something I’m counting on. For reasons we’re not entirely sure of, this, is a very big deal for him and he’s going to want to get rid of us fast as he can and get back to his guests. But we’re not going to Jet him. Which is going to make him even madder. And then we’re going to make him madder still.”
Osborn looked at him uncertainly. “I don’t follow.”
“We’re going to tell him everything we know. About your father’s murder. The scalpel he invented and the occupations and murders of the other people killed the same year he was. And at some point we’re going to throw in a few things we don’t know but are going to act like we do. The idea is to put so much pressure on him that he breaks. Squeeze him so hard that he rolls over and cops out. Confesses to murder for hire.” McVey suddenly looked at Remmer. “How many backup units did you request?”
“Six. With six more holding—waiting for our instructions. We have uniforms behind that if there is a reason for mass arrest.”
“McVey,” Osborn said. “You said we were going to tell him what we don’t know. What do you mean?”
“Suppose, for Herr Scholl’s benefit, we tell him we’ve been searching high and low for a profile of his guest of honor, Herr Lybarger, and have come up with nothing. We’re curious and would like to meet him. For a lot of reasons he’ll refuse. And to that we say okay, since you won’t let us meet him we have to assume the reason we’ve come up with nothing is that the poor guy is dead and has been for a long time.”
“Dead?” Remmer said from the front.
“Yeah. Dead.”
“Then who’s playing Lybarger and why?”
“I didn’t say it wasn’t Lybarger. I simply said the reason we don’t know anything about him is that he’s dead. At least most of him is—”
Osborn felt ice creep down his spine. “You think he’s a successful experiment. That it’s Lybarger’s head on someone else’s body. Done by atomic surgery at absolute zero.”
“I don’t know if I think it but it’s not a bad theory, is it? Lying or not, it was Cadoux who made the connection for us when he said he had information connecting Scholl to Lybarger, and Lybarger to the headless corpses. Why else the mystery surrounding Lybarger’s stroke and his isolation with Doctor Salettl at the hospital in Carmel and his long recuperation at the nursing home in New Mexico? Richman, the micropathologist, said if the operation were done and successful, it would be seamless, undetectable, like a limb grown on a tree. Even his physical therapist, the American girl, wouldn’t know. Wouldn’t in her wildest imagination have any idea.”
“McVey, I think you’ve been in Hollywood too long.” Remmer lit a cigarette and held it between tightly bandaged fingers. “Why don’t you try selling that to the movies.”
“I bet that’s what Scholl says, but I think we ought to take a shot at proving it or disproving it anyway.”
“How?”
“Lybarger’s fingerprints.”
Remmer stared at him. “McVey, this is no theory. You actually believe it.”
“I don’t disbelieve it, Manfred. I’m too old. I can believe anything.”
“Even if we get Lybarger’s prints, which won’t be the easiest thing on earth, what good are they? If your Frankenstein theory is right and his own body from the shoulders down is dead and buried God knows where, we would have nothing to compare them to anyway.”
“Manfred, if you were going to have your head joined to another body wouldn’t you pick a much
“This is a bizarre side of you I have never seen.” Remmer smiled.
“Pretend it’s not bizarre. Pretend it’s done all the time.”
“Well—If I was—Yes, sure, a younger body. With my experience, think of all the young, beautiful girls I could get.” Remmer grinned.
“Good. Now let me tell you we’ve got the once deep-frozen head of a man in his early twenties sitting in a morgue in London. His name is Timothy Ashford of Clapham South. He was once in a fight with a couple of bobbies, so the London P.D. has his prints in their Records Bureau.”
Remmer’s smile faded. “You actually think this Timothy Ashford’s fingerprints could belong to Lybarger?”
McVey raised a hand and touched the salve covering his burns. Wincing, he took his hand away and looked at the black flecks of his own charred skin in clear salve.
“These people have gone to a lot of trouble to keep anyone from finding out what’s going on, and a lot of people are dead because of it. Yes, I’m guessing, Manfred. But Scholl’s not going to know that, is he?”
117
THE SPRAWLING works of the German Romantic artists Runge, Overbeck, and Caspar David Friedrich— whose brooding landscapes portrayed humans as insignificant against the overwhelming enormity of nature— covered the walls of Charlottenburg’s Gallery of Romantic Art, while a string quartet alternating with a concert pianist played a selection of Beethoven sonatas and concertos, to provide an apt mood and setting for the gathering of the powerful guests come to honor Elton Lybarger. Intermingling loudly, they argued politics, the economy and Germany’s future, while formally dressed waiters danced among them with cornucopian trays brimming with drink and hors d’oeuvres.
Salettl stood alone near the gallery entrance watching the whirlwind. From what he could tell, nearly everyone invited had come, and he smiled at the turnout. Crossing the room, he saw Uta Baur with Konrad Peiper. And Scholl, along with German newspaper magnate Hilmar Grunel and Margarete Peiper, stood listening to his American attorney, Louis Goetz, hold court in English. Four words Goetz threw out in a matter of seconds told the direction of his take. Hollywood. Talent agencies. Kikes.
Then Gustav Dortmund entered with his wife, a staid, white-haired woman in a dark green evening dress whose plainness was offset by a dazzling show of diamonds. Almost immediately Scholl went over to Dortmund and the two went off to a corner to talk.
Summoning a waiter, Salettl lifted a glass of champagne, then looked at his watch. It was 7:52. At 8:05 the guests would be ushered up the grand stairway to the Golden Gallery, where dinner would be served. At 9:00 exactly, he would excuse himself and go to the mausoleum to check on Von Holden’s preparations for the privileged proceedings that would take place there following Lybarger’s speech. By 9:10, he would have made his way to Lybarger’s quarters, where Lybarger, in the company of Joanna and Eric and Edward, would be in the final stages of his preparation.
Taking Joanna aside, he would tell her her assignment was complete and dismiss her, ordering a driver to take her immediately from the palace. That meant that once she had gone, and with the exception of carefully screened security and service personnel, the entire building would now be free of outsiders. At 9:15, Lybarger would make his entrance into the Golden Gallery; His speech would be over at 9:30, and by 9:45 everything would be done.
Behrenstrasse was a street of town homes lined with stately and ancient trees. A middle-aged couple out for a stroll after dinner passed under a streetlight and walked on as Von Holden’s taxi pulled up in front of number 45.
Telling the driver to wait, he got out, pushed through an iron gate and went quickly up the steps of the four- story building. Pressing the bell, he stood back and looked up. The clear sky of earlier had turned to a low overcast and the weather service called for drizzle and fog later in the evening. It was a bad sign. Fog kept planes grounded, and Scholl was due to fly out for his estate in Argentina immediately after the final ceremony at Charlottenburg, Of all nights, this was not the one for fog.
There was a sharp sound and abruptly the door opened, and a bone-thin man of sixty or so squinted out at him.
