The Second Objective

  “So, Dick, you a deserter?” asked Eddie.

  “I am now.” They both laughed. “You?”

  “They had my whole battalion in the brig up in Belgium on a black-market beef. The Krauts come across a couple days ago, they tell us we’re off the hook if we’ll go catch a few bullets on the front line. I said hell yeah, why don’t you just fit me for the pine overcoat while you’re at it?”

  They laughed again, Eddie in an aggressive, Woody Woodpecker staccato, his mouth contorted like the mask of tragedy.

  “It was sayonara suckers before they even knew I was gone. This ain’t my fight; I got no gripe with the Krauts. A freakin’ Chinese fire drill getting down here; I can thank the Krauts for that.”

  “Why’d you stop in Reims?”

  “That was a neighborhood we used to work; lotta freight moves on that canal. Thought I’d make a pass, see if I could pick up a few bucks.” Eddie tried on a gray fedora, checking out his reflection in the car window. “That guy who came at us in the theater, he’s one of these fellas you were supposed to meet?”

  “I never saw him before.”

  “He called you Lieutenant Miller.”

  “Obviously he thought I was somebody else.”

  “Hey, it was him or us,” said Eddie. “You won’t hear me complaining.”

  “Who was the other cop, the one in the lobby?”

  “That prick busted me the other night, Criminal Investigation Division, a real hard-on. Earl Grannit. New York homicide.”

  “He’s a police detective?”

  “That’s right. He’s on your tail, too?”

  “He put some heat on us. I never knew his name.”

  “Well, fuck him, he can eat our dust,” said Eddie. “I was gonna say we head down to Paris, what do you think?”

  “You know your way around?”

  “Been stationed there since August. Got that city wired. Our battalion was floating on a river of cash.”

  They heard sirens in the distance toward downtown Reims. When Eddie turned, Von Leinsdorf raised the silenced pistol, ready to shoot him in the back of the head.

  “Our train yard’s just west of the city, near Versailles,” said Eddie.

  Von Leinsdorf lowered the pistol. “Versailles?”

  “Yeah. I’m telling you, you got to check out Paris. It’s a fuckin’ free-for-all. A guy with brass ones like you makes a killing in no time.”

  Von Leinsdorf put the pistol away before Eddie turned around.

  “The Free French or de Gaulle or the U.S. Army may think they’re running the joint, but nobody’s got a handle on it. And the only God they bow down to in that town is the almighty American buck.”

  “You could introduce me to some people?”

  “You got a stake we can use to prime the pump, get things rolling?”

  “Sure,” said Von Leinsdorf.

  “Dick, I’m not pushing banana oil here. A couple weeks we could be running our own show. Just me and you, no brass skimming off the top.”

  “The army, the MPs, they’re going to come looking for us.”

  “Forget it, I know places we could hole up for months. Local cops want nothing to do with the black market, and they’re all on the pad anyway. You make your own law. There’s parts of that city the army won’t even come into.”

  “Will these get us there?” asked Von Leinsdorf, showing him some papers from his pocket.

  “Road passes, regional business stamps, laissez-passers. Yeah, I’d say you got it covered.”

  “We’re Danish businessmen looking into postwar oil contracts,” said Von Leinsdorf.

  “Let’s get rich.”

  They shook hands, climbed into the Renault, and drove off. Von Leinsdorf had positioned the car less than a hundred yards from an entrance to the bridge that would carry them across the river, toward the highway to Paris. The army wouldn’t throw roadblocks up on the bridge until half an hour after they crossed.

  Von Leinsdorf glanced at Eddie as he drove. The man amused him, a common thief with a lust for money. So much more useful than Bernie Oster. That he’d left the young American alive remained an irritant, but a minor one. Brooklyn didn’t have the skills to survive alone for long on enemy ground. He’d get himself captured or killed. Even if he talked, he knew nothing about the Second Objective; Von Leinsdorf had seen to that. He smiled. Eddie grinned back.

  Everybody needed a little luck now and then.

  Bernie stayed behind Earl Grannit’s right shoulder and kept his mouth shut, as ordered. A few of the other MPs shot questioning glances his way—where had he been all night?—but none said a word. Grannit was in charge and he was Grannit’s man.

  Grannit’s temper flared once he’d gathered all his MPs and Army Counter Intelligence men in the theater lobby. The killer and a probable accomplice had walked out into the night and vanished. How was it possible that no one saw them or followed them or picked them up once they left the theater? Forty men looking for one man and “Lieutenant Miller” slipped the net like smoke.

  Bernie could feel the other officers’ frustration in the tense silence that followed. They had a bona fide deserter from Skorzeny’s brigade dead and three men from his squad alive; didn’t that qualify as a good night’s work? Maybe other German agents had been there, and maybe they’d gotten away, but no one else had seen these two phantom killers in back of the stage or outside the movie house. Not even the three Krauts they’d captured knew anything about them.

  It seemed obvious to everyone else in the room that William Sharper had murdered the MP and Ole Carlson. Sharper died with the knife that killed Carlson in his hand. He’d been shot with Carlson’s gun. He even looked like the sketch Grannit had circulated.

  An army intelligence officer summed up their reservations. “Even if this Lieutenant Miller was here and got away, what can one Kraut do alone in the middle of France?”

  “First of all, Carlson didn’t shoot Sharper,” said Grannit. “He’s got no powder residue on his hand. That knife Sharper had in his hand killed two French border guards earlier today. An SS officer named Erich Von Leinsdorf killed those two men. He came into Reims in an ambulance today, killed the drivers, a female civilian, and our two men here to night. He set up Sharper to take the fall, then killed him and walked away clean when we had him dropped, so don’t fucking tell me what this man can’t do.”

  Bernie wondered if anyone figured him as the source of all this, and if so, how he had come to know it.

  “I want this sketch of Von Leinsdorf telexed to every checkpoint in France. Expand roadblocks to every road and highway leading out of town. Cover train and bus stations and canvass every street in this part of the city door to door. Do it now.”

  Grannit stormed out of the meeting; Bernie followed. They spent twenty minutes with a graves detail outside making sure Ole Carlson would be shipped home instead of being planted under a white cross in a French cemetery. Grannit wrote a letter to the man’s father to accompany the casket. They were about to walk upstairs to the apartment Grannit used as his command post, when he heard the chug of a diesel motor cutting through the fog on the canal. Bernie followed him to the water’s edge. Grannit lit a cigarette and walked along the bank, looking down through a break in the fog at a tug pushing a coal barge downstream.

  “He used a boat,” said Grannit, angry at himself for not seeing it earlier. “God damn it, he used a boat.”

  “He won’t give up,” said Bernie. “He won’t stop until you kill him.”

  “Where’s he going? Give me your best guess.”

  “Paris, I think. He said he spent time there before. He speaks the language like a native. I think he’s supposed to kill somebody. Somebody important, I don’t know who.”

  Grannit whistled sharply, and two MPs ran toward them from the movie theater. Grannit offered Bernie a cigarette while they waited. Bernie took it and accepted a light.

  “Whoever he’s after,” said Bernie, “that’s his next move.”

/>   Grannit didn’t answer, but he turned to the MPs when they arrived. “Search the canal, both directions. Cut off the bridges. He took a boat.”

  They scrambled back toward the theater, blowing whistles to summon more men.

  “He’s halfway there by now,” said Bernie.

  “He’s going after General Eisenhower,” said Grannit. “That’s the target.”

  Bernie felt what little strength he had left rush out of him. He stumbled slightly, and nearly went to his knees.

  “Jesus Christ.”

  “You didn’t know that.”

  “No, sir. He wouldn’t tell me anything. I don’t know what to say. It’s my fault. They’re all fucking crazy. I could’ve stopped him; I should’ve killed him when I had the chance.”

  Grannit just watched him. “How many men were assigned to this?”

  “He said there were five squads, but I only saw four.”

  “Not the whole commando unit?”

  “No, no, it was a small group. Four squads, four men apiece. How many are left?”

  “Not counting you,” said Grannit, “one.”

  “One squad?”

  “Just him.”

  Grannit took out the keys to the jeep. Bernie could see he was thinking about tossing them to him, telling him to drive it around. He could also see that Grannit knew that he knew that Grannit was thinking about it. Grannit put the keys back in his pocket and tossed away the cigarette.

  “Paris,” he said.

  29

  Versailles

  DECEMBER 19

  General Eisenhower returned to Allied headquarters after his meeting at Verdun, and the jaws of the security detail protecting him from Skorzeny’s assassins snapped shut. He would not be allowed to leave his heavily defended compound again.

  For the first time that morning headlines about the “Battle of the Bulge” appeared in American newspapers, and it quickly became the catchphrase for the entire Ardennes offensive. As the American front continued to deteriorate, Eisenhower made a controversial decision to place Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery in charge of the northern half of the battlefield. In doing so, he transferred authority over two American army groups that had long served under General Bradley to the one British officer almost universally disliked by the American senior staff. Unable to communicate with his generals in that part of the field, Bradley had his hands full holding the southern half of the Ardennes until Patton arrived. Still, Bradley reacted furiously to the perceived slap at his performance and tried to tender his resignation. Eisenhower refused it, arguing that the Germans had surrounded the American divisions in Bastogne. The fight was entering its most critical hours, and Bradley was his man.

  Bradley had until recently, and for years prior, been Eisenhower’s superior officer, so this loss of command was a bitter pill to swallow, particularly since he knew Ike shared his antipathy for Montgomery. When Bradley agreed to stay on, as a show of gratitude Eisenhower made arrangements for him to receive his fourth star. Although Montgomery conducted his new command effectively, conflicts that resulted between the senior staffs of the Allies nearly achieved Hitler’s objective of tearing their delicate alliance apart. Throughout, Eisenhower maintained his unearthly composure, kept Montgomery in check, and held these two armies together by force of will and his own quiet decency.

  Three hours before daylight on December 21, the 150th Panzer Brigade finally entered the Battle of the Bulge under the command of Otto Skorzeny. Realizing that Operation Greif’s plan to capture the bridges at the Meuse would never materialize, Skorzeny volunteered his brigade for a frontal assault to capture the key city of Malmédy, where the Allies had mounted a makeshift but tenacious defense. His ten tanks, German Panthers disguised as American Shermans, led the attack from the southwest. They did not enjoy the benefit of surprise; an attack in the Ardennes by a German force dressed as Americans had been anticipated for days. As the tanks approached, they set off trip wires that flooded the night sky with flares. Under the artificial light, American guns entrenched on the far side of a stream opened fire and destroyed four of the tanks. Two more were taken out as they forded the stream. By dawn and into the early afternoon, rallied by Skorzeny’s leadership, the brigade fought its way into the outskirts of town, defended primarily by the 291st Combat Engineers. When two companies of American infantry arrived to reinforce them, Skorzeny assessed his precarious position from a hill overlooking the field and reluctantly ordered his brigade to retreat. None of his tanks and less than half of his infantry survived.

  That night, while approaching German divisional headquarters near Ligneuville to make his report, Skorzeny’s armored car was blown into a ditch by a barrage of American artillery shells. Skorzeny was thrown from the car. Shell fragments peppered him in the legs, and a splinter the size of a small pencil pierced his forehead above the right eye. It caused heavy bleeding and carved off a flap of dangling flesh that impaired his vision. Taken to headquarters for treatment, he refused anesthetics and the doctor’s recommendation that he be moved to a hospital for surgery, demanding that they stitch his forehead together so he could return to the field. He would command his remaining troops in a variety of actions for two more days before infection set in around the wound that nearly blinded him and forced his evacuation to a German hospital.

  The Ardennes offensive, so far as Otto Skorzeny and what was left of his 150th Panzer Brigade were concerned, was effectively over.

  30

  Paris, France

  DECEMBER 20

  The City of Light had turned dark and cold. While the Allies’ Liberation of Paris in August raised the spirits of those who had endured the German occupation, the early success of the Ardennes offensive leveled them in a single chilling blow. Amid wild rumors that circulated in the absence of hard news, the specter of Nazi columns marching back in along the Champs Élysées seemed all too easy to envision. Thousands of returning civilians who had just begun to reestablish their lives fled again in panic.

  For those who remained, on the eve of what would be remembered as the coldest Parisian winter in modern memory, there was little fuel to heat their apartments and almost no food beyond the barest necessities to put on their table. Unstable gas lines resulted in random explosions that killed dozens every week. Curfews and blackouts, already in place but enforced more rigorously once fighting in the Ardennes began, emptied the streets. The power grid failed at least twice a night and the deep darkness provided cover for a campaign of terror, as the Free French who had resisted the Nazis during occupation took revenge against collaborators. Only two months in office, General Charles de Gaulle’s provisional French government clashed repeatedly with the Allied high command, which retained de facto control of Paris as a war zone, and their conflicts strangled the flow of essential goods and services. Anyone with means who sought to remedy their personal or house hold shortages had no alternative but to traffic in black-market goods.

  Every block on every street in every arrondissement produced a broker, someone who knew someone who could connect him to the rising tide of illicit goods that flooded the city like an invisible sea. Enterprising citizens traveled back and forth by train to Normandy, returning with suitcases full of Spanish hams, wheels of English cheese, sacks of coffee from Morocco. Whether you were a GI looking to sell his daily ration of cigarettes to a man hawking Lucky Strikes outside the St. Denis Metro station, or a star chef trying to score a hundred pounds of veal for a three-star restaurant on the Rue Royale, the deal could be done if you greased the right wheels. In the Darwinian ecosystem that had sprouted up overnight to meet those demands, ruthlessness and amorality guaranteed success.

  Montmartre, Paris

  DECEMBER 20

  As regular as banker’s hours, the man known only as Ververt spent every night from eight P.M. to two A.M. at a table near the kitchen of a jazz club he owned on Rue Clichy at the foot of Montmartre. He chain-smoked cigarettes, nursed one milky glass of pastis each hour, and kept an eye
trained to oversee the action on the floor. A squadron of underlings ran interference, screening every supplicant who asked for an audience with their boss. Most problems or requests they were able to handle, but occasionally something crossed the door that warranted Ververt’s personal attention. Like the two thousand in American cash sitting on the table in front of him.

  Ververt gestured to a couple of chairs. The two men looked and moved like Americans. Soldiers, out of uniform, probably deserters, like so many others who sought him out. Listening to “le jazz Américain” from the quartet on stage, the audience was filled with the usual assortment of Allied servicemen, more than 50 percent on any given night. None had any idea they were paying for stolen U.S. Army liquor and cigarettes they should have been getting for pennies on the dollar at their officers’ club or PX.

  “Is it always this cold in Paris this time of year? I’m gonna complain to my travel agent,” said the shorter one, rubbing his hands together. Then, to an appearing waiter: “How about a cup of coffee?”

  Ververt could see that the taller man, who hadn’t spoken, was in charge but wanted to let the little one do the talking. The second man shook his head to the waiter. His eyes met Ververt’s for a moment, before respectfully looking away.

  This one is interesting, thought Ververt.

  “You speak English, right?” asked Eddie Bennings.

  “I speak dollars,” said Ververt.

  “It’s the universal language,” said Eddie. “We’re working from the same phrase book, my friend.”

  Ververt looked at the two thousand, without making a move to pick it up. “What are you trying to say?”

  The man leaned toward him, in the overly familiar way that Americans mistook for charm. “I believe that you had some dealings with a few of my former associates. Captain John Stringer and other officers from the 724th Railway Battalion.”