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“If this wasn’t so important,” Cohen said, “I’d tell you to go fuck yourself and walk out of here—”

“You cannot speak that way!” Dietl snapped.

Cohen held his palm out toward Dietl while not breaking eye contact with von Hassburger.

“I’m going to ask you this only once, Cardinal. Are you willing to both listen and talk or are you going to continue to hide under that red yarmulke?”

“You’re talking about Odessa?”

“There’s more to it than Odessa. For lack of a more precise term, I think of them as the people who worship in the Church of Saint Heinrich the Divine.”

“I gather you’re one of those who pays credence to this Nazi church fantasy?”

“You are testing my patience, Cardinal,” Cohen said, his tone icy. “You damn well know it is no fantasy. What I’m going to try to do is convince you it is more of a threat to the Holy Mother Church than the communists and the Muslims combined.”

“To what end?”

“To help us wipe the bastards off the face of the earth.”

“Would you be offended, Colonel, if I told you I’m rather surprised at the depth of your vehemence?”

“Meaning what?”

“I was led to believe that you were what every intelligence officer aspired to be. That is to say, logical, analytical, rational, and, above all, emotionless.”

“Sorry to disappoint you.”

“What is it about these—how did you put it?—these disciples of Saint Heinrich the Divine that so bothers you? That angers you?”

“Cardinal, what’s your Christian name?”

“What’s that got to do with anything?”

Cohen made a Let’s have it gesture with both hands, which caused the cardinal to sigh.

“I was christened Helmut.”

“So that makes you Helmut Cardinal von Hassburger?” Cohen looked at the others, then said, “Okay, from now on you’re Helmut. You can call me Mortimer or Morty. If you can’t stand that blow to your dignity and prestige, meeting’s over. Agreed, Helmut?”

Von Hassburger held up his hands in a gesture of resignation.

“Good, Helmut. So let’s start with mass murder. Mass murder of the Jews. My take on that is, Hitler didn’t go down that path just because he didn’t like Jews. He needed someone to blame for Germany getting its ass kicked in World War One, and the Jews were a convenient scapegoat.

“I think he was even a little surprised at how easy it was to get the German people to go along with him. What I’m saying here is, the death factories came later, after Saint Heinrich came up with the idea—probably from one or more of the classic German philosophers who’d been pushing the idea for centuries—of exterminating the Untermenschen, the people they decided were not as good as Aryans.”

Cohen paused as he glanced at the others in the room, then turned back to von Hassburger and continued. “You will recall, I’m sure, that when Hitler started the mass murder business—long before the Final Solution—it was with retarded children. These Untermenschen obviously had no future, thus feeding and housing them was an unacceptable drain on the economy. It then advanced, with the same justification, to include retarded adults. Some argued that Hitler was doing them a favor by ending their miserable existences.”

He stared at the cardinal, then asked, “You ever think of it that way, Helmut?”

“I’ve heard that theory.”

“I thought you might have. Anyway, before that happened—and about the time Saint Heinrich fell in love with this obscure Austro-German politician named Hitler and joined what was then the German Workers’ Party—Himmler began to reason that if there were Untermenschen, it followed that there had to be Übermenschen. But who would they be? Obviously, the German race—not to be confused with the German population as a whole. Hell, there were millions of Jews who believed themselves to be part of the German people.

“The pure Germans were blond and blue-eyed. And, of course, above the Untermenschen.

“When Himmler formed a personal bodyguard for Hitler—who now referred to himself as Der Führer—he accepted into what he had grandly called the Schutzstaffel only those Germans who could prove their forebearers had been ethnically pure for three or more generations. Thus, no Poles, no Austrians, et cetera.

“The members of this new organization, which quickly became known simply as the SS, swore allegiance not to Germany but instead to Adolf Hitler personally.