Strasser shifted from one foot to another. “I have to sit down,” he
wheezed. He moved slowly down the hallway.
They followed him down the hall, to a large, ornate, book-lined room. It
was a library, a two-story atrium with walls and shelves of burnished
mahogany.
“You live in hiding,” Anna said. “Because you’re a war criminal.”
“I am no war criminal!” Strasser hissed. “I’m as innocent as a baby.”
Anna smiled. “If you aren’t a war criminal,” she replied, “why are you
hiding?”
He faltered, but only for a moment. “Here it has become fashionable to
expel former Nazis. And yes, I was a member of the National Socialist
party. Argentina signs agreements with Israel and Germany and America
they want to change their image. Now they only care what America
thinks. They’d expel me just to make the American President smile. And
you know, here in Buenos Aires, tracking down Nazis is a business! For
some journalists it’s a full-time job, how they make their living! But
I was never a Hitler loyalist. Hitler was a ruinous madman that was
clear early in the war. He would be the destruction of all of us. Men
like me knew that other accommodations had to be reached. My people
sought to kill the man before he could do further damage to our
industrial capacities. And our projections were correct. By the war’s
end, America had three-quarters of the world’s invested capital, and
two-thirds of the world’s industrial capacity.” He paused, smiled. “The
man was simply bad for business.”
“If you’d turned against Hitler, why are you still protected by the
Kamaradenwerk?” Ben asked.
“Illiterate thugs,” Strasser scoffed. “They are as ignorant of history
as the avengers they seek to thwart.”
“Why did you go out of town?” Anna interrupted.
“I was staying at an estancia in Patagonia owned by my wife’s family. My
late wife’s family. At the foot of the Andes, in Rio Negro province. A
cattle and sheep ranch, but very luxurious.”
“Do you go there regularly?”
“This is the first time I go there. My wife died last year and … Why
do you ask these things?”
“That’s why they couldn’t find you to kill you,” Anna said.
“Kill me … But who is trying to kill me?”
Ben looked at Anna, urging her to continue speaking.
She replied, “The company.”
“The company?”
“Sigma.”
She was bluffing, Ben knew, but she did it with great conviction.
Chardin’s words came to his mind, unbidden. The Western world, and much
of the rest, would respond to its ministrations, and it would accept the
cover stories that accompanied them.
Now Strasser was brooding. “The new leadership. Yes, that is it. Ah,
yes.” His raisin eyes gleamed.
“What is the ‘new leadership’?” Ben prompted.
“Yes, of course,” Strasser went on as if he hadn’t heard Ben. “They are
afraid I know things.”
“Who?” Ben shouted.
Strasser looked up at him, startled. “I helped them set it up. Alford
Kittredge, Siebert, Aldridge, Holleran, Conover–all those crowned heads
of corporate empires. They had contempt for me, but they needed me,
didn’t they? They needed my contacts high up in the German government.
If the venture wasn’t properly multinational, it had no hope of
succeeding. I had the trust of the men at the very top. They knew I
had done things for them that forever placed me beyond the pale of
ordinary humanity. They knew I had made that ultimate sacrifice for
them. I was a go-between trusted by all sides. And now that trust has
been betrayed, exposed for the charade it always was. Now it has become
clear that they were using me for their own ends.”
“You talked about the new leaders–is Jurgen Lenz one of them?” Anna
asked urgently. “Lenz’s son?”
“I have never met this Jurgen Lenz. I didn’t know Lenz had a son, but
then I wasn’t an intimate of his.”
“But you were both scientists,” Ben said. “In fact, you invented
Zyklon-B, didn’t you?”
“I was one of a team that invented Zyklon-B,” he replied. He pulled at
his shabby blue bathrobe, adjusted it at the neck. “Now all the
apologists attack me for my role in this, but they do not consider how
elegant was this gas.”
“Elegant?” Ben repeated. For a second he thought he’d misheard.
Elegant. The man was loathsome.
“Before Zyklon-B, the soldiers had to shoot every prisoner,” Strasser
said. “Terrible bloodbaths. Gas was so clean and simple and elegant.
And you know, gassing the Jews actually spared them.”
Ben echoed: “Spared them.” Ben was sickened.
“Yes! There were so many deadly diseases that went around those camps,
they would have suffered much longer, much more painfully. Gassing them
was the most humanitarian option.”
Humanitarian. I’m looking in the face of evil, Ben thought. An old man
in a bathrobe uttering pieties.
“How nice,” Ben said.
“This is why we called it ‘special treatment.” ”
“Your euphemism for extermination.”
“If you wish.” He shrugged. “But you know, I didn’t hand-pick victims
for the gas chambers like Dr. Mengele or Dr. Lenz. They call Mengele
the Angel of Death, but Lenz was the real one. The real Angel of
Death.”
“But not you,” Ben said. “You were a scientist.”
Strasser sensed the sarcasm. “What do you know of science?” he spat.
“Are you a scientist? Do you have any idea how far ahead of the rest of
the world we Nazi scientists were? Do you have any idea?” He spoke in
a high tremulous voice. Spittle formed at the corners of his mouth.
“They criticize Mengele’s twin studies, yet his findings are still cited
by the world’s leading geneticists! The Dachau experiments in freezing
human beings those data are still used! What they learned at
Ravensbruck about what happens to the female menstrual cycle under
stress when the women learned they were about to be executed
scientifically this was a breakthrough! Or Dr. Lenz’s experiments on
aging. The famine experiments on Soviet prisoners of war, the limb
transplants I could go on and on. Maybe it’s not polite to talk about
it, but you still use our science. You’d rather not think about how the
experiments were done, but don’t you realize that one of the main
reasons we were so advanced was precisely because we were able to
experiment on live human beings?”
Strasser’s creased face had gotten even paler as he spoke, and now it
was chalk-white. He had grown short of breath. “You Americans are
disgusted by how we did our research, but you use fetal tissue from
abortions for your transplants, yes? This is acceptable?”
Anna was pacing back and forth. “Ben, don’t debate with this monster.”
But Strasser would not stop. “Of course, there were many crackpot
ideas. Trying to make girls into boys and boys into girls.” He
chortled. “Or trying to create Siamese twins by connecting the vital
organs of the twins, a total failure, we lost many twins that way ”
“And after Sigma was established, did you continue to keep in touch with
Lenz?” Anna asked, cutting him off.
Strasser turned, seemingly perturbed at the interruption. “Certainly.
Lenz relied on me for my expertise and my contacts.”
“Meaning what?” Ben said.
The old man shrugged. “He said he was doing work, doing research
molecular research that would change the world.”
“Did he tell you what it was, this research?”
“No, not me. Lenz was a private, secretive man. But I remember he said
once, “You simply cannot fathom what I’m working on.” He asked me to
procure sophisticated electron microscopes, very hard to get in those
days. They had just been invented. Also, he wanted various chemicals.
Many things that were embargoed because of the war. He wanted
everything crated and sent to a private clinic he had set up in an old
Schloss, a castle, he had seized during the invasion of Austria.”
“Where in Austria?” Anna asked.
“The Austrian Alps.”
“Where in the Alps? What town or village, do you remember?” Anna
persisted.
“How can I possibly remember this, after all these years? Maybe he
never told me. I only remember Lenz called it ‘the Clockworks’ because
it had once been some kind of clock factory.”
A scientific project of Lenz’s. “A laboratory, then? Why?”
Strasser’s lips pulled down. He sighed reproachfully. “To continue the
research.”
“What research?” he said.
Strasser fell silent, as if lost in thought.
“Come on!” Anna said. “What research?”
“I don’t know. There was much important research that began during the
Reich. Gerhard Lenz’s work.”
Gerhard Lenz: what was it Sonnenfeld had said about Lenz’s horrific
experiments in the camps? Human experimentation … but what?
“And you don’t know the nature of this work?”
“Not today. Science and politics it was all the same to these people.
Sigma was, from the beginning, a means of tunneling support to certain
political organizations, subverting others. The men we’re talking about
these were already men of enormous influence in the world. Sigma showed