anguished. “I can’t blame her. She didn’t have to live with this
legacy. Her father was killed in the war when she was a child.”
“I’m sorry to have brought it up,” Ben said.
“Please, not at all. It is a perfectly natural question. I’m sure it
strikes Americans as strange that the son of the notorious Gerhard Lenz
devotes his life to giving away money to study the crimes of his father.
But you must understand, those of us who, by the accident of birth, have
had to struggle with this we, the children of the most important Nazis
we each react in very different ways. There are those, like Rudolph
Hess’s son Wolf, who spend their lives trying to clear their father’s
names. And there are those who grow up confused, struggling to make
some sense of it all. I was born too late to have retained any personal
memories of my father, but there are many who knew their fathers only as
they were at home, not as Hitler’s men.”
Jorgen Lenz grew steadily more impassioned as he spoke. “We grew up in
privileged homes. We drove through the Warsaw ghetto in the back of a
limousine, not understanding why the children out there looked so sad.
We watched our fathers’ eyes light up when the Fuhrer himself called to
wish the family a merry Christmas. And some of us, as soon as we were
old enough to think, learned to loathe our fathers and everything they
stood for. To despise them with every fiber of our being.”
Lenz’s surprisingly youthful face was flushed. “I don’t think of my
father as my father, you see. He’s like someone else to me, a stranger.
Shortly after the war ended, he escaped to Argentina, I’m sure you know,
smuggled out of Germany with false papers. He left my mother and me
penniless, living in a military detention camp.” He paused. “So you
see, I’ve never had any doubts or conflicts about the Nazis. Creating
this foundation was the very least I could do.”
The room was silent for a moment.
“I came to Austria to study medicine,” Lenz continued. “In some ways it
was a relief to leave Germany. I loved it here–I was born here–and I
stayed, practicing medicine, keeping as anonymous as I could. After I
met Use, the love of my life, we discussed what we could do with the
family money she’d inherited–her father had made a fortune publishing
religious books and hymnals–and we decided I’d give up medicine and
devote my life to fighting against what my father fought for. Nothing
can ever efface the darkness that was the Third Reich, but I’ve devoted
myself to trying, in my own small way, to be a force of human
betterment.” Lenz’s speech seemed a little too polished, too rehearsed,
as if he’d delivered it a thousand times before. No doubt he had. Yet
there didn’t seem to be a false note. Beneath the calm assured ness Lenz
was clearly a tormented man.
“You never saw your father again?”
“No. I saw him two or three times before his death. He came to Germany
from Argentina to visit. He had a new name, a new identity. But my
mother wouldn’t see him. I saw him, but I felt nothing for him. He was
a stranger to me.”
“Your mother simply cut him off?”
“The next time was when she traveled to Argentina for his funeral. She
did do that, as if she needed to see that he was dead. The funny thing
was, she found she loved the country. It’s where she finally retired
to.”
There was another silence, and then Ben said quietly but firmly, “I must
say I’m impressed by all the resources you’ve devoted to shedding light
on your paternal legacy. I wonder, in this connection, if you can tell
me about an organization known as Sigma.” He studied Lenz’s face
closely as he spoke the name.
Lenz looked at him for a good long while. Ben could hear his own heart
thudding in the silence.
At last Lenz spoke. “You mention Sigma casually, but I think this may
be the entire reason you have come here,” Lenz said. “Why are you here,
Mr. Simon?”
Ben felt a chill. He had let himself be cornered. Now the roads
diverged: now he could try to hold on to his false identity, or come out
with the truth.
It was time to be direct. To draw out the quarry.
“Mr. Lenz, I’m inviting you to clarify the nature of your involvement
with Sigma.”
Lenz frowned. “Why are you here, Mr. Simon? Why do you sneak into my
house and lie to me?” Lenz smiled strangely, his voice quiet. “You’re
CIA, Mr. “Simon,” is that right?”
“What are you talking about?” Ben said, baffled and frightened.
“Who are you really, Mr. “Simon’? Lenz whispered.
“Nice house,” Anna said. “Whose is it?”
She sat in the front seat of a smoke-filled blue BMW, an unmarked police
vehicle. Sergeant Walter Heisler was at the wheel, a beefy, hearty
looking man in his late thirties, smoking Casablancas. He was cordial
enough.
“One of our more, eh, prominent citizens,” Heisler said, taking a drag
on his cigarette. “Jurgen Lenz.”
“Who is he?”
They were both looking out at a handsome villa a hundred yards or so
down Adolfstorgasse. Anna saw that most of the parked cars had black
license plates with white letters. Heisler explained that you had to
pay to maintain such plates; it was the old, aristocratic style.
He blew out a cloud of smoke. “Lenz and his wife are active in the
social circles here, the Opera Ball and so on. I guess you’d call them,
how you say, phi lo philanthropists? Lenz runs the family foundation.
Moved here twenty-some years ago from Germany.”
“Hmmm.” Her eyes were smarting from the smoke, but she didn’t want to
complain. Heisler was doing her a major favor. She rather liked
sitting here in the smoke-filled cop car, one of the fellas.
“How old?”
“Fifty-seven, I believe.”
“And prominent.”
“Very.”
There were three other unmarked vehicles idling on the street, one near
them, the other two a few hundred yards down the block, on the other
side of Lenz’s villa. The cars were arranged in a classic box
formation, so that no matter how Hartman chose to leave the
neighborhood, they would have him trapped. The officers waiting in the
cars were all highly trained members of the surveillance squad. Each of
them was equipped with weapons and walkie-talkies.
Anna had no weapon. It was highly unlikely, she thought, that Hartman
would put up any resistance. His records showed that he’d never owned a
gun or applied for a license to carry. The murders of the old men had
all been done by means of poison, by syringe. He probably had no weapon
with him.
In fact, there wasn’t much she knew about Hartman. But her Viennese
comrades knew even less. She had told her friend Fritz Weber only that
the American had left prints at the crime scene in Zurich, nothing more.
Heisler, too, knew only that Hartman was wanted in Rossignol’s murder.
But that was enough for the Bundespolizei to agree to apprehend Hartman
and, at the formal request of the FBI legal in Vienna, to place him
under arrest.
She wondered how much she could trust the local police.
This was no theoretical question. Hartman was in there meeting with a
man who … A thought occurred to her. “This guy, Lenz,” she said, her
eyes burning from the smoke. “This may be a strange question, but does
he have anything to do with the Nazis?”
Heisler stubbed out his cigarette in the car’s overflowing ashtray.
“Well, this is a strange question,” he said. “His father–do you know
the name Dr. Gerhard Lenz?”
“No, should I?”
He shrugged: naive Americans. “One of the worst. A colleague of Josef
Mengele’s who did all kinds of horrifying experiments in the camps.”
“Ah.” Another idea suggested itself. Hartman, a survivor’s son with an
avenging spirit, was going after the next generation.
“His son is a good man, very different from his father. He devotes his
life to undoing his father’s evil.”
She stared at Heisler, then out the windshield at Lenz’s magnificent
villa. The son was anti-Nazi? Amazing. She wondered whether Hartman
knew that. He might not know anything about the younger Lenz except
that he was the son of Gerhard, son of a Nazi. If he were really a
fanatic, he wouldn’t care if Lenz Junior could turn water into wine.
Which meant that Hartman might already have given Jurgen Lenz a lethal
injection.
Jesus, she thought, as Heisler lit another Casablanca. Why are we just
sitting here?
“Is that yours?” Heisler suddenly asked.
“Is what mine?”
“That car.” He pointed at a Peugeot that was parked across the street
from Lenz’s villa. “It’s been in the area since we get here.”