The Berkut (59 page)

"Sometimes they're the same thing. But he left?"

"It was inevitable, I suppose. Another stranger came one night with two little girls." The mayor stopped and leaned toward his guest. In a hushed voice he asked, "You won't write about this?"

"I can't promise that," Valentine said, wanting to maintain the tension. "I have to write the truth. You know that, don't you?"

"Yes," the mayor lied, not really understanding. In his view the purpose of a magazine or newspaper was to promote the general good and create a sense of community, not to write the truth if it left readers worse off. "The doctor was in his surgery one morning when the stranger came in with the girls. The doctor told his nurse that he had to leave to see to the welfare of two refugees and that he would return. But then he packed his bag and all his other belongings and disappeared."

"Who was the stranger?"

"We don't know," the mayor said, but Valentine could sense that he was hiding something.

"In America reporters have a saying: You can tell us your story or we'll make it up from what we know."

The mayor became more agitated. "I didn't know the stranger. None of us knew him, and only the nurse saw him."

"Reporters learn to sense things, Herr Mayor. I sense now that you are not telling me everything."

The old politician sighed. "I hope our village won't be judged by one person. Most of us are good and simple people. We did not support Hitler, not like those fanatics in the cities. Some of our number voted for him, some even believed him, and most of us were happy to see Germany getting back on her feet. I suppose we'll carry that to our graves."

"Mistakes are not the sole province of Germany," Valentine said, trying to placate the man.

The mayor stared at the fire for a moment, then drew in a deep breath and leaned back in his rocking chair. "There was a young woman from our town. Her name was Janna Friest. Her parents were old, and she was the last of a large family-I can't tell you how many. They lived in the hills near here and kept to themselves. They farmed, but not very well. They were crude people-rough, no grace. During the war the old ones died and all the children left except for the girl, who stayed to finish her schooling. But she was a sour fruit-is that the English phrase?"

"Close enough. You mean a 'rotten apple.' "

The man nodded. "She was a bad girl. She matured quickly and liked boys from a young age. Many of the boys in town, and later many of the men, were with her at one time or another. One of the older men, a man from our town council, got a disease from her and passed it on to his wife. There was a scandal and he enlisted in the army. Fraulein Friest left, too and joined some kind of SS auxiliary for women. But I swear to you we didn't know what she did."

"You had some suspicions, though."

"No more than that. About a month before the war ended she came back here and took up residence in her family farm. She had two young girls with her and claimed they were hers, but we all suspected they were too old; besides, we'd never heard anything about her getting married. She stayed to herself, but when any of us had contact with her she seemed to be a changed woman. Sometimes headstrong young people grow out of it, you know? In any event, the two girls who came to the doctor's surgery with the stranger were the same two that Janna had brought with her. When the doctor left, there was a lot of gossip, so I asked our constable to investigate."

Valentine did not interrupt. The man's story was beginning to take on the proportions of a confession. "We found the house burned and Janna gone-or so we thought. Perhaps she had stolen the children. Or maybe she'd rescued them from some terrible fate. But not far from the house we found signs of digging, and from the hole we uncovered"-he seemed to struggle for a word-"evidence.

"It's an extremely sensitive situation. She was dead, and there were some photographs, as well as other materials ... from a camp. She appeared to have been a guard in one of those places you mentioned earlier. We were appalled. So then we thought the stranger must have been a relative of the girls, and that he'd somehow tracked her here to reclaim his children. It was logical to think that the stranger had killed her."

"You never saw the doctor again?"

"Never. A great loss to the future of our villa
ge."

"And the stranger with the
children?"

The mayor shook his head slowly. "Gone."

"Do you think they knew each other?"

"Yes, surely. The nurse heard them talk to each other-in another language, perhaps Russian. I believe they were confederates, but in what scheme only God knows. I hope the children are all right."

Valentine considered the information. Of all the refugees who had passed through the area, only one had remained-two, if one counted the stranger. It could be something, Valentine told himself. "Tell me more about the doctor. Did he have close friends?"

"Only our two physicians, and they were much older than he. They said he was unusually competent and easy to work with. He attended social functions, but had no close acquaintances that we could see. There were no women that we know of. He spent long hours in the surgery and slept very little. He was unobtrusive and dedicated. The only theory I ever heard-and it was from one of the old doctors
was that once he might have worked for a pharmaceutical company. He had great knowledge of and interest in drugs. He was very concerned about the supplies of medicine in the town. He spent some of his time in our chemist's shop, showing him some new methods of compounding. "

"Sounds like an American doctor."

"He was a very unusual man."

"What did the chemist think of him?"

"He found him informative and helpful. Our chemist is young, and so not yet set in his ways. Our old chemist would have thrown the doctor out on his ear; he felt no great love for medical men who looked on the healing art as a science."

"Your chemist is new, then?"

"By our standards anyone in the first generation here is new." The mayor smiled, more relaxed now that he was on safer ground. "He came here after Herr Halter passed on in '43. It's not easy to find such people for a small town, but we had enjoyed the advantage of our own chemist for so long that we didn't want to do without."

"Halter
?"

The mayor smiled and poured more wine in their glasses. "There could be no other like Herr Halter. I could tell you stories about him for days. He was not easy to get along with even in his prime, and at the end he was impossible, but he was a fine, honest man. He was the most knowledgeable man in our village about the mountains. We always found it difficult to reconcile his interest in the wilds with the cold precision of his profession. He was unique. His grandson and he would camp in there for weeks on end in all weather, even in the winter snows."

"Grandson? "

"Yes. Günter von Brumm." Valentine stiffened as the mayor went on. "A good boy. Quiet, strong. He went to military academy and was a career soldier, but he dropped the 'von' from his name. Not many knew what he was doing, but I did. Old Halter once told me that Gunter was part of Skorzeny's commando operation. He didn't come back from the war. He must be dead, or captured by the Russians. It's the same thing, I think."

Valentine let his interest show. "Now, that might be a story for me. One of the villagers who served with the famous Otto Skorzeny, the man who rescued Mussolini. He was SS, right?"

Quickly the mayor became defensive again. "There was SS and there was SS," he explained carefully. "They weren't all monsters. When the Allies hear those words they see red, but the SS was nothing more than an elite military organization, like your own American Range
rs and the British commandos. Gü
nter was only a soldier, but a good one. There's no shame for men serving faithfully when national need is declared, even if it was Hitler who issued the call.
The village is proud of Gü
nter, though we didn't know him well. He left when he was a young man and seldom returned. When he did come back, he stayed with his grandfather; even when the old man could hardly walk, they went into the mountains together. Halt
er was proud of his grandson.
"

"He came back on leave?"

"Yes."

"Recently?"

"No, not since the summer of '44."

"To visit his grandfather?"

"It was a sad scene. He loved that old man. He went to the cemetery; my wife saw him near his grandfather's grave. He left after only one day."

"Leaves were hard to come by then."

"I suppose," the mayor said. "But he went off to camp in the mountains for the last time. Sometimes young people think they kno
w more than their elders. Not Gü
nter; he worshiped his grandfather."

83 – April 2, 1946, 5:00 P.M.

By boarding early in Trieste, Pogrebenoi had secured a window seat in a cushioned and well-appointed compartment. She immediately stored her suitcase and made herself comfortable.

The train stopped in Venice, Padua, Bologna, Florence, Orvieto and a dozen smaller cities before finally reaching Rome. The Italians called it an express. When Pogrebenoi asked about the long delays, a conductor curled his fist, pointed a finger to mimic a revolver and said, "Mussolini, pow." Having been oversold at every stop along the winding route, the train was overcrowded
. In
typical fashion, the Italian males pushed their way past women and children to capture seats for themselves-unless, of course, a woman was attractive, in which case the men stopped to boldly pinch and fondle her, or in exceptional instances, to actually give up a seat.

Getting into the country had been an easy matter. She had entered under a French passport and had been careful to dress properly for her Italian assignment. Her dress was of a thin material, cut tight and low in the bodice and high above her knees. She wore open-toed sandals with high narrow heels and found herself enjoying the use of her body and looks to unnerve Italian railway officials. When the Italian security agent examined her passport at the Trieste airport, she had deliberately leaned forward, giving him an unrestricted view of her breasts as she engaged him in hushed conversation. She was careful to give him the name of a hotel in the city, even spelling it out for him. She never said she would be staying at the hotel, but it was clear that this was his understanding. Sweat rolled off his face as he stamped her papers and passed her on with a wink. She watched him slowly scratch down the hotel's name with the nub of a pencil and carefully tuck the slip of paper into the band inside his cap.

She was met outside customs by a Soviet diplomat who drove her to the rail station and bribed a gate official to get her on board early. The other passengers were still sequestered outside the barrier as she strolled lazily down the platform. The men in the crowd whistled
loudly and thrust their hands through the fence as she passed by. The noise followed her down the platform like a wave. From her window seat she watched as other women struggled through the narrow aisles nearby. Though they were in the north, it was extremely hot and there was no ventilation. Soon the musk-sweet odor of humanity engulfed her.

As the train was still loading, a thin male entered her compartment, took the seat next to her and without a word grabbed her. She drove her right elbow into his throat, which set him gagging; he stood, trying to get away from her, but she rose and drove her knee sharply between his legs, sending him tumbling into the corridor in a moaning heap. Other men, who had been watching, looked quickly away and left her alone.

The rest of the trip to Rome was uneventful, but by the time she arrived in Rome her early enthusiasm for Italians had begun to wane. They were like children, a constant drain on one's energy. The Termini, like the stations in all the other cities where the train had stopped, was packed with people. Begun before the war by Mussolini, it had never been completed and stood as a national monument to procrastination.

As in Trieste, Pogrebenoi's arrival created a stir among the males in the station. By the time she reached the street and a line of waiting cabs, she had barked a knuckle on one man's front tooth and bruised an ankle kicking another would-be assailant in the knee.

The cabdrivers didn't bother to get out of their vehicles; instead, they simply hung out the windows, each trying to outshout the others for customers. Pogrebenoi got into the first cab she came to and gave the driver a slip of paper with an address near where Via del Corso intersected Via Crescenzio. Her hotel, the Corsair, was four kilometers from Vatican City and only two short blocks from the chocolate glaze of the Tiber. She registered as Sharon Jeune, the identity on her French passport, and was shown to her room, where she bolted the door and soaked herself in a tub. The lukewarm water was colored rust by the pipes.

The next morning she cleaned her handgun and attached the silencer. She carried three clips of nine rounds each and practiced changing them until she could do it quickly by touch. Unlike most women, Pogrebenoi took pleasure in firearms, their weight in her hands giving her added confidence.