Dry Bones (20 page)

“Don’t worry, done it right for Ike, do it right for you.” The cook wiped knife on apron, muttered, “Wasn’t for my cookin’ Ike wouldn’t had the swing he needed to roll them Krauts.”

Dinner was served. The roast was medium rare and delicious. Mulholland summoned the cook from the kitchen for a round of applause. Everyone ate heartily, especially the girls. After dinner, one of them did an a cappella solo,
a bluebird over white cliffs of Dover, tomorrow, just you wait and see.
Sweet but sad.

They went back to the bar.

“This is beginning to feel like a goddamn wake,” Mulholland barked. “War’s over, everybody! Get some goddamn music on the radio.” The bartender tuned in a tribute to Glenn Miller, who’d gone missing the previous Christmas when the plane carrying him to rejoin his fifty-piece Army Air Force Band in Paris went down over the English Channel.

“Moonlight Serenade” came on. Some of the guests started to dance with their dates. The party finally took off when a late arrival showed up with a portable phonograph and a mixed stack of V-Disc 78s and prewar swing records made by Benny Goodman, Louis Armstrong, and Tommy Dorsey.

“Come on,” he roared. “Let’s get it shaking!”

Dining room became dance hall. Table and chairs were pushed against the wall. The English girls, previously reserved, revealed themselves expert, uninhibited jitterbuggers. Even Mulholland joined in, doing a passable Lindy. The longer it went on, the more girls and soldiers wandered in—mostly Army Air Corps—spontaneous jumble of jiving, swinging, colliding couples caught up celebrating first postwar Christmas.

Peace on earth—long as it lasts. Goodwill to all—for now.

The cook stood next to Dunne at the bar. “Man, makes you wonder, don’t it, the way Mister Charlie can’t abide the colored but can’t get enough of our music.”

Next morning, Dunne received another telegram from Bassante with a New Year’s greeting and solemn promise to keep the next appointment, which he scheduled for the following week, at the Drummond Hotel, at one in the afternoon.

D
RUMMOND
H
OTEL
, L
ONDON

D
UNNE ARRIVED EARLY
. T
HE CLOCK IN THE HOTEL LOBBY WAS FIVE
minutes shy of one. The only other guest, a tweedy, professorial type, slouched next to the softly playing radio in the corner. Dunne caught a few lines of a BBC commentary on “the spirituals of the American Negro.” Uninterested in the radio as well as the copies of the London
Times
and the
Tribune
splayed on the stub-legged table in front of his chair, Dunne signaled for the waiter.

Black swallowtail coat hanging from curtain-rod shoulders, the waiter turned out to be the same one from a year ago. He approached with a slight limp. His parchment-like skin tautly stretched from crown of head across sharp jut of cheek and awkwardly prominent Adam’s apple. He replaced the used napkin with a fresh one and served Dunne’s scotch and side of water from a tray the same tarnished silver as his thinning hair. Decidedly less harried than he’d been the year before, he lowered the glasses onto the table with the solemnity of a priest placing a chalice on the altar.

Dunne was resolved not to give vent to his resentment at Bassante’s several reschedulings. What good would it do? Bassante would have his excuses—true or false, Dunne didn’t give a hoot. All he cared about was finishing this last bit of business and getting home—ASAP.

Bassante arrived punctually at one and checked his coat. His well-tailored blue chalk-stripe suit gave him a passing resemblance to those transatlantic diplomats in the newsreels shuttling in pursuit of a framework for Europe’s postwar reconstruction. He leaned over the front desk. His needle nose pointed down at the clerk, who nodded in Dunne’s direction.

“Don’t get up.” Bassante gestured for Dunne to stay where he was. “I owe you a
mea maxima culpa
.” He rearranged the adjoining chair so they sat shoulder to shoulder. “I see you’ve already ordered a drink. It would be rude to make you drink alone. This nation, unlike ours, frowns on bad manners.”

The waiter returned. Bassante ordered a glass of sherry. His face had lost none of its fierce angularity, but he seemed more at ease than in Bari. “Let me reiterate my apology for all these delays as well as my great gratitude for your patience.”

“Just so you know, I’m over my surgery, my papers are filed, so whatever this involves, it better be quick.”

“It will be, I promise.” Bassante felt under his chair and did the same to the table.

“Are you doing what I think you’re doing?”

“What’s that?” Bassante sat back.

“Scouting a mike.”

“I suggest you do the same.”

“You’re serious, aren’t you?”

“Did you choose the chair or did someone direct you?”

“Does it matter?”

“Check the chair and we’ll know.”

Dunne ran his hand across its underside. Nothing.

The waiter returned. A tray with sherry-filled crystal glass was balanced on his right palm. “Will that be all, sir?”

“Fine for now, thank you.”

“As you wish, sir.” He retreated with studied footsteps that mitigated his lameness.

Bassante raised his glass in a quasi toast. “Here’s to Kipling. He had it right. ‘Lo, all our pomp of yesterday / Is one with Nineveh and Tyre! / The tumult and the shouting dies / The Captains and the Kings depart.’ No empire lasts forever. The best the Brits can do is shuffle off with a modicum of dignity. This is among the truths—”

“Look, Bassante, let’s get down to business,
now
! The war’s done, and I’m going home.” Dunne slammed down his glass. The sound echoed through the room.

The gentleman by the radio gave a daggerlike stare in their direction. Obviously perplexed—if not surprised—by their rude behavior, he fumbled with the dial, momentarily amplifying a snatch of the spiritual he’d been listening to: “Oh those bones, oh those bones, oh those skeleton bones.” He flipped the dial in the opposite direction, turned the radio off, and headed to the dining room.

Bassante sighed. “I’m afraid we’ve put another dent in Anglo-American relations.”

“Let’s cut to the chase, okay?”

“You’re right. I apologize again. It’s complicated.” Bassante picked up the
Tribune
from the table. He crossed his legs, resting right ankle atop left knee. Toe caps of his narrow, elegant black wing tips were decorated with intersecting circles of subtle perforations. “I don’t know if you saw it, but there was an important article in this paper back in October.”

“I don’t read the papers,
especially
the English ones.” A taxi pulled up in front of the window. A bowler-hatted Brit with umbrella hooked on his forearm got out. The taxi idled where it was, awaiting another hire. Dunne felt ready to run out, hop in, get back to his quarters, and start packing.

Bassante folded the newspaper and tapped Dunne’s knee. “You should look up this one. Everyone should. ‘You and the Atom Bomb,’ by Orwell, an English journalist. Bleak but prophetic. What
we face, he writes, is not the kind of
drôle de guerre
—the phony war that preceded the German blitzkrieg. This is a struggle neither side can wage outright. It will be fought through subversion and in proxy wars, a
guerre froide
, or cold war, a ‘peace that is no peace.’ It’s already under way. No way to tell when it will end.”

“What’s any of this got to do with Dick Van Hull?”

“I’m the one who got Dick involved, or at least got him started. Donovan called him back to Washington to help save the OSS. Once Truman pulled the plug, I recruited Dick to the Counter–intelligence Corps. The CIC’s brief, I explained to him, is ensuring that the prosecution of war criminals doesn’t end with the handful of headliners on trial in Nuremberg. The Reich’s terror apparatus wasn’t limited to the SS, the Gestapo, and the like. The murder of millions wasn’t the work of a small gang of fanatics.

“The crimes couldn’t have been carried out without the
schreibtischtäter
, the ‘desk criminals’—eugenicists, physicians, scientists, industrialists, railroad officials, professors, bureaucrats, and paper pushers who signed the necessary forms and assigned subordinates to do the dirty work. The British War Crimes Group has ten thousand names of those involved in abetting mass murder. The actual number is far beyond that—horrifyingly far.”

“How do you try that many?”

“At a bare minimum you put in place a process that establishes the dimensions of the crime, identifies those involved, punishes the worst offenders, and publicly brands and bars their accomplices from government employment.”

“Isn’t that what’s going on in Nuremberg?”

“It’s a start. An infinitesimally small start. But more and more, the emphasis is putting the war behind us, wiping the slate clean, and squaring off against the Russians.”

“You still haven’t explained the fix that Dick Van Hull is in.”

“I’m getting there. With his linguistic skills and OSS experience, he was perfect for the job. He was with me at a CIC briefing
last summer when it came up that Reinhard Gehlen and several adjutants were in Washington to confer with some of the brass.”

“Should I know who Reinhard Gehlen is?”

“Forgive me for taking for granted what I shouldn’t. Gehlen was made head of German military intelligence for Eastern Operations when Operation Barbarossa was launched. He amassed a tremendous amount of data on the Red Army. No mere observer, he was intimately familiar with the fact that at least three million Soviet POWs were systematically starved to death, that the interrogation of prisoners routinely included torture and execution, that millions more civilians were murdered throughout the Baltics, Ukraine, Belarus, and Poland, and that the extermination of European Jews had been undertaken by the SS.

“After Hitler fired him in March of ’45, Gehlen and a cadre of aides transferred the reams of information they’d gathered on the Red Army to microfiche. The Wehrmacht’s surrender was unconditional. Gehlen’s was on
his
terms. Although he was far more implicated than Nuremberg defendants like Konstantin von Neurath and Franz von Papen, who were never near a battlefield or concentration camp, Gehlen offered his archives and expertise in exchange for immunity. He counted on present utility trumping unsavory past. He hasn’t been disappointed. He’s been returned to the American zone in Germany and put to work. Van Hull vociferously opposed Gehlen getting a free pass.”

“That got him in Dutch?”

“That was the start. The decision on Gehlen had been made, so I had Dick reassigned to me in the research unit in Nuremberg preparing for the upcoming doctors’ trial, which won’t get going until the Nazi grandees’ has ended.”

Finished with his drink, Bassante signaled the waiter. “Another sherry for me and a scotch for my friend.”

“No thanks. I’m still working on mine.” Dunne rubbed his hands together. Across the room, the fireplace where he’d sat with
Van Hull and discussed Operation Maxwell was out of commission. The wall directly above was scarred by a prominent crack, a consequence of the V-2 rocket that hit farther down the block and reduced a row of stately eighteenth-century town houses and their inhabitants into dust and debris.

A downpour descended on the pedestrians outside, who seemed universally prepared, black umbrellas sprouting the length of the block.

“Someday, I suppose, by dint of natural selection, the Englishman and his umbrella will evolve into a single organism.” Bassante tossed the newspaper on the table. “
Homo britannicus
: a subspecies distinguished by umbrella-like appendage, tight ass, and stiff upper lip.”

“You were talking about the doctors’ trial,” Dunne said.

The waiter returned with the glass of sherry.

Bassante watched until he was out of earshot. “An odd affair: Twenty-three defendants are scheduled for indictment, including Karl Brandt, Hitler’s personal physician; a twenty-fourth is the subject of a jurisdictional tug-of-war. Van Hull is in the middle.”

The various involvements of the defendant in question, SS-Hauptsturmführer Dr. Karsten Heinz, were ticked off by Bassante: participant in the T4 Program, assistant physician at the Auschwitz Concentration Camp, member of the Reich Research Council, fellow of the Berlin-Dahlem Research Institute for Racial Biology and Anthropology, and associate director of the Research and Teaching Community for the Ancestral Heritage, the Forschungs-und-Lehrgemeinshaft das Ahnererbe.

Bassante recounted being present for the interview with Heinz conducted by Colonel Winfield Thomas, former head of psychiatry and neurology at Albany Medical College, at the prison in Nuremberg. Bassante liked Thomas—they were both “devotees of Sigmund Freud”—and agreed that Thomas would do the questioning.

As Bassante told it, Heinz denied any awareness of Auschwitz’s role as an extermination camp. He had never participated in any of the “alleged selections of Jewish arrivals,” never witnessed any of the “alleged gassings,” never encountered American POWs at Mauthausen. He joined the Nazi Party and the SS for practical reasons. He was never a National Socialist fanatic.

“Although it’s contradicted by everything we’ve found in his SS file, that’s the line he sticks to. In other words—at very best—he didn’t sell his soul; he merely rented it. Now it seems he’s looking to change landlords.” Instead of sipping his sherry, Bassante downed it in a single swallow. “Son of a bitch smirked the entire time. At the end, he let it slip he’d already had ‘extensive conversations with an American intelligence officer.’

“Colonel Thomas asked, ‘Who?’

“‘Someone I presume you know,’ Heinz responded. ‘Lieutenant Colonel Bartlett.’

“Thomas looked at me quizzically. He presumed that since I was with the CIC, I’d have an idea who this Bartlett was. I shrugged, thinking to myself that the only Bartlett I knew was Carlton Bartlett, who must have finished up his work with the Strategic Services Unit by now and hurried back to the Stork Club’s Cub Room to wine and dine clients and regale them with war stories.