Heinrich nodded for his father. “Yes, I heard you,” he said in a small voice. “We’ll take care of it. I promise.”
Walter turned and started up the steps. Bravely, Heinrich followed. “Walter, wait! Are you a general now? What did you do in the war? Were you ever shot? Do you know how close the Russians are? Are you hungry?”
Walter Beck stepped into the night and ducked into the back of a waiting car. It sped off as Heinrich’s other questions died on his lips.
Otto Beck’s mouth was bleeding, his cheek bruised. Heinrich helped him up onto a chair and ran to get water and a cloth. Otto waved him away, his eyes on the empty stairs, his mind on his wife, who was sleeping. “Don’t tell her he was here,” he said. Otto Beck never spoke of Walter again.
The crate was hidden away below the basement with Otto’s most valuable paintings, in a vault that was lined with metal to keep it dry. It remained there until after the war, long after the Russians had come looking for Walter. Russian reprisals against former SS were terrible, especially for those like Walter Beck, who had made their reputation in the east.
One day Russian troops smashed their way into the building. Otto had just enough time to shove his son into the lower basement and close the trapdoor. The Russians beat Otto to death and shot his wife. They tore apart the shop, but they were drunk and not very good at what they did and never found the trapdoor beneath which Heinrich trembled with his treasures. For three months they peed on priceless canvases and drank vodka while Heinrich hid beneath the floor, listening to their balalaika and living on jam and stale bread and a drum of water that tasted of diesel, only emerging when they were asleep or out on patrol.
“My God,” Joe Cooley said. “How does a boy live through that?”
“He was luckier than most,” Max said. “He was alive.”
After the Russians left, Heinrich resumed his father’s business under the new reality of life in East Berlin. As the years passed and Heinrich heard nothing from Walter, he assumed his brother was dead or a prisoner of the Soviets, which amounted to the same thing. But one day a man came to the gallery with a letter from Walter, instructing Heinrich to give his crate to the man carrying the letter.
“Heinrich only kept his journal for a few months after that,” Max said. “The last entry was made just two days before the Stasi raided the gallery. It is possible they were aware of his black-market dealings. We have no further word of Heinrich. He disappeared.”
Max paused, taking a drink. He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “Walter also disappeared, but he had a great deal of help, from some very surprising sources.” He picked up the next document, a declassified U.S. Army report, and continued the story.
Walter Beck was captured by American forces as he made his way toward northern Italy. His papers identified him as Horst Schmidt, a Wehrmacht chaplain. His interrogation by an army lieutenant had just commenced when Beck, desperately ill, collapsed in a faint from a lucky but severe case of flu and was carried unconscious to the infirmary. After his recovery, a paperwork mistake sent him directly into the general camp population of POWs without further questioning. He never had to bare his arm, on which the SS blood-group tattoo would have betrayed his identity. After the general release of prisoners he spent the next three years working in an olive grove on a farm owned by a friend of the SS, part of an underground network devoted to helping ex-Nazis elude detection. One day he received a packet with Red Cross identity papers and an Argentine landing permit, provided through the efforts of Alois Hudal, an Austrian bishop at the Vatican.
In May 1948 he boarded a Croatian freighter bound for Buenos Aires, where he was welcomed into a community of German fugitives among Argentine Catholics. He was given a laborer’s job in a saddle factory, but introductions made by his contacts soon led to work for the Perón government, which needed officers like Beck to train the military. Beck also found himself sought out by the American CIA, which paid him to provide a steady stream of hearsay and gossip about men he had known in his ancestral home, in what was now East Berlin, in exchange for which they kept his identity a secret. Beck was soon living opulently, happy to serve both masters. He married an heiress and thought his future secure.
After a decade or so things began to fray. The Americans grew bored with gossip and their money dried up. And then an Israeli team kidnapped Adolf Eichmann, who lived quite near Beck.
Argentina was no longer safe. He needed money. He left his wife without saying good-bye and went deep underground, hiding in a basement flat belonging to a sympathetic Argentine diplomat. He used his network to send a man to his father’s gallery in Berlin, to collect the case he’d left there in 1945. The crate traveled to Argentina in a diplomatic shipment, a costly but common method used by the Nazis to transport contraband out of Europe.
Beck had the reliquary broken down, the gold melted, and the jewels mounted and sold. He also disposed of several of his paintings, modern works by Picasso and Chagall, highly marketable at the time.
He made his way to Paraguay, whose president, Alfredo Stroessner, had long provided another safe haven for Nazis. Beck lived in Asunción for nearly a decade, making regular payments for protection but growing more uncomfortable as the corruption of Stroessner’s government spiraled out of control. Men with so little personal honor would sell him for a pittance to the Jews, who were not letting go of a long-ago war. Josef Mengele was in country, one of the most high-profile targets alive.
One day Beck noticed two young men watching him at a café. They appeared not to know each other, one on a bicycle, another reading a paper, but to his growing paranoia they might as well have been wearing Stars of David. They followed him but he lost them. He did not return home but collected his valuables from their hiding place and fled to La Paz.
“This brings us to Victor Maslov,” Max said. He pulled a thick stack of clippings from a file. “He figured prominently in a series of articles in the New York Times about international arms dealers.”
Victor Maslov had scrapped his way up from nothing, starting work for a cousin who had acquired a World War II–era American bomber and converted it to carry freight. The cousin was no businessman but Maslov was. He learned to fly and soon was ferrying black-market goods to Croatia and Yugoslavia, Greece, and Hungary. He dealt mostly in wheat and flour at first, then beer and whisky, willing to make dangerous night landings as he built a network of partners in Europe and Africa. He soon had two more planes, graduating to small arms along with the whisky, then abandoning whisky altogether and selling nothing but arms. As regional conflicts grew so did his capabilities. His fleet eventually included an Ilyushin-76 aircraft big enough to ferry tanks.
He bought from America and Europe and sold in every corner of the world, meticulous with the end-user certificates he needed to keep the business legitimate under international law. His was a world of killers and despots, and one did not survive in that world without being ruthless and shrewd. Wherever he operated men died, whether as victims of the weapons he sold or from the hidden workings of his enterprise. He was a master of the grey world of the international arms trade, protected by powerful interests in every country. Governments condemned him at the same time they did business with him.
The press dubbed him the Merchant of Death. News magazines ran full-color spreads of the destruction caused by his weapons, sometimes in the same issue in which they ran features about his private life. One of the world’s most eligible bachelors, he had homes in Los Angeles and Paris, a liking for high-stakes gambling, and impeccable taste in clothing and women. He had one genuine passion: he loved fine art. He collected it, studied it, was moved by it. He was self-taught, spending time in galleries and museums the world over. His acquisitions came from established auction houses and dealers and from less legitimate sources. Not only did he love art, he sometimes used it as currency in cases where a government’s financial controls hindered a particular transaction.