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blocking their path.
"Name?" he demanded in German, "Gotta have your name. All these booths
are reserved. No name, no booth."
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Eberle grinned at the man. "Hitler. Name's Hitler. Haven't been here for
about fifty years, but I'm sure you remember me."
Distracted by Eberle's baiting of the waiter, Drummond hardly noticed the
punker with the tattoo on his cheek and his mousy female companion, just getting
up from one of the small tables near the wall. The two were far less memorable
than many of the patrons of the establishment. He had determined to enjoy himself
as he followed Eberle and the waiter to their booth.
Eberle had been right about the food. It was delicious. The wurst was tangy
and succulent, and the kraut, served with applesauce, had a zest of its own. Washed
down with several steins of beer, it was one of the most satisfying meals
Drummond could ever recall having eaten. The bohemian atmosphere created by
the raucous students at the long tables provided the perfect backdrop to the meal as
the two men settled back to their coffees, Eberle lighting up one of his ubiquitous
cigars.
"So, John, what did you see today?"
"Not much in the way of tourist attractions, I'm afraid," Drummond replied.
"I spent most of the day doing some research for my master's thesis."
"Oh, really?" Eberle blew a lazy smoke ring at the ceiling. "Where was
that?"
"At a place called Ritterbuchs, over on the edge of the second district. It's run
by "
"Baron von Liebenfalz," Eberle supplied.
"Yeah. Do you know him?" Drummond asked.
Eberle cleared his throat. "Let's just say that he is not unknown in our
professional circles."
"Really? Is he one of the regulars on the fraud squad lists?"
"Oh, no. Nothing so uncomplicated as fraud." Eberle reached for his coffee.
"During the war, when Austria was occupied by Hitler's Reich, his home was the
headquarters of the Ahnenerbe."
"What's the Ahnenerbe?" Drummond asked.
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"Oh, it was a special branch of the SS. They spent all of their time
investigating witchcraft, occult sciences, Freemasonry, and the like. Anyhow, in
1938, two days after the Anschluss, they rounded up a bunch of Freemasons, took
them to 'Number 17,' as the Ahnenerbe headquarters was known, and executed
them."
Drummond set down his empty coffee cup. "Why wasn't von Liebenfalz
arrested as a war criminal then, when the war was over?"
"He was in Switzerland at the time an iron-clad alibi. Besides, after the
war, the Austrian government decided to prosecute the German officer in charge of
the executions, instead." Eberle looked at his watch. "Gads, it'd nearly midnight.
We'd better head back. I've got to be in court in the morning." Tossing two
hundred-schilling notes on the table, Eberle stood up and stretched. "Drop you back
at your hotel?"
"No thanks, Markus." Drummond smiled at his friend. "I think I'll walk."
«» «» «»
The night air was crisper than he thought, and Drummond could feel it
reaching through his lightweight leather jacket like some gigantic cold hand slowly
squeezing the breath out of his lungs. Ignoring the cold, he walked on towards the
heart of the city, retreating to the comfort of a taxi only when a light rain started to
fall.
Back at his hotel, the night porter greeted him at the door, and Drummond
made his way back to his room. The room was stuffy and overheated. Obviously
the staff had turned on the heat to compensate for the cold front that was moving
through Vienna, but Drummond found the temperature uncomfortable. Walking
over to the French doors that led to a small balcony outside his room, he opened
them wide, then shed his jacket and tossed it over the back of a nearby chair.
Stucke's copy of the report from the Wiesenthal Center was lying on top of a
small writing desk in one corner of the sitting room. The report was in German, so
Drummond was unable to do more than just look at the first few pages of closely
typed material. Further on were German military forms, but even without a
dictionary, Drummond had no trouble figuring them out.
Kluge must have been the embodiment of Hitler's "ideal" Nazi. Looking at
the photocopy of his ID picture, Drummond saw a ruggedly handsome young man
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with neatly clipped blond hair in an immaculate black uniform, the silver SS runes
and three pips of a second lieutenant on his collar tabs.
Next to the photo, Kluge's physical description tallied with Drummond's first
impressions. After a bit of number-crunching, Drummond decided that at 183
centimeters tall and 75 kilos in weight, Kluge had been just on six feet tall and
weighed just under a hundred and seventy pounds. According to his birth date, he
had been just twenty when the picture was taken, which would have made him
twenty-six in 1944. The rest of the page was unintelligible, although Drummond
guessed that most of it must have related to Kluge's overall physical condition.
The next page seemed to be some sort of assessment sheet. Down one side of
the page there were a number of questions, and opposite these were five boxes.
Most of the tick marks were in the first two boxes, with only one showing a tick in
the last box. Drummond immediately resolved to buy a German-English dictionary,
so he could find out what Kluge's one apparent failure was.
The next page was a list of place names, and Drummond speculated that it
might be a list of Kluge's duty assignments. Running his finger down the list, he
saw that the first entry was for Lichterfelde. The dates next to it indicated that
Kluge was there for nearly two years before being transferred to Wewelsberg.
After less than a year he was posted to Wien Vienna arriving there in
December of 1937. In April of 1938, he was again posted to Wewelsberg, this time
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