Dry Bones Page 6

  Bunde shook his head. “They mentioned it in training, although nobody called it Victor. It isn’t something a Catholic can avail himself of.”

  “There are times merely knowing you have a choice brings comfort of its own.” Van Hull returned it to his pocket. “Wouldn’t you say so, Fin?”

  “The final lesson of war: Never say ‘never’ because you never know. Billy Coughlin declined to bring Victor along on a drop we made in Croatia. He stepped on a land mine. His testicles and everything below were Mixmastered into mush. We left him with his rosary in one hand. We put Victor in the other.”

  The blood had drained from Bunde’s face. “That’s terrible. But I’m not taking it with me. It’s out of the question.”

  Dunne studied the torpid rotation of the fan. The question remained:

  Which one did he use?

  Maybe both.

  Perpetual light, Billy.

  Victor was nestled in a small aperture sewn in Dunne’s fatigues, option, amulet, proviso.

  Never say “never” because you never know.

  Bassante referred them to a small, detailed map in their briefing books of the drop zone, a meadow twenty miles north of Banská Bystrica. “The success of last summer with some five hundred downed pilots rescued from Yugoslavia and three times that number from Romania set the bar high. Our goals are no less important. We want to erase the embarrassment of our men falling into German hands, bring them out alive, and make clear our interest in helping shape the future of a restored Czechoslovak state.”

  He turned his sharp profile to the map and poked it with the pointer. “Before we commit any significant force to a rescue attempt we must know the size, strength, and reliability of the partisan network in this area. The worst possible result would be to end up with the new group of rescuers suffering the same fate as the last.

  “You’ll have to assess the commitment of the partisans to risking additional losses in carrying out the rescue. This means paying attention to nuances. The partisans loyal to Moscow might be reluctant, believing the best course is to await the arrival of the Red Army. Those loyal to the government-in-exile in London will be eager to demonstrate their commitment to the Anglo-American alliance. The configuration of forces in Czechoslovakia needs to be explored. The information you gather will be helpful.”

  “You’ve left out one detail,” Dunne said.

  “What’s that?” Bassante put down the pointer.

  “Our exit.”

  “It depends.”

  “On whether we’re still alive?”

  Bassante leveled his sharp, inquisitor’s face at Dunne’s. “Save the sarcasm for the SS. They might find it a novelty. I don’t.”

  Tired and distracted, conscious of the long list of items to attend to after the briefing—inventory of supplies intended for the partisans, equipment checks, final packing—Dunne hadn’t intended his question to sound as sarcastic as Bassante interpreted it. “I didn’t mean that the way it came out.”

  “No need for an apology.” Bassante waved his hand dismissively, as if brushing away one of Bari’s fat, lethargic flies. “It’s a lot to absorb, so let me finish up. The timing of your exit depends on whether there’s a rescue operation. If the prisoners have been removed to Germany, which can’t be ruled out, your radio operator, Lieutenant Bunde, will let us know and we’ll make arrangements to get you out.

  “Finally, there’s the matter of making contact with Dr. Schaefer. The man is a bit of a mystery. A medical doctor who’d served in the Austrian army in the first war, he founded a highly respected pharmaceutical firm. Its success reflects Schaefer’s savvy as a salesman as well as his ability to navigate among the treacherous shoals of national and ideological antagonisms.”

  In the interwar years, Bassante explained, “Schaefer had traveled extensively. Along with headquarters in his native city of Brünn—Brno to the Czechoslovaks—he had branch offices in Vienna, Prague, and Zurich, and maintained a villa in the Grunewald district of Berlin, where, despite his well-advertised disinterest in politics and failure to join the Nazi Party, he acted as open-handed host to members of the regime’s hierarchy.

  “Unfortunately, no photographs of him are available. One of the few times he spoke for the record is a short interview he gave the Pharmaceutical News—it’s in your briefing books—during a visit to the United States. After the outbreak of war, he served as an adviser to the Wehrmacht’s medical corps, helping expedite delivery of supplies to frontline units.

  “In late 1942, the day after the Allied landing in North Africa led the Germans to occupy all of France, Allen Dulles arrived in Bern, Switzerland, on the last train from Vichy. His mission was to set up an OSS listening post on the Reich’s doorstep.”

  Practically every German industry, Bassante related, had ties with Swiss businesses and maintained offices there. Schaefer made several visits to his company’s office in Zurich, which aroused no suspicion. Eventually, he contacted Dulles’s office in Bern and began providing information on the Wehrmacht’s deteriorating position in the east. He also intimated he was privy to a growing body of information of an “especially alarming nature.” When the intelligence Schaefer provided proved useful, Dulles arranged a meeting.

  Bassante paused and cleared his throat. “It’s been no secret the ‘special treatment’ the Germans have meted out to the Jews in endless rounds of confiscations, deportations, and pogroms. But Schaefer claimed to have chronicled something on a whole other scale, involving systematic extermination at the hands of special firing squads—Einsatzgruppen—and in a network of camps in occupied Poland whose sole purpose was the liquidation of Jews. All of them.

  “In the spring of ’42, in order to fill the quota of labor conscripts demanded by the Germans, Tiso offered to deliver Slovakia’s fifty thousand Jews. He did the added favor of using the Hlinka Guard to round them up. Learning of the Jews’ deportation to the sprawling operation under way at Auschwitz, Schaefer used his connections within the regime and his firm’s status as subcontractor to chemical giant IG Farben to wheedle the authority to visit its plant there.

  “He made it a practice to note the names and ranks of those he encountered, and the roles and assignments of different units. Friend, confessor, confidant, and patron to police, civil administrators, railway executives, doctors, contractors, regular army staff, and SS men, noncoms and high-ranking officers, he constantly added to his summary of conversations, tearful confessions, drunken rants, boasts, rumors. What he uncovered was nothing less than industrialized murder.”

  Bassante reached into his briefcase and laid on the table a thin, soft-covered report so that the title was visible: German Extermination Camps—Auschwitz and Birkenau. “This was published by the War Refugee Board last November. It’s a compilation of several accounts. The Germans have done their best to draw a veil over the effort to exterminate the Jews. But at least among intelligence circles and the Allied leadership, the facts are known. If Schaefer’s records are as exhaustive as he makes out, they’ll add invaluably to our ability to apprehend the perpetrators and their accomplices.”

  “Do we know where those records are?” Van Hull tossed the wet, limp match he’d been cleaning his teeth with into the ashtray and pulled a fresh one from a pack.

  “They’re with Schaefer.”

  “Where’s he?”

  “He told Dulles he kept the records in a safe in his villa in Berlin. When he returned there in August, not long after the attempt on Hitler’s life, he sensed his lack of political conviction was no longer deemed innocent idiosyncrasy but suspected as a possible cover for treason. That night he began turning his trove of information into microfiche and burning the originals.

  “Several days later, he drove to Prague, then Brünn, and lay low in the countryside, where he has numerous friends. He was incommunicado until he appeared in Banská Bystrica, where he joined the Slovak military rebels and the partisans. They in turn put him in touch with Lieutenant Jahn and his party.
”

  “Did he give the microfiche to Jahn?” Van Hull continued to glean between his teeth with the match.

  “We don’t know. What we do know is by that time the SS was ready to overrun the last rebel strongholds. When it was clear an air rescue wasn’t possible, Jahn and his men set off to join the partisans in the mountains. Schaefer didn’t have the stamina to keep up with them. Instead, he asked that he be roughed up and thrown in a cell, so that it’d look as if he’d been a prisoner of the partisans.”

  “Did it work?”

  “In the short run, it seems so. He’s well practiced bluffing his way. Last report from the underground in Banská Bystrica indicated that he was seen driving away in his Tatra 77 from the headquarters of the Sicherheitsdienst, the SS security police.”

  “Good taste in cars.” Van Hull chewed the paper end of the match. “You think he still has the microfiche?”

  “Here’s hoping you’ll provide the answer. If it’s yes, you’ll take both Schaefer and the microfiche under your protection. The Soviets and their agents will be competitors in that regard. They’ve their own reasons for taking control of any materials pertinent to their grand narrative of the ‘Great Patriotic War.’”

  Bassante went over the details of their drop. The partisans would meet them with a horse-drawn lumber wagon, load the weapons and supplies on it, and then escort them to a safe house, about ten miles outside Banská Bystrica.

  “You’ll be on foot,” Bassante said, “and moving as quickly as possible both to take advantage of the dark and because you’ll want to. The average daytime temperature in the area has been twenty-eight degrees; nighttime, zero to minus five.”

  From the safe house, radio contact would be made with Bari. Anton, the partisan leader, ran a bakery. Given Lieutenant Bunde’s proficiency in the language, he’d accompany Anton in his delivery truck for a close look at the Hlinka headquarters where it seemed probable Jahn and his party were being held. Once Bunde felt comfortable with the layout, Anton would bring Van Hull and Dunne to meet with the underground unit in town. By then, the arms and explosives should have been infiltrated.

  “You have to establish whether the prisoners are where we think they are and if the partisans can support a rescue attempt. Here again, Bunde’s familiarity with the language will be important. Once we have some certainty about the fate of Jahn and his party, we’ll make arrangements to get you out.”

  “Nothing ever goes according to plan.” Van Hull discarded the match and worked this teeth with the edge of the matchbook cover.”

  “You might think about getting a Zippo. They might be useless for purposes of dental hygiene, but they don’t get wet and are more reliable than matches.”

  “They need to be refueled and the flints wear out. Matches are a lot easier to replace. Best of all is to know how to start a fire without either.”

  “Be prepared. Another Boy Scout skill?”

  “The more the merrier.”

  Bassante ended with a pep talk of the kind prepared and distributed by one of the morale/propaganda committees run by Lieutenant Colonel Carlton Baxter Bartlett. The boilerplate advice was framed around pitching ace Dizzy Dean’s assertion that he avoided “the fancy stuff,” and stuck to “three simple pitches—curve, fastball, and changeup.”

  In this instance, the simple pitches, which Bassante read from an index card, varied from the patently untrue (“Every mission counts”) to the self-evident (“Success depends on teamwork”) to the aspirational (“Keep your wits about you”).

  He put down the card. “Depend on the fact that little, if anything, will go according to plan. So let me add one imparted to me by Louie Pohl. ‘The simplest and most necessary of all’ is how Louie describes it: ‘Pay attention.’”

  * * *

  The next day was taken up with final packing and equipment inspection. In the evening, Dunne had just finished writing to Roberta when Bassante stopped by his room. The door was open. “Sorry for barging in. I know you’d like time to yourself before you leave.”

  “I never relax the night before a drop.” Dunne was lying on the bed.

  Bassante sat at the desk. He stroked his nose with thumb and forefinger. “You need to know something. I’m responsible for you going on this mission.”

  “You?” Dunne sat up. “General Donovan said he was the guilty party.”

  “He decided on the mission. Realist though he is, the general has a romantic streak. He’s read Henry V one too many times. When he frames a challenge in terms of noblesse-oblige athleticism—teammates, the old college try, rah-rah—he’s especially vulnerable. You know that old chestnut attributed to the Duke of Wellington—‘The Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton’? Well, it wasn’t won by public school brats, but by English slum dwellers, Irish spalpeens, and Scottish ploughboys.

  “When the general directed me to work up this mission, I told him I thought it unnecessary. The odds against it are substantial to insurmountable. He overruled me, as I presumed he would. Van Hull immediately volunteered but was adamant he wanted to go alone. He understood the odds and didn’t want to risk anybody else’s life. I convinced the general it should be a three-man scouting operation and to put off a rescue attempt until we had a better picture of the situation on the ground. I recommended Bunde and you.”

  “You chose Bunde, too?”

  “His fluency in the language is invaluable. For sure, he’s swayed by the ancestral attachments to the old country typical of the children of immigrants, but he’s no supporter of the Tiso regime. He’ll work well, I think. He needs guidance, that’s all.”

  “Why’d you choose me?”

  “Word of mouth led me to read your file. In your career, you’ve been around the block more times than almost anyone else in this organization. It seemed to me you possessed the perfect balance between Van Hull’s valor and Bunde’s inexperience. When I brought up your name, the general jumped on it. ‘Dunne knows how to deal with trouble and how to avoid it, and he can spot what others might miss.’

  “I’m not sure about finding Schaefer and his microfiche—it seems about as likely as stumbling across the Abominable Snowman—but if it’s to be done, it will take not only luck but also the instincts of a first-class detective. Call it ‘street smarts’ if you like, the ability to distinguish important from unimportant, even if the difference isn’t apparent at the time. You have it, I’m sure of it.”

  “I’m glad you’ve dubbed it Maxwell.”

  “Why?”

  “Maxwell House Coffee. ‘Good to the last drop.’”

  “Ah, yes, that advertising slogan attributed to the first President Roosevelt, who on finishing a cup—or so some huckster claimed—blurted out words to that effect.”

  “I’m hoping this is my last drop.”

  Bassante abandoned a tentative attempt at smiling. “Subconsciously, I suppose, I chose the name because I grew up in Hoboken. Maxwell’s electric sign watches over the town like the eye of God. But we select code names by going through the alphabet sequentially. This mission landed on M and was designated Maxwell. It was luck.”

  “Luck is fate’s knuckleball. It has a will of its own.”

  “A good team is more important than an occasional knuckleball.”

  “Then let’s call it totiusque.”

  “Say it again.”

  “Totiusque. It’s from a prayer.”

  “The Suscipiat. Bane of every altar boy. I was one, too.”

  “It stuck with me. ‘Totiusque’ always sounded to me like ‘good luck.’”

  “‘Luck’ isn’t a word used in prayers, not Catholic ones. It means ‘and all.’ But for tonight we can pretend it does. Luck by any other name is still luck. So totiusque, Dunne.”

  Bassante smiled. This time it stuck.

  Part III

  The Last Drop

  Dr. Gerhard Schaefer is a medical doctor and the chairman and chief executive officer of Aigle, an independent pharmaceutical compan
y headquartered in Brünn, a city of more than 280,000 people. At the end of the Great War, Brünn, formerly a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, was incorporated into the newly created state of Czechoslovakia. (The city, referred to as Brno by the Czechs, reverted to German rule with the recent annexation of Bohemia and Moravia.)

  Founded by Dr. Schaefer and his former partner, prize-winning chemist Dr. Herschel Cernak, in 1920, Aigle has amassed a record of successful product development and profitability throughout these tumultuous years.

  Dr. Schaefer appears to be in his early fifties (he declined to give his age and it does not appear in his official biography). Balding, with a gap-toothed smile redolent of old-fashioned German gemütlichkeit, he has a friendly, open manner devoid of the haughty superiority that has become the preferred pose of present-day Germany’s self-styled übermensch. He is widely respected for his scientific knowledge, his business acumen, and his interest in literature and the arts.

  Dr. Schaefer attended the Twelfth Annual International Pharmaceutical Convention, which was held in Baltimore, Maryland, from April 12 through 15. An unassuming man who speaks English flawlessly, with little trace of an accent, he graciously consented to a brief interview about the state of the industry and the world with Pharmaceutical News.

  PN: You named your company Aigle in honor of the goddess of good health, correct?

  GS: Yes, Aigle, which means “radiance” in Greek, is the daughter of Asclepius, god of medicine, and Epione, goddess of pain relief. A marriage made in heaven, if you will.

  PN: What effect did the last war have on our industry?

  GS: Major innovations were growing in number well before the turn of the century, but the war added a whole new impetus.

  PN: What has been the impact of the world economic depression?