“Yes, I know,” Kurt Oppenheimer replied, and after a few more steps realized that he had said it aloud.
20
An American Army deserter with whom Kurt Oppenheimer had once done a little business in Munich was the one who finally gave the authorities their first clue. It happened six weeks after Oppenheimer left Berlin. The deserter had sold Oppenheimer a Walther pistol — the same pistol, in fact, which later he would use to kill the man who sold identities, Karl-Heinz Damra.
The second in what was to be the long series of deaths had been that of an ex-Waffen SS lieutenant colonel, and for a time the Army investigators entertained the notion that the American deserter might have been the one who had shot him three times. The deserter finally convinced them that he hadn’t and in doing so gave them an extremely accurate description of the man to whom he had sold the Walther. The only thing misleading about his description was his claim that the man who had bought the pistol spoke English with a heavy German accent. It was an accent, of course, which Oppenheimer sometimes employed.
But everything else about the deserter’s description tallied almost exactly with the extensive dossiers that both Bureau IV and Bureau V of the SS Reichssicherheitshauptampf, or National Central Security Office, had once maintained on Kurt Oppenheimer. The pattern of operating was the same, as were the height, weight, and coloring. The only item missing from the SS files was a photograph. There was none.
The Americans shared their discovery with the Russians and the British. They also offered the information to the French, but the French that week were miffed about something and rejected the offer. The Russians and the British, however, were very much interested, and as the killings went on they became even more so.
Sitting now on the edge of his cot in the cellar of the ruined castle near Höchst and waiting for the water to boil for his tea, Kurt Oppenheimer tried to remember the faces of all the men he had killed. For some reason, the faces of those he had killed before the war ended were clearer than those he had killed afterward. These latter faces tended to blur and sometimes even took on the features of Sergeants Packer and Sherrod. He often thought of the two Americans, who had been shipped home months before, and wondered what they were doing. Packer he always pictured on a horse, dressed like a cowboy, and Sherrod, red beard bristling, was always lying near the surf on some warm beach.
He had no trouble remembering Karl-Heinz Damm’s face, however, because Damm he had known quite well. Damm, in fact, had been the only one he had really despised. The rest had been merely symbols that he had destroyed. He had decided that you didn’t need to hate a symbol in order to destroy it All you had to do was squeeze the trigger. It was really quite simple.
He rose and poured the boiling water into the teapot. Then he took the list that he had torn from Damm’s ledgerlike book and studied it. The first name on the list was in the American Zone, in Russelsheim, only 19 miles from Frankfurt. The second name on the list was in the British Zone, in Bonn — or was it Bad Godesberg? No matter. He would do the one at Russelsheim first. Today he would demote himself to lieutenant It would be the last time that the American officer uniforms would be of any use. Yesterday in the Casino he knew he had pushed his luck by approaching the British Major. But it had been amusing. He realized that the British were probably looking for him. And there was even the possibility that the Major had been one of those who were doing the looking. He had that hunter’s look about him, and besides, British majors weren’t all that common in the American Zone. It would be even more amusing if the British Major somehow discovered that the American who had bought him a drink was actually the very man that he was looking for.
You want them to catch you, fool, his mocking self told him. “Well, yes, naturally,” Oppenheimer said aloud. “I’ve always known that.”
The Opel Motor Works at Russelsheim, about halfway between Frankfurt and Mainz, covered five hundred acres and at one time had been the largest automobile-manufacturing plant in Europe. At its peak it had turned out nearly 5,000 cars and trucks a month and had employed some 24,000 workers.
Both the RAF and the U.S. Army Air Corps had bombed it by day and by night, but despite their combined efforts the Opel plant was still operating at 40 percent of capacity at the war’s end. Now it was back in operation, after a fashion, and supervising the entire plant and its 4,137 German workers was Lt. Jack Fallon, who before the war had been a shop steward for a United Auto Workers (CIO) local at the Ford plant in Dearborn, Michigan. To help him run his new empire, the Military Government had allotted him two enlisted men, a three-quarter-ton truck with a trailer, and an interpreter.
It was the interpreter whom the CID Lieutenant wanted to see.
“Jesus, you don’t think he’s a Nazi or something, do you?” Fallon said. “I’Ve already lost two interpreters because somebody claimed they were Nazis. Hell, this guy couldn’t be a Nazi. He was in a concentration camp.”
“It’s just routine,” Kurt Oppenheimer said.
“Okay, I’ll see if I can find him for you.”
Fallon turned in his swivel chair and yelled through the open door, “Hey, Little, where the hell’s Wiese got off to?”
“Beats the shit out of me, Lieutenant,” Cpl. Virgil Little yelled back.
“Well, go find the fucker and get his ass in here.”
“Yes, sir.”
Fallon leaned back in his chair. “It might take a while,” he said. “This is one hell of a big plant”
“That’s all right,” Oppenheimer said.
“They keeping you guys busy?”
“Fairly so. How about you?”
Fallon sighed. “It’s a mess. You know who I get orders from? I get orders from G-Five in Frankfurt. Except that sometimes their orders are just the opposite of the ones I get from G-Four — that’s production control. And before I can turn around, here comes a new set of orders in — this time from OMGUS up in Berlin. And if that wasn’t enough, those G-Five fuckers down at Seventh Army in Heidelberg think they’ve got to put their two cents’ worth in. I don’t know what the hell I’m doing half the time.”
“Sounds rough,” Oppenheimer said, producing a pack of Camels, and offered them to Fallon.
Fallon shook his head. “Let me give you an example of what I mean.” He looked hopefully at Oppenheimer and was encouraged by the sympathetic nod that he got.
“What we’re trying to do here is turn out trucks — small ones, you know, three-quarter-ton jobs. But in the meantime we’re also supposed to be turning out radiators and carburetors, and these we ship off to the D-B plant at Mannheim.”
“D-B?” Oppenheimer said.
“Daimler-Benz.”
“Oh.”
“Okay, swell, we turn out four hundred and sixteen radiators and six hundred and two carburetors, right?”
“Right.”
“Then they shut down the fucking gas on us. Well, we get our gas from Darmstadt, and Darmstadt has to have coal before it can turn out gas. But Darmstadt depends on getting its coal from somewhere up in the Ruhr, in the British Zone. Well, they’re not mining any coal up in the Ruhr, or if they are, those British fuckers are keeping it for themselves. So D-B is screaming for its radiators and its carbs and I’m screaming back that I can’t turn ’em out without gas and I can’t get the gas unless Darmstadt gets the coal. So you know what they tell me to do?”
“What?”
“Improvise.”
“Jesus.”
“So here’s what I do. I take one of those trucks that we turned out and I write it off. I mean the records on it just disappear. It was never produced, if you know what I mean? Then I start nosing around the black market and I find some guy who’s got coal. You can find it if you know where to look. So I say to this guy, ‘How’d you like a brand-new truck?’ Of course, he wants to know what the catch is. Well, the catch is that he’s gotta use the truck to haul enough coal over to Darmstadt to provide me with gas for three weeks.”