The Negotiator (45 page)

For answer, Lutz borrowed the bar’s telephone directory. There were four columns of Bernhardts. And that was just for Hamburg. There are ten states in the Federal Republic, and they all have several such directories. “If he’s listed at all,” said Lutz.

“Criminal records?” asked Quinn.

“Unless it’s federal, there are ten separate police authorities to go through,” said Lutz. “You know that, since the war, when the Allies were kind enough to write our constitution for us, everything is decentralized. So we can never have another Hitler. Makes tracking someone down enormous fun. I know—it’s part of my job. But a man like this ... very little chance. If he wants to disappear, he disappears. This one does, or he’d have given
some
interview in twenty-three years, appeared in the papers. But, nothing. If he had, he’d be in our files.”

Quinn had one last question. Where had he originally come from, this Bernhardt? Lutz scanned the sheets.

“Dortmund,” he said. “He was born and raised in Dortmund. Maybe the police there know something. But they won’t tell you. Civil rights, you see—we’re very keen on civil rights in Germany.”

Quinn thanked him and let him go. He and Sam wandered down the street looking for a promising restaurant.

“Where do we go next?” she asked.

“Dortmund,” he said. “I know a man in Dortmund.”

“Darling,” she said, “you know a man everywhere.”

In the middle of November, Michael Odell faced President Cormack alone in the Oval Office. The Vice President was shocked by the change in his old friend. Far from having recovered since the funeral, John Cormack seemed to have shrunk.

It was not simply the physical appearance that worried Odell; the former power of concentration was gone, the old incisiveness dissipated. He tried to draw the President’s attention to the appointments diary.

“Ah, yes,” said Cormack, with an attempt at revival. “Let’s have a look.”

He studied the page for Monday.

“John, it’s Tuesday,” said Odell gently.

As the pages turned Odell saw broad red lines through canceled appointments. There was a NATO Head of State in town. The President should greet him on the White House lawn; not negotiate with him—the European would understand that—but just greet him.

Besides, the issue was not whether the European leader would understand; the problem was whether the American media would understand if the President failed to show. Odell feared they might understand only too well.

“Stand in for me, Michael,” pleaded Cormack.

The Vice President nodded. “Sure,” he said gloomily. It was the tenth canceled appointment in a week. The paperwork could be handled in-house; there was a good team at the White House nowadays. Cormack had chosen well. But the American people invest a lot of power in that one man who is President, Head of State, Chief Executive, Commander in Chief of the armed forces, the man with his finger on the nuclear button. Under certain conditions. One is that they have the right to see him in action—often. It was the Attorney General who articulated Odell’s worries an hour later in the Situation Room.

“He can’t just sit there forever,” said Walters.

Odell had reported to them all on the state in which he had found the President. There were just the inner six of them present—Odell, Stannard, Walters, Donaldson, Reed, and Johnson—plus Dr. Armitage, who had been asked to join them as an adviser.

“The man’s a husk, a shadow of what he once was. Dammit, only five weeks ago,” said Odell. His listeners were gloomy and depressed.

Dr. Armitage explained that President Cormack was suffering from deep postshock trauma, from which he seemed unable to recover.

“What does that mean, minus the jargon?” snapped Odell.

What it meant, said Armitage patiently, was that the Chief Executive was stricken by a personal grief so profound that it was depriving him of the will to continue.

In the aftermath of the kidnapping, the psychiatrist reported, there had been a similar trauma, but not so profound. Then the problem had been the stress and anxiety stemming from ignorance and worry—not knowing what was happening to his son, whether the boy was alive or dead, in good shape or maltreated, or when or if he would be freed.

During the kidnap the load had lightened slightly. He had learned indirectly from Quinn that at least his son was alive. As the exchange neared, he had recovered somewhat.

But the death of his only son, and the savagely brutal manner of it, had been like a body blow. Too introverted a man to share easily, too inhibited to express his grief, he had settled into an abiding melancholy that was sapping his mental and moral strength, those qualities humans call the will.

The committee listened morosely. They relied on the psychiatrist to tell them what was in their President’s mind. On the few occasions when they saw him, they needed no doctor to tell them what they were seeing. A man lackluster and distraught; tired to the point of deep exhaustion, old before his time, devoid of energy or interest. There had been Presidents before who had been ill in office; the machinery of state could cope. But nothing like this. Even without the growing media questioning, several present were also beginning to ask themselves whether John Cormack could, or should, continue much longer in office.

Bill Walters listened to the psychiatrist with an expressionless face. At forty-four he was the youngest man in the Cabinet, a tough and brilliant corporate lawyer from California. John Cormack had brought him to Washington as Attorney General to use his talents against organized crime, much of it now hiding behind corporate façades. Those who admired him admitted he could be ruthless, albeit in pursuit of the supremacy of the law; those who were his enemies, and he had made a few, feared his relentlessness.

He was personable to look at, sometimes almost boyish, with his youthful clothes and blow-dried, carefully barbered hair. But behind the charm there could be a coldness, an impassivity that hid the inner man. Those who had negotiated with him noticed that the only sign he was homing in was that he ceased to blink. Then his stare could be unnerving. When Dr. Armitage had left the room Walters broke the grim silence.

“It may be, gentlemen, we will have to look seriously at the Twenty-fifth.”

They all knew about it, but he had been the first to invoke its availability. Under the Twenty-fifth Amendment, the Vice President and a majority of the Cabinet may together, in writing, communicate to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their view that the President is no longer able to discharge the powers and duties of his office. Section 4 of the Twenty-fifth Amendment, to be precise.

“No doubt you’ve memorized it, Bill,” snapped Odell.

“Easy, Michael,” said Jim Donaldson. “Bill just mentioned it.”

“He would resign before that,” said Odell.

“Yes,” said Walters soothingly. “On health grounds, with absolute justification, and with the sympathy and gratitude of the nation. We just might have to put it to him. That’s all.”

“Not yet, surely,” protested Stannard.

“Hear, hear. There is time,” said Reed. “The grief will pass, surely. He will recover. Become his old self.”

“And if not?” asked Walters. His unblinking stare went across the face of every man in the room. Michael Odell rose abruptly. He had been in some political fights in his time, but there was a coldness about Walters he had never liked. The man did not drink, and by the look of his wife he probably made love by the book.

“Okay, we’ll keep an eye on it,” he said. “Now, however, we’ll defer decision on that. Right, gentlemen?”

Everyone else nodded and rose. They would defer consideration of the Twenty-fifth. For now.

It was a combination of the rich wheat and barley lands of Lower Saxony and Westphalia to the north and east, plus the crystal-clear water trickling out of the nearby hills, that first made Dortmund a beer town. That was in 1293, when King Adolf of Nassau gave the citizens of the small town in the southern tip of Westphalia the right to brew.

Steel, insurance, banking, and trade came later, much later. Beer was the foundation, and for centuries the Dortmunders drank most of it themselves. The industrial revolution of the middle and late nineteenth century provided the third ingredient for the grain and the water—the thirsty workers of the factories that mushroomed along the valley of the Ruhr. At the head of the valley, with views southwest as far as the towering chimneys of Essen, Duisburg, and Düsseldorf, the city stood between the grain prairies and the customers. The city fathers took advantage; Dortmund became the beer capital of Europe.

Seven giant breweries ruled the trade: Brinkhoff, Kronen, DAB, Stifts, Ritter, Thier, and Moritz. Hans Moritz was head of the second-smallest brewery and head of the dynasty that went back eight generations. But he was the last individual to own and control his empire personally, and that made him very seriously rich. It was partly his wealth and partly the fame of his name that had caused the savages of the Baader-Meinhof gang to snatch his daughter Renata ten years before.

Quinn and Sam checked into the Roemischer Kaiser Hotel in the center of the city and Quinn tried the telephone directory with little hope. The home number, of course, was not listed. He wrote a personal letter on the hotel stationery, called a cab, and had it delivered to the brewery’s head office.

“Do you think your friend will still be here?” asked Sam.

“He’ll be here, all right,” said Quinn. “Unless he’s away abroad, or at any of his six homes.”

“He likes to move around a lot,” observed Sam.

“Yeah. He feels safer that way. The French Riviera, the Caribbean, the ski chalet, the yacht ...”

He was right in supposing that the villa on Lake Constanz had long been sold; that was where the snatch had taken place.

He was also in luck. They were eating dinner when Quinn was called to the phone.

“Herr Quinn?”

He recognized the voice, deep and cultured. The man spoke four languages, could have been a concert pianist. Maybe should have been.

“Herr Moritz. Are you in town?”

“You remember my house? You should. You spent two weeks in it, once.”

“Yes, sir. I remember it. I didn’t know whether you still retained it.”

“Still the same. Renata loves it, wouldn’t let me change it. What can I do for you?”

“I’d like to see you.”

“Tomorrow morning. Coffee at ten-thirty.”

“I’ll be there.”

* * *

They drove out of Dortmund due south along the Ruhrwald Strasse until the industrial and commercial sprawl dropped away behind and they entered the outer suburb of Syburg. The hills began, rolling and forested, and the estates situated within the forests contained the homes of the wealthy.

The Moritz mansion was set in four acres of parkland down a lane off the Hohensyburg Strasse. Across the valley the Syburger monument stared down the Ruhr toward the spires of Sauerland.

The place was a fortress. Chain-link fencing surrounded the entire plot and the gates were high-tensile steel, remote-controlled and with a TV camera discreetly attached to a pine tree nearby. Someone watched Quinn climb out of the car and announce himself through the steel grille beside the gates. Two seconds later the gates swung open on electric motors. When the car passed through they closed again.

“Herr Moritz enjoys his privacy,” said Sam.

“He has reason to,” said Quinn.

He parked on the tan gravel in front of the white stucco house and a uniformed steward let them in. Hans Moritz received them in the elegant sitting room, where coffee waited in a sterling-silver pot. His hair was whiter than Quinn recalled, his face more lined, but the handshake was as firm and the smile as grave.

They had hardly sat down when the door opened and a young woman stood there hesitantly. Moritz’s face lit up. Quinn turned to look.

She was pretty in a vacuous sort of way, shy to the point of self-effacement. Both her little fingers ended in stumps. She must be twenty-five now, Quinn thought.

“Renata, kitten, this is Mr. Quinn. You remember Mr. Quinn? No, of course not.”

Moritz rose, crossed to his daughter, murmured a few words in her ear, kissed the top of her head. She turned and left. Moritz resumed his seat. His face was impassive, but the twisting of his fingers revealed his inner turmoil.

“She ... um ... never really recovered, you know. The therapy goes on. She prefers to stay inside, seldom goes out. She will not marry ... after what those animals did ...”

There was a photograph on the Steinbeck grand; of a laughing, mischievous fourteen-year-old on skis. That was a year before the kidnapping. A year afterward Moritz had found his wife in the garage, the exhaust gases pumping down the rubber tube into the closed car. Quinn had been told in London.

Moritz made an effort. “I’m sorry. What can I do for you?”

“I’m trying to find a man. One who came from Dortmund long ago. He may still be here, or in Germany, or dead, or abroad. I don’t know.”

“Well, there are agencies, specialists. Of course, I can engage ...”

Quinn realized that Moritz thought he needed money to engage private investigators.

“Or you could ask through the Einwohnermeldeant.”

Quinn shook his head.

“I doubt if they would know. He almost certainly does not willingly cooperate with the authorities. But I believe the police might keep surveillance on him.”

Technically speaking, German citizens who move to a new home within the country are required by law to notify the Inhabitants Registration Office of changes of address, both where from and where to the move took place. Like most bureaucratic systems, this works better in theory than in practice. The ones the police and/or the income tax authorities would like to contact are often those who decline to oblige.

Quinn sketched in the background of the man Werner Bernhardt.

“If he is still in Germany, he would be of an age to be in employment,” said Quinn. “Unless he has changed his name, that will mean he has a social security card, pays income tax—or someone pays it for him. Because of his background he might have been in trouble with the law.”