Kohler snorted.
“Fuck the war party, I’m thinking about Number One. Look, there’s still a chance we could come out of this ahead—sure, von Leeb won’t let us alert the Gestapo, but that doesn’t mean we still can’t use my men as backstops. We’ll bait the trap, but I’ll have a team of our best field agents following us day and night to spring it. We’ll be running a risk, yeah, but if we survive and nab the Jap we’ll be von Leeb’s fair-haired boys. We’ll be heroes of the Reich, for God’s sake, you and me, we’ll be given more power and honor than you could ever dream of.”
“If we survive.”
Kohler’s momentary euphoria seemed to have dissolved. “Yeah. If.”
We sat over our empty glasses for a minute, and I think both of us were equally drained by the sheer immensity of the thing. Finally, Kohler slapped a twenty-mark note on the bar and got up.
“Let’s get back to Headquarters, I’m going to phone Washington and have them send a team down by the next jet And then we’ve got a trip to make.”
“Where?”
“Westchester. There’s a guy I want to talk to. He may be one of the few people left in the world who can give us some leads on this goddamned Jew.”
“Does the Jew really matter anymore?”
“No, but we’ve got to act as if he does if we’re going to keep the Japs hot and anxious on our trail. The last thing we want right now is for them to lose interest.”
“Yeah,” I said dully. “That would be terrible. They might even let us stay alive a few more days.”
We drove downtown, the traffic bad as ever, and I waited in the car while Kohler went in to call his men and brief Beck on von Leeb’s latest diktat. He was in there about a half hour, and all the time I kept my jacket open and my sweaty palm on the grip of the Schmeisser. I wasn’t going to enjoy my new role of target, that’s for sure.
“How did Beck take it?” I asked as we crawled over to the Henry Hudson Drive.
“He didn’t like it, needless to say. Who does? But he agrees we’ve got no choice. He’s at the telex now, waiting for reports from all our bureaus on Jap intelligence activity in the United States. There’s still a slim chance we might get a make on your karate expert, and he could lead us to the rest of his cell.”
“Yeah, sure.” That was about as likely as the Manhattan air turning breathable. “Did he get the lab report on Fiske’s apartment?”
“Clean as a whistle. These are pros, remember.”
“How can I forget.”
“By the way, the station house called in, there was a message for you from somebody called the Professor. Not our Professor, somebody who runs a sadie parlor in the Village. Do you want to cut over there first?”
“No, it can wait. I left him a dupe of Macri’s identikit sketch, and he’s hot for his thirty pieces of silver. Probably dug up ten Bowery bums by now who fit the description.”
“Yeah. Well, we’ve got to keep trying.”
The Hudson gleamed blue as we hit the Drive, the pollution all under the surface. The new Bremerhaven was leaving Fifty-third Street Pier on the second half of its maiden voyage, passengers hurling confetti from the decks, a flotsam of tiny tugs bobbing in its wake, fire-boats pissing their hoses against the bows. I wished I was on it, heading anywhere but where I was. I also wished I’d brought a pint of bourbon along for the ride.
We cut off the Drive onto the Goethe Parkway, the traffic thinning as we got further into the suburbs. The heat was murderous, a hot, prickly blanket of humidity, and Kohler’s old heap didn’t even have a cooler. I still didn’t know why we were heading out to Westchester, and to tell the truth I didn’t care much. I was trying to sort out the events of the last three days, without any success. The thing was still so fucking unreal.
“We’re almost there.”
Kohler had left the Parkway and we were in relatively open country now, undeveloped except for a few neat little ranch-style houses with manicured lawns and white picket fences, a change from the bedroom suburbs we’d been passing through with their arid stretches of identical shoeboxes. This was the kind of day a normal guy with a normal family would set out the barbecue in the backyard, mix up a pitcher of martinis and sit in the shade getting quietly stoned with the neighbors. And not a worry in the world, not a thought about Jews or Japs or Berlin politics or nuclear war. Shit.
“That’s Croton-on-Hudson up ahead,” Kohler said. “It’s not far now.”
You could read the sign from 500 yards, a huge billboard draped with swastika bunting and crested by an Imperial Eagle with the globe clutched in its talons: “Welcome to Croton-on-Hudson. Home of the Final Solution. Visit the Frederick Barbarossa Death Camp, 1 mile ahead, First Right. Admission 35 marks, children Free. No Dogs Allowed. Picnic areas adjacent.” Now I understood where we were going, but I still wasn’t sure why.
Croton was a pleasant enough little town with a lot of mock-Tudor storefronts all named Ye Olde something or other. There weren’t many people out on the streets, the heat probably, but a half mile outside of town we pulled to a halt behind thirty or forty lined up cars. I could spot an observation tower shimmering in the heat haze somewhere up ahead, and every minute or so the procession would move forward another twenty or thirty feet.
“Ticket booth,” Kohler explained. “Shouldn’t take long now.”
In fact it took almost twenty-five minutes and the heat was really killing as we crawled along at five miles an hour, losing even the feeble breeze we’d had driving up. My shirt was plastered to me and the sweat was streaming down my forehead, the salt making my eyes burn. I felt queasy, lightheaded, and I needed a drink, bad.
We finally reached the gate, more like a military checkpoint, set into a high barbed wire fence that stretched off into the distance, studded at regular intervals by observation towers. I glanced at the nearest one and jumped as I made out a guy crouched over a machine gun, aiming right at us. I wiped the sweat out of my eyes and looked again. It was a dummy, the kind you see in store windows, dressed up in the black and silver uniform of the Deathshead SS. The machine gun looked real enough, though. Anything to hook the tourists. The guy at the gate was wearing the same uniform, but it hung loosely on his skimpy frame. He was in his late teens, a local probably, and the only service he’d ever seen was in the Viking Youth.
“Two, Mac? That’ll be seventy marks, you pay extra you wanna tour the museum.”
The words were barely audible through the wad of gum he was chewing, and the dim eyes were bored. Inside the guard hut a transistor was shrieking the latest hit disc. God, the younger generation, he could at least have put on one of the old marching songs. I’ve never been one of your gung-ho flag wavers, but shit, the guys who’d worn his uniform had left three hundred thousand dead from the beaches at Southampton to the ruins of London, only to have this punk desecrate it as a promotion gimmick.
“We’re here to see Colonel Kastendieck.”
“Oh, yeah, he phoned down.” There was no interest in his voice, but he checked a clipboard. “Kohler, that your name?”
Ed nodded and the kid waved us through.
We drove along the road at fifteen or twenty miles an hour, not enough to give us back the breeze, and I looked out at the Barbarossa Camp without any great interest. There wasn’t really much to see, just a lot of old barracks and endless coils of rusty barbed wire plus a string of road signs from the local Elks and Rotarians greeting visitors: “Croton-on-Hudson, where Four Million Enemies of the Reich Perished.” I remember reading that Croton was second only to Auschwitz in its kill ratio, so I guess they had reason for pride, but I didn’t care for the commercialization. One big sign was decorated with a blown-up color photograph of an emaciated Jew in the regulation black and yellow striped pajamas of the camps, holding out a tin plate with a piece of hardtack on it, the drowned eyes luminous with hunger. It was captioned in huge red letters, “If Bread and Water Isn’t Enough For You, Visit Schaumberger’s Steak House, Rt. 1, 250 yards from the Wesley Overpass.” Off to the right loomed a big windowless building, a factory it looked like, topped by four towering smokestacks.