“The girl was driving the Audi,” Cohen said. “She died during the ambush.”
“How?” Conroy pursued.
“I shot her,” Cronley said. “In the forehead.” He pointed with his index finger.
“How were you able to identify them? Positively? So quickly?” Wallace asked impatiently.
“I am always delighted to explain CIC techniques to a fellow intelligence officer,” Cohen said sarcastically. “What we did, Colonel, was check the prewar records of the Bavarian Motor Vehicle Bureau for a 1939 yellow-and-black Audi soft-top.
“There were complete records for one hundred fifty-three such vehicles. One hundred forty-nine of them had either been requisitioned by the Todt Organization or reported as destroyed. There were four whose records said they had been stolen. One of the four was registered to SS-Obersturmbannführer Kuhn.
“He was on your list of senior SS officers to be looked for, probably, I thought, because he had been on the personal staff of Reichsführer-SS Himmler. Such senior officers often reported their personal cars stolen just before the Todt Organization requisitioned them. Since they were senior SS officers, the Motor Vehicle Bureau took them at their word. The vehicles then disappeared under a haystack on a farm somewhere, from which they would rise phoenixlike after the Final Victory.
“We knew that SS-Obersturmbannführer Kuhn had a farm not far outside Nuremberg, because we had gone there looking for him. So I sent one of my men, dressed as a Nuremberg policeman, to the farm. He told Frau Kuhn that her daughter had met her fate in an auto accident and she would have to identify the remains. My guy then took Frau Kuhn to the German hospital to which I had moved the body.
“When the sheet was pulled from the girl’s corpse, Frau Kuhn screamed at my guy, ‘You stupid sonofabitch of an American lackey! This was no auto accident. My daughter was shot! Shot by your goddamned Jewish masters.’
“Or words to that effect. At that point, Frau Kuhn was taken into custody.”
“You arrested her?” Wallace asked. “On what charge?”
“The German authorities arrested her. She is charged as an accessory before the fact with murder. The Germans also arrested former SS-Obersturmbannführer Kuhn for murder.”
“But neither Cronley nor Winters were hurt,” Wallace challenged.
“Their daughter was killed. Under German law, anyone involved in a crime is responsible for anything that happens during the commission of that crime. Their daughter was unlawfully deprived of her life, which is the definition of murder, during Kuhn’s attempt to unlawfully deprive Mr. Cronley and Lieutenant Winters of their lives. Since there is no longer a death penalty in Germany, the punishment for murder is life imprisonment at hard labor. If the Kuhns do not understand this law, their court-appointed attorneys will explain it to them at the earliest opportunity.
“The funeral will be delayed until her parents can attend her interment. Until, in other words, we can shackle her father, who will be dressed in prison clothes, to a wheelchair, which Frau Kuhn, also shackled, and wearing a prison dress, will be permitted to push to the gravesite.
“I will have people at the cemetery to see who shows up for the burial of a fallen heroine of the Himmler cult, and to check their Kennkarten to see if that’s who they really are. We may get lucky.
“Following the interment, the Kuhns will be returned to their solitary confinement cells, where they will have time to think about their future. After they have had what I consider to be sufficient time to do that thinking, either Cronley or I will visit them and offer a reduction in the charges against them to manslaughter, which carries a penalty of five to twenty years if they give us former Brigadeführer Franz von Dietelburg.”
“You or Cronley?”
“I haven’t made up my mind whether they will react better to a nasty Hebrew colonel or to a nice young man who speaks fluent German with a Strasbourg accent and who looks like a poster boy for an SS recruitment poster.”
“Thanks a lot!” Cronley protested.
“You said, ‘Himmler cult.’ What’s that?” Wallace asked.
“It’s the religion Himmler set up, with Castle Wewelsburg as its Vatican,” Cohen said.
“You’re telling me you’re placing credence in that nonsense?”
“Oh, yes. And so do persons of much higher pay grade than you and I.”
“What persons of higher pay grade? Chief Schultz? The admiral?”
“When I was telling Schultz what Super Spook the poster boy—”
“Jesus Christ!” Cronley said.
“—had come up with in Strasbourg, he brought the subject up. He said the admiral had told him Justice Jackson had told the President that he was worried that all that hanging Göring and company was going to do was give the German people martyrs to Nazism. The President said that Jackson had heard from me about what had gone on at Castle Wewelsburg and he wanted the admiral to get to the bottom of it.
“So the admiral told Schultz to get on it. So Schultz asked me what we were doing, and I told him what Cronley and I were doing. And he said, ‘Keep Cronley at it. Give him whatever he asks for.’”
“What else did he say?”