“Yes, sir, Mr. Justice.”
The two were smiling at each other.
“Ken’s a very bright—brilliant—lawyer. He was top of his class at Yale. And I really need him around here.”
Cronley’s mouth went on automatic: “He’s a lawyer and a clerk?”
“That’s the way the system works, Jim,” Mr. Justice Jackson said, smiling. “Now tell me about my interpreter.”
“After he whacked the three NKGB guys at Kloster Grünau, I took him into DCI, which proved to be one of my rare good ideas.”
“You had that authority?”
“Yes, sir. Or I took it because it was the right thing to do.”
“And you want him to be my bodyguard?”
“I want him to be in charge of your security detail. We’re going to cover you twenty-four hours a day. I brought the men to do that with me.”
“All multilingual former members of the Free Polish Forces?”
“Most of them. But two of them are German-speaking Pennsylvania Dutchmen. One is a former Criminal Investigation Division agent, and the other one graduated from high school last year. Really bright kid. He came up with how Odessa was moving Nazis out of Germany.”
“You touched on that.”
“They were concealing them on the trucks that deliver Stars and Stripes all over Europe. That’s how we caught SS-Brigadeführer Ulrich Heimstadter and SS-Standartenführer Oskar Müller.”
“Who are?”
“The guys responsible for massacring the slave laborers at Peenemünde.”
“I saw the story in Stars and Stripes. It didn’t say what they had done, and I got the impression that alert Constabulary troopers had caught them trying to cross the Franco–German border.”
That’s his very polite way of saying he thinks I’m lying.
“Casey—the young Pennsylvania Dutchman—wondered why the Stripes trucks were crossing into France at that remote location. When we learned from the French, from Commandant Jean-Paul Fortin of the DST—the Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire—that a man named Luther Stauffer with known connections . . .”
I don’t think I should tell Mr. Justice Jackson that Luther is my cousin.
“. . . to Odessa had been spending a lot of time in that little Dorf Wissembourg, we put two and two together and borrowed some Constabulary troopers from General White and staked them out along the Wissembourg road. The sergeant, First Sergeant Abraham Lincoln Tedworth, in the picture is top kick of the Constab unit that guards Kloster Grünau and the Compound. Tedworth grabbed the bastards because we knew that Odessa was going to try to get somebody through that checkpoint.”
Major General I. D. White—a stocky forty-six-year-old who had led the 2nd Armored Division to the Elbe River, and then into the German capital after the Russians had been allowed to take Berlin—had assumed command of the Constabulary on 1 Febru
ary.
“General White and the Constabulary have a connection with DCI?”
Do I tell him?
My gut tells me he’s a decent guy, a really decent human being.
Fuck it! In for a penny, in for a pound.
“As I understand it, sir, General White has been tasked to support us. Not publicly, of course.”
“You just said the Constabulary is providing security for your two bases. Isn’t that public?”
“Tedworth’s people wear Constabulary insignia, but they’re really assigned to what we call the ‘Military Detachment, DCI-Europe.’”