Hauser shook his head with disgust. Even Hitler, ultimately, had disappointed him.
In the last few days he had begun to see how weak and frail the man was. Only last night as they celebrated, had he returned, briefly, to the powerful and charismatic figure he once was. But even then, his jokes and his stories had solicited tired, long-suffering smiles from those around him. He had become like the drunken, awkward party guest that everyone wished would leave.
The flames had engulfed Hitler’s head, and now, amidst the popping and hissing, he imagined he could hear the man’s mewling cry, like Schenkelmann’s. Pathetic.
The Jew’s research notes and Hauser’s project data for the bomb were in a box in the bunker. That was a box of incredibly valuable information. And, he reflected, he too was going to be valuable.
His work could go on. His knowledge and his skills would be of extreme interest to the Russians, of that he was sure.
When they arrived, all of these people standing with him out in the courtyard and watching the flames would be unimportant, superfluous. He could well imagine the first Russians to arrive being trigger-happy, hungry to exact a little vengeance upon the first faces they stumbled across.
It would be important, he decided, to lie low, to remain unfound until their intelligence officers arrived at the scene later on, and then… then, he could make himself known, and humbly offer his services.
While every other face in the courtyard remained impassive, emotionless and still, there was a smile spreading across his.
Hauser could see in the time ahead, after this war was brought to a conclusion, that there were going to be great opportunities for a man like him. He turned away from the flames and headed back inside the bunker to collect his box of notes. Those papers were going to be his passport out of here when the Russians came.
Chapter 60
He studied their motel rooms from across the parking lot. There had been a light on in one of them until just now. He looked at his watch — it was approaching four in the morning. He would love to be tucked up in bed like them, but there was some thinking to do and perhaps a final job to be done.
It was decision time.
As he stood silently in the darkness, lit only faintly by the flickering neon light outside the diner, he allowed his mind to wander, to start gathering up all the loose ends into a manageable knot; loose ends that spanned over sixty years, all of his professional life, in fact.
His mind drifted back to the end of that last meeting with Truman. There had been an almost tangible sense of relief in the conference room as Hitler’s implied deadline came and went. Hours had passed and nothing had happened. Then Truman drafted a second, cautiously worded telegram to Hitler, calling for his surrender once more. It was over.
Then the work, his work, began.
The worst of it had all been a long time ago, the killings. Some of them were still fresh in his mind. He sometimes thought he saw their faces in a crowd, or on the evening news, or at least faces that reminded him of them; the faces of those innocent witnesses whose deaths he had calmly ordered.
The whole thing had been a nasty, unpleasant business, but a necessary job that had been passed his way to organise. In the weeks that had followed that meeting at the White House in the last days of the war, in fact for several months afterwards, he had been put in sole charge of the hastily assembled little department as it went about cleaning up many of the scattered breadcrumbs.
It had needed to be done quickly with the minimum of fuss, and certainly without the unnecessary involvement of any other departments. The President had decided that a small, ring-fenced mini-agency with a lean head-count of dependable, well-remunerated and experienced agents was the perfect tool for the job. The breadcrumbs had needed tidying up, therefore it was he, and his little task force, who’d had to ensure that all seventeen of the civilian witnesses simply vanished, with no one left to make a noise.
There were some vanishings that had stuck in his mind more than others; the truly unpleasant ones. They were the ones that, even today, could disturb his sleep and keep him up until the first pale shades of dawn. There were other ones, though, that he’d found comparatively easy to organise. For example, there had been that obnoxious Brooklyn janitor who had discovered the decomposing remains of a body on the roof of his tenement building late in the summer of ’45. He could still remember the janitor’s name — Bradley Donegan. The body he had accidentally stumbled upon was grostesquely distorted by both the fall impact and several months of decomposition and would have passed as just another John Doe in a city that served them up every day.
It would have passed for a John Doe, that is, except for the fact that Donegan had seen the German uniform and was asking a lot of awkward questions. The mess, of course, had been quickly cleared up by the Department. The body never made it to a morgue, and the uniform was hastily incinerated in the building’s basement boiler room. His report to the local police went missing, and Bradley Donegan, a single, middle-aged man with a legacy of violent offences against his ex-wife and a taste for under-aged hookers, was found hanging in his apartment a few days later.
He smiled.
Never lost a single night’s sleep over that piece of shit.
The world was most definitely a better place without Bradley Donegan in it.
But then, to counter that, there were those ones that had troubled him deeply.
For example, the young elementary school teacher, Ms Elaine Scherbaum, who had spotted the erratic behaviour of ‘a large military-looking aircraft’ over the Prospect Park area. There had been children in her care at the time. That had complicated things further.
He had struggled with that one, long and hard, allowing himself much more time than was prudent to wrestle with the decision of what to do. Most of the children he was prepared to let go. None of them had seen the plane themselves, and had only heard their teacher comment on it briefly. It would have been an unnecessary risk to consider these children as liabilities. Children tell stories all the time. No one ever listens to them.
But it turned out that one of them, a twelve-year-old girl, had seen the plane along with Miss Scherbaum. Worse still, the girl had made a big deal about seeing something that looked like a body fall from the plane. Deciding what to do with them had been a very tough call, but there was no way he could afford to let them go around talking. The young teacher had family, sisters and parents in New York, and the longer she was left the more it looked like she would share her story with them. With some regret, there had been strings that needed pulling, quite a few in fact, to ensure both the little girl and the teacher were held longer than they should have been at the precinct station and then driven back home in the early hours by a squad car that met with an unfortunate end off the Brooklyn Bridge. The policeman driving the car had drowned along with them, and the next day the vehicle and all three bodies were recovered. The police discovered one of the car’s tyres had blown, and a curiously weak section of guard rail on the bridge, it appeared, had failed to prevent the car from going over.
That one had been unpleasant. But it had been by no means the worst.
He shuddered at memories that crept insidiously forward into the light.
What about the young boy?
They are taking the boy and his father, the only two people from this small coastal town to have seen the body on the beach, taking them back to Washington to be properly debriefed. At least, that’s what he’s told them. And, being patriotic Americans, they’re eager to help in any way they can.
It’s just him and Blaine in the car with them. He doesn’t know Blaine well. The man is older than him, has served in the OSS for some time. He had helped in the round-up of Japanese-Americans back in ’ 41. Blaine looks like a hard sonofabitch, and there are no black marks on his record. He comes across as the kind of guy that doesn’t ask questions, just gets the job done with as little fuss and fanfare as possible. That’s why he was one of the first to be hastily headhunted and recruited by the Department. A safe pair of hands.
They’re driving south along the coast road, looking for somewhere remote enough to pull over and do this thing. Blaine spots a track off the road, leading into woods. It’s perfect. Blaine looks at him, and he nods back. The
