The Aquitaine Progression: A Novel

  “I’ve heard it all before, Ilse,” Leifhelm broke in wearily. “There are no statutes for so-called war criminals and expatriated funds. So the hypocrites choke on their hypocritical rules the instant they cost money, and abandon them.”

  “You are always so perceptive, my general, and I have always been so loyal. I’ve never refused you a single request whether it was professional in nature or far more intimate. Please. Two million American! It will take but ten or fifteen minutes!”

  “You’ve been like a good niece, I can’t deny it, Ilse. And there is no way anyone could know about you in other matters.… Very well, this evening then. I’m dining at the Steigenberger at nine o’clock. I’ll stop at the Schlosspark at eight-fifteen or thereabouts. You can buy me a gift with your—shall we say—ill-conceived new riches.”

  “I’ll meet you in the lobby.”

  “My driver will accompany me.”

  “Ach, bring twenty men!”

  “He’s worth twenty-five,” Leifhelm said.

  Fitzpatrick sat in the chair in the small conference room on the second floor of the hotel and examined the gun, the manual of instructions on his lap. He tried to match what the clerk had told him to the diagrams and instructions, and was satisfied that he knew enough. There were basic similarities to the standard Navy issue Colt .45, the only handgun he was familiar with, and the technical information was extraneous to his needs. The weapon he had purchased was a Heckler & Koch PGS auto pistol, about six inches long, its caliber nine millimeters, and with a nine-shell magazine clip. The instructions emphasized such points as “polygonal rifling” and “sliding roller lock functions”; he let the manual slip to the floor, and practiced removing the clip and slapping it back into place. He could load the weapon, aim it and fire it; those were all that was necessary and he trusted the last would not be necessary.

  He glanced at his watch; it was almost eight o’clock. He shoved the automatic into his belt, reached down for the instructions and stood up, looking around the room, mentally checking off the movements and the locations he had designated for himself. As he had expected, the Fishbein woman had told him Leifhelm would be accompanied by someone, a “driver” in this case, and it could be assumed the man had other functions. If so, he would have no chance to perform them.

  The room—one of twenty-odd conference rooms in the hotel—that he had reserved under the name of a fictitious company was not large, but there were structural arrangements that could be put to advantage. The usual rectangular table was in the center, three chairs on each side and two at the ends, one with a telephone. There were additional chairs against the walls for stenographers and observers—all this was normal. However, in the center of the left wall was a doorway that led to a very small room apparently used for private conversations. Inside was another telephone, which when off the hook caused a button on the first telephone on the conference table to light up; confidentiality had its limits in Bonn. The hallway door opened onto a small foyer, thus prohibiting those entering from scanning the room while standing in the corridor.

  Connal folded the Heckler & Koch instructions, put them in his jacket pocket, and walked over to the table to survey his set pieces. He had gone to an office-supply store and purchased the appropriate items. On the far end of the table by the telephone—which was placed perpendicular to the edge, the buttons in clear view—were several file folders next to an open briefcase (from a distance its dark plastic looked like expensive leather). Scattered about were papers, pencils and a yellow legal pad, the top pages looped over. The setting was familiar to anyone who had ever had an appointment with an attorney, said learned counsel having put his astute observations down on paper prior to the conference.

  Fitzpatrick retraced his steps to the chair, moved it forward several feet, and crossed to the door of the small side room. He had turned on the lights—two table lamps flanking a short couch; he went to the one above the telephone and turned it off. He then walked back to the open door and stood between it and the wall, peering through the narrow vertical space broken up by upper and lower hinges. He had a clear view of the foyer’s entrance; three people would pass into the conference room and he would come out.

  There was a knock on the hallway door—the rapid, impatient tapping of an heiress unable to control herself. He had told the Fishbein woman the location of the room, but nothing else. No name or number, and in her anxiety she had not asked about either. Fitzpatrick went to the telephone table in the small room, lifted the phone out of its cradle and placed it on its side. He returned to his position behind the door, angling himself so as to look through the crack, his body in the shadows. He took the pistol from his belt, held it in front of him and shouted in a friendly voice, loud enough to be heard outside in the hotel corridor. “Bitte, kommen Sie herein! Die Türe ist offen. Ich telefoniere gerade!”

  The sound of the door as it opened preceded Ilse Fishbein as she walked rapidly into the room, her eyes directed at the conference table. She was followed by Erich Leifhelm, who glanced about and then turned slightly, nodding his head. A third man in the uniform of a chauffeur came into view, his hand in the pocket of his black jacket. Connal then heard the second sound he needed to hear. The hallway door was slammed shut.

  He yanked back the small door and quickly stepped around it, the gun extended, aimed directly at the chauffeur.

  “You!” he cried in German. “Take your hand out of your pocket! Slowly!” The woman gasped, then opened her mouth to scream. Fitzpatrick interrupted harshly. “Be quiet! As your friend will tell you, I haven’t anything to lose. I can kill the three of you and be out of the country in an hour, leaving the police to look for a Mr. Parnell who doesn’t exist.”

  The chauffeur, the muscles of his jaw rippling, removed his hand from his pocket, his fingers rigid. Leifhelm stared in anger and fear at Connal’s gun, his face no longer ashen but flushed. “You dare?”

  “I dare, Field Marshal,” said Fitzpatrick. “Just as you dared forty years ago to rape a young kid and make damned sure that she and her whole family never walked out of the camps. You bet your ass I dare, and if I were you, I wouldn’t give me the slightest cause to be any angrier than I am.” Connal spoke to the woman. “You. Inside that briefcase on the table are eight strands of rope. Start with the driver. Bind his hands and feet; I’ll tell you how. Now! Quickly!”

  Four minutes later the chauffeur and Leifhelm sat in two conference chairs, their ankles and wrists bound, the driver’s weapon removed from his pocket. Connal checked the ropes, the knots having been tied under his instructions. Everything was secure; the more one writhed, the tighter the knots would become. He ordered the panicked Fishbein woman into a third chair; he lashed her hands to the arms and her feet to the legs.

  Rising, Connal picked up the automatic from the table and approached Leifhelm, who was sitting in the chair next to the lighted telephone. “Now,” he said, the gun pointed at the German’s head. “As soon as I hang up the phone in the other room we’re going to make a call from here.” He walked quickly into the small side room, hung up the telephone, and returned. He sat down next to the bound Leifhelm and took a scrap of paper out of the open briefcase. On it was written the phone number of the general’s estate on the Rhine beyond Bad Godesberg.

  “What do you think you’ll accomplish?” asked Leifhelm.

  “Trade-off,” replied Fitzpatrick, the barrel of the gun pressed against the German’s temple. “You for Converse.”

  “Mein Gott!” whispered Ilse Fishbein as the chauffeur writhed, his hands straining against the ropes, which were now biting into his wrists.

  “You believe anyone will listen to you, much less carry out your orders?”

  “They will if they want to see you alive again. You know I’m right, General. This gun isn’t so loud—I made sure of that. I can turn on the radio and kill you and be on a plane out of Germany before you’re found. This room is reserved for the night with instructions that we’re not to be disturb
ed for any reason whatsoever.” Connal shifted the weapon to his left hand, picked up the telephone, and dialed the number written on the scrap of paper.

  “Guten Tag. Hier bei General Leifhelm.”

  “Put someone in authority on this phone,” said the Navy lawyer in perfect German. “I have a gun less than a foot away from General Leifhelm’s head and I’ll kill him right now unless you do as I say.”

  There were muffled shouts over the line as a hand was held against the mouthpiece. In seconds a crisp British accent was speaking slowly, deliberately in English.

  “Who is this and what do you want?”

  “Well, what do you know? This sounds like Major Philip Dunstone—that was the name, wasn’t it? You don’t sound half so friendly as you did last night.”

  “Don’t do anything rash, Commander. You’ll regret it.”

  “And don’t you do anything stupid, or Leifhelm will regret it sooner—that is, until he can’t regret anything any longer. You’ve got one hour to get Converse to the airport and inside the Lufthansa security gate. He has a reservation on the ten o’clock flight to Washington, D.C., by way of Frankfurt. I’ve made arrangements. I’ll be calling a number in a room where he’ll be taken and I’ll expect to talk with him. After I do, I’ll leave here and call you on another phone, telling you where your employer is. Just get Converse to that security gate. One hour, Major!” Fitzpatrick shoved the phone in front of Leifhelm’s face, and pressed the barrel of the gun into the German’s temple.

  “Do as he says,” said the General, choking on the words.

  The minutes went by slowly, stretching into a quarter of an hour, then thirty, the silence finally broken by Leifhelm. “So you found her,” he said, gesturing his head at Ilse Fishbein, who trembled as tears streaked down her full cheeks.

  “Just as we found out about Munich forty years ago, and a hell of a lot of other things. You’re all on your way to that great big war room in the sky, Field Marshal, so don’t worry about whether I’ll go back on my word to your English butler. I wouldn’t miss seeing you bastards paraded for everyone to see what you really are. People like you give the military everywhere a goddamned rotten name.”

  There was a slight commotion from the hallway beyond the door. Connal looked up, raising the gun and holding it directly at Leifhelm’s head.

  “Was ist?” said the German, shrugging.

  “Keine Bewegung!”

  From the hotel corridor came the strains of a melody sung by several male voices more off key than on. Another conference in one of the other rooms had broken up, obviously as much from the excessive intake of alcohol as from the completion of a business agenda. Raucous laughter pierced a refrain as harmony was unsuccessfully attempted. Fitzpatrick relaxed, lowering the automatic; no one on the outside knew the name or number of the room.

  “You say men like me give your profession—which is my profession as well—a seriously bad name,” said Leifhelm. “Has it occurred to you, Commander, that we might elevate that profession to one of indispensable greatness in a world that needs us badly?”

  “Needs us?” asked Connal. “We need the world first and not your kind of world. You tried it once and blew it, don’t you remember?”

  “That was one nation led by a madman trying to impose his imprimatur over the globe. This is many nations with one class of self-abnegating professionals coming together for the good of all.”

  “Whose definition? Yours? You’re a funny fellow, General. Somehow I question your benevolent tendencies.”

  “Indiscretions of a deprived youth whose name and rightful opportunities were stolen from him should not be held against the man a half-century later.”

  “Deprived or depraved? I think you made up for lost time pretty quickly and as brutally as you could. I don’t like your remedies.”

  “You have no vision.”

  “Thanks be to Jesus, Mary, and Joseph it’s not yours.” The singing out in the corridor faded briefly, then swelled again, more discordant and louder than before. “Maybe that’s some of your old Dachau playboys having a beer bust.”

  Leifhelm shrugged.

  Suddenly the door burst open, crashing into the wall as three men raced in, spits filling the air as silenced guns fired, hands jerking back and forth, the surface of the table chewed up, splinters of wood flying everywhere. Fitzpatrick felt the repeated stabs of intense pain in his arm as the automatic was blown out of his grip. He looked down and saw the blood drenching the fabric of his right sleeve. Though in shock he glanced about him. Ilse Fishbein was dead, her bleeding skull shattered by a fusillade of bullets; the chauffeur was smiling obscenely. The door was closed as if nothing had happened.

  “Stümper,” Leifhelm said as one of the invaders cut the ropes around his wrists. “I used that term only yesterday, Commander, but I did not know how right I was. Did you think a single telephone call could not be traced to a single room? It was all too coincidentally symmetrical. Converse is ours and suddenly this poor whore comes into immense riches—American riches. I grant you it was entirely possible—such bequests are made frequently by sausage-soaked idiots who don’t realize the harm they do, but the timing was too perfect, too—amateurish.”

  “You’re one son of a bitch.” Connal shut his eyes, trying to force the pain out of his mind, unable to move his fingers.

  “Why, Commander,” said the general, getting out of the chair, “do I sense the bravado of fear? Do you think I’m going to have you killed?”

  “You sense it. I won’t give you any more than that.”

  “You’re quite wrong. Considering the nature of your military leave, you can be of minor but unique service to us. One more statistic to disrupt a pattern. You’ll be our guest, Commander, but not in Germany proper. You are going on a trip.”

  17

  Converse slowly opened his eyes, a dead, iron weight on his lids and nausea in his throat—blurred darkness everywhere—and a terrible stinging at his side, on his arm, flesh separated from flesh, stretched and inflamed. Blindly he tried to touch the offending spot, then gasping, pulled back in pain. Somewhere light was creeping around the dark space above him, picking its way through moving obstructions, peering into the shadows. Objects slowly came into focus—the metal rim of the cot next to his face, two wooden chairs opposite each other at a small table in the distance, a door also in the distance, but farther away and shut … then another door, this one open, a white sink with a pair of dull-metal faucets on the left in a far-away cubicle. The light? It was still moving, now dancing, flickering. Where was it?

  He found it: high in the wall on either side of the closed door were two rectangular windows, the short curtains billowing in the breeze. The windows were open, but oddly not open, not clear, the spaces interrupted. Joel raised his head, supporting himself on his forearm and squinted, trying to see more clearly. He focused on the interruptions behind the swelling curtains—thin black metal shafts vertically connecting the window frames. They were bars. He was in a cell.

  He fell back on the cot, swallowing repeatedly to lessen the burning in his throat, and moved his arm in circles trying to lessen the pain of the … wound? Yes, a wound, a gunshot! The realization jarred his memory; a dinner party had turned into a battleground filled with hysteria. Blinding lights and sudden jolts of pain had been accompanied by strident voices bombarding him, incessant echoes pounding in his ears as he tried desperately to repel the piercing assaults. Then there had been moments of calm, the drone of a single voice in the mists. Converse closed his eyes, pressing his lids tightly together with all his strength as another realization struck him and disturbed him deeply. That voice in the swirling mists was his voice; he had been drugged, and he knew he had given up secrets.

  He had been drugged before, a number of times in the North Vietnamese camps, and as always there was the sickening feeling of numbed outrage. His mind had been stripped and violated, his voice made to perform obscenities against the last vestiges of his will.

/>   And, again as always, there was the empty hole in his stomach, a vacuum that ran deep and produced only weakness. He felt starved and probably was. The chemicals usually induced vomiting as the intestines rejected the unnatural substance. It was strange, he reflected, opening his eyes and following the moving shafts of light, but those memories from years ago evoked the same self-protective instincts that had helped him then—so many years ago. He could not waste energy; he had to conserve what strength he had. Regain new strength. Otherwise there was nothing but the numbed outrage and neither his mind nor his body could do anything about it.

  There was a sound across the room! Then another and another after that! The grating sound of sliding metal told him that a bolt was being released; the sharp sound of a key followed by the twisting of a knob meant that the door in the far distant wall was about to be opened. It was, and a blinding burst of sunlight filled the cell. Converse shielded his eyes, peering between his fingers. The blurred, frazzled silhouette of a man stood in the doorframe carrying a flat object. The figure walked in and Joel, blinking, saw it was the chauffeur who had electronically searched him in the driveway.

  The uniformed driver crossed to the table and deftly lowered the flat object; it was a tray, its contents covered by a cloth. It was only then that Converse’s attention was drawn back to the sunlit doorway. Outside, milling about in anxious contempt was the pack of Dobermans, their shining black eyes continually shifting toward the door, their lips curled, teeth bared in unending quiet snarls.

  “Guten Morgen, mein Herr,” said Leifhelm’s chauffeur, then shifting to English, “Another beautiful day on the northern Rhine, no?”

  “It’s bright out there, if that’s what you mean,” replied Joel, his hand still cupping his eyes. “I suppose I should be grateful to be able to notice after last night.”

  “Last night?” The German paused, then added quietly, “It was two nights ago, Amerikaner. You’ve been here for the past thirty-three hours.”