by Ira Levin
“It wasn’t your decision to make,” the colonel said. “You put six of our men into much more danger than we bargained for.”
“And by doing so preserved your very large investment, not to mention the destiny of the race.” Mengele got up and went to the desk, took a cigarette from a brass cup of them. “Anyway, it’s water over the dam,” he said.
The colonel sipped coffee, looking at Mengele’s back. He lowered his cup and said, “Rudel wanted me to call the men in today.”
Mengele turned, took the lighted cigarette from his lips. “I don’t believe that,” he said.
The colonel nodded. “He takes his responsibilities as an officer very seriously.”
“He has responsibilities as an Aryan!”
“True, but he’s never been as sure as the rest of us that the project will work; you know that, Josef. Good Lord, the selling job we had to do!”
Mengele stood silently—hostile, waiting.
“I told him pretty much what you just told me,” the colonel said. “If the men check in and everything’s all right, then Liebermann hasn’t been able to stir anything up, so why not leave them out? He finally agreed. But Liebermann’s going to be watched from now on—Mundt’s taking care of it—and if there’s any sign that he is stirring anything up, then a decision will have to be made: either to kill him, which might only stir things up further, or to bring the men in.”
Mengele said, “Do that and you throw everything down the drain. Everything I achieved. All the money you spent on staff and equipment and arranging the placements. How can he even think of it? I’d send out six more men if these were caught. And six more. And six more!”
“I agree, Josef, I agree,” the colonel soothed. “And I’d like very much for you to have a voice in the decision if it ever actually has to be made. A strong voice. But if Rudel learns now that you let the men leave knowing Liebermann was alerted—he’ll cut you out of the operation completely. You won’t even get the monthly reports. So I’d rather not tell him. But before I can do that I have to have an assurance from you that you won’t…make any more solo decisions.”
“About what? There are no more decisions to be made, except to keep the men out and working.”
The colonel smiled. “I wouldn’t put it past you to hop on a plane and go after Liebermann yourself.”
Mengele drew at his cigarette. “Don’t be ridiculous,” he said. “You know I wouldn’t dare go to Europe.” He turned to the desk and tapped ash into a tray.
“Do I have your assurance,” the colonel asked, “that you won’t do anything affecting the operation without checking with the Organization?”
“Of course you do,” Mengele said. “Absolutely.”
“Then I’ll tell Rudel it’s a mystery how Liebermann got wind of things.”
Mengele shook his head incredulously. “I cannot believe,” he said, “that that old fool—Rudel, I mean, not Liebermann—would write off so much money, and the Aryan destiny along with it, out of concern for the safety of six ordinary men.”
“The money was only a fraction of what we have,” the colonel said. “We exaggerated its importance to keep you cost-conscious. As for the Aryan destiny, well, as I said, he’s never fully believed the project will work. I think it smacks a little of magic or witchcraft to him; he’s hardly a scientific-minded man.”
“You’d be insane to let him have the final say.”
“We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it,” the colonel said. “If we come to it. Let’s hope Liebermann stops talking even to students, and you get to make ninety-four checks on this beautiful chart.” He stood up. “Walk me to the plane.” He thrust out a robot-stiff leg and stumped in slow motion, singing: “‘Here comes the bride’—step!—‘All dressed in white’—step! What a nuisance! I’m for simple weddings, aren’t you? But try telling that to a woman.”
Mengele walked him to the plane, waved him into the sky, and went back into the house. His lunch was waiting in the dining room, so he ate it, and then scrubbed his hands at the lab sink and went into the study. He gave the can of enamel a good shaking and used the screwdriver to pry its lid off. He put on his glasses, and holding the can of bright red and the new thin brush, mounted the stepladder.
He dipped the bristles, pared them against the can’s rim, took a steadying breath, and brought the red-tipped brush to the box next to Döring—Deutschland—16/10/74.
The check came out quite nicely: gleaming red on white, straight-edged and jaunty-looking.
He touched it up a bit and painted a similar check in the box of Horve—Dänemark—18/10/74.
And Guthrie—V.St.A.—19/10/74.
He got down off the stepladder, backed away, and studied the three checks over his glasses.
Yes, they would do.
He climbed back up on the stepladder and painted checks in the boxes of Runsten—Schweden—22/10/74, and Rausenberger—Deutschland—22/10/74, and Goodwood—England—24/10/74, and Oste—Holland—27/10/74.
He got back down and took another look.
Very nice. Seven red checks.
But hardly any pleasure at all.
Damn Rudel! Damn Seibert! Damn Liebermann! Damn everybody!
Pandemonium, that was what he came back to. Glanzer the landlord, who would have made a marvelous anti-Semite if not for the fact that he was Jewish, shouted accusations at a trembling little Esther while Max and a gawky young woman Liebermann had never seen before pushed at Lili’s desk, forcing it toward the corner by the bedroom door. A musical pinging and plopping came from pots and bowls that sat everywhere catching water-drops that fell from dark wetnesses all over the ceiling. A piece of crockery smashed in the kitchen—“Oh rats!” (that was Lili in there)—and the phone rang. “Aha!” Glanzer cried, turning, pointing. “Now comes the big world figure who doesn’t care about the average man’s property. Don’t put that suitcase down, the floor won’t take it!”
“Welcome home,” Max said, hauling at an end of the desk.
Liebermann put his suitcase down, and his briefcase. He had expected, because it was Sunday morning, a quiet, empty apartment. “What happened?” he asked.
“What happened?” Glanzer squeezed toward him between the backs of two desks, his bulbous face fire-red. “I’ll tell you what happened! We had a flood upstairs, that’s what happened! You overload the floor, you put strain on the pipes! So they break! You think they can take this load you’ve got here?”
“The pipes upstairs break and I’m to blame?”
“Everything’s connected!” Glanzer shouted. “Strain is transmitted! The whole house’ll come down because of the overloading you’ve got here!”
“Yakov?” Esther held out the phone with a hand on its mouthpiece. “A man named von Palmen, in Mannheim. He called last week.” A wisp of gray hair stuck out from under the side of her red-brown wig.
“Get the number, I’ll call him back.”
“I just broke the pink bowl,” Lili said, standing mournfully in the kitchen doorway. “Hannah’s favorite.”
“Out!” Glanzer shouted, on top of Liebermann, spewing bad breath. “All these desks go out! This is an apartment house not an office building! And the file cabinets too, out!”
“You go out!” Liebermann shouted just as loud—the best way to deal with Glanzer, he had found. “Go fix your rotten plumbing! This is my furniture, desks and file cabinets! Does it say in the lease only tables and chairs?”
“You’ll find out in court what it says in the lease!”
“You’ll find out what you pay for this water damage! Get out!” Liebermann thrust a finger toward the door.
Glanzer blinked. He looked at the floor beside him as if hearing something, looked at Liebermann worriedly, nodded. “You bet I’m getting out,” he whispered. “Before it happens.” He tiptoed his bulk toward the open door. “My life is more precious to me than my property.” He tiptoed out, and drew the door cautiously closed.
Liebermann stamped on the f
loor and called, “I’m stamping on the floor, Glanzer!”
From a distance came “Fall through!”
“Yakov, don’t,” Max said, touching Liebermann’s arm. “We’re liable to.”
Liebermann turned. He looked around, and up, and let out a woeful “Ei, yei, yei” and bit his lower lip.
Esther, stretching to wipe at the top of a file cabinet, said, “We caught it early, it’s not that bad. Thank God I baked this morning. I brought over a nut cake. When I saw what was doing I called Max and Lili. It’s just in here and the kitchen, not the other rooms.”
Max introduced the gawky young woman, who had beautiful large gray eyes; she was his and Lili’s niece Alix from Brighton, England, staying with them on her vacation. Liebermann shook her hand and thanked her for helping, and took his coat off and joined in the work.
They wiped the desks and furniture, replaced full pots and bowls with emptied ones, held towel-covered brooms to the wet places in the ceiling.
Then, sitting at desks and the accessible half of the sofa, they had coffee and cake. The leaks had dwindled to half a dozen slow trickles. Liebermann talked about the trip a little, about old friends he had visited, changes he had seen. Alix, in halting German, answered questions from Esther about her work as a textile designer.
“A lot of contributions, Yakov,” Max reported, nodding his gray head solemnly.
Lili said, “Always after the Holy Days.”
“But more this year than last, darling,” Max said, and to Liebermann: “People know about the bank.”
Liebermann nodded and looked to Esther. “Did anything come for me from Reuters? Reports? Clippings?”
“There’s a Reuters envelope,” Esther said, “a big one. But it says Personal.”
“Reports?” Max asked.
“I spoke to Sydney Beynon before I left. About the Koehler boy’s story. There wasn’t anything about him, was there?”
They shook their heads.
Esther, rising with her cup and saucer on her plate, said, “It can’t be true, it’s too crazy.” She moved to Max’s desk. Lili rose, gathering her plates, but Esther said, “Leave everything, I’ll clean up. You go show Alix the sights.”
Liebermann thanked Max and Lili and Alix as they put on their coats. He kissed Lili, shook hands with Alix and wished her a happy vacation, patted Max on the back. When he had closed the door after them, he picked up his suitcase and carried it into the bedroom.
He went to the bathroom, took his twelve-o’clock pills, hung his other suit in the closet, and exchanged his jacket for his sweater and his shoes for his slippers. With his glasses in his hand he went back into the living room, picked up his briefcase, and went around and between desks toward the French doors to the dining room.
Esther said from the kitchen doorway, “I’ll stick around and keep an eye on the dripping. Do you want me to get that man in Mannheim?”
“Later,” Liebermann said, and went into the dining room—his office now.
The desk was heaped with magazines and stacks of opened letters. He put the briefcase down, switched the lamp on, put on his glasses; moved a stack of letters from several large envelopes beneath. He found the gray Reuters envelope, hand-addressed, bulkily full. So many?
Sitting, he cleared everything else out of the way, pushed piles of mail to the sides and back of the desk. Hannah’s picture turned; magazines slapped the floor.
He unwound the envelope’s string fastener and tore the taped flap open. Tilting the envelope to green blotter, he shook out, pulled out, a mass of newspaper clippings and teletype tear-offs. Twenty, thirty, more, some of them photocopies, most quick-scissored patches of newsprint. Mann getötet in Autounfall; Priest Slain by Robbers; Eldsvåda dödar man, 64. Blue and yellow labels with dates and the names of newspapers were pasted to some of the clippings. A good forty items altogether.
He looked into the envelope and found two more small clippings and a sheet of white paper that had been folded around the whole bundle.
Keep me posted, it said in small neat handwriting at its center. S.B. Dated 30 Oct.
He put it aside along with the envelope, and spreading the clippings and tear-offs with both hands, opened them out to greater visibility, a layered patchwork of French, German, English—and Swedish, Dutch, others, indecipherable except for a word here and there. Död was surely tot and dead. “Esther!” he called.
“Yes?”
“The dictionaries for translating, Swedish and Dutch. And Danish and Norwegian.” He picked up a German clipping: an explosion in a chemical plant in Solingen had killed a night watchman, August Mohr, sixty-five. No. He put it aside.
And took it back. Mightn’t a civil servant, a low-level one, have a second job at night? Unlikely for a sixty-five-year-old, but possible. The explosion had happened at one in the morning on the day before the story appeared, making it October 20th.
The overhead light went on, and Esther, crossing the room, said, “They must be in here.” She went to the dining table against the wall and read the sides of the cartons on it. “We don’t have a Danish one,” she said. “Max uses the Norwegian.”
Liebermann got a pad from the drawer. “You’d better give me the French too.”
“First let me find.”
He reached for his pen standing up among the mail. Glancing again at the clipping, he wrote on the large yellow pad—after a scribble at the top to get the pen going: 20; Mohr, August Solingen, and put a question mark after it.
“Dictionaries,” Esther announced, and opened the flaps of a carton. “Norwegian, Swedish, French?”
“And Dutch, please.” He put the clipping to the left, where he would keep the possibles. He looked for the one in English about the priest, found it, skimmed it, and—“Ei”—put it to the right.
Esther came, unsteadily carrying four thick blue-bound volumes. He pulled mail in from the side of the desk to make room for them. “Everything was organized,” she complained, setting them down.
“I’ll reorganize. Thanks.”
She tucked hair in under the side of her wig. “You should have kept Max here if you wanted translations.”
“I didn’t think.”
“Should I try to find him?”
He shook his head, picked up another clipping in English: Dispute Ends in Fatal Knifing.
Esther, looking troubledly at the spread of clippings, said, “So many men murdered?”
“Not all,” he said, putting the clipping to his right. “Some are accidents.”
“How will you know which ones the Nazis killed?”
“I won’t,” he said. “I’ll have to go look.” He picked up a German clipping.
“Look?”
“And see if I can find a reason.”
She scowled at him. “Because a boy calls up and disappears?”
“Good-by, Esther dear.”
She went from the desk. “I would be writing articles and making some money.”
“Write them, I’ll sign them.”
“Do you want something to eat?”
He shook his head.
A few of the items reported the same deaths as others; a few of the dead men were outside the age-range. Many were tradesmen, farmers, retired industrial workers, vagrants; many had been killed by neighbors, relations, bands of young hoodlums. He searched the bilingual dictionaries with his magnifying glass; a makelaar in onroerende goederen was a real-estate broker, a tulltjänsteman a customs officer. He put the can’t-bes to his right, the possibles to his left. Most of the words in the Danish clippings were in the Norwegian-German dictionary.
Late in the afternoon he put the final clipping with the can’t-bes.
There were eleven possibles.
He tore the list of them from the pad and started a fresh list, setting them down neatly according to the dates of death.
Three had died on October 16th: Chambon, Hilaire, in Bordeaux; Döring, Emil, in Gladbeck, a town in the Essen area; and Persson, Lars, in Fagersta
, Sweden.
The phone rang; he let Esther take it.
Two on the 18th: Guthrie, Malcolm, in Tucson—
“Yakov? It’s Mannheim again.”
He picked up the phone. “Liebermann speaking.”
“Hello, Herr Liebermann,” a man’s voice said. “How was your trip? And did you find the reason for the ninety-four killings?”
He sat still, looking at the pen in his hand. He had heard the voice before but couldn’t place it. “Who is this, please?” he asked.
“My name is Klaus von Palmen. I heard you speak at Heidelberg. Maybe you remember me. I asked you if the problem was really hypothetical.”
Of course. The shrewd-looking blond young man. “Yes, I remember you.”
“Did any of your audiences do better than we did?”
“I didn’t ask the question again.”
“And it wasn’t hypothetical, was it.”
He wanted to say it was, or to hang up—but a stronger impulse took hold of him: to talk openly with someone who was willing to believe, even this antagonistic young Aryan. “I don’t know,” he admitted. “The person who told me about it…has disappeared. Maybe he was right and maybe he was wrong.”
“I suspected as much. Would it interest you to know that in Pforzheim, on October twenty-fourth, a man fell from a bridge and drowned? He was sixty-five years old, and about to retire from the postal service.”
“Müller, Adolf,” Liebermann said, looking at his list of possibles. “I know already, and about ten others besides: in Solingen, Gladbeck, Birmingham, Tucson, Bordeaux, Fagersta…”
“Oh.”
Liebermann smiled at the pen and said, “I have a source at Reuters.”
“That’s very good! And have you taken steps to find out whether it’s statistically normal for eleven civil servants, age sixty-five, to die violently in—what is it, a three-week period?”
“There were others,” Liebermann said, “who were killed by relations. And still others, I’m sure, that Reuters missed. And out of all of them, I think only six at the most could be…the ones I’m afraid of. Would six over normal prove anything? And besides, who keeps such statistics? Violent deaths on two continents, by age and occupation. God, maybe, would know what’s ‘statistically normal.’ Or a dozen insurance companies put together. I wouldn’t waste the time writing them.”
