The Aquitaine Progression: A Novel by Robert Ludlum
Erich Leifhelm had arrived and his ascendancy in the party was swift and assured. At eighteen he was Jungführer of the Hitler Youth movement, photographs of his strong, athletic face and body challenging the children of the New Order to join the national crusade. During his tenancy as a symbol, he was sent to the University of Munich, where he completed his courses of study in three years with high academic honors. By this time, Adolf Hitler had been swept into power; he controlled the Reichstag, which gave him dictatorial powers. The Thousand-Year Reich had begun and Erich Leifhelm was sent to the Officers Training Center in Magdeburg.
In 1935, a year after his father’s death, Erich Leifhelm, now a youthful favorite of Hitler’s inner circle, was promoted to the rank of Oberstleutnant in the Gruppenkommando 1 in Berlin under Rundstedt. He was deeply involved in the vast military expansion that was taking place in Germany, and as the war drew nearer he entered what we can term the third phase of his complicated life, one that ultimately brought him to the centers of Nazi power and at the same time provided him with an extraordinary means of separating himself from the leadership of which he was an intrinsic and influential part. This is briefly covered in the following final pages, a prelude to the fourth phase, which we know is his fanatic allegiance to the theories of George Marcus Delavane.
But before we leave the young Erich Leifhelm of Eichstätt, Munich, and Magdeburg, two events should be recorded here that provide insights into the man’s psychotic mentality. Mentioned above was the robbery at the Luisenstrasse house and the resulting profits of the theft. Leifhelm to this day does not deny the incident, taking pleasure in the tale because of the despicable images he paints of his father’s first wife and her “overbearing” parents. What he does not speak of, nor has anyone spoken of it in his presence, is the original police report in Munich, which, as near as can be determined, was destroyed sometime in August 1934, a date corresponding to Hindenburg’s death and Hitler’s rise to absolute power as both president and chancellor of Germany with the title of der Führer raised to official mandatory status.
All copies of the police report were removed from the files, but two elderly pensioners from the Munich department remember it clearly. They are both in their late seventies, have not seen each other in years, and were questioned separately.
Robbery was the lesser crime that early morning on the Luisenstrasse; the more serious one was never spoken of at the insistence of the family. The fifteen-year-old Leifhelm daughter was raped and severely beaten, her face and body battered so violently that upon admission to the Karlstor Hospital she was given little chance of recovery. She did recover physically, but remained emotionally disturbed for the rest of her short life. The man who committed the assault had to be familiar with the interior of the house, had to know there was a back staircase that led to the girl’s room, which was separated from the rooms of her two brothers and her mother in the front. Erich Leifhelm had questioned his father in depth regarding the inside design of that house; he was there by his own admission, and was aware of the fierce pride and strict moral code held by the “tyrannical in-laws.” There is no question; his compulsion was such that he had to inflict the most degrading insult he could imagine, and he did so, knowing the influential family would and could insist on official silence.
The second event took place during the months of January or February 1939. The specifics are sketchy insofar as there are few survivors of the time who knew the family well, and no official records, but from those who were found and interviewed, certain facts surfaced. Heinrich Leifhelm’s legal wife, his children and her family tried without success for several years to leave Germany. The official party line was that the old patriarch’s medical skills, having been acquired in German universities, were owed to the state. Too, there were unresolved legal questions arising from the dissolved union between the late Dr. Heinrich Leifhelm and a member of the family, questions specifically relating to commonly shared assets and the rights of inheritance as they affected an outstanding officer of the Wehrmacht.
Erich Leifhelm was taking no chances. His father’s “former” wife and children were virtually held prisoners, their movements restricted; the house on the Luisenstrasse was watched, and for weeks following any renewed applications for visas, they were all kept under full “political surveillance” on the chance that they had plans of vanishing. This information was revealed by a retired banker who recalled that orders came from the Finanzministerium in Berlin instructing the banks in Munich to immediately report any significant withdrawals by the former Frau Leifhelm and/or her family.
During what week or on what day it happened we did not learn, but sometime in January or February of 1936, Frau Leifhelm, her children and her father disappeared.
However, the Munich court records, impounded by the Allies on April 23, 1945, give a clear, if incomplete, picture of what took place. Obviously driven by his compulsion to validate his seizure of the estate in the eyes of the law, he had a brief filed on behalf of Oberstleutnant Erich Leifhelm listing the articles of grievance suffered by his father, Dr. Heinrich Leifhelm, at the hands of a family cabal, said family of criminals having fled the Reich under indictment. The charges, as expected, were outrageous lies: from outright theft of huge nonexistent bank accounts to character assassination so as to destroy a great doctor’s practice. There was the legal certificate of the “official” divorce, and a copy of the elder Leifhelm’s last will and testament. There was only one true union and one true son, all rights, privileges and inheritances passed on to him: Oberstleutnant Erich Stoessel-Leifhelm.
Because we possessed reasonably accurate dates, survivors were found. It was confirmed that Frau Leifhelm, her three children and her father perished at Dachau, ten miles outside of Munich.
The Jewish Leifhelms were gone; the Aryan Leifhelm was now the sole inheritor of considerable wealth and property that under existing conditions would have been confiscated. Before the age of thirty, he had wiped his personal slate clean and avenged the wrongs he was convinced had been visited on his superior birth and talents. A killer had matured.
“You must have one hell of a case there,” said Caleb Dowling, grinning and poking Joel with his elbow. “Your butt burned up in the ashtray a while ago. I reached over to close the goddamned lid, and all you did was raise your hand like I was out of order.”
“I’m sorry. It’s … it’s a complicated brief. Christ, I wouldn’t raise my hand to you, you’re a celebrity.” Converse laughed because he knew it was expected.
“Well, my second bit of news for you, good buddy, is that celebrity or no, the smoking lamp’s been on for a couple of minutes now and you still got a reefer in your fingers. Now, I grant you, you didn’t light it, but we’re getting a lot of Nazi looks over here.”
“Nazi …?” Joel spoke the word involuntarily as he pressed the unlit cigarette into the receptacle; he was not aware that he had been holding it.
“A figure of speech and a bad line,” said the actor. “We’ll be in Cologne before you put all that legal stuff away. Come on, good buddy, he’s going in for the approach.”
“No,” countered Joel without thinking. “He’s making a pitchout until he gets the tower’s instructions. It’s standard—we’ve got at least three minutes.”
“You sound like you know what the hell you’re talking about.”
“Vaguely,” said Converse, putting the Leifhelm dossier into his attaché case. “I used to be a pilot.”
“No kidding? A real pilot?”
“Well, I got paid.”
“For an airline? I mean, one of these real airlines?”
“Larger than this one, I think.”
“Goddamn, I’m impressed. I wouldn’t have thought so. Lawyers and pilots somehow don’t seem compatible.”
“It was a long time ago.” Joel closed his case and snapped the locks.
The plane rolled down the runway, the landing having been so unobtrusive that a smattering of applause erupted from the rea
“Now you hear a lot more,” said Converse.
“For a hell of a lot less. By the way, where are you staying, counselor?”
Joel was not prepared for the question. “Actually, I’m not sure,” he replied, again reaching for words, for an answer. “This trip was a last-minute decision.”
“You may need help. Bonn’s crowded. Tell you what, I’m at the Königshof and I suspect I’ve got a little influence. Let’s see what we can do.”
“Thanks very much, but that won’t be necessary.” Converse thought rapidly. The last thing he wanted was the attention focused on anyone in the actor’s company. “My firm’s sending someone to meet me and he’ll have the accommodations. As a matter of fact, I’m supposed to be one of the last people off the plane, so he doesn’t have to try to find me in the crowd.”
“Well, if you’ve got any time and you want a couple of laughs with some actor types, call me at the hotel and leave a number.”
“I probably will. I enjoyed riding shotgun.”
“On a cattle drive, pardner?”
Joel waited. The last stragglers were leaving the plane, nodding at the flanking stewardesses, some yawning, others in awkward combat with shoulder bags, camera equipment and suit-carriers. The final passenger exited through the aircraft’s concave door and Converse got up, gripping the handle of his attaché case and sliding into the aisle. Instinctively, without having a conscious reason to do so, he glanced to his right, into the rear section of the plane.
What he saw—and what saw him—made him freeze. His breath exploded silently in his chest. Seated in the last row of the long fuselage was a woman. The pale skin under the wide brim of the hat, and the frightened, astonished eyes that abruptly looked away—all formed an image he vividly remembered. She was the woman in the café at the Kastrup Airport in Copenhagen! When he last saw her she was walking rapidly into the baggage-claim area, away from the row of airlines’ counters. She had been stopped by a man in a hurry; words had been exchanged—and now Joel knew they had concerned him.
The woman had doubled back, unnoticed in the last-minute rush for boarding. He felt it, he knew it. She had followed him from Denmark!
6
Converse rushed up the aisle and through the metal door into the carpeted tunnel. Fifty feet down the passageway the narrow walls opened into a waiting area, the plastic seats and the roped-off stanchions designating the gate. There was no one; the place was empty, the other gates shut down, the lights off. Beyond, suspended from the ceiling were signs in German, French and English directing passengers to the main terminal and the downstairs baggage claim. There was no time for his luggage; he had to run, to get away from the airport as fast as possible, get away without being seen. Then the obvious struck him, and he felt sick. He had been seen; they knew he was on the flight from Hamburg—whoever they were. The instant he walked into the terminal he would be spotted, and there was nothing he could do about it. They had found him in Copenhagen; the woman had found him and she had been ordered on board to make certain he did not stay in Hamburg, or switch planes to another destination.
How? How did they do it?
There was no time to think about it; he would think about it later—if there was a later. He passed the arches of the closed-down metal detectors and the black conveyor belts where hand luggage was X-rayed. Ahead, no more than seventy-five feet were the doors to the terminal. What was he going to do, what should he do?
NUR FÜR HIER BESCHÄFTIGTE MÄNNER
Joel stopped at a door. The sign on it was emphatic, the German forbidding. Yet he had seen those words before. Where? What was it?… Zurich! He had been in a department store in Zurich when a stomach attack had descended to his bowels. He had pleaded with a sympathetic clerk who had taken him to a nearby employees’ men’s room. In one of those odd moments of gratitude and relief, he had focused on the strange words as they had drawn nearer. Nur für hier Beschäftigte. Männer.
No further memory was required. He pushed the door open and went inside, not sure what he would do other than collect his thoughts. A man in green overalls was at the far end of the line of sinks against the wall; he was combing his hair while inspecting a blemish on his face in the mirror. Converse walked to the row of urinals beyond the sinks, his demeanor that of an airlines executive. The affectation was accepted; the man mumbled something courteously and left. The door swung shut and he was alone.
Joel stepped back from the urinal and studied the tiled enclosure, hearing for the first time the sound of several voices … outside, somewhere outside, beyond … the windows. Three-quarters up from the floor and recessed in the far wall were three frosted-glass windows, the painted white frames melting into the whiteness of the room. He was confused. In these security-conscious days of airline travel with the constant emphasis on guarding against smuggled arms and narcotics, a room inside a gate area that had a means of getting outside before entering customs did not make sense. Then the obvious fact occurred to him. It could be his way out! The flight from Hamburg was a domestic flight, this part of the Cologne-Bonn airport a domestic terminal; there were no customs! Of course there were exterior windows in an enclosure like this. What difference did it make? Passengers still had to pass through the electronic arches and, conversely, authorities wanting to pick up a passenger flying domestically would simply wait by a specific gate.
But no one waited for him. He had been the last—the second to last—passenger off the late night flight. The roped-off gate had been deserted; anyone sitting in one of the plastic chairs or standing beyond the counter would be obvious. Therefore, those who were keeping him in their sights did not want to be seen themselves. Whoever they were, they were waiting, watching for him from some remote spot inside the terminal. They could wait.
He approached the far-right window and lowered his attaché case to the floor. When he stood erect, the sill was only inches above his head. He reached for the two white handles and pushed; the window slid easily up several inches. He poked his fingers through the space; there was no screen. Once the window was raised to its full height, there would be enough room for him to crawl outside.
There was a clattering behind him, rapid slaps of metal against wood. He spun around as the door opened, revealing a hunched-over old man in a white maintenance uniform carrying a mop and a pail. Slowly, with deliberation, the old man took out a pocket watch, squinted at it, said something in German, and waited for an answer. Not only was Joel aware that he was expected to speak, but he assumed that he had been told the employees’ men’s room was being closed until morning. He had to think; he could not leave; the only way out of the airport was through the terminal. If there was another, he did not know where, and it was no time to be running around a section of an airport shut down for the remainder of the night. Patrolling guards might compound his problems.
His eyes dropped, centering on the metal pail, and in desperation he knew what he had to do, but not whether he could do it. With a sudden grimace of pain, he moaned and grabbed his chest, falling to his knees. His face contorted, he sank to the floor.
“Doctor, doctor … doctor!” he shouted over and over again.
The old man dropped the mop and the pail; a guttural stream of panicked phrases accompanied several cautious steps forward. Converse rolled to his right against the wall; he gasped for breath as he watched the German with wide, blank eyes.
“Doctor …!” he whispered.
The old man trembled and backed away toward the door; he turned, opened it and ran out, his frail voice raised for help.
There would be only seconds! The gate was no more than two hundred feet to the left, the entrance to the terminal perhaps a hundred to the right. Joel got up quickly, raced to the pail, turned it upside down, and brought it back to the window. He placed it on the floor and stepped up with one foot, his palms making contact with
There were distant shouts from beyond the door; the old man had reached someone. The sweat rolled down Converse’s face as he stepped off the pail and reached for his attaché case on the floor. Action and decision were simultaneous, only instinct unconsciously governing both. Joel picked up the leather case, stepped forward and crashed it repeatedly into the window, shattering the glass and finally breaking away the lower wooden frame. He stepped back up on the pail and looked out. Beyond—below—was a cement path bordered by a guardrail, floodlights in the distance, no one in sight. He threw the attaché case out the window, and pulled himself up, his left knee kicking fragments of glass and what was left of the frame to the concrete below. Awkwardly, he hunched his whole body, pressing his head into his shoulder blades, and plunged through the opening. As he fell to the ground he heard the shouts from inside: they grew in volume, all in counterpoint, a mixture of bewilderment and anger. He ran.
Minutes later, at a sudden curve in the cement path, he saw the floodlit entrance of the terminal and the line of taxis waiting for the passengers of Flight 817 from Hamburg to pick up their luggage before the drivers collected their inflated night prices to Bonn and Cologne. There were entrance and exit roads leading to the platform, broken by pedestrian crosswalks, and beyond these an immense parking lot with several lighted booths still operating for those driving their own cars. Converse slipped over the guardrail and ran across an intersecting lawn until he reached the first road, racing into the shadows at the first blinding glare of a floodlight. He had to reach a taxi, a taxi with a driver who spoke English; he could not remain on foot.… He had been captured on foot once, years ago. On a jungle trail, where if he had only been able to commandeer a jeep—an enemy jeep—he might have … Stop it! This is not ’Nam, it’s a goddamn airport with a million tons of concrete poured between flowers, grass and asphalt! He kept moving in and out of the shadows, until he had made a complete semicircle—one-eight zero. He was in darkness, the last of the taxis in the line ahead of him. He approached the first, which was the last.