The Human Pool Read Online Free PDF Page B

Looting Investigation Unit, a division of the OSS. Freedom of movement was the key; we came and went as we pleased. Dulles the spymaster was able to incorporate many extracurricular activities under that title. During our drive to Frankfurt he told me it had taken a personal call to General George S. Patton to secure my release. Dulles enjoyed pulling strings, and his summons was a sign that he was up to mischief. I would be witness to something beyond my understanding and be relied upon to keep my mouth shut. Pretty much my usual role.
    We drove from Switzerland, a journey made slow by roadblocks, footbound columns of refugees and convoys moving north. Dulles was uncharacteristically short-tempered. His gout was spoiling his enjoyment of the end of the war.
    The first night we stayed in a schloss outside Munich where he held meetings to which I wasn’t privy. The place was some kind of headquarters, of what no one was saying. I ate in the kitchen and was given a billet in an outbuilding.
    We arrived in Frankfurt on the evening of the second day as night fell. On a main road outside the city, we stopped at a checkpoint and were given a map.
    The map was little more than a set of compass directions. It looked like a blank puzzle. It’s tempting to say that one flattened town looks much like another, but the ruins of Frankfurt felt very different from those of Munich or Berlin, as though the city had become a ghost of its previous incarnation. By moonlight its devastation took on the quality of a photographic negative and a heart-stopping beauty, for there is an enormous awe in mass destruction. Even Dulles was impressed.
    Our only company that night was a distant rumble. Dulles, who had spent most of the war in Switzerland, seemed excited, and nervous. ‘What’s that noise?’ he asked.
    It was tanks. We soon came up behind a convoy of covered trucks with an unusually heavy guard of several half-tracks as well as the tanks. It was easy enough to guess its destination as there was nowhere else to go.
    In a city rendered completely dark by the destruction of its electricity services, we were confronted by a miracle of light, and the equally bizarre sight of an intact building, and an exceptionally large and official-looking one at that. Its survival I assumed was the result of carelessness or oversight. There was a checkpoint and a heavy guard. Barbed wire surrounded everything. Teams on scaffolds were mending windows while more shadowy figures on the roof carried out further repairs. The place looked like it had been a bank, and from the tight security I guessed it was now a prison for top Nazis.
    Dulles smoked up the car with his pipe and grunted at the sight of a line of rats crossing the road while we waited for the checkpoint to clear the convoy. With his permission, I opened the window a crack and could hear the sound of generators. When I got out to stretch my legs, a guard ordered me back in the car. A checkpoint sign said it belonged to the 29th Infantry.
    Regardless of Dulles’s senior status our papers were checked and rechecked. We were escorted from our car to the building where we were questioned again by a major at a large desk in a marbled lobby. His uniform looked indecently new in such fusty, stiff-collar surroundings. Standing wooden crates, over six feet tall, were in the process of being loaded on flatbed trolleys by teams of workers. The mood was quietly purposeful. The place wasn’t a prison. It was still a bank: a working bank in the middle of the night, in the middle of a non-city. The U.S. Army’s recent appropriation was evident in dozens of stencilled signs. One warned, in case of fire, to use the field telephone in front of the main vault which connected to the civilian fire department, with an added Footnote that no one spoke English.
    When Dulles was ordered to hand over his briefcase, he refused, saying it was a matter of national security. He won, after letting the