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Pyle saw him out but was not calmed. Even the CIA fouled up sometimes, he reminded himself too late. Had he known more, and read less fiction, he would have known that a senior officer of the Company could not have the rank of colonel. Langley does not take ex-Army officers. But he did not know. He just worried.
On his way down, Easterhouse realized he was going to have to return to the States for consultations. It was time, anyway. All was in place, ticking like a patient time bomb. He was even ahead of schedule. He ought to give his patrons a situation report. While there he would mention Andy Laing. Surely the man could be bought off, persuaded to hold his fire, at least until April?
He was unaware how wrong he was.
“Dieter, you owe me, and I’m calling in the marker.”
Quinn sat with his contact in a bar two blocks away from the office where the man worked. Sam listened and the contact looked worried.
“But, Quinn, please try to understand. It is not a question of house rules. Federal law itself forbids non-employees to have access to the morgue.”
Dieter Lutz was a decade younger than Quinn, but far more prosperous. He had the gloss of a flourishing career. He was in fact a senior staff reporter with Der Spiegel, Germany’s biggest and most prestigious current affairs magazine.
It had not always been so. Once he had been a freelancer, scratching a living, trying to be one step ahead of the opposition when the big stories broke. In those days there had been a kidnapping that had made every German headline day after day. At the most delicate point of the negotiations with the kidnappers Lutz had inadvertently leaked something that almost destroyed the deal.
The angry police had wanted to know where the leak had come from. The kidnap victim was a big industrialist, a party benefactor, and Bonn had been leaning on the police heavily. Quinn had known who the guilty party was, but had kept silent. The damage was done, had to be repaired, and the breaking of a young reporter with too much enthusiasm and too little wisdom was not going to help matters.
“I don’t need to break in,” said Quinn patiently. “You’re on the staff. You have the right to go and get the material, if it’s there.”
The head offices of Der Spiegel are at 19 Brandstwiete, a short street running between the Dovenfleet canal and the Ost-West-Strasse. Beneath the modern eleven-story building slumbers the biggest newspaper morgue in Europe. More than 18 million documents are filed in it. Computerizing the files had been going on for a decade before Quinn and Lutz took their beer that November afternoon in the Dom-Strasse bar. Lutz sighed.
“All right,” he said. “What is his name?”
“Paul Marchais,” said Quinn. “Belgian mercenary. Fought in the Congo 1964 to 1968. And any general background on the events of that period.”
Julian Hayman’s files in London might have had something on Marchais, but Quinn had not then been able to give him a name. Lutz was back an hour later with a file.
“These must not pass out of my possession,” he said. “And they must be back by nightfall.”
“Crap,” said Quinn amiably. “Go back to work. Return in four hours. I’ll be here. You can have it then.”
Lutz left. Sam had not understood the talk in German, but now she leaned over to see what Quinn had got.
“What are you looking for?” she asked.
“I want to see if the bastard had any pals, any really close friends,” said Quinn. He began to read.
The first piece was from an Antwerp newspaper of 1965, a general review of local men who had signed on to fight in the Congo. For Belgium it was a highly emotional issue in those days—the stories of the Simba rebels raping, torturing, and slaughtering priests, nuns, planters, missionaries, women, and children, many of them Belgian, had endowed the mercenaries who put down the Simba revolt with a kind of glamour. The article was in Flemish, with a German translation attached.
Marchais, Paul: born in Liège 1943, son of a Walloon father and Flemish mother—that would account for the French-sounding name of a boy who grew up in Antwerp. Father killed in the liberation of Belgium in 1944/45. Mother returned to her native Antwerp.
Slum boyhood, spent around the docks. In trouble with the police from early teens. A string of minor convictions to spring 1964. Turned up in the Congo with Jacques Schramme’s Leopard Group. There was no mention of the rape charge; perhaps the Antwerp police were keeping quiet in the hope he would show up again and be arrested.
The second piece was a passing mention. In 1966 he had apparently quit Schramme and joined the Fifth Commando, by then headed by John Peters, who had succeeded Mike Hoare. Principally manned by South Africans—Peters had quickly ousted most of Hoare’s British. So Marchais’s Flemish could have enabled him to survive among Afrikaners, since Afrikaans and Flemish are fairly similar.
The other two pieces mentioned Marchais, or simply a giant Belgian called Big Paul, staying on after the disbanding of the Fifth Commando and the departure of Peters, and rejoining Schramme in time for the 1967 Stanleyville mutiny and the long march to Bukavu.
Finally Lutz had included five photocopies of sheets extracted from Anthony Modeler’s classic, Histoire des Mercenaires, from which Quinn could fill in the events of Marchais’s last months in the Congo.
In late July 1967, unable to hold Stanleyville, Schramme’s group set off for the border and cut a swath clean through all opposition until they reached Bukavu, once a delightful watering hole for Belgians, a cool resort on the edge of a lake. Here they holed up.
They held out for three months until they finally ran out of ammunition. Then they m
arched over the bridge across the lake into the neighboring republic of Ruanda.
Quinn had heard the rest. Though out of ammunition they terrified the Ruandan government, which thought they might, if not appeased, simply terrorize the entire country. The Belgian consul was overwhelmed. Many of the Belgian mercenaries had lost their identity papers, accidentally or on purpose. The harassed consul issued temporary Belgian ID cards according to the name he was given. That would be where Marchais became Paul Lefort. It would not be beyond the wit of man to convert those papers into permanent ones at a later date, especially if a Paul Lefort had once existed and died down there.
On April 23, 1968, two Red Cross airplanes finally repatriated the mercenaries. One plane flew direct to Brussels with all the Belgians on board. All except one. The Belgian public was prepared to hail their mercenaries as heroes; not so the police. They checked everyone descending from the plane against their own wanted lists. Marchais must have taken the other DC-6, the one that dropped off human cargoes at Pisa, Zurich, and Paris. Between them the two planes carried 123 mixed European and South African mercenaries back to Europe.
