He felt hot. Around his throat and in his eyes there seemed to be a fire burning, the air superheated and un-breathable. He tried to fight the suffocation, to remember she was a frightened old woman, furious with ghosts, not him … but the room pulsed with fire, the scene from another world, its colors distorted, the faces inhuman. Who was he? A little boy? An old man? He felt his legs shrink. The couches were giants with long arms that entwined and mocked him to move. He could hear the voices from all those parties: “Look how handsome he is! He has your beautiful voice!” A famous writer, his old face unwrinkling with pleasure, saying: “You are a born writer, don’t let them destroy you.” The Japanese was in the room: had he bombed Pearl Harbor? He carried whiteness in his hand: a towel? Andrea was holding him: something spattered from his mouth — blood! He was spewing blood on his mother’s glass table. Chunks of his intestines spilling out also, bobbing helplessly in the thin red river. I must be dying, he thought sadly. Well, all great artists die young, he told himself gently, and watched more of his heart and stomach vomit out. …
Hans Gott looked like his photo. “There is little of the arrogant Nazi left, after years of being hunted,” David found himself writing mentally. The eyes glared at everything, as though each little evidence of life — a buzzing fly, the warm breeze rustling leaves — was an outrage. The world was disobedient, his face seemed to scold.
The arrangements had tortured them all. In the end there was simply no way to guarantee Gott that they weren’t really Nazi-hunters or hadn’t sold him out in one fashion or another; just as there was no long-distance way for him to prove definitively that he really was Gott. Finally, however, he must have wanted the money for the interview desperately, because after they met all of his precautions, driving to two different locations (presumably so he could watch them to see if they were followed), one a public park, the other a cafe, they were instructed (from a phone booth, just like in a movie thriller) that they could find him in the Hilton coffee shop. The voice on the telephone warned them that there were armed men hidden to deal with any surprises.
This was the first of the possibilities that arose for David to do the right thing. He could excuse himself abruptly (Chico would hardly risk blowing the interview by wasting time to argue that David must come along) and go up to his room rather than to the coffee shop. From there he could phone — what? the Israeli consulate? the local revenge group? the police? Gott, after all, had fled from Argentina fearful of extradition, and was in Brazil illegally. But David doubted any of those actions would succeed. Besides, he didn’t want to miss seeing Gott. And there was the suspicion that it was all some sort of practical joke. That there would be no one in the last booth of the Hilton coffee shop.
But the old man was there. He looked very similar to the file photos of Gott at his glory: starving children to death, injecting dye into their eyes, cutting off limbs without anesthetic to see how long it would take to bleed to death, and on and on in a list of horrors that boggled the mind, not simply because they were so brutal, but because they were done by a man in power, not by a serial killer in a plastic American suburb, not by a gurgling homicidal psychopath, but by a distinguished figure in a society that enthusiastically sanctioned his actions. Gott didn’t kill and torture from afar, phoning his orders for the millions to be gassed; he was there every day. hearing his victims’ screams, watching their bodies being mangled, looking into their faces while picking and choosing death or agony. Yes, the old man looked like the black-and-white photos, only now the eyes seemed disgusted by the rude world — the black fire of arrogance was gone.
There were knives on the table. Not sharp, but David could plunge one in quite thoroughly. He was a frail old man, and David would have time to strike his chest over and over, looking into his eyes to tell him: “I am a Jew, monster. I am a Jew. And I have paid you for all my brothers.”
He would be arrested. Or perhaps Gott’s threat wasn’t a bluff, and hidden supporters would appear, gunning David down, his body sagging, collapsing onto the knife handle only to drive it farther into the villain’s chest. There would be death or jail, but he would have triumphed, willed himself through the moral cheesecloth, free of the stale smell and gauzy fog. One pure simple action, ending everything. The nights of guilt would not come: for once, he would never have to wonder what he should have done.
Chico began the questions that were intended to help amplify the bona fides Newstime had insisted on. It was a shock to hear Gott’s German accent, his halting attempts to form grammatical sentences in English: he sounded a little bit like a Jewish immigrant. David couldn’t take his eyes off Gott. He peered at each liver spot, noted the constant slight tremble in his right hand, observed the gnarled swollen look of his knuckles, and stared into those eyes — the enraged middle-class man furious at the world for its bad manners and sloppy plumbing. He saw no fear or regret in them. The exchange of money and identification material took place. Gott let go of his folder filled with various passports and other private papers reluctantly, but he took the envelope with the bank check eagerly. He glanced at it and then held his hand up in the air — the thumb up in a signal of victory.
A middle-aged man dressed in a drab summer raincoat appeared next to the table seconds later. Gott handed him the check. David felt scared. He swallowed hard and began to worry that this Gott was more than merely a hunted old man — that he could still do harm. “He will dispose of the check as we talk,” Gott said while his associate walked away. “Until he returns I won’t be reassured enough to discuss important matters.”
Chico asked if he had had plastic surgery.
“I am myself,” Gott said. David wrote it down: good quote for an ironic last line. He began to feel some of the excitement that Chico had been full of — this was going to be a knockout story. The entire journalistic world would envy him his seat at the coffee table. Later he would come down and take notes on the decor — the details of its mediocrity would contrast nicely. “No one glancing into the hotel coffee shop and seeing three gentlemen hunched over their coffee would suspect that one of the great criminals in …”
“I don’t want to give details — dates and so on — of my recent movements,” Gott said. “Is this man your secretary?” he asked, nodding at David as though he were mute and couldn’t answer for himself.
“No,” Chico answered. They were both nervous that Gott would find out David was Jewish. It had been decided not to introduce themselves beyond first names, to let Chico ask all the prepared questions (David was to come in only if he felt Chico had missed an opportunity), and not to explain their positions at the magazine. “Why have you decided to tell your story now?”
“To get rid of the lies about me and Mengele!” Gott’s attempt to yell came out as a rasp of irritation. “They become more fantastic every day — the things they say we did. Ridiculous.”
“I thought the accusations had been consistent,” Chico said.
“Ah!” Gott said, waving his hand in disgust.
“In our files, we haven’t come across anything new.”
“The victors write history, my friend,” Gott said. “Files can be altered. Made to look consistent. Everybody does it. It is so easy, when a man is silent, to say what you like about him. But there is no proof! Everything is exaggerated.”