The Day After Tomorrow

86

BY OSBORN’S watch it was nearly 2:30 in the morning, Thursday, October 13.

Next to him, in the dark, he could see Clarkson scanning the red and green lighted instrument panel of the Beechcraft Baron as he held it at a steady 200 knots. Behind them, McVey and Noble dozed fitfully, looking more like weary grandfathers than veteran homicide detectives. Below, the North Sea shimmered in the light of a waning half-moon, its strong tide running full against the Netherlands coast.

A short while later they banked to the right and entered Dutch air space. Then they were crossing over the dark mirror that was the Ijsselmeer, and soon afterward flying east over lush farmland toward the German border.

Osborn tried to picture Vera holed up in a house in the French countryside. It would be a farmhouse with a long drive up to it so that the armed men guarding her could see anyone coming well before they got there. Or maybe not. Maybe it was a modern two-story home on the rail line of a small town that trains passed by a dozen times a day. A nondescript house like thousands of others throughout France, ordinary and plain looking, with a five-year-old car parked out front. The last place a Stasi agent would ever guess housed his target.

Osborn must have dozed off himself because the next thing he saw was the faint glow of dawn on the horizon and Clarkson was dropping the Beechcraft through a light deck of clouds. Directly beneath, he said, was the river Elbe, dark and smooth, like a welcoming beacon that stretched as far in front of them as either of them could see.

Descending farther, they followed its southern bank for another twenty miles until the lights of the rural city of Havelberg shone in the distance.

McVey and Noble were awake now, watching as Clarkson dipped the left wing and banked sharply. Coming around, he cut the throttle and made a low, nearly silent, pass over the shadowy landscape. As he did, a signal light on the ground blinked twice then went out.

“Take us in,” Noble said.

Clarkson nodded and brought the Baron’s nose up. Giving the twin 300-horsepower engines a burst of power, he executed a steep righthand roll, then eased off the throttle and dropped back down. There was a bump as the landing gear came down, then Clarkson leveled off and came in just above the treetops. As he did, a row of blue lights came on, defining a grass landing strip in front of them. A minute later the wheels touched, the nose came over and the front wheel settled down. Immediately the landing lights went out and there was a deafening roar as Clarkson gave the propellers full reverse thrust. Several hundred feet later, the Baron rolled to a stop.

“McVey!”

A thick German accent was followed by a heavy laugh as McVey stepped out onto the dewy wet grass of the Elbe meadow some sixty miles northwest of Berlin and was instantly swept up in a giant bear hug by a huge man in a black leather jacket and blue jeans.

Lieutenant Manfred Remmer of the Bundeskriminalamt, the German Federal Police, stood six foot four and weighed two hundred and thirty-five pounds. Emotional and outspoken, ten years younger and he could have played linebacker for any team in the NFL. He was still that solid, that coordinated. Married and the father of four daughters, he was thirty-seven and had known McVey since he’d been sent to the LAPD as a young detective twelve years earlier in an international police exchange program.

Assigned to a three-week stint in Robbery-Homicide, two days later Manny Remmer had become McVey’s partner-in-training. In those three weeks, trainee Manfred Remmer was present at six court dates, nine autopsies, seven arrests, and twenty-two questioning and interrogation sessions. He worked six days a week, fifteen hours a day, seven of those without pay, sleeping on a cot in McVey’s study instead of the hotel room provided, in case something happened that needed their immediate and undivided attention. In the sixteen-odd days he and McVey were together, they arrested five hard-core drug dealers wit outstanding murder warrants and tracked down, apprehended and obtained a full confession from a man responsible for killing eight young women. Today, that man, Richard Homer, sits on San Quentin’s death row, having exhausted a decade of appeals, waiting for execution.

“I am glad to see you, McVey. Happy to see you well and joyful to hear you were coming,” Remmer said as he fishtailed a silver unmarked Mercedes off the meadowland and onto a dirt road. “Because I turned up a little information on your friends inside Interpol, Herren Klass and Halder. Not easy to get. Better to tell you in person than on the telephone—He’s okay, yes?” Remmer threw a glance over his shoulder at Osborn sitting in back with Noble.

“He’s okay, yes,” McVey said, with a wink at Osborn. There was no longer need to keep him in the dark about what else was going on.

“Herr Hugo Klass was born in Munich in 1937. After the war he went with his mother to Mexico City. Later they moved to Brazil. Rio de Janeiro, later São Paulo.” Remmer banged the Mercedes hard through a drainage ditch and accelerated onto a paved road. Ahead of them he sky was brightening, and with it came just a hint of the baroque Havelberg skyline.

“In 1958, he came back to Germany and joined the German Air Force and then the Bundesnachrichtendienst, West German Intelligence, where he developed a reputation as a fingerprint expert. Then he—”

Noble leaned over the front seat. “Went to work for Interpol at headquarters. Precisely what we got from MI6.”

“Very good.” Remmer smiled. “Now tell us the rest.”

“What rest? That’s all there is to tell.”

“No background information? No family history?”

Noble sat back. “Sorry, that’s all i have,” he said dryly.

“Don’t keep us guessing.” McVey put on his sunglasses as the rising sun filled the horizon.

In the distance, Osborn saw a gray Mercedes sedan pull out of a side road and turn onto the highway in the same direction they were going. It was moving slower than they were, but when they caught up to it, accelerated to speed and Remmer stayed directly behind it. A moment later he was aware the same kind of car had pulled in behind them and was holding there. Turning, he could see two men in the front seat. Then, for the first time, he noticed the submachine gun in a holder on the door at Remmer’s left elbow. The men in the cars in front and behind were obviously federal police. Remmer was taking no chances.

“Klass is not his birth name. It’s Haussmann. During the war his father, Erich Haussmann, was a member of the Schutzstaffel, the SS. Identification number 337795. He was also a member of the Sicherheitsdienst, the SD. The security service of the Nazi party.” Remmer followed the lead Mercedes south onto the Uberregionale Fern-verkehrsstrasse, the interregional through-route highway, and all three cars picked up speed.

“Two months before the war ended, Herr Haussmann vanished. Frau Bertha Haussmann then took her maiden name, Klass. Frau Haussmann was not a wealthy woman when she and her son left Germany for Mexico City in 1946. Yet she lived in a villa there with a cook and a maid and took them with her when she went to Brazil.”

“You think she was supported by expatriate Nazis after the war?” McVey asked.

“Maybe, but who’s to prove it? She was killed in a 1966 automobile accident outside Rio. I can tell you, however, Erich Haussmann visited her and her son on more than two dozen occasions while she lived in Brazil.”

“You said the old man vanished before the war ended.” Noble foble leaned forward again.

“And headed straight for South America, along with the father and older brother of Herr Rudolf Halder, your man in charge of Interpol, Vienna. The man who helped Klass so deftly reconstruct Albert Merriman’s fingerprint from the piece of glass found in the Paris apartment of the dead private investigator, Jean Packard.” Remmer took a pack of cigarettes from the dashboard, shook one out and lit it.

“Halder’s real name was Otto,” he said, exhaling. “His father and older brother were both in the SS and the SD, the same as Klass’ father. Halder and Klass are the same age, fifty-five. Their formative years were spent not just in Nazi Germany, but in the households of Nazi fanatics. .Their teen years were spent in South America, where they were educated, overseen and funded by expatriate Nazis.”

Noble looked at McVey. “You don’t think we’re looking at a neo-Nazi conspiracy—”

“Interesting idea, you add it all up. The killing of Merriman by a Stasi agent the day after he’s discovered alive by a man strategically positioned in a place where worldwide police inquiries come and go a hundred times a day. The hunting down of Merriman’s girlfriend and the killing of his wife and family in Marseilles. The shooting of Lebrun and his brother when they started looking into what Klass was doing in Lyon, pulling the Merriman file from the NYPD by using old Interpol codes most people don’t even know exist. Blowing up the train Osborn and I were on. The gunning down of Benny Grossman in his house in Queens after he collects and passes information to Noble about people Erwin Scholl allegedly had killed thirty years ago.

“You’re right, Ian. Put it all together and it sounds like the work of an espionage unit, a KGB kind of operation.” McVey turned to Remmer.

“What do you think, Manny? Does the Klass-Halder connection turn this into some kind of neo-Nazi thing?”

“What the hell do you mean, neo-Nazi?” Remmer snapped. “Head-busting, sieg-heiling, skinheads with potatoes in their pockets filled with nails? Assholes who beat up immigrants and burn them out of their camps and are TV news every night?” Remmer looked from McVey to Noble behind him and then to Osborn. He was angry.

“Merriman, Lebrun, the Paris-Meaux train, Benny Grossman, who, when I called him for where to stay when I took the kids to New York, said, ‘Stay at my house!’ You say KGB like I think we should be saying not neo-Nazi but neo-Nazi working with old Nazi! A continuum of the thing that murdered six fucking million Jews and destroyed Europe. Neo-Nazis are the nipple on the tit, they’re bullshit. For the moment, a nuisance. Nothing. It’s underneath where the sickness still lives, lying behind the blinking faces of bank clerks and cocktail waitresses without them even knowing it, like a seed waiting for the right time, the right mixture of elements to give it rebirth. You spend the time I have on the streets and in the back halls of Germany and you know it. Nobody will ever say it, but it’s there, like the wind.” Remmer glared at McVey, then-stamped out his cigarette and looked back to the road in front of him.

“Manny,” McVey said quietly. “I hear you talking your private war. Guilt and shame and everything else thrown at you by another generation. What happened was their doing, not yours, but you bought the ticket anyway. Maybe you had to. And I’m not arguing with you about what you’re saying. But, Manny, emotion is not fact.”

“You’re asking if I have firsthand information. The answer is no, I don’t.”

“What about the Bundeskriminalamt or Bundesnach christ and dice—or however the hell you pronounce the name for German Intelligence.”

Remmer looked back. “Has hard evidence been found of an organized pro-Nazi movement large enough to have influence?” . . .

“Has it?”

“Same answer. No. At least not that I or my superiors are aware of, because such things are discussed all the time between police agencies. It is government policy to Remain je wachsam. That means ever alert, ever vigilant.”

McVey studied him for a moment. “But personally, you say what? The mood is ripe—”

Remmer hesitated, then nodded. “It will never be spoken of. When it comes, you will never hear the word Nazi. But they will have the power just the same. I give it two, three years, five on the outside.”

On that pronouncement, the men in the car fell silent, and Osborn thought of what Vera had said about the resignation of Francois Christian and the new Europe. Her grandmother’s haunted memories of the Nazi occupation of France: people taken away for no reason and never seen again, neighbor spying on neighbor, family on family, and everywhere, men with guns. “I feel that same shadow now—” The sound of her voice was as clear as if she were there beside him, and the fear in it chilled him.

The cars slowed as they reached the outskirts of a small town and started through it. Looking out, Osborn saw the early sun reaching across rooftops. Saw autumn leaves carpeting the village in bright red and gold. Schoolchildren waited on street corners, and an elderly couple walked along the sidewalk, the old woman leaning on a cane, her free arm tucked proudly into that of her husband. A traffic cop stood near an intersection arguing with a truck driver, and everywhere shopkeepers were setting out their goods.

It was hard to tell how big the town was. Two or three thousand maybe, if you counted the side streets and neighborhoods you couldn’t see but knew were there. How many more like it were waking throughout Germany this morning? Hundreds, thousands? Towns, villages, small cities; each with its people going about their daily lives somewhere on the arc from birth to death. Was it possible that any of them still secretly yearned for the sight of goose-stepping storm troopers in tight shirts and swastika armbands, or hungered for the sound of their polished jackboots ringing off every door and window in the Fatherland?

How could they? The terrible era was a half century past. The moral right and wrong of it were worn and everyday themes. Collective guilt and shame still weighed on generations born decades after it was over. The Third Reich and what it stood for was dead. Maybe the rest of the world wanted always to remember, but Germany, Osborn was certain as he looked around, wanted to forget. Remmer had to be wrong.

“I have another name for you,” Remmer said, breaking the silence. “The man who was instrumental in securing permanent positions for Klass and Halder within Interpol. Its current assignment director, a former officer in the Paris Prefecture of Police. I think you know him.”

“Cadoux? No. It can’t be! I’ve known him for years!” Noble was shocked.

“Yes, that’s right.” Remmer leaned back from the wheel and lit another cigarette. “Cadoux.”