“Why the topcoat?”
“The what?” I said.
“You were naked, but before you’d talk over the phone, you put on a topcoat.”
“I never answer the phone naked.”
“I like to,” she said.
“So did I.”
“But you don’t anymore?”
“No.”
She looked at me for a moment. “I think you’re a little weird after all.”
“A little,” I said.
“Where do you want it, on the dresser?”
“What?”
“Your twenty thousand I got from the bank this morning. By the way, Orcutt wants to see you at noon,”
“Okay.”
“Well, where do you want the money?”
“On the dresser, honey,” I said. “I like to preserve the traditions.”
Chapter 24
They caught a Mutt and Jeff pair in Bonn who they thought might have raped and murdered my wife. It was in January of 1958 and I had just finished the training program that Section Two claimed would equip me to go out into the world and cope with the enemies of the Republic. I could divine a map, shoot a pistol with what everyone agreed was fair accuracy, and even use a knife should the occasion arrive. Not only that, but I could burgle a house or a flat with reasonable competency, defend myself unarmed against the neighborhood bully, and decipher a code or two. There were some other courses which were taught to the five of us who composed the class of ’57, and the instructors would usually preface their lectures with the phrase, “This may save your life.” But since there were no tests, only an evaluation by a board, I no more listened to the lectures than I did to those that I had endured while in basic infantry training at Camp Hood.
Halfway through the course I received a written evaluation which I suppose was designed to shake me up a little. It noted that I was “inattentive” and “unmotivated,” whatever that meant. It didn’t bother me. They had spent close to twenty-six thousand dollars sending me to college for four years and they were buying that and my languages, not what I had learned in a six-month course in Maryland. I must have been graduated, if that’s the term, at the bottom of my class.
Again it was Carmingler who told me about the pair in Bonn. He wore a greenish-gray tweed suit that day, which emphasized his flaming hair and once more I thought that he must be the world’s most conspicuous secret agent. “They fit the description you gave,” he said.
“It wasn’t much of a description except that one was a little short and the other one was taller than that.”
“There are a couple of other things that fit,” he said. “They’re East Germans and that’s where the colonel had been operating.”
“Doing what?” I said.
He ignored the question and didn’t even wince as much as usual. Carmingler had been on my evaluation board and in his appraisal had written that I had a “facile mind, but an unfortunately flippant attitude which bodes him ill.” Nobody but Carmingler could have written “bodes him ill.” He really should have been a major in a proper British regiment seconded to special operations during World War I. It would have made him extremely happy.
“The other thing,” he said, “is that the pair removed someone in Bonn who had been working closely with the colonel.”
“Removed?”
“Eliminated.”
“Killed?”
“Yes, damn it.”
“I won’t even ask who.”
“Good.”
“You want me to try to identify them?”
“Yes.”
“All right,” I said. “When do we leave?”
“Tomorrow.”
We flew from Baltimore to what was then still Idlewild and made the long prop flight to Gander and Scotland and London and finally to Cologne. Carmingler read books and documents and otherwise improved his mind during the trip. I stared out the window, drank what was offered, and slept. We didn’t talk much.
We were met at the Cologne-Bonn airport by a driver with a black Opel Kapitan. It was one of those wet, nasty January days that the Rhine is so good at producing. The heater didn’t work in the Opel and when we finally got to where we were going I was chilled and irritable.
It was an old brick warehouse that somehow had escaped the bombing, probably because it was built just outside of Cologne in a sparsely settled residential area. It hadn’t escaped completely, however, and I could see where shell fragments had torn into the brick leaving scars that still looked like pink scabs.
“Ours?” I said.
“Belongs to the British really,” Carmingler said.
We went up a short flight of concrete steps, through a door, and down a hall that was covered with scuffed green linoleum. The walls were painted a dirty tan and some notices in German about what to do in case of an air raid were still thumbtacked up in several places. Carmingler seemed to have been there before and he walked briskly down the hall as if headed for the executive washroom. He stopped at the door that was half wood, half frosted-glass, knocked, and opened it before anyone said who is it or come in. He held it open for me and I entered into what once must have been Herr Direktors office. There was a carpet on the floor and a massive oak desk at one end of the almost square room. There was also a long table with nine or ten chairs around it that could have been used for meetings of the board or the staff. Some photographs of the Rhine decorated the tan walls, along with a calendar whose pages no one had turned since June, 1945. I suppose the British needed the calendar to remind them that they had really won the war.
A man behind the desk rose as we entered and said, “Hullo, Carmingler.” They didn’t shake hands and Carmingler said, “Dye, Speke,” which may have set a record for short introductions.
“Where are they?” Carmingler said.
“In the cellar.” Speke was English.
“Did your people do any good?”
Speke nodded his head. “Some, but they both talked a lot of gibberish. Their English is excellent, you know, and they could pass as Americans. Both were P.O.W.s in Mississippi during the war. One even has what I’d venture is a slight Southern accent.”
Carmingler looked at me and I shook my head. “They never said a word.”
“Anything else?” Carmingler said.
Speke looked down at his bare desk as if trying to remember. “We’re quite satisfied that they’re a team who’ve been operating out of the GDR since forty-nine or so. They admit that they did for a chap that we had in Hamburg in fifty-three and to a long list of other probables.”
“They admit anything else?” Carmingler said.
“Well, they could scarcely deny the Bonn thing after your people caught them in the act — or just after the act, since poor old Basserton was already dead.”
“Political?” Carmingler asked, and I noticed that he was shaving his consonants and elongating his vowels more than usual. He always did that around the British.
“No,” Speke said, “no we don’t think so any more than your people do. They’re professionals, no doubt of that. But their motivation is exclusively money, not politics.”
“What about before the war?”
“They both claim that they were petty crooks in Berlin. It could be. They’ve got the accent and the argot. After they were sent back from the States and demobbed, they say that they drifted into this, although they are a little vague about how one drifts into the assassination profession.”
“And despite the necktie they still deny having been back to the States?” Carmingler said.
“What necktie?” I said.
“One of them was wearing a tie with a Hecht Company label on it. The Hecht Company’s a Washington department store. We checked the tie out and it can’t be more than a year old.”