“It makes a change,” Oppenheimer said. “I shall miss being an American officer. It was a rather carefree life.”
“I have your new life here for you,” Kubista said, reached into a drawer, and brought out a small stack of wallet-size documents. He dealt them off one by one. “Your basic identification card, of course; your interzonal pass; your British Zone ration books; rent receipts; some wartime odds and ends that could be useful for verisimilitude; and three letters from your lover, who lives in Berlin and misses you rather desperately.”
Oppenheimer went through the documents one by one. He smiled at his new name. “Ekkehard Fink. The finch. Did you know that Fink has a rather unpleasant connotation in English?”
“No.”
“It means informer, I think.”
“I must remember that. There are many around here to whom it could be applied.”
“Probably.”
“Even I have been tempted.”
“Oh?”
“Twice recently. Here,” he said, rising and taking a dark blue suit from a nail. “Try this on. Over there on the chair are a shirt, tie, shoes, and the rest of it. We’ll pick you out a hat and overcoat later.”
Oppenheimer started removing his uniform. “Tell me about your temptation.”
Kubista reached into his pocket and brought out a pack of Chesterfields. He lit one, inhaled deeply, blew the smoke out, and looked at his cigarette with pleasure. He had deep-set, moist brown eyes that stared out from behind thick, wire-framed spectacles. What was left of his hair was white. His nose was long and thin and wandered a bit where it had been broken by a camp guard in 1942. He had an old man’s sunken mouth which caved in on itself because most of his teeth were missing. He looked sixty. He was thirty-eight.
“What an indescribable luxury is American tobacco.”
“One of the few currencies that can be either consumed or spent with equal pleasure,” Oppenheimer said. “Tell me about your temptation.”
“Yes, that. The first occurred yesterday morning. A German. He came to buy a bicycle, and after he found one that suited him he made very discreet inquiries about obtaining documents and was directed to me. It turned out that he was a printer — and a good one, if I’m any judge. We had quite a nice little chat. He claimed to be looking for a long-lost brother. Younger brother. It seemed that he had heard that this young brother, a bad sort, was posing as an American officer. My new printer friend wanted to find him and put him on the path to righteousness and redemption. I didn’t believe him for a second, and he didn’t expect me to. He did mention a sum of money. Quite a nice sum. He seemed rather well off, did my printer friend.”
Oppenheimer finished knotting his tie. “What did you reply?”
“I told him I would have to ask around. He said he would be back tomorrow.”
“And the second tempter?”
“Ach, that one. Well, he’s one of us. A thief. Quite a good one, as a matter of fact. He’s a Romanian who pretends to be an Estonian. He made no bones about whom he was looking for — an American officer who recently might have bought himself some new identifications. He also mentioned a sum of money, although he was not nearly so generous as the printer. I told him the same thing. That I would make inquiries.”
Oppenheimer nodded and slipped on the suit coat. “Too bad you don’t have a mirror.”
“You look very nice,” Kubista said. “Poor but respectable.”
“I turned the jeep over to your associates.”
“Excellent.”
“And then there is this.” He opened the palm of his hand. In it lay a diamond, slightly more than a carat in weight.
“Well,” Kubista said, picking up the stone and holding it up to the light. “I was not expecting this.”
“I am hoping that it will buy silence,” Oppenheimer said. “Not total silence, only partial silence.”
Kubista nodded. “You are wise. Too many are already making inquiries. Soon the American authorities will be making them.”
“And you will have something to tell them.”
“Good.”
“But first you can sell what you know to your printer friend and to the Romanian.”
“Even better. But how much can I sell them?”
“You can sell them where I’ve been, but not where I’m going.”
Kubista smiled. “The cellar in the old castle.”
Oppenheimer nodded.
“Is your immense store of cigarettes included?”
“Unfortunately, yes.”
Kubista smiled again. “Then I will adjust my price accordingly.”
By the time Lieutenant Meyer and Major Baker-Bates got there, the U.S. Constabulary, with their lacquered blue-and-yellow helmet liners, were swarming over the Opel plant at Russelsheim like so many potato bugs.
The Constabulary was what the Army had come up with when it suddenly discovered that it had not many more than 150,000 troops to keep order in its zone of occupation and menace the Russians at the same time. What it lacked in numbers it decided to make up for in visibility.
Immediately scrapped was the Eisenhower jacket, which made what troops there were look like so many gas-station attendants — unless they were six feet tall and had a male model’s physique. The Ike jacket was replaced with a brass-buttoned blouse on whose left shoulder was a 2½ inch gold disk patch bordered in blue. When they weren’t wearing their flashy helmet liners, members of the Constabulary had to wear visored service caps. On their feet were highly polished paratroop boots, and the final touch of what someone had decided was class came in the form of a Sam Browne belt. Hanging from the belt was a .45-caliber automatic.
It was all mostly for show, but since the Germans admired nothing as much as a snappily turned-out soldier, a jeepful of Constabulary troops zipping through a village could keep the American presence very much in the German mind. They were called the Constabulary because someone had remembered that that was what the Army had called its troops when it had occupied the Philippines after the war with Spain. It also had a nice semi-police-state ring.
The body of the dead Oskar Gerwinat had been removed from Lieutenant Fallon’s office by the time a Constabulary captain ushered in Meyer and Baker-Bates. Lieutenant Fallon had already told his story to some CID types, who were still hanging around waiting for him to get his breath so he could tell it twice and probably three times. Reluctantly they agreed to let Meyer and Baker-Bates have their crack at Fallon, but only after Meyer dropped the names of a couple of USFET generals who, he claimed, were expecting a full report within the hour.
The first thing Meyer did was show Fallon the photograph of Kurt Oppenheimer. Fallon studied it carefully, then looked up and said, “Yeah, that’s the guy. He’s German, huh?”
“He’s German,” Meyer said.
“Well, he sure talks one hell of a good brand of American.”
“Tell us about it, Lieutenant,” Baker-Bates said. “Start at the beginning and tell it just as you remember it.”
So Fallon told it again, and after he got to the point where Oppenheimer had introduced his “evidence” in the form of one of the pages that he had ripped from the blackmailer Damm’s ledgerlike book, Lieutenant Meyer interrupted.
“It was just a page?”
“Yeah, a page with two photographs on it.”
“But there was also information on it?”
“Sure, but I couldn’t read it because it was in German.”
“This information. Was it typed or written?”
“It was written.”
“In ink?”
“Yeah, sure, ink.”
“Okay,” Meyer said, “go on.”
So Lieutenant Fallon went on, and when he was through, Lieutenant Meyer brought him back again to the page that had been torn from Damm’s ledger. In fact, Lieutenant Meyer opened his briefcase and took out the ledger itself.