A pause. “Hey there,” Avery responded. “How’s life treating you?”

“Oh, just swell. Good to hear your voice.” Paul couldn’t believe that he’d said good-bye to him just yesterday. It seemed like months. “How’s your other half?”

“Staying out of trouble.”

“That’s hard to believe.” Paul wondered if Manielli had been mouthing off to any Dutch soldiers the same way he wisecracked in America.

“You’re on a speaker here,” came Manielli’s irritated voice. “Just to let you know.”

Paul laughed.

Then staticky silence.

“What time is it in Washington?” Paul asked Morgan.

“Lunchtime.”

“It’s Saturday. Where’s Gordon?”

“We don’t have to worry about that. They’ll find him.”

Through the headset a woman’s voice said, “One moment, please. Placing your call.”

A moment later Paul heard a phone ring. Then another woman’s voice answered, “Yes?”

Morgan said, “Your husband, please. Sorry to trouble you.”

“Hold the line.” As if she knew not to ask who was calling.

A moment later Gordon asked, “Hello?”

“It’s us, sir,” Morgan said.

“Go ahead.”

“Setback in the arrangements. We’ve had to approach somebody local for information.”

Gordon was silent for a moment. “Who is he? General terms.”

Morgan gestured to Paul, who said, “He knows somebody who can get us close to our customer.”

Morgan nodded at his choice of words and added, “My supplier has run out of product.”

The commander asked, “This man, he works for the other company?”

“No. Works for himself.”

“What other options do we have?”

Morgan said, “The only other choice is to sit and wait, hope for the best.”

“You trust him?”

After a moment Paul said, “Yes. He’s one of us.”

“Us?”

“Me,” Paul explained. “He’s in my line of work. We’ve, uhm, arranged for a certain level of trust.”

“There’s money involved?”

Morgan said, “That’s why we’re calling. He wants a lot. Immediately.”

“What’s a lot?”

“A thousand. Your currency.”

A pause. “That could be a problem.”

“We don’t have any choice,” Paul said. “You’ve got to make it work.”

“We could bring you back from your trip early.”

“No, you don’t want to do that,” Paul said emphatically.

The sound from the radio could have been a wave of static or could have been Bull Gordon’s sigh.

“Sit tight. I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.”

“So what would we get for my money?”

“I don’t know the details,” Bull Gordon said to Cyrus Adam Clayborn, who was in New York on the other end of the phone. “They couldn’t go into it. Worried about eavesdropping, you know. But apparently the Nazis have cut off access to information Schumann needs to find Ernst. That’s my take.”

Clayborn grunted.

Gordon found himself surprisingly at ease, considering that the man he was speaking to was the fourth-or fifth-richest human being in the country. (He had ranked number two but the stock market crash had pulled him down a couple of notches.) They were very different men but they shared two vital characteristics: they had military in their blood and they were both patriots. That made up for a lot of distance in income and station.

“A thousand? Cash?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I like that Schumann. That was pretty sharp, his reelection comment. FDR’s scared as a rabbit.” Clayborn chuckled. “Thought the Senator was going to crap right there.”

“Looked like it.”

“Okay. I’ll arrange the funds.”

“Thank you, sir.”

Clayborn preempted Gordon’s next question. “’Course, it’s late Saturday in Hun-ville. And he needs the money now, right?”

“That’s right.”

“Hold on.”

Three long minutes later the magnate came back on the line.

“Have ’em go to the clerk at the usual pickup spot in Berlin. Morgan’ll know it. The Maritime Bank of the Americas. Number eighty-eight Udder den Linden Street, or however the hell you say it. I can never get it right.”

“ Unter den Linden. It means ‘Under the Linden Trees.’”

“Fine, fine. The guard’ll have the package.”

“Thanks, sir.”

“Bull?”

“Yes, sir?”

“We don’t have enough heroes in this country. I want that boy to come home in one piece. Considering our resources…” Men like Clayborn would never say, “my money.” The businessman continued. “Considering our resources, what can we do to improve the odds?”

Gordon considered the question. Only one thing came to mind.

“Pray,” he said and pressed down the cradle on the phone then paused for a moment and lifted it once more.

Chapter Seventeen

Inspector Willi Kohl sat at his desk in the gloomy Alex, attempting to understand the inexplicable, a game played nowhere more often than in the halls of police departments everywhere.

He had always been a curious man by nature, intrigued, say, by how the blend of simple charcoal, sulfur and nitrate produced gunpowder, how undersea boats worked, why birds clustered together on particular parts of telegraph lines, what occurred within human hearts to whip otherwise rational citizens into a frenzy when some weasely National Socialist spoke at a rally.

His mind was presently preoccupied with the question of what sort of man could take another’s life? And why?

And, of course, “Who?” as he now whispered aloud, thinking of the drawing done by the street artist at November 1923 Square. Janssen was now having it too printed up downstairs, as they’d done with the photo of the victim. It wasn’t a bad sketch by any means, Kohl reflected. There were some erasures from the false starts and corrections but the face was distinctive: a handsome square jaw, thick neck, hair a bit wavy, a scar on the chin and a sticking plaster on his cheek.

“Who are you?” he whispered.

Willi Kohl knew the facts: the man’s size and age and hair color and probable nationality, even his likely city of residence. But he’d learned in his years as an investigator that to find certain criminals, you needed far more than details like this. To truly understand them, something more was required, intuitive insights. This was one of Kohl’s greatest talents. His mind made connections and leaps that occasionally startled even himself. But now, none of these was forthcoming. Something about this case was out of balance.

He sat back in his chair, examining his notes as he sucked on his hot pipe (one advantage of being with the ostracized Kripo was that Hitler’s disdain for smoking did not reach here, to these unhallowed halls). He shot smoke toward the ceiling and sighed.

The results from his earlier requests had not been forthcoming. The laboratory technician had not been able to find any fingerprints on the Olympic guidebook that they’d found at the scene of the brawl with the Stormtroopers, and the FPE (yes, Kohl noted angrily, still only one examiner) hadn’t found matches for the prints from Dresden Alley. And still nothing from the coroner. How the hell long does it take to cut a man open, to analyze his blood?

Of the dozens of missing persons reports that had flooded into the Kripo today, none matched the description of the man who was certainly a son and maybe a father, maybe a husband, maybe a lover…

Some telegrams had arrived from precincts around Berlin, reporting the names of those who’d bought Spanish Star Modelo A pistols or Largo ammunition in the past year. But the list was woefully incomplete and Kohl was discouraged to learn that he’d been wrong; the murder weapon was not as rare as he’d thought. Perhaps because of the close connection between Germany and Franco’s Nationalist forces in Spain, many of these powerful and efficient guns had been sold here. The list as of the moment totaled fifty-six people in Berlin and environs, and a number of gun shops remained to be polled. Officers had also reported that some shops kept no records or were closed for the weekend.