“Really.” She made some meaningless marks on her yellow pad.
“Times have changed in Argentina. The bad old days, when a Josef
Mengele could live openly here, under his own name, they are gone. The
days of the Per6n dictatorship are over. Now Argentina is a democracy.
Josef Schwammberger was extradited. Erich Priebke was extradited. I
cannot even recall the last time we arrested a Nazi here.”
She crossed out her doodle with a slash of her pen. “What about
immigration records? Records of people who entered the country in the
forties and fifties?”
He frowned. “Maybe there are records of entries, arrivals. The
National Registry, the Migrations Department–it is index cards,
everything entered by hand. But our coastline is thousands of
kilometers long. Who knows how many tugboats and rowboats and fishing
trawlers landed decades ago at one of the hundreds of estancias–the
ranches–and were never detected? Hundreds of kilometers of coastline
in Patagonia, no one is there to see.”
He again jabbed the air. “And then in 1949, Perdn issued a blanket
amnesty for anyone who had entered the country under a false name. So
it is unlikely there will be any immigration record of Josef Strasser
even if he really is here. Maybe you can go down to Bariloche, the ski
resort, and ask around. The Germans love Bariloche. It reminds them of
their beloved Bavaria. But I would not hold out much hope. I am
terribly sorry to disappoint you.”
Anna Navarro was not gone from Miguel Antonio Peralta’s office two
minutes before the Interpol man picked up his telephone. “Mauricio,” he
said. “I’ve just had a most interesting visitor.”
In a modern office building in Vienna, a bland-looking middle-aged man
watched without interest as the plasterboard walls that had enclosed a
carpeted “reception area” and “conference room” were dismantled and
wheeled away toward a freight elevator by a team of construction
workers. Next came a Formica conference table, a plain metal desk, and
assorted office equipment including a dummy telephone system and a
working computer.
The bespectacled man was an American who for the last decade or so had
been engaged to perform a variety of services around the world, the
significance of which was invariably obscure to him. He had never even
met the company’s chief, had no idea who he was. All he knew was that
the mysterious head of the firm was a business associate of this
building’s owner, whb’d been happy to lend use of the eleventh floor.
It was like watching a stage set being struck. “Hey,” called out the
bespectacled American, “someone’s gotta take down the sign in the lobby.
And leave that U.S. seal with me, will ya? We might need it again.”
New York
Dr. Walter Reisinger, the former Secretary of State, took the call in
the back of his limousine as it inched through morning rush-hour traffic
on Manhattan’s East Side.
Dr. Reisinger disliked the telephone, which was unfortunate, since
these days he spent virtually every waking moment on the phone. His
international consulting firm, Reisinger Associates, was keeping him
even busier than his days at State.
Secretly he had been afraid that, after retiring from the government and
writing his memoirs, he’d be gradually marginalized, treated as an
eminence grise, invited to appear on Nightline once in a while, and to
write the occasional thumb-sucker for the New York Times Op-Ed page.
Instead, he had become more famous, and certainly far richer. He found
himself globe-hopping more now than during his shuttle diplomacy days in
the Middle East.
He pressed the speaker button. “Yes?”
“Dr. Reisinger,” said the voice on the other end of the phone, “this is
Mr. Holland.”
“Ah, good morning, Mr. Holland,” Reisinger said jovially. The two men
chatted for a minute or so, and then Reisinger said, “This shouldn’t be
a problem. I have good friends in just about every government in the
world–but I think the most direct route would be to go right to
Interpol. Do you know its Secretary-General? A most interesting man.
Let me give him a call.”
Patient Eighteen lay on a hospital bed with his eyes closed, an IV
feeding tube in his left arm. He was shaking, as he had done constantly
since the treatments began. He was also nauseated, and periodically
retched
into a bedpan placed beside the bed. A nurse and a technician stood
watching nearby.
A doctor, whose name was Lofquist, came into the examination room and
went up to the nurse. “How is the fever?” he asked. They spoke in
English, because his English was still better than his German, even
after working here in the clinic for seven years.
“It hasn’t broken,” the nurse replied tensely.
“And the nausea?”
“He’s been vomiting regularly.”
Dr. Lofquist raised his voice to address Patient Eighteen. “How’re you
feeling?”
The patient moaned. “My god damned eyes hurt.”
“Yes, that’s normal,” Dr. Lofquist said. “Your body is trying to fight
it off. We see this all the time.”
Patient Eighteen gagged, leaned over to the bedpan, and was sick. The
nurse wiped his mouth and chin with a damp washcloth.
“The first week is always the most difficult,” Dr. Lofquist said
cheerily. “You’re doing wonderfully well.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE.
Our Lady of Mercy, Nuestra Senora de la Merced, was an Italian ate
basilica perched on the swarming Cane Defensa, across from a
disconcertingly contemporary branch office of the Banco de Galicia. The
church’s granite facade was crumbling, A wrought-iron fence enclosed a
forecourt paved with worn and cracked black-and-white harlequin stone
tiles, where a Gypsy mother and her brood begged for alms.
Ben watched the mother in her jeans, black hair tied back, sitting on
the steps against the ruins of a column’s pedestal, kids spilling out of
her lap and at her feet. Deeper into the courtyard an old man in coat
and tie dozed, one arm locked in a crutch, the top of his bald pate
tanned.
At one-fifteen exactly, as instructed, Ben entered the church’s foyer,
and walked through swinging wooden doors into the loamy darkness of the
narthex, which smelled of beeswax candles and sweat. The interior, once
his eyes accustomed to the dark, was immense, daunting, and shabby. The
Romanesque ceilings were high and vaulted, the floor paved with ancient
encaustic tiles, beautifully inlaid. A priest’s singsong Latin chant,
electronically amplified, echoed in the cavern, and the congregants
responded dutifully. Call and response. All rise.
One o’clock weekday Mass and it was, impressively, almost half full. But
then Argentina is a Catholic country, Ben thought. Here and there the
trilling of cell phones. He oriented himself, spotted the chapel on the
right.
A few rows of benches were arrayed before a glassed-in tabernacle
containing the bloodied figure of Christ and bearing the words humilidad
Y paciencia. To its left, another statue of Jesus, this one in the
open, beneath the words sag rado co razon en vos conf io Ben sat on the
front bench, also as instructed, and waited.
A priest in his vestments sat praying by a bottle-blond young woman in
miniskirt and high heels. The swinging doors squeaked and slammed, and
when they opened, the throaty blare of a motorcycle intruded. Each time
Ben turned to look: Which one was it? A businessman with a cell phone
entered the narthex, crossed himself, then turned into the alcove –was
it him?–but then touched the figure of Jesus, closed his eyes, and
prayed. More unison chanting, more electronically amplified Latin, and
still Ben waited.
He was afraid but determined not to show it.
A few hours earlier he’d dialed a number he’d pilfered from Sonnenfeld’s
files, one that had, so it appeared, once belonged to Lenz’s widow.
It still did.
The woman obviously wasn’t in hiding, but she hadn’t come to the phone
herself. A brusque, hostile baritone answered: her son, he’d said.
Lenz’s brother? Half brother?
Ben had identified himself as a trusts-and-estates lawyer from New York,
come to Buenos Aires to settle a huge bequest. No, he could not
identify the deceased. He would only say that Vera Lenz had been left a
good deal of money, but he would first have to meet with her.
A long silence ensued while the son decided what to do. Ben interjected
one more piece of irrelevant-seeming information, which probably turned
out to be the deciding one. “I’ve just come from Austria,” he said. No
names, no mention of her son–nothing specific to hang on to or object
to. Less said the better.
“I don’t know you,” the son at last replied.
“Nor I you,” Ben came back smoothly. “If this is inconvenient for you
or for your mother …”
“No,” he said hastily. He would meet Ben–“Mr. Johnson”–at a church,
in a certain chapel, a certain bench.
Now he sat with his back to the entrance, turning with each squeak of
the doors, each gust of noise from the outside.
Half an hour went by.
Was this a setup? The priest looked at him, wordlessly offered a couple