“I see.”
“It is a tragic loss. I was relying on his aid.” The voice quavered, and sounded suddenly very old. “Lieutenant, I have a fingerspitzengefuhl, how do you say, a fingertip feeling on this. I have had such feelings, such intuition in the past, and they have always proved valid. Grauber was a very good pilot. Do you understand me?”
“I do, Professor.” Too well.
“Then I will see you tomorrow morning. Good night.”
This time, he’d forgotten the heil.
Kohler was lounging against the information booth reading an early edition of the News. He’d brought along a suitcase, which seemed overdoing it a bit, and didn’t look particularly overjoyed to see me.
“I’ve been here for forty fucking minutes, I thought…”
“I was tied up at the fights, sorry.”
“The fights? My God, Haider…”
I gave him a fast briefing on the day’s events and he quickly forgot his tired feet.
“First Fiske, then Grauber. It looks like it, doesn’t it?”
“Yeah. Somebody’s tidying up behind and ahead of us, and doing it damn neatly.”
“Von Leeb could be…”
I shook my head.
“No, it’s not only Grauber that clears him, he could have thrown that out as cover, it’s everything else. He’d snuff us out without batting an eye, sure, but his main interest now is the Jew.” I realized I no longer was putting the words in quotes. “He needs us, or at least he thinks he does, and the only thing on his mind is finding the bastard. He might wonder if we were expendable afterwards, but he wouldn’t divert his energy this way. Not now.”
Kohler ran one hand through his hair, ruffling the regulation part. He looked beat.
“I don’t know, shit, I just don’t know. I mean, scrubbing Fiske could be seen as a precautionary measure if it’d been done after we’d pumped him dry. I probably would have advised it myself. But doing it before, and now eliminating Grauber…” He stopped, looked up hopefully. “You know, that could be an accident. Planes do go down, even with the best of pilots.”
I nodded.
“Yeah, maybe. And Fiske’s death could have had nothing to do with us. It could all be coincidence.”
Kohler just sighed. He didn’t believe it any more than I did.
“Okay, let’s see where this thing leaves us. If we’re not dealing with a parallel sanitizing job then we’ve got to work on the assumption it’s a preemptive operation, right? Which means, to phrase it in the nicest way possible, that we’re not exempt.” He grimaced. “So screw von Leeb, screw Heydrich, how do we save our own skins?”
A subject close to my heart.
“There’s only one way.” I lowered my voice although nobody was around but a couple of downy-cheeked Luftwaffe cadets necking on top of their duffle bags. “We’ve got to broaden the investigation, turn the whole Gestapo onto it. The opposition obviously want the Jew for themselves, and as long as we’re the only ones in their way we’re gonna be targets. But once a couple of hundred trained investigators are working on the job there isn’t any percentage in silencing you and me, they’d have to wipe out a small army. We’re only a threat to them, whoever the hell they are, as long as we’re operating solo—once it’s out in the open we’re safe.”
Kohler coughed uneasily.
“I’ll buy that, but von Leeb would never…”
“Von Leeb is no fool. He suspects something’s on, and if there’s a choice between secrecy and getting the Jew hell take the Jew anytime. Besides, you can tell him the Gestapo will keep the thing under wraps no matter how many agents we assign to it.”
Kohler smiled wanly.
“Maybe, just maybe, it could work.”
“It’s got to. Schedule a meeting with your boys at the New York office tomorrow afternoon, and in the morning we’ll both go over to the Adlon. We’ll either get clearance from von Leeb or leak it ourselves.”
Kohler’s spirits seemed to lift with the prospect of action.
“Okay, Bill, I think we just might be heading clear.” He picked up his phony suitcase and we walked together to the Thirty-Sixth Street exit. It was cooler outside and I stood with Kohler on the curb as he waited for a cab.
“While we’re at it,” he said thoughtfully, “who do you think is handling the cleanup?”
I just shook my head, but as he got into a cab I leaned through the open window.
“Maybe von Leeb is only half-right,” I said quietly. “Maybe this guy isn’t the only Jew left on earth.”
I stepped back to the curb and the cab pulled out into the traffic before Kohler could say anything. I stood looking after it for a long minute. Sleep on that, buddy, if you can sleep. If either of us can.
I picked up the car and drove downtown again to check out the two names Larsen gave me. I’d planned to do it in the morning, but the opposition was moving fast, too fast, and every minute counted now. As I pulled up outside the seedy old hotel on West Fifteenth, I glanced at my watch. A little past eleven, only twelve hours or so since I’d first seen von Leeb. It seemed like a lifetime.
The desk clerk said he’d never heard of anybody named Reagan, so I flashed my badge and he gave me the room number without blinking. Reagan was a friendly little butterball, about five-five, with a funny nervous habit of taking off his glasses and wiping them on the sleeve of his plastron jumpsuit. But he was cool, and once I’d identified myself and showed him Macri’s sketch he didn’t try to deny anything, just looked at it closely and shook his head.
“Never seen him. Anyway, he’s too old. I get mainly ex-cons, they need travel papers, work permits, that kind of thing. But this guy is over fifty easy, anybody who goes up at that age winds up in the sleep shop. Take a look at the Euthanasia Bill.”
I nodded glumly, and left. It’d been a long shot anyway, but I’d still have to try Larsen’s Professor. I didn’t have enough leads to throw any away.
The address on the sheet of paper turned out to be a sadie parlor on Macdougal that catered mainly to sailors and Waffen SS men. The greasy-faced tout outside gave me a quick onceover and directed me to a small bar in back facing the stage.
“This is a licensed joint,” he whined as I went in. “We never have no trouble.”
It turned out that the Professor was both bartender and owner of the place. He was a beefy guy in his mid-fifties with the coarse, flattened features of a wrestler, but the hands that served my Scotch were those of an artist, the fingers long and tapered, and stained with ink. He had a thick Austrian accent, and looked like a tougher nut to crack than Reagan.
“I don’t know what you are talking about, Lieutenant. This is a legitimate establishment, I would never deal in anything illegal, much less forged papers. Do you take me for a fool?”
He kept on wiping glasses with a dirty towel as he talked, and the indignation in his voice didn’t reach the cold appraising eyes. He must have been through this a dozen times before, and was just waiting for me to set the terms of the payoff.
“I don’t care what you do on the side, and I don’t want your money, just information.” I slid the sketch across the bar. “Have you ever seen this man before—in any capacity?”
“No.”
“Look at him, goddamn it.”
Reluctantly, he slid his eyes down.
“No, never.”
There hadn’t been any flicker of recognition that I could notice, but then he was obviously a pro. Well, as long as von Leeb had given me carte blanche I might as well throw some of his money around.
“There’s five thousand marks in it for you.”
That drove some expression into his eyes, and he looked back at the sketch, carefully this time. But he still said no, now with some regret, and I retrieved the sketch.