The Master Sniper (32 page)

Roger leaned against the fender of the Jeep out in front of the castle—
castle?
it was more like a big, fancy house!—enjoying the freedom of the moment. No fun, the ride down, two raw nerves in back for cargo. They’d jumped the Jeep while it was still rolling and headed straight for the great doors, as if there were free money inside, instead of some Kraut.

He popped a piece of spearmint into his mouth. He had no dreams of the future and no memories of the
past; he was determined to extract the maximum pleasure of that exact instant. He worked the gum into something soft. Sure was a nice day out. He assumed a Continental grip on an imaginary racquet and slow-motioned through a dozen topspin approach shots to the background corner. The trick was to keep your head down and follow through high. It was a shot he’d need to
own
, lock, stock and barrel, if he hoped to stay with the Frank Bensons of the world in the years to come.

And then he saw a woman.

She was just a silhouette preserved momentarily between the window through which he glimpsed her and what must have been another window or set of doors behind her. Just a profile, blurred, moving down a corridor between wings of the castle, gone in a second.

Women! Here? It had been weeks since he’d pulled out of London and that mix-up in Paris hadn’t amounted to anything. Women. He explored facets of the problem. Now what would women be doing here? Wasn’t this some kind of prison or something?

Still, that had definitely been—

Jesus Christ!

The roar seemed to flatten him. He fell back in momentary confusion, looking for the source of this outrage, to see a P-47 maybe fifty feet above him flash past, more shadow than substance at over 400 miles an hour. He could see its prop wash suck at the trees, pulling a cloud of leaves off them in its wake. It rolled majestically as it yanked its nose up—crazy bastard, he was going to get in real trouble that way, Roger thought—and he followed the fighter-bomber as it climbed.

He was dumb struck. The sky was jammed with
planes. He’d noticed contrails earlier, but the sky was always full of contrails on the rare, clear European days. Now, staring, he saw them jumbled, tangled, knotted even, tracing corkscrews and barrels and loops and Immelmanns and stall-outs. He could make out the planes themselves, fighters mostly, specks at the head of each furry, swooping track. Must have been fifty, sixty. What a show.

One last giant dogfight? Maybe the Germans had saved up for an aerial Bulge, a last go, all their stuff in the air, jets, rockets, ME’s, Focke-Wulfs, and a Stuka or two if any were left, and all the experimental stuff everybody said they were working on. One last shoot-out at 25,000 feet: all guns blazing, take on the entire Eighth Air Force, some kind of
Götterdämmerung
, or maybe a crazy kamikaze thing, like Japs, just crashing into their targets?

But if this were a battle, wouldn’t there be puffs of flame up there, and long jags of smoke from crashing ships, and wouldn’t there be other columns of smoke on the horizon from planes that had already gone down?

Yes, there would.

This was—
fun!

Another plane, a two-engine British job, howled overhead, slightly higher than the Jug but just as loud. He ducked.

What the hell’s going on? Rog wondered.

He looked about and saw nobody in the house. No guards, no officers, nothing. He did notice a path off to one side in the trees and thought to head out back, dig somebody up. The path turned quickly into a kind of sidewalk, though of fine, tiny pebbles set between metal
rails of some sort. Very fancy, it reminded him of the kind of arrangements he’d seen in Newport. He followed it through some tricky turns, and at last found himself in some sort of garden, low hedges arranged like a geometry problem around flower beds that were beginning to show signs of waking up. Beyond lay a vast rolling carpet of grass and behind, though shielded by a screen of tall, thin trees, was the castle. But Roger picked up something more interesting immediately: standing on the grass, by a bench of some sort, back turned, looking up at the aerial circus, was a girl. A WAC or something.

He advanced warily, unsure whether she was an officer. She was in some kind of uniform all right, but not an officer, for there was no gleam at her collar. He stepped forward.

“Uh, pardon me, have you got any idea what’s going on, miss?”

The girl turned. One of those clear, guileless Midwestern faces organized around big eyes, blue, a pert nose and even freckles. A kind of strawberry complexion, hues of pinkness, and it all made him think of freshness, a kind of innocence.

Hey, would I like to pork
that!
he decided.

Then he noticed she was crying.

“Gee, what’s wrong? Bad news, huh?”

She came into his arms—he could not
believe
his famous luck again—and began to sob against his shoulder. He held her close and tight, muttering, “Now, now,” stroking her hair.

She looked up, soft and blurred, and he thought she wanted a kiss and so he pressed his lips into hers.

* * *

At last Eichmann spoke.

“What guarantees can you offer? Repp is very dangerous. You insist that I betray him, or you’ll let it be known I betrayed him. Yet without a guarantee, the first possibility does not exist.”

“We have a way of remembering our friends. We’ve that reputation, don’t we? Give us a chance to live up to it. That’s all I can say.”

“I’d need to disappear. Understand, it’s not the Americans who frighten me. It’s Repp.”

“I understand,” said Leets. “All right. I’ll see what I can do.”

“A bargain then, Eichmann for Repp?”

“I said I’d see.”

“Eichmann for Repp. How that would sicken him.” He laughed.

“Herr Eichmann,” Tony said, in better German than Leets’s, “let us proceed with our business.”

The
draydel
had run out of energy, and sputtered to a stop, lurching spastically on the table. Eichmann picked it up in his blunt fingers—an anatomical oddity, hands so big on such a skinny man—and began to talk.

“Operation Nibelungen: I was in on it from the beginning. It was Pohl’s actually, Pohl, of the Economic and Financial Office, WVHA, but he brought me into it, and together we sold the
Reichsführer
. It was nothing personal, the business with the Jews, you understand that. It was just our way, our job. We had to do it. The policies were set from the very top. We only did what we were—”

“Get to the point,” Leets instructed.

“Operation Nibelungen. The point of Operation Nibelungen is a Special Action.”

“A ‘Special Action’?”

“With a rifle.”

“Special Action means murder.”

“Call it what you will. It can be justified morally from a World Historical perspective which—”

“Who?” said Leets, surprising even himself at how uninterested he sounded after so many months of sawing on the same question.

“You must realize. I am not against the Jews. I respect and understand them. I myself am a Zionist. I believe it would be best for them to have their own country. All this was forced upon us by our superiors—”

“Who? When?”

“When, I cannot say. I was taken off the project and sent to Hungary on special emergency assignment before the final planning took place. But soon. If not already.”

Leets said, “Who, Herr Obersturmbannführer Eichmann? For the last time,
WHO?”

His yell seemed to startle the little man.

“No need to yell, Captain. I’m about to tell you.”

“Who?”

“A child,” Eichmann said. “A six-year-old boy. Named Michael Hirsczowicz. Now I think I might have one of those cigarettes.”

Roger put the tip of his tongue through the girl’s lips.

She smashed him in the face, open hand.

“What?” he said. “Hey, I don’t get it.”

“Fresh,” she said.

“You kissed
me!
I just walked around the corner and here’s these
lips.”

“You made it dirty. You spoiled it.”

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” She was knocking him out. He was in love, or half in love at any rate.

“Look, I really didn’t mean anything bad. It was just a friendly gesture.”

“Tongues are more than just friends,” she said.

“Oh, well, you get carried away, is all. Heh, heh. My name’s Rog, Rog Evans. What’s yours?”

“Nora.”

“Well, Nora, how are you? Nice to meet you. Do you play tennis, by any chance? Where’d you go to school?”

“Prairie View.”

“Prairie View, yeah, think I heard of it. Women’s school out west, California, isn’t it? A real good school, I hear.”

“It’s a high school in Des Moines. I doubt if you’ve heard of it. I didn’t even go to a college yet.”

“Oh, yeah, well, college is pretty much a waste of time. Even Harvard, where I go, is not really for serious people. Are you a WAC?”

“The Red Cross Women’s Auxiliary.”

“A civilian?”

“Yeah. But we’re still supposed to call officers sir and all.”

“Must be real interesting,” he said.

“I hate it. It stinks. They watch you like a hawk. You never get to
do
anything.”

“Yeah, well, that’s the service. Speaking of
doing
something, I was wondering, you tied up or anything tonight?” Get the date first, then worry about dumping
Leets and Outhwaithe. “See, I don’t know the area too well. I’m OSS—Office of Strategic Services … high-level intelligence, that sort of thing. Anywhere it’s hot, that’s where you’ll find us. But I was wondering if you could sort of—”

“How can you think of
that
on a day like
this?”

“And what’s
this
day?” he finally asked her.

Eichmann smoked and explained.

“In the last days before the war, a wealthy, assimilated Warsaw Jew named Josef Hirsczowicz seemed to convert to Zionism. Naturally, there were ramifications.”

Leets thought of just one of them: the shabby little office in London, the old man Fischelson, and all the grim, dark, weeping women. And Susan Isaacson, American, from Baltimore, Maryland, who’d lost her soul there, or perhaps found it.

“We viewed this with some concern. First, we felt the Hirsczowicz fortune to be ours, by right of biological superiority. Second, an accumulation of capital such as this fellow’s is not without its influence. And that much money in the hands of Zionist agitators, anarchists, Socialists, Communists, what have you, could create considerable problems for us. Incidentally, Major, in this respect we are not so much different from your own government, which, in the Mideast at any rate, recognizes the World Jewish Conspir—”

“Get on with it,” Tony said.

“Thus it was imperative that the man Hirsczowicz and his family and heirs be added to the list of Warsaw intelligentsia marked for special handling. And so it happened.”
Eichmann left to their imaginations the full meaning of the euphemism.

“But imagine our dismay and surprise,” and here the German allowed himself a prim, wicked smile, “when our accountants discovered in an audit of the Bank Hirsczowicz that his fortune had disappeared. Disappeared! Vanished! A billion zlotys. Five hundred million Reichsmarks.”

One hundred million bucks, thought Leets.

“Discreet inquiries were made. Naturally so large a sum cannot simply become invisible. A hundred rumors were tracked, a thousand interrogations launched. Obergruppenführer Pohl made it his special project. He was experienced in financial matters and saw the power of the fortune. He scoured Europe, when he was not busy running his concentration camp empire. And finally, he had success. In the middle of 1944, a source in Zurich was able to prove that the Jew had actually gotten his funds into the country, to the Schweizerschaft Banksellschaft. And that he had gotten something else out.”

“The boy. The heir,” said Tony.

“Yes and no. Again the Jew had been clever, very clever. The boy was not the heir. The boy was to be provided for, of course, but the fortune would not be his.”

“Who would get it?” Leets asked.

“The Jews,” said Eichmann.

“The Jews?”

“Yes. I told you the man was a Zionist. He had decided that his people’s only salvation lay in a Jewish state, an Israel. Privately, I agree with him. Thus the
money was held in escrow for several groups. Zionist groups. Refugee groups. Propaganda outlets. All dedicated to this idea of a new country.”

“I see.”

“But he was too clever, this Jew. Too clever by half. He of course worried about the son.”

“Any father would.”

“And so he made an arrangement with one of the fiery young Zionists. That the boy should be raised as one of them, as a first-generation Israelite. And know nothing of the fortune. But the father was terrified for the boy. And so he had written into the document for the transfer of the money a special complication. He did it on the last day, in an emotional state. We believe it to be a reenactment of one of their rituals.
Pidyon Haben
. The redemption of the firstborn son. May I have another cigarette, please? Thank you. What does that say? A Lucky Strike? Finding me has indeed been a lucky strike for you, hasn’t it?”

“Get on with it.”

“The arrangement holds that the boy must survive the war. He is to be delivered to the bank and identified by fingerprints. It made sense, because the boy would be raised in Palestine, far from any battles. It was only to make sure the boy didn’t get somehow lost in a shuffle.”

“But the war broke out,” Leets added. In his mind he could see the Zionists stuck in the middle of Switzerland, in the middle of Nazi territory, with the boy who was the key to their future. “And so they left him there.”

“You have grasped the essence.”

“Kill him and there’s no money for the Jews.”

“No. And this is how I was brought into it. I was considered an expert in finding Jews.”

“I see.”

“I supervised the search team. It was not easy. It was very difficult. An agent of ours, one Felix, operated under my direct control. Painstakingly we tracked the rumors, the lies, the missing trails.”