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CHAPTER
11
FROM THE KITCHEN Reggie grabbed some buttered toast and put it on a plate with fried sausages and a sliced apple. Also juggling a cup of hot tea, she carried it all to the library. As she entered, Professor Mallory looked up from a large book written in Polish, took out his pipe, and smiled. “I thought I heard you come in last night. Your car has a distinctive sound.”
“It’s called a wretched exhaust pipe.” She sat down next to him, lined her toast with the sausages, bit into it, and drank her tea. “Where’s Whit?”
“I don’t believe he’s here yet. But I expect him shortly.”
“I wanted to talk to you about the personnel for the Kuchin job.”
Mallory laid aside his book. His bow tie was still askew, but this morning his shirt-collar points were both directed to where they should be and it looked like he’d actually combed his hair.
“Do you have thoughts?” he asked.
“I believe Whit should play a prominent role.”
“Did he ask you to talk to me?”
“Not in so many words.”
“It’s difficult for you, I know. And him.”
“How do you mean?”
“Well, you’ve supplanted him as the leader in the field, Regina.”
The professor was the only one among them who referred to her by her proper name.
“I don’t see it exactly that way.”
“But it is exactly that way.”
“You know, Professor, quite frankly, you could use a bit more tact.”
He smiled at this mild reproach. “If you try to gloss over the truth or massage the facts all you’re doing is heightening your chances of arriving at an erroneous conclusion.”
“Whit is a good asset.”
“I completely agree with you. And if it were women we were going after we would probably have greater use of him in the lead role. Unfortunately, our targets trend to the male and heterosexual side.”
“He’s gone after men. Successfully.”
“Successful to the extent that they were terminated, yes. But we like to handle our work under the radar. For example, if we left evidence behind of why we had ended the lives of these people and that became public, you know what would happen?”
“The remaining ones would hide even deeper. But there are no more Nazis.”
“It doesn’t disprove the point. And let me correct you. There are no more Nazis of which we are aware. New intelligence may lead to more work in that arena. But take Kuchin. We dispose of him and word leaks out, other Eastern European mass murderers with new lives—and there are at least a dozen we’re researching at present—would be forewarned.”
“But we don’t broadcast why we’re killing them. It’s never made public.”
“But that’s not the only way to warn someone.”
“I’m not getting what you mean.”
Mallory said, “Your first lead target was the old Austrian married five times. You tied him up and did your job, but you ransacked the house and busted a door lock, so it looked like a robbery. And you didn’t do a bunk and scamper away but rather stayed on during the investigation so no one suspected you of anything. Now, let’s take Whit. This was before your time, but in one lead assignment he killed a former Gestapo chieftain by shooting him in the genitalia. He was supposed to inject the fellow with a poison that dissolves in the body in two minutes and is untraceable. He claims that the bottle the poison was in broke. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that putting a bullet in a man’s private region and letting him bleed out is a revenge-style killing. In fact, it could well have jeopardized future targets.”
“Maybe the bottle did break. Everything doesn’t go smoothly in the field.”
