Wyatt's Revenge: A Matt Royal Mystery (13 page)

“Maybe we’ve hit a dead end,” I said.

“I’m not sure about that, Matt. Somebody wants you out of Europe. Maybe if you stick around and let them know you’re here, they’ll make another move, and we can figure out who they are.”

“I’m not sure I like the feeling of being bait, but that may be our only option.”

“If you go back to Florida, you’re never going to find out who ordered the hit on Wyatt. And, whoever’s after you may just follow you home.”

“I hadn’t thought about that. How do we let the bad guys know where I am?”

“If we could figure out how they found us in Bonn, we could use that connection.”

“Maybe Speer blew the whistle on us,” I said.

“That’s possible, but why would he do that?”

“Who knows? Maybe he’s one of the latter-day Nazis.”

My cell phone beeped, letting me know that a text message had come in. I opened the phone. The message on the screen was short. “Go home or die.”

I held the phone up so that Jock could see it. He smiled, a cold smile that didn’t reach his eyes, the smile of the hunter in sight of his prey. “Does the message show a sender?”

“No.”

“That’s okay. They know your phone number, but they don’t know where you are. Otherwise, they’d have sent somebody in person. It’s scarier that way.”

“Also more dangerous. They might think that we’d try to get to them through the guy who brings the message.”

“They don’t know who I am,” said Jock, “and I doubt they know what you’re capable of. They might not think we’re much of a danger. Maybe Jess talked to somebody at the archives yesterday, or someone there knew what she was doing. It didn’t have to be Speer.”

We were interrupted by Jessica joining us. She signaled the waiter for coffee and took a seat. “You’re not going to believe this,” she said. “I found somebody who knew de Fresne.”

“Klaus Blattner,” Jessica said. “He’s on Wyatt’s list.”

“Who is he?” I asked.

“He was part of a German underground group known as the Edelweiss Pirates. They were mostly kids from working-class families who hated the Nazis. Blattner was a middle-class kid whose dad was a professor at the Goethe University in Frankfurt. He’d been a member of the Hitler Youth, but became disenchanted with the Nazis. He joined the Pirates and became very active in the organization’s anti-Nazi efforts. When the group started appearing on the Nazi radar, a large number of them were arrested and some were executed.

“Blattner escaped notice, probably because he wasn’t part of the underclass that made up most of the membership, and because he’d used a false name when he joined. When the Pirates organization was rolled up, he enlisted in the Waffen-SS under his real name and was posted to France. He worked with the Milice, the Vichy government’s secret police, and became a conduit to the French underground on what the Gestapo and Milice were doing. When the Allies invaded, the underground got him out of Vichy and hid him for the rest of the war.”

“He’s still alive?” I asked.

“Yes. He’s an old man now, but he came back to Germany after the war and worked for the West German government in one of the minor bureaus. He’s retired and lives in Fulda. I called him, and he’s happy to see us. Today, if we can get there.”

“Where the hell is Fulda?” asked Jock.

“About three hours from here,” Jess said. “Over where the East German border used to be.”

I stood up. “Give Blattner a call and tell him we’ll be there early this afternoon.”

We drove across central Germany. The weather was still bleak, and snow occasionally drifted onto the windshield. Jock was quiet, concentrating on his driving.

Jessica was in the front passenger seat, turned so that she could talk to me. “From what my friend at the Klarsfeld Foundation told me, I gather that Blattner has been a reliable source for them for years. He knew a lot about the inner workings of the Milice and its Gestapo masters.”

“Had anybody at the foundation talked to Wyatt?”

“There’s no indication of that. Sauer either. Maybe Wyatt got Blattner’s name from some other research. Since the Klarsfelds were on his list, I’d guess he meant to talk to them.”

“Maybe. Did Blattner say whether he’d talked to either Sauer or Wyatt?”

“I didn’t ask him. Didn’t want to scare him off.”

“What did you tell him?”

“The truth. That I’m a historian specializing in the Vichy period in France and I wanted to talk to him.”

“Not the whole truth.”

“Well, not all of it. Try not to scare the old gent when we get there.”

We drove for the better part of three hours, stopping once for lunch at a roadside restaurant. We pulled into the old cathedral town of Fulda in early afternoon. Fulda had once been a garrison town for American soldiers guarding the East German border. They were gone now, as was the border. Reunification had obviated the need for troops.

Blattner had given Jessica good directions to his home. He lived in an apartment house near the old town in the center of Fulda. We found a parking place a block away and walked back to his building. His apartment was on the ground floor.

The door was opened by a robust man with a shock of white hair. He was tall and appeared fit, not carrying any excess weight. He was wearing
a checkered flannel shirt with brown slacks held up by suspenders, sturdy shoes. “Dr. Connor, I presume,” he said. “Come on in and bring your friends.” His English was almost accentless, and spoken with a fluidity that only comes with a lot of practice.

Jessica introduced Jock and me, using our real names. We followed Blattner through the foyer and into a small living room that contained a sofa, recliner, and large-screen TV. One wall was a solid bookcase, filled with titles in both English and German. As we sat down, an elegant woman, tall with perfectly coiffed white hair, entered the room. The men all stood, and Blattner introduced us to his wife. Frau Blattner offered us tea or coffee in passable English, and when we declined, she left us to what she called our reminiscences.

Blattner leaned back in his recliner, seeking a comfortable position. He looked at Jessica. “I’m guessing that your quest isn’t entirely historical in nature.”

Jessica returned the smile. “Not entirely. Have you lived in America? Your English is perfect and sounds American.”

“No, I’ve never even visited the States. I worked here in Fulda as a German government liaison to the American military. I dealt with Americans every day, all day. It was a wonderful experience. I liked them all. Can you tell me why you’re here?”

“Certainly,” said Jess. “I am a historian by training and did my doctoral dissertation on the Vichy government. But I’m here to help Mr. Royal find out who killed his friend. Mr. Algren is helping also.” She explained what happened to Wyatt, and what we’d discovered so far.

“Ah, Dr. Wyatt,” Blattner said. “I had several long telephone conversations with him. He was particularly interested in the same man you are. Richard de Fresne. I’m sorry to hear that he’s passed on.”

I leaned forward on the sofa. “Can you see any connection between de Fresne and Dr. Wyatt’s death?”

“No. Nobody’s heard anything about de Fresne since the war ended. The French government tried to find him after the war, but lost the trail in Frankfurt. De Fresne was working for the Gestapo at their headquarters there. The city was flattened by Allied bombing near the end of the war,
and it has been assumed that de Fresne was just another of the thousands of unidentified dead found in the rubble.”

“What do you think?” I asked.

“I think he’s still alive.”

“Why?”

“De Fresne was in charge of transporting the Jews from southern France to the concentration camps. I worked in the same office with him, and when a transport order was about to be issued, I would get the names to the French underground. They couldn’t save a lot of them, because that would have led the Germans to suspect a leak in their office. But, they did save some, and that’s better than none.”

“How did de Fresne decide who was going to be sent to the camps?” I asked.

“At first, he targeted the wealthiest of the Jews. He would make a deal with them. For a lot of money, he would keep their names off the lists. He collected millions in cash, artwork, silver settings, jewelry, real estate, and whatever else the Jews could scrape up. He left the ones who donated off the lists, and the word got around among the Jews that they could buy their lives from de Fresne. The loot poured in, and when he’d tapped them all out, and there were no rich Jews left, their names went on the transport lists. They all died in the camps, and de Fresne put his millions in a Swiss bank.”

“How do you know all this?” asked Jock.

“It was common knowledge. De Fresne bragged openly about his growing wealth. He said that he’d been a poor kid and was going to finish the war rich. He thought the Jews deserved what they were getting, and he deserved their money.”

“I didn’t know the French were so complicit in the Holocaust,” I said.

“Oh yeah. A lot of them were. De Fresne had grown up in North Africa. His father was a career military man, a sergeant I think, and his mother was American. She had worked as a maid and nanny for a rich American family living in Paris. That’s where she met the sergeant. They got married and moved to Africa.

“When de Fresne was a teenager, his dad was killed in some sort of skirmish with the Arabs, and the kid was sent to Marseilles to live with a relative of the sergeant’s. He never spoke of his mother, so I don’t know what happened to her. He did well in school and was at the Sorbonne when the war broke out. Because of his mother, he was fluent in English and spoke with an American accent. He found work in the Quai d’Orsay, the French Foreign Ministry, and worked with the American Embassy in some capacity, maybe a translator for his bosses at the ministry.

“How did he end up in the Milice?” I asked.

“I’m not sure, but he was very vocal in his antiSemitism. He’d been a member of a Fascist group in Paris before the war. He was running in a fast crowd; the Sorbonne, Diplomatic Service. Sergeant’s kids didn’t usually get into that part of French society. He once told me that if it hadn’t been for the Jews, he could have gone further and faster. I think, though, it was his social status that held him back. Maybe the Milice took him because he wasn’t afraid to get his hands dirty.”

There was a knock at the front door. Blattner excused himself and went to open it. He came back, followed by the man who’d accosted Jock and me in the coffee shop in Bonn.

The man stopped at the doorway to the foyer and said something to Blattner in German. Blattner sat in the chair he’d vacated to answer the door. The Arab had a nine-millimeter pistol in his hand. He pointed it at me. “I told you to go home, Mr. Royal.”

“We were just on our way,” I said. “Why are you so interested in my going back to Florida?”

“That doesn’t matter. What does matter is that you didn’t listen. Now you’ll pay a price.”

I stared at him. “How did you find us?”

He laughed. “Ah, that’s very simple my friend. We have a tap on Herr Blattner’s phone.”

A piece of the puzzle clunked into place. That’s how they knew about Wyatt. But why did they care?

“Do you work for de Fresne?” I asked.

A puzzled look appeared on the Arab’s face. “Who?”

“Richard de Fresne.”

“I don’t know anybody by that name.”

“Then why are you so intent on killing me?” I said.

“I really don’t know, Mr. Royal, and I don’t care. My boss tells me where to go and what to do and I do it. I only know about the tap on Herr Blattner’s phone because the boss chose to tell me about it.”

“Do you know who I am?” asked Blattner.

“No, and I don’t care. You have lived a long life, old man, so your death won’t be a great loss.” He snorted, a stab at laughter. “Except maybe to you.”

He was still laughing when Jock shot him through the head. He
dropped like a stone, his gun falling to the floor. The Arab had been concentrating on Blattner and didn’t see Jock ease his pistol out of the pocket of his windbreaker. There was no reason for the man to think that either of us would be armed. Germany had strict gun laws, so good people weren’t expected to carry weapons. Only the bad guys had them. Or so they thought.

Jessica hadn’t moved in the seconds since the shooting. She was frozen, rooted to her seat on the sofa, her hands grasping her face. “My God,” she said, finally, “My God, Jock.”

Frau Blattner hurried into the room, her hand going to her mouth when she saw the body on the floor. “Klaus?” she whispered.

Blattner went to her, put his arm around her shoulders, made a shushing sound. He looked at Jock. “What was that?” His voice was shaky.

“I’m not sure,” said Jock, and explained where we had seen the man before. “Have you had any problems with anybody, Herr Blattner?”

“No. Never. Does this have to do with de Fresne?”

“It must. I can’t imagine any other reason this guy would be following us or that your phone would be tapped. Can you?”

“No, Mr. Algren, I can’t. I must call the police.”

“Please don’t do that, Herr Blattner,” I said. “I think you’ll be a lot safer if we can figure this out ourselves. The police will only complicate things, and Jock will be in trouble for having a gun.”

Blattner frowned. “Mr. Algren did break the law.”

Jock shrugged. “And if I hadn’t, we’d all be dead.”

“We can’t leave a dead man here,” Jessica said, finally finding her voice. “We have to call the police.”

Jock pulled his cell phone out of his pocket, punched in a number, and waited. Then, “I need a cleanup. In Fulda. As soon as possible.” He recited the Blattner address, and turned back to the group. “Somebody will be here in a couple of hours. They have to come from Frankfurt.”

Jessica stood up and walked to the window, trying not to look at the corpse on the floor. “Jock, who are you? Matt said you worked for the government. What part of the government?”

“The part that can get this mess cleaned up, Jess. That’s about all I can tell you.”