The Eighth Dwarf by Ross Thomas

sure?”
    Lieutenant Meyer nodded.
    Baker-Bates tapped the lists. “You’ve given this to the right people here at HQ?”
    â€œYes, sir, but we also thought that you should have a copy.”
    â€œBecause of my interest in him.”
    â€œYes, sir.”
    Baker-Bates read the list again. “Five living in our zone, I see. How many in yours?”
    â€œSeven in ours and four in the French.”
    â€œHave you already collected yours?”
    â€œLast night. We got six of them. The seventh—the one in Stuttgart—killed himself and his wife just as we were going in.”
    â€œHow?”
    â€œWell, we made the mistake of knocking first—”
    â€œI mean how did he kill himself?”
    â€œOh. With a knife. He cut his throat. His wife’s too. They say it was a mess.”
    Baker-Bates brought out a package of Lucky Strikes and offered them to Meyer, who took one. Each lighted his own cigarette. When they were going, Baker-Bates said, “How was he killed? Damm.”
    â€œShot. Twice.”
    â€œWho heard it?”
    â€œNobody.”
    Baker-Bates’s eyebrows went up. The Lieutenant noticed that there were traces of gray in them. “Nobody?”
    â€œWell, sir, that’s something else that’s not quite kosher. This guy Damm lived all by himself in an eight-room house almost within spitting distance of us at the Farben building. Now, you know as well as I do that nobody in Germany’s got an eight-room house all to themselves, not unless they’ve got the fix in somewhere, which is something else that we’ve got our people looking into. We don’t think his name was Damm, either. He came out of Dachau clean as a whistle, but we figure that’s where he probably fixed himself up with a new ID. We’re checking on it.”
    â€œWhere did Damm work—or did he?”
    â€œHe didn’t,” Meyer said. “He was in the black market, apparently in a pretty big way. He had a cellar full of stuff—cigarettes, coffee; he even had three cases of Johnnie Walker Scotch, and you know how hard that is to get. So at first we figured that’s why he got killed, because of some kind of black-market deal that went sour. We figured that until we found that list of names, and then we started figuring something else.”
    â€œYou say nobody heard anything?”
    â€œNo, sir.”
    â€œDid they see anything?”
    â€œMaybe.”
    â€œMaybe?”
    â€œWell, there’s this one old woman, but her eyes aren’t too good. She said she saw an American soldier go into Damm’s house about seventeen hundred hours and come out about seventeen-thirty. He was driving a jeep.”
    â€œWhat kind of soldier—could she tell?”
    â€œNo, sir. Like I said, her eyes weren’t too good, but she thought he was about six feet tall and kind of blond. That would fit, wouldn’t it?”
    â€œThat would fit.”
    â€œDoes he speak English?”
    â€œOppenheimer?”
    â€œYes, sir.”
    â€œYes, he speaks English, Lieutenant. Perfect English.”
    â€œThen that would be a pretty good disguise, wouldn’t it?”
    Baker-Bates sighed. “Like his English, it would be perfect. How many names do you think he got?”
    â€œWell, sir, there were sixteen left, like I said, and he seemed to’ve torn out half the pages that had names on ’em, so we figure that’s about what he’s got. Sixteen.”
    â€œAnd he’ll start going for them one by one,” Baker-Bates said, and ground his cigarette out in a cheap tin tray.
    â€œYou think he’s crazy, sir—Oppenheimer?”
    â€œPossibly. Why do you ask?”
    â€œWell, he’s doing pretty much what he did during the war. He acted out some pretty rotten ones then, from what I hear. Now he seems to be going back and picking off the ones that we missed or can’t find. Well, hell, sir, I know