Then she crawled back onto the stretcher.
Get your little ass out of the line of fire.
The sonofabitch in the passenger seat may be alive, and he probably has a gun.
She realized her ears were ringing painfully from the sounds of five shots going off in the confines of the ambulance.
And then she felt dizzy.
And then she threw up.
[ TWO ]
Hotel Vier Jahreszeiten
Maximilianstrasse 178
Munich, American Zone of Occupation, Germany
0215 24 January 1946
Chief Warrant Officer August Ziegler, who was thirty-one but looked younger, walked down the nicely carpeted third-floor corr
idor and stopped before the double doors of Suite 507. Above the door a neatly lettered sign announced XXVIITH CIC.
There was a brass door knocker on each of the double doors, so Ziegler lifted the one on the right and let it fall, and then did the same with the knocker on the left.
After he lifted the first knocker, he thought he heard a faint ringing of a bell, not inside 507 but somewhere close, and when he lifted the second knocker he knew he heard it again.
There was no response to Ziegler’s rings from inside 507, so he lifted and dropped both knockers again.
This time he heard both bell rings and then the sound of an opening door. Then he saw someone coming down the corridor. It was a plump young man in his twenties. He was wearing a rather luxurious red silk dressing gown, very cheap cotton shower shoes, and he had around his waist a leather belt supporting a Colt Model 1911A1 pistol in a holster Ziegler instantly recognized to be a “Secret Service High Rise Cross Draw” holster.
He knew it because few people anywhere—except of course the Secret Service—had such holsters. Augie Ziegler was one of the few people who did. He was wearing one right now under his Ike jacket, the lapels of which bore triangles, the idea being that people would think he was a civilian employee of the Army, and that he was not armed.
He was in fact not only a chief warrant officer but also a supervisory special agent of the Criminal Investigation Division—called the CID—of the Provost Marshal General’s Department.
Aware that on general principles he and others in the CID did not think much of the CIC—and that the reverse was true—Augie smiled, and turned on cordiality.
“Sorry, sir, to disturb you at this hour,” he said. “I wouldn’t do it, sir, if it wasn’t important.”
When he spoke, sort of a German accent was apparent. It was not a German accent precisely, but a Pennsylvania Dutch accent. Augie was from Reading, Pennsylvania.
“No problem,” the chubby man said. “What can I do for you at this obscene hour of the morning?”
When the chubby man spoke, a German accent also was apparent. Staff Sergeant Friedrich Hessinger had been born in Germany. A Jew, he and his family had gotten out of the Thousand-Year Reich just in time to miss getting sent to the gas chambers.
Hearing the accent, Augie wondered, Is this CIC sonofabitch mocking me?
He said: “Does the name Claudette Colbert mean anything to you?”
“I’ve always thought she is better-looking than Betty Grable. Why do you ask?”
There’s that Kraut accent again!
The sonofabitch is mocking me!
Augie took his credentials—a leather folder holding a badge and a plastic-sealed photo identification card—and held them before the chubby man’s face.