Hour of the Assassins (19 page)

The grand finale of the tour was a brief boat ride to an island in the river inhabited by a tribe of Macá Indians, selling handicrafts from market stalls. The tourists descended on the stalls like Sennacherib on the fold, waving wads of guaranis and noisily haggling for all they were worth. Some of the chattering Macá women smoked fat cigars while impassive Indian men in loincloths, their dark eyes shuttered like camera lenses, charged two hundred guaranis to pose for pictures. Caine bought a gaudy lightweight
aho poi
shirt to further reinforce his tourist image. By the time the weary tourists staggered off the minibus with armfuls of booty, Caine had decided that a sojourn in a Vietnamese “tiger cage” would beat going on another tour.

Caine found the name of the local office of Mengele & Sons in the Asunción phone book. It was a little anticlimactic, like finding the prize in a box of Cracker Jacks. You always knew it had to be there. He located the office in a modern three-story building on Independencia Nacional near the Braniff office. There was no way to avoid going in, he would have to know the layout.

The cool shade of the hallway soothed his skin like sunburn lotion, after the blistering morning heat of the streets. The Mengele office shared the third floor with a lawyer's office. Caine entered the Mengele office and stopped at the partition separating him from a petite blond receptionist, who was chewing on a pencil. The walls were hung with blown-up photographs of agricultural equipment, digging into the earth like giant mechanical insects from a grade B science fiction movie. Beyond the partition were a few shirt-sleeved clerks bent over their desks and two doors to private offices. One of the doors bore a brass plate with the inscription,
ALOIS MENGELE, PRESIDENT.
Mengele's brother.

Caine's eyes narrowed behind his sunglasses as he checked the walls for light switches and alarm wiring. The files he needed would be in Mengele's office, probably in a desk or wall safe. The blonde stopped chewing on her pencil, ruffled a few papers to show she had more important things to do than talk to him, and finally looked up.

“What do you wish, señor?”

“Where is the office of Señor Gomez?” Caine asked, naming the lawyer in the adjoining office. He deliberately emphasized his American accent and mangled the syntax. A gringo who could speak fluent Spanish was bound to be suspect.

“He is in the other office, the next door on the left, señor.”

“
Gracias
.”

He left the office and explored the corridor, listening for a moment to the sound of typing coming from behind the lawyer's door. At the end of the corridor a rickety, unlit staircase led him to an alley beside the building. He went back up the stairs to the second floor and came down again, leaving the building by the main entrance. It was then that he saw the procession.

A single drum announced the platoon of soldiers with the inexorable, almost frightening tempo of a heartbeat. Rifles held at port arms with fixed bayonets gleaming in the tropic sun, they marched four abreast down the center of Independencia Nacional. Traffic ground to a halt and pedestrians came to a kind of informal attention as they solemnly lined both sides of the avenue. Caine positioned himself in the second rank of shoppers watching the soldiers approach, their legs kicking high in a measured goose step like a mechanical wave approaching some distant shore.

Behind the soldiers white-robed acolytes carried large ornate icons of the crucified Christ and the Blue Virgin of the Miracles on their shoulders. The icons swayed above the acolytes as though they were riding a raft on a sea of impassive Indian faces. A ripple of movement ran along the lines of onlookers as they knelt and genuflected at the icons' approach. Behind the icons a group of priests and assistants blessed the crowd with the sign of the cross, looking like a flock of crows in their black cassocks. After the priests came another platoon of goose-stepping soldiers, bringing up the rear.

Caine stood transfixed as the procession marched by. He felt an almost superstitious sense of shock and recognition and unconsciously he touched the Bauer, held snug in his waistband at the small of his back, almost as if it were a good-luck charm. Never before had he associated the Church with goose-stepping soldiers and fixed bayonets. As nothing ever had, it brought home to him a glimpse of what life for these people was really all about. No wonder Mengele had been able to go about his business here with complete impunity, he mused.

That evening he attended Sabbath eve services in a tiny synagogue in the Trinidad suburb. The church procession had convinced him that any attempt to directly approach Mengele would only muddy the water and forewarn the target. He needed hard information on local Nazis and it was likely that the Jews of Asunción had some of the answers. If you want to know where the wolves are, you could do worse than to ask the sheep, he thought.

An orange afterlight of the tropic sunset lingered over the streets like a floating veil, bringing little relief from the relentless heat. The street was crowded with gossiping housewives. Ragged copper-skinned children played in a garbage-strewn corner lot. From an open
tienda
a radio blared the rhythms of
música folklórica
as he entered the small wooden-frame house that served as a synagogue.

Inside, about twenty mostly elderly Jews in business suits stood praying in Spanish-flavored Hebrew. Their perspiring bodies swayed ritualistically as they faced a wooden closet covered by a crepe curtain. It bore a crudely painted Lion of Judah standing on a Star of David. Caine awkwardly placed a handkerchief on his head to serve as a yarmulke, wondering what he was supposed to do.

A fat red-faced man in his fifties with bulldog jowls shoved a prayer book at Caine, pointing out the place in the text. Caine shrugged helplessly and the man smiled back with an air of patient resignation. After the service Caine told the man, who introduced himself as Jaime Weizman, that he was an American Jew who was thinking of opening a business in Paraguay and needed advice on local conditions. They arranged to meet for lunch at the
parrillada
and it was Weizman that Caine was waiting for as he checked his watch again.

The only hitch was that he had been tailed by a green Chevy from the synogogue back to his hotel. It was frustrating because there was no reason for it and because he couldn't flush the tail without revealing that he knew he was being followed and thereby blowing his cover. Things were getting hairy too soon, he told himself as he sipped his drink.

The waiter brought over his
carne asada
and went back to the bar, where he settled on a stool and pulled out a tattered paperback. The lurid book cover showed a blonde in a torn blouse being pistol-whipped by a faceless figure in a trench coat. The waiter dived headfirst into the book as into a pool, as Weizman finally arrived in an old Fiat.

Weizman ambled slowly toward Caine, his checked sports jacket refracted in the shimmering heat, as though seen through warped glass. He settled into the chair opposite Caine with a small sigh of relief. With an air of annoyance at the interruption, the waiter put down his book and came over to the table. Weizman ordered a
sopa Paraguaya
, a kind of corn bread quiche, and a cold
cerveza
. The waiter delivered the order to the kitchen and went back to the bar and his paperback.

Caine explained once again that as a fellow Jew he wanted to get to know the Jewish community in Asunción before committing himself to a business venture in Paraguay. As Caine spoke, Weizman's dark eyes regarded him with a disconcerting mixture of friendliness and unhappiness, like a puppy that wants to play and knows it's going to be rebuffed. Weizman patted at his florid, sweating face with a handkerchief, smiling apologetically, as though he were wagging his tail.

“
Perdóneme
, Señor Foster, but you are not Jewish,” Weizman said uneasily, his English heavily accented and tentative.

Caine briefly considered lying, then decided against it. He sensed that hidden inside that amiable envelope of flesh was a shy, frightened man.

“How can you tell?”

Weizman shrugged with that gesture of Latin indifference that is mostly indolence. Then he smiled shyly, as though offering Caine a gift.

“After two thousand years, you get a knack for it.”

“You're right, I'm not Jewish.”

Weizman nodded solemnly. The waiter brought a frosted bottle of beer that Weizman consumed greedily, sucking at the bottle like a starving baby at the nipple. Weizman was like a man who had gone hungry and forever afterward lived with the fear that his food might be taken from him again.

“I'm with Interpol. I'm here to investigate Nazi war criminals,” Caine said crisply, flashing the bronze badge he had bought in Las Vegas.

“What war crimes? The camps were all a figment of Zionist propaganda. If you don't believe me, ask any German.”

“I did.” Caine smiled. “They're all innocent. Hitler fought the war single-handed.”

“
Meshuggener
.” Weizman smiled sadly, meaning “crazy” as if it were a compliment. “Do you know the story in the Talmud about the king who visited the prison? Each of the prisoners protested his innocence, except for one man, who admitted he was a robber. Throw this thief out of here,' the king said. ‘He will corrupt all these innocents.'” Weizman giggled happily at his own story.

“I'm here after some of the guilty ones, even if they are maligned victims of Zionist propaganda,” Caine said with a wink.

“Guilt.” Weizman looked at him quizzically. “You use such old-fashioned words, Señor Foster. I thought you North Americans were much more up-to-date. Besides, guilt, vengeance, justice, those words passed me by a million years ago. I am a Jew, Señor Foster. What matters to us is survival. That's all, just survival. We're very good at it, we Jews. Survival is the great Jewish”—he waved his hand, searching for the word, as though seeking to pluck it from the air—“talent.”

“Do you want to see the Nazis go free?”

“Which of us is truly free, Señor Foster? You, me, the Germans? We are all the prisoners of our past,
verdad?
When the Nazis came to power, the Jews tried to flee Germany. Not one country was willing to take them in, including your United States. There was only one place that was willing to accept them. Do you know where that was, Señor Foster?” Weizman asked, mopping his sweating brow with the soggy handkerchief. “Nazi Germany. Then during the war the world stood idly by, while the Holocaust happened. Europe was flattened, but not one of the death camps was ever bombed. Not one! After the war it was business as usual. The war was over. Who wanted to dig up a past better left buried? After all, the Nazis were only doing their duty, like a good German should.”

“If you really believe that shit, why did you agree to see me?”

“To find out what you were after. There are only a few hundred Jews in Paraguay, Señor Foster. We are a small tightly knit community and we survive mostly by staying out of the limelight. So when anyone takes an interest in us, it's dangerous, and we have to know what it's all about.”

“Is that why you had me tailed back to my hotel?” Caine asked, with a sudden surge of relief.

“I'm afraid we're not very good at that sort of thing,” Weizman apologized.

Jesus, so that's all the Chevy was, Caine thought. Amateurs should never play with professionals. It was like giving children your new Buick and asking them to go play Grand Prix driver on the Santa Monica freeway.

“No, you're not. I'd advise you not to try it again.”

“Do you know what it's like to be a Paraguayan Jew, Señor Foster? Our glorious leader, Alfredo Stroessner”—Weizman's lips pursed in a strange kind of unctuous irony as he whispered the name, looking around the empty restaurant to make sure he wasn't overheard—“is descended from Bavarian immigrants. We are under constant surveillance. People who stick their noses into German business just disappear. We have been threatened many times. Even the most casual remark can cause arrest and the whole community is threatened with reprisals. Twice our synagogue was firebombed and when we went to the police, they told us to mind our own business. My Cousin Meyer once identified Eduard Roschmann right here in Asunción. What was left of my cousin's body was found two days later in the jungle by Mennonite missionaries. Don't stir up trouble, Señor Foster. The Germans here still believe in the principle of collective guilt. Whatever you do, we will be the ones to pay for it.”

“So just play it safe, is that it?”

“We survive, Señor Foster,” Weizman sighed. “It's what we're good at.”

“Where's Josef Mengele?”

“I'm begging you, señor.” Weizman's bulldog face quivered with emotion. “
Por favor
, let it alone. Let us handle it in our own way.”

“That's what the Jews said to Moses when he wanted to challenge the Pharaoh. Fortunately he wasn't paying attention.” Caine smiled.

“Such a deal,” Weizman giggled. “I was right, you are a
meshuggener
.”

“No, I'm just a
goy
with a job to do. Have you ever seen Mengele here in Asunción?”

Weizman hawked and spat into the sand.

“That one. It would give you a chill to see him. He left Asunción years ago and moved to Amambay province in the south. But he used to come back every so often. Sometimes I would see him at the Amstel Restaurant. And once at the Tyrol Hotel in Eldorado.”

“When was the last time you saw him?”

“Maybe five—no, six years ago. There was another man from Interpol here then. He also stirred things up. That's when we were firebombed the first time. And for what? Mengele was already gone. We heard that he had left Pedro Juan Caballero and crossed the border to Ponta Porã, on the Brazilian side of the Paraná. The last we heard he had simply disappeared into the Mato Grosso. That was the last anyone ever heard of him and good riddance. He hasn't come back.”