Spandau Phoenix (32 page)

With a hiss of frustration Luhr went in search of Officer Beck.

As soon as he disappeared, Schneider pulled a ballpoint pen from his shirt pocket and copied the number from the card onto the palm of his hand. Then he followed Luhr into the house.

"Lieutenant?" he called. "Herr Lieutenant!"

Luhr barrelled back through the front door, his face flushed with anger.

"I'm sorry, Lieutenant." Schneider shook his head as if he were a fool and knew it. "That card was in my coat pocket all the time. I could have sworn I gave it to Beck. Here you are."

Luhr snatched the card. "Officer Beck says he never asked you for the card!"

Schneider continued shaking his head. "Must have been somebody else. I tell you, past midnight and my mind just goes."

"I suggest, Detective," Luhr said acidly, "that you either get more sleep or look for a new line of work. Have you had anyone trace this number yet?"

"No, sir. Not yet."

"I'll handle it, then."

While Luhr stalked out to his unmarked Audi, Schneider stood in the foyer and scratched his large head. Something had felt wrong about this case from the moment he walked in the door. While everyone else had gone on about the sloppiness of the murder, Schneider had kept silent.

Twenty minutes later the nameless card had turned up. And now this Nazi-looking lieutenant had appeared-the prefect's aide, no less-to spirit that card away.

Schneider couldn't remember ever having seen Luhr at a crime scene before. That bothered him. He hurried past the few technicians left outside the house and climbed into his battered Opel Kadett.

"Telephone," he murmured as he cranked the old car.

Jiirgen Luhr had beat him to it. As Schneider rounded the corner of Levetzow and Bachstrasse, he spied the prefect's aide standing at a corner call box. Schneider slowed, then drove on, maddeningly shut out of the conversation passing through the wires just over his head.

"Frau Funk?" Luhr asked, when a woman answered. "I'm sorry to disturb you so late. This is Jijrgen Luhr. Could I speak with the prefect, please? ... But he was leaving the station-" Luhr broke the connection and punched in the number of Abschnitt 53. "Berlin-Two," he snapped.

"The prefect, immediately."

A full minute passed before Funk came on the line, his voice smug and unruffled in contrast to, its earlier panic.

"Yes, Jiirgen?"

"I've found something odd at the Tiergarten house. A card with nothing but a phone number on it. We should trace it immediately. The crime looked very suspicious. Evidence of automatic weapons fire, conflicting signs of amateurishness and professionalism. I think our brothers in uniform may have, been there."

"How interesting," said Funk. "Why don't you come back to the station and we'll discuss your theory."

"What's the matter? Is someone with you?"

A pause. "There was someone here, Jijrgen. Sergeant Ross just took her downstairs to her new accommodations."

"Her? Who are you talking aboutt' "The wife of one of our 'brothers in uniform,' as you put it. A Frau Ilse Apfel. She walked into the station just after you left. She had a most interesting story to tell."

"What? The sergeant's wife?"

"That's right. I understand the situation much better after talking to her. I suggest you get back here, Jiirgen, if you want to be in on this at all. I've already spoken to Pretoria.

I received some very interesting orders, and they involve YOU."

Luhr left the receiver dangling from the call box and dashed to his car.

He squealed down the Bachstrasse in a rage. "Damn that imbecile! How could he be so lucky?" He screeched around a curve.

"It's all right," he assured himself, calming a little. "He hasn't found Hauer or Apfel yet.

Or the Spandau papers. And that's what Phoenix wantswhat he's frightened of. And that distinction will be mine."

In his fury, Luhr failed to notice the burly figure of Detective Julius Schneider standing at a yellow call box four blocks from the one he had used to place his own call. Unlike Luhr, Schneider wasn't about to try to trace the mysterious phone number through normal channels.

An inquiry in his own name might draw unpleasant attention, possibly even the prefect's, and Schneider didn't need that. Besides, he had always believed in taking the shortest route between two points.

Reading the telephone number off the palm of his hand, he lifted the receiver and punched in the digits. He heard five rings, then a click followed by the familiar hiss and crackle of an automated answering machine.

"This is Harry Richardson," said a metallic voice. "I'm out.

Friends can leave a message at the tone. If you're a salesperson, don't call back. If it's a military matter, call my office. The previous message will be repeated in German.

Thank you."

Schneider waited until the German version of the message had finished, then hung up. His pulse, normally as steady as a hibernating bear's, was racing. Schneider knew who Harry Richardson was. He'd even met him once. American intelligence officers who took the time to cultivate investigators of the Kriminalpolizei were rare enough to remember.

Schneider doubted if Richardson would remember him, but that didn't matter. What mattered was that an American army officer was somehow involved in what was fast shaping up to be an explosive murder case.

Schneider took several deep breaths and forced himself to think slowly.

He'd found Richardson's card outside the victim's house, but there had been blood all around it. What did that mean? And what should he do?

He thought of the prefect's insolent aide, and the overly officious manner that in Schneider's experience spelled coverup.

With sudden insight Schneider realized that he now stood at one of those crossroads that can change a man's life forever.

He could get into his car and go home to his wife and his warm bed-a course of action almost any sane German would choose-or he could make the call that he suspected would pluck him from his old life like the wind sweeps a seed from the ground.

"God," he murmured. "Godfrey Rose."

Schneider jumped into his car and fired the engine. Thirty minutes ago he had been mildly intrigued by the night's events. Now his mind ran wild with speculation, electrified by the smell of the kind of chase he had become a detective for in the first place.

Squealing away from the curb, he made an illegal U-turn and headed east on the Budapester Strasse, making for the Tiergarten station. He hoped his English was up to the task.

CHAPTER TWELVE

12.'30 A.M. Veipke, FRG. Near the East German Border Professor Natterman swung the rattling Audi back toward the frontier and pushed the old sedan to 130 kilometers per hour. Now that the end of his harrowing journey approached, he could not keep from rushing. The speed was exhilarating; the protesting whine of the tires as he leaned the car into the curves kept his fatigued mind alert. Thank God for old friends, he thought. A boyhood churn had come through for him tonight, providing the Audi with no questions asked.

Thankfully, the mysterious Englishman who had "accidentally" stumbled into his compartment had disappeared.

Natterman hadn't seen him again on the train, nor at Helmstedt when the few passengers disembarked. A few times during the last hour he had caught sight of headlights in the blackness far behind him, but they came and went so frequently that he wrote them off to nervousness.

As the Audi jounced over the railroad linking Gardelegan to Wolfsburg, the professor spied the eerie, never-dimming glow of the sprawling factory city to the west. The sight startled him still.

When he was a boy, Wolfsburg had been a tiny village of less than a hundred, its few houses scattered hodgepodge around the old feudal castle. But when the Volkswagen works came there in 1938, the village had been transformed almost OVERNIGHT into an industrial metropolis.

He could scarcely believe his father's tiny cabin still remained in the quiet forest northeast of the city.

It had been eleven months since he last visited the cabin, but he knew that Karl Riemeck, a local laborer and old family retainer, would have both the grounds and the house in fine shape. The thought of spending some time in the old place had almost blotted out the wild theories whirling through Natterman's weary brain. Almost. As he roared down the narrow road cut through the deep forest, visions of notorious and celebrated faces from the past flickered in his mind like pitted newsreels. Hitler and Churchill ... the Duke of Windsor ... Stalin ...

Joseph P Kennedy, the American ambassador to wartorn Britain, a Nazi appeaser and father of a future U. S. President. . . Lord Halifax, the nerveless British foreign secretary and secret foe of Churchill ...

Those smiling faces now seemed to conceal uncharted worlds of deception, worlds waiting to be mapped by an intrepid explorer. The thrill of impending discovery coursed through the old historian's veins like a powerful narcotic, infusing him with youthful vigor.

He eased off the gas as he crossed the Mittelland Canal bridge.

Again he had arrived at the impenetrable core of the mystery: what were the British hiding? If Hess's double had flown to Britain to play a diversionary role, what was he diverting attentionfrom? Why had the real Hess flown to Britain? To meet Englishmen, of course, his mind answered. But which Englishmen? With a pang of professional jealousy Natterman thought of the Oxford historians who were documenting the pro-Nazi sympathies of over thirty members of the wartime British Parliament whom they believed had known about Hess's flight beforehand.

The gossip in academic circles was that the Oxford men believed these MPs were Nazi appeasers, enemies of Churchill whom Hess had flown secretly to Britain to meet. Natterman wasn't so sure.

He had no doubt that an apparently pro-Hitler clique of upper-class Englishmen existed in 1941. The real question was, did those men really intend to betray their country by forging an unholy alliance with Adolf Hitler? Or was there a deeper, more noble motive for their behavior?

The answer to this lay in Hitler's war plans. The Fuhrer's ultimate goal had always been the conquest of Russia-the acquisition of Lebensraum for the German people-which made him very popular with certain elements of British society. For despite being at war with Germany, many Englishmen saw the Nazi state as an ideal buffer against the spread of communism. Similarly, the Fuhrer had visions of Germany and England united in an Aryan front against communist Russia. Hitler had never really believed that the English would fight him. Yet when Winston Churchill refused to accept the inevitable surrender to and alliance with Germany, the Fuhrer got angry.

And there, Natterman believed, lay the basis of Rudolf Hess's mission.

Hitler had assigned himself a very strict timetable for Barbarossa-his invasion of the Soviet Union.

He believed that if he did not invade Russia by 1941, Stalin's Red Army would gain an overwhelming superiority over him in men and materiel.

That meant that to be successful, his invasion armies had to jump off eastward by May of 1941 at the latest, before the snows melted and made the effective use of tanks impossible. And the British, Natterman remembered, had known this. An RAF group captain named F. W.

Winterbotham had worked it out in 1938. And this knowledge@orrectly exploited@ould have given the British a peculiar kind of advantage.

For the longer they could fool Hitler into believing they wanted a negotiated peace, the longer they could stave off an invasion of Britain. And the nearer would draw the date when Hitler would have to redeploy the bulk of his armies eastward. If Hitler could be fooled long enough, England would be spared.

But had those "pro-Nazi" Englishmen understood that in 1941?

Nattennan wondered. Were they altruistic patriots who had lured Rudolf Hess to Britain on a fool's errand, and thus saved their homeland from the Nazis? Or were they traitors who had decided Adolf Hitler was a man they could deal with-a bit of a boor, perhaps, but with sound policies vis-A-vis the communists and Jews? The answer seemed simple enough: If a group of powerful Englishmen had merely pretended to treat with Hitler in order to save Britain, they would be heroes and would require no protection from public scrutiny, especially fifty years after the fact.

However, the well-documented efforts of the British government to suppress the details of the Hess case tended to reinforce the opposite theory: that those Englishmen really had been admirers of Hitler and fascism.

The variable that confused this logic was a human wild card-Edward VIII, Duke of Windsor, former Prince of Wales and abdicated King of England.

The duke's proGerman sympathies and contact with the Nazis-both before and during the war-were documented and very embarrassing facts' At the very least Windsor had made a fool of himself by visiting Hitler and all the top Nazis in Germany, then trumpeting the Fuhrer's "achievements" to a shocked world.

At worst he had committed treason against the country he was born to rule. After his stormy abdication, the duke, living in neutral Spain, had pined away for the throne he had so lightly abandoned.

Startling evidence unearthed in 1983

indicated that in July of 1940 Windsor had slipped secretly into neutral Lisbon to meet a top Nazi, where they explored the option of Windsor's return to the English throne. And that, Natterman thought excitedly, was the core of it all! Because according to British historian Peter Allen, the Nazi whom Windsor had sneaked into Portugal to meet had been none other than Rudolf Hess!