And clever fellow that I am, I just figured out what that clever fellow Cohen has done. Since he and/or his people couldn’t get anything out of this guy at Darmstadt, he moved him here—
Did he need anyone’s permission to do that?
Or is ol’ Morty Cohen another loose cannon?
—where he will see all of the big shots on their way to the gallows and will be thinking of how he can dodge that.
But why didn’t Morty interrogate Macher himself once he was here?
Because Macher clammed up in Darmstadt when interrogated by a senior officer of the Jewish persuasion. Answering questions posed by a gottverdammten Juden would be a sin against Saint Heinrich’s new religion, and we know that Macher worked for Himmler, and Saint Heinrich himself sent him to see that Castle Wewelsburg was emptied and then blown up.
That means Himmler trusted him. He was too junior to be an apostle, but he damned sure had to be a convert to the new religion. A born-again convert, like someone at a Southern Baptist revival: “Hallelujah, brother. You have been washed in the blood of the lamb!”
In this case, the blood of Jews, Gypsies, Russian POWs, homosexuals, and other Untermenschen.
And when I said I wanted to talk to Macher, Cohen figured, “What the hell, maybe Cronley can do what I couldn’t. Improbable, but worth trying.”
And so he had Macher moved here.
Does Cohen think I can do what he couldn’t?
Is that a vote of confidence in me?
Or is he just grasping at straws?
Almost certainly.
A 26th Infantry sergeant led Cronley up three flights of metal stairs to the upper tier, then past a dozen cells, and then across the bridge to the right tier of cells, and then down it to a door with a sign—“Macher, Heinz”—on it.
“Open it up,” the sergeant ordered the PFC who was standing beside the door.
He’s about as old as Casey. Casey will fit right in here.
“Fit in”? Bullshit!
Casey should be running around Pennsylvania chasing girls, not risking his neck—his life—trying to outwit some really dangerous people.
And what about you, Super Spook?
Shouldn’t you be a Second John, supervising the washing of mud off the tracks of a tank in some motor pool, not trying to outwit some really dangerous and clever people?
“Mr. Cronley?” the sergeant asked.
Cronley saw the door to Cell 12 was open.
“Thanks, Sergeant,” Cronley said, and walked into the cell.
A tall, trim, nice-looking man in his late twenties rose from the bed on which he had been sitting.
“Wie geht’s, Heinz?” Cronley asked. “How are they treating you?”
Macher didn’t reply.
Cronley showed him his DCI credentials.
“I don’t know what that is, this Directorate of Central Intelligence,” Macher said, after he had carefully examined them.
“Well, it’s sort of Abwehr and the Sicherheitsdienst rolled into one. We look into everything from theft to crimes against humanity. You’re charged with both.”