“Without a floor plan, is there another way?”
“Sure. Tape measure.”
“Excuse me?”
“You measure a room. Then you go outside the castle’s wall, outside that room, and measure there. If there’s a significant difference—the outside measures twenty-eight feet, say, and the inside is twenty—you know there’s eight feet of something missing.”
“Dumb question: Do you have a tape measure?”
“Never leave home without it.”
“Okay, then you start measuring while Colonel Cohen gets on the telephone.”
“Who’s Colonel Cohen calling?” Colonel Cohen asked.
“General White.”
“And what am I going to say to General White?”
“You’re going to talk him out of a troop of Constabulary. We need to really guard this place.”
Cohen looked at Dickinson, and said, “The most annoying thing Captain Cronley does, Colonel, is think of something minutes before you do.”
XIII
[ONE]
Farber Palast
Stein, near Nuremberg, American Zone of Occupation, Germany
0805 26 April 1946
“Good morning, Miss Johansen,” Father McKenna greeted her as she strode into the palace dining room.
“I hate people who are cheerful in the morning.”
“My apologies. It comes naturally. Occupational hazard, you might say.”
“Sure. The Vatican is hiding the Nazis’ dirty money and you’re a fucking choirboy of cheerfulness.”
McKenna, shocked, was speechless.
She turned to Cronley, who looked up at her from his steak-and-eggs breakfast.
“I’m afraid to ask how you slept, Janice. You should be exhausted after our long day at the castle. Buy you some breakfast?”
She ignored the offer. “Your bright idea ain’t going to work, Jimmy.”
“To which of my many bright ideas do you refer?”
“This one,” she said, and handed him a sheet of paper that had a sheet of carbon paper and another sheet of paper stapled to it.”
His eyes went to the top page:
CONSTABULARY TO OPEN NCO ACADEMY
By Janice Johansen