Chapter 51

Under normal circumstances, Jan DeLaaren’s message might not have been retrieved until the following day, but the rose left on the tomb of Brother Junipero had been white rather than red  -- which had meant the wildebeest had news of some urgency to relay.  And so it was that the papers were collected almost within the hour of their being left.

The grasshopper mouse who took the documents had no trouble concealing them as he exited from the head; his habitual mode of dress contained no small number of hiding places.  He had no idea what was in the papers and would never, never examine them -- but unlike Jan DeLaaren, he did know for whom they had been left.  As the local Sicherheitdiest station’s chief courier, it was necessary for him to have direct contact with his superior from time to time.  Fortunately, this was no problem.  They had been enjoying a regular game of chess even before the rodent had been recruited...and when the offer had finally been broached, he had snapped it up like a barracuda on an anchovy.

Even though the courier had been born and raised in Boston, Massachusetts, he did not feel that he was betraying his country.  As he saw it, the REAL traitors to America were Franklin Delano Rosenfeld and the cabal of Jewish financiers who had put him into power...and who were now lining their pockets to the ruination of the United States.  Look at what was happening on Wall Street the previous spring; just as his mentor had always predicted, the ‘Jew Deal’ had finally run out of steam and now an even bigger crisis than the Great Depression was looming...all thanks to FDR and the rest of his mob.

If America had only followed Hitler’s lead or if only the Kingfish, God rest his soul, had survived his assassination. ( an assassination ordered by that grinning thief and liar in the White House, of that the rodent had no doubt. )  If only either one of those things had happened, America would be even stronger now than she had been at the end of the Great War.

And the dirty Jews who thought to suck America dry would either be dead, deported, or in prison where they belonged.

A traitor?  Never!  Try PATRIOT!

Even though it was only a short walk to his destination, as soon as he stepped onto the Meeting Island quay, he hailed a rickshaw.  Though he had long since won the battle with his illness, it still left him feeling weak on humid days.  And so he was greatly pleased to see amongst the milling drivers the familiar face of  Tin’ha-Li, a burly young fox who had carried him many a time before.  In fact Tin’ha was the only rickshaw driver willing to carry him on a regular basis.  The rest of them, especially the new ones, usually took one look at his face and pretended not to have seen him at all.

“Odd time for chess, isn’t it Father?” he said, as he pulled his rickshaw up in front of the grasshopper mouse.  It was fast approaching twilight.

“Well, you just never know when the winning move will hit you, son.” said Father Thomas Cork.

Then he climbed aboard the rickshaw and they were off.

It would have shocked Katie to see how much the mouse had changed since last they had seen one other in New Guinea...and not just his political bent.  Father Cork’s face was now as pitted and pocked as a WWI no-fur’s land. 

But his worst scars were still the invisible ones.

It had happened in October of 1933, after Katie had left the Iso Valley for good.  One rainy morning in Port Moresby, the grasshopper mouse had awakened with a high temperature, body aches, and vomiting.  At first, he had assumed it was malaria and had accordingly dosed himself with quinine, predicting that the fever would quickly subside.

Except the fever had NOT subsided, it had spiked...and on the third day an ugly crimson rash had appeared on the mouse’s face and spread quickly to his extremities.

It was smallpox.

Though Father Cork had eventually recovered from the illness, a great many of his native parishioners had not been so lucky.   Like the Aztecs of Mexico, neither they nor their ancestors had never been exposed to smallpox...and so they had fallen before the disease like wheat before a scythe, erasing the years of good will the priest had built up at a single stroke.  By the time the good father was finally able to get out of bed, his mission, and his clinic had become a virtual ghost town; the New Guinea natives wanted nothing more to do with him.  How COULD he have failed to immunize himself against smallpox, knowing full well what would happen if the disease got loose amongst the tribal populations?

What made this a doubly bitter blow, and the records confirmed it, was that Father Cork HAD made sure to have himself inoculated against smallpox.  A later investigation showed that the supplier of the vaccine, the Melbourne firm of Sandberg & Sons, Ltd. had filled a supply gap by substituting chicken pox culture for cowpox culture.  The scandal made front page news all over Australia, several arrests were also made, and the Catholic diocese of Melbourne immediately filed a lawsuit against the firm.  But for Father Cork, it was too little, too late; the New Guinea natives didn’t read newspapers and they didn’t know a lawsuit from liana.

Fortunately, the Bishop was far more sympathetic than Father Cork’s parishioners.   A letter had been sent to Rome, and the grasshopper mouse had thence been transferred to New Orleans, where he would take up a teaching post at Loyola University.

Though the Vatican could not possibly have known it at the time, it was a singularly ill-advised decision.  Not to put too fine a point on it, New Orleans probably was the single, worst place for Father Cork to have been relocated to at that time.  Once the brightest and most cheerful of souls, he had now become moody and saturnine, partially as a result of bitterness and partially as a result what of the smallpox fever had done to his mind.  But whatever the reason, when the grasshopper mouse had left New Guinea for the last time, he had taken with him a deep and burning hatred for the firm of Sandberg and Sons.

That hatred would soon metastasize into a deep and festering loathing of all the ‘degenerate’ Jewish race...never mind the fact that his name notwithstanding, Joseph Sandberg was NOT a Jew.

Several months after settling in at his new job, the priest began to hear the name of ‘The Kingfish’ being spoken around campus.  He soon learned that this was not a reference to the character from the hugely popular Amos and Andy radio program, but to Louisiana’s junior Senator, Huey ‘Kingfish’ Long...and the talk about him was invariably laudatory, sometimes to the point of nearly violating the First Commandment.  Father Cork also soon discovered that Long was frequent visitor to Loyola, attracting huge crowds whenever he came.

One evening out of curiosity, Father Cork dropped in on one of the bluetick hound’s political rallies, where Long spoke about something called the Share Our Wealth program.  He was instantly spellbound.  Here was a dog who stood for the Little Furs of America in much the same way the priest had done for the New Guinea natives...and against the greedy tycoons of industry like Sandberg and Sons Ltd..  From that day on, Father Cork never missed one of Long’s radio broadcasts, and would go to hear him speak in furson whenever his teaching duties permitted.

But it was another fur who was destined to turn the grasshopper mouse’s head around once and for all.  At a rally in Baton Rouge, Long was introduced to the audience by a bobcat who, it was quickly revealed, was also one of America’s most popular radio fursonalities.  ( Father Cork later learned that his program regularly OUTDREW Amos n’ Andy. )

The feline turned out to be a spellbinding orator in his own right; his peroration easily matched the best of the Kingfish’s discourse.

But that was not what really caught Father Cork’s attention; it was the fact that the emcee was wearing the same type of collar as himself.

His name was Father Charles Coughlin, otherwise known as 'The Radio Priest'...and he was a rabid anti-Semite and demagogue. 

From that day on, Thomas Cork was Father Coughlin’s devoted apostle.  Before long, he was emulating the Radio Priest’s shrill style of rhetoric in his lectures to his students -- much to the embarrassment of the Monsignor and the University President, both of whom advised him to tone it down.

Father Cork did no such thing, instead adding The International Jew and The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion to his students’ reading list.

With that kind of behavior, a break was inevitable, and in 1935, with the assassination of Huey Long, it finally happened.  After cloistering himself for three whole days, Father Cork delivered a tear-stained, impromptu address in the commons at lunch time, with nearly half the student body present.  In the course of his diatribe, the mouse accused President Roosevelt of fursonally having orchestrated the murder of Senator Long.   In and of itself, that might not have been sufficient grounds for his dismissal, but then Father Cork had paraphrased King Henry II of Britain, speaking to his knights of Thomas Beckett.

“What cowards have we brought up in American, who care nothing for their allegiance to their country? Who will rid us of this murderous President?"

For the Grasshopper mouse’s superiors, that was the final straw.  The Catholic diocese of America might have to put up with the those sorts of ravings from a priest who was also a hugely popular celebrity...but an obscure University teacher was quite another matter.  Within a week of his ad hoc address, Father Cork was summoned to the Bishop’s office and coldly informed that he would not be returning to his teaching post the following semester.  Instead it was decided to send him to a parish where he couldn’t cause any more trouble....to the Spontoon Islands, where he would serve as assistant to the head of the local diocese, Father Thomas Merino.   And where there would be no ready audience for his anti-Semitic diatribes.

It was another foolish mistake.  Within six months of his arrival in the archipelago, the grasshopper mouse had slid back the screen in the confessional and a familiar voice had said to him, “Forgive me Father, for I am ABOUT to sin.  I am about to attempt to recruit you as an agent of the Third Reich.”

It had taken Father Cork all of three minutes to sign on.  By now he was convinced that ANYTHING was better than letting the Judeo-Bolshevists continue to destroy America.

These memories were temporarily put on hold as the rickshaw pulled up in front of a house overlooking the north lagoon, with the jade hills of Main Island visible in the distance. 

At first glance, the place was a cheerful looking affair, a domicile that might have been transplanted wholesale from the Amalfi coast of Italy by way of the Greek island of Santorini.  It was a two story Neopolitan villa, in bleach-white stucco, with a tiled roof, a wrought iron gate, soaring palm trees, and a perfectly trimmed topiary garden.  A closer inspection, however, would have revealed that the wall surrounding the dwelling was at least two feet thick and ten feet high, and that there was a row of closely spaced iron barbs planted along the top.  ( all of which had been honed to the sharpness of hypodermic needles. )  The observer might then have taken note of the fact that there were not one but TWO stout locks on the gate -- and of the heavy, wrought-iron bars covering each and every window.

And if the shutters were closed, he might also have noted that they were fashioned of inch-thick oak...and fitted with cross-shaped firing slits.

Father Cork paid his driver and went up to the door.

The individual who answered looked something like a very lean jungle cat, with mud-brown fur and an elongated muzzle.  He was, in fact, a fossa, an arboreal relative of the mongoose family. Dressed in a loose fitting linen suit, Jacques Silverstein might almost have appeared innocuous -- except for his eyes; deep, green, and iridescent, they were like the eyes of a house-cat when they catch the light...except these eyes glistened 24 hours a day, rain or shine.

They were the eyes of someone who is anything but harmless.

Because of his surname, most furs who met Jacques Silverstein for the first time assumed that he was Jewish.

He wasn’t.  He was in fact, just the opposite.  Born Joachim Silverstein in the Alsace, to a pair of thoroughly nationalistic German parents, he had been uprooted along with his family when the province had been returned to France at the end of the First World War...but not before becoming so fluent in the French language, no one ever questioned professed origins.

It was his mission in life to see his birthplace under German rule once again.

“Why bonjour mon Pere,” he said, with perfectly feigned bonhomie,“Quelle surprise.  I did not know that you and Monsieur had a chess game scheduled for today.”

“I just now thought of a way to counter James’ last move,” the mouse replied, and watched Silverstein’s eyes narrowing ever so slightly at the code-phrase he had just recited.  What he had actually just told the fossa was, “I have picked up some information that may be of immediate importance.”

“Ah, tres bien.” Silverstein replied, then gestured towards the gravel path at the end of the portico, “Monsieur is out in the back garden, as of course you may have surmised.  Why don’t you just go straight around and see him?  I shall be there shortly wiz the drink tray.  Bushmill’s and water as usual, mon Pere?”

“That would be fine, thank you Jacques.” said Father Cork.

He found James Gordon-Pratt in knee-high Wellingtons, in the midst of transplanting a bush from a pot to the soil.  As he approached, the black-furred feline looked up at the priest and smiled with perfect cordiality.

“Ah, there you are, Father.  Come here and give us a paw for just one second, yes?”.

For the hint of a heartbeat, Father Cork felt the way a non-anthro mouse feels when a non-anthro cat looks at him.  In other words, he wanted to run fast and run anywhere....even though there was absolutely no outward reason for him to feel this way.  Unlike with his majordomo, there was absolutely nothing sinister about James Gordon-Pratt’s appearance.  At more than seventy-three years of age, with a big belly, white tufted ears and a slightly bent back, he would have looked a near perfect Santa Claus with the addition of a beard.  (And in fact, played that role for the local children, every year at yuletide.)

It was probably the most spectacular case of miscasting in history.  Though James Gordon-Pratt had spent several years of his life surreptitiously entering homes in the dead of night, it had been for the purpose of removing valuable items rather than leaving them.

In those days he had been known by his real name, Albert Cole...well, that was how it was pronounced anyway.  His actual birth name was Albert KOHL, and he had been born in Rostock Germany, not the midlands of Britain as he later claimed and as his forged identity papers indicated.

When he had first anglicized his name however, Albert had claimed New York City as his place of birth...and no one had doubted for a minute that he was as American as popcorn.  His mastery of English went far beyond mere schoolbook fluency.  He had served briefly as a reporter for the New York World, he had worked as a tour-guide at the Barnum Museum, he had toured the with several vaudeville shows...and in the course of that work, had developed a gift for imitating almost any kind of accent.  He could render the patois of a Boston Brahmin, a Tennessee muleskinner, or a Brooklyn pushcart vendor with stunning accuracy.

It was shortly after one of these shows folded that Albert found his real calling.  A friend of a friend introduced him to a ferret named Piano Charlie, who immediately offered the Albert a proposition; he and his friends were planning bank job that night and they needed someone to distract the beat cop who made the rounds in that neighborhood.  If Albert could manage to keep the police-fur busy for just half an hour, he would earn $500 for his services.  That was more than Albert had made in a month with Lee and Starrett’s Traveling Troupe and he had accepted the offer almost at once.

That night as the patrol-fur, a ferret, made a turn around a corner, he found himself face to face with a hapless visitor from Georgia...a frantic cat with black and white fur and a deep Southern drawl. He had been trying to find his way to his hotel from Delmonico’s restaurant and had become hopelessly lost.

“Might y’all be of any assistance to me, suh?”

By the time the officer finally set the visitor on the right path to his hotel, Piano Charlie and his crew had long since completed their good night’s work...and Albert Cole was $500 richer.

It was the easiest money the black cat had ever made, and he soon became a full-fledged member of Charlie’s gang, eventually branching off to start a gang on his own.

But not before Charlie introduced him to his partner and mentor, Adam Worth.  He was a badger, he was of German extraction like Albert, and also like the feline, he had anglicized his name by way of the simple expedient of changing the spelling (from Wirth to Worth).

He was a living legend, an immensely wealthy and successful criminal mastermind who would one day serve as the template for Arthur Conan Doyle’s Professor James Moriarity.  From their first introduction, Albert had resolved that one day he too would rise to the top of the criminal pyramid.

And if Adam Worth, or anyone else got in the way, well...too bad for them.

That was the biggest difference between Albert and his role model.  Adam Worth abhorred the use of violence and never, never employed it, not even in the face of double cross or a betrayal to the police.  With Albert Cole, it was a different story; though he never used violence in the actual commission of his crimes, any associate of his found to have been talking to the police, any gang member found to have taken more than his fair share from a job, any rival caught poaching on Albert’s territory received exactly one warning.  After that, he could count his life in hours...and also his death, for it quickly became Albert’s practice to make examples out of those who crossed him.  One particular troublemaker, a Springer Spaniel who had tried to abscond with the entire take of a hotel burglary was roasted alive in the furnace of a tenement basement.

Unfortunately for Albert, he had chosen to ‘discipline’ that canine only a week after a new Police Commissioner named Theodore Roosevelt had taken up his office.  Within a week, no less than three of the black cat’s associates had been pulled in for questioning about the killing.  Though they were all soon released ( and none of them talked ) it was too close a call for Albert and he decided a sojourn abroad might be in order about now.  Luckily, he was more than able to afford it; by now, he was one of the most successful thieves working the Eastern Seaboard, and unlike the vast majority of his compatriots, he preferred to invest the bulk of his proceeds rather than spend it as if doomsday were around the corner.

And so, in the company of not one but TWO beautiful young mistresses (neither of whom was over the age of 17), he left on a grand tour of Europe; Paris, Vienna, Budapest, Venice, Athens, Constantinople, the French Riviera  Though it was intended as a pleasure trip, everywhere Albert looked, he saw new and lucrative criminal opportunities just waiting to be taken.  And so, upon reaching London, the first thing he did was take a suite at the Savoy, paying three months rent in advance and the second was to obtain a false set of papers identifying him as one James Gordon-Pratt, British citizen and dealer in antiquities.

The next five years saw Albert unleashing what amounted to a one-cat crime wave upon the European continent; a bank burglary in Genoa that netted half a million Lira, the theft of more than 200,000 Francs from the safe of Hotel Normandie in Paris, the vanishing of Holbein’s Studies of Erasmus’s Face from the Sternberk Palace gallery in Prague, the disappearance of a shipment of uncut diamonds from the Orient Express worth nearly half a million Dutch Guilders, the loss of more than L150,000 sterling in a single night from the offices of Cunard Steamship lines in Southampton.  Albert even dared to commit the ultimate in criminal heresy, relieving a bank in Basel Switzerland of the contents of it’s safe.

None of these crimes were ever solved...partially because Albert always made it a point to rotate his criminal operations; he never pulled off a job in the same country, twice in a row.  In the days before Interpol, at a time when most European government regarded each other with suspicion at best and outright hostility at worst, this made the establishment of any sort of modus operandi virtually impossible.

Curiously, Albert never operated in Germany, even though the Second Reich’s economy was growing at a booming rate and there were criminal opportunities galore.  Why he did this, even he didn’t know, there was no conscious reason for it; it just...FELT like something he had to do.

As the Victorian Era gave way to the Edwardian, Albert’s fursonal participation in his criminal activities began to wane.  He would still put up the money and plan the job, or if there were special tools needed, he would see to their construction, but he was less and less frequently to be seen in the company of the thieves he sent out to do their dirty work.  He had other things to attend to, most notably living the good life.  He bought a villa in St. Tropez, a steam yacht named the Lucky Star, and moved to the fashionable London neighborhood of Mayfair.  And he enjoyed an adventurous and satisfying sex-life.  

One of the biggest incongruities of British society at the turn of the twentieth century was that while extramarital affairs were a considered a cardinal sin for the working and middle classes, for the gentry such dalliances were the rule, not the exception.  So common was the practice in fact, that many a great house had a door installed for the express purpose of allowing her ladyship to make a discreet exit and entrance..  Jenny Churchill, the wife of Lord Randolph Churchill was famous for her lovers...and her son Winston saw nothing wrong with any of it.  In fact, he several times used his mother to wheedle favors out of those of her paramours who might be in a position to advance his political and military career. 

And so it was that Albert enjoyed many affairs with ladies of high birth, enjoyed them so much that he soon lost his taste for younger women.  It was almost pitifully easy for the cat.  Though outwardly respectable, he had the air of a rogue about him that the wives of the gentry found absolutely irresistible.  He even managed a fling with Frances MacArran, the Duchess of Strathdern...a mare who by all accounts had never strayed from her husband’s bed before she and Albert met.

While all this was going on, Albert was shifting the focus of his criminal network from such high risk crimes as bank burglaries and train robberies to such low key activities as stock swindles and pyramid schemes.  These crimes might not be as exciting as blowing a safe in Cannes or looting the luxury suites of Shepheard’s Hotel in Cairo, but they were far less risky...and also much more lucrative.  One particularly ingenious bond fraud scheme netted the black cat nearly five million US dollars.

Life was good, life was fun.  No one questioned the source of Albert’s wealth; it was something ‘not done’ in those days.  And neither Scotland Yard, nor the Minkertons, nor the Surete came anywhere close to unmasking him.  There was even talk of his being elevated to a peerage.

Then he met Elfi.

It happened during a dance concert in 1906, while Albert was taking a holiday in the Spontoons.  She was a white furred Angora cat with marble blue eyes, she was half his age...and she was the most beautiful feline he had encountered in his life.  From the moment he saw her, Albert was entranced.   He asked her to dance, he asked her dinner, and ultimately, he asked her to marry him.

Her father, the captain of a Hamburg-Amerika steamship liner initially disapproved of the match, not because of Albert’s years, not even because of the somewhat enigmatic source of his income, but because Friedrich Schelricher, a passionate German nationalist did not want his daughter marrying a foreign feline, especially not an ENGLISH cat.

The irony of this situation was not lost upon the cat who had been christened Albert Kohl, but fortunately he was nothing if not a consummate charmer.  Within six months of their meeting, Elfi not only had her father’s permission to marry the dashing Mr. Gordon-Pratt, but even his actual blessing.  Albert took her home to live with him in Mayfair and much to the astonishment of his associates, immediately became a dedicated and loving husband.  Nights making the rounds with the boys were replaced by nights at the theater or the opera with Elfi.  Most amazing of all, he never cheated on her, not one single time, and she bore him three lovely kittens in the space of six years.

That led one of his underlings, a squirrel name Chalkie Leeson to make a dreadful mistake.  Assuming that Albert had ‘gone soft’, he attempted to usurp the cat’s authority, running a bank job that Albert had vetoed as too risky behind his back.

He was caught during the burglary, but later managed to escape.   His cohorts however were not so lucky, and though Albert had not been involved in the bank job, every single participant in that bungled enterprise knew enough about his earlier crimes to put him away for two decades.

But then Chalkie Leeson was found nailed through the knees and elbows to a tree in Clapham Common...after which a final nail had been driven into his skull.

None of the thieves named Albert to the police after that...and no one ever again voiced the suggestion that he was losing his nerve.  Even so, Albert decided to it was time retire from the underworld and become an upstanding citizen in fact as well as facade.  He had plenty of money, a beautiful wife and three lovely children, and his investments were doing wonderfully well.  It was time to stop scheming and start living the respectable life his lovely Elfi deserved.

The year was 1914....the year that Albert’s life came crashing down around his head.

With the roar of the Guns of August, a wave of anti-German sentiment swept Britain...and Elfi Gordon-Pratt quickly bore the brunt of it.  Though she spoke English well, she spoke it with a pronounced Teutonic accent...and worse, had always spoken glowingly of both her homeland and The Kaiser in the years before the war.  As if that were not enough. Elfi’s father and all her brothers promptly signed up to fight for Second Reich, and one of her sisters foolishly praised their decision in a letter sent via Zurich...forgetting all about wartime censorship.  That prompted a visit to the Gordon Pratt’s home from Scotland yard, and while the detectives came away satisfied, Elfi’s friends and neighbours most decidedly did not.  The French Army and the BEF were being hurled back towards Paris at the moment and tempers were running at a fever pitch.

Thus it was that overnight, Elfi Gordon-Pratt became an untouchable.  Friends she had known for years crossed the street to avoid speaking with her, children stuck out their tongues as she passed, store clerks and waiters acted as if she were invisible, and most of her household staff tendered their resignations.  And it wasn’t just Elfi herself; the kittens were shunned at school and taunted by the other children as ‘the little huns’.  Worst of all, another letter arrived, this one from her mother, baldly ordering he to leave her English husband, and “return to ‘Die Vaterland’ where you belong.”

Alfred was not unaware of this, but he was in a quandary.  He would gladly have taken Elfi home to Germany if he could...but as a supposed British citizen, he didn’t dare.  There were too many skeleton’s in his closet for him to take that risk.

And so, he sought a middle course.  He and the family would relocate to Switzerland for the duration of the war.  Sending Elfi on ahead by way of Italy, which was also not yet a belligerent, he set about tidying up his affairs in Britain before joining her.

He would never see her again.  When he arrived at the house he had rented in Bern, Elfi and the kittens were not there...but a note from her was.  She had just learned that her father had been killed at Jutland when his ship, the Rossbach, had taken a direct hit on his bridge...leaving her mother and sisters all alone, with no one to care for them.

That, and the proximity to the country of her birth had been too much for her to bear...She and the kits had taken the train to Hamburg and hoped James would soon join her there.

Albert tried...but was turned back at the border.  Elfi had never been naturalized, and so had a German passport.  His was British and so he had to set about obtaining a false set of papers before he could follow her,.  In the meantime he sent Elfi a telegram, care of her mother..and was told that she had never arrived in Hamburg.  At least that was what Lena said....but when he finally managed to con and bribe his way across the border, he discovered that his mother-in-law had been telling the truth.  Elfi, who didn’t know a railway timetable from a menu, had decided to take the train home by way of Strasbourg rather than Ottenburg.  On the surface it was not such an unwise decision; Strasbourg had been under German control since the end of the Franco-Prussian war.  But that had been then, this was now.  Now the Alsace/Lorraine was a hotbed of anti-German partisans...and an obviously German femme, traveling alone with three kittens, well...

Albert would never know what happened to them.  Elfi and his children simply vanished into thin air.

At Hamburg, a tense scene ensued between Albert and Lena...each accusing the other of being responsible for Elfi’s disappearance.   But both of them knew where the fault truly lay.

It lay with the French and especially the damned British.  They’d had no right to treat his beloved Elfi as a Pariah, no right at all.

On the train back to Switzerland Albert swore an oath; if he EVER got the chance to make the British pay for what they had done...

His opportunity came shortly after he returned to Bern.  He was sitting on the terrace of a an outdoor café, with no plans and no idea as to what he was going to do -- except try to find out what had happened to his family when the war ended. (He never did.) 

That was when his sharp, feline ears had picked up the first British accent he’d heard since leaving London.

“So K of K’s got A convinced that the straits can’t be forced without a large troop commitment.  W’s fuming, but can’t do a thing about it.  Admiral J won’t back him.”

Perhaps the speaker had assumed that the sad looking cat at the next table could not speak English,  (Albert hadn’t spoken a word of it in months.) perhaps he was merely reflecting the arrogance of all British diplomats of the time, or perhaps he assumed that since he had couched his words in phrases no one but a British Gentlefur could decipher, they were perfectly safe to utter aloud in public.

He could not have been more mistaken.  Albert had not only understood him the English furs’ words, he had known immediately what, or rather who he was talking about; K of K was Lord Kitchener, the BEF Commander in Chief, A was Prime Minister Herbert Asquith,  Admiral J was Britain’s First Sea Lord, Admiral Lord John ‘Jacky’ Fisher, and W was that pompous ass in charge of  the Admiralty, Winston Churchill.

But it was the words ‘the straits’ that really caused Albert’s ears to prick up.  That could mean only one place, the Dardanelles...and if the British had changed their minds and were going to commit a land force as well as a sea force there, it meant the operation would have to be put on hold, pending the troops’ arrival.

Albert went immediately to the German consulate with the news.  At first the consul’s reaction was lukewarm...until the cat repeated what he’d heard a second time, this time in the consul’s bedroom in the wee hours of the morning -- after gaining entrance by way of forcing a window. 

“The damned English drove my wife away children away from me,” he told the astonished diplomat before vanishing into the night, “and now they must pay.”

It was almost five weeks before Albert heard back from the consul.  But in the meantime, rumors began to circulate in Bern that the Second Reich was rushing troops and arms to the Bosporus as fast the trains could carry them.

Then, one morning as Albert was strolling through the market square, someone slipped a note into his pocket.

With his long experience in running a criminal enterprise, it took the cat almost no time to build up an effective intelligence network...and in 1917 he pulled off his greatest coup, making contact with a Saiga antelope and Russian expatriate named Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, or 'Lenin' as he called himself.  “He says that if Germany can arrange for safe passage through the lines on the Eastern Front, he will spare no effort to take Russia out of the war when he arrives home.”

The Second Reich immediately took Lenin up on his offer and the Russian antelope soon proved to be as good as his word.

With the end of the war, Albert resumed his fruitless search for Elfi, finally giving up in 1922.  He put the house in Mayfair and the Lucky Star up for sale and sailed away for the Spontoons, vowing never again to return to Europe. 

It was a promise he would break only once.

Albert’s first few years in the islands were spent as a virtual recluse, never venturing beyond the wall surrounding his villa and growing ever fatter on the creations of the not one but TWO gourmet chefs he employed.  The rest of his time was spent either working in his garden, admiring the stolen works of art he had acquired in his criminal career, or speculating on the currency markets.  He had no friends, no associates and wanted none of either

But then gradually, by degrees, Albert started to come out of his shell.  He began to take brief strolls along the beach, he began to take his lunch at restaurants instead of at home, he even began to appear at a few social gatherings.  By 1928, he had become a well known cat-about-town on Meeting Island, and even something of a supporter of the Spontoon community, putting up the money to erect a new cinema, and making a generous contribution to the construction of Songmark Academy’s new auditorium, a largesse he could easily afford.  Except for his chefs and his exquisite garden, the cat allowed himself almost no indulgences.  He owned no motorcar, no real estate, and his yacht had long since been sold, along with all his stocks, the money being deposited in Switzerland before he left Bern.  He never visited Casino Island (or any other island for that matter) and his current place of residence was a cottage compared to his former home in Mayfair.  To top it all off, he had done extremely well in his currency speculations, reaping an especially large return when Britain had returned to the gold standard.  When the New York Stock Exchange crashed in 1929, it caused hardly a ripple in the cat’s financial situation.  In fact, he was pleased.  Let this be America’s punishment, he reasoned, for not staying OUT of the war.

It was indicative of Albert’s growing change of attitude that he should feel this way.  Though he had lived in Germany for only the first 5 years of his life, he now began to think of himself more and more as Albert Kohl, rather than Albert Cole, much less James Gordon-Pratt.

This smoldering sense of Teutonic Nationalism was fanned into flames in late 1932, with an apparently innocuous arrival on Albert’s doorstep.

Always an avid reader of newspapers, Albert had arranged for the delivery of various European sheets to his villa almost as soon as he arrived, all of which owned a decidedly rightwards slant; The Times of London, Paris Temps, Il Popolo D’ Italia...and the Berliner Tagblatt.  The latter of these was actually far too moderate for Albert’s tastes, but at the time, there were no German papers available that suited his political bent.

Until one day in June of 1932 when a week old copy of something called Der Angriff appeared on his doorstep.  Albert read it five times over before putting it down, and then hastily dashed off a telegram to Berlin asking for more.  Within a month, Der Angriff had been supplemented by a second newspaper, the Volkitscher Beobachter, and then a third newspaper, Der Stuermer. By the end of that summer, all his other newspaper subscriptions had been summarily canceled. 

Incredibly, none of Albert’s friends or acquaintances became aware of his new tastes in reading, much less his new political sympathies.  His European papers had always been delivered in a collective bundle, and wrapped in brown paper, and he never read them in public.  And Albert, naturally secretive after years of running a criminal enterprise, never gave vent to his growing admiration for Adolf Hitler; he never rendered the Nazi salute, never sang the NSDAP’s praises, and there wasn’t a portrait of the Fuhrer or a swastika to be seen anywhere in his home.  He even became a semi-regular patron at Luchows, whose Jewish owner always regarded him as a nice, convivial, old gentlefur, and would converse freely with the skunk who lived at the end of his street, Dr.James Meffit, also a Jew.  When Hitler came to power a year later, Albert was outwardly bored, inwardly elated.  So elated in fact, that in 1934, he began toying with the idea of returning to the land of his birth, there to live out his life under his real and genuine name.

With that in mind, he booked passage for Europe aboard a P & O liner, first to tidy up a few remaining loose ends in Britain and Switzerland, ( Something he should have done a long time ago. ) and from there, on to Berlin, to see for himself the New Germany.

And to explore the possibility of settling down there.

When Albert disembarked from his train at Grunewald Railway station, there were two strangers waiting on the platform to greet him, a hyena and a baboon, both of them dressed in smart, black uniforms with silver trim, including little death’s heads affixed to the peaks of their caps.

“Herr Gordon-Pratt?” the hyena said, stepping forward and favoring the cat with a stiff armed salute. “Would you accompany us, bitte?  There appears to be a minor problem with your passport.”

Albert was taken to a long, black touring-car and put in the back, with one of the two SS furs seated beside him, while the other drove.  He was more curious than frightened, knowing full well that he was not under arrest; had that been the case there would have been SS furs sitting on BOTH sides of him.  He did wonder what the Schutzstaffel could possibly want with him though, but reasoned that he would find out soon enough.

From the Grunewald Station, Albert was driven to a foreboding-looking gothic building on the Prinz Albrechtstrasse, where the car was admitted through a side gate and driven around to the back...but not before Albert was ordered to ducked down, out of sight.  Whatever their purpose bringing him here, the SS did not want him to be seen entering their headquarters...and that was when the true nature of their ‘invitation’ finally dawned on the cat.

He spent the next half hour seated on a couch beside a pair of tall, ornately carved double doors, in a hallway alternately bedecked with swastikas, and the twin lightning flash symbol of the SS,.  The hyena seated beside him was both polite and solicitous, asking Albert if he would like anything to eat or drink while he waited.  Albert managed a smile while declining the offer.

“Very well,” the hyena cautioned, wagging a finger as though at a child, “But du should know it may be some time before we are admitted.  The Obergruppenführer is quite busy today.”

It was at this point Albert decided that he didn’t LIKE being patronized by this smug, smarmy little whelp, and moved quickly to put the hyena in his place.

“I do not mind that, Herr Hauptmann,” he answered, not only in flawless German, but in a perfect Bavarian accent as well, “However would you mind if we spoke in German?  Forgive me for saying so, but your English is not very good.”
 
Then he sat back to enjoy his escort’s astonished expression... not only at his linguistic skills but at having been able to recognize his badges of rank.

Not another word was uttered until the door opened and he was conducted inside.

Within, he found the domain of a Renaissance fur; a violin case and music stand occupied one corner of the room, the near wall was dominated by a large collection of fencing foils, epees, and sabers, together with a number of medals and trophies won in competition, as well as several more for victories in pentathlons and skiing contests.  Against the far wall was a cream colored desk of the late Hapsburg period.  This was occupied by a tall, slender German Shepherd dog, with fur like new-fallen snow, and a face and body as hard as cast iron.  As Albert entered, he rose and came around the front of the desk with an outstretched paw.

“Herr Cole?” he said, “A pleasure to meet you at long last.  My name is Heydrich, Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich of the SS.”

A lesser feline might have been intimidated by the fact that Heydrich knew his alias.  Not Albert Kohl.  Instead, he began sizing up the canine.

In the first place, Heydrich’s voice was far too high and reedy for such a powerfully built dog;  it was almost a falsetto.  His hips also didn’t fit the picture of the Immer Korrekt Nordic specimen either...they were so wide as to be almost feminine, an effect greatly enhanced by his elegantly cut riding breeches.  Someday, Albert suspected, Reinhard Heydrich was going to be walking on two canes, crippled by the hip dysplasia for which his breed had long been noted. 

“Guten tag, Herr Obergruppenführer.“ he responded in that same, perfect, Bavarian accent, while shaking the German Shepherd dog’s paw, “A pleasure to make your acquaintance.  If I may be so forward, may I assume that I have been brought here with the aim of recruiting me into the SD?”

That might have been enough to dumbfound a lowly desk clerk but not the second most powerful fur in the SS.

“You may.” said Heydrich, bowing slightly, with elegant courtliness. “Your service to the Fatherland during the war has not been forgotten, Herr Cole.”

“Ach zo.” Albert had responded, leaning with one paw on his walking stick, “Then Herr  Obergruppenführer, it would be best if you did not waste your breath in making the attempt.”  At once, the canine’s teeth had become visible and the fur on his neck had stood up, but then Albert had added, unhurriedly, “Du see, I had already decided, once I realized why I had been brought here, to accept your offer...und by the way my real name is Albert K-O-H-L, not C-O-L-E and I was born in Rostock, Germany, not in America.”

That was when Reinhard Heydrich’s jaw finally hit the floor.


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