Curtain of Death

by W. E. B Griffin

  You sound just like Cronley.

  “Jim even knows what Choucroute Garnie à l’Alsacienne, which is what—before I knew you were coming—I told the kitchen to prepare for our lunch. It’s sauerkraut garnished with smoked pork. If that doesn’t please you, I’m sure the kitchen can fix a hamburger or something else from your barbaric American cuisine.”

  “What you said sounds fine, sir,” Winters said, smiling.

  “Why are you not in your usual sour mood?” Cronley asked.

  Fortin didn’t reply for a moment, and when he did, the tone of his voice made it clear he was now being absolutely serious.

  “Because we are, as you put it, going to be partners. When you didn’t come back, I began to think that you, too, had gotten a message from on high to leave Odessa alone.”

  “Quite the opposite,” Cronley said. “But have people on high told you to leave Odessa alone?”

  “Not in so many words. But subtly. So subtly that I suspect the Vatican is involved. I was actually about to go to Le General de Gaulle. I didn’t want to do that, and now I don’t think I will have to. I think I can get from you the logistical and other support that has been denied me.”

  “Whatever you need.”

  “Thank you. Starting with photographic paper and chemicals, I hope. Leica-ing the contents of that briefcase is going to just about exhaust what’s in my lab.”

  “Get me a list of what you need and get me on a secure line, and I’ll have it on its way here this afternoon.”

  “Deladier, make up a list of what the lab needs. Captain Cronley can take it back with him to Munich.”

  “Oui, Mon Commandant,” the sergeant said, and went to a sideboard and took out a telephone.

  A white-jacketed waiter appeared.

  “Getting back to the more pleasant subject of our lunch,” Fortin said, “I suggest we begin with a bottle of Crémant d’Alsace. It’s a sparkling wine, champagne in everything but name.”

  “We’ll have to pass, thanks,” Cronley said.

  “Because you think I am going to ply you with champagne to loosen your tongues?”

  “That, too, but Tom and I are flying, and I like to do that sober.”

  “I’d forgotten,” Fortin replied. “I often think it was probably much more pleasant a century ago when officers could take a little wine and then get on a horse which knew the way home.”

  “I would hate to have to ride a horse back to Munich,” Cronley said.

  Fortin ordered their meal, and the waiter left.

  “Are you going to tell us what you know about Odessa now?” Cronley asked. “Or hold us in suspense until after we have our lunch?”

  Fortin shrugged.

  “It actually started here,” he said, “or Die Spinne—the Spider—did. In August 1944. In the Maison Rouge Hotel, right around the corner from here, on Rue Des Francs-Bourgeois—”

  “Excuse me, Mon Commandant,” Winters interrupted. “I never heard any of this before. I’d like to take notes.”

  “I have full confidence that any notes you make will not become general knowledge,” Fortin said. His tone suggested that his confidence was anything but full.

  “No, sir, they won’t get out. They’re just for me.”

  “Good idea, Tom,” Cronley said. “This is all new to me, too. But on the subject of notes, make one to tell Barbara that anything that goes on in the Compound is not to be shared with the OLIN. And if you see him before I do, make sure Bonehead gets the same message to Ginger. No offense, Tom, but I have very painfully learned the hazards of pillow talk.”

  “None taken, sir. Barbara—my wife, Commandant—is an Army brat. She knows the rules. And I tell her as little as possible. I’ll talk to Moriarty.”

  “What’s OLIN?” Fortin asked. “Who’s Bonehead?”

  “It’s short for the Officers’ Ladies Intelligence Network,” Cronley explained.

  Fortin laughed, and then asked, “And Moriarty is Bonehead? Meaning not too bright?”

  “Quite the opposite,” Cronley said. “He got that name in our first year in college.”

  “That would be Texas A&M, correct?” Fortin said. “The military school?”

  How the hell did he find that out?

  “That’s right. Anyway, after his haircut was found unsatisfactory, Private Moriarty shaved his head.”

  “And, if I may ask, where did you go to university, Lieutenant?”

  “The U.S. Military Academy, sir,” Winters said. “West Point?”

  “I’m sure Captain Cronley has told you how important it is that it not get out that we’re—how should I phrase this?—intensifying our interest in Odessa.”

  “Yes, sir, he has.”

  “But on that subject, Jean-Paul,” Cronley said, “the night before last an attempt was made to kidnap two of my people.”

  “And?”

  “It failed. My administrative officer killed three of them with head shots from a pistol she carries in her brassiere. And she wounded a fourth man. We are now interrogating him. Odds are they’re NKGB but we don’t know that.”

  “This woman . . .”

  “Claudette Colbert, like the movie star. You’ll be dealing with her.”

  “. . . killed three of these people? With a pistol she carries in her brassiere? Did I understand you to say that?”

  Cronley nodded.

  “Formidable!” Fortin said admiringly.

  “Yes, she is.”

  “Let me know what you find out about an NKGB connection.”

  “Absolutely,” Cronley said, and then went on: “You were telling us how Odessa was started here in Strasbourg.”

  “It wasn’t called Odessa then,” Fortin said. “What was formed here was called ‘the Spider.’ Odessa—Organisation der Ehemaligen SS-Angehörigen—former members of the SS—wasn’t formed until after the German capitulation.

  “What happened was that after Operation Overlord—the Normandy landing—was successful, and the Soviet advance from the East couldn’t be stopped, it became obvious to just about everybody but Hitler himself that the war was lost.

  “The upper level of German industrialists and bankers, who were the opposite of stupid, had heard of SS plans to escape the wrath of the Russians by going to South America. And they had figured out that senior SS officers were interested only in getting themselves out and didn’t care about German businessmen. So they set up a secret meeting here. At the Maison Rouge.”

  “Who were ‘they’?” Cronley asked.

  “There were about thirty participants. I can give you a complete list, but I would be surprised if there’s not already one in General Greene’s material. The important ones were Kurt von Schröder, the banker; Emil Kirdorf, who either owned outright or controlled Germany’s coal mines; Georg von Schnitzler of IG Farben; Gustav Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach—Herr Krupp himself; and Fritz Thyssen, who owned just about all of the steel mills.

  “There were also a number of Roman Catholic clergy at the meeting. The Vatican has always been good at keeping secrets, and we don’t know much about them. They are identified in the minutes of the meeting, which we think we have intact, as Father G. and Bishop M., and the like. The tentative identifications I have made of the Vatican contingent I will give you, although I suspect General Greene already has them.”

  “It might be interesting to compare your list with Greene’s,” Cronley said.

  “Yes, it would,” Fortin said. “What I was going to say is that there is a common thread in my tentative identifications. Many of the priests and two of the bishops were Franciscans.”

  “May I ask a question? Questions?” Winters asked.

  “You’re supposed to,” Cronley said.

  “Why was the Church involved in this?”

  “You said ‘the Church,’” Fortin said. “
That suggests you’re a Roman Catholic.”

  “I am.”

  “Others would have said ‘the Roman Catholic Church.’”

  “I suppose that’s true,” Winters said.

  “What about you, Jim?”

  “I’m Episcopalian. Church of England.”

  “And your mother?”

  “She left the Catholic Church—maybe was kicked out—when she married my father. Now she’s head of the Altar Guild at Saint Thomas’s Episcopal Church in Midland.”

  The waiter returned, carrying an enormous tray with one hand.

  He laid plates of Choucroute Garnie à l’Alsacienne before them. Winters saw that it was mounds of browned sauerkraut heavily laced with chunks of roasted pork. The smell made him salivate.

  “My father was Roman,” Fortin said, after he’d finished his first mouthful and then washed it down with healthy swallows of the sparkling Crémant d’Alsace. “When he married my mother—an Evangalische, a Lutheran—she had to sign a document stating any children of the union would be raised as Romans. I was. My mother was in the habit of saying unkind things about the Roman Church. This invariably distressed my father, who was rather devout. Are you distressed, or outraged, Thomas, when someone questions the motives of Holy Mother Church?”

  “Annoyed, usually, depending on what is said, and by whom.”

  “My mother used to say that the primary responsibility of Roman Catholic Church clergy is the preservation of the Roman Catholic Church. Does that offend you, Thomas?”

  Winters visibly considered the question before replying, “I’m not sure I agree with it, but it doesn’t offend me.”

  “I began to be disillusioned about the Roman Church at Saint-Cyr,” Fortin said. “My fellow cadets began to say terrible things about it . . .”

  “What sort of terrible things?” Winters asked.

  “. . . yet seemed to get away with it. There was no lightning bolt from heaven to incinerate them where they stood.”

  “What sort of terrible things?” Winters repeated.

  “Well, for example, that the Pope—Popes, Pius the Eleventh, and Pius the Twelfth, who succeeded him, were, if not actually Fascists, then the next thing to Fascists.”

  “Did they say why?” Winters asked softly.

  “They pointed to the Vatican Concordat of 1929,” Fortin said.

  “I have no idea what that is,” Cronley said.

  “It was the deal struck between the Roman Church—Pius the Eleventh—and Italy—Mussolini—which made the Vatican—all forty-four hectares of it—a sovereign state.”

  “A hectare is two and a half acres, right?” Winters asked.

  Both Fortin and Cronley nodded, and Fortin went on.

  “With a population of about eight hundred people. Now, my irreverent classmates pointed out to me, while this was certainly a good thing for the Roman Church, it also silenced criticism by the Church of Mussolini and his Fascists.

  “They also pointed out to me that Hitler freely admitted that Mussolini was his inspiration for the Nazi Party. Which brings us to the Reichskonkordat of 1933.”

  “I have to confess I don’t know what that is,” Winters said. “Which probably makes me look more stupid than I like to think I am.”

  “I don’t know what that is, either,” Cronley confessed.

  “There is a difference between ignorance and stupidity,” Fortin said. “I know Jim isn’t stupid, and I don’t think you are. But ignorant, yes. The both of you are ignorant of things you really should know in our line of business.”

  Cronley thought: I have just been called ignorant. Why am I not pissed off?

  Because ol’ Jean-Paul is right on the fucking money.

  I’ve never heard of the Vatican Concordat or—what the hell did he say?—the Reichskonkordat—until just now.

  “What’s the Reichskonkordat?”

  “A treaty signed between what was by then the sovereign state of the Vatican and Germany in July of 1933, just as Hitler was coming to power. It did the same thing, basically, as the Vatican Concordat. The Germans agreed to recognize most of what the Vatican wanted recognized, and the Vatican shut off criticism of the Nazis by the clergy of the Roman Church in Germany.

  “It was signed on behalf of the Vatican, or Pius the Eleventh, if you prefer, by Vatican Secretary of State Eugenio Cardinal Pacelli. He was later Papal Nuncio—ambassador—to the Thousand-Year Reich, and later, when Pius the Eleventh died in 1939, Cardinal Pacelli became Pope Pius the Twelfth.”

  “Frankly, I never heard any of this before,” Winters said. “Either I was asleep during that history class at West Point . . .”

  Cronley thought: Me, too. I did a lot of sleeping through classes at College Station.

  “. . . or that wasn’t presented,” Winters went on. “The only time I thought about the Church and the Nazis was when I heard that Count von . . . Whatsisname? The blind-in-one-eye guy who put the bomb under Hitler’s table . . .”

  “Von Stauffenberg,” Cronley furnished. “Colonel Count Claus von Stauffenberg.”

  “. . . and just missed blowing the sonofabitch up was a devout Catholic. I wondered how he handled the ‘Thou Shalt Not Kill’ commandment.”

  “I was probably asleep, too, during that class,” Cronley said. “I heard about von Stauffenberg from a friend of mine. Hitler hung—strangled—my friend’s father from a butcher’s hook for his involvement in the bomb plot.”

  “Your friend?” Fortin asked.

  “Hans-Peter von Wachtstein. Now the Graf von Wachtstein. He was a Luftwaffe fighter pilot. Now he’s a pilot for SAA.”

  “For what?”

  “South American Airways. Argentine. It’s a DCI asset.”

  “You . . . we . . . have an airline?” Winters asked, visibly surprised.

  “At the moment. Juan Domingo Perón, the Argentine strongman, is threatening to seize it.”

  “So that’s how you’ve been getting people to Argentina. You own the Argentine airline,” Fortin said.

  “Operative phrase ‘at the moment.’”

  “I’d like to hear more about that, but right now”—he paused and then continued—“the argument advanced to justify the Vatican Concordat and the Reichskonkordat was that the Italian Fascists and the German Nazis would have been even nastier to the Italians and the Germans—and of course the Church—had there been no concords.

  “I accepted that all through the war, until I came back to Strasbourg and learned what the Church had done, or had not done, with regard to my family.”

  “I don’t understand,” Winters said.

  “You didn’t tell him, Jim?” Fortin asked.

  Cronley shook his head. “Not in detail. Just what happened to them.”

  “When France fell,” Fortin said, “I went to England and served with the Free French. The Germans—actually their lapdogs, the Milice—here in Strasbourg—”

  “The Milice?” Winters parroted. “Doesn’t that mean ‘militia’?”

  “The word does. The Milice was a paramilitary organization set up by the Vichy government, primarily to fight the Underground. Some of them—like Jim’s cousin Luther—were Nazis, or at least Nazi sympathizers. Others believed they were doing God’s work fighting the Underground, which after Hitler invaded Russia had become substantially—or even predominantly—Communist. And other men joined the Milice to keep from getting sent to Germany as slave laborers.

  “Anyway, the Milice here in Strasbourg somehow got the idea that I had returned to work with the Underground and arrested my family—my mother, my wife, and my children—for interrogation. When the interrogation was over, the Milice threw their bodies into the Rhine.”

  “Captain Cronley told me that,” Winters said, adding, “Jesus Christ!”

  “I was never in the Underground. I served at General de
Gaulle’s headquarters and returned to Strasbourg only with General Leclerc’s 2nd Armored Division. My wife and my mother knew where I was, and—through my mother—our priest knew that I was not, and never had been, in Strasbourg since the war began.

  “When I asked Father Kramer why he had not gone to SS-Brigadeführer Kollmer, to whom he was serving Mass every Sunday in the Cathedral of Our Lady of Strasbourg and with whom he was dining—in this very restaurant—on a weekly basis and told him that he knew my mother and my wife and my children had no information of any kind of any possible interest to the Sicherheitsdienst, he said that as much as he would have liked to have done so, I would understand he couldn’t, as doing so would endanger the relationship he—the Church—had built with the Sicherheitsdienst.”

  “Nice guy,” Cronley said bitterly.

  “You have to understand, Jim, that he believed in what he told me. His most important duty was to protect the Church.”

  “Fuck him!” Cronley said.

  “Is this priest still here in Strasbourg?” Winters asked.

  “No. They found Father Kramer’s body floating in the Rhine. Person or persons unknown had apparently shot him four times with a .22 caliber weapon. In his elbows and knees. If he tried to swim, when he was thrown off the wharf, it must have been excruciatingly painful.”

  Fortin paused long enough for this to sink in, and then went on:

  “I thought it should be understood between us that if, as we try to shut down Odessa and find the people running it, we find that members of the Catholic clergy are involved, I am going to find it hard—virtually impossible—to look away, to accept the rationale that all they are doing is their duty to the Church.”

  For a long moment there was silence. Cronley finally broke it.

  “I think it should be understood between us, Jean-Paul, that if—when—we find such people, what happens to them will be mutually agreed between us. If you can’t live with that, it’s what in Texas we call a deal breaker. Are we agreed?”

  Fortin shrugged, then nodded.

  “As I was saying,” Fortin went on, “what the German industrialists and the representatives of the Vatican did was set up a system—the Spider—to get the industrialists and—how do I put this?—friends of the Vatican out of what was to become Occupied Germany through Switzerland and then into Italy. From Italy, they made their way to South America. This involved arranging for false identity documents, passports, contacts, and safe houses. It came to be known as the Monastery Route because most of the safe houses were in monasteries.”