Man Who Wanted Tomorrow Page 4

  “I’m ready to do anything you want, Herr Muntz.”

  The man smiled, relieved. It was going to be all right, he decided.

  “I want you to help Heinrich,” he said, raising his hand as he saw her about to speak.

  “He’ll need help, a lot of help …” she broke in.

  “… And you know that I and other people are prepared to give it to him,” completed Muntz.

  Gerda smiled at him, gratefully. Such a good man, she thought.

  “You must do two things,” continued the lawyer. “You must, as I have said, report to me the slightest thing that happens to you that is out of the ordinary. I don’t care how trivial or unimportant it seems. Anything. You understand?”

  She nodded, dutifully.

  “And the moment there is any contact from Heinrich, or anyone saying he represents Heinrich, then you must contact me at once.”

  Again she nodded.

  “At once, Frau Pöhl. Before going to meet him or anyone at any given spot. Before opening the door of your apartment. I must know, within minutes.”

  He held out a sheet of paper he had prepared waiting for her to arrive that morning.

  “I shall always be available at one of these numbers. And I want the call at any time of the day or night. Is that clear, Frau Pöhl?”

  She moved her head, her face bright with happiness. How good it felt. Alive and vital again. Doing something. Being important. And Heinrich was alive! Alive and coming back. She’d protect him. God, how she’d protect him. No man would know such protection.

  “Do you understand, Frau Pöhl?”

  “Oh yes, Herr Muntz,” she said. She was breathless, as if she had run up stairs. “Oh yes.”

  “Heinrich’s life, your life, will depend on how quickly you call me.”

  “I know, Herr Muntz. You can trust me. You know you can trust me.”

  He smiled. She was very simple, he decided.

  “I know I can, Frau Pöhl.”

  He took out his wallet and extracted 500 marks.

  “A gift, Frau Pöhl, from the Organization. You’ll need to buy a new dress maybe. And some food, in case Heinrich arrives suddenly.”

  Her eyes flooded again, but this time from gratitude and she grabbed the hand proffered by the man, lowering her lips to it. Muntz stood over her, wincing with distaste, but allowing the gesture. For the moment, she was very important.

  “And take the rest of the day off,” he said, moving his hand behind his back and wiping it against his jacket. “… But remember. Any contact … anything unusual. Call me immediately.”

  Muntz had already finished one schnapps when Frieden arrived at the Am Zoo hotel. Immediately he ordered another, feeling he had earned it.

  “Well?” questioned the millionaire. Muntz shrugged, sipping his drink.

  “It was dreadful,” he said.

  “But she knows what we want … she agreed?” snapped Frieden, immediately.

  “Oh, of course she agreed,” said Muntz, irritably. Contemptuously he added, “She’s a perfect Party member. She’s been reborn. She’s got a cause again. She’ll do exactly as I’ve told her.”

  Frieden smiled, signaling for the menu. He frowned, slightly, when Muntz indicated another drink.

  “It was a wise precaution, all those years ago, offering her a job,” said the property-speculator.

  Muntz grunted.

  “You told her we wanted to help Heinrich?” pressed the millionaire.

  Muntz sniggered, slightly drunk. “Of course,” he said.

  “How I’ll help him,” mused Frieden. “I’ll help him stand while they put the piano wire around his genitals and steady him as he’s lifted up against the beams by the overhead pulley …”

  He caught Muntz’s eye and they both laughed, savoring the picture.

  “It will be good to kill him,” agreed the lawyer.

  “What about the woman?” asked Frieden, suddenly.

  “Utterly stupid,” judged Muntz. “She’ll be a nuisance, later.”

  “So we’ll have to kill her, then?”

  “Oh yes. After she’s served her purpose.”

  Frieden gestured to the hovering waiter, anxious to order. His diet had precluded breakfast. He’d have Schweinebacken and then, after the pigs’ cheeks, wild boar and dumplings. Then Harzer with Ganseschmalz. He loved the goose fat with that Harz-mountain cheese.

  In the apartment in Seelingstrasse, Uri Perez frowned up at the two men who had spent fifteen minutes giving the detailed report on Gerda Pöhl.

  “Different?” he queried. “How different?”

  “She left work after only two hours,” reported the first man. “She went immediately to one of the stores on the Kurfürstendamm and paid 250 marks for a suit. Then she had lunch, with a half-bottle of wine. And then shopped for over an hour. She bought a whole ham and some Wurst. And a bottle of brandy and some wine.”

  “French,” enlarged the second man.

  “And this morning, Gerda Pöhl, née Köllman, was living as a widow on a restricted income,” reflected Uri. He paused, then added, “Interesting.”

  The stories began the following day in the Jerusalem Post, Ma’ariv and Yediot Arathnot, claiming there had been a response to the £.1,000,000 reward. Pressed for comment from all foreign news media, official government spokesmen would neither deny nor confirm the reports. Moshe Dayan stoked the speculation by asserting in the Knesset, as an answer to a tabled question from the Likud, the opposition party, that any public discussion would be premature.

  Three days later, when every newspaper in the West had front-paged the speculation, there was another Knesset session when the premier was faced with written demands about the progress of the ransom offer.

  He repeated Dayan’s assertion that public discussion would be harmful and then made a disclosure that fueled the interest even further.

  The approach had emanated from Berlin, he conceded. Yes, the West German authorities had been informed. The box had not, however, been retrieved. The following day, the Foreign Minister flew to New York to defend his country before the United Nations. The Israeli plane arrived two hours after the Soviet Ilyushin had departed for Moscow returning the Soviet scientists from their conference.

  Cigarette constantly alight, Vladimir Kurnov read the New York Times report of the second Knesset meeting. By his side, Mavetsky wondered if it were his imagination or whether Kurnov was being unusually brusque to everyone’s attempts at conversation.

  (5)

  Kurnov knew Mavetsky was keeping him waiting to prove his importance. The scientist sat irritably in the rambling anteroom to the minister’s Kremlin office, purposely avoiding the ashtray and fouling the floor. Already ten cigarette stubs and their ash lay scattered around his feet. Pig, thought the secretary, across the room. She’d make sure the minister knew of the scientist’s stupidity. They were all the same, imagining they were indispensable. He’d learn, one day. They always did.

  Kurnov stared sightlessly at the opposite wall, trying to stifle the feeling bubbling inside him. It was ridiculous for the nerves to surface so soon. Nervous men made mistakes. And he couldn’t afford mistakes, now least of all. He was, he realized, facing the greatest danger since the collapse of the Third Reich. Perhaps greater. In 1945, he’d made his escape-plans carefully and, even though he had so foolishly panicked, they had proven virtually foolproof. But now he was improvising. A man who regarded preparation and attention to details as important, it offended him to approach anything without a rehearsed scheme that had been examined for every flaw.

  In an attempt to control the fear, he tried to rationalize what had happened and chart new escape-routes. There’d been scares before, of course, certainly after the Nuremberg trials and then, much later, when the Israelis had snatched Eichmann. He halted the reassurance, realistically. What had happened after Nuremberg and Eichmann had never been any danger. To imagine they were was an attempt at self-flattery proving to himself how clever he had be
en in his precautions all those years ago. This time it was different. The one mistake he had ever made was no longer at the bottom of Lake Toplitz. Just one mistake … one stupid, infantile error that now he could hardly believe he had been capable of allowing to happen. However had he overlooked that damned German mentality for records and documentation? Everything had been destroyed, he had thought. Everything. And then he had remembered the file in the documentation center in Berlin, and realized that some nameless clerk throughout the years would have recorded against the name of Heinrich Köllman all the research and experiments that he had done for the Third Reich, together with the personal congratulations from the Führer that had led to all the honors and the favored treatment.

  What a drive it had been on that May morning in 1945 through the Russian bombardment of the capital, he recalled. Like rats, the Germans had been scuttling to escape, running in all directions instead of banding together, as the Führer had demanded. There was no jar in that thought against his own behavior. It was right for the country’s leaders to take precautions for their safety. The people should have obeyed the instructions, regardless of the cost. Twice men had actually tried to stop his car, to steal it. He’d shot them both. He smiled at the memory, then immediately became serious again, reliving that feeling of helplessness as he had stood in the deserted headquarters, scattered with discarded S.S. uniforms and stared at the ransacked cabinets, drawers jerked out like half-pulled teeth, and realized the one file that could mean his destruction was missing.

  Too late he had learned of the retreat to Bad Aussee. And that in the bleak, cold lake had been dumped the records containing his fingerprints, the one thing that could positively identify him in the Soviet Union with the personal file, containing the matching prints, that had been created since he had achieved such stature.

  Then the mistakes began to multiply.

  The Nazis began to pursue him, knowing how much he had put into his own Swiss account, to pay for plastic surgery. The fortune was amassed from his victims in the camps, but they regarded it as theirs. They would have killed him, he had known. Painfully. And so for the first time in his life he had moved without proper consideration. He could have escaped them. He knew that now. But shocked by the collapse of Germany, still in pain from the operation and frightened of becoming a victim of men whose ability to inflict pain he had perfected, he had congratulated himself that his new identity was probably more acceptable anyway to the East than to the West, and fled. Behind the Iron Curtain. He screwed around, gazing from the window, watching the snow building up on the Moscow roofs opposite. That, he decided, greeting the familiar regret, was the worst mistake he had ever made. So it was important not to panic again.

  Thank God, he thought, he had left one lifeline for himself in the West. “Always leave an escape-route.” Who had said that? Kaltenbrunner?—no, not him. The fool actually believed they would regroup in Bad Aussee and fight again. Who then? Bormann. That was it, Martin Bormann, who had always advised so cleverly against personal publicity, using his power without the need for the self-adulation that all the others possessed. A clever man, Martin. What a cruel quirk of fate that he should have died so quickly, in the filth of a railway yard.

  How secure was his escape-route? he wondered. It had been thirty years, without any contact. The only man who knew his secret had plenty of reasons for still helping, he reasoned, searching for hope. For thirty years the man had had access to a fortune of over £1,000,000. Over the years, interest would have increased that amount by at least three times.

  What if the man had died? He felt the sweat form in the hollow of his back at the sudden doubt. It could easily have happened, he decided.

  Why the hell did those bloody yids need to start probing that lake?

  “Ficken,” he said, softly.

  “Comrade?”

  “Nothing,” replied Kurnov, his Russian fluent. “Just day-dreaming.”

  The buzzer on the desk sounded and she nodded to the scientist.

  Mavetsky stood as Kurnov entered, smiling broadly. The minister’s policy for survival was to establish apparent friendship with everyone who might matter. Kurnov was such a person, and he troubled the minister. They should have been friends, spending time together socially. But the scientist had consistently rejected the overtures, always erecting a barrier. Others called it arrogance, but Mavetsky was unconvinced.

  “Vladimir! Good to see you. Sorry I had to keep you waiting …”

  He paused, selecting a familiar pose.

  “… It isn’t an easy life, being a minister, you know.”

  Usually that was greeted with a sympathetic smile, but Kurnov remained impassive. He should have known better, Mavetsky told himself. He nodded toward the inlaid cigarette-box on the desk and Kurnov accepted the invitation, still not speaking.

  “I thought America was very useful,” continued the minister, enthusiastically. The openly embraced ideas and opportunities already proven acceptable, was another survival ploy.

  “Very,” agreed Kurnov. The meeting would be recorded, he knew. Mavetsky was a cautious man.

  “Did you learn much from the Americans of their human stress research?”

  Kurnov shook his head. “We’re far more advanced than they are,” he asserted.

  Mavetsky sniggered. “Well, we have, shall we say, better facilities than the Americans for your particular form of research. Our experiments can be more complete.”

  Kurnov stared at him, staying silent.

  “Have you been down to the camps at Potma recently?” dangerously enlarged Mavetsky, realizing his mistake and needing a comment from the other man. Mavetsky was a fool, decided Kurnov. The minister knew precisely what his movements were, so the question was pointless. It was a juvenile attempt to cover himself on tape.

  “The Americans had some interesting theories, though,” he sidestepped.

  Mavetsky shrugged. Despite Kurnov’s suspicions, there had been no initial malice in the question about the Potma labor-camp. It had occurred to him spontaneously to see how mentally alert Kurnov was, and he had thrown the query out unthinkingly. Which had been stupid. It didn’t do to be shown to be a person who discussed such things so easily.

  “Will you accept the invitation to be at Houston for the link-up?” asked Kurnov. He knew that would be the point of his summons before the minister.

  “I don’t know. What do you think?”

  “I’d like to go,” said Kurnov, consciously attempting to sound casual. “The Houston communications are good. Electronically, they’ve established a good investigation pattern. I shall be able to get instant voiceprints for each day’s conversation, to enable immediate testing for any tension. One of their astronauts is a trained doctor. He’ll be conducting electroencephaloeranhs and cardiac readings in flight for transmission to Houston …”

  Kurnov cut off, abruptly. He’d already submitted a lengthy memorandum to the minister, containing all the points. There was a danger in over-stressing the advantages.

  “You seem very keen” said the minister.

  Kurnov felt a lurch. The face stayed expressionless, of course. Often Kurnov had reflected on the advantages of having had such complete plastic surgery. There had been some small nerves carelessly destroved, which had worried him at first. Even now, he realized, it might create some slight deformity as he got very old, but at the moment he looked far vounger than his fifty-nine years, and enjoyed being able to hide any emotion. Long ago he had learned how unsettling people found it.

  “I’ve always been enthusiastic about my work,” he said, easily.

  Mavetsky was anxious to recover from the earlier blunder.

  “Surely our own communications are equal to those of the Americans?”

  “Unquestionably,” agreed Kurnov, anticipating the other man’s reaction. “All the more reason for my going to America. I know exactly the detail that will be available here. But we can’t be sure what will go into Houston, unless I’m there, ensur
ing they can’t conceal anything. If I have their complete records to compare against those we take at Baikonur, my part of the research will be guaranteed.”

  It was unarguable logic, realized Mavetsky. Kurnov was manipulating him, he decided, angrily.

  “They will expect to have someone here, for the same reason,” threw back the minister.

  “Undoubtedly,” agreed Kuraov again. “That’s part of the agreement, anyway. But I’ve met every one of their team. Only two speak Russian and then so badly it is almost laughable. For most of the time in any control center, they won’t understand what is happening.”

  Kurnov had prepared himself well, conceded Mavetsky. He was a very formidable man.

  “One is inclined to forget how fluent you are in so many languages,” said Mavetsky, carelessly.

  “One should never overlook something to their advantage,” returned the smoothfaced man and the minister frowned. On a recording, what had been a remark of some sarcasm would appear naïve.

  “Obviously you should go then,” said Mavetsky, tightly.

  It had been stupid to jump so quickly, realized Kurnov. He was approaching the most difficult part of the interview and now the other man was antagonized. Perhaps one day, he thought, accepting the psychological failing, he’d be able to control the need to prove himself constantly superior to everyone.

  “I thought I might be able to encompass several things on one trip,” he said. To attempt a casual tone would only have alerted the other man, so he didn’t bother.

  Mavetsky looked up, like an animal sniffing the wind to detect danger.

  “Like what?” he said, cautiously.

  It was time to make concessions, decided Kurnov. He wondered if he could disarm the other man.

  “There have been one or two things I’ve found curious in the last few months, during my visit to Potma,” he said.

  Mavetsky just avoided the smile of satisfaction. The tape wouldn’t be damaging now.

  “Curious?” he probed.