Winner Lose All Read online

  “Does he have a pointed hat and a green face?”

  Dietrich’s eyes sparked for a moment, and then he shook his head. “You must believe me, Edward. If you do not start cooperating with old Glinda here, you will never get out of Oz alive, never.”

  “Tell you what, Glinda,” Scanlon answered in a hoarse whisper. “I don’t care if you do put out, I’m still not taking you to the Prom.”

  “Ah! That famous American tough-guy sense of humor again, spitting into the face of adversity. I so love so it — John Wayne, Clark Gable, Errol Flynn, simply marvelous,” Dietrich said as his lips formed a thin, knowing smile. “But you know, brave gestures at a time like this are like pissing your pants on a cold winter day. It might give you a momentary warm glow, but soon the cold reality will set back in.”

  As usual, Dietrich was right. That was the night they began to work on Scanlon’s left hand and fingernails. Eventually, he realized that the Chief Inspector’s amiable chatter was not just mindless drivel. It was a central element of his system of torture, which was designed to systematically break a man’s will. Not that he was ever around to watch the dirty work. Quite the contrary. He never even touched Scanlon during the four days of starvation, sleeplessness, electric shocks, beatings, and worse. Like an SS uniform with silver piping, death’s head emblems, and black boots, that would not have been his style.

  After his goons finished a long, brutal session of beatings and torture, Dietrich would reappear as the sad, helpless voice of reason. If only someone would listen to him and cooperate.

  “You Americans can’t appreciate your good fortune. Take 1929 and 1930 for example. We were a democracy. We had the vote — that panacea which you Americans believe fixes every national fault. We even had one of your precious constitutions and a legislature; yet election after election, my entire pay envelope could not buy a loaf of bread. As Dostoevsky put it so well, ‘In the end, they will lay their freedom at our feet and say, “Enslave us, but feed us!” ’ ”

  “The Brothers Karamazov,” Scanlon mumbled. “The Grand Inquisitor. Are you casting yourself for that part, too?”

  “Oh, no, it is far too dark and too heavy for my taste.” Dietrich shuddered as he tugged on his French cuffs. “I only want the happy parts — a big Busby Berkeley song and dance number, or romantic comedy where the hero gets the blonde starlet with the capped teeth and the big smile.” That was how it went, hour after hour, in a seemingly endless pattern of beatings, ice water, starvation, electrical shocks, and violent questioning, followed by Dietrich’s inane chatter. Around and around it went, in a system designed to break him down. Some men could take more, some men could take less, but it was always the same in the end. You broke or you died.

  “Ah, we were talking about the movies, were we not?” Dietrich asked the next time he appeared. “You Americans are so good at them and we Germans are so very bad, proving Hitler’s point that a people should stick to what they do best. You make those beautiful motion pictures, while we are unsurpassed at making war — and at persuading people to tell us things they really do not want to tell us.”

  It was probably some nameless, faceless German psychiatrist who concluded decades before that the anticipation of pain was at least as effective as the actual pain itself. That, of course, was the point of Otto Dietrich’s slow, philosophical ramblings. They were designed to give his guest more time to anticipate what would happen after the Chief Inspector went away and his monkey soldiers took over again. By the second day, whether he realized it or not, the prisoner wanted Dietrich to stay and continue with his moronic commentary. By the third day, he was your best friend, your only friend. You were desperate for him to stay and talk about New York, old movies, or anything else he wanted, because the longer he stayed, the longer the goons with the hobnailed boots stayed away. To make Dietrich stay, however, eventually you had to tell him something. You had to begin talking. If you remained quiet and let him walk out the door, the anticipation of what was coming would chew through the top of your skull. So, you finally told him something, even if it was only a tiny tidbit. Besides, what difference did it make, Scanlon agonized. The other members of the cell would have scattered long ago by now — Hanni, Will Kenyon, old Horstmann, and all the rest. They would be long gone and safely in hiding, so what was the point of holding out? What did it matter, he wondered, without realizing that he had just opened the floodgate.

  Later, as he lay on the table with the electric wires still attached, Dietrich shook his head and lamented. “Look what you are making us do to you, my boy. Who do you think you are, Cary Grant?” Dietrich mocked him. “Perhaps you think you are Beau Geste holding the fort to the last man? The noble cause? The noble death?” The German leaned closer, his voice little more than a seductive whisper in Scanlon’s ear. “Well, I have seen a hundred battered corpses down here, and there was nothing noble about any of them. Dead is dead, Edward. Dead is dead, and uncooperative people leave them no choice. So, I am afraid the monkey soldiers are not finished with you yet.”

  Them, Scanlon thought. It was always them, that vague, malevolent third person plural who was responsible for the pain and the suffering. It was never first person singular.

  Dietrich picked up Scanlon’s broken left hand and examined the bloody, nail-less fingertips with a calm, professional interest. “Well, I guess the violin is out, Edward. A pity,” he sighed, “but think of all the money you will save on manicures.” Later, he had them throw a bucket of ice water on Scanlon to revive him. “You know, from the rankest amateur to the most hardened professional, all it takes to break a man down is time, Edward. I hate to remind you, but you do have a second hand, two feet, and countless other body parts if you force them to be creative. Promise me you will not make them do that.”

  It was at the end of the fourth day when Scanlon realized Dietrich was right and he began to unravel. A word popped out here, and another one there. Like the Dutch boy at the dike, Scanlon tried to stop the leak, but that was impossible and the leak soon became a flood. He told them about the network. He told them about Will Kenyon. He told them about Horstmann, and he finally told them about Hanni, too. Not that the Gestapo wouldn’t catch them anyway, sooner or later; but Scanlon talked, and after he spilled his guts he felt nothing but contempt and loathing for himself.

  Hours later, he realized that it mattered not whether he talked or not. The torture continued anyway. With typical German thoroughness, the Gestapo would never believe a single word of it. They would keep pounding until the nut was smashed into a thousand pieces, to be absolutely certain he was not holding anything out. By then, all of the king’s horses and all of the king’s men weren’t going to put Edward Scanlon back together again. Not ever.

  It was later that night that Will, Hanni, and four of her men broke in and rescued him. Scanlon remembered very little about it, except the echo of gunfire and muffled explosions that rocked the cavernous stone building, followed by more pain as they broke down his cell door and carried him out. The building was the old Leipzig central police station. Hitler’s Reich might not last the thousand years promised, but this old relic would. It was built like a fortress. Mere hand grenades and plastique would not put a dent in it, but the explosions filled the corridors with clouds of smoke and dust so thick that they had to feel their way along the walls to find the building’s side door.

  “Kenyon, you’re a damned fool,” Scanlon managed to tell him as they dragged him down the corridor. His feet bumped into something and he looked down. Scanlon smiled for the first time in four days as he saw the bullet-riddled bodies of two of Dietrich’s monkey soldiers sprawled on the floor. Unfortunately, Otto Dietrich was not among them.

  “A piece of cake, old man,” Kenyon said as he guarded the door. “After all, they design jails to keep the undesirables in, not to keep them out.”

  “You shouldn’t have come, Will.”

  “And miss that famous Scanlon humor? Don’t be silly. You didn’t leave me back in th
e rail yard, did you? You know we Kenyons can’t abide a debt.” He was limping badly from his leg wound, but he was not about to let that stop him. He led them out of the cell, while Hanni brought up the rear and two of her men half-carried and half-dragged Scanlon up two flights of stairs and out the side door. This must be how they got in, Scanlon realized, seeing the door had been blown off its hinges and the doorframe was still smoking from the explosion.

  Once outside, the numbing cold of the wintry German night hit him like a bracing slap in the face. Scanlon’s eyes snapped open as an old, battered BMW sedan careened down the street with old Georg Horstmann at the wheel and skidded to a halt next to them. Off to their left, he saw a small army of heavily armed Cripo and Gestapo men pour out the building’s front door and down the granite steps as if it were a fire drill. They were screaming and pointing in every direction until someone saw the BMW and the street suddenly erupted in gunfire. Hanni jumped into the car’s front seat while Kenyon shoved Scanlon into the back. “Go!” he screamed at Horstmann and slammed the car door behind Scanlon.

  “No!” Scanlon shouted back as he tried to get out, but it was too late and he was far too weak. Hanni also shouted to Horstmann, “Go!” while Kenyon dropped to one knee, raised the barrel of his stubby British Sten submachine gun and fired off a long burst at the crowd of police at the building’s front door as the sedan raced away. Helpless, all Scanlon could do was collapse on the car seat. Kenyon’s shots found their mark, however. Four of the Gestapo men tumbled to the ground and the rest scattered. No surprise. They were head beaters and arm breakers, accustomed to fighting unarmed old men, not professional soldiers with automatic weapons. Ragged as it was, however, they finally managed to return fire. Heavy slugs began to slam into the BMW as Kenyon fired off another long burst. That was when his luck ran out. A bullet caught him in the chest. Two more closely followed and knocked him backward onto the sidewalk. Scanlon saw him go down and screamed for Horstmann to stop the car, but he could see it was already too late. From the way Kenyon’s body lay limp on the pavement, there was no doubt he was dead.

  The BMW raced away into the night, down the narrow, twisting streets of the old city with Scanlon slumped in the rear seat. He might be free and out of Otto Dietrich’s grasp now, but it came at a monstrous price. That noble fool Will Kenyon was gone.

  Hanni used the remnants of her Communist underground to smuggle Scanlon out of Leipzig and northwest through Upper Saxony, to the Baltic coast. The Gestapo launched a massive manhunt, expecting them to head east toward the Russians, west toward the Americans, or even south toward Switzerland, but not north; so that was exactly where they went — to Denmark, to a small fishing village, and to a trawler bound for Sweden. Her NKVD gold badge got them the terrified help of every Communist cell along the way, as they managed to stay one step ahead of Otto Dietrich’s frantic search parties. Still, they both knew it would only be a matter of days or even hours before the Gestapo picked up his scent again, and hers.

  “You must come away with me to England,” he begged her. “I love you.”

  “You know I cannot do that,” she said as she buried her face in his shoulder and cried. “My work is here. I cannot.”

  And she did not. Could not. Would not. Did not. As with everything else, the girl had a will of tempered steel. That was how he preferred to remember her: standing on a windswept dock in the middle of a freezing winter night, watching his small boat motor away into the thick Baltic fog. He was off to England, and she was headed back to Leipzig. They both knew it would probably mean her death, but there was not a damned thing he could do to change her mind, not that he ever could.

  One tough woman, he thought. He had to give her that much. One tough woman. And one soon-to-be-very-dead one.

  PART TWO

  LONDON, ENGLAND

  MARCH 1945

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Two months later, Ed Scanlon found himself sitting alone at a small table in the rear corner of a smoke-filled English pub a half-mile from the hospital, working on getting himself stinking drunk again. Other men might be dropping bombs or shooting at each other on the borders of Germany, but as far as he was concerned, his war was over. He had given himself a verbal discharge and had mustered himself out, dressed as he was in faded, blue-striped pajama bottoms and an old plaid shirt he had stolen from the janitor’s locker room. On the back of his chair hung his soiled US Army trench coat with his tarnished-silver Captain’s bars pinned to the shoulder tabs. He had worn the coat because it was raining when he escaped through the hospital’s service door, not as any concession to rank or uniform, since he now considered himself a civilian.

  An early spring had descended in full bloom on London. That should have made life feel more pleasant than it had felt in late January in Leipzig, but it did not. On those rare occasions when he felt much of anything now, it was a slow-burning hatred for everything German, from cuckoo clocks and short leather pants to schnapps and that all-too-polite Chief Bastard Otto Dietrich. Germans! They were the ones responsible for Hanni Steiner’s death, for Will Kenyon’s, and for starting the whole goddamned war in the first place. Now that he was trapped on the wrong side of the battlefield, the wrong side of the English Channel, and the wrong side of eight weeks, he had nothing to do but remember, think, and regret. Otto Dietrich might have stripped him of his manhood, his dignity, and his only reason for living; but these eight weeks in England had proved infinitely crueler than the basement of Gestapo headquarters in Leipzig. He spent four days and nights there, had eight weeks to think about them, and had not even begun to heal. How could he? His body was damaged and his nerves were shot. He was barely twenty-seven years old and already little more than an empty husk.

  He looked down at the small table he was seated at. There was a neat row of shot glasses lined up in front of him. He frowned as he tried to focus his eyes long enough to count them. Six were empty and two were full, temporarily at least, so this must be his seventh round. He smiled as he picked it up and raised it to the light. Unfortunately, that was when he saw the pub’s front door open, and his smile went limp at the corners. It was Sergeant Major Rupert Carstairs himself, standing in the doorway squinting as he searched through the thick haze of the small room. Scanlon saw Carstairs’s nose twitch like a well-lathered bloodhound sniffing the air. He was on the hunt, and aggravation at first sight. Scanlon raised the shot glass until he had the big Brit’s head balanced on the glass’s wet rim, thinking he did not look nearly as intimidating up there. Unfortunately, there was no getting around it. Carstairs’s eyes were slowly adjusting to the gloom, so Scanlon tossed the rest of the scotch down the back of his throat, knowing he could not hide from the determined bastard for much longer. When he left the hospital, it was only a question of who found him first — Carstairs, the American MPs, or the Right Honorable Colonel Sir George Bromley himself, but Scanlon had slipped well beyond the point of caring.

  Sure enough, Carstairs spotted him sitting in the rear corner. With a loud grunt and his best parade-ground, double-time stride, the Sergeant Major marched down the narrow aisle, chin up, baton under one arm, and the other swinging to the precise, well-practiced cadence beating in his head.

  As Carstairs passed the bar, the innkeeper cautioned, “I don’t want no trouble in here, mate.”

  “Bugger off,” he snarled back without a glance or breaking stride, “and I ain’t your bleedin’ mate!”

  All class, Scanlon thought as Carstairs came to a crisp halt in front of him, heels locked, thumbs down the seams of his trousers, the front creases brushing against the forward edge of the table. Despite how much he detested this ill-bred, upstart American, Carstairs was an enlisted man and Scanlon an officer. That might mean absolutely nothing to Scanlon, but in the British Army, it was a gulf as wide as the English Channel.

  “Begging the Captain’s pardon,” Carstairs began correctly enough, knowing he had Scanlon right where he wanted him. “It appears that you have absented yourself
from your duty station, albeit a hospital bed, without an official by-your-leave. And you know how our people like to know where their Americans wander off to… Suh!”

  “Rupert, my good man,” Scanlon slowly looked up at him. “I have wandered off to precisely here, and here is where I hope to be found most hours of the day — every day — by appointment only, of course,” he added with a soft, well-liquored grin. “And for the record, I am no longer running errands for the good Colonel Bromley. As the official emissary and Minister Plenipotentiary of President Roosevelt to this very pub, I have mustered myself out of our little colonial Army and declared myself a civilian.”

  “Is that so, Sir? We English are but an insignificant little people, and I don’t know how we shall ever carry on the war without you.”

  Scanlon drained the last drop from his glass and picked up the next one. “The war is over, Rupert, and I’ve had all I can take from you and that pompous ass Bromley.”

  “The war is over, is it, Sir? Good heavens! I read the Times this very morning, and I don’t know how I could have missed a story like that.”

  “Believe me, it’s over. So, you can go volunteer for Borneo, or Burma, or some other goddamned place, as long as it’s the hell away from me.”

  The Sergeant Major’s face turned red with the veins popping out on his forehead, yet he remained rock-hard. “Funny you should mention Burma, since I’ve already been there, and North Africa, and Italy too, behind the lines, doing one dirty job after another with SOE. I go where they send me, you see. In our little army, we call that discipline. We call it following orders. Today, my orders are to come to this pub and retrieve you; so retrieve you I shall.”

  The Sergeant Major had a mean streak that ran wide and deep. Officer or not, after the incident in the DC-3 six months before, Scanlon knew it did not pay to push the big bastard too far. However, Scanlon had paid his own dues. “You Brits are really something, aren’t you?” he said. “God save the British Empire. That’s all that really matters, isn’t it?”