“So that’s what ‘go to bed’ means.”
“That’s one meaning. When we get to your room, I’ll show you another.”
“It’s right down the hall,” Cronley said, and waved Janice out of his office.
VI
[ ONE ]
The Main Dining Room
Hotel Vier Jahreszeiten
Maximilianstrasse 178
Munich, American Zone of Occupation, Germany
0945 26 January 1946
Major Harold Wallace looked into the dining room and found what he had failed to find the last four times he had looked in the past half hour.
James D. Cronley Jr. was sitting alone at a table. He was neatly attired in pinks and greens with triangles, watching a waiter fill his coffee cup.
Now that he had found him, Wallace wasn’t happy. He didn’t want to do what he realized he had to. But he had reached the conclusion as he had flown to Munich from the Eschborn airstrip that Mattingly was right.
Cronley, the poster child for loose cannons, had to go.
This time he had gone too far.
Colonel Robert Mattingly had come to Wallace’s room in the Schlosshotel Kronberg at 0500, as Wallace was shaving and preparing to go to the airstrip for his flight to Munich.
He had begun the conversation by telling Wallace how unhappy Lieutenant Colonel Parsons, the War Department G-2 officer stationed at the Compound, was with the young chief, DCI-Europe.
Some of Parsons’s complaints were bullshit—that Cronley did not treat him with the crisp military courtesy to which Parsons felt entitled headed that list—but some of them, when Parsons, as he threatened to do, took them to General Seidel, the USFET G-2, Seidel was going to think perfectly valid.
Mattingly had told him that suspecting what Cronley was up to, Parsons had stood a young ASA sergeant tall and got him to admit that ASA intercept operators, at Cronley’s orders, were intercepting all of Parsons’s communications with the Pentagon—incoming and outgoing—and giving copies to Cronley.
It had also somehow come to Parsons’s attention that Cronley had been in contact with Commandant Jean-Paul Fortin of the Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire in Strasbourg. When asked about this, even after Parsons had told him that the Pentagon was especially interested in Fortin’s role in investigating Odessa, Cronley had told Parsons he knew nothing about Fortin, the DST, or Odessa.
Mattingly had suggested—and Wallace was forced to conclude he was right—that the proper way to deal with a situation in which Cronley didn’t want to share intelligence with Parsons was to tell him he couldn’t share the intelligence without the approval of Admiral Souers in Washington, and then ask the admiral for that permission.
To boldly lie to the War Department G-2’s man in Germany, since he knew Cronley was lying, was tantamount to telling Parsons and the War Department G-2 to go piss up a rope.
Mattingly had then proceeded to report what had happened when he had gone to Cronley for two reasons. First to see if he couldn’t reason with him and possibly make him see the wisdom of pouring oil on the troubled waters between him and Colonel Parsons.
Wallace thought this was bullshit. Mattingly, who devoutly believed he should be chief, DCI-Europe, was almost certain to have been delighted to see Jim Cronley’s ass in a crack, which might see him getting canned, and leaving the chief, DCI-Europe, slot open for someone highly qualified, such as Colonel Robert Mattingly.
The second reason Mattingly said he had gone to Cronley was to ask him about what he had heard from Colonel Parsons about Sergeant Colbert shooting three people in the NCO club parking lot.
Cronley had no reason not to tell Mattingly everything about that. Mattingly might be a prick, but he was also deputy commander of CIC-Europe and not a Russian spy.
Instead, he had told Mattingly he didn’t have the Need to Know, and when Major Davis, who was Seidel’s man in CIC-Europe, asked him where he thought he had the authority not to tell Colonel Mattingly anything he wanted to know, Cronley had whipped out his DCI credentials.
Despite all this, Wallace had not firmly decided to relieve Cronley until he walked into the lobby of the Vier Jahreszeiten.
There were reasons not to fire him, starting of course with the fact that President Truman had personally named Cronley as chief, DCI-Europe. And then there was the question of what to do with him. He couldn’t be sent to some tank company in the Constabulary. Argentina was a possibility, but Cletus Frade was there, and he was not going to take kindly to his little brother getting fired because he had pissed off some Pentagon chair-warmer. And Cletus Frade had the ear of El Jefe Schultz, executive assistant to the director of Central Intelligence.
And then Major Wallace had walked into the lobby of the Vier Jahreszeiten and absentmindedly helped himself to a copy of Stars and Stripes from a stack on a small table.