“How did de Fresne decide who was going to be sent to the camps?” I asked.
“At first, he targeted the wealthiest of the Jews. He would make a deal with them. For a lot of money, he would keep their names off the lists. He collected millions in cash, artwork, silver settings, jewelry, real estate, and whatever else the Jews could scrape up. He left the ones who donated off the lists, and the word got around among the Jews that they could buy their lives from de Fresne. The loot poured in, and when he’d tapped them all out, and there were no rich Jews left, their names went on the transport lists. They all died in the camps, and de Fresne put his millions in a Swiss bank.”
“How do you know all this?” asked Jock.
“It was common knowledge. De Fresne bragged openly about his growing wealth. He said that he’d been a poor kid and was going to finish the war rich. He thought the Jews deserved what they were getting, and he deserved their money.”
“I didn’t know the French were so complicit in the Holocaust,” I said.
“Oh yeah. A lot of them were. De Fresne had grown up in North Africa. His father was a career military man, a sergeant I think, and his mother was American. She had worked as a maid and nanny for a rich American family living in Paris. That’s where she met the sergeant. They got married and moved to Africa.
“When de Fresne was a teenager, his dad was killed in some sort of skirmish with the Arabs, and the kid was sent to Marseilles to live with a relative of the sergeant’s. He never spoke of his mother, so I don’t know what happened to her. He did well in school and was at the Sorbonne when the war broke out. Because of his mother, he was fluent in English and spoke with an American accent. He found work in the Quai d’Orsay, the French Foreign Ministry, and worked with the American Embassy in some capacity, maybe a translator for his bosses at the ministry.
“How did he end up in the Milice?” I asked.
“I’m not sure, but he was very vocal in his anti-Semitism. He’d been a member of a Fascist group in Paris before the war. He was running in a fast crowd; the Sorbonne, Diplomatic Service. Sergeant’s kids didn’t usually get into that part of French society. He once told me that if it hadn’t been for the Jews, he could have gone further and faster. I think, though, it was his social status that held him back. Maybe the Milice took him because he wasn’t afraid to get his hands dirty.”
There was a knock at the front door. Blattner excused himself and went to open it. He came back, followed by the man who’d accosted Jock and me in the coffee shop in Bonn.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
The man stopped at the doorway to the foyer and said something to Blattner in German. Blattner sat in the chair he’d vacated to answer the door. The Arab had a nine-millimeter pistol in his hand. He pointed it at me. “I told you to go home, Mr. Royal.”
“We were just on our way,” I said. “Why are you so interested in my going back to Florida?”
“That doesn’t matter. What does matter is that you didn’t listen. Now you’ll pay a price.”
I stared at him. “How did you find us?”
He laughed. “Ah, that’s very simple my friend. We have a tap on Herr Blattner’s phone.”
A piece of the puzzle clunked into place. That’s how they knew about Wyatt. But why did they care?
“Do you work for de Fresne?” I asked.
A puzzled look appeared on the Arab’s face. “Who?”
“Richard de Fresne.”
“I don’t know anybody by that name.”
“Then why are you so intent on killing me?” I said.
“I really don’t know, Mr. Royal, and I don’t care. My boss tells me where to go and what to do and I do it. I only know about the tap on Herr Blattner’s phone because the boss chose to tell me about it.”
“Do you know who I am?” asked Blattner.
“No, and I don’t care. You have lived a long life, old man, so your death won’t be a great loss.” He snorted, a stab at laughter. “Except maybe to you.”
He was still laughing when Jock shot him through the head. He dropped like a stone, his gun falling to the floor. The Arab had been concentrating on Blattner and didn’t see Jock ease his pistol out of the pocket of his windbreaker. There was no reason for the man to think that either of us would be armed. Germany had strict gun laws, so good people weren’t expected to carry weapons. Only the bad guys had them. Or so they thought.
Jessica hadn’t moved in the seconds since the shooting. She was frozen, rooted to her seat on the sofa, her hands grasping her face. “My God,” she said, finally, “My God, Jock.”
Frau Blattner hurried into the room, her hand going to her mouth when she saw the body on the floor. “Klaus?” she whispered.
Blattner went to her, put his arm around her shoulders, made a shushing sound. He looked at Jock. “What was that?” His voice was shaky.
“I’m not sure,” said Jock, and explained where we had seen the man before. “Have you had any problems with anybody, Herr Blattner?”
“No. Never. Does this have to do with de Fresne?”
“It must. I can’t imagine any other reason this guy would be following us or that your phone would be tapped. Can you?”
“No, Mr. Algren, I can’t. I must call the police.”
“Please don’t do that, Herr Blattner,” I said. “I think you’ll be a lot safer if we can figure this out ourselves. The police will only complicate things, and Jock will be in trouble for having a gun.”
Blattner frowned. “Mr. Algren did break the law.”
Jock shrugged. “And if I hadn’t, we’d all be dead.”
“We can’t leave a dead man here,” Jessica said, finally finding her voice. “We have to call the police.”
Jock pulled his cell phone out of his pocket, punched in a number, and waited. Then, “I need a cleanup. In Fulda. As soon as possible.” He recited the Blattner address, and turned back to the group. “Somebody will be here in a couple of hours. They have to come from Frankfurt.”
Jessica stood up and walked to the window, trying not to look at the corpse on the floor. “Jock, who are you? Matt said you worked for the government. What part of the government?”
“The part that can get this mess cleaned up, Jess. That’s about all I can tell you.”
“Why are these men looking for you?”
“I don’t think they’re after me. They’re trying to scare Matt off for some reason. I’m just part of the scenery.”
She pointed to the dead man. “He had an Arabic accent.”
“Yes, I noticed.”
“He said he’d told you to go home, Matt. What’s that all about?”
I told her about the encounter in the coffee shop in Bonn.
“And you didn’t think that was important enough to tell me about?”
“I didn’t want to worry you.”
Her voice rose. “Stop treating me like a child, damn it.”
“Okay. I’m sorry. It was a bad call on my part.”
“Do you know how he found you and Matt at the coffee shop?”
“No. Maybe Speer is involved with these guys some way.”
“I don’t think so. I told you about the assistant that was helping me. The young man who walked me out of the building.”
“Yes.”
“His name is Hassan. His parents were Moroccan immigrants.”
“Damn,” said Jock. “That’s how they knew we were in Bonn. But why would they have Herr Blattner’s phone tapped?”
Blattner cleared his throat. “I think I know. I sent an e-mail query to the archives in Bonn a couple of months ago. The Klarsfeld Foundation was trying to find out more about de Fresne. One of their investigators came to see me. I told him what I could, but it got me to thinking about how de Fresne may have gotten out of Europe. I e-mailed the archive and said that I was interested in anything they had on de Fresne. I got an e-mail back a couple of days later from an assistant curator named Hassan telling me that they had no records on de Fresne.
”
Jessica shook her head. “Obviously they do have the records, because I found them. They were right in the index. Certainly, anybody that works there would be able to find them.”
Jock nodded. “Somebody’s trying to protect de Fresne. I would have thought this guy was just hired help, but with Hassan at the archives, it makes me wonder if one of the Muslim terror groups is involved somehow.”
“But why?” I asked. “What connection could there be between an ancient Nazi and a modern terror group?”
Jess spoke up. “A lot of the Muslims were pro-Nazi during the war. I think they were more anti-British than anything, but some of them fought for the Germans. Maybe there’s a connection there.”
“Possibly,” I said, “but that’s a long way back.”
“Money may be the common thread,” Jock said. “Herr Blattner, do you have an estimate as to how much money de Fresne extorted from the Jews?”
“He bragged that he had about twenty million dollars in Swiss francs in the bank.”
“Holy shit,” said Jock. “That would be a quarter of a billion dollars in today’s money. Think if that had been invested wisely over the years. Just a half-assed investment would have turned that into billions of dollars by today. That kind of money would draw a lot of flies.”
“Could he have really had that much?” I asked.
Jock held up his hands in a “who knows” gesture. “Even if he only had half or a quarter of that, it would be real big money.”
“And he would have needed help in investing it,” I said. “That much money being dropped into any economy is going to draw government interest.”
“Maybe that’s where the Arabs come in,” said Jess. “Maybe they were de Fresne’s investment bankers.”
We moved into the kitchen to wait for Jock’s cleaners. Frau Blattner was still upset, but we were all coming to terms with the fact that we’d come close to death on a dreary afternoon in a quaint German town.
Three men arrived in a van with a logo on the side written in German. Jess said it was a firm of carpet cleaners. Jock greeted the men with some sort of code word, and they went to work. They brought a carpet into the house, rolled the body into it and took it to the truck. Anyone on the street would have thought the men were delivering a clean rug and taking a dirty one back to their place of business. They took the Arab’s gun with them and left, not saying another word to any of us.
“They’ll fingerprint the body, run DNA, and everything else. If this guy is in the system in any country, they’ll find him.”
“What are we going to do about the Blattners?” I asked. “We can’t leave them here now.”
Jock turned to Herr Blattner. “Sir, if you’ll go to Frankfurt with us, my government will put you up in a place where you’ll be safe until we can get to the bottom of this.”
The Blattners had a hushed conversation in German, and Blattner nodded at Jock. “We’ll pack a few things and go with you.”
CHAPTER THIRTY
frankfurt, germany
march 1945
The city lay in rubble. What had been home to half a million people and the financial center of Germany, was now a pile of bricks. Men and women clad in rags, some holding children’s hands, picked through the debris, the master race no more. Corpses rotted in the anemic sun, the odor causing a gag reflex in the soldier wearing American battle fatigues. He stood a little over six feet tall, and the months in the field had made him lean and hard. His face was creased with fatigue, a chronic state for soldiers at war. He had dark brown eyes that squinted in the pale sun, and his nose was a little off center, as if broken in a long-ago fight. Wisps of brown hair escaped from the helmet perched on his head. He carried a pack on his back and tugged occasionally at the straps, settling it a little, easing the strain on his shoulders. The man picked his way carefully down the rubble-strewn street, rifle at the ready, locked and loaded. He was wary of snipers, even though there had been no reports of such. He didn’t want to get shot dead this near to the end of the war.
The United States 5th Infantry Division had taken the city of Frankfurt the day before, March 28, 1945. There had been almost no resistance, and soldiers were already setting up headquarters in the I.G. Farben Building near downtown. It was one of the few structures still standing, the result of Eisenhower’s order to the 8th Air Force not to bomb it.
The American was looking for 27 Linden Strasse, but he was disoriented by the destruction, not sure where the street was. He’d driven his jeep from the Hauptbahnhoff, the main train station, still mostly intact. He’d gone northeast on Mainzer Landstrasse and turned onto Bockenheimer Landstrasse. After a few blocks he came to an area so saturated with rubble that he had to walk. There were no street signs, and the destruction made it impossible to determine where the intersections lay.
The American hailed a man digging through the remains of what had probably once been his home. “Do you know where Linden Strasse is?” he asked in German.
“Ja,” came the answer. The man pointed to the west and continued in German. “You go one more street that way. The cross street is Linden Strasse.”
“Danke.”
The American trudged on until he came to what appeared to be the street he was looking for. It was hard to tell, because the ruins of buildings were spread haphazardly across the landscape. He picked his way carefully down the block, ignoring the people who were digging in the mess that had once been homes and businesses.
He stopped in what he thought to be the middle of the first block. There were no landmarks, just a sea of destruction. No one was near the place, no one picking through the debris. The American had the fleeting thought that he was standing on poisoned ground. The building he sought, if in fact this was the right building, was like the rest of the street, a pile of blocks and timber, tumbled inward as if a giant had stepped on it. He walked carefully over the debris, looking for some sign that he had reached his goal. There were bodies entwined in the rubble, and he had to cover his nose. A chill wind was blowing, kicking up little eddies of dust. He pulled up the collar of his field jacket, seeking warmth for the back of his neck. He removed his helmet, the steel pot with the gold leaf insignia of his rank, wiped his brow, stirring the dust that had collected there, and resettled the headgear. He took a swallow of tepid water from his canteen, put it back in its case hanging from his web belt.
He stood, surveying the remains of a once important city. There were no trees, no shrubs, no greenery of any kind, just the colorless debris that had once been homes and offices, stretching as far as he could see. No building stood to block his view, no structure to give substance or scale to the landscape. Just devastation. War, he thought, brought to an unsuspecting people by a maniac who cared nothing for their suffering. Nobody could ever imagine the horrors wrought when modern men decided to kill each other for the glory of their nations. You had to see it for yourself. And he’d seen more than he believed he could live with.
He turned to leave, afraid that his mission was a failure. He stepped on a brick in the rubble, turning it over. He saw the arm of a dead man, clad in black, the death’s head insignia on the cuff indicating that he was an officer of the SS, the dreaded storm troopers of the Third Reich. The American looked more closely and saw the edge of a swastika flag peeking out of the rubble. He pulled at it, but it wouldn’t budge. He kicked aside more rubble and as he neared the far edge of the flag, he realized it was attached by its grommets to a flagpole that had been sheared in the bombing. No other place in this part of town would fly the flag. He’d found what he was looking for.
The American moved through the area of what had once been a large building. Parts of the walls were still standing, but the building had been gutted. He came to what had been the back yard, an area that contained very little debris. The house had fallen in on itself, probably from a direct hit by a bomb or perhaps an artillery shell. A Mercedes sedan, its tires flat, its shiny paint pocked with shrapnel scars, sat alone at the
end of a concrete driveway that emerged from the rubble.
He stood quietly, listening. He heard only the wind as it whipped about the broken building, making an eerie whistling sound, not unlike a low moan. Fitting, thought the American. It fit this place.
He walked some more, careful where he stepped, rifle held in a combat-ready position, finger on the trigger, safety off. He was nervous, edgy, ready to shoot anything that moved. He saw more bodies, some in civilian clothes, heaped in a mound near the back wall, most of which was still standing. He moved closer, saw that they’d all been shot in the back. Recently. There was no stench of decay, but it wouldn’t be long in coming. Three men and six women, the females all naked, hands tied behind them. They’d been executed, their last vision of earth the partially destroyed wall they were facing when shot.
He’d seen it before, in North Africa, France, the Low Countries, and in the Fatherland itself. Civilians killed by the retreating Germans. People just taken out and shot. The American had become inured to death, to a cruelty that he would never have imagined before the war. More than anything, he wanted to go back to that life, the one before the war, the one where he was a respected professor of history in a small southern college, where he lived with a beautiful woman who wanted to give him children.
He’d like to erase the bitterness that had crept over him almost unnoticed as he moved about the battlefields, trying to discern the enemy’s intentions. The bitterness that was sharpened by the letter from home, the one asking for a divorce, because his wife had fallen in love with another man, and she wanted to give him children. Surely, the American would understand, what with his absence of three years. Loneliness was depressing, and she knew her husband would not want her to be depressed. Surely, he could understand the reasonableness of her request for a divorce. Yes, he wanted that life back, but he understood about impossibilities.
That life was gone, another casualty of war. He’d kissed it good-bye the day he joined the Office of Strategic Services, the clandestine arm of the military. His fluency in German and his doctorate in history had attracted the recruiters from the OSS. They came to the campus and convinced him that he could contribute the most to the survival of the United States by becoming one of them. So he did. And now, he was brought to this place of execution, this wasteland in the heart of what had once been a nation of culture and refinement, this country that had slipped into a savagery undreamed of by even the most barbaric of historical figures.
Wyatt's Revenge: A Matt Royal Mystery Page 11
