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“. . . She used to live at 71 Cobenzlgasse in Grinzing. Find out everything you can about her and that address. I’ll ask Wangermann to do the same. Which brings us to him. Get on the radio to him and tell him I’d like to buy him lunch. Right now. I’m at the Restaurant Cobenzl. And prioritize a list of our guys according to the importance of what they’re doing. I’m going to need a bunch of people to handle what I’ve got going. Other things are going to have to wait. Got all that?”
There was a reply, which Wasserman didn’t acknowledge. He simply hung up.
“Wangermann?” Niedermeyer asked.
“Walter Wangermann, the Vienna cops’ chief of intelligence. Good man. The Russians and the Organisation der Ehemaligen SS-Angehörigen like him about as much as they like Cronley. About a month ago, one or the other put a bomb in his Mercedes.”
Thirty minutes later, a muscular man in his late thirties stepped into the room, looked around carefully, and then made a Come ahead gesture. A stocky, florid-faced man in his fifties, in a suit that looked two sizes too small for him, came into the room, followed by another well-dressed, muscular man in his thirties, this one holding a Schmeisser along his trouser seam.
The older man walked to the table and sat down. One of his bodyguards sat at a nearby table. The one with the Schmeisser pulled a chair near the door, turned it around, and then sat down on it.
“Walter, these are my friends Otto Niedermeyer, Cezar Zielinski, and James Cronley,” Wasserman said. “And this is my friend Walter Wangermann.”
Wangermann offered his hand first to Niedermeyer and then to Cronley, both of whom politely said, “Wie geht es Ihnen?”
“I can’t decide if you’re a Berliner or a Viennese,” Wangermann said to Niedermeyer. “The boy is obviously a Strasbourger. He has a worse accent than my sister-in-law. And this one’s obviously an Englishman.”
“The boy”?
Fuck you!
Why is this guy so rude?
“Actually, I’m a Pole,” Zielinski said.
“And I’m a Texan, Herr Wangermann,” Cronley said. “My mother is from Strasbourg.”
“Well, at least she taught you to speak German. Most Amis can’t.”
There he
goes again!
Is he just naturally a rude sonofabitch?
Or does he have an agenda?
“A bit of each, actually, Herr Wangermann,” Niedermeyer said.
“Been traveling, have you? That suit didn’t come from either Berlin or here.”
And once more!
Is he trying to show us how clever he is?
Or to make the point that he can say anything he wants to us because he knows we want something from him?
“No, it didn’t,” Niedermeyer said coldly.
And now Otto is getting pissed off!
“And what brings you to Vienna, Captain Strasbourger?”
“I’m looking for former SS-Brigadeführer Franz von Dietelburg.”
“A lot of people are looking for that Hurensohn. Maybe if your people sent somebody a little older and more experienced looking for him—”
“Hurensohn, Jim,” Niedermeyer said, “is Viennese patois for ‘sonofabitch.’”
