about it.”
“And the document I mentioned the articles of incorporation did he ever
mention hiding it somewhere here?”
She stopped stirring the greens. “Never.” She said it with absolute
certainty.
“You’re sure? It wasn’t in the vault.”
“He would have told me if he’d hidden it here.”
“Not necessarily. He didn’t show you this photograph. He may have
wanted to protect you, or maybe keep you from worrying.”
“Well, then your guess is as good as mine.”
“Would you mind if I looked around?”
“Be my guest.”
While she finished making dinner, he searched the cabin methodically,
trying to put himself into his brother’s head. Where would Peter have
hidden it? He ruled out any place that Liesl would have regularly
cleaned or had any reason to look. Liesl and Peter’s bedroom was one of
two small rooms off the living room area, the other being Peter’s study.
But both rooms were spartanly furnished and yielded nothing.
He checked the floor all over for any loose planks, then inspected the
log-and-plaster walls, but nothing.
“Do you have a flashlight?” Ben asked, returning to the kitchen area.
“I want to look outside.”
“Of course. There’s a flashlight in every room the lights go out often.
There’s one on the table by the door. But we’ll be ready to eat in just
a few minutes.”
“I’ll make it quick.” He took the flashlight and stepped outside, where
it was cold and completely dark. He made a cursory tour of the grassy
area surrounding the cabin. There was a scorched place where they
obviously cooked outdoors, and a large log pile covered with a
tarpaulin.
The document might have been hidden in a container beneath a rock, but
that ‘would have to wait until the light of morning. He beamed the
flashlight on the exterior of the cabin, made his way slowly around the
walls, poking around a propane tank, but again turned up nothing.
When he went back inside, Liesl had already set out two plates and
silverware on a red-and-white-checked tablecloth over a small round
table against a window.
“Smells delicious,” Ben said.
“Please, sit.”
She poured two more glasses of wine and served both of them. The food
was wonderfully flavored, and Ben devoured it. They both concentrated
on eating, and only began to talk after they’d satisfied their hunger.
The second glass of wine made Liesl melancholy. As she spoke about
Peter and how they met, she cried. She recalled how Peter had taken
such pride in furnishing their cabin, their home, building the bookcases
and much of the furniture himself.
The bookcases, Ben thought. Peter had built the bookcases … He got up
suddenly. “Would you mind if I looked at little closer at the shelves?”
“Why not,” she said with a tired wave.
The bookcases appeared to have been built as several separate units and
assembled in place. They weren’t open shelves; you could not see the
log-and-plaster walls behind them. Instead, Peter had built a backing
of wood.
Shelf by shelf, Ben removed all of the books and looked behind them.
“What are you doing?” Liesl called out in vexation.
“I’ll put them all back, don’t worry,” Ben said.
Half an hour later, he hadn’t found anything. Liesl had finished doing
the dishes and announced that she was exhausted. But Ben kept at it,
removing each shelf of books, looking behind them, becoming more and
more frustrated. When he came to the row of novels by F Scott
Fitzgerald, he smiled sadly. The Great Gatsby had been Peter’s
favorite.
Then, behind the Fitzgeralds, he found a small compartment that had been
flush-mounted, almost invisibly, into the wooden shelf backing.
Peter had done an impeccable job of carpentry: even with all the books
off the shelf, you could barely see the faint rectangular outline of the
compartment. He pried at it with his fingernails, but it didn’t yield.
He poked at it, pressed in, and then it popped open. A neat piece of
craftsmanship. Peter the perfectionist.
The document was carefully rolled up. A rubber band held the roll
together. Ben pulled it out, removed the rubber band, unrolled it.
It was a fragile, yellowed sheet of paper covered with mimeographed
lettering. Just one page. Merely the front page of a corporate filing.
It was headed sigma ag. There was a date: April 6, 1945.
Then a list of what had to be the company’s officers and directors.
Dear God, he thought, thunderstruck. Peter had been right: there were
names he recognized. Names of corporations that still existed, that
made automobiles and weapons and consumer goods. Names of moguls and
corporate chairmen. In addition to the figures he’d recognized from the
photograph, there was the fabled magnate Cyrus Weston, whose steel
empire had exceeded even that of Andrew Carnegie’s, and Avery Henderson,
who was regarded by business historians as the twentieth century’s most
important financier after John Pierpont Morgan. There were the chief
executive officers of the major automotive companies; of early
generation technology firms that had taken the lead in developing radar,
microwave, and refrigeration technologies–technologies whose full
potential wouldn’t be realized for years, decades, to come. The heads
of the three largest petroleum companies, based in America, Britain, and
the Netherlands. Telecommunication giants, before they were called
that. The mammoth corporations of the time, some as intact and as vast
as ever, some of them now subsumed into corporate entities even greater
than themselves. Industrialists from America, Western Europe, and, yes,
even a few from wartime Germany. And toward the very top of the list
was the name of the treasurer: max hartman
(OBERSTURMFUHRER, SS).
His heart was hammering away crazily. Max Hartman, a lieutenant in
Hitler’s SS. If this was a forgery… it was certainly well done. He
had seen documents of incorporation many times before, and this looked
very much like a page from such a document.
Liesl emerged from the kitchen. “You have found something?”
The fire was dying, and the room was beginning to get cold. “Do you
know any of those names?” Ben asked.
“The famous ones. The mighty ‘captains of industry,” as Peter called
them.”
“But almost of all them are dead now.”
“They would have heirs, successors.”
“Yes. Well-protected ones,” Ben said. “There are other names here,
too, names that I don’t recognize. I’m not a historian.” He pointed to
a few of those names, those that were not from the English-speaking
world. “Are any of these names familiar to you? And any of them
alive?”
She sighed. “Gaston Rossignol, I know, must still live in Zurich,
everyone’s heard of him. A pillar of the Swiss banking establishment
for much of the postwar era. Gerhard Lenz was an associate of Josef
Mengele, who did all those terrible medical experiments on prisoners. A
monster. He died somewhere in South America many years ago. And, of
course …” Her voice trailed off.
“Peter was right,” Ben said.
“About your father?”
“Yes.”
“It’s strange. Der Apfel fall! Night wett vom Stamm, my people say-the
apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. You and Peter are really so
alike. And when I look at Max Hartman as a young man, I see you in him.
Yet you’re both so utterly different from your father. Appearance is an
uncertain guide.”
“He is an evil man.”
“I’m sorry.” She looked at him for a long while. Whether it was out of
sorrow, or pity, or something more, Ben couldn’t decide. “Just now you
look more like your brother than ever before.”
“How do you mean?”
“You look… haunted. As he came to look in the last–the last months.”
She closed her eyes, blinking back tears. After a moment, she said,
“The couch in Peter’s study pulls out into a bed. Let me get it ready
for you.”
“That’s all right,” he said. “I can do it.”
“Let me at least get you some linens. And then I’ll say good night. I’m
about to drop from exhaustion and too much wine. I was never a
drinker.”
“You’ve been through some hard times recently,” he said. “We both
have.”
He said good night, undressed, then carefully folded the document and
tucked it into the pocket of his leather jacket, next to Peter’s
identity papers. Within moments he had fallen into a deep, almost
drugged sleep.
He and his brother were packed into a sealed boxcar, jammed with other
people, unbearably hot, foul-smelling, because none of the prisoners had
bathed in days. He was unable to move his limbs. Soon he passed out,
and the next thing he knew they were somewhere else, again in a crowd of
prisoners, walking skeletons with shaved heads. But Peter looked
relieved, because at last he would be allowed to take a shower, and so
what if it was a communal shower? Ben was overcome with panic, because
he knew. Somehow he knew. He tried to shout: “Peter! No! This is not
a shower–it’s a gas chamber! Get out! It’s a gas chamber!” Yet his