Boys from Brazil

5

AN INDICTMENT CHARGING Frieda Altschul Maloney and eight other persons with mass murder at the Ravensbrück concentration camp was expected to be handed down at any moment; so when, on Friday, January 17th, Yakov Liebermann presented himself at the offices of Frau Maloney’s attorneys, Zweibel & Fassler of Düsseldorf, he wasn’t accorded a warm or even room-temperature welcome. But Joachim Fassler was lawyer enough to know that Liebermann hadn’t come there to gloat or kill time; there was something he wanted, and therefore something he would offer or could be asked for in exchange. So, after switching on his recorder, Fassler received Liebermann in his office.

He was right. The Jew wanted to meet with Frieda and question her about certain matters in no way related to her wartime activities and having no bearing whatsoever on the approaching trial—American matters involving the period from 1960 to 1963. What American matters? Adoptions that she or someone else had arranged on the basis of information she had got from the files of the Rush-Gaddis Agency.

“I know of no such adoptions,” Fassler said.

Liebermann said, “Frau Maloney does.”

If she saw him and answered his questions fully and candidly, he would tell Fassler about some of the testimony that was going to be presented against her by witnesses he had located.

“Which ones?”

“Not their names, only some of their testimony.”

“Come now, Herr Liebermann, you know I’m not going to buy that kind of pig in a poke.”

“The price is cheap enough, isn’t it? An hour or so of her time? She can’t be very busy, sitting in her cell.”

“She may not want to talk about these alleged adoptions.”

“Why not ask her? There are three witnesses whose testimony I know about. You can either hear it cold in the courtroom or have a preview tomorrow.”

“I’m truly and honestly not that concerned.”

“Then I guess we can’t do business.”

It took four days to work it all out. Frau Maloney would speak to Liebermann for half an hour about the matters that interested him, provided that A) Fassler was present; B) no fourth party was present; C) nothing was written down; and D) Liebermann permitted Fassler to search him for a recording device immediately prior to the interview. In return Liebermann would tell Fassler all he knew about the probable testimony of the three witnesses and give each one’s age, sex, occupation, and present mental and physical condition, with particular regard to any scars, deformities, or disabilities resulting from experiences at Ravensbrück. The testimony and description of one witness would be supplied prior to the interview; those of the other two subsequent to it. Agreed and agreed.

On Wednesday morning, the 22nd, Liebermann and Fassler drove together in Fassler’s silver-gray sports car to the federal prison in Düsseldorf where Frieda Maloney had been confined since her extradition from the United States in 1973. Fassler, a stout and well-groomed man in his mid-fifties, was almost as pink-cheeked as usual but—when they identified themselves and signed in—hadn’t yet regained his customary swaggering assurance. Liebermann had told him about the most damaging witness first, hoping that the fear of worse to come would make him, and through him Frieda Maloney, anxious not to give short weight in the interview.

A guard took them up in an elevator and led them along a carpeted corridor where a few guards and matrons sat silently on benches between walnut doors marked with chrome letters. The guard opened a door marked G and showed Fassler and Liebermann into a square beige-walled room with a round conference table and several chairs. Two mesh-curtained windows gave daylight through adjacent walls, one window barred and the other not, which struck Liebermann as odd.

The guard switched on an overhead light, making scarcely a difference in the already light room. He withdrew, closing the door.

They put their hats and briefcases on the shelf of a corner coatrack, and took their coats off and hung them on hangers. Liebermann stood with his arms outstretched and Fassler searched him, looking pugnacious and determined. He felt the pockets of Liebermann’s hanging coat and asked him to open his briefcase. Liebermann sighed but unstrapped it and opened it; showed papers and the Farago book, closed and restrapped it.

He satisfied himself about the windows—the unbarred one gave on a high-walled yard far below; the barred one had black rooftop close beneath—and then he sat down at the table with his back toward the unbarred window; but immediately got up again so he wouldn’t have to rise or not rise when Frieda Maloney came in.

Fassler opened the barred window a bit and stood looking out through it, holding aside the beige mesh curtain.

Liebermann folded his arms and looked at a carafe and paper-wrapped glasses on a tray on the table.

He had reported Frieda Altschul’s record and whereabouts to the German and American authorities in 1967. The record had been in the Center’s files, distilled from conversations and correspondence with dozens of Ravensbrück survivors (the three soon-to-be witnesses among them); the whereabouts had been given him by two more survivors, sisters, who had spotted their former guard at a New York racetrack and followed her to her home. He himself had never met the woman. He didn’t look forward to sitting at the same table with her. Aside from everything else, his middle sister Ida had died at Ravensbrück; it was entirely possible that Frieda Altschul Maloney had had a hand in her death.

He put Ida from his mind; put everything from it except the Rush-Gaddis Agency, and six or more boys who looked alike. A former file clerk at Rush-Gaddis is coming in, he told himself. We’ll sit at this table and talk awhile, and maybe I’ll find out what the hell is going on.

Fassler turned from the window, pushed his cuff back, frowned at his watch.

The door opened and Frieda Maloney came in, in a light-blue uniform dress, her hands in her pockets. A matron smiled over her shoulder and said, “Good morning, Herr Fassler.”

“Good morning,” Fassler said, going forward. “How are you?”

“Fine, thanks,” the matron said. She gave her smile to Liebermann, and covered it with closing door.

Fassler held Frieda Maloney’s shoulder, kissed her cheek, and backed her into the corner, speaking softly. She was gone behind his bigness.

Liebermann cleared his throat and sat down, drew the chair in to the table.

He had seen what photographs had shown: an ordinary-looking middle-aged woman. On the small side, graying hair combed up at the sides, curls on top. Gray-white unhealthy skin, a wide jaw, a disappointed mouth. Eyes that were tired but resolute, a lighter blue than the prison dress. She might have been an overworked chambermaid or waitress. Some day, he thought, I would like to meet a monster who looks like a monster.

He held the table’s thick wood edge and tried to hear what Fassler was saying.

They were coming to the table.

He looked at Frieda Maloney, and she—as Fassler drew back the chair opposite—looked at him, the blue eyes measuring, the thin-lipped mouth down-drawn. She nodded, sitting.

He nodded back.

She flicked a thanking smile toward Fassler, and with her elbows on the chair arms, tapped with the flats of her fingers at the table edge, one hand’s fingers and then the other’s, fairly quickly; then stopped and let them rest there, looking at them.

Liebermann looked at them too.

“It’s now exactly”—Fassler, seated at Liebermann’s right, studied the watch on his raised wrist—“twenty-five of twelve.” He looked at Liebermann.

Liebermann looked at Frieda Maloney.

She looked at him. Her thin eyebrows arched.

He found he couldn’t speak. No breath was in him; only hatred. His heart pounded.

Frieda Maloney sucked at her lower lip, glanced toward Fassler, looked at Liebermann again; said, “I don’t mind talking about the baby business. I made a lot of people very happy. It’s nothing I’m ashamed of.” She had a soft South German accent; easier to listen to than Fassler’s Düsseldorf rasping. “And as far as the Comrades Organization is concerned,” she said contemptuously, “they’re no comrades of mine any more. If they were, I wouldn’t be here, would I? I’d be down in Sowze Amayrica”—her eyes widened—“living zee good life.” She put a hand above her head and snapped her fingers, swaying her torso in mock-Latin rhythm.

“The best thing, I think,” Fassler said to her, “would be for you to tell everything as you told it to me.” He looked at Liebermann. “And then you can ask whatever questions you want. As time allows. You agree?”

Breath came back. “Yes,” Liebermann said. “Provided time does allow for questions.”

“You aren’t really going to count minutes, are you?” Frieda Maloney asked Fassler.

“I certainly am,” he said. “An agreement is an agreement.” And to Liebermann, “There’ll be enough time, don’t worry.” He looked at Frieda Maloney and nodded.

She folded her hands on the table, looked at Liebermann. “A man from the Organization got in touch with me,” she said. “In 1960, in the spring. An uncle of mine in Argentina told them about me. He’s dead now. They wanted me to get a job with an adoption agency. Alois—the man, that is—had a list of three or four of them. Any one would be all right as long as it was a job where I could look at the files. ‘Alois’ was the only name he ever gave me, no last name. Over seventy, white-haired; an old-soldier-type with very straight posture.” Her eyes questioned Liebermann.

He gave no response, and she sat back in her chair and examined her fingernails. “I went to all the places,” she said. “There were no openings. But after the summer Rush-Gaddis called me in, and they hired me. As a file clerk.” She smiled musingly. “My husband thought I was crazy, taking a job in Manhattan. I was working then at a high school only eleven blocks from home. I told him that they promised me at Rush-Gaddis that in a—”

“Just the essentials, yes?” Fassler said.

Frieda Maloney frowned, nodded. “So. Rush-Gaddis.” She looked at Liebermann. “What I did there was go through the mail and the files looking for applications where the husband was born between 1908 and 1912 and the wife between 1931 and 1935. The husband had to have a job in the civil service, and both of them had to be white Christians with a Nordic background. This was what Alois told me. Whenever I found one, and that was only once or twice a month, I copied it on the machine there along with all the letters between the couple and Rush-Gaddis. These were only people who hadn’t been given babies, of course. Two sets I made, one for Alois and one for me. The ones for him I mailed to a box-number he gave me.”

“Where?” Liebermann asked.

“Right there in Manhattan. The Planetarium Station, on the West Side. I kept doing that, looking for the right kind of applications and mailing them, the whole time I was there. After a year or so it got even harder to find them, because I’d been through the files by then and only had the new applications to look at. The civil-service part was changed then; as long as the job was like civil service it was all right. Something where the man was with a big organization and had some authority; an insurance company claim adjuster, for instance. So I had to go through the files again. Altogether I must have mailed off forty or forty-five applications in the three years. Copies of applications.”

She leaned forward and took one of the paper-wrapped glasses from the tray, turned it in her hands. “Between…oh, Christmas 1960 and the end of summer 1963, which is when it ended and I left, this is what would happen. Alois or another man, Willi, would call me. Usually Willi. He’d say, ‘See if…“the Smiths” in California want one in March.’ Or whatever month, usually two months away. ‘Ask “the Browns” in New Jersey too.’ Maybe he’d give me three names.” She looked at Liebermann, explained: “People whose applications I mailed before.”

He nodded.

“So. I would call the Smiths and the Browns.” She picked the wrapper-top out of the mouth of the glass. “A former neighbor of theirs told me they wanted a baby, I would say. Were they still interested? Almost always they were.” She looked challengingly at Liebermann. “Not just interested. Overjoyed. The women especially.” She gathered the wrapper into her hand, pushing the glass out bit by bit. “I told them I could get them one, a healthy white infant a few weeks old, in March or whenever. With New York State adoption papers. But first they had to send me as soon as possible complete medical reports—I gave them Alois’s box-number—and they’d also have to agree never to tell the child it was adopted. The mother insisted on that, I said. And of course they’d have to pay me something when they came and got the baby, if they got it. A thousand usually, sometimes more if they could afford it. I could tell from the application. Enough so it would seem like an ordinary black-market arrangement.”

She put the crushed wrapper on the tray and lifted the stopper from the carafe. “A few weeks later I’d get another call. ‘Smith is no good. Brown can have it on March fifteenth.’ Or maybe—” She tipped the carafe over the glass, tipped it farther; nothing came out. “Typical,” she said, turning the black carafe upside down. “Typical of the way this whole damn place is run! Wrapped glasses but no water in the damn bottle! God!” She slammed the carafe down onto the tray; wrapped glasses jumped.

Fassler stood up. “I’ll get some,” he said, taking the carafe. “You go on.” He went away toward the door.

Frieda Maloney said to Liebermann, “I could tell you things about the gross ineptness here…God! So. Yes. He tells me who gets the baby and when. Or maybe both couples are good, so he tells me to call the second and tell them it’s too late for this one but I know another girl who’s expecting in June.” She rolled the glass between her palms, her lips pursed. “On the night a baby was given,” she said, “everything was worked out very carefully in advance. By Alois or Willi and me, and by me and the couple. I would be in a room at the Howard Johnson Motel at the airport, Kennedy now—it was Idlewild then—using the name Elizabeth Gregory. The baby was brought to me, by a young couple or a woman alone or sometimes a stewardess. Some of them brought more than one—at different times, I mean—but usually it was someone new each time. They brought the papers too. Exactly like real ones, with the couple’s names filled in. An hour or two later the couple would come and get the baby. Joyously. Grateful to me.” She looked at Liebermann. “Nice people who would be good parents. They would pay me, and promise—I made them swear on the Bible there—never to tell the boy he was adopted. They were always boys. Darlings. And they would take them and go.”

Liebermann said, “Don’t you know where they came from? Originally, I mean?”

“The boys? From Brazil.” Frieda Maloney looked away. “The people who brought them were Brazilian,” she said, holding out her hand, “and the stewardesses were from the Brazilian airline, Varig.” She took the carafe from Fassler, brought it to her glass, poured water. Fassler went around the table and sat down.

“From Brazil…” Liebermann said.

Frieda Maloney drank, putting the carafe on the tray. She drank, lowered the glass, licked her lips. “Almost always everything went like clockwork,” she said. “One time the couple didn’t show up. I called and they said they changed their mind. So I took the baby home with me and arranged for the next couple to come. Also new papers. I told my husband there was a mix-up at Rush-Gaddis and nobody else had room for the baby. He didn’t know anything about anything. To this day he doesn’t know. And that’s it. Altogether there must have been about twenty babies; a few close together at the beginning, and after that, one every two or three months.” She raised the glass and sipped.

“Twelve of,” Fassler said, looking at his watch. He smiled at Liebermann. “You see? You have seventeen minutes left.”

Liebermann looked at Frieda Maloney. “How did the babies look?” he asked her.

“Beautiful,” she said. “Blue eyes, dark hair. They were all alike, even more alike than babies usually are. They looked European, not Brazilian; they had light skin, and the blue eyes.”

“Were you told they were from Brazil or did you base that just on…?”

“I wasn’t told anything about them. Only what night they would be brought to the motel, and what time.”

“Whose babies did you think they were?”

“Her opinion,” Fassler said, “certainly doesn’t have any bearing on anything.”

Frieda Maloney waved a hand. “What difference does it make?” she asked, and said to Liebermann, “I thought they were the children of Germans in South America. The illegitimate children, maybe, of German girls and South American boys. As to why the Organization was putting them into North America, and choosing the families so carefully—that I couldn’t figure out at all.”

“You didn’t ask?”

“At the very beginning,” she said, “when Alois first told me what kind of applications to look for, I asked him what it was all about. He told me not to ask questions, just to do what I was told. For the Fatherland.”

“And I’m sure you were aware,” Fassler reminded her, “that if you didn’t cooperate, he could have exposed you to the kind of harassment that finally came years later.”

“Yes, of course,” Frieda Maloney said. “I was aware of that. Naturally.”

Liebermann said, “The twenty couples you gave the babies to—”

“About twenty,” Frieda Maloney said. “Maybe a few less. No more than twenty.”

“They were all American?”

“Do you mean from the United States? No, some were Canadian. Five or six. The rest were from the States.”

“No Europeans.”

“No.”

Liebermann sat silently, rubbing his earlobe.

Fassler glanced at his watch.

Liebermann said, “Do you remember their names?”

Frieda Maloney smiled. “It was thirteen, fourteen years ago,” she said. “I remember one, Wheelock, because they gave me my dog and I called them for advice sometimes. They raised them, Dobermans. The Henry Wheelocks, in New Providence, Pennsylvania. I mentioned we were thinking of getting one, so they brought Sally, just ten weeks old then, when they came for the baby. A beautiful dog. We still have her. My husband still has her.”

Liebermann said, “Guthrie?”

Frieda Maloney looked at him, and nodded. “Yes,” she said. “The first one was Guthrie; that’s right.”

“From Tucson.”

“No. In Ohio. No, Iowa. Yes, Ames, Iowa.”

“They moved to Tucson,” Liebermann said. “He died in an accident this past October.”

“Ohh…” Frieda Maloney bit her lip regretfully.

“Who was next, after the Guthries?”

She shook her head. “This is when there were a few close together, only two weeks apart.”

“Curry?”

She looked at Liebermann. “Yes,” she said. “From Massachusetts. But not right after the Guthries. Wait a minute now. The Guthries were at the end of February; and then another couple, from someplace in the South—Macon, I think; and then the Currys. And then the Wheelocks.”

“Two weeks after the Currys?”

“No, two or three months. After the first three they were spread out.”

Liebermann asked Fassler, “Would it kill you if I wrote this down? It’s not going to hurt her, in America so long ago.”

Fassler scowled and sighed. “All right,” he said.

“Why is it important?” Frieda Maloney asked.

Liebermann got out his pen and found a piece of paper in his pocket. “How is ‘Wheelock’ spelled?” he asked.

She spelled it for him.

“New Providence, Pennsylvania?”

“Yes.”

“Try to remember: exactly how long after the Currys did they get their baby?”

“I can’t remember exactly. Two or three months; it wasn’t a regular schedule.”

“Was it closer to two months or to three?”

“She can’t remember,” Fassler said.

“All right,” Liebermann said. “Who came after the Wheelocks?”

Frieda Maloney sighed. “I can’t remember who came when,” she said. “There were twenty, over two and a half years. There was a Truman, not related to Truman the President. I think they were one of the Canadian couples. And there was…‘Corwin’ or ‘Corbin,’ something like that. Corbett.”

She remembered three more names, and six cities. Liebermann wrote them down.

“Time,” Fassler said. “Would you mind waiting for me outside?”

Liebermann put his pen and paper away. He looked at Frieda Maloney, nodded.

She nodded back.

He got up and went to the coatrack; put his coat over his arm and took his hat and briefcase from the shelf. He went to the door, and stopped and stood motionless; turned. “I’d like to ask one more question,” he said.

They looked at him. Fassler nodded.

He looked at Frieda Maloney and said, “When is your dog’s birthday?”

She looked blankly at him.

“Do you know?” he asked her.

“Yes,” she said. “April twenty-sixth.”

“Thank you,” he said; and to Fassler: “Please don’t be too long; I want to get this over with.” He turned and opened the door and went out into the corridor.

He sat on a bench doing some figuring with his pen and a pocket calendar. The matron, sitting on the other side of his folded coat, said, “Do you think you’ll get her off?”

“I’m not a lawyer,” he said.

Fassler, nudging his car restlessly against stalled traffic, said, “I’m totally mystified. Would you tell me, please, what the Organization was doing in the baby business?”

“I’m sorry,” Liebermann said, “but that’s not in our agreement.”

As if he knew.

He went back to Vienna. Where, in the face of a court order, the desks and file cabinets were being moved to an office Max had found, two small rooms in a run-down building in the Fifteenth District. And where he, therefore, had to move at once—Lili was already looking—to a smaller and cheaper apartment (good-by, Glanzer, you bastard). And where, what with one thing and another—two months’ advance on the office, legal fees, moving costs, the phone bill—there was hardly enough left in the kitty to buy a ticket to Salzburg, let alone Washington.

Which was where he had to go the week after next, February 4th or 5th.

He explained to Max and Esther while they made the new office look more like the War Crimes Information Center and less like H. Haupt & Son, Advertising Specialties. “The Guthries and the Currys,” he said, scraping the second H from the doorpane with a paper-pinched razor blade, “got their babies about four weeks apart, at the end of February and the end of March, 1961. And Guthrie and Curry were killed four weeks apart, one day over, in the same order. The Wheelocks got their baby around July fifth—this I know because they gave Frieda Maloney a ten-week-old puppy that was born on April twenty-sixth—”

“What?” Esther turned and looked at him. She held a map to the wall while Max pushed thumbtacks in.

“—and from the end of March to July fifth,” Liebermann said, scraping, “is roughly fourteen weeks. So it’s a good bet that Wheelock is supposed to be killed around February twenty-second, fourteen weeks after Curry. And I want to be in Washington two or three weeks before.”

Esther said, “I think I follow you,” and Max said, “What’s not to follow? They’re being killed in the same order they got the babies, and the same time apart. The question is—why?”

The question, Liebermann felt, would have to wait. Stopping the killings, whatever their reason, was what mattered, and his best chance of doing that was through the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation. They could confirm easily enough that two men who had died in “accidents” were the fathers of illicitly adopted look-alike sons, and that Henry Wheelock was a third (or fourth, if they turned up the one in Macon-maybe). On February 22nd, give or take a few days, they could capture Wheelock’s intended killer, and learn from him the identities, and maybe even the schedules, of the other five. (Liebermann believed now that the six killers were working singly, not in pairs, because of the closeness in time of the murders of Döring, Guthrie, Horve, and Runsten—all in different countries.)

He might also, more easily, go to the Federal Criminal Investigation Department in Bonn, since he was certain that a German adoption agency (and an English and three Scandinavian ones) had had a Frieda Maloney searching its files and distributing babies. Klaus had found the boy in Freiburg identical to the one in Trittau, and Liebermann himself, while in Düsseldorf, had called the Frauen Döring, Rausenberger, and Schreiber, getting, in response to “Tell me, please, is your son adopted?,” two surprised and wary yesses, one furious no, and three orders to mind his own business.

But in Bonn he would have no next victim to offer, and the explanation of how he had got Frieda Maloney to talk wouldn’t be well received. He himself wouldn’t be well received either, as he hoped he might be in Washington. Besides, in his Jewish heart of hearts, he didn’t trust German authorities as much as American where Nazi matters were concerned.

So, Washington and the F.B.I.

He sat at the phone in the new office calling old contributors. “I don’t like to buttonhole you this way, but believe me, it’s important. Something that’s going on now, with six SS men and Mengele.” Inflation, they told him. Recession. Business was awful. He began bringing in dead parents, the Six Million—which he hated doing, using guilt as a fundraiser. He got a few promises. “Please, right away,” he said. “It’s important.”

“But it’s not possible,” Lili said, spooning a second deadly portion of potato kugel onto his plate. “How can there be so many boys who look alike?”

“Darling,” Max said to her across their table, “don’t say it’s not possible. Yakov saw. His friend from Heidelberg saw.”

“Frieda Maloney saw,” Liebermann said. “The babies were all alike, more than babies usually are.”

Lili made a spit-sound at the floor beside her. “She should die.”

“The name she used,” Liebermann said, “was Elizabeth Gregory. I meant to ask her if it was given to her or if she picked it herself, but I forgot.”

“What’s the difference?” Max asked, chewing.

Lili said, “Gregory. The name Mengele used in Argentina.”

“Oh, of course.”

“It must have come from him,” Liebermann said. “Everything must have come from him, the whole operation. He was signing it, even if he didn’t mean to.”

Some money came in—from Sweden and the States—and he booked a ticket to Washington via Frankfurt and New York, for Tuesday, February 4th.

On Friday evening, January 31st, Mengele was using the name Mengele. He had flown with his bodyguards to Florianópolis on the island of Santa Catarina, roughly midway between São Paulo and Pôrto Alegre, where in the ballroom of the Hotel Novo Hamburgo, decorated for the occasion with swastikas and red and black streamers, the Sons of National Socialism were holding a hundred-cruzeiros-ahead dinner dance. What excitement when Mengele made his appearance! Big Nazis, the ones who had played stellar roles in the Third Reich and were known throughout the world, tended to be snobbish toward the Sons, declining their invitations on grounds of ill health and making testy comments about their leader, Hans Stroop (who even the Sons would admit sometimes overdid his Hitler act). But here was Herr Doktor Mengele himself, in the flesh and white dinner jacket, shaking hands, kissing cheeks, beaming, laughing, repeating new names. How kind of him to come! And how healthy and happy he looked!

And was. And why not? It was the 31st, wasn’t it? Tomorrow he would paint four more checks on the chart and be more than halfway down the first column—eighteen. He was going to every dance and party available these days; a reaction, of course, to the anguish and depression he had gone through back in November and early December, when it had looked for a while as if Jew-bastard Liebermann was going to spoil everything. Sipping champagne in this festive ballroom full of admiring Aryans, some of the men in Nazi uniforms (squint a little: Berlin in the thirties), he was amazed to remember the state he’d been in scarcely two months back. Absolutely Dostoevskian! Plotting, planning, making arrangements to leap into the breach if the Organization betrayed him (which they had been on the verge of doing, there was no doubt of that). But then Liebermann had led Mundt off on a tour of France, and Schwimmer through the wrong cities in England; and finally, thank God, had given up and stayed home, assuming, no doubt, that his young American stooge had been mistaken. (Thank God, too, that they had got to him before he had actually played the tape for Liebermann.) So we sip champagne and eat these delicious little whatever-they-ares (“A pleasure to be here! Thank you!”) while poor Liebermann, according to The New York Times, is off in the wilds of America on what, reading between the lines of Jew-controlled puffery, is surely a very small-potatoes lecture tour. And it’s winter there! Snow, please, God; plenty of snow!

He sat on the dais with Stroop at his left; was toasted by him most eloquently—the man wasn’t as much of an idiot as he’d expected—and turned his attention to the ravishing blonde on his right. Last year’s Miss Nazi she turned out to be, and small wonder. Though wedding-ringed now and—no fooling his eye—pregnant, four months. Husband in Rio on business; thrilled to be sitting next to such a distinguished…Maybe? He could always stay over; fly back bright and early.

While he was dancing with pregnant Miss Nazi, working his hand down gradually onto her really marvelous ass, Farnbach danced close and said, “Good evening! How are you? We heard you were here and came gate-crashing. May I present my wife Ilse? Sweetheart, Herr Doktor Mengele.”

He kept dancing in place and smiling, thinking he had had too much to drink, but Farnbach didn’t disappear or turn into someone else; he stayed Farnbach—became more Farnbach, in fact; shaven-headed, thick-lipped, introducing himself hungry-eyed to Miss Nazi while the ugly little woman in his arms yammered about “honor” and “pleasure” and “though you took Bruno away from me!”

He stopped dancing, freed his arms.

Farnbach explained cheerfully to him: “We’re at the Excelsior. A little second honeymoon.”

He stared at him, and said, “You’re supposed to be in Kristianstad. Getting ready to kill Oscarsson.”

Gasp from the ugly woman. Farnbach went white, stared back at him.

“Traitor!” he screamed. “Pig of a—” Words couldn’t do it; he flung himself at Farnbach and grabbed his thick neck; pushed him backward through dancers, strangling him, while Farnbach’s hands pulled at his arms. Red-faced the no-word-for-him now, blue eyes bulging. Scream of a woman; people turning: “Oh my God!” A table stopped Farnbach, lifted its far side; people retreated. He pushed Farnbach down, strangling him; the table shot up, pouring dishes-glasses-cutlery as they fell before it, spilling soup and wine on Farnbach’s shaven head, washing his purpling face.

Hands pulled at Mengele; women screamed; the music splintered and died. Rudi tore at Mengele’s wrists, looking pleadingly at him.

He let go, allowed himself to be pulled up and away, set on his feet. “This man is a traitor!” he shouted at them all. “He betrayed me, he betrayed you! He betrayed the race! He betrayed the Aryan race!”

A scream from the ugly woman kneeling at Farnbach’s side as, red-faced and wet, he rubbed his throat, gasping. “There’s glass in his head!” she cried. “Oh my God! Get a doctor! Oh Bruno, Bruno!”

“This man should be killed,” Mengele explained breathily to the men around him. “He betrayed the Aryan race. He was given a job to do, a soldier’s duty. He chose not to do it.”

The men looked confused and concerned. Rudi rubbed Mengele’s blotched wrists.

Farnbach coughed, trying to say something. He pushed his wife’s napkin-hand from his face and raised himself on one arm, looking up toward Mengele. He coughed and rubbed at his throat. His wife clutched his wet-darkened shoulders. “Don’t move!” she told him. “Oh God! Where’s a doctor?”

“They!” Farnbach barked. “Called! Me back!” A drop of blood slid down in front of his right ear and became a small ruby earring, hanging, growing.

Mengele pushed men away, looked down.

“Monday!” Farnbach told him. “I was in Kristianstad! Setting things up for”—he looked at the others, looked at Mengele—“for what I had to do!” His blood-earring dropped; another began growing in its place. “They called me in Stockholm and told”—he glanced toward his wife, looked at Mengele—“someone I knew there that I should come back. To my company’s office. At once.”

“You’re lying,” Mengele said.

“No!” Farnbach cried; his blood-earring dropped. “Everyone’s back! One was at—the office when I got there! Two had already been! The other two were coming!”

Mengele stared at him, swallowed. “Why?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” Farnbach told him scornfully. “I don’t ask questions any more. I do as I’m told.”

“Where’s a doctor?” his wife screamed; “He’s on his way!” someone called from the door.

Mengele said, “I…am a doctor.”

“Don’t you come near him!”

He looked at Farnbach’s wife. “Shut up,” he said. He looked around. “Does anyone have a pair of tweezers?”

In the banquet manager’s office he picked slivers of glass out of the back of Farnbach’s head with tweezers and a magnifying glass, while Rudi held a lamp close beside. “Just a few more,” he said, dropping the largest sliver into an ashtray.

Farnbach, sitting bent over, said nothing.

Mengele dabbed the cuts with disinfectant and taped a gauze square over them. “I’m very sorry,” he said.

Farnbach stood up, straightened his damp jacket. “And when,” he asked, “do we find out why we were sent?”

Mengele looked at him for a moment and said, “I thought you stopped asking questions.”

Farnbach turned on his heel and went out.

Mengele gave the tweezers to Rudi and sent him out too. “Find Tin-tin,” he said. “We’ll be leaving soon. Send him ahead to warn Erico. And close the door.”

He put things back in the first-aid kit, sat down at the slovenly desk, took his glasses off, palmed his forehead dry. He got out his cigarette case; lit a cigarette and drew on it, dropped the match on the slivers of glass. He put his glasses back on and got out his address book.

He called Seibert’s private number. A Brazilian maid with the giggles told him that the senhor and senhora were out, she didn’t know where.

He tried headquarters, expecting no answer; got none.

Ostreicher’s son Siegfried gave him another number, where Ostreicher himself answered the phone.

“This is Mengele. I’m in Florianópolis. I just saw Farnbach.”

Silence, and then: “Damn it. The colonel was going to tell you in the morning; he’s been putting it off. He’s very unhappy about it. He fought like hell.”

“I can imagine,” Mengele said. “What happened?”

“It’s that son of a bitch Liebermann. He saw Frieda Maloney sometime last week.”

“He’s in America!” Mengele cried.

“Not unless they moved it to Düsseldorf. She must have told him the whole story of her end of things. Her lawyer asked some of our friends there how come we were black-marketing babies in the 1960’s. He convinced them it was true, and they asked us. Rudel flew in last Sunday, there was a three-hour meeting—Seibert very much wanted you to be there; Rudel and some of the others didn’t—and that was it. The men came in on Tuesday and Wednesday.”

Mengele pushed his glasses up and groaned, holding his eyes. “Why couldn’t they simply have killed Liebermann?” he asked. “Are they lunatics, or Jews themselves, or what? Mundt would have leaped at the chance. He wanted to do it on his own, at the very beginning. He, alone, is smarter than all your colonels put together.”

“Would you like to hear their reasoning?”

“Go ahead. If I vomit while you’re speaking, please excuse me.”

“Seventeen of the men are dead. This means, according to your figures, that we can be sure of one or even two successes. And maybe one or two more among the others, since some of the men will die naturally at sixty-five. Liebermann still doesn’t know everything, because Maloney doesn’t. But she may have remembered names, and if she did, his next logical step is to try to trap Hessen.”

“Then just bring him in! Why all six?”

“That’s what Seibert said.”

“And?”

“This is where you’ll vomit. The whole thing has become too risky. That’s Rudel. It’s going to end up putting the Organization in the limelight, and so would Liebermann’s murder. Better to settle for the one or two successes or even more—which are enough, aren’t they?—and close everything down. Let Liebermann spend the rest of his life Hessen-hunting.”

“But he won’t. He’ll catch on eventually and concentrate on the boys.”

“Maybe and maybe not.”

“The truth is,” Mengele said, taking his glasses off, “they’re a bunch of tired old men who’ve lost their balls. They want only to die of old age in their villas by the sea. If their grandchildren become the last Aryans in a world of human shit, they couldn’t care less. I would line them up in front of a firing squad.”

“Come on now, they helped bring us this far.”

“What if my figures were wrong? What if the chance isn’t one out of ten but one out of twenty? Or thirty? Or ninety-four? Where are we then?”

“Look, if it were up to me I would kill Liebermann regardless of the consequences and go on with the others. I’m on your side. Seibert is too. I know you don’t believe it, but he put up one hell of a battle. It would have been settled in five minutes if not for him.”

“That’s very comforting,” Mengele said. “I have to go now. Good night.” He hung up.

He sat with his elbows on the desk, his chin on the thumbs of his finger-locked hands, his lips kissing his inmost knuckle. So it always is, he thought, when one depends on others. Was there ever a man of vision, of genius (yes, genius, damn it!), who was well served by the Rudels and Seiberts of this world?

Outside the closed door of the office, Rudi waited, and Hans Stroop and his lieutenants; and the banquet manager and general manager of the hotel; and, at a discreet distance, Miss Nazi, not listening to the young man in uniform talking to her.

When Mengele came out, Stroop went to him with open arms and an ingratiating smile. “That poor fellow’s gone off into the night,” he said. “Come, we’re holding the main course for you.”

“You shouldn’t have,” Mengele said. “I have to go.” He took Rudi by the arm and hurried toward the exit.

Klaus called and said he knew everything: how ninety-four boys could be as alike as twins and why Mengele would want their adoptive fathers killed on specific dates.

Liebermann, who had been up the night before with rheumatic aches and diarrhea, was spending the day in bed, and the first thing that struck him was the nice symmetry of it: a question put to him by one young man, by telephone while he was in bed, would be answered for him by another young man, by telephone while he was in bed. He was certain Klaus would be right. “Go ahead,” he said, gathering the pillows up behind him.

“Herr Liebermann”—Klaus sounded uncomfortable—“it’s not the sort of thing I can rattle off over the phone; it’s complicated, and I really don’t understand it thoroughly myself. I’ve only had it at second hand, from Lena, this girl I live with. It was her idea, and she spoke about it to a professor of hers. He’s the one who really knows. Could you come up here and I’ll arrange a meeting? I promise you it has to be the explanation.”

“I’m leaving for Washington on Tuesday morning.”

“Then fly up tomorrow. Or better yet, come Monday, stay over, and go on from here Tuesday. You must be going through Frankfurt anyway, yes? I’ll pick you up at the airport there and bring you back again. We can meet with the professor Monday night. You’ll stay here with Lena and me; you get the bed, we get the sleeping bags.”

Liebermann said, “Give me at least the gist of it now.”

“No. Really, it has to be explained by someone who knows what he’s talking about. Is this why you’re going to Washington?”

“Yes.”

“Then you certainly want as much information as possible, don’t you? I promise you, you won’t be wasting your time.”

“All right, I trust you. I’ll let you know what time I’ll be getting in. You’d better check with this professor and make sure he’s free.”

“I will, but I’m sure he will be. Lena says he’s anxious to meet you and help. So is she. She’s Swedish, so she has a vested interest. Because of the one in Göteborg.”

“What does he teach, her professor—political science?”

“Biology.”

“Biology?”

“That’s right. I have to go out now, but we’ll be in all day tomorrow.”

“I’ll call. Thank you, Klaus. Good-by.”

He hung up.

So much for nice symmetry.

A professor of biology?

Seibert was relieved not to have had to be the one to break the news to Mengele, but he also felt he had got off the hook perhaps too easily; his long association with Mengele, and his admiration of his truly remarkable talent, suggested that he offer some sort of expression of commiseration and good cheer, and in fairness to himself he also wanted to present a fuller description than Ostreicher claimed to have given of the heated battle he had fought against Rudel, Schwartzkopf, et al. He tried to raise Mengele on the radio during the weekend, and unable to do so, flew out to the compound early Monday afternoon, taking his six-year-old grandson Ferdi along for the flight and bringing with him new recordings of Die Walküre and Götterdämmerung.

The landing strip was empty. Seibert doubted that Mengele had stayed on in Florianópolis, but it was possible that he was in Asunción or Curitiba for the day. Or he might only have sent his pilot into Asunción for supplies.

They walked along the pathway toward the house, Seibert and prancing Ferdi, with the co-pilot, who wanted to use the bathroom, walking behind them.

No one was about—no guards, no servants. The barracks, whose door the co-pilot tried, was locked, and the servants’ house was closed and shuttered. Seibert grew uneasy.

The main house’s back door was locked, and its front door too. Seibert pounded and waited. A small toy tank lay on the floorboards; Ferdi bent to it, but Seibert said sharply, “Don’t touch!”—as if infection might lurk.

The co-pilot kicked in one of the windows, elbowed away the remaining peaks of glass, and carefully put himself through. A moment later he unlocked and opened the door.

The house was deserted but in good order, with no signs of a hasty departure.

In the study, the glass-topped desk was as Seibert had seen it last, the painting things lined up on a towel at a corner. He turned to the chart.

It was raped with red. Slashes like blood tore down through the boxes in the third and second columns. The first column’s boxes held neat red checks halfway down, then larger and wilder checks, stabbing beyond the boxes.

Ferdi, looking worried, said, “He went outside the lines.”

Seibert gazed at the ravaged chart. “Yes,” he said. “Outside the lines. Yes.” He nodded.

“What is it?” Ferdi asked.

“A list of names.” Seibert turned and put the package of records on the desk. A bracelet of animal claws lay at its center. “Hecht!” he called; and louder, “Hecht!”

The co-pilot’s answering “sir?” came faintly.

“Finish what you’re doing and go back to the plane!” Seibert picked up the bracelet. “Bring me a can of gas!”

“Yes, sir!”

“Bring Schumann back with you!”

“Yes, sir!”

Seibert examined the bracelet and tossed it back onto the desk. He sighed.

“What are you going to do?” Ferdi asked him.

He nodded toward the chart. “Burn that.”

“Why?”

“So no one ever sees it.”

“Will the house catch on fire?”

“Yes, but the man who owns it isn’t coming back.”

“How do you know? He’ll be angry if he does.”

“Go play with that little toy outside.”

“I want to watch.”

“Do as I say!”

“Yes, sir.” Ferdi hurried from the room.

“Stay on the porch!” Seibert called after him.

He pushed the long table with its stacks of magazines close against the wall. Then he went to the file drawers under the laboratory window, crouched and opened one, and took out a thick handful of folders and another thick handful. He brought them to the table and fitted them between magazine stacks. He looked ruefully at the red-slashed chart, shook his head.

He brought several loads of folders to the table, and when there was room for no more, opened the remaining drawers. He unlocked and opened the windows behind the desk.

He stood looking at the Hitler memorabilia above the sofa, took three or four items from the wall, looked speculatively at the large central portrait.

The co-pilot came in with a red fuel can; the pilot stood in the doorway.

Seibert put the things he had taken on the package of records. “Take out the portrait,” he told the co-pilot. He sent the pilot off to make sure no one was in the house and to open all the windows.

“May I stand on the sofa?” the co-pilot asked.

Seibert said, “My God, why on earth not?”

He poured gasoline over the folders and magazines, standing well back, and tossed a few splashes up onto the chart itself. Names gleamed wetly: Hesketh, Eisenbud, Arlen, Looft.

The co-pilot carried the portrait out.

Seibert put the can outside the door and went to the open file drawers. He took from one a few sheets of paper and twisted them into a white branch as he moved to the desk. He picked up the lighter there, a cylindrical black one, and pressed flame from it a few times.

The pilot reported no one in the house and the windows open. Seibert had him take out the records and mementos and the fuel can. “Make sure my grandson’s there,” he told him.

He waited a moment, lighter in one hand, white paper branch in the other. “Is he with you, Schumann?” he called.

“Yes, sir!”

He lit the tip of the branch and put the lighter back behind him; dipped the branch to strengthen the flame, and stepping forward, threw it onto the flame-bursting folders and magazines. Flame sheared up the wall.

Seibert stepped back and watched the red-slashed center column of the chart blister and go brown. Names, dates, and lines, sheeted with flame, died away as blackness grew around them.

He hurried out.

Behind the house they stopped and watched awhile, well back from the wavering heat and the crackling: Seibert holding Ferdi’s hand, the co-pilot resting a forearm on the frame of Hitler’s portrait, the pilot with his arms full and the red can by his feet.

Esther had her hat and coat on and one foot out the door—literally—when the phone rang. This was not her day. Would she ever get home? Sighing, she drew the foot back, closed the door, and went and answered the ringing phone in the faint light from the doorpane.

An operator, with a call for Yakov from São Paulo; Esther told her Herr Liebermann was out of town. The caller, in good German, said he would speak to her. “Yes?” she said.

“My name is Kurt Koehler. My son Barry was—”

“Oh yes, I know, Herr Koehler! I’m Herr Liebermann’s secretary, Esther Zimmer. Is there any news?”

“Yes, there is, and it’s bad news. Barry’s body was found last week.”

Esther groaned.

“Well, we’ve been expecting it—no word in all this time. I’m starting home now. With…it.”

“Ei! I’m so sorry, Herr Koehler!”

“Thank you. He was stabbed, and then dumped in the jungle. From a plane, apparently.”

“Oh my God…”

“I thought Herr Liebermann would want to know—”

“Of course, of course! I’ll tell him.”

“—and I also have some information for him. They took Barry’s wallet and passport, of course—those filthy Nazi pigs—but there was a piece of paper in his jeans that they overlooked. It looks to me as if he wrote down some notes while he was listening to that tape recording, and there’s a great deal here that I’m sure Herr Liebermann can make use of. Could you tell me where I can get in touch with him?”

“Yes, he’s at Heidelberg tonight.” Esther switched on the lamp and turned her phone index. “In Mannheim, actually. I’ve got the number right here.”

“Tomorrow he’ll be back in Vienna?”

“No, he’s going to Washington from there.”

“Oh? Well, perhaps I ought to call him in Washington. I’m a little…shaken up right now, as you can imagine, but I’ll be home tomorrow and able to talk more easily. Where will he be staying?”

“At the Benjamin Franklin Hotel.” She turned the index. “I have that number too.” She found it and read it off slowly and clearly.

“Thank you. What time is he due there?”

“His plane lands at six-thirty, God willing; he should be at the hotel by seven or seven-thirty. Tomorrow night.”

“Is he going there about this business Barry was investigating?”

“Yes,” Esther said. “Barry was right, Herr Koehler. A lot of men have been murdered, but Yakov’s going to put a stop to it. You can rest assured that your son didn’t die in vain.”

“It’s good to hear that, Fräulein Zimmer. Thank you.”

“Don’t mention it. Good-by.”

She hung up, sighed, and shook her head sadly.

Mengele hung up too, picked up his brown canvas suitcase, and got on the shorter of the two lines at the Pan Am ticket counter. He had brown hair combed to the side and a full brown mustache, and was wearing a high padded neck-brace. So far it seemed to be doing its job of making people avoid his eyes.

According to his Paraguayan passport he was Ramón Aschheim y Negrín, a comerciante en antigüedades, a dealer in antiquities; which was why he had a gun in his suitcase, a nine-millimeter Browning Hi-Power Automatic. He had a permit for it, as well as a driver’s license, a full complement of social and business credentials, and in his passport, page after page of visas. Señor Aschheim y Negrín was setting off on a multinational buying trip: the States, Canada, England, Holland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Germany, and Austria. He was well supplied with money (and diamonds). His visas, like his passport, had been issued in December, but they were still valid.

He bought a ticket for New York on the next flight out, leaving at 7:45, which in conjunction with an American Airlines flight would get him into Washington at 10:35 the next morning.

Plenty of time to get settled in at the Benjamin Franklin.