The Grave of Truth (21 page)

He looked at Holler and then at his own hands as if he expected to find something had changed in them.

‘So I made a deal with the colonel,' he said. ‘I told him what Fegelein had told me, for Himmler's use. Eva Braun had a child by Hitler. It was a boy, and it was two years old. I told him where it was being kept. They sent me to a labour camp as a reward.'

‘Where was the child?' Heinrich Holler asked.

‘With a foster-mother in Munich. Her name was Brandt, and Eva's sister Gretl Fegelein had made the arrangements. Brandt thought it was the bastard of a high Party official. It was called Frederick, after Frederick the Great, Hitler's hero.'

‘And what do you think they did with this information?'

Günther Mühlhauser clasped his hands together and looked up. ‘I think they killed the boy,' he said. ‘Just as they took the Führer's body out of Berlin. They wanted to wipe out all trace of him. To leave nothing, not even a grave. They would have seized the child and murdered it.'

‘Munich was occupied by the Allies,' Holler said.

‘That wouldn't stop the KGB,' Mühlhauser said.

Heinrich Holler nodded slowly. ‘No,' he said, ‘it wouldn't. And you didn't cheat, did you, Günther? You didn't give them the name and address of someone else so they could murder the wrong child?'

‘I wished I had,' Mühlhauser confessed. ‘I wished I'd been cunning enough to make up a story, but I didn't. I told them the truth. Otherwise I wouldn't be alive now.'

‘Yes,' Holler said, ‘that seems to make sense. And this is what you admitted to the men from Odessa today?'

‘I didn't tell them I knew where the boy was hidden,' Mühlhauser muttered. ‘I kept that back. I just admitted telling the Russians he existed.'

‘And they let you go free? I find that very hard to understand.'

‘Not really,' Günther Mühlhauser sounded bitter. ‘They couldn't have killed Beatrix and me without causing a huge police hunt. They didn't want that. They pretended to let me go. I would have been punished later; maybe through Beatrix. Some accident would have happened to her and I'd have known but never been able to prove anything—That's why I must get her and my wife to the States. You couldn't protect us, Herr Holler, even if you wanted to.'

There was a knock on the door, and the stenographer came in.

‘Here's the transcript, sir,' she said. Holler glanced at the pages and then handed them to Mühlhauser. ‘Read those, and sign them if they're what you said.'

Mühlhauser did so, and handed them back. Holler stood up, and limped across to the door. He turned to face Mühlhauser before he opened it.

‘So the mystery of Janus is solved,' he said. Gunther answered firmly, ‘Yes. And you'll let us go?'

‘The CIA are welcome to you, Gunther,' he said. ‘Just remember to tell them the same lies that you've told me.' He opened the door and went out.

In Geneva the man known to Kesler and Franconi as Paul put down the telephone at the end of the call from Munich. He sat and tapped a pencil against the edge of the table. So far they had disposed of two of the four people designated with expertise and speed. Helm and Schmidt were dead. But the woman Gretl Fegelein had eluded them. The convent denied all knowledge of her, but the men who employed Paul and professionals like Kesler and Franconi didn't make mistakes. He didn't know what to do; he had told Kesler to call back in three hours, and he hoped to have fresh instructions for them. Kesler had sounded irritable and on edge; Paul guessed that his attempt to get to Gretl Fegelein had involved him in some risk of being recognized. He was leaving Munich in the hour, and couldn't guarantee to make the call until the evening.

There was nothing Paul could do but contact his superior and relay whatever orders he was given. He got up and locked the room behind him; it was a dingy office at the back of a shop selling cheap men's shoes. He told his assistant, an elderly man who helped him three afternoons a week, that he was going out for an hour, and then made his way on foot to the bus stop. He bought a ticket to the Rue du Rhone. It was only a hundred yards to one of Geneva's smartest hotels. He went round to the service entrance in the basement, and asked to see the undermanager, M. Huber. He was kept waiting for ten minutes, and then shown up in a lift to the ground floor and into a bright, well-furnished office. Huber came forward and shook hands. He was a man in his mid-forties, with sleek fair hair and an ingratiating smile. ‘Good afternoon, Raymond,' Paul said.

‘Good afternoon, Paul. Sit down, and have a drink. What would you like?'

‘Nothing, thank you.' Paul had never got over his nervousness of the smiling Raymond Huber. His courtesy was full of menace. There was nothing Paul needed more than a drink at that moment.'

‘What's your news?' Huber asked.

Paul told him. He nodded when the names of Helm and Schmidt were mentioned, and murmured, ‘Excellent, very good,' as if he were praising a member of his staff. The smile was gone when Paul had told him about Kesler's failure to reach Gretl Fegelein. ‘He says she's not at the convent,' Paul finished; he hesitated and then said, ‘There couldn't be a mistake, could there, Raymond—it's certain she's at that address?'

‘We don't make mistakes,' Raymond said. ‘She's never left that place in more than twenty years. He blundered, that's all and he's trying to cover it up.'

‘What shall I tell them to do?' Paul asked. ‘They're calling back tonight for instructions—do you want them to try again? It could be dangerous; I got the impression Kesler would be recognized. He seemed very anxious to leave Munich.'

‘Then he certainly did blunder,' Raymond said crisply. He walked over to his desk, lit a cigarette and pulled out a bottle of cognac from the drawer, with a little glass. He poured himself a drink, sat down behind the desk and sipped it. Paul didn't interrupt him. He had been working for them for five years; like Kesler and Franconi he had begun with the rackets in Marseilles and graduated through the school of narcotics, blackmail and murder to the rarefied heights of political assassination.

The money was very big; Paul had two large bank accounts in Switzerland, one in Zurich and the second in Berne. He was a rich man, and if Raymond ever allowed him to retire he owned a luxury villa in the beautiful Seychelles Islands, far enough away from his old life and associates. He had a woman he had been living with for years, and two teenage children. She only knew him as the owner of the shoe shop. She was not part of his plans for retirement to the Indian Ocean.

‘I shall have to take instructions from higher up,' Raymond said suddenly. He frowned and Paul quailed inside; the blue eyes were like dull stones and he knew that meant Raymond was angry. ‘She was the most important target. I hope those two are not getting past it.' He didn't address his remarks to Paul, more to himself. ‘You say they're leaving Munich? Where are they going?'

‘Frankfurt and then to Bonn,' Paul answered. ‘The last name on the list. What shall I tell them to do?'

‘Carry out the assignment,' Raymond said. ‘And no mistakes this time! This has become very important. Emphasize that. At all costs this man must be eliminated as quickly as possible. Tell Kesler if he completes this part of the contract satisfactorily we may overlook his failure in Munich.'

‘Shall I mention the fee?' Paul said.

‘Yes; it's what motivates them, after all. Say they shall get the full payment. Good afternoon, Paul. Thank you for coming.' He walked over and shook hands with the older man; the bright smile was back and the eyes were no longer opaque and dangerous. Paul hurried out of the room and down through the service entrance.

Raymond Huber went back to his desk and picked up the house telephone. ‘I'm not to be disturbed for the next hour,' he said. ‘Reception can deal with complaints, and please don't let them ring through and say somebody has made a double booking and will I come down and sort it out. Thank you, Janine.'

He was a restless thinker; he roamed round the office, looking out of the window, and back to his desk, lighting cigarettes and occasionally sipping brandy. He had worked at the hotel for ten years. First as a trainee, then through the various departments, and now as under-manager. It was the perfect cover: no one who was welcomed by him would connect the charming young Swiss in his formal jacket and striped trousers, a fresh flower in his buttonhole, with the man who had been born in a village on the Russo-Polish border and served several years in the foreign sector training department of what was then the NKVD in Leningrad. Raymond had lost both parents during the war; he had memories of burning villages and corpses, and a sky which was darkened by smoke and burning ash that floated on the wind. He had been taken with the refugees into central Russia to escape the German advance; his brilliance at school was noted, and he was sent for higher education to Moscow. His progress was steady; he left Moscow University after only two terms to study at what was said to be a technical institute in Leningrad. Here he was enrolled in the Soviet Intelligence Service. When he arrived in Switzerland he was bilingual in both French and Schweizerdeutsch, and was equipped with the identity of a genuine Franco-Swiss who had died after a motor accident. Raymond Huber was the key controller for the assassination department of the Service in Western Europe. The higher power to which he intended referring the problem of Gretl Fegelein was visiting Lake Lucerne on a Norwegian passport.

Huber had used Kesler and Franconi for a number of political murders, and this was the first time they had not accounted for their target. Their killing of Sigmund Walther was a classic. There was not a clue left for Interpol or the Sûreté; the newspapers had ceased to speculate, and interest was already fading. That was why it was so important that the others should appear as accidents. There must be no chain of connection to alert someone like Heinrich Holler, for instance. And yet Raymond knew, because a trusted agent had told him, that Holler was involved.

He had received the news over his private telephone line only a few hours ago; it was the last information that particular agent would impart for some time, but it contained another and even more disturbing revelation. Time was running short for Kesler and Franconi's contract. The last person on it could have been killed at their leisure, but not now. He damned the Convent of the Immaculate Conception to a place in their own hell. One bastion too strong for the inquisitors of Western Europe, too secure for his expert killers, protected by a power which he personally resented because it was not based on a political reality. Fegelein's wife had sought sanctuary with the Roman Catholic Church, and the power of that Church had protected her and her secret as effectively from his agents as from those of Holler and the CIA. Something very drastic would have to be done about the Convent of the Immaculate Conception.

He locked his office, and went through to the main foyer; he paused at the reception desk. ‘I'm going out for a few minutes,' he said to the clerk. He pulled on a light raincoat to hide his formal clothes and buttonhole, and was soon one of the crowd wandering along the Rue du Rhone. Raymond went to the nearest post office and entered a telephone booth. He dialled the number in Lucerne direct and spoke to his superior officer. The conversation was short and mostly one-sided. Raymond came out of the post office and strolled back to the hotel. It was a beautiful evening, with the sun still spreading a pink and purple haze over the sky, in which the stars were twinkling prematurely.

He went back to his office; there had been no crisis, no messages. He asked for an outside line and telephoned Paul at his home number. ‘Has our friend called yet? No? Good. Now listen. Tell him to forget Munich, you understand. But there are two more people I want him to visit. Yes, take a note of the names.' He spelt them out clearly, and gave the city, but not an address. At the other end, Paul copied them out. His common-law wife was watching television, and his two sons were arguing over the programme.

‘I've got that,' Paul said. ‘I'll give the instructions. Right, yes, I'll tell them to get it done as quickly as possible.'

He hung up and went back to his chair. He memorized what was written on the piece of paper, and then crushed it into a little ball and burnt it in the ashtray. His elder son sniffed and made a face. ‘What are you burning, Pa? It stinks.'

Paul was fond of his children. He had made handsome provision for them when he retired to his villa. ‘Just a bit of scrap paper,' he said. ‘An old bill.'

The boys' mother looked round at him without interest. She had been pretty when young, but she had lost her looks and her figure after the second baby was born. She cooked well and was a careful housekeeper, but he hadn't slept with her for years.

‘Do stop talking a minute,' she complained. ‘I can't hear what's going on.…'

‘Turn up the volume, then,' Paul said. At that moment the telephone rang again. He had refused to have an extension, pleading the extra cost. But with only one phone, nobody could pick up the second and listen in.

‘Oh, for God's sake,' the woman grumbled. ‘It's never stopped all evening! Just when this quiz programme is on, it rings and rings.…'

Paul got up and answered it. It was Kesler. ‘Oh,' Paul said. ‘Yes, I've got the orders for you. Don't bother sending any to Munich, but take two extra samples. Yes, that's what I said. Two. I'll give you the names they're to go to—are you ready?'

‘I'm ready,' Kesler said. Franconi was by his elbow. ‘Pencil, quick,' Kesler hissed at him. ‘Write it down.'

‘Wind up the business as quickly as you can,' Paul instructed. ‘The profit is just the same without the Munich sale. But you've got to hurry. And don't be too particular about your sales methods. It's the results that count. Call through when you've got the final figures.'