—
“He’s not going to give us the mole, Jim,” DuPres said, when Martin closed the door after him. “Or anything else unless I let Ibn Tufail loose, and Commandant Fortin said I was not to do that without your permission.”
“Pierre, I have noticed that when Frenchmen give people a gift, the person gifted gives the giver a kiss on the cheeks. True?”
“Excuse me?”
Cronley motioned for DuPres to come closer, and when he did, Cronley grabbed his shoulders and kissed him wetly on both cheeks.
And when he turned him loose, he wiggled a finger at Sergent-chef Ibn Tufail to come close and kissed both of his cheeks.
“Jim?” DuPres asked. “What—”
“I have just had one of the famous James D. Cronley Junior epiphanies.”
“A what?”
“I have just had a sudden and striking realization vis-à-vis my cousin Luther that I should have figured out—or at least suspected—a long time ago.”
“Jim, I don’t understand what you’re talking about.”
“And come to think of it, Jean-Paul and you have been as blind as I have.”
“Blind to what?”
“Cousin Luther is not just the low-level flunky running errands for Odessa that we all thought him to be. That’s why I kissed you,” Cronley said. “You have given the DCI what we have been looking for—without any success at all—a high-ranking member of Odessa. The sonofabitch has been in Odessa—in the inner circle of Odessa—from the beginning.”
“What?”
“Think about it, Pierre. Where did Odessa start, where was that organizational meeting held?”
“You mean, the meeting in the Maison Rouge hotel in Strasbourg?”
“Right. So let’s start with that. Why Strasbourg? Why not in Köln or Munich, or for that matter, Berlin?”
“So it wouldn’t come to the attention of the SS?”
“That, and because they knew as soon as they lost the war, Strasbourg would be returned to France. All a Nazi—either a businessman or a senior SS officer—would have to do to avoid getting bagged after the surrender was get across the Rhine into what again would be French Strasbourg.
“And in the beginning, it was called Die Spinne, right? It had nothing to do with the SS. In fact, they didn’t even want the SS to know what they were up to.”
“That’s true.”
“But there was a senior SS officer at the meeting . . .”
“SS-Obergruppenführer Wilhelm Kramer,” DuPres said. “Who we haven’t been able to catch.”
“And the SS never heard about Die Spinne, right? If they had, Himmler would have had all those businessmen hung in the Flossenbürg concentration camp where they hung Admiral Canaris. So why didn’t the SS learn about Die Spinne? Because a very senior SS officer . . .”
“SS-Obergruppenführer Wilhelm Kramer,” DuPres interjected.
“. . . killed any investigation,” Cronley concluded. “Now, these people couldn’t just paddle across the Rhine in a rowboat to Strasbourg when the time came unless they had somebody there to take care of them. But who?
“There was an interesting man in the SS . . .”
“Sturmführer Luther Stauffer.”
“. . . who was from Strasbourg. And had been awarded the Iron Cross. So SS-Obergruppenführer Whatsisname . . .”