Hour of the Assassins (25 page)

“When you left Paris, was Claude still doing business?” Caine asked. Yoshua pounded irritably on the horn at the driver in front of him, who had the
chutzpah
to wait for the light to turn green before starting to move.

“The Claudes of the world never go out of business,” Yoshua pronounced.

Caine was getting a little tired of Yoshua's brand of saloon philosophy, the kind they print on cocktail napkins. The memories were getting to him, he realized, and he was on the verge of telling Yoshua to stuff it. He held himself back, realizing that that wasn't a good idea; the last thing in the world he wanted was to get the Israelis interested in him any more than they already were. Only Amnon and Yoshua knew him here and he was hoping they would let it go at that.

He thought about Claude, whom he knew only by hearsay as an independent counterfeiter from Marseille who impartially produced documents for the Sûreté Nationale and the Corsican gangs, with a fine lack of distinction for anything except the price. He had first heard of Claude from the suave plainclothesman from the rue des Saussaies who had arranged for his exit from France after the Abu Daud hit. He wanted to get Claude started on a new cover for him even before he saw Feinberg. By now the Foster cover was as effective a bit of camouflage as a red flag waved in front of a bull.

Yoshua dropped him off at the Dan Hotel on the crowded Tel Aviv beachfront. Along Rehov Hayarkon near the hotel entrance, miniskirted girl soldiers walked hand-in-hand with tanned boyfriends, street cafés echoed with boisterous shouts and shabby moneychangers clustered like flies around the tourists, offering to exchange dollars for Israeli pounds at black-market rates that were quoted daily in the
Jerusalem Post
. When he was back in his room, Caine called the international operator and left word for her to call him when she had made the connections to L.A. and Marseille. Then he stripped off his clothes, took a long shower, and went to bed.

He dreamed he was back at the Moonglow with C.J., the surf pounding at the pilings as though they were about to be washed out to sea. He was telling her that he couldn't marry her, because he already had a wife, someone he had left behind in Asia. Her blue eyes were wet and shiny and she was saying something, but he couldn't hear her because the damn telephone was ringing and then he came awake, dripping with sweat, as though surfacing from the sea and fumbled for the phone by his bed. The international operator had finally put his call through, he realized grabbing the receiver. The dull roar of surf came through the earpiece. It was like holding a seashell to his ear.

“This is Wasserman, who is this?” he heard Wasserman's voice say.

“This is an open line, so let's keep it brief,” Caine said, hoping that the transatlantic traffic was busy tonight. These days if you want to pass something on the telephone, you might as well take out a full-page ad in the
Times
.

“How's it going?” Good, he thought. Wasserman had picked up his cue. Now let's see if he picked up the tab.

“We've got a solid lead on that lost consignment of angels, but it's going to be expensive to cover the tariff.”

“How expensive?”

“Thirty-five K.” The extra money might come in handy. Sitting down to play with less than you can afford to bet is the surest way to guarantee losing, Caine thought.

“That's some tariff,” Wasserman said, pausing to consider.

“In for a penny, in for a pound. It's part of the deal.”

“Nobody likes a
shnorrer
,” Wasserman said, and Caine pictured him in the office, glancing at the Monet and lighting a cigar, enjoying his brief moment of power for all it was worth. Where was C.J. now? Caine wondered, feeling a sudden pang of hatred for Wasserman.

“The goods are worth the price,” Caine said harshly.

“Is this absolutely necessary?” Wasserman replied equally harshly, and Caine felt that he was hearing the man's true voice for the first time. It was a legitimate question—perhaps the only legitimate question that Wasserman could ever ask him, since Wasserman didn't know how the game was going, or what the Scoreboard read.

“Do you think I'd risk a call if it weren't?”

“How do we arrange the transfer of funds?” And Caine felt himself breathing again. He could almost smell his quarry and he badly wanted the game to go on. Perhaps Wasserman had felt it too. In for a penny in for a pound, he thought, a surge of relief coursing through his veins like a shot of alcohol.

“With a certified letter-of-credit bearer bond, sent to me, care of
poste restante
in Vienna.”

“Don't be such a
chozzer
next time,” Wasserman said with a good-natured tone. He knew Caine must be on to something or he would never have risked a call.

“
Shalom
,” Caine said, and hung up. He was smiling as he lit a cigarette and leaned his head on his hands against the headboard of the bed. For no reason, a quote from Shakespeare's
Richard III
had popped into his mind:

“God take King Edward to his mercy,/And leave the world for me to bustle in!”

CHAPTER 10

“So Heinrich Müller is dead. Pity,” Feinberg said deliberately, sucking his teeth as though it helped him digest the information.

“Let's not waste too many crocodile tears on him. He wasn't what you would call a choirboy,” Caine put in sarcastically.

“That he wasn't,” Feinberg agreed. “In a way, he achieved a certain celebrity. You see, Müller was the SS officer responsible for the massacre of tens of thousands of Jews at Babi Yar in the Ukraine. A Russian poet wrote a famous poem about it.” The corners of his eyes behind the bifocal lenses crinkled as he ventured an apologetic smile. “I'm afraid I can never remember poetry. Still it's a pity you weren't able to get more out of him. He's been on my list for a long time.”

“He wasn't exactly in a talkative mood,” Caine observed.

Feinberg smiled appreciatively and began to stuff his pipe with tobacco in a slow, deliberate manner. He carefully tamped the tobacco down, lit it, then dissatisfied with the draw, he tamped it down again, with the precision of an old man who has lived alone for a long time. He would pursue Nazi fugitives in the same careful way, Caine mused, with the strict, plodding attention to detail that was bound to trip them up in the end. Except that Caine was on a deadline, and he knew he could never work that way in any case.

Feinberg was a big man, perhaps six foot, with a large frame that had already begun to shrink with age, giving his untidy navy suit the appearance of being too big for him. His remaining wisps of hair were disheveled and combined with his wire-rimmed bifocals to give him the air of a quiet scholar, far too preoccupied with his work to pay much attention to appearances. Which was probably close to the truth, Caine realized, as he glanced around the cramped two-room apartment on Rudolf Platz, which served as the office for the Jewish Relief Center.

Both rooms of the apartment had every inch of wall space lined with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves bursting with files, creating the claustrophobic atmosphere of a Dickensian counting house—file cabinets that looked as if they had been ransacked, spilled papers onto old desks and a moth-eaten couch, and motes of dust floated like water lilies on the musty air. Scrooge would have felt right at home here, Caine mused. From the front room that served as a cramped reception area came the pecking sound of the petite brunette, Feinberg's granddaughter, at an ancient manual typewriter. The typing was regular and insistent, like the rapping of a methodical woodpecker. Feinberg's desk was piled high with folders, tilted precariously, like paper Towers of Pisa.

“Peru,
ja
, that fits,” Feinberg said, pensively tapping his pipe stem against his teeth, unconsciously falling into the rhythm of the typewriter's deliberate tapping. “Quoth the Raven, ‘Nevermore,'” Caine thought, following Feinberg's nearsighted gaze to the small grimy window. Through it he could see the jumble of buildings surrounding Saint Stephen's Cathedral and beyond to the heavy afternoon traffic on Franz-Josefs-Kai, along the pea-soup-green Danube Canal.

The traffic moved slowly in the cold rain that had been falling all day. Pedestrians with black umbrellas scurried across the square, looking like moving mushrooms from the third-floor vantage of the window rattling restlessly with the wind. But the gray weather couldn't dampen the spirits of a group of blue-uniformed
gymnasium
students, drinking beer and roughhousing in the small park in the middle of the square. After all, it was
Fasching
, the carnival season when the German-speaking world relentlessly pursues pleasure as if it were a military duty. The season when every night is party night, from posh white-tie affairs like the
Opernball
to all-night student parties in the Brauerei, when beer and
heuriger
wine is downed endlessly from liter-size glasses and adultery is not grounds for divorce. Looking out at the handsome young people larking in the baroque splendors of the city, the streets glistening in the rain, he found it hard to believe that Adolf Hitler had been born in this picture-postcard land.

“Why does Peru fit?” Caine asked.

“About three years ago, I got a letter from a Jew named Samuel Cohen. He owned a small clothing store in Iquitos in the Peruvian Amazon. He claimed to have spotted Mengele in Iquitos.”

“That's not much to go on.”

“Cohen had been an inmate at Auschwitz and Treblinka, before immigrating to Peru after the war. Naturally I wrote back asking him for details, but he never answered. I wrote again and about six months later I received a note from his wife. She wrote that he had been killed in an auto accident while on a business trip to Lima.”

“That isn't why you contacted the Mossad,” Caine said disgustedly. He had been hoping for a real lead, instead of a three-year-old maybe. The letter of credit he had cashed that morning and converted into Deutschmarks at the Handelsbank was burning a hole in his pocket. Some instinct had told him that Feinberg was on to something and he was anxious to get on with it. Feinberg's pale-blue eyes were distorted like fish eyes by the bifocal lenses. Once they had saved his life, Feinberg had told him, when an SS guard in a jovial mood had plucked him out of a line of inmates scheduled for the gas chambers, slapped him on the back with a playful gesture, and told him that no one with blue eyes would be sent up the chimney that day. Now those eyes regarded Caine with a steady, serious gaze.

“Why is the CIA suddenly interested in Mengele?”

Caine shrugged elaborately, hoping he wasn't overdoing it.

“That's what I'm supposed to find out. Something's up and Mengele is the key. So our mutual interests happen to dovetail at this point.”

“I don't want him killed,” Feinberg said sharply, his old man's voice a reedy treble. “I want him brought back to Frankfurt to stand trial. When the crime is so great, no punishment that man can devise will ever fit.”

“I thought you wanted revenge. Isn't that what it's all about?”

“
Nein
, not at all. My business is prevention, not retribution. I believe it was one of your American philosophers, Santayana, who said that those who do not remember history will be condemned to repeat it. A major war-crimes trial reminds the public that the Holocaust was not a myth, that it really happened. By reminding people of what happened, we help ensure that it will never happen again”—the old man's eyes glinting with the zeal of the true believer. Perhaps it had been that fire, that consuming sense of a holy mission, that had kept him alive in the death camps, Caine reflected.

“What have you got?”

“You will bring him back to stand trial?”

“If I can,” Caine lied, trying Harris's patented smile of sincerity on for size. “What have you got?” Come on, he thought. Come on.

“It will take money, a lot of money,” Feinberg said intently.

Caine took a thick wad of Deutschmarks out of his pocket and slapped it onto the crowded desk, as if he were laying down a bet. Feinberg's eyes widened slightly and he allowed himself a nervous smile.

“What have you got?” Caine repeated.

Feinberg relit his pipe, took a few puffs, and then put it down. It was an uncomfortable moment for him. In the jargon of the intelligence trade, he was about to “drop his pants.” Come on, sweetie, Caine thought anxiously. Drop your pants and show the boys what you got. The Vaseline is on the table.

“About three months ago I got a curious call from a man who identified himself as Hans Gröbel. He said he had read about me in the newspapers and he had some information that he was sure would interest me. He was in Vienna on business and suggested that we get together for lunch. I get many such calls.” Fein-berg smiled apologetically. “Usually they're just a nuisance, but this time, well, I guess my instincts were in good working order. Sometimes all the publicity I get has its uses,” he remarked. “At first I was going to hang up on him, but then he said something about ‘
ein grosse Fisch
,' a big fish, and I knew that it would always bother me if I didn't see him.

“Anyway,” Feinberg shrugged, “we met in a private dining room in the Griechenbeisl, near the post office. He was a short, fat man in his fifties, with dark hair and thick horn-rimmed glasses. He was dressed very neatly and he seemed very fastidious about his food. I wasn't surprised when he told me he was
ein Rechnungsführer
,” searching for the word in English, “
ja
, an accountant. He seemed very upset because there were rumors where he worked that on account of the recession he might be one of those let go. He was very aggrieved on that point. He felt that after twenty years with the firm that they were betraying him. In his bookkeeping he had noticed something funny going on, and what with his changed attitude about his employers, he secretly began to make Xerox copies of certain things. He wouldn't tell me what he had, but he offered to sell me the lot for fifty thousand marks in cash.” Feinberg's eyes strayed to the money on the desk.