AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“We know that Perón and Lombardi are close. But we don’t know if Perón knows these two came off U-234, or whether he thinks they came here by other means. What I’m saying is that Nulder may have arranged for the libretas as a routine courtesy to Lombardi and doesn’t know of the U-234 connection. That offers the possibility that Perón doesn’t know about U-234. The possibility that he doesn’t.
“Yesterday, both Lang and Körtig came to Buenos Aires to an apartment at 1044 Calle Talcahuan, near the Colón Opera House. The apartment . . .”
Frogger, recognizing the address, blurted, “My parents’ apartment?”
Martín nodded and went on: “. . . was owned by the German embassy. Señor Frogger and his wife were housed there. After they defected, the embassy retained ownership of course until the end of the war. Then something very interesting happened. Several weeks before the German surrender, the first secretary of the German embassy, Anton von Gradny-Sawz, offered to defect to the BIS. I wondered what he was up to and accepted the defection. I got nothing of value from him before the surrender occurred, but then I learned what he was up to.
“It seems—for reasons I admit I don’t understand—that the Allies are not treating Ostmark, the name the Germans gave to Austria after it was annexed, as still part of Germany. They have decided that Austria was liberated, not conquered, and is again a sovereign nation.”
“I’ll be goddamned,” Frade said softly. “Some of the worst Nazis were Austrians. Allen Dulles told me that seventy to eighty percent of SS officers were Austrians.”
“That’s a little high, Cletus,” Alois Strübel said. “More than half, but not seventy to eighty percent.”
“I will defer to your greater knowledge of the subject, Herr SS-Obersturmbannführer,” Frade said, somewhat sarcastically.
Strübel replied with an American hand gesture he had learned from Frade. He held his balled fist, center finger extended, out to him.
“If I may continue?” Martín asked impatiently.
“Sorry,” Strübel and Frade said over one another.
“At the moment, there are two occupation authorities,” Martín went on. “One for Germany and, wholly separate from that, one for Austria. Gradny-Sawz got in touch with the British ambassador here, whom he knew. He told the ambassador that he had defected to the Argentines before the war ended and that he now would like to make himself again of service to the country of his birth, Austria.
“The British ambassador, who is not too bright, called me to see if Anton had in fact defected. When I told him he had, he contacted the British element of the Allied Occupational Authority in Vienna and told them he had found just the man to handle Austrian diplomatic affairs in Argentina until diplomats could be sent from Vienna.
“Then the ambassador went to the Foreign Ministry and asked them to release the apartment on Calle Talcahuano to Gradny-Sawz, who needed a place to live now that he was going to be handling Austrian affairs. They agreed.
“When I heard about this, I was curious, because I knew Gradny-Sawz was living in an apartment he owned in Belgrano. By then it was too late to install surveillance devices in the apartment on Talcahuano, but I kept an eye on it.
“The day after the apartment was turned over to Gradny-Sawz, a man we’d been keeping an eye on, one of the Nazis who’d come here on one of the first submarines, whom I knew to be SS-Sturmführer Erich Raschner, started to use the apartment to meet other people.
“Rudy Nulder had arranged a libreta for him in the name of Erich Richter. After seeing who went to the apartment to meet Richter, in particular Señor José Moreno of Banco Suisse Creditanstalt S.A., I started to believe that it was all connected with what these people called the ‘Special Fund.’
“I think everybody here knows this is the money they extorted from both our Jews and North American Jews to ransom their relatives out of the concentration camps in Germany. That operation differs from Operation Phoenix in that the beneficiaries of the latter are all senior SS officers. It has been in some disarray since SS-Brigadeführer Ritter Manfred von Deitzberg—after taking control of all its assets in Uruguay—met his untimely death in the men’s room of the Edelweiss Hotel in San Carlos de Bariloche.”
Cronley saw the look exchanged between Niedermeyer and Frade and wondered what it meant.
“I had to adjust my thinking, however,” Martín went on, “when another senior SS officer, Brigadeführer Ludwig Hoffmann . . .”
“Whom I brought here,” von Dattenberg offered.
Martín nodded and went on: “. . . for whom Rudy Nulder had arranged a libreta identifying him as Ludwig Mannhoffer, first showed up at the apartment. He was joined there yesterday by SS-Brigadeführer Gerhard Körtig and SS-Oberführer Horst Lang.
“Last night, Lang drove to Villa General Belgrano, from which at three A.M., in a hastily assembled convoy, he set out with Kapitän Schneider and members of the crew of U-234 for an unknown destination, which is more than likely either Estancia Condor or perhaps even the U-234 itself.
“Körtig has a reservation for a drawing room on the Bariloche Special, which is scheduled to depart the Retiro Station at six-fifty this morning.” He looked at his watch. “In other words, about fifteen minutes ago. He has a ticket all the way to San Carlos de Bariloche, but the train stops at San Martín de los Andes at five twenty-five before it gets to San Carlos.
“I confess I don’t know the significance of all this—the significance of any of this—as Cletus says, ‘Unless there’s an application for it, intelligence is useless’—but for the moment it’s all I have and I thought it might be useful and that I should put it on the table.”
For a moment, there was silence.
Doña Dorotea broke it.
“My God, Bernardo,” she said in awe. “It’s all you have?”
Then Niedermeyer said, “Might be useful? Amazing. Absolutely amazing!”
Then he began to applaud loudly and was quickly joined by the others.
