Crossfire

by David Hagberg

  As they turned down the long driveway, Maria said, “His name is Alois Rheinfälls.”

  McGarvey pulled up short and doused the rental car’s headlights just off the highway. There was a partial moon tonight, but clouds driving in off the Atlantic obscured it much of the time.

  “If it’s the same one mentioned in Roebling’s notebook,” he said.

  “It is,” Maria replied.

  “How can you be so sure?”

  “This bastard is rich, isn’t he? It’s the same one.”

  McGarvey decided he would not delve into that logic, though he suspected that she was probably correct. According to what Maria had found in the tax records, the property had been owned by Rheinfälls since 1943. Where had he gotten his money in that day and age?

  Twenty yards ahead, the driveway was blocked by a tall iron gate. A large sign warned in Portuguese, German, and English that the property was patrolled continuously by guard dogs. There was a telephone on their side of the fence.

  “We’re not going to get in unless he wants to let us in,” McGarvey said. “Even if there is a connection between him and your Major Roebling, it will have been long buried by now. And if this one knows about the gold, he certainly won’t want to discuss it with us.”

  “Then we go in by force,” Maria said hotly. “We can use dynamite or plastique. I don’t think either will be too difficult to acquire. He will talk—”

  “So will the Portuguese police. And once we’re arrested, then what?”

  “We’ll have the information we came for.”

  “No,” McGarvey said. “We’ll do it my way.”

  Maria looked sharply at him. But then she nodded. Despite what had happened between them that afternoon, he had the feeling that she would put a knife in his back, as she had to the Argentinian mate aboard the Yankee Girl, if he crossed her.

  He put the car in gear, flipped on the headlights, and drove to the gate. When he got out and approached the telephone a pair of Dobermans appeared out of the darkness on the other side, silently, their teeth bared. They did not approach any closer than three or four feet from the wire itself. McGarvey figured the fence was electrified. They watched him, the stubs of their tails wagging as if they wanted to play.

  McGarvey picked up the telephone and a few seconds later it was answered by a man. “Sim.”

  “Ich kom aus Freiburg,” McGarvey shouted. “I must speak with Herr Rheinfälls.”

  “Wer ist das?” the man answered in German. He sounded much too young to be Rheinfälls. But he was a native speaker.

  “My name isn’t important, but we must speak with Herr Rheinfälls. It is a matter of life or death. They … know.”

  “Who is this? What are you talking about?”

  “Listen to me, you fool, the secret is out at long last! I have the woman with me. We have come from Freiburg. Do you understand? From Freiburg! From Herr Doktor Hesse!”

  “Eine Augenblick,” the man said. One moment.

  McGarvey glanced back at the car. Maria had gotten out and stood looking at him. The dogs were beginning to get agitated.

  An older man came on. “Ja, hier ist Alois Rheinfälls. Wer ist das?”

  “My name is Kirk McGarvey. I’m here with the granddaughter of Captain Ernst Reiker. I believe you know this name?”

  “What is it? What do you want with me?”

  “We have been to speak with Professor Hesse in Freiburg, and because of him we found Major Roebling’s notebook. Do you know these names?”

  “Hesse is dead.”

  “Yes,” McGarvey said. “They killed him. And we all know why. It has begun again.”

  “What do you want here with me?” Rheinfälls cried in sudden anguish.

  “Your help,” McGarvey said. “We want the killing to stop.”

  The line was silent.

  “Herr Rheinfälls?” McGarvey said.

  “Get back in your car. I will send someone to escort you to the house.”

  McGarvey hung up the phone and went back to the car. “He’s agreed to see us.”

  “You talked to him?” Maria asked, her voice filled with emotion.

  “Yes.”

  “Dios.”

  The house was huge and Italianate. It reminded McGarvey of the gaudy villas that had been built in the twenties along the French Riviera by Americans who had the cash but no class. Broad marble stairs rose in front to a balustraded porch that ran the width of the broad, three-story house. Above were balconies, and below on the porch, and out in the front yard, were dozens of statues and fountains, all of them bathed in soft lights.

  They were escorted by a pair of burly men who silently frisked both of them before they were allowed inside. McGarvey had figured they would be searched, so he had left his pistol under the seat in the car.

  An old man in tails and white gloves led them back to a very large and pleasantly furnished conservatory crammed with growing things. The smells were rich and moist, and they could hear water gently falling on stones somewhere. The rear wall, which was mostly glass, faced south so that in the daytime the large room would be filled with sunlight.

  “May I get you something to drink?” the servant asked.

  “Get away from me, Nazi,” Maria ordered harshly.

  The servant didn’t flinch. He half bowed. “Very well, Fraulein,” he said, and he turned and left.

  A few moments later Alois Rheinfälls came in. He was a very tall man with a Prussian officer’s bearing and manner. McGarvey judged him to be in his mid-seventies or perhaps even eighty, his hair white, his complexion pale, and his skin wrinkled. He was dressed in evening clothes, as if he had either just come in or was about to go out.

  “You have upset my house very badly,” he said. “Why have you come here like this in the night? What do you want with me? I know nothing and I cannot help you.”

  “But RSHA Major Walther Roebling knew you.”

  “Rheinfälls is not an unusual German name.”

  “Neither are Dieter Feldmann, or Karl Sikorsky, or Sigmund Müeller,” McGarvey said, naming the other three Maria had remembered from the notebook. “Shall I go on?”

  Rheinfälls took a deep breath. “I have never heard those names in my life.”

  “But you knew Professor Hesse in Frieburg.”

  “I know the name.”

  “Yes? Well, it was he who told us about the submarine.”

  “He had no business to—” Rheinfälls began, but stopped himself abruptly.

  “We found it,” McGarvey went on. “Off the coast of Argentina in the Golfo San Matías. She was sunk in about seventy-five meters of water just offshore. There had been an explosion. A bomb. It was sabotage.”

  Rheinfälls’s eyes were large; a thin sheen of sweat covered his high forehead. He was obviously very frightened.

  “Roebling escaped, of course, but he’d left his notebook behind. In the boat’s escape trunk. We found it and brought it back to the surface. Along with …”

  Rheinfälls rocked forward on the balls of his feet.

  “A lead bar covered by a thin gold plating. There were a lot of them down there. The sub was filled with them.”

  “This has nothing to do with me.”

  “It was an elaborate ruse. Captain Reiker and his crew were sent on a decoy mission to throw off the chase. It was Roebling’s job to kill them all and then die himself in Argentina. That way your secret would be safe.”

  “No.”

  “But, yes,” McGarvey said. “You and your pals figured to wait until after the Nuremberg trials. Until the dust settled. Until the world began to forget.”

  Rheinfälls was silent.

  “But something happened in June of 1949 that you hadn’t counted on. At a prison camp outside of Bonn run by the Allies. An RSHA lieutenant escaped. He’d been questioned about the submarine. It wasn’t much later that the killings began, starting with his interrogators.”

  Still Rheinfälls said nothing.

  “His n
ame, of course, was Rainer Mossberg.”

  Now Rheinfälls held out a shaking hand as if to ward off a blow.

  “Professor Hesse thought that Mossberg might be dead. The killings, he said, stopped in 1978. But he was wrong. And he lost his life because of his error. So did Major Roebling. They both believed”—McGarvey smiled sadly—“they both believed in you, and what you were hiding.”

  “No!” Rheinfälls cried.

  “Then, what?”

  “You don’t understand.”

  “Tell me,” McGarvey said relentlessly. “Explain it to me so that the killings will stop.”

  “We didn’t expect this. It wasn’t supposed to happen this way.”

  “No,” Maria said, her voice shrill. “Nor did you bastards expect what happened in May of 1948. That had to have been an even bigger blow for you.”

  “What … ?”

  “When Israel became a state. On that day you and your friends must have been shitting in your pants.”

  57

  RHEINFÄLLS’S FACE SUDDENLY BECAME animated. McGarvey was amazed at the dramatic change in the old man.

  “So, a little Jewess, a Zionist, here seeking retribution for what happened fifty years ago,” Rheinfälls spat. “Do you believe that I was a death camp commandant? You think you recognize my face from old photographs? Is that it?”

  “No!” Maria shot back. “I may have Jewish blood in my veins, and I may have been born in Argentina, but I’m German, too, and I’ve learned to be ashamed of it … of being from the same stock as you.”

  “Ah, so you believe you carry the guilt of the sins of your fathers. Of your fatherland. You are so clean of sin yourself that you are quite willing to take on the blame for an entire nation of people. It must be gratifying for you.”

  “I’m no Nazi.”

  “No, but your people were, I think. And you?” Rheinfälls looked bleakly at McGarvey. “Are you one of Rainer’s people come here to kill an old man? Well, let me tell you something. There was no need of you to come here like this. The secret is safe with me, and the others.” He laughed. “There aren’t many others now. Hesse was wrong. The killings didn’t stop in 1978. Nature has taken over where the generals left off.”

  “The generals?” McGarvey asked, careful to keep his voice even.

  Rheinfälls blinked. “What?”

  “You said nature took over where the generals left off. What generals are these?”

  Rheinfälls stepped back a pace. “You can ask me this now? After what you said?”

  “We’ve come for the gold.”

  “What gold?”

  “You know,” McGarvey said.

  “Never,” Rheinfälls whispered.

  “It was collected from Jews,” McGarvey said. “From the teeth that were extracted before they were put to death. From the gold chains around their necks, bracelets around their wrists. From wedding bands and watches and watch fobs. Perhaps in some instances of the very rich, from their gold-plated cutlery. Gold-rimmed eyeglasses. Cuff links and collar pins and shirt studs.”

  “It was sent to South America. For the new Reich. For …”

  “The Odessa?” McGarvey asked rhetorically. “No, that was merely a diversionary tactic. The real hoard is here, I think. In Portugal. Where you and the others could keep an eye on it. Spend it.”

  “No!” the old man cried. He looked over his shoulder as if he expected one of his bodyguards to come to his rescue. But the house was silent.

  “This life-style is very expensive,” McGarvey noted.

  “I have always had money. The family has had money. There were mines in Alsace. Vineyards. A steel mill on the Ruhr. Some of the fortune was saved.”

  “But it’s here,” McGarvey said. “The gold. There must be millions. Maybe more. A lot more.”

  “Tell us,” Maria demanded.

  Rheinfälls looked from McGarvey to her and then back. “You don’t understand.”

  “Explain it to us.”

  Rheinfälls shook his head. “I can’t.”

  “Then you will die like the others,” Maria said. “I’ll kill you myself.”

  The old man stumbled back a few steps and sank down onto a broad wicker chair. His skin looked almost gray, and it seemed as if he were having a problem catching his breath. McGarvey thought he might be on the verge of a heart attack.

  “You don’t understand,” Rheinfälls repeated weakly. Then he mumbled something else, but they didn’t catch it.

  McGarvey pulled a chair close and sat down. “Let’s end it here and now,” he said. “Tell us where the gold is … that is, if it’s still intact.”

  “It is,” Rheinfälls said.

  “Tell us where.”

  “Then what?”

  “We’ll make sure it’s returned to the … Jews. To Israel. To its rightful owners.”

  Rheinfälls’s entire body shook as if he had received a massive jolt to his system. “Impossible.”

  “No …”

  “It’s cursed,” Rheinfälls whispered.

  “What?” McGarvey asked, not at all sure he had heard correctly. He glanced up at Maria, but she hadn’t heard it. Her face was set in a grim mask of hate.

  “No one can get near it,” Rheinfälls mumbled. “All these years it has been safe from … everyone.”

  “Where?”

  “It will kill you, too!”

  “Where!” McGarvey asked, leaning forward.

  The old man’s eyes met his.

  “Here in Portugal?” McGarvey prompted.

  Rheinfälls nodded.

  “In this house?”

  “No.”

  “But near enough so that you could keep an eye on it?”

  “Yes,” Rheinfälls said. “Very near.”

  “Then tell us where.”

  “It’s been many years since any of us have gone there to see it.”

  “Where?”

  The old man said something very softly. McGarvey leaned even closer so that he was barely six inches away.

  “Ponte do Sor,” Rheinfälls whispered.

  “What?” Maria cried. “What did he say?”

  “What is this place?” McGarvey asked.

  Rheinfälls turned to look toward the windows. “The lights …” he said, when he was flung violently off the wicker chair, a big piece of his skull flying away in a broad spray of blood and brain tissue.

  A high-powered rifle, McGarvey thought instantly.

  “Down!” he shouted to Maria as he dived off his chair. He hit the floor badly, and something gave way inside his body. It felt as if his incisions had torn open, the pain instant and excruciating.

  Through the haze of pain that threatened to obliterate his ability to see or think, McGarvey pulled himself between the big potted plants and the wicker tables and benches to where he could see the back wall of the conservatory.

  The back yard was in darkness. No light came from the sides or the front of the big house.

  “Kirk?” Maria called from behind him.

  “Stay down,” McGarvey managed to croak through his pain.

  “Rheinfälls is dead,” Maria called to him.

  Where were the guards or the dogs? The shooter had managed to get onto the property, had turned out the lights, and had fired a shot from somewhere in the back all without raising an alarm.

  McGarvey was getting a very bad feeling here. A cornered feeling. In his condition he would not be able to put up much of a fight against whoever it was who had tracked them and had killed the old man before he could tell the entire story.

  Rheinfälls had blamed the killings on “the generals.” What generals? Who had he been talking about?

  “Do you see anything?” Maria asked.

  “Not yet. Can you reach the light switch?”

  “Just a minute.”

  “Keep down.”

  A few seconds later the conservatory lights went out. “There’s a guard down in the hall,” she called in the darkness. “He looks dead.�
��

  McGarvey painfully worked his way across the room, joining her at the hall doorway. He was light-headed and nauseated from the effort. But Maria didn’t notice. She was pressed against the wall, her complexion chalky in the light from the hall. But she seemed to be in control. It didn’t look as if she would fall apart on him yet.

  Cautiously he peered around the doorframe. One of the burly men who had frisked them lay on his back near the stairs. A lot of blood had puddled beneath his head. The front door was open, but McGarvey could see nothing outside except for a section of empty porch.

  There were no sounds in the house. And except for the guard’s body in the hall, the open front door, and the extinguished lights in front, everything could have seemed normal.

  But there was something odd about the downed man. McGarvey stared at the body for a full thirty seconds before he finally had it: the man had not drawn his weapon. He’d evidently come into the hall, or had just come down the stairs, when someone had opened the front door and shot him in the head. He’d made no move to defend himself.

  “Are they gone?” Maria asked.

  “I don’t know,” McGarvey answered. “Stay here and keep your head down.” He got carefully to his feet, swaying there for a moment or two.

  “What’s wrong?” Maria asked, alarmed.

  “I’m all right.”

  “No, you’re not,” she said. “What’s wrong with you?”

  “There’s no time now,” McGarvey said. “Just keep down.” Girding himself, he stepped into the hall and hurried as fast as he could move across to the stairs, where he ducked down behind the massive oak banister.

  From there he could just see into the dining room. The body of the old servant who had ushered them into the conservatory was visible. The man was lying on his back.

  McGarvey scrambled over to the guard’s body, flipped open the coat, and pulled out the man’s gun. It was a large, nine-millimeter Beretta automatic.

  He levered a round into the chamber and switched off the safety as he dashed to the open door. There he flattened himself against the wall.