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Cronley looked at the photograph of a young man in uniform.
I’ll be a sonofabitch, Cousin Luther was an SS officer.
Fortin extended his hand for the dossier, looked at it, and said, “Forgive me for saying this, Mr. Cronley, but he looks very much like you.”
“I noticed,” Cronley said.
“In February 1945,” Fortin went on, “the brigade was renamed ‘the Thirty-third Waffen-Grenadier-Division der SS Charlemagne,’ then loaded on a train and sent to fight the Red Army in Poland. On February twenty-fifth it was attacked by t
roops of the Soviet First Belorussian Front and scattered. What was left of them retreated to the Baltic coast, were evacuated by sea to Denmark, and later sent to Neustretlitz, in Germany, for refitting.
“The last time anyone saw Sturmführer Stauffer was when he went on a three-day leave immediately after getting off the ship in Germany,” Fortin said matter-of-factly. “We think it reasonable to believe he deserted the SS at that time, even before his comrades reached Neustretlitz. It is possible, even likely, that he made his way here to Strasbourg and went into hiding.”
“You think he deserted because he could see the war was lost?” Cronley asked.
“I’m sure he knew that, but I think it more likely that he heard somehow—he was an SS officer—what the Boche had in mind for them.”
“Berlin?” Hessinger asked.
Fortin nodded.
“The remaining collaborators,” Fortin amplified, “about seven hundred of them, went to Berlin in late April, just before the Red Army surrounded the city. A week later, when the Battle for Berlin was over, what few were left of them—thirty—surrendered to the Russians.
“According to the Russians, they fought bravely, literally until they had fired their last round of ammunition. I’d like to believe that. But on the other hand, what other option did they have?”
“Desertion?” Cronley asked.
“Desertion was more dangerous than fighting the Russians, as those thirty survivors learned. Of the seven hundred men who went to Berlin, seventy-two died at the hands of the SS for attempting to desert. They were hung from lamp poles pour encourager les autres.”
“You have no idea where Luther Stauffer is?” Cronley asked.
“I have not been entirely truthful with you, Mr. Cronley,” Fortin said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if at this moment he’s at Hachelweg 675 here in Strasbourg.”
They locked eyes for a moment.
“And I have not been entirely truthful with you, either, Commandant Fortin,” Cronley said.
He took his Directorate of Central Intelligence identification from his Ike jacket and handed it to Fortin.
Fortin examined it carefully and then handed it back.
“I’m impressed,” he said. “The DCI has only been in business since the first of January, and here you are—what? a week and two days later?—already hard at work.”
“And I’m surprised that the Strasbourg chief of police has even heard about the DCI.”
“I’m just a simple policeman,” Fortin said, with a straight face, “but I try to stay abreast of what’s going on in the world. Are you going to tell me what your real interest in Luther Stauffer is, Mr. Cronley?”
“He’s my cousin. I should lead off with that. He—actually his wife—wrote my mother begging for help, saying they were starving. She sent food—canned hams, coffee, cigarettes, et cetera—to me and asked that I deliver them to him.”
“And?”
“When we were in his house, all three of us sensed that he wasn’t telling us the truth. He said he was conscripted into the German Army . . .”
“Where he served as a common soldier, a grenadier,” Hessinger injected.
“. . . which sounded fishy to us, so Mr. Hessinger suggested that the police might be able to tell us something about him.”
“I’m disappointed,” Fortin said. “Frankly, I was hoping the DCI was working on the Odessa Organization. I’m almost as interested in that as I am in dealing with our collaborators.”
