Killer Waves (17 page)

"Just like that," I repeated.

"Yeah, well, the end of the war, a lot of funny things like that were going on. Hey, thanks again for the ride, Lewis."

"Jack, you are very welcome."

And as I watched him walk slowly up to the porch, relying steadily on his cane with every step, I recalled my last visit to the rooms that Reeves and her crew had rented back at the Lafayette House, and the documents I had seen, the documents in German.

Then I backed up my Ford and went south, to Tyler.

Chapter Ten

The offices of the
Tyler Chronicle
were dark and closed up tight. I drove slowly through the parking lot and then continued out and made my way to High Street in Tyler. Paula lived in an apartment building about five minutes away from the center of town, and her car was in the building's tiny lot when I got there. Abutting the parking lot was a two-story motel, its windows and doors boarded up. A couple of months ago the place had been hit by an arsonist, and Paula told me that the owners were taking the chance to turn the place into condos instead of taking their insurance money and rebuilding the motel.

As I got out of my Ford, Paula was coming out the main door of her building, black leather purse over her shoulder, wearing a short white jacket.

"Hey," I called out. "Sorry I'm late. Did you get any of my messages?"

"Sure, Lewis," she said, striding over to her car, "I got all three of them."

I followed her over to the car. "Sorry, but I only remember leaving you three messages.”

She turned to me at the car, a tired look on her face.  “Sure I got the message on my office voice mail and the message on the answering machine at home. And there was a third message there, too, my friend. You see, earlier I wanted something simple. Conversation and a drink. That's all. Something friends and companions and occasional lovers-whatever the hell that means nowadays-can do without thinking, without even planning it. But those two little things didn't seem important to you tonight. That's the third message I got tonight. That what I needed wasn't important."

I held my hands behind my back and clasped them tightly.

"It surely was important," I said, speaking low and even. "Which is why I called you when I knew I was going to be late. If I didn't care or if I didn't think it was important, I wouldn't have made the effort."

"And why were you late?" she asked, in the same tones she used when interrogating the town manager over discrepancies in the town's budget.

"I was involved with somebody at the Porter Submarine Museum, for a story I might be working on."

"Ah yes," she said, opening the door to her car. "Another story for
Shoreline
magazine that never appears. It must be tough, trying to keep track of your mysterious life."

"I manage," I said. "Look, I'll make it up to you. Dinner instead of a drink. Right here and now."

"You know what night it is, right? Tuesday night. Guess where I'm off to in an hour."

Houston, we have a problem, I thought. "The weekly Tyler selectmen's meeting. I should have known, you're right. Look, I'll come along, sit next to you. We can write catty notes to each other about the town fathers as they drone on."

There, a small victory, as a smile flickered across her face.

"Nice offer. But not tonight. You go do your things mysterious. I'm off to have dinner with the new town counsel and then to work. Take care, Lewis."

And then she got in her car, started it up, and was gone.

             
An incurable romantic would have followed her, I suppose, and continued the debate, continued the argument, continued whatever it was that had been going on. But I had other commitments, other things to do.

At the Lafayette House I could detect the odor of dinner being prepared in the fine kitchen of its restaurant, and my stomach started grumbling as I took the elevator up to the fifth floor. I went to Room 512 and knocked, and then knocked again. No answer. The door to Room 510 opened up and the redheaded member of the team, Gus Turner, poked his head out.

"Oh, it's you," he said. "Looking for Laura?"

"That I am," I said, walking over to him. "Is she about?"

"She's ... she's on the phone right now," he said. "What do you need?"

"I just want to give her an update."

"Oh. Give it to me, then. I'll pass it on."

"No offense, Gus," I said. "But I'm working for her. I'm not working for you. If I'm giving anybody an update, it'll be her. When she gets off the phone or whatever, she can give me a ring at home. That's where I'll be."

He grinned as he closed the door. "No offense taken, Lewis. And you want to know why?"

"I'm sure you'll let me know."

"Because I predicted this, the first time we came to your house. Nobody says no to Laura. Nobody. It was just a matter of time before you came aboard."

"Aboard what? The
Titanic
?"

He smiled again, started closing the door. "I'll let her know. Have a great night."

"You, too."

I took the elevator back down to the lobby, and then made a detour to the dining room.

A half hour later I was back home, sitting at the kitchen counter eating a Lafayette House lobster pie, which was the meat of two lobsters, sliced and soaked in melted butter, plopped right down in the middle of a seafood stuffing mix.  The Lafayette House doesn’t do take-out dinners, but I have an understanding with the evening chef, an understanding that involves some cash donations on my part.

The American Heart Association would probably collectively shudder in horror at what I was eating, and I was trying to balance the assault on my cholesterol level with a salad and a glass of red wine. It wasn't probably much of a balance, but we all have our fantasies.

Just as I was finishing up, the phone rang, and it was Laura Reeves. As she started talking, I knelt before my fireplace and got a small fire going.

"Lewis? Laura here. What do you have?"

I struck a match and started burning a rolled-up editorial page from the
Boston Globe
. Some days, being used as fuel was its best use. "Gee, it's nice to talk to you, too, Laura. How was your day?"

I could hear her sigh over the phone line. "My day was horrible, as was the day before and no doubt the day tomorrow. I'm sorry if I'm offending your delicate little sensibilities, so here I go again. Hello, Lewis. How nice to talk to you. I hope you're well. Did you do any fucking work today? Lewis?"

I smiled, watched the flames dance up from the dying
Globe
and into the small pile of kindling. "How nice of you to ask. Yes, I'm fine, and I did have a busy day. I've talked to a detective at the Porter Police Department, the curator of a submarine museum in Porter, and an acquaintance of mine who's been known to be involved in things criminal. I've also talked to a local newspaper reporter and another detective with the Tyler Police Department. No Whizzer, no lead on Whizzer, but many promises to see what they can find."

"All right," she said grudgingly. "A fair start. And what will you do tomorrow?"

I picked up a length of oak, put it in across the growing flames. "More of the same, I suppose. And I'll probably talk to the same people again at the end of the day, to see what's going on.  And what about you?”

"Don’t you mind what we're doing," she said. "You do your own little piece.  We’ll do our own."

"Thanks for the vote of confidence," I said.

"Confidence has nothing to do with it," Laura said. "I'll use a phrase I'm sure you'll remember from your days at the Pentagon. Need to know. Right?"

I sat down on the couch, extended my feet to the flames.

"There are many things I've tried to forget about my years at the Pentagon, and you and your crew keep on bringing them back to me. Thanks a lot."

"You're welcome," she said. "And do talk to me tomorrow, will you?"

"You can count on it."

After she hung up, I sat there on the couch, phone in my lap, just watching the flames rise higher and higher, the fuel from the dried wood giving the fire life until they, too, gave up all they had, and the flames began to die.

Then I went upstairs.

In my office I went through my collection of books, until I found what I was looking for: a two-volume history of Hitler's U-boat war, expertly researched and written by Clay Blair. I also took down a couple of other books about the Battle of the Atlantic during World War II, and then started looking up information about what was going on in this nearby stretch of the ocean as the European theater of World War II ground to a halt. Armed with this basic information, I fired up my computer and started racing down the grand old information superhighway, to see what I could learn about U-234.

And it didn't take long.

The U-234 was more than three hundred feet long, and had been designed as a submarine that would lay mines. For its final trip, its mine-laying equipment was torn out by German engineers so that it could carry more cargo. Among the cargo it carried in its intercepted voyage were tons of strategic materials --- from lead to steel to mercury --- and as Jack had mentioned, a disassembled twin-engine ME-262 jet fighter aircraft. There were also optical glass, medical supplies, anti-aircraft ammo and equipment.  The submarine left the great German naval base at Kiel on March 25,1945, for Norway, where it picked up an additional passenger, a Luftwaffe general.

And stored forward, in ten cube-shaped metal cases about nine inches on a side, were more than twelve hundred pounds of uranium-oxide ore. Produced for the German atomic bomb effort, it was being sent to their Axis allies in Japan for their own atomic bomb project.

The heavily laden submarine left Norway on April 15, 1945, and in the middle of the Atlantic, when word came that Germany had given up on May 7, the U-234 surfaced and the crew surrendered to an American destroyer, the
USS Sutton
, on May 14. And, as Jack had said, the two Japanese officers had committed suicide rather than allow themselves to be captured.

At the Porter Naval Shipyard on May 17, the uranium oxide --- which could be processed for use in an atomic bomb --- was removed from the submarine. And there, the paper trail ended. No official government records existed on what happened to the uranium.

Oh, there were theories, the most popular one being extraordinarily ironic, in that the uranium was processed in the American Manhattan Project and was used in the atomic bombs dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima. German uranium used in American atomic bombs to shatter Japan. But nothing definite.

In looking through the documents and my books, I saw a familiar name. Fehler. Johann Heinrich Fehler, a thirty-four-year-old German navy lieutenant who was commander of the U- 234.

Fehler. Just the other day, when I was first with Laura Reeves in her room at the Lafayette House, Gus Turner had come in saying he had secured the Fehler debrief. Which meant an intelligence document of some sort, debriefing Fehler after his surrender.

I quietly logged off, stared at the blank screen. I tried to think of any type of circumstance where a German U-boat and a U-boat captain and its load of uranium could have anything to do with Colombians, Mexicans, and a drug shipment, but I had no success. After a while my head hurt, and I turned off the computer and went to bed.

The phone rang about thirty minutes later, and putting on my robe, I went downstairs, rubbing at my face. My portable office phone had been left downstairs, and although there's a phone jack in my bedroom, there's never been a phone there. It would be easy enough to set up another phone, but I've always felt a room with a bed in it should have the basics: a bed, a light, and plenty of books. Besides, by the time I got downstairs to answer the phone, I was usually awake enough to make sense in talking on the damn thing.

"Hello," I said, bringing the phone over to the couch, barely beating the answering machine. The fireplace was now dark. Even the last of the embers had died away to black.

"Hey, Lewis, it's Paula."

"Hey yourself," I said, looking at the time. It was ten past eleven.

"Did I wake you?"

"Not hardly."

"But you must have been in bed, the phone rang so long."

I tried to lighten up my voice. "It makes me smile to think that you know how many steps it takes to go from my bedroom to my phone."

There. A laugh. She went on. "I just got out of the selectmen's meeting, and they were still going at it when I left. They had fifteen items on the agenda, and number twelve --- which they spent more than thirty minutes yapping about --- was whether or not the town should have a park designated for dogs only. That way, the dogs have a place where they can poop while their owners run them around, and we don't have to worry about kids playing in dog doo-doo and getting it in their mouths."

"Democracy in action," I pointed out.

"Yeah, ain't it wonderful," she said, sighing. "Then a couple of people spoke up, said that taxpayer’s dollars paid for those parks, and that everyone in town should have the same right to visit them. that it wasn’t right to exclude people from a town park. Then somebody said didn't dogs have rights too. After all, their owners have to pay money to license and register them in the town. About then I was expecting somebody to bring Fido up to testify, and I started getting the giggles, thinking how Rhonda, the recording secretary, would put that in the meeting minutes."