[ONE]
Wewelsburg Castle
Near Paderborn, American Zone of Occupation, Germany
0955 27 April 1946
Cronley slowed to a walk as he entered the kitchen. General White was helping himself to a cup of coffee and a doughnut from a tray on the table in the center of the room. Two Constabulary troopers, the elder of whom looked as if he required a shave maybe every other week, eyed Cronley coldly. Both troopers obviously were prepared to turn their Thompsons on him if he acted at all suspiciously. Cronley saluted crisply.
“Good morning, sir. An unexpected pleasure.”
General White returned the salute by touching his riding crop to his gleaming helmet liner.
“I was taking a morning patrol with my troopers and realized we were close to your castle. I thought I’d drop by and pay my respects.”
“We’re honored to have you, sir.”
“You’re scared practically shitless, Cronley. I can tell when you are because your military courtesy is impeccable.”
Cronley didn’t reply.
“In response to your unasked question, Sergeant Casey is sitting—figuratively speaking, of course—on Miss Johansen in Sonthofen. I didn’t want her around until I had a good look at what’s going on at your castle. I have a number of probing questions for you. Starting with, why is King Arthur’s table in pieces and why are they loading said pieces onto that six-by-six?”
“Sir, Colonel Dickinson believes an entry—maybe the entry—into the secret passages in the castle is concealed where the table was sitting.”
“Now I’m really glad I came,” White said, then gestured with his riding crop. “Lead on, Captain Super Spook. Show me the secret passages.”
When they walked into the vaulted room, they found Major Lomax on his knees where the table had been. He was gently tapping the stone floor with a ball-peen hammer and then, all of a sudden, raised the hammer over his shoulders and delivered a heavy blow to the floor.
“You’re brighter than you look, Lomax,” Colonel Dickinson said. “Maybe you should consider a career in the Corps of Engineers.”
Lomax ignored him, instead handing the hammer to Technical Sergeant Holmes.
“You see where it’s starting to crack, Elwood?”
“Got it, sir,” Sergeant Holmes said, taking the hammer and dropping to his knees.
At that point, Dickinson, Lomax, and Father McKenna, who was standing beside Lomax, spotted General White, a natty lieutenant next to him, obviously his aide-de-camp, his bodyguards, and Cronley.
Dickinson called, “Ten-hut!” and everybody in the room, which included maybe a dozen soldiers, popped to attention.
“Rest,” White ordered, and then pointed his riding crop at Father McKenna. “Who are you, padre? And what are you doing in my castle?”
“I’m Father McKenna, General. I’m on Cardinal von Hassburger’s staff. The cardinal sent me here to learn what I can about the Nazi religion Himmler started.”
White didn’t respond, instead asking, “Sergeant, why are you hammering on the floor?”
“Sir, we think there’s a—I don’t know—maybe some sorta trapdoor under here, blocking the entrance to a passage or stairway, or something. Somebody’s tried to hide it. And did a damn good job.”
The sound of the hammer striking the stone floor took on a new pitch. Then there was a cracking sound.
The sergeant wedged an iron crowbar into a crack and, with a grunt, heaved on it. This caused a section of the floor, almost an inch thick and four feet square, to rise just high enough so that the sergeant could insert a metal wedge.
“There you are, you tough son of a bitch,” the sergeant said. “Somebody, quick, get me a length of chain and then move one of the damn jeep wreckers over here. There’s no telling how heavy that son of a bitch is going to be.”
Ten minutes later, the sergeant had looped the chain through a handle on the underside of the square blocking the hole and then looped the other end through a hook on the jeep wrecker’s derrick.
As the sergeant used hand signals to control the derrick, the chain tightened. The truck engine revved as the derrick strained under the weight, then began to lift.
“Here comes the bastard,” Dickinson called.
The square slowly cleared the hole, then swung to one side. The sergeant made a slashing motion across his throat, and the derrick operator stopped raising the chain.
The sergeant went to the hole and looked down in it. As he did, Colonel Dickinson got on his knees beside him for a better look.
And then he clutched at his throat with his hand and, gray-faced, turned away from the hole.
The sergeant vomited. Then so did Dickinson.
General White, in his legendary voice of command, ordered, “Everybody out! Now!”
White turned to Cronley.
“You get Dickinson. I’ll get the sergeant.”
Cronley got a whiff.
“Jesus! Poison gas?” he asked as they hurried toward the hole.
He got another whiff—then vomited.
“No,” White said. “That’s a mass of human bodies putrefying . . .”
[TWO]
General White cared for, almost parentally, his aide and the two teenage bodyguards, all of whom took longer than almost anyone else to get control of their wrenching stomachs.
Cronley required much the same care—and got it from Father McKenna—before he was able to help anyone else.
Finally, he decided that he had done all he could. He surveyed the chaotic scene and was surprised that everyone was still alive.
Cronley made his way outside, into the cobblestone courtyard, and deeply inhaled the fresh air. He found Father McKenna with Colonel Dickinson and Major Lomax. They were sitting on cobblestones, their backs against the rear tires of the 6×6 truck that held the pieces of the disassembled round table.
Soon, General White approached. “You guys going to be all right?”
Cronley, Lomax, and Dickinson nodded, and, in a chorus, said weak “Yes, sir”s. McKenna made a limp gesture with his right fist, the thumb up.
Cronley saw White’s teenage bodyguards more or less stumble out of the castle and come to rest where they could keep an eye on General White.
“If it makes you feel any better,” White said, “the first time I smelled that—and what I smelled then wasn’t as bad as this—I was hors de combat for six hours.”
“Where was that, sir?” Dickinson asked.
“Peenemünde, the German rocket labs. We knew what had been going on there, so we were in a race with the Russians to get there first. The Germans sent SS-Generalmajor Wilhelm Burgdorf—one of the two bastards Super Spook is looking for—to blow up the place and otherwise make sure that whoever got there first, us or the Reds, would find nothing of value.”
“But we did, right?” McKenna said.
“Peenemünde was enormous. There was no way Burgdorf could blow up the whole thing. So he blew up and burned what he could, and then he massacred the slave laborers who had been working there so they couldn’t tell us or the Reds what they had seen.”
“Massacred, sir?” Dickenson said. “How?”
“He didn’t have enough time to shoot all of them—there were hundreds, not counting those who had died from being worked to death—so what he did was bulldoze mass graves, usher the workers into the graves, and, after a perfunctory attempt to shoot them, had the bulldozers bury everybody—dead, or still breathing, or sometimes not even wounded—men, women, and children.
“That’s when I smelled this for the first time”—he gestured back toward the castle—“when I opened those mass graves . . . It’s a smell that sticks with you a long time. I suspect forever.”
He paused and then went on. “So how can we get rid of enough of the stink, Dickinson, and how soon, so that we can have a look in the hole and see what’s down there?”
“Exhaust fans are the obvious answer, General,” Lomax weakly answered for Dickinson, then suddenly got to his feet and ran twenty feet before bending at the waist and suffering another attack of nausea.
“Where do we get exhaust fans?” White went on.
“The Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives people, sir,” Dickinson said. “They use them to blow air into caves and tunnels and mines where the Krauts stored stolen artwork.”
“Do you know for sure where there are such fans?”
“Yes, sir. But I don’t know how Monuments is going to like our wanting to take them over.”
White nodded. “Can the engineers settle such a dispute or am I going to have to send a couple of Constabulary troops with you?”
Lomax walked back to where they sat by the truck. “We can handle it, General.”
“Once you get the fans, how long will it take?”
“I’d run them at least twenty-four hours, sir. But there’s always a chance that they could clear it faster.”
“Start looking for them,” White ordered.
“Yes, sir.”
“Super Spook, where’s your Nazimobile?”
“It’s here, sir, outside by the moat.”
“We’re going to ride into Nuremberg with the windshield folded down and see if that’ll help in getting the smell out of our nostrils.”
“Yes, sir. Why are we going to Nuremberg?”
“To pay our respects to Mr. Justice Jackson.”
“Stupid question,” Cronley said.
“Yes, it was.”
“General, can I hitch a ride with you?” Father McKenna asked.
“You have business with Justice Jackson?”
“No, sir. But I want to send a message to the cardinal.”
“What sort of message?”
McKenna paused before replying, then said, “I want to tell him that the situation is even worse than Cronley presented it.”
“Castle Wewelsburg got to you, did it?”
“It’s made its impression, yes, but not as much as my conversation with Brigadeführer Heimstadter.”
“How so?”
“It took me some time, General, to accept that he’s perfectly willing, maybe even eager, to be a martyr to this new religion and the Thousand-Year Reich. He’s an intelligent man. One would think that after all that’s happened—Hitler’s suicide, Goebbels and his wife murdering their children before committing suicide themselves, the defect of the Wehrmacht, the unconditional surrender, the utter destruction of Berlin, all of that—that he’d at least begin to question what good his suicide could do the cause. That’s what I find really dangerous. How many more are there like him? Intelligent, educated, competent—and clearly out of their minds?”
“More than I like to think, I’m afraid, Father. And you want to tell the cardinal this?”
“I want to get that message to Cardinal von Hassburger soonest. But I don’t want to telephone, as I’m convinced Odessa has people listening. So, what I’m going to do is find someone in Nuremberg’s Jesuit community who’ll carry what I have to say to Rome verbally.”
“Sure, you can ride along with us,” White said. “Okay, Super Spook, let’s go.”
As they crossed the courtyard, White’s aide and then the two teenage bodyguards struggled to their feet, obviously determined to go where he was going despite their feeling ill.
“Cronley,” White ordered, “tell them they’re not going.”
“With respect, sir, no. I have a rule about not breaking hearts.”
“You are one difficult sonofabitch. Did anyone ever tell you that?”
“Yes, sir. But I didn’t believe them.”
Several minutes later, they drove off in the Horch, its top folded down and with both the front and rear seat windshields also folded down.
Cronley was at the wheel. White sat beside him. In the rear, the general’s aide and Father McKenna rode regally in the leather-upholstered rear seat, while the general’s bodyguards rode uncomfortably in the jump seats.
[THREE]
Office of the Chief U.S. Prosecutor
International Tribunal Compound
Nuremberg, American Zone of Occupation, Germany
1710 27 April 1946
“Why do I get the feeling that this isn’t a social call?” Justice Jackson said as White, Cronley, and McKenna entered his office. “And what is that sickening smell?”
“First things first, Mr. Justice,” White replied. “Father McKenna needs to contact the Jesuit community in Nuremberg and doesn’t know the most expeditious manner to find it. I’ve assured him if anyone knows, you do.”
“I don’t have a clue,” Jackson said as he walked to the window and opened it. He took in a deep breath of the outdoor air.
“That won’t work,” White said. “The stench clings to you.”
Jackson acted as if he hadn’t heard.
“Is there anything I can do for you, Father?” he asked. “Aside from having my clerk locate the Jesuits for you?”
“The odor to which you refer,” White then said, “is that of the putrefying of what I estimate to be between one hundred and three hundred corpses we have found in a hitherto secret room in Castle Wewelsburg.”
“Say that again, I.D.?” Jackson said.
White repeated himself verbatim. He added, “It is not unlike the mass graves I uncovered of slave laborers massacred by the Nazis at Peenemünde.”
Jackson walked behind his desk, slumped in his chair, and with both hands gestured Let’s have it.
White told him what had transpired at Castle Wewelsburg, concluding, “We won’t know how many bodies, or who they were, until we can get down there. And we don’t know when we can do that. Certainly not until tomorrow.”
Jackson wanted an explanation of that, too.
Cronley had just finished providing it when Kenneth Brewster came into the office.
“My God! What smells in here?”
He went to open the window wider.
“I don’t smell anything,” Cronley said. “Can you, General?”
“The faint smell of roses, perhaps,” White replied. “How about you, Father?”
The priest shook his head in disbelief and disapproval but did not reply.
“Ken,” Jackson said, “this is Father McKenna, who needs your assistance.”
“That Father McKenna?”
“I’m afraid I don’t follow,” the priest said.
“Does the name Heimstadter mean anything to you, Father?”
“We’ve met.”
“Where?”
“In the Tribunal Prison.”
“Then that raises the question, what were you doing with Heimstadter?”
“I took him to see Heimstadter,” Cronley said, sharply. “Okay, Brewster?”
“And you had Justice Jackson’s permission to do that?”
“Because I had his permission to take Heimstadter out of the prison, I damn sure didn’t think I needed it.”
Jackson said, “Where is your interrogatory taking us, Ken?”
“Sir, there was an incident at lunch. Party or parties unknown poured boiling water down Heimstadter’s back. He’s now in the infirmary rather badly burned.”
“It wasn’t accidental, I gather?” Jackson asked.
“No, sir. And from the moment he got to the infirmary, he’s been asking—demanding—to see Father McKenna.”
Jackson looked at Cronley. “Jim?”
“How’d you hear about this, Brewster?” Cronley demanded.
“What do mean?”
“Who told you somebody poured boiling water on Heimstadter? What the hell were you doing, Brewster, hoping to catch me with my hand in the cookie jar?”
“Enough!” Jackson said, softly but angrily. He let that sink in and then turned to Cronley. “Okay, Jim, what were you up to with Heimstadter?”
“I offered him a deal. He gives us Burgdorf, von Dietelburg, and/or the Odessa money and he gets to go to Argentina.”
“You had no right to propose such a thing! They’re to be properly tried here in court,” Brewster said, righteously indignant. Then, realizing he had overstepped his authority, he looked at Jackson and said, “Am I right, sir?”
“Ken,” Jackson said, evenly, smiling at his aide who had been top of his class at Yale and who he considered a brilliant lawyer. “Jim was simply following the Hotshot Billy Principle.”
Jackson and White exchanged smiles.
“Excuse me, sir?” Brewster asked, confused.
Jackson said, “‘If you need permission to do something that you’re absolutely sure is right, and know your superior is going to tell you no, do it anyway. Success earns forgiveness.’ Or words to that effect.”
“I gather Heimstadter rejected your offer?” White said.
“Yes, sir. Cold. But I gave Father McKenna another shot at it.”
“And?”
“Cold. Frighteningly cold,” McKenna said.
White nodded. “That was, of course, before somebody poured boiling water on him. But if he turned down your offer, Cronley, why would anyone be angry?”
“When we returned him from the Mansion to the prison, we put him alone in the backseat of the Nazimobile and took him on a tour of Nuremberg. Somebody with access to boiling water must have seen him.”
“Isn’t that dirty pool?” Jackson asked.
“On the contrary, I think it was a fine idea,” White said. “I thought so at the time, and now that he’s asked for Father McKenna, I believe it a brilliant idea.”
White turned to McKenna.
“Father, if your message to the cardinal can wait, how about going to see why Heimstadter wants to talk to you?”
[FOUR]
Prison Dispensary
International Tribunal Compound
Nuremberg, American Zone of Occupation, Germany
1935 27 April 1946
A prison guard sat uncomfortably in a folding metal chair in a corner of the room, holding his nightstick in both hands. SS-Brigadeführer Ulrich Heimstadter was lying naked on his stomach in a hospital bed. He was swathed in greasy-looking bandages from just below his neck to his upper buttocks.
“I heard what happened,” Father McKenna said as he walked into the room. “How are you? How are they treating you?”
“I’m in agony,” Heimstadter said.
“Are they giving you anything for the pain?”
“I refused the injection. I wanted my mind clear when I talked to you.”
“What’s on your mind, Ulrich?”
“You know why those bastards poured the boiling water on me.”
“I gather it wasn’t an accident.”
“When they heard I was riding around Nuremberg in the backseat of that Horch, they concluded that I had betrayed my oath. As that son of a bitch Cronley hoped they would.”
“You don’t know that, Ulrich.”
“Let’s cut the bullshit. What I’m wondering now is whether you can be trusted.”
“About what?”
“Are you here as a priest? For that matter, are you really a priest? Or are you a DCI agent in a priest’s collar?”
“I am not a DCI agent. I am a Jesuit priest assigned to the Vatican.”
“Swear to that—swear to God that you’re a priest and not an agent of Cronley, or any American!”
“Normally, I wouldn’t do that, but these are extraordinary circumstances, aren’t they?” He raised his right hand to the level of his shoulder, and said, “I so swear.”
“Before God!”
“I so swear before God.”
“The first thing I have to do is get out of here alive. If I stay here, the Nazis will kill me as a traitor.”
“You don’t know that.”
“In their shoes, I would regard killing me as a duty.”
“What are you asking, Ulrich?”
“If Cronley agreed to have me transferred elsewhere, could I trust him? Would you trust him?”
“You could. I would. But why would he get you transferred out of here?”
“In exchange for information.”
“What information? The location of von Dietelburg and Burgdorf?”
“I don’t know where they are. But I know where they might be.”
“Then why should he trust you?”
“Because, at the very least, the information I have would permit him to arrest three or four—maybe more—of the Odessa people he’s looking for. And allow him to recover—steal—some Odessa money.”
“And you’d give him all this just to be taken from the prison?”
“I’d give him all that to save my life and to open further conversation about me going to Argentina. Once he learned to trust me. Understand?”
“Ulrich, it is not my business to be your agent in any sort of a discussion. But what I will do, if you like, is tell Cronley what you told me and that you want to talk to him.”
“Make that I am willing to talk to him.”
[FIVE]
Cronley, when Father McKenna had passed Heimstadter’s message, marked the time on his wristwatch in order to wait thirty minutes before entering the prison dispensary.
“Herr Brigadeführer,” Cronley said as he and the priest approached Heimstadter’s bed, “I hate to tell you this, but you look like a beached whale.”
When it looked as if McKenna was going to leave the room, Heimstadter called, “Please stay, Father.”
“What did you do,” Cronley pursued, moving to the head of the bed in order to meet Heimstadter’s eyes, “jump into the shower before testing the water?”
“You know very well what happened.”
“What’s on your mind?”
“If I stay in the prison, I’m going to be killed.”
Cronley nodded. “Quite probably.”
“If you agree, with Father McKenna as my witness, that you will transfer me some place I’ll be safe, I’ll give you information you will find valuable.”
“First, I get you transferred and then you give me that valuable information? As in the sun will rise tomorrow?”
“The information I will provide will allow you to arrest four—possibly more—Odessa officers, each of whom almost certainly has far more information regarding the location of von Dietelburg and Burgdorf than you do. You will also be able to seize a considerable amount of Odessa’s assets.”
“I’m having trouble believing my good fortune,” Cronley said. “And believing you.”
“Once we get through stage one—once, in other words, that you will be forced to accept that I’m telling the truth—I’d like to go to stage two, revisiting our conversation about Argentina.”
Cronley was silent, then said, “Getting you moved to some other place will take at least two or three days. What I will do immediately is post a couple of MPs in here. Okay?”
Heimstadter considered that for a minute, then the whole of his body seemed to go limp, his head dropping to the pillow. He sighed as he nodded.
“Approximately six kilometers to the north of Castle Wewelsburg,” he said, “there is a small complex of buildings surrounded by several hundred acres of farmland. It was formerly the Experimental Farm of the Ministry of Agriculture. The complex is currently being run as a farm under the supervision of your military government.”
He raised his head, and went on. “Somewhere on that farmland is a building built in secrecy by the SS when the castle was being renovated. The building today appears deserted, damaged in the war. But under it is the complex of rooms originally designed to work with the castle.”
This sounds like pure bullshit, Cronley thought, his eyes locked on Heimstadter’s.
So why am I believing it?
He said, “And . . . ?”
“And there are at least four—and possibly, probably, as many as six—Odessa officers living there.”
“And nobody has seen them? Come on, Heimstadter!”
“They are hiding in plain sight, as the expression goes, working on the farm. Driving tractors, trucks, et cetera. One of your warrant officers—his name is Wynne—is glad to have them. The remote location of the farm makes it difficult to hire the local farmworkers, and these men are good workers.”
“Warrant Officer Wynne?”
“He’s the American in charge. There are half a dozen other American soldiers on the place.”
“How do you know all this?” Cronley said.
Stupid question. He’s not going to tell me how he learned.
They pass messages—and other contraband, like cyanide—in and out of this Compound like it’s a post office. Even Morty Cohen can’t stop it, and God knows he tries hard.
The look on Heimstadter’s face showed that he, too, thought it was a stupid question.
He said, “What the farm is, Captain Cronley, is a splendid example of what can happen when the victorious Americans and the defeated Germans put the war behind them and cooperate.”
I’d like to kick that flabby white ass of yours from here to Berlin.
“Come on, Father,” Cronley said. “Let’s go get Ulrich some MPs to protect him. Don’t go anywhere, Ulrich. I’ll be back.”
“I rather thought you would.”
[SIX]
Farber Palast
Stein, near Nuremberg, American Zone of Occupation, Germany
2225 27 April 1946
Jim Cronley entered the dining room and saw that General White was at a table pouring champagne into a crystal stem.
“I was about to give up on you and have my dinner,” White said as Cronley approached, “but then Billy Wilson called from the airfield to announce his and Miss Johansen’s arrival. They should be here any minute. What happened with Heimstadter?”
“We got lucky, General,” Cronley said. “Possibly very lucky, depending on how much we can trust the bastard.”
White made one of his Let’s have it gestures with both hands, and Cronley started to tell him what had gone on in the prison dispensary.
He had just about finished when Lieutenant Colonel William W. Wilson and Miss Janice Johansen of the Associated Press walked up to the table.
“Ah, there you are,” White said, getting to his feet. “We were just about to order dinner. How was your flight?”
Janice stopped at the table, hands on her hips. “You have to the count of ten to tell me about this big story you’ve got for me, General, before I start throwing things. One . . . two . . .”
“You should know, Miss Johansen, that no one intimidates me. That said, Captain Cronley will explain it all to you. May I offer you a glass of champagne?”
“Only if it comes in a bottle that I can throw at Super Spook if he tries any of his bovine excreta on me.”
Cronley grunted. “Calm down, Janice. Sometime after first light tomorrow, Colonel Wilson will take you flying again . . .”
“Over my dead body,” she replied. “Better yet, over ol’ I.D.’s dead body.”
Cronley pretended not to hear her.
“. . . This time in a L-19, not in the general’s Gooney Bird, so it will be easier for you to take photographs,” he went on. “You will fly over a farm complex about six kilometers from Wewelsburg. The farmlands constitute seven hundred hectares. It is currently under the control of the military government. You will first locate the main complex of buildings—”
“What’s the sudden interest in a damn farm?” she interrupted.
He ignored her again.
“—And then a second building somewhere on the farm. This will look to the casual observer to be deserted and abandoned because of damage suffered in the recent conflict. To a sharp-eyed observer such as yourself, Janice, there should be obvious evidence of activity. I’m sure Colonel Wilson here will be happy to help, pointing out, say, tire tracks from trucks or tractors, perhaps smoke from a cooking fire—”
“Somewhat repeating myself: What’s your interest in this building in the middle of nowhere, Jimmy?”
“Well, Janice, I’m pretty sure it houses five or six Odessa officers, a quantity of Odessa money, and, I dare to hope, von Dietelburg and Burgdorf as well.” He paused, then added, “When you return from your flight—and only after we secure the buildings—there may be room in an M8 for you to go with us to find out.”
Janice stared at him, then glanced at White, before turning back to Cronley. “And this is my story, Jimmy? No one else knows anything about it?”
“It’s yours and yours alone.”
Janice’s eyebrows went up, and, after some thought, said, “Okay, what’s the catch, Super Spook?”
“But only if we still have our understanding.”
“Of course we do. Why the hell would we not?”