Paris, France, November 2009
The Simon Wiesenthal Centre in the Rue Laugier was located in a four-story brick building opposite the narrow Rue Galvani. A stone-faced ground floor was accessed through an arched doorway. An equally stone-faced Gérard Cohen met Enzo in the entrance as arranged. He was a small man, clutching a large leather briefcase, and was completely bald. He had a lined, almost wizened face and small, black, suspicious eyes. He wore a dark blue suit that had seen better days. Enzo noticed how under the jacket the cuffs of his white shirt were frayed. His collar was crumpled, and his tie too tightly tied. He had a small, neatly trimmed silver moustache above too-f lips that were purple and shiny wet. Enzo thought that he must be at least seventy-five.
He shook Enzo’s hand with a firm but brief grip. Enzo reached for the door to hold it open for him. But he shook his head. “I no longer have an office here, monsieur.” He nodded along the street toward the Café Liberté on the far corner of the Rue Guillaume Tell. “But you can buy me a drink.”
He walked with quick, shuffling steps along the street, almost running, and Enzo had to work at keeping up with him. It was still dry in Paris, and mild. But a leaden sky presaged the coming rain that Enzo’s train had earlier outrun. They passed the Shri Ganesh Indian restaurant with its maroon canopies and crossed the street diagonally to the opposite corner, provoking a flurry of car horns.
Cohen took a seat by the window and Enzo slipped into a chair opposite. The café was also a
tabac
and sold lottery tickets, and so there was a constant stream of clients. It was noisy, customers barracking at the bar, the rumble of diesel engines out in the street, and the tinny, wasp-like buzz of motor-scooters whizzing past. Ideal for an exchange of confidential information. The place smelled of old alcohol and fried onions, but the smokers stood out on the sidewalks these days, so they were spared the fugg.
Enzo could see from the nicotine stains on his fingers that Cohen was also a smoker. He could smell the stale smoke that clung to his clothes but wasn’t certain if it was the enforced abstinence from cigarettes or some deeper insecurity that made him so nervous. The one-time Wiesenthal investigator kept glancing from the window toward the
quincaillerie-droguerie
opposite, as if there might be someone watching them from across the street. He constantly interlinked and unlinked his fingers on the table in front of him.
Enzo felt unsettled by his apparent edginess. “Is there any reason for us to be concerned about meeting like this?” he asked.
“Not that I know of, monsieur. But there are usually eyes on us.”
Enzo frowned. “Whose eyes?”
“The Nazis.” The word rolled off his tongue almost casually.
Enzo nearly laughed. “Surely those days are long gone? The people you went after following the war are dead or too old to be a threat.”
“Yes. But there is a new generation, monsieur. And they regard the people we hunted as heroes. And those who hunted them as vermin to be exterminated.”
The barman came to their table and they ordered beers.
Cohen fixed him with a penetrating stare. “So. How can I help you?”
“You know how you can help me. I want to know what you and Adam Killian wrote about in your exchange of letters. Why he came to see you.”
Cohen scratched his chin, and an alien-like tongue darted out to pass quickly over his already wet lips before withdrawing again behind yellowed teeth. He looked at Enzo pensively. “I checked you out, monsieur. You have quite a presence on the Net.”
“Yes,” Enzo agreed ruefully. “Unfortunately I do.”
“It’s where I live these days.”
Enzo frowned.
Cohen explained. “On the Internet. I spend most of my waking hours online. It’s incredible, you know, just how much Nazi propaganda there is out there masquerading as fact, how many sites there are where the neos meet to exchange ideas and intelligence. They are stitching themselves back into the fabric of our society, without our even being aware of it.”
Enzo looked at him speculatively, wondering if he was just another paranoid conspiracy theorist, or whether there was any truth in his assertions. “Are you going to tell me about Adam Killian or not?”
Their beers arrived, and Cohen took a long pull at his, holding his glass in a hand that shook a little as he raised it to his mouth. “Did you ever hear of a man called Erik Fleischer?”
Enzo shook his head.
“He was a young Bavarian doctor, newly qualified when war broke out. He was taken under the wing of a certain Aribert Heim, an SS doctor assigned initially to the concentration camp at Mauthausen in Austria. You probably know Heim better by his nickname. Doctor Death.”
Enzo raised an eyebrow in surprise. He had been vaguely aware of newspaper articles about Nazi hunters closing in on the last surviving Nazi on the most-wanted list from World War Two. The press had called him Doctor Death, and he was rumoured to be still alive and hiding somewhere in Patagonia.
“Anyway, Fleischer was Heim’s assistant, and for several months in 1941 they carried out the most horrific experiments on Jewish prisoners at Mauthausen. They injected numerous substances directly into their hearts just to see what physical reactions they might cause. Things like petrol, water, various poisons. The eyewitness account of a Mauthausen survivor told of a young eighteen-year-old boy being taken to their clinic with inflammation of the foot. Fascinated by his level of fitness, they discovered that he played football. But instead of treating the foot inflammation, they anaesthetised him, opened him up, dissected one kidney, removed the other, then castrated him. Finally he was decapitated, and Heim boiled the flesh off the skull so that it could be put on display.”
Enzo felt the hairs stand up all over his body, raised by a mix of anger and revulsion, and he washed the bad taste quickly from his mouth with another gulp of beer.
“Heim went on to another camp at Ebensee, near Linz, and ended up in Finland. Fleischer went to the Majdanek concentration camp near Lublin, in Poland, where he earned the nickname of
The Butcher
. He continued his experiments on prisoners with various forms of poison and surgery, before being assigned to a field hospital on the eastern front. After the war he went back to Bavaria and set up a very successful gynaecology practice in Munich.”
Cohen glanced nervously from the window and took several more mouthfuls of beer.
“The war crimes people finally caught up with him in 1951. But the Nazis still had a well-oiled early warning system and escape network in those days. He was tipped off and got away, leaving behind him a wife and two children.”
“He just disappeared?”
“At first, yes. It took investigators nearly ten years to find him again. But we’re pretty sure they did. Our operatives tracked him down finally to the Moroccan seaport of Agadir. He had given up his medical status and was working under the name of Yves Vaurs as the manager of the city’s fishmarket. They had been watching him for several weeks, photographing him, making comparisons with photographic evidence already possessed, before deciding to move in.”
And suddenly everything started falling into place for Enzo. He said, “On the night of February 29, 1960, right?”
Cohen blinked beady, suspicious eyes at him. “How do you know that?”
“I’ll tell you in a moment, Monsieur Cohen. What happened that night?”
“Well, I’m assuming you’re aware that an earthquake destroyed most of the town.”
“Yes.”
“All three operatives died in the quake. Missing, presumed dead.”
“And Fleischer?”
“As far as we knew, he was also killed. His apartment block in the old
kasbah
was completely destroyed. There were no survivors from that building.”
“So you stopped looking for him?”
“We would have pursued him all the way to hell and back, Monsieur Macleod. But death robbed us of that option. Case closed.”
“Until Adam Killian contacted you.”
“Well, he didn’t come to us with any fresh information, if that’s what you mean. But he did arouse our interest, yes.”
“What did he say?”
“When he first wrote he was just looking for information about Fleischer. He didn’t say why. I sent him the standard background that we put out to the press when we believed he was still alive. We had several exchanges, then, before he telephoned me at the centre one day, asking if he could meet me here in Paris.”
“Why did he want to meet you?
“Because, as with you, monsieur, there was a limit to how much I was prepared to give out by mail or by telephone.” He drained his glass. “I could do with another of these.”
Enzo caught the attention of the barman and ordered another two glasses of beer.
Cohen waited until he had a fresh glass in his hand before he continued. “He was interested to see any photographs we had of Fleischer.”
“And you were able to show him some?”
“I let him see some of those we had in the file. Fleischer was still a young man, then, of course. Killian spent a long time looking at them, and then asked if he could keep them.”
“You gave him copies?”
“No, monsieur, I did not. He was very disappointed. But we were not prepared to let them pass into general circulation.”
“Did he say why he was so interested in Fleischer?”
“No, he wouldn’t tell me.”
“Did you arrive at any conclusions about that yourself?”
“It seemed to me pretty clear that he thought he had found Fleischer and was looking for some way to confirm his identity.”
“But you didn’t take that too seriously?”
“No, monsieur. We used to be inundated with claimed sightings. Most of them, of course, were either fanciful or malicious. Besides… Fleischer was dead.” He paused, swirling his beer around in his glass, staring into the bubbles that foamed to the surface. “He wanted to know if we had any other means of confirming Fleischer’s identity. Other than photographic comparison, that is.”
“And did you?”
Cohen raised his eyes to scrutinise the Scotsman’s face, hesitating for a moment, as if pondering whether or not to respond with the truth. Finally he said, “Yes, we did.” He paused. “And still do.”
“How?”
“At Mauthausen, monsieur, there was a young prisoner who had trained as a hairdresser. He was assigned to cut the hair of the SS officers who ran the camp. And because he made such a good job of it, they kept him alive. An older prisoner, a lecturer in science at the University of Vienna before the war, persuaded him to smuggle out a lock of hair from each of the officers. These were preserved, notated, dated and hidden. The old professor believed they would provide an ideal way of proving the identity of these criminals after the war.”
Enzo nodded. For decades, examination of hair under a comparison microscope had provided forensic scientists with a good, although not foolproof, basis for identifying both victims and criminals.
“And he was right. Although the old professor did not survive the camps himself, the young barber and his hair clippings did. And they were used, along with photographic evidence and eyewitness accounts, to convict several war criminals in the years that followed.”
“And you still have a sample of Fleischer’s hair?”
“We do. Monsieur Killian and I went on to exchange several letters on the subject. He was anxious to ascertain that the hair would be available for scientific testing, if requested.”
Enzo sat back in his chair and raised his eyes toward the ceiling. Suddenly the note Killian had scribbled on the shopping list on the fridge door made absolute sense.
A bit of the flood will boil the feast
. Which, with the Spoonerism reversed, translated as,
a fit of the blood will foil the beast
. Somehow Killian had obtained a DNA sample from the man he suspected to be Erik Fleischer. Although still in its infancy in 1990, DNA comparison was already being employed by forensic investigators to identify criminals. Killian had worked in the field of tropical medical genetics, so he would have been only too familiar with the technology. A simple comparison of mitochondrial DNA between the hair and the suspect would have provided definitive proof of identity.
His mind was flitting with butterfly randomness among myriad thoughts flooding his brain. Killian would have needed a sizeable sample to make the comparison. Somehow he must have got that. But how? And where had he hidden it? He opened his eyes again to find Cohen watching him.
“You think Fleischer didn’t die in Agadir?” the old man said.
“Adam Killian was certain he didn’t.”
“So you believe he found someone that he thought to be Fleischer?”
“Yes.”
“But how would he know? How would he ever have suspected?”
Enzo shook his head. “I have no idea. But your hair sample gave him the means by which he thought he could prove it. Do you have a photograph you can show me?”
“Yes, of course.” Cohen lifted his briefcase on to the table and took out a fat manila folder. Enzo watched as he thumbed through yellowing documents with official stamps, extracts from registers of birth and marriage, reports, correspondence, photographs. Dozens of photographs, including several old, blurred prints from his youth. A smiling young man giving no clue as to the monster within. Finally Cohen separated out an eight by ten black and white print and pushed it across the table toward Enzo. “That’s probably about the best, taken around 1945 we think.”
“What about the ones taken in Morocco?”
“Unfortunately the photographs taken in Agadir were lost with our operatives in the earthquake.”
Enzo took out his half-moon reading glasses and perched them on the end of his nose to peer at the print Cohen had given him. Fleischer stood grinning self-consciously for the camera. He was in uniform, but holding his cap in his hands. It had clearly been blown up from a smaller print and was grainy, but quite sharp. His face was thin and pale. He had a thick head of black hair and cautious eyes. Enzo stared at it for a very long time. There was something familiar about the face, although it was difficult to say what. Something, perhaps, in the set of the jaw or the line of the mouth. But this had been taken more than sixty years ago. If the man in the photograph were still alive, he would be in his nineties now. Virtually unrecognisable.