by Michael Dean
Dawson was still shaking his head in wonder. ‘The nerve of that guy! Just as well you didn’t find the paintings, eh Captain.’
‘Thank you for that, sir,’ Hodge muttered.
Dawson was twinkling, all pink and white. ‘But now, I guess for the first time, we have the advantage. Felfe does not know we rumbled him. We got the biggest advantage you can have, the advantage of surprise. But I’m stealing your thunder, major. Carry on.’
‘Sir!’ Lindsay said. ‘OK, everybody. This is the plan. We send a telex from Captain Hodge to Felfe/Palfrey, as planned. We do not say we found the pictures. If we do that Felfe will start making transport arrangements. We tell him we have Wagner and we expect Wagner to tell us where the pictures are soon. It is our belief that it is big enough news for Felfe to contact Kaltenbrunner. And let me be clear, everybody, Kaltenbrunner’s the big fish here. Bigger than Wagner. A lot bigger.’
‘Excuse me, major,’ said Bingham. He addressed the meeting at large. ‘For your information we have Felfe’s address in Paris. We checked out the address found in your room, Captain Hodge, and Felfe and Veronica really do reside there.’
‘Good,’ said Hodge.
Bingham went on. ‘We have a tap on his telephone. We have a trace on his telex. If, as we expect, he contacts Kaltenbrunner with this hot news, we expect to have Kaltenbrunner in hours. We think he’s in Austria, near his home town, and we have our people there on standby.’
‘Are there any comments or questions?’ Lindsay said. ‘Can anybody see any problems?’
There was a silence. Eventually Hodge said, ‘It’s a good plan.’
‘Good,’ said Lindsay. ‘We’ll get you to draft the telex, John. You can add some personal touches.’
Hodge winced.
So now we move to the Ludwigsburg end of the operation.’ Lindsay looked at everybody round the table in turn.
‘Major, before you do that,’ Dawson said. ‘Like I said, we’re leaving operational matters entirely to you, so Major Bingham and I will be heading back to Stuttgart now. We have another meeting.’
Dawson stood. Bingham began a harvest of his files. Dawson clasped Lindsay’s hand in both his bear-like paws. ‘Thank you for your hospitality, major.’
‘Thank you for coming, sir. And Major Bingham.’
When Dawson and Bingham were gone, Lindsay puffed out his cheeks in relief.
‘We still do not have Wagner,’ he resumed. ‘Wagner is a war criminal. And we have not recovered those paintings. So we start afresh on that. And as you all see, I have invited Herr Keil to help us out here, to give us some suggestions as to where we should start looking. So, over to you, Herr Keil.’
Keil’s creased face looked weary. He nodded to himself. ‘Thank you Major Lindsay,’ he said. ‘And before I begin, I wish to add the congratulations of the people of Ludwigsburg on your promotion. We are grateful for what you have done for us.’
‘Hear hear!’ said Barbara Ketz.
‘You’re welcome,’ said Lindsay, quietly.
‘But Zur Sache, as we say, turning to the matter in hand. I am afraid I have not the slightest inkling as to the whereabouts of Karl Wagner. All I can say is that I am ninety percent sure he is still in Ludwigsburg, not least for the reason given earlier. Namely, that his own group are loyal to him, but if he moves too far from his base the SS will kill him. Frἂulein Ketz, what is your opinion?’
‘I agree,’ Barbara said.
‘However on the matter of the paintings …’ Wilhelm Keil stopped and fought for breath. Hodge remembered Lindsay saying he was seventy-five. If anything he looked older. ‘Excuse me. On the matter of the paintings I have two suggestions. The first of them concerns the possible location of the paintings themselves.’
‘Go on,’ Lindsay said.
Keil had found some extra energy, he rallied. ‘Most rooms large enough to hold nine paintings have been searched, at one time or another, under the French, under the Americans. The tunnel under the Stern being perhaps the last such possibility. Certainly, if they had been in somebody’s home, or even in a building like a school, they would have been found by now. I believe they are underground.’
‘Any idea where?’ Lindsay said.
‘Last year,’ Keil began, ‘throughout the whole of Germany, or the Reich as the Nazis called it, all armaments production was ordered underground, because of the allied bombing. In Ludwigsburg this was organised by Munitions Inspectorate V under the control of our late and unlamented Gauleiter, Wilhelm Murr. The biggest production company we have was called Sautter et Cie, they made machine tools before the war. Murr ordered them to move their production of radios for the Wehrmacht underground.’
‘Did he now?’ Lindsay said, softly.
‘But there was no obvious way of drilling a cavern to work in before the next wave of bombers flew over. So they did the next best thing. They moved to the only company which did have underground storage. This was of course a furniture company. On 25 May 1944, they moved production of radios to the Kollmann Furniture Company’s underground storeroom.’
‘Address?’ said Lindsay, tensely.
‘Lindenstrasse, 43,’ Keil said. ‘The youngest Kollmann son, Ludwig, is one of Wagner’s gang. He would seal off the storeroom, if the paintings are there. And there are not many other places they could be. I think no other places.’
‘Thank you!’ Lindsay said with emphasis. ‘I believe you said there was something else.’
Old man Keil nodded, shutting his eyes for a second, then opening them. ‘I have been giving some thought to the transport of these paintings. They cannot leave them here forever. So how do they get them out? They need a lorry. The Americans say truck, don’t they? And there is only one place in Ludwigsburg that can come from.’
‘Holzbauer!’ Barbara said.
‘Yes, indeed, Frἂulein Ketz,’ said Keil. ‘Have you come across Holzbauer, Major? He’s a dyed-in-the-wool Nazi.’
Lindsay gave a grim smile. ‘Yeah. He did that lousy repair on the jeep we loaned Captain Hodge. We’ll mount an operation to raid the furniture company. As for the garage, we maintain covert surveillance. See if they make a move.’
‘Can I come on the raid?’ Hodge asked Lindsay.
‘And me?’ Barbara said.
Lindsay hesitated, but only for a few seconds. ‘OK, John. Miss Ketz, we needed you last time, at the Stern. So yes. But stay well back, if you please.’
‘Yes, Major,’ Barbara said.
‘Miss Ketz is staying right next to me,’ said Hodge.
Chapter 15
Ludwigsburg, Thursday August 30, 1945
Unusually for Ludwigsburg in August, the blazing afternoon sun was shining out of a cloudless, dark-blue sky. Which was just as well, as John Hodge and Barbara Ketz needed to shake off the rest of the world and there was little chance of that indoors. Papa Fritz was at the Ketz home, painting. And Hodge did not feel right about taking Barbara into Flak Barracks. So when he said, ‘I really need to talk to you. Where can we go?’ she said, ‘I can show you the vineyards. They are lovely in August.’
And so they were. The vine stalks were bent heavy with plump grapes. From a distance, the slopes looked blue as much as green. By now the vines had grown higher than the lovers. It was easy to find a secluded shady spot and lie in each other’s arms.
When they kissed, Barbara pressed her lips against Hodges’ without opening her mouth, simulating a passion he was sure she did not feel. Twice he tried gently sliding his tongue forward against her lips. Both times she recoiled.
‘Sorry,’ she said.
‘It’s OK,’ Hodge murmured in her ear. ‘We have all the time in the world.’
He tried it just once more. This time, his tongue made contact with the tip of hers but she giggled and again recoiled.
‘I’m not very good, am I?’ Barbara said. Her body was rigid with tension.
‘You’re wonderful. I never want to be with anybody else. I love you.’
She began to cry, soft sob
s. She stopped as suddenly as she had started, as if the crying were a valve which had released the tension, for a while at least.
They lay on their backs in silence, next to each other but not touching. Hodge shut his eyes, content to be with her, with the late-morning sun breaking through the vines and making patterns on their faces.
Even in the vineyard, lying next to Hodge, Barbara was getting flashbacks of the evening Wagner had done those things to her. They were coming more often since she met Hodge. The story started earlier now. She remembered waste ground. She was sure they had not gone into the Stern, where the head of the tunnel was.
The next time Hodge kissed her she enjoyed it more. She was wearing the same dress she had worn when Hodge visited the Ketz home for the first time. He slowly unbuttoned the top two buttons. She froze, her eyes wide and wild. He smiled gently and did the buttons up again.
‘I’m sorry, John!’ She started to cry again. ‘You should have a normal girl, not someone like me.’
‘Oh really? What’s wrong with you, then?’
‘I have a big nose. They used to call me synagogue nose at school.’
‘Bastards! I want to take away everything that ever hurt you. I want to love it better. Whatever it is.’
‘Oh yes! Just like that. The conquering hero can do anything.’ He looked hurt. ‘Oh, John, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it. It’s just …’
‘Just what? Tell me, Barbara.’
‘To … to trust people again …’
‘You don’t mean people, you mean men, don’t you?’
She nodded.
He thought rapidly, deciding to chance it. ‘It was a rape, wasn’t it?’
She nodded hard, her eyes wide, staring into his face. ‘Yes,’ she said.
‘Can you …?’
‘I can’t talk about it, John. Not yet. Please give me time.’
‘Of course, darling. Of course. We have forever. That is a solemn promise.’
‘Thank you. Thank you, thank you, thank you.’ She flung her arms round him, pulling him into her, squeezing him with amazing force. She said something in German. He was learning the language as fast as he could and he understood. She said bleibe, bleibe, bleibe. Stay, stay, stay.
‘Just tell me one thing …’ Hodge said, gently. ‘What … what nationality was the man, or men who did this to you?’
She laughed, although the laugh was a little hollow and hysterical.
‘Was it an American?’
She smiled into his face. Her eyes were smiling too, now. ‘No, it wasn’t an American. So no, not Carpenter. It’s what you’re thinking, isn’t it? He was horrible, but not like that. It was a German. And it was a long time ago. The day my life stopped.’
‘Stopped until now,’ said Hodge. ‘Today is the day it starts again. And my life starts with it.’
He stroked her face and kissed her tears.
*
The raid on the Kollmann Furniture Company that afternoon was a smaller scale operation than the raid on the Stern had been. There were two reasons for that: Wilhelm Keil’s tip-off was an informed deduction – there was no evidence. Also, Lindsay was even lower on manpower than he had been before, as the Kornwestheim building work had to be started again after the Werwolf attack had destroyed it.
So only two US jeeps drew up outside 43 Lindenstrasse. One of them, driven by Hodge, had Barbara in the front and two GIs in the back. One of the GIs was Sergeant Danny Rubin, who had volunteered for the raid and requested to be assigned to Captain Hodge as ADC.
Lindsay had acceded to the request. He knew how close the two of them had become. And in any case he tried always to agree when men asked to work together.
The lead jeep was driven by Lindsay with three more GIs. One of them, also a volunteer for the raid, was Sergeant Briscoe. Another, by chance, was Corporal de Lorio, the there-goes-another-bloody-hound man.
So that made a total of seven fighting men. The five GIs had bolt-action Springfield rifles, the two officers’ side-arms only. All seven soldiers had helmets on. A helmet had been offered to Barbara Ketz, but she refused to wear it.
As the jeeps drew up, two young men hurried out of the Kollmann Furniture Company and strode off down the road, with their heads tilted up toward the sky. They were in flannels and open necked shirts. Hodge looked at Lindsay as they got out of their respective jeeps.
‘Should we stop them?’
Lindsay shrugged. ‘What for? We can’t pull ‘em in for hurrying. But I agree with you. I don’t like the look of them.’
Inside the building there was sudden deep shadow after the blazing sun outside. A young man was making a studied performance of filing papers at a desk. Around him were half-finished pieces of furniture – dressers, tables, chairs, desks. There was a pungent smell which Hodge thought was turpentine or possibly linseed oil, with an overlay of furniture polish.
‘Major Lindsay, United States Army. Are you Ludwig Kollmann?’ Lindsay asked the burly young man at the desk.
The young man affected not to understand, so Barbara was brought in to translate.
‘He’s stalling,’ Rubin muttered in Hodge’s ear. ‘He’s giving those other guys we saw out there time to get clear.’
Kollmann’s laborious replies to translated questions about an underground storeroom reinforced Rubin’s opinion. Kollmann denied there was or had ever been such a storeroom.
‘He’s lying to you,’ Barbara said to Lindsay. ‘I am sure our information is correct.’
Lindsay had brought one of the Pioneer Corps soldiers along, with a Geiger Counter. This had caused one of the few episodes of bad feeling under Lindsay’s command.
The captain in charge of the Pioneer Corps – Robert Gilligan – was furious at losing another man he could not spare from the rebuilding at Kornwestheim. A head-to-head row in front of the men had resulted in Lindsay having to put in writing the order to take the Pioneer soldier for the day, with Gilligan’s objections also put in writing. It was sour.
Although they had no idea where the underground storeroom may be, the Geiger Counter quickly indicated pockets of radon. With Barbara translating, Lindsay threatened to reduce every stick of furniture in the place to matchwood if Kollmann did not show them where the entrance to the storeroom was.
Lindsay began a countdown. Kollmann pointed to a hinged trapdoor under his desk.
They moved the desk and Kollmann, then opened the trapdoor. Leaving two GIs to guard Kollmann, the rest of them made their way down a stairway, and into the storeroom. They located the paintings in minutes, stacked behind an old cupboard-unit, not even well concealed.
‘Check the paintings, John,’ Lindsay shouted. ‘Is it them? And are they OK?’
Hodge knelt lovingly before the paintings. And there they were, all nine of them, three each by Jankel Adler and Lasar Segall, two by Marc Chagall and one by Hans Feibusch.
‘They’re all here,’ he called to Lindsay. ‘And they’re fine.’
Just then Barbara gasped. Hodge rose and whirled round to her. Barbara had a fist at her mouth. She nodded her head at the wall to her right. There were more paintings stacked there.
Hodge went over to the second group of paintings. He pulled one away from the wall.
Barbara’s voice was breaking. ‘They are by my father,’ she said. All the paintings she had loaded into the cart that day, that terrible day seven years ago, Wagner had kept them to sell with his other booty.
Hodge was pulling them away from the wall, facing them outwards so Barbara could see them. He recognised a couple of them himself, from the monograph he had read on Ketz. There was a near-abstract picture of irises. There was a forest landscape, painted in the expressionist style.
‘We’ll come back for them,’ Hodge said to Barbara. ‘We’ll give them back to your father.’
Barbara smiled. Her face was streaked with tears.
*
Lindsay went back upstairs and got a walkie-talkie message through to Flak Barracks. He orde
red a pick-up truck for the paintings, men to load them and an armed guard back to Flak for Ludwig Kollmann.
The GIs brought all the paintings, one by one, gingerly back up from the storeroom to the main office. There a blustering Kollmann, via Barbara’s translation, denied ever having seen them before.
Ten minutes later, Lindsay’s walkie-talkie crackled into life again. There was a message from one of the GIs watching from a top floor apartment in Karlstrasse, opposite Holzbauer’s garage. At least ten men, maybe more, but including Holzbauer, were loading up a German army truck with wooden chests. They were heavily armed. The GI on the end of the radio then said the truck was starting up with the men it.
‘Heading east,’ Lindsay said into the walkie-talkie, with everybody gathered round listening to him. ‘I’ll bet they are. Munich and then down into Austria. It’s the Werwolf group.’
A guard had to be left behind for Ludwig Kollmann and the paintings until the pick-up truck and more GIs arrived from Flak. Lindsay was only too aware that his remaining force was now down to six, less than the Werwolf group had at their disposal. But he gave the order to give chase anyway, after a walkie-talkie communication back to Flak to send more men after them. The priority was not to lose the Werwolf group.
Lindsay’s leading jeep was tearing out of Ludwigsburg, heading east, before he glanced back to make sure the other jeep was behind him. Only then did he realise that Barbara Ketz was still with them, sitting next to Hodge in the second jeep. The wind was blowing her long black hair out behind her. Her eyes were shut and she was smiling.
‘Shit!’ Lindsay muttered to himself.
As they headed east out of Ludwigsburg at top speed along Schorndorferstrasse, Hodge started hooting and signalling to Lindsay’s jeep, ahead. Lindsay understood immediately. It made more sense for Hodge’s jeep to go first, as Barbara knew the area. Lindsay waved jauntily as he slowed to let Hodge’s jeep overtake.
As the last Ludwigsburg suburbs receded they hit the country road out towards Waiblingen. It was pockmarked with cracks and small craters. Hodge cursed as he struggled to stay in control of the jeep. He feared a puncture. The few people on the road, mainly women carrying loads – hamsters as he had learned to call them – got out of the way with the instinctive, ingrained obedience of the occupied. There was no other traffic. There were maize fields on both sides, rushing past, with some farmhouses blurring at speed in the distance.
