The Tears of Autumn - Charles McCarry [20]
“You get to Zurich, don’t you?” he asked Christopher. “There’s a guy there you ought to know—you can’t forget his name. Dieter Dimpel. I bought him a watch store in 1950—told ‘em it was owed to old Dieter. So he’s out of it. But go see him.”
“I will,” Christopher said. “I use up a lot of watches.”
“Listen, Paul. Dieter is a midget—I mean he’s a real midget. He’s one meter, twenty-five centimeters high. Comes from Munich. Walks like Goring—he’s got a big imaginary body he carries around with him. He used to sweep up in the beer halls. Knew Hitler in the old days, when the Führer would come in in his trench coat and mumble about taking over the world. They wouldn’t let Dieter into the party because he was a freak, right? So Dieter goes to a forger and has a party card made. He gets himself an armband with a swastika on it and goes to all the Nazi rallies. Around 1943, some storm trooper grabs him. The forger had asked Dieter what number he wanted on his card. Dieter said, ‘Oh, make it 555—that’s easy to remember.” Unfortunately, 555 is the number of Adolf Hitler’s party card. The storm trooper was nothing compared to the Gestapo when they got hold of Dieter. Forged credentials! A freak saying he’s a Nazi! Using the Führer’s party number!
“Off old Dieter goes to Dachau. He’s resourceful as hell, he becomes a trusty. He escapes five days before the Americans come. He heads east. The Russians grab him. Dieter is a bit light-headed after two years on the Dachau diet, so he tells the Russians he’s a Nazi. They put him in a camp. Well, of course he walks right through the wire and heads west again.
“I picked him up in Berlin in late ‘46—he’s sweeping up in a beer hall again, wearing tiny lederhosen. Dieter is a bitter little guy. He knows he’s smarter than Hitler, but he’s only four feet tall. He wants revenge against the world. Good agent material.
“At that time we were trying to figure some way to get into the headquarters of a certain occupying power. No way to do it—troops on every door, bars on every window, bells and sirens wired up all over the place. Miller was running the Berlin base then, and he was full of stories of the good old prewar days in the FBI, when they used to sneak into the German ambassador’s bedroom in Washington and come back with samples of his wife’s pubic hair.
“Miller thought he was the world’s champion burglar, but he couldn’t think of a way to crack the GRU. However, / had Dieter. I recruited him by giving a whore a few marks to pretend she couldn’t live without him. I gave him a cyanide pill to carry in a hollow ring—Krauts don’t think you’re serious unless you give ‘em a cyanide pill.
“I had Dieter trained in rope climbing, in judo, I turned him into an acrobat. Dieter was a very strong midget. I put him through a course in clandestine entrance. Safecracking, photography with infrared, the works. After six months, he was the best burglar in Germany. Then, one dark and moonless night, I sent him down the chimney with a camera. Dieter came out a fireplace on the second floor, cracked every safe in the place, photographed everything, put it all back, and came out the chimney again. For three years Dieter went down the chimney once a month and did his work. Never left even a finger print. We sent him all over the place, doing the same. He got more stuff than any agent in the history of Berlin.
“One night, Dieter was shooting some agents’ reports and one of their colonels came in, working late. He turned on the lights, and here was this sooty midget with a camera and an infrared light set up in his office and the safe spilling all over the floor. Dieter whipped out his gun and shot the Russian right between the eyes. He dropped everything but the camera and went up the chimney like a rocket.
“I’m waiting in the next street. Lights go on, sirens go off, soldiers start coming out the windows. Dieter