CHAPTER 13

“Did you enjoy having sex with my daughter?” Mendoza asked.

“You ought to know,” Caine retorted, and Rolf, the blond man from the BMW, savagely slapped his face. Caine spat out a mouthful of blood and grinned. He had expected something more sophisticated from the Angel of Death of Auschwitz.

“What is your name, anyway? McClure, Foster, or Caine?” Mendoza asked conversationally. They had been through his knapsack and found the other passports, he realized. He shrugged his shoulders as best he could, with his hands and feel tied to a steel chair in Mendoza’s laboratory.

“Foster’s good enough,” Caine lied. He was a professional spy; he’d be telling lies on his deathbed.

“As you wish,” Mendoza muttered through his thin lips. And then he was staring at Caine’s icy green eyes and the cruel smile that came to Caine’s mouth, blurred with blood, like a smeared painting.

“Dr. Mengele, I presume,” Caine said.

“Of course,” the old man snapped and gave Caine a perfunctory Prussian nod that oddly managed to be both contemptuous and respectful. He was leaning against the lab counter, his hands on his hips and his legs crossed at the ankles. Helga stood nearby, a glint of satisfaction in her piggy eyes, the Bauer still in her hand. Rolf stood near Caine, his hands balled into fists, anxious to start beating Caine, like a dog straining to slip the leash. Inger had gone. Caine sighed and shook his head.

“I walked right into it, didn’t I?” Caine said.

“You are to be congratulated for having gotten this far, Herr Foster. You are the first man to find me in more than six years. How did you find me? Müller?”

“Sure, Müller,” Caine said. Maybe the bastard would think he was safe now and it might be easier for whoever came after him to get Mengele, he thought.

“I thought as much,” Mengele muttered. “You’re a dangerous man, Herr Foster. Five of my Kameraden are dead thanks to you: Müller, Steiger, Hans and Fritz in Paraguay, Klaus in Vienna and Franz is crippled for life. Very impressive,” he admitted. “You must have Aryan blood in you. I would be curious to know your racial heritage. What were your parents?”

“Well,” Caine smiled, “my father was Little Black Sambo and my mother was Golda Meir.”

“Schweirihund!” Rolf shouted, and Caine saw the slap coming. At the last second he turned his face into it and caught the bottom of Rolfs little finger between his teeth. He bit savagely as Rolf screamed in pain and didn’t let go until Helga kicked the inside of his knee, the pain flooding through his body. Caine spat out a thick stream of blood, together with a tooth and a piece of Rolf’s finger.

“Fucking American!” Rolf cursed, nursing his hand and glaring balefully at Caine; but didn’t try to slap him again.

“And don’t you forget it,” Caine said coldly, rage coursing through him. His eyes were slits and he swore to himself he’d stay alive. He had only one thought now: to kill Mengele and Rolf, no matter what. He let the rage come because it would keep him going. He was still the hunter, he told himself.

“If you were about to be tortured yourself, what would you do?” he had asked Smiley Gallagher that time at Madame Wu’s.

“There’s only one sure way to survive torture,” Smiley had said, his breath wafting the sharp smell of fish sauce at Caine, that odor of fish that was as much a part of his memory of Vietnam as the stench of death itself.

“And that is?”

“You must never, under any circumstance, allow yourself to get caught,” Smiley had giggled.

“I was right, Herr Foster. You are a dangerous man. It’s a pity I’m going to have to kill you. In some ways we are very much alike,” Mengele said calmly, his eyes as dark and empty as outer space.

“I’m nothing like you, you motherfucker,” Caine growled.

“Oh, but you are,” Mengele said with a mocking smile. Caine recognized the smile. It was exactly as the old Gypsy had described it. Wasserman had been right, he realized. Mengele was no ordinary sadist.

“In a way it is fitting that we should meet in the jungle like this, you and I. We are both strong men who know that the world is a jungle, where only the strong survive,” Mengele went on. “We are both killers, outcasts, who make our own rules. Neither of us is bound by the conventional morality of the bourgeoisie. And spare me your protestations of innocence. If I’m a murderer, so are you. After all you came here to murder me, didn’t you? So you see, we have something in common after all.”

“I’m not even in your league,” Caine said angrily, a fine spray of blood spattering his shirt. “I never sent millions of human beings to the gas chambers. I never shot innocent women and babies. I never cut out eyes or healthy limbs. I never buried people alive or used them like laboratory animals. I never fumigated lice with mustard gas. You have that distinction all to yourself, you disgusting pervert!”

Mengele’s black eyes bored into Caine, the dark irises like openings to a vortex of emptiness. They were the eyes of a machine. Mengele shook his head, as though he was troubled.

“I don’t suppose you’ll believe me when I tell you that I sincerely regret what happened in those days. That whole period is like a bad dream that I can hardly remember. It was all so long ago,” Mengele said, his mouth twitching with an old man’s tremble.

“It’s true,” he whispered, his eyes wide and fearful, as though he was seeing ghosts. “I did terrible things. We all did. It was as though we were possessed by demons. Men are capable of anything. Anything! Did you know that? Once you let the demons slip their leash, the most horrible things can happen. We gorged like leeches on the blood of our victims. We were drunk with it. I, worst of all. There was no stopping it.

“It was like a long sickness. When I think of it, it’s as though I had no part in it. It’s as if I were recalling a stranger. It’s true, I was insane then, but so was the whole world. Everyone contributed to the crime. Everyone!” he thundered. “There are no innocents! We live in a jungle where every living thing survives by murdering other living things. We are all assassins, so who are you to judge me? How can you, a murderer, judge me for murder?”

“Who’s better qualified?” Caine asked simply.

Mengele turned away, his hands gripping the counter for support. With shaky hands he poured himself a glass of papaya juice from a pitcher and sipped at it. He offered the half-filled glass to Caine, who shook his head. Mengele took a deep breath, and when he began again, there was a whine of self-justification in his voice.

“I am not the man I was. You must believe me. Look at me! I’ve changed over the past thirty-five years. You’ve changed! The world has changed, so why not Mengele? Look at this place,” he said, gesturing at the laboratory. “This is my penance. I’ve dedicated my life to helping men, not killing them. Can’t you see that? What more must I do? I only want to preserve life.”

“Why don’t you go back to Germany to stand trial. They’ll give you a chance to testify, I’m sure. You can tell them all how wonderful you are.”

“What good will that do? Will my testimony and death bring back even one of all those millions? Will it? At least here I can be of some use. There are hundreds, thousands, of Indians who are alive today because of me. By staying here, I do the greatest good for the greatest number. Isn’t that truly what morality is all about? I shall finish my life here in the jungle,” he said definitively, nodding his head.

“You’re so full of shit, it’s coming out of your ears,” Caine retorted. “What about all the people you had killed who tried to bring you to justice? What about Nora Aldot? Shit, you haven’t changed!”

“Surely every human being has a right to survive. How can you condemn me for simply trying to stay alive? I didn’t go after them, they came after me. How can a dead man do penance?” Mengele argued persuasively, his hands outstretched as though he were addressing a jury.

“You fucking malignancy!” Caine said coldly, his eyes fixed on Mengele, like a cat on a mouse. “Do you think there’s anything you can say or do that’ll wipe out what you’ve done? Do you?”

Mengele’s eyes, caught in Caine’s glance, were as hollow and empty as the sockets of a skull. His hands clutched at the counter behind him as though to a life preserver.

“Is there no redemption, then?” Mengele asked in a tremulous whisper. Caine shook his head solemnly from side to side, though somewhere he knew that the question would always haunt him. When he opened his mouth, blood dribbled over his lower lip and down his chin, giving him a reddish goatee.

“Not for you,” he said finally.

“Damn Jew!” Mengele screamed wildly and lurched against the counter, smashing the pitcher and glass to the floor, slivers of glass exploding like tiny pieces of shrapnel. “Jewish scum!” Mengele howled, his face suddenly and totally red, like the eye of a mud hen.

Helga cocked the Bauer and shoved the muzzle against the bridge of Caine’s nose, her fat face gloating with satisfaction.

“Now, Herr Doktor?” she asked hopefully. “Can I kill him now, this Schweinhund?”

“Nein,” Mengele snapped authoritatively. “We still have questions to put to Herr Foster.”

Mengele stood there arrogantly, once more in complete control. His pupils were cold pinpoints, like those of a hawk. Out of the corner of his eye Caine watched Helga waddle away, her bloated body jiggling with disappointment. Then with a shattering sense of déjà vu Caine watched fascinated as Mengele carefully cracked his knuckles, one by one, precisely as the old Gypsy had described it, and when Mengele coldly examined Caine again, Caine couldn’t repress a shiver, because he was finally seeing what only the dead had seen. Dr. Josef Mengele was about to operate.

“I have wasted enough time with you on idle discussion. I want to know everything you know about the Starfish Conspiracy,” Mengele announced.

That was it, Caine thought. The Starfish Conspiracy. It was the unknown factor that from the beginning had dogged his footsteps like a shadow, till it tripped him up in the end. He didn’t need to look at Mengele’s impassive face to know that unless he gave Mengele something to chew on, they would make his death extremely unpleasant. Not that it mattered now. Not that anything did.

“How long have you known about it?” Caine admitted.

“Over a year. It’s taken you a long time to track me down.”

“Who told you about it? Müller? I knew that was a mistake,” Caine said, guessing.

“Excellent,” Mengele said, raising his eyebrows. He was clearly enjoying himself. “Yes, Heinrich was one of the few Kameraden who refused to betray me. Now its your turn to answer my questions. Tell me, Hen-Foster, who sent you?”

“I’m a field agent for the CIA. Did you know that we were involved?”

“I see,” Mengele muttered disgustedly. “So that was the fifth arm of der Seestern.”

So that was it, Caine thought excitedly. The Starfish was named for a five-armed conspiracy with a single objective. ODESSA, Mengele’s former Kameraden, was one arm and the CIA might be another, if Harris had lied to him in Berlin. But why did they want Mengele out of the way?

“Why did they want you out of the way?” he asked.

“I don’t know,’ Mengele admitted. “Unless it was—”

And then Caine had it. There could be only one reason that Mengele was a danger to them, even in his jungle hideout. Because it might come out.

“Unless it would be bad publicity for them,” Caine finished for Mengele. He shook his head, because the whole thing was insane. It meant that all of them—Wasserman, Harris, Gröbel, and God knows who else—had all been in on it.

There is a moment in every agent’s life when he wonders if he has become truly paranoid, because he begins to suspect everyone of conspiracy. Caine wondered if he had reached that point The whole thing was getting all mixed up, he thought, and he had to consider dismissing the whole idea as impossible. Then he shrugged mentally, because it didn’t look like he was ever going to find out.

“I walked right into it, didn’t I, like a fly blundering into a spiderweb?” Caine said disgustedly. “Müller alerted you about the Starfish Conspiracy, so you knew they would send someone. I set off alarm bells in Paraguay, Bariloche, and Vienna to let you know I was on the way. The colonel in Pucallpa let you know I was coming by radio and you had Rolf here to identify me, just to make sure. Inger was the decoy, in case I had any tricks up my sleeve. All you had to do was sit back and wait, like a spider in the middle of his web.”

“Just so,” Mengele said. “So there’s only one thing left before we finish with you, before I step on you like an insect. Where is von Schiffen?”

“Von Who?” Caine asked. He was genuinely astonished.

“How tiresome,” Mengele remarked. “And our discussion was going so well,” he sighed. “Still, I’ll give you one more chance. Perhaps your position isn’t entirely clear. You are going to die. It’s up to you whether we do it quickly, or whether you die a few days from now, screaming in agony, begging for me to kill you. So I’ll ask you once again, where is von Schiffen?”

“Why do you want to know?”

Mengele shrugged. This agent was a dead man in any case. It didn’t matter what he told him. Besides, the man clearly had Aryan blood in him. Perhaps he could be reasoned with.

“Von Schiffen is the Starfish, didn’t you know? Once he learns that you failed, he will send others. I have to eliminate him before he gets me. Have you forgotten what I said before? I want to live. Surely every human being has a right to fight for his survival. Now, where is von Schiffen?”

Caine took a deep breath, returning Mengele’s cold gaze with his own ruthless stare. It was time to show and tell—only he didn’t have the foggiest idea who von Schiffen was, and even if he did, it wouldn’t matter. The only consolation he would have as he died was that Mengele would still be worrying about this von Schiffen character. It wasn’t much, he reflected. But still, men have died for less.

“Whatever gave you the idea that you’re a human being?” Caine said carefully.

Mengele smiled and Came knew he had been right. It was not a human smile. He had to hang on to one thought now, only one. If he ever got free again, even for a second, he would kill Mengele as mercilessly as he would a plague-carrying rat.

“That was a very foolish thing to say. You see, here in the jungle one has no need of elaborate torture apparatus. The jungle itself provides all the discomfort necessary to persuade you to do anything I say. Take him to the Anthill,” Mengele ordered.

Rolf placed the muzzle of the Winchester against Caine’s back as Helga began to carefully untie his feet, squatting between his legs like a giant toad. It was useless to hope, Caine realized. He could barely move.

“I don’t think I’m going to like the Anthill,” Caine said. He really didn’t think he was going to like it at all.

“Nein, I’m sure you won’t,” Mengele said, and patted Caine’s hair paternally with the same comforting air of a doctor prescribing foul-tasting medicine for the patient’s own good that he used as a bedside manner with the Indians.

“We built a tin shed over an anthill,” Mengele said conversationally. “Of course, the shed is incredibly hot and uncomfortable, like an oven in the sun. But that is nothing. You see, my friend, this is the Amazona and these are fire ants. Any one of them is from two to five centimeters long and can give you a bite far more painful than any beesting. You will be bitten thousands and thousands of times. They never stop.

“You can scream all you like. There’s no one to hear you except the ants and the Indians. And they won’t mind or help you, I assure you. Usually after two or three hours on the Anthill, even a strong man goes completely and permanently insane. I may decide to keep you there for days. It’s up to you.” Mengele smiled and affectionately pinched Caine’s cheek. “Now get him out of here. He has taken up too much of my time already,” Mengele snapped to Rolf and Helga.

They forced Caine into a squatting duck walk, his hands and torso still tied to the chair. Rolf prodded him with the Winchester toward the door, Helga never taking her eyes off him. Now he knew how a cripple felt, he thought as he paused near the door, throwing a last glance back at Mengele, who smiled.

“Auf Wiedersehen, Herr Foster,” Mengele said.

“Heil Hitler, you creep,” Caine retorted with a bravado he was far from feeling, as Rolf kicked him and he fell heavily to the ground. Rolf kicked Caine to his feet and prodded him across the compound in his awkward squat, while the Indians watched his progress with silent, open stares.

A shadow crossed his face for a second and he glanced up at the blinding bluish-white glare of the tropic sun until he could make out the black speck of a large bird in the blue immensity of the sky. For a moment he wondered where Inger was. Then Rolf prodded him again with the gun and they resumed their slow pilgrimage across the compound to the small corrugated metal hut that stood at the outskirts of the institute on the leafy fringe of the jungle. All the way across, Caine had only a single thought in his mind: kill Mengele.

Helga unlocked the door to the shed and the heat from the dark interior almost knocked them down. It was as blistering as a sauna. As his eyes adjusted to the gloom, Caine could make out the anthill, a low sand-colored mound swarming with scurrying dark rust-brown insects about half the size of his little finger. A few Yagua Indians had come up to the door of the shed to watch what was going on. As the light from the doorway invaded the hut, the ants ran about in turmoil and Caine felt his flesh crawl. He had that same feeling of unreality as in a nightmare—that feeling of helplessness as the worst you can imagine is happening and you can’t do a thing to stop it.

“Oh, shit,” he muttered. With a curse Rolf shoved him into the shed and kicked his legs from under him. Caine fell heavily onto the anthill, landing on his side. The mound seemed to boil with a frenzy as the excited insects milled and ran about in confusion.

Rolf and Helga quickly tied the chair arms with hemp line to rusty hooks on opposite sides of the shed, slapping at the insects on their clothes as they worked. Then they hastily retreated to the door to watch. Helga took a spray can from her dress pocket and she and Rolf sprayed each other, while the Indians began to giggle at the strange antics of the white people.

Caine felt the first bite almost immediately on his calf and he screamed desperately. It was like being stabbed by a white-hot knife. His body began to twitch uncontrollably as tears rolled out of his eyes. There was another bite on his arm and another on his cheek and he screamed again. With horror he realized that he had never really known pain before. Not like this. His body thrashed spasmodically and he screamed again and again as thousands of insects swarmed over him, running and biting. It was like touching fire, like being burnt alive, each bite raising a bright red welt on his skin.

His screams echoed in the dark, stifling shed. His skin was crawling with maddened ants, and they were biting his thighs, back, and stomach. He felt his mind shrivel like burning paper as his body seemed to explode with agony. “Help me,” he begged. “Help me!”

For one horrible moment he opened his eyes and saw the Indians in the doorway. They were laughing and slapping each other on the back, almost falling down with laughter, as though they were watching a hilarious slapstick comedy. Rolf and Helga smiled grimly at each other as they regarded Caine, his body almost black with a moving surface of insects. He screamed desperately as an ant bit his eyelid. Then the doorway went dark as Helga slammed the door shut and locked it. Caine was alone in the crawling darkness.

The pain seemed to get worse and worse, his body quivering with hundreds of burning, stabbing wounds. In desperation he tried a Zen mind discipline, attempting to concentrate on each bite, to experience it into disappearing—but it was impossible. His screaming nerves were feeding in too much pain from too many points and the agony was unbearable.

He could feel his skin crackling and sizzling like meat on a grill, as the pain grew and grew and there was nothing left of him, no part of him that wasn’t pain. The frenzied ants crawled under his clothes and stampeded into every crevice of his body. They swarmed through his hair, into his ears and nostrils, across his screwed-tight eyelids, and into his mouth. His skin and clothes were black with the rustling, scorching mass of them, piercing him again and again with sharp, stinging jaws. He felt his mind going as the top of his head seemed to explode. Please stop, someone was whimpering over and over and he didn’t even know it was him. And some part of him broke and he lay there quivering like jelly, his tears and sweat soaking into the ground and everything was darkness and pain and crawling terror.

He was in hell, a noisy, burning hell filled with laughing, tormenting demons who devoured his living, screaming flesh with the mindless savagery of machines. He was in a black, fiery tunnel, the darkness growing to engulf him, and even as he welcomed it, the bliss of nothingness, of death, he knew that the world was a horror, a place of madness. And he became one with the insects devouring him and as the horror carried him to the crawling, cruel insect that he finally knew himself to be, a single thought filled his tiny insect brain, black with hate: kill Mengele. Kill Mengele. Kill Mengele.