Hour of the Assassins (18 page)

Twelve Jewish survivors of Auschwitz living in Brazil got hold of an Interpol report and formed the “Group of Twelve,” dedicated to getting Mengele. In 1965 the group set up shop in Pôrto Mendes, on the Brazilian side of the Paraná. Two members of the group crossed the river to seek out Mengele. Their bodies were hauled out of the river a few days later. The entire group then went into Paraguay, but Mengele had gone to ground once again. After a few abortive raids on places Mengele was thought to frequent, the surviving amateur Nazi hunters had to return to Brazil emptyhanded.

Yet another bizarre attempt to capture Mengele was revealed in a 1968 Argentinian police report. Acting under the authority of an open order issued in Buenos Aires back in 1960 by Judge Dr. Jorge Luque of the Argentinian Federal District Court for the extradition of Mengele to Germany, an undercover police agent in the Brazilian jungle state of Paraná claimed to have killed Mengele. The agent, a flamboyant Austrian immigrant to Brazil named Erico Erdstein, received a tip that Mengele periodically crossed the border into Brazil, where he stayed at the estate of Dr. Alexander Lénárd, a Nazi sympathizer, near the jungle town of Rio do Sul. Erdstein planned to abduct Mengele from Rio do Sul to the frontier town of Puerto Iguassú on Argentinian soil, where Judge Luque's order would be in force. On September 13, 1968, Erdstein arrested Mengele and two companions in Pôrto Mendes and took them on a chartered boat down the Paraná toward Puerto Iguassú.

According to Erdstein's deposition, appended to the report, a Paraguayan patrol boat intercepted them and in the ensuing gun battle Mengele and his companions were killed. Except that a subsequent Bureau One file reported that Mengele was spotted a year later in the Paraguayan province of Amambay. Like the fabled Rasputin, Mengele just wouldn't die. The West German authorities in Frankfurt requested a clarification of Erdstein's claim and, after studying the case, concluded that the three men killed were petty smugglers.

After almost five more years of bureaucratic muddling a special inquiry authorized by the Hesse state court uncovered eyewitness accounts from anonymous sources indicating that Mengele was still living in Amambay. Incredibly, the story was leaked to a staff reporter on the
Frankfurter Allgemeine
and on October 25, 1973, the following story appeared in
The New York Times:

AUSCHWITZ DOCTOR SAID TO BE IN PARAGUAY

West German justice officials said in Bonn yesterday that Dr. Josef Mengele, the Nazi physician sought for the last twenty-two years for alleged mass murders in the Auschwitz concentration camp during World War II, was believed to have been located in a remote village in Paraguay. Mengele, known as “the Angel of Death,” was reported to be in the village of Pedro Juan Caballero, near the Brazilian frontier, in the province of Amambay.

Based on the story, President Goppel, the Minister of Bavaria, contacted the Paraguayan dictator, President Alfredo Stroessner, to request extradition. But Stroessner denied any knowledge of Mengele. In any case it was too late. After all the publicity and an ostentatious search by the Paraguayan police, Mengele had vanished into thin air. Once again the elusive quarry had gone to ground.

Caine closed the last folder and glanced at his watch. It was well past lunch and he had been at it for hours. He lit a cigarette and glanced around the reading room. The detective had gone and the room was empty. His glance fell on the pile of folders in front of him, massive and incomplete, like the ruins of a failed civilization: a bureaucratic monument bearing an inscription as indecipherable as if it had been written in Etruscan. Caine shrugged. As far as he was concerned, all the Mengele hunters combined could have given lessons in incompetence to the planners of the Watergate break-in.

He leaned back and ran a mental tab, plucking the useful nuggets of information like the raisins from a bowl of cereal. Bariloche. The Blue Falcons. Judge Luque. Erico Erdstein. Feinberg in Vienna. The paraguayan authorities, who seemed so solicitous of Mengele's welfare. That could only mean bribes on a fairly large scale. Who had arranged for Mengele's naturalization as a Paraguayan citizen? he wondered. He opened one of the folders and finally found the name he was looking for. Mengele's application for citizenship had been filed by an Asunción lawyer, Cesar Augusto Sanabria. His application had been sponsored by two other German-born Paraguayans: Werner Jung and one Alexander von Eckstein. Cross-references on von Eckstein indicated that he was a leader of the highly visible German community in Asunción.

Caine decided that he could dismiss Mengele's son, Karl Heinz, and former wife, Martha, as potential information sources. That mine had obviously been worked until it was played out. Besides, in addition to their evident bitterness about Mengele, they had been out of the action and too far away from the field for a long time.

But throughout his reading a single question had been running through his mind, repeating itself like a pop melody that you hum once and then keeps coming back, haunting the day. Where had the money come from? Everything Mengele had done—travel, bodyguards, bribes, and so on—had required a great deal of money. He obviously hadn't earned that kind of money with his Paraguayan medical practice, so it had either come from the family business, or the ODESSA treasury.

That ODESSA had vast sums at its disposal was evident. During the war years the SS had systematically looted Europe of its gold, jewelry, and art treasures. Not to mention all the valuables they had taken from the Jews in the concentration camps. In fact, tons of gold had been extracted from the teeth of Jewish corpses in Auschwitz alone. Yet little of the Nazi loot had ever been recovered. So ODESSA had the means to help Mengele, he mused. Whether they really wanted to was something else.

Mengele must have been a hot potato for the
Kameraden
of ODESSA, he thought. He was very hot and very visible and the practical leaders of ODESSA would probably have funded Mengele only to the extent necessary to keep him away from them. Any large-scale funding would have left a trail back to them as wide as a California freeway.

So the bulk of Mengele's funds must come from the family business. Indeed, as the folders indicated, the Günzburg firm was one of the largest manufacturers of farm and industrial equipment in Germany, with worldwide business dealings. Caine's eyes narrowed. He had hit pay dirt and he knew it. He'd be willing to bet his Mauritian stamp against a political candidate's promise to balance the budget that the Mengele firm had an office in Asunción. If he could just follow the money, it would lead him to Mengele as inevitably as a spawning salmon would lead anyone to his birthplace.

Caine stood up and stretched, his eyes beginning to refocus after all the reading he had done. It was time to begin the search in earnest, where the trail had last disappeared. After returning the folders, he left the center and headed back to the Hilton to check out. He called Lufthansa for a reservation, did some money changing, and made the drop for Harris at the American Express, then headed for Tegel Airport. The last thing he did before leaving Berlin was to stop by the airport telegraph office and send Wasserman a terse, unsigned cable.

He mentally checked everyone boarding the Lufthansa flight to New York, where he would make a connecting flight to South America, but no one seemed interested in him except for one well-dressed woman in her mid-forties. But if she had anything on her mind besides trying him on for size in the plane's lavatory, Caine couldn't spot it. It was just as well, he decided, because the research phase was over. As the jet lifted off the runway, he felt that it was more than just a separation from the earth. The hunt had entered the active phase.

CHAPTER 8

The old-fashioned ceiling fan revolved as slowly as a second hand, a perpetual-motion machine endlessly grinding away eternity. Beyond the drooping palm fronds that formed the thatched ceiling of the open-air
parrillada
, he could see the noon haze hanging over the Paraguay River. It was as if the entropy that will end the universe had already begun. A mosquito whined by his ear and he slapped at it with a gesture that had become automatic over the past four days. On the far side of the earth-colored river the Chaco jungle formed an endless hedge, a dull green wall rippling in the heat waves.

On the broad Avenida McAl Lopez a ragged shoe-shine boy, his bare arms as thin as the straw in Caine's drink, worked on a fat policeman's boots. The boy's movements were slow and desultory in the dense heat that soaked up energy like a sponge. A sand-colored gecko crawled tentatively up one of the wooden posts that supported the thatched roof. With a final flick of his long tail he disappeared into a crack in the wood and it was as though he had never existed.

Even now Caine couldn't get used to the summer heat. He felt suffocated and oddly immobile in the breathless humidity wrapped around him like a rubberized wet suit. With a listless gesture he motioned to the waiter and ordered another iced
caña
, the powerful liquor distilled from sugarcane. The young waiter, his pencil-thin mustache giving him a gigolo's oily charm, served the drink with a flourish, as if he were executing a
verónica
in the Plaza de Toros. Then the waiter walked proudly back to the empty bar, his platform heels clicking like castanets on the flagstone floor.

The rank smell of mud and decay floated up from the riverbank. The shops were shuttered and the streets almost deserted, as the city languidly prepared for the afternoon siesta. A lone army Jeep crawled slowly and deliberately along the riverfront toward Calle El Paraguayo Independiente. For perhaps the twentieth time in as many minutes, Caine glanced at his Omega. His contact was late and the waiter was getting restless. He wanted to close up and go home for his siesta. To give him something to do, Caine called him over and ordered a
carne asada
, although the heat had sapped his appetite.

The indistinct sound of an argument came from the kitchen. Behind his sunglasses Caine's eyes crinkled with a smile as he thought he heard the waiter's voice saying something about “
Turistas locos
.” He lit another cigarette, hoping it would help keep the insects away, although so far as he could tell, the smoke didn't seem to bother the insects at all.

He knew when he arrived in Asunción that he couldn't just head on down to Pedro Juan Caballero and ask around the small town for the local Nazi criminal. In effect, that's what a number of the previous Mengele hunters had done. They were the ones found floating face down in the Paraná River. Caine had decided that he would have to locate Mengele long before he could approach the target. When he finally saw Mengele, it would only be when he was closing for the hit.

He spent the first couple of days playing tourist, learning his way around Asunción, and getting acclimatized. The combination of jet lag and the humid one-hundred-plus-degree temperature weakened him more than he had anticipated and he knew that any attempt to initiate the action phase before he was fully operational would be suicidal.

That first morning he had dutifully joined a minibus tour leaving from the curved driveway of the Hotel Itá Enramada, its modernistic white facade and palm trees giving it the appearance of an outpost from Miami Beach. The tour would not only help orient him, but would also help establish local cover as a tourist. A small group of American tourists milled around the spacious palm-lined lobby, checking camera equipment and trying to one-up each other on the bargains they had got on gaudy Guarani handicrafts and silver
maté
cups.

A woman in a flowered print dress and a large straw hat decorated with plastic fruit was reminding her husband for the twentieth time that they had to be sure and get enough samples of
nauditi
lace for the entire family. Her husband, his pink sunburned knees sticking out under Bermuda shorts, pretended he hadn't heard her and fiddled with one of his camera cases. She poked him with her fingers as they boarded the minibus in front of Caine.

“Oh, honey, we mustn't forget Aunt Flo,” she said. The man looked unhappily out the window, as if the one thing in the world he wanted to do was to forget Aunt Flo.

Caine settled into a window seat with a silent prayer to whoever had invented air conditioning. A teen-aged blonde in jeans traveling with an elderly woman that he took to be her grandmother, glanced at him out of the corner of her eye to let him know that her glands were working. Give her fifteen years and a couple of failed marriages and she might even become interesting, Caine thought, and turned to the window.

At last the minibus began to move, trailing a cloud of exhaust fumes that hung in the air like brown fog. He watched the corrugated shacks along the riverfront slide by, catching glimpses of naked brown children playing soccer in a dusty field. The driver pointed out the ornate Government Palace and ministry offices on Calle El Paraguayo Independiente, gleaming white in the bright sunlight. The minibus turned away from the river and headed downtown, stopping for a guided tour at the Pantheon of Heroes in the Plaza de los Héroes.

The Pantheon was a white marble structure that looked like the fourth Xerox of the Hotel des Invalides in Paris. It had been built to commemorate the disastrous nineteenth-century War of the Triple Alliance, in which the outnumbered Paraguayans had fought the combined forces of Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay. Barely thirty thousand Paraguayan males, mostly boys, survived the carnage and a sequence of military dictatorships had ensued. As a result of the Chaco border war with Bolivia during the thirties, the military solidified their power with the establishment of a fascistic regime that still endured, modeled after the National Socialism that held sway in Germany at that time.

After leading them to a number of tourist shops on Calle Palma, Asunción's bargain-basement version of Fifth Avenue, the driver took them to the Jardín Botánico for more picture taking. Caine snapped photos for his fellow tourists, who squinted into the sun and said “cheese” till it hurt. The man who wanted to forget Aunt Flo took enough snapshots of the orchids to start a florist's catalog.