North Reich (7 page)

      
"What do you wish?" asked FDR.

      
"Information," Marshall said quickly.
 
"The people at Camp Washington are ready to pick up where the British left off, but we must have more and we must have it now.
 
We know the Nazis are up to something, but what?"

      
"I cannot turn the FBI loose in Canada," the president said vehemently.
 
"If their agents were caught, we would be exposed.
 
Besides, and despite what Hoover says, they are not up to that type of enterprise.
 
FBI agents are pathologically unable to disguise themselves or hide in a crowd.
 
What do you think of using the OSS instead?"

      
Marshall looked askance, while King rolled his eyes.
 
Neither man had any confidence in the newly formed Office of Strategic Services led by William J., "Wild Bill," Donovan, an old friend of Roosevelt's.
 
It had been formed shortly after Pearl Harbor with the hope that they would penetrate behind enemy lines and provide intelligence as well as performing acts of sabotage.
 
For a number of reasons including a dearth of targets in the Pacific and a total lack of agents who could pass as Japanese, the enterprise never really got started.
 
It was clear that the OSS was waiting for a war with Germany.
 
It was also evident that the American military had little confidence in the OSS’s abilities.

      
FDR was clearly enjoying his guests' discomfiture.
 
"Yes, I know that many of them are amateurs, socialites, and dilettantes, but they are all patriots and volunteers.
 
More important, though, they can all be identified as civilians and that means they can wander about in Canada relative safety while we deny their existence.
 
I think it's marvelous.
 
After all, aren't the Germans doing the same thing right now?"

      
King and Marshall had to agree, albeit reluctantly.
 
They'd both seen FBI reports indicating that numbers of German "tourists" and "students" had crossed into the United States and were wondering around with impunity.
 
So far the FBI had been unable to find anything more sinister than tourist-like photographs and innocuous journals when they broke into their hotel rooms.
 
Yes, the U.S. needed information and who the devil cared how it was acquired?

      
Marshall decided to shift the subject.
 
"Sir, you say you are concerned about a provocation.
 
What about the Germans provoking us?
 
What can our response be?"

      
"I don't want war with Germany unless they are clearly the aggressor," Roosevelt said uncomfortably.
 
He knew where the conversation was going.

      
Admiral King did not let him down.
 
"We cannot wait until we've had another Pearl Harbor, Mr. President.
 
Hypothetically, while an armed man is not much of an immediate threat to me, he becomes more so when he draws his weapon and, in my opinion becomes a grave threat that requires a response when he points that gun at my very valuable person.
 
I sincerely hope that we do not have to wait until that armed man actually shoots before responding.
 
If so, it could be too late."

      
Roosevelt's response was almost a whisper.
 
He was so tired. Why the devil had he agreed to a third term and why was he even thinking of a fourth?
 
Had he been insane?
 
Why, yes, he answered himself.
 
If Wendell Willkie would run against him in 1944 instead of New York's Republican governor Tom Dewey being the likely candidate, maybe he'd just concede and go home.
 
What a wonderful thought.
 
Nor could he think of a Democrat who could replace him.
 
His vice president, Henry Wallace, was a mistake who was hated by both liberals and conservatives.

      
"Gentlemen, find me the provocation and I will give you the response."

Oskar Neumann understood that the Gestapo was greatly overrated as a police force.
 
That was not its job.
 
Its real task was not to enforce the law, but to enforce the ideology of the Reich.
 
What was not underrated was that it depended on terror to be effective.
 
People across Europe lived in deathly fear of the claws of the Gestapo, and Neumann was confident that it would soon be the case in Canada where fear of the Gestapo was growing almost daily.

The Gestapo was a totally German organization that wasn't that large in numbers, perhaps sixty thousand agents in all the Reich and its conquered territories.
 
The Gestapo relied on fear, terror, and large numbers of informers to be effective.
 
Its presence in Canada was cumbersome if for no other reason than that few members of the Gestapo were fluent in English and most of those who were had been sent to England.
 
Neumann, who considered himself fluent in English, was sent the dregs.
 
Good agents, yes, but not able to communicate well in Canada.
 
Some of his so-called English speaking agents couldn't read a newspaper or order food in a restaurant, which had the effect of making them look stupid, even laughable when they made mistakes.
 
That too would soon change as a very effective propaganda effort directed from Berlin was bearing fruit.
 
It blamed the United States for England's defeat and Canada's current humiliation.
 

Relations between the U.S. and Canada had frequently been strained and many Canadians felt betrayed by their large neighbor to the south who had done nothing to help them when the Nazis rolled through Europe.
 
In what Neumann conceded was a brilliant ploy, little was being directly said about the evil of the Jews. Not yet, he admitted. Soon, however, all that would soon change. The average Canadian might not yet believe in Judaism's inherent evil and the need for it to be rooted out, violently if necessary.
 
Articles planted in newspapers did point out that Jews controlled the U.S. banking and entertainment industries, but did not yet call for violence against Canada's small Jewish population.

      
Neumann held the rank equivalent to a colonel in the army and the SS, and had all of metropolitan Toronto to control and only fifty agents with which to do it.
 
Thanks to the war, almost seven hundred thousand now people lived in Toronto and many thousands more in the suburbs and nearby cities, such as Hamilton, with its one hundred and sixty thousand.
 
Worse, the population of Toronto was a mongrel one.
 
Immigrants from Italy, Portugal, and even Asia made Toronto a racially offensive place.

There were more than eleven million people in Canada and fully a third of them lived in Ontario and most of those were in the south of the province.
 
Ottawa, Canada’s capital city, was small in comparison.

The Canadian authorities were passively uncooperative with Neumann and the Gestapo and he could do little about it.
 
At least not yet, which infuriated him.
 
He was making progress, but not enough to satisfy his goals and ambitions.
 
Someday soon all of the damned Canadians would realize that they'd lost the war and were going to lose a lot more if they didn't start enforcing the policies of the Reich, especially those regarding Jews.
 
There weren't all that many Jews in Canada, and he was confident that there would be a lot fewer very soon.
 
Whether they fled to the United States or were interned in camps, or even shipped to their deaths in Poland didn't matter.
 
The Jewish cancer would be obliterated.
 

Neumann had set up a group of young and disaffected thugs into what he called the Canadian Legion, and outfitted them with uniforms that featured black shirts, which had become their unofficial name.
 
It was based on a similar fascist organization in England.
 
But there were only a couple of hundred of them and most of them knew little about Nazism.
 
Their desire was to bully and lord it over those other Canadians who considered them scum and trash at best, which, in Neumann's opinion, they were.

      
One plays the cards one is dealt, Neumann thought and then laughed bitterly.
 
He'd been dealt a bunch of jokers.
 
The Munro brothers, Wally, Jed, and Paul, were the best of a bad lot and he thought that the total combined intellects of the three of them were about equal to one normal human.
 
They seemed to live for the opportunity to abuse and assault other people, and robbery was like taking candy to them.
 
There were rumors of their involvement in rapes, which did not surprise Neumann.

      
The Toronto based Gestapo had offices in the city's downtown, but the hub of their activities was an isolated farm ten miles to the north of the city.
 
Neumann envisioned it as a place where people could be brought, imprisoned, and interrogated without neighbors complaining about the screams.
 
So far, he'd only had the opportunity to use it a few times and with mixed results.
 
He had hoped to be able to use locals for rough interrogations, but people like the Munro brothers were far more concerned with beating people than with extracting information.
 
Neumann thought that torture for its own sake was not effective, although he admitted it could be satisfying.
 
Torturing women was something he and the Munros found especially pleasant.
 

      
Neumann decided to discuss details of the task at hand only with Wally Munro, the best of a bad lot.

      
"Mr. Munro, do you understand why you are being sent south to do this?"

      
"Sure.
 
You don't want to get caught."

      
Arrogant little shit, Neumann thought.
 
"Close enough.
 
If something should happen, it would be far better if the someone caught is not a German.
 
Diplomatic immunity can only carry so far.
 
Now, what are you to do?"

      
Wally Munro was short, stocky, and in his early twenties.
 
He was irked by the question.
 
"We've been over this, Mr. Neumann."

      
"Humor me."

      
"Simple.
 
We are to intercept the car, shoot the people, and then make it look like a robbery by taking everything of value.
 
But most of all, we are to take that pouch."

      
Good, Neumann thought.
 
By taking wallets and money along with the pouch, it might make the Washington police, along with the American military, think that it had been just a particularly violent robbery.
 
While he was not totally confident that the charade would provide cover for very long, it might last long enough.
 
And if one of the Munros should get caught, or better, killed, there would be nothing to link them back to him.

      
"And if one of you is caught?"

      
"We are to sit tight in jail until someone bails us out and then we disappear.
 
Our phony ID says we're from Virginia, so they won't worry too much about us flying back to Canada."

      
"And if one of you is killed?"

      
"Then we take as many of the fuckers with us as we can.
 
Oh yeah, if we can find out who was responsible, we'll make them wish they'd never been born."

      
Neumann thought Munro had contradicted himself, but chose to keep quiet.
 
The Munro's were expendable, but if they could provide information as to what was going on at that new facility near Washington, they could prove priceless.

Chapter Three

Alicia Cutter groaned and grasped her abdomen.
 
It was her time of the month and the cramps seemed especially painful.
 
Each month seemed more painful than the last.
 
Maybe growing old wasn't such a curse.
 
A couple of her friends laughingly suggested she get pregnant and solve the problem, at least for a while.
 
Of course she’d create a new problem for maybe twenty years along with her periods when they resumed.

      
She signed for the pouch from the WAC captain who understood Alicia's unpleasant situation.
 
"At least it's a nice day for a ride," she said.

      
Alicia managed a smile and admitted that it was.
 
In a couple of weeks it would be Christmas, and the day was cold and bright.
 
There were rumors that it might even snow, which would be a small miracle in Virginia.
 
It snowed, but not that often and rarely around Christmas.
 
When she got back to her quarters, she'd find some brandy, medicinal of course, take to her bed and feel sorry for herself.
 
Maybe she'd get lost in her violin.
 
She hadn't played it in several days and was worried that she'd lose what skills she had.
 
Someday the war with Japan would be over, and she could go back to teaching, unless, of course, America was also at war with Germany, which seemed increasingly likely.