Clete, white-faced, glared at him but said nothing.
“When Mattingly told Tiny to ‘deal with’ the Russian, all I had to do to cover my ass was look the other way and keep my mouth shut. He didn’t tell me to deal with it. He told Tiny. You think I wanted to take on Gehlen and Mattingly? And now you?”
“Then why the hell did you? Are you?”
“Write this down, Colonel: Because I saw it as my duty.”
“You can justify that, right?” Clete said coldly.
“First, it was my duty to Tiny. An officer takes care of his men, right? A good officer doesn’t let other officers cover their asses by hanging his men out to dry, does he?”
“That’s it?”
“Two, I decided that what ex-Major Konrad Bischoff—Gehlen’s hotshot interrogator—was doing to Major Orlovsky—the clever business of having him sit in a dark cell with a canvas bucket full of shit—wasn’t going to get what we wanted from him. Actually, I decided Bischoff’s approach was the wrong one.”
“Based on your extensive experience interrogating NKGB officers?” Clete said sarcastically.
“Based on what you said at dinner, you’re now the honcho of Operation Ost, so I’ll tell you what I told Mattingly when I thought he was the honcho. As long as I’m in charge of Kloster Grünau, I’m going to act like it. If you don’t like what I do, relieve me.”
Clete didn’t reply immediately, and when he did, he didn’t do so directly.
“Why, in your wise and expert opinion, Captain Cronley, is Major Bix . . . Bisch . . .”
“Bischoff. Ex-Major Konrad Bischoff.”
“Why do ex-Major Konrad Bischoff’s interrogation techniques fail to meet with your approval?”
“Because they haven’t let him see either that Orlovsky is smarter than he is—I don’t know why, maybe he believes that Nazi nonsense that all Russians are the Untermenschen—”
“Untermensch is a pretty big word. You sure you know what it means?”
Cronley ignored the question.
“Or that my good buddy Konstantin Orlovsky has decided that, except for a bullet in the back of his head, it’s all over for him. And in that circumstance he’s not going to come up with the names of Gehlen’s people that he turned. Names, maybe, if that’s what it will take to get out of his cell and shot and get it over with, but not the actual ones.”
“But you have a solution for all these problems, right?”
“Would I be wasting my breath telling you, Clete?”
“We’ll have to wait and see, won’t we?”
“Look. When Mattingly called and told me to come here as soon as I could, I was talking to Orlovsky. I had just proposed to him that I arrange for him to disappear from the monastery—”
“Disappear to where?”
“Argentina. Where else?”
“My God!”
“And that, once he was there and gave me the names of Gehlen’s bad apples, and we found out they were in fact the bad apples, I would pressure Gehlen to get Orlovsky’s family out of Russia.”
“If I thought you were into Mary Jane cigarettes, I’d think you just went through two packs of them. Listen to yourself, Jimmy! You’re talking fantasy!”
“Maybe. But, on the other hand, if I turn Orlovsky back over to Bischoff, and we go down that road, what we’re going to have is no names of the real turned Gehlenites, and a body in the monastery cemetery that just might come to light if the Bad Gehlenites let the Soviets know about it. Which brings us back to me not willing to let Tiny Dunwiddie or myself hang for that.”
Clete thought that over for a long moment.
“What was the Russian’s reaction?”