The Tenth Witness (Henri Poincare Mystery) (28 page)

I explained all this as I positioned the photos for Plannik.

“You opened files on three of them for suspected war crimes,” I said, “but the prosecutors couldn’t find them and the inquiries ended. They’re in Buenos Aires. I can give you their identities. I know where they meet.”

Plannik reached for a magnifying glass, and I followed with my photo of Liesel with her uncles, including Eckehart Nagel. It felt wrong, unholy even, that she should be standing beside that man. When she gave me the photo, I’d promised not to cut the others out of it. So here she was, part of evidence delivered to a man who built dossiers against Nazis. The Zentrale Stelle was not where Liesel should have been, or where I wanted to bring her.

Nagel’s bald, grinning skull was bad enough. But the image of a dour Franz Hofmann and a buoyant Viktor Schmidt was almost too much.

“This man, I believe, is Menard Gottlieb, already investigated for war crimes.” I produced Gottlieb’s secondary file. “You’ll notice, no photo—though there had been one because here’s a caption on a blank page, and glue marks. It was either lost or someone stole it. The photo I just showed you was taken two months ago. Gottlieb’s now a physician in Buenos Aires.”

I produced a final file, the thickest yet, on Reinhard Vogt.

Plannik propped his glasses on his forehead. “You’ve been busy.”

I hadn’t set out to be, not in just this way. I couldn’t begin to re-create for him the tangle that had brought me to his archive a second time. I would have been pleased never to see it again.

“Reinhard Vogt ran the guards at Drütte,” I continued. “Your own investigation showed him to be the worst of the worst. I’m almost certain that today he splits his time between Munich and Buenos Aires. I can give you his new name and an address in both cities.”

I thought long and hard before giving Liesel’s uncle and Friedrich’s grandfather to Plannik. I knew only too well the seriousness of making accusations that couldn’t be wished away if I were wrong.

I had a compelling case. The Edelweiss Society met at his house. No one who wasn’t a guard at Drütte was a member of the society. Only Gottlieb’s and Vogt’s photos were missing from the Archive, removed almost certainly by the same strong, politically connected hand. I was positive about Gottlieb’s identity. That Viktor Schmidt was familiar with these men, that he was Kraus’s partner, was undeniable. He was Reinhard Vogt. I was sure.

Plannik rubbed his eyes.

“Who’s the woman?” he asked. “I’ve seen her before. I can’t place it.”

I told him. “A philanthropist. You may have attended the same events.”

“Or seen her in the magazines, I suppose. She
is
pretty.”

He sat back in his chair. “I have no reason to doubt any of this,” he said, waving a hand at my presentation. “But let me spare you some trouble. Argentina doesn’t recognize our extradition requests, and my prosecutors no longer bring cases against Nazis who fled there. Many nations looked the other way in 1948 as they scoured the Nazi ranks, looking for useful talent. The Americans got their rocket scientists. The Argentines settled for smaller fish with the know-how to modernize their economy. It’s all on paper, the ratline that ran from the Red Cross and the Vatican right through to Juan Perón’s presidential mansion. He made thousands of travel documents available to Germans with uncertain backgrounds. Today, his successor generals won’t let us touch them.”

“Gottlieb and Vogt travel,” I said. “You can arrest them outside Argentina.”

“I could be interested,” said Plannik. “This is continually painful, you know.”

“What is?”

“What? It’s continually painful to me how nearly 10,000 Nazis fled to South America, at least half to Argentina, and we can’t touch them. Europe was in chaos after the war, with millions of refugees. People had nothing, no food, no papers. Imagine your village is bombed in the night. Are you going to search for your identification papers when the walls are falling in? They ran. In the concentration camps alone, the Allies liberated tens of thousands. Where were they to go? These people had nothing, and the International Committee of the Red Cross set up refugee camps and issued new papers.

“I’m not saying the ICRC didn’t do good work for many, many people. But the evidence they required for proof of identity was laughable. All you had to do was arrive at a transit camp with three fellows who’d vouch for you. You made up a name, your friends said, ‘Yes, that’s him,’ and you were issued a piece of paper with a new name and an official Red Cross stamp. That’s how Franz Stangl, the commandant of Treblinka, escaped. In some cases, the ICRC knew it was giving passes to Nazis. The system was a disaster.

“And the Catholic Church was a handmaiden to it all. They hated communists more than they hated Nazis. They also wanted to pump up their churches in South America with nice white Europeans, so they issued travel documents. Stangl, in fact, listed his address in Rome, at a bishop’s residence. It was more than a ratline. It was a highway leading from the Third Reich through Rome or the Red Cross, to Argentina. So, no, I’m not surprised that you found a cadre of SS guards from Drütte in Buenos Aires. I’m not surprised, and I can’t touch them.”

He looked like a man who’d returned from a cafeteria line with rancid food, the best he would get all day.

“These two,” he said. “Gottlieb and Vogt. You have definite information?”

“I need your help, Herr Plannik. I don’t mean to be crass, but—”

“Ah, here’s where the bargaining begins.”

I felt ashamed.

“There’s such a thing as trust in the world, young man. You’ve heard of it?”

If he was Schmidt’s man, I was dead. If he wasn’t, I could still be dead, though my chances of living to see my children born improved. “Yes, I’m told there are people in the world who trust each other.”

“Why are these men dying, Herr Poincaré?”

“I don’t know.”

“Contact the police,” he said, turning the files back to me. “This office deals in past crimes, not present ones.”

If he was turning me out, I had nothing to say. Grossman would be a dead man, and I’d lose Isaac to history. But Plannik made no move to the door. He reached for the photo he brushed aside when I arrived.

“This one was taken at Babi Yar,” he said. “The SS swept in behind the Wehrmacht in Kiev in September 1941 and murdered 30,000 Jews—mostly women, children, and the elderly—over two days. They forced the victims to strip, then the SS machine-gunned them into a ravine. They covered the wounded and the dead with dirt and rocks. Later, they killed communists and gypsies at the ravine. A hundred thousand in all. Look at these two, mugging for the camera. We found them, you know. The worst of it is that their consciences are clear. They killed, they said, but it was wartime, and somehow they made it all fit into the constellation of their lives. That was then. No big deal.”

He set the photo aside. “This is what happens to vacations. Three days back in the office, and I’m plunged back into the murk. Let me tell you something about numbers that haunt me. I know them by heart. Between May 1945 and this year, the Federal Republic of Germany has mounted 85,802 proceedings against those suspected of Nazi crimes. A full ninety percent, nearly 80,000 cases, led to nothing. The accused couldn’t be located, they died in the war, they’d been previously tried and acquitted by one of the military courts after the war, or they fled to South America or to the Arab countries. We
knew
tens of thousands were guilty, and we couldn’t touch them. Twelve men out of 85,000,
twelve
were sentenced to death. This itself is a crime.”

The number hung in the room before it died, and for a moment Plannik wouldn’t meet my eyes. Watching him was like watching the time-lapse decay of a corpse, from life to bloat to festering flesh to bone. His spirits, so bright on greeting me, had gone to a dark place, and I realized that at a Nazi archive a man of conscience like Plannik could only come to grief: grief when he succeeded in bringing war criminals to justice, and grief again when he failed to do so. How could a man come to such work each morning?

And woe to the rest of us if he didn’t!

“I’ll help if I can,” he said, rising from his desk. “You’ve got me agitated, which is the proper frame of mind for a place like this. Why do you think I can find David Grossman if he doesn’t want to be found?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I can’t think of anyone else.”

“Do you appreciate that we have millions of documents in this archive? All that I have would amount to a backwards search. If he just recently changed his name, what help would that be? Moreover, you represent no federal, state, or even local police authority. I’m hanging on the slenderest of threads.”

I reached for a pen. “You may not be able to find Grossman’s new name and address. I understand that. Here are the current identities for Gottlieb and Vogt. I want you to get these men indicted. Wait for Gottlieb to leave South America and arrest him. Get Vogt now. He’s in Munich. You have the files to make these cases. Please, do this.”

“It will take time,” he said. “The rule of law demands it.”

I looked at him. “The same law that forced you to let thousands of Nazi criminals go free?”

He shrugged. “We’d be no better than Nazis ourselves if we just rounded them up and hanged them. Though there are days . . .” He reached into a desk drawer for his business card. “Call me in a week, on my direct line. And leave these here.” He pointed to the files. “It may no longer be such a good idea for you to be carrying them. I’ll help if I can. If I don’t, it won’t be for lack of trying.”

thirty-seven

I
left the Zentrale Stelle with a backwards glance, relieved to be on the far side of the thick prison walls. A guard buzzed me out through the steel doors, but not twenty paces later I wished I could have scrambled back inside. For I saw them: Schmidt’s men, one in a car, one on foot, closing in quickly. They had seen me, emerging from the one place on earth that Schmidt had warned me to avoid. I had parked a block away. I glanced over my shoulder and picked up my pace.

The man on foot spoke into a handheld radio, then motioned to the one in the car. Schmidt likely already knew where I was, and I didn’t want to contemplate what might happen if they caught me. I considered sprinting across traffic in the direction of the utility crew that had set up along Schorndorfer Strasse. If I kept my wits, I could fall very near them, claim chest pains or a bad ankle, and ask for an ambulance. Or I could sprint straight away and beg them to call the police on their radios.

Instead, I panicked.

I ran down the sidewalk towards my car, a supremely stupid move. The man in the Mercedes zoomed past me; and while my eyes followed him and plotted how I might still escape by bolting into traffic to reach a heavily wooded park, the driver’s side door of a blue Saab opened and I crashed into it, crumpling to the sidewalk. Someone pulled me into the backseat, and I passed out.

I
WOKE
with a hood over my head.

After an hour’s drive, two men dragged me from the car and into a building, where they strapped me at the ankles, thighs, waist, wrists, arms, and chest into a high-backed wooden chair. The first thing I saw when they removed the hood was my empty bag and, on a nearby table, all its contents: maps, keys, wallet, and not a single incriminating file from the Zentrale Stelle: nothing on Drütte, nothing on Vogt or Gottlieb, nothing on Kraus. At the last moment, Plannik had held them back on an impulse that likely saved my life.

It was a large room, another warehouse. I sat alone with a bright light shining in my face and two lights directed to a cart on which I could see a collection of surgical instruments and clamps, in addition to handsaws and several pairs of pliers with different grip configurations. A roll of plastic sheeting leaned against the cart. Beyond this circle of light, the room was dimmed by heavy curtains at the windows, which were closed. The air smelled thick and heavy. I guessed I was in a Kraus facility very near my former lab and apartment.

For thirty minutes I waited, the straps cutting into me.

Then I heard footsteps. Accompanied by three men, the two I’d run from and a third, I supposed, from the Saab, Viktor Schmidt stepped into the room wearing a leather apron over his shirtsleeves. He adjusted his tie, where it remained knotted tightly. He pointed to my bag.

“You and I had an understanding about the Archive,” he said. “I told you I didn’t want you going. I thought you understood, but there you were. And here you are. Did you think I trusted you, that I’d stopped following after that first time? I made that first surveillance so obvious that even an imbecile could take a hint. You must be a special sort of imbecile.”

His apron looked well used, with burn marks and brown stains.

“May I explain a problem to you, Henri?”

I tried to speak, but the impact with the car door had bruised my throat, and my jaw wasn’t working right. It was swollen, and I couldn’t feel my tongue or left cheek. I knew I was bleeding. I tasted blood.

“My friend in Buenos Aires, whom you met at
my
home— who welcomed you to
his
city—says he was summoned to police headquarters on a request from Interpol. It’s a shameful thing for a successful man, a medical doctor no less, to be called in for questioning to inspect a passport. What do you know of this?”

I made a noise meant to sound like
nothing.

“You’re too clever by a half,” said Schmidt. “You pressed him about a visit to Vienna. The only reason you’re alive is that my goddaughter happens to love you. If it weren’t for
that
—” He leaned close enough for me to see where he’d missed shaving that morning. He wore too much cologne. “If it weren’t for Liesel, you’d be dead. You went to the Ulrich farm and talked with that old man. Looking for news of Otto Kraus, yes? That came after your visit to the library at Hanover, where you were reading up on the war, I understand, and on the Reichswerke. One of my men stayed behind at your study carrel and noted the books you’d ordered. You went to Bruges and talked with an old woman after
lying
to Liesel and me about what you were doing. Henri, it’s not looking so good for you. What were you doing in Bruges?”