The Lie (6 page)

“Ernst Oberman?” Klaus said in German.

“Yes. And you?”

“Lieutenant Spier. Berlin Police Department.” Klaus showed him a badge and identification. “May I come in and talk to you,
please?”

“Is something wrong?”

“Nothing like that. Just a few questions about your security work at Wannsee. It shouldn’t take long.”

Oberman led him into the kitchen. A pot of coffee was on the stove; he poured Klaus a cup without asking. They sat down at
a wooden table with straw place mats, and Klaus noted the neatness of the clean, brightly lit room.

“I have to ask you about your keys to Wannsee,” he said. “You haven’t by chance lost or misplaced any, have you?”

The old man frowned, his face cracking into a hundred lines. “Are you serious? Those keys are never off my belt, never out
of my sight.”

“Nothing personal. It’s just that a man, a known criminal, was killed in Berlin last night, and a set of the Wannsee Center’s
keys was found in his pocket. So we’re just checking to see whose they might have been.”

“Well, you can be sure they’re not mine, Lieutenant.”

Stiff with indignation, Ernst Oberman rose, unbuttoned his uniform tunic, and showed Klaus the ring of keys dangling from
his belt. “Here’s where they are and here’s where they stay,” he said. “Unless I’m sleeping. Then they’re under my pillow.
Someone would have to kill me to get these keys, and I don’t kill easy.”

“I know that, sir.”

The old man rebuttoned his gray, gold-trimmed tunic and slowly sat down. It was a chief of security’s uniform at the nearby
Wannsee Museum and Conference Center, but he wore it with the pride and dignity of a
Reichmarschall
.

“You know
what
?” he asked.

“That someone would have to kill you to get those keys, and that you don’t kill easy.”

The old man stared at Klaus across the kitchen table.

“You’re no stranger to me, Captain Oberman. I know of your heroic war record with the Wehrmacht, and the many wounds you suffered
serving the fatherland. I know these things will never be forgotten.”

“They’re forgotten already. Turned to shit like everything else we did and tried to do. Master race.” He laughed coldly. “Master
money-grubbers. We’ve become a nation of weakling shopkeepers. We’re out-Jewing even the Jews. The six million we buried must
be laughing in their graves.”

“You have no regrets about that?”

“You mean about killing the Jews?”

Klaus Logefeld nodded.

“Of course I have regrets. But not about the six million we killed. What I regret are the five million we never got to kill
because we lost the fucking war.”

“I admire your honesty. These days not many have the courage to say things like that.”

“There are more of us than you think, Lieutenant.”

Klaus did not doubt it. Tiredly, he put down his cup and rose from the table. “Thanks for the coffee, Captain Oberman. I’m
sorry to have troubled you.”

“No trouble, sir. It’s good to know that a German of your generation can appreciate all that the Third Reich stood for.”

Heil Hitler
, thought Klaus, and he followed the ramrod-straight ex-soldier out of his spotless kitchen and into the foyer.

Moving quickly and silently, he grabbed the old man’s head from the rear with both hands and, with a short, vicious push-pull
motion, twisted his neck backward, upward, and sideways.

The cervical column snapped with a sharp, cracking sound. Klaus felt Oberman’s body give one final contraction before it slumped
against him.

He dragged the old man back into the kitchen and stretched him out on the tile floor. He looked at the pale dead face and
staring eyes and felt nothing—not even the satisfaction of having removed one more hurtful German from the current scene.

Pulling on a pair of fine latex gloves, Klaus made sure that the front and rear doors were locked. He washed and put away
his coffee cup and wiped all fingerprints from anything he might have touched. When that was done, he opened the old man’s
tunic, disconnected the ring of keys from his belt, and laid them one by one on a work counter. There were nine in all.

He took two rectangular packages of sliced, half-inchthick wax from his jacket pockets, softened the contents over a stove
burner, and made a careful impression of each key. Then he put the wax impressions in the refrigerator’s freezing compartment
to harden, cleaned any hint of wax from the keys themselves, and slipped their ring back on Oberman’s belt. His need for the
keys was still a fair number of days away; when the old man’s body was found, the integrity of the keys would not appear to
have been compromised.

To this same end, he now set about trying to give the police reason to believe that Oberman’s death had been accidental.

The cellar door opened from a small hallway off the kitchen. The stairs leading down from it were steep, of smooth-surfaced
wood, and ended on a concrete floor. A perfect fatal fall waiting to happen. Particularly for an old man with dimming eyes
and erratic balance.

It took only a few moments.

Klaus lifted the late Captain Oberman from the kitchen tiles, eased him into the open cellar door, and launched him down the
stairs. For added detail, he took a small wicker hamper of dirty clothes out of a bathroom and tossed it next to the sprawled
body. Clearly the old man had been carrying it down to the washing machine when he missed his footing and fell. Klaus was
careful to leave the cellar door open and the lights on.

Returning to the kitchen, he took his now hardened wax impressions out of the freezer, placed them in plastic sheeting and
a cardboard box, and slipped the small package into his jacket pocket.

Klaus checked everything once more. When he was satisfied that no visible signs of his presence remained, he left the kitchen
and found a small office just off the living room. In it were a desk and a file cabinet. He went through both until he opened
a folder marked
WANNSEE
and saw what he was looking for: several blueprints and schematics that included details of rooms, air-conditioning and heating
units, and wiring and plumbing.

Moments later he left the house the same way he had entered, setting the outside door to lock behind him. He saw no one as
he walked through the quiet, early-morning streets, and as far as he knew, no one saw him.

It was just ten after seven when he reached his car.

I
T WAS LATE
in the evening of the third day that Kate and Paulie had been working together on her story about the Walterses. That the
piece was merely an artifice created for her own needs made it no less real in the doing. The words were real, the connection
between them was real, and the freshly dug graves of Paulie’s mother and father were most real of all.

What remained unreal was the fragile web of lies that supported the entire works, with Kate herself as the biggest lie of
all. So much so that at times, in the very act of speaking, the combined enormities of what she had already done and what
she was even now attempting to do would suddenly clog her throat.

As for Paulie’s lies, they were mostly lies of omission. Whatever he might be telling Kate about his family for her article,
he was forced to leave out an almost equal amount. Not :hat he didn’t do his censoring effectively. He was well practiced.
It was just that with Kate, he did it painfully, reluctantly, as if each true fact omitted was a betrayal of everything he
was growing to feel for her.

They shared a late supper that evening in his father’s studio, the big, glass-walled room lighted by just two candles and
the moon, and their eyes and thoughts focused solely on each other. The great Luciano Pavarotti’s heart was breaking in soaring
tenor notes from hidden speakers.

“I love you.” He whispered the three words as if fearful of waking someone sleeping nearby.

Kate studied his face. She touched it with the tips of her fingers, a silent searching.

Paulie held his breath. What would she discover?

Yes, I can see you love me
, Kate was thinking.
What you’ll never know is that I loved you first
.

Carefully leaning across the table, she kissed him.

He took her upstairs.

He took her to the room that had been his from infancy until he was a man and living in a house of his own. Only as they were
passing through the doorway did he realize that in all his twenty-six years of living, he had never before said “I love you”
to anyone but his mother and father.

Paulie switched on the brass, green-shaded student lamp he had once studied by, and which was now going to teach him about
Kate.

Dressed, she had a cool, narrow look.

Naked, her breasts and hips were fuller, more sensual.

From the softness of her lips to the pliant curves of her body she might have been one of those erotic phantom lovers that
lonely men invent for themselves in the long, unpeopled stretches of the night.

Presented altogether, she drove him a little wild.

“Gently,” she said, and helped him. For once, after all Nicko’s practiced expertise, Kate herself was able to feel a bit like
the teacher. She loved it.

Entering her, Paulie saw an image of Kate’s face turned to gold in the lamplight.

She was beneath him now, and Paulie looked again at her face. It suddenly seemed different, with a new, half-frightened little
girl’s look cutting into and marring its glow.

“What is it?”

Holding him, she hesitated.

“Tell me,” he said.

“I’m scared to death of loving you. I’m afraid that what we have might be too good.”

“What’s there to be afraid of in that?”

“That it won’t last,” she whispered, her breath quickening.

“Who says so?”

“I… do…” She was barely able to manage the two small words.

He could feel her beginning, although she was still a few seconds away.

“What do you know about it?” he said.

More than I’ll ever be able to tell you
, Kate thought.

Then she went for the sky and took Paulie with her.

The old student lamp was off and they lay holding each other in their separate darks. For Paulie Walters, it had been a knowing,
drowning, passionate experience, a rising tide of wanting that had swept away the past days of bereavement. For these moments
at least, his grief had been lessened in the plain, lumpy bed of his boyhood.

It was very different for Kate Dinneson. Something seemed to be waiting for her in the dark, and it was less than good. She
was going through one of those panic attacks that turned simple breathing into an act of balance.

She felt vile. Why? She had done only what she had set out to do, which was to love this warm, caring, very special man, and
get him to love her in return. Whom had she hurt?

No one, she thought, but it was just the beginning.

So?

So we could end up with a very large investment in each other
.

Wonderful. What could be better?

If he finds out you killed his mother and father?

He won’t find out
, she told herself, and dropped it right there.

A faint, far-off ringing in the dark woke Paulie. A luminous digital clock said 1:07
A.M.
but the nearest telephone was across the hall in his parents’ bedroom. Slowly, reluctantly, he pulled away from the warm,
fragrant body beside him and went to take the call.

“Paulie,” said Tommy Cortlandt’s voice. “I guess I woke you. How are you doing?”

It was six hours earlier in Langley, and the CIA director usually worked late, so he was probably calling from his office.

“I’m all right, Tommy.” Paulie waited briefly. “Got anything good for me?”

“I’m not sure how good. But I’ve had some people checking back through our data base and they did come up with one small possibility.”

Cortlandt paused and the connection hummed between them.

“I have to tell you, I can see nothing but damage resulting from your even getting involved in this wild goose chase.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s a deeply emotional thing that can get obsessive.”

Paulie stood naked in his parents’ bedroom with the phone against his ear. In the wavering moonlight he looked at the bed
in which his mother had died, and the broad stain left by his father’s blood on the pastel-colored rug.

“Not to mention the danger,” he heard Cortlandt say.

“The danger?” Paulie echoed dimly.

“Remember,” said Cortlandt’s distant voice, “you’ll be going after a killer you won’t know or see, while he’ll certainly be
knowing and seeing you.”

“Anything else?” Paulie asked.

“No.” The CIA director’s sigh carried over more than six thousand miles. “So here’s what I have. According to the still classified
records, only three of our own people ever knew your father killed the Falangas. Two of them were killed at the scene, and
we’ve been out of contact with the third since he retired to Switzerland about ten years ago. But I do have his last known
address and the name he was using at the time.”

“Go ahead.”

“He was calling himself William Meister and living at 15 Ausdorf. That’s in Zurich.”

Paulie scribbled the information on his mother’s telephone pad. “Who was he?”

“A good pro. Spent almost thirty years with us. Maybe a little burned out near the end, but who isn’t?”

“What did he have to do with the Falanga hit?”

“Whatever your dad told him. It was your father’s operation. A lot of people had very good reason to kill your father, Paulie.”

“Maybe. But not to kill my mother along with him.”

The CIA director left that one alone.

“Anyway,” said Paulie, “I appreciate what you’ve done.”

Paulie hung up and stood staring at the name and address he had written down. Too much depended on them. He wished he had
more.

Kate stirred as he got back into bed beside her.

“Anything wrong?” Her voice was soft, remote with sleep.