselves in. It might not even be a stretch for somebody to have told the rest of our squad members, during the course of their investigations. If those guys knew, then you better believe they were mad at us. They would have considered us to be cheats for not including them. Surely, they would have been angry enough to do something drastic if they reasoned they had been cheated out of what they considered their part of an inheritance.

And there was another suspect, somebody who was more than just a person of interest. Fogarty had told us about a member of the Muller family and how one of them had gone to Brazil after the War. I didn’t explain the ramifications of his statement to Lucy, because it might have caused her needless worry. I didn’t explain about the people who went to Brazil being mostly outcasts, the persona non grata in Germany after the War. And most of those people came from the ranks of the dreaded Waffen SS.

It is not common knowledge, but most people in this country don’t know that members of the three branches of the SS are fugitives wanted for murder. Their own people want them for war crimes and crimes against humanity. Many of them joined the French Foreign Legion, and many others immigrated to Argentina and Brazil.

Maybe it was my paranoia acting up again. But I always believed if the SS was involved, they might have moved a mole here, somebody to watch for me to eventually show up. And that somebody would be keeping his eyes on Lucy. If they couldn’t find me, why not stake out the only lead they had–Lucy? And maybe that mole was a Muller; I don’t know.

We talked for another couple of hours, longer than we intended. We talked about all my suspected enemies–all but one and I didn’t want to talk about him. Was it possible the man in the casket was not Eric? Then who was in the casket the undertaker had seen? Who was wearing Eric’s dog tags? Who then had killed this stranger? If it was not Eric, who was it? And if it wasn’t Eric, then Eric must have known who it was–Eric must have been the one who killed him, or he was in some way involved. Was it the same three guys on the train, the ones who killed Carl? Had they also killed the stranger? Was Eric one of them? Had they killed Eric, too? Carl’s widow told the cops one of their attackers spoke with some kind of an accent; I had read it in her report. Eric spoke with a trace of an accent. Could it really have been him.”

In fact, if by some bizarre turn of events Eric killed the stranger and then Carl, it’s not likely he is even interested in diamonds or jewelry. Because there’s more involved besides the paltry millions in diamonds we took from the Merkers mine. There are such large amounts involved that even the best of friends might fall out and start hunting one another. And right now, I’m skirting the subject, afraid to tell her any more than I have.

Finally, she went to the same bureau as last night to get my bedclothes and pillow. She saw the expression on my face, and sat down beside me on the sofa.

“Look Mike,” she said, “I know what you’re thinking about us. Okay, I suppose I have no objections to your proposal. But there is more to it than that. And I don’t want you to get the wrong idea. It reminds me of something our pastor said on the subject.”

She went on to tell me what he had told his congregation. He was preaching on the subject of Marriage and Family Relations. “The trouble with young people today,” he said, “they want to jump into bed with one another with only the slightest provocation. And, thereby, lies a big problem, which often leads to a break-up. If a marriage is to have a chance of beating the high odds of divorce, then something has to happen: They must first become acquainted; then they must become friends; and they then must marry before becoming intimate. If any one of the steps is left out, they’re in danger of ending up as statistics.”

That’s what she said her pastor said, anyway, and she said it made good sense to her. She went on: “In fact, when I heard him say it, I thought of Eric and me. That’s exactly what we did; we skipped the middle part. We never became friends; we became lovers first, before we ever really became acquainted, and we paid the price. Let’s not you and I make the same mistake. You stay on the couch, yah’ hear?”

What was there to argue about? I lost before I had ever gotten started.

I lay on the sofa thinking about what I had already told her. As I said, we sat in her car for another hour talking after Fogerty left. Then we went inside and ended up staying longer, still talking, endlessly talking. And me continually wondering how much more I should tell her about this strange tale of mine. And all the time wondering how much she was going to believe, and wondering whether she might conclude I had some kind of ulterior motive in contacting her in the first place. I wouldn’t have been surprised if this had been her reaction after I told her what else happened after Merkers.

And it has just occurred to me. What about her brother? Worthington, the undertaker, told me she had a brother. How close is he to Muller. And who is Muller anyway, besides a figment of my active imagination.

As it turned out, when Lucy inherited the farm, her brother acquired no legal interest; apparently her father figured her brother would have forced her to sell if he was included in some kind of trust. She told me this didn’t set well with him, which might be expected. Did her brother fall in with Muller then? But why would Muller tell him anything in the first place? Muller doesn’t need him, or does he? Why does her brother hang around the area when there’s no future for him here; he’s not that close to his sister. Is he waiting, hoping they’ll drill for oil and maybe she’ll cut him in?

I haven’t asked Lucy much about him on purpose. I don’t want to infer her brother is hooked up with murderers. Still, I can’t rule him out; everybody is suspect when you’re dealing with figures as large as those I’m talking about. Anyway, the list goes on and on, seemingly with no end in sight. And the more I think about it the more confused I get.