He’s had Müller terrified of being discovered and sent to a death camp with a pink triangle sewn to his chest.
“Wonder if that would come as any surprise to Günther?”
Beck grunted. “Who do you think we caught Hans with?”
Palasota, his face furious, picked up the telephone and dialed a short number from memory.
After a moment, he controlled his tone as he said into the phone, “Hans, something has come up. Are you busy? No? Good. See you in a moment.”
Palasota stood, and everyone else got up at once.
“We cannot all go,” Jimmy Skinny said. “It will spook him. Give me and Oskar twenty, thirty minutes with him, and then you can follow.”
“I don’t like it,” Canidy said.
“You don’t have to, Dick. But it is what has to happen.”
* * *
>
Ten minutes later, Dick Canidy and Ernst Beck entered the ornate metal doors of the SS Field Office building. Oskar Kappler was coming out of a room to the right, wiping at his uniform sleeve with a hand towel.
There’s blood splatter on his neck, Canidy thought. And his clothes.
Kappler saw Canidy’s expression.
“Your man is alive. Hans told me where to find Nola—his body.”
Shit, Canidy thought. Farewell, Frank. We have the watch.
Kappler nodded to a stairwell in the corner of the room.
“Follow me.”
A flight down, Kappler led them through a heavy wooden door, then past one made of iron bars, to a space that clearly had been set up as a torture room. There were medieval racks. Rusty chains hung from bolts on the wall.
They turned a corner and Canidy then saw Müller lying on the stained coarse stone floor. A pool of blood drained from a hole in the back of his head.
Canidy then saw Tubes strapped to a rough-hewn wooden table. It looked vaguely familiar, and he remembered the tables Müller had used in the villa for the germ warfare experiment.
Tubes looked gaunt. His once thick blond hair was thin, dirty, matted. There were bruises visible up and down his body, but they did not look fresh. Canidy looked at Tubes’s hands and feet and saw only crusted scabs.
Sonofabitch!
Palasota was undoing the leather straps at Tubes’s feet. Tubes turned his head, tried to focus, then managed to form something resembling a smile when he saw Canidy.
“Fins!” he grunted weakly.
“Yeah, Tubes,” Canidy said, his voice cracking. “Fins. But not anymore.”
Palasota looked up. “Fins?”
Canidy cleared his throat, then said, “It was our O.K. Corral code word for ‘everything’s about to go to shit so start shooting every bastard you can.’ Got said a little too late, it would appear . . .”
“God help him,” Ernst Beck said softly.
“You’re going to be okay, Jim,” Canidy said. “You’re going home.”