Curtain of Death (Clandestine Operations 3)

“Jack will work,” Hammersmith said.

“When Jack walked in here . . . this room . . . with the packages, he had another letter—”

“One from my father to me,” Cronley interrupted. “It explained the packages. My father reminded me that when he married my mother, who’s from Strasbourg, right after World War One, there had been some trouble with her family and that after they went to the States, she’d had little, practically no, contact with then.

“Then, Dad said, one of them, her nephew—which makes him my cousin—Herr Luther Stauffer, apparently decided his aunt might be a warmhearted sucker who would take pity on him and his poor family, and send them stuff, so he wrote her a letter. She sent me four boxes of black market goodies, which I was supposed to give to him.

“My father, who didn’t like Cousin Luther playing my mother for a sucker, said it was my call. What I should do was decide what was best for my mother. So I put the boxes away while I thought that over.

“Then we had to go to Vienna to meet Seven-K—”

“Who is?” Ziegler asked.

“Shorthand, an NKGB agent,” Wallace furnished. “Leave it at that for now. Go on, Jim.”

“By which time I had decided, what the hell, I’ll give Cousin Luther the goodies and then tell Mom to stop sending packages because it’s against the law. Problem solved. So I told Freddy to get me an ambulance and I would drive to Strasbourg, drop the goodies off, and then go to Vienna. Pick it up, Al.”

“Freddy said ‘no.’ He believed that the captain alone in an ambulance would make the Frogs curious—Strasbourg is in France—and what we should do is have a little Mess Kit Repair Company convoy, a staff car, and an ambulance—”

“Mess Kit Repair Company?” Augie Ziegler asked. “What the fuck . . . sorry, Dette . . . is that?”

Claudette looked at Cronley for permission, and when he nodded, she answered the question.

“Since we didn’t want to put DCI, or even CIC, on our bumpers, and had to put something, Captain Cronley had 711th MKRC painted on the bumpers. He said it meant the 711th Mess Kit Repair Company . . .”

“Which Fat Freddy said was sophomoric,” Cronley said.

Hammersmith thought: And it was. Just the sort of thing you’d expect from a twenty-two-year-old captain.

“So,” Cronley went on, “Freddy changed it to Mobile Kitchen Renovation Company. Same letters. Go on, Al.”

“Then Freddy put on stripes and QM lapel insignia, and a second john’s bar and QM insignia on the captain, and off we went to Strasbourg with me driving the Ford staff car and six of Tiny’s Troopers in the ambulance.”

“‘Tiny’s Troopers’?” Hammersmith parroted.

“As our security force is fondly known,” Cronley explained. “Making reference to their former first sergeant, Captain Dunwiddie, who for some unknown reason is known as Tiny.”

Wallace smiled.

Hammersmith thought bitterly: That figures. The big black guy was a first sergeant and now he’s a captain. And Major Hammersmith is now a master sergeant.

Then he had a second thought: Maybe Greene knew that, and that’s what he was thinking when he said if I played my cards right, I could get my commission back. If this DCI can pin railroad tracks on a first sergeant, they can probably pin my gold leaf back on me.

But that’s not what Wallace said.

“So we go to the address that the captain had,” Finney went on, “and asked the woman who opened the door—we later found out she was Frau Stauffer—for Cousin Luther. She never heard of him until Freddy told her the captain was Luther’s cousin. Then he appeared.

“He seemed very happy to meet his long-lost relative who had the black market goodies for him, and he seemed fascinated with the detachment of the Mobile Kitchen Renovation Company on its way to Salzburg to renovate kitchens.

“We left him two boxes of goodies, and the captain told Cousin Luther that he would try to come back to see him, which also seemed to please him.

“Something wasn’t right, and we all smelled it, so Freddy suggested we go see if the DST had anything on Cousin Luther . . .”

“DST?” Ziegler interrupted.

“Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire,” Finney said. “Sort of a Frog version of the CIC and the CID combined. Where we met Commandant Jean-Paul Fortin of the Strasbourg office of the DST. Who is one smart sonofabitch.”

“Why do you say that?” Wallace asked.