“You get to keep that stuff. When you’re all alone in your monastery, feeling sorry for yourself, you can take it out and read it and tell yourself, ‘What the hell, at least I’m rich.’”
“Very funny. You through?”
“Yeah.”
Jimmy drained his glass and pushed it away. “Okay. Speaking of the monastery, Clete: Despite what everyone seems to think, all is not sweetness and light between General Gehlen and me.”
Clete’s eyebrows rose.
“I don’t think I’m going to like this,” he said.
“Tiny’s Number Two, Sergeant Tedworth, caught an NKGB officer sneaking out of the monastery—”
Clete silenced him with a raised hand.
“Let’s get all the details in from the beginning,” he said. “Tiny is who?”
“First Sergeant Chauncey Dunwiddie…”
“Well, Jimmy, I can understand why General Gehlen might be a little miffed that a twenty-two-year-old American captain who never saw a Russian a month ago decided he knows more about interrogating NKGB officers than Abwehr Ost experts. How do you even communicate with this guy? Sign language? You don’t know three words of Russian. What the hell were you thinking?”
“Konstantin speaks English. And German.”
“Konstantin? Sounds like you’re buddies.”
“I like him. Okay?”
“My God!”
“That — liking him — came after I decided that I wasn’t going to — couldn’t — stand around with my thumb up my ass watching while some Kraut kept him in a dark cell stinking from his own crap, following which he would be blown away. And knowing if anything came out about that, I’d be on the hook for it, not the Germans and not Mattingly.”
“Oh, so that’s it? You were covering your ass?”
“Fuck you, Clete!”
“What?” Clete said angrily. “Let’s not forget, Little Brother, that your big brother is a lieutenant colonel and you’re a captain. A brand-new captain.”
“Sorry. Make that, ‘Fuck you, Colonel.’”
Clete, white-faced, glared at him but said nothing.
“When Mattingly told Tiny to ‘deal with’ the Russian, all I had to do to cover my ass was look the other way and keep my mouth shut. He didn’t tell me to deal with it. He told Tiny. You think I wanted to take on Gehlen and Mattingly? And now you?”
“Then why the hell did you? Are you?”
“Write this down, Coloneclass="underline" Because I saw it as my duty.”
“You can justify that, right?” Clete said coldly.
“First, it was my duty to Tiny. An officer takes care of his men, right? A good officer doesn’t let other officers cover their asses by hanging his men out to dry, does he?”
“That’s it?”
“Two, I decided that what ex-Major Konrad Bischoff — Gehlen’s hotshot interrogator — was doing to Major Orlovsky — the clever business of having him sit in a dark cell with a canvas bucket full of shit — wasn’t going to get what we wanted from him. Actually, I decided Bischoff’s approach was the wrong one.”
“Based on your extensive experience interrogating NKGB officers?” Clete said sarcastically.
“Based on what you said at dinner, you’re now the honcho of Operation Ost, so I’ll tell you what I told Mattingly when I thought he was the honcho. As long as I’m in charge of Kloster Grünau, I’m going to act like it. If you don’t like what I do, relieve me.”
Clete didn’t reply immediately, and when he did, he didn’t do so directly.
“Why, in your wise and expert opinion, Captain Cronley, is Major Bix… Bisch…”
“Bischoff. Ex-Major Konrad Bischoff.”
“Why do ex-Major Konrad Bischoff’s interrogation techniques fail to meet with your approval?”
“Because they haven’t let him see either that Orlovsky is smarter than he is — I don’t know why, maybe he believes that Nazi nonsense that all Russians are the Untermenschen—”
“Untermensch is a pretty big word. You sure you know what it means?”
Cronley ignored the question.
“Or that my good buddy Konstantin Orlovsky has decided that, except for a bullet in the back of his head, it’s all over for him. And in that circumstance he’s not going to come up with the names of Gehlen’s people that he turned. Names, maybe, if that’s what it will take to get out of his cell and shot and get it over with, but not the actual ones.”
“But you have a solution for all these problems, right?”
“Would I be wasting my breath telling you, Clete?”
“We’ll have to wait and see, won’t we?”
“Look. When Mattingly called and told me to come here as soon as I could, I was talking to Orlovsky. I had just proposed to him that I arrange for him to disappear from the monastery—”
“Disappear to where?”
“Argentina. Where else?”
“My God!”
“And that, once he was there and gave me the names of Gehlen’s bad apples, and we found out they were in fact the bad apples, I would pressure Gehlen to get Orlovsky’s family out of Russia.”
“If I thought you were into Mary Jane cigarettes, I’d think you just went through two packs of them. Listen to yourself, Jimmy! You’re talking fantasy!”
“Maybe. But, on the other hand, if I turn Orlovsky back over to Bischoff, and we go down that road, what we’re going to have is no names of the real turned Gehlenites, and a body in the monastery cemetery that just might come to light if the Bad Gehlenites let the Soviets know about it. Which brings us back to me not willing to let Tiny Dunwiddie or myself hang for that.”
Clete thought that over for a long moment.
“What was the Russian’s reaction?”
“What he’s doing right now is thinking it over.”
“He didn’t say anything?”
“What he said was, ‘Why would you expect me to believe something like that?’ And I said because I was telling him the truth, that I wasn’t promising to get his family out of Russia, just that I would make Gehlen try. I also told him if he was a man, he’d do anything he could to help his family. Then he called me a sonofabitch, and that was the end of the conversation.”
Clete shook his head.
“But he’s thinking about it, Clete. I know that in my gut. He doesn’t give a damn what happens to him. But his family is different. He doesn’t want them shot or sent to Siberia. What I did was… sow the seed, I guess… to start him thinking.”
“And you really thought Mattingly would put Operation Ost at risk by trying to sneak an NKGB officer out of Germany? And that Gehlen would risk his agents-in-place by trying to get an NKGB officer’s family out of Russia? My God!”
“I thought I could sell both of them on the idea that if we turned Orlovsky — the NKGB didn’t send a guy who graduated from spy school two months ago to penetrate Operation Ost — we’d all be ahead.”
“That’s pretty sophisticated thinking for a guy who — if memory serves — was about to graduate from spy school about that long ago. But didn’t finish spy school because they needed his expert services here to run a roadblock.”
“Yeah, and I probably didn’t know much more about running that roadblock — or Kloster Grünau when they gave that to me — than you did about blowing up ships when you went to Argentina.”
“Well, some things haven’t changed. Your mouth still runs away with you, you’re not troubled with modesty, and you have a hard time even admitting the possibility that you can be mistaken.”
Jimmy didn’t reply.
“I’ll try to get you out of this, but don’t get your hopes up,” Clete went on. “I think you are probably going to spend the rest of your military career — how long are you in for?”