Ei.
What he needed, really, was a Jewish F.B.I. Or a U.S. branch of Israel’s Mossad. Someplace where he could go in tomorrow and say, “A Nazi is coming to kill a man named Wheelock in New Providence, Pennsylvania. Guard him; capture the Nazi. Don’t ask me questions, I’ll explain later. I’m Yakov Liebermann—would I steer you wrong?” And they would go ahead and do it.
Dream! If only such an organization existed!
People in the plane fastened their seat belts and made comments to one another; the sign had lit up.
Liebermann sat frowning at the window.
After a refreshing hour’s nap, Mengele washed and shaved, put on the wig and mustache, and got into his dark suit. He laid everything out on the bed—white jacket, gloves, knife in sheath, tray with basket of fruit and Do Not Disturb sign—so that as soon as he saw Liebermann check in and learned his room number, he could zip up and assume his waiter role with no delay.
When he left the room he tried the knob and hung the other Do Not Disturb sign on it.
At 6:45 he was seated in the lobby, leafing through a copy of Time and keeping an eye on the revolving door. The occasional suitcase-bearing new arrivals who went to the registration desk across the lobby were almost all unaccompanied men, a veritable textbook of inferior racial types; not only Blacks and Semites, but a pair of Orientals as well. One fine-looking young Aryan checked in, but a few minutes later, as if to compensate for an error, a black dwarf appeared, striding along beside a suitcase in a wheeled metal frame.
At twenty past seven Liebermann came in—tall, round-shouldered, dark-mustached, in a tan cap and belted tan overcoat. Or was this Liebermann? A Jew, yes, but too young-looking and with not quite the Liebermann beak.
He got up and strolled across the lobby, took a This Week in Washington from a stack of them on the cracked marble counter.
“You’re staying through Friday night?” the clerk asked the possible Liebermann at his back.
“Yes.”
A bell pinged. “Would you take Mr. Morris to seven-seventeen?”
“Yes, sir.”
He strolled back across the lobby. A Lebanese or some such had taken his seat—fat and greasy-looking, rings on every finger.
He found another seat.
The beak of all beaks came in, but it was attached to the face of a young man holding the elbow of a gray-haired woman.
At eight o’clock he stepped into a phone booth and called the hotel. He asked—taking care not to let his lips touch the mouthpiece, laden with God knew what germs—if Mr. Yakov Liebermann was expected.
“Just a moment.” A click, and ringing. The clerk across the lobby picked up a phone and said in Mengele’s ear, “Front desk.”
“Have you a room reserved for Mr. Yakov Liebermann?”
“For this evening?”
“Yes.”
The clerk looked down as if reading. “Yes, we do. Is this Mr. Liebermann speaking?”
“No.”
“Would you like to leave a message for him?”
“No, thank you. I shall call later.”
He could keep watch just as well from inside the booth, so he put another ten-cent coin into the phone and asked the operator how he could get the number of someone in New Providence, Pennsylvania. She gave him a long number to call; he wrote it down on Time’s red border, took the coin from the receptacle at the bottom of the phone, put it in at the top again, dialed.
There was a Henry Wheelock in New Providence. He wrote the number down below the other one. The woman gave him the address too, Old Buck Road, no house number.
A Latin with a suitcase and a leashed poodle went to the registration desk.
He thought for a moment, then called the operator and got instructions. He examined his array of coins on the booth’s small shelf, picked out the right ones.
It was only when the phone at the other end gave its first ring that he realized that if this was the Henry Wheelock he wanted, the boy himself might answer. In another instant he could actually be speaking with his Führer reborn! A dizzying joy swept his breath away, tipped him against the side of the booth as the phone rang again. Oh please, dear Boy, come and answer your telephone!
“Hello.” A woman.
He drew in breath, sighed it out.
“Hello?”
“Hello.” He straightened up. “Is Mr. Henry Wheelock there?”
“He’s here, but he’s out in back.”
“Is this Mrs. Wheelock?”
“It is, yes.”
“My name is Franklin, madam. I believe you have a son approaching the age of fourteen?”
“We do…”
Praise God. “I conduct tours for boys of that age. Would you be interested in sending him to Europe this summer?”
A laugh. “Oh no, I don’t think so.”
“May I send you a brochure?”
“You may, but it’s not going to do you much good.”
“Old Buck Road is the address?”
“Really, he’s staying right here this summer.”
“Good night, then. I’m sorry to have troubled you.”
He took a pamphlet from the unattended car-rental booth and sat studying it, glancing up whenever the revolving door whisked.
Tomorrow he would rent a car and drive to New Providence. When Wheelock was taken care of he would drive on up to New York, turn in the car, sell a diamond, and fly to Chicago. If Robert K. Davis was still in Kankakee.
But where the hell was Liebermann?
At nine o’clock he went into the coffee shop and took a counter seat from which he could see the revolving door through the glass shop-door. He ate scrambled eggs and toast, drank the world’s worst coffee.
He got a dollar’s worth of change when he left, went into the phone booth again, and called the hotel. Maybe Liebermann had come in through the side entrance.
He hadn’t. They were still expecting him.
He called both airports, hoping—it was possible, wasn’t it?—that there had been a crash.
No such luck. And all incoming flights were on schedule.
The son of a bitch must have stayed on in Mannheim. But for how long? It was too late to call Vienna and find out from that Fräulein Zimmer. Too early, rather; not quite four in the morning there.
He began to worry about someone remembering him sitting in the lobby all evening watching the door.
Where are you, you goddamned Jew-bastard? Come let me kill you!
On Wednesday afternoon, at a few minutes after two o’clock, Liebermann got out of a traffic-locked taxi in the middle of Manhattan’s garment center and took to the sidewalk despite the freezing rain. His umbrella, borrowed from the people he had stayed the night with, Marvin and Rita Farb, was another bold color in each of its panels (it’s an umbrella, he told himself; be glad you’ve got it).
He splatted briskly down the west side of Broadway, weaving past other umbrellas (black) and men pushing plastic-covered racks of dresses. He looked at the numbers of the office buildings he passed; walked faster.
He walked seven or eight blocks, crossed a street and looked at the building there—an Off-Track Betting office, a lamp showroom, twenty or so stories of grimy stonework and narrow windows—and went to its arched entrance and backed open a heavy glass swing-door, pulling the multicolored umbrella closed.
He crossed the black-matted lobby—small, a magazine-and-candy-stand taking up most of it—and joined the half-dozen people waiting for the elevators; stamped his sodden shoes, tapped the umbrella’s tip against the wet rubber matting, making rain on it.
On the twelfth floor—dingy, paint peeling—he followed the numbers on pebbled doorpanes: 1202, Aaron Goldman, Artificial Flowers; 1203, C. & M. Roth, Imported Glassware; 1204, Youthcraft Dolls, B. Rosenzweig. Room 1205 had YJD on the pane, stick-on metallic letters, the D a little higher than the Y and the J. He knuckled the glass.