“You were never very curious about Dad’s background, were you?”
“Not really, no,” Ben admitted.
Peter smiled grimly. “That’s probably the way he preferred it. And
lucky for you that you weren’t. It’s nice to live in a state of
innocence. Believing all the lies. The story, the legend Dad created
about the Holocaust survivor who came to America with ten bucks in his
pocket and built a financial empire. Became a great philanthropist.” He
shook his head, snorted. “What a fraud he is. What a myth he created.”
With a sneer he added: “The great man.”
Ben’s heart began to pound slowly. Dad was difficult to get along with;
his enemies called him ruthless. But a fraud?
“Max Hartman was a member of the Schutzstaffel” Peter repeated. “The
SS, okay? File it under ‘strange but true.” ” Peter was so damned
earnest, so convincing, and Ben never knew him to lie to his face. But
this was so patently false! He wanted to scream, Stop it!
“What kind of corporation was it?”
Peter shook his head. “Possibly a front, a sort of dummy corporation,
established with millions and millions of dollars in assets pooled by
the principals.”
“For what? To what end?”
“That I don’t know, and the document doesn’t specify.”
“Where is this document?”
“I’ve got it hidden away safely, don’t worry. This corporation,
headquartered in Zurich, Switzerland, in early April 1945, was called
Sigma AG.”
“And did you tell Dad you’d found this?”
Peter nodded and took his first sip of coffee. “I called him, read it
aloud to him, asked him about it. He blew up, as I knew he would.
Claimed the thing was a fake, like you did as I knew he would. Got
angry, defensive. Started shouting, screaming. How could I believe
such slander? With all he’d been through, blah blah blah, how could I
possibly believe such a lie? That sort of thing. I never expected to
get anything out of him, but I wanted to gauge his reaction. So I
started asking around. Looking into corporate records in Geneva, in
Zurich. Trying to find out whatever happened to this firm. And then I
was almost killed. Twice. The first time it was a ‘car accident,” a
near miss. A car swerving onto the pavement on the Limmatquai, where I
was walking. The second time it was a ‘mugging’ on Niederdorfstrasse
that was no mugging. I managed to escape both times, but then I was
warned. If I persisted in digging around in things that were none of my
business, next time I’d be killed. No more near misses. I was to hand
over all pertinent documents. And if any of the details about this
corporation got out, I’d be dead, along with everyone in our family. So
don’t think about phoning in a tip to the newspapers, they said. Dad I
didn’t care about, obviously. It was you and Mom I was protecting.”
That sounded so much like Peter he was no less fierce a protector of
their mother than Ben had been. And he was levelheaded, not at all
prone to paranoia. He had to be telling the truth.
“But why were they so concerned about what you knew?” Ben persisted.
“Look at it objectively. A corporation was set up more than half a
century ago. So what? Why the secrecy now?”
“We’re talking about a joint partnership across enemy lines. We’re
talking about the risk of public exposure, and thus public disgrace, of
some of the most powerful, revered figures of our time. But that’s the
least of it. Consider the nature of the enterprise. Mammoth
corporations, Allied and Axis alike, establishing a joint entity in
order to enrich all of them. Germany was blockaded at the time, but
then, capital doesn’t respect national boundaries, does it? Some people
would call it trading with the enemy. Who knows what international laws
might have been violated? What if there was some chance that the assets
could be frozen or confiscated? There’s no way of gauging the magnitude
of those assets. A lot can happen in half a century. We could be
talking about staggering sums of money. And even the Swiss have been
known to waive the secrecy laws under international pressure. Obviously,
some people came to the conclusion that I might just know enough to
jeopardize their cozy arrangement.”
” “Some people’? Who was it who threatened you?”
Peter sighed. “Again, I wish I knew.”
“Come on, Peter, if there’s anyone else alive who was involved in
setting up this corporation, they’d have to be ancient.”
“Sure, most of the ones who were in high positions are gone. But some
are still around, believe me. And some aren’t all that old in their
seventies, even. If only two or three guys on the board of this company
are still alive, they may be sitting on a fortune. And who knows who
their successors might be? It’s obvious they’ve got enough money to
keep their secret buried, you know? By any means necessary.”
“So you decided to disappear.”
“They knew way too much about me. My daily schedule, the places I went,
my unlisted home phone number, names and locations of family members.
Financial, credit information. They were making a point, loud and
clear, that they had extensive resources. So I made a decision, Benno.
I had to die. They’d left me no other choice.”
“No other choice? You could have given them their stupid document,
agreed to their demands moved on as if you’d never found the thing.”
Peter grunted. “That’s like trying to unring a bell, put the toothpaste
back in the tube can’t be done. They were never going to let me live,
now that I knew what I knew.”
“So what was the purpose of the warning?”
“Keep me quiet while they determined how much I knew, whether I’d told
anyone. Until they got rid of me.”
Ben could hear the old woman moving about in the other room, the
floorboards squeaking. After a while, he said, “How’d you do it, Peter?
The death, I mean. It can’t have been easy.”
“It wasn’t.” Peter leaned back in his chair, resting the back of his
head against the window. “I couldn’t have done it without Liesl.”
“Your girlfriend.”
“Liesl’s a wonderful, remarkable woman. My lover, my best friend. Ah,
Ben, I never thought I’d be so lucky as to find someone like this. I
hope someday you find someone even half as terrific as her. It was her
idea, really. I’d have never been able to put the plan together. She
agreed I had to disappear, and she insisted it had to be done right.”
“But the dental records I mean, Christ, Peter, they identified your body
positively, beyond any doubt.”
Peter shook his head. “They matched the body’s teeth with the dental
records back home in Westchester, the assumption being that those were
really my dental X-rays in Dr. Merrill’s office.”
Ben shook his head, perplexed. “Whose body… ?”
“Liesl got the idea from the prank that the medical students at the
University of Zurich pull almost every year at the end of the spring
semester. Some joker always steals the cadaver from the gross anatomy
class. It’s sort of a morbid springtime ritual, medical-student humor
one day their cadaver just disappears. It’s always reclaimed, sort of
ransomed. Instead, she arranged to have an unclaimed body stolen from
the hospital morgue. Then it was a simple matter to pull the dead guy’s
medical records, including dental records this is Switzerland,
everyone’s documented,” Ben smiled in spite of himself. “But to switch
the X-rays … ?”
“Let’s just say I hired someone to do a simple, low-risk breaking-and
entering job. Dr. Merrill’s office isn’t exactly Fort Knox. One pair
of films was substituted for another. No big deal. When the police came
to him requesting my dental records, they got the substituted ones.”
“And the plane crash?”
Peter explained, leaving out no significant detail.
Ben watched him as he spoke. Peter had always been soft-spoken, quiet,
the deliberate, thoughtful one. But you’d never call him calculating or
devious, and deviousness was what this plan had required. How
frightened he must have been.
“A few weeks earlier, Liesl applied for a position at a small hospital
in the canton of St. Gallen. Of course they were delighted to hire her
they needed a pediatrician. She found us a small cabin in the
countryside, in the woods by a lake, and I joined her. I posed as her
Canadian husband, a writer working on a book. All the while I
maintained a network of contacts, my antennae.”
“People who knew you were alive that must have been risky.”
“Trusted people who knew I was alive. Liesl’s cousin is an attorney in
Zurich. He was our listening post, our eyes and ears. She trusts him
completely, and therefore so do I. An attorney with multiple
international interests has his contacts in the police, in the banking