The Arms Maker of Berlin (5 page)

“Suit yourself. But this is my courtroom, and I’m setting bail at twenty-five grand.” He slammed the gavel down as if hammering a dented fender. “Willis, go see if Ed Wellborn can squeeze us into his social schedule.”

The policeman went to fetch the other man while the judge fiddled with paperwork. Nat slid down the pew toward Gordon, who finally acknowledged him with a wink.

“Viv says you’ve made camp with the barbarians,” he whispered. Not angrily, but with a twinkle in his eye.

“Not exactly. I just—”

“Don’t worry, Nat. I understand completely. It’s the first thing they’ve done right. Just do as they say. Inspect everything carefully and diligently, and tell them exactly what you find. Or more to the point, exactly what you
don’t
find.”

“You act like you know what they’re looking for.”

“More than you do, apparently.”

They were on sensitive ground, especially with Holland only twenty feet away.

“Don’t get nervous,” Gordon said. “I won’t ask you to say anything you shouldn’t.”

It was already their most congenial conversation in years. Maybe jail agreed with him.

“So you’re not posting bail?”

“I’d just as soon stick it out in here than out there where they are.”

“You need anything? Your meds, maybe?”

“Viv brought ‘em over. Could sure use a drink, though.”

“Can’t help you there.”

“Didn’t think so. How ‘bout some pens and paper, then? Tell Viv to send some over.”

“I can take care of it.”

“No. You concentrate on your work. It’s the best thing you can do for me, even though Viv doesn’t know it yet. The faster the better. But the most important thing is that you proceed thoroughly and professionally. The way you always do.”

His first compliment in ages, and it still had the power to please.

“You sure you don’t want a lawyer? I could make some calls.”

“Hell, Nat, they planted those boxes. The way I figure it, they’ve been setting this up for quite a while. Where do you think that story in the
Daily Wildcat
came from?”

“The feds?”

“The kid that wrote that had more of my military records than you’d even get from a freedom of information request. You really think that’s the work of a second-year journalism student?”

“Why bother?”

“Flush me out. Give them leverage.”

“For what?”

“Except I’ll be the one with the leverage. You’ll see.”

“For
what
, Gordon?”

“Just do your job, Nat, and your employers will be ready to deal. The sooner you finish, the sooner your old professor gets out of this chicken coop.”

“Unless they move you to some federal chicken coop.”

“That’s the last thing they want.”

“Let’s go, sir.” It was the cop, Willis Turner, who had arrived with the other prisoner. Gordon stood, then stooped toward Nat for a final word.

“Actually, there is one thing you can do. Tell your Mr. Holland that as long as he’s going to all this trouble, maybe he should give me some protection. This place is wide open.”

“Protection from what?”

“Her, for starters.” He nodded toward the mystery woman in the peasant blouse, who to Nat’s surprise had moved to the front row just across the aisle. “She’s a damned nuisance. But it’s the others that really worry me.”

“What others?”

“Holland will know. Just tell him.”

Typical Gordon. Playing up the drama for all it was worth, now that he was the center of attention. The cop led Gordon away before Nat could ask more, and the old man’s age showed in the stiffness of his first steps. Nat thought he heard a sob from Viv in the back, but Gordon was grinning as he went out the door.

Nat turned, half expecting Holland to be glaring in disapproval. But the only person paying any attention was the young woman, who looked away quickly, as if she had been eavesdropping. Maybe she was his federal minder. He tried staring her down, but she kept her eyes averted, and he was too intimidated by her looks to introduce himself.

When he stood to leave, he was mildly disappointed that she didn’t follow. Oh, well. If she really was with the FBI, he supposed they’d be meeting soon enough.

FIVE

O
NLY HOLLAND
and the two agents from the diner were at Gordon’s house when Nat began reviewing the files. No sign of Viv or the mystery woman. Agent Neil Ford had vanished, presumably to wherever he’d come from.

“I’ll leave you to your work,” Holland said. “Let me know of any special needs.”

“Peace and quiet should do it.”

“And do you have a camera? A notebook?”

“Uh, yeah. Both.”

“Sorry, but you’re to lock the camera in your car until completion. Keep note taking to a minimum. Anything you write down belongs to us.”

At least they couldn’t confiscate his memory. Another reason to proceed slowly.

For all his eagerness, the first hours were tedious. The archive was cluttered, as such things usually are, with grunt work—German press summaries, translations of Nazi speeches from Radio Stuttgart, interoffice correspondence over matters so trivial that they had become irrelevant within days. So far, not a single mention of the White Rose.

But here and there were tantalizing glimpses of people and events that Nat knew about, and he paused to savor them. It wasn’t just scholarly indulgence. It was the only responsible way to proceed, lest he miss an obscure but previously unknown connection to either White Rose activities or the Scholls.

Nat was reasonably familiar with the major players of wartime Bern—the spies, businessmen, and diplomats that Dulles and his pickup team of operatives had mingled with. In one folder he spotted a reference to a meeting between Dulles and Gero von Gaevernitz, a debonair German financier who spent the first years of the war shuttling between Bern and Berlin while piling up an impressive hoard of intelligence.

Fearing for his safety, Gaevernitz left Germany for good in late 1941 to take refuge in Bern, where he became a confidant of Dulles. They met almost daily at the spymaster’s ground-floor flat at Herrengasse 23, and Gaevernitz often arranged introductions with visiting Germans willing to pass along information. Switzerland’s wartime blackout made it easy for clandestine visitors, who approached a back entrance via an uphill path through terraced gardens overlooking the River Aare. As an extra precaution, Dulles talked the locals into removing the bulb from the streetlamp that illuminated his doorway.

Dulles’s status was an open secret. That was the way he wanted it, calculating that the best way to join the spy game was to let it be known that he was open for business. It was one reason the British never put much stock in his product. They figured he was being played for a fool. Too bad for them. By war’s end Dulles was an expert at separating fact from rumor, information from disinformation.

He brought to the job a masculine but genteel clubroom manner, puffing a pipe and sipping port during amiable hearthside chats. Considering the privations of rationing, he offered one of the best tables in town. Shucked oysters, perhaps, followed by roast leg of lamb. Nat had seen those items and more on the household cook’s grocery lists, which were on file in a tattered notebook at the National Archives. The cook turned out to be jotting down other items as well, and she was promptly fired when Dulles found out she had been passing information to the Germans.

That was par for the course in wartime Bern—a crowded nest of espionage hatchlings, all crying for their daily feed, then wondering what it was they were really digesting for their masters back home. And Gordon Wolfe, even if nothing but a lowly clerk, had been stationed at the center of it all. That much soon became clear to Nat from the “GW” notations penciled at the corner of several filings. It was eerie to come across his initials, especially while knowing that at the time Gordon was roughly half Nat’s current age. Hard to think of him as an ambitious young snoop after having just seen him at the courthouse, shuffling off to jail.

Nat wondered anew why Gordon seemed so eager for him to do a thorough job. And what was it that everyone really wanted him to find? Or
not
find, in Gordon’s case. White Rose materials, while interesting, would hardly seem to have much impact on the here and now. And if Nat came up empty, how was that supposed to strengthen Gordon’s hand with the feds? Theft was theft, whether the goods were helpful or not.

Halfway through the first box Nat still hadn’t found anything even remotely connected to the White Rose, not even in the news summaries. But he had noticed a potentially important anomaly. The label on the box’s spine said it contained folders 1-37. A quick count showed that only 33 folders were inside. Numbers 4, 5, 11, and 12 were missing. Was this what Gordon had meant? If so, then where was the missing material, and what was its significance?

Shortly before lunch Nat came across a few items that he figured might someday be useful in his own research. One was a lengthy and colorful account from February 1943 of a visit to Dulles by a German banker, Dieter Elsner. The poor man swallowed so much of Dulles’s port that he ended up facedown in the rear garden—next to a grape arbor, appropriately enough. The cook, presumably more reliable than her turncoat predecessor, helped drag the portly fellow back indoors, where Dulles and she revived him long enough for Elsner to groggily telephone a business associate to come retrieve him.

The associate turned out to be industrialist Reinhard Bauer, whom Nat was familiar with from the man’s prominent role in Germany’s wartime armaments industry. He also became a player in the country’s postwar economic renaissance, partly by switching from tank parts to coffeemakers. Bauer was one of those eager-to-please Hohenzollern blue bloods who had dropped the “von” from the family name to appease Hitler’s mistrust of the aristocracy. But he was never enough of a gung-ho Nazi to attract the attention of war crimes investigators.

Dulles’s typewritten account noted that Bauer arrived at his rear entrance within minutes of Elsner’s phone call, which led the spymaster to believe that the whole evening had been a ruse to arrange an introduction. Bauer showed up impeccably dressed, even though it was 2 a.m., and before they even reached his supposedly drunken friend, Bauer was already offering to share his insights on the German rearmament effort led by Reichsminister Albert Speer. The conversation began with such promise that Dulles summoned an interpreter to the house shortly afterward to help translate, since his German and Bauer’s English weren’t exactly the best. Dulles then assigned the code name “Magneto” to Bauer for use in all ensuing correspondence. It was a decent find for Nat, because up to then he had never come across any evidence that Reinhard Bauer had assisted the Allies. Already the trip was worthwhile.

The odd part was that Gordon had never before mentioned the meeting or Bauer in either his published work or any of their conversations. Yet Gordon had been the summoned translator, and his initials appeared on the memo—a lonely “GW” penciled into the lower left corner.

Nat’s stomach growled. It was one thirty. He had been at it for four hours, and to his surprise he was nearly done with the first box. At this rate, two days might actually be enough to complete the assignment, just as Holland had said. How disappointing.

“Hungry?”

It was one of the agents, who had been babysitting Nat from a seat in the living room.

“Yes.”

“I could get us some takeout.”

“Thanks, but I could use some fresh air. I’ll try the diner.”

“I’ll get my car.”

“Alone, if you don’t mind.”

The man nodded, but looked disappointed. Probably bored out of his mind.

“I have to check your notes before you go.”

“Haven’t taken any.”

“Gotta search you, too.”

He patted Nat down from head to toe, then pronounced him good to go.

To Nat’s relief, no one followed from the house as he departed in the rented Ford. But halfway down the mountain a sedan in a turnout tucked in behind him and stayed on his tail all the way into town. It was a black Chevy, like the ones the feds were driving. He parked across the street from the diner, and the Chevy took a space half a block back No one got out. Maybe they were just making sure he wasn’t visiting Gordon.

Nat took a menu but decided he had better check in with Karen before ordering, in case news of his “disappearance” had spread. He reached for his cell phone, then cursed as he remembered it was still on his desk. The waitress directed him to a pay phone by the restroom doors and changed a few bucks into quarters so he could use it.

Sending Karen off to Wightman had been his ex-wife Susan’s idea, and she had sprung it on him like a trap, by arriving unannounced on his doorstep the day of their daughter’s enrollment. At the time he viewed it as a vengeful prank, payback for years of neglect. But he saw now that it was a gift he hadn’t deserved, a last opportunity to make friends before youthful bitterness hardened into adulthood.

During Karen’s first semester he dutifully visited each week, usually taking her to dinner. Their conversations were strained, awkward. When she inquired about taking one of his classes, he found himself subtly steering her elsewhere, and later wondered why.

It wasn’t fear of favoritism, he decided, or a lack of confidence in his lectures. Nat was an engaging speaker, with a wall full of teaching awards. Then it came to him. He realized he had become the very sort of professor she would see right through and, ultimately, despise—glibly entertaining on the podium but AWOL whenever students or office hours beckoned. Sort of like the father he had been. Always leaving others—his graduate assistants, Karen’s mom—to deal with the messier affairs of disputed grades, delicate egos, and the youthful need to feel loved and included.

Symptomatic of this approach was his standard preamble, the one he had been using for years to open each and every course:

Faces to the front, you sons and daughters of YouTube and Facebook. Cell phones off. BlackBerries disabled. iPods silenced. Mouths shut
.

I will offer this information only once, so take heed. Henceforth we will proceed at my pace, not yours. No one is to ask me to back up, start over, or slow down. The lazy and the inattentive will be summarily abandoned, and from here onward you will need to know exactly where we are, where we’ve been, and where we’re going. Those, after all, are the reasons we study history, correct? History plays for keeps, and so do I
.

Until Karen’s arrival he had always thought of his little intro as standard shock therapy for bored undergrads, a mildly clever alternative to merely handing out the syllabus. But as he sat across from her in a downtown eatery, telling her once again why it might be wiser to take Mainstream Currents in American Political Thought, he realized he would never be able to repeat those words with her in the audience. They were too much of a self-reproach, a confession of the sort of person he was becoming.

Not long afterward they achieved a breakthrough, when Karen became infected by the same sort of intellectual fever that had possessed him at her age, under Gordon’s influence. For her the subject was poetry—specifically, the poems of Emily Dickinson. Hardly the first time a female undergrad had fallen under the spell of the Belle of Amherst. Then again, Nat hadn’t exactly been the first male smitten by the Past.

In any event, it gave him an easy point of entry into her inner life, since he knew firsthand the excitement she was feeling. It was a little bit like watching someone fall in love. He was charmed, even a little jealous, wishing he could borrow some of her spark for his own hurtful romance with History.

By encouraging her enthusiasm he first won her gratitude, and then her trust. He ordered a poster from the Emily Dickinson Museum, which she immediately tacked up above her desk. He then sealed the deal by beginning a father-daughter parlor game of swapping Dickinson quotes whenever they met, with each of them tailoring the passage to prevailing circumstances. Thank goodness the Belle wrote a zillion poems, giving Nat gobs of material. Their exchanges became well known in the history and English departments, prompting a colleague of Nat’s to remark archly, “If her life had stood a loaded gun, does that make dear old dad a vintage Luger?”

So now, standing in the diner as her number rang, he searched his memory for an appropriate stanza. About then he happened to glance out the window of the diner, just as the door was opening on the Chevy that had followed him into town. The mystery woman from the courtroom got out and headed his way. His stomach fluttered. By the time Karen answered, he was fumbling for words.

“Dad?”

“I’m here. Just give me a sec. Got to load some quarters.”

“I heard about your cell phone. That was a very dramatic note you left behind.”

“So the FBI called?”

“At, like, seven this morning. Just what my hangover needed.”

“Sorry. I realized later I’d overreacted.”

“Where did they take you?

“Up to Gordon Wolfe’s summer house.”

“The one with, like, fifty deer antlers in the living room?”

“That’s called Adirondack style. I’d forgotten you’ve been there.”

“I was only eleven. But even then I remember thinking he was a scary old guy.”

“Not anymore. They’ve thrown him in jail.”

“Wow. Crimes against humanity?”

“Seriously, he’s in deep trouble. They found a stolen archive in his kitchen. That’s why they brought me in.”

“To do what?”

He quoted the stanza that had popped into his head:

” ‘He ate and drank the precious words, His spirit grew robust.’”

“You’re, uhhhh, appraising the archive?”

“Like, very good. Unfortunately they’re only giving me two days.”

“What does Professor Wolfe think of all this?”

“He’s surprisingly supportive. Seems to think I can help his case. None of which I’m supposed to be discussing, by the way.”

“And with a blabbermouth student, no less. Does the FBI have your cell phone?”

“They’re supposed to. Why?”

“Well, about an hour after they called I got a hang-up from your number.”

“Checking out my call menu, I guess. Natural-born snoops.”

“Except this was some guy with an accent, wondering who I was. When I asked for his name, he hung up.”