“Councilor Forster, please,” he said. “This is Ambassador Schulker.”
Councilor Konrad Forster was diplomatically accredited to the Republic of Uruguay as the Commercial Attaché of the Embassy. He was also—as only Ambassador Schulker knew—Hauptsturmführer Forster of the Geheime Staatspolizei—the German Secret State Police, known as the Gestapo.
Forster came on the line a minute later, sounding as if he had been asleep. “Heil Hitler, Excellency!”
“Heil Hitler, Forster. I need a few words with you. Would twenty minutes from now be convenient?”
“Jawohl, Excellency.”
“Heil Hitler,” Schulker said, and hung up.
He climbed the stairs and entered his bedroom.
His wife woke as he was pulling on his trousers. “Are you going somewhere?”
“I need to see Forster for a few minutes. I won’t be long.”
“Why don’t you have him come here?”
Because whenever he’s been in my home, I feel like a dog has shat on the carpet.
“I won’t be long,” he repeated.
“We’re having the Paraguays for lunch,” she said. She meant the Paraguayan Ambassador and his wife.
“I know. I’ll be back in plenty of time.”
“On your way out, would you ask Juanita to bring me my coffee?”
“Certainly.”
He started for the garage, but changed his mind. It was a nice day, and Forster lived only five blocks away. It would be a nice walk, and good for him.
The message Fräulein Lerner had delivered to him was for Forster.
The German Embassy in Montevideo was not considered sufficiently important to the Thousand-Year Reich to have its own communications section. Thus routine messages to and from Berlin were transmitted over “commercial facilities,” which in the case of this message meant they were routed, via the German Post Office, to Geneva, Switzerland, where they were retransmitted as ordinary radiograms over the facilities of RCA, which of course meant the Radio Corporation of America, which of course meant that copies were furnished to the American OSS detachment in Geneva.
Important messages—those it was hoped would not be read by the Americans en route—were routed through the German Embassy in Buenos Aires, 200 kilometers across the Rio Plate. They were usually sent to Montevideo by messengers, who three times a week rode the overnight steamer between the two capitals. In the case of something really important, the couriers were flown across the river in a light aircraft assigned to the Embassy in Buenos Aires.
The exception to this procedure was for messages between the SS in Berlin and Hauptsturmführer Forster. These were transmitted as routine messages—that is to say, via RCA to and from Switzerland—in a code known, at least in theory, only to Hauptsturmführer Forster.
Ambassador Schulker did not share the common belief that the Americans were intelligence amateurs and therefore incompetent. In his mind they had often proven this wrong, most recently when they had not only intercepted some sort of secret smuggl
ing operation into Argentina, but in the process had not only eliminated the military attaché of the Buenos Aires Embassy and a senior SS officer but had accomplished that in such a manner that diplomatic protests could not be made.
He would not be at all surprised to learn that the message he was about to pass to Hauptsturmführer Forster had already been decoded and read by the Americans in Geneva.
But, of course, he said nothing. Forster had told him the transmission system was foolproof, and a wise man never argued with the Gestapo.
He reached Forster’s quarters in five minutes. Forster lived in a neat little bungalow two blocks off La Rambla. His car, an Opel Kadet—appropriate to his rank—was parked inside the fence.
He rang the doorbell, and Forster opened it himself.
He was a slight man in his early thirties who wore his black hair slicked down, just long enough to part. There were also wire-framed glasses, with round lenses. In short, he looked very much like Heinrich Himmler. Schulker wondered whether this was intentional—brush mustaches like Hitler’s had also become fashionable—or whether it was simply that Forster and Himmler were a type of German, as for example stout Bavarians were a type, and hawk-featured Prussians and Pomeranians were another.
Forster was wearing a silk dressing gown and a foulard, and held a silver cigarette holder in his hand.
He probably thinks he looks like a gentleman, Schulker thought. God knows, he likes to play at being a diplomat. But he really looks like neither. He looks like what he is, a clerk, with an exaggerated opinion of his own importance, wearing clothing he associates with that of his betters.