Hour of the Assassins (26 page)

“I tried to explain to him that, the newspaper stories notwithstanding, I didn't have that kind of money, and besides I had no idea what I might be buying. His papers might be worthless. I tried to bargain with him, but he was adamant about the price. It was a kind of obsession with him, the sum he had calculated he would need for his retirement. And he kept saying,
ein grosser Fisch
, as if that too were an obsession that he kept doggedly repeating, like a phonograph needle stuck in a groove.

“To tell you the truth, I was beginning to think he was a crank and tried to terminate the meal. Then he told me a little more about himself and I was able to check him out later. What he said turned out to be true and that's when I contacted the Mossad for the money. Unfortunately they didn't come through.” He hesitated delicately. “Until now,” Feinberg added, leaning forward across the desk.

“It turns out that during the war our Herr Gröbel had worked as an accountant in
Amt
Two of the RSHA. Do you know about the RSHA?”

Caine shook his head, and with a satisfied nod Feinberg went on.

“The Reichssicherheitshauptamt, or Reich Central Security Office, was the centralized bureau set up by the Nazis to handle internal security matters, including the camps. Their office was directly responsible for the death of over fifteen million people. The bureau consisted of six sections, or
Amts
, each of which had a specific function.
Amts
One and Two, where Gröbel worked, handled administrative and financial matters, respectively.
Amt
Three was the SD, the infamous security
Polizei
, which also acted as the controlling department of the entire RSHA.
Amt
Four was the Gestapo, where Eichmann worked.
Amt
Five handled criminal activity, and
Amt
Six was the Abwehr, the Reich's foreign intelligence agency.”

“I appreciate the history lesson,” Caine said irritably, “but what difference does it make?” Take it easy, he told himself. Don't spook him, because he's got something, and suddenly Caine's senses were completely alive. Something told him he was getting close. Feinberg worked on a shoestring; all you had to do was to look at the office to know that. So he wasn't about to spend fifty thousand marks on hot air and sauerkraut. He had something.

“Don't you see,” Feinberg said intently, his eyes sparkling with intelligence, as though with passion, “after all those years with the RSHA, they trusted him. After the war he spent twenty years with the same company, so if there was something funny, something that would indeed lead to
ein grosser Fisch
, he would be sure to spot it.”

“But he didn't tell you what it was?”

“No, he didn't. But he did call me about two weeks ago to tell me that he had been laid off and was I still interested. I told him yes and asked him to give me a little more time to get the money. We agreed that as soon as I got it, I would send him a note, care of
poste restante
in Stuttgart. At first I called some people, but since I couldn't be specific, I wasn't getting very far in raising the money. Your timing couldn't have been better, Herr Foster. As soon as I got Amnon's call, I sent the note and Gröbel called me. I'm meeting him, alone, tomorrow night.”

“Where?”

“He said
alone
, Herr Foster, and he knows them well enough to mean it. He knows what they would do to him if anyone ever found out that he had been saving those copies for years.”

“What makes you think that some funny accounting is worth over twenty thousand dollars?” Caine asked, playing dumb. He was close and he knew it.

“Because,” Feinberg paused to matter-of-factly light his pipe, “for the past twenty years, Hans Gröbel has been an accountant for the firm of Mengele and Sons, in their headquarters office in Günzburg.”

Bingo, Caine thought exultantly. Follow the money and it'll lead you right to the son of a bitch's doorstep.

“When do I get to see the goods?” he asked.

“We can go over them together tomorrow night. I'll meet you here in my office at midnight,” the old man replied, sucking monotonously at his pipe, like a baby at the breast.

A light, wet snow was falling from an invisible sky, the flakes swirling like moths around the solitary light of a streetlamp. The fat wet flakes decorated the windshield with a fragile lace pattern, forcing him to flick on the windshield wipers every so often. The wet surface of the dark street glistened like black ice as it reflected the electric sign of the tavern. Perhaps if the visibility had been better, or if he hadn't been so tired, he would have seen them sooner.

There were two of them, one on each side of the shiny street. They were both wearing the black leather trench coats that were the hallmark of the Stadtspolizei and made them almost invisible in the dark night. They approached cautiously, ready to dive into a doorway and start firing the second he hit the ignition. He still had time to start the car and make a break for it, but they were almost too close and he knew if he did, he would leave Feinberg exposed and that was what he was there for, to chaperone Feinberg and to see that the exchange went off without a hitch. So he just sat where he was, his hands on the steering wheel and did nothing, a ripple of fear shuddering down the length of his spine. This was the way it would end for him, as it had for so many others. With a silenced soft-nosed bullet in some dark side street, and no one to ever know or care. The morning papers would carry a brief paragraph about a gangland killing, assailants unknown; that was how police departments everywhere handled intelligence casualties. That was how it would happen. It came with the territory.

He let the fear come because it sent a shot of adrenaline through him which he needed desperately, not having slept in two days. After his meeting with Fein-berg he had flown to Marseille for an r.d.v. with Claude at that dingy café, two blocks off the crowded Canebière. Claude was a tiny man, almost a midget, with a large skull topped by an oversized beret, which gave him the outlandish appearance of a nineteenth-century bohemian. He affected the air and manners of an
artiste
, as though he were about to join Lautrec for a bout of table sketching and absinthe at the Moulin Rouge.

The café was ripe with the sour smell of garlic and Algerian red wine and Gauloise smoke, and every few seconds Claude glanced up at people he obviously knew, but who never approached their corner table. The café was frequented by serious men, smugglers making the run to Tangiers, ex-Legionnaires and hard-faced rogue cops from the SDECE, who growled softly in the French-Corsican patois of the French underworld and left them alone. They knew how to conduct business, these types, Caine thought.

Claude had already gone through half a bottle of cognac even before Caine sat down, but if it had any effect on the little man, Caine couldn't see it. They agreed on a price of $5,000 for a new American passport and international driver's license, but timing was a problem. Claude said he would need three days and he explained something about the watermark problem, as they walked to Claude's studio for the photographs.

After paying him $2,500 as a down payment, Caine caught a taxi to the airport, but there was some kind of a labor dispute going on and he had raced back to the station to catch the express back to Vienna. The train didn't arrive at the
Bahnhof
in Vienna till late afternoon and he'd barely made it to the car-rental agency on the Kärtner Ring, just before closing. All they could let him have was a VW bug with a sticky clutch, but time was running out and he took it. He drove over to the Rudolf Plate and watched the light in Feinberg's office, until it went out. Then he had carefully tailed Feinberg to the r.d.v., in a
Heuriger-
style tavern on Walfischgasse, near the Opera Haus. Sounds of accordion music and
Fasching
revelry filtered out to the darkening street from the
Heuriger
, as the snow began to fall. A short time after Feinberg had gone in, a taxi had dropped off a short man bundled in a dark wool overcoat who answered Feinberg's description of Gröbel. Caine watched Gröbel pay the driver and nervously glance at the street before entering the
Heuriger
.

However, either his fatigue or the bad visibility had let him miss the two men in trench coats and now he could no longer mother-hen the r.d.v. He would have to be the red herring, mindful of the fact that herrings usually ended up on someone's plate. As he watched them approach, he found himself wishing that he'd been able to get the new ID from Claude, instead of being forced to face the Stadtspolizei with the tattered Foster cover.

There was a gentle tapping on the car window. One of the black raincoats was there and he was doing his tapping with the muzzle of a Walther PPK and motioning for Caine to roll down the window.

“Get out of the car,” he said, an unlit cigarette dangling from his mouth. It was a bad sign, because it meant he knew how easily a lit cigarette can be spotted at night and that meant he knew what he was doing.

“Do you speak English?” Caine said hopefully, with a wide idiotic tourist grin, spreading from ear to ear.

“Your German is excellent Herr Foster. Outside, please, Police,” the man said coldly and he wasn't smiling. Caine got out of the car.

“What are you doing here?”

“Isn't this the way to the American embassy?”

The second policeman had come up and they bracketed him for the frisk, which was handled with quick efficiency. The first policeman hefted the Bauer in his hand for a moment, before slipping it into his coat pocket.

“Interesting little toy. What are you doing with a gun, Herr Foster?” he said calmly, snowflakes clinging to his eyelashes, like tears.

“I'm afraid of the dark.”

“He makes jokes, Franz,” the first policeman said.

“Funny man,” Franz said with a thin-lipped smile as he snapped the handcuffs on Caine's wrists. “We'll have some fun tonight, funny man.”

Franz was the one to watch out for, Caine thought, watching the sensuous way he smiled and almost subconsciously caressed the Walther with his fingertips. When he squeezed the trigger, it would be with an expression of pure enjoyment. In a way Franz reminded him of Van Dagen, the Belgian ex-Legionnaire and mercenary he had met in Paris just after the collapse of Biafra. Violence was a narcotic for these men, the confrontation with death the ultimate trip. “
L'heure douce
,” the sweet hour, was the way Van Dagen had referred to combat. The sweet hour.

The two men marched him over to a black Mercedes parked across the street. The first policeman opened the rear door and gestured with the Walther.

“Get into the car.”

“I think I'd rather walk. It's such a lovely eve—” Caine couldn't finish the sentence because Franz had savagely jammed the muzzle of his gun into Caine's solar plexus, doubling him over against the rear fender.

“Get into the car.”

“On second thought, I think I'll get into the car,” Caine managed to gasp, and climbed in with Franz right behind him. The first policeman got into the driver's seat and pulled out, the wheels slipping slightly on the slushy surface. Caine glanced over at Franz, who smiled back with his sniggering look, except that his eyes were as blank and empty as those on a monument. Caine was worried because it was all wrong. And then he had it. They had called him by name! They knew who he was and he had made a fatal error. He wasn't the red herring, he was the target! They hadn't been after Feinberg or Gröbel, they had come for him.

It was all wrong, because it meant that they had been put on him by either the Nazis, or else—and it was just as bad—Harris had lied and the Company was running him on a blind mission. Either way, the pickup meant that they weren't really interested in interrogating him, because all he knew was that Mengele might be somewhere in Peru. What it meant was they they were going to terminate him and there wasn't a damn thing he could do about it, because Franz was holding the Walther very steadily and he didn't look like he was going to make any mistakes. He hadn't realized that Mengele's reach could extend all the way to the Vienna Stadtspolizei, unless it was Company business. Their reach could extend to Tierra del Fuego, if they wanted to.

The Mercedes slithered down the heavily trafficked streets, the snow falling through the beams of the headlights as though it would never stop, as though a new Ice Age were beginning. Franz fished into his pocket for a stick of gum and began chewing it, but the gun never moved from the vicinity of Caine's ribs. He would know for certain what they were going to do when they reached Schotten Ring. If they turned into the Ring toward the Danube, it meant that they were taking him to the central police station for questioning and there might be a way out. If they headed out on Währingerstrasse toward Kahlenberg, then it was a one-way trip and they just wanted to do it without fuss in a quiet place. Caine didn't think they would take him to the Vienna Woods to listen to an open-air concert in three-quarter time.

The first policeman concentrated on his driving, as he slowed to approach the intersection, occasionally flicking his eyes to the rearview mirror to check on Caine. Their motion was smooth and almost dream-like, the only sound the slapping of the windshield wipers and the low rumble of the snow tires on the wet pavement. They bumped carefully over the slick tram tracks and then there was the tick-tick of the directional signal. A pretty blonde with a bottle in her hand in a crowded BMW in the adjoining lane glanced over at him and then waved the bottle playfully at him. She drunkenly mouthed a one-word invitation:
Fasching
. She ran her tongue lasciviously over her lips and smiled, her eyes bright with seduction. She reminded him a little of C.J. He wondered if he would ever see her again. He tried to smile back, but it was impossible because the Mercedes was making the turn across the intersection. It was Währingerstrasse.