Curtain of Death

by W. E. B Griffin

  “Well, then I suggest, Cronley, that we pool our talents and assets and find those two bastards.”

  White said: “I was going to suggest Cronley take you with him to see Commandant Fortin when he goes there in three days.”

  “Yes, sir,” Cronley said. “Good idea.”

  “How well do you get along with Fortin?” McMullen asked.

  “Very well,” Janice said, “after Jim gave him two refrigerators and a trailer full of photo lab supplies. Fortin is French, you know.”

  “You gave him two refrigerators, Cronley?” White asked. “Where did you get them?”

  “I’d rather not say, sir.”

  “What were we just saying about things of questionable legality?” White said, then chuckled. “Well, that’s it. Wagner can start on giving us details of the Stars and Stripes delivery system. Until lunch. Which brings us to that. Miss Johansen, what we’re having for lunch is clam chowder. You’re familiar with New England clam chowder?”

  “Of course.”

  “Clams, potatoes, a little tomato, all in a milk broth. Served very hot?”

  “I said I was.”

  “Miss Johansen, if you refer to me or Colonel McMullen with a term of endearment, such as ‘darling,’ in the presence of my wife or his, you will shortly thereafter enjoy a lap full of clam chowder. Do we understand one another?”

  “General, darling, I never get guys I really like in trouble with their wives. You and the handsome Irishman have absolutely nothing to worry about.”

  [ FOUR ]

  München-Ostfriedhof Cemetery

  St.-Martins-Platz

  Munich, American Zone of Occupation, Germany

  1050 5 February 1946

  It had begun to snow and the shoulders and hats of the archiereus and the priests who had conducted the service began to be covered as they watched cemetery workers pat the dirt over the graves into neat mounds with shovels.

  Finally, the workers finished and looked at the archiereus for his approval.

  He answered by making the sign of the cross, mumbling a final prayer, and then brushing the snow off his ornately embroidered vestments.

  He then looked at Cronley and Ziegler, who, wearing Class A uniforms, stood across the graves. He blessed them, mumbled something to the priests and brothers, and then turned away from the graves and started to walk toward the Ford staff car that had brought them to the cemetery.

  CID Agent Walter Thomas, of the CID photo lab, followed the procession for fifteen seconds with an Eyemo 16mm motion picture camera. Then he panned to Ziegler and Cronley for five seconds and then put the camera down.

  “I fully expect to get an Academy Award for this,” Hollywood announced. “Category, Weird Funerals in a German Snowstorm.”

  “Just develop that film, Hollywood, and get his”—Ziegler pointed to another CID agent who had been photographing the funeral with a 35mm Leica still camera—“film developed and printed and over to the Vier Jahreszeiten, like, ten minutes ago. This is important.”

  “I hear and obey, Master. Give me two hours.”

  “I’m going to hold you to two hours,” Ziegler said.

  —

  “You know what I was thinking when all that was going on?” Ziegler asked as they drove through the cemetery toward the gate.

  “No,” Cronley said. “But I guess you’re going to tell me.”

  “Munich got pretty well screwed up during the war. It doesn’t look like it used to, I mean.”

  “A sage observation, Mr. Ziegler.”

  “This place,” Ziegler said, gesturing at the gravestones, tombs, and trees they were passing through, “hasn’t changed hardly at all. Today, we buried some Russians who got themselves shot while doing their duty to their country. Two years ago, some Germans who got themselves shot doing their duty to their country got buried here, probably ten yards from where we buried the Russians. A couple of years before that, the Nazis used this place to hide the ashes of three thousand nine hundred and ninety-six Germans they’d killed in Dachau, Auschwitz, and Buchenwald—”

  “Three thousand nine hundred and ninety-six? Where’d you get that number?”

  “After that—I guess they ran out of space here—they just buried them in Dachau, et cetera,” Ziegler said.

  “Is there a point in this history lesson?”

  “I was thinking that pretty soon, at some cemetery in Berlin, or maybe Moscow, some NKGB guys are going to stand around watching guys with shovels pat the earth over Mattingly’s grave into a neat pile.”

  “We don’t know that’s going to happen,” Cronley said.

  “You don’t think we’re going to get him back, do you?”

  “What we’re trying to do now is just that.”

  “They won’t give him back unless we give them the Likharevs, and you know—or should—that we’re not going to do that.”

  “I don’t know that, either. Somebody may decide that we need Mattingly more than we need the Likharevs.”

  “We can’t do that, and you know it. That would encourage the bastards to kidnap somebody else whenever they want something from us.”

  “I tried to make that point to Schultz and the admiral.”

  “What did they say?”

  “They didn’t say anything.”

  “Figures. They want to make the swap.”

  Cronley let slip: “I’m not going to let that happen.”

  “What the fuck did you just say?”

  “Nothing. Forget what I just said.”

  “How the hell can I do that?” Ziegler asked. “You really think you can stop them from swapping the Likharevs for Mattingly?”

  “Change the subject, Augie. Please.”

  “If you fuck up a swap like that, and I don’t see how you could—but if you even try to fuck up a swap, you’ll find yourself in Leavenworth.”

  “I wasn’t suggesting you change the subject, Mr. Ziegler. That was an order.”

  Ziegler looked at him for a moment, exhaled audibly, and said, “Yes, sir.”

  [ FIVE ]

  Suite 507

  Hotel Vier Jahreszeiten

  Maximilianstrasse 178

  Munich, American Zone of Occupation, Germany

  1110 5 February 1946

  Colonel Richard P. McMullen, DCI agents Karl-Christoph Wagner and Albert Finney, Major Harold Wallace, Lieutenant Thomas Winters, and Miss Janice Johansen were filling all the chairs in the outer office when Cronley and Ziegler walked in. Technical Sergeant Florence J. Miller, now wearing blue triangles on her uniform, was sitting at the desk usually occupied by Claudette Colbert.

  “Good morning, sir,” Cronley said.

  “How went the funeral?” Miss Johansen asked.

  “If you had gone out there, you would know.”

  “I knew you would be giving me pictures,” she said. “And I don’t like standing around in the snow. Did anybody else show up?”

  “Like who?”

  “Maybe the mole you’ve got around here. To see if you were going to bury them, or just tell Serov you did.”

  Jesus, I didn’t think about that!

  Was there somebody from the NKGB peering around a tombstone?

  Well, if there was, he can tell Serov I’m being a good boy.

  No harm.

  But what good, either, is that charade I just staged going to do about getting Mattingly back?

  “Not that I saw,” Cronley said. “Anything else new?”

  “I called Fortin to make sure he’ll be there for you and Colonel McMullen,” Finney said.

  “And will he be? He’s back from the Spanish border?”

  “Capitaine DuPres said he’s back from the Spanish border—”

  “Who’s Captain DuPres?” Janice asked.

  “He works
for Fortin,” Cronley said. “Little guy. Young, but one tough sonofa . . . officer and gentleman.”

  “My kind of guy. You’ll have to introduce me,” Janice said.

  “. . . but not yet back in Strasbourg,” Finney continued. “He’s apparently been following your cousin Luther all over, and right now he’s in Wissembourg.”

  “Wissembourg?” Colonel McMullen asked.

  “I looked it up, Colonel,” Finney replied. “It’s a little dorf about forty miles north of here, on a little river called the Lauter, which is the international border between France and Germany.”

  “So Wagner has been telling us,” McMullen said.

  “Excuse me?” Finney asked.

  “Tell the nice man what you told us about Wissembourg, Casey,” the colonel ordered.

  Wagner said, “Yes, sir.” Then he stood up and visibly collected his thoughts before going on.

  “We have Americans all over France. In Paris, for example, on an island called—I forget what—and in places like Carentan, which is near Cherbourg—”

  “I know it well,” Ziegler offered. “I was there for a month. It’s where we’re building a permanent cemetery for our guys who bought it on the invasion beaches and as we broke out of the beachhead.”

  “I just have to know,” Cronley said. “What the hell were you doing in a cemetery for a month?”

  “You really want to know?”

  “I really want to know,” Colonel McMullen said.

  “And curiosity seems to have overwhelmed me, too,” Major Wallace said.

  “Okay. Two days after the invasion on D-Day, Graves Registration started burying the people who had bought it on the beaches. Among whom, incidentally, was President Roosevelt’s son—President Teddy Roosevelt’s son—who was a buck general who bought it on the beach.”

  “Mr. Ziegler is,” Cronley said, “in case anyone is wondering, the DCI’s unquestionable expert on cemeteries.”

  “Carry on, Mr. Ziegler,” McMullen said. “You’ve caught everyone’s attention.”

  “Okay,” Ziegler said. “As I was saying, right after the invasion, Graves Registration started burying bodies—most often in ponchos, but sometimes without anything. There was a lot of bodies. And then after the breakout, they opened another cemetery, this one overlooking Omaha Beach, near a little dorf called Colleville-sur-Mer.

  “After the war the families of the guys buried there were offered the choice of having their dead returned to the States, or having them reburied in what was to be the Normandy American Cemetery and Memorial. Nine thousand three hundred and eighty-seven families said bury them where they got killed. About that many, a little more, said, ‘Send him home.’

  “This started one hell of an operation. The guys to be returned not only had to be dug up, but embalmed, and then put in caskets. Freighters loaded with nothing but caskets began to arrive in Cherbourg, and the Military Air Transport Command began flying in planeloads of licensed embalmers. They put these people up in another little dorf, Carentan.”

  “Why did they need embalmers?” Major Wallace asked.

  “Because in some places in the States, you can’t be buried unless you’ve been embalmed,” Ziegler clarified. “So they had to embalm all the bodies going home before they put them in caskets. And then somebody decided that it was only fair that the guys not going home get the same treatment. Before they could be buried in the permanent cemetery, they had to be embalmed and put in caskets. Which came, by the way, with silk linings, silk pillows for their heads, and silk sheets to wrap the bodies in. Which is why I spent a month in Carentan.”

  “Embalming bodies?” Cronley asked.

  Ziegler shook his head. “Making a case against the Frogs who broke into the warehouses where the caskets were stored and stole the silk and sold it to dressmakers and brassiere makers in Paris. We got one hundred and two of them put in the Frog slam, some for stealing the silk and some for receiving stolen property.”

  “I have to confess that I never heard anything about this before,” Colonel McMullen said.

  “The ambassador—our ambassador to France—got the whole investigation classified Secret. He said it ‘would impair Franco-American relations unnecessarily,’ and the French government kept it out of the French newspapers. I got a Green Hornet for ‘good work in a classified investigation.’”

  “A Green Hornet?” Janice asked.

  “The Army Commendation Medal. The ribbon is green with white stripes. Anyway, that’s what I was doing in Carentan. Casey, what’s with you and Carentan?”

  “The way they deliver Stripes in France is to send a truckload of them to Paris, to that island in Paris I can’t remember the name of—it’s some sort of depot—where they unload. The Stripes is then taken by the depot’s trucks to the American bases all over France, like Carentan, for example, when they make their regular daily runs carrying supplies or whatever.

  “When I was looking at the maps, I started wondering why the Stripes trucks went that way to Paris. It’s not the direct route, and it’s not a major highway. There is a Constabulary checkpoint at Wissembourg, because it’s an international border. But then I started thinking, since Stripes trucks go by them every day, the Constab guys aren’t going to take a real close look at them.

  “And then when I kept looking at the maps, I saw that there’s nothing much on both sides of the border around Wissembourg. It’s in the middle of nowhere. And there’s not much traffic on the road. So no one would see the truck stopping, and a couple of guys coming out of the woods and getting on the trucks, and then getting off, with nobody seeing them, on the other side of the border.”

  “And,” McMullen said, “Commandant Jean-Paul Fortin has followed Cousin Luther—what’s his name, Cronley?”

  “Stauffer, Luther Stauffer. My mother’s maiden name is Stauffer.”

  “So Commandant Fortin of the Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire has followed Herr—or is it Monsieur?—Stauffer to Wissembourg,” McMullen said. “Does anyone else find that fascinating?”

  Before anyone could answer, the telephone on Florence Miller’s desk rang.

  Cronley looked at her impatiently as she answered, and then curiously as she gestured to Tom Winters that it was for him.

  Winters jumped out of his chair and went to her and took the telephone.

  His face brightened as he listened.

  “I’ll be right there,” he announced after a moment, handed the telephone to Florence, and looked at Cronley.

  “Sorry, I have to go,” he said.

  “You have to go where?”

  “The stork is about to land at the Compound.”

  “Where the hell was the Storch?” Cronley demanded, and then understood. “Oh! Christ, she can’t have a baby in the Compound.”

  “That’s why I have to go. To take her to the 98th General.”

  “Calm down, Tom,” Cronley said. “Get on the horn to Bonehead. Have him take Barbara to the hospital. You meet her there.”

  “Bonehead is already there. He took Ginger there at about five this morning. I didn’t have the chance to tell you.”

  “Well then, what the hell are you waiting for?” Cronley said. “Get going! Tell the ladies good luck.”

  “Talk about timing!” Winters said, and headed for the door.

  After a moment, Ziegler said, “Well, I guess Tom won’t be going with us to Wissembourg. He and Bonehead will be holding hands in the waiting room of the maternity ward.”

  That triggered laughter and chuckles.

  “There’s no point in anybody going to Wissembourg,” Cronley said.

  “I thought you and the colonel had to see Fortin,” Major Wallace challenged.

  “We do,” McMullen said. “But I’d be surprised if there’s an airfield there. So we’d have to drive. Forty-odd miles on bad roads. And w
hen we get there, then what? We wander around what Wagner describes as a little dorf, stopping people and asking, ‘Excuse me, Madam—or Gnädige Frau—we’re looking for a senior officer of French intelligence named Fortin who’s chasing a chap named Stauffer. Can you point out either of them to us, please?’”

  “Ouch!” Wallace said. “I will try to atone for that stupid suggestion, Colonel, sir, by suggesting that I stick around here until we get the stuff from the photo lab. I will then have someone fly me to Frankfurt, where I will catch the Air Force courier flight to Berlin. Meanwhile, you and Cronley can fly to Strasbourg and wait for Fortin to return from Wissembourg.”

  He paused long enough for that to sink in, then asked, “How’s that sound to you, Cronley?”

  That wasn’t an announcement. He’s asking my permission.

  What’s that all about?

  “That’s fine with me, if it’s all right with you, Colonel McMullen.”

  “It’s either that, or go over to the 98th and offer our moral support to the fathers-to-be.”

  “Thank you,” Wallace said. “I’d really like to get a feel about what’s going on in Berlin. And I’ve been thinking that if I show up at the Glienicke Bridge with the film of the funeral, Serov will accept that I’m simply your messenger. And it might help Bob Mattingly’s morale if he sees me there.”

  “How does Colonel Mattingly feel about attractive women?” Janice asked. “Would seeing me on that bridge do anything for his morale?”

  Cronley shut off his automatic mouth just in time. He was about to say, You’re not going anywhere near that goddamn bridge!

  Instead, he asked, “Colonel, do you think Comrade Serov would shoot our Janice if she walked out onto the bridge, taking pictures with her Leica, beside Major Wallace?”

  McMullen considered that for five seconds, which seemed longer, before replying.

  “Possibly, but unlikely,” he said. “We haven’t paid a lot of attention to public relations in this, have we?”

  “Just Janice’s Stars and Stripes slash Associated Press stories,” Wallace said.

  “I was thinking it couldn’t make anything worse than it already is,” Cronley said. “And it might shake up Comrade Serov a little. Where’s Cronley? What’s he doing? And what’s the role of Janice Johansen of the Associated Press in this?”