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Tiny answered for him: “The obvious purpose of the memorandum was to suggest to everybody on the Copies To list that Cronley was a black marketeer.”
“You mean that he meant to suggest that the chief, DCI-Europe, was—”
“Fuck you, Chum Ivan,” Cronley said.
Serov chose to ignore him.
“And who is El Jefe?” he asked.
“My boss, Chum Ivan, but that’s all you get,” Cronley said, and then went on. “My first reaction was to throw the packages away, but then I decided to deliver them. Or at least one of them.
“But then Fat Freddy and Tiny intuited something smelled.”
“Fat Freddy is?”
“You met him, Chum Ivan. Here. He’s my chief of staff. Sort of a younger version of Colonel Cohen.”
“I’d forgotten.”
“Freddy thought that we should learn more about Cousin Luther, and that showing up in a staff car with Twenty-third CIC painted on the bumpers was not the way to do that. So I put on a gold bar and quartermaster insignia, and we drove down there in one of our ex-ambulances that had 711th MKRC painted on the bumpers.”
“Which meant?”
“Originally—my idea when I thought we had to paint something other than Twenty-third CIC on the bumpers—it stood for Mess Kit Repair Company, but Fat Freddy made me change that to 711th Mobile Kitchen Renovation Company.”
Serov chuckled and said, “Clever. What could be more innocent than a kitchen renovation company?”
“So we went to Strasbourg and met with Cousin Luther and his wife, Ingebord,” Cronley continued. “And gave them two of my mother’s packages. They were suitably grateful. And then Freddy started talking about there being more PX black market goodies available, if Luther knew anyone who would pay for them and make sure no one learned about it.
“Cousin Luther said he’d see what he could come up with, and then we left.
“On our way out of town, we were congratulating ourselves on how clever we were. Cousin Luther, we cleverly deduced, was up to his ears in the black market, and we would work our way up that chain of command and at least be able to nab a serious black marketeer or two, and possibly somebody, or something, more important.
“And then we were stopped by French police militaire, who escorted us to the headquarters of th
e Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire—which even if we had heard of it, we knew next to nothing about it—and where Commandant Jean-Paul Fortin was waiting for us.
“Cutting to the chase, Commandant Fortin said he knew there was no unit called the 711th Mobile Kitchen Renovation Company because he had asked his good friend Brigadier General Homer Greene—”
“The USFET counterintelligence chief?” Serov asked.
Cronley nodded.
“So what the hell were we doing in Strasbourg talking to Luther Stauffer?
“When you can’t think of anything else, tell the truth. So I did. Fortin then showed me a photograph of my cousin Luther getting married. He was in uniform. That of a Sturmführer. We later learned the wedding took place in Castle Wewelsburg.
“Fortin said that General Greene had told him something else. That the story going around the intelligence community that DCI-Europe was sort of a joke, and not a serious intel operation, the proof being that its commander was a very junior twenty-two-year-old captain, was obfuscation.
“So, Fortin said, he was going to tell me of DST’s interest in my cousin Luther. Luther’s story was that he had deserted the SS in the last days of the war and made his way home. Fortin believed Luther had been sent there by Odessa, specifically by SS-Brigadeführer Franz von Dietelburg, whom he suspected was running Odessa, to facilitate the escape of senior SS officers and other Nazis from Germany into France, and then, via Spain, to South America.
“He said my snooping around Luther was going to interfere with his surveillance of him, so butt out unless you learn something that might help me catch von Dietelburg. So I dropped contact with Cousin Luther until Casey Wagner figured out how Odessa was using Stars and Stripes trucks to smuggle Nazis into France through a little Dorf on the border called Wissembourg.
“So I got in contact with Fortin and told him what Casey had come up with. He said that was very interesting, because Cousin Luther was spending a lot of time in Wissembourg. Cutting to the chase, we caught Odessa trying to smuggle two really bad Nazis across the border, and Fortin caught Cousin Luther waiting for them on the other side.
“So he’s been trying to get Where’s von Dietelburg? intel from Luther ever since. Without much success. According to Fortin, he resisted with a ‘religious-like fervor,’ which of course made us think of what went on at Castle Wewelsburg.
“When I suggested to Fortin that the threat of the hangman’s noose might seem more real to Cousin Luther if he was in the Tribunal prison and could take his meals with Göring and company, whom he knows we’re going to hang, he agreed to let me bring him here.
