The Eighth Dwarf (8 page)

Jackson turned from the window, found a chair, and sat down in it. “And then there's Kurt Oppenheimer, the boyish assassin. You lied about him too.”

“Actually, I didn't.”

“No?”

“No. What I did was fail to mention everything that I knew about him.” Ploscaru looked over at Jackson and grinned. “You're getting wet feet, aren't you?”

“Cold feet.”

“Yes, of course. Cold feet.”

“No. Not exactly,” Jackson said. “It's just that I haven't figured out what lies I'm going to tell the Army and the State Department.”

The dwarf smiled cheerfully. “You'll think of something.”

“That's what bothers me,” Jackson said. “I probably will.”

Ploscaru had to see the White House first, of course. After that they followed Pennsylvania Avenue down to where it jogged around the Treasury Building and had lunch at the Occidental, where the dwarf was impressed by all the photographs of dead politicians on the walls, if not by the food.

When they had finished lunch, the dwarf said that he had to see some people. Jackson didn't ask whom. If he had asked, he was fairly sure he would have been lied to again.

After the dwarf caught a cab, Jackson went back up to his hotel room and started making phone calls. It was the third call that paid off. The man whom Jackson had phoned was Robert Henry Orr, and when Jackson had first known him he had been in the OSS and everyone had called him Nanny, because it was to Nanny that everyone turned who wanted something fixed. Now Orr was in the State Department, and he didn't seem at all surprised that Jackson had called.

“Let me guess, Minor,” Orr said. “You finally decided that you wanted to come home and you called poor old Nanny. How nice.”

“I didn't know there was one,” Jackson said. “A home.”

“Not yet, but give us another year. Meantime, I could put you on to something temporary, perhaps in Japan. That would be nice. Would you like that?”

“Not much,” Jackson said. “Maybe we could get together for a drink later on.”

There was a silence, and then Orr said, “You've got something going on your own, haven't you, Minor? Something naughty, I'll bet.”

“How about the Willard at five-thirty in the bar?”

“I'll be there,” Orr said, and hung up.

Robert Henry Orr had been a beautiful child in the early twenties—so beautiful, in fact, that he had earned nearly $300,000 in photographic-modeling fees not only in New York but also in London and Paris. Most adults who had been children in the twenties could still remember that beautiful face with its long dark curls grinning out at them from a box of the cereal that then had been the chief competitor of Cream of Wheat. In fact, a large portion of adult America had grown up hating Robert Henry Orr.

But when he was thirteen, Robert Henry Orr had developed a case of acne, the nasty kind for which nothing can be done other than to let it run its course. It had left him with a splotched and pitted face, which, as soon as he was old enough, he had grown a beard to conceal.

Although the beard had disguised his ruined face, nothing could conceal his brilliant mind and his mordant wit. Living nicely on the income from the $300,000 he had earned as a child, and which his banker father had prudently invested, Robert Henry Orr became a professional student. He studied at both Harvard and Yale and at the London School of Economics. From there he went to Heidelberg and from Heidelberg to the Sorbonne. After that, he spent a year at the university at Bologna and another two years studying Oriental languages in Tokyo. He never earned a degree anywhere, but in July of 1941 he was either the sixth or seventh man hired by Colonel William J. Donovan for the Office of the Coordinator of Information, which, after a number of twists and turns, was to become the OSS.

It was in the OSS that Orr had discovered his true calling: he was a born conniver. Although he was given the title of deputy director of personnel, his real job had been to champion the OSS cause against its most implacable enemy, the Washington bureaucracy. For weapons he had used his brilliance, his by now immense girth, his bristling beard, his wicked tongue, and his encyclopedic knowledge about almost everything. He had awed Congress, intimidated the State Department, flummoxed the military, and deceived them all. Most of the strange collection of savants, con men, playboys, freebooters, patriots, socialites, fools, geniuses, college boys, and adventurers who composed the OSS had adored him and called him Nanny. Many of them had needed one.

Promptly at 5:30 Orr entered the Willard bar and strode across the room to the corner table where Jackson sat. Jackson started to rise and shake hands, but Orr waved him back into his seat. He stood, carefully tailored as always, rocking back and forth on his heels, his hands clasped comfortably across his huge belly, as he inspected Jackson for evidence of sloth and decay.

“You're older, Minor,” he said, settling into a chair. “You're older and thin. Far too thin.”

“Your beard's gone gray,” Jackson said. “What do you want to drink?”

Orr said he wanted Scotch, and Jackson ordered two of them from a waiter. When the drinks came, Orr tasted his and said, “Did you ever get it?”

“Get what?”

“Your medal. They put you in for one, you know. A Bronze Star, I think, for something wonderful and brave that you did in Burma. What thing wonderful and brave did you do in Burma, Minor?”

“I got jaundice.”

“Maybe it was for that.”

“Probably.”

“I'll have to look into it.”

“Is that what you're still doing, looking into things?”

Orr took another swallow of his drink. “We're in hiding. That's mostly what we do all day long. Hide.”

“They're after you, huh?”

“Indeed. You've heard, of course.”

“I've heard.”

“They split us up, you know. The War Department got Intelligence and Special Operations. Research and Analysis went to State. Nine hundred of us. You should have heard the screams from the old-line State crowd. Can you imagine Herbert Marcuse in State?”

“It's hard. Who else is left?”

“Well, a few are hanging on by their much-gnawed fingernails overseas. Let's see, Phil Horton's in France, Stacey is here, Helms is in Germany, Al Ulmer's in Austria, Angleton's in Italy, Seitz is in the Balkans, of course. And—oh, yes—Jim Kellis is in China.”

“What's going to happen?”

“Give us a year and we shall rise again like the Phoenix, God and Joe Stalin willing.”

“The Communist hordes, huh?”

“Exactly.”

“Who's going to run it—Donovan?”

Orr shook his head. “Not a chance. I suspect that he'll be made ambassador to somewhere dreadful and unimportant. Chile or Siam—one of those places. I understand he needs the money. Now tell me, what mischief are you up to, Minor? I do so hope it's something really nasty.”

Jackson shrugged. “I just want to get to Germany, and I don't want anybody to bother me when I get there.”

Orr stroked his beard and pursed his lips. “Why Germany?”

“I think I can make some money there.”

“Legally?”

“Almost.”

“Dare I ask doing what?”

Jackson grinned and said, “A very delicate mission of a most confidential nature for old friends.”

Orr beamed. “Oh, my, you do have something naughty, don't you?”

“Maybe.”

“Let's see, how shall we work it? You could go as Germany's first postwar tourist. You'd be just in time for the Oktoberfest. But I think we'd better come up with something just a tiny bit more blatant so that the Army can understand it. Let me think.” Orr closed his eyes. When he opened them a few moments later he was smiling.
“Next Thursday at Two.”

“Jesus.”

“Surprised?”

“Nobody knows about that.”

“I do,” Orr said. “But then, I know everything. It really wasn't that bad a play. I'm surprised it was never produced.”

“I'm not.”

“But there we have it, you see. Minor Jackson, noted playwright, war hero—I must dig up that medal—and, let's see, what else have you done?”

“Nothing.”

“No matter. You have decided to turn your sensitive gaze on postwar Germany and to write, I think, a book; yes, a book about what you have seen with your own eyes. A friend of mine's in publishing in New York, and I can get a letter down from him with no problem, since it won't cost him a penny. After that, I'll simply walk it through. Let me have your passport”

Jackson took his passport out and handed it over. Orr thumbed through it idly and said, “Rather a nice likeness.”

Jackson swallowed some more of his drink and, keeping his voice toneless and casual, said, “Did you ever hear of a Romanian who calls himself Nicolae Ploscaru?”

Still thumbing through the passport, Orr said, “The wicked dwarf. Where ever did you hear of him? He worked for us once, you know, in—when was it—'44, '45? He was most capable. Expensive, but capable.”

“What'd he do?”

Orr tucked Jackson's passport away in an inside pocket, patted it protectively, and said, “We used him to see what he could do about our wild-blue-yonder boys. You know, the ones who were shot down over Bucharest and Ploesti. We finally sent a team of our own in just before the Russians got there. Well, the dwarf had organized things to a fare-thee-well. The fly-boys swore by him. It seems that Ploscaru knew everybody in Romania—everybody worth knowing of course. His father had been a member of what passed for nobility in that dreadful country—a count, or perhaps a baron—and so the dwarf used his contacts to see that nothing bad happened to our lads. Some of them, in fact, were living off the fat of the land by the time our OSS team got there. The fliers gave the dwarf all the credit.”

Orr put his glass up to his lips and stared at Jackson over its rim. It was a long, cool stare. When he brought the glass down, he said, “Still, he was such a wicked little man. We got into a frightful flap with the British over him. It had been one of those co-op things that never work out. I think they wanted to shoot him when it was all over, except that he couldn't be found—or the fifty thousand in gold that we'd supplied. Gold sovereigns, as I recall. He simply disappeared, but we thought it was money well spent I'm curious. Where ever did you hear of him?”

“In a bar. In Mexico.”

“So that's where he is?” Orr said. “I've sometimes wondered.”

“He's not there, but somebody who'd known him was.”

“Who?”

“A cashiered British type who said his name was Baker-Bates.”

“
Gilbert
Baker-Bates?” Orr's tone was almost incredulous.

Jackson nodded.

“
Gilbert
Baker-Bates? The manic Major.
Cashiered!
Not likely, Minor. Why, poor old Gilbert's now the rising star in the British firmament.
Who ever
told you that he was cashiered?”

“Somebody who lies a lot,” Jackson said.

8

The ruined castle, or
Schloss,
lay a mile or two out of Höchst, which made it not much more than a forty-minute drive from the center of Frankfurt. The castle has been ruined by time as well as by a couple of stray American bombs. Now no one was quite sure whom it really belonged to, although the Americans apparently had staked out their claim with a big, carefully lettered, social-looking sign that read in both English and German:

Property of U.S. Army

ABSOLUTELY NO TRESPASSING

The Germans who still lived nearby respected the sign, of course. But even had it not been there, none of them would have been likely to do much trespassing. Rumor kept them away, rumor that the castle was the sometime rendezvous of a roving band of Polish and Latvian DP's—thieves and cutthroats all, naturally, or worse. Although none of the DP's had been seen there in some time, few, if any, Germans were willing to take a chance. And besides, there was the sign.

Once or twice a day, at irregular intervals a U.S. Army jeep with a captain at its wheel could be seen driving slowly up to the castle and disappearing, sometimes for long intervals, behind its crumbling walls. The Germans who noticed the Captain and his irregular appearances approved of both as sound strategy. With luck, he might catch a Pole or two.

About the only thing that distinguished the castle as a castle, and not as just another bombed-out ruin, was the determinedly Gothic tower at its north end. It was nearly four stories high, with crenelated walls and an imposing enough turret that was only half destroyed. Much of the castle's outer walls also remained standing, although there was no longer anything left for them to protect or shield.

Had the neighboring Germans been disobedient enough to ignore the warning sign, or brave enough to risk an encounter with a Polish or Latvian desperado, they might have geen surprised at the new, solid-looking wooden door that led down to the area underneath the north tower which possibly, years ago, might have been a dungeon.

And the neighboring Germans would have been more surprised had they been able to watch the American Captain use his keys on the two stout padlocks that helped chain the door shut and then follow him down the old stone steps into that dank, cavernous space which was a dungeon no longer. Now, it was apparently a warehouse for all those hard-to-come-by American items which kept the black market flourishing.

There were cigarettes, for instance. One entire wall was stacked high with cases of them—not cartons, but cases. Stacked against another wall were jerry cans of gasoline—the pink, American kind which, if found in the possession of a German, automatically meant a long jail sentence. Food was stacked against a third wall. There were ten-in-one Army rations mostly, but there were also sacks of U.S. Army flour and ten or twelve cases—again not cartons, but cases—of candy bars. About half of them were Baby Ruths. The rest were a mixed lot of Hershey Bars, Oh Henrys, Mars Bars, and Powerhouses.