That evening he attended Sabbath eve services in a tiny synagogue in the Trinidad suburb. The church procession had convinced him that any attempt to directly approach Mengele would only muddy the water and forewarn the target. He needed hard information on local Nazis and it was likely that the Jews of Asunción had some of the answers. If you want to know where the wolves are, you could do worse than to ask the sheep, he thought.
An orange afterlight of the tropic sunset lingered over the streets like a floating veil, bringing little relief from the relentless heat. The street was crowded with gossiping housewives. Ragged copper-skinned children played in a garbage-strewn corner lot. From an open tienda a radio blared the rhythms of música folklórica as he entered the small wooden-frame house that served as a synagogue.
Inside, about twenty mostly elderly Jews in business suits stood praying in Spanish-flavored Hebrew. Their perspiring bodies swayed ritualistically as they faced a wooden closet covered by a crepe curtain. It bore a crudely painted Lion of Judah standing on a Star of David. Caine awkwardly placed a handkerchief on his head to serve as a yarmulke, wondering what he was supposed to do.
A fat red-faced man in his fifties with bulldog jowls shoved a prayer book at Caine, pointing out the place in the text. Caine shrugged helplessly and the man smiled back with an air of patient resignation. After the service Caine told the man, who introduced himself as Jaime Weizman, that he was an American Jew who was thinking of opening a business in Paraguay and needed advice on local conditions. They arranged to meet for lunch at the parrillada and it was Weizman that Caine was waiting for as he checked his watch again.
The only hitch was that he had been tailed by a green Chevy from the synogogue back to his hotel. It was frustrating because there was no reason for it and because he couldn’t flush the tail without revealing that he knew he was being followed and thereby blowing his cover. Things were getting hairy too soon, he told himself as he sipped his drink.
The waiter brought over his carne asada and went back to the bar, where he settled on a stool and pulled out a tattered paperback. The lurid book cover showed a blonde in a torn blouse being pistol-whipped by a faceless figure in a trench coat. The waiter dived headfirst into the book as into a pool, as Weizman finally arrived in an old Fiat.
Weizman ambled slowly toward Caine, his checked sports jacket refracted in the shimmering heat, as though seen through warped glass. He settled into the chair opposite Caine with a small sigh of relief. With an air of annoyance at the interruption, the waiter put down his book and came over to the table. Weizman ordered a sopa Paraguaya, a kind of corn bread quiche, and a cold cerveza. The waiter delivered the order to the kitchen and went back to the bar and his paperback.
Caine explained once again that as a fellow Jew he wanted to get to know the Jewish community in Asunción before committing himself to a business venture in Paraguay. As Caine spoke, Weizman’s dark eyes regarded him with a disconcerting mixture of friendliness and unhappiness, like a puppy that wants to play and knows it’s going to be rebuffed. Weizman patted at his florid, sweating face with a handkerchief, smiling apologetically, as though he were wagging his tail.
“Perdóneme, Señor Foster, but you are not Jewish,” Weizman said uneasily, his English heavily accented and tentative.
Caine briefly considered lying, then decided against it. He sensed that hidden inside that amiable envelope of flesh was a shy, frightened man.
“How can you tell?”
Weizman shrugged with that gesture of Latin indifference that is mostly indolence. Then he smiled shyly, as though offering Caine a gift.
“After two thousand years, you get a knack for it.”
“You’re right, I’m not Jewish.”
Weizman nodded solemnly. The waiter brought a frosted bottle of beer that Weizman consumed greedily, sucking at the bottle like a starving baby at the nipple. Weizman was like a man who had gone hungry and forever afterward lived with the fear that his food might be taken from him again.
“I’m with Interpol. I’m here to investigate Nazi war criminals,” Caine said crisply, flashing the bronze badge he had bought in Las Vegas.
“What war crimes? The camps were all a figment of Zionist propaganda. If you don’t believe me, ask any German.”
“I did.” Caine smiled. “They’re all innocent. Hitler fought the war single-handed.”
“Meshuggener.” Weizman smiled sadly, meaning “crazy” as if it were a compliment. “Do you know the story in the Talmud about the king who visited the prison? Each of the prisoners protested his innocence, except for one man, who admitted he was a robber. Throw this thief out of here,’ the king said. ‘He will corrupt all these innocents.’” Weizman giggled happily at his own story.
“I’m here after some of the guilty ones, even if they are maligned victims of Zionist propaganda,” Caine said with a wink.
“Guilt.” Weizman looked at him quizzically. “You use such old-fashioned words, Señor Foster. I thought you North Americans were much more up-to-date. Besides, guilt, vengeance, justice, those words passed me by a million years ago. I am a Jew, Señor Foster. What matters to us is survival. That’s all, just survival. We’re very good at it, we Jews. Survival is the great Jewish”—he waved his hand, searching for the word, as though seeking to pluck it from the air—“talent.”
“Do you want to see the Nazis go free?”
“Which of us is truly free, Señor Foster? You, me, the Germans? We are all the prisoners of our past, verdad? When the Nazis came to power, the Jews tried to flee Germany. Not one country was willing to take them in, including your United States. There was only one place that was willing to accept them. Do you know where that was, Señor Foster?” Weizman asked, mopping his sweating brow with the soggy handkerchief. “Nazi Germany. Then during the war the world stood idly by, while the Holocaust happened. Europe was flattened, but not one of the death camps was ever bombed. Not one! After the war it was business as usual. The war was over. Who wanted to dig up a past better left buried? After all, the Nazis were only doing their duty, like a good German should.”
“If you really believe that shit, why did you agree to see me?”
“To find out what you were after. There are only a few hundred Jews in Paraguay, Señor Foster. We are a small tightly knit community and we survive mostly by staying out of the limelight. So when anyone takes an interest in us, it’s dangerous, and we have to know what it’s all about.”
“Is that why you had me tailed back to my hotel?” Caine asked, with a sudden surge of relief.
“I’m afraid we’re not very good at that sort of thing,” Weizman apologized.
Jesus, so that’s all the Chevy was, Caine thought. Amateurs should never play with professionals. It was like giving children your new Buick and asking them to go play Grand Prix driver on the Santa Monica freeway.
“No, you’re not. I’d advise you not to try it again.”
“Do you know what it’s like to be a Paraguayan Jew, Señor Foster? Our glorious leader, Alfredo Stroessner”—Weizman’s lips pursed in a strange kind of unctuous irony as he whispered the name, looking around the empty restaurant to make sure he wasn’t overheard—“is descended from Bavarian immigrants. We are under constant surveillance. People who stick their noses into German business just disappear. We have been threatened many times. Even the most casual remark can cause arrest and the whole community is threatened with reprisals. Twice our synagogue was firebombed and when we went to the police, they told us to mind our own business. My Cousin Meyer once identified Eduard Roschmann right here in Asunción. What was left of my cousin’s body was found two days later in the jungle by Mennonite missionaries. Don’t stir up trouble, Señor Foster. The Germans here still believe in the principle of collective guilt. Whatever you do, we will be the ones to pay for it.”
“So just play it safe, is that it?”
“We survive, Señor Foster,” Weizman sighed. “It’s what we’re good at.”
“Where’s Josef Mengele?”
“I’m begging you, señor.” Weizman’s bulldog face quivered with emotion. “Por favor, let it alone. Let us handle it in our own way.”
“That’s what the Jews said to Moses when he wanted to challenge the Pharaoh. Fortunately he wasn’t paying attention.” Caine smiled.
“Such a deal,” Weizman giggled. “I was right, you are a meshuggener.”
“No, I’m just a goy with a job to do. Have you ever seen Mengele here in Asunción?”
Weizman hawked and spat into the sand.
“That one. It would give you a chill to see him. He left Asunción years ago and moved to Amambay province in the south. But he used to come back every so often. Sometimes I would see him at the Amstel Restaurant. And once at the Tyrol Hotel in Eldorado.”
“When was the last time you saw him?”
“Maybe five—no, six years ago. There was another man from Interpol here then. He also stirred things up. That’s when we were firebombed the first time. And for what? Mengele was already gone. We heard that he had left Pedro Juan Caballero and crossed the border to Ponta Porã, on the Brazilian side of the Paraná. The last we heard he had simply disappeared into the Mato Grosso. That was the last anyone ever heard of him and good riddance. He hasn’t come back.”
“Would you know if he were back in Paraguay?”
For a moment Weizman’s eyes searched Caine’s face as if it were a map he was trying to read. Then he shook his head with finality.
“He is not in Paraguay. If he were, we would know about it, comprende? Besides”—he shrugged—“we have enough Nazis here without him.”
“Who leads the Nazis here in Asunción?”
Weizman’s eyes turned up and Caine could, see the whites as Weizman shifted uneasily in his chair, like a child who has to go to the bathroom.
“Müller,” he muttered, actually trembling in terror like a field mouse in front of a snake. “Heinrich Müller. He owns a meat-packing business. Perfect for a butcher, wouldn’t you say? But be careful, señor. He has important friends. Political friends.”
“Such a deal,” Caine said, and stood up. He left a five-hundred-guarani note on the table for the check and extended his hand to Weizman.
“Gracias,” he said and shook Weizman’s limp, moist hand.
“Buena suerte.” Good luck, Weizman said, looking as though he didn’t have any to spare. Caine left him sitting there, fervently attacking his sopa Paraguayo as though it were his last meal.
Caine was growing impatient. He had been tailing Müller for almost a week without getting a single chance to make the snatch. Of course, snatching Müller might alert Mengele, but since Caine had no intention of letting Müller go, all the Nazis would know for sure was that Müller had disappeared. Then, too, if he could move quickly enough against Mengele, Müller’s disappearance wouldn’t matter. “Surpries lies at the foundation of all undertakings, without exception,” Koenig used to say, quoting Clausewitz. Koenig was fond of quoting Clausewitz. Except that it didn’t look like he was going to get the chance to put the theory into practice, Caine mused, because he hadn’t found any way to get at Müller.
To make matters worse, inevitably he had been spotted. It was impossible to tail someone in such a small community and go unobserved, so he had taken the opposite tack, blatantly showing up wherever Müller did, making a noisy show as the ugly American tourist with a local hooker on his arm for camouflage. But the ploy only worked short term and time was running out. He had been spotted once too often for coincidence, and now they were undoubtedly wondering who the hell he was and whether or not to terminate him.
Even now Müller was flicking an uneasy glance in his direction across the crowded restaurant. Unless he did it tonight he would have to abort; he was already running too close to the wire. Maybe they were playing Ring-Around-the-Rosie. That very evening before dinner Caine had come back to his room in the Hotel del Lago to find that the hair he had stretched across the doorposts was broken and the keys he had placed in a carefully disarranged pattern in his bureau drawer had been moved. The problem was that the son of a bitch was never alone, Caine mused as he swallowed the last of his beer.
Müller was a big man—nearly six feet—his body still hard and trim under his lightweight sport shirt and slacks. His hair was closely cropped and iron gray, his blue eyes like aquamarines set in a face that looked like it had been hammered out of bronze. Even in his civies he still looked like an SS officer on furlough. He leaned over and whispered something to his bodyguard, Steiger, then with a bellow he rejoined his table companions in singing war songs from the good old days. They punctuated their bleary nostalgia by banging their beer bottles on the table in time to the singing, drowning out the plaintive Paraguayan music played by a trio of a harp and two guitars in the far corner.
Steiger was a bullet-headed Neanderthal with a white scar running down his forehead into his cheek. Caine didn’t bother to fool himself into thinking Steiger was a pushover. He hadn’t gotten that scar from Heidelberg. He had the piggish face of a Brown-shirt bully and Caine was willing to bet that the scar came from the kind of street brawl he probably relished. Steiger made no effort to hide the gun in his waistband, jammed against his beer belly like a truss. It was a naval Luger with a six-inch barrel, the kind that used to be carried by the Wehrmacht paratroopers. Also seated at the table were Müller’s mistress, an aging blonde who wore a silk scarf around her neck to hide a sagging chin line, and a fat, bald German in a business suit, who crooned the lyrics in a beery off-key monotone.
It had to be now or never, Caine decided, signaling the waiter for the check. He had completed his preparations in Asunción, renting a black Ford and buying everything he needed: flashlight, canteen, binoculars, car flares, fishing tackle with eighty-pound test line, the tin cans of vegetables that he had emptied, the five-gallon can of gasoline. But it was impossible to get at Müller in Asunción. The man’s house and office were made of brick and built like fortresses, his pattern of movement constantly varied—and Steiger never left his side.
Then Müller broke the pattern once again. Caine followed Müller’s Mercedes to the resort town of San Bernardino on the tropical shore of Lake Ypacaraí. Müller evidently planned to spend a few days with his mistress at his sumptuous lakeside villa. Caine reconnoitered the area till he found the spot he was looking for: a jungle clearing near an abandoned farmhouse, miles from any habitation. Near the clearing was a stagnant marsh pool, oozing with the stench of slime and death. The marsh was bordered with thick mud, black and sticky as pitch.
Using the fishing line and pebbles placed in the empty tin cans, the way they used to around the fortified hamlets, he set trip wires across the overgrown trail from the farmhouse to the clearing. As he worked the smell of his own body heat, the noisy shrieks of the jungle birds, the trip wires, brought it all back. Asia.
He thought he heard the belch of mortars and the rattle of small-arms fire, but when he looked up, there was only the electric whine of insects, like the constant hum of high-power lines and the squawking of a pair of wildly colored parrots. That fucking war just won’t end, he thought miserably. He reached for a stick to throw at the birds, then flinched back with horror as it slithered silently into the undergrowth.
But it was no go. Caine had watched the villa through the binoculars from a rowboat well out in the lake. He counted on the glare from the water to cover the glint of sunlight off the lenses. But except for a bit of waterfront fishing with Steiger, Müller hadn’t left the villa. All Caine had to show for two days of stakeout were the surubi and armados fish he had caught, a wealth of mosquito bites, and, in spite of a thick layer of sunscreen, a neon-bright sunburn that made him look like a warning ad for Solarcaine—until tonight, when Müller finally ventured out to La Cordobesa for dinner and the sentimental Bierhaus sing-along.
Their singing followed Caine out of the restaurant, the lyrics hanging in his mind like an unfinished sentence.
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“Wie heist Lilli Marlene, Wie heist Lillie Marlene?”
The question lingered like a Zen koan. It seemed that if he could just find an answer to the riddle of Lilli Marlene’s identity, it would somehow contain an answer to the riddle of the universe itself. He shrugged the thought away as he got into the car. Perhaps there was no answer, no real Lilli Marlene. And perhaps the universe didn’t mean anything either.
He backed the car into the dark alley beside the restaurant, by the back exit door he had spotted earlier. He opened the locked door with his folding knife and slipped unnoticed into the filthy men’s lavabo near the door. He latched the cubicle door, folded down the toilet seat, and settled down to wait, trying to breathe through his mouth to minimize the stench.
While he watched the door through the doorjamb crack of the cubicle, he made a slipknot loop from a length of fishing line and put it back into his pocket. Then he took out the Bauer and cocked it. He was counting on the beer and the regularity of Miiller’s bladder capacity. The last time he had seen Müller out drinking in Asunción, Müller had hit the john approximately every forty-five minutes. It wasn’t much, but it was something. More important, Steiger hadn’t gone with him.
Caine glanced around the cubicle at the graffiti. The partitions were decorated with the usual badly drawn cocks and cunts and obscene Spanish suggestions that would have required a contortionist to fulfill. That’s the part that the Company doesn’t talk about when recruiting, he thought wryly. That an agent spends more time in toilets than a janitor does.
Müller’s image filled the doorway for an instant and then it was gone. Caine waited until he heard the piddling water sound from the urinal before he quietly unlatched the cubicle door and stepped out. Müller was just zipping up his fly when he heard Caine. He started to turn, his eyes narrowing at the sight of the Bauer aimed at his heart.
“Put your hands up,” Caine ordered sharply.
Hour of the Assassins Page 15
