The Day After Tomorrow

97

“GUSTAV DORTMUND, Hans Dabritz, Rudolf Kaes, Hilmar Grunel—” Remmer put down the faxed description sheet and looked across to where McVey sat reading the same five-page copy of the Charlottenburg guest list. “Herr Lybarger has some very wealthy and influential friends.”

“And some not so wealthy, but just as influential,” Noble said, studying his own copy of the list. “Gertrude Biermann, Matthias Noll, Henryk Steiner.”

“Politically, far left to far right. Normally they wouldn’t be caught in the same room together.” Remmer shook out a cigarette, lit it, then leaned over and poured himself a glass of mineral water from a bottle on the table.

Osborn leaned against the wall, watching. He’d not been given a copy of the guest list nor had he asked for 1 one. In the last hours, as more information came in and the detectives increased their concentration on it, he’d been almost wholly ignored. Its effect was to alienate him further and intensify the feeling he’d had earlier: that when they left to meet Scholl, he would not be going.

“Naturalized or not, Scholl seems to be the only American. Am I right?” McVey asked, looking at Remmer.

“Everyone else identified is German,” Remmer said. There were seventeen names on the guest list Bad Godesberg had so far been unable to trace. But with the exception of Scholl, all of those who had been identified were highly respected, if politically disparate, German citizens.

Looking at the list again, Remmer exhaled a cloud of cigarette smoke that McVey waved off as it passed him.

“Manfred, you mind? Why don’t you just up and quit, huh?” Remmer glared and started to reply but McVey held up a hand. “I’m gonna die, I know. But I don’t want you to be the one who takes me out.”

“Sorry,” Remmer said flatly, and stamped the butt into an ashtray.

Increasingly irritable snippets of conversation, underscored by long periods of silence, evidenced the collective frustrations of three markedly tired men trying to piece together what was going on. Beside the fact that the Charlottenburg celebration was being held in a palace instead of a hotel ballroom, on the surface it seemed to be no more than that, the kind of thing done hundreds of times a year by groups all over the world. But the surface was only the surface, and the interest was in what lay beneath. Among them they had more than a hundred years of experience as professional policemen. It gave them an instinct for things others wouldn’t have. They had come to Berlin because of Erwin Scholl and, as far as they could tell, Erwin Scholl had come to Berlin because of Elton Lybarger. The question was—Why?

The “why?” became even more intriguing when one realized that, of all the illustrious people invited to the affair in his honor, Lybarger was the least illustrious and least known of any of them.

Bad Godesberg’s search of records showed him born Elton Karl Lybarger in Essen, Germany, in 1933, the only child of an impoverished stonemason. Graduated public school in 1951, he’d vanished into the mainstream of postwar Germany. Then, thirty-odd years later, in 1983, he’d suddenly reemerged as a multimillionaire, living in a castle-like estate called Anlegeplatz twenty minutes outside Zurich, surrounded by servants, and controlling considerable shares of any number of first-rate Western European corporations.

The question was—How?

Early income tax filings from 1956 until 1980 showed his occupation as “bookkeeper,” and gave addresses that were drab, lower-class apartment complexes in Hannover, Düsseldorf, Hamburg and Berlin, and then, finally, in 1983, Zurich. And in every year until 1983 his income had barely reached the mean wage. Then, with the 1983 filing, his income soared. By 1989, the year of his stroke, his taxable income was in the stratosphere, more than forty-seven million dollars.

And there was nothing, anywhere, to explain it. People were successful, yes. Sometimes almost overnight. But how did anyone, after years of work as an itinerant bookkeeper, living in a world a foot up from poverty, suddenly emerge as a man of opulent wealth and influence?

Even now, he remained a mystery. He sat on the boards of no European corporations, universities, hospitals or charities. He held membership in no private clubs, had no registered political affiliation. He had no driver’s license or record of marriage. There wasn’t so much as a credit card issued in his name. So who was he? And why were one hundred of Germany’s richest and most influential citizens arriving from all parts of the country to applaud his health?

Remmer’s reasoned guess was that in all those years, Lybarger had been secretly dealing in the drug world, moving from city to city, amassing a fortune in cash and laundering it into Swiss banks, where in 1983 he had enough to suddenly go legitimate.

McVey shook his head. There was something that struck both him and Noble the moment they had seen the guest list. Something they hadn’t shared with Remmer. Two of the names on it—Gustav Dortmund and Konrad Peiper— were principals, along with Scholl, in GDG—Goltz Development Group, the company that had acquired Standard Technologies of Perth Amboy, New Jersey. The firm that in 1966 had employed Mary Rizzo York to experiment with super-subzero cooling gasses. The same Mary Rizzo York, Ph.D., Erwin Scholl had allegedly hired Albert Merriman to murder in that same year.

It was true that takeover had happened at a time when only Scholl and Dortmund were involved with GDG. Konrad Peiper hadn’t come aboard until 1978. But since then, as its president, he had forged GDG to the forefront, however illegally, as a world-class arms supplier. The obvious was that both before Peiper and afterward, Goltz Development was hardly a wholesome, straightforward operation.

When McVey asked Remmer what he knew of Dortmund, the German detective joked and said that aside from his relatively minor position as head of the Bundesbank, the central bank of Germany, Dortmund was already one of the pedigreed super-rich. Like the Rothchilds, his family had been one of the great European banking families for more than two centuries.

“So, like Scholl, he’s beyond reproach,” McVey said.

“It would take one hell of a scandal to bring him down, if that’s what you mean.”

“What about Konrad Peiper?”

“Him, I know almost nothing about. He’s rich and has an extraordinarily beautiful wife who has a great deal of money and influence of her own. But all one really needs to know about Konrad Peiper is that his paternal grand-uncle, Friedrich, was supplier of arms to half the planet in both world wars. Today that same company does very well making coffeepots and dishwashers.”

McVey looked at Noble, who merely shook his head. The thing was as mystifying now as when they started. The Charlottenburg affair had attracted a gathering that included Scholl, the chief of the Bundesbank, the head of an international munitions trade and a guest list of German citizens who were the Who’s Who of the ultra-rich and powerful and the truly politically connected; many of whom, under other circumstances, would be philosophically and maybe even physically at each other’s throats. Yet here they all were, coming arm in arm to an ornate museum built by Prussian kings, to celebrate the return to wellness of a man with a history so shadowy you could put a hand through it.

And then there was the Albert Merriman situation and the swath of horror that had followed it, including the sabotaging of the Paris-Meaux train and the murders of Lebrun in England, his brother in Lyon and the gunning down of Benny Grossman in New York. Not to mention the hidden Nazi past of Hugo Klass, the respected fingerprint expert at Interpol, Lyon, and Rudolf Halder, the man in charge of Interpol, Vienna.

“The first one taken out was Osborn’s father, in April 1966, just after he designed a very special kind of scalpel.” McVey padded a few feet across the carpet and sat down on the window ledge. “The latest was Lebrun, sometime this morning,” he said, bitterly. “Shortly after he connected Hugo Klass to the killing of Merriman . . . And from first to last, one link through it all, the straight line, from then until now is—”

“Erwin Scholl,” Noble finished for him.

“And now we’re back to square one with the same questions. “Why For what reason? What the hell is going on?” Most of McVey’s career had been spent on the circular route, asking the same question hundreds of times. That’s what you did in homicide, unless you just happened to walk in and find somebody holding a smoking gun. And almost always the route ended with a detail overlooked until then, one that was suddenly as clear as if it had been a huge rock sitting there the whole time with the word CLUE spray-painted on it in red.

But not this one. This was a circle with a beginning but no end. It was round and kept going. The more information they garnered, the bigger the circle got and that was all.

“The headless bodies,” Noble said.

McVey threw up his hands. “All right, why not? Let’s ‘ work that angle.”

“What angle? What are you talking about—?” Remmer looked from Noble to McVey and back again.

Remmer’s Bundeskriminalamt, like all police agencies in the countries where the decapitated bodies had been found, received copies of McVey’s status reports to Interpol. Purposely, McVey had not informed Interpol about the bodies’ ultra-deep-freezing or the projections about the experiment. that lay behind the freezing. So naturally Remmer was in the dark; he didn’t know enough. Under the circumstances, now seemed an extraordinarily good time to tell him.