wearing a hat and a rumpled raincoat waded into the pool of yellow light
thrown off by a dim spotlight above the glass doors. The man stopped
when he saw Luhr, taking in the silver lieutenant's bars, st@ched-flat
uniform, and gleaming boots.
"What can I do for you, Lieutenant?" he asked warily.
"Detective Schneider, I presume?"
The big man nodded.
'I am here as the unofficial representative of the prefect.
He has expressed an interest in this case As the murdered man apparently
has some tie to the East German government, the prefect fears that there
might be ... repercussions.
You understand?"
Detective Schneider waited for the lieutenant to ask what he had come
outside to ask. He didn't like the way Luhr's arrogant little mouth
softened his classic Nordic face. Or the eyes, he thought.
Rapist's eyes.
"The photographer tells me that you discovered a card on the premises. A
card with only a telephone number. Where is this card now?"
"I didn't actually find it," Schneider said, slipping his right hand
into his trouser pocket. "Patrolman Ebert did."
Schneider fingered the white card and watched Luhr's face.
"I'm not sure where it is now. I had it, but I think Officer Beck asked
me for it. He's still here, I believe."
"What have you got in your pocket?" Luhr asked sharply.
Schneider slowly withdrew his hand. He held the brass gorget plate and
chain that identified him as a Kripo detective.
With a hiss of frustration Luhr went in search of Officer Beck.
As soon as he disappeared, Schneider pulled a ballpoint pen from his
shirt pocket and copied the number from the card onto the palm of his
hand. Then he followed Luhr into the house.
"Lieutenant?" he called. "Herr Lieutenant!"
Luhr barrelled back through the front door, his face flushed with anger.
"I'm sorry, Lieutenant." Schneider shook his head as if he were a fool
and knew it. "That card was in my coat pocket all the time. I could
have sworn I gave it to Beck. Here you are."
Luhr snatched the card. "Officer Beck says he never asked you for the
card!"
Schneider continued shaking his head. "Must have been somebody else. I
tell you, past midnight and my mind just goes."
"I suggest, Detective," Luhr said acidly, "that you either get more
sleep or look for a new line of work. Have you had anyone trace this
number yet?"
"No, sir. Not yet."
"I'll handle it, then."
While Luhr stalked out to his unmarked Audi, Schneider stood in the
foyer and scratched his large head. Something had felt wrong about this
case from the moment he walked in the door. While everyone else had
gone on about the sloppiness of the murder, Schneider had kept silent.
Twenty minutes later the nameless card had turned up. And now this
Nazi-looking lieutenant had appeared-the prefect's aide, no less-to
spirit that card away.
Schneider couldn't remember ever having seen Luhr at a crime scene
before. That bothered him. He hurried past the few technicians left
outside the house and climbed into his battered Opel Kadett.
"Telephone," he murmured as he cranked the old car.
Jiirgen Luhr had beat him to it. As Schneider rounded the corner of
Levetzow and Bachstrasse, he spied the prefect's aide standing at a
corner call box. Schneider slowed, then drove on, maddeningly shut out
of the conversation passing through the wires just over his head.
"Frau Funk?" Luhr asked, when a woman answered. "I'm sorry to disturb
you so late. This is Jijrgen Luhr. Could I speak with the prefect,
please? ... But he was leaving the station-" Luhr broke the connection
and punched in the number of Abschnitt 53. "Berlin-Two," he snapped.
"The prefect, immediately."
A full minute passed before Funk came on the line, his voice smug and
unruffled in contrast to, its earlier panic.
"I've found something odd at the Tiergarten house. A card with nothing
but a phone number on it. We should trace it immediately. The crime
looked very suspicious. Evidence of automatic weapons fire, conflicting
signs of amateurishness and professionalism. I think our brothers in
uniform may have, been there."
"How interesting," said Funk. "Why don't you come back to the station
and we'll discuss your theory."
"What's the matter? Is someone with you?"
A pause. "There was someone here, Jijrgen. Sergeant Ross just took her
downstairs to her new accommodations."
"Her? Who are you talking aboutt' "The wife of one of our 'brothers in
uniform,' as you put it. A Frau Ilse Apfel. She walked into the
station just after you left. She had a most interesting story to tell."
"What? The sergeant's wife?"
"That's right. I understand the situation much better after talking to
her. I suggest you get back here, Jiirgen, if you want to be in on this
at all. I've already spoken to Pretoria.
I received some very interesting orders, and they involve YOU."
Luhr left the receiver dangling from the call box and dashed to his car.
He squealed down the Bachstrasse in a rage. "Damn that imbecile! How
could he be so lucky?" He screeched around a curve.
"It's all right," he assured himself, calming a little. "He hasn't
found Hauer or Apfel yet.
Or the Spandau papers. And that's what Phoenix wantswhat he's
frightened of. And that distinction will be mine."
In his fury, Luhr failed to notice the burly figure of Detective Julius
Schneider standing at a yellow call box four blocks from the one he had
used to place his own call. Unlike Luhr, Schneider wasn't about to try
to trace the mysterious phone number through normal channels.
An inquiry in his own name might draw unpleasant attention, possibly
even the prefect's, and Schneider didn't need that. Besides, he had
always believed in taking the shortest route between two points.
Reading the telephone number off the palm of his hand, he lifted the
receiver and punched in the digits. He heard five rings, then a click
followed by the familiar hiss and crackle of an automated answering
machine.
"This is Harry Richardson," said a metallic voice. "I'm out.
Friends can leave a message at the tone. If you're a salesperson, don't
call back. If it's a military matter, call my office. The previous
message will be repeated in German.
Thank you."
Schneider waited until the German version of the message had finished,
then hung up. His pulse, normally as steady as a hibernating bear's,
was racing. Schneider knew who Harry Richardson was. He'd even met him
once. American intelligence officers who took the time to cultivate
investigators of the Kriminalpolizei were rare enough to remember.
Schneider doubted if Richardson would remember him, but that didn't
matter. What mattered was that an American army officer was somehow
involved in what was fast shaping up to be an explosive murder case.
Schneider took several deep breaths and forced himself to think slowly.
H
e'd found Richardson's card outside the victim's house, but there had
been blood all around it. What did that mean? And what should he do?
He thought of the prefect's insolent aide, and the overly officious
manner that in Schneider's experience spelled coverup.
With sudden insight Schneider realized that he now stood at one of those
crossroads that can change a man's life forever.
He could get into his car and go home to his wife and his warm bed-a
course of action almost any sane German would choose-or he could make
the call that he suspected would pluck him from his old life like the
wind sweeps a seed from the ground.
"God," he murmured. "Godfrey Rose."
Schneider jumped into his car and fired the engine. Thirty minutes ago
he had been mildly intrigued by the night's events. Now his mind ran
wild with speculation, electrified by the smell of the kind of chase he
had become a detective for in the first place.
Squealing away from the curb, he made an illegal U-turn and headed east
on the Budapester Strasse, making for the Tiergarten station. He hoped
his English was up to the task.
CHAPTER TWELVE
12.'30 A.M. Veipke, FRG. Near the East German Border Professor
Natterman swung the rattling Audi back toward the frontier and pushed
the old sedan to 130 kilometers per hour. Now that the end of his
harrowing journey approached, he could not keep from rushing. The speed
was exhilarating; the protesting whine of the tires as he leaned the car
into the curves kept his fatigued mind alert. Thank God for old
friends, he thought. A boyhood churn had come through for him tonight,
providing the Audi with no questions asked.
Thankfully, the mysterious Englishman who had "accidentally" stumbled
into his compartment had disappeared.
Natterman hadn't seen him again on the train, nor at Helmstedt when the
few passengers disembarked. A few times during the last hour he had
caught sight of headlights in the blackness far behind him, but they
came and went so frequently that he wrote them off to nervousness.
As the Audi jounced over the railroad linking Gardelegan to Wolfsburg,
the professor spied the eerie, never-dimming glow of the sprawling
factory city to the west. The sight startled him still.
When he was a boy, Wolfsburg had been a tiny village of less than a
hundred, its few houses scattered hodgepodge around the old feudal
castle. But when the Volkswagen works came there in 1938, the village
had been transformed almost OVERNIGHT into an industrial metropolis.
He could scarcely believe his father's tiny cabin still remained in the
quiet forest northeast of the city.
It had been eleven months since he last visited the cabin, but he knew
that Karl Riemeck, a local laborer and old family retainer, would have
both the grounds and the house in fine shape. The thought of spending
some time in the old place had almost blotted out the wild theories
whirling through Natterman's weary brain. Almost. As he roared down
the narrow road cut through the deep forest, visions of notorious and
celebrated faces from the past flickered in his mind like pitted
newsreels. Hitler and Churchill ... the Duke of Windsor ... Stalin ...
Joseph P Kennedy, the American ambassador to wartorn Britain, a Nazi
appeaser and father of a future U. S. President. . . Lord Halifax, the
nerveless British foreign secretary and secret foe of Churchill ...
Those smiling faces now seemed to conceal uncharted worlds of deception,
worlds waiting to be mapped by an intrepid explorer. The thrill of
impending discovery coursed through the old historian's veins like a
powerful narcotic, infusing him with youthful vigor.
He eased off the gas as he crossed the Mittelland Canal bridge.
Again he had arrived at the impenetrable core of the mystery: what were
the British hiding? If Hess's double had flown to Britain to play a
diversionary role, what was he diverting attentionfrom? Why had the
real Hess flown to Britain? To meet Englishmen, of course, his mind
answered. But which Englishmen? With a pang of professional jealousy
Natterman thought of the Oxford historians who were documenting the
pro-Nazi sympathies of over thirty members of the wartime British
Parliament whom they believed had known about Hess's flight beforehand.
The gossip in academic circles was that the Oxford men believed these
MPs were Nazi appeasers, enemies of Churchill whom Hess had flown
secretly to Britain to meet. Natterman wasn't so sure.
He had no doubt that an apparently pro-Hitler clique of upper-class
Englishmen existed in 1941. The real question was, did those men really
intend to betray their country by forging an unholy alliance with Adolf
Hitler? Or was there a deeper, more noble motive for their behavior?
The answer to this lay in Hitler's war plans. The Fuhrer's ultimate
goal had always been the conquest of Russia-the acquisition of
Lebensraum for the German people-which made him very popular with
certain elements of British society. For despite being at war with
Germany, many Englishmen saw the Nazi state as an ideal buffer against
the spread of communism. Similarly, the Fuhrer had visions of Germany
and England united in an Aryan front against communist Russia. Hitler
had never really believed that the English would fight him. Yet when
Winston Churchill refused to accept the inevitable surrender to and
alliance with Germany, the Fuhrer got angry.
And there, Natterman believed, lay the basis of Rudolf Hess's mission.
Hitler had assigned himself a very strict timetable for Barbarossa-his
invasion of the Soviet Union.
He believed that if he did not invade Russia by 1941, Stalin's Red Army
would gain an overwhelming superiority over him in men and materiel.
That meant that to be successful, his invasion armies had to jump off
eastward by May of 1941 at the latest, before the snows melted and made
the effective use of tanks impossible. And the British, Natterman
remembered, had known this. An RAF group captain named F. W.
Winterbotham had worked it out in 1938. And this knowledge@orrectly
exploited@ould have given the British a peculiar kind of advantage.
For the longer they could fool Hitler into believing they wanted a
negotiated peace, the longer they could stave off an invasion of
Britain. And the nearer would draw the date when Hitler would have to
redeploy the bulk of his armies eastward. If Hitler could be fooled
long enough, England would be spared.
But had those "pro-Nazi" Englishmen understood that in 1941?
Natten-nan wondered. Were they altruistic patriots who had lured Rudolf
Hess to Britain on a fool's errand, and thus saved their homeland from
the Nazis? Or were they traitors who had decided Adolf Hitler was a man
they could deal with-a bit of a boor, perhaps, but with sound policies
vis-A-vis the communists and Jews? The answer seemed simple enough: If
a group of powerful Englishmen had merely pretended to treat with Hitler
in order to save Britain, they would be heroes and would require no
protection from p
ublic scrutiny, especially fifty years after the fact.
However, the well-documented efforts of the British government to
suppress the details of the Hess case tended to reinforce the opposite
theory: that those Englishmen really had been admirers of Hitler and
fascism.
The variable that confused this logic was a human wild card-Edward VIII,
Duke of Windsor, former Prince of Wales and abdicated King of England.
The duke's proGerman sympathies and contact with the Nazis-both before
and during the war-were documented and very embarrassing facts' At the
very least Windsor had made a fool of himself by visiting Hitler and all
the top Nazis in Germany, then trumpeting the Fuhrer's "achievements" to
a shocked world.
At worst he had committed treason against the country he was born to
rule. After his stormy abdication, the duke, living in neutral Spain,
had pined away for the throne he had so lightly abandoned.
Startling evidence unearthed in 1983
indicated that in July of 1940 Windsor had slipped secretly into neutral
Lisbon to meet a top Nazi, where they explored the option of Windsor's
return to the English throne. And that, Natterman thought excitedly,
was the core of it all! Because according to British historian Peter
Allen, the Nazi whom Windsor had sneaked into Portugal to meet had been
none other than Rudolf Hess!
Natterman gripped the wheel tighter. A clear picture had begun to
emerge from the blurred background of speculation. He could see it now:
while Hitler's "British sympathizers" may have been feigning sympathy
for the Nazis in order to save England, the Duke of Windsor most
definitely was not. And if Windsor had committed treason@r even come
close-that was the kind of royal "peccadillo" that the British secret
service would be forced to conceal, suppressing the entire Hess story,
the heroism as well as the treason.
Natterman felt his heart thump. A fourth and stunning possibility had
just occurred to him. What if the British "traitors" really were
pro-Nazi, but had been allowed to pursue their treachery by an even more
devious British Intelligence? That way the Nazis could not possibly
have picked up on any deception, because the conspirators themselves
would not have been aware that they were part of one!
Natterman's mind reeled at the implications. He tried to focus on that