Ross Thomas - The Eighth Dwarf

Kurt Oppenheimer put the Walther back into his hip pocket. He picked up the leather sack of diamonds, hesitated a moment, then shrugged and stuffed them into another pocket. He opened the ledger and counted the names of those to whom Karl-Heinz Damm had sold new identities. There were thirty-two names. He tore half of them out of the ledger, folded them, and put them into a pocket. He would take care of these himself. The other half he would leave for the Americans, who might get around to them and, then again, might not.

He looked around the room, inspecting it quickly but carefully with his blue-green eyes which missed nothing. There were fingerprints on his glass, but the Americans were welcome to them. He moved over to the body of Damm and felt his pulse. My German thoroughness, he thought, and then quickly went out the front door, got into the jeep, and drove off.

Ten minutes later, he was standing at the bar of the American officers’ club in the I. G. Farben complex.

“How’s it going, Captain?” the Sergeant said as he served him his usual Scotch and water.

“Not bad, Sammy,” Kurt Oppenheimer said. “How’s it with you?”

Major Gilbert Baker-Bates had been back in Germany for nearly a week when Damm was killed. He had been in Hamburg, attending to some routine chores, when an American Counter-Intelligence Corps courier brought news of Damm’s murder along with a typed list of five names and addresses.

The CIC courier was a twenty-six-year-old U.S. Army lieutenant named LaFollette Meyer who was from Milwaukee and who was in no hurry to get back there. Meyer liked his work and he liked Germany, especially its women. He watched as Major Baker-Bates read the list of names and addresses.

“It gets a little more interesting, sir, when you match them up with these,” he said, and handed Baker-Bates another list, which contained the real names of five minor war criminals who were living in the British Zone.

“Well, now,” Baker-Bates said. “This chap Damm, he was in the business of selling new identities?”

“Yes, sir.”

“How many had he sold?”

“That’s hard to say, sir. In his safe he had sixty-eight new ID’s all ready to go. Then there was that ledger we found. It contained sixteen names, and about that many seemed to have been ripped out by whoever killed him.”

“Whoever?”

“Well, we’re not positive, sir. Not one hundred percent.”

“But you’re fairly sure?”

Lieutenant Meyer nodded.

Baker-Bates tapped the lists. “You’ve given this to the right people here at HQ?”

“Yes, sir, but we also thought that you should have a copy.”

“Because of my interest in him.”

“Yes, sir.”

Baker-Bates read the list again. “Five living in our zone, I see. How many in yours?”

“Seven in ours and four in the French.”

“Have you already collected yours?”

“Last night. We got six of them. The seventh — the one in Stuttgart — killed himself and his wife just as we were going in.”

“How?”

“Well, we made the mistake of knocking first—”

“I mean how did he kill himself?”

“Oh. With a knife. He cut his throat. His wife’s too. They say it was a mess.”

Baker-Bates brought out a package of Lucky Strikes and offered them to Meyer, who took one. Each lighted his own cigarette. When they were going, Baker-Bates said, “How was he killed? Damm.”

“Shot. Twice.”

“Who heard it?”

“Nobody.”

Baker-Bates’s eyebrows went up. The Lieutenant noticed that there were traces of gray in them. “Nobody?”

“Well, sir, that’s something else that’s not quite kosher. This guy Damm lived all by himself in an eight-room house almost within spitting distance of us at the Farben building. Now, you know as well as I do that nobody in Germany’s got an eight-room house all to themselves, not unless they’ve got the fix in somewhere, which is something else that we’ve got our people looking into. We don’t think his name was Damm, either. He came out of Dachau clean as a whistle, but we figure that’s where he probably fixed himself up with a new ID. We’re checking on it.”

“Where did Damm work — or did he?”

“He didn’t,” Meyer said. “He was in the black market, apparently in a pretty big way. He had a cellar full of stuff — cigarettes, coffee; he even had three cases of Johnnie Walker Scotch, and you know how hard that is to get. So at first we figured that’s why he got killed, because of some kind of black-market deal that went sour. We figured that until we found that list of names, and then we started figuring something else.”

“You say nobody heard anything?”

“No, sir.”

“Did they see anything?”

“Maybe.”

“Maybe?”

“Well, there’s this one old woman, but her eyes aren’t too good. She said she saw an American soldier go into Damm’s house about seventeen hundred hours and come out about seventeen-thirty. He was driving a jeep.”

“What kind of soldier — could she tell?”

“No, sir. Like I said, her eyes weren’t too good, but she thought he was about six feet tall and kind of blond. That would fit, wouldn’t it?”

“That would fit.”

“Does he speak English?”

“Oppenheimer?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Yes, he speaks English, Lieutenant. Perfect English.”

“Then that would be a pretty good disguise, wouldn’t it?”

Baker-Bates sighed. “Like his English, it would be perfect. How many names do you think he got?”

“Well, sir, there were sixteen left, like I said, and he seemed to’ve torn out half the pages that had names on ’em, so we figure that’s about what he’s got. Sixteen.”

“And he’ll start going for them one by one,” Baker-Bates said, and ground his cigarette out in a cheap tin tray.

“You think he’s crazy, sir — Oppenheimer?”

“Possibly. Why do you ask?”

“Well, he’s doing pretty much what he did during the war. He acted out some pretty rotten ones then, from what I hear. Now he seems to be going back and picking off the ones that we missed or can’t find. Well, hell, sir, I know that’s not right, but I don’t think it makes him crazy. I think he’s just sort of — well, dedicated.”

“Dedicated.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And you’re thinking that maybe we ought to let this — uh — dedication run its course.”

Meyer shook his head. “No, sir, I don’t guess I really think that.”

“But you wouldn’t be too upset if he were to — as you say — ace out a few more? I mean some really rotten ones.”

“Well, hell, Major—”

Baker-Bates interrupted with another question. “You are, I believe, Lieutenant, of the Jewish faith.”

“I’m a Jew,” said Meyer, the atheist.

“Are you a Zionist?”

“I’m not sure.”

“But you know what’s going on in Palestine.”

“Yes, sir. You’re determined to keep the hundred thousand Jews that’re still left in the DP camps from reaching Palestine, where you promised them they could go.”

“I thought you said you weren’t a Zionist. That’s the Zionist line if I ever heard it.”

“Yes, sir, but it’s also fact.”

“Well, we don’t want Oppenheimer in Palestine, Lieutenant, and that’s why we’re going to find him. We don’t want him there.”

“No, sir,” Lieutenant Meyer said. “I bet you don’t.”

Every day on his way home from work, Otto Bodden, the printer, would check the letter drop near the ruined Petrikirche in Lübeck. There had been nothing in it until now, the day after Damm’s death. When he reached home and the privacy of his small room, Bodden opened the envelope, which looked as if it had already been used several times. Inside was a flimsy sheet of paper with a block of numbers written on it in pencil. Bodden sighed and began the tedious chore of decoding them. When he was done, the message read: Proceed Frankfurt. Karl-Heinz Damm killed. Shot twice. U.S. Army uniform, possibly junior officer.