Boys from Brazil

6

THE PROFESSOR OF BIOLOGY—whose name was Nürnberger and who, behind his close-trimmed brown beard and gold-rimmed glasses, looked to be no more than thirty-two or -three—bent back his pinky as if to snap it off and present it. “Identical appearance,” he said, and bent back his next finger. “Similarity of interests and attitudes, probably to a greater degree than you’re presently aware.” He bent back his next finger. “The placement with similar families: this is the giveaway. You put these together and there’s only one possible explanation.” He folded his hands on his crossed legs and leaned forward confidingly. “Mononuclear reproduction,” he told Liebermann. “Dr. Mengele was apparently a good ten years ahead of the field.”

“It’s not surprising,” Lena said, shaking a small bottle in the kitchen doorway, “since he was doing research at Auschwitz, in the forties.”

“Yes,” Nürnberger agreed (while Liebermann tried to get over the shock of hearing “research” and “Auschwitz” in one sentence; forgive her, she’s young and Swedish, what could she know?). “The others,” Nürnberger was saying, “English and Americans for the most part, didn’t begin until the fifties and still haven’t worked with human ova. Or so they say; you can bet they’ve done more than they admit. That’s why I say Mengele was only ten years ahead rather than fifteen or twenty.”

Liebermann looked at Klaus, sitting at his left, to see if he knew what Nürnberger was talking about. Klaus chewed, examining a stub of carrot-stick. His eyes met Liebermann’s and looked a you see? at him. Liebermann shook his head.

“And the Russians, of course,” Nürnberger said, rocking back comfortably on his campstool, cupping a knee with interlaced fingers, “are probably even farther along, with no church and public opinion to contend with. They probably have a whole school of perfect little Vanyas somewhere in Siberia; even older, perhaps, than these boys of Mengele’s.”

“Excuse me,” Liebermann said, “but I don’t understand what you’re talking about.”

Nürnberger looked surprised. Patiently he said, “Mononuclear reproduction. The breeding of genetically identical copies of an individual organism. Have you studied any biology at all?”

“A little,” Liebermann said. “About forty-five years ago.”

Nürnberger smiled a young man’s smile. “That’s just when the possibility of it was first recognized,” he said. “By Haldane, the English biologist. He called it cloning, from a Greek word meaning ‘a cutting,’ as from a plant. ‘Mononuclear reproduction’ is a far more explicit term. Why coin a new word when the old ones convey more?”

“Cloning is shorter,” Klaus said.

“Yes,” Nürnberger conceded, “but isn’t it better to use a few more syllables and say exactly what you mean?”

Liebermann said, “Tell me about ‘mononuclear reproduction.’ But bear in mind please that I studied biology only because I had to; my real interest was music.”

“Try singing it,” Klaus suggested to Nürnberger.

“It wouldn’t make much of a song if I could,” Nürnberger said. “Not a pretty love song like ordinary reproduction. There we have an ovum, or egg cell, and a sperm cell, each with a nucleus containing twenty-three chromosomes, the filaments on which the genes, hundreds of thousands of them, are strung like beads. The two nuclei merge, and we have a fertilized egg cell, forty-six chromosomes. I’m speaking now of human cells; the number is different in different species. The chromosomes duplicate themselves, duplicating each of their genes—it really is miraculous, isn’t it?—and the cell divides, one set of identical chromosomes going into each resulting cell. This duplication and division occurs again and again—”

“Mitosis,” Liebermann said.

“Yes.”

“The things that stay in the mind!”

“And in nine months,” Nürnberger said, “we have the billions of cells of the complete organism. They’ve evolved to perform different functions—to become bone or flesh or blood or hair; to respond to light or heat or sweetness, and so on—but each of those cells, each of the billions of cells that constitute the body, contains in its nucleus exact duplicates of an original set of forty-six chromosomes, half from the mother, half from the father: a mix that, except in the case of identical twins, is absolutely unique—the blueprint, as it were, of an absolutely unique individual. The only exceptions to the forty-six-chromosomes rule are the sex cells, sperm and ova, which have twenty-three, so that they can merge, fulfill each other, and begin a new organism.”

Liebermann said, “So far it’s clear.”

Nürnberger leaned forward. “That,” he said, “is ordinary reproduction as it occurs in nature. Now we go into the laboratory. In mononuclear reproduction, the nucleus of an egg cell is destroyed, leaving the body of the cell unharmed. This is done by radiation and is, of course, microsurgery of the most sophisticated order. Into the enucleated egg cell is put the nucleus of a body cell of the organism to be reproduced—the nucleus of a body cell, not a sex cell. We now have exactly what we had at this point in natural reproduction: an egg cell with forty-six chromosomes in its nucleus; a fertilized egg cell which, in a nutrient solution, proceeds to duplicate and divide. When it reaches the sixteen- or thirty-two-cell stage—this takes four or five days—it can be implanted in the uterus of its ‘mother’ who isn’t its mother at all, biologically speaking. She supplied an egg cell, and now she’s supplying a proper environment for the embryo’s growth, but she’s given it nothing of her own genetic endowment. The child, when it’s born, has neither father nor mother, only a donor—the giver of the nucleus—of whom it’s an exact genetic duplicate. Its chromosomes and genes are identical to the donor’s. Instead of a new and unique individual, we have an existing one repeated.”

Liebermann said, “This…can be done?”

Nürnberger nodded.

“It’s been done,” Klaus said.

“With frogs,” Nürnberger said. “A far simpler procedure. That’s the only acknowledged instance, and it caused such a flap—at Oxford in the sixties—that all later work has been done on the quiet. I’ve heard reports, every biologist has, of rabbits, dogs, and monkeys; in England, America, here in Germany, everywhere. And as I said before, I’m sure they’ve already done it with humans in Russia. Or at least tried. What planned society could resist the idea? Multiply your superior citizens and prohibit the inferior ones from reproducing. Think of the savings in medical care and education! And the improved quality of the population in two or three generations.”

Liebermann said, “Could Mengele have done it with humans in the early sixties?”

Nürnberger shrugged. “The theory was already known,” he said. “All he needed was the right equipment, some healthy and willing young women, and a high degree of microsurgical skill. Others have had it: Gurdon, Shettles, Steptoe, Chang…And of course, a place where he could work without interference or publicity.”

“He was in the jungle by then,” Liebermann said. “He went in in ’59. I drove him in…”

Klaus said, “Maybe you didn’t. Maybe he chose to go.”

Liebermann looked uneasily at him.

“But it’s pointless,” Nürnberger said, “to talk about whether or not he could have done it. If what Lena told me is true, he obviously did do it. The fact that the boys were placed with similar families proves it.” He smiled. “You see, genes aren’t the only factor in our ultimate development; I’m sure you know that. The child conceived by mononuclear reproduction will grow up looking like his donor and sharing certain characteristics and propensities with him, but if he’s raised in a different environment, subjected to different domestic and cultural influences—as he’s bound to be, if only by being born years later—well, he can turn out to be quite different psychologically from his donor, despite their genetic sameness. Mengele was obviously interested not in breeding a particular biological strain, as I think the Russians might be, but in reproducing himself, a particular individual. The similar families are an attempt to maximize the chances of the boys’ growing up in the right environment.”

Lena came to the kitchen doorway.

“The boys,” Liebermann said, “are…duplicates of Mengele?”

“Exact duplicates, genetically,” Nürnberger said. “Whether or not they’ll grow up to be duplicates in toto is, as I said, another question.”

“Excuse me,” Lena said. “We can eat now.” She smiled apologetically; her plain face became pretty for an instant. “In fact, we have to,” she said, “otherwise things will be ruined. If they aren’t already.”

They got up and went from the small room of scavenged furniture, animal posters, paperback books, into an almost-the-same-size kitchen, with more animal posters, a steel-gated window, and a red-covered table—bread, salad, red wine in mismatched tumblers.

Liebermann, uncomfortable on a small wire-backed chair, looked across the table at Nürnberger buttering bread. “What did you mean,” he asked, “about the boys’ growing up in ‘the right environment’?”

“One as much like Mengele’s as possible,” Nürnberger said, looking at him. He smiled in his brown beard. “Look,” he said, “if I wanted to make another Eduard Nürnberger, it wouldn’t be enough simply to scrape a bit of skin from my toe, pluck a nucleus from a cell, and go through that whole procedure I described—assuming I had the ability and equipment—”

“And the woman,” Klaus said, putting a plate before him.

“Thank you,” Nürnberger said, smiling. “I could get the woman.”

“For that kind of reproduction?”

“Well, assuming. It only means two tiny incisions, one to extract the ovum and one to implant the embryo.” Nürnberger looked at Liebermann. “But that would be only part of the job,” he said. “I would then have to find a suitable home for Baby Eduard. He would require a mother who’s very religious—almost a maniac, in fact—and a father who drinks too much, so that there’s constant fighting between them. And there would also have to be in the house a wonderful uncle, a math teacher, who takes the boy out of there as often as he can: to museums, to the country…These people would have to treat the boy like their own, not like someone conceived in a laboratory, and furthermore, the ‘uncle’ would have to die when the boy was nine and the ‘parents’ would have to separate two years later. The boy would have to spend his adolescence shuttling between the two with his younger sister.”

Klaus was sitting down with a plate at Liebermann’s right. A plate lay before Liebermann—dry-looking meat loaf, carrots steaming a minty smell.

“And even then,” Nürnberger said, “he might turn out very different from this Eduard Nürnberger. His biology teacher might not take a shine to him, as mine did. A girl might let him go to bed with her sooner than one let me. He’d read different books, watch television where I listened to radio, be subject to thousands of chance encounters that might make him more or less aggressive than I am, more or less loving, witty, et cetera, et cetera.”

Lena sat down with a plate at Liebermann’s left, looked across the table at Klaus.

Nürnberger, breaking meat loaf with his fork, said, “Mengele was aware of the chanciness of the whole thing, so he produced and found homes for many boys. He’ll be happy, I suppose, if a few, or even only one, turns out exactly right.”

“Do you see now,” Klaus asked Liebermann, “why the men are being killed?”

Liebermann nodded. “To—I don’t know what word to use—to shape the boys.”

“Exactly,” Nürnberger said. “To shape them, to try to make them psychological Mengeles as well as genetic ones.”

Klaus said, “He lost his father when he was a certain age, so the boys must do the same. Or lose the men they think are their fathers.”

“The event,” Nürnberger said, “surely was of paramount importance in shaping his psyche.”

“It’s like unlocking a safe,” Lena said. “If you can turn the knob to all the right numbers, in the right order, the door opens.”

“Unless,” Klaus said, “the knob was turned to a wrong number in between. These carrots are great.”

“Thank you.”

“Yes,” Nürnberger said. “Everything’s delicious.”

“Mengele has brown eyes.”

Nürnberger looked at Liebermann. “Are you sure?”

Liebermann said, “I’ve held his Argentine identity card in my hand. ‘Eyes, brown.’ And his father was a manufacturer, not a civil servant. Farm machines.”

“He’s related to those Mengeles?” Klaus asked.

Liebermann nodded.

Nürnberger, taking salad onto his plate, said, “No wonder he could afford the equipment. Well, he can’t have been the donor himself, if the eyes don’t match.”

Lena said to Liebermann, “Do you know who’s the head of the Comrades Organization?”

“A colonel named Rudel, Hans Ulrich Rudel.”

“Blue eyes?” Klaus asked.

“I don’t know. I’ll have to check. And his family background.” Liebermann looked at the fork in his hand, put its tines into a slice of carrot, raised the carrot, put it into his mouth.

“At any rate,” Nürnberger said, “you know now why those men are being killed. What are you planning to do next?”

Liebermann sat silently for a moment. He put his fork down and took the napkin from his lap and put it on the table. “Excuse me,” he said, and got up and went out of the kitchen.

Lena looked after him, looked at his plate, looked at Klaus.

“It’s not that,” he said.

“I hope not,” she said, and pressed the side of her fork into her meat loaf.

Klaus looked beyond her; watched Liebermann go to the bookshelves in the other room.

“Not that this isn’t excellent meat,” Nürnberger said, “but we’ll all be eating much better meat some day, and much cheaper, thanks to mononuclear reproduction. It’ll revolutionize cattle-breeding. And it’ll also preserve our endangered species, like that beautiful leopard there.”

“You’re defending it?” Klaus asked.

“It doesn’t need defending,” Nürnberger said. “It’s a technique, and like any other technique you can mention, it can be put to either good or bad uses.”

“I can think of two good ones,” Klaus said, “and you just mentioned them. Give me a pencil and paper and five minutes and I’ll give you fifty bad ones.”

“Why must you always take the opposite side?” Lena asked. “If the professor had said it’s a terrible thing, you’d be talking now about cattle-breeding.”

“That’s not true at all,” Klaus said.

“It is so. He’ll argue against his own statements.”

Klaus looked beyond Lena; saw Liebermann standing in profile, head bent to an open book, rocking slightly: Jew at prayer. Not a Bible, though; they didn’t have one. Liebermann’s own book? He was standing just about where it was. Checking on the colonel’s eyes? “Klaus?” Lena offered the salad bowl.

He took it.

Lena turned and looked, turned back to the table.

Nürnberger said, “I’m going to have a hard time keeping my mouth shut about this.”

“You must, though,” Klaus said.

“I know, I know, but it won’t be easy. Two of the men in the department have tried it themselves, with rabbit ova.”

Liebermann stood in the doorway, ashen and beaten-looking, his glasses hanging from the hand at his side.

“What is it?” Klaus put the bowl down.

Nürnberger looked; Lena turned in her chair.

Liebermann said to Nürnberger, “Let me ask you a foolish question.”

Nürnberger nodded.

“The one who gives the nucleus,” Liebermann said. “The donor. He has to be alive, yes?”

“No, not necessarily,” Nürnberger said. “Individual cells are neither alive nor dead, only intact or not intact. With a lock of Mozart’s hair—not even a lock; with a single hair from Mozart’s head—someone with the skill and equipment”—he smiled at Klaus—“and the women”—he looked back at Liebermann—“could breed a few hundred infant Mozarts. Find the right homes for them and we’d wind up with five or ten adult Mozarts, and a lot more beautiful music in this world.”

Liebermann blinked, took an unsteady step forward, shook his head. “Not music,” he said. “Not Mozart.” He brought his hand from behind his back and showed them Hitler; the paperback book bore three black brush-strokes: mustache, sharp nose, forelock.

Liebermann said, “His father was a civil servant, a customs officer. He was fifty-two when… the boy was born. The mother was twenty-nine.” He looked around for someplace to put the book, found no place, put it on one of the stove’s burners. He looked at them again, wiped his hand against his side. “The father died at sixty-five,” he said. “When the boy was thirteen, almost fourteen.”

They left everything on the table and went in and sat in the other room, Liebermann and Klaus on the daybed again, Nürnberger on the campstool, Lena on the floor.

They looked at the empty glasses on the trunk before them, the bowls of carrot-sticks and almonds. They looked at one another.

Klaus picked up a few almonds, tossed them on his palm.

Liebermann said, “Ninety-four Hitlers,” and shook his head. “No,” he said. “No. It’s not possible.”

“Of course it isn’t,” Nürnberger said. “There are ninety-four boys with the same genetic inheritance as Hitler. They could turn out very differently. Most of them probably will.”

“Most,” Liebermann said. He nodded at Klaus and at Lena. “Most.” He looked at Nürnberger. “That leaves some,” he said.

“How many?” Klaus asked.

“I don’t know,” Nürnberger said.

“You said five or ten Mozarts out of a few hundred. How many Hitlers out of ninety-four? One? Two? Three?”

“I don’t know,” Nürnberger said. “I was talking. No one really knows.” He smiled wryly. “The frogs weren’t given personality tests.”

“Make a guess,” Liebermann said.

“If the parents were matched only by age, race, and the father’s occupation, I’d say the prospects were pretty poor. From Mengele’s viewpoint, I mean; pretty good from ours.”

“But not perfect,” Liebermann said.

“No, of course not.”

“Even if there were only one,” Lena said, “there would still be a chance of his…being influenced the right way. The wrong way.”

Klaus said to Liebermann, “Do you remember what you said at the lecture? Someone asked you if the neo-Nazi groups were dangerous, and you said not now, only if social conditions got worse—which God knows they’re doing every day—and another leader like Hitler appeared.”

Liebermann nodded. “Speaking to the whole world at once,” he said, “by television satellite. God in heaven.” He closed his eyes, put his hands to his face, and wiped his fingers across his eyelids, pressing hard.

“How many of the fathers have actually been killed?” Nürnberger asked.

“That’s right!” Klaus said. “Only six! It’s not as bad as it seems!”

“Eight,” Liebermann said, lowering his hands, blinking his reddened eyes. “You’re forgetting Guthrie in Tucson, and the one between him and Curry. Others, too, that we don’t know about in the other countries. More at the beginning than later on; that’s how it was in the States.”

Nürnberger said, “The initial batch must have had a higher success-ratio than he expected.”

“I can’t help feeling,” Klaus said, “that you’re a little bit pleased by the achievement.”

“Well, you have to admit that strictly from a scientific viewpoint, it’s a step forward.”

“Jesus Christ! Do you mean you can sit there and—”

“Klaus,” Lena said.

“Oh—shit.” Klaus slapped the almonds down.

Liebermann said to Nürnberger, “I’m going to Washington tomorrow to speak to their Federal Bureau of Investigation. I know who the next father there is; they could trap the killer, they have to trap him. Will you come with me and help convince them?”

“Tomorrow?” Nürnberger said. “I can’t possibly.”

“To prevent a new Hitler?”

“God!” Nürnberger rubbed his brow. “Yes, of course,” he said, “if you absolutely need me. But look, there are men there, at Harvard, Cornell, Cal Tech, whose credentials are much more impressive than mine and who would in any case carry more weight with American authorities simply by virtue of being American. I can give you names and schools if you’d like—”

“I would, yes.”

“—and if for any reason you do want me, I will come over.”

“Good,” Liebermann said. “Thank you.”

Nürnberger took a pen and a black leather memo pad from inside his jacket. “Shettles himself would probably help you,” he said.

“Put his name down,” Liebermann said. “And where I can reach him. Put down everyone you can think of.” To Klaus he said, “He’s right, an American is better. Two foreigners, they’ll kick us out on our asses.”

“Don’t you have any contacts there?” Klaus asked.

“Dead contacts,” Liebermann said. “Not-with-the-Justice-Department-any-more contacts. I’ll manage, though. I’ll break down doors. God in heaven! Think of it! Ninety-four young Hitlers!”

“Ninety-four boys,” Nürnberger said, writing, “with the same genetic inheritance as Hitler.”

The Benjamin Franklin, as a hotel, a place to stop at, rated about one tenth of a star in Mengele’s judgment, and that only because the sink in the bathroom had a certain antique charm. As a place to rid oneself of an enemy bent on destroying one’s life work and the last hope (correction, certainty) of Aryan supremacy, however, it rated three and a half stars, possibly a full four.

For one thing, the clientele in the lobby was partly black, which meant, of course, that crime on the premises wasn’t unheard of. As proof of this, if proof were needed, the door of his room, 404, bore the gouge-marks of forcible entry, and For your own protection please keep door bolted at all times, a red-lettered sticker on the inside urged. He complied.

For another thing, the place was ill-attended; at 11:40 in the morning, breakfast trays still lay outside the doors of some of the rooms. As soon as he had taken off the damn neck-brace (only for border-crossing and maybe in Germany) he nipped outside and got himself a tray and a breadbasket and a Do Not Disturb sign. He hid the tray between the mattress and the box spring, the breadbasket in a paper laundry bag on the closet shelf; put the Do Not Disturb sign in the writing drawer with the one already there. He checked the floor plan on the door; there were three stairways, one right around a corner from arrow-marked 404. He went out again and found it; opened the door, went onto the landing, looked up and down the gray-painted flights.

Room service was abominable. By the time his lunch appeared he had excreted and cleaned the tube of diamonds, washed up, powdered his chafed neck, unpacked as much as he meant to unpack, tried the television, and made a list of everything he had to buy and do. But the waiter who brought the lunch—a full star right here—was a white man almost as old as he, sixty or so, wearing a plain white linen mess jacket such as might be bought, surely, in any working-class clothing store. He added it to the list; easier than filching one.

The food, sole à la bonne femme—forget it.

He left the hotel at a little after one, by a side door. Dark glasses, no mustache, hat, wig, overcoat with turned-up collar. Gun in shoulder holster. He would leave nothing of value in that vulnerable room, and besides, it was wise to go armed in the States; not only for himself, for anyone.

Washington was cleaner than he had expected and quite attractive, but the wide streets were wet with day-old snow. The first thing he did was stop in a shoestore and buy a pair of rubbers. He had flown from summer into winter and had always been susceptible to colds; vitamins were on his list too.

He walked until he came to a bookstore, and went in and browsed, exchanging the dark glasses for his regular ones. He found a paperback copy of Liebermann’s book; studied the stamp-size photo on the back of it. There would be no mistaking that Jewish beak. He flipped through the section of photos at the book’s center and found his own; Liebermann, on the other hand, would be hard put to recognize him. It was the Buenos Aires photo of ’59, obviously the best Liebermann had been able to come up with; neither with the brown wig and mustache nor his own cropped gray hair and newly shaven upper lip did he look much at all, alas, like this handsome sixteen-years-younger himself. And Liebermann, of course, wouldn’t even be watching for him.

He put the book back in its place in the rack and found a section of travel books. He selected road atlases of the States and Canada; paid for them with a twenty-dollar bill and accepted his change, bills and coins, with a casual glance and a nod.

In dark glasses again, he walked into less spacious streets with brighter, more gaudy shop windows. He couldn’t find what he wanted, and finally asked a young black man—who would know better? He walked on, following the surprisingly well-spoken directions.

“What kind of knife?” a black man behind a counter asked him.

“For hunting,” he said.

He chose the best. German-made, good in the hand, really beautiful. And so sharp it whisked ribbons from loosely held paper. Two more twenties and a ten.

A drugstore was next door. He bought his vitamins.

And in the next block, Uniforms & Work Clothes.

“I’d say you’re about a thirty-six?”

“Yes.”

“Would you like to try it on?”

“No.” Because of the gun.

He bought a pair of white cotton gloves too.

A food store was impossible to find. Nobody knew; they didn’t eat, apparently.

He found one finally, a glary supermarket full of blacks. He bought three apples, two oranges, two bananas, and for his own consumption, a lovely-looking bunch of green seedless grapes.

He took a taxi back to the Benjamin Franklin—the side entrance, please—and at 3:22 was back in that dismal one-tenth-of-a-star room.

He rested awhile, eating grapes and looking at the atlases in the easy (ha!) chair, consulting now and again the typed sheets of names and addresses, dates. He could get Wheelock—assuming he was still in New Providence, Pennsylvania—almost on schedule; but from then on, it would have to be catch-as-catch-can. He would try to keep within six months of the optimum dates. Davis in Kankakee, then up into Canada for Stroheim and Morgan. Then Sweden. Would he have to renew the visa?

After he had rested, he rehearsed. Took off the wig and put on the white jacket and gloves; practiced carrying the basket of fruit on the tray; said, “Compliments of the management, sir”—again and again till he got the th-sound right.

He stood with his back to his bolted door, hung the Do Not Disturb sign on air and let it fall, knocked at air. “Compliments of the management, sir.” He carried the tray across the room, set it on the dresser, drew the knife from the sheath in his belt; turned, keeping the knife behind him; walked, stopped, put out his left hand. “Sank you, sir.” Grabbed with his left hand, stabbed with his right.

“Thank you, sir. Thank you. Th, th, th.” Grab with the left hand, stab with the right.

Do Jews tip?

He worked out some alternative movements.

The sunlit plateau of clouds ended abruptly; blue-black ocean lay below, wrinkled and white-flecked, immobile. Liebermann gazed down at it, his chin in his hand.

Ei.

He had lain awake all night, sat awake all day, thinking of a full-grown Hitler hurling his demonic speeches at mobs too discontented to care about history. Two or three Hitlers even, maneuvering to power in different places, recognized by their followers and themselves as the first human beings bred by what in 1990 or so would be a widely known, maybe widely practiced, procedure. More alike than brothers, the same man multiplied, wouldn’t they join forces and wage again (with 1990 weapons!) their first one’s racial war? Certainly that was Mengele’s hope; Barry had said so: “It’s supposed to lead to the triumph of the Aryan race, for God’s sake!” Words to that effect.

A lovely package to bring to an F.B.I. that’s had an almost hundred-percent turnover since Hoover died in ’72. He could hear the puzzled question: “Yakov who?”

It had been easy enough last night to tell Klaus he would manage, would break down doors; and in truth he wasn’t wholly without contacts. There were senators he had met who were still in office; one of them, surely, would unlock the right doors for him. But now, having weighed the horror, he was afraid that even with unlocked doors too much time might be lost. Guthrie’s and Curry’s deaths would have to be investigated, their widows questioned, the Wheelocks questioned…Now it was the utmost necessity to capture Wheelock’s would-be killer and find through him the five others. The rest of the ninety-four men had to stay alive; the knobs of the safes, to follow Lena’s comparison (a good one to remember and use in the days ahead), must not be allowed to be turned to what was maybe the last and most crucial number in the combination.

And making matters even worse, the 22nd was only an approximation of Wheelock’s death date. What if the real date was earlier? What if—laughable, the small thing future history might hinge on—Frieda Maloney had been wrong about the puppy being ten weeks old? What if it had been nine weeks old, or eight weeks old, when the Wheelocks got their baby? The killer might kill and be gone a few days from now.

He looked at his watch: 10:28. Which was wrong; he hadn’t set it back yet. He did it now—spun the hands and gave himself six extra hours, at least as far as watches were concerned: 4:28. New York in half an hour, customs, and the short hop to Washington. He’d get some sleep tonight, he hoped—he was a little punchy already—and in the morning he would call the senators’ offices; call Shettles too, some others on Nürnberger’s list.

If only he could arrange now to have Wheelock’s killer watched for, without any waiting, explaining, checking, questioning. He should have come sooner; would have, of course, if he had known the full enormity…

Ei.

What he needed, really, was a Jewish F.B.I. Or a U.S. branch of Israel’s Mossad. Someplace where he could go in tomorrow and say, “A Nazi is coming to kill a man named Wheelock in New Providence, Pennsylvania. Guard him; capture the Nazi. Don’t ask me questions, I’ll explain later. I’m Yakov Liebermann—would I steer you wrong?” And they would go ahead and do it.

Dream! If only such an organization existed!

People in the plane fastened their seat belts and made comments to one another; the sign had lit up.

Liebermann sat frowning at the window.

After a refreshing hour’s nap, Mengele washed and shaved, put on the wig and mustache, and got into his dark suit. He laid everything out on the bed—white jacket, gloves, knife in sheath, tray with basket of fruit and Do Not Disturb sign—so that as soon as he saw Liebermann check in and learned his room number, he could zip up and assume his waiter role with no delay.

When he left the room he tried the knob and hung the other Do Not Disturb sign on it.

At 6:45 he was seated in the lobby, leafing through a copy of Time and keeping an eye on the revolving door. The occasional suitcase-bearing new arrivals who went to the registration desk across the lobby were almost all unaccompanied men, a veritable textbook of inferior racial types; not only Blacks and Semites, but a pair of Orientals as well. One fine-looking young Aryan checked in, but a few minutes later, as if to compensate for an error, a black dwarf appeared, striding along beside a suitcase in a wheeled metal frame.

At twenty past seven Liebermann came in—tall, round-shouldered, dark-mustached, in a tan cap and belted tan overcoat. Or was this Liebermann? A Jew, yes, but too young-looking and with not quite the Liebermann beak.

He got up and strolled across the lobby, took a This Week in Washington from a stack of them on the cracked marble counter.

“You’re staying through Friday night?” the clerk asked the possible Liebermann at his back.

“Yes.”

A bell pinged. “Would you take Mr. Morris to seven-seventeen?”

“Yes, sir.”

He strolled back across the lobby. A Lebanese or some such had taken his seat—fat and greasy-looking, rings on every finger.

He found another seat.

The beak of all beaks came in, but it was attached to the face of a young man holding the elbow of a gray-haired woman.

At eight o’clock he stepped into a phone booth and called the hotel. He asked—taking care not to let his lips touch the mouthpiece, laden with God knew what germs—if Mr. Yakov Liebermann was expected.

“Just a moment.” A click, and ringing. The clerk across the lobby picked up a phone and said in Mengele’s ear, “Front desk.”

“Have you a room reserved for Mr. Yakov Liebermann?”

“For this evening?”

“Yes.”

The clerk looked down as if reading. “Yes, we do. Is this Mr. Liebermann speaking?”

“No.”

“Would you like to leave a message for him?”

“No, thank you. I shall call later.”

He could keep watch just as well from inside the booth, so he put another ten-cent coin into the phone and asked the operator how he could get the number of someone in New Providence, Pennsylvania. She gave him a long number to call; he wrote it down on Time’s red border, took the coin from the receptacle at the bottom of the phone, put it in at the top again, dialed.

There was a Henry Wheelock in New Providence. He wrote the number down below the other one. The woman gave him the address too, Old Buck Road, no house number.

A Latin with a suitcase and a leashed poodle went to the registration desk.

He thought for a moment, then called the operator and got instructions. He examined his array of coins on the booth’s small shelf, picked out the right ones.

It was only when the phone at the other end gave its first ring that he realized that if this was the Henry Wheelock he wanted, the boy himself might answer. In another instant he could actually be speaking with his Führer reborn! A dizzying joy swept his breath away, tipped him against the side of the booth as the phone rang again. Oh please, dear Boy, come and answer your telephone!

“Hello.” A woman.

He drew in breath, sighed it out.

“Hello?”

“Hello.” He straightened up. “Is Mr. Henry Wheelock there?”

“He’s here, but he’s out in back.”

“Is this Mrs. Wheelock?”

“It is, yes.”

“My name is Franklin, madam. I believe you have a son approaching the age of fourteen?”

“We do…”

Praise God. “I conduct tours for boys of that age. Would you be interested in sending him to Europe this summer?”

A laugh. “Oh no, I don’t think so.”

“May I send you a brochure?”

“You may, but it’s not going to do you much good.”

“Old Buck Road is the address?”

“Really, he’s staying right here this summer.”

“Good night, then. I’m sorry to have troubled you.”

He took a pamphlet from the unattended car-rental booth and sat studying it, glancing up whenever the revolving door whisked.

Tomorrow he would rent a car and drive to New Providence. When Wheelock was taken care of he would drive on up to New York, turn in the car, sell a diamond, and fly to Chicago. If Robert K. Davis was still in Kankakee.

But where the hell was Liebermann?

At nine o’clock he went into the coffee shop and took a counter seat from which he could see the revolving door through the glass shop-door. He ate scrambled eggs and toast, drank the world’s worst coffee.

He got a dollar’s worth of change when he left, went into the phone booth again, and called the hotel. Maybe Liebermann had come in through the side entrance.

He hadn’t. They were still expecting him.

He called both airports, hoping—it was possible, wasn’t it?—that there had been a crash.

No such luck. And all incoming flights were on schedule.

The son of a bitch must have stayed on in Mannheim. But for how long? It was too late to call Vienna and find out from that Fräulein Zimmer. Too early, rather; not quite four in the morning there.

He began to worry about someone remembering him sitting in the lobby all evening watching the door.

Where are you, you goddamned Jew-bastard? Come let me kill you!

On Wednesday afternoon, at a few minutes after two o’clock, Liebermann got out of a traffic-locked taxi in the middle of Manhattan’s garment center and took to the sidewalk despite the freezing rain. His umbrella, borrowed from the people he had stayed the night with, Marvin and Rita Farb, was another bold color in each of its panels (it’s an umbrella, he told himself; be glad you’ve got it).

He splatted briskly down the west side of Broadway, weaving past other umbrellas (black) and men pushing plastic-covered racks of dresses. He looked at the numbers of the office buildings he passed; walked faster.

He walked seven or eight blocks, crossed a street and looked at the building there—an Off-Track Betting office, a lamp showroom, twenty or so stories of grimy stonework and narrow windows—and went to its arched entrance and backed open a heavy glass swing-door, pulling the multicolored umbrella closed.

He crossed the black-matted lobby—small, a magazine-and-candy-stand taking up most of it—and joined the half-dozen people waiting for the elevators; stamped his sodden shoes, tapped the umbrella’s tip against the wet rubber matting, making rain on it.

On the twelfth floor—dingy, paint peeling—he followed the numbers on pebbled doorpanes: 1202, Aaron Goldman, Artificial Flowers; 1203, C. & M. Roth, Imported Glassware; 1204, Youthcraft Dolls, B. Rosenzweig. Room 1205 had YJD on the pane, stick-on metallic letters, the D a little higher than the Y and the J. He knuckled the glass.

A flesh-and-white blur came to the pane. “Yes?” A young woman’s voice.

“It’s Yakov Liebermann.”

The mail slot below the pane clinked and gave light. “Would you put your I.D. through?”

He got out his passport and put it into the slot; it was taken from his fingers.

He waited. The door had two locks, one that looked like the original, and beneath it, a bright-brassed new-looking one.

A bolt clicked and the door opened.

He went in. A fat girl of sixteen or so with pulled-back red hair smiled at him and said, “Shalom,” offering him his passport.

He took it and said, “Shalom.”

“We have to be careful,” the girl apologized. She closed the door and turned its bolt. She wore a white sweatshirt and blue swollen-tight jeans; her hair hung down her back, a glistening orange-red horsetail.

They were in a tiny cluttered anteroom: a desk, a mimeograph machine on a table with stacks of white and pink paper; raw wood shelves piled with handbills and newspaper reprints; in the wall opposite, an almost-closed door with a Young Jewish Defenders poster taped to it, a hand brandishing a dagger in front of a blue Jewish star.

The girl reached for the umbrella; Liebermann gave it to her and she put it in a metal wastebasket with two others, black, wet.

Liebermann, taking his hat and coat off, said, “Are you the young lady who was on the phone?”

She nodded.

“You handled things very efficiently. Is the Rabbi here?”

“He just came in.” She took the hat and coat from Liebermann.

“Thank you. How’s his son?”

“They don’t know yet. His condition is stable.”

“Mm.” Liebermann shook his head sympathetically.

The girl found places for the hat and coat on a full coat-tree. Liebermann, straightening his jacket, smoothing his hair, glanced at piles of handbills on a shelf beside him: The New Jew; KISSinger OF DEATH: No Compromise—Ever!

The girl excused herself past Liebermann and knocked at the postered door; opened it farther and looked in. “Reb? Mr. Liebermann’s here.”

She pushed the door all the way open, and smiling at Liebermann, stepped aside.

A stocky blond-bearded man glared grimly at Liebermann as he came into an overheated office of men and desks and clutter; and coming out from behind the corner desk, Rabbi Moshe Gorin, handsome, dark-haired, compact, smiling, blue-jawed; in a tweed jacket and an open-necked yellow shirt. He took Liebermann’s hand, gripped it in both his own, and looked at him with magnetic brown eyes weighted with shadows. “I’ve wanted to meet you ever since I was a kid,” he said in a soft but intense voice. “You’re one of the few men in this world I really admire, not only because of what you’ve done, but because you did it without any help from the establishment. The Jewish establishment, I’m talking about.”

Liebermann, embarrassed but pleased, said, “Thank you. I wanted to meet you too, Rabbi. I appreciate your coming in this way.”

Gorin introduced the other men. The blond-bearded one, hawk-nosed, with a crushing handshake, was his second-in-command, Phil Greenspan. A tall balding one with glasses was Elliot Bachrach. Another, big, a black beard: Paul Stern. The youngest—twenty-five or so—a thick black mustache, green eyes, another crushing handshake: Jay Rabinowitz. All were in shirtsleeves, and like Gorin, skullcapped.

They brought chairs from the other desks and put them around the end of Gorin’s desk; seated themselves. The tall one with glasses, Bachrach, sat against a windowsill behind Gorin, his arms folded, the buff shade all the way down behind him. Liebermann, across from Gorin, looked at the sober strong-looking men and the shabby cluttered office with its wall maps of the city and the world, a blackboard easel, stacks of books and papers, cartons. “Don’t look at this place.” Gorin waved it away.

“It’s not so different from my office,” Liebermann said, smiling. “A little bigger, maybe.”

“I’m sorry for you.”

“How is your son doing?”

“I think he’ll be all right,” Gorin said. “His condition is stable.”

“I appreciate your coming in.”

Gorin shrugged. “His mother is with him. I did my praying.” He smiled.

Liebermann tried to get comfortable in the armless chair. “Whenever I speak,” he said, “in public, I mean—they ask me what I think of you. I always say ‘I never met him personally, so I have no opinion.’” He smiled at Gorin. “Now I’ll have to make a new answer.”

“A favorable one, I hope,” Gorin said. The phone on the desk rang. “Nobody’s here, Sandy!” Gorin shouted toward the door. “Unless it’s my wife!” To Liebermann he said, “You’re not expecting any calls, are you?”

Liebermann shook his head. “Nobody knows I’m here. I’m supposed to be in Washington.” He cleared his throat, sat with his hands on his knees. “I was on my way there yesterday afternoon,” he said. “To go to the F.B.I, about some killings I’m investigating. Here and in Europe. By former SS men.”

“Recent killings?” Gorin looked concerned.

“Still going on,” Liebermann said. “Arranged for by the Kameradenwerk in South America and Dr. Mengele.”

Gorin said, “That son of a bitch…” The other men stirred. The blond-bearded one, Greenspan, said to Liebermann, “We have a new chapter in Rio de Janeiro. As soon as it’s big enough we’re going to set up a commando team and get him.”

“I wish you luck,” Liebermann said. “He’s still alive all right, running this whole business. He killed a young fellow there, a Jewish boy from Evanston, Illinoise, in September. The boy was on the phone to me, telling me about this, when it happened. My problem now is, it’s going to take time for me to convince the F.B.I. I know what I’m talking about.”

“Why did you wait so long?” Gorin asked. “If you knew in September…”

“I didn’t know,” Liebermann said. “It was all…ifs and maybes, uncertainty. I only now have the whole thing put together.” He shook his head and sighed. “So it dawned on me on the plane,” he said to Gorin, “that maybe you, the Y.J.D.”—he looked at all of them—“could help out in this thing while I go on to Washington.”

“Whatever we can do,” Gorin said, “just ask, you’ve got it.” The others agreed.

“Thank you,” Liebermann said, “that’s what I was hoping. It’s a job of guarding someone, a man in Pennsylvania. In a town there, New Providence, a dot on the map near the city Lancaster.”

“Pennsylvania—Dutch country,” the man with the black beard said. “I know it.”

“This man is the next one to be killed in this country,” Liebermann said. “On the twenty-second of this month, but maybe sooner. Maybe only a few days from now. So he has to be guarded. But the man who comes to kill him mustn’t be scared away or killed himself; he has to be captured, so he can be questioned.” He looked at Gorin. “Do you have people who could do a job like that? Guard someone, capture someone?”

Gorin nodded. Greenspan said, “You’re looking at them,” and to Gorin, “Let Jay take over the demonstration. I’ll manage this.”

Gorin smiled, tilted his head toward Greenspan and said to Liebermann, “This one’s main regret is he missed World War Two. He runs our combat classes.”

“It will only be for a week or so, I hope,” Liebermann said. “Just till the F.B.I. comes in.”

“What do you want them for?” the young one with the mustache asked, and Greenspan said to Liebermann, “We’ll get him for you, and get more information out of him, quicker, than they will. I guarantee it.” The phone rang.

Liebermann shook his head. “I have to use them,” he said, “because from them it has to go to Interpol. Other countries are involved. There are five other men besides this one.”

Gorin was looking toward the door; he looked at Liebermann. “How many killings have there been?” he asked.

“Eight that I know of.”

Gorin looked pained. Someone whistled.

“Seven that I know of,” Liebermann corrected himself. “One very probable. Maybe others.”

“Jews?” Gorin asked.

Liebermann shook his head. “Goyim.”

“Why?” Bachrach at the window asked. “What’s it for?”

“Yes,” Gorin said. “Who are they? Why does Mengele want them killed?”

Liebermann drew a breath, blew it out. He leaned forward. “If I tell you it’s very, very important,” he said, “more important in the long run than Russian anti-Semitism and the pressure on Israel—would that be enough for now? I promise you I’m not exaggerating.”

In silence, Gorin frowned at the desk before him. He looked up at Liebermann, shook his head, and smiled apologetically. “No,” he said. “You’re asking Moshe Gorin to lend you three or four of his best men, maybe more. Men, not boys. At a time when we’re spread thin already and when the government’s breathing down my neck because I’m lousing up their precious détente. No, Yakov”—he shook his head—“I’ll give you all the help I can, but what kind of a leader would I be if I committed my men blindly, even to Yakov Liebermann?”

Liebermann nodded. “I figured you’d at least want to know,” he said. “But don’t ask me for proof, Rabbi. Just listen and trust me. Or else I wasted my time.” He looked at all of them, looked at Gorin, cleared his throat. “By any chance,” he said, “did you ever study a little biology?”

“God!” the one with the mustache said.

Bachrach said, “The English word for it is ‘cloning.’ There was an article about it in the Times a few years ago.”

Gorin smiled faintly, winding a loose thread around a cuff-button. “This morning,” he said, “by my son’s bedside, I said ‘What next, oh Lord?’” He smiled at Liebermann, gestured ruefully at him. “Ninety-four Hitlers.”

“Ninety-four boys with Hitler’s genes,” Liebermann said.

“To me,” Gorin said, “that’s ninety-four Hitlers.”

Greenspan said to Liebermann, “Are you sure this man Wheelock hasn’t been killed already?”

“I am.”

“And that he hasn’t moved away?”—the black-bearded one.

“I got his phone number,” Liebermann said. “I didn’t want to talk to him myself yet, until I knew you would do what I wanted you to”—he looked at Gorin—“but I had the woman from the couple I’m staying with call him this morning. She said she wanted to buy a dog and heard he raised them. It’s him. She got directions how to get there.”

Gorin said to Greenspan, “We’re going to have to work this out of Philadelphia.” And to Liebermann: “The one thing we won’t do is take guns across a state border. The F.B.I. would love to get us along with the Nazi.”

Liebermann said, “Should I call Wheelock now?”

Gorin nodded. Greenspan said, “I’m going to want to put someone right in his house with him.” The young man with the mustache moved the phone over near Liebermann.

Liebermann put his glasses on and got an envelope out of his jacket pocket. Bachrach at the window said, “Hi, Mr. Wheelock, your son is Hitler.”

Liebermann said, “I’m not going to mention the boy at all. It might make him hang up on me, because of the way the adoption was. I just dial, yes?”

“If you have the area code.”

Liebermann dialed the phone, reading the number from the envelope.

“School’s probably out by now,” Gorin said. “The boy is liable to answer.”

“We’re friends,” Liebermann said drily. “I met him twice already.” The phone at the other end rang.

Rang again. Liebermann looked at Gorin looking at him.

“Hay-lo,” a man said in a deep-throated voice.

“Mr. Henry Wheelock?”

“Speaking.”

“Mr. Wheelock, my name is Yakov Liebermann. I’m calling from New York. I run the War Crimes Information Center in Vienna—maybe you heard of us? We collect information on Nazi war criminals, help find them and help with the prosecution?”

“I’ve heard. That Eichmann.”

“That’s right, and others. Mr. Wheelock, I’m after someone now, someone who’s in this country. I’m on my way to Washington to see the F.B.I. about it. This man killed two or three men here not so long ago, and he’s planning to kill more.”

“Are you looking for a guard dog?”

“No,” Liebermann said. “The next one this man is planning to kill, Mr. Wheelock”—he looked at Gorin—“it’s you.”

“All right, who is this? Ted? That’s a real good Choiman agzent, you shithead.”

Liebermann said, “This isn’t someone joking. I know you think a Nazi would have no reason to kill you—”

“Says who? I killed plenty of them; I bet they’d be damn happy to get even. If any were still around.”

“One is around—”

“Come on now, who is this?”

“It’s Yakov Liebermann, Mr. Wheelock.” “Christmas!” Gorin said; the others spoke, groaned. Liebermann stuck a finger in his ear. “I swear to you,” he said, “that a man is coming to New Providence to kill you, a former SS man, maybe in only a few days. I’m trying to save your life.”

Silence.

Liebermann said, “I’m here in the office of Rabbi Moshe Gorin of the Young Jewish Defenders. Until I can get the F.B.I. to protect you, which could take a week or so, the Rabbi wants to send some of his men down. They could be there—” He looked questioningly at Gorin, who said, “Tomorrow morning.” “Tomorrow morning,” Liebermann said. “Will you cooperate with them until F.B.I. men get there?”

Silence.

“Mr. Wheelock?”

“Look, Mr. Liebermann, if this is Mr. Liebermann. All right, maybe it is. Let me tell you something. You happen to be speaking to one of the safest men in the U.S.A. Firstly, I’m a former correction officer at a state penitentiary, so I know a little about taking care of myself. And secondly, I’ve got a houseful of trained Dobermans; I say the word and they tear the throat out of anyone who looks cross-eyed at me.”

“I’m glad to hear that,” Liebermann said, “but can they stop a wall from falling on you? Or someone shooting at you from far away? That’s what happened to two of the other men.”

“What the hell is this about? No Nazi is after me. You’ve got the wrong Henry Wheelock.”

“Is there another in New Providence who raises Dobermans? Sixty-five years old, a wife much younger, a son almost fourteen?”

Silence.

“You need protection,” Liebermann said. “And the Nazi has to be captured, not killed by dogs.”

“I’ll believe it when the F.B.I. tells me. I’m not going to have any Jew kids with baseball bats around.”

Liebermann was silent for a moment. “Mr. Wheelock,” he said, “could I come see you on my way to Washington? I’ll explain a little more.” Gorin looked questioningly at him; he looked away.

“Come ahead if you want to; I’m always here.”

“When is your wife not there?”

“She’s away most of the day. She teaches.”

“And the boy is in school too?”

“When he’s not playing hooky to make movies. He’s going to be the next Alfred Hitchcock, he thinks.”

“I’ll be there around noon tomorrow.”

“Suit yourself. But just you. I see any ‘Jewish Defenders’ around, I let the dogs loose. You got a pencil? I’ll give you directions.”

“I have them,” Liebermann said. “I’ll see you tomorrow. And I hope tonight you stay home.”

“I was planning to.”

Liebermann hung up.

“I have to tell him it involves the adoption,” he told Gorin, “and it’s better if he can’t hang up on me.” He smiled. “I also have to convince him the Y.J.D. isn’t ‘Jew kids with baseball bats.’” To Greenspan he said, “You’ll have to wait someplace there and then I’ll call you.”

“I have to go to Philadelphia first,” Greenspan said. “To pick my men and get my equipment.” To Gorin he said, “I want to take Paul along.”

They worked things out. Greenspan and Paul Stern would go to Philadelphia in Stern’s car as soon as they could get packed, and Liebermann would drive Greenspan’s car to New Providence in the morning. When he had persuaded Wheelock to accept Y.J.D. protection, he would call Philadelphia and the team would drive out and meet him at Wheelock’s home. Once things were settled there, he would drive on to Washington, keeping Greenspan’s car till the F.B.I. relieved the team. “I should call my office,” he said, stirring tea. “They think I’m there already.”

Gorin gestured at the phone.

Liebermann shook his head. “No, not now, it’s too late there. Early in the morning I’ll call.” He smiled. “I won’t stick the Y.J.D.”

Gorin shrugged. “I’m on the phone to Europe all the time,” he said. “Our chapters there.”

Liebermann nodded thoughtfully. “The contributors went from me to you.”

“I suppose some did,” Gorin said. “But the fact that we’re sitting here together, working together, proves that they’re still helping the same cause, doesn’t it?”

“I guess so,” Liebermann said. “Yes. Sure.”

Later he said, “Wheelock’s boy doesn’t paint pictures. It’s 1975; he makes movies.” He smiled. “But he picked himself the right initials. He wants to be another Alfred Hitchcock. And the father, the civil servant, doesn’t think it’s such a good idea. Hitler and his father had big arguments about his wanting to be an artist.”

Mengele had gone across the street early Wednesday morning and taken a room at another hotel, the Kenilworth, registering as Mr. Kurt Koehler of 18 Sheridan Road, Evanston, Illinois. He had been asked, fairly enough, to pay in advance, since all he carried was a slim leather portfolio (papers, knife, clips for the Browning, diamonds) and a small paper bag (grapes).

He couldn’t call Liebermann’s office from the room of Sr. Ramón Aschheim y Negrín, for after Liebermann’s death the calls from Koehler might well be checked into, nor did he especially care to gather seven dollars’ worth of coins and spend an hour blackening his thumb as he fed them into a booth phone. And as Kurt Koehler he could receive a return call, should one be necessary.

In his second room (no tenths of a star) he had reached Fräulein Zimmer and explained to her that he had flown from New York to Washington, sending Barry’s body on its way unescorted, because of the overriding importance of getting the poor boy’s notes—even more significant than he had originally realized—into Herr Liebermann’s hands as quickly as possible. But where, pray tell, was Herr Liebermann?

Not at the Benjamin Franklin? Fräulein Zimmer had been surprised but not alarmed. She would call Mannheim and see what she could find out. Perhaps Herr Koehler might try some other hotels, though why Herr Liebermann should have gone elsewhere she couldn’t imagine. No doubt he would call in soon; he usually did when he changed his plans. (Usually!) Yes, she would call Herr Koehler as soon as she had information. At the Kenilworth, kind Fräulein; the Benjamin Franklin had been full when he arrived. But holding a room for Herr Liebermann, of course.

By the time she had called back he had called more than thirty hotels, and the Benjamin Franklin six times.

Liebermann had left Frankfurt on his intended flight Tuesday morning; so he was either in Washington or had stopped off in New York.

“Where does he stay there?”

“Sometimes the Hotel Edison but usually with friends, contributors. He has a lot of them there. It’s a big Jewish city, you know.”

“I know.”

“Don’t worry, Herr Koehler; I’m sure I’ll hear soon and I’ll tell him you’re waiting. I’m staying here late, just in case.”

He called the Edison in New York, more hotels in Washington, the Benjamin Franklin every half-hour; dashed back there through freezing rain to make sure his clothes and suitcase were still in his Do Not Disturb-signed room.

He slept Wednesday night at the Kenilworth. Tried to sleep. Grew depressed. Thought of the gun on the bedside table…Did he really expect to get Liebermann and the other men still to be killed (seventy-seven of them!) before being killed himself? Or even worse, captured and made to endure the kind of hideous mock-trial that had befallen poor Stangl and Eichmann? Why not end all the struggling, planning, worrying?

He found, at one in the morning on American television—and surely this was God’s doing, a sign sent to raise him from despair—glorious film of the Führer and General von Blomberg watching a Luftwaffe flyover; silenced the loathsome English narration and watched the grainy old soundless images, so heart-wrenchingly bittersweet, so reinspiring…

Slept.

At a few minutes after eight on Thursday morning, just as he was about to place another call to Vienna, the phone rang. “Hello?”

“Kurt Koehler?” A woman, American, not Fräulein Zimmer.

“Yes…”

“Hello, this is Rita Farb! I’m a friend of Yakov Liebermann’s. He’s been staying with us. I’m in New York. He asked me to call you. He called his office in Vienna a little while ago and found out you were there in Washington waiting for him. He’ll be there tonight, around six. He’d like you to have dinner with him. He’ll call you as soon as he gets in.”

Relieved, joyful, Mengele said, “That’s fine!”

“And could you do him a favor, please? Would you call the Hotel Benjamin Franklin and tell them he’ll definitely be coming?”

“Yes, I’ll be glad to! Do you know what flight he’s arriving on?”

“He’s driving, not flying. He just left. That’s why I’m calling. He was a little rushed.”

Mengele frowned. “Won’t he be here earlier than six?” he asked. “If he left already?”

“No, he has to make a detour into Pennsylvania. He might even be a little later than six, but he’ll definitely be there and he’ll call you first thing.”

Mengele was silent; then said, “Is he going to speak to Henry Wheelock? In New Providence?”

“Yes, I’m the one who got the directions for him. It certainly is interesting having Yakov in your house! I gather something really big is going on.”

“Yes,” Mengele said. “Thank you for calling. Oh, do you know what time Yakov and Henry are getting together?”

“Noon.”

“Thank you. Good-by.” He pushed the phone’s button down, held it, looked at his watch, closed his eyes and pressed the side of his fist against his forehead; opened his eyes, released the button, tapped at it. Got the cashier and told her to get his food-and-phone bill ready.

Put the mustache on, the wig. The gun. Jacket, coat, hat; grabbed the portfolio.

He ran across the street and into the Benjamin Franklin; paused at the cashier’s window to give instructions and hurried to the car-rental booth. A pretty young woman in a yellow-and-black uniform smiled radiantly at him.

And only a little less radiantly when she learned he was Paraguayan and had no credit card. The estimated cost of the rental would have to be paid in cash in advance; around sixty dollars, she thought; she would work it out more accurately. He threw bills down, left his license, told her to have the car ready within ten minutes, no later; hurried to the elevators.

By nine o’clock he was on the highway to Baltimore, in a white Ford Pinto under a bright blue sky. Gun under his arm, knife in his coat pocket, God at his side.

Driving at the fifty-five-mile-per-hour speed limit, he would reach New Providence almost an hour before Liebermann.

Other cars slowly passed him. Americans! The limit is fifty-five, they go sixty. He shook his head and allowed himself to drive faster. When in Rome…

He reached New Providence—a clutch of drab houses, a shop, a one-story brick post office—at ten of eleven, but then he had to find Old Buck Road without asking directions of someone who might later describe him and/or his car to the police. The road map he had picked up at a gas station in Maryland, more detailed than the atlas map, showed a town named Buck to the southwest of New Providence; he explored in that direction, following a bumpy two-lane road that curved through winter-bare farmland; slowed at each cross road and peered at all-but-illegible signs and markers. Occasional cars and trucks passed him.

He found Old Buck Road branching right and left; chose the right-hand branch and headed back toward New Providence, watching for mailboxes. Passed Gruber, and C. Johnson. Leafless trees locked branches over the narrow road. A horse-drawn black buggy came toward him. He had seen similar ones on billboards on the main road; Amish people were apparently a local tourist attraction. A bearded black-hatted man and a black-bonneted woman sat within the black-canopied buggy, looking straight ahead.

The mailboxes, near drives leading into trees, were few and far apart. Which was good; he could use the gun.

H. Wheelock. The red flag-signal was down at the side of the box. GUARD DOGS, a board below warned (or advertised?) in crude black-painted letters.

Which was bad. Though not wholly bad, since it gave him a more acceptable reason for being there than the summer-tour-for-the-boy business which he had intended to repeat.

He turned right, guiding the car’s wheels into the deep ruts of a humpbacked dirt drive that led gradually uphill through trees. The car’s bottom scraped against the hump: Herr Hertz’s problem. But his own, too, should the car be disabled. He drove slowly. Looked at his watch: 11:18.

Yes, he vaguely remembered one of the American couples listing dog-breeding among their interests. No doubt it had been the Wheelocks; and the prison guard, retired by now certainly, had perhaps made a full-time occupation of his former pastime. “Good morning!” Mengele said aloud. “The sign down below says ‘guard dogs,’ and a guard dog is exactly what I’m looking for.” He pressed the full mustache down tight, patted the wig at side and back, tilted the mirror and glanced at himself; put the mirror right and followed the rutted drive slowly; reached under coat and jacket, unsnapped the holster’s side so the gun could be whipped free.

Dogs’ barking, a tumult of it, challenged him from a sunlit clearing where a two-story house—white shutters, brown shingles—stood at an angle to him; and at its back a dozen dogs flinging themselves at high mesh fence, barking, yipping. A white-haired man stood behind them, looking toward him.

He drove on to the foot of the house’s stone-paved walk and stopped the car there; shifted to P and turned the key. One dog yipped now, a puppy by the sound of it. At the far side of the house a red pickup truck stood in a two-car garage, the other half empty.

He unlocked the car door, opened it, got out; stretched and rubbed his back while the car whined at him to take the key. The gun stirred under his arm. He slammed the door and stood looking at the white-trimmed porch at the head of the walk. This is where one of them lives! Perhaps a photo of the boy would be around somewhere. How wonderful to see that nearly-fourteen-year-old face! God in heaven, what if he’s not in school today? Upsetting but thrilling thought!

The white-haired man came loping around the side of the house, a dog at his side, a gleaming black hound. The man wore a bulky brown jacket, black gloves, brown trousers; he was tall and broad, his ruddy face sullen, unfriendly.

Mengele smiled. “Good morning!” he called. “The—”

“You Liebermann?” the man asked in a deep-throated voice, loping nearer.

Mengele smiled more widely. “Ja, yes!” he said. “Yes! Mr. Wheelock?”

The man stopped near Mengele and nodded his head of wavy white hair. The dog, a handsome blue-black Doberman, snarled at Mengele, showing sharp white teeth. Its chain collar was hooked by a black leather finger. Rips and tears shredded the sleeves of the coarse brown jacket, fibers of white quilting sticking out.

“I’m a little early,” Mengele apologized.

Wheelock looked beyond him, toward the car, and looked directly at him with squinting blue eyes under bushy white brows. Wrinkles seamed his white-stubbled cheeks. “Come on in,” he said, tilting his white-haired head toward the house. “I don’t mind admitting you’ve got me goddamn curious.” He turned and led the way up the walk, finger-holding the blue-black Doberman’s chain.

“That’s a beautiful dog,” Mengele said, following.

Wheelock went up onto the porch. The white door had a dog’s-head knocker.

“Is your son at home?” Mengele asked.

“Nobody is,” Wheelock said, opening the door. “Excepting them.” Dobermans—two, three of them—came licking his glove, growling at Mengele. “Easy, boys,” Wheelock said. “It’s a friend.” He gestured the dogs back—they retreated obediently—and he went in with the other dog, beckoning to Mengele. “Close the door.”

Mengele came in and closed the door; stood looking at Wheelock crouching among crowding black Dobermans, stroking their heads and clapping their firm flanks while they tongued and nuzzled him. Mengele said, “How beautiful.”

“These young fellows,” Wheelock said happily, “are Harpo and Zeppo—my son named them; only litter I ever let him—and this old boy is Samson—easy, Sam—and this one is Major. This is Mr. Liebermann, fellows. A friend.” He stood up and smiled at Mengele, pulling at glove fingertips. “You can see now why I don’t wet my pants when you say someone’s out to get me.”

Mengele nodded. “Yes,” he said. He looked down at two Dobermans sniffing his thighs. “Wonderful protection,” he said, “dogs like these.”

“Tear the throat out of anyone who looks cross-eyed at me.” Wheelock unzipped his jacket; red shirt was inside it. “Take your coat off,” he said. “Hang it there.”

A high coat-stand with large black hooks stood at Mengele’s right; its oval mirror showed a chair and the end of a dining table in the room opposite. Mengele put his hat on a hook, unbuttoned his coat; smiled down at the Dobermans, smiled at Wheelock taking his jacket off. Beyond Wheelock a narrow stairway rose steeply.

“So you’re the one that caught that Eichmann.” Wheelock hung up his shredded-sleeved jacket.

“The Israelis caught him,” Mengele said, taking his coat off. “But I helped them, of course. I found where he was hiding down there in Argentina.”

“Get a reward?”

“No.” Mengele hung his coat up. “I do these things for the satisfaction,” he said. “I hate all Nazis. They should be hunted down and destroyed like vermin.”

Wheelock said, “It’s the boogies not the Nazis we have to worry about now. Come on in here.”

Mengele, adjusting his jacket, followed Wheelock into a room on the right. Two of the Dobermans escorted him, nosing at his legs; the other two went with Wheelock. The room was a pleasant sitting room, with white-curtained windows, a stone fireplace, and to the left, a wall of all-colored prize ribbons, gilded trophies, black-framed photos. “Oh, this is very impressive,” Mengele said, and went and looked. The photos were all of Dobermans, none of the boy.

“Now why is a Nazi coming for me?”

Mengele turned. Wheelock was sitting on a Victorian settee between the two front windows, pinching tobacco out of a cut-glass jar on a low table before him, packing it into a chunky black pipe. A Doberman stood with his front paws on the table, watching.

Another Doberman, the largest one, lay on a round hooked rug between Wheelock and Mengele, looking up at Mengele placidly but with interest.

The other two Dobermans nosed Mengele’s legs, his fingertips.

Wheelock looked over at Mengele and said, “Well?”

Smiling, Mengele said, “You know, it’s very hard for me to talk with…” He gestured at the Dobermans beside him.

“Don’t worry,” Wheelock said, working at his pipe. “They won’t bother you unless you bother me. Just sit down and talk. They’ll get used to you.”

Mengele sat down on a wheezing leather sofa. One of the Dobermans jumped up beside him and turned around and around, getting ready to lie down. The Doberman on the rug got up and came and pushed his sleek black head between Mengele’s knees, sniffing toward his crotch.

“Samson,” Wheelock warned, sucking match-flame into his pipe bowl.

The Doberman withdrew his head and sat on the floor looking at Mengele. Another Doberman, sitting by Mengele’s feet, scratched with a hind leg at his chain collar. The Doberman beside Mengele on the sofa lay watching the Doberman sitting before Mengele.

Mengele cleared his throat and said, “The Nazi who’s coming is Dr. Mengele himself. He’ll probably be here—”

“A doctor?” Wheelock, holding his pipe, shook out the match.

“Yes,” Mengele said. “Dr. Mengele. Mr. Wheelock, I’m sure these dogs are perfectly trained—I can tell as much from all these marvelous prizes”—he pointed a finger at the wall behind him—“but the fact is, when I was eight years old I was attacked by a dog; not a Doberman, a German shepherd.” He touched his left thigh. “This entire thigh,” he said, “is still today a mass of scars. And there are mental scars too. I’m very uncomfortable when a dog is in the room with me, and to have four of them present—well, this is a nightmare for me!”

Wheelock put his pipe down. “You should’ve said so right off the bat,” he said, and stood up and snapped his fingers. Dobermans jumped, sprang, jostled to his side. “Come on, boys,” he said, leading the pack across the room toward a doorway by the sofa. “We’ve got another Wally Montague on our hands. In you go.” He pointed the Dobermans through the doorway, toed something away from the bottom of the door and closed it, tried the knob.

“They can’t come in another way?” Mengele asked.

“Nope.” Wheelock walked back across the room.

Mengele breathed a sigh and said, “Thank you. I feel much better now.” He sat forward on the sofa and unbuttoned his jacket.

“Tell your story quickly,” Wheelock said, sitting on the settee, picking up his pipe. “I don’t like to keep them cooped up in there too long.”

“I’ll come directly to the point,” Mengele said, “but first”—he raised a finger—“I should like to lend you a gun, so you can defend yourself at moments like this when the dogs are not with you.”

“Got a gun,” Wheelock said, sitting back with the pipe between his teeth, his arms along the settee’s frame, his legs crossed. “A Luger.” He took the pipe from his mouth, blew smoke. “And two shotguns and a rifle.”

“This is a Browning,” Mengele said, taking the gun from the holster. “Similar to the Luger except that the clip holds thirteen cartridges.” He thumbed the safety catch down, and holding the gun in firing position, turned it toward Wheelock. “Raise the hands,” he said. “Put the pipe down first, slowly.”

Wheelock frowned at him, white eyebrows bristling.

“Now,” Mengele said. “I don’t want to hurt you. Why should I? You’re a complete stranger to me. Liebermann is the one I’m interested in. ‘The one in whom I’m interested,’ I should say.”

Wheelock uncrossed his legs and leaned forward slowly, glaring at Mengele, his face flushed. He put his pipe down and raised his open hands above his head.

“On the head,” Mengele suggested. “You have beautiful hair; I envy you. This is a wig, unfortunately.” He got up from the sofa, wagged the gun’s barrel upward.

Wheelock got up, his hands folded across the top of his head. “I don’t care doodily-shit about Jews and Nazis,” he said.

“Good,” Mengele said, keeping the gun aimed at Wheelock’s red-shirted chest. “But nevertheless I should like to put you someplace where you can’t give Liebermann a signal. Is there a cellar?”

“Sure,” Wheelock said.

“Go to it. At a not-alarming pace. Are there any other dogs in the house besides those four?”

“No.” Wheelock walked slowly toward the hallway, his hands on his head. “Lucky for you.”

Mengele followed after him with the gun. “Where is your wife?” he asked.

“At school. Teaching. In Lancaster.” Wheelock walked into the hallway.

“Have you pictures of your son?”

Wheelock paused for a moment, walked toward the right. “What do you want them for?”

“To look at,” Mengele said, following after him with the gun. “I’m not thinking of hurting him. I’m the doctor who delivered him.”

“What the hell is this about?” Wheelock stopped beside a door in the side of the stairway.

“Have you pictures?” Mengele asked.

“There’s an album in there. Where we were. On the bottom of the table where the phone is.”

“That is the door?”

“Yes.”

“Lower one hand and open it, only a little.”

Wheelock turned to the door, lowered a hand, opened the door slightly; put the hand back on his head.

“The rest with your foot.”

Wheelock toed the door all the way open.

Mengele moved to the wall opposite and stood against it, the gun close to Wheelock’s back. “Go in.”

“I have to put the light on.”

“Do so.”

Wheelock reached, pulled a string; harsh light came on inside the doorway. Putting his hand back on his head, Wheelock ducked and stepped down onto a landing of household implements clipped to plank wall.

“Go down,” Mengele said. “Slowly.”

Wheelock turned to the left and started slowly down stairs.

Mengele moved to the doorway, stepped down onto the landing; turned toward Wheelock, drew the door closed.

Wheelock walked slowly down cellar stairs, his hands on his head.

Mengele aimed the gun at the red-shirted back. He fired and fired again; deafeningly loud shots. Shells flew and bounded.

The hands left the white-haired head, groped down, found wooden rails. Wheelock swayed.

Mengele fired another deafening shot into the red-shirted back.

The hands slipped from the rails and Wheelock toppled forward. The front of his head banged floor below; his shoe-soled feet spread apart and his legs and trunk slid farther down the stairs.

Mengele looked, reaming at an ear with a forefinger.

He opened the door and went out into the hallway. The dogs were barking wildly. “Quiet!” Mengele shouted, finger-reaming his other ear. The dogs kept barking.

Mengele pushed the safety catch up and put the gun into the holster; got out his handkerchief, wiped the door’s inside knob, pulled the light string, elbowed the door closed. “Quiet!” he shouted, putting the handkerchief in his pocket. The dogs kept barking. They scratched and thumped at a door at the end of the hallway.

Mengele hurried to the front door, looked out through a narrow pane beside it; opened the door and ran out.

Got into his car, started it, and drove it past the house and around into the empty half of the garage.

Ran back into the house, closed the door. The dogs were barking and whining, scratching, thumping.

Mengele looked at himself in the coat-stand’s mirror; detached the wig and took it off, peeled the mustache from his upper lip; put mustache and wig into a pocket of his hanging coat, pulled the flap out and over.

Looked at himself again as he palmed his cropped gray hair with both hands. Frowned.

Took his jacket off, hung it on a hook; took the coat and hung it over the jacket.

Unknotted his black-and-gold-striped tie, whipped it off, rolled it up and stuffed it into another coat pocket.

Unbuttoned the collar of his light-blue shirt, the next button too; spread the collar, pressed down its wings.

The dogs barked and whined behind the door.

Mengele worked at the holster’s back-strap. Looked at himself in the mirror and asked, “You Liebermann?”

Asked it again, more American, less German: “You Liebermann?” Tried to make his voice more Wheelock-like, more down-in-the-throat: “Come on in. I have to admit I’m goddamn curious. Ignore sem, sey always bark like sat. Them. They. Th, th, th. That, that. Ignore them, they always bark like that. You Liebermann? Come on in.”

The dogs barked.

“Quiet!” Mengele shouted.