Mark of the Devil (12 page)

Saturday, 20 October 2001

It was 6:30 in the morning when the aging Isuzu Trooper loaned by Park’s friend in St. Augustine rolled to a stop in front of the dive shop. Except for several delivery trucks bringing goods to some early-opening stores, there were only a few vehicles in the lot, most in front of a small breakfast café across the way. Matt’s stomach growled at the thought of food. Ignoring the hunger pangs, Matt said, “I see you got your Atlantic Pro Divers sign back up. New dive flag, too. When did that happen?”

“Yesterday. Steve Jr. fixed the sign and put up the flag—but stop changing the subject. Sure you don’t wanna go to your aunt’s house and get some sleep?” Park asked.

Matt shook his head as he eased his way out of the SUV. Nodding to the sling holding his left arm, he said, “Shoulder will hurt whether I’m here or at the house, and I want to take a look at this bag of souvenirs we brought up from the sub.” He patted the strangely shaped plastic shopping bag cradled between his chest and the cloth sling. “Might just tell us something about what’s down there. Give me the keys to the front door, and I’ll open up.”

While Park unloaded the dive equipment from the rear of the Trooper, Matt unlocked the front door of the shop, pushed inward, took two steps, and stopped dead in his tracks. “Holy Christ!”

“What?” Park asked, the neck of an empty air tank swinging from each hand as he crossed the sidewalk.

“Looks like another hurricane just tore the hell out of the shop.”

Park set the steel tanks on the concrete walk with a simultaneous
ca-clank
before edging past Matt with a shocked sing-song “Go-o-oddamn! This can’t be happening.”

“Seeing is believing, and you can bet your ass, it was Henry Shoemaker’s crew that did this,” Matt said. Stepping past Park and over a pile of Atlantic Pro Divers logo T-shirts and packaged swim fins strewn across the entranceway, he was careful not to go any farther. Buoyancy control jackets, regulators, dive masks, fish and seashell placards, diver training manuals, overturned air tanks and racks of wetsuits and dive skins—all blocked his way like an impenetrable wall of storm wreckage. The several glass fronts of the L-shaped sales counter were broken out; the counter’s stock of dive knives, watches, and compasses swept to the floor. The cash register had been torn from its mounting and slammed down through the top of the sales counter. It rested on the bottom shelf in a sea of broken glass.

Matt pointed to the open doorway in the back of the store and the delivery alley visible in the early sunlight. “They came in that way. I think you better call the cops.”

“What are we gonna tell ‘em?”

“Nothing about last night or Henry Shoemaker, but maybe they can pick up prints or something that might help at some point in the future.”

“We’ll need your son’s prints and anybody else who works here, Mr. Park,” Detective Hammersmith said, his voice as gruff and unyielding to Matt’s ears as during their first encounter. To Matt, he said, “Looks like you’re the little black cloud hangin’ over a lotta things, Berkeley. Your buddy in Washington gettin’ waxed, and now your buddy here gettin’ tossed. And what’d you do to earn a sling on your arm?”

“Slipped in the shower.”

“I hate a smart-ass,” Hammersmith said before nodding at the destruction in the store. “Guess you’re gonna tell me Henry Shoemaker’s chauffeur drove him over here so he could bust things up like this?”

“I’m not telling you anything, Hammersmith. I came in with Steve this morning, and we found what you see here.” Matt waved his good hand in a 90-degrees arc. “You’re the policeman. You solve it.”

“Know somethin’, Berkeley? I don’t like your attitude.”

“Sorry about that, Detective, but that’s not telling us who broke in here last night. That’s why you’re here, isn’t it? To find the evidence and solve the crime?”

Matt felt Hammersmith’s eyes boring deep into his own before the man turned to the crime scene technician in the doorway to Park’s office. The technician was snapping photographs of the pulled-out desk and filing cabinet drawers and the reams of paper scattered around the room. “Okay, Mezzaro, let’s finish it up and get outta here. I’m gettin’ a bad taste in my mouth.”

“But I’m not—”

“Now, Mezzaro.”

Stepping gingerly over equipment still lying on the floor, the technician threw a disgusted look in Hammersmith’s direction. Quietly shaking his head, the technician quickly disassembled his equipment and headed out the door to a blue and white van parked next to Hammersmith’s unmarked Crown Victoria. As Hammersmith reached for the door, he turned and asked, “You been holding that plastic bag like it was gonna fly away if you turned loose, Berkeley. What’s in it?”

Matt looked down at the package, tightly pressed between his left arm and side, and chuckled. “Would you believe a bottle of mouth-wash to clean away the bad taste some people leave behind?”

For a second time, Hammersmith’s eyes narrowed into small slits of hostility, his upper incisors grinding against his lower lip. “Keep it up, Berkeley, and you and me, sooner or later…”

Hammersmith caught himself, finishing with, “Just sooner or later, and you’ll know.” His last word was cut short by the slamming of the door behind him.

“Hey, man, what the hell’s going on between you two?” Park asked, one arm laden with wetsuits, his free hand hanging them on the upturned clothing rack.

“Henry Shoemaker’s name came up when they called me in about Sam Gravely. Wrong move. Hammersmith’s like everybody else around here: thinks Shoemaker’s the second coming of Christ. See what money can do?”

“I’d rather see what you’ve got in that bag and that little souvenir you talked about.”

“Come, my friend,” Matt said, giving a wave of his hand while carefully stepping his way around and over the mountain of dive equipment still on the floor. “To the office for a little show-and-tell.”

After Park cleared the top of the desk of paper, Matt untwisted the tie from around the top of the plastic bag, pulled both the framed picture and the officer’s hat from the bag, and laid them on the desk.

“What the hell is that?” Park asked impatiently, pointing to what was largely a smear of black and white, badly wrinkled photographic paper beneath the glass.

“The picture is of the man I’m fairly sure was the commanding officer of the sub, but the water’s pretty much done a number on it, even since I brought it up. I’ll have to see if there’s a photo restorer around who can do anything with it. It was a captain and his crew on a U-boat, but all I could make out of the boat’s number was an eight something-or-another.”

Park pointed to the hat. “And that?”

“A German officer’s hat.”

“I can tell that, damn it, but what kind?”

“I’m pretty sure it’s SS, one of the really bad guys, right up there with the Gestapo.” Matt stepped back and let his eyes do the touching. The hat cover, a heavy cotton material, still in excellent condition, had already begun to dry. Immediately below the hat’s peak was a silver eagle, wings outspread. Beneath the eagle’s talons, a wreath-like design encircled a swastika, and below that was a silver skull-and-crossbones. The black, half moon-shaped bill with a dull leather finish was ringed by a rapidly blackening, silver-threaded chinstrap.

“The death’s head indicates the guy was part of the SS,” Matt said. “From what my dad told me about the war and a saber he brought home from Germany, SS officers could be part of the Army, kind of a special forces type, and there were also those who ran the concentration camps. He took the saber from a German officer who had committed suicide when the U. S. Army liberated Dachau.”

Very carefully, Park picked up the hat. “Wonder if there’s any kind of identification inside?” Turning it over, he inspected the underside of the bill, then the leather hatband that ran the interior circumference of the hat. “Something that looks like the manufacturer’s name. Can’t make it out, and two letters pressed into the leather. J. K. The guy’s initials?”

“Could be,” Matt said, “and how about this?” He pulled a handkerchief from his hip pocket, unfolded it on the desktop, and removed the medal he’d taken from the naval officer’s remains. “There were two corpses in the compartment. Owner of the hat and the guy I took this from.” He pointed to the medal. “Fairly certain this came from the sub’s CO.”

Park touched the medal with his fingers, but left it in Matt’s hand. “Iron Cross?”

Cleaning off another area on the desk, Matt arranged the medal and its red, white, and black ribbon so the ribbon encircled an imaginary throat. “Think so. Couldn’t make out the word or numbers below the swastika, but looks like it’s, uh…yeah, nineteen thirty-nine.”

“Okay, and these things?” Park asked, pointing at the ribbon just above the cross.

“An oak leaf cluster, and those,” Matt fingered the design, “are crossed swords. If their meaning is anything similar to U. S. medals with stars, oak leaves, and other decorations added, my friend on the U-boat did a helluva lot more than whatever was required to get the Iron Cross.”

“Like sink allied ships.”

Matt nodded, turned the medal over, and read the inscription engraved on the back, “’Gott mit uns.’ God with us, the letters
H
and
S,
and the numerals eleven, twelve and nineteen forty-two.”

“Twelve November nineteen forty-two,” Park said.

“No, eleven December forty-two. We put the month first. Europeans just the opposite.”

“But nothing to indicate the name of the sub,” Park said. “And you didn’t see anything down there that had a name on it?”

Matt shook his head. “No, but to my knowledge, U-boats didn’t have names. Just a
U
followed by a number, and if there was something like that, I either didn’t see it or didn’t recognize it.”

“So what do we do? Your buddy Gravely’s dead. Any more contacts in Washington you can trust? Anybody who can help us find out what we’ve got down there?”

“What we and Henry Shoemaker’s got, you mean,” Matt said, a low, sarcastic grunt couched beneath his words. “And I’ll tell you something else. The Law of the Sea Convention, to which the U. S. is a signatory, says sunken military vessels still belong to the country of origin. I learned that the hard way when NAARPA was working on some wrecks off Bermuda a couple of years ago. The way Shoemaker and Antiquities Finders work, there’s no way they’ve told our government they’ve found a World War Two U-boat, let alone the German government. No, and I—”

A set of chimes interrupted Matt, followed by the closing of the door at the front of the shop. “Sounds like you’ve got a customer.”

Park checked the clock on the wall, took a final look at the officer’s cap and medal, then turned and moved through the doorway into the shop. Matt heard Park say, “Sorry ma’am, but as you can see, we got burgled last night, so we’re not really open for business.” This was answered by a woman’s voice, only low and whispery, unintelligible, and unidentifiable, immediately followed by a short laugh from Steve Park and more whispers.

Reexamining the inside of the hat, Matt pulled down the hat band to see if there was anything else that might help identify the owner and what he was. As he ran an index finger inside the band, he heard a woman’s voice behind him. “It’s impossible for you to stay out of trouble, isn’t it?”

Matt whirled around. “My God, Ashley! I thought you said—” “Steve called me last night while you were getting your body sewn up again for the twenty-or thirtieth time and…” Ashley’s face puckered into a sad little frown. “You’re not glad to see me?”

“Oh, sweetheart, I’ve never been so glad to see anybody in my life.” Matt pulled his left arm from its sling with a, “Who needs that damn thing! C’mere, you gorgeous creature.”

Free of the sling, he grabbed his wife and threw both arms around her waist. “Kiss me quick, before I—” And she did.

Using Aunt Freddie’s membership card for access to the Ocean Club Resort’s beachfront parking wasn’t really the kosher thing to do, Matt knew, but what the hell! With the card, he was able to gain entry to the famous resort where his aunt had taken him to dine several years back. To the best of his knowledge, it was her one major extravagance. The card was like a magic key to the world of private clubs along the beachfront.

The multi-storied resort’s lavishly appointed hotel and restaurants cast mid-afternoon shadows along the beach, and a gaggle of sandpipers skittered about in front of Matt and Ashley as they walked along the spread of bone-white sand. With an arm wrapped around each other’s waist, the couple made the impression of two lovers out for an afternoon stroll, but their conversation was far from amorous.

“You know how much I appreciate your help,” Matt said, flexing his left shoulder against the pull of the stitches and tightness of the bandage covering the bullet wound. “But to be honest, I should never have asked you to do anything. This whole damn thing’s turned into a bucket of snakes that won’t stop wriggling.”

“Why so?” Ashley asked, hop-scotching away from the rush of an incoming tide.

“People are already dead because I asked for information and a favor.”

“As for what I’ve done to help,” Ashley went on, squiggling her toes through the sand to unearth a suspected sand dollar shooting air bubbles up from beneath the surface, “all I did was call an old friend of mine at the Navy Historical Center in Washington. He used to be stationed on one of the destroyer squadron staffs in Charleston before the base closed.”

“Ah-ha!” Matt responded, a note of
gotcha
in his voice. “An old flame you never told me about. So much for me thinking I was the first.”

With the upward kick of her foot, accompanied by a quick burst of laughter, Ashley sprayed Matt with a shower of salt water and white foam. “And I suppose I was the first? Yeah, right. Forget it, mister. The past is the past. And that’s all I got out of my friend, the past, as in World War Two.” Her last words were followed by another spray of water in Matt’s face.

Laughing, Matt held up both hands in surrender. “Okay. I give up, so tell me about the past and how it relates to the problem at hand.”

Ashley nodded toward the resort’s outdoor bar at the top of the beach, took Matt by the hand, and pulled him away from the water’s edge. “Let’s go up to the patio and use dear Aunt Freddie’s membership card to get something to drink. Then I’ll tell you.”

Less than ten minutes later, settled low in her chair to shield herself from the onshore breeze and its dampness, Ashley swirled the cherry in her Manhattan before lifting the fruit and plucking it off the stem with her teeth and lips. With a shudder and an involuntary
“brrr”
from the sudden chill and tartness of cherry, bourbon, and vermouth, Ashley admitted, “I probably should have ordered a good hot cup of coffee instead.”

Matt lifted his Scotch and water. “Anti-freeze,” he said, smiling broadly. “Tell me what you’ve got.”

With a smug little smile, Ashley pulled a small notebook from inside her jacket, opened it, and said, “My friend says on the night of May the fifth, nineteen forty-five, after Germany had announced they were surrendering, a tanker was sunk off Jacksonville Beach. Two destroyers were headed out to sea from the St. Johns River—”

“Two destroyers?”

“That’s what he said. They were coming out of the St. Johns en route to Norfolk when they picked up an SOS from the tanker. She’d been hit by torpedoes. They figured it had to be a U-boat that sank her.”

“Good guys to the rescue.”

“Not really. The tanker broke up so quickly, by the time they got there—apparently several miles from the mouth of the river—she was on the bottom. He said they did, however, pick up the sound of a submarine on their sonar and went after it.”

Matt sat with his hands steepled in front of his face, his breath making a faint whistling sound through the tips of his fingers. “What’d your buddy say all this is based on? Ship’s logs?”

“Right.”

“What were the names of the ships?”

“The uh…” Ashley looked at her notes, “…
USS De Haven,
DD Seven twenty-seven and the…” she said, pausing for a moment, wetting her index finger, and turning the page, “…the
USS Collett,
DD Seven thirty.”

“Two of the destroyers on the list Sam Gravely gave me.”

“Anyway,” Ashley went on, “they chased the sub, using…” she read again from her notes, “…half-ton Killer depth charges and hedgehogs.” She stopped and, looking up from the notes, said, “I know what depth charges are. The movie
Das Boot,
and those big cans falling through the water, but hedgehogs?”

“Little before my Navy days, to be honest. Kind of like an oversized mortar. A weapon system on a ship capable of firing more than twenty contact-triggered projectiles at the same time. Fired them in a circular pattern out in front of the ship. They apparently used it on the sub.”

“According to the
Collett’s
log, she immediately followed the
De Haven
on the attack. After she dropped her depth charges, she picked up a loud roaring sound that lasted at least half a minute. The
De Haven’s
log says they heard the same sound. Then suddenly everything went quiet. Can they hear sounds like that with their sonar?”

“Not sure, unless they quit pinging with active sonar and used a passive hydrophone system.” Matt shrugged his shoulders. “I really don’t know what they had on destroyers in those days or how sophisticated it was. They think they got the sub?”

Ashley took a folded piece of paper from a small pocket at the back of the notebook, then closed the notebook. “They never knew. They circled the area until daylight, but could find no sign of the sub or any kind of debris indicating they’d hit it. It just disappeared.”

She took a sip of her Manhattan, waiting for Matt’s reaction as he stared out to sea in the direction of where he knew the submarine lay. Finally he said, “It disappeared all right, and I think I know why and how. I’ll need a chart of the area showing the bottom as it looked back in those days, but ten’ll get you twenty, the U-boat found a trench deep enough to hide in, or so they thought. Depth charges and hedgehogs tore hell out of the sea floor near the tops of the walls surrounding the trench, and—”

“Oh, my God!” Ashley gasped, a hand going immediately to her mouth, the horror of what she was thinking written on her face. “The sides of the trench caved in on the submarine. That’s what you’re thinking, isn’t it?”

Matt nodded.

“The crew was buried alive and that’s how they died. How terrible.”

“The crew of the tanker they sunk wouldn’t have thought it was so terrible if they’d known, but yeah,” Matt agreed, taking a final swallow of his drink. “Not a good way to die. Just waiting for that last breath.” Matt shook his head. “No thanks.”

Momentarily subdued, Ashley unfolded the sheet of paper and handed it to Matt. “Almost forgot what I was doing. My friend faxed this to me.”

The moment Matt took the paper, his eyes grew wide with surprise, followed immediately by an irritated “For chrissake, Ashley, we may have talked about the possibility of a submarine being down there when I was in Charleston, but that was between us. Certainly not for publication. Now the Navy knows what somebody, namely me, your husband, is looking for off the Florida coast.”

“Don’t get mad with me, Matt Berkeley. I didn’t ask him a damn thing other than whether any submarines were sunk off Jacksonville Beach during the war. Because of the underwater speed, faster than anything the Navy had or had experienced from the Germans at the time, this is what they later decided the submarine must have been. A new…what did he call it? A new class of submarine the Germans were building just before the end of the war. Supposedly only a few made it to sea. Just to be nice, he faxed it to me.”

Settling back in his chair, the sudden annoyance gone from his voice, Matt read aloud the blurb printed beneath the picture.

“U-Twenty-five thirteen. Type Twenty-one. U. S. Navy Shipyard, Portsmouth, Virginia, August Nineteen forty-five.” He laid the paper on the table and sat for a moment. “This meshes with what Sam Gravely thought it might be.” With a nod toward the ocean, he added, “Out there. And from what he told me, the sub in this photo is one of two that were turned over to the U. S. after the war, but there’s something different about the sail area…the conning tower, from what I saw last night.”

“Oh?”

“The one out there had a gun turret at the after end of the tower like this one in the photograph, but no turret at the forward end. Rather, an open, very small topside conning station in front of these.” Matt pointed to the raised snorkel and periscopes. “There was a hatch leading down to the control room.”

“Where, of course, Mr. Daredevil had to go.”

Matt spread his hands in front of him. “Who else? Anyway, without that gun turret up front, the U-boat we found has a much more streamlined design than the U-Twenty-five thirteen in this picture. Less drag underwater, I guess, but why the change? Special mission?”

“I’m sure I don’t know,” Ashley said, reaching across the table and covering one of Matt’s hands with hers. “But more important to me, what are you going to do now?”

“Whatever I do, it’ll have to be done without Henry Shoemaker or his shadow, Eric Bruder, finding out. They’ve apparently got eyes and ears everywhere. And knowing Shoemaker, if he and his AFI people are so interested, there’s gotta be more than a sub sitting on the bottom. There’s something in that baby they know about and want, but what?”

“Nazi gold? You know the old stories.”

“It’s possible, but first, I’ve gotta find out which U-boat it was, and what its mission was to bring it so close to the U. S. coast when Germany was already in the process of surrendering. Then maybe I’ll know what’s on there that’s worth killing Sam Gravely and his friend…and trying to kill Steve and me for.”

“How are you going to do that?”

Matt sat for a moment, turning the empty drink glass in his hands and concentrating on the movement as though it would provide an answer. Finally, he looked up. “An old teacher of mine. Quite a bit older than me, but he was at South Carolina on some kind of student exchange program. Came from Europe to major in physics, then changed his major to European history, of all things. Taught German to freshmen and sophomores to earn extra money.”

“That’s where you learned to speak that awful German?”

Matt laughed.
“Jawohl, meine gnädige Frau.
Yes, my dear wife. And, hey, I’m not so bad if I do say so myself, especially reading. That’s always the easiest. I took his class when I was a freshman. He was in grad school by then. Eddy, we called him. Now, Herr Dr. Eduard Richter.”

“Where is he now?”

“Went back and taught at the University of Heidelberg. Retired last year and works part time at the Federal Archives in Koblenz. My fraternity used to invite him to all our parties and, for whatever reason, we’ve pretty well kept track of one another over the years. I think he might be able to help.”

“How?”

“Two ways. First, he became an authority on World War Two, from the German side. He grew up during the war, and saw much of it firsthand. His father was an officer on the pocket battleship
Graf Spee.”

“And two?”

“He works at the Federal Archives, which has some of the most in-depth records in the world of the
Kriegsmarine,
the German navy. I’m hoping that includes the World War Two U-boats.”

“And you think he can tell you what’s out there?” Ashley nodded over her shoulder in the direction of the sunken barge and submarine.

“If anybody can, Eddy can. I’m hoping
H
and S, what I think are initials on the back of the medal I brought up, will identify the CO, and subsequently the sub and its mission. That might also tell us why there was an SS officer with the death’s head insignia onboard.”