by his red brothers. You see, Pa’s no-good sons
heard there was oil shale beneath the Chimayas and
did their thing. Incidentally, I trust you catch the
verbal associations in the name Ratchet, you can take
your choice. There’s just plain ‘rats,’ or Ratchet as in
‘wretched,’ or Ratchet as in the tool screwing
everything in front of it by merely pressing forward.”
There was something different about the actor
now thoughtJoel, bewildered. Was it his words? No,
not the words his voice. The Western inflections were
greatly diminished “I don’t know what you’re talking
about, but you sound differ ens.”
“War, Ah’ll jes’ be hornswaggled i” said Dowling,
laugh
124 ROBERT LUDLUM
ing. Then he returned to the unaccented tones he
had begun to display. “You’re looking at a renegade
teacher of English and college dramatics who said
a dozen years ago to hell with old-age tenure, let’s
go after a very impractical dream. It led to a lot of
funny and not very dignified jobs, but the spirit of
Thespis moves in mysterious ways. An old student
of mine, in one of those indefinable jobs like
‘production-coordinator,’ spotted me in a crowd
scene; it embarrassed the hell out of him.
Nevertheless, he put my name in for several small
parts. A few panned out, and a couple of years later
an accident called Santa Fe came along. That’s
when my perfectly respectable name of Calvin was
changed to Caleb. ‘Fits the image belter,’ said a pair
of Gucci loafers who never got closer to a horse
than a box at Santa Anita…. It’s crazy, isn’t it?”
‘Crazy,” agreed Converse, as the stewardess
walked back up the aisle toward them.
‘Crazy or not,” added Dowling under his breath,
‘ this good old rancher isn t going to offend anyone.
They want Pa Ratchet, they’ve got him.”
“Your bourbon, sir,” said the woman, handing
the actor a glass.
“Why, thank you, li’l darlin’! My oh my, you’re
purber than any filly on the showI”
“You are too kind, sir.”
“May I have a Scotch, please,” said Joel.
“That’s better, son,” said Dowling, grinning
again as the stewardess left. “And now that you
know my crime, what do you do for a living?”
“I’m an attorney.”
“At least you’ve got something legitimate to
read. This screenplay sure as hell isn’t.”
Although considered by most of Munich’s re
spectable citizens to be a collection of misfits and
thugs, the National Socialist German Workers’
Party,
with its headquarters in Munich, was making itself
felt throughout Germany. The radical-populist
movement was taking hold by basing its inflamma-
tory message on the evil un-German “them.” It
blamed the ills of the nation on a spectrum of
targets
ranging from the Bolsheviks to the ingrate Jewish
bankers; from the foreign plunderers who had
raped
an Aryan land to, finally, all things not “Aryan,”
THE AQUITAINE PROGRESSION 125
namely and especially the Jews and their
ill-gotten wealth.
Cosmopolitan Munich and itsJewish
community laughed at the absurdities; they were
not listening. The rest of Cermany was; it was
hearing what it wanted to hear. And Erich
Stoessel-Leifhelm heard it too. It was his passport
to recognition and opportunity.
In a matter of weeks, the young man literally
whipped his father into shape. In later years he
would tell the story with heavy doses of cruel
humor. Over the dissolute physician’s hysterical
objections the son removed all alcohol and
smoking materials from the premises, never
letting his father out of his sight. A harsh
regimen of exercise and diet was enforced. With
the zeal of a puritanical athletic trainer
Stoessel-Leifhelm started taking his father out to
the countryside for Gewaltmarschen forced
marches gradually working up to all-day hikes
on the exhausting trails of the Bavarian
mountains, continually shouting at the older man
to keep moving, to rest only at his son’s
commands, to drink water only with permission.
So successful was the rehabilitation that the
doctor’s clothes began to hang on him like seedy,
old-fashioned garments purchased for a much
fatter man. A new wardrobe was called for, but
good clothing in Munich in those days was
beyond the means of all but the wealthy, and
Stoessel-Leifhelm had only the best in mind for
his father not out of filial devotion but, as we
shall see, for a quite different purpose.
Money had to be found, which meant it had
to be stolen. He interrogated his father at length
about the house the doctor had been forced to
leave, learning everything there was to learn.
Several weeks later Stoessel-Leifhelm broke into
the house on the Luisenstrasse at three o’clock
one morning, stripping it of everything of value,
including silver, crystal, oil paintings, gold place
settings, and the entire contents of a wall safe.
Sales to fences were not difficult in Munich of
1930, and when everything was disposed of father
and son had the equivalent of nearly eight
126 ROBERT LUDLUM
thousand American dollars, virtually a fortune
in those times.
The restoration continued; clothes were
tailored in the Maximilianstrasse, the best
footwear purchased at bootsmiths on the
Odeonsplatz, and, finally, cosmetic changes
were effected. The doctor’s unkempt hair was
trimmed and heightened by coloring into a
masculine Nordic blond, and his shabby
inch-long beard shaved off, leaving only a small,
unbroken, well-trimmed moustache above his
upper lip. The transformation was complete;
what remained was the introduction
Every night during the long weeks of
rehabilitation, Stoessel-Leifhelm had read aloud
to his father whatever he could get his hands on
from the National Socialists’ headquarters, and
there was no lack of material. There were the
standard inflammatory pamphlets, pages of
ersatz biological theory purportedly proving the
genetic superiority of Aryan purity and,
conversely, the racial decline resulting from in-
discriminate breeding all the usual Nazi dia-
tribes plus generous excerpts from Hitler’s
Mein Kampf. The son read incessantly until the
doctor could recite by rote the salient outrages
of the National Socialists’ message. Throughout
it all, the seventeen-year-old kept telling his
father that following the party’s program was
the way to get back everything that had been
stolen from him, to avenge the years of
humiliation and ridicule. As Germany itself had
been humiliated by the rest of the world, the
Nazi party would be the avenger, the restorer of
all things truly German. It was, indeed, the New
Order for the Fatherland, and it was waiting for
men of stature to recognize the fact.
The day came, a day when Stoessel-Leifhelm
had learned that two high-ranking party officials
would be in Munich. They were the crippled
propagandist Joseph Goebbels and the
would-be aristocrat Rudolf Hess. The son
accompanied the father to the National
Socialists’ headquarters where the well-tailored,
imposing, obviously rich and Aryan Doktor
requested an audience with the two Nazi
leaders on an urgent and confidential matter. It
was
THE AQUITAINE
PROGRESSION 127
granted, and according to early party historical ar-
chives, his first words to Hess and Goebbels were
the
following.
“Gentlemen, I am a physician of impeccable
credentials, formerly head surgeon at the
Karlstor Hos,
pital and for years I enjoyed one of the most
successful practices in Munich. That was in the
past. I was
destroyed by Jews who stole everything from me. I
am back, I am well, and I am at your service.”
The Lufthansa plane began its descent into
Hamburg and Joel, feeling the drag, dog-eared the
page of Leifhelm’s dossier and reached down for his
attache case. Beside him, the actor Caleb Dowling
stretched, script in hand, then jammed his screenplay
into an open flight bag at his feet.
“The only thing sillier than this movie,” he said,
“is the amount of money they’re paying me to be in
it.”
“Are you filming tomorrow?” asked Converse.
‘.Today,” corrected Dowling, looking at his watch.
“It’s an early shoot, too. Have to be on location by
five-thirty dawn over the Rhine, or something
equally inspiring. Now if they’d just turn the damn
thing into a travelogue, we’d all be better off. Nice
scenery.”
“But you were in Copenhagen.”
“Yep.”
“You’re not going to get much sleep.”
“Nope.”
“Oh.”
The actor looked atJoel, the crow’s-feet around
his generous eyes creasing deeper with his smile. “My
wife’s in Copenhagen and I had two days off. This
was the last plane I could get.”
“Oh? You’re married?” Converse immediately
regretted the remark; he was not sure why, but it
sounded foolish.
“Twenty-six years, young fella. How do you think
I was able to go after that impractical dream? She’s
a whiz of a secretary; when I was teaching, she’d
always be this or that dean’s gal Friday.”
“Any children?”
“Can’t have everything. Nope.”
“Why is she in Copenhagen? I mean, why isn’t
she staying with you on location?”
The grin faded from Dowling’s suntanned face; the
lines
128 ROBERT LUDLUM
were less apparent, yet somehow deeper. “That’s an
obvious question, isn’t it? That is, you being a
lawyer would pick it up quickly.”
“It’s none of my business, of course. Forget I asked