The pimp watched Eddie exit the pension, and waited a few minutes while finishing his first coffee of the day. On the short side, and swarthy, he bore a distinct tattoo of a knife between the thumb and fingers of his right hand. When his girl failed to appear, he sauntered up to her apartment. Appalled less by her physical condition and hysterical emotional state than by her failure to collect any cash, he gave her a more severe beating, emptied her purse, and went back to the street. Outraged that this American prick had flouted the conventions of their industry—the little whore claimed she’d been stiffed—the pimp asked the barkeep if he had seen which way the man went, then hurried off in that direction until he spotted his overcoat on a neighboring street. He followed the man until he entered a transient apartment building a few blocks up the hill. A plan on how to collect his debt took shape immediately.
He walked four blocks south to the local police station, behind a nightclub on the Rue de la Rochefoucauld. The bicycle of a corrupt patrolman he bribed to protect his business sat in its usual parking space under the blue lantern outside. As much as it pained him to enter the station, for fear he might be perceived as a snitch, which in fact he was, the pimp did so just long enough to signal the patrolman that he needed a word. They met around the corner, where the pimp told the corrupt patrolman how his girl had just been taken advantage of by either an American GI or more likely a deserter. His behavior fit the profile of a dabbler in the black market, in which case he was probably sitting on a considerable pile of cash, from which the two of them might, without undue effort or risk, be able to separate the fucker. They agreed to pay the American a visit as soon as the patrolman came off duty later that day and then went their separate ways.
In this unwitting way, for want of a cup of coffee, would Corporal Eduardo DiBiaso, aka Eddie Bennings, make his only significant contribution to the Allied war effort.
The Hotel Meurice, Paris
DECEMBER 21, 2:25 P.M.
At 2:25, just before he left room 417, Von Leinsdorf called an office number at SHAEF headquarters that he found in Lieutenant Alan Pearson’s address book. Speaking as a convincingly under-the-weather Pearson, he reported that he had taken desperately ill at lunch and would need to spend the rest of the day recuperating in bed. Hoping it wouldn’t be too great an inconvenience, he would present himself for duty the following morning. The secretary asked him to hold the line.
“Right, sorry, just checking the schedule, sir,” said the secretary. “The G2 will be out at our offices at Versailles all day tomorrow. I’m afraid you’d have to come out there.”
Von Leinsdorf tried to sound neutral. “whatever the general thinks is best.”
“Will you be needing a driver then?”
“Yes. If you wouldn’t mind sending a car around.”
Before ringing off, she filled him in on how and where to present himself to clear SHAEF security upon arriving at Versailles.
An escort right into Versailles. Von Leinsdorf hung up the phone and laughed so hard he had to cover his mouth.
Earl Grannit and Bernie Oster entered the lobby of the Hotel Meurice at two-thirty P.M. After handing flyers with Von Leinsdorf’s likeness to guards at the entrance, they were speaking with the front desk when Von Leinsdorf came off the elevator, carrying a small suitcase and attaché, with a British officer’s greatcoat over his arm, dressed in the uniform of Lieutenant Alan Pearson. He saw Grannit and Bernie across the crowded lobby on his way to the desk. He turned away, patting his pockets as if he’d forgotten something, and headed back up the stairs. Badly shaken by the sight of them, he stopped in the stairwell to collect his thoughts, then ran back up to the fourth floor. He quickly rearranged how he had left things in room 417 in a way that he thought would solve this unwelcome development, then took a rear staircase to the back entrance, sorting through the problem as he walked away.
They had found the apartment and the dead girl in Reims, and Bernie Oster alive in the bargain. That had to be it. Had he convinced Grannit he was an American soldier? Unlikely, but why else would he still be a free man? Grannit and Bernie Oster together.
He walked back toward the Place Vendôme. Had he said anything to Bernie that could have put them on his trail? Why were they at the Meurice? Had he mentioned staying there during his last trip to Paris? Perhaps in passing. A block away he turned to look back at the hotel, saw no other police or military outside. They would have come in force if they were sure he was there, just as they had in Reims.
The two men had come alone then. He walked on, trying to weigh how this affected his plan for the following day. The Lieutenant Pearson scenario had given him a straight-ahead path to the end, but the identity would be compromised by any thorough search of the hotel. He had to assume that would happen, and couldn’t risk using it now.
His mind scrambled after solutions. Pearson had eliminated his need for Eddie Bennings—he’d planned to dispense with him on his return to Montmartre—but now he’d have to keep that scenario in play. And the Corsican, Ververt, as well.
He stepped off a curb without noticing and his foot hit the pavement, jarring him. He felt a violent, visceral shift disrupt his mind from his innermost self, and for a moment all thought of the mission was forgotten. His obsessive focus lifted, he was suddenly, keenly aware of the grid of the Paris streets and how much they reminded him of his own rigid mental discipline; straight lines and angles, geometric precision. He saw perfection and power in their clean, spare rigor. Civilization had reached an apex in this miracle of order, and he wanted nothing more than to inhabit them forever, walking down these broad avenues and regimented streets. He felt that if these buildings, all the people, even the streets themselves faded from view, the deep underlying meaning that their physical reality masked and could only hint at would be revealed. Patterns that unlocked all the uncertainties of existence. It was a moment of grace freed from time and circumstance, transcendent and full, but it was shadowed by a dawning awareness just beyond his comprehension that something dreadful had been done to him. A yawning darkness opened behind him, hideous forms of primal terror lurched at him out of it. He saw himself being held down in a malformed coffin, squirming to escape unseen hands. His head was missing, then it looked up at him from inside his attaché case, and horror like none he’d ever known lit up his mind—
A horn sounded, a screech of brakes. His attaché hit the pavement. He had walked blindly into the middle of a street and nearly been hit by a jeep full of MPs. He waved an apology, picked up his case, and walked on. They watched him go and he felt their eyes on him until they drove away. As quickly as it had come, back in reality, his waking nightmare vanished. He saw the Café de la Paix straight ahead across the street.
The newspaper he’d left on the table was gone. In its place, a pair of gloves and a blue scarf.
The signal. Contact. His mind found navigable points again. Now he could make all the pieces fit together. He crossed the street, and stepped down the stairs to the Madeleine metro station.
Grannit and Bernie spent twenty minutes with the manager at the front desk, who promised them they could question the rest of their staff and the hotel residents. Over two hundred officers billeted at the Meurice, but most were out during the day. Grannit said they were prepared to wait until every last one had been cleared.
Bernie sat near the front desk while Grannit telephoned Inspector Massou. He was out of the office, so Grannit left word to call them at the hotel. He joined Bernie a short time later, waiting for the staff to assemble and keeping an eye on the door in case Von Leinsdorf showed.
As he walked up the stairs at the Abbesses metro station, Von Leinsdorf heard choral music, looked up, and caught sight of a modest Gothic church, St. Pierre de Montmartre, perched on the hill before him just below the Sacre Coeur. The voices drew him forward. He had never had religious feelings—following the Party line, he believed only in the Father, not the Son—but he craved a few minutes in the presence of that music. He slipped ins
ide and stood near the back of the church. A choir stood in a stall below the altar, lit by candlelight, performing a medieval chanson. The ancient music fed a hunger in Von Leinsdorf he hadn’t known he possessed. The mysterious feeling of peace that had overwhelmed him as he walked the streets crept back into his mind, shadowed by that same black foreboding. He went weak for a moment, breaking into a sweat, and had to brace himself against a pew.
What is this?
A priest appeared at his side. Was he all right?
Yes, yes, he just needed a rest.
Von Leinsdorf slid into a pew and let his eyes drift up and around the chapel. He vaguely remembered that this was the oldest church in Paris. A bank of windows on one side had been shattered by a bomb, and he could see a storm drawing into the late afternoon sky above. He closed his eyes for a moment.
When he opened them again, he saw through the broken windows that the sky had turned pitch black. He glanced at his watch. Over an hour had vanished. He looked around, startled. The music had stopped, the choir was gone. The same priest was talking with a gendarme at the back of the church. Von Leinsdorf got up quickly, gathered his things, and walked out.
33
Montmartre
DECEMBER 19, 6:30 P.M.
Eddie Bennings heard him on the stairs before he came through the door. Von Leinsdorf was wearing a long greatcoat when he entered their garret and he immediately went into the second room to change. Bennings, who was pitching pennies against a bare wall in the front room, under the light of the room’s only lamp, never saw the British uniform.
“Where you been, Dick? I was starting to worry,” said Eddie.
“Nothing to worry about,” said Von Leinsdorf from the other room. “Making arrangements. What was your day like?”
“Boring. Just sitting around on my ass.”
Bennings had decided not to mention his own outing that morning. He picked up Stars and Stripes while he waited and made conversation.
“Did you hear they can’t find Glenn Miller? They think his plane went down over the Channel.”
“When did that happen?”
Von Leinsdorf came out dressed in civilian clothes. He carried a greatcoat and was using a needle and thread to sew a flap inside its left front panel. Bennings glanced at him without curiosity and went back to his paper.
“Don’t know. Last few days. On his way to Paris to organize a Christmas concert.”
“Was it the Krauts?” asked Von Leinsdorf.
“Had to be. Crying shame, isn’t it? You know how many times that guy’s music got me laid? I got no quarrel with the Krauts, but I’d like to get my hands on the punks who did this. Man, I’m starving. Haven’t been out all day.”
“Where did you get the newspaper?”
“Found it downstairs.”
“So you did go out,” said Von Leinsdorf.
“I went out once, briefly, for a pack of cigarettes.”
Von Leinsdorf moved to the window and looked out the curtains. The clouds had lowered and the rain that had threatened was starting to fall.
“Did you speak to anyone?”
“No, Christ, no. You want to get something to eat? What time we meeting him?”
“Seven.”
“What time is it now?”
“Half past six.”
Von Leinsdorf saw two men standing across the street from the entrance to the building. Both were looking up at the attic window. He turned off the lamp inside the room, retrieved his binoculars, and took a closer look at them.
A gendarme and a smaller, swarthy-faced man, a civilian. Both unfamiliar. Not who he’d expected.
“Something wrong?” asked Eddie.
“I don’t know yet.”
“So what do you say we grab some grub?”
“We’ll get something at the club.”
When they walked outside and started down the hill through the winding streets toward Ververt’s club, the two men across the street were gone. They arrived ten minutes ahead of schedule, tapped on the front window, and waited for someone to appear. Von Leinsdorf knew they were being followed, probably by the gendarme and his companion, but never caught a glimpse of them. One of Ververt’s men opened the front door of the jazz club and they went inside.
Ververt sat at his table near the kitchen. He asked if they were hungry, more hospitable this time, as one of the men set down a bottle of red wine and a platter of bread, cheese, and green olives. Ververt asked to hear their proposal, and he listened carefully, saying nothing while Eddie laid out the details of the Christmas train job.
“How many trucks do we need?” asked Ververt when Eddie was done.
“That’s up to you,” said Eddie. “We can fill two or three.”
“What time do they need to leave Paris?”
“We need a ride to the depot,” said Von Leinsdorf. “We have to be there by midnight, so we should be on the road by nine. Have them meet us at the Invalides metro stop. They drop us at the yard, then drive back into Versailles.”
“We’ll hook up on the spur line at three when we bring the train in to load up,” said Eddie.
“How long will that take?”
“Once the train’s there, not more than an hour. The trucks should be back in the city by first light.”
Ververt looked at his cigarette. “What about security on the train?”
“We’ve got that covered out of our end.”
“And the money?”
“Fifty thousand,” said Eddie. “Half now, half on delivery.”
Ververt flicked his cigarette, a gesture of disdain. “I don’t know what I’m buying.”
“We’ve got to take care of the boys on the train before they’ll open it up,” said Eddie.
“Why should that be my concern?” asked Ververt.
“Because otherwise we don’t have a deal,” said Von Leinsdorf.
Ververt poured himself another glass of pastis. He nodded to one of his men, who stepped forward and set a gray strongbox down on the table. Ververt opened it and counted out ten thousand American dollars.
“The rest when we finish loading the trucks,” he said.
The money sat on the table between them for a long beat. Ververt closed the strongbox to punctuate the finality of the offer. Finally, Von Leinsdorf reached over and picked up the money.
“Coffee?” asked Ververt.
The corrupt patrolman and the pimp had been taken aback by the appearance of the second man, who arrived at the rooming house soon after they took up their surveillance. They assumed he was another American deserter, and decided to alter their approach. Instead of charging up to the garret, they waited and followed the men, when they left their building, to a jazz club owned by a notorious local gangster. They observed them through a window, sitting down with Ververt. The connection to Ververt made the pimp question the wisdom of taking these two down, but the patrolman, who had collected payoffs from the Corsican for years, felt more certain than before that they were viable targets. These were unknown players with no local standing. Ververt was probably setting them up for a sting, so they might as well beat him to it.
Shortly after seven o’clock at the Hotel Meurice, a British major marched down to the front desk in his bathrobe and registered a noisy complaint about a missing dress uniform that he had sent for cleaning the previous day. Bernie and Grannit were on the house phones, calling each resident officer, working their way through the registration cards, when they overheard the major’s tirade.
So did an Algerian chambermaid, who was standing in a nearby line of employees waiting to be questioned by the hotel’s chief of security. She stepped forward to say she remembered seeing a valet returning a major’s uniform earlier that day on the fourth floor. The major’s anger went up a few decibels—he was staying on the second floor, so why the bloody hell was his uniform being delivered on the fourth floor? The major then answered his own question: because theft was rampant in this bloody hotel, that was why, because of the overwh
elming presence in this city of the bloody Wogs.
“Just another reminder that the Wogs begin at Calais,” he was heard to say.
The chief of security called Grannit over to hear the maid’s story, and inserted himself between them.
The maid, sensitive to the major’s racism, mentioned that this valet was a man she had never seen in the hotel before, but not that he’d given her five dollars after she’d opened a room for him with her pass key. She failed to recall which room it was.
Grannit and Bernie pulled registration cards for every officer staying on the fourth floor. Five new arrivals had checked in that day, and Grannit called each room from the switchboard. Two of the men were in their rooms. Grannit identified himself and asked them to come down to the lobby for questioning. Three did not answer. Two of those room keys rested in their pigeonholes on the rack behind the desk, so those men were reasonably assumed to be out of the hotel.
One key was missing, room 417, registered to a Lieutenant Alan Pearson, who according to his card had checked in shortly after noon. One of the clerks behind the desk then remembered that Lieutenant Pearson had come back from lunch shortly thereafter looking the worse for wear from drink, in the company of another British officer who had asked for the key to 417 and then helped him upstairs.
“Who was this other man?”
A major, he thought. Pressed for details, the clerk recalled only that the major wore a black eye patch, although he couldn’t say for certain which eye it covered, and that was all he could remember about him.