Spoils of Victory (15 page)

In the middle of the intersecting branches, Winstone had written Eddie Kantos's name. The man seemed to be connected in one way or another to just about everyone on the board. Mason followed one branch that led from Kantos to Frieder Kessel, the assistant manager of the Casa Carioca. Winstone had written
SS?
beside Kessel's name, and next to that, he had written
Herr Z
with a question mark and
Gestapo Major, Intelligence,
also with a question mark.

The hairs on the back of Mason's neck stood up. He could not have said why, but suddenly he felt certain that Herr Z was Volker, the Turkish-cigarette-smoking Gestapo interrogator who had tortured him. The one Mason would swear had also been at the Steinadler and who'd blown Mason's cover.

“You got all this down, right?” Mason asked.

Abrams nodded and then pointed to two more entries. “Then you've got ‘Herr X' and ‘Herr Y' set off from the rest. No names, but Winstone connects them with everyone on this board, including our dead German gang bosses. Who do you think Winstone was referring to there?”

“Whoever they are—”

“What are you two doing, skulking over there?” Tavers said. “Are you about finished?”

“Anxious to get back to your crossword puzzle?”

“I don't have to stand for this,” Tavers said and stormed out.

The clerk appeared a moment later, and Mason asked, “Did you find anything on Abbott?”

“Sir, that could take days,” the clerk said. “If he's in special operations, they may not admit he's one of theirs.”

With the clerk now assigned to watch them, Mason and Abrams set to work: Abrams dusting for fingerprints, and Mason studying the documents from the safe. The files yielded little new information. The safe's combination dial had obviously been wiped clean, as there was just one set of prints, and those could only have been Tavers's. If Winstone had kept an agenda book or diary, it was gone. And no copies existed of the reports Winstone had sent to Pritchard.

An hour later, they returned to their car and drove away from CIC headquarters.

“Whoever cleaned out Winstone's records knew what they were looking for,” Mason said.

“If they wanted to cover their tracks, why did they leave all that stuff up on the chalkboard?”

Mason shrugged. “Actually, they might have added stuff just to throw us off.”

Abrams looked deflated. “That idea makes my head hurt.”

“Did you check up on the address that Yaakov gave us from that first interview?”

“Yep. Unless he lives under the Olympic skating rink parking lot, he gave us a bogus address.”

Mason pulled out his cigarette lighter and flicked it open and closed as he thought. Finally he said, “All the lines on the chalkboard converged on Eddie Kantos. We'll start with him.”

E
ddie Kantos covered his tracks well. He had a clean police record, both American and German. In the public records he was listed as an upstanding citizen and sole proprietor of the Club Havana, which interestingly was his only known address. Mason and Abrams stopped by the Club Havana, a bar-nightclub-restaurant that catered to Americans and locals with enough money for the overpriced drinks. The lunch crowd filled the tables, most of whom seemed to prefer a liquid diet. The Latin music and a few ferns were the only indications that the place had anything to do with its namesake. Mason talked to the barman, who said Eddie never came in before ten
P.M.
After a considerable amount of coercion, the barman gave up Eddie's home address.

They found the house, an alpine-style affair of medium size and surrounded by a high row of shrubs, situated in an upscale part of town. That was the thing about Garmisch: Even the dangerous gangsters lived in charming gingerbread houses on Hansel-and-Gretel lanes. Another reminder that, in this town, nothing was as it appeared.

Mason and Abrams entered the property via a gate in a white-picket fence painted with pink roses. Mason held the cowbell hung from the latch to keep it from clanging their presence. They had
expected at least one guard to be watching from a discreet distance, but none appeared. Perhaps the guards were inside, as it had turned bitterly cold, with the sun hidden behind a thick cover of clouds. Their boots crunched in the hard-crusted snow, and Mason noticed a whole series of footprints climbing and descending the steps that led up to a high porch.

“Even lace curtains on the front door windows,” Abrams said. “This guy's thought of everything. Probably has doilies on the sofa arms.”

Mason knocked, and they waited.

“You think the bartender gave us a bogus address?” Abrams asked.

Mason knocked harder.

“Could be he's not home,” Abrams said.

“Do you plan to have a running commentary the rest of the afternoon?”

“Jeez. Just thinking out loud. I figured you'd be in a better mood after getting laid.”

Mason pointed to the corner of the house. “Check out the back. See if you can get a look inside from one of the rear windows. Stay alert. Someone could be in there with an itchy trigger finger.”

They stepped off the porch and proceeded around the house in different directions. Mason tried to see in the front picture window, but the curtains were drawn closed. Then he noticed a brick red splatter stain on the lower edge of the curtain.

“Abrams,” Mason said in a loud whisper.

Abrams stopped. Mason removed his pistol and headed back to the front door. With a look of alarm, Abrams did the same. At the front door, they took opposite sides, using the door frame as cover. Mason used the barrel of his pistol to break a lower pane of glass. He waited a moment, then reached inside and unlocked the door. He ducked back behind the door frame and opened the door. Mason signaled for Abrams go in on the right side, and he'd take the left. Abrams nodded, and, with guns at the ready, they slipped inside.

The living room had a high-sloped ceiling. A freestanding fireplace separated the living room from the dining room. A high-backed sofa and chairs were clustered in the middle. Mason and Abrams slid along opposite walls, checking the open balconies that spanned the two long sides of the room. As Mason cleared the sofa, he saw why the place had been so quiet.

A man's body lay on its back, with one bullet hole in the forehead. He had a look of surprise on his gray face. It was Hans Engel—Frack, of Frick and Frack, one of the two German CIC agents working for Winstone. The splattered bloodstain on the curtain had come from the exit wound in the back of Engel's head. Two more bullets had punctured his chest. No time to wonder what Frack was doing here; they had to clear the rest of the house.

Mason and Abrams alternated rooms, covering each other, as they searched the house. They didn't have to go far before finding a second body in the kitchen. Werner Schluser, a.k.a. Frick, had the same look of surprise on his face. A half-eaten sandwich still lay on the breakfast table. The bullet had entered the back of his head. And like Frack, two more bullet wounds in the chest. And like Giessen, Bachmann, and Plöbsch, both had been killed execution style.

No sign of a struggle; Frick contentedly eating his sandwich, then dead. His suit coat lay open, exposing a nine-millimeter still in its shoulder holster.

“What were these two doing here?” Abrams said.

Mason shook his head and pointed to the upper floor. They climbed the stairs and moved silently from room to room. Finally Abrams whistled softly for Mason's attention.

A man lay naked, facedown, on the bathroom floor. He was tall and muscle-bound, with a series of scars across one shoulder, hip, and back. Like the others, he had been shot in the head with two in the chest.

They still had two bedrooms to go. On the other side of the sink, a door fed into what Mason presumed was the master bedroom.
Mason signaled for Abrams to approach the bedroom from the hallway. He waited for Abrams to get into position, then he stepped over the corpse and peeked into the room. The master bedroom took up a third of the second floor. A massive canopy bed sat in the middle. Mason checked the corners and entered. Abrams did the same thing from the hallway door. A second later, Abrams hissed and pointed to the far corner on the other side of the bed.

When Mason went around the bed, he saw a woman in a white nightgown curled up in a ball, lifeless on the floor. She looked to be in her early thirties, with long, dark hair. She'd been shot in the head and chest, like the others, but there was a bullet wound in the back of her shoulder. Mason figured she'd heard the pop of a silencer and Kantos fall. When she tried to run from the killers, she'd been hit in the shoulder. She'd curled up on the floor, as if to shield herself. She had a look of terror frozen on her face.

Mason forced himself to breathe; they still had one more bedroom. Abrams must have been feeling the same thing, as his face was tense with dread at what they might find in the final room.

Their worst fears were realized. Lying in bed as if asleep, a boy of eight or nine still had his bedcovers pulled up to his chin. He, too, had been shot in the head, but it seemed even the killers had their limits, as there were no other marks on the boy's body.

Mason stared at the boy's face. The boy's eyes were closed and sunken. His skin pale in contrast to the blood that had spread across the pillow. A flash of memory came to Mason: during the war, another child shot through the head, her blood staining the snow. He slammed his fist against the wall.

After taking another ten minutes clearing the rest of the house, the two investigators returned to the body in the bathroom. Mason turned the corpse onto its back. The exiting bullet had taken out most of the man's forehead and bridge of his nose, and his eyes were filled with blood, but Mason could still make out the face.

“This has to be Kantos,” Mason said. “I saw him with Giessen
once or twice.” He searched the floor in the immediate area of the shooting. “The killers were pros. They picked up the shell casings. We probably won't find a print anywhere.”

“There's still the footprints outside. We can see if there are any matches with the prints from the Steinadler. The thing I don't get is, why were Hans and Werner pulling bodyguard duty with one of the men Winstone was investigating?”

Mason shook his head. “Whatever the reason, they must have known the killers. That's the only way they could have gotten inside and surprised two trained agents.” He squatted and examined the body. From the condition of the corpse, Mason estimated Kantos was shot six to eight hours before, putting it at early in the morning. “Any visitors before six would have seemed strange, so sometime after that.”

“Someone's eliminating the competition,” Abrams said.

“Or potential witnesses. It's time to find Yaakov before anyone else does.”

“Shouldn't we call this in first?”

“If we do that, we'll be tied up with this for the entire afternoon. We've got to find Yaakov. Now.”

“We can't just walk away from these people.”

Mason looked up at Abrams. He thought about the woman and the boy lying dead and beginning to decay. He couldn't have cared less about Kantos's remains, but Abrams was right: He wouldn't let the woman and boy lie there any longer. “All right, call it in.”

Thirty minutes passed before a contingent of MPs, crime scene techs, and the assistant ME arrived. By that time, Mason and Abrams had searched around the bodies and the house for traces of footprints, hair, or fibers. The search turned up nothing of real value. Mason had hoped to find something that could help tie Kantos in with the other suspects listed on Winstone's chalkboard or identify the killers and their bosses. They did find a sack of cash: U.S. dollars, British pounds, Swiss francs, and Italian lire. In all, close to ten thousand dollars'
worth: a fortune by some standards, but probably pocket change for Kantos. Wherever he kept the majority of his earnings, it wasn't in the house. And, as with Winstone's office, Mason suspected that whatever records or incriminating material had been in the house, the killers had destroyed or taken with them.

The only break came in finding the slug that had passed cleanly through the wife's shoulder and embedded itself in the wall. The relatively intact bullet, a nine-millimeter, would have the distinct striations, the markings, left by the weapon. He could compare those with the compressed bullets from the other gunshot wounds and see if it was the same weapon and determine its make. But in all, they came away with very little useful evidence.

Mason and Abrams were finishing up, and giving instructions to the crime scene techs, when, to Mason's surprise and displeasure, Densmore entered and marched up to them. “Seems every place you go, another set of corpses turn up. And this time, you're going to have to learn about cooperation. German victims, German police.”

“The principal target was Eddie Kantos. A British citizen.”

Densmore hissed a curse, and said, “Now, I suppose, we're going to have to involve the Brits on this one.”

“The woman and boy were Austrian.”

“Boy?” Densmore said with dismay.

“Kantos's wife and her son. I found the marriage certificate along with their passports. The son was from a previous marriage.”

Densmore let out a tired sigh, then eyed Mason. “Why were you here, anyway?”

“To question Kantos. I got access to Winstone's office and saw he'd drawn out a chart with a whole web of unsavory characters, living and dead, with Kantos at the center of it all.”

“You're still circling around Winstone being murdered? When are you going to wise up, Collins?”

“Winstone was investigating Kantos, among others, and now here he is, shot dead execution style—just like Giessen and the rest. The
two bodyguards were working for Winstone, and probably knew the assailants, since there was no sign of a struggle and their weapons are still holstered. I'm sure it's the same hit squad that took out the three German crime bosses, Winstone, Hilda. Now Kantos, his wife and son, and the bodyguards. There were no prints. The front door was locked. No shoot-out. They were just popped off as pretty as you please. No muss, no fuss. When are
you
going to wise up?”

Densmore studied Mason as he processed this.

“Go see for yourself,” Mason said. “Have a good look at the wife and boy, then tell me there's not some kind of cold-blooded gang taking over.”

Densmore stepped past Mason and headed for the stairs.

As Mason watched Densmore climb the stairs, he said to Abrams, “Now you see why I added Densmore's name to the list. Let's get out of here.”

Outside, a gaggle of German reporters waited at the gate. They fired questions as Mason and Abrams wedged past them. Then, just outside the gate, Mason had the feeling once again that someone was watching him. He glanced around and spotted a car parked opposite their jeep. Mason froze in midstep. Sure enough, someone was staring at him through the driver's-side window. Laura sat in an elegant Mercedes 770, probably once belonging to some Nazi general, with her hands on the steering wheel and the engine idling.

She locked eyes with his and nodded toward the road, her expression conveying anger or fear. But just as Mason moved toward her, she revved the engine and drove off. Puzzled, he watched her race down the road. He recovered a moment later and got behind the wheel of the jeep. Abrams barely had time to jump in before Mason took off.