The Aquitaine Progression: A Novel

  “At the end you bank on the morality of a Jew, then? His acknowledgment of a debt.”

  “In part, yes, but not entirely, General. I know something about Leifhelm, about the way he’s maneuvered through the years. He’d have me shot, then send his men after the rest of you, leaving himself in the number one position.”

  “That’s exactly what he’d do,” agreed the Israeli.

  “And I didn’t think Van Headmer had any real authority north of Pretoria.”

  “Right again,” said Abrahms, walking back toward Converse. “So the hellhound created in Southeast Asia is a survivor.”

  “Let’s be more specific,” countered Joel. “I was sent out by people I don’t know who abandoned me without raising the slightest question as to my guilt or innocence. For all I know, they joined in the hunt to “kill me to save their own lives. Given these conditions I intend to survive.”

  “What about the woman? Your woman?”

  “She goes with me.” Converse put down the cigarette and picked up the gun. “What’s your answer? I can kill you now, or leave that to Bertholdier, or Leifhelm, if he kills the Frenchman first. Or I can bank on your morality, your acknowledgment of a debt. What’s it going to be?”

  “Put away the gun,” said Chaim Abrahms. “You have the word of a sabra.”

  “What’ll you do?” asked Joel, placing the weapon back on the table.

  “Do?” shouted the Israeli in a sudden burst of anger. “What I’ve always intended to do! You think I give a horse’s fart for this abstraction, this Aquitaine’s infrastructure? Do you think I care one whit for titles or labels or chains of command? Let them have it all! I only care that it works, and for it to work respectability must come out of the chaos along with strength. Bertholdier was right. I am too divisive a figure—as well as a Jew—to be so visible on the Euro-American scene. So I will be invisible—except in Eretz Yisrael, where my word will be the law of this new order. I, myself, will help the French bull get whatever medals he wants. I will not fight him, I will control him.”

  “How?”

  “Because I can destroy his respectability.”

  Converse sat forward, suppressing his astonishment. “His sex life? Those buried scandals?”

  “My Cod, no, you imbecile! You kick a man below his belt in public you ask for trouble. Half the people cry ‘Foul,’ thinking it could happen to them, and the other half applaud his courage to indulge himself—which they would very much like to do.”

  “Then how, General? How can you do this, destroy his respectability?”

  Abrahms sat down again in the brocaded chair, his thick body squeezed dangerously between the delicately carved mahogany arms. “By exposing the role he played in ‘code-name Aquitaine.’ The roles we all played in this extraordinary adventure that forced the civilized world to summon us and the strengths of our professional leadership. It’s entirely possible that all free Europe will turn to Bertholdier, as France nearly turned to him after De Gaulle. But one must understand a man like Bertholdier. He doesn’t merely seek power, he seeks the glory of power—the trappings, the adulation, the mysticism. He would rather give up certain intrinsic authority than lose any part of the glory. Me? I don’t give a shit about the glory. All I want is the power to get what I need, what I command. For the kingdom of Israel and its imprimatur in all of the Middle East.”

  “You expose him, you expose yourself. How can you win that Way?”

  “Because he’ll blink first. He’ll think of the glory and submit. He’ll do as I say, give me what I want.”

  “I think he’ll have you shot.”

  “Not when he’s told that if I die several hundred documents will be released describing every meeting we attended, every decision we made. Everything is scrupulously detailed, I assure you.”

  “You intended this from the beginning?”

  “From the beginning.”

  “You play rough.”

  “I’m a sabra. I play for the advantage—without it we would have been massacred decades ago.”

  “Among these documents is there a list of everyone in Aquitaine?”

  “No. It has never been my intention to jeopardize the movement. Call it whatever name you will, I believe truly in the concept. There must be a unified, international military-industrial complex. The world will not stay sane without it.”

  “But there is such a list.”

  “In a machine, a computer, but it must be programmed correctly, the proper codes used.”

  “Could you do it?”

  “Not without help.”

  “What about Delavane?”

  “You have certain perceptions yourself,” said the Israeli, nodding. “What about him?”

  Again Joel had to control his astonishment. The computer codes that released the master list of Aquitaine were with Delavane. At least the key symbols were. The remainder were provided by the four leaders across the Atlantic. Converse shrugged. “You haven’t really mentioned him. You’ve talked about Bertholdier, about the elimination of Leifhelm, and the impotence of Van Headmer, who could, however, bring in raw materials—”

  “I said ‘gold,’ ” corrected Abrahms.

  “Bertholdier said ‘raw materials.’ But what about George Marcus Delavane?”

  “Marcus is finished,” said the Israeli flatly. “He was coddled—we all coddled him—because he brought us the concept and he worked his end in the United States. We have equipment and matériel all over Europe, to say nothing of the contraband we’ve shipped to insurgents, just to keep them occupied.”

  “Clarification,” interrupted Joel. “ ‘Occupied’ means killing?”

  “All is killing. Disingenuous philosophers notwithstanding, the ends do justify the means. Ask a man hunted by killers if he will jump into human excrement to conceal himself.”

  “I’ve asked him,” said Converse. “I’m he, remember? What about Delavane?”

  “He’s a madman, a maniac. Have you ever heard his voice? He speaks like a man with his testicles in a vise. They cut off his legs, you know, amputated only months ago for diabetes. The great general felled from an excess of sugar! He’s tried to keep it a secret. He sees no one and no longer goes to his impressive office filled with photographs and flags and a thousand decorations. He operates out of his home, where the servants come only when he’s hidden in a darkened bedroom. How he wished it could have been a mortar shell or a bayonet charge, but no. Only sugar. He’s become worse, a raving fool, but even fools can have flashes of brilliance. He had it once.”

  “What about him?”

  “We have a man with him, an aide with the rank of colonel. When everything begins, when our commands are in place, the colonel will do as instructed. Marcus will be shot for the good of his own concept.”

  It was Joel’s turn to get out of his chair. Once again he walked to the cathedral window across the room and felt the cool mountain breezes on his face. “This examination is finished, General,” he said.

  “What?” roared Abrahms. “You want your life. I want guarantees!”

  “Finished,” repeated Converse as the door opened and a captain in the Israeli Army walked inside, his gun leveled at Chaim Abrahms.

  “There will be no discussion between us, Herr Converse,” said Erich Leifhelm, standing by the door of the study. The doctor from Bonn had just left the room. “You have your prisoner. Execute him. Over many years and in many ways I have been waiting for this moment. In truth, I’m weary of the morbidity.”

  “Are you telling me you want to die?” asked Joel, standing by the table with the pistol on top.

  “No one wants to die, least of all a soldier in the quiet of a strange room. Drums and sharp commands to a firing squad are preferable—there’s a certain meaning in that. But I’ve seen too much death to go into hysterics. Pick up your pistol and get it over with. I would if I were you.”

  Converse studied the German’s face, whose strange eyes were noncommittal, expressing only contempt. “You
mean it, don’t you?”

  “Shall I give orders myself? There was a newsreel years ago. A black man did that against a bloodstained wall in Castro’s Cuba. I’ve always admired that soldier.” Leifhelm suddenly shouted, “Achtung! Soldaten! Präsentiert das Gewehr!”

  “For Christ’s sake, why not talk?” roared Joel, riding over the fanatical voice.

  “Because I have nothing to say. My actions speak, my life has spoken! What is it, Herr Converse? You have no stomach for executions? You cannot give the order to yourself? A small, insignificant man’s conscience will not permit him to kill? You are laughable!”

  “I remind you, General, I’ve killed several people these past few weeks. Killed with less feeling than I ever thought possible.”

  “The lowliest coward running for his life will kill in panic. There is no character in that, merely survival. No, Herr Converse, you are insignificant, an impediment even your own forces care nothing about. You abound in this world. There is an odd phrase you have in your country that so readily applies to you, a phrase our associate uses frequently. You are a ‘shit-kicker,’ Herr Converse, nothing more and probably less.”

  “What did you say? What did you call me?”

  “You heard me clearly. A shit-kicker. A little man who steps in waste. Shit-kicker, Herr Converse. Shit-kicker!”

  He was hack a lifetime ago, on the bridge of a carrier, the face in front of him contorted, obscene, the voice shrill. Shit-kicker! Shit-kicker, shit-kicker, shit-kicker! Then other explosions followed, and he was blown into the dark clouds, the wind and the rain buffeting him, hammering him as he swung down toward the earth. Down to the ground and four years of madness and death and dying children weeping. Madness! Shit-kicker … shit-kicker … shit-kicker!

  Converse reached down for the pistol on the table. He picked it up and, with his index finger around the trigger, leveled it at Erich Leifhelm.

  And then a sudden shock went through him. What was he doing? He needed all three men of Aquitaine. Not one, not two, but three! It was the basis, the spine of what he had to do! But still there was something else. He had to kill, he had to destroy the deadly human virus staring at him, wanting death. Oh, Jesus! Had Aquitaine won, after all? Had he become one of them? If he had, he had lost.

  “Your kind of courage is cheap, Leifhelm,” he said softly, lowering the gun. “Better a quick bullet than other alternatives.”

  “I live by my code. I die by it gladly.”

  “Cleanly, you mean. Swiftly. No Dachau, no Auschwitz.”

  “You have the gun.”

  “I thought you had so much to offer.”

  “My successor has been chosen carefully. He will carry out details, every nuance of my agenda.”

  The opening was there, a strategy suddenly revealed. Joel pushed the button.

  “Your successor?”

  “Ja.”

  “You have no successor, Field Marshal.”

  “What?”

  “Any more than you have an agenda. You don’t have anything without me. It’s why I brought you here. Just you.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “Sit down, General. I’ve several things to tell you, and for your own sake you’d better be seated. Your own execution might be more preferable to you than what I’ve got to say.”

  “Liar!” screamed Erich Leifhelm four minutes later, his hands gripping the arms of the brocaded chair. “Liar, liar, liar!” he roared.

  “I didn’t expect you to believe me,” said Joel calmly, standing in the middle of the spacious, book-lined study. “Call Bertholdier in Paris and tell him you just heard some disturbing news and you’d like a clarification. Say it outright; you’ve learned that while you were in Essen, Bertholdier and Abrahms came to see me at your place in Bonn.”

  “How would I know that?”

  “The truth. They paid a guard to open the door—I don’t know which one, I didn’t see him—but a guard did unlock the door and let them in.”

  “Because they believed you were an informer, sent out by Delavane, himself?”

  “That’s what they told me.”

  “You were drugged! There were no such indications!”

  “They were suspicious. They didn’t know the doctor and they didn’t trust the Englishman. I don’t have to tell you they don’t trust you. They thought the whole thing might be a hoax. They wanted to cover themselves.”

  “Incredible!”

  “Not when you think about it,” said Converse, sitting down opposite the German. “How did I really get the information I had? How did I know the exact people to reach—except through Delavane? That was their thinking.”

  “That Delavane would do this—could do it?” began the astonished Leifhelm.

  “I know what that means now,” interrupted Joel quickly, seizing on the new opening presented him. “Delavane’s finished, they both admitted it when they understood he was the last person on earth I’d work for. Maybe they were throwing me a few crumbs before setting me up for my own execution.”

  “That had to be done!” exclaimed the Third Reich’s once youngest field marshal. “Certainly you can understand. Who were you? Where did you come from? You yourself did not know. You spoke of inconsequential names and lists and a great deal of money but nothing that made sense. Who had penetrated us? Since we could not find out, you had to be turned into a pariah. Into something rotten. A thing of rot no one would touch.”

  “You did it very well.”

  “For that I must take credit,” said Leifhelm, nodding. “It was essentially my organization. Everything was mine.”

  “I didn’t bring you here to discuss your achievements. I brought you here to save my life. You can do that for me—the people who sent me out either can’t or won’t—but you can. All I have to do is give you a reason.”

  “By implying that Abrahms and Bertholdier conspire against me?”

  “I won’t imply anything, I’ll give it to you straight in their own words. Remember, neither one of them thought I’d leave your place except as a corpse conveniently shot in the vicinity of some particularly gruesome assassination.” Suddenly Converse got out of the chair, shaking his head. “No!” he said emphatically. “Call your trusted French and Israeli allies, your fellow Aquitainians. Say anything you like, just listen to their voice—you’ll be able to tell. It takes an accomplished liar to spot other liars, and you’re the best.”

  “I find that offensive.”

  “Oddly enough, I meant it as a compliment. It’s why I reached you. I think you’re going to be the winner over here, and after what I’ve been through I want to go with a winner.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Oh, come on, let’s be honest. Abrahms is hated; he’s insulted everyone in Europe, the U.K. and the U.S. who doesn’t agree with his expansionist policies for Israel. Even his own countrymen can’t shut him up. All they can do is censure him, and he keeps on screaming. He’d never be tolerated in any kind of international federation.”

  The Nazi quickly, repeatedly shook his head. “Never!” he shouted. “He is the most loathsome man to come out of the Middle East. And, of course, he’s a Jew. But how is Bertholdier to be equated in this manner?”

  Joel paused before answering. “His manner,” he replied thoughtfully. “He’s imperious, arrogant. He sees himself not only as a great military figure and a history-making power broker, but also as some sort of god, above other men. There’s no room on his Olympus for mortals. Also he’s French. The English and the Americans wouldn’t give him spit: one De Gaulle in a century is enough for them.”

  “There’s clarity in your thoughts. He’s the sort of abominable egotist only the French can suffer. He is, of course, a reflection of the entire country.”

  “Van Headmer doesn’t count except where he can bring South Africa around for raw materials.”

  “Agreed,” said the German.

  “But you, on the other hand,” Converse went on rapidly, again sitting down
, “worked with the Americans and the English in Berlin and Vienna. You helped implement occupation policies, and in good conscience you turned over evidence to both the U.S. and the U.K. prosecution teams in Nuremberg. Finally, you became Bonn’s spokesman in NATO. Whatever you were in the past, they like you.” Again Joel paused, and when he continued there was a degree of deference in his voice. “Therefore, General, you’re the winner, and you can save my life. All you need is a reason.”

  “Then give it to me.”

  “Use the phone first.”

  “Don’t be an idiot and don’t take me for one! You would not insist so unless you were sure of yourself, which means you are telling the truth. And if those Schweine conspire against me, I will not inform them that I’m aware of it! What did they say?”

  “You’re to be killed. They can’t risk the accusation that an old-line member of the Nazi party has assumed vital controls in West Germany. Even under Aquitaine there’d be too many cries of ‘Foul!’—too much fuel for the inevitable dissenters. A younger man or someone who thinks like they do, but with no party affiliations in his past, will take your place. But no one you recommend.”

  Leifhelm was braced rigidly in the brocaded chair, his aged but still taut body immobile, his pallid face with the piercing light-blue eyes like an alabaster mask. “They have made this most holy decision?” he said icily through lips that barely moved. “The vulgar Jew and the depraved French prince of maggots dare to attempt such a move against me?”

  “Not that it matters, but Delavane agrees.”

  “Delavane! A raging, infantile clump of fantasies! The man we knew two years ago has disintegrated to a point beyond senility! He doesn’t know it, but we give him orders, couched naturally as suggestions and beneficial possibilities. He has no more powers of reason than Adolf Hitler had in his last years of madness.”

  “I don’t know about that,” said Converse. “Abrahms and Bertholdier didn’t go into it other than to say he was finished. They talked about you.”