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“Those are actually violoncello cases,” Zielinski said. “Thompsons don’t really fit in violin cases. So I bought these on the free market, and now have two really beautiful violoncellos that I have absolutely no idea how to play.”
“On the other hand, we didn’t terrify the people in the lobby by walking in with Thompsons slung from our shoulders.”
Wasserman chuckled and then asked, “What brings you to Vienna?”
“Brigadeführer Franz von Dietelburg,” Cronley replied. “And it’s probably a wild-goose chase, but I’m desperate. What happened was that Cletus Frade told me Otto was at the Compound doing some business with General Gehlen, so I went to see him, to see if he could help. He told me that he hadn’t seen von Dietelburg since before the war, when he left here to become Himmler’s adjutant.”
“I actually knew von Dietelburg rather well,” Niedermeyer said. “Well enough to remember his lady friend, a strikingly beautiful ballerina, and that he had set her up in a villa on the Cobenzl. Unfortunately, I can’t remember her name, or the address on Cobenzl. But I thought if I was in Vienna, my memory might be triggered, and knowing how much Jim wants von Dietelburg, I thought it would be worth coming here.”
He’s lying—we’re both lying—to one of the good guys.
Who is also a damned good intelligence officer, and damned good intelligence officers can generally tell when people are lying.
But we certainly can’t tell him he’s in Vienna trying to help Gehlen get his wife and her brother out of the AVO jail in Budapest. Gehlen has to get Wallace’s permission to stage any kind of an operation, and Gehlen knows that Wallace would judge—with justification—that since Otto’s wife and her brother contribute zilch to DCI, the risk of DCI getting caught breaking them out of an AVO jail in Budapest was not justified.
So we have no choice but to lie to one of the good guys.
“And have you had any luck with your memory?” Wasserman asked.
“Not so far. But just now I was thinking of walking over to the Hotel Sacher to see if that triggers anything. I used to spend many hours drinking there with von Dietelburg and his lady friends. Friends, plural. There were many.”
“Any names you could come up with might be helpful,” Cronley said.
“Unfortunately, Jim, in those days they were called Schatzi or Liebchen. And won’t be in the telephone book.”
“Well, at least we can have a Sachertorte,” Wasserman said.
“You’ve apparently been here long enough to know about Sachertorte,” Niedermeyer said.
“I had my own version of ‘What to do in Vienna.’ Written by my mother. ‘Eat Sachertorte. Do not drink Slivovitz.’ She was raised here. My mother’s an Austro-Hungarian.”
“So is my wife,” Niedermeyer said.
“She’s with you in Argentina?”
“My wife has grown very fond of Lomo and Cabernet Sauvignon from Clete’s vineyards.”
“Let me propose this,” Wasserman said. “We walk over to the Sacher—you can leave the fiddle cases here. When you called, I decided to bring some of my guys with me. We’ll have a snort of Slivovitz and have a piece of Sachertorte and see if that triggers your memory. Then we’ll get something to eat. And tomorrow, say eleven-fifteen, Charley and I will pick you up and take you to lunch. There’s a nice restaurant atop the Cobenzl. And as we drive slowly up the Cobenzlgasse, you can spot the villa where von Dietelburg stashed whatsername, his Schatzi.”
“You’re more than kind, Colonel,” Niedermeyer said.
XIII
[ONE]
The Hotel Bristol
Kaerntner Ring 1
Vienna, Austria
1120 28 February 1946
As Cronley, Zielinski, and Niedermeyer walked out of the revolving door of the hotel to get in Wasserman’s staff car, Cronley saw a well-dressed Viennese matron, a woman pushing sixty, coming toward the hotel. She was wearing an ornate feathered hat, a Persian lamb coat, and was leading a dachshund on a leash.
But Cronley knew she was not really a Viennese matron, but rather an NKGB colonel known to the Gehlen Organization as Rahil—Rachel—who had been given the code name Seven-K.
Seven-K, for $200,000, had smuggled Natalia Likharev and her sons, Sergei and Pavel, out of their Leningrad apartment to East Germany, where Cronley and Kurt Schröder had flown across the border and picked them up in Storchs.
