I waited a few seconds then heard his voice again as he spoke to the person next to him, and I finally placed his accent. It was Spanish.
“La putana! Ariel was lying to us. I'll kill her!”
“What did the woman say?” asked another voice.
“She said that she doesn't have any papers from Ariel. We'll have to go back and squeeze the little bitch.”
“Wait,” said the other voice. “Let me call the boss first. We can't call from the apartment.”
Then I heard another series of touch-tone beeps. A man's voice answered the phone, “Ja?”
“It's me,” said the voice in English. “The woman called. She says she has no papers but she wants to meet.”
A pause. “Are you sure she didn't contact the police?”
His voice sounded familiar but I couldn't place it. He also had an accent – German, if anything, surely – it certainly wasn't Spanish.
“She never mentioned it and she was very anxious to see Ariel. She isn't stupid enough to do that.”
“OK, get back to the apartment and I'll call you there.”
“Yes, boss.”
The boss's accent came through again. It was clearly German. Was I just imagining that the speaker sounded familiar?
The tape ended. I turned off the recorder, marked the date and time on the cassette label, and put it in my pocket.
I sat at my desk thinking through next steps. The first move was easy; speaking of bosses, I had to report to Stone.
I went out to the street, found a pay phone, and used my prepaid phone card to call Washington.
“David,” I said, “things are getting hotter here.”
“I guess you don't mean the weather.”
“No,” I smiled, “the German weather is cooling but our climate is warming. I have a safe-deposit box I suspect contains papers my target gave his daughter in Munich before he was killed. It's possible that he had already felt the heat. Next, the daughter called her mother in Israel. The mother came to Munich looking for her daughter, who shortly was kidnapped. It didn't make the papers.”
David listened attentively, as always. “Are the German police on the kidnap matter as well?”
“Certainly,” I said. “I'm also trying to help them. They don't seem to appreciate it, but you know me. I hang on anyway.”
“Don't create a turf war.”
“Well, some kind of war is already on,” I countered.
“What the hell do you mean by that?”
“Something is brewing but I'm not sure exactly what it is. Just to identify one player, I suspect the Israelis are in on this matter as well. I mean the Israeli government.”
Stone let this one hang for a moment, then came at me. “What do you make of it? These are your people, after all.”
“Well, our friend was in their service more than thirty years ago, but I don't understand their current interest. Assistance could come now for old times’ sake, or maybe he had something they wanted as well.”
“So where is the war?” puzzled David.
“I'm guessing they're not the only ones following my target's trail; there seem to be others.”
“What others? Do you know who they are? You should always know who you're up against.”
“Take it easy, I'm working on it. The problem is that I'm not sure each player has the same goal. The people holding the daughter have a distinct agenda. They want to get some papers her father gave her.”
“Do you know who they could be?”
“Could be Latinos. I suspect that in addition to the Latinos and the Israelis, there are others. I'm walking in a fog, and every now and then I bump into something.”
“Don't let me lose you,” said Stone with genuine concern. “Is the legat helping you?”
“As much as he can, I guess. Don't worry; I always land on my feet. I'm more concerned with what's going on around my dead target.”
“With all the international interest in this guy, I'm surprised he managed to live sixty-three years.”
“The whole thing is a mystery,” I agreed. “There are too many players, and all of them seem somewhat in the dark.”
“I'll have to report this to the State Department,” said Stone, somewhat reluctantly.
“I guess so,” I said. Scandals in foreign lands are their territory. Since I was working out of the consulate, Ron Lovejoy was kept in the loop. It was his job to keep the ambassador informed. Then it was the ambassador's job to do the same with the State Department. But I knew David – he covered all the bases.
I went back to my room, looked at the yellow pad on the desk, and drew several square boxes. In the middle box I wrote “DeLouise.” Then I drew a line to another box and wrote “Ariel” in it; next to it, in a separate box I wrote “Mina.” I drew five additional boxes on the side and inserted in each a different name: “Mossad,” “German police,” “U.S. Department of Justice,” “Latinos,” and finally a question mark, for all others yet to emerge.
I looked at the pad again and tried to identify each group's interest in DeLouise.
The German police: That was easy. They wanted Ariel, and to prosecute anyone involved in her kidnapping and in her father's murder.
The U.S. Department of Justice: That was a two-pronged effort. I was after DeLouise's money, but that trail now seemed to pass through Ariel and Mina. So I was stuck with them as well. And the criminal division, through INTERPOL, was trying to locate DeLouise so that it could request his extradition to the United States for trial. Although INTERPOL does handle requests for police interviews of witnesses, many countries, including Germany, require either an MLAT request under a Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty between the countries or a letter rogatory – a formal request from a court in one country to the appropriate judicial authorities in another country – for such interviews and have such questioning done by (or, less often, supervised by) a magistrat, with a greffier – a legal assistant of the court – making a proces-verbal of it.
If the person to be interviewed abroad is a suspect or the target of an investigation, the matter becomes sticky. The United States would not send Germany a letter rogatory for the questioning of an actual defendant. And there's no international criminal-law mechanism for compelling a person to return to the States just for questioning. Although DeLouise was dead, rendering this issue irrelevant, I still wanted to know if Germany had commenced with an investigation following a request through INTERPOL. In that case their findings could become handy for my investigation. I made a mental note to ask David to find out.
Finally, the Mossad: If they were in on this, as I suspected, I had no idea what their objectives might be. To get Ariel? To help Mina? To get something DeLouise gave Ariel? Did they want the same thing the Latinos wanted? What documents could DeLouise have held that could cause such havoc?
I went out to the street again to call Benny at the Mossad. It was cold and drizzling. I was going to catch pneumonia just so I could maintain confidentiality. There had to be a better way.
There was no answer on Benny's direct line. I left a message on his voice mail asking him to call my New York number. I called his home. No answer there. I called Blecher at the Munich police headquarters but a detective told me that he was gone for the day.
I went up to my room, activated the touch-tone-identifier software on my laptop, and replayed the audiotape recording of the call the Latinos made from the pay phone. The identifier quickly interpreted the touch tone beeps into numbers: 2-3-5-9-9-0-9. This was probably a local number, since no area code was punched. I called the police station again, asking them to trace Blecher for me. Where were all these guys when I needed them? Nobody called me back and I fell asleep.
The next morning I woke up in a belligerent mood. A delay in my efforts here meant more guilt for being away from my children and increased pressure from David to produce results. After spending most of the morning writing my report, I took a cab to Mielke Bank. I was determined to get access to the safe-deposit box. If Mina was with the Mossad guys, she might tell them about the box. They would ask her to open it, and I would be chopped liver.