Ordinary Heroes (51 page)

The first time I came back to visit Leach in Hartford, in November 2003, I got right to the point.

"What Dad wrote doesn't answer your question." "My 'question'?"

"Whether my father murdered Martin once he freed him."

"Oh, that." Bear gave his dry, gasping laugh. "Well, what do you think, Stewart?"

Before I'd read the pages Bear gave me, his suspicions were astonishing, but once I understood that Dad had abandoned everything for Gita Lodz, I comprehended Leach's logic. As my father had told her, if she betrayed him again, he would have had nothing. With Martin dead, on the other hand, she could never rejoin him. Certainly, Dad had no need to fear discovery if he murdered Martin. There was virtually no chance one more body would ever be identified among the thousands decomposing in the massive pit at the edge of Balingen. Dad was armed, of course. And after combat, he was sadly experienced in killing.

In other words, Dad had motive and opportunity, which I'd listened to prosecutors for years label as the calling cards of a strong circumstantial murder case. But my faith in my father's decency, which even now seemed as tangible to me as his body, remained unchanged. Realizing everything I hadn't known about his life, murder still seemed beyond him, and I told Leach that. Bear was very pleased to hear it, favoring me with his funny sideways smile.

"Good for you, Stewart."

"But am I right?"

"Of course. It became critical for me to determine the answer to my own question, especially after the verdict and sentence. Quite frankly, Stewart, if there was a worse crime to be discovered, I might have thought twice about pressing ahead with appeals. Five years for the murder of another officer, even a wanted one, was not a disappointing result, if that's what had actually occurred."

But it turned out Martin was alive?"

"When your father last saw him? Without doubt. Where are my papers?" The Redweld folder, Bear's treasure chest, as I thought of it, rested against the chrome spokes of his wheelchair, and I handed it up. Leach's bent fingers stumbled through the pages. He would touch a paper several times before he could grab it and then bring it almost to his nose to read. "No," he'd say, and the process would begin again
,
with his apologies to me for the agonizing pace. "Here!" he said at last.

LABORATORY

APO #758, U
. S
. ARMY

APO

May 16, 1945

REPORT OF AUTOPSY

C-1145

NAME: (Name, Rank, Unit & Organization Unknown)

AGE: Approx. 42
RACE: White SEX: Male NATIVITY: Unknown

ADMITTED: Not admitted to this hospital DIED: Approx. May 9, 1945

AUTOPSY: 1230, May 13, 1945

CLINICAL DIAGNOSIS

MISCELLANEOUS: Malnutrition
,
dehydration, severe burns, third degree, partially healed

PRESENT ILLNESS: This patient was found dead sitting on a divan in the Hochshaus Hote
l i
n Berlin, Germany (Grid Q-333690), upon the arrival of U
. S
. troops in that sector on or about May 11, 1945. He was dressed in the uniform of a United States Army Officer, with oak leaf cluster on his right shirt collar, but otherwise without insignia or identity tags. He evidently had been held as a prisoner for a period of time and had starved to death.

PHYSICAL EXAMINATION: Examination at the cemetery revealed no fresh external wounds. Patient appeared to be recovering from third-degree burns several months old; his left hand is missing.

AUTOPSY FINDINGS

The body is that of a well-developed but markedly emaciated male, about 40 years of age, measuring 70 inches long and weighing approximately 105 pounds. Rigor and liver are absent. The head is covered with long black hair, except for an area of scarring above the left ear, upon which most of the helix has been lost, apparently due to burning. The anterior portion of his deeply sunken eyes is below the lateral portion of the orbital margin. A beard, several weeks' growth, covers his face and contains some gray hairs in front of each ear. All of hi
s t
eeth are present. The rib markings are very prominent and the thin anterior abdominal wall rests only slightly above his spine.

Evidence of recent third-degree burns also appears on the distal portion of the leg and thorax; scar tissue remains livid and taut, and appears abraded in several places. The left hand is absent below the wrist. The uneven stump reveals similar burn scarring, suggestin
g t
he hand may have been lost in an explosion or amputated thereafter. Suture scars indicate recent surgical reparation.

PRIMARY INCISION: The usual incision reveals one millimeter of subcutaneous adipose tissues, thinning muscles, normally placed organs in the smooth abdominal cavity, and normal pericardial and pleural cavities.

GASTROINTESTINAL TRACT: The stomach contains only a slight amount of light mucus, the bowel is empty, and a minimal amount of fecal material is in the colon. All the mesenteric vessels are prominent on the colon.

NOTE: Nearly all of the adipose tissue throughout the body has disappeared, and is diminished even around the kidneys and heart.

The tissues display lack of turgor indicative of severe dehydration. The absence of recent external trauma and only mucus in the gastrointestinal tract would seem to indicate that this man died of malnutrition and dehydration.

s/ Nelson C. Kell Captain
,
Medical Corps Laboratory Officer

"I received that in June 1945," Bear said, "from your father's doctor friend, Cal Echols, only a few days after the court-martial concluded. Cal had been transferred to headquarters hospital in Regensburg and visited your father often before and after the trial. Since I had been on the lookout for Martin from the start, I had asked Cal to inform me discreetly if he ever heard reports of a one-handed burn victim. My thought was that Martin might seek medical treatment. Instead, this autopsy had come across Cal's desk as the object of considerable curiosity.

"When U
. S
. troops entered Berlin on May 11, the Soviets had directed the Americans to this body, citing it as another German atrocity. But you'll note the pathologist's conclusion that death had occurred within the last seventy-two hours. The Germans had surrendered Berlin to the Russians on May 2. Thi
s m
an didn't die until a week later. The American doctors suspected that the Russians, not the Germans, had had custody of him."

"The Russians killed Martin?"

"Well, that certainly was how it appeared. After several weeks Graves Registration still had had no success in identifying the remains. But the circumstances of the death, particularly the involvement of the Soviets, spurred continuing interest and finally had led the autopsy to be passed up the line in the Medical Corps. After a good deal of thought, I decided to report this development to General Teedle."

"Teedle?"

"I'd had contact with him now and then. We did not get off on a particularly good foot. I thought he was going to get out of his chair and throttle me during his cross-examination. But Teedle had remained preoccupied with your father's case, regarding it as totally enigmatic. He had let me know that he would always hear me out if I came up with any extenuating evidence. And I'll give Teedle credit. He recognized the prime significance of the autopsy at once."

"Which was?"

"Well, it was hard to believe that the Soviets would have killed a loyal agent, especially by starving him to death. There were many alternatives--perhaps Martin had fallen out with his Soviet masters--but with your father now under a prison sentence, Teedle recognized that the autopsy raise
d p
lausible doubts that Martin was a spy. After he turned it over to the OSS, they dispatched a team to identify the body. As usual, OSS wanted to keep the results of its subsequent investigation to themselves, but Teedle would not stand for that.

"As it developed, everything Martin had said to your father about the Alsos Mission was essentially true. OSS had recruited teams of physicists who were racing across Germany, hoping to reach the German atomic scientists before the Soviets. And Hechingen, where the top German physicists had been sent from Berlin, was indeed Alsos' foremost target. There's been a good deal of writing about it."

Out of his folder, Bear handed me photocopied sections from several histories explaining the Alsos Mission, which I scanned. Hechingen was in the sector of Germany where the Free French were leading the combat effort, but because of the atomic secrets that rested with the German scientists, a large American force cut in front of the French without permission and entered Hechingen on April 24, 1945. They seized Werner Heisenberg's laboratory, secreted in a former wool mill on Haigerlocherstrasse above the town center, where they found several of Germany's foremost physicists, including Otto Hahn, Carl von Weizsacker, and Max von Laue, along with two tons of uranium, two tons of heavy water, and ten tons of carbon. Hunting around, the Americans also located th
e r
ecords of the scientists' research secreted in a cesspool behind Weizsacker's home.

"Heisenberg," Bear said, "the foremost physicist in the group, and Gerlach, were missing. Under OSS interrogation, their colleagues soon explained that Heisenberg and Gerlach had fled about ten days earlier, in the wake of a strange incident. A lone one-handed man had been apprehended about to detonate an enormous explosive charge, which would have brought down the brick mill building, killing everyone inside it. The would-be bomber had discarded his dog tags and claimed at first to be French, but when the SS arrived, they identified his uniform, which bore no insignia, except for an oak leaf cluster, as that of an American officer. Given his mission, and the fact that he had slipped into town well in advance of American forces, the SS concluded he could only be OSS.

"The German scientists at Hechingen had foreseen that the Allies, including the Soviets, would want to capture them to learn about their research. This was disheartening on one level, because they knew they were doomed to a lengthy captivity, but they had assumed that whoever caught them--and they much preferred the Americans or the British--was bound to keep them alive in order to absorb their knowledge. The implication of this attempted bombing was far more distressing, since it suggested that the Americans instead were intent on killin
g t
hem all. Hahn and Weizsacker and Laue decided to remain with their families and accept their fate. But Heisenberg and Gerlach and one or two others literally ran for their lives, only to be tracked down by the Americans within ten days."

Bear's photocopies described Heisenberg's apprehension. Naturally none of the scientists were killed. Instead, as they'd originally anticipated, all were removed to the British intelligence facility at Farm Hall in England, where a lengthy debriefing established that Heisenberg's team was far behind the Manhattan Project.

"And did OSS realize this one-handed soldier was Martin?" I asked.

"Immediately."

"So that was late April, right? Before the court-martial hearing. And did they tell you about this attempted explosion?"

"Not one word. Bear in mind, Stewart, the A-bomb remained America's deepest secret. OSS wouldn't say anything concerning that or Alsosnot to Teedle, the trial judge advocate, or least of all me. But their mania to suppress all knowledge about anything to do with the bomb worked to our advantage. The prosecuting TJA on David's case was a lawyer named Meyer Brillstein, who seemed far angrier at your father than Teedle. One may suppose why. But early on--I'm sure at the insistence of OSS--Brillstein offered to dismiss the capital charg
e a
gainst your father in exchange for David's guilty plea and a mutual agreement not to seek discovery or offer proof of any of Martin's OSS-related activities, aside from those David had witnessed firsthand. Both your father and I saw this offer as the proverbial gift horse, since it meant that the court-martial panel would never know that David deliberately released a suspected Soviet spy. If they had, there's no telling how much longer your father's prison sentence would have been.

"Of course, we can see now that Martin knew much less than he thought he did. He had been briefed for Alsos in London in September 1944, with the idea that
he would lead the team of American physicists into Germany. Although Martin necessarily was informed about the German atomic program, in that need-to-know world, no one told him about the Manhattan Project. He had no inkling that the U
. S. A
. was close to perfecting the bomb on its own, and thus no foresight that in less than four months, Pandora's box, as he called it, would be opened over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Of course, Martin's superiors at OSS became even more determined to keep him in the dark once he began openly expressing doubts about whether a weapon like the Bomb should be in the hands of any nation. By October 1944 he'd passed one comment too many. London decided to pull him in. And Martin decided to defy them.

"At OSS, when they learned in April 1945 about Martin's attempt at Hechingen, the meaning was regarded as patent: the Soviets had recognized that they would not get to Hechingen first and had dispatched Martin to destroy the facility to prevent the scientists and their research from falling into American hands. Game, set, and match on the issue of whether Martin was a spy. Within the agency, a small faction led by Colonel Winters maintained that it was dubious to believe the Soviets would have supported such an improbable effort. According to the physicists at Hechingen, Martin had assembled a ferry-rigged device made of unexploded artillery shells, was traveling in an American jeep with a short-circuited ignition, had no visible collaborators, and was done in because he'd not yet mastered the striking of a match with one hand.