The Tenth Witness

by Leonard Rosen

  Nagel landed at JFK two days before the first heart attack victim in the U.S., and left LAX the evening after the third. His visits to England and Portugal overlapped the heart attacks in London and Lisbon. I checked. He’s a cardiologist.”

  “How did you get his travel information?”

  “The police in Buenos Aires. They asked him to visit headquarters with his passport. Maybe you’ve heard. When the police ask you to do something in Argentina—”

  One of the men approaching me was Schmidt’s assistant, from the lab.

  “They photocopied, then faxed the passport. Who is Nagel? What are you not telling me, Henri? What is his relation to these dead men?”

  I didn’t know.

  I had already betrayed Anselm and Liesel by releasing the report to Laurent. I wouldn’t betray them again by tainting the Kraus name with a murder investigation, not until I knew where it led. I owed Liesel that much, but I was frightened and wanted to spill it all.

  “Come on,” I said, trying to sound casual. “A thousand businessmen overlapped those cities and countries on the same dates. It’s just that we don’t know who they are. Nagel’s schedule is no big deal. What does it prove?”

  Laurent waited long enough for me to appreciate the stupidity of what I’d said. “You asked me to investigate,” he said. “Without your list, no one could have linked these deaths. You’ve got a handful of sixty- and seventy-year-olds dropping dead in different cities around the world. What’s the big deal? I don’t know. But you’ve managed to link them somehow, and I’m left with several possibilities.”

  Schmidt’s man and his colleague stopped eight paces from me and waited.

  “Let’s dismiss the first,” said Laurent. “That all this is coincidence. Let’s not insult each other. The second possibility: you’re way over your head in something you don’t understand and can’t possibly manage.”

  The smaller of the two men lit a cigarette and waved. Why had Schmidt sent them? I had seen him not two days ago, on Terschelling and at the dive platform. While he was unusually solemn, he didn’t seem particularly angry with me or suspicious. Just out of sorts.

  But here were his men, and the sickening thought occurred to me that all this time, after the visit to the lab and his ham-handed effort to have me followed, he was following me: expertly now, after a first, obvious warning that he’d meant for me to see. Now his men had tracked me to Bruges and Salzgitter. They knew I visited Ulrich Bloch. They had reported back, and here they were.

  “Third possibility,” said Laurent. “Grossman, the one who’s dropped out of sight, may have killed the others and is now a fugitive. Fourth: Nagel killed them, and Grossman is running for his life. Fifth: You’ve orchestrated all of this and are using me to trap Nagel or Grossman. You don’t strike me as someone who’d hire an assassin, but I’ve seen stranger things. Where are you now?”

  Schmidt’s men stepped toward me.

  I spoke so that they could hear.

  “I’m at a rest stop near the Dortmund exit on the A2, traveling west. I’m driving a yellow Fiat rented yesterday from the GSX Agency in Harlingen. There are two large men in suits standing in my face, not looking very kind. I want you to tell them exactly who you are.”

  My voice was shaking. I handed the phone to the one from the lab. “It’s Interpol,” I said. “For you.”

  The rest stop was busy with late-night haulers and families on holiday. I waited at a table, and after a minute Schmidt’s men joined me. We were surrounded by truckers drinking coffee and children slurping ice cream and downing burgers.

  “Viktor would like to see you.”

  “Of course,” I said. “I’ll call him in the morning.”

  “Tonight.”

  I had no doubt they would have delivered me personally but for Laurent. “Is there anything in particular he wants to talk about?”

  “Call him.”

  They left, and ten minutes later I followed. I couldn’t find their car in the parking lot, and drove off thinking I was free of them. What I didn’t notice was a blue Saab, which followed me all the way to Ludwigsburg.

  thirty-six

  Gustav Plannik looked like a man freshly returned from vacation. He was tan and the puffy half moons beneath his eyes had receded. He might have lost weight and, if I wasn’t mistaken, he’d worked some boot black into his hair. It was a good day to drop in unannounced on the director.

  I had no choice, given Laurent’s news. If Nagel found Grossman, he would follow the other witnesses to the grave. If I found him first, he had a chance of surviving, and I had a chance of learning something, perhaps, about Isaac.

  I needed no reminder that Schmidt had someone at work for him inside the Zentrale Stelle. But I didn’t plan to stay long enough for an informer to place a call back to Munich and have it matter. I stopped in Stuttgart to empty the safe deposit box, then headed to the Archive. The risk was that Plannik himself was Schmidt’s man, though I doubted it. If I were wrong, so much the worse for me. I had little choice but to tell him everything.

  After a bit of negotiating at the main gate, I was buzzed into the compound and was met by the director himself, who’d walked halfway down a corridor to greet me. The bounce had returned to his step, and his seemed genuinely pleased by my visit.

  In his office he brushed aside a photo of two soldiers posing beside a pile of bodies. One had a hand on the shoulder of his comrade, who’d set a boot on the rump of a corpse as if it were a lion shot on safari.

  Surrounding us on the pale walls, still, were the organizational charts of the SS and Gestapo. Thirty years removed from Hell, Plannik chose to sit in the middle of it every morning at nine o’clock. Given the photos and sworn statements he confronted daily, Australia seemed about the right distance for a vacation.

  Plannik folded his hands. “So,” he said. “Still searching?”

  I told him I was, and that I had something for him.

  Outside the open windows I heard traffic on Schorndorfer Strasse. A utility crew was jackhammering a section of road, and the sound of concrete breaking carried into Plannik’s office like a bass-note concussion.

  The director leaned forward. “So, how can I help? More time in the Archive?”

  I reached into my bag for the list of witnesses, and he reached for his glasses.

  “Okay,” he said. “I recognize this list from your last visit, when I approved the documents you copied. These are the witnesses in the Kraus affair. One of them, Grossman, is circled. The others . . . they have lines drawn through them.”

  “May I close your door?”

  Five minutes later, having shared my suspicions, I concluded the only way I could. “I don’t know why they’re dying, Herr Plannik, but they are. I think it has something to do with this place.”

  “Something to do with Drütte.”

  I agreed. I produced the file I’d copied on the camp and opened to a group photograph of several SS guards. Ever since my return from Buenos Aires, I was often nagged by the thought that I had already encountered the men of the Edelweiss Society. I’d been busy and preoccupied, and let it slide until early that morning, before I returned to the Archive. Sleep was impossible in any event. I startled at every sound in the hotel corridor, imagining Schmidt’s men hunting me down. I thought to call Laurent and ask for police protection. But I held off, concluding for the second time in twelve hours that any talk with the authorities would lead back to Anselm, and I wasn’t prepared to betray him a second time.

  Nagel was entangled in the murders; but it was a stretch, pure conjecture, to suppose that Anselm was. I had no reason to contact Laurent, no theory at all on why the signatories to the affidavit were dying.

  Much of that night, I reviewed my notes and the photocopied materials before calling on Plannik. Using a large magnifying glass, for the first time I scrupulously studied the photos that hadn’t gone missing. It was then I recognized in the Drütte folder eight smoothly shaven faces looking into the middle dis
tance, dressed in the crisp uniform of the SS-Totenkopfverbände, the Death’s Head formations. The Edelweiss brotherhood had enjoyed a long history after all. These were not random expat Germans who happened to find each other in Buenos Aires after the war. They’d served together at the Reichswerke Hermann Göring.

  I explained all this as I positioned the photos for Plannik.

  “You opened files on three of them for suspected war crimes,” I said, “but the prosecutors couldn’t find them and the inquiries ended. They’re in Buenos Aires. I can give you their identities. I know where they meet.”

  Plannik reached for a magnifying glass, and I followed with my photo of Liesel with her uncles, including Eckehart Nagel. It felt wrong, unholy even, that she should be standing beside that man. When she gave me the photo, I’d promised not to cut the others out of it. So here she was, part of evidence delivered to a man who built dossiers against Nazis. The Zentrale Stelle was not where Liesel should have been, or where I wanted to bring her.

  Nagel’s bald, grinning skull was bad enough. But the image of a dour Franz Hofmann and a buoyant Viktor Schmidt was almost too much.

  “This man, I believe, is Menard Gottlieb, already investigated for war crimes.” I produced Gottlieb’s secondary file. “You’ll notice, no photo—though there had been one because here’s a caption on a blank page, and glue marks. It was either lost or someone stole it. The photo I just showed you was taken two months ago. Gottlieb’s now a physician in Buenos Aires.”

  I produced a final file, the thickest yet, on Reinhard Vogt.

  Plannik propped his glasses on his forehead. “You’ve been busy.”

  I hadn’t set out to be, not in just this way. I couldn’t begin to re-create for him the tangle that had brought me to his archive a second time. I would have been pleased never to see it again.

  “Reinhard Vogt ran the guards at Drütte,” I continued. “Your own investigation showed him to be the worst of the worst. I’m almost certain that today he splits his time between Munich and Buenos Aires. I can give you his new name and an address in both cities.”

  I thought long and hard before giving Liesel’s uncle and Friedrich’s grandfather to Plannik. I knew only too well the seriousness of making accusations that couldn’t be wished away if I were wrong.

  I had a compelling case. The Edelweiss Society met at his house. No one who wasn’t a guard at Drütte was a member of the society. Only Gottlieb’s and Vogt’s photos were missing from the Archive, removed almost certainly by the same strong, politically connected hand. I was positive about Gottlieb’s identity. That Viktor Schmidt was familiar with these men, that he was Kraus’s partner, was undeniable. He was Reinhard Vogt. I was sure.

  Plannik rubbed his eyes.

  “Who’s the woman?” he asked. “I’ve seen her before. I can’t place it.”

  I told him. “A philanthropist. You may have attended the same events.”

  “Or seen her in the magazines, I suppose. She is pretty.”

  He sat back in his chair. “I have no reason to doubt any of this,” he said, waving a hand at my presentation. “But let me spare you some trouble. Argentina doesn’t recognize our extradition requests, and my prosecutors no longer bring cases against Nazis who fled there. Many nations looked the other way in 1948 as they scoured the Nazi ranks, looking for useful talent. The Americans got their rocket scientists. The Argentines settled for smaller fish with the know-how to modernize their economy. It’s all on paper, the ratline that ran from the Red Cross and the Vatican right through to Juan Perón’s presidential mansion. He made thousands of travel documents available to Germans with uncertain backgrounds. Today, his successor generals won’t let us touch them.”

  “Gottlieb and Vogt travel,” I said. “You can arrest them outside Argentina.”

  “I could be interested,” said Plannik. “This is continually painful, you know.”

  “What is?”

  “What? It’s continually painful to me how nearly 10,000 Nazis fled to South America, at least half to Argentina, and we can’t touch them. Europe was in chaos after the war, with millions of refugees. People had nothing, no food, no papers. Imagine your village is bombed in the night. Are you going to search for your identification papers when the walls are falling in? They ran. In the concentration camps alone, the Allies liberated tens of thousands. Where were they to go? These people had nothing, and the International Committee of the Red Cross set up refugee camps and issued new papers.

  “I’m not saying the ICRC didn’t do good work for many, many people. But the evidence they required for proof of identity was laughable. All you had to do was arrive at a transit camp with three fellows who’d vouch for you. You made up a name, your friends said, ‘Yes, that’s him,’ and you were issued a piece of paper with a new name and an official Red Cross stamp. That’s how Franz Stangl, the commandant of Treblinka, escaped. In some cases, the ICRC knew it was giving passes to Nazis. The system was a disaster.

  “And the Catholic Church was a handmaiden to it all. They hated communists more than they hated Nazis. They also wanted to pump up their churches in South America with nice white Europeans, so they issued travel documents. Stangl, in fact, listed his address in Rome, at a bishop’s residence. It was more than a ratline. It was a highway leading from the Third Reich through Rome or the Red Cross, to Argentina. So, no, I’m not surprised that you found a cadre of SS guards from Drütte in Buenos Aires. I’m not surprised, and I can’t touch them.”

  He looked like a man who’d returned from a cafeteria line with rancid food, the best he would get all day.

  “These two,” he said. “Gottlieb and Vogt. You have definite information?”

  “I need your help, Herr Plannik. I don’t mean to be crass, but—”

  “Ah, here’s where the bargaining begins.”

  I felt ashamed.

  “There’s such a thing as trust in the world, young man. You’ve heard of it?”

  If he was Schmidt’s man, I was dead. If he wasn’t, I could still be dead, though my chances of living to see my children born improved. “Yes, I’m told there are people in the world who trust each other.”

  “Why are these men dying, Herr Poincaré?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Contact the police,” he said, turning the files back to me. “This office deals in past crimes, not present ones.”

  If he was turning me out, I had nothing to say. Grossman would be a dead man, and I’d lose Isaac to history. But Plannik made no move to the door. He reached for the photo he brushed aside when I arrived.

  “This one was taken at Babi Yar,” he said. “The SS swept in behind the Wehrmacht in Kiev in September 1941 and murdered 30,000 Jews—mostly women, children, and the elderly—over two days. They forced the victims to strip, then the SS machine-gunned them into a ravine. They covered the wounded and the dead with dirt and rocks. Later, they killed communists and gypsies at the ravine. A hundred thousand in all. Look at these two, mugging for the camera. We found them, you know. The worst of it is that their consciences are clear. They killed, they said, but it was wartime, and somehow they made it all fit into the constellation of their lives. That was then. No big deal.”

  He set the photo aside. “This is what happens to vacations. Three days back in the office, and I’m plunged back into the murk. Let me tell you something about numbers that haunt me. I know them by heart. Between May 1945 and this year, the Federal Republic of Germany has mounted 85,802 proceedings against those suspected of Nazi crimes. A full ninety percent, nearly 80,000 cases, led to nothing. The accused couldn’t be located, they died in the war, they’d been previously tried and acquitted by one of the military courts after the war, or they fled to South America or to the Arab countries. We knew tens of thousands were guilty, and we couldn’t touch them. Twelve men out of 85,000, twelve were sentenced to death. This itself is a crime.”

  The number hung in the room before it died, and for a moment Plannik wouldn’t meet m
y eyes. Watching him was like watching the time-lapse decay of a corpse, from life to bloat to festering flesh to bone. His spirits, so bright on greeting me, had gone to a dark place, and I realized that at a Nazi archive a man of conscience like Plannik could only come to grief: grief when he succeeded in bringing war criminals to justice, and grief again when he failed to do so. How could a man come to such work each morning?

  And woe to the rest of us if he didn’t!

  “I’ll help if I can,” he said, rising from his desk. “You’ve got me agitated, which is the proper frame of mind for a place like this. Why do you think I can find David Grossman if he doesn’t want to be found?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I can’t think of anyone else.”

  “Do you appreciate that we have millions of documents in this archive? All that I have would amount to a backwards search. If he just recently changed his name, what help would that be? Moreover, you represent no federal, state, or even local police authority. I’m hanging on the slenderest of threads.”

  I reached for a pen. “You may not be able to find Grossman’s new name and address. I understand that. Here are the current identities for Gottlieb and Vogt. I want you to get these men indicted. Wait for Gottlieb to leave South America and arrest him. Get Vogt now. He’s in Munich. You have the files to make these cases. Please, do this.”

  “It will take time,” he said. “The rule of law demands it.”

  I looked at him. “The same law that forced you to let thousands of Nazi criminals go free?”

  He shrugged. “We’d be no better than Nazis ourselves if we just rounded them up and hanged them. Though there are days . . .” He reached into a desk drawer for his business card. “Call me in a week, on my direct line. And leave these here.” He pointed to the files. “It may no longer be such a good idea for you to be carrying them. I’ll help if I can. If I don’t, it won’t be for lack of trying.”

  thirty-seven

  I left the Zentrale Stelle with a backwards glance, relieved to be on the far side of the thick prison walls. A guard buzzed me out through the steel doors, but not twenty paces later I wished I could have scrambled back inside. For I saw them: Schmidt’s men, one in a car, one on foot, closing in quickly. They had seen me, emerging from the one place on earth that Schmidt had warned me to avoid. I had parked a block away. I glanced over my shoulder and picked up my pace.