Fuck, she thought. He was too good-too clever-to try any sortof bluff. She could only play the cards she held. “I think the coincidence is incredible, your being so right at that goddamned press conference.”
Not as good as he’d hoped, but he still believed himself ahead. “I’d liked to have found out earlier. Or rather that London had been quicker. Whom do your people regard the most important?”
Miriam frowned. “Don’t you think it’s Frederich Dollmann? He was the chief secretary in the bunker.”
Charlie felt the slow, warming burn move through him. It still wasn’t an answer, but the middle of the jigsaw was beginning to fill at last. “I’m not making the analysis. London is, as Washington obviously is with you. All I got was the names and a thumbnail sketch of what they’d so far come up with.” Plucking a name at random from the list, Charlie went on, “Our guys seemed to think Werner von Bittrick was important.”
“An aide-de-camp, admittedly,” said Miriam. “But it was Dollmann and Buhle who saw him every day: took the dictation.”
Franz Buhle, completed Charlie, as he filled in a lot more. At least three of the fifteen Germans had spent the last months of the war in daily contact-two of them taking the dictation-with the demented Adolf Hitler, fighting battles already lost with armies that no longer existed: the bunker that the Russians were the first to seize as they were the first to seize Berlin. Forcing the casualness as well as the conversation-but letting his mind run ahead-Charlie said, “Let’s face it, the combined knowledge of everyone who was there would have been astonishing. But to historians-”
“I know the problem,” broke in Miriam, which Charlie had hoped she would. “Why art experts? I could understand practically anyone else except them.” When-or how-was she going to get the American names?
Charlie believed he could understand. Partially, at least. If he was right, it was the conspiracy to beat all conspiracies ever conceived, reducing those of the courts of Rome, Tudor England, the Borgias and Machiavelli to children painting by numbers.
Caught by his silence and her belief in his greater knowledge, Miriam said, “But you can?”
Distantly, virtually thinking aloud, Charlie said, “They wouldn’t have known, would they?”
What were the right words? Miriam thought desperately. Maybe to follow with another question. “Known what?”
“What they were going to find in Yakutsk. Why they were being allowed there,” suggested Charlie, still thinking aloud. “We can’t look at it from today’s perspective. We’ve got to look at it as they would have in Berlin in March or April or May 1945. Total chaos, total confusion. Suddenly to have made available the last support staff around Hitler: people who knew intimately every moment of every day in the last months of one of history’s greatest monsters! People who knew where all the treasures were. That would have been too much to have considered rationally. There was no rationale.”
“But there weren’t any art treasures in the bunker!” protested Miriam.
“You sure of that?” demanded Charlie. “They wouldn’t have been, not then. I’m still not sure now, after half a century.”
Now it was Miriam who remained silent, pushing the blintzes away. Charlie didn’t speak, either, needing to think as much as the woman. Eventually Miriam said, “You’re saying they didn’t go to Yakutsk because of Hitler’s staff?”
“No,” denied Charlie. “They went because of Hitler’s staff. But that’s not what they were taken there for. There was another reason.”
“There couldn’t have been another reason!” protested Miriam, belatedly accepting Charlie’s earlier argument. “To get to the Germans would have been incredible!”
“That was only part of it,” said Charlie. “There has to be more, otherwise none of it makes sense.”
They ate-both duck-but were unaware of what they were eating and neither properly tasted the wine, either, each engrossed in private thoughts, hands and mouths working automatically.
Charlie felt instinctively that he was close, maybe close enough to reach out and touch, but there were still too many bits missing. His mind-his hope-was on Vitali Novikov, who according to Natalia was arriving the following day. All or nothing throbbed through Charlie’s head, like a drumbeat. It wouldn’t-couldn’t-be absolutely nothing, he reassured himself. No matter how desperate, the man wouldn’t have risked a total and outright lie-not someone as aware, as Novikov was, of the return expected for his freedom from theinherited exile of an innocent father. A bargain, in fact, that the doctor himself had volunteered.
Miriam was more confused now than when she’d arrived. Nothing that seemed to make sense to Charlie was even vaguely comprehensible-guessable, even-to her. So he was still out of sight and she couldn’t see a way to catch up. Richard Cartright suddenly came into her mind: Richard Cartright, with the too-ready questions inexplicable then and even more inexplicable now, if London was operating with the sort of harmony Charlie was inferring. Tentatively she said, “How’d you find the attitude in London?”
“Attitude?” queried Charlie.
When the fuck was she going to get a half-useful answer instead of another wrong-position question? “Thought maybe you might have heard something about Peters’s visit, on his way back from here?”
No, she didn’t, Charlie recognized at once, concentrating fully. “It was a pretty big meeting, I gather. There’s a lot of different interests, in London-too many, in my opinion. I didn’t hear in any specific detail how it went with your guy. What playback did you get?”
A way at last to avoid the question! “I didn’t, as such. But I kinda got the impression there was …”-the apparent search for the word wasn’t necessary-“some rivalry in England?”
“How?” Charlie’s demand was as unhelpful as she’d tried to make hers in the beginning.
“I will keep to our agreement,” said Miriam. “And for me I guess it’s easier. It’s been left entirely to me-okay, so my head’s on the block-but at least I don’t have the irritation of someone riding shotgun on me. That’s how mistakes happen.” Cartright had tried to use her as she’d been happy to use him, before realizing that he knew nothing. This was just getting a repayment for what he’d gotten in another way.
Could he risk the guess? No. A guess, even though he was sure of the answer, would change the balance, weighing the scales to her advantage. Not another blitzkrieg. A softening-up salvo, to continue her belief in his superior firepower. There was only one thing she could be missing, apart from the full answer which she clearly hadn’t gotten. He said, “I’ve got both American names and I know wherethe grave is of the one who was really buried in Yakutsk.” And waited.
Miriam said, “Cartright.”
“Personal?”
“Very much so. Carried out badly, too.”
“Your lieutenant was George Timpson. Buried in the American cemetery at Margraten, in Holland. The second American was a Harry Dunne. He survived the war, as far as I know. I’ve no idea if he’s still alive.” Charlie was glad the encounter with Miriam was the first of a busy day and that he’d fought off the embassy ambush earlier that day.
“This come to your people from Washington?”
She shouldn’t need to ask that! “No.”
“Have they been told?”
If they had, she, in turn, would-or should-have been told. So her question manifestly showed that she hadn’t been. No need even to guess now. “Have you been cut out entirely? Or sidelined?”
Abruptly-frighteningly-Miriam felt the emotion flood through her, her eyes briefly blurring. Her recovery was as quick as the near-collapse. He knew too much-was too intuitive-to go on with the charade anymore and in any case she was too tired and dispirited and pissed off and pissed over to try anymore. “Entirely.” Bitterly she added, “You know what that motherfucker Peters told me? He said I was the fall guy. That you were, too. Both of us at the bottom of the heap, to take the shit if it came down. Denies it, of course. But I taped the son-of-a-bitch!” Miriam’s emotions switchbacked again. This time she was suffused by an enormous feeling of relief. “That’s it, Charlie! All of it. I don’t have anything more to tell you. Nothing held back.”