Realizing that he was still alive, the other Gestapo man, the one called Karl, began to cross himself furiously, uttering a Hail Mary.
“Better talk to me, Karl,” said Schellenberg, tightening his grip on the MP40’s plastic handle. “Or would you like me to count to three again?”
“It was the chief’s direct order.”
“Muller?”
Karl nodded. “He’s trying to find out how far these peace negotiations of Himmler’s have gone. If it’s just Dr. Kersten, or if you’re involved, too.”
“I see,” said Schellenberg.
Things were a lot clearer to him now. In August of ’42, there had been a discussion involving himself, Himmler, and Himmler’s chiropractor, Dr. Felix Kersten, concerning how a peace with the Allies might be negotiated. The discussion had stalled pending the failed attempt to remove von Ribbentrop-who was perceived to be an obstacle to a diplomatic peace-from his post as Reich foreign minister. But Schellenberg was completely unaware of any current peace negotiations.
“Do you mean to say that there are peace negotiations taking place right now?”
“Yes. Dr. Kersten is in Stockholm, talking to the Americans.”
“And is he under surveillance, too?”
“Probably. I don’t know.”
“What about Himmler?”
“We were told to follow you. I’m afraid that’s all I know.”
“From where does Muller get this information?”
“I don’t know.”
“Take a guess.”
“All right. The splash around Prinz Albrechtstrasse is that there is someone in Himmler’s own office at the Ministry of the Interior who’s been throwing his voice in our direction. But I don’t know his name. Really I don’t.”
Schellenberg nodded. “I believe you.”
“Thank God.”
His mind was racing. There would have to be an investigation into the murder of the Gestapo man, of course. Muller would welcome a chance to embarrass him, and more important, Himmler. Unless…
“Have you got a radio in your car?”
“Yes.”
“Did you radio your last position?”
“We haven’t reported anything since we stopped outside the Ka-De-We.”
There it was, then. He was in the clear. But only if he was prepared to act decisively, now and without hesitation.
Even as the logic of it presented itself clearly to Schellenberg’s mind, he squeezed the trigger. And as he machine-gunned the second Gestapo man, in cold blood, Schellenberg felt that, finally, he had a kind of answer to the question that had often haunted him in the company of his more murderous colleagues. Two bodies now lay dead on the ground in front of him. Two murders hardly compared with Sandberger’s 65,000 or Janssen’s 33,000, but it could hardly be denied that the second murder had felt easier than the first.
With shaking hands, Schellenberg lit a cigarette and smoked it greedily, giving himself up to the soothingly toxic, alkaloid effect of the nicotine in the tobacco. With nerves somewhat steadied, he walked back to his car and took a large mouthful of schnapps from a little Wilhelmine silver hip flask he kept in the glove box. Then he drove slowly back to the Berkaerstrasse.
V
My journey from New York to London would have left Ulysses looking for a couple of aspirin. Eight hours after leaving LaGuardia Airport at 8:00 A.M. on Tuesday the fifth, I had only traveled as far as Botwood, Newfoundland, where the U.S. Navy Coronado flying boat stopped to refuel. At 5:30 P.M., the four-engine plane was back in the air and heading east across the Atlantic like an outsized goose flying the wrong way for winter.
There were three other passengers: a British general named Turner; Joel Beinart, a USAAF colonel from Albuquerque; and John Wooldridge, a naval commander from Delaware, all three of them tight-lipped men whose demeanor seemed to indicate it wasn’t just walls that had ears but the fuselage of a transatlantic aircraft as well. Not that I was feeling very gabby myself. For much of the journey, I read the Katyn files given to me by the president, which put the kibosh on any conversation.
The Wehrmacht file on Katyn had come via Allen Dulles from the OSS office in Berne. It was the most exhaustively detailed of the files, but I wondered how Dulles had come by it. In my mind’s eye I pictured some blond, blue-eyed Ubermensch from the German embassy in Bern just turning up at the OSS office one day and handing over the file as if it were nothing more important than the Swiss daily newspapers. Or had Dulles met up with his opposite number in the Abwehr for a glass of hot wine in the bar of the Hotel Schweizerhof? If either of these two scenarios were true, then it seemed to imply a degree of cooperation between Dulles and German intelligence that I found intriguing.
An astonishing number of photographs accompanied the findings of the so-called International Committee. Assembled by the Germans, it included the professor of pathology and anatomy at Zagreb University, Ljudevit Jurak, and several Allied officers who were German POWs. It was obvious that the Nazis hoped to exploit the massacre to drive a wedge between the Soviet Union and its Western allies. And, whatever happened, it was impossible to see how, after the war, the British or the Americans could ask the people of Poland to live in peace with the Russians. That possibility seemed no more likely than the chief rabbi of Poland asking Hitler and Himmler to come over for a Passover drink and a couple of hands of whist.
At Katyn there had been a systematic attempt by the Russians to liquidate the national leaders of Polish independence. And it was clear to me that Stalin, no less than Hitler, had wanted to reduce Poland to the level of a subject state within his empire. Just as important, however, he had wanted revenge on the Poles for the defeat they had inflicted on the Red Army and on its commander-Stalin himself-at the Battle of Lvov in July 1920.
I had witnessed the Russian hatred of the Poles at first hand and in circumstances that even now, more than five years later, I still found troubling. No, “troubling” didn’t really cover it; potentially dangerous was more like it. To have one skeleton in my OSS locker was a misfortune, but to have two looked like a serious predicament.
The Coronado gave a lurch as we hit some turbulence, and the naval commander groaned.
“Don’t worry about that,” said the USAAF colonel. “Try to think of an air pocket as something to catch the plane rather than to trip it up.”
“Would anyone care for a drink?” asked the British general. He was wearing breeches, tall riding boots with buckles, and a thick belted tunic that looked as if it had been tailored before the year
1900. A woolly-bear caterpillar clung tenaciously to his upper lip underneath a hooked nose. With fine, peaceful, well-manicured hands, the general threw open a large and well-provisioned hamper basket and took out a flat pint of bonded bourbon. A minute later the four of us were libating the benevolence of the gods of transatlantic air travel.
“Is this your first time in London?” asked the general, offering me a shoe-sized sandwich from a shoebox-sized tin.
“I was there before the war. At the time I was thinking of going up to Cambridge to do a doctorate in philosophy.”
“And did you? Go up to Cambridge?”
“No, I went to Vienna instead.”
The general’s Wellington-sized nose wrinkled with disbelief. “Vienna? Good God. What on earth possessed you to do that?”
I shrugged. “At the time it seemed like the place to be.” And added, “I also had some family there.”