The End. He bent his head; applause flooded at him and he withdrew a step from the lectern, keeping title to it with a hand touching a rounded corner. He waited, breathing hard, then stepped forward, grasped the lectern again with both hands, and faced the applause into spattering near-silence. “Thank you,” he said. “If you have questions now, I’ll do my best to answer them.” He looked around, chose and pointed.
Traunsteiner, leaning forward over a tightly held steering wheel, fired his car full-speed at the back of a gray-haired man walking on the road’s shoulder. Swelling close in the headlight’s explosive radiance, the man turned, raised a folded magazine above his eyes, back-stepped. The car’s fender bowled him up and away. Fighting a smile, Traunsteiner swerved the car back full onto pavement, barely missing a white-on-blue intersection warning. Braking, and braking more, he swung the car screechingly left into a wider road posted Esbjerg—14 Km.
“Mainly by contributions,” Liebermann said, “from Jews and other concerned people all over the world. And also by my income from writing and from engagements such as this.” He pointed to a hand in the back row. A young woman stood up, pink-faced and plump; she began asking what he saw was going to be the Frieda Maloney question.
“I can see,” the young woman said, “that it’s important to get the key people put on trial, the ones who held high positions. But aren’t you still motivated by vengeance in a case like Frieda Maloney, a rank-and-file guard who gets dragged back here after being an American citizen for so many years? Whatever she did during the war, hasn’t she made up for it by what she’s done since? She was a very useful citizen there. Teaching and so on.” The young woman sat down.
He nodded and stayed silent for a moment, smoothing his mustache down thoughtfully—as if he had never been asked the question before. Then he said, “I gather from your question that you’re aware that a woman who has been a nursery-school teacher, and a finder of homes for homeless babies, and a good housewife, kind to stray dogs, can also have been—the self-same woman!—a ‘rank-and-file’ concentration-camp guard, guilty, perhaps—her trial, when it finally takes place, will tell us—of mass murder. I ask you now: would you be aware of this somewhat surprising possibility if Frieda Altschul Maloney hadn’t been found and extradited? I don’t think so, and I don’t think it’s an unimportant possibility for you to be aware of. Neither does your government.”
He looked around—at hands springing up, including the hand of the Barry-like young man. He looked away from him (not now, Barry, I’m busy) and pointed at a shrewd-looking blond young man at dead center. (“There are ninety-four of them,” Barry’s telephone voice insisted, “and they’re all sixty-five-year-old civil servants. How do you like them apples?”)
A new question was coming at him. “But Frieda Maloney hasn’t even been indicted yet,” the blond young man was saying. “Is our government really so interested in pursuing Nazi criminals? Is any government in the world today, even the Israeli? Hasn’t there been a decline of interest, and isn’t that one of the reasons why you haven’t been able to reopen your Information Center?”
So who tells you to pick the shrewd-looking ones? “First of all,” he said, “the Center is temporarily in smaller quarters, but it’s still open. People are working; letters come in, advisories go out. As I said before, we’re funded by private individuals and in no way dependent on any government. Secondly, though it’s true that both German and Austrian prosecutors are no longer as…responsive as they once were, and Israel has other more pressing problems, the cause of justice hasn’t yet been deserted. I have it on good authority that Frieda Maloney will be indicted sometime in January or February, and brought to trial soon after. The witnesses have been found, a difficult and time-consuming job in which the Center played a part.” He looked at raised hands again, bright young faces—and suddenly realized exactly what he was looking at. A gold mine, for God’s sake! Right in front of him!
Here in this luminous oyster shell were nearly five hundred of the smartest young people in Germany, the cream of their generation, and he was trying to figure the thing out alone, one old fool with one tired brain. Dear God!
Ask them? Crazy!
He must have pointed at someone; the neo-Nazism question had been asked. “Two factors are necessary for a resurgence of Nazism,” he recited quickly, “a worsening of social conditions till they approximate those of the early thirties and the emergence of a Hitler-like leader. Should both these factors come into being, neo-Nazi groups around the world would of course become a focus of danger, but at the present time, no, I’m not particularly alarmed.” Hands sprang up, but he raised his hand against them. “Just a minute, please,” he said. “I’d like to interrupt the questions for a moment—and ask one instead of answering.”
The hands fell away. The bright young faces looked at him expectantly.
Crazy! But how could he not try to make use of such brain-power?
He gripped the lectern with both hands, took a breath, thought. “I want,” he said to the oyster shell full of such excellent pearls, “to borrow your brains to solve a problem. A hypothetical problem that a young friend presented to me. I’m very anxious to solve it, so much so that I’m willing to cheat a little and get help.” Small laugh. “And who could help me better than students of this great university and their friends?”
He let go of the lectern and stood straight, looked at them casually—a man offering a hypothetical problem, not a real one.
“I’ve told you about the Comrades Organization in South America,” he said, “and about Dr. Mengele. Here’s the problem my friend presented. The Organization and Dr. Mengele decide that they want to kill a large number of men in different countries of Europe and North America. Ninety-four men, to be exact, and they’re all sixty-five years old and civil servants. The killings are to take place over a two-and-a-half-year period, and there’s a political motivation for them, a Nazi motivation. What is it? Can you find an answer for me? Who are these men? Why are their deaths desirable to the Comrades Organization and Dr. Mengele?”
The audience of young people sat uncertainly. A hum of whispering grew among them. A cough broke out; another cough echoed it.
He took the lectern—casually. “I’m not joking with you,” he said. “This problem was put to me. As an exercise in logic. Can you help me?”
They leaned to one another, and the hum of whispering intensified, became the buzz of ideas being hazarded.
“Ninety-four men,” he said slowly, guidingly. “Sixty-five years old. Civil servants. In various countries. Two and a half years.”
A hand came up, and another.
Hoping, he took the first; a few rows back, left of center. “Yes?”
A young man in a blue sweater stood up. “The men hold positions of responsibility,” he said in an unexpectedly high-pitched voice. “Their deaths will directly or indirectly bring about the worsening of social conditions you just referred to, creating a more suitable climate for a rebirth of Nazism.”
He shook his head. “No, I don’t think so,” he said. “Could the killing of highly placed men go on for months, let alone two and a half years, without attracting attention and causing investigation? No, the men must be low-echelon civil servants. And at sixty-five they’ll more than likely be retiring anyway, so removing them from their jobs can’t possibly be the object of killing them.”