Hour of the Assassins (17 page)

Caine looked at the bear enclosure, where Schwips, a big brown male, was idly scratcing his back against a post. He had reached a decision point and he knew it. By rights he should contact Wasserman and tell him that Mengele was bound to be forewarned and the game was called on account of darkness. The permanent kind.

He looked to the south, toward the Steglitz district. He could see the tall rubble mound, dubbed the “Insulaner” by the Berliners, thrusting its way into the skyline. He turned and let his gaze run along the modernistic lines of the Gedächtniskirche, looking like a complicated piece of futuristic computer equipment. The architects had left one broken steeple from the original structure standing as a grim keepsake of a B-17 raid. Over toward the Strasse des 17 Juni, named to commemorate the day in 1953 that protesting East German workers were gunned down by Russian tanks, stood the blood-red granite spire of the Siegesäule. The column had been built in the last century to celebrate the Prussian victory over France. There was no escaping the war in this city, he thought, because the war hadn't ended in the spring of '45. It had never ended for any of them. It just went on forever in different battlefields. The Middle East, Africa, Southeast Asia. No matter which way you turned, the dead wouldn't stay buried. He thought of the old Gypsy at Auschwitz and that bleak ordinary room where Mengele had conducted his
experimentieren
. And he knew that there was no going back, no matter what the odds were, or what the Company did or didn't have on. The war was still on for him. He wanted Mengele. The job was no longer just business. It had become personal.

The morning was cold, with a clarity that was clean and sharp-edged, as though every object had been carved with a scalpel. A single wisp of cumulus bisected the pale blue sky, like a long strand of white hair. Caine drove a rented VW bug, chosen for its anonymity, through the outskirts of the city to the rural suburb of Zehlendorf. Traffic this way was light and tall, slender trees crowded right up to the road, as though he were driving down a country lane. Clusters of gold autumn leaves still clung to spindly branches, like swarms of brittle butterflies. The undergrowth was green and through gaps in the trees he could see the deep blue of the many lakes that dotted the district. They reminded him of the color of C.J.'s eyes.

He followed Wasserkaferstieg road to its end on the banks of a small quiet lake surrounded by trees. The American Document Center was a long low concrete affair, set like an estate behind a cement-and-iron fence. He gave his name to the guard at the gate and then drove through a tunnel of branches overhanging a private road to the building. Harris had mentioned that the structure was like an iceberg, extending eight floors underground, where the archives were kept in bombproof vaults. Caine handed the Foster passport to the clerk at the reception desk. The clerk checked his name against a typewritten list and handed him a pen and an application form on a clipboard to fill out. Caine filled it out and handed it back to the clerk, then he sat down on a couch to wait. Strewn on the coffee table in front of him were recent issues of
Newsweek
and
Der Spiegel
and an old-well-thumbed copy of
Playboy
. It was like sitting in a dentist's waiting room. The only things missing were the Norman Rockwell prints and copies of articles on the dangers of periodontitis.

After a few minutes the clerk motioned to him and Caine followed him into a large reading room filled with Formica tables and chairs. There was only one other person in the room, a large heavyset German detective in civilian clothes, with the unmistakable air of authority that clings to policemen everywhere, like the indelible scent of aftershave lotion. Caine put him down as a member of Bureau One, the section of the West Berlin police department delegated to investigate war crimes.

He waited for about ten minutes until another wispy clerk handed him a thick four-volume set of three-inch binders, each of which bore the label
JOSEF MENGELE,
numbers one through four. With a faint sigh he settled himself in the chair and opened the first folder.

For a long while he studied the photographs of the young Mengele attached to the SS records. He realized that after more than forty years they were virtually worthless for identification purposes. Time and age had certainly sculpted that thin-lipped, rather mediocre face into something that no longer had any resemblance to the photo. And although there was no indication of it in the files, Mengele might well have had cosmetic surgery to further obscure his identity. What Caine was after was something more fundamental, some clue to the character of the man that revealed itself to the camera—something that couldn't be changed.

The photographs revealed an intense-looking, thin-faced young SS officer, with dark hair and eyes. He was clean-shaven with a prominent nose and there might have been a touch of vanity in the studied pose he had presented to the camera. He looked more like an Eastern European than a German. Perhaps that had been the source of his boundless hatred of non-Aryans, Caine mused—the fact that he resembled them. For some reason the dark eyes and beaklike nose reminded Caine of a bird of prey. When Mengele operated, that gaze would have revealed no more emotion than a hawk when it killed a rabbit. For the rest, there was nothing there, he decided. It was really a very ordinary face after all.

He skimmed fairly rapidly through the bulk of the first two volumes, which contained records of Mengele's early life, war records, indictments, affidavits concerning a staggering list of war crimes and various warrants for his arrest, requests by different agencies for information, and so on. He began to read carefully when he came to the application for an Argentinian identity card, which had been the last authoritative mention of Mengele in Wasserman's dossier.

On October 27, 1956, the officials of the by-then defunct Perón government, which had been notoriously hospitable to ex-Nazis, issued
cédula
number 3940484 to Mengele under the name Dr. Gregor Schklastro. It was the first of many aliases Mengele had occasion to employ. The files had records of Mengele, a.k.a. Dr. Helmut Gregor-Gregori, Dr. Edler Friedrich von Breitenbach (under which he practiced medicine in Buenos Aires), Franz Fischer, Fausto Rindon, José Aspiazu, Stefan Alvez, Walter Hasek, Heinz Stobert, and even, audaciously, José Mengele. Caine was growing excited and he put down the file for a moment. Mengele was a far more elusive prey than Eichmann had ever been. To hunt him down would be the most extraordinary challenge he had ever faced.

The aliases clarified one point: Mengele was unable to adopt the protective coloration of the South American environment. Whatever identity he assumed, he was unable or unwilling to disguise his German background. Caine smiled. It was the first flaw.

Wherever Mengele was now, he was posing as a German immigrant in his late sixties, probably in a German enclave in Latin America. The target was beginning to narrow.

Given his vast experience in sterilization, it was almost inevitable that Mengele established a successful practice in Buenos Aires, specializing in abortion. He was briefly arrested in 1958 after a woman died on his operating table following a botched abortion. Mengele bribed his way out of jail and entered Paraguay on a tourist visa.

When Mengele fled Argentina, he abandoned his wife Martha and their young son, Karl Heinz, who stayed on in Buenos Aires. They subsequently left Argentina and returned to Europe, settling in Kloten, Switzerland, near the Zurich airport. During the early sixties, while the West German authorities intensified their hunt for Mengele as a result of the Freiburg court indictment, Frau Mengele and her son were located by Feinberg, a Jewish Nazi hunter based in Vienna, who then notified the Zurich police. The last thing the peace-and-order-loving Swiss government wanted was a war crimes trial. In July 1962 the Swiss authorities expelled Martha and Karl Heinz, who then settled in the quiet village of Merano in the Italian Tyrol, where Martha still lived. Martha subsequently divorced Mengele
in absentia
and there had apparently been no further contact between Mengele and his former family. A separate report by Feinberg, referenced in a footnote, indicated that the boy grew up despising his father, as did Frau Mengele.

When his Paraguayan visa expired, Mengele went to the Andean ski resort of San Carlos de Bariloche, where he spent the early part of 1959. There were many cross-references in the files to Bariloche, a luxurious Alpine-like retreat near the Argentinian-Chilean border. First established by a German immigrant named Wiederhold, Bariloche was clearly an enclave for the Nazis, who were drawn to its German atmosphere, that stein-thumping fellowship of beery
gemütlichkeit
, its snow-capped mountain setting so reminiscent of Switzerland and the Tyrol, and its proximity to the Chilean border. As the cross-references noted, such Nazi bigwigs as Mengele, Adolph Eichmann, and even Martin Bormann—Hitler's deputy and heir-had often been reported wandering its streets and trails, dressed in
lederhosen
and acting for all the world as if they were still in Berchtesgaden, paying a social call on the
Führer
. In October 1959 Mengele returned to Paraguay, where he was issued a citizenship certificate, number 293348, and established a new medical practice in Asunción.

Even as Mengele calmly and openly went about his business in Asunción, the hunt was intensifying. In Israel, Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion authorized a special commando unit of the Mossad, Israel's general intelligence agency, to initiate two top-secret operations: “Operation Eichmann” and “Operation Angel of Death.” According to a CIA report in the folder the objectives of the unit, code-named the “Blue Falcons,” were to kidnap Adolph Eichmann and Josef Mengele and bring them to Israel to stand trial.

Meanwhile, on November 13, 1959, the German embassy in Asunción petitioned the Paraguayan Ministry of the Interior for permission to examine Mengele's naturalization papers as a first step toward initiating extradition proceedings. Only five days later Interpol's Paris office approached the Paraguayan authorities with a similar request. A few days later a member of the Blue Falcons was found in Eldorado, Paraguay, his throat slit from ear to ear.

Caine put down the file and looked up at the ceiling, breathing deeply. Then he shook his head wearily. What a balls-up, he thought. They had all crowded around the target, jostling each other in their eagerness to piss into the soup. With a sigh he resumed his reading.

Forewarned by an unidentified Paraguayan leak, Mengele went to ground, next surfacing in Bariloche. Mengele and his bodyguards took over a floor in a chalet at the base of the towering precipice of Cerro Catedral. Using the alias Franz Fischer, he spent much of his enforced vacation hiking the rugged Andean trails.

A frequent companion during those weeks was a pretty blond woman from Frankfurt, named Nora Aldot. They had met at the chalet bar and soon they were inseparable. Mengele had a well-known weakness for beautiful women, and for her part Nora appeared smitten by his old-fashioned Bavarian charm. But Mengele was hot and he knew it. Strangers were showing up in Bariloche and the Argentinian and Paraguayan authorities were being pressured to do something about him. Mengele had his bodyguards and ODESSA
Kameraden
check her out.

The CIA report didn't indicate what, if anything, they found to incriminate the woman. All that was known for certain was that on February 12, 1960, Nora and Mengele and two of his bodyguards went hiking on the Cerro Catedral and that later the three men reported that Nora had fallen in a terrible accident. Nora's battered body was found in a ravine a few days later by the local police.

After a brief and somewhat cursory investigation an Argentinian police report in the folder recorded the death as accidental and the investigation was closed due to a lack of any further evidence—except that the CIA report on the incident noted that Nora Aldot's real name was Norit Edad, a native of Frankfurt who had immigrated to Tel Aviv after the war. The CIA had concluded that she had in fact been a member of the Blue Falcons. It was the last time the Israelis got close to Mengele, and “Franz Fischer” once again went to ground.

The Blue Falcons were more successful with Eichmann and on May 23, 1960, Ben-Gurion was able to announce Eichmann's capture to the Knesset. But Ben-Gurion's triumph was short lived. The reaction of most Western and South American governments to the Israeli campaign of retribution was almost uniformly negative. The resulting scandals led to the resignation of Isar Harel as head of the Mossad and later to the fall of Ben-Gurion's government. An angry Ben-Gurion stormed off to semiretirement on a kibbutz in the Negev Desert, swearing to never again speak to the new prime minister, his former protégé, Levi Eshkol, who had forced him out of office. Israel was effectively out of the retribution business.

Even worse, the worldwide publicity associated with the Eichmann snatch and trial for war crimes sent fugitive Nazis scurrying for deeper cover. The frightened Nazis were getting harder to get at than ever. Even the complete record in front of Caine contained little information of Mengele's whereabouts between the time of his stay in Bariloche and 1965, except that Caine knew from Ibn Sallah that after the Eichmann snatch the fugitive had tried and failed to relocate to Egypt in 1961.

The record between 1960 and 1965 was a monotonous series of fiascos, as Interpol and Bureau One went through the motions, running down one false lead after another. The Mengele case was becoming a bureaucratic albatross. The situation was muddied still further by the attempts of enthusiastic Jewish amateurs.

In July 1962 the West German government asked the Paraguayans for information on Dr. José Mengele, who was supposedly living in Asunción, according to an Interpol report. A Paraguayan leak let Mengele know about the inquiry even before the Ministry of the Interior officially received the request. Mengele left Asunción and moved to the
finca
of a German immigrant named Krug, near the town of Ericarnación on the upper Paraná River, located in a jungle region near the Argentinian and Brazilian borders.