Black Ops

Snow covered the ground. It had been snowing on and off all day, and it was gently falling now.

The stained-glass windows of the ancient Church of St. Elisabeth glowed faintly from the forest of candles burning inside, and the church itself seemed to glow from the light of the candles in the hands of the faithful who had arrived to worship too late to find room inside and now stood outside.

A black Mercedes-Benz 600SL was stopped in traffic by the crowds on Elisabethstrasse, its wipers throwing snow off its windshield.

The front passenger door opened and a tall, heavyset, ruddy-faced man in his sixties got out. He looked at the crowds of the faithful, then up at the twin steeples of the church, then shook his head in disgust and impatience, and got back in the car.

“Seven hundred and sixty-nine fucking years, and they’re still waiting for a fucking virgin,” Otto Gorner said, as much in disgust as awe.

“Excuse me, Herr Gorner?” the driver asked, more than a little nervously.

Johan Schmidt, the large forty-year-old behind the wheel, was wearing a police-type uniform; he was a supervisor in the security firm that protected the personnel and property of Gossinger Beteiligungsgesellschaft, G.m.b.H. Otto Gorner was managing director of the holding company, among whose many corporate assets was the security firm.

Schmidt’s supervisor was in charge of security for what in America would be called the corporate headquarters of Gossinger Beteiligungsgesellschaft, G.m.b.H., in Fulda, another small Hessian city about one hundred kilometers from Marburg an der Lahn. The supervisor had arrived at Schmidt’s home an hour and a half before, and had come right to the point.

“Herr Gorner wants to go to Marburg,” he’d announced at Schmidt’s door. “And you’re going to drive him.”

He had then made two gestures, one toward the street, where a security car was parked behind the SL600, and one by putting his thumb to his lips.

Schmidt immediately understood both gestures. He was to drive Herr Gorner to Marburg in the SL600, and the reason he was going to do so was that Herr Gorner—who usually drove himself in a 6.0-liter V12-engined Jaguar XJ Vanden Plas—had been imbibing spirits. Gorner was fond of saying he never got behind the wheel of a car if at any time in the preceding eight hours he had so much as sniffed a cork. The Mercedes was Frau Gorner’s car; no one drove Otto Gorner’s Jag but Otto Gorner.

Gorner’s physical appearance was that of a stereotypical Bavarian; he visually seemed to radiate gemutlichkeit. He was in fact a Hessian, and what he really radiated—even when he had not been drinking—was the antithesis of gemutlichkeit. It was said behind his back that only three people in the world were not afraid of him. One was his wife, Helena, who was paradoxically a Bavarian but looked and dressed like a Berlinerin or maybe a New Yorker. It was hard to imagine Helena Gorner in a dirndl, her hair in pigtails, munching on a wurstchen.

Frau Gertrud Schroeder, Gorner’s secretary, had been known to tell him no and to shout back at him when that was necessary in the performance of her duties.

The third person who didn’t hold Gorner in fearful awe didn’t have to. Herr Karl Wilhelm von und zu Gossinger was by far the principal stockholder of Gossinger Beteiligungsgesellschaft, G.m.b.H. Gorner worked for him, at least theoretically. Gossinger lived in the United States under the polite fiction that he was the Washington, D.C., correspondent of the Tages Zeitung newspaper chain—there were seven scattered over Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary—which constituted another holding of Gossinger Beteiligungsgesellschaft, G.m.b.H.

It was commonly believed that the heir to the Gossinger fortune seldom wrote anything but his signature on a corporate check drawn to his credit and instead spent most of his time chasing movie stars, models, and other female prey in the beachside bars of Florida and California and in the apres-ski lounges of Colorado and elsewhere.

“I said it’s been seven hundred and sixty-nine fucking years, and they’re still waiting for a fucking virgin,” Gorner repeated.

“Yes, sir,” Schmidt said, now sorry he had asked.

“You do know the legend?” Gorner challenged.

Schmidt resisted the temptation to say “of course” in the hope that would end the conversation. Instead, afraid that Gorner would demand to hear what the legend was, he said, “I’m not sure, Herr Gorner.”

“Not sure?” Gorner replied scornfully. “You either do or you don’t.”

“The crooked steeples?” Schmidt asked, taking a chance.

“Steeple, singular,” Gorner corrected him, and then went on: “The church was built to honor Elisabeth of Hungary, twelve hundred seven to twelve hundred thirty-one. She was a daughter of King Andrew II of Hungary. He married her off at age fourteen to Ludwig IV, one of whose descendants was Mad King Ludwig of Bavaria, who lost his throne because he became involved with an American actress whose name I can’t at the moment recall, possibly because, before this came up, I got into the wassail cup.

“Anyway, Ludwig IV, the presumably sane one, went off somewhere for God and Emperor Frederick II of the Holy Roman Empire. While so nobly employed, he caught a bug of some sort and died.

“Elisabeth, now a widow, interpreted this as a sign from God and thereafter devoted her life and fortune to good works and Holy Mother Church. For reasons I have never had satisfactorily explained, she came here and founded a hospital for the poor, right here behind the church—our destination, you understand?”

“I know where we’re going, Herr Gorner.”

To see a dead man, he thought. A murdered man.

So why am I getting this Gottverdammt history lesson—because he’s feeling no pain?

Or because he doesn’t want to think about the real reason we’re here?

“That was before the church was built, you understand,” Gorner had gone on. “The church came after she died in 1231. By then she had become a Franciscan nun and given all her money and property to the church.

“So, they decided to canonize her. Pope Gregory IX did so in 1235, and in the fall of that year, they laid the cornerstone of the church. It took them a couple of years to finish it, and nobody was so impolite as to mention that one of the steeples was crooked.

“But everybody saw it, of course, and a legend sprang up—possibly with a little help from the Vatican—that the steeple would be straightened by God himself just as soon as Saint Elisabeth’s bones were reburied under the altar. That happened in 1249. The steeple didn’t move.

“The legend changed to be that the steeple would be fixed when the first virgin was married in the church.” He paused, then drily added, “Your choice, Schmidt—either there was a shortage of virgins getting married, or the legend was baloney.”

Schmidt raised an eyebrow but said nothing.

“The steeple was still crooked three hundred years later,” Gorner continued, “when Landgrave Phillip of Hesse threw the Romans out of the church and turned it over to the Protestants. That was in 1527, if memory serves, and it usually does.

“He threw the Dominicans out of their monastery on the top of the hill”—Gorner turned and pointed over his shoulder—“at about the same time and turned it into a university, which he modestly named after himself. That’s where I went to school.”

“So I have heard, Herr Gorner.”

“Enough is enough,” Gorner said.

“Sir?”

“It could be argued that inasmuch as poor Gunther is dead, there is no reason for us to hurry,” Gorner said. “But an equally heavy argument is there is no reason we should wait while they stand there with their fucking candles waiting for a fucking virgin. Sound the horn, Schmidt, and drive through them.”

“Herr Gorner, are you sure you—”

Gorner reached for the steering wheel and pressed hard on the horn for what seemed to Schmidt an interminable time.

This earned them looks of shock and indignation from the candle-bearing worshippers, but after a moment