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“Once they had gassed the Untermenschen in the shower rooms . . .”

“What are you talking about?” Ginger said. “Gassed? Shower rooms?”

“You don’t want to know,” Cronley said.

“Yes, damn it, I do!”

Cronley raised his eyebrows, then said, “Okay. In Dachau, for example, when the trains arrived—not passenger cars but boxcars packed with prisoners—they were greeted by SS officers holding the leashes of vicious German shepherds. The men were separated from the women and children, and the old from the young, and the healthy from the sick. The healthy were marched off to work as slave labor in the factories, et cetera.

“Everybody else was told they were to take a shower, after which they would be issued prison uniforms and taken to their barracks. This group then took off their clothes and went naked into the next room, which had a sign identifying it as a shower room. The doors closed. That was the cue for the SS men on the roof to pour a pesticide—it’s called Zyklon B—into the room. Depending on conditions, death came anywhere from five to fifteen minutes later.”

“Five to fifteen? How . . . How did they know?”

“They knew they were all dead when all the screaming stopped.” He saw the look in her eyes. “You want more, Ginger?”

“Finish,” she said.

“Next, after waiting a half hour before opening the death chamber doors, other inmates entered and started loading the corpses in wheelbarrows and on tables with wheels and rolled them out of the showers. Just outside were other inmates who were forced to inspect the corpses. They removed any jewelry, such as wedding rings. Then another team of specialists went to work. They pried open the mouths of the corpses. If they found gold false teeth, or gold bridgework, or fillings, they took a hammer and chisel . . .”

Ginger gasped involuntarily, covering her mouth with her hand. Her eyes glistened.

“. . . and removed the gold. I’m sorry, baby. You wanted to hear.”

She motioned for him to continue.

“You sure?”

She nodded.

“Okay. The wedding rings and the jewelry were put in one basket, the gold teeth in another. The idea was to melt down the rings and the dental work to make gold bars, which were then to be deposited in the Deutsche Bank.

“That sometimes—in fact, often—didn’t happen, as called for. Some clever SS officer reasoned that since the Deutsche Bank didn’t know how many wedding bands, say, had been minted as gold bars, some rings could be set aside and later converted and distributed among deserving SS officers. Or smuggled into Switzerland and sold, the cash from that again distributed among the deserving.

“From its beginning, the SS was corrupt to the core—criminally corrupt. One of the original big shots

, right under Himmler, was a man named Reinhard Heydrich. He had been cashiered from the Navy for moral turpitude.”

“Was?” Ginger said. “What happened to him?”

“Heydrich was taken out in Prague by Czech agents when he was ‘protector’ of what had been Czechoslovakia. To avenge his death, the Nazis, among other despicable acts, rounded up all the citizens—men, women, and children—of a village called Lidice. The bastards put them in a church and burned the church down with them in it. They then burned down the rest of the town and leveled it with bulldozers, sowing what was left with salt.”

Tears rolled down her cheeks.

“That’s so terrible, it’s hard to believe.”

“It’s true,” Cronley said. “But we’re getting off the subject.”

He turned to Fortin, and said, “Your scenario is, Odessa gave them enough money to buy phony papers from the Vatican to get them out of France and into Spain.”

Fortin shook his head.

“That’s not what I said. I’m saying Odessa gave the Vatican enough data—photographs, und so weiter—so that the Vatican can prepare the phony documents. They’ll hide somewhere in France until they get the documents and then they’re off to Spain, Portugal—wherever—and, ultimately, to South America.”

“Jesus,” Cronley said.

“No money will change hands. Odessa’s credit is good. They’ve been doing business with the Vatican for a long time. The Vatican will get paid when these bastards are in Buenos Aires or Montevideo.”

“I don’t think I understand,” Father McGrath said.