Curtain of Death (Clandestine Operations 3)

Alphonse was captured by the U.S. 20th Armored Division, which (together with the 3rd, 44th, and 45th Infantry Divisions) took Munich against light resistance on April 29–30, 1945. He was then serving as an interpreter. He had become fluent in French, Italian, Spanish, Hungarian, Polish, and English while working his way up from dishwasher to senior bartender in the Vier Jahreszeiten, and was conversant in several other tongues, including Russian.

He had been a POW for two weeks when the POW camp commander, for whom Alphonse had been serving as an interpreter/bartender, decided Alphonse was just the man to take over the bar in the Vier Jahreszeiten, which had just been requisitioned by the U.S. Army for service as a senior officers’ hotel.

Six weeks after he had been mustered into the Volkssturm, Alphonse was again wearing his white jacket and mixing drinks in what he thought of as his bar.

Alphonse quickly became friendly with the American officers, majors and up, who patronized the bar off the Vier Jahreszeiten’s lobby. While Alphonse was, perhaps understandably, something of a snob, he could tolerate most of the Americans, even though he quickly decided that only a very few of them genuinely could be called gentlemen.

Conversely, he didn’t dislike many of his American customers, although there were a few that he really disliked.

When the Army had taken over the Vier Jahreszeiten, among the first people to move in were officers of the Office of Strategic Services. They took over the entire fifth floor of one of the wings.

Their commanding officer met Alphonse’s criteria as a gentleman. His name was Robert Mattingly and he was a colonel of cavalry. His uniforms were impeccable, he was never in need of a haircut or a shave, and he spoke German fluently with a Hessian accent.

His deputy, Major Harold Wallace, not only also spoke German fluently, with a Berliner accent, but decent French and Italian as well. But that was about all that could be said in his favor. While he rarely needed a shave, he often needed a haircut, and he was seldom seen in pinks and greens, but rather in a brown woolen uniform indistinguishable from that worn by common enlisted men. And his shoes often needed a shining. And he had the disconcerting habit of opening his jacket, revealing a large pistol in a shoulder holster.

Their administrative officer wasn’t really an officer at all, but a sergeant who wore the insignia of a civilian employee on the lapels of an officer’s pinks-and-greens uniform. Friedrich Hessinger spoke German with a Bavarian accent fluently. He was a Bavarian, a Jew who had gone to America and was now back as a member of the occupying army.

Hessinger frequently brought to the bar statuesque blond German women, sometimes two of them at once. Alphonse didn’t hold the women against him—to the victor go the spoils—or blame the women. But a German Jew who was really a sergeant bringing women of dubious morality into a senior officers’ bar was obviously inappropriate.

When Colonel Mattingly left Munich for duty at a higher headquarters, Major Wallace and Sergeant Hessinger remained, now as members of something called the XXVIIth CIC, which had replaced the OSS, and which Alphonse understood to be something like the Sicherheitsdienst in the former regime.

And then the one American whom Alphonse really didn’t like appeared in the XXVIIth CIC. He was a captain, although he didn’t look to be old enough to hold that rank. He often appeared in a uniform with triangles, suggesting he was a civilian employee. When wearing the latter—and sometimes when wearing ODs and pinks and greens with his captain’s insignia—he wore cowboy boots. Sometimes they were highly polished, and sometimes they looked as if he had walked from Moscow to Munich in them.

Alphonse didn’t think the young captain was a Jew. He was blond and didn’t have Semitic facial features. Alphonse strongly suspected the young captain was a German, because he spoke German fluently with a strong Alsatian accent. He was invariably armed, carrying a huge pistol either in a holster, or sometimes simply jammed in his waistband.

Once, when this “officer and gentleman” had appeared in the bar wearing a gray woolen upper garment on which was printed in red a map of Texas and the lettering “A&M”—plus of course his battered cowboy boots—and was accompanied by two German men, whom he addressed in German as “Herr General” and “Herr Oberst,” Alphonse knew he had to do something about it.

Alphonse tried to hear what they were talking about, but every time he sidled close as he polished glasses, they stopped talking. He would have liked to hear them talking about what he thought they were talking about—specifically, black market prices—so he could take that information with him when he went to Lieutenant Colonel Matthews, who was the club officer.

He went to Colonel Matthews anyway, where he suggested that since it was not his position to say anything, perhaps the colonel might see fit to have a word with the young captain about his presence in a senior officers’ bar wearing a garment more suited to a gymnasium and with a pistol jammed in his waistband, and bringing with him two Germans whom regulations forbade being in the Vier Jahreszeiten at all.

“Between you and me, Alphonse,” Colonel Matthews had replied, “yours is not the first complaint I’ve heard about Cronley. A number of the officers’ ladies have complained. But the thing is, he’s the chief of something called the DCI and so far as his being quartered in the Vier Jahreszeiten, this DCI thing gives him the assimilated rank of lieutenant colonel. And this DCI, whatever the hell it is, is not under Munich Military Post. And so far as those two Germans are concerned, they have documents identifying them as members of this DCI, and they can come in here, too. We just have to live with this situation. Sorry.”

—

When Captain James D. Cronley Jr. walked into the Vier Jahreszeiten bar and took a stool, Alphonse Bittermann saw that again his dress did not meet the standards of the house. The wearing of pinks and greens was “strongly recommended” after 1930 hours. And not only was the young captain wearing OD, he was wearing it with civilian triangles and a turtleneck sweater instead of a shirt and tie. And of course cowboy boots, the ones that looked as if he had walked in them all the way from Moscow.

Alphonse draped his barman’s napkin over his left arm, walked quickly to him, smiled, and greeted him in English.

“Good evening, Captain Cronley, sir. What can I fix for you this evening?”

Cronley replied in German: “What’s new, Fritz? How about pouring me a double Jack Daniel’s? Water on the side. I’m entitled. I’ve had a long day.”

“Yes, sir. Double Jack Daniel’s. Water on the side,” Alphonse parroted in English, and then added, “My name is Alphonse, sir.”

“I don’t know why I can’t remember that. One of my favorite gangsters is named Alphonse. Alphonse Capone.”

Alphonse smiled although he had heard Cronley’s little joke before. He suspected the gottverdammt Amerikaner called him Fritz just so he could make his little joke. He had vowed he wouldn’t give him the chance again but had forgotten.

As Alphonse took the bottle of Jack Daniel’s from the row of bottles behind the bar, he saw in the mirror that the gottverdammt Amerikaner was looking with interest at a woman sitting far down the bar.

This pleased him. The woman, who was in her late twenties or early thirties, had been in the bar for about an hour. She had attracted the attention of three different officers, all of whose advances she had bluntly rejected. The woman was wearing a pink-and-green uniform with a gold-thread-embroidered patch sewn to her sleeves at the shoulder. It read US WAR CORRESPONDENT.

With just a little bit of luck, Captain Cronley would make a play for the woman, and she would reject him at least as humiliatingly as she had the other officers, all of whom, Alphonse recalled, were not only in the proper uniform but senior—one major and two lieutenant colonels—to him.

And then, after he had placed the bottle of Jack Daniel’s, two glasses, a water decanter, and a silver ice cube bucket with tongs on his tray and turned to carry it to Cronley, Alphonse saw something that really pleased him.

Colonel Robert Mattingly, as usual splendidly turned out, had entered the bar together with another officer, a major, whom Alphonse did not recognize, and was headed for Cronley. Mattingly certainly would be offended by the turtleneck sweater and he would correct him. Cronley could not ignore Mattingly.