It was Shumuk’s formal message – passed by an agent of Moscow’s Communications Division – telling Parker to leave his house in Chicago immediately together with his ‘wife’ that brought Grechko to his final frantic act. Parker and his ‘wife’, Fusako, were immediately moved to a safe house in Toronto. On Thursday, 16 August, the Parkers flew to Moscow. In the six days leading up to his suicide Grechko exhausted every method of communicating with Fusako Parker: all failed. On the night of Sunday, 19 August, having finally discovered that the Parkers had gone to Toronto, he had even sent a team to break into the house. It was a desperate course of action; the act was poorly planned, the men untrained and hastily briefed. They had been arrested by local police.
After arriving at the motel with slurred speech and whisky on his breath, Grechko drank a whole bottle of Cutty Sark and swallowed an unknown amount of barbiturates. (The man from the USSR embassy who claimed the body would not permit an autopsy.) In his hand when he died Grechko held tightly to a sheet of Rousillon Beach Motel notepaper bearing the message, ‘Darling Fusako, I cannot go on without you. I love you, my beloved. I will always be your darling Yu-yu.’
‘Can I talk to Mr Kleiber, Melvin?’ Boyd Stuart asked.
‘Talk to him!’ said Kalkhoven, with his eyes still on Kleiber. ‘You can take him away and feed him to the alligators as far as I’m concerned, XPD the bastard!’
‘You listen to me,’ said Kleiber. He was on his feet and his eyes were bright. ‘We have a deal …’
‘Sit down, Kleiber,’ said Kalkhoven. He took a box of matches from his pocket. ‘You’ve run out of stock to trade, the shelves are empty, man. Grechko was your dinner ticket. You talk with this nice man here, or else …’ Impassively Kalkhoven took Grechko’s suicide note by the corner and set light to it. London and Washington had agreed that all such evidence would be destroyed on the spot, and that had been the order.
‘Go to hell,’ said Kleiber, but there was no conviction in his words.
‘“I have set before you life and death,”’ said Kalkhoven, ‘“blessing and cursing; therefore choose life, that both thou and thy seed may live.”’
Kleiber looked at Boyd Stuart. ‘Can you find a bottle of scotch?’
‘Probably,’ said Boyd Stuart. ‘Let’s go and find somewhere quiet to sit down. This place will be a madhouse when the heavy mob from Langley arrive to show us that the training manual way is the only way.’
Chapter 49
Someone had parked a large truck so that it obscured the view from the windows that faced away from the courtyard. Kleiber did not think that the truck had been parked like that by chance. All he could see of it from the kitchen window was the bottom of a gigantic K for Kleenex, or perhaps it was Kellogg’s – he could not see enough of the truck to decide, it was so close to the wall.
From the front window there was a view of the pool, artificially blue, lit by underwater floodlights, and the other three sides of the units which made up the motel. Behind the low, sloping roofs there were a few dusty palm trees and a high chimney which at night was lighted by a red warning light. Kleiber wondered whether that meant they were near an airfield, but there was little sound of aircraft. He knew they must be near Washington.
It had been like this ever since leaving Geneva. The Americans hauled him round the country like freight, never divulging where they were, where they had been or where they were going. They did not trust him; he could hardly blame them. Would they eventually kill him, he wondered. Was this process just a way of ensuring that there was no paperwork, no trace, no witnesses to his having arrived in the USA?
‘You say the Hitler Minutes never existed?’ he asked the Englishman. He did not wait for him to reply. ‘Well, I know they did exist.’
‘Really,’ said Stuart, without displaying too much interest. ‘How could you know?’
‘I was at the Merkers mine when Wever and Breslow delivered them there.’
‘So you were the mysterious Reichsbank Director Frank?’ Kleiber nodded and smiled. ‘Is that why Dr Böttger and the others selected you to get them back?’
‘Can I have a drink?’ said Kleiber. Stuart broke the sealed cap of the whisky bottle and poured some into the clear plastic beakers the motel provided. He had watched Kleiber fidgeting but now, with the drink in his possession, he was calm and made no haste to consume it. ‘No, it was the other way round. I selected them.’ He put the whisky to his mouth and drank some. ‘I selected them. I went to them and told them that someone named Lustig was collecting material to make a film. I told them he was digging deeply into the story of the Kaiseroda mine. I told them he’d already found an officer named MacIver who was spilling his guts out and that the story of the Hitler Minutes was sure to surface. I’d had money from Böttger before for such missions; I knew he’d buy this project.’
‘Well, you won’t get any more cash from him, Kleiber. He knows now that you were working for Moscow.’
Kleiber’s mouth tightened but he managed to force a strained smile. ‘What did he say?’
‘I wasn’t there,’ said Stuart. ‘But they’re returning a hundred million dollars to the bank in Geneva. Their official explanation is that there was a computer error. The name of Friedman is not mentioned.’
‘Young Stein will benefit,’ said Kleiber. ‘He’ll take the money and get married to Mary Breslow … that’s the final joke, eh?’
‘A lot of people will benefit,’ said Stuart, who knew that the final horrible joke was yet to come. ‘There’s Delaney, the nightclub owner, an ex-gangster named Petrucci, Pitman’s nephew in Arkansas … They’ll all benefit but the real beneficiaries are the clients of the bank, they’re the people you swindled, Kleiber.’
‘Put away your violin,’ said Kleiber.
‘How did you hear that Lustig was making a film?’
‘I was having dinner with Max Breslow one evening in Frankfurt. He mentioned the film quite casually. He asked me if I thought it could prove dangerous to us. I told him it wouldn’t be dangerous if the production was in our hands. I told him I might be able to raise enough money to buy Lustig out.’
‘Did Breslow know the money came from Böttger?’
Kleiber settled back in his chair and sat in silence for a moment before replying. ‘Max Breslow was a war casualty. When he was a young soldier he had guts. Once, long ago, he was tough, Mr Stuart, in the way that you and I are tough.’
‘Do we have something in common?’
‘You don’t fool me with your soft voice and your fancy accent, your old school tie and your vague smiles and deferential manner; I recognize the killer in you, Mr Stuart. I’ve had too many like you on my payroll to make a mistake.’
‘And Max Breslow?’
‘He believed that propaganda shit that the Nazis fed us all. He couldn’t see that the penpushers writing all that stuff about Aryans, the historical destiny of the Fatherland and ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer, were writing it because it paid better than doing translations of Karl Marx.’
‘But there came a time when doing translations of Karl Marx paid better?’
‘You play the music; I’ll sing the words, Mr Stuart. But poor old Max wasn’t so adaptable. When he realized that the Nazis were just another set of crooked politicians, it broke his spirit. He was never the same again. Now what is he? – a nothing!’
‘But he took over the Lustig film when you asked him.’
Kleiber laughed. ‘You think he might have turned me down, eh? Max is finished; nearly bankrupt. Who’d invest money in one of Breslow’s shoddy little films? His house is mortgaged to the very limit, he’s got no money saved, and only put his daughter through college by selling off his wife’s jewellery piece by piece. Sure, he jumped at the chance of taking over the Lusting film with the finance guaranteed, and a standard producer’s fee. He couldn’t afford to do otherwise.’
‘And all the time you were reporting to Moscow?’
‘The Russians were threatening to release some
phoney evidence about me being implicated in war crimes.’
Stuart allowed the word phoney to go unremarked. ‘And the KGB approved of your idea to involve Böttger and his Trust?’
‘The Trust provided perfect cover, and through them I got help from people who would never have helped the Russians. And what expertise! I could never have arranged that hundred-million-dollar coup against Pitman’s bank without having all the resources of the Trust behind me.’
‘What exactly did you tell Dr Böttger?’
‘They didn’t need much persuasion. Those fat businessmen could see the economic consequences of rewriting the history books to make Hitler into a hero. They didn’t want anyone saying that he’d been clever enough to make Winston Churchill come cringing.’
‘But Churchill changed his mind; Churchill turned down the peace terms.’
‘So Churchill becomes the warmonger who continued with the war that caused twenty million deaths. Any way you present the facts, Hitler comes out best.’
‘And that would have hurt the West German economy?’
‘Publicity and controversy leading on to speeches and demonstrations. Neo-Nazis fighting left-wingers in the streets. Once it started there is no telling where it might have ended.’
‘Especially with General Shumuk pulling the strings,’ said Stuart, but Kleiber had never heard of Shumuk and did not respond to this remark.
‘We Germans are like that,’ said Kleiber. ‘We’re always too anxious to please the people who conquer us. We flatter them and imitate them. Split down the centre, we now have two halves each trying slavishly to adopt the system, myth and methodology of our masters. But Böttger knew that West Germany needs the untarnished memory of Churchill and Roosevelt in a way that the other western countries don’t need them. Moscow Centre thought Böttger might be right and judging from the effort your people put into it, London did too.’ He smiled, and drank more whisky.
Stuart said, ‘They thought it might be a blow to the value of sterling on the international exchanges. It doesn’t need much to start a run. They worried about the psychological effect the idea of Churchill’s asking for peace would have on American public opinion. Here in the US, most anglophilia depends on Churchill’s wartime reputation as a man who never considered giving up the struggle. My people worried too about public opinion in those countries which Churchill was prepared to consign to the Nazi empire. Some of those countries now sell Britain oil and vital raw materials. There was plenty to worry about.’
At the sound of conversation outside, Kleiber got to his feet and went to the window. He looked across the pool to the units where two men in white coats were going to examine Grechko’s body. He watched them enter the door and then turned back to Stuart. ‘I was there,’ he said suddenly. ‘You know that, don’t you?’
‘I guessed,’ said Stuart. ‘I got your army service record. You were attached to the Führerhauptquartier for roughly the period of the Churchill visit. You were an intelligence officer: I guessed it was an attachment for security purposes, for the summit meeting.’
Kleiber looked at him. The British were like that. He never knew quite where he was with them, but they didn’t frighten him in the way the CIA men did.
‘I went out to the site with Dr Todt and the survey team. Before they even started on it.’
‘It was built specially for the Churchill meetings?’
‘Sure. It wasn’t much of a place. It’s still there. A couple of years ago I stopped off and had coffee at the hotel there. It’s not changed much: a church, a hotel and a few houses … a concrete bunker, plus a few wooden huts. Wolfschlucht, Hitler named it.’
‘So you were there before Churchill arrived?’
‘I helped arrange the new passes and the perimeter and so forth. It was a small party that arrived. No military attachés or war correspondents, no one in civilian clothing at all. It was obviously something very unusual. We were told only that it was to be a conference, and thought Mussolini was coming north. I suppose that’s what we were intended to think.’
‘But it was Churchill.’
‘He was the only one in civilian clothes. He wore a misshapen, grey rollbrim hat, a spotted bow-tie and a lumpy looking overcoat. His plane had no markings as I recall. We saw ten Messerschmitt fighters in loose formation above Churchill’s de Havilland when it arrived. They continued to circle while he landed at Le Gros Caillou, near Rocroi in France, about ten kilometres from us. They brought him up to Brûly in a Fiesler Storch communications aircraft. There was just room to land in the field behind the hotel.’
‘Churchill was alone?’
‘There was one person with him, a British colonel in civilian clothes. The Führer had a small guard of honour made up from the SS Begleit Kommando and the army’s FBB. Churchill was invited to inspect them but he waved the guard commander away. The two leaders went directly to the wooden hut where the secretaries and translators were waiting. The Führer greeted Churchill at the door of it; the two men did not shake hands. I got the idea that Churchill was making sure that there were no photographers there. He had stipulated that beforehand. We had special instructions to confiscate all cameras from everyone, and there were notices in the barrack huts threatening the death sentence for anyone not handing his camera over to the security service.’
‘So who was present at the meeting?’
‘Hitler, Churchill, Churchill’s colonel, our translator from the Foreign Office …’ Kleiber scratched his head. ‘That’s all, I think. Nearby there were secretaries and two more translators waiting in case they were needed.’
‘So who wrote up the Hitler Minutes?’
Kleiber smiled. ‘Reichsführer Himmler had a bureaucratic turn of mind. He persuaded the Führer that some proper record of the proceedings must be made. The Führer was nervous about compromising the talks and eventually Himmler took it upon himself to rig an underground line and a hidden microphone so that one of the army’s shorthand writers could keep a record of what was said.’
‘Who was that?’
‘You’ve guessed already, haven’t you?’ said Kleiber. ‘It was Franz Wever. The Führer used him many times for keeping shorthand notes of important meetings. He was one of the best shorthand writers they had.’
‘Franz Wever.’ So Wever had known who Reichsbank Director Frank really was.
‘He even denied it to me. That’s funny, isn’t it? He denied it to me: the man who helped to rig the cable to the hut where he was sitting. Franz was terrified that someone would find out about it. He was frightened that he’d be murdered on account of his secret.’
‘And eventually he was murdered because of it.’
Kleiber pulled a face and seemed about to argue the facts but decided against it. Franz Wever’s death was not a subject he wished to discuss with a member of the British Secret Intelligence Service.
‘Hitler was clever,’ he said. ‘He knew how to be modest and magnanimous. Instead of adopting the manner of the conqueror he was quiet spoken and polite to Churchill. He was a wonderful judge of character, you see. He knew he’d get far more out of Churchill if he behaved like an English gentleman in the presence of another such “lord”.’
‘But Hitler’s terms were tough. You must have read the transcript.’
‘Considering the situation, no. He admired the British Empire but he envied it too. His first concern was to make the German war machine entirely independent in terms of raw materials – rubber, oil, tungsten, chrome and so on. He was obviously planning to attack the USSR once the west was resolved.’
‘You mean he would have taken over British colonies?’
‘He said the Union Jack would continue to fly everywhere from Vancouver to Calcutta to Hong Kong but he wanted his trading links secured. A large proportion of the British merchant fleet would have come under German control. Hitler had drafted some ideas about that. Then of course there was the Royal Navy. Germany could not have permitted Britain to retain control of the Atlantic s
ea routes; it would have been like offering Churchill a chance to have his hands round our throat.’
‘Occupation of Britain?’
‘No. Just a few Germans in sensitive posts. Himmler to vet all senior police appointments. It would have given us enough control, or at least warning in time to counteract trouble.’
‘There was no shouting?’
‘No shouting at all. The summit went off remarkably well. The second meeting was very late – after midnight – and then there was the final meeting on the morning of Wednesday, 12 June. That was even more promising. Churchill and the Führer even shook hands. There were some muttered cheers. Churchill was smoking a cigar and smiling … To be allowed to smoke a cigar in the presence of the Führer – this was something unprecedented. We were all sure that the peace had been arranged. At least until the following Sunday.’
‘What happened on Sunday?’
‘It began very warm. I went past the church and saw four army officers kneeling in prayer. They were offering prayers for peace, they said. Hitler’s driver brought the big black three-axle Mercedes tourer up through the trees. Its roof was folded back, as it was for the big parades. The Führer drove to Schloss Acoz, near Charleroi, Belgium. I was one of the security detail that accompanied him.’
‘Schloss Acoz?’
‘To meet the young colonel who’d been with Churchill. He’d come to withdraw Churchill’s offer. He was a tall fellow, much taller than the Spanish staff officer who was with him. Spain was neutral of course. The Spanish officer came along to guarantee the safety of the Englishman. They were both in civilian clothes. The meeting took place in the open. There were just the three of them standing under the trees, the sun dappling the ground and making patches on the men as they shifted positions. Hitler was stiff. We saw his face tighten. We all knew that was a danger sign. The English colonel spoke first. He went on talking for two or three minutes. He had no notes to refer to but it was obviously a prepared message that he had committed to memory. Then Hitler asked some questions and there was a general conversation. The Spanish general said very little; he was there just to conduct the Englishman and be responsible for his safety.’