CHAPTER 7

In Berlin the pattern changed. It wasn’t so much a change in content as in perspective, Came reflected; like one of those ink-blot optical illusions that looks like a duck’s head until it’s turned sideways and then appears to be a rabbit.

Caine flew in on the afternoon LOT flight to East Berlin. As the Viscount entered the landing pattern for Schönefeld Airport, he could see the vast flat expanse of the Marx Engels Platz below, like a giant concrete lake that drained the river of concrete that was the Unter den Linden. Dominating the skyline was the Brobdingnagian statue of a Russian soldier in Treptower Park, looking as if with his next giant stride he would be stubbing his toe on the wedding-cake facade of the reconstructed Reichstag. The outsize statue looked big enough to scoop up the Statue of Liberty like a football and run with it. Beyond the statue the monotonous vista of Stalinist gingerbread apartment buildings stretched all the way to the Spreewald. On the western side of the wall he could see the Funkturm Tower in the Messengelände, standing like a modernistic beacon for the glories of capitalism. The Viscount landed in a small series of bounces, like a stone skipped across a lake. After going through Customs, he caught a taxi to the Potsdamer Platz.

As the taxi turned down Friedrichstrasse, Caine took in the furtive air of pedestrians scurrying in the cold wind, like faceless human ants dwarfed by the immense monuments. Hulking over the eastern approach to Potsdamer Platz were the ruins of the Führerbunker, where the dying Third Reich had tried to play the last scene of the war as though it were the final reel of The Phantom of the Opera. The taxi slowed as it bumped over the tram tracks on Zimmerstrasse and neared the cinder block wall that bisected the city. The apartment blocks near the wall were bricked up and a cleared area twice the length of a football field and filled with tank traps and land mines and barbed wire ran parallel to the wall. At intervals along the barbed wire, skull-and-crossbone signs announced Achtung, Meinen, just in case the locals didn’t get the idea that wall climbing wasn’t an encouraged sport for the Spartakia.

The taxi stopped at Checkpoint Charlie, and as soon as Caine paid him, the driver took off with a roar, as though to forestall any objections to having carried an American tourist foolish enough to abandon the glories of democratic socialism. A young Vopo, a Kalatchnikov slung over his shoulder, impassively watched Caine enter the low concrete Passkontrolle. A Grepo, resplendent in a blue uniform that made him look like a U.S. Air Force general, mechanically held out his hand for Caine’s passport. If it had been a contest of uniforms, the Germans would have won the war, Caine reflected as he handed over the passport.

“What is your name?”

“William Foster.”

The official glanced suspiciously up at him. Or perhaps he just looked at everyone that way, Caine thought. He stared at a large wall poster behind the official. On it a sprinter crouched at the starting line, his social realism muscles bulging, as he prepared to run for, “Sport and Health in the G.D.R.,” according to the title.

“And your destination?”

“The Berlin Hilton.”

The official raised his eyebrows barely perceptibly. Caine was obviously a hopeless capitalist. He stamped the passport as if it were an execution order, then gave Caine one last suspicious glance just to let Caine know that he couldn’t be fooled.

“Go through that door to the Customs.”

“Ja, danke,” Caine said, retrieving his passport.

At the customs tables a Western tour group crowded uncertainly like a nervous herd. Midwestern husbands in checked coats glanced cautionary daggers at their wives, who surveyed the guards with satisfied eyes under lacquered gray hair, as though to silently remind them that they were (whisper it) crossing the Iron Curtain. Near the front of the group a longhaired hippie wearing a brown leather jacket bearing a Canadian flag and on the back a painted fist with the inscription, “Che lives!” paced impatiently, as though he expected to be met by a brass band. A wan blonde in jeans sitting on a suitcase anxiously watched him pace.

Caine waited patiently for his turn. For a moment his eyes met the glance of one of the Vopos and then they both looked away. Maybe neither of them wanted to be there. The busy customs officer barely glanced at the Hasselblad and after he wrinkled all the clothes in Caine’s suitcase to conform with the approved border-crossing disorder, Caine was able to walk past the gate and go through the whole procedure again for the American MP’s.

From the minute he hailed a Mercedes cab from the taxi stand on Freidrichstrasse, he was dirty. It seemed so improbable that he had the driver circle the Brandenburger Tor twice, just to make sure that the black Opel wasn’t simply part of the traffic pattern. For a moment he stared at the triumphal arch surmounted by a warrior’s chariot drawn by four bronze horses, while he ran the possibilities through his mind. The last time victorious troops had paraded under the arch was at the end of the Franco-Prussian War. It had remained a symbol of Prussian might until the Red Army had used it for target practice.

Perhaps the Opel simply contained locals with standing orders to tail anyone interesting who crossed the checkpoint. After all, this was Berlin, where you couldn’t throw away an empty pack of cigarettes without someone tearing it apart for a drop. Or perhaps someone had made him from his Company days. Or maybe it was Wasserman again. Or maybe—and this was his real worry—it was something else.

The bright neon of the Kurfürstendamm was already lit to dispel the gathering gloom of late afternoon, the sky darkening with gray clouds, as though bundling up for the winter. The electric light flickering over the parade of smart shops and cafés lent an air of forced gaiety to the city. He told the driver to take him to the American consulate on Clay-Allee. As for the tail, he mentally shrugged, let them think he was official.

The consulate was a calculated risk, but he knew he would need some kind of official authorization to gain access to the American Document Center in Zehlendorf. As he had originally noted in the Wasserman dossier, the center contained the only complete set of records on the SS, as well as the best information available on all wanted Nazis.

While he was explaining to the slow-moving Marine sergeant at the front desk that he wasn’t feeling well and needed a list of English-speaking doctors, the pattern shifted. As the sergeant reached for a file to hand him a Xeroxed list, Caine caught a glimpse of a trim blond American civilian, a folder in his hand, entering the elevator. For a second their glances met and moved away without recognition, but Caine could feel the prickle of sweat starting down his spine.

“Say, isn’t that old Charlie Connors from USC?” Caine asked, gesturing at the closing elevator. The sergeant flicked a heavy-lidded glance to the elevator, then turned back to Caine, his drawl stretching all the way back to Birmingham.

“You mean the blond fella?”

Caine nodded.

“That’s Mr. Jennings. He’s a trade assistant.”

They exchanged a bit of small talk about how Caine must be mistaken and how everyone in the world probably has a double somewhere. Then Caine thanked the sergeant and got back in his taxi, telling the driver to take him to the Hilton. His mind raced as they drove back to the electric brightness of the Kurfürstendamm, because the pattern had shifted and he didn’t even know what game he was in. It explained the tail, of course, but not much else because the blond man wasn’t Jennings any more than he was the mythical Charlie Connors. He was Bob Harris, who had put Wasserman onto him in the first place.

Once he had checked into his room at the Hilton, Caine locked the door and turned on the television. Then he set to work checking for bugs. The TV program was one of those American action imports that Europeans decry and then snap up like blue jeans. On the screen jiggly girls from the Screen Actors Guild were using choreographed karate chops on overweight villains wearing black shirts and white ties, just in case the audience might forget who the bad guys were. He found the bug fairly quickly in the base of the telephone. With a sigh he lit a cigarette and stretched out on the bed.

Of course, Harris being in Berlin could have just been coincidence. Sure, he told himself. And you could improve your cash flow with the help of the Good Tooth Fairy. He remembered the lecture Koenig had given them at the Farm after they had completed their paramilitary training or, as the trainees called it, the “boom-boom course.” Koenig was a short stocky man with a crew cut surmounting an ungainly triangular face that might have been a slice cut from a lumpy pie. Caine had once seen Koenig take apart a burly ex-Green Beret named O’Hearn on the unarmed combat course without getting his shirt wrinkled. Koenig had stood before them in the Quonset hut classroom, lightly tapping a ruler against his palm. He balanced on the balls of his feet, as he paused for effect.

“There are no coincidences in this business,” Koenig had said. “None. The moment you spot anything that even smells like a coincidence, you’ve been blown. That means you’re as wide open as a whore’s legs. And once that happens, you’ve got only three choices: get out, get dead, or get them”—punctuating each get with a slap of the ruler against his palm.

For an instant Caine felt a stab of anguish. The bastards wouldn’t let him quit. Then he brushed the thought away, because if Harris was running a Company mission, then the sooner he learned the rules of the game, the better his chances of survival would be. He wasn’t going to fool himself about how expendable ex-agents were. Right now he knew he was about as welcome as a rent-increase notice.

With a shrug he stabbed out his cigarette and got up. He felt the old familiar tightening sensation just below his solar plexus. It hits everyone differently. With some it’s wet palms or shaking hands. Some get shivers down the spine. Some break out in hives. With others it’s stomach cramps. In Indochina he had seen men get the shakes, and just before action, he had seen some lose control of their sphincters and piss and shit in their pants. But it hit all of them one way or another. With Caine it was a tightening in his stomach, like a lump of food that had lodged in his esophagus and just wouldn’t move or digest. Well, he thought, they can kill you but they can’t eat you, using the stock bravado phrase they had used in combat to exorcise the fear. It never really worked, but they used it anyway.

He was going to do the one thing he hadn’t wanted to do. He was potentially alerting the Company that he was on a run. Unless—and this was even worse—the Company already knew. He went downstairs to the lobby phone and called the consulate.

“Department one-oh-six, Jennings here,” Harris answered.

Normally Caine would have done a number permutation that varied daily. Based on the 106 prompt, he would have responded with the appropriate counter number, like, “Sorry, I was trying to reach the Intershop at Frankfurter Allee ninety-three.” Except that he wasn’t in the Company anymore and had no idea what the day’s sequence was, so he said, “This is an open line and don’t tell me you weren’t as surprised as I was.”

“This is the American consulate. What number do you want?”

“Do you know the Ballhaus Resi?”

“Hasenheide, corner of Gräfestrasse, but I’m afraid I don’t know what you’re talking about. You must have the wrong number,” Harris replied and hung up. Caine was grinning as he hung up the receiver, knowing that the call must have sent Harris up the wall at all the procedures he had broken. Serve the little twerp right, he thought as he went outside and stepped into a taxi. Although the Ritz was nearby, he had the driver double back by way of the Gedächtniskirche, to check for tails. The church’s spotlighted spires made it look a little like the Enchanted Castle at Disneyland. He was clean, of course. After all, they knew where he was and where he was going, so they could afford to leave him alone. After a leisurely dinner of roast goose with dumplings, he took a tram outside the Ritz to the Resi.

By the time he got to the Ballhaus Resi, probably the biggest nightclub in town, close to a thousand noisy representatives of the New Germany were crammed around a dance floor no bigger than a throw rug. Thanks to a lavish tip to the headwaiter, Caine was able to share a tiny table from which he could survey the entrance and the stage. On the stage a rock band did a passable imitation of the Rolling Stones. The shirtless lead singer chosen more for his resemblance to Mick Jagger than his voice, screamed that he was sexy while he grabbed the microphone like a steel phallus. Behind the band colored strobe lights flickered across a gushing water display synchronized to the beat, while girls in see-through plastic disco outfits wriggled in ecstasy. The only things missing, he mused, were fireworks and The 1812 Overture complete with cannons. But the real attractions of the Resi were the brightly lit numbers and telephones on each table, so that you could dial any member of either sex who caught your fancy, Caine noted, as he sipped his Scotch-flavored ice cubes at ten marks a shot.

He took time to examine his table companion out of the corner of his eye, a chunky dark-haired man in his mid-twenties who kept ostentatiously glancing at his Rolex as if he had something to do tonight besides checking out the girls. He was the new European man, riding the economic boom like a surfer. His watch was Swiss, his jeans French, his disco shirt and jacket Italian, and his slang came from American TV. He nervously jiggled his knees against Caine’s and winked at him, conspirators in the eternal quest for the one-night stand. While Caine checked the crowd for Harris, his table partner researched the club for girls.

The telephone rang and before Caine could move, his partner grabbed the receiver like he was a racetrack tout waiting for results of the Kentucky Derby. But it was for Caine. A busty blonde with the heft of a Wagnerian singer at Table 43 waved at him and invited him to dance. At Caine’s “Nein, danke” she shrugged in an exaggerated manner to show off the low-cut bosom he had turned down and hung up. Caine noted with satisfaction that with the band blaring the telephone was almost completely private, in the midst of the huge crowd.

The second call was also for Caine. This time his partner handed the phone over with a touch of annoyance. It was a pretty dark-haired girl with a sweet gentle smile a few tables away. She had on a tight pink cashmere turtleneck that seemed to glow like neon in the dim light. Caine felt his groin stir as he reluctantly turned down her offer to buy him a drink. He looked at her and thought, another time, another place, another life, and hung up. His table partner looked at him curiously, probably figuring him for a queer, and moved his chair a fraction of an inch away from Caine, not wanting to be guilty by association.

There was a loud series of cheers and catcalls and Caine glanced back at the stage, where the lead singer was working himself into an erotic frenzy. The phone rang again. This time it was Harris. Caine’s table partner smiled broadly as he handed over the receiver. The call from a man had confirmed his suspicion. He knew Caine was a queer for sure.

“I’m at table thirty-one. Do you come here often?” Harris said. Except that Caine wasn’t playing.

“Only during the mating season,” Caine replied, spotting Harris lounging indifferently, his legs crossed, at a table near the door. With his blow-dryed blond hair, black pin-striped Cardin suit, and cocktail in hand, Harris looked like he belonged in an expensive whiskey ad.

“I bet you only come here for the classy acts,” Harris said, using a code identification. On stage the lead singer was gyrating his hips to the music while the band blasted a hard rock version of Beethoven’s Fifth.

“Cut the shit, Bob. I left my Junior Secret Agent kit at home.”

“Is that the one with the plastic mask and the water gun that looks, like a Luger?”

“Yeah, and fifty snappy sayings to keep the KGB in stitches.”

The strobe lights flickered madly and the dancers writhed uncontrollably as the band and the audience went wild.

“What’s it all about, Alfie?” Harris asked.

“You tell me. You’re the one dealing the cards.”

“I think we have a communication problem. I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”

“You say that so sincerely, Mr. Jennings. Why don’t I believe you?”

Harris shrugged and sipped his drink as the audience exploded into applause and stamped their feet like a giant beast with two thousand legs.

“Then we’re even,” Harris taunted. “Your passport says William Foster, but I’m not holding it against you.”

“That’s big of you. Look, let’s stop fencing, sweetie. The applause is dying down and my table partner has already got me marked for a queer.”

“That’s because you look so cute in your three-piece suit. What about lunch tomorrow?”

“I love you too, you sexy thing,” he replied. His table partner overheard him and smiled broadly.

“In the Tiergarten, by the elephant cage.”

“Just the two of us, lover,” Caine said and hung up, suppressing an impulse to plant a cross-bottom fist between his table partner’s teeth. He waited till the music started again and the aisles were filled with couples making contact and crowding their way to the dance floor, before getting up and leaving his table partner smirking over the telephone.

It was in the Tiergarten that the teen-aged werewolves and cripples of the Home Guard made a last pathetic stand against the Red Army. The few old trees that managed to survive the Battle of Berlin were cut down for fuel during the frigid postwar winter of ’45. During the fifties the ground was reseeded, saplings were planted, and rose gardens once again replaced potato patches. As he walked down the path to the zoo, the only evidences of the war Caine could see were the strange mounds several hundred feet high that dotted the park. The mounds had been constructed of rubble, then covered with soil and seeded with grass. Under the leaden winter sky they looked like tells from a long-lost civilization. Caine wondered what some archeologist from the distant future might make of them. He checked his watch and decided he had enough time for a bite before his r.d.v. with Harris. He stopped at a stand and bought a bockwurst dipped in mustard, which he ate as he walked through the zoo. Harris had used the code phrase “What about lunch …” which meant fourteen minutes after twelve.

A plaque on the outside railing of the elephant enclosure identified the elephant as “Shanti.” The massive gray animal ambled near the rail, her long trunk searching the concrete lip of the moat for peanuts. Like the rest of her breed, she was a survivor. She had come through the Allied bombings and the Russian onslaught to become something of a local institution. The irony of her name was not lost on Caine, with his linguistic background. It meant “peace” in Sanskrit.

Two small children, their long blond hair tousled by the wind, were throwing peanuts at each other. The little boy chased the girl around the massive bulk of their mother, who watched them with an air of stolid patience. The little girl’s shrieks of excitement sounded thin and high-pitched in the air, like the calls of a bird in distress. Caine watched Harris approach and rechecked the large open area. It was secure; Harris was alone. He turned back to the enclosure and watched the elephant until he felt Harris lean against the railing beside him.

“You’re looking well, Herr Foster,” Harris said, his lopsided grin giving him the boyish charm of a street urchin that women found irresistible. He wore a well-cut camel’s hair overcoat that seemed to match his trim blond hair. His blue eyes twinkled with sincerity and as always Caine had the feeling that Harris wanted to sell him something he would be better off without.

“I’ll bet you say that to all the girls.”

“How’s civilian life treating you?”

“I wouldn’t know. It looks to me like you bastards are trying to run me without the benefit of a salary.”

“Whatever gave you that idea?”

“What are you doing in Berlin, Bob?”

Harris pulled away from him for a moment and looked at him curiously. Perhaps he was remembering some of the things Caine had said when he quit. He reached into his pocket, brought out a handful of peanuts, and tossed them over the moat at the elephant.

“Do you really expect me to answer that? Come on, you know better than that. You were a Company man yourself once, or have you forgotten?”

“No,” Caine said. “I haven’t forgotten.”

For a moment the two men were silent. They watched Shanti’s powerful trunk pick up a peanut and put it into her mouth.

“What makes you think we’re running you?”

“Not ‘we,’ you. You’re the one who put Wasserman onto me in the first place. Then I run into you here in Berlin, the one place someone interested in Nazis would have to come to eventually. Quite a coincidence, wouldn’t you say?”

“Is that what Wasserman wanted you for? Jesus, that’s funny.”

“Then why aren’t I laughing, Bob?”

“For Chrissakes, Johnny,” Harris said, smiling his sincere boyish grin for all it was worth. “I thought I was doing you a favor and picking up a little change on the side. I didn’t know you were going to go all paranoid on me. Until you walked into the consulate I had no idea you were in Berlin.”

“If you were running a mission, would you tell me?”

“Sure.” Harris grinned. “Would you believe me?”

“Of course not.”

The two men smiled. Harris handed Caine a few peanuts and cracked one open for himself. He spit out a speck of shell and wiped his mouth.

“I was tailed to the consulate,” Caine said, his eyes an icy green, like shallow Arctic water.

“Of course you were tailed, marching through Checkpoint Charlie like Napoleon,” Harris retorted irritably. “It has nothing to do with you. The Gehlen Bureau has a runner coming across and we want to get our hands on him before they bring him around the corner”—using the German intelligence slang phrase for killing. “As soon as I saw you, I figured those junior G-men had snafu’d and called them off.”

Caine lit a cigarette, cupping his hand against the chill breeze. The wind whipped the smoke away as fast as he could exhale it, the pale whiff swirling into the gray air.

“So Berlin is just a coincidence, it that it?”

Harris grabbed Caine’s lapel to emphasize his point. Caine let him, knowing how vulnerable that made Harris, since he could snap Harris’s elbow by locking the grip and using a base palm blow against the outside upper arm. It was the kind of amateurish mistake that not even a rookie operative would make. But then, Harris was a senior case officer. The kind who moved pins around on a map and never got his hands dirty unless he spilled a drink at an embassy party.

“Look, Johnny. You are out of it. Neither I nor the Company give a shit what kind of a kraut-hunt you and the old pimp have cooked up. You wandered across an open op and I came here to tell you to get off the field because there’s a game in progress. That’s it.”

Caine glanced at Harris’s hand for a moment, then back at Harris, who dropped his hand from Caine’s lapel as if it had grown suddenly heavy.

“Aren’t you even a little curious about what we’re up to?”

“C’mon, Johnny, whatever you and Wasserman are up to with the krauts, just tell me it has nothing to do with the Company and I promise to keep it to myself. I won’t report it. Scout’s honor”—holding up his right hand in the three-fingered Boy Scout sign.

“It’s a private beef, Bob.”

“Then you have my word.”

“Thanks, I’ll sleep better at night knowing that,” Caine said, the sarcasm heavy in his voice. Harris smiled his patented boyish grin.

“Once and for all, Johnny. The tail was a bureaucratic foul-up and Wasserman paid me an easy five grand for an ex-agent’s name. You’re off the books. You and I are just two ships that accidentally went bump in the night.”

“Then there is no problem, is there? If I see any of your people in my rearview mirror, I’m going to step on them.”

Harris shrugged. “Grind them up and feed them to the pigeons for all I care. Christ, you have been out of the game too long. What makes you think the Company gives a shit about the krauts? The only thing that counts these days is oil, kiddo,” Harris said, biting his lip as if he had said too much.

Caine wondered about that. He wondered about it for a long time. It was a loose thread and those are the kind that trip you up. Then he shrugged the thought away. The only thing that mattered now was to get at the Mengele records in the official archives. “Then you wouldn’t mind doing me a favor,” he said.

“Like what?”

“Get me authorization to get into the American Document Center.”

Harris looked at him quizzically, as if he were Scrooge being asked to play Santa Claus at the office Christmas party.

“Why should I?”

“Money.”

Harris grinned broadly, as though Caine had just handed him a Valentine. He really was the all-American success story, Caine thought, with a shine on his shoes, credit cards in his pocket, and good old-fashioned greed in his eyes.

“That’s what makes the world go around,” Harris said.

“Funny. Somebody told me it was love.”

“You’d be surprised how loveable money can be,” Harris replied with a wink.

That was pure Harris, Caine thought. He always had to get in the last cliché, even while picking your pocket.

Harris left after they agreed that he was to call the document center and verbally authorize access for an American named William Foster. In exchange Caine agreed to a drop of twenty-five hundred marks in an envelope addressed to P. Jennings at the American Express office on the Kürfurstendamm. But instead of leaving the Tiergarten after Harris had gone, Caine sat down on a bench and smoked a cigarette, staring vacantly at the bear cage.

If Harris was lying, then he had to get out. Because if he was being run blindly on a Company mission, it could only mean that he was expendable and sooner or later they would bring him around the corner. Even if Harris wasn’t lying, the fact that the Company knew what he was up to would queer the pitch for sure, because every intelligence service is playing its own game and security is never that good, no matter how many “Top Secret” and “For Your Eyes Only” stamps are plastered on each page. Intelligence services are more tangled than bodies at a Hollywood Hills orgy, no matter which side they were coming from—which was why an agent could whisper something in a bar girl’s ear in Miami and two days later an unidentified body would be found floating facedown in one of the klongs in Bangkok.

Of course, everything Harris had said sounded reasonable, and Harris seemed sincere. But then, the world isn’t a reasonable place and sincerity was Harris’s long suit. It could have been coincidence running into Harris in Berlin. But it was farfetched, because Harris was the thread that tied Wasserman and Mengele and the Company together. If Koenig were here now, he would say that if Caine bought Harris’s story, he could let him have the Brooklyn Bridge at an after-Christmas discount price.

Caine looked at the bear enclosure, where Schwips, a big brown male, was idly scratcing his back against a post. He had reached a decision point and he knew it. By rights he should contact Wasserman and tell him that Mengele was bound to be forewarned and the game was called on account of darkness. The permanent kind.

He looked to the south, toward the Steglitz district. He could see the tall rubble mound, dubbed the “Insulaner” by the Berliners, thrusting its way into the skyline. He turned and let his gaze run along the modernistic lines of the Gedächtniskirche, looking like a complicated piece of futuristic computer equipment. The architects had left one broken steeple from the original structure standing as a grim keepsake of a B-17 raid. Over toward the Strasse des 17 Juni, named to commemorate the day in 1953 that protesting East German workers were gunned down by Russian tanks, stood the blood-red granite spire of the Siegesäule. The column had been built in the last century to celebrate the Prussian victory over France. There was no escaping the war in this city, he thought, because the war hadn’t ended in the spring of ’45. It had never ended for any of them. It just went on forever in different battlefields. The Middle East, Africa, Southeast Asia. No matter which way you turned, the dead wouldn’t stay buried. He thought of the old Gypsy at Auschwitz and that bleak ordinary room where Mengele had conducted his experimentieren. And he knew that there was no going back, no matter what the odds were, or what the Company did or didn’t have on. The war was still on for him. He wanted Mengele. The job was no longer just business. It had become personal.

The morning was cold, with a clarity that was clean and sharp-edged, as though every object had been carved with a scalpel. A single wisp of cumulus bisected the pale blue sky, like a long strand of white hair. Caine drove a rented VW bug, chosen for its anonymity, through the outskirts of the city to the rural suburb of Zehlendorf. Traffic this way was light and tall, slender trees crowded right up to the road, as though he were driving down a country lane. Clusters of gold autumn leaves still clung to spindly branches, like swarms of brittle butterflies. The undergrowth was green and through gaps in the trees he could see the deep blue of the many lakes that dotted the district. They reminded him of the color of C.J.’s eyes.

He followed Wasserkaferstieg road to its end on the banks of a small quiet lake surrounded by trees. The American Document Center was a long low concrete affair, set like an estate behind a cement-and-iron fence. He gave his name to the guard at the gate and then drove through a tunnel of branches overhanging a private road to the building. Harris had mentioned that the structure was like an iceberg, extending eight floors underground, where the archives were kept in bombproof vaults. Caine handed the Foster passport to the clerk at the reception desk. The clerk checked his name against a typewritten list and handed him a pen and an application form on a clipboard to fill out. Caine filled it out and handed it back to the clerk, then he sat down on a couch to wait. Strewn on the coffee table in front of him were recent issues of Newsweek and Der Spiegel and an old-well-thumbed copy of Playboy. It was like sitting in a dentist’s waiting room. The only things missing were the Norman Rockwell prints and copies of articles on the dangers of periodontitis.

After a few minutes the clerk motioned to him and Caine followed him into a large reading room filled with Formica tables and chairs. There was only one other person in the room, a large heavyset German detective in civilian clothes, with the unmistakable air of authority that clings to policemen everywhere, like the indelible scent of aftershave lotion. Caine put him down as a member of Bureau One, the section of the West Berlin police department delegated to investigate war crimes.

He waited for about ten minutes until another wispy clerk handed him a thick four-volume set of three-inch binders, each of which bore the label JOSEF MENGELE, numbers one through four. With a faint sigh he settled himself in the chair and opened the first folder.

For a long while he studied the photographs of the young Mengele attached to the SS records. He realized that after more than forty years they were virtually worthless for identification purposes. Time and age had certainly sculpted that thin-lipped, rather mediocre face into something that no longer had any resemblance to the photo. And although there was no indication of it in the files, Mengele might well have had cosmetic surgery to further obscure his identity. What Caine was after was something more fundamental, some clue to the character of the man that revealed itself to the camera—something that couldn’t be changed.

The photographs revealed an intense-looking, thin-faced young SS officer, with dark hair and eyes. He was clean-shaven with a prominent nose and there might have been a touch of vanity in the studied pose he had presented to the camera. He looked more like an Eastern European than a German. Perhaps that had been the source of his boundless hatred of non-Aryans, Caine mused—the fact that he resembled them. For some reason the dark eyes and beaklike nose reminded Caine of a bird of prey. When Mengele operated, that gaze would have revealed no more emotion than a hawk when it killed a rabbit. For the rest, there was nothing there, he decided. It was really a very ordinary face after all.

He skimmed fairly rapidly through the bulk of the first two volumes, which contained records of Mengele’s early life, war records, indictments, affidavits concerning a staggering list of war crimes and various warrants for his arrest, requests by different agencies for information, and so on. He began to read carefully when he came to the application for an Argentinian identity card, which had been the last authoritative mention of Mengele in Wasserman’s dossier.

On October 27, 1956, the officials of the by-then defunct Perón government, which had been notoriously hospitable to ex-Nazis, issued cédula number 3940484 to Mengele under the name Dr. Gregor Schklastro. It was the first of many aliases Mengele had occasion to employ. The files had records of Mengele, a.k.a. Dr. Helmut Gregor-Gregori, Dr. Edler Friedrich von Breitenbach (under which he practiced medicine in Buenos Aires), Franz Fischer, Fausto Rindon, José Aspiazu, Stefan Alvez, Walter Hasek, Heinz Stobert, and even, audaciously, José Mengele. Caine was growing excited and he put down the file for a moment. Mengele was a far more elusive prey than Eichmann had ever been. To hunt him down would be the most extraordinary challenge he had ever faced.

The aliases clarified one point: Mengele was unable to adopt the protective coloration of the South American environment. Whatever identity he assumed, he was unable or unwilling to disguise his German background. Caine smiled. It was the first flaw.

Wherever Mengele was now, he was posing as a German immigrant in his late sixties, probably in a German enclave in Latin America. The target was beginning to narrow.

Given his vast experience in sterilization, it was almost inevitable that Mengele established a successful practice in Buenos Aires, specializing in abortion. He was briefly arrested in 1958 after a woman died on his operating table following a botched abortion. Mengele bribed his way out of jail and entered Paraguay on a tourist visa.

When Mengele fled Argentina, he abandoned his wife Martha and their young son, Karl Heinz, who stayed on in Buenos Aires. They subsequently left Argentina and returned to Europe, settling in Kloten, Switzerland, near the Zurich airport. During the early sixties, while the West German authorities intensified their hunt for Mengele as a result of the Freiburg court indictment, Frau Mengele and her son were located by Feinberg, a Jewish Nazi hunter based in Vienna, who then notified the Zurich police. The last thing the peace-and-order-loving Swiss government wanted was a war crimes trial. In July 1962 the Swiss authorities expelled Martha and Karl Heinz, who then settled in the quiet village of Merano in the Italian Tyrol, where Martha still lived. Martha subsequently divorced Mengele in absentia and there had apparently been no further contact between Mengele and his former family. A separate report by Feinberg, referenced in a footnote, indicated that the boy grew up despising his father, as did Frau Mengele.

When his Paraguayan visa expired, Mengele went to the Andean ski resort of San Carlos de Bariloche, where he spent the early part of 1959. There were many cross-references in the files to Bariloche, a luxurious Alpine-like retreat near the Argentinian-Chilean border. First established by a German immigrant named Wiederhold, Bariloche was clearly an enclave for the Nazis, who were drawn to its German atmosphere, that stein-thumping fellowship of beery gemütlichkeit, its snow-capped mountain setting so reminiscent of Switzerland and the Tyrol, and its proximity to the Chilean border. As the cross-references noted, such Nazi bigwigs as Mengele, Adolph Eichmann, and even Martin Bormann—Hitler’s deputy and heir-had often been reported wandering its streets and trails, dressed in lederhosen and acting for all the world as if they were still in Berchtesgaden, paying a social call on the Führer. In October 1959 Mengele returned to Paraguay, where he was issued a citizenship certificate, number 293348, and established a new medical practice in Asunción.

Even as Mengele calmly and openly went about his business in Asunción, the hunt was intensifying. In Israel, Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion authorized a special commando unit of the Mossad, Israel’s general intelligence agency, to initiate two top-secret operations: “Operation Eichmann” and “Operation Angel of Death.” According to a CIA report in the folder the objectives of the unit, code-named the “Blue Falcons,” were to kidnap Adolph Eichmann and Josef Mengele and bring them to Israel to stand trial.

Meanwhile, on November 13, 1959, the German embassy in Asunción petitioned the Paraguayan Ministry of the Interior for permission to examine Mengele’s naturalization papers as a first step toward initiating extradition proceedings. Only five days later Interpol’s Paris office approached the Paraguayan authorities with a similar request. A few days later a member of the Blue Falcons was found in Eldorado, Paraguay, his throat slit from ear to ear.

Caine put down the file and looked up at the ceiling, breathing deeply. Then he shook his head wearily. What a balls-up, he thought. They had all crowded around the target, jostling each other in their eagerness to piss into the soup. With a sigh he resumed his reading.

Forewarned by an unidentified Paraguayan leak, Mengele went to ground, next surfacing in Bariloche. Mengele and his bodyguards took over a floor in a chalet at the base of the towering precipice of Cerro Catedral. Using the alias Franz Fischer, he spent much of his enforced vacation hiking the rugged Andean trails.

A frequent companion during those weeks was a pretty blond woman from Frankfurt, named Nora Aldot. They had met at the chalet bar and soon they were inseparable. Mengele had a well-known weakness for beautiful women, and for her part Nora appeared smitten by his old-fashioned Bavarian charm. But Mengele was hot and he knew it. Strangers were showing up in Bariloche and the Argentinian and Paraguayan authorities were being pressured to do something about him. Mengele had his bodyguards and ODESSA Kameraden check her out.

The CIA report didn’t indicate what, if anything, they found to incriminate the woman. All that was known for certain was that on February 12, 1960, Nora and Mengele and two of his bodyguards went hiking on the Cerro Catedral and that later the three men reported that Nora had fallen in a terrible accident. Nora’s battered body was found in a ravine a few days later by the local police.

After a brief and somewhat cursory investigation an Argentinian police report in the folder recorded the death as accidental and the investigation was closed due to a lack of any further evidence—except that the CIA report on the incident noted that Nora Aldot’s real name was Norit Edad, a native of Frankfurt who had immigrated to Tel Aviv after the war. The CIA had concluded that she had in fact been a member of the Blue Falcons. It was the last time the Israelis got close to Mengele, and “Franz Fischer” once again went to ground.

The Blue Falcons were more successful with Eichmann and on May 23, 1960, Ben-Gurion was able to announce Eichmann’s capture to the Knesset. But Ben-Gurion’s triumph was short lived. The reaction of most Western and South American governments to the Israeli campaign of retribution was almost uniformly negative. The resulting scandals led to the resignation of Isar Harel as head of the Mossad and later to the fall of Ben-Gurion’s government. An angry Ben-Gurion stormed off to semiretirement on a kibbutz in the Negev Desert, swearing to never again speak to the new prime minister, his former protégé, Levi Eshkol, who had forced him out of office. Israel was effectively out of the retribution business.

Even worse, the worldwide publicity associated with the Eichmann snatch and trial for war crimes sent fugitive Nazis scurrying for deeper cover. The frightened Nazis were getting harder to get at than ever. Even the complete record in front of Caine contained little information of Mengele’s whereabouts between the time of his stay in Bariloche and 1965, except that Caine knew from Ibn Sallah that after the Eichmann snatch the fugitive had tried and failed to relocate to Egypt in 1961.

The record between 1960 and 1965 was a monotonous series of fiascos, as Interpol and Bureau One went through the motions, running down one false lead after another. The Mengele case was becoming a bureaucratic albatross. The situation was muddied still further by the attempts of enthusiastic Jewish amateurs.

In July 1962 the West German government asked the Paraguayans for information on Dr. José Mengele, who was supposedly living in Asunción, according to an Interpol report. A Paraguayan leak let Mengele know about the inquiry even before the Ministry of the Interior officially received the request. Mengele left Asunción and moved to the finca of a German immigrant named Krug, near the town of Ericarnación on the upper Paraná River, located in a jungle region near the Argentinian and Brazilian borders.

Twelve Jewish survivors of Auschwitz living in Brazil got hold of an Interpol report and formed the “Group of Twelve,” dedicated to getting Mengele. In 1965 the group set up shop in Pôrto Mendes, on the Brazilian side of the Paraná. Two members of the group crossed the river to seek out Mengele. Their bodies were hauled out of the river a few days later. The entire group then went into Paraguay, but Mengele had gone to ground once again. After a few abortive raids on places Mengele was thought to frequent, the surviving amateur Nazi hunters had to return to Brazil emptyhanded.

Yet another bizarre attempt to capture Mengele was revealed in a 1968 Argentinian police report. Acting under the authority of an open order issued in Buenos Aires back in 1960 by Judge Dr. Jorge Luque of the Argentinian Federal District Court for the extradition of Mengele to Germany, an undercover police agent in the Brazilian jungle state of Paraná claimed to have killed Mengele. The agent, a flamboyant Austrian immigrant to Brazil named Erico Erdstein, received a tip that Mengele periodically crossed the border into Brazil, where he stayed at the estate of Dr. Alexander Lénárd, a Nazi sympathizer, near the jungle town of Rio do Sul. Erdstein planned to abduct Mengele from Rio do Sul to the frontier town of Puerto Iguassú on Argentinian soil, where Judge Luque’s order would be in force. On September 13, 1968, Erdstein arrested Mengele and two companions in Pôrto Mendes and took them on a chartered boat down the Paraná toward Puerto Iguassú.

According to Erdstein’s deposition, appended to the report, a Paraguayan patrol boat intercepted them and in the ensuing gun battle Mengele and his companions were killed. Except that a subsequent Bureau One file reported that Mengele was spotted a year later in the Paraguayan province of Amambay. Like the fabled Rasputin, Mengele just wouldn’t die. The West German authorities in Frankfurt requested a clarification of Erdstein’s claim and, after studying the case, concluded that the three men killed were petty smugglers.

After almost five more years of bureaucratic muddling a special inquiry authorized by the Hesse state court uncovered eyewitness accounts from anonymous sources indicating that Mengele was still living in Amambay. Incredibly, the story was leaked to a staff reporter on the Frankfurter Allgemeine and on October 25, 1973, the following story appeared in The New York Times:

AUSCHWITZ DOCTOR SAID TO BE IN PARAGUAY

West German justice officials said in Bonn yesterday that Dr. Josef Mengele, the Nazi physician sought for the last twenty-two years for alleged mass murders in the Auschwitz concentration camp during World War II, was believed to have been located in a remote village in Paraguay. Mengele, known as “the Angel of Death,” was reported to be in the village of Pedro Juan Caballero, near the Brazilian frontier, in the province of Amambay.

Based on the story, President Goppel, the Minister of Bavaria, contacted the Paraguayan dictator, President Alfredo Stroessner, to request extradition. But Stroessner denied any knowledge of Mengele. In any case it was too late. After all the publicity and an ostentatious search by the Paraguayan police, Mengele had vanished into thin air. Once again the elusive quarry had gone to ground.

Caine closed the last folder and glanced at his watch. It was well past lunch and he had been at it for hours. He lit a cigarette and glanced around the reading room. The detective had gone and the room was empty. His glance fell on the pile of folders in front of him, massive and incomplete, like the ruins of a failed civilization: a bureaucratic monument bearing an inscription as indecipherable as if it had been written in Etruscan. Caine shrugged. As far as he was concerned, all the Mengele hunters combined could have given lessons in incompetence to the planners of the Watergate break-in.

He leaned back and ran a mental tab, plucking the useful nuggets of information like the raisins from a bowl of cereal. Bariloche. The Blue Falcons. Judge Luque. Erico Erdstein. Feinberg in Vienna. The paraguayan authorities, who seemed so solicitous of Mengele’s welfare. That could only mean bribes on a fairly large scale. Who had arranged for Mengele’s naturalization as a Paraguayan citizen? he wondered. He opened one of the folders and finally found the name he was looking for. Mengele’s application for citizenship had been filed by an Asunción lawyer, Cesar Augusto Sanabria. His application had been sponsored by two other German-born Paraguayans: Werner Jung and one Alexander von Eckstein. Cross-references on von Eckstein indicated that he was a leader of the highly visible German community in Asunción.

Caine decided that he could dismiss Mengele’s son, Karl Heinz, and former wife, Martha, as potential information sources. That mine had obviously been worked until it was played out. Besides, in addition to their evident bitterness about Mengele, they had been out of the action and too far away from the field for a long time.

But throughout his reading a single question had been running through his mind, repeating itself like a pop melody that you hum once and then keeps coming back, haunting the day. Where had the money come from? Everything Mengele had done—travel, bodyguards, bribes, and so on—had required a great deal of money. He obviously hadn’t earned that kind of money with his Paraguayan medical practice, so it had either come from the family business, or the ODESSA treasury.

That ODESSA had vast sums at its disposal was evident. During the war years the SS had systematically looted Europe of its gold, jewelry, and art treasures. Not to mention all the valuables they had taken from the Jews in the concentration camps. In fact, tons of gold had been extracted from the teeth of Jewish corpses in Auschwitz alone. Yet little of the Nazi loot had ever been recovered. So ODESSA had the means to help Mengele, he mused. Whether they really wanted to was something else.

Mengele must have been a hot potato for the Kameraden of ODESSA, he thought. He was very hot and very visible and the practical leaders of ODESSA would probably have funded Mengele only to the extent necessary to keep him away from them. Any large-scale funding would have left a trail back to them as wide as a California freeway.

So the bulk of Mengele’s funds must come from the family business. Indeed, as the folders indicated, the Günzburg firm was one of the largest manufacturers of farm and industrial equipment in Germany, with worldwide business dealings. Caine’s eyes narrowed. He had hit pay dirt and he knew it. He’d be willing to bet his Mauritian stamp against a political candidate’s promise to balance the budget that the Mengele firm had an office in Asunción. If he could just follow the money, it would lead him to Mengele as inevitably as a spawning salmon would lead anyone to his birthplace.

Caine stood up and stretched, his eyes beginning to refocus after all the reading he had done. It was time to begin the search in earnest, where the trail had last disappeared. After returning the folders, he left the center and headed back to the Hilton to check out. He called Lufthansa for a reservation, did some money changing, and made the drop for Harris at the American Express, then headed for Tegel Airport. The last thing he did before leaving Berlin was to stop by the airport telegraph office and send Wasserman a terse, unsigned cable.

He mentally checked everyone boarding the Lufthansa flight to New York, where he would make a connecting flight to South America, but no one seemed interested in him except for one well-dressed woman in her mid-forties. But if she had anything on her mind besides trying him on for size in the plane’s lavatory, Caine couldn’t spot it. It was just as well, he decided, because the research phase was over. As the jet lifted off the runway, he felt that it was more than just a separation from the earth. The hunt had entered the active phase.