“Oh my.” Freya wiped a bony hand along her skirt and extended it, smiling vivaciously. “How are you? What a great pleasure.” She looked guilty.
Watching Liebermann nodding and shaking hands down the line, Beynon was dismayed to see how much the man had aged and diminished since their last meeting some two years before. He was still a presence, but no longer as massive or implicit with bearish strength as he had been then; the broad shoulders seemed pulled down now by the raincoat’s scant weight, and the then-powerful face was lined and gray-jowled, the eyes weary under drooping lids. The nose at least was unchanged—that thrusting Semitic hook—but the mustache was streaked with gray and wanted trimming. The poor chap had lost his wife and a kidney or such, and the funds of his War Crimes Information Center; the losses were recorded all over him—the crushed and finger-marked old hat, the darkened tie knot—and Beynon, reading the record, realized why his inner self had blocked that return call. His guilt swelled, but he quashed it, telling himself that to avoid losers was a natural and healthy instinct, even—or perhaps especially—to avoid losers who had once been winners.
Though one wanted to be kind, of course. “Sit down, Yakov,” he invited heartily, gesturing at the bench-end beside him and drawing the wine bottle closer.
“I don’t want to disturb your lunch,” Liebermann said in his heavily accented English. “If we could talk later?”
“Sit down,” Beynon said. “I get enough of these chaps at the office.” He put his back toward Freya and pushed a bit; she ceded a few inches and turned the other way. Beynon gave the added space to the bench-end, and smiling at Liebermann, gestured at it.
Liebermann sat down and sighed. Holding his knees with big hands, he scowled down between them, rocking his feet. “New shoes,” he said. “Killing me.”
“How are you otherwise?” Beynon asked. “And how’s your daughter?”
“I’m all right. She’s fine. She has three children now, two girls and a boy.”
“Oh, that’s nice.” Beynon touched the neck of the bottle between them. “I’m afraid we don’t have another cup.”
“No, no. I’m not allowed anyway. No alcohol.”
“I heard you were in hospital…”
“In, out, in, out.” Liebermann shrugged, and turned his weary brown eyes on Beynon. “I had a very crazy phone call,” he said. “A few weeks ago. Middle of the night. This boy from the States, from Illinoise, calls me from São Paulo. He has a tape of Mengele. You know who Mengele is, don’t you?”
“One of your wanted Nazis, isn’t he?”
“One of everybody’s,” Liebermann said, “not only mine. The German government still offers sixty thousand marks for him. He was the chief doctor at Auschwitz. ‘The Angel of Death,’ he was called. Two degrees, an M.D. and a Ph.D., and he did thousands of experiments on children, twins, trying to make good Aryans, to change brown eyes into blue eyes with chemicals, through the genes. A man with two degrees! He killed them: thousands of twins from all over Europe, Jewish and non-Jewish. It’s all in my book.”
Beynon picked up half his egg-salad sandwich and bit into it determinedly.
“He went home to Germany after the war,” Liebermann went on. “His family is rich there, in Günzburg; farm machinery. But his name began to come up in the trials, so ODESSA got him out and into South America. We found him there and chased him from city to city: Buenos Aires, Bariloche, Asunción. Since ’59 he lives in the jungle, in a settlement by a river on the Brazil and Paraguay border. He has an army of bodyguards, and Paraguayan citizenship, so he can’t be extradited. But he has to lay low anyway because groups of young Jews down there still try to get him. Some of them are found floating down the river, the Paraná, with their throats cut.”
Liebermann paused. Freya tapped Beynon’s arm and asked for the wine; he passed the bottle to her.
“So the boy has a tape,” Liebermann said, looking straight ahead, his hands on his knees. “Mengele in a restaurant sending out former SS men to Germany, England, Scandinavia, and the States. To kill a bunch of sixty-five-year-old men.” He turned and smiled at Beynon. “Crazy, yes? And it’s a very important operation. The Kameradenwerk is involved too, not only Mengele. The Comrades Organization, that keeps them safe and with jobs down there. Do you like the apples, as they say?”
Beynon blinked at him and smiled. “No, I’m afraid I don’t,” he said. “Did you actually hear this tape?”
Liebermann shook his head. “No. Just when he’s ready to play it for me, there’s a knock at the door, his door, and he goes to answer it. Bumping and thumping, and a little later the phone is hung up.”
“Perfect timing,” Beynon said. “It smells rather like a hoax, don’t you think? Who is he?”
Liebermann shrugged. “A boy who heard me speak two years ago, at his university, Princeton. He came to me in August and said he wanted to work for me. Do I need new workers? I’m only using a handful of the old ones. You know, I’m assuming, that all my money, all the Center’s money, was in the Allgemeine Wirtschaftsbank.”
Beynon nodded.
“The Center is in my apartment now—all the files, a few desks, and me and my bed. The ceiling downstairs is cracking. The landlord sues me. The only new workers I need are fund-raisers, which isn’t the boy’s field of interest. So he went down to São Paulo, his own boss.”
“Not exactly someone I’d put much faith in.”
“That’s just what I think while he talks to me. And he doesn’t have all his facts right either. One of the SS men is named Mundt, he says, and he knows about this Mundt from my book. Now, in my book I know there’s no Mundt. I never heard of a Mundt. So this doesn’t increase my confidence. But still…after the bumping and thumping, while I’m calling to him to come back to the phone, there’s a certain sound, not very loud but very clear, and it’s one thing and nothing else: it’s the sound of a cassette being dejected from a tape recorder.”
“Ejected,” Beynon said.
“Not dejected? Pushed out?”
“That’s ejected. Dejected is sad, pushed down.”
“Ah.” Liebermann nodded. “Thank you. Being ejected from a tape recorder. And one thing more. It was quiet then, for a long time, and I was quiet too, putting the bumping and thumping together with the cassette sound; and in that long quiet”—he looked forebodingly at Beynon—“hate came over the phone, Sydney.” He nodded. “Hate like I never felt before, not even when Stangl looked at me in the courtroom. It came to me as plain as the boy’s voice, and maybe it was because of what he said, but I was absolutely certain the hate came from Mengele. And when the phone was hung up I was absolutely certain that Mengele hung it.” He looked away and leaned forward, his elbows on his knees, a hand gripping his other hand’s fist.
Beynon watched him, skeptical but moved. “What did you do?” he asked.
Liebermann sat up straight, rubbed his hands, looked at Beynon and shrugged. “What could I do, in Vienna at four in the morning? I wrote down what the boy said, all I could remember, and read it, and told myself that he was crazy and I was crazy. Only who…ejected the cassette and hung up the phone? Maybe it wasn’t Mengele, but it was somebody. Later, when it was morning there, I called Martin McCarthy at the U.S. Embassy in Brasília; he called the police in São Paulo, and they called the phone company and found out where the call to me came from. A hotel. The boy disappeared from it during the night. I called Pacher here and asked him if he could get Brazil to watch for the SS men—the boy said they were leaving that day—and Pacher didn’t exactly laugh at me but he said no, not without something concrete. A boy disappearing from a hotel room without paying his bill isn’t concrete. And neither is me saying SS men are leaving because the boy told me so. I tried to get the German prosecutor in charge of the Mengele case but he was out. If it was still Fritz Bauer, he would be in for me, but the new one was out.” He shrugged again, rubbed at the lobe of his ear. “So the men left Brazil, if the boy was right, and he hasn’t been found yet. His father is down there pushing the police; a well-to-do man, I understand. But he has a dead son.”