Ordering himself back to his desk, he pulled on his reading glasses, tugged at his cuffs, and with a resigned sigh, picked up the leather bound diary he’d been struggling with all morning. The faded blue script spoke of a dinner in August of 1942 given by Adolf Hitler at Wolfschanze, his battlefield headquarters in East Prussia. Hitler had ranted at length about the chronic shortage of labor in the country’s largest factories and had ordered shipments of foreign workers to the Fatherland increased. Sklavenarbeit was the word he employed. Slave labor. The information would be useful tomorrow when Judge sat face to face with the diarist himself, and listened to the fat man’s confident denials. In open court, it would prove damning.
The prospect made Judge smile for the first time that morning.
Selecting a bookmark from a neat stack two inches deep, he inscribed a number at its head and inserted it into the diary. He sighed. Number 1,216, and still nearly three years of the war to go. Copying the numerals to his legal pad, he transcribed the pertinent details in the painstaking print he’d developed over five years as an attorney. Neatness brought clarity, and clarity, order, he reminded himself. There was no room for confusion in a proper legal argument. That went for the simplest case of larceny. It counted double for the most important trial in the tenure of civilized mankind.
Devlin Parnell Judge had not come to Europe simply as an attorney, but as a member of the International Military Tribunal, the august legal body established by the Allied powers — Russia, Britain, France and the United States — to try the leaders of the Third Reich for war crimes. The acts were so heinous, so original in their barbarity that they warranted a new and unique classification: crimes against humanity.
Judge had been assigned to the interrogations division. They were the hard-eyed boys, charged with drawing incriminating statements from the accused so that their silver-tongued colleagues could make mincemeat of them on the stand. It wasn’t the first team, but he was happy all the same. Every lawyer in Manhattan, including those who worked alongside him at the US Attorney’s office, wanted in. The war crimes trials would make front-page news and the men who stood before the bar would be as famous as Ruth or DiMaggio. Though he’d lobbied hard for the spot, Judge’s motivations had little to do with career advancement. Nor were they shaped by any altruistic bent. Only as a member of the International Military Tribunal could he uncover the details of what had happened to his brother, Francis Xavier, an ordained Jesuit priest and army chaplain killed in Belgium seven months before. More importantly, only as a member of the IMT could he have the power to make those responsible pay.
Today was the day.
The phone rang and Judge pounced on it.
But it was only a driver from motor transport confirming his pickup tomorrow morning. Was six o’clock alright? They needed an hour to Orly and an hour on top of that for the flight to Mondorf-les-Bains. The major would be at the “Ashcan” by nine o’clock sharp. Judge said he’d be ready and hung up the phone.
The “Ashcan” was slang for the Palace Hotel in Luxembourg, a fading five star princess pressed into service as a maximum security prison. Inside its peeling stucco walls resided fifty of the highest-ranking Nazis in captivity. Speer, Donitz, Keiteclass="underline" the shameless Bonzen of the National Socialist Worker’s Party. And, of course, Hermann Wilheim Goering, Hitler’s jovial prince, and the man with whose interrogation Judge had been charged.
He continued reading, the historical significance of his work granting him a resolve he couldn’t otherwise muster. Ten minutes later, he decided further progress was futile. Off came the glasses, down went the diary. He simply couldn’t concentrate. Better not to work at all, than to risk bad product. Rising from his desk, he closed the balcony doors behind him. The music was no longer a distraction, just a nuisance. Germany’s most famous expatriate singing the English lyrics to Hitler’s favorite tune. Why did the song make him so homesick?
Pacing the perimeter of his cramped office, Judge plucked a dozen law books from their scattered resting places and returned them to the shelves. He was not a tall man, but the beam of his shoulders and the girth of his neck conspired to ensure he was never ignored. This strength was also apparent in his back, which was broad and well-muscled, the product of a youth hustling barrels of Canadian whiskey at the local speakeasy. His hands, too, were thick and compact, at odds with his well-manicured nails and the wedding band he still wore only to pretty them.
He had a gambler’s sly face with flashing brown eyes and a smile that promised trouble. His black hair was cut short and parted with a razor slash. And this guileful mien set on a fighter’s frame lent him a smouldering ambiguity. At El Morocco, he was made to wait even with a reservation in hand. At the Cotton Club, he was immediately shown the best table in the house. But Judge had no problem reconciling his physical contradictions, for in them he read his own secret history. He was the neighborhood rascal masquerading as the law. The reformed sinner who prayed louder than the rest, not so that God might better hear him, but to drum out his own undying doubts.
Having finished replacing the heavy legal tomes, he scanned the office for anything else out of place. The bookshelves were packed to full, spines arranged by height. A dozen legal pads rose high on a credenza. As usual his desk was immaculate. A chipped porcelain mug stuffed with a bouquet of sharpened pencils decorated one corner, an army-issue day calendar the other, its officious red script declaring the date to be Monday, 9 July. Tucked behind a green-visored table lamp stood two small photographs — his sole concession to lending his office of six weeks a touch of home.
One showed a tall, portly man with wavy dark hair sporting the bold pin-stripes of the Fordham Rams, his insouciant smile and practiced slouch betrayed by the serious grip with which he held the bat to his shoulder. Judge picked up the frame and wiped away a day’s accumulation of dust, then returned it to its place. His brother, Francis, hadn’t been much of a ball player. He was a klutz with a glove and slow as an ox. But give him a fastball and he’d knock it out of the park. Anything else, forget it. He’d go down swinging in four pitches. The words “full count” were nowhere in his lexicon.
The second photo was smaller, worn and creased from a thousand days in Judge’s wallet. A smiling four year old greeted the camera, dark hair parted and combed like his father’s, eyes opened wide with excitement as if life were something he couldn’t get enough of. Judge dusted the photo, too, returning his boy’s smile with equal parts longing and pride.
He’d brought a few other reminders of home with him to Europe — a sterling fob watch given to him by his old boss, Thomas Dewey, back when Dewey was just a special prosecutor and not yet governor of New York State; a small ornately sculpted crucifix that had belonged to his brother and a photo of his parents, deceased these ten years — but these he stored in his drawer. An attorney’s eyes were best kept on his work, he’d been taught, and personal mementos were little more than crutches for the unfocused mind.
Satisfied that his office was in presentable shape, he contemplated returning to his desk. Eyeing the low backed chair, he took an unconscious step backward, as if it were electrified. Even on good days, he wasn’t a patient man. Today, he was downright skittish. A hand fell to his wrist and he began turning his watch round and round. He couldn’t remember when he’d acquired the habit, only that it was a long time ago. What was waiting but a genteel form of torture?
The latest batch of documents had arrived yesterday at noon. Forty-seven filing cabinets stuffed with three thousand pounds of official government correspondence, property of the Reich Main Security Office at Prinz Albrechtstrasse 8, Berlin — headquarters of the “SS”, or Schutzstaffel — Hitler’s private black guard. Judge’s spies upstairs in “C&C” cataloguing and collating — told him these were the papers he’d been waiting for: movement orders, casualty lists, after-action reports chronicling the daily battlefield history of the SS’s elite divisions. Somewhere inside was word of who had killed his brother. It was just a question of finding it.