‘Why did Parker lose our men?’
‘No, no, it’s the other way around. You want to know why your men lost Parker.’
‘Parker deliberately shook them.’
‘Maybe for fun, the same as me this afternoon. I shook two of them, and I could have got rid of the third one too.’
The third one was one of the two Feds standing over by the door. He cleared his throat and said, ‘Don’t be so sure of yourself, you.’
Grofield smiled at Hopalong Cassidy. ‘Shall we have a dry run? Use all the men you want, in one hour I’ll be clear. Little side bet to add spice?’
Hopalong shook his head. ‘I don’t understand you people,’ he said. ‘You don’t make sense. You do this, you do that, but nothing happens.’
‘We’re subjects of the red queen,’ Grofield told him, knowing he wouldn’t get it and not giving a damn.
Hopalong waved a hand as though he were tired of Grofield, disgusted with Grofield, uninterested in Grofield. ‘Go on,’ he said. ‘Go on about your business.’
‘Bless you.’ Grofield, smiling, got to his feet. To the two at the door he said, ‘Come along, chums. We have unfinished business in a lady’s apartment.’
2
BARON Wolfgang Friedrich Kastelbern von Altstein lay on his back on a maroon carpet and raised his bare right leg perpendicular to the floor. He lowered it again and raised the left leg. Then the right leg. Then the left leg. Across the way, Steuber sat morose in a red-upholstered Victorian chair, his watch in one hand and an exercise book in the other. He counted aloud as Baron he called himself, these days, Wolfgang Baron raised each leg, and when he reached thirty Baron rolled over on his face and started doing push-ups.
Steuber looked at his watch. ‘Forty-five seconds ahead,’ he said.
Baron grunted and kept on with the push-ups.
He was fifty-seven years old now, but no one would guess he was much over forty. He kept himself in good physical and mental shape at all times. Doing push-ups now, dressed in white T-shirt and black bathing trunks, he looked the picture of health, a man with thirty or forty years of life left in him.
His life had started, in Kiel, Germany, just a few years before the First World War. His father, the fourth Baron, was at that time a major in the German army, a Prussian career officer like his own father and his father’s father. By the time the war had nearly run its course he was a general, and then just a few months later he was a civilian. By 1920, bewildered by a world that seemed to have no use for any of his barbaric arts, he was dead in his own bed and his son Wolfgang had inherited his title, his old uniforms, and his debts.
Baron grew up in a Germany of chaos. He was too young to be part of the Freikorps,battling the undeclared war on the Polish frontier in the early twenties, but he turned eighteen and graduated from the gymnasium just in time to be swept into the maw of National Socialism, the new movement that was already being called by the slang word Nazi. He was living in Danzig then, with an uncle on his mother’s side, and every Sunday he could be found in the big park wearing his brown uniform, singing the marching songs, and listening to the speeches.
The SA was a good place for a young man in the late twenties. Comradeship, good drinking parties, singing and marching, carousing, truck rides in the country, now and then a good brawl with the Poles or with some other political bunch. Baron was pleased to be in the SA, and the SA was just as pleased to have him; some day he might prove useful, what with his hereditary army connections. The army at that time had not yet been brought within the Nazi sphere.
After Hitler’s take over and the capitulation of the army, it was suggested to Baron that he leave the SA and accept an army commission, but he was still youthful at heart and preferred to stay with the crowd he knew. It was only with the murder of Roehm and the near-downfall of the SA organization completely that he decided to move on, and then it was not to the army that he went but to the SS. The army had killed his father by becoming all important to him and then deserting him. The army would have no such chance with the son.
The war, when it arrived, matured Baron and taught him things about himself he’d never guessed were there. He was already in his thirties, but still acted like a college kid on a spree, until the war came along.
The first thing he learned about himself was that he was afraid to die. Men could fight for the Fatherland anywhere in the world they wanted, but they’d fight without Baron. It wasn’t patriotism that had stirred him at the rallies all these years but merely pageantry, and it wasn’t the Fatherland that had lifted his heart but merely the Fatherland’s beer.
The second thing he learned about himself was that he was a natural opportunist, with innate skill and native balance. In a world gone mad, self-interest approaches the level of a sacrament, so it was with a will that Baron launched himself into his new-found vocation: Looking Out for Number One. (He had a little joke in those days, used only when among his closest and dearest friends. ‘I hate to be chauvinistic, but
‘ and then finish the sentence with something viciously anti-Nazi or anti-Hitler or anti-Germany or possibly just pro-Baron.)
His activities during the war were varied, lucrative, and extremely safe. He entered France well behind the combat troops three months behind and became one of the overseers in the plunder of French art treasures, most of which was shipped to Germany but some of which Baron siphoned away for his own use at another time when the world should roll over once again. Later he was an administrative part of the famous scheme to flood Great Britain with bogus pound notes, and a few cartons of the counterfeits very quietly disappeared to a cache that only Baron knew.
Although almost everything he engaged in during the Second World War was a crime, none of it he was always a careful man came under the heading of war crime, so the name Wolfgang von Altstein appeared on no one’s list of most-wanted Germans. The war’s end found him in Munich, in hastily assembled civilian clothing and armed with the false set of identity papers he’d had made up two years before for just such an emergency. On these identity papers the name Wolfgang Baron first appeared. The papers claimed Baron had been a language teacher at a school in Berlin he did speak English, French, and Spanish, all fluently and that his sole connection with the Nazi Party or any German military organization was his membership in the Volkssturm,the home guard of the old, the very young, and the lame, assembled from the remnants of German maledom towards the end of the war.
With the coming of peace, Baron traded his black uniform for the black market, exchanging watches and cameras for coffee and gasoline and cigarettes. This interim activity kept him going and earned him some pleasant profit until 1948, when it was possible for him to move abroad and begin converting various of his acquisitions to cash.
He lived in France for the next eight years, slowly selling off the art works he’d commandeered during the war, and it was his expectation to live the rest of his life in France, well off and well out of trouble.
But then the roof fell in. The biggest Nazis had long since been taken care of, and the lesser Nazis were almost all either dead or captured. Smaller and smaller fish were being added to the lists of wanted men, simply because the lists gave so many men in so many countries a source of livelihood, and in the late fifties the name of Baron Wolfgang Friedrich Kastelbern von Altstein made the grade. Charge: war crimes. Specifics: the looting of France. Some enlisted men, truckdrivers and such, had ratted on him.
He found out in time to get out from under, but not in time to liquidate all his assets. He landed in Spain still a wealthy man, but with his wealth cut just about in half and with his opportunities for accumulating more money drastically diminished. He lived for several years in Spain, living on his capital, and when he was approached by the Russians for potential espionage work he was more than willing to take their money. Unfortunately the deal fell through before he made a pfennig; the truth was, he didn’t know anything the Russians could use and he didn’t know any way to find out anything the Russians could use. Espionage had never been a part of his world.