When he had gathered sufficient nerve, he asked one of the girls out. Ice cream, he had said. She had blonde hair tied back tight to her head and a scattering of pimples on her chin. He thought her name was Melissa. She had politely said that’s sweet, but no, thank you, and returned to her cluster of friends. He had stood with a bundle of pamphlets in his sweating fingers as they walked away giggling.
He heard the word ‘kike’ and they erupted in laughter, glancing back over their shoulders at him. Young Weiss tore the pamphlets up and dumped them in the nearest garbage can. He was no longer a communist.
By the time Weiss first visited Berlin, he had lost any notions of either the left or right having a moral superiority. He earned that knowledge as he fought his way across Europe, the hardest lesson learned a few miles from the city of Weimar, in what first appeared to be some kind of fenced-in village. The men fell silent as they neared the place, Buchenwald as Weiss learned, and above the thrumming of their engines, they heard the thin and pitiful cries.
Weiss had felt for a moment that he had lost his sanity, that the stick figures beyond the fence were night terrors escaped from his mind into the waking world. Men and women and children, so shrivelled he couldn’t fathom how they still lived.
The soldiers, his comrades, gasped and wept, covered their mouths and noses against the stench. They stepped down from their vehicles and walked amongst the shambling hordes, the mounds of bodies discarded by the Germans who had fled minutes before.
Weiss took photographs with the small Brownie Six-16 folding camera he carried, images of children staring at the sky, flies on their dead lips.
When the Germans had surrendered, Weiss learned the Soviets were every bit as cruel as the common Nazi enemy. Barbarians, a member of Weiss’s regiment had said. Goddamn animals. He saw the evidence of it himself in the weeks after Berlin fell, heard the stories from the mouths of those Russian soldiers who had fled to the Americans, and the civilians surviving among the ruins of the city. Women cowered in basements and attics, dreading the roving parties of drunken Soviet men who would rape anything that breathed.
Not long after the Allies had carved up Germany’s corpse, the Soviets took over Buchenwald labour camp and put it to much the same use as it had been built for.
In the end, for all of Hitler’s deranged evil, Stalin proved little better. So Weiss had learned that fascism and communism were brother and sister, each born of the same poison seed. And when those creeds met with nationalism, only bloodshed could follow.
As it did in 1948 when Weiss fought for the creation of the state that was now his home. He had spent a year back in Brooklyn, helping his father around the drugstore, but he passed every moment of his spare time at meetings around the city, young men like him talking about Palestine and their brothers who fought there. Soon he travelled back to Europe, through Italy, ferried across the Mediterranean to be smuggled under the noses of the British. He joined the swelling ranks of the Haganah and was soon a member of the elite Palmach fighting force. He had shed joyful tears with his comrades as they listened to the radio broadcast of David Ben-Gurion reading Israel’s Declaration of Independence, the words that made his country real. He had fought for Israel’s existence ever since.
Six months ago, Weiss had met Thomas de Groot in a cafe on Kochstrasse, not far from Checkpoint Charlie. De Groot was a large man, tall and generous at the waist, who sweated a great deal. One would have thought a South African used to the arid heat of his homeland might have found early winter in West Berlin to be cool. Weiss certainly did, but de Groot’s shirt was darkened by perspiration nonetheless.
Thomas de Groot did not work for any government. At least, not any single government. He had neither allegiances nor enemies. He simply provided a service to anyone willing to pay. That service was the sourcing of information.
De Groot handed a manila file across the cafe table. Weiss opened it, leafed through the contents, and closed it again. He passed a fat envelope back to de Groot.
“You’ve been a good client,” de Groot said.
“I know. I’m surprised that hasn’t qualified me for a discount.”
De Groot smiled, showed his small blunt teeth. “Not a discount. A free gift, more like.”
Weiss studied the South African for a moment. “Oh?”
“You know I like to avoid disagreements, conflicts of interest, that sort of thing. Doesn’t do anyone any good to be tripping over each other out in the field.”
Weiss nodded. “Indeed it doesn’t.”
“Well, something came up, and I thought it best to make you aware of it. Just in case.”
“What is it?”
A waitress set about cleaning the table next to them. They held their silence until she had finished.
“Someone else has been asking after Otto Skorzeny,” de Groot said.
“Who? Which agency?”
De Groot shook his head. “No agency. No government. No one official.”
“A freelancer?”
“An Englishman. Captain John Carter, formerly of the SAS. He’s been seeking information on Skorzeny and his associates in Ireland. Not directly from me, you understand, but a friend of mine in Amsterdam was approached some time ago. I wouldn’t have been too concerned, after all information is information, I just find it lying around and store it up to save men like you the trouble of finding it for yourself.”
“But?”
“But it seems Captain Carter has also been spending time in procurement and recruitment.”
“Weapons?”
“Small arms. Clean, never used in anger. My friend was able to help him with that. And manpower. He was looking for someone to complete a team. Someone experienced in commando operations. He let it be known it was interesting work and potentially lucrative.”
“I see. Thank you for letting me know. I’ll arrange for a small bonus to be wired to you.”
De Groot smiled and stood. “Not too small, I hope.”
Weiss shook his hand. “I’ll see what I can do.”
It took a month of investigation to track Carter down, and another six weeks of observation before Weiss was confident of his next move: introducing himself.
Carter had been flying back and forth between Dublin and London, a week in one city, a fortnight in the other. He had been eating alone in a pub on the Vauxhall Bridge Road when Weiss first approached him.
The first conversation had not gone well. In fact, it had developed into a fist fight on a path by the Thames riverbank, but eventually, with a knee planted between the Englishman’s shoulder blades, Weiss had been able to convince Carter to see things his way.
Carter’s original plan had been a mess. It had involved little more than storming Skorzeny’s farm, taking him prisoner, and convincing him to hand over the money. The subtlety, if such a word could be applied, of using Skorzeny’s Kameraden as statements of intent had been Weiss’s contribution to the plan. Carter and his men were excellent soldiers, Weiss had no doubt of that, but they were not tacticians. Not like him.
Now, in this damp and stinking cottage, Carter glared across the table at Weiss with all the hatred of a man who knows the object of his attention is better than him.
“You’re not so clever,” he said, reaching for the vodka bottle.
Weiss snatched it away from his grasp. “Go easy, my friend.”
Carter bared his teeth, his breathing deepened, then a grin spread across his face. “You know, Wallace wanted to kill you today. He took me aside. He said, why don’t we just blow that Jew bastard’s head off? And I thought about it. I really did. You and that Mick you’re so fond of. We could have got rid of both of you, left you out here in the arsehole of nowhere. We could see this thing through ourselves.”