Hour of the Assassins (2 page)

“Let's say that Bob owed me a favor,” said Wasserman. Caine remembered Harris wishing him luck with a boyish smile that was as sincere as a deodorant commercial.

“Bob Harris wouldn't do a favor for his dying mother,” Caine snapped.

“The favor cost me five thousand dollars cash.”

“Oh, yes,” Caine nodded. “He'd do that all right.”

Wasserman nodded appreciatively and leaned forward, resting his elbows on the desk. “
Tochis afn tish
, as we say, Mr. Caine. Let's get down to business.”

“All right,” Caine said. He thought he might have the accent pinned down from the way Wasserman pronounced
tochis
. It sounded like
low German
, possibly Bavarian.

“What else do you know about me?”

“Quite a lot. For instance, I know that your name is John Caine. I also know that you were an extremely effective field operative, with excellent qualifications in geography, finance, linguistics, military and political science. Your best languages are German, Spanish, and Laotian and you have a black belt in karate. Although I don't have all the details, I believe that you were involved in certain dirty tricks in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. I think the phrase is ‘wet work,' isn't it? Now it seems you recently quit the CIA under somewhat unusual circumstances and I want to pay you one thousand dollars for exactly one hour of your time, beginning now.”

That shit Harris must have peddled my file, Caine thought angrily, as Wasserman reached into his jacket pocket and brought out a thick wad of hundred-dollar bills. He counted out ten of them and laid them on the desk in front of Caine, replacing the wad back in his pocket.

“In exchange for what?”

“I want you to sit here and listen to a story.” The two men looked at each other, measuring, testing the air with invisible antennae. What the hell, Caine thought, as he reached for the money.

“Sordid, isn't it?” Wasserman gestured at a customer getting an “X-rated” massage on the television monitor. He glanced at the screen, shook his head, then pressed a button on a desk console and the screen went blank.

“But don't knock it. I do over twenty million a year in business out of this office. I distribute films, magazines, newspapers, and sexual aids through a nationwide chain of adult bookstores and movie theaters. In addition, I do the biggest mail-order business in the country.”

“Not to mention prostitution,” Caine put in.

“Please, professional massage. After all I don't make the laws. I'm just a simple businessman who knows that boys will be boys, no matter what the law says,” Wasserman said with a roguish wink, implying that he was just a man of the world, smiling at the harmless frailties of human nature.

“Still and all, despite these oppressive and unconstitutional laws, I've done all right for myself. I came to this country as a penniless immigrant after the war and America has been very good to me.”

Jesus Christ, what comes next: a rousing chorus of “God Bless America”? Caine wondered. Something told him that he was going to earn that thousand.

“So what,” he shrugged.

“So, I am a very wealthy man, who can afford to pay a great deal for what I want,” Wasserman said, leaning back complacently.

“Which is?”

“I want you to kill a man.”

Caine stood up, took the $1,000 out of his pocket, and dropped it on the desk.

“I don't know what Harris told you, but I've retired from the dirty tricks business,” he snapped, and turned to leave.

“Sit down, Caine! I paid a thousand dollars for your time and you'll hear me out,” Wasserman thundered. Then in a more conciliatory tone, “Hear me out, Caine. If, after we've spoken, you are still not interested, keep the money and we'll just forget the whole thing.”

Caine hesitated for a moment. Then he picked up the money, put it back in his pocket, and sat down. Wasserman was beginning to arouse his curiosity.

For the first time, Wasserman appeared ill at ease, as if having come so far, he didn't know quite how to proceed. He offered Caine a cigar and when Caine declined, he lit one for himself with a solid gold Dunhill lighter. Then after a single puff, he made a wry face and stabbed the cigar out in an onyx ashtray. He looked around nervously, glanced at the television monitors, then pressed a few buttons and the other screens went blank. He stared at the blank screens for a moment and when he turned back to face Caine, his pale blue eyes had grown suddenly old.

“Do you do much dreaming, John?” asked Wasserman.

“Not much.”

“Did you ever have the same dream, night after night?”

“No,” Caine lied.

“Well, I do.”

“It doesn't matter,” Caine said. “Dreams aren't real.”

“This one is,” Wasserman replied, wiping his sweating face with a handkerchief. “Every night for the past three months, I have had the same horrible dream,” began Wasserman. “Every night I put off sleep, because I know that as soon as I doze off, it will happen again. I've tried pills, sex, drugs, liquor; nothing works. How could it? Because every night, as soon as my eyes close, I am back there.”

“There?” asked Caine.

“Auschwitz,” Wasserman replied and, unbuttoning his sleeve, thrust his right arm at Caine. A number was tattooed on his forearm in faint blue characters.

“When I arrived in Auschwitz I was only twenty-six,” Wasserman continued. “That was in 1941. By then my parents had already been taken. Before the Nazis came, I had worked with my father. We had the largest accounting firm in Leipzig. It was confiscated, of course. Later I managed to bribe a local Nazi party official and get a job as a laborer in a munitions factory. But it was all futile. They came for us one night and we were packed with hundreds of others into a boxcar. Myself, my wife, Hanna, and our baby son, Dieter. We were among the last Jews to leave Leipzig. She was so beautiful, my Hanna. Blond hair and gentle eyes—who would have thought there was so much strength in that slender body. And our baby, he was only fourteen months old.”

It's always bad, Caine thought. Our generation grew up with it. You'd have thought we'd have gotten used to it by now, that we'd have heard the worst by now. But it's always bad.

Wasserman's eyes were brimming wet, but he shook his head and went on.

“I don't understand how we survived that trip, standing crushed against the dead, the insane, and the dying for six days without food or water. But we did.

“When we arrived at Auschwitz, the
kapos
threw those of us who were still alive out of the boxcars and the guards marched us to the Birkenau railroad camp for our first selection. Hanna was clutching Dieter when they separated us. It was then that I caught my first glimpse of a short, swarthy SS officer. He was the camp doctor, SS
Hauptstürmführer
Josef Mengele. That was what the guards called him. We inmates had another name for him. We called him
malachos mavet
, in Hebrew it means the Angel of Death.

“Mengele selected those who were healthy enough to work for the labor barracks. All the others, and almost always the children, were sent to the gas chambers. Once, while standing in front of the crematorium, he stood with his hands on his hips and bragged, ‘Here the Jews enter through the gate and leave through the chimney.' And all the while a small orchestra made up of inmates played Strauss waltzes. He wanted to make it
gemütlich
, don't you see?

“I never saw my son again. But Hanna I saw one more time, and God help me, I see her again now every night.”

Wasserman rubbed his hands over his sweaty face, then he regained control and continued more calmly.

“Of all the Nazi criminals, Mengele was perhaps the most infamous. There is an open warrant for his arrest in West Germany and a fifteen-thousand-dollar reward. He is also wanted by Interpol, the U.S., Britain, France, Russia, and of course, the Israelis. He sentenced millions of people to death.

“I personally know of one instance when he threw a crying baby into an open fire before the horrified eyes of the mother. I once saw him bury a bayonet in a young girl's head. He would inject phenolic acid into children's eyes. You see, this monster was obsessed with breeding twins with blue eyes.

“But that isn't what I dream about, or why you are here. Because he did something much worse than all that to my Hanna.”

Wasserman stared bleakly through Caine, as though he were seeing her face once more. It was coming now, Caine thought. In a reflex action Caine took out' a cigarette and lit it. As he inhaled, he looked at Wasserman's empty blue eyes, lost in the dark night that never quite ends for survivors. But mixed with his pity was a sense of uneasiness. Something didn't fit, but he couldn't quite put his finger on it.

Wasserman took a deep breath and went on in a strangled, hoarse monotone, as the sweat poured down his face.

“Every night it starts the same way. The
kapos
come to rouse us and they march us through the fence into the women's compound for the first time. At first I don't recognize Hanna standing in front of the other women. Her head is shaved and she is so thin and ragged. But then she looks up for a moment and I see those gentle blue eyes filled with fear and courage and loathing and things I will never know. And then Mengele comes and stands on a platform to address us. As always, his black SS uniform is neatly pressed. He was, like most vain men, a sharp dresser. I remember that he always wore clean white gloves.

“‘Dogs,' he shouts. They always used to call the prisoners
dogs
and they called the guard dogs
men
. ‘This Jewess has been elected by the other bitches in her barracks to bring a medical problem to my attention. It seems that the bitches in these barracks, like all bitches, are suffering from an infestation of lice. I want to thank this Jewess for bringing this medical problem to my attention and I've brought you all here to see that the New Order knows how to deal with lice. The barracks will be fumigated.' And then he smiled. A few of the women cheered and his smile grew broader. You see, he was no ordinary sadist.

“Then he marched the women, including Hanna, into the barracks. He ordered the doors sealed and then had the barracks fumigated—with mustard gas.… The women's screams seemed to go on for hours.”

Wasserman slumped down in his chair, then after a time he looked up at Caine, as though seeing him from far away, from long ago.

“You want me to waste Mengele?” Caine asked.

“I'll pay you half a million dollars, if you can locate and kill Mengele within six months,” said Wasserman.

“That's a lot of money.”

“I need you, Caine. Ordinary hit men don't know how to work outside the country. Mercenaries don't have the brains or the resources to track him down and, even if they could, probably couldn't get close to him. Government agents and Israeli spies have tried and failed. I've gone over it from every angle. You're the man for the job. And I'll provide you with all the money and resources at my disposal to help you to do it.”

Caine got up and walked over to the painting. He submitted himself to that pretty nineteenth-century scene as if to a baptism. Things were different then, he thought. They believed in things and fought for causes as if it mattered. The whole thing is crazy. Why had Wasserman waited thirty years for his revenge? Besides, he had come to Los Angeles to escape the past. He'd had enough of ghosts. Let the dead bury the dead, he decided, as he walked back to the chair and sat down.

“It won't wash, Wasserman,” Caine said quietly. For a long moment the two men sat silently, then Wasserman shrugged helplessly.

“I can think of a dozen reasons why your story won't work,” Caine continued. “For instance, you want me to believe that you want to pay me half a million to waste some old Nazi. That's all ancient history. Nobody cares about that crap anymore, including you. You go off and forget about this Mengele for thirty years, wake up one morning after a bad dream and say, My, my, I've waited long enough for my revenge, so I'll find some Company type, looking for a quick buck, to do in six months what half-a-dozen governments have been unable to accomplish in thirty years. And why, all of a sudden, are you having nightmares about the bad old days, after thirty years of pimping and indifference? Tell you what, why don't you wait a few years and the kraut bastard will drop dead from old age? And why me, Wasserman, why me?”

Wasserman slumped back in his chair, his eyes bleak and defeated. Then he sniffed, straightened up, and took out a cigar and lit it. In a way his gesture touched Caine more than anything he had said. In spite of everything, he had never quite given up. He puffed a few times and, exhaling the smoke, played his trump.

“All right, Caine, if I give you a satisfactory explanation, will you agree to consider my offer? Come with me to my beach house in Malibu. I have a dossier in my safe there that I've compiled on Mengele. I want you to see it and think it over. In the morning, if you still don't want the assignment, I'll pay you another thousand dollars for your trouble. Agreed?”

Despite himself, Caine was intrigued. Wasserman was no fool and he had clearly thought the whole thing out. Besides, it was an easy $1,000.

“Agreed,” he replied.

“First of all, as to why I chose you,” Wasserman began. “You know there's an ancient Afghani saying, that the Afghan wolf is hunted with an Afghan hound. I've bribed a lot of people to find out about you. There were favors exchanged through friends I have in the Syndicate. And money. I know you, Caine. You're a hunter. You're the Afghan hound I'm setting to kill the wolf.”

“That won't do it,” Caine said. “Why the six-month deadline, the thirty-year wait?”

“That's easy. I pushed it out of my mind. After the camp, nothing meant anything. Love, hate, joy, grief, these were only words. Morality had no meaning, so why not sell garbage to the swine? I was past caring. All I wanted was money, pleasure, power, so that I need never remember, never look back.”