“But what could they want, Comrade Serov? The American’s story is utterly preposterous. Sweden? No one is going to believe that.”
“Obviously, the Nazis did, and the Americans did. What do you think those dead policemen were all about?”
“But Comrade Serov,” Varentsov pleaded. “Friesemann’s cover is perfect. We have the Berlin archives, so what can they prove?” he asked, offering a hopeful smile. “Neptune is safely back in Germany now and the U-boat is on the bottom where no one can touch it. So let them ask their stupid questions,” he asserted proudly. “They have nothing.”
Serov slowly shook his head, as if he were the Headmaster talking to the class dunce. “Varentsov, you have wrapped yourself up so tightly in your little intrigues that you have completely lost sight of reality. That was our story, you fool! We don’t know where that damned U-boat is any more than they do. Poland? Sweden? Perhaps the duck pond in Gorky Park. I do not know and neither do you. We created that story out of thin air because it fit our needs and provided a very convenient explanation as to why Bruckner ended up in one of our prisoner-of-war camps.” Serov leaned forward, his voice fading to a cruel whisper. “But what if the American is right? What if he really was there? What if that submarine really is lying off the south coast of Sweden, and he knows where it is? That would be the end of Neptune, and it would be the end of you and me. But I promise you, before Comrade Beria puts his hand on my shoulder, you shall already be dead.”
Varentsov felt hot and sweaty, as if the floor beneath his feet had become a frying pan on high heat. He was roasting, but Serov did not ease up. He leaned even closer. “The Fascists were thinking three moves ahead of you each step of the way. Why else do you think they sent an elite SS operations team to New York to grab the American?”
Varentsov stuttered. "I… Yes, I can see that now, Comrade Serov, I… "
“Silence!” the Chief’s angry voice silenced him. “This is what you will do, Varentsov. First, forget the Fascists; you’ll never catch up with them anyway. Concentrate on the Americans. They’ll go for the U-boat, them and the Israelis. Follow them. It is somewhere in the Baltic, and I have a feeling in my gut it’s lying off Sweden, where the American says it is. Follow them, find it, and destroy it. I do not care how. Is that clear?”
“Yes, Comrade Serov, I see it all clearly now.”
Serov leaned forward, his eyes narrowing to unforgiving little slits. “The U-boat is the key, Varentsov. It forces everyone’s hand, because it is the only tangible proof that can destroy Neptune and destroy us. That is why they shall come looking for it.”
“Then, let me kill the American and put an end to the whole business now,” Varentsov said without thinking. “If he is the only link they have…”
“Varentsov, you and that phony Admiral of yours are the ones who gave the American credibility to begin with. After the Fascists failed, you will never get near him now.” Finally, Serov seemed to soften. He leaned back and actually smiled. “Oh, do not fret, Varentsov. This is the 1950s, not the 1930s, and I am a modern man. Fail me, and I will not have you hanging from a meat hook in the basement. No, no, we do not do that anymore.”
Varentsov felt a wave of relief washing over him.
“I am a scientist, a student of human nature and justice, now,” Serov went on. “There is a perfect punishment for each crime, and a ‘perfect’ hell for every criminal. If you fail me, yours will be a posting back here to Moscow, to MVD Headquarters, where you shall serve out your remaining years as an ordinary private guarding the employee entrance at the rear of the building, right there, right below my window.” Serov pointed a stubby finger toward the tall bank of windows along the sidewall. “This way, I will have the pleasure of seeing you in the sweltering heat of August, in the cold, cheerless rains of November, and in the icy blasts of January that cut a man to the bone. I will see you every day, year in and year out, until you are a wrinkled, shriveled-up old man.”
Serov smiled the cruel, toothy smile of a crocodile. “I can picture you snapping to attention and saluting all the pretty young secretaries as they come to work, the humorless file clerks, and the Ministry’s minor officers as they trudge in and out of the building. And what of your lovely wife and daughters, you ask? Well, they shall be under strict orders to leave your new, dreary little cold-water flat by the rail yards at noon each day and ride the tram here to bring you your lunch pail, bitching all the way about the abject misery you have brought crashing down on their heads." Serov clucked contentedly, picturing it in his mind. “Yes, that is the ‘perfect’ punishment for a man like you. You shall serve the state by being a constant reminder that a dull, below-average man should control his ambitions and never dare reach higher than his ability. You see, I know you, Varentsov; and now I know you won’t fail me. Will you, Varentsov?”
“No, no, Comrade Serov,” Varentsov whispered, already feeling the flames of hell licking at his pants legs.
“Excellent! Now get out of my sight.” Serov’s voice roared. “And do not come back until you have destroyed that cursed submarine and ended this business once and for all.”
Varentsov turned and headed for the door as fast as his feet could carry him. He walked quickly across the thick carpet and out the door, cursing Neptune and cursing that damned American every step of the way. Safely out in the hallway and around the corner, he began to run, but the flames were rising up all around him now, higher and higher, chasing after him, blistering the skin on his backside as if he were on fire.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
New York
At 7:30 the next morning, Michael heard a knock on his hotel room door. It was Leslie, dressed in her running shoes and shorts, ready to hit the streets of Midtown Manhattan again, undeterred by the previous day’s excitement. "You weren’t downstairs," she started to explain, until she saw he was wearing those old blue jeans and that plaid shirt again. "What gives?" she asked, with a puzzled expression. “Where are the Keds and the old track shorts?”
“I’m not running today,” he said tersely without inviting her in, but she pushed past him and into the room anyway. There was no hiding his suitcase lying on the bed or the dark blue Pan Am ticket folder on the nightstand next to it.
“What? You’re leaving, and you weren’t even going to say good-bye? You were just going to go?” she asked with hurt written all over her face. “Not that you owe me anything…”
“I was going to stop by your room on the way out,” he lied, knowing he would have skulked straight out of town if he thought he could get away with it. He was a total coward when it came to Leslie, and the look she gave him did not help any. “What can I say, Les, I’m fed up. I’ve got to do something.”
“Something? You mean like leaving me here. Is that your idea of something?”
“I don’t make a very good target, and I can’t take sitting here anymore.”
“Where are you running off to? I know you aren’t going back home to try to face Daddy. Not you. Not like this. Where then? Back to Sweden? You going to run back there and hide again?” She picked up the ticket folder and flipped it open. “Frankfurt? You’re going after Bruckner again, aren’t you?”
“What do you mean ‘again’? You know I didn’t go after him!”
“No?” She waved the ticket folder in his face. “Well, you sure are this time.”
“What else can I do? I’ve got to get some answers.”
“Without me?”
“I don’t want to get you messed up in this thing.”
She put her hands on her hips and stepped closer. “I think the fat guy in the alley, the painter, and the dead driver in the blue van already did that.”
“Leslie, it’s something I have to do; and I can’t take you with me.”
“Yeah? Well, try to stop me!”
“Leslie, it’s dangerous. You saw what they did, what they’re like.”
“Exactly, and that’s why I’m not letting you go by yourself.”
�
�I already owe your family too much — your brother, your father… if anything happened to you, how would I explain it to him?”
“Why don’t you ask him and ask me, before you go making decisions for us.”
“All right! If anything happened to you, I don’t know how I’d explain it to me.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” She folded her arms across her chest, her eyes on fire. “Does it mean you like me? Maybe you’ll miss me? How about love? Is that in there somewhere too?”
“Leslie, I don’t know what you want me to say.”
“Yes you do, Michael Randall; try something adult. And if I have to explain it to you after all this time, then I might as well just smack you silly right here and now.”
“Hey, hey!” Manny’s voice interrupted them from the doorway. “It doesn’t sound like you kids are playing nice in here.”
“Great timing, Manny, as usual!” Leslie snapped angrily.
“You’ve been talking to my wife?”
“Michael was about to tell me…" she paused and looked at both of them in frustration. “Oh, forget it!” She turned her eyes away from Michael and held up the airplane ticket folder. “He’s going to Germany, Manny, and he’s going alone. Maybe you can talk some sense into him.”
Manny looked at him for a moment. “Germany? Now, that’s interesting.”
“You’ve got to stop him. He’s going to get himself killed.”
“Okay, when’s your plane leave?" Manny asked.
"Five this afternoon and I’m going to be on it."
"Okay, that’s the overnight flight from LaGuardia. I’ll see that you’re on it.”
“You don’t need to, I can handle it.”
“No problem. I owe you that much. But you don’t need to leave for the airport much before 2:30. Even later, if I give you a police escort.” He smiled as he raised his hands in mock surrender. “Okay, look, we blew it. I owe both of you a big apology for yesterday — not for trying, and not for not telling you, but for screwing it up.”
“That’s not good enough, Manny,” Michael replied as he returned to his packing. “I’m not interested in your problems or your excuses. I’ve got enough of my own.”
“Problems? I wish I had your freakin’ problems," Manny laughed. "From a dumb schmuck in handcuffs sitting in the back seat of a police car, you’ve suddenly become the center of attention, the most popular guy in town; but you don’t need to go to Bonn. Hell, you don’t need to go anywhere. You’ve got people coming here from all over the place, just to see the one and only Randall, Michael T. Why cut and run now? Why now?”
“Cut and run? You fat bastard, you don’t know…”
“Oh, yes I do, I know all about it,” Manny insisted. “Look, we figured somebody might come looking for you. Actually, we hoped they would; but we never thought they’d come that quick or be that good when they got here.”
“He made you look like the Keystone Cops,” Leslie chimed in.
“Leslie,” Manny turned to her with a smile. “Have you ever noticed, it’s always the guys who can’t dance who say the band’s out of tune?”
“All right, so who was he?” Michael asked. “German?”
“That’s a pretty good guess, but the truth is, we haven’t got a clue,” Manny shrugged. “We told the newspapers it was a Mafia hit gone bad. That’s an old New York cop trick. When you’ve got a couple of dead bodies you don’t know what to do with, blame it on a Mob gang war. In New York, it usually is.”
“That wasn’t the Mafia, Manny,” he said flatly.
“No, it wasn’t; but it got the press off our backs. Then, I got the Israelis to get the CIA to feed a story to the FBI that it was the Russians. That got the FBI running around chasing their tails, so they won’t be bothering us either. Mention a Commie, and J. Edgar positively glows. Frankly though, the pattern doesn’t fit. It was too well prepared, too clever by far, and too well executed. The Israelis say a dancing bear isn’t nimble or quick enough to pull off something like this.”
“The Israelis?” Leslie asked.
“Yeah, well, I know some people who know some people, if you know what I mean. The Israeli Mossad is the best in the business — small, new, and very good.”
“Do they know who the painter was working for?” Michael asked.
“The smart money is on the U-boat’s former owners.” Manny answered.
“Then it IS that damned admiral!” Michael shot back.
“Maybe yes, maybe no. Germans come in a lot of different flavors these days. First, there’s Bruckner and the official government establishment in Bonn. Most of them are all right, but nobody completely trusts them. Then there’s the East Germans. The Russians have owned them since the 1930s, but the East German Stasi are mostly second-rate hacks and leftovers. Then there are your old friends in black and silver.”
“The SS?”
“They’ve set up shop in South America where they have a boy’s club for out-of-work thugs called the Brotherhood. They left with a lot of gold, and they own Argentina, Bolivia, Paraguay, Uruguay, and Peru. They own most of Bonn, too; so you won’t get any help there, either. They’ve got themselves tucked away up in those high South American mountains where you’ll never get at them.”
Michael looked at him. “Tell me, Manny, how’s a retired New York police detective from the Bronx know all this stuff about the Russians and old Nazis in South America?”
“Me?” Manny smiled. “It’s not what I know, Mike. It’s who I know, who I go talk to, and what they know.”
“The Israelis?” Leslie asked.
“They may be new at this spy stuff, but your Nazi pals are at the top of their hit list. That’s why I need for you to give me a couple of hours, Mike.”
“A couple of hours? For what?”
“There are some people I’d like you to meet. They have a plan and they can explain it to you a hell of a lot better than I can. So come with me. Maybe you’ll learn something.”
“Michael, a couple of hours, what can it hurt?” Leslie asked.
“After you talk to them,” Manny added. “If you still want to catch that five o’clock plane to Germany, that’s okay by me.”
“Manny, how could you tell him that?” Leslie fumed.
“It doesn’t matter, kid; trust me. He might fly over, but they’ll never let him out of the airport. The Krauts aren’t that stupid. This thing’s a big embarrassment, so they’ll have his photo up at every gate. They’ll toss his butt on the next plane back to New York, and he’ll be right back here all red-eyed and cranky.”
“Manny, we’ve got to make that bastard talk,” Michael said.
“It’ll never happen, sport. Besides, he doesn’t matter.”
“What do you mean he doesn’t matter!”
“No, Manny’s right,” Leslie began to nod her head. “This thing isn’t about the Admiral, is it, Manny? It’s all about the U-boat.”
“Hey, two points for the Cutie Pie.” He threw a thumb in her direction and smiled. “Don’t get me wrong, in the end, it is about the Admiral. It’s always been about the Admiral. If he really is dead, like you think he is, then somebody went to a lot of trouble to put that other guy in his place. But the only way to flush him out — the only way to flush them out — is to go to Sweden, find that U-boat, and prove he’s a phony. That’s why it’s all about the U-boat. It’s your proof.”
Michael stared at him. “Manny, I told you; I don’t know where it is. That’s an awfully big haystack up there.”
“Maybe, but they don’t know that, do they? They think you do. And if we go up there with a good salvage boat, sonar, divers, and some people who know how to work that stuff, we’ll force their hand.”
“You want to use me for target practice again?”
“Now or later, kid; ’cause they ain’t gonna leave you alone. You can stay here, you can go to Bonn, or you can go back to South Carolina, but eventually they’re gonna come after you again.”
“That’
s a cheery thought,” Leslie said.
“Come with me to Sweden, you get to shoot back,” Manny said, and Michael stopped arguing. “Okay, then. Leslie, go change your clothes, and the two of you meet me in the lobby,” Manny said. “My car’s downstairs and if I don’t convince you, I promise I’ll run you out to the airport… if you still want to go… which you won’t.”
Thirty minutes later they walked up the front steps of an old, nondescript brownstone in the middle of the block on 12th Street near 2nd Avenue on the lower East Side. They were east of Union Square and Washington Square in a quiet, much older part of the city. The house was made of heavy stone blocks, and the nondescript front door looked heavy enough to stop a tank. There was no nameplate on the door, and Michael saw thick steel bars on both the first and second story windows. With the drapes and sheers on the windows, it was as impossible to see inside, as it would be to get inside.
“The Israeli Consulate is around the corner on 2nd Avenue,” Manny explained as he glanced up and down the street before he rang the doorbell. “They use this place when they don’t want certain visitors to be seen strolling in the official front door.”
Once inside, he led them back to a conference room in the center of the house in what used to be the dining room, away from prying eyes and ears and all the windows. Manny then introduced them to two men who were waiting at the table when they entered the room. “Mike, Leslie, I’d like you to meet Doctor Yuri Chorev and Chief Petty Officer Nathan Schiff.”
They all shook hands and Manny said, “Sit, sit. You’ll find the Israelis are too new at this stuff to stand on formality. The good doctor is a marine geologist specializing in underwater mineral formations and oil deposits, or at least that’s what he does between other things. He did some consulting with the Swedes back before the war, which gives us a good excuse for him to go back up and do some further research. Yuri was in the Israeli Navy. He’s been in the Reserves the last two years.”
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