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“He sounds very serious to me.”
“This is a serious matter,” Derwin said.
“What should I tell him, Jim?” Wallace asked.
“Everything . . . well, maybe not everything. And make sure he understands that whatever you tell him is classified Top Secret–Presidential.”
“What I am about to tell you, Major Derwin,” Wallace said, with a smile, “is classified Top Secret–Presidential.”
Derwin didn’t reply.
“The penalty for divulging Top Secret–Presidential material to anyone not authorized access to same is castration with a dull bayonet, followed by the firing squad, as I’m sure you know.”
“I have to tell you, Major, I don’t find anything humorous in this,” Derwin said.
“Stick around, it gets much funnier,” Wallace said. “Well, one day Colonel Schumann—and a dozen associates—found himself on a back road not from here—I’ve always wondered what he was doing out in the boonies . . .”
“Me, too,” Cronley said.
Now I know, of course, what the sonofabitch was doing there. He was looking for it. He wanted to find out what was going on at Kloster Grünau so he could tell his handler in the NKGB.
“. . . but anyway, there he was, and he comes up on a monastery, or what had been a monastery, Kloster Grünau, surrounded by fences and concertina barbed wire. On the fence were signs, ‘Twenty-third CIC’ and, in English and German, ‘Absolutely No Admittance.’
“Colonel Schumann had never heard of the Twenty-third CIC, and he thought as IG for CIC Europe he should have heard of it.”
“What was this place?” Derwin asked.
“You don’t have the need to know that, Major,” Cronley said.
“You’re not in a position to tell me what I need to know, Cronley,” Derwin snapped.
“Yeah, he is,” Major Wallace said. “But anyway, Schumann, being the zealous inspector general he was . . . I shouldn’t be making fun of him, the poor bastard got himself blown up. Sorry. Anyway, Schumann drives up the road and is immediately stopped by two jeeps, each of which has a pedestal-mounted .50 caliber Browning machine gun and four enormous soldiers, all black, in it.
“He tells them he wants in, and they tell him to wait.
“A second lieutenant wearing cowboy boots shows up. He’s the security officer for Kloster Grünau. His name is James D. Cronley Junior.”
“A second lieutenant named Cronley?” Major Derwin asked.
“This was before he got promoted.”
“I’d like to hear about that, too,” Derwin said.
“That’s also classified Top Secret–Presidential,” Wallace said. “Anyway, Second Lieutenant Cronley politely tells Lieutenant Colonel Schumann that nobody gets into Kloster Grünau unless they have written permission from either General Greene or Colonel Robert Mattingly.
“Lieutenant Colonel Schumann, somewhat less politely, tells Second Lieutenant Cronley that second lieutenants don’t get to tell lieutenant colonels, especially when he is the CIC IG, what he can’t do. And tells his driver to ‘drive on.’
“Second Lieutenant Cronley issues an order to stop the staff car.
“One of the .50s fires one round.
“Bang.
“Right into the engine block of Colonel Schumann’s staff car. It stops.
“At that point, Colonel Schumann decides that since he’s outgunned, the smart thing to do is make a retrograde movement and report the incident to General Greene. He does so just as soon as he can get back to Frankfurt, dragging the disabled staff car behind one of his remaining vehicles.
“General Greene tells him Second Lieutenant Cronley was just carrying out his orders, and for Colonel Schumann not only not to try again to get into Kloster Grünau, but also not to ask questions about it, and finally to forget he was ever there.
