34
BUENOS AIRES
On the night of August 13, 1979, Maria Espinoza Ramirez, poet, cellist, and Argentine dissident of note, was hurled from the cargo hold of a military transport plane flying several thousand feet above the South Atlantic. Seconds before she was pushed, the captain in charge of the operation slashed open her abdomen with a machete, a final act of barbarism that ensured her corpse would fill rapidly with water and thus remain forever on the bottom of the sea. Her husband, the prominent antigovernment journalist Alfonso Ramirez, would not learn of Maria's disappearance for many months, for at the time he, too, was in the hands of the junta's henchmen. Had it not been for Amnesty Inter national, which waged a tireless campaign to bring attention to his case, Ramirez would almost certainly have suffered the same fate as his wife. Instead, after more than a year in captivity, he was freed on the condition he refrain from ever writing about politics again. "Silence is a proud tradition in Argentina," said the generals at the time of his release. "We think Senor Ramirez would be wise to discover its obvious benefits."
Another man might have heeded the generals' advice. But Alfonso Ramirez, fueled by rage and grief, waged a fearless campaign against the junta. His struggle did not end with the regime's collapse in 1983. Of the many torturers and murderers Ramirez helped to expose in the years afterward was the captain who had hurled his wife into the sea. Ramirez wept when the panel of judges found the captain guilty. And he wept again a few moments later when they sentenced the murderer to just five years in prison. On the steps of the courthouse, Ramirez declared that Argentine justice was now lying on the bottom of the sea with the rest of the disappeared. Arriving home that evening, he found his apartment in ruins and his bathtub filled with water. On the bottom were several photos of his wife, all of which had been slashed in half.
Having established himself as one of the most prominent human rights activists in Latin America and the world, Alfonso Ramirez turned his attention to exposing another tragic aspect of Argentina's history, its close ties to Nazi Germany. Sanctuary of Evil, his 2006 historical masterwork, detailed how a secret arrangement among the Peron government, the Vatican, the SS, and American intelligence allowed thousands of war criminals to find safe haven in Argentina after the war. It also contained an account of how Ramirez had assisted Israeli intelligence in the unmasking and capture of a Nazi war criminal named Erich Radek. Among the many details Ramirez left out was the name of the legendary Israeli agent with whom he had worked.
Though the book had made Ramirez a millionaire, he had resisted the pull of the smart northern suburbs and still resided in the southern barrio of San Telmo. His building was a large Parisian-style structure with a courtyard in the center and a winding staircase covered by a faded runner. The apartment itself served as both his residence and office, and its rooms were filled to capacity with tens of thousands of dog-eared files and dossiers. It was rumored that Ramirez's personal archives rivaled those of the government. Yet in all his years of rummaging through Argentina's dark past, he had never digitized or organized his vast holdings in any way. Ramirez believed that in clutter lay security, a theory supported by empirical evidence. On numerous occasions, he had returned home to find his files in disarray, but none of his important documents had ever been stolen by his adversaries.
One section of the living room was largely free of historical debris, and it was there Ramirez received Gabriel and Chiara. Propped in one corner, exactly where she had left it the night of her abduction, was Maria's dusty cello. On the wall above were two handwritten pages of poetry, framed and shielded by glass, along with a photograph of Ramirez at the time of his release from prison. He bore little resemblance to that emaciated figure now. Tall and broad-shouldered, he looked more like a man who wrestled with machinery and concrete than words and ideas. His only vanity was his lush gray beard, which in the opinion of right-wing critics made him look like a cross between Fidel Castro and Karl Marx. Ramirez did not take the characterization as an insult. An unrepentant communist, he revered both.
Despite the abundance of irreplaceable paper in the apartment, Ramirez was a reckless, absent-minded smoker who was forever leaving burning cigarettes in ashtrays or dangling off the end of tables. Somehow, he remembered Gabriel's aversion to tobacco and managed to refrain from smoking while holding forth on an array of topics ranging from the state of the Argentine economy to the new American president to Israel's treatment of the Palestinians, which, of course, he considered deplorable. Finally, as the first drops of afternoon rain made puddles on the dusty windowsill, he recalled the afternoon several years earlier when he had taken Gabriel to the archives of Argentina's Immigration Office. There, in a rat-chewed box of crumbling files, they discovered a document suggesting that Erich Radek, long assumed dead, was actually living under an assumed name in the first district of Vienna.
"I remember one thing in particular about that day," Ramirez said now. "There was a beautiful girl on a motor scooter who followed us wherever we went. She wore a helmet the entire time, so I never really saw her face. But I remember her legs quite clearly." He glanced at Chiara, then at Gabriel. "Obviously, your relationship was more than professional."
Gabriel nodded, though by his expression he made it clear he wished to discuss the matter no further.
"So what brings the two of you to Argentina this time?" Ramirez asked.
"We were doing a bit of wine tasting in Mendoza."
"Find anything to your liking?"
"The Bodega de la Mariposa Reserva."
"The '05 or the '06?"
"The '05, actually."
"I've had it myself. In fact, I've had the opportunity to speak with the owner of that vineyard on a number of occasions."
"Like him?"
"I do," Ramirez said.
"Trust him?"
"As much as I trust anyone. And before we go any further, perhaps we should establish the ground rules for this conversation."
"The same as last time. You help me now, I help you later."
"What exactly are you looking for?"
"Information about an Argentine diplomat who died in Zurich in 1967."
"I assume you're referring to Carlos Weber?" Ramirez smiled. "And given your recent trip to Mendoza, I also assume that you're searching for the missing fortune of one SS-Hauptsturmfuhrer Kurt Voss."
"Does it exist, Alfonso?"
"Of course it exists. It was deposited in Bank Landesmann in Zurich between 1938 and 1945. Carlos Weber died trying to bring it to Argentina in 1967. And I have the documents to prove it."
35
BUENOS AIRES
There was just one problem. Alfonso Ramirez had no idea where he had hidden the documents. And so for the next half hour, as he shuffled from room to room, lifting dusty covers and frowning at stacks of faded paper, he recited the details of Carlos Weber's disgraceful curriculum vitae. Educated in Spain and Germany, Weber was an ultranationalist who served as a foreign policy adviser to the parade of military officers and feeble politicians who had ruled Argentina in the decade before the Second World War. Profoundly anti-Semitic and antidemocratic, he tilted naturally toward the Third Reich and forged close ties to many senior SS officers—ties that left Weber uniquely positioned to help Nazi war criminals find sanctuary.