Ben closed his eyes, inhaled deeply, and shook his head. “That’s preposterous. Jews weren’t members of the SS. The document’s obviously a forgery.”
“Believe me,” Peter said quietly. “I’ve had plenty of time to study this document. It’s no forgery.”
“But then …”
“In April of 1945, our father was supposedly in Dachau, remember? Liberated by the U.S. Seventh Army at the end of April ’45?”
“I don’t remember the exact timing—is that right?”
“You were never very curious about Dad’s background, were you?”
“Not really, no,” Ben admitted.
Peter smiled grimly. “That’s probably the way he preferred it. And lucky for you that you weren’t. It’s nice to live in a state of innocence. Believing all the lies. The story, the legend Dad created about the Holocaust survivor who came to America with ten bucks in his pocket and built a financial empire. Became a great philanthropist.” He shook his head, snorted. “What a fraud he is. What a myth he created.” With a sneer he added: “The great man.”
Ben’s heart began to pound slowly. Dad was difficult to get along with; his enemies called him ruthless. But a fraud?
“Max Hartman was a member of the Schutzstaffel,” Peter repeated. “The SS, okay? File it under ‘strange but true.’” Peter was so damned earnest, so convincing, and Ben never knew him to lie to his face. But this was so patently false! He wanted to scream, Stop it!
“What kind of corporation was it?”
Peter shook his head. “Possibly a front, a sort of dummy corporation, established with millions and millions of dollars in assets pooled by the principals.”
“For what? To what end?”
“That I don’t know, and the document doesn’t specify.”
“Where is this document?”
“I’ve got it hidden away safely, don’t worry. This corporation, headquartered in Zurich, Switzerland, in early April 1945, was called Sigma AG.”
“And did you tell Dad you’d found this?”
Peter nodded and took his first sip of coffee. “I called him, read it aloud to him, asked him about it. He blew up, as I knew he would. Claimed the thing was a fake, like you did—as I knew he would. Got angry, defensive. Started shouting, screaming. How could I believe such slander? With all he’d been through, blah blah blah, how could I possibly believe such a lie? That sort of thing. I never expected to get anything out of him, but I wanted to gauge his reaction. So I started asking around. Looking into corporate records in Geneva, in Zurich. Trying to find out whatever happened to this firm. And then I was almost killed. Twice. The first time it was a ‘car accident,’ a near miss. A car swerving onto the pavement on the Limmatquai, where I was walking. The second time it was a ‘mugging’ on Niederdorfstrasse that was no mugging. I managed to escape both times, but then I was warned. If I persisted in digging around in things that were none of my business, next time I’d be killed. No more near misses. I was to hand over all pertinent documents. And if any of the details about this corporation got out, I’d be dead, along with everyone in our family. So don’t think about phoning in a tip to the newspapers, they said. Dad I didn’t care about, obviously. It was you and Mom I was protecting.”
That sounded so much like Peter—he was no less fierce a protector of their mother than Ben had been. And he was levelheaded, not at all prone to paranoia. He had to be telling the truth.
“But why were they so concerned about what you knew?” Ben persisted. “Look at it objectively. A corporation was set up more than half a century ago. So what? Why the secrecy now?”
“We’re talking about a joint partnership across enemy lines. We’re talking about the risk of public exposure, and thus public disgrace, of some of the most powerful, revered figures of our time. But that’s the least of it. Consider the nature of the enterprise. Mammoth corporations, Allied and Axis alike, establishing a joint entity in order to enrich all of them. Germany was blockaded at the time, but then, capital doesn’t respect national boundaries, does it? Some people would call it trading with the enemy. Who knows what international laws might have been violated? What if there was some chance that the assets could be frozen
or confiscated? There’s no way of gauging the magnitude of those assets. A lot can happen in half a century. We could be talking about staggering sums of money. And even the Swiss have been known to waive the secrecy laws under international pressure. Obviously, some people came to the conclusion that I might just know enough to jeopardize their cozy arrangement.”
“‘Some people’? Who was it who threatened you?”
Peter sighed. “Again, I wish I knew.”
“Come on, Peter, if there’s anyone else alive who was involved in setting up this corporation, they’d have to be ancient.”
“Sure, most of the ones who were in high positions are gone. But some are still around, believe me. And some aren’t all that old—in their seventies, even. If only two or three guys on the board of this company are still alive, they may be sitting on a fortune. And who knows who their successors might be? It’s obvious they’ve got enough money to keep their secret buried, you know? By any means necessary.”
“So you decided to disappear.”
“They knew way too much about me. My daily schedule, the places I went, my unlisted home phone number, names and locations of family members. Financial, credit information. They were making a point, loud and clear, that they had extensive resources. So I made a decision, Benno. I had to die. They’d left me no other choice.”
“No other choice? You could have given them their stupid document, agreed to their demands—moved on as if you’d never found the thing.”
Peter grunted. “That’s like trying to unring a bell, put the toothpaste back in the tube—can’t be done. They were never going to let me live, now that I knew what I knew.”
“So what was the purpose of the warning?”
“Keep me quiet while they determined how much I knew, whether I’d told anyone. Until they got rid of me.”
Ben could hear the old woman moving about in the other room, the floorboards squeaking. After a while, he said, “How’d you do it, Peter? The death, I mean. It can’t have been easy.”
“It wasn’t.” Peter leaned back in his chair, resting the back of his head against the window. “I couldn’t have done it without Liesl.”
“Your girlfriend.”
“Liesl’s a wonderful, remarkable woman. My lover, my best friend. Ah, Ben, I never thought I’d be so lucky as to find someone like this. I hope
someday you find someone even half as terrific as her. It was her idea, really. I’d have never been able to put the plan together. She agreed I had to disappear, and she insisted it had to be done right.”
“But the dental records—I mean, Christ, Peter, they identified your body positively, beyond any doubt.”
Peter shook his head. “They matched the body’s teeth with the dental records back home in Westchester, the assumption being that those were really my dental X-rays in Dr. Merrill’s office.”
Ben shook his head, perplexed. “Whose body … ?”
“Liesl got the idea from the prank that the medical students at the University of Zurich pull almost every year at the end of the spring semester. Some joker always steals the cadaver from the gross anatomy class. It’s sort of a morbid springtime ritual, medical-student humor—one day their cadaver just disappears. It’s always reclaimed, sort of ransomed. Instead, she arranged to have an unclaimed body stolen from the hospital morgue. Then it was a simple matter to pull the dead guy’s medical records, including dental records—this is Switzerland, everyone’s documented.”
Ben smiled in spite of himself. “But to switch the X-rays … ?”
“Let’s just say I hired someone to do a simple, low-risk breaking-and-entering job. Dr. Merrill’s office isn’t exactly Fort Knox. One pair of films was substituted for another. No big deal. When the police came to him requesting my dental records, they got the substituted ones.”
“And the plane crash?”
Peter explained, leaving out no significant detail.
Ben watched him as he spoke. Peter had always been soft-spoken, quiet, the deliberate, thoughtful one. But you’d never call him calculating or devious, and deviousness was what this plan had required. How frightened he must have been.
“A few weeks earlier, Liesl applied for a position at a small hospital in the canton of St. Gallen. Of course they were delighted to hire her—they needed a pediatrician. She found us a small cabin in the countryside, in the woods by a lake, and I joined her. I posed as her Canadian husband, a writer working on a book. All the while I maintained a network of contacts, my antennae.”
“People who knew you were alive—that must have been risky.”
“Trusted people who knew I was alive. Liesl’s cousin is an attorney in Zurich. He was our listening post, our eyes and ears. She trusts him
completely, and therefore so do I. An attorney with multiple international interests has his contacts in the police, in the banking community, among private investigators. Yesterday he learned about the bloodbath at the Bahnhofplatz, about a foreigner who was brought in for questioning. But as soon as Dieter had told me about the murder attempt on you, I realized what had happened. They, the inheritors, whoever on that list is still around, have probably always been suspicious that my death was faked. They’ve always been on the alert—either for my reappearance in Switzerland, or else for some sign that you were carrying on my investigations. I know for a fact that they’ve got a lot of Swiss policemen in their pocket, a bounty on my head. They practically own half the cops. I assume the bank where you had a meeting that morning, UBS, was the tripwire. So I had to come out of hiding to warn you.”
Peter risked his life for me, Ben thought. He felt the sting of tears coming to his eyes. Then he remembered Jimmy Cavanaugh, the man who wasn’t there. Hurriedly, he filled Peter in on the mystery.
“Incredible,” Peter said, and he took on a faraway look.
“It’s like they’re trying to gaslight me. You do remember Jimmy Cavanaugh?”
“Of course. He spent Christmas with us at Bedford a couple of times. I liked the guy, too.”
“What could he have had to do with the Corporation? Did they turn him, somehow, make every trace of his existence disappear at some point?”
“No,” Peter said, “you’re missing the point. Howie Rubin must have been right. There is no Jimmy Cavanaugh and there never was.” He began speaking more quickly. “In a twisted way, there’s a logic to this. Jimmy Cavanaugh—let’s call him that, whatever his real name was—was never turned. He was working for them all along. Here’s a kid who’s older than the rest of the class, lives off campus, and before you know it, he’s your asshole buddy. Don’t you see, Benno? That was the plan. For whatever reason, they must have decided it was important to keep a close eye on you at that point. It was a matter of taking precautions.”
“You’re saying Cavanaugh was … assigned to me!”
“And probably somebody was assigned to me, too. Our dad was one of the principals. Did we learn something that might jeopardize the organization? Were we going to be a threat to them in some way? Did they need to worry about us? Maybe they needed to be sure. Until you went
off to your ghetto and I went off to Africa—basically put ourselves out to pasture, as far as they were concerned.”
Ben’s mind reeled, and all this talk of they only made matters worse.
“Doesn’t it make sense for a group of industrialists to bring in an operative, a killer, whose highly specific qualifications included knowing you by sight?”
“Hell, Peter, I suppose …”
“You suppose? Benno, if you think about it—”
The sound of shattering glass.
Ben gasped, saw the jagged hole that suddenly appeared in the windowpane. Peter seemed to bow his head, leaning forward deliberately onto the table in an oddly comic gesture, as if kowtowing exaggeratedly, genuflecting, giving a courtly salaam. In that same freeze-frame moment it was the expulsion of breath, the throaty haaah, that made no sense, until Ben saw the obscene crimson exit wound in the middle of Peter’s forehead, the flecks of gray tissue and splinters of white bone fragments that sprayed over the table, on the plates and silverware.
“Oh, my God!” Ben keened. “Oh, my God. Oh, my God.” He toppled backward in his chair, tumbling to the floor, his head slamming against the hard oak floorboards. “No,” he moaned, barely aware of the volley of silenced gunfire exploding everywhere in the small dining room. “Oh no. Oh, my God.” He was frozen, paralyzed by terror and shock and disbelief, so unfathomable was the horror in front of him, until some primitive signal of self-preservation emerged from deep within his hindbrain, propelling him to his feet.
Now he looked out of the shattered window, saw nothing but blackness, and then, illuminated by a muzzle flash preceding another gunshot, there was a face. The image lasted no longer than a split second, but it was emblazoned indelibly in his mind. The assassin’s eyes were dark and deep-set, his face pale and unlined, the skin almost tight.
Ben leaped across the small dining room as, behind him, another windowpane shattered, another bullet pitted the plaster in the wall not a foot away.
The assassin was aiming at him now, that was clear. Or was it? Was he still aiming at Peter, this shot just wildly astray? Had he seen him, too? Did he see him?
As if in answer to his unspoken question, a bullet splintered the doorframe just inches from his head as he vaulted through it into the dark
corridor that connected the dining room to the entrance area. From ahead, in the foyer, came a female shout, presumably the innkeeper yelling in anger or in fear; suddenly she loomed directly in his path, arms flailing.
He knocked her aside as he bounded into the foyer. The innkeeper squawked in protest.
He was barely thinking now, he was moving fast and frantically, dazed and numb and robotic, not having to think about what had just happened, not thinking about anything now except survival.
His eyes adjusting to the near-darkness—a small lamp in the far corner of the room, behind the reception counter, cast a tiny circle of light—he saw there was only the front door and another hallway that led to the guests’ rooms.
A narrow staircase off the hallway, visible from here, led to more rooms upstairs. There was no window in the room he was now standing in, which meant it was a safe haven from incoming bullets, at least for a few seconds.
On the other hand, the lack of a window meant he was unable to see whether the shooter had run around to the front of the building. Peter’s killer would have realized he had missed one of his targets, and so he’d have run either to the front or the back of the inn. Front entrance or back, unless there were others Ben didn’t know about. That gave Ben a fifty-fifty chance of making it out through the front door.
Fifty-fifty.
Ben didn’t like the odds.
And what if there were more than one of them?
If there were several, they’d have fanned out to stake out all entrances, all exits from the building. Either way, one or several killers out there, escaping through the front or the back was out of the question.
A scream issued from the dining room: the innkeeper had no doubt just discovered the sickening carnage.
Welcome to my world, madame.
From the floor above Ben could hear the heavy tread of footsteps. Other guests awakening.
Other guests: How many were staying here?
He rushed toward the front door, turned the heavy steel safety lock.
Rapid footfalls thundered from the staircase on the other side of the room, then a hulking figure of a fat man appeared at the foot of the stairs. He was wearing a blue bathrobe, looking as if it had been hastily
thrown on. The man’s face was fearful. “Was geht hier vor?” he cried.
“Call the police,” Ben yelled back in English. “Polizei—telephone!” He pointed at the phone behind the reception desk.
“The police? What—is someone hurt?”
“Telephone!” Ben repeated angrily. “Go! Someone’s been killed!”
Someone’s been killed.
The fat man lurched forward clumsily as if he’d been pushed. He rushed to the reception desk, picked up the telephone, listened for a brief moment, then dialed.
The fat man was now speaking in German, loudly and quickly.
Where was the gunman—gunmen?—now? He’d burst inside and look for him and do to him what he’d done to Peter. There were other guests here, others who would get in the way … but that wouldn’t stop him, would it? He remembered the massacre in the Zurich arcade.
The fat Swiss hung up the phone. “Sie sind unterwegs,” he said. “Police—is coming.”
“How far away are they?”
The man looked at him for a moment, then understood. “Just down the road,” he said. “Very near. What happened—who was killed?”
“No one you know.”
Again Ben pointed, this time toward the dining room, but the woman innkeeper burst through the doorway, shrieking, “Er ist tot! Sie haben ihn erschossen! Dieser Mann dort draussen—Dein Bruder, er wurde ermordet!” Somehow she’d concluded that Ben had killed his own brother. Insanity.
Ben felt his stomach turn over. He’d been in a haze, a deadened stupor, and suddenly the reality of it, the horror, was sinking in. The guest shouted something at her. Ben ran toward the hall that he guessed led to the rear of the house.
The woman was screaming at his back, but Ben kept running. The high caterwauling of a police siren joined the innkeeper’s shrill hysteria, then grew louder as the police car came closer. It sounded like a single siren, a single car. But that was enough.
Stay or go?
They own half the cops, Peter had said.
He ran down the hall, turned sharply to the right, then saw a small painted wooden door. He flung it open: wooden shelves piled with linens,
The siren grew louder, now accompanied by the crunch of a car’s wheels on gravel. The police were arriving at the front of the building.
Ben ran toward another wooden doorway at the end of the hall. A small louvered window next to it told him the door led to the outside. He turned the knob and pulled at the door. It stuck; he pulled again, harder, and this time it yielded and the door came open.
The area outside had to be safe by now: the police sirens would have scared the gunmen away. No one would be lurking in the dense woods back here for fear of getting caught. He leaped forward into the underbrush, his foot snagging on a vine, knocking him painfully to the ground.
Christ! he thought. Must hurry. The police had to be avoided at all costs. They own half the cops. He scrambled to his feet, lunged forward into the pitch-black.
The siren had gone silent, but now there were shouts, both female and male, the crunch of feet on the gravel. Running forward, he pushed branches away from his face, but still one scraped him, just missing an eye. He kept going, not slowing for a second, turning this way, juking that, through the close vegetation, the narrow tunnels, under canopies formed by interlaced branches. Something tore at his pants. His hands were scraped and bloodied. But he kept plowing through the trees, machinelike, unthinking, until he came to the hidden clearing where Peter’s truck was still parked.
He opened the driver’s side door—unlocked, thank God—and of course there was no key in the ignition. He felt under the floor mat. Nothing. Under the seat. Nothing.
Panic overcame him. He inhaled sharply several times to try to calm himself. Of course, he thought. I’ve forgotten what I know.
He reached into the mess of wires beneath the dash, pulled them out to inspect the tangle by the weak overhead light. Hot-wiring, their beloved family groundskeeper, Arnie, had told him and Peter one summer morning. This is a skill you may never have a use for. But if you do, you’ll sure be glad you got it.
In a few moments he’d paired the two wires, and the ignition turned over, roared to life. Slamming the gearshift into reverse, he backed out of the clearing onto the dark road. No headlights in either direction. He shifted into drive; the old truck balked, but then lurched ahead, surging down the deserted highway.