“Very clever,” said Deakin.
“No,” said Reichleitner. “You were careless, that’s all.” He made one pile of pages out of the several smaller ones and then pushed the documents toward me.
“After Katyn Forest,” he said, “this was the next investigation. Hardly as thorough, but just as shocking. It relates to a place in Russia called Beketovka. The largest POW camp for German soldiers captured at Stalingrad. The conditions described here apply in all Soviet POW camps for German soldiers. Except those for the SS. For the SS things are much worse. Please, read this file. Several men died to bring the information and these pictures out of Russia. I shan’t detain you with the precise figures now, gentlemen. Instead I shall merely give you one statistic. Of the two hundred fifty thousand Germans captured after the surrender at Stalingrad, about ninety percent are now dead from cold, starvation, neglect, or just plain murder. My mission here is simple. To deliver this file to your president with a question. If the deaths of twenty-seven thousand Poles are not enough for you to break off your alliance with the Soviet Union, then what about the deaths of two hundred and twenty-five thousand German prisoners?”
“Only four thousand Poles have been found. So far.”
“There were other graves,” said Reichleitner. “In truth we had no time to examine all of them. However, our intelligence sources in Russia have indicated that this may be only the tip of the iceberg. Of the million or more Poles deported in 1941, perhaps as many as a third of them are now dead, with many more unaccounted for in Soviet labor camps.”
“Bloody hell,” breathed Deakin. “You can’t be serious.”
“Had I not seen what I have seen, then I might have agreed with you, Major Deakin,” said Reichleitner. “Look, this is what I know. But what I suspect is much, much worse. There are terrible things that Germany has done, too. Dreadful things to the Jews in Eastern Europe. But we are your enemy. The Russians are your friends. Your allies. And if you do and say nothing of these things, you will be as bad as them, for you will be condoning what they have done.”
Deakin looked at me. “These figures he mentions, they’re impossible, surely.”
“I don’t think so.”
“But three hundred thousand Poles?”
“Men, women, and children,” said Reichleitner.
“It doesn’t bear thinking of.”
Reichleitner threw himself down on his bed. “Well, I have done my duty. Everything is explained in the file. I can tell you no more than you may read for yourselves.”
Deakin tapped the bowl of his pipe against the heel of his hand and, catching my eye, nodded.
“Actually there’s quite a lot you haven’t told us, Major,” he said. “Such as who sent you on this mission. And who you were to make contact with when you arrived in Cairo. You don’t expect us to believe that you were going to make your way to the American legation and hand this dossier over to the president in person. To whom were you intending to entrust this?”
“Good point,” I said.
“You might not be a spy yourself, but the person with whom you were supposed to make contact in Cairo almost certainly is.”
“I was sent on this mission by Reichsfuhrer Himmler,” admitted Reichleitner. “My orders were to check in to Shepheard’s Hotel posing as a Polish officer. I speak Polish and English. Better English than I led you to believe earlier. And I’m afraid that I was planning to do exactly as you have said. To deliver the dossier to the American legation. Number twenty-four Nabatat Street, is it not? Here in Garden City.”
Deakin threw a nod in my direction. “That’s the address, all right.”
“I was to place the dossier in a parcel marked for the attention of your American minister, Alexander Kirk. I had a covering letter addressed to Mr. Kirk, but I lost that when I bailed out, along with my Polish passport.”
“Very convenient,” said Deakin.
Reichleitner shrugged. “Can you think of a better way to deliver a dossier into the hands of the Americans than simply to hand it in at the legation? I know Cairo. I was often here before the war. So why would I need a contact? A contact might only have compromised me and my mission.”
“A contact might help you to escape from Egypt,” I suggested.
“That’s not so difficult, with money.”
“He had several hundred pounds on him when we picked him up,” explained Deakin.
“A ninety-minute train ride to Alexandria,” said Reichleitner. “Then a ship to Jaffa, in Palestine. From there it’s easy enough to get passage for Syria and then Turkey. I’m often in Ankara.”
“Nevertheless, I still think we will have to try you as a spy,” said Deakin.
“What?” Reichleitner leaped off the bed and pointed to the papers he had brought from Germany. “I came to bring you information, not to spy. What kind of spy brings papers and film with him? Answer me that?”
“These might be forgeries,” said Deakin. “Disinformation designed to drive a wedge between us and our Russian allies. We call that sabotage. Same as blowing up an oil refinery or an officers’ mess.”
“Sabotage? But that’s idiotic.”
Deakin collected the Beketovka papers from the table. “These will have to be evaluated. And if they don’t check out, you could find yourself facing a firing squad.”
The German closed his eyes and groaned. “But this is preposterous,” he said.
“Major Deakin,” I said, laying my hand on the German’s papers. “I wonder if I might be allowed to speak to Major Reichleitner alone for a moment? It’s all right. I don’t think the major will try to injure me, will you, Major?”
Reichleitner sighed and shook his head.
“All right,” said Deakin. “If you’re sure.” He knocked on the door to summon the lance corporal, and a moment or two later Reichleitner and I were alone.
“I don’t feel so good,” groaned the German.
I helped myself from the packet of cigarettes I had given the major. “I can get you some medicine when I leave this cell. If you like.”
Major Reichleitner nodded. “It’s my stomach.”
“I’m told everyone gets stomach trouble in this country. So far I’ve been lucky, I guess. But then, I don’t think you can catch much from cigarettes and scotch.”
“I don’t know if it’s something I ate, or just nerves. Do you think that English idiot really means to charge me with spying?”
“I could probably persuade him not to. If you were to do me a small favor.”
It was a dangerous game I had decided to play. But now that I had met Major Reichleitner, it was a game I felt I could control. I had decided that it would be better to know what the Bride material actually contained, rather than live in fear of mere possibility. If Reichleitner did manage to decode Bride, I’d decide what to do about it afterward. Controlling a man like Reichleitner, a prisoner of war, with the aid of some cigarettes and scotch and some medicine would be a lot easier than trying to deal with an Allied officer in SOE.
“What kind of a favor?” The German frowned suspiciously. “Look here, if it’s information you want, there’s nothing I can tell you. I can’t imagine that the work of the German War Crimes Bureau is of much interest to American intelligence.”
“It’s my understanding from Deakin that before joining the bureau you were with a signals and communications battalion on the eastern front.”
“That’s right. At Heinrich East, the Regimental HQ in Smolensk. My God, it seems like a hundred years ago.”
“Why did they assign you to the Katyn Forest massacre?”
“For one thing, my languages. I speak Russian and Polish. My mother is Russo-Polish. And for another, before joining the army I was a detective in Vienna. Cryptology was always a sort of hobby of mine.”
“A few minutes ago-what you were saying about the Russians. I didn’t want to say anything in front of Deakin, but there are an awful lot of Americans who believe that Russia is the enemy, not Germany. My boss in the OSS, for one. He hates the Bolsheviks. So much so that he’s set up a secret section inside the OSS to spy on the Russians. A while ago, we started monitoring Soviet signals traffic in Washington. It seems that our ally is spying on us.”
