CHAPTER SIXTY

Abasto Transient Hotel, Ex Abasto District, Córdoba, Argentina, October 4, 1962, late morning

Erich Boehme was not in a good mood. He disliked flying, and he had just gotten off a bumpy ride which the stewardesses had euphemistically called “turbulence.” He did not like to hurry; he much preferred a careful Prussian plan; but he had rushed out of Bariloche so quickly that he had forgotten his toothbrush and camel hairbrush. Even after seventeen years, he remained very leery about leaving his very protective little Germanic enclave in Bariloche. He had vivid memories of the manhunts for his fellow SS officers during the past few years—especially Adolf Eichmann who was kidnapped in front of his house on Garibaldi Street in Buenos Aires in May 1960, and his personal friends, Ustasha Dinko Šakić, the former commandant of the Jasenovac concentration camp—Auschwitz of the Balkans—and Richard Walther Darré, who served as part of the Führer’s cabinet. Erich had nightmares of being arrested even after all of these years. And here he was in Córdoba among strangers, most of whom seemed to be in queues outside whorehouses. Who knew how many Mossad spies, Jewish Avengers, or other Nazi hunters might be all around him?

He muttered to himself that this French Nazi SS Gruppenführer und Generalleutnant der Waffen-SS Antoine Duvalier was nothing to him, certainly not important enough to put himself at risk. But the ODESSA had its stern code. He had benefitted and accepted a significant position in the organization—a lucrative one, he had to admit—so he was obligated. He had set the operation in motion to get this Duvalier person to Bariloche and to let him go on about his business. He sighed quietly as he knocked on the flimsy door to the horrible little hotel room.

He was unpleasantly surprised to find not one, but nine, men standing in the room. He frowned his Prussian officer frown and tried to determine which of the men was the general. It was easy, as it turned out, because all of rest of the men deferred to the tall patrician gray-haired man with the Frankish nose and hard hazel eyes.

Antoine said, “Hauptsturmführer Boehme, I presume?”

Erich stood more erect when he heard his rank given correctly, “Jawohl, mein Gruppenführer und Generalleutnant!”

He reflexively clicked his heels.

“May I present my comrades-in-arms: Waffen SS-Obersturmbannführer [Lieutenant Colonel] Serge Alain Rounsavall, Waffen SS-Hauptsturmführer [Head Company Unit Storm Leader] Jérôme Christophe Mailhot, Waffen SS-Sturmbannführer [Senior Battalion Leader], Hugues Beauchamp, Berthold Küppers, Rolf Kohns, Clause Fischer, Willibald Movius, und Gerhard Jungermann. These fine Third Reich soldiers are all that is left of what we like to call ourselves—the Gebirsjägers.”

That broke the ice. Even stolid and wary Erich managed a semblance of a laugh at the almost forgotten reference to the light infantry mountain troops formed in Norway and especially pertinent to the present group of Frenchmen for the unit’s heroics in the battles in the Vosges region of France. All of the men gave each other a well-executed Hitlergrüss.

“What am I to do with nine of you when I was only warned to expect one?”

It was rhetorical, but Antoine answered anyway, “Help us get to Bariloche; so, we can make you rich. We are presently in need, and will always be in your debt, Hauptsturmführer. However, we do not come as beggars to the feast. We have excellent resources. In fact, once we are settled, I will ask that you bring major investors of our same persuasion; and we will all begin to build a financial empire. You will benefit without making a financial contribution; your expertise will suffice. Others will profit beyond their wildest dreams. We have already done what we need to do in Bariloche to get started and have full confidence that our financial infusion will sweep away any lingering doubts on anyone’s part.”

“But, of course, Herr General. I hope to help you all to a rapid and successful assimilation into Argentinian life. I have found the country to be most accommodating and cordial.”

§§§§§§

Headquarters, Metropolitan Police Service/New Scotland Yard, Criminal Investigation Department [CID], Victoria Embankment, London, the same day

DIs Angela Snowden and Anthony Bourden-Clift reported to DCI Lincoln Crandall-White and Superintendent Guy Mutz, chief of the INTERPOL, in the western suburb of St. Cloud in Paris on their day’s investigation into the little known affairs of two men presumed to be the mass murderers of World War II senior Allied officers.

Angela was—as usual—terse: “We learned two things. The first is that the most important of the killers—presumably the ring leaders—were the man in the Texas hospital, Randolph Bellwether, and Antoine Duvalier aka Laird Eagen. Duvalier was traced to Moscow on information from his office and with the good work of our tech department. However, he has disappeared off the face of the earth it would appear. The second thing we learned is that there are several potential confederates. We found a list of names, all presumably aliases, but still perhaps in use.”

She passed out a printed Xerox copy of the list they found. It included the names of eleven men: Laird Eagen, Randolph Bellwether, Pedro T. Rodriguez, Gonzalez Martin Sanchez, Dominico Lobos, Antonio de Castro, Guglielmo Pardini, Humberto Garrido, Ismael García-Iglesias, Augustín Ruiz-Rubalcaba, and José María Zapatero.

“Of these, we only know the original identity of the first two. Laird Eagen is the putative leader of the group—correctly, Antoine Duvalier—and Randolph Bellwether is the former Michaele Dupont who is now lying in a Texas hospital under the remarkably improbable alias of Dennis Cunningham Lord Downfort. He has given a full confession and has been granted immunity. The officers at the hospital are under the impression that he is suffering from an advanced case of tuberculosis and is not long for this world. Our office is attempting to get more old French and German army records about the Nazi SS unit they all served in during the war—the 33^rd Waffen-Grenadier

Division, better known as the Charlemagne Division—and the Russian and Allied POW records. It is slow going. INTERPOL, under Superintendent Mutz and DCS Dentremont, we have a liason with Soviet law enforcement, and are working directly with a Moscow police detective, Lieutenant of Militsiya Trushin Vasilyovich Stepanovich. He has connections to the KGB which—miracle of miracles—is willing to open its files on the Siberian POW camps to help trace the activities of the German SS officer corps internees after their release in 1956. It is a significant understatement to observe that the KGB has a very efficient record system and ability to find people it wants to find.

“The second part of the answer to your question is something Chief Superintendent Dentremont suggested. Maybe the perpetrators are all old Nazi SS officers who now recognize that they can no longer live in Europe. Like most good Nazis, they may have been secreted out of Europe by the ODESSA and are now living comfortably in Argentina, the US, or even Asia. SS fugitives have the help of the Vatican, the Swiss, and the CIA. INTERPOL sources are investigating all of those helpers. Because the move must have been quite recent, we are concentrating on Argentina first. The Mossad has a very thorough and intense interest in the South American Nazi havens, and they have agreed to help. We have begun to work with Argentine police who are willing to help to a degree because an influential citizen of theirs was one of the murder victims.

Our liason agent in Argentina is Teniente Policía de la Provincia de Policía de Córdoba, PPC José Emanuel de Corsos. INTERPOL has an agent in Córdoba as we speak. We have spread a wide net and are beginning to close it down bit by bit as we obtain more information. We have a set of Spanish names; so, Argentina is where the net will tighten the quickest and the tightest.”

“Angela, tell us about the ongoing efforts with organized crime. We are getting hints that Eagan and Bellwether have a role in that world,” said Superintendent Mutz.

“We have only known about that connection for a little while; so, everything is preliminary. I don’t have to tell you that the mafia or its counterparts is a very close-mouthed bunch. They tend to respond only to serious threats to their ongoing enterprises or to promises of illicit profiteering. We are employing both tactics at the same time. Our INTERPOL and regular law enforcement agencies all over the free world are putting the screws on organized criminals, starting with the mid-level gangsters who usually know the most and do the most. As with the other efforts, we are concentrating on Argentina to begin with. One of the murders occurred in France, and there is a Corsican connection to that murder and to Argentine organized crime. Benedettu Paganucci and his two underlings, Dominic Rizzuto and Tony Lagomarsino, have a lucrative confidential informant relationship with Enquêteur] Grégoire Laurent De Vincent and Research Unit Officer-Assistant to Inspector De Vincent Gendarmerie Lieutenant Sylvain Piétri.

“Our preliminary information from those sources indicates that the organized crime families are beginning to doubt the effectiveness of the so-called Gebirgsjägers and are losing their fear of them. The profit motive is beginning to take over. Paganucci has given some good intel into the underbelly of Argentine society—who can be bought, who does the buying, and where the skeletons are buried. Most importantly, he seems to know where the criminal money is being spent to branch into legitimate businesses. All of that information comes at a cost; and INTERPOL is working with the French, the Americans, and the Israelis to pay the cost. We are in hopes that the information coming in is good, because Paganucci, Rizzuto, and Lagomarsino are going to be rich men from the payments for the dribs and drabs of information they are supplying. We’ll see whether or not the cost is worth it.

“We know that there are Catholic, organized crime, and ODESSA, tentacles intertwined into certain Swiss financial organizations. There is a ‘fixer’ by the name of François Caussidière, an enthusiastic Swiss Nazi collaborator before and after the war. He has connections with Paganucci, the Vatican, and the UBS [Union Bank of Switzerland] in Geneva. He is a pure mercenary and can be bought for the right price; but we have to tread lightly since his sympathies lie with the Nazis. Our tack is to convince him that the Gebirgsjägers’ day is done. We are trying to squeeze him to find out any financial information about, or the whereabouts of, the still-surviving Gebirgsjägers. Not much in the way of results yet, but the wily fox seems to be negotiating rather than outright refusing. It is an early work in progress, I’m afraid.”