The second piece was a passing mention. In 1966 he had apparently quit Schramme and joined the Fifth Commando, by then headed by John Peters, who had succeeded Mike Hoare. Principally manned by South Africans-Peters had quickly ousted most of Hoare’s British. So Marchais’s Flemish could have enabled him to survive among Afrikaners, since Afrikaans and Flemish are fairly similar.
The other two pieces mentioned Marchais, or simply a giant Belgian called Big Paul, staying on after the disbanding of the Fifth Commando and the departure of Peters, and rejoining Schramme in time for the 1967 Stanleyville mutiny and the long march to Bukavu.
Finally Lutz had included five photocopies of sheets extracted from Anthony Modeler’s classic, Histoire des Mercenaires, from which Quinn could fill in the events of Marchais’s last months in the Congo.
In late July 1967, unable to hold Stanleyville, Schramme’s group set off for the border and cut a swath clean through all opposition until they reached Bukavu, once a delightful watering hole for Belgians, a cool resort on the edge of a lake. Here they holed up.
They held out for three months until they finally ran out of ammunition. Then they marched over the bridge across the lake into the neighboring republic of Ruanda.
Quinn had heard the rest. Though out of ammunition they terrified the Ruandan government, which thought they might, if not appeased, simply terrorize the entire country. The Belgian consul was overwhelmed. Many of the Belgian mercenaries had lost their identity papers, accidentally or on purpose. The harassed consul issued temporary Belgian ID cards according to the name he was given. That would be where Marchais became Paul Lefort. It would not be beyond the wit of man to convert those papers into permanent ones at a later date, especially if a Paul Lefort had once existed and died down there.
On April 23, 1968, two Red Cross airplanes finally repatriated the mercenaries. One plane flew direct to Brussels with all the Belgians on board. All except one. The Belgian public was prepared to hail their mercenaries as heroes; not so the police. They checked everyone descending from the plane against their own wanted lists. Marchais must have taken the other DC-6, the one that dropped off human cargoes at Pisa, Zurich, and Paris. Between them the two planes carried 123 mixed European and South African mercenaries back to Europe.
Quinn was convinced Marchais had been on the second plane, that he had disappeared into twenty-three years of dead-end jobs on fairgrounds until being recruited for his last foreign assignment. What Quinn wanted was the name of one other who had been with him on that last assignment. There was nothing in the papers to give a clue. Lutz returned.
“One last thing,” said Quinn.
“I can’t,” protested Lutz. “There’s already talk that I’m writing a background piece on mercenaries. I’m not-I’m on the Common Market meeting of agriculture Ministers.”
“Broaden your horizons,” suggested Quinn. “How many German mercenaries were in the Stanleyville mutiny, the march to Bukavu, the siege of Bukavu, and the internment camp in Ruanda.”
Lutz took notes.
“I have a wife and kids to go home to, you know.”
“Then you’re a lucky man,” said Quinn.
The area of information he had asked for was narrower, and Lutz was back from the morgue in twenty minutes. This time he stayed while Quinn read.
What Lutz had brought him was the entire file on German mercenaries from 1960 onward. A dozen at least. Wilhelm had been in the Congo, at Watsa. Dead of wounds on the Paulis road ambush. Rolf Steiner had been in Biafra; still living in Munich, but was never in the Congo. Quinn turned the page. Siegfried “Congo” Muller had been through the Congo from start to finish; died in South Africa in 1983.
There were two other Germans, both living in Nuremberg, addresses given, but both had left Africa in the spring of 1967. That left one.
Werner Bernhardt had been with the Fifth Commando but skipped to join Schramme when it was disbanded. He had been in the mutiny, on the march to Bukavu, and in the siege of the lakeside resort. There was no address for him.
“Where would he be now?” asked Quinn.
“If it’s not listed, he disappeared,” said Lutz. “That was 1968, you know. This is 1991. He could be dead. Or anywhere. People like that… you know… Central or South America, South Africa…”
“Or here in Germany,” suggested Quinn.
For answer, Lutz borrowed the bar’s telephone directory. There were four columns of Bernhardts. And that was just for Hamburg. There are ten states in the Federal Republic, and they all have several such directories. “If he’s listed at all,” said Lutz.
“Criminal records?” asked Quinn.
“Unless it’s federal, there are ten separate police authorities to go through,” said Lutz. “You know that, since the war, when the Allies were kind enough to write our constitution for us, everything is decentralized. So we can never have another Hitler. Makes tracking someone down enormous fun. I know-it’s part of my job. But a man like this… very little chance. If he wants to disappear, he disappears. This one does, or he’d have given some interview in twenty-three years, appeared in the papers. But, nothing. If he had, he’d be in our files.”
Quinn had one last question. Where had he originally come from, this Bernhardt? Lutz scanned the sheets.
“Dortmund,” he said. “He was born and raised in Dortmund. Maybe the police there know something. But they won’t tell you. Civil rights, you see-we’re very keen on civil rights in Germany.”
Quinn thanked him and let him go. He and Sam wandered down the street looking for a promising restaurant.
“Where do we go next?” she asked.
“Dortmund,” he said. “I know a man in Dortmund.”
“Darling,” she said, “you know a man everywhere.”
In the middle of November, Michael Odell faced President Cormack alone in the Oval Office. The Vice President was shocked by the change in his old friend. Far from having recovered since the funeral, John Cormack seemed to have shrunk.
It was not simply the physical appearance that worried Odell; the former power of concentration was gone, the old incisiveness dissipated. He tried to draw the President’s attention to the appointments diary.
“Ah, yes,” said Cormack, with an attempt at revival. “Let’s have a look.”
He studied the page for Monday.
“John, it’s Tuesday,” said Odell gently.
As the pages turned Odell saw broad red lines through canceled appointments. There was a NATO Head of State in town. The President should greet him on the White House lawn; not negotiate with him-the European would understand that-but just greet him.
Besides, the issue was not whether the European leader would understand; the problem was whether the American media would understand if the President failed to show. Odell feared they might understand only too well.
“Stand in for me, Michael,” pleaded Cormack.
The Vice President nodded. “Sure,” he said gloomily. It was the tenth canceled appointment in a week. The paperwork could be handled in-house; there was a good team at the White House nowadays. Cormack had chosen well. But the American people invest a lot of power in that one man who is President, Head of State, Chief Executive, Commander in Chief of the armed forces, the man with his finger on the nuclear button. Under certain conditions. One is that they have the right to see him in action-often. It was the Attorney General who articulated Odell’s worries an hour later in the Situation Room.
“He can’t just sit there forever,” said Walters.
Odell had reported to them all on the state in which he had found the President. There were just the inner six of them present-Odell, Stannard, Walters, Donaldson, Reed, and Johnson-plus Dr. Armitage, who had been asked to join them as an adviser.