[ONE]
The Dining Room, Farber Palast
Stein, near Nuremberg, American Zone of Occupation, Germany
1330 15 April 1946
A waiter delivered two bottles of Veuve Clicquot champagne to the table.
“With the compliments, meine Dame und Herren, of Oberst Serov.”
As a second waiter placed champagne flutes before everybody, Cronley saw Serov sitting at the bar, raising a flute toward their table.
Cronley gestured to him to come over.
“What are you up to, Jim?” Justice Jackson asked.
“I respectfully suggest, sir,” Cronley said, “that the question is, what is Serov up to?”
“Point taken,” Jackson said, smiling.
Serov, wearing the dress uniform of an infantry colonel, approached the table.
“Mr. Justice,” he said. “How nice to see you again, sir.”
“Colonel,” Jackson said.
“Pull up a chair, Ivan,” Cronley said, “and tell us what you expect to get for your bottles of bubbly.”
“A moment of your time,” Serov replied. “First, to welcome you back from Argentina. And, second, to ask how the inquiry into the escape is going.”
So, Serov knows where I was?
No surprise.
“I don’t know how that Argentina rumor got started,” Cronley said. “And this is not the place to discuss the escape.”
Serov didn’t reply, instead turning to the waiter and telling him to bring his open bottle of champagne to the table.
“Someone once said, ‘There is no such thing as too much money or champagne,’” Serov said. “Are you going to introduce me to your friends?”
“Ginger, Father McGrath, when you get home you can dazzle people by reporting that you met a very senior officer of the NKGB. This is Colonel Ivan Serov, first deputy to Commissar of State Security Nikolaevich Merkulov.”
“I thought I told you, James, that is in the past. I am now back in my beloved infantry, serving as adviser to the Soviet chief prosecutor to the Tribunal. I speak English, he doesn’t.”
Serov turned to McGrath.
“Father, it is a pleasure to meet you. But James hasn’t given me the proper name of this lovely lady.”
“This is Mrs. Moriarty,” McGrath said, “a friend of the family.”
“And the widow of the late Lieutenant Bruce Moriarty,” Cronley said, an edge to his tone.
Serov turned to Ginger.
“I heard, of course, about your husband, Mrs. Moriarty. A tragedy. My condolences.”
It wasn’t a tragedy, Ivan, Cronley thought. It was an assassination.
And I’m just about convinced—not sure, but just about convinced—that you were behind it.
“I know how it is to lose someone,” Serov went on, “to lose one’s life companion . . .”
And where are you going now with this, you bastard?
“. . . I recently lost my Rozalina. On March seventeen. Not quite a month ago.”
“I’m very sorry to hear that,” Jackson said.
“I didn’t know about your wife, Ivan,” Cronley said. “I’m sorry.”
Serov nodded solemnly.
Cronley was not surprised to realize that he really did feel badly for the Russian, that it wasn’t just the expected thing to say. In late October—not quite six months earlier—the drunk driver of a big rig had killed his bride, Marjorie Howell Cronley, as she drove her Buick into Washington on U.S. 1. They had been married the day before by a justice of the peace.
Serov went on. “Rozalina died of breast cancer at the Tomsk cancer hospital. We’d met there—the hospital is part of Tomsk National Research Medical Center—and were married there and then gone away, only to return for Rozalina to die there. We’d been married not quite twenty years.”
Twenty years? Cronley thought.
Jesus, I didn’t have twenty hours.
Serov paused as the waiter delivered the open champagne bottle, put it before Serov, then filled the others’ flutes with a fresh bottle.
Cronley lifted his flute.
“May I propose we toast your bride?”
“Thank you, James,” Serov said, clearly moved by the gesture.
He picked up his champagne flute, and when everyone else had raised theirs, he said, “To my beautiful Rozalina, now blessed with eternal peace.”
After everyone took a sip, Serov continued. “She married me against the wishes of her family. At the time, I thought it was because I was then an NKGB officer. But over the years, I came to understand it was because they thought I was a heathen. They were wrong. While I certainly wasn’t a devout, go to mass every day Christian—which is hardly the path to promotion within the NKGB—neither was I an atheist.
“The issue of religion—I suppose I should say Christianity—arose when Rozalina became seriously ill. We returned to Tomsk not for sentimental reasons but rather because it’s the best cancer facility in the Soviet Union, and I had by then risen sufficiently in rank so that I could get her admitted.”
Risen to general. What’s this colonel bullshit?
And to me? I know better.
When I first met you, you made it clear that dealing with a captain was beneath the dignity of a general.
“I could also arrange accommodations for her family in Tomsk—her father, a brother, and two sisters; her mother was dead—and did so. And they prayed, on their knees, every day at her bedside. I remember thinking, when she was gone, that maybe if I had dropped to my knees beside them, Rozalina would still be alive.”
He paused, cleared his throat, and went on. “I then did what any man alone in the world—”
“What do you mean alone?” Cronley interrupted.
“Well, my relationship with Rozalina’s family ended with her death. Mutually.”
“And you’d had no children?” Ginger asked.
Serov, his tone bitter and sarcastic, said, “God, despite the long hours Rozalina had spent praying on her knees, asking Him for children, had chosen not to bless us with even one. So, I was alone and did what any reasonable man would do, given the circumstances: I came back to Nuremberg and threw myself into my work. Life goes on.”
“Yes, it does,” Ginger said. “At first, you don’t think it will, but then something happens.”
She means me, Cronley thought.
Confirmation of that speculation came when he looked at her and she met his eyes and gave him a soft smile.
“I apologize for troubling you with my troubles,” Serov said. “I don’t know what came over me.”
“No apologies are necessary, Colonel,” Jackson said.
Serov raised his champagne flute.
“Za to, chtoby sbyvalus mechty!” he said.
“Well, I’ll drink to that, whatever it means,” Ginger said.
“You were expecting Nostrovia! perhaps?”
“That’s what I’ve heard at the movies.”
“I understand,” Serov said. “Somebody should tell Hollywood that Nostrovia! as a toast is meaningless, and also that all Russians are not monsters. What I propose as a toast—Za to, chtoby sbyvalus mechty—means ‘Let our dreams come true.’”
“Well, I’ll drink to that,” Justice Jackson said.
“So will I,” Ginger said, and again met Cronley’s eyes and smiled at him.
Oh, Jesus! Cronley thought.
“Would it be impolitic of me to ask again how your investigation into the escape of Burgdorf and von Dietelburg is progressing?” Serov asked. “We’re all wondering how that could have happened.”
Talk about brass balls!
The odds are ninety-nine to one that you arranged it!
“I’ll let Jim answer that, Colonel,” Jackson said. “He’s in charge of the investigation.”
“Well, Ivan—”
“Excuse me, Jim,” Serov interrupted him and snapped his fingers to attract the attention of a waiter hovering nearby.
“Herr Oberst?” the waiter said.
Serov pointed to the table where Tiny Dunwiddie and Max Ostrowski were sitting with the nurse and the baby.
“Send a bottle of the champagne to that table with my compliments,” he said.
“Jawohl, Herr Oberst.”
“Curiosity overwhelms me,” Serov said. “Who is the infant whose protection requires the services of two of DCI’s best agents? And the attention of a very senior Army nurse?”
“That’s John Jay McCloy’s love child, Ivan,” Cronley said. “I suppose that now that you’ve spotted them, that secret’s no longer so secret.”
“My God, Jim,” Jackson said. His tone suggested he was more amused at the injecting of the assistant secretary of war than shocked.
“That is my son,” Ginger said, evenly.
Cronley was not finished.
“We’re all friends here, Ivan. So, tell me—what’s the gossip on Lubyanka Square? Does Nikolaevich Merkulov go home to Mrs. Merkulov every night? Or does he have a little something on the side? Maybe a ballet dancer?”
Serov’s face went white and his eyes flashed. He stood up.
“Sometimes, Cronley, you go too far,” he said, angrily. He nodded his head toward Jackson. “You’ll have to excuse me, Mr. Justice. I just remembered an appointment.”
He stormed out of the dining room.
Everyone at the table exchanged glances.
“Was that wise, Jim?” Jackson asked.
“It was stupid,” Ginger snapped.
“Oh, good ol’ Ivan’ll be back,” Cronley replied. “He wants something. I told him the escape is off-limits here.”
“What?” Jackson asked.
“I haven’t figured that out yet. But I will.”
“To change the subject, where are you going to start?” Jackson asked.
“Specifically?”
Jackson nodded.
“You remember when Colonel Cohen said that if Odessa was behind the break, he thought they were trying to free somebody besides von Dietelburg and Burgdorf?”
“I do.”
“Well, I think I know who they were after.”
“Who?”
“Standartenführer Oskar Müller and SS-Brigadeführer Ulrich Heimstadter. I’m going to start with them.”
“Who are they?” Ginger asked.
Cronley flashed her an impatient look.
Jackson picked up on it.
“Get used to that, Cronley. If we’re going to hide Ginger in plain sight, the more she knows about everything, the better. I suggest you take that to heart.”
Ginger looked very pleased.
Cronley had a look of resignation, then nodded.
“Toward the end of the war, my love,” he said, “when it looked as if the German rocket facility at Peenemünde was about to be captured by either the Russians or the Americans—we ultimately took it—Brigadeführer Heimstadter and Standartenführer Müller decided the best way to make sure that the thousand-odd slave workers there didn’t tell either the Reds or the Amis what Wernher von Braun and his friends had been up to was to kill them. First, they made the slave workers dig an enormous hole—a mass grave. Then, until the bullets ran out, the Germans lined them up at the edge of the grave and shot them in the back of the head. They fell into the hole. When bullets ran out, the Germans pushed them into the grave alive, then buried them with a bulldozer.”
“My God!” Ginger said.
“Really bad Nazis. Presuming the break was staged by Odessa, what Cohen thinks—and I agree—is that Odessa wanted Heimstadter and Müller but then learned that von Dietelburg and Burgdorf were in the prison and sprung those two bastards instead. Which confirms that von Dietelburg and Burgdorf are more important to Odessa than just about anyone else.”
Cronley looked around the table, then added, “This afternoon, I’m going to the prison and shake up Heimstadter and Müller a little before I really start talking to them, which I will do immediately on my return from Strasbourg tomorrow.”
“You’re going where?” Ginger asked.
“We are going to Strasbourg to see what Colonel Jean-Paul Fortin knows, or has heard, or can find out for me, about the prison break. We’ll take Father McGrath and, of course, the baby and the nurse.”
“And bodyguards?” Jackson asked.
“Yes, sir. We’ll need another car. Everyone won’t fit in the Horch. Max Ostrowski will drive the other car. That’s enough security.”
“Okay,” Jackson said. “Let me know what Fortin comes up with. And now I’m going to have to leave you.”
[TWO]
Farber Palast
Stein, near Nuremberg, American Zone of Occupation, Germany
1505 15 April 1946
There were three U.S. Army staff cars parked in a line at the stairs to the palace when Cronley drove up in the Horch convertible sedan.
Ginger Moriarty, who was holding Baby Bruce, stood on the steps with Father J-for-Jack McGrath and Tiny Dunwiddie.
On the right of the steps were five men wearing U.S. Army uniforms. The lapels of their Ike jackets had blue-and-white patches reading U.S. that identified them as civilian employees of the Army.
They were, in fact, DCI agents.
Cronley got out of the car and went to Dunwiddie.
“What’s going on, Tiny?”
“Mr. Justice Jackson called and told me to make sure you didn’t go off to Strasbourg alone.”
“You mean, without bodyguards? Guess he didn’t agree with me that Max was enough.”
“Precisely. So here we are.”
“Fortin will think we’re invading.”
“Give the commandant my regards, Jim,” Dunwiddie said. “And now I will return to my duties. Any orders, mon chef?”
“Get on the horn to your godfather and make sure Casey is here when we get back.”
“I hear and obey, mon chef,” Dunwiddie replied. He turned to the others. “Have a nice trip.”
Dunwiddie walked to the row of staff cars, got in the first one, and drove away. As he did, one of the DCI agents left the others, went to a second staff car, and got in behind the wheel. The remaining agents walked to Cronley and the others.
“Interesting man,” Father McGrath said. “I couldn’t tell if he dislikes you intensely or if you’re friends.”
“A little of both, but mostly very good friends.”
“What was that about his godfather?”
“Tiny’s Norwich. So was his father, class of ’20. And so was General White. He’s Tiny’s godfather.”
Max Ostrowski walked up to Cronley.
“Tiny said a lead staff car and a trail car, with the Horch in the middle. That okay with you? And who sits where?”
“I suppose that’s better than using M8 armored cars.”
“Is all this security really necessary?” Father McGrath asked.
“Jackson wants to keep you all alive,” Ostrowski said. “And he’s not been unreasonable.”
Ostrowski then pointed to the door of the Horch. There were four indentions in it, covered with fresh paint.
“Those look like bullet holes,” Father McGrath said, making it a question.
Ginger’s eyes grew wide. “Bullet holes?”
“Repaired bullet holes,” Ostrowski said.
Oh, goddamn you, Max, Cronley thought.
Ginger didn’t have to hear this!
Wait . . .
“Actually,” Cronley said, “a couple months back, at the end of February, Tom Winters and I were ambushed while taking a shortcut from the airport to here. Turned into a Wild West gunfight. We got the bad guys—they were Odessa—who had Schmeissers. One of them was an eighteen-year-old girl. I shot her in the forehead.”
Cronley felt Ginger’s horrified eyes on him.
If that doesn’t buttress my argument that Ginger had better find some nice insurance salesman instead of a guy who people are trying to whack—and, sooner or later, will succeed—I’ll have to think of something else.
There was silence, which was then broken by Ostrowski: “We’re back to who sits where?”
[THREE]
Hôtel Maison Rouge
Rue des Francs-Bourgeois 101
Strasbourg, France
2005 15 April 1946
Colonel Jean-Paul Fortin, a trim forty-year-old, marched purposely into the hotel dining room and up toward the table where Cronley and the others were sitting. He was wearing a U.S. Army olive-drab Ike jacket and trousers, and had removed his kepi from his head. Shoulder boards identified him as colonel. He was accompanied by a similarly uniformed officer whose boards identified him as a captain.
Cronley stood up as the officers approached the table. Fortin wrapped his arms around him affectionately.
“Dunwiddie telephoned to say you were coming,” he greeted Cronley. “I expected you at the office, but then DuPres spotted your Nazimobile parked outside.”
“We’re having dinner. There was no place to eat on the way over. Join us?”
“I’ll join you, but Pierre and I have had our dinner.”
He motioned for the other officer to bring them chairs. When he had, they sat down. Fortin signaled for a waiter.
“Bring cognac,” he ordered.
“Everybody,” Cronley then announced, “this is Colonel Jean-Paul Fortin, who tries but usually fails to maintain the peace in Strasbourg. And this is Capitaine Pierre DuPres. I don’t know what he did wrong, but as punishment Pierre was assigned to Jean-Paul as his deputy.”
DuPres laughed.
“Jean-Paul, this is Mrs. Virginia Moriarty and Father Jack McGrath. You know Max.”
“Enchanté,” Fortin said, taking Ginger’s hand and kissing it. “And you are here why, madame?”
Cronley said, “Ginger, who is the widow of Lieutenant Moriarty, is with me.”
“The gentleman who made the mistake of taking a nap in your bed?”
“Uh-huh. End of the interrogation, mon colonel. And before you say something—or, worse, do something stupid—be advised that Father McGrath is Anglican, Church of England, not Roman Catholic.”
“Isn’t that a meaningless distinction, James?” Fortin said.
“Your ignorance is showing again, Jean-Paul,” Cronley replied.
“You may find this hard to believe,” DuPres said to no one in particular, “but they’re really quite fond of each other.”
“Well, you could have fooled me,” Ginger said.
“There’s a rumor going around,” Cronley said, “that when a Catholic priest says something that annoys Colonel Fortin, next thing you know the priest is trying to swim in the Rhine.”
“Which is hard to do,” Max Ostrowski added, “after someone has shot you in the elbows and knees with a .22.”
Cronley saw Ginger was looking at Ostrowski with disbelief that turned into horrified realization Fortin was not denying the implied accusation.
She shouldn’t be hearing this.
She shouldn’t be here.
Which means I shouldn’t have brought her.
Which is yet another indication that we shouldn’t be together—that she’d be far better off with any of the nice, safe guys her parents are trying to match her with.
Mother asked what I was thinking. And the truth is—pardon my French—I was thinking with the head of my dick.
And, wow, I’ve really fucked this up . . .
“Dunwiddie didn’t say why you were coming,” Fortin said, and added, “with a priest.”
“I like to think of myself as a scholar/priest, Colonel,” McGrath said. “My specialty is heretical religions. I’m in Germany looking into the one that Heinrich Himmler started.”
“Am I supposed to believe that you and James are simply friends? And that you have no connection with the DCI?”
McGrath shrugged, then said, “Let me throw this up for your edification. I trust you’re familiar with Colonel Cletus Frade of the DCI?”
Fortin nodded.
“When Colonel Frade was a fighter pilot on Guadalcanal,” McGrath went on, “I was the fighter group’s chaplain. Cletus asked me to help him find out more about Himmler’s heretical religion. I’m happy to do so.”
“And that’s what you’re doing in Strasbourg?” Fortin pursued.
“You must be the very good—relentless—intelligence officer Jimmy tells me you are,” McGrath said. “Actually, I’m in Strasbourg for several reasons. First, on the way, Jimmy told me about Saint Heinrich the Divine’s Wewelsburg Castle—”
“I’m having trouble believing any of that,” Fortin put in.
“Well, I’m very interested in getting a look at it,” McGrath said. “And, second, I’m here because Mrs. Cronley—Jimmy’s mother—made me promise to hold him to his promise to look in on the widow of her recently deceased nephew, Jimmy’s cousin.”
“I presume you’re talking about the late SS-Sturmführer Luther Stauffer,” Fortin said, but it sounded like a question.
“Correct. And, third, Jimmy wants to ask you—”
“You have a cousin who was in the SS?” Ginger asked Cronley, incredulously.
“I did until Odessa got him to bite on a cyanide capsule in the Tribunal Prison.”
There was again a look of disbelief in her eyes, followed by a look of horrified acceptance.
It hurts seeing her react this way. Maybe I wasn’t thinking with my dick, which means I am in love with her . . .
If that’s true, I’ve got to get her away from me.
Get her and the baby away from me.
“What about his widow?” Ginger asked. “Do you know where she is? I’d like to see her.”
“I’m afraid that’s impossible, madame,” Fortin said. “She’s in the Sainte-Marguerite Prison.”
“Why?” Ginger said, her tone on the edge of unpleasantness.
“The Ministry of Justice is in the process of deciding whether she is to be tried for collaboration or turned over to the Americans for trial on charges of crimes against humanity. At the Nuremberg Tribunal. And when that decision is made, I’m going to inquire into her connection with Odessa.”
“She’s a Nazi?”
“There seems little question about that,” Fortin said. “She and her husband were given the privilege of being married in that castle, Wewelsburg, that James describes as the Church of Saint Heinrich the Divine. In a Nazi ceremony in accordance with the rituals of this new Nazi religion.”
“Jean-Paul,” Cronley said, “as much as I hate to leave this delightful subject, how about we bring you and Pierre up to date on the prison break, and then you tell us what you know, suspect, or have heard about said subject?”
“I was about to suggest that,” DuPres said.
“Oh, were you?” Fortin challenged. “And have you any other brilliant suggestions?”
“As a matter of fact, mon colonel, I do indeed. If you would buy us a bottle of good cognac, it might help to erase the opinion that James’s lady and the good Father must have evolved to your being, vis-à-vis good manners, the French equivalent of an SS-Unterscharführer.”
“That’s a corporal, Ginger,” Cronley said.
“So far as manners are concerned,” Fortin snapped, “I wonder how the hell someone as impertinent as you, DuPres, ever managed to graduate from Saint-Cyr, much less hold a commission for more than two weeks.”
“That’s the French West Point,” Cronley added, helpfully.
“Apparently,” DuPres said with a shrug, “they desperately needed junior officers to explain big words with multiple syllables to its colonels.”
“You may find this hard to believe, Father McGrath,” Cronley said, “but they’re really quite fond of each other.”
“You could have fooled me.”
Fortin glared at everybody, then asked, “Would you honor me with your presence at the bar, Madame Moriarty? For some decent cognac?”
[FOUR]
“When I heard about the breakout from James,” Fortin said, draining the cognac bottle into his snifter while waving for the bartender to bring another to the table, “I told my people to start looking for them here.”
“You think they’re coming here?” Cronley said, surprised.
“I think they’re headed for Spain, and then, more than likely, for South America.”
“And leave Odessa’s money behind?”
“I’m surprised Mr. Justice Jackson calls you Super Spook. You haven’t figured this out, have you?”
“Please, enlighten me.”
“For a price, the Vatican will provide documents that will get these bastards out of Spain.”
“Really?” Father McGrath said. “I heard that rumored, but . . .”
“It’s no rumor, Father,” Fortin said.
Cronley said, “You think that von Dietelburg and Burgdorf picked up money—enough to pay off the Vatican—from the Odessa guys who got them out and are now headed here?”
“No. I think they’re gone from here, and, if not in Spain, they will be shortly.”
“Then looking for them is a waste of time?”
Fortin ignored the question, and said, “Turning to scenario two: Serov, the NKGB, arranged the escape. It was a professional job, so probably the AVO was deeply involved.”
“Why would Serov want to bust them out?” Ginger asked.
“Money, primarily. He gets them to Budapest, and the AVO gets them to tell Serov where the money is. He grabs the money, then kills both of them as they try to escape. He brings the bodies back to Nuremberg and says, ‘Look what a good guy I am!’”
“How much money does Odessa have?” Father McGrath asked.
“Estimates range from a hundred million in currency to maybe five, ten times that much. And that doesn’t include the gold and jewels.”
“Where did they get it?” Ginger asked.
“The currency that they have—that they stole—came from banks. Most of the gold the same way. But some of the gold is—or was—from teeth . . .”
“From teeth?” Ginger parroted.
“Once they had gassed the Untermenschen in the shower rooms . . .”
“What are you talking about?” Ginger said. “Gassed? Shower rooms?”
“You don’t want to know,” Cronley said.
“Yes, damn it, I do!”
Cronley raised his eyebrows, then said, “Okay. In Dachau, for example, when the trains arrived—not passenger cars but boxcars packed with prisoners—they were greeted by SS officers holding the leashes of vicious German shepherds. The men were separated from the women and children, and the old from the young, and the healthy from the sick. The healthy were marched off to work as slave labor in the factories, et cetera.
“Everybody else was told they were to take a shower, after which they would be issued prison uniforms and taken to their barracks. This group then took off their clothes and went naked into the next room, which had a sign identifying it as a shower room. The doors closed. That was the cue for the SS men on the roof to pour a pesticide—it’s called Zyklon B—into the room. Depending on conditions, death came anywhere from five to fifteen minutes later.”
“Five to fifteen? How . . . How did they know?”
“They knew they were all dead when all the screaming stopped.” He saw the look in her eyes. “You want more, Ginger?”
“Finish,” she said.
“Next, after waiting a half hour before opening the death chamber doors, other inmates entered and started loading the corpses in wheelbarrows and on tables with wheels and rolled them out of the showers. Just outside were other inmates who were forced to inspect the corpses. They removed any jewelry, such as wedding rings. Then another team of specialists went to work. They pried open the mouths of the corpses. If they found gold false teeth, or gold bridgework, or fillings, they took a hammer and chisel . . .”
Ginger gasped involuntarily, covering her mouth with her hand. Her eyes glistened.
“. . . and removed the gold. I’m sorry, baby. You wanted to hear.”
She motioned for him to continue.
“You sure?”
She nodded.
“Okay. The wedding rings and the jewelry were put in one basket, the gold teeth in another. The idea was to melt down the rings and the dental work to make gold bars, which were then to be deposited in the Deutsche Bank.
“That sometimes—in fact, often—didn’t happen, as called for. Some clever SS officer reasoned that since the Deutsche Bank didn’t know how many wedding bands, say, had been minted as gold bars, some rings could be set aside and later converted and distributed among deserving SS officers. Or smuggled into Switzerland and sold, the cash from that again distributed among the deserving.
“From its beginning, the SS was corrupt to the core—criminally corrupt. One of the original big shots, right under Himmler, was a man named Reinhard Heydrich. He had been cashiered from the Navy for moral turpitude.”
“Was?” Ginger said. “What happened to him?”
“Heydrich was taken out in Prague by Czech agents when he was ‘protector’ of what had been Czechoslovakia. To avenge his death, the Nazis, among other despicable acts, rounded up all the citizens—men, women, and children—of a village called Lidice. The bastards put them in a church and burned the church down with them in it. They then burned down the rest of the town and leveled it with bulldozers, sowing what was left with salt.”
Tears rolled down her cheeks.
“That’s so terrible, it’s hard to believe.”
“It’s true,” Cronley said. “But we’re getting off the subject.”
He turned to Fortin, and said, “Your scenario is, Odessa gave them enough money to buy phony papers from the Vatican to get them out of France and into Spain.”
Fortin shook his head.
“That’s not what I said. I’m saying Odessa gave the Vatican enough data—photographs, und so weiter—so that the Vatican can prepare the phony documents. They’ll hide somewhere in France until they get the documents and then they’re off to Spain, Portugal—wherever—and, ultimately, to South America.”
“Jesus,” Cronley said.
“No money will change hands. Odessa’s credit is good. They’ve been doing business with the Vatican for a long time. The Vatican will get paid when these bastards are in Buenos Aires or Montevideo.”
“I don’t think I understand,” Father McGrath said.
“To be truthful,” Fortin said, “I do not think that Super Spook does either, so I’ll walk you through it. This scenario is based on the premise that Odessa staged the prison break. But we don’t know that. As I said, I think it’s entirely possible that the NKGB—specifically, James, your pal Serov—was involved. The breakout was a little too classy for Odessa.
“But for sake of discussion, let us say Odessa was behind it. They wanted to get Brigadeführer Heimstadter and Standartenführer Oskar Müller out of the Tribunal Prison because they’re important to Odessa. And then they learned that you bagged von Dietelburg and Burgdorf in Vienna. Those two are more important to Odessa—you will recall that von Dietelburg was Himmler’s adjutant—so they decided to let Heimstadter and Müller stay locked up for the time being.”
Cronley said, “You think we’re wasting time looking for them here, or, for that matter, in Germany?”
“Never underestimate your enemy, James. I’m surprised you don’t know that. And now we come to the part where I tell you what you can do for me.”
“I’m going to check on Bruce,” Ginger said, getting to her feet, “and then get some sleep.”
Everyone got to their feet, too.
She nodded at the men, said good night, and walked out of the bar.
“What’s on your greedy mind, Jean-Paul?” Cronley said.
“I’d like to see this castle you’re always talking about.”
“As would I,” Father McGrath said.
“You have access to a light airplane?” Cronley said to Fortin.
“I have a Fieseler Storch.”
“That figures,” Cronley said. “I’ll talk to Cohen. But if I call, you’ll have to come right then.”
“Fair enough,” Fortin said, who then offered his hand to Father McGrath. “Pleasure meeting you.”