The front door gaped open, hanging away by its lower hinge. Tina Zygorny laughed her masculine laugh; von Sweringen thundered, “Rise and shine! You’ve had your beauty sleep!”
Only silence. Insects twanging, chittering.
Shining the light before him, Mengele went up the step and through the doorway. Five years at least, since he’d last set foot…
Beautiful Bavaria. The poster clung to the wall, dusty and rippled: sky, mountain, flowered foreground.
He smiled at it, and moved the light beam.
Finding gouged wallboard where shelves and cabinets had been ripped out. Stems of plumbing standing at attention. The wall with the brown spots that Reiter had burned into it, starting a swastika with his microscope. Could have burned the place down, the idiot.
He walked carefully around broken glass. A rotting melonrind, ants feasting.
He looked into barren rooms, and remembered life and activity, gleaming equipment. The sterilizer keened, pipettes clinked. Over ten years ago.
Everything had been taken out, junked or perhaps given to a clinic somewhere, so that in case the Jew-gangs got in—they were strong in those days, “Commando Isaac” and the others—they’d have no clues, no inkling.
He walked down the central corridor. Native attendants spoke soothing words in primitive dialects, trying to make themselves understood.
He came into the dormitory, fresh-smelling and cool thanks to its open roof. The grass mats were still there, lying in disarray.
Make what you will of a few dozen grass mats, Jew-boys.
He walked among them, remembering, smiling.
Something sparked white against the wall.
He went to it, looked down at it lying there in the flashlight’s beam; picked it up, blew at it, examined it on his hand. Animal claws, a circle of them; one of the women’s bracelets. For good luck? The power of the animals transferred to the wearer’s arm?
Odd that the children hadn’t found it; surely they played in here, rolled on these mats, had disarranged them.
Yes, good luck that this bracelet had lain here all these years so that he might find it on this night of fear and uncertainty, of possible betrayal. He clustered his fingers into it, shook it down around them, pushed at it with the wrist of his flashlight-hand; the claw-circle dropped down around his gold watchband. He shook his fist; the claws danced.
He looked about at the dormitory, and up through its broken roof at treetops, and stars that came and went among them. And—maybe, maybe not—at his Führer watching him.
I won’t fail you, he promised.
He looked about—at the place where so much, so gloriously much, had already been accomplished—and glaring, said aloud, “I won’t.”
4
“WE’VE ONLY ELIMINATED four of the eleven,” Klaus von Palmen said, cutting into a thick sausage before him. “Don’t you think it’s too soon to talk about stopping?”
“Who’s talking about stopping?” Liebermann knifed mashed potatoes onto the back of his fork. “All I said was I’m not going to go all the way up to Fagersta. I didn’t say I’m not going to go to other places, and I also didn’t say I’m not going to ask someone else to go up to Fagersta, someone who won’t need an interpreter.” He put the sausage-and-potatoed fork into his mouth.
They were in Five Continents, the restaurant in Frankfurt Airport. Saturday night, November 9th. Liebermann had arranged for a two-hour stopover on his way back to Vienna, and Klaus had driven up from Mannheim to meet him. The restaurant was expensive—Liebermann acknowledged the reproach of invisible contributors—but the boy deserved a good meal. Not only had he checked out the man in Pforzheim, whose jump, not fall, from a bridge had been witnessed by five people, but after Liebermann had spoken to him from Gladbeck on Thursday night he had gone down to Freiburg too, while Liebermann had gone to Solingen. Besides, his look of shrewdness—the small pinched-together features and glittering eyes—at close range seemed maybe only part shrewdness and the other part malnutrition. Did any of these kids eat enough? So, Five Continents. They couldn’t talk in one of the snack bars, could they?
August Mohr, the night watchman at the chemical plant in Solingen, had turned out to be, as Liebermann had thought he might, a civil servant by day—a custodial worker in the hospital where he had died. But fire officials had thoroughly investigated the explosion that killed him, and had traced it to a chain of mishaps they were certain couldn’t have been prearranged. And Mohr himself was as unlikely a victim of Nazi plotting as Emil Döring had been. Semi-literate and poor, a widower for six years, he had lived with his bedridden mother in two rooms in a shabby boarding house. For most of his life, including the war years, he had worked in a Solingen steel mill. Mail or phone calls from outside the country? His landlady had laughed. “Not even from inside, sir.”
Klaus, in Freiburg, had thought at first that he was on to something. The man there, a clerk in the Water Department named Josef Rausenberger, had been knifed and robbed near his home, and a neighbor had seen someone watching the house the night before.
“A man with a glass eye?”
“She wouldn’t have noticed, she was too far away. A big man in a small car, smoking, was what she told the police. She couldn’t even tell what make of car. Was there a man with a glass eye in Solingen?”
“In Gladbeck. Go on.”
But. Rausenberger had belonged to no international organizations. He had lost both his legs below the knees in a train accident when he was a boy; as a result he hadn’t done military service or even set foot—artificial foot, that is—outside Germany. (“Please,” Liebermann chided.) He had been an efficient and painstaking worker, a devoted husband and father. His savings had been left to his widow. He had disapproved of the Nazis and voted against them, but nothing more. Born in Schwenningen. Never in Günzburg. One notable relation: a cousin, the managing editor of the Berliner Morgenpost.
Döring, Müller, Mohr, Rausenberger; none of them by any stretch of the imagination Nazi victims. Four of the eleven.
“I know a man in Stockholm,” Liebermann said. “An engraver, from Warsaw originally. Very clever. He’ll be glad to go up to Fagersta. The man there, Persson, and the one in Bordeaux are the two main ones to check on. October sixteenth was the one date Barry mentioned. If neither of those two was someone the Nazis could have and would have killed, then he must have been wrong.”
“Unless you haven’t heard about the right man. Or he was killed on the wrong day.”
“‘Unless,’” Liebermann said, cutting sausage. “The whole thing is ‘unless’ this, ‘if’ that, ‘maybe’ the other. I wish to hell he hadn’t called me.”
“What did he say exactly? How did it all happen?”
Liebermann went through the story.
The waiter took their plates and their dessert orders.
When he had gone, Klaus said, “Have you realized that your name might have been added to the list? Even if it wasn’t Mengele, recognizing you by telepathy—which I don’t for a moment believe, Herr Liebermann; I’m surprised that you do—but if any Nazi hung up the phone, he certainly would have made it his business to find out who Barry was talking to. The hotel operator would have known.”
Liebermann smiled. “I’m only sixty-two,” he said, “and I’m not a civil servant.”
“Don’t joke about it. If killers were being sent out, why not give them one more assignment? With top priority.”