Man Who Wanted Tomorrow (3 page)

She paused, sipping from a water glass.

“It would also tell us how the Butcher of Auschwitz, Dr. Josef Mengele, is managing to live in South America …”

There was another pause.

“And it would make it possible for us to get from the sanctuary they now occupy two scientists whom the Israeli government regard as equal to Eichmann, Mengele, or Bormann, for crimes against the Jewish people. We want to locate Dr. Otto Grüber. And Dr. Heinrich Köllman. These two men worked under Mengele in Auschwitz. Later, working as a team, they moved to Bergen-Belsen and Buchenwald. Their experimentation involved testing human reaction to cold, to prepare for the German assault upon the Russian front. They immersed Jews in water which froze solid, to assess their resistance. They force-marched women and children, some dressed, some stark naked, through snow and ice to establish susceptibility to frostbite …”

She paused, as if uncertain whether to continue. Then she added, “They starved them, trying to reach the point where, in such extreme conditions, the victims would resort to cannibalism to survive …”

Another pause. “And succeeded in reaching that point …”

She began talking again. “These two men, working almost under the personal direction of Adolf Hitler, were engaged upon every conceivable form of human experimentation … Hitler personally entrusted to them the task of creating a biological blue-print for his super-race. About both very little is known. We have established that Köllman definitely survived. About Grüber we don't yet know that. Both were known to be working in Buchenwald when the Russians advanced, and Moscow refuses to answer all inquiries.”

The room was satiated with detail and sensation, and the journalists stared numbly towards the table behind which the officials sat. The woman fingered the gold bars lying before her.

“You have heard that this is worth something like £1,000,000 …” She looked up towards the television cameras. “… We accept that the missing box may contain nothing more than that which you see before you today … loot from the crematoria. We have gambled and lost the lives of five Israelis. To recover the box that could contain what we want, the Israeli government are prepared to pay, wherever and in any currency or method demanded, the similar sum of £1,000,000 …”

In another part of the Knesset building, Uri Perez glanced away from the television monitor upon which he had watched the conference, now bursting into a further flurry of questioning.

“Well?” he demanded. The tension of their argument still existed and he spoke with odd formality to the other man, to whom he had once felt closer than the family he had lost in Buchenwald and Dachau. His companion, a burly giant of a man, overflowing from his chair, his stomach bulged over his army webbing-belt, shrugged.

“Not bad,” offered Arron Mosbacher, turning down the volume on the monitor. They could read a transcript later.

“It sounded pretty good to me,” encouraged Perez, with just a trace of truculence. He could not lose his irritation at Mosbacher's objection to what was happening up there in the committee-room.

Both men had been attached to the Mitzvah Elohim, the Wrath of God group formed from the Mossad to combat Palestinian terrorism, until they had been seconded to the Austrian assignment. Mosbacher had immediately argued against the proposal, and as the planning had progressed Perez, who had overall command, had twice considered recommending Mosbacher's transfer. He had withheld from doing so because of their association and now wondered if he had made a mistake. He didn't want to make another. A month before, he had stood with Mosbacher on the far side of the Austrian lake and seen men with whom they had lived daily for six months destroyed in less than two minutes of gunfire. Mosbacher's opposition since that massacre had grown with Perez's feeling of guilt.

“It'll be a miracle if there's the reaction we expect,” warned Mosbacher.

“We invented miracles,” reminded Perez, attempting the lightness that had once existed between them. He was a slight, studious man, dwarfed by his companion. A brilliant scholar, with honors degrees from Oxford and Harvard, he desperately wanted to leave his country's security service to take the Chair of Psychiatry at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Twice the government had refused his request to leave the umbrella of Mossad, knowing there was no one to equal his ability to organize spectacular intelligence operations.

“There are too many uncertainties,” argued Mosbacher, who was seriously worried about his friend. The idea was insanity, he thought, created by a man who had known only success and had thus become over-confident. It was odd, Mosbacher had often recalled, that it had been he, the older by two years, who had led Perez by the hand on to the beach at Haifa when the refugee boat had nudged ashore, and the two orphans had been shoved on to the beach to avoid British patrols. Then he had been the leader. And remained so for several years. But later the role was reversed. Was he jealous at the changeover, wondered Mosbacher? No, he dismissed, immediately. Even though he now considered the ability was wrongly channeled, Perez was unquestionably the more intelligent of the two.

The Israeli cabinet had selected the two men very carefully, regarding the realistic objectivity of the bigger man as the perfect balance for the impetuous brilliance of Perez. No one was aware of the strain that had grown between them, leading to the mutual doubt.

“There's little to lose,” said Perez, regretting the sentence as he spoke. Immediately Mosbacher picked it up.

“We've already lost five people.”

Embarrassed, Perez said, “Other people are making sacrifices. Which no one seems to appreciate.”

Mosbacher looked sadly at the younger man. The tendency for self-pity supported his doubt about the man's mental ability to carry through the operation, he thought.

“Everyone realizes what you are doing personally,” he said, soothingly.

Perez snorted, unconvinced. Mosbacher was a fool, he decided, angrily. The plan—his plan—was going to succeed. He knew it would. He'd enjoy having Mosbacher apologize, in the coming months.

“Shapiro stood up well,” said Perez, seeking neutral ground.

“Yes,” agreed Mosbacher. “Which reminds me. Shouldn't you ring the hospital?”

Sighing, Perez nodded, then dialed a number on a security-cleared line. He was connected immediately, upon identification, to the hospital director and for several minutes became engrossed in detailed conversation. Replacing the receiver, he said to Mosbacher, “Another three weeks. And he's unsure about that.”

Mosbacher considered the period, then humped his shoulders. “We don't really have any choice, do we?”

“No,” agreed Perez. His see-saw outlook dropped in another direction and optimism bubbled to the surface. “That'll be long enough,” he said, confidently. “You'll see.”

“It'll have to be,” said Mosbacher, gloomily, realizing that now the conference had been held, they were irrevocably committed.

In his Houston motel-room, which was securely locked, Vladimir Kurnov sat before the television-set carrying live the C.B.S. coverage of the Jerusalem conference. He was tensed forward on the edge of the chair, the habitual cigarette forgotten in its holder. After the coverage, there was a studio discussion among several alleged Hitler historians about whether the £1,000,000 offer would lead to the recovery of the document-box.

The program ended, and Kurnov realized suddenly his cigarette had almost burned itself out. Quickly he lit another from the stub he extricated from the holder, then pulled the smoke deeply into his lungs. He turned away from the set and began pacing the room, head slumped forward. The dull ache started in his left leg, as it always did in moments of stress.

Once he stopped and, with supreme irony, muttered several times, “Verdammte Scheisse.”

Three of the men who had formed part of the assassination squad died very quickly under interrogation in the specially sound-proofed cellar beneath a block of office buildings in West Berlin's Ludwigsfelderstrasse. Another went insane and was shot, because he could not answer questions sensibly, thus making it pointless to preserve his life. The leader endured the questioning for five days, repeating again and again they had only recovered two boxes and admitting there had been an insufficient search of the shallow water-line to detect a third. Satisfied the missing box had not been secreted for blackmail purposes, the questioners shot the leader and the other survivor of the killer squad, then walked upstairs leaving others to incinerate the bodies.

“So,” said the man who had asked most of the questions, “there is definitely a missing box.”

Max Frieden had been the Standartenführer for the area covering Buchenwald when the war ended. But he had been far away when the Russians swept in. By the time Eichmann and Kaltenbrunner and the rest had arrived at Bad Aussee, Frieden had already “vanished,” equipped with a new face and a perfect set of genuine papers, seeing in the rebuilding of war-ravaged Berlin a far greater chance of prosperity than the mountains of Austria. He was an indulgently plump, small man who enjoyed entertaining children at Christmas and birthday parties and prided himself as an amateur conjuror, for which he now had plenty of time to practice, having established one of the most successful property-development empires in the city. Apart from the Berlin apartment, there was the country lodge in the Bavarian mountains outside Munich, and soon he intended purchasing a villa among friends on the outskirts of Madrid. Despite the fact that he was a millionaire, however, he still regarded the years as Standartenführer from 1939 to 1945 as the best of his life. He still recalled with pride among intimate gatherings of friends that, during those six years, he considered he had been personally responsible for the deaths of at least 3,000 Jews.

“Definitely missing,” agreed the second man. “And it could be the most important one.”

Manfred Muntz had served the entire war as a colonel on Frieden's staff and gone underground with him in 1945. A tall man, with distant eyes, he had a tubercular cough and was constantly bringing a handkerchief to his mouth.

“We've had the shoreline searched. And the surrounding forest. There's nothing,” he added. A month earlier, the two men had examined the contents of the two boxes recovered after the assassination, cursing that they hadn't even the luck of the Israeli survivor. Their boxes had contained nearly all counterfeit money.

“This could be the end of us all,” said the fat man. He looked up suddenly. “Have warnings been sent out?”

“Yes,” nodded Muntz, one of West Berlin's most successful commercial lawyers. “To Egypt, Paraguay, Uruguay, the Argentine, Ireland. And here.”

“If we only knew who had the bloody thing,” said Frieden, “we could outbid the Jews easily.”

“Have we the money here?” asked the consumptive lawyer.

The man who loved children nodded towards the large wall-picture showing a Berchtesgaden mountain-scene, behind which was hidden a wall-safe.

“Four million pounds sterling in gold arrived from Zurich last night,” he confirmed.

At that moment, in a Jerusalem hospital, Lev Shapiro died from the injuries sustained in the dive in Lake Toplitz, coupled with the strain of appearing at the press conference.

And Perez and Mosbacher had their second serious argument.

(4)

The mornings were always bad. It had been natural at first, she supposed, that awakening moment of fear as she lay in the empty bed, tensed for the sound that would mean there was someone else in the apartment, a man in uniform with a warrant for her arrest. But she had expected it to dissipate gradually, like that momentary hesitation when she had to sign her signature and had always paused, very slightly, at the need to concentrate upon the new name of Gerda Pöhl instead of Gerda Köllman. Now she signed any form unthinkingly, because she
was
Gerda Pöhl. But the mornings never began without that cramp of apprehension. She even prepared her clock in its expectation, giving herself ten minutes longer in bed than was necessary, to recover. She lay, as was her custom now, while the fear drained, then got up. A woman of strict regime, she bathed immediately, then strained her heavily graying hair back into its accustomed bun at the back of her head. Patiently, she massaged her face for fifteen minutes, convinced such daily attention had kept it free of any lines or signs of strain. Finally, she washed her face again, in cold water this time, then dressed with care.

It was difficult to dress as she would have liked, thought Gerda. How different from the old days, the good times when her darling Heinrich had had such a standing with the Führer. Then it had needed three trunks to contain what she needed for just a weekend at Berchtesgaden. Several times the Führer had complimented her upon her appearance, which had made it even more important to be dazzling on the subsequent occasions they had been invited. And how
dazzling
she had been, always. All that had been necessary was for her to sign the purchase-bill at any of the couture houses in Berlin or Paris or Rome and the garments arrived always within a fortnight. And what dresses: the finest silks, material woven specially for her, even her own designs. They had all envied her, she knew. Frau Himmler, Frau Goebbels, Eva Braun. Such a mousy girl, Eva. She would never be able to understand what the Führer saw in her. It was said, of course … but no, that didn't matter. No one questioned the Führer, not even now.

She chose the black suit, carefully picking at the nap on the elbows and the seat of the skirt, trying to remove the shine of wear. It would be at least another six months before she could afford a replacement, despite the good salary Herr Muntz paid her. The apartment was far too expensive, she told herself again. But she refused to abandon the good address. She had so little left. She couldn't lose everything.