Robert Ludlum - Aquatain Progression.txt

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by The Aquitaine Progression [lit]


  now thoughtJoel, bewildered. Was it his words? No,

  not the words his voice. The Western inflections were

  greatly diminished "I don't know what you're talking

  about, but you sound differ ens."

  "War, Ah'll jes' be hornswaggled i" said Dowling,

  laugh

  124 ROBERT LUDLUM

  ing. Then he returned to the unaccented tones he

  had begun to display. "You're looking at a renegade

  teacher of English and college dramatics who said

  a dozen years ago to hell with old-age tenure, let's

  go after a very impractical dream. It led to a lot of

  funny and not very dignified jobs, but the spirit of

  Thespis moves in mysterious ways. An old student

  of mine, in one of those indefinable jobs like

  'production-coordinator,' spotted me in a crowd

  scene; it embarrassed the hell out of him.

  Nevertheless, he put my name in for several small

  parts. A few panned out, and a couple of years later

  an accident called Santa Fe came along. That's

  when my perfectly respectable name of Calvin was

  changed to Caleb. 'Fits the image belter,' said a pair

  of Gucci loafers who never got closer to a horse

  than a box at Santa Anita.... It's crazy, isn't it?"

  'Crazy," agreed Converse, as the stewardess

  walked back up the aisle toward them.

  'Crazy or not," added Dowling under his breath,

  ' this good old rancher isn t going to offend anyone.

  They want Pa Ratchet, they've got him."

  "Your bourbon, sir," said the woman, handing

  the actor a glass.

  "Why, thank you, li'l darlin'! My oh my, you're

  purber than any filly on the showI"

  "You are too kind, sir."

  "May I have a Scotch, please," said Joel.

  "That's better, son," said Dowling, grinning

  again as the stewardess left. "And now that you

  know my crime, what do you do for a living?"

  "I'm an attorney."

  "At least you've got something legitimate to

  read. This screenplay sure as hell isn't."

  Although considered by most of Munich's re

  spectable citizens to be a collection of misfits and

  thugs, the National Socialist German Workers'

  Party,

  with its headquarters in Munich, was making itself

  felt throughout Germany. The radical-populist

  movement was taking hold by basing its inflamma-

  tory message on the evil un-German "them." It

  blamed the ills of the nation on a spectrum of

  targets

  ranging from the Bolsheviks to the ingrate Jewish

  bankers; from the foreign plunderers who had

  raped

  an Aryan land to, finally, all things not "Aryan,"

  THE AQUITAINE PROGRESSION 125

  namely and especially the Jews and their

  ill-gotten wealth.

  Cosmopolitan Munich and itsJewish

  community laughed at the absurdities; they were

  not listening. The rest of Cermany was; it was

  hearing what it wanted to hear. And Erich

  Stoessel-Leifhelm heard it too. It was his passport

  to recognition and opportunity.

  In a matter of weeks, the young man literally

  whipped his father into shape. In later years he

  would tell the story with heavy doses of cruel

  humor. Over the dissolute physician's hysterical

  objections the son removed all alcohol and

  smoking materials from the premises, never

  letting his father out of his sight. A harsh

  regimen of exercise and diet was enforced. With

  the zeal of a puritanical athletic trainer

  Stoessel-Leifhelm started taking his father out to

  the countryside for Gewaltmarschen forced

  marches gradually working up to all-day hikes

  on the exhausting trails of the Bavarian

  mountains, continually shouting at the older man

  to keep moving, to rest only at his son's

  commands, to drink water only with permission.

  So successful was the rehabilitation that the

  doctor's clothes began to hang on him like seedy,

  old-fashioned garments purchased for a much

  fatter man. A new wardrobe was called for, but

  good clothing in Munich in those days was

  beyond the means of all but the wealthy, and

  Stoessel-Leifhelm had only the best in mind for

  his father not out of filial devotion but, as we

  shall see, for a quite different purpose.

  Money had to be found, which meant it had

  to be stolen. He interrogated his father at length

  about the house the doctor had been forced to

  leave, learning everything there was to learn.

  Several weeks later Stoessel-Leifhelm broke into

  the house on the Luisenstrasse at three o'clock

  one morning, stripping it of everything of value,

  including silver, crystal, oil paintings, gold place

  settings, and the entire contents of a wall safe.

  Sales to fences were not difficult in Munich of

  1930, and when everything was disposed of father

  and son had the equivalent of nearly eight

  126 ROBERT LUDLUM

  thousand American dollars, virtually a fortune

  in those times.

  The restoration continued; clothes were

  tailored in the Maximilianstrasse, the best

  footwear purchased at bootsmiths on the

  Odeonsplatz, and, finally, cosmetic changes

  were effected. The doctor's unkempt hair was

  trimmed and heightened by coloring into a

  masculine Nordic blond, and his shabby

  inch-long beard shaved off, leaving only a small,

  unbroken, well-trimmed moustache above his

  upper lip. The transformation was complete;

  what remained was the introduction

  Every night during the long weeks of

  rehabilitation, Stoessel-Leifhelm had read aloud

  to his father whatever he could get his hands on

  from the National Socialists' headquarters, and

  there was no lack of material. There were the

  standard inflammatory pamphlets, pages of

  ersatz biological theory purportedly proving the

  genetic superiority of Aryan purity and,

  conversely, the racial decline resulting from in-

  discriminate breeding all the usual Nazi dia-

  tribes plus generous excerpts from Hitler's

  Mein Kampf. The son read incessantly until the

  doctor could recite by rote the salient outrages

  of the National Socialists' message. Throughout

  it all, the seventeen-year-old kept telling his

  father that following the party's program was

  the way to get back everything that had been

  stolen from him, to avenge the years of

  humiliation and ridicule. As Germany itself had

  been humiliated by the rest of the world, the

  Nazi party would be the avenger, the restorer of

  all things truly German. It was, indeed, the New

  Order for the Fatherland, and it was waiting for

  men of stature to recognize the fact.

  The day came, a day when Stoessel-Leifhelm

  had learned that two high-ranking party officials

  would be in Munich. They were the crippled

  propagandist Joseph Goebbels and the

  would-be aristocrat Rud
olf Hess. The son

  accompanied the father to the National

  Socialists' headquarters where the well-tailored,

  imposing, obviously rich and Aryan Doktor

  requested an audience with the two Nazi

  leaders on an urgent and confidential matter. It

  was

  THE AQUITAINE

  PROGRESSION 127

  granted, and according to early party historical ar-

  chives, his first words to Hess and Goebbels were

  the

  following.

  "Gentlemen, I am a physician of impeccable

  credentials, formerly head surgeon at the

  Karlstor Hos,

  pital and for years I enjoyed one of the most

  successful practices in Munich. That was in the

  past. I was

  destroyed by Jews who stole everything from me. I

  am back, I am well, and I am at your service."

  The Lufthansa plane began its descent into

  Hamburg and Joel, feeling the drag, dog-eared the

  page of Leifhelm's dossier and reached down for his

  attache case. Beside him, the actor Caleb Dowling

  stretched, script in hand, then jammed his screenplay

  into an open flight bag at his feet.

  "The only thing sillier than this movie," he said,

  "is the amount of money they're paying me to be in

  it."

  "Are you filming tomorrow?" asked Converse.

  '.Today," corrected Dowling, looking at his watch.

  "It's an early shoot, too. Have to be on location by

  five-thirty dawn over the Rhine, or something

  equally inspiring. Now if they'd just turn the damn

  thing into a travelogue, we'd all be better off. Nice

  scenery."

  "But you were in Copenhagen."

  "Yep."

  "You're not going to get much sleep."

  "Nope."

  "Oh."

  The actor looked atJoel, the crow's-feet around

  his generous eyes creasing deeper with his smile. "My

  wife's in Copenhagen and I had two days off. This

  was the last plane I could get."

  "Oh? You're married?" Converse immediately

  regretted the remark; he was not sure why, but it

  sounded foolish.

  "Twenty-six years, young fella. How do you think

  I was able to go after that impractical dream? She's

  a whiz of a secretary; when I was teaching, she'd

  always be this or that dean's gal Friday."

  "Any children?"

  "Can't have everything. Nope."

  "Why is she in Copenhagen? I mean, why isn't

  she staying with you on location?"

  The grin faded from Dowling's suntanned face; the

  lines

  128 ROBERT LUDLUM

  were less apparent, yet somehow deeper. "That's an

  obvious question, isn't it? That is, you being a

  lawyer would pick it up quickly."

  "It's none of my business, of course. Forget I asked

  it."

  "No, that's okay. I don't like to talk about

  it rarely do but friendly seatmates on airplanes

  are for telling things. You'll never see them again,

  so why not slice off a bit and feel better." The actor

  tried haltingly to smile; he failed. "My wife's name

  was Oppenfeld. She's Jewish. Her story's not much

  different from a few million others, but for her it's

  . . . well, it's hers. She was separated from her

  parents and her three younger brothers in

  Auschwitz. She watched them being taken

  away away from her while she screamed, not

  understanding. She was lucky; they put her in a

  barracks, a fourteen-year-old sewing uniforms until

  she showed other endowments that could lead to

  other work. A couple of days later, hearing the

  rumors, she got hysterical and broke out racing all

  over the place trying to find her family. She ran into

  a section of the camp they called the A/ofall, the

  garbage, corpses hauled out of the gas chambers.

  And there they were, the bodies of her mother and

  her father and her three brothers, the sight and the

  stench so sickening it's never left her. It never will.

  She won't set foot in Germany and I wouldn't ask

  her to."

  No alarms, just surprises . . . and another Iron

  Cross for the Erich Leilhelms of the past, retroactively

  presented.

  "Christ, I'm sorry," murmured Converse. "I

  didn't mean to ,,

  "You didn't. I did.... You see, she knows it

  doesn't make sense."

  "Doesn't make sense? Maybe you didn't hear

  what you just described."

  "I heard, I know, but I didn't finish. When she

  was sixteen, she was loaded into a truck with five

  other girls, all on their way to that different type of

  work, when they did it. Those kids took their last

  chance and beat the hell out of a Wehrmacht

  corporal who was guarding them in the van. Then

  with his gun they got control of the truck from the

  driver and escaped." Dowling stopped, his eyes on

  Joel.

  Converse, silent, returned the look, unsure of its

  meaning, but moved by what he had heard. "That's

  a marvelous story " he said quietly "It really is."

  'And," continued the actor, "for the next two years

  they

  THE AQUITAINE PROGRESSION 129

  were hidden by a succession of German families, who

  surely knew what they were doing and what would

  happen to them if they got caught. There was a

  pretty frantic search for those girls a lot of threats

  made, more because of what they could tell than

  anything else. Still, those Germans kept moving them

  around, hiding them, until one by one they were

  taken across the border into occupied France, where

  things were easier. They were smuggled across by the

  underground, the German underground. 'Dowling

  paused, then added. "As Pa Ratchet would say, 'Do

  you get my drift, son?' '

  "I'd have to say it's obvious."

  "There's a lot of pain and a lot of hate in her and

  God knows I understand it. But there should be

  some gratitude, too. Couple of times clothing was

  found, and some of those people those German

  people were tortured, a few shot for what they did.

  I don't push it, but she could level off with a little

  gratitude. It might give her a bit more perspective."

  The actor snapped on his seat belt.

  Joel pressed the locks on his attache case,

  wondering if he should reply. Valerie's mother had

  been part of the German underground. His ex-wife

  would tell him amusing stories her mother had told

  her about a stern, inhibited French intelligence

  officer forced to work with a high-spirited, opinion-

  ated German girl, a member of the Untergmud How

  the more they disagreed, and the more they railed

  against each other's nationality, the more they

  noticed each other. The Frenchman was Val's father;

  she was proud of him, but in some ways prouder of

  her mother. There had been pain in that woman,

  too. And hate. But there had been a reason, and it

  was unequivocal. As there had been for one Joel

  Converse years la
ter.

  "I said it before and J mean it," began Joel

  slowly, not sure he should say anything at all. "It's

  none of my business, but I wouldn't ever push it, if

  I were you."

  "Is this a lawyer talkin'to ole Pa?" asked Dowling

  in his television dialect, his smile false, his eyes far

  away. "Do I pay a fee?"

  "Sorry, 111 shut up." Converse adjusted his seat

  belt and pushed the buckle in place.

  "No, I'm sorry. I laid it on you. Say it. Please."

  "All right. The horror came first, then the hate.

  In sidewinder language that's called prima facie the

  obvious, the first sighting . . . the real, if you like.

  Without these, there'd

  130 ROBERT LUDLUM

  be no reason for the gratitude, no call for it. So, in

  a way, the gratitude is just as painful because it

  never should have been necessary. "

  The actor once again studied Joel's face, as he

  had done before their first exchange of words.

  "You're a smart son of a bitch, aren't you?"

  "Professionally adequate. But I've been there . .

  . that is, I know people who've been where your wife

  has been. It starts with the horror."

  Dowling looked up at the ceiling light, and

  when. he spoke his words floated in the air, his

  harsh voice quietly strained. "If we go to the movies,

  I have to check them out; if we're watching

  television together, I read the TV section . . .

  sometimes on the news with some of those tucking

  nuts I tense up, wondering what she's going to do.

  She can't see a swastika' or hear someone screaming

  in German, or watch soldiers marching in a goose

  step; she can't stand it. She runs and throws up and

 

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