I decided to walk back to my hotel. I had to see if there was an indication on my guest registration that I was with the U.S. government and either remove it or check out. I strolled a few blocks in the chilly air and found myself in Marienplatz, the center of life in Munich. I looked in my guidebook. I could do this. I could be a tourist for a moment, at least until I could fully absorb the meaning of my meeting with Guttmacher.
Marienplatz, the guidebook said, was named after the three-hundred-foot gilt statue of the Virgin Mary that stands in the middle of the square. At the north side of the square is the Neues Rathaus. Built at the end of the nineteenth century, it is best known for its glockenspiel. Once a day, its army of enameled copper figures performs the Scheffeltanz, followed by a reenactment of an event that celebrated royal weddings in the fifteenth century. At the end of each session, a mechanical rooster crows.
Legend has it that, after World War II, an American GI concerned by the deteriorating condition of the figures “borrowed” some paint from his unit's storage area and gave it to the building's caretakers. As a show of their appreciation, the caretakers allowed him to ride one of the horses in the jousting scene, earning cheers from the people gathered in the square.
After taking in the sights for a bit, I stopped into a cafe for a cup of tea. I sat looking through the window at the buildings and at the people going by, but not really taking anything in. I decided to walk back to my hotel, preoccupied with Herr Hans Guttmacher. He'd obviously snapped at my bait. He'd proven easy to draw in to corrupt dealings, and that could have been a good reason for DeLouise to hire him. I was anxious to learn, though, whether DeLouise had used Guttmacher. If he had, would he have been Peled or DeLouise?
At the hotel I found a message from Lan waiting for me at the front desk. “I have the numbers you requested. How do you want them forwarded?” it read.
I stuffed the note in my shirt pocket and headed up to my room. Lan was always prompt, discreet, and intelligent. She could sense what I meant even if I gave her a seemingly indecipherable hint. I knew very little about her personal life. She was half-Chinese and half-Vietnamese. She'd worked at the U.S. Embassy in Saigon until the last days in 1975 but had stayed behind when the embassy's diplomatic staff left. After things calmed down, however, she was granted a U.S. visa as a token of appreciation. She came to the States and married a Vietnamese journalist in D.C. Her husband died several years later, when she was in her midforties. She'd never remarried.
I called Lan and asked her to forward the data through the secure connection to the legat at the American Consulate General in Munich. I was always amused at the double-talk in the U.S. Foreign Service: legat, short for legal attache, isn't always a lawyer but is always an FBI special agent. In the intelligence community, use of these titles is termed light cover; deep cover is reserved for positions outside the embassy or consulate, such as in trade companies or in other businesses in which international travel and contacts would seem normal. CIA jargon for the position is NOC, nonofficial cover. The Soviets used to call their deep cover agents illegal, because they didn't work out of the embassy or in a company connected with their country.
As usual, I had planted a decoy magazine and a telltale hair when I'd left my room and, when I walked into the room, I went directly to the safe to check on them. The hair was still in place. I took a bottle of good German beer from the minibar and watched TV until I fell asleep out of sheer boredom.
The following morning I drove to the consulate's compound at Koniginstrasse and went to see Helga, the legat's secretary. She looked particularly lovely. “This came for you this morning with the diplomatic pouch,” she said with a smile, handing me an envelope.
She led me to a small conference room, where I read the memo from Lan. October 6,1990 To: Dan Gordon From: Lan A. Tien I've attached the telephone numbers you forwarded with the names and addresses of the subscribers. There are ten numbers that we could not identify, even after running the numbers on the investigative telephone database as well as the reverse listing. Please let me know what else you need. Lan
I looked at the list. There were calls to three Japanese restaurants, two jewelry stores, several calls to what appeared to be private residences in Munich, and six calls to Bankhaus Backer amp; Haas, the bank of my new pal Guttmacher. I compared the numbers on the log with the number on the business card Guttmacher had given me. Different. I picked up the telephone and called the number on the log.
“Guttmacher,” replied a voice at the other end. I hung up. So he'd given DeLouise his direct line. But he hadn't given it to me. I guessed DeLouise was a bigger fish for him. With six calls to Guttmacher identified, the likelihood that DeLouise had more than one contact with the banker had been upgraded from a suspicion to an assumption, but not a fact.
A separate page showed fifteen international calls made from DeLouise's hotel room: three calls to Switzerland; two to Luxembourg; seven to the United States, all to California; one to Italy; and two to Israel.
Israel again! The lines next to the two numbers in Israel were empty. “Unknown subscriber” was written in the comments box.
I looked at the numbers. There were two calls to the same number. I didn't need to look twice to realize it was a very familiar number: the Mossad's clandestine headquarters on King Shaul Boulevard in northern Tel Aviv, across from Israel's Pentagon.
“What the hell!” I thought excitedly, but then I slowed down. Why would DeLouise call the Mossad thirty-three years after he had left it? For that matter, had he really left it? Had he forgotten the elementary rules of security, which forbid making a traceable phone call from a hotel room?
I grabbed my notes and put the list back into the envelope. I stuffed it all into the inner pocket of my blazer and went back to Helga's workstation. She was out, but Ron Lovejoy was sitting at his desk with his office door open.
“Good afternoon, Ron,” I said, from the doorway, “Can you spare me a minute?”
“Sure,” he said, “come right in.”
I sat in a chair across the desk from him. Lovejoy was a well-built, clean-shaven man in his late forties with gray hair and rimless reading glasses. He must have been a jogger or maybe spent a lot of time at a health club. The thought made me feel rather guilty When I'd joined the Israeli army, I had barely 175 pounds on my 6?4? frame. And now? Well, never mind. I knew I had to do something about it and kept promising myself to change things. But somehow, between cases and trips, I never really got around to it. If I were three inches taller, my weight would be OK. I'm not overweight, I told my friends who'd criticized my few extra pounds, I'm just short.
“Well, the clues I dug up in Israel led me here, and I'm hoping I'll find an ex-wife and the daughter, Mina Bernstein and Ariel Peled.”
“So you haven't found DeLouise yet.”
“Yes, I did. He's dead.” I realized I had not yet shared this information with Lovejoy He'd left his office before I'd called David Stone in Washington with the news.
He didn't react when I told him about my visit to the morgue. Sitting behind that consulate desk didn't expose him to those kinds of stories; it was probably his field service in the FBI that made morgue visits sound routine.
“How long would it take to get a copy of the German police report?” I asked.
“Well, it depends. Usually they don't share their investigations with us unless they need our help. When that happens, we insist on getting all the details before we send Washington a request for FBI assistance.”
“Is there a better way?” I asked.
“Frankly, though it sounds convoluted, the easiest and fastest way to get that report is for an FBI agent working the bank investigation in the States to send a message through INTERPOL mentioning the U.S. criminal investigation of DeLouise and asking urgently for a copy. Make sure he asks for a faxed copy of the complete report in German – ask INTERPOL specifically not to translate it. If the Germans and INTERPOL are willing, that will speed things up. The Bureau can get it translated once it arrives.”