Five Past Midnight Read online

  FIVE PAST MIDNIGHT

  A NOVEL

  JAMES THAYER

  SIMON & SCHUSTER

  _ SIMON & SCHUSTER

  Rockefeller Center

  1230Avenue of the Americas New York, NY 10020

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental

  Copyright © 1997 by James Stewart Thayer

  All rights reserved,

  including the right of reproduction

  in whole or in part in any form

  SIMON & SCHUSTER and colophon are

  registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster Inc

  Designed by Edith Fowler

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  10987654321

  Library of Congress Cataloging-m-Publication Data Thayer, James Stewart Five past midnight a novel by James Thayer p cm

  1 Roosevelt, Franklin D (Franklin Delano), 1882- 1945—Fiction

  2 World War, 1939-1945—Fiction I Title PS3570H347F58 1997 97-12446 CIP 81354—dc2l ISBN 0-684-80025-X

  My heartfelt thanks to David G. Knibb, Sally A. Martin, Daniel J. Niehans, John D. Reagh III, Jeano Riley, John L. Thayer, M.D., Joseph T. Thayer, Dexter A. Washburn, Mark A. Washburn, and my wonderful wife, Patricia Wallace Thayer.

  For my mother

  BURYL STEWART THAYER

  and her parents

  CONSTANCE MAY MACMILLAN STEWART (1902-1996) and

  THOMAS WILLIAM STEWART (1898-1988)

  Victory is a thing of the will.

  —FERDINAND FOCH

  Contents

  Prologue

  PART ONE

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  PART TWO

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  PART THREE

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  Prologue

  THE WHITE HOUSE APRIL 4, 1945

  DONOVAN NEVER recorded the meeting in his journal, but he would remember it in fine detail to the end of his days. It began when the usher tapped lightly on the massive oak door, then pressed a small button hidden in the wainscoting to notify the Secret Service watch officer that the spymaster was about to enter the office. Above the button a portrait of Andrew Jackson glared down at them.

  "He's expecting you, General," the usher said in a low voice appropriate for the august place. When he pushed open the door, the spymaster stepped through.

  Franklin D. Roosevelt was sitting behind his desk, his face green in the light of a banker's lamp. The chandelier had been doused, the blackout curtains were drawn across the windows, so the walls of the Oval Office were a periphery of darkness. A mail pouch, copies of the New York Times and the Washington Post, a pitcher and glass, and several marble paperweights were on the desk.

  The president waved the general into the room. Behind the desk, two tasseled United States flags hung from poles. The pennant Roosevelt had designed for himself when he was assistant secretary of the navy was displayed on a smaller staff near the fireplace. On a stand at the end of the desk was an intricate reproduction of the USS Constitution, one of the many ship models in the president's collection.

  General William Donovan, director of the Office of Strategic Services, placed a manila envelope on the desk, pushing it across to the blotter so the president would not have to use the tongs he kept in a drawer. White House carpenters had raised the desk six inches to accommodate the president's wheelchair, and when Donovan sat in the low leather chair opposite the president, the desktop came almost to Donovan's shoulders.

  Roosevelt chided the general by lifting the envelope and making a production of weighing it. "You are a lawyer by profession, Bill. You write briefs. But you never write anything brief."

  Donovan should have chuckled dutifully. Not this night. The contents of the envelope precluded levity. Like most Americans, the general loved Roosevelt's voice, the fireside companion that had carried America through the bleak years. Every time the general heard that silky, compelling, faintly exotic voice, he felt rejuvenated and stronger. But again, not this night, not with the envelope.

  Roosevelt pulled a Camel from its pack and stabbed it at a Bakelite holder that had white teeth marks on the stem. His hands trembled, and only after three attempts did he succeed in planting the cigarette. When he leaned forward for his Ronson, the president's face came into the lamplight. Donovan's breath caught.

  Twenty-three of Roosevelt's sixty-two years had been spent in a wheelchair. Yet he had been the most vibrant man Donovan had ever met, exuding health and virility and energy. The president had possessed a sheer physical magnetism. But in the three weeks since their last meeting, Roosevelt's skin had taken on a ghastly pallor and a translucence that revealed the skull beneath. The bags under his eyes had darkened, and his lips had acquired a blue tinge. Stray strands of his hair flitted like insects in the lamplight above his head. The president was wearing a tweed jacket so old that it was shiny.

  Roosevelt inhaled the smoke deeply then let it trail out his nostrils. He abruptly lifted his head in the manner that led many to suppose he was arrogant but which simply allowed him to see through his spectacles. "Can you spare me all the reading, Bill? It's late."

  Bill Donovan was in plainclothes, as always. He was a small man, and scrappy, with ajuttingjaw and a boxer's nose. Harry Hopkins, called him the Irish terrier because the OSS chief always seemed on his hind legs at the end of a leash waiting for his master to let him go. Tonight he would try again.

  "Mr. President, I will summarize the contents of my envelope in three sentences."

  Roosevelt grinned appreciatively.

  "First, each and every day the war in Europe continues, twenty- eight thousand men, women, and children die."

  The president's smile vanished.

  "Second, a group of German staff officers is ready to assume leadership of the Third Reich if an opportunity arises, and will instantly surrender."

  Roosevelt's eyes lost their avuncular angle and became unreadable. He lowered the cigarette holder to an ashtray.

  "Finally, Mr. President, we have confirmation of General Eisenhower's report that the German SS is preparing a national redoubt in the Bavarian Alps, where Hitler may be able carry on the war for another two years."

  President Roosevelt started to speak but his throat rattled, and he bent low over the blotter, caught in a coughing fit that left him breathless and even more pale. He lifted the glass of water with a shaking hand. Water splashed to the desktop. He sipped carefully.

  He was finally able to rasp, "The bastard is going to outlive me, isn't he?"

  Donovan avoided the question. "Hitler has recently pledged, and I use his words, that he will
fight 'until five minutes past midnight.'"

  The president blinked several times, and his mouth silently moved. He seemed awash in melancholy. He gripped the wheelchair rims and backed away from the desk. Carpet in the Oval Office had been removed to allow the wheelchair to move more easily. He rolled to a window overlooking the lawn. Most Americans had long before taken down their blackout curtains, but Roosevelt liked "to remain on war footing," as he once told Donovan. The president pushed aside the curtain, a small act that seemed to consume the last of his strength. It was ten o'clock in the evening. Streetlights and garden lamps and the Washington Monument were dark for the duration, so there was nothing to be seen through the window.

  Yet he peered into the blackness for a full minute. Then without turning away from the window, he said softly, as if in the presence of the dead, "You take care of it, Bill."

  That was just enough. General Donovan rose from the chair, retrieved the manila envelope, and fairly sprinted out of the office.

  PART ONE

  1

  BERLIN APRIL 7, 1945

  OTTO DIETRICH was curled on the metal cot under a tattered blanket that smelled of urine and old blood. The blanket was alive with biting and burrowing vermin, yet he lay motionless, 1 too uncaring to scratch. His eyes were closed tightly and his mouth was pulled taut in fear.

  They always came at noon. A few more minutes. They had left him his watch so he would know when his moment had arrived. But his belt, shoelaces, gold badge, and wallet had been taken. And his bridgework, lest he try to slash his wrists with his false teeth, he supposed.

  Dietrich's cell contained the cot and blanket, a chamber pot, and nothing else. The cell was belowground. Water seeped down the mold- encrusted stone walls to the floor where it gathered in brown pools speckled with rotted waste. A single bulb was behind an iron grate in the ceiling, and it was never extinguished. The door to the corridor was an iron sheet with a viewing port at eye level. Another hatch was near the floor, through which a soup bowl and a cup of water was pushed once a day, and through which would come his Henkersmahlzeit, the condemned's last meal. There were no windows to the outside, and the cell walls were so thick that sounds could not breach them — not the guards' footsteps, not the wind, not the other prisoners' cries. The only noise in the cell was Dietrich's stertorous breathing and the steady dripping of water.

  With an effort that made him moan, the prisoner struggled to a sitting position. He would meet his fate with dignity and would stand when they came for him. He had not bathed or shaved in three months, nor had he had a change of clothing. His skin was covered with dirt and insect bites and open sores that refused to heal. Grease and grime matted his hair and beard.

  Dietrich doubled over with a grinding cough. Pneumonia, he suspected. His lungs rattled with each breath. He had lost two teeth while in the cell. His hands shook uncontrollably, and the skin around his fingers had shrunk for want of nourishment. They resembled claws.

  Dietrich levered himself from the cot. He placed a hand on the oozing wall to steady himself. He spit into a hand, and pawed his face with it, trying to wipe away the filth. They had reduced him to an animal's existence, but every day he cleaned himself as best he could. He straightened his foul clothing and turned to the door. They were always prompt.

  Dietrich's cell was in Wing B of the Lehrterstrasse Prison, across the Spree River from Berlin's Tiergarten. The prison was star-shaped, with three floors of cells. It had been built in the 1840B, patterned after London's Pentonville. The structure had no adornment. Brick walls and iron bars across small windows spoke of its sole purpose, to punish. Berliners found it impossible to pass Lehrterstrasse Prison without shivering. Many entered the prison. Far fewer left alive. Executions occurred in the cellar.

  It had been a busy place since July 20,1944. At Hitler's headquarters at Rastenburg in East Prussia, Colonel Count von Stauffenberg's briefcase bomb had only slightly wounded Hitler because the attache case had been shunted aside by another officer, and Hitler had been shielded by the conference table's heavy leg. Colonel Stauffenberg, Generals Beck and Haider, Field Marshal Witzleben, former Leipzig Mayor Goerdeler and other plotters had already met their ends. Five thousand others — army officers, professors, writers, doctors, clergymen, district and town officials, most with utterly no knowledge of the plot — had also been executed.

  Before his arrest Otto Dietrich had been chief criminal inspector with the Berlin Police. He had joined the Kriminalpolizei, known to Berliners as the Kripo, after the Great War. Arguing that the investigation of criminal acts was irreconcilable with political police work, he had assiduously avoided involvement in the political police—then called the Schupo—and the growing National Socialist German Workers' Party and its strong-arm branches, the SA and the SS. He graduated from the Institute of Police Science in Charlottenburg. He won promotion to inspector that year.

  Dietrich's investigative gift was clear from the start. In 1928 he solved the murder of the heiress Elisabeth Hoffer, whose headless corpse had been found in the Spree, put there, Dietrich learned, by her younger sister, whom he tracked to Buenos Aires. Two years later he was assigned to the highly publicized murder of Director Drager of the Mercedes Palast cinema, who was killed during a kidnap attempt gone awry. Dietrich found the two killers in the German community of Seffert in central Ukraine. And in 1938 when Karl Schwandheist reported that two brigands had stabbed and carried off the body of his wife Marie, Inspector Dietrich found her alive and well in Geneva, spending with her husband the 400,000-mark insurance proceeds he had claimed. Otto Dietrich was a household name in Berlin.

  From the door came the scrape of a key, followed by the shriek of metal on rusted hinges. Dietrich's fear welled up again. The executioner stepped into the cell.

  In a land besotted with uniforms, even executioners had their own colors. Sergeant Oscar Winge's uniform was police green with yellow insignia and carmine-red piping. He had a drinker's face, blotched and purple, with red capillaries showing on his nose. His razor had missed spots below his mouth and under an ear.

  A Gestapo case officer followed him into the cell. The agent had a pinched face, with deep lines like a cracked window. He wore street clothes and the ubiquitous Gestapo accessory, a black leather coat belted at the waist. The agent's name was Rudolf Koder, of the Gestapo's Amt IV 3a (counterintelligence.) He was a senior-grade civil servant, a deceptively bland title.

  The agent said, "Let's see what today brings, shall we, Inspector?"

  Winge brought Dietrich's arms behind his back to secure them with handcuffs. He prodded the prisoner through the door into the hallway. A line of dim overhead bulbs marked the way to the death chamber. When Dietrich's legs sagged, the executioner gently pulled on one of his arms to right him. Their footsteps echoed along the hall. They passed a dozen cell doors, behind which huddled the condemned.

  Dietrich had always avoided cases that involved political controversies. He shunned the Drossier case in 1932 when it was clear the National Socialists had framed Drossier. And in 1939 he told his superior, Director Friedrichs, that he would not investigate crimes referred to him by the Gestapo. Only Dietrich's brilliant successes and his city-wide reputation allowed Friedrichs to resist the Gestapo's pressure to dismiss the inspector. When Director Friedrichs retired in 1940, Dietrich was passed over for the directorship because of his failure to join the Nazi Party.

  There was more to it than that. Dietrich and the chief of the Gestapo, Heinrich Müller, had engaged in a ten-year feud, a running battle in which only Dietrich's skill and notoriety had allowed him to escape Muller's wrath. This time, skill and notoriety had not been enough.

  And now Dietrich was an inmate in the very prison to which he had sent so many convicted criminals. His crime was as insignificant as it was damning. His brother Joachim had stolen from the Gettels Munitions Works in Hamburg the "L" relay and detonator used in Colonel Stauffenberg's briefcase bomb. The Gestapo had taken only three weeks to discover Joa
chim's complicity in the plot, and he had been executed within twelve hours of his arrest. Otto Dietrich had known nothing of Joachim's involvement with Stauffenberg and was entirely unaware of the plot. But Dietrich's blood relationship to Joachim was an adequate indictment. His well-known anti-Party behavior over the years sealed his conviction.

  The executioner and the Gestapo agent led Dietrich down three steps to the lowest room in the prison. Above the door was a crude keystone that jutted an inch into the hall. The ancient wood door hung on broad black iron hinges. Rudolf Koder opened the chamber door.

  It is little known that the guillotine is the German execution device. Dissimilarities in the German and French guillotines may reflect their differences as people. Whereas the uprights on the French guillotine in the courtyard of the Fort d'lvry in Paris rise to the heavens, the German machine is short and thickset, its purpose more readily evident. In France, the severed head drops into a woven basket, and while perhaps not a tender invention, the basket compares favorably to the rough plank onto which the German head falls. The French trestle, where the condemned lies while his head is slipped through the lunette below the blade, is decorated with a carved fleur-de-lis to remind the condemned of the state's authority by which he has found himself in this predicament. The Germans do not bother with such trifles, not wishing to waste the lesson on one who will momentarily be beyond caring.

  Winge shoved Dietrich against the trestle and wrapped leather straps around his chest and knees. Lying on the board belly-down, Dietrich was then lowered to horizontal. The trestle was on rails. The executioner slid Dietrich forward until his head was through the lunette. The neck beam was lowered and secured with a metal clasp. The Gestapo agent removed the safety bolt from the upright.

  On his stomach Dietrich could see the plank and surrounding stone floor, blackened by a century of blood. He fought for breath, trying not to sob.

  The Gestapo agent moved around the guillotine's ground beam so that Dietrich could see him out of the corner of an eye. "Have you truly told us all you know about Joachim, Inspector?"