The Second Objective (32 page)

“I understand.”

Grannit waited while Bernie changed.

“What’s your name, sir?” he asked.

“Lieutenant Grannit. That’s all you fucking need to know.”

“Yes, sir.”

When Bernie had finished dressing, Grannit waved him toward the driver’s seat. “They taught you how to handle a jeep. Drive back to the movie house.”

When Erich Von Leinsdorf and Eddie Bennings walked out the back of the theater, the German turned left and led him down an alley. He had scouted the area earlier before going inside. After dumping his MP equipment in an alley that led deeper into the city, where he knew it would be found, they ran three blocks to the west, jumped a fence, and squeezed through a narrow gap between buildings.

“Where we going, Boss?” asked Bennings.

“Don’t talk, Eddie. We’re not out of this yet.”

They emerged from the buildings onto the banks of the Aisne Canal, barely visible through the fog twenty feet below. They heard police whistles blowing, shouts, and men running through the fog behind them. Von Leinsdorf directed Bennings to a rope fixed to an iron ring hanging down a steep concrete wharf. Eddie glanced over the edge and saw that a small flatboat had been tied off on a narrow ledge at the bottom of the rope. Von Leinsdorf followed Bennings down, untied the boat, and they each took an oar. While Grannit’s military detail dropped roadblocks into place on all the side streets feeding into the square, they were in the boat, rowing silently south on the still water.

They stayed close to the shoreline, working their oars without a splash. Unable to see the top of the bank through the fog, they twice heard voices and car engines from above near the edge of the canal. Each time they shipped their oars and drifted until the voices and cars faded away.

They rowed downstream for half a mile, and Von Leinsdorf steered them to the left bank. Another small dock at the base of a quay appeared out of the mist, and he angled toward it, jumped out first, and tied off the boat. A small flight of stairs led up to the top of the bank.

They emerged onto a quiet street under a bridge that spanned the canal and the adjacent river. A single civilian car, a nondescript black Renault, was parked across the street. Von Leinsdorf took out keys and unlocked the trunk. Eddie Bennings had calmed down during the boat ride, impressed by the man’s moves under pressure. He’d known a few guys with this kind of cool back home in Jersey—made men, guys he’d always looked up to—but never anybody in the army.

“I gotta say, Dick, whatever it is they want you for,” said Bennings, “you got me beat by a mile.”

“I didn’t have a chance to tell you. Turns out we’re in the same line.”

“Black market? Can’t say I’m surprised.”

“I had to take out those MPs. They get their hands on me, it’s like this...” He slashed his hand across his throat, then lifted a suitcase out of the trunk. “Don’t know about you, I’m not that interested in firing squads.”

“Brother, I’m picking up your frequency.”

“Maybe they were looking for both of us back there. Doesn’t matter now.”

“Except you saw it coming, set up the boat, left this car here thinking about a way out.”

“Helps to cover the bases, Eddie. We gotta lose the uniforms. Here, help yourself.”

Von Leinsdorf opened a suitcase packed with everyday outfits. Both men picked some out and changed clothes by the side of the car. Eddie noticed a couple of jerricans sitting in the backseat.

“So, Dick, you a deserter?” asked Eddie.

“I am now.” They both laughed. “You?”

“They had my whole battalion in the brig up in Belgium on a black-market beef. The Krauts come across a couple days ago, they tell us we’re off the hook if we’ll go catch a few bullets on the front line. I said hell yeah, why don’t you just fit me for the pine overcoat while you’re at it?”

They laughed again, Eddie in an aggressive, Woody Woodpecker staccato, his mouth contorted like the mask of tragedy.

“It was sayonara suckers before they even knew I was gone. This ain’t my fight; I got no gripe with the Krauts. A freakin’ Chinese fire drill getting down here; I can thank the Krauts for that.”

“Why’d you stop in Reims?”

“That was a neighborhood we used to work; lotta freight moves on that canal. Thought I’d make a pass, see if I could pick up a few bucks.” Eddie tried on a gray fedora, checking out his reflection in the car window. “That guy who came at us in the theater, he’s one of these fellas you were supposed to meet?”

“I never saw him before.”

“He called you Lieutenant Miller.”

“Obviously he thought I was somebody else.”

“Hey, it was him or us,” said Eddie. “You won’t hear me complaining.”

“Who was the other cop, the one in the lobby?”

“That prick busted me the other night, Criminal Investigation Division, a real hard-on. Earl Grannit. New York homicide.”

“He’s a police detective?”

“That’s right. He’s on your tail, too?”

“He put some heat on us. I never knew his name.”

“Well, fuck him, he can eat our dust,” said Eddie. “I was gonna say we head down to Paris, what do you think?”

“You know your way around?”

“Been stationed there since August. Got that city wired. Our battalion was floating on a river of cash.”

They heard sirens in the distance toward downtown Reims. When Eddie turned, Von Leinsdorf raised the silenced pistol, ready to shoot him in the back of the head.

“Our train yard’s just west of the city, near Versailles,” said Eddie.

Von Leinsdorf lowered the pistol. “Versailles?”

“Yeah. I’m telling you, you got to check out Paris. It’s a fuckin’ free-for-all. A guy with brass ones like you makes a killing in no time.”

Von Leinsdorf put the pistol away before Eddie turned around.

“The Free French or de Gaulle or the U.S. Army may think they’re running the joint, but nobody’s got a handle on it. And the only God they bow down to in that town is the almighty American buck.”

“You could introduce me to some people?”

“You got a stake we can use to prime the pump, get things rolling?”

“Sure,” said Von Leinsdorf.

“Dick, I’m not pushing banana oil here. A couple weeks we could be running our own show. Just me and you, no brass skimming off the top.”

“The army, the MPs, they’re going to come looking for us.”

“Forget it, I know places we could hole up for months. Local cops want nothing to do with the black market, and they’re all on the pad anyway. You make your own law. There’s parts of that city the army won’t even come into.”

“Will these get us there?” asked Von Leinsdorf, showing him some papers from his pocket.

“Road passes, regional business stamps,
laissez-passers
. Yeah, I’d say you got it covered.”

“We’re Danish businessmen looking into postwar oil contracts,” said Von Leinsdorf.

“Let’s get rich.”

They shook hands, climbed into the Renault, and drove off. Von Leinsdorf had positioned the car less than a hundred yards from an entrance to the bridge that would carry them across the river, toward the highway to Paris. The army wouldn’t throw roadblocks up on the bridge until half an hour after they crossed.

Von Leinsdorf glanced at Eddie as he drove. The man amused him, a common thief with a lust for money. So much more useful than Bernie Oster. That he’d left the young American alive remained an irritant, but a minor one. Brooklyn didn’t have the skills to survive alone for long on enemy ground. He’d get himself captured or killed. Even if he talked, he knew nothing about the Second Objective; Von Leinsdorf had seen to that. He smiled. Eddie grinned back.

Everybody needed a little luck now and then.

Bernie stayed behind Earl Grannit’s right shoulder and kept his mouth shut, as ordered. A few of the other MPs shot questioning glances his way—where had
he
been all night?—but none said a word. Grannit was in charge and he was Grannit’s man.

Grannit’s temper flared once he’d gathered all his MPs and Army Counter Intelligence men in the theater lobby. The killer and a probable accomplice had walked out into the night and vanished. How was it possible that no one saw them or followed them or picked them up once they left the theater? Forty men looking for one man and “Lieutenant Miller” slipped the net like smoke.

Bernie could feel the other officers’ frustration in the tense silence that followed. They had a bona fide deserter from Skorzeny’s brigade dead and three men from his squad alive; didn’t that qualify as a good night’s work? Maybe other German agents had been there, and maybe they’d gotten away, but no one else had seen these two phantom killers in back of the stage or outside the movie house. Not even the three Krauts they’d captured knew anything about them.

It seemed obvious to everyone else in the room that William Sharper had murdered the MP and Ole Carlson. Sharper died with the knife that killed Carlson in his hand. He’d been shot with Carlson’s gun. He even looked like the sketch Grannit had circulated.

An army intelligence officer summed up their reservations. “Even if this Lieutenant Miller was here and got away, what can one Kraut do alone in the middle of France?”

“First of all, Carlson didn’t shoot Sharper,” said Grannit. “He’s got no powder residue on his hand. That knife Sharper had in his hand killed two French border guards earlier today. An SS officer named Erich Von Leinsdorf killed those two men. He came into Reims in an ambulance today, killed the drivers, a female civilian, and our two men here to night. He set up Sharper to take the fall, then killed him and walked away clean when we had him dropped, so don’t fucking tell me what this man can’t do.”

Bernie wondered if anyone figured him as the source of all this, and if so, how he had come to know it.

“I want this sketch of Von Leinsdorf telexed to every checkpoint in France. Expand roadblocks to every road and highway leading out of town. Cover train and bus stations and canvass every street in this part of the city door to door. Do it now.”

Grannit stormed out of the meeting; Bernie followed. They spent twenty minutes with a graves detail outside making sure Ole Carlson would be shipped home instead of being planted under a white cross in a French cemetery. Grannit wrote a letter to the man’s father to accompany the casket. They were about to walk upstairs to the apartment Grannit used as his command post, when he heard the chug of a diesel motor cutting through the fog on the canal. Bernie followed him to the water’s edge. Grannit lit a cigarette and walked along the bank, looking down through a break in the fog at a tug pushing a coal barge downstream.

“He used a boat,” said Grannit, angry at himself for not seeing it earlier. “God damn it, he used a boat.”

“He won’t give up,” said Bernie. “He won’t stop until you kill him.”

“Where’s he going? Give me your best guess.”

“Paris, I think. He said he spent time there before. He speaks the language like a native. I think he’s supposed to kill somebody. Somebody important, I don’t know who.”

Grannit whistled sharply, and two MPs ran toward them from the movie theater. Grannit offered Bernie a cigarette while they waited. Bernie took it and accepted a light.

“Whoever he’s after,” said Bernie, “that’s his next move.”

Grannit didn’t answer, but he turned to the MPs when they arrived. “Search the canal, both directions. Cut off the bridges. He took a boat.”

They scrambled back toward the theater, blowing whistles to summon more men.

“He’s halfway there by now,” said Bernie.

“He’s going after General Eisenhower,” said Grannit. “That’s the target.”

Bernie felt what little strength he had left rush out of him. He stumbled slightly, and nearly went to his knees.

“Jesus Christ.”

“You didn’t know that.”

“No, sir. He wouldn’t tell me anything. I don’t know what to say. It’s my fault. They’re all fucking crazy. I could’ve stopped him; I should’ve killed him when I had the chance.”

Grannit just watched him. “How many men were assigned to this?”

“He said there were five squads, but I only saw four.”

“Not the whole commando unit?”

“No, no, it was a small group. Four squads, four men apiece. How many are left?”

“Not counting you,” said Grannit, “one.”

“One squad?”

“Just him.”

Grannit took out the keys to the jeep. Bernie could see he was thinking about tossing them to him, telling him to drive it around. He could also see that Grannit knew that he knew that Grannit was thinking about it. Grannit put the keys back in his pocket and tossed away the cigarette.

“Paris,” he said.

29

Versailles

DECEMBER 19

G
eneral Eisenhower returned to Allied headquarters after his meeting at Verdun, and the jaws of the security detail protecting him from Skorzeny’s assassins snapped shut. He would not be allowed to leave his heavily defended compound again.