Death at Nuremberg (Clandestine Operations 4)

“I’m all right, Dad. I’m in the Duchess Suite of a fancy hotel in Nuremberg used to house reporters.”

“Schultz told me about your new job. How’s it going?”

“Fine. Physically?”

“Excuse me?”

“You said Mom was fine physically. What does that mean?”

“It means she’s a little shaken up, emotionally.”

“About what?”

“Well, for one thing Ginger Moriarty lost control at the funeral.”

“‘Lost control’?”

“As she was being led away from the gravesite, she spotted us and screamed, ‘If it wasn’t for that goddamn hotshot son of yours, my baby would still have his father.’”

“Oh, shit!”

“It was painful for your mother.”

“Unfortunately, that’s true. I recruited Bonehead for DCI. I thought I was doing him a favor. He was sleeping in what had been my bed when some sonofabitch shot him in the head and six other places with a silenced Colt Woodsman .22, thinking he was whacking me.”

“Schultz told us that. So your mother is upset about the scene in the cemetery, and even more upset knowing that somebody is trying to kill you.”

“Nobody’s going to kill me.”

“I think it would be helpful if you personally tried to convince her of that.”

“Sure, get her on the phone.”

“Before I do—she’s taking a nap—there’s one more thing. She got a letter from Frau Stauffer yesterday, your cousin Luther’s wife. She said that Luther has been arrested on trumped-up charges by some French policeman who hates him because he was drafted into the Wehrmacht. She went on to say she tried to call you to beg you to use your influence to get him set free, but that you have refused to take her calls, to talk to her.”

“And she wants Mom to lean on me?”

“That’s the sum of it. If you were to tell your mother you’ll do what you can . . .”

“Won’t happen, Dad.”

“Why not?”

“That bitch never tried to call me—and I would have heard if she did—because she knows I know her husband, former SS-Sturmführer Luther Stauffer—”

“You’re saying he was in the SS?”

“—did not desert as soon as he could to come home to Strasbourg, but instead was sent to Strasbourg by Odessa—Organisation der Ehemaligen SS-Angehörigen, or the organization of former members of the SS—to facilitate the escape of big-shot Nazis to South America and elsewhere.”

“That’s a hell of an accusation, Jimmy. Are you sure of your facts? Did this come from some French officer you met who hates Strasbourgers who were drafted into the German Army? I have to ask.”

“Cousin Luther was arrested by a friend of mine, Commandant Jean-Paul Fortin, who is probably really a colonel, and who commands the DST—Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire in Alsace-Lorraine.”

“And he told you this about Luther Stauffer?”

“No. I already knew. I turned my cousin Luther over to Fortin after my people—my people, Dad—caught him trying to get two real Nazi bastards—SS-Brigadeführer Ulrich Heimstadter and his deputy, Standartenführer Oskar Müller—across the Franco–German border and then to Spain. These were the sonsofbitches who massacred all the slave laborers—men and women, some of whom were buried alive—at Peenemünde so they couldn’t tell the Russians or us—whoever got to Peenemünde first—what SS-Sturmbannführer Wernher von Braun and his rocket scientists had been up to.”

“Von Braun was in the SS, too?”