Hour of the Assassins

by Andrew Kaplan

  That was what he liked best about the Jews, their finely honed sense of gallows humor, Caine realized, feeling himself relax for the first time in two weeks. They had been among the most frustrating weeks of his life and it felt good to be trying something positive again, even if it blew up in his face. And if the Israelis followed procedure, that’s exactly what would, happen. But he didn’t care anymore. Because unless they could give him a lead, it was all over anyway.

  He had escaped from Paraguay following the same route Mengele had used. Abandoning the Ford on a side street of Porto Merdes on the Brazilian side of the Paraná, he had taken a river launch to Puerto Iguassú. From there he had hopped a local flight to Buenos Aires to meet with Judge Luque.

  The judge was a slender, aristocratic man who proved to be sympathetic, but not very helpful. He could only confirm what Caine already knew. Mengele hadn’t been sighted in more than six years. Caine promised to keep in touch if he found anything and caught the morning Aerolineas flight to Bariloche.

  It was high summer in Bariloche, the streets and cafés thronged with festive crowds up from Buenos Aires for the Bavarian beer and clear mountain air. German and Spanish were the languages he heard as he brushed by couples in shorts, who spent the time between heavy sauerbraten meals shopping for camera film and sunburn lotion, and every afternoon at three, an oom-pah-pah band gave a concert in the small town square.

  But Caine couldn’t exactly share the holiday mood, because he was dirty from the minute he had checked into the Lorelei, an Alpine chalet with a wooden facade carved into more curlicues than an Afro hairdo. The first time they came at him was on the curving mountain road on the way to Cerro Catedral, its snow-capped peak sparkling in the bright sunshine. Two blond young men in a BMW had tried to force his rented Mustang over the precipice at the edge of the road. He had managed to throw the Mustang across the road in a racing skid that brought him hard against the cliff face, badly denting the fender. His hands were still clenched around the wheel as he watched the BMW disappear around a curve, leaving a cloud of exhaust fumes hanging over the road like a memory.

  The second time was more serious. It was evening during the dinner-hour promenade in the plaza, the couples talking and flirting while the boisterous sounds of the serious beer drinkers resounded from the sidewalk cafés. He knew they weren’t kidding this time because it was a front-and-rear tail and when he tried to reverse, so that he could flush and tail one of them and find out what it was all about, he discovered that it was a four-man box. They were serious and professional, the two blond men from the BMW and the two older types. They took their time because they knew exactly what they were doing, and he knew he wasn’t going anywhere.

  The Foster cover was blown wide open and the only chance he had was to get out. Somewhere he had cut one corner too many and the word had gone out, probably from Paraguay. Like a spider sensing an intruder by tremblings in the web, Mengele had become aware of his inquiries and had given orders. The hunter had become the prey.

  What made it all the more frustrating was that there was no clue to Mengele’s whereabouts in Bariloche. But that didn’t matter anymore because the town had become a death trap for him. His only chance lay in sticking with the crowd. As he threaded his way through the promenade, like a desperate halfback, he latched onto a pretty blond waitress in a dirndl sitting at a café with some friends. They needed a ride to a house party in the hills and the next thing he knew, they all piled into the Mustang. Later he was able to slip out of the party around the time that it got to the jumping-in-the-pool stage. He left the waitress delicately snoring on a pile of clothing in one of the bedrooms, her skirt pulled up over her hips and a naked bleary-eyed young man tugging at her sleeping legs, trying to separate them.

  In the morning Caine was able to take the airport bus, hugging the security of the crowd, and safely boarded the first flight back to Buenos Aires. From there he had connected to Madrid, being careful to always keep a crowd between him and the two tails.

  The two blond men from the BMW stayed with him all the way to Madrid, where they peeled off. He knew it wasn’t because they had lost interest. They wouldn’t do that until he had a paper tag tied to his big toe in the deep-freeze box of some local morgue. They were Judas goats, there to identify him to whoever had picked up the contract to terminate him. The fact that they were gone only meant that someone new had picked up the tag. And they weren’t playing for baseball cards, because whoever took over had been good and Caine had been unable to spot him until Rome, when he made a break at the taxi stand at Fiumicino Airport. The tail was a tall, well-dressed Mediterranean type with wraparound sunglasses and chiseled features that must have wowed the Scandinavian girls who came to disco on the Costa Brava. He hurriedly grabbed the taxi right behind Caine’s.

  Caine made the break in the middle of a colossal Roman traffic jam, the Fiats honking and climbing the sidewalks. He handed a wad of lire to the driver, then jumped out of the taxi and weaved his way through the bedlam of horns and noisy Italian comments on his ancestry to a department store, where he picked up a Tyrolean-style hat and raincoat, then added a false mustache to change the image. He left the department store by a side entrance after quickly scanning the crowd for Mr. Sunglasses. Although Caine appeared to have lost him, he knew that he would have to jump back into the frying pan to catch his connecting flight. Fiumicino was the red zone, where they would try to pick him up again. He waited under the big Cinzano sign for the Alitalia flight to Ben-Gurion Airport near Tel Aviv, booked under his own name, until he felt reasonably sure he was clean by the time he boarded.

  Things were becoming a little too hairy, he thought. When they forced you to use your own ID to change the image, it was time to start reaching for the rip cord. Then he remembered the stamps and C.J., her long lithe legs opening to him and the little cry of pleasure when he entered her. It was all his if he could pull it off. He remembered the old Gypsy and knew that he no longer had any choice in the matter. He had to go on with it, no matter how many alarm bells he set off, or what kind of nasty little back-alley death they had planned for him.

  “Are you done, Signore?” the Alitalia stewardess with the dark eyes that matched her uniform was asking him, gesturing at the pinkish melting ice cubes that was all that was left of his Campari and soda.

  “Si, grazier.”

  “Prego.”

  He had telephoned Yoshua from Ben-Gurion Airport and it was Yoshua, whom he had worked with on the Abu Daud job in Paris, who had set him up for this evening’s meeting with Amnon Sofer, a Mossad staff intelligence officer. So far as Yoshua knew, Caine was still working for the Company. Caine let him believe that and Yoshua didn’t press him. One of the advantages of being a spy is not having to do a lot of talking about your work.

  “Retribution,” said Amnon quietly, picking a speck of tobacco from his lip. Myriad pinpoints of light began to blink on in the gathering darkness, the hills dotted with them like the bivouac fires of an invading army. The air had grown cold and soon they would have to move inside.

  “An eye for an eye. The biblical injunction still applies,” Yoshua said. Temira began to clear away the dishes and take them inside.

  “To be sure, to be sure,” Amnon murmured, raising his eyebrow as a signal to Yoshua to leave them alone. Yoshua got up and went inside and Caine could hear the musical babble of Hebrew as Yoshua began talking with Temira. He became aware of the sound of a radio newscast being turned on. The announcer was mentioning the names of politicians and using the word shalom, so Caine assumed that he was saying something about peace talks. Amnon pulled a cigarette out of his pack of Dubek’s, Caine struck a match, and they both lit up. Smoking was a national epidemic-among the excitable Israelis, Caine observed.

  “Why is the Company suddenly interested in Mengele? And why does your being here have to be unofficial?” Amnon said.

  “I’m an operative, not the DCI. They only tell me what to do, not why.” Caine shrugged.


  “Retribution,” Amnon said again. “We’ve been trying to get away from that policy for a long time, since the days of Isar Harel.”

  “That’s not what Yoshua thinks. ‘An eye for an eye,’ he said. And the hate in his eyes was real enough.”

  “Get any two Jews together and you’re bound to get at least three opinions on everything. Anyway, Yoshua doesn’t make policy.”

  “Don’t tell me the policymakers don’t have to take men like Yoshua into account.”

  “I remember someone once asked Levi Eshkol—blessings on his memory—how it felt to be prime minister. Eshkol replied, ‘You try being prime minister of a country with three million prime ministers,’” Amnon said, chuckling.

  “Are you trying to tell me that the Mossad no longer has any interest in the Nazis?”

  “Let’s just say that we have all the present enemies we can handle. We don’t need to go around trying to dig up enemies from the past,” Amnon observed mildly. The pale crescent moon hung over the city like an Islamic omen, as if to underscore what Amnon was saying.

  “Don’t tell me the Jews have decided to forgive and forget the malachos mavet of Auschwitz,” Caine retorted.

  Amnon smiled at Caine’s clumsy Hebrew pronunciation. Then he sighed and shook his head, the cigarette tip glowing like a tiny beacon in the shadows of his face. His sad Jewish eyes examined Caine’s face carefully.

  “Im eshkahaich Yerushalaim, If I forget thee, O Jerusalem. No, we haven’t forgotten, or forgiven,” he said at last.

  “Look I don’t know what the Company is running or why. My job is to locate Mengele. Period. If there’s more, they’ll tell me when the time comes. We work strictly on a need-to-know basis, you know that. But I doubt that retribution has anything to do with it. The Company isn’t given to subscribing to Jewish philanthropies. Whatever it is, it’s strictly top drawer, ‘For your eyes only,’ because otherwise we’d be running it through channels. Now do you have a lead on the son of a bitch or don’t you?” Caine said irritably, standing up. He had played his trump and all he could do was hope that his manufactured anger was convincing.

  “All right, you make your point. Sit down, chaver. Please,” Amnon said placatingly. “I was just feeling you out. We Jews have to argue about everything, didn’t you know that?” Amnon said with a wink. Caine couldn’t help himself. He let out a snort of laughter and sat down.

  He pulled on his jacket. The night had grown cold. “What have you got?” he asked.

  “Do you know Feinberg?”

  “Only by reputation. Didn’t he supply the key lead for the Eichmann snatch?”

  “Also Wiese, the Butcher of Bialystok, Ehle, the Mauer brothers, Franz Stangl, the commander of Treblinka, and dozens more. Feinberg operates the Jewish Relief Center in Vienna. No, he is the Jewish Relief Center.”

  “What about him?”

  “He came to us about three months ago and told us he might have a lead on Mengele. But he said it would require a large bribe. I believe fifty thousand Deutschmarks was mentioned.”

  “What happened?”

  “Fifty thousand marks is a lot a money, chaver. We don’t have billions to play with like the CIA,” Amnon said with a touch of bitterness. “Anyway, we kicked around the idea and decided not to pursue it. Our resources in money and manpower were already stretched to the breaking point.”

  “Why didn’t you come to us?”

  Amnon looked at him scornfully.

  “Didn’t you say yourself that the Company isn’t given to subscribing to Jewish philanthropies. Besides, if the Americans or anybody else had ever really gone after Mengele, he would have been brought around the corner a long time ago. Mengele has survived because of official indifference, that’s all. Just indifference.”

  “Well, we’re not indifferent now. And I’ve got the money. So do me a favor and let Feinberg know I’m coming. And chaver,” Caine said sharply, “this conversation never happened.”

  The two men got up and shook hands. Then, almost as if it had been rehearsed, they both looked out at the pale, jumbled lights of Jerusalem, the stars hanging in the night sky, like a heavenly mirror of the city.

  “It’s a pleasure doing business with you, Adon,”— Amnon hesitated briefly, searching his memory for the name Caine was using—“Foster.”

  They drove in silence down from the Judean hills toward Tel Aviv, situated on the coastal plain that had been the Via Maris, the pathway of armies since long before recorded history, because it was the only route across the mountains and deserts that separated the ancient empires of Africa and Asia. The car radio was tuned to Israeli pop music broadcast from Kol Yisrael. The music struck Caine as pleasant but a little repetitious. All the songs seemed to sound alike. It was a little like having bad sex, he thought. The sensation isn’t unpleasant, but you’re not sorry when it’s over. Every so often Yoshua glanced away from his driving and over at Caine, as though he wanted to say something but was waiting for Caine to begin.

  The headlights picked out the ancient wrecks of World War II vintage armored cars and burnt-out truck chassis that littered the sides of the road. During the 1948 War of Independence the Israelis had tried desperately to run the blockade of this road to reach besieged Jerusalem. After the war they had painted the wrecks with blood-red antirust paint, garlanded them with flowered wreaths, and left them beside the road as memorials. There were times, Caine thought, when it was impossible to escape the notion that the world was nothing but a vast graveyard.

  “Do you have any children?” Yoshua asked, and Caine knew that he was thinking about a recent terrorist incident in Metulla where two children had been killed. For a moment the image of Lim, laughing and pregnant in a field of flowering poppies, flashed into his mind. Then he remembered the first time he had seen Lim’s daughter, sitting motionless on the porch of the hut and staring out into the rain. He tried to push the image away and forced himself to think of C.J., as she looked in the flickering glow from the fireplace, her long blond hair cascading over them like a shower of golden silk.

  “No,” he said.

  “That’s the worst, that’s where they really get you. When they get the children,” Yoshua said grimly, and Caine suddenly realized that Yoshua was too emotional for this business. Maybe the Israelis knew it too and that was why they had called him back from Paris.

  “That’s not the worst,” Caine said and regretted it as soon as he said it, because he couldn’t stop it now. It was like releasing the cork in a bottle of champagne and the images began to spill over, the old tightness closing on his chest like a vise. “Then what is?”

  “The worst are the things we do ourselves,” Caine said, wondering how it was that Yoshua didn’t know that. Wasn’t it Yoshua himself who had said, “In the end we are all murderers”? And then it didn’t matter because he was remembering Teu La. He remembered how Dao had looked at him, with that strange mixture of curiosity and indifference, as though Caine had been a spoiled child throwing a temper tantrum, when he had argued furiously against the raid. Even as he had shouted and threatened, he could sense Dao deciding whether it was worth having him killed. Maybe that thought had held him back. Maybe that was why he hadn’t tried to kill Dao right then and there.

  There was no military reason for it, he remembered shouting. There was no reason at all, because the pull-out had already begun and their only function was to distract Charley to cover the withdrawal. Except that reasons no longer mattered in a world where everything was falling to pieces, while the diplomats at the Paris peace talks had already spent more than a year debating the shape of the table for the parley.

  Dao had stood there, swaying and dangerous, his eyes bloodshot from the corn liquor. All of them drunk and miserable in the fetid heat of the bush, the mosquitoes rising around them in clouds thick as mist. They had been savagely mauled for two solid days in the Plain of Jars by the heavy mortars of a full Pathet Lao division, supported by VC artillery. By the third day they were using bodies t
o make breastworks to crouch under, the bodies bloated black and green with the heat and the unforgettable stench of death that permeated every breath. They burrowed under the damp earth and piles of bodies like insects, the constant explosions blowing the limbs of the living and the dead into an endless rain of bleeding flesh.

  When they finally escaped into the bush, it was more of a stampede than a retreat, and when they collected at the fallback site, a muddy clearing thick with snakes and land crabs, they had fallen on the corn liquor with the desperation of desert travelers on oasis water. There were barely two hundred of them left, most of them strangers to him, with the hollow eyes and rabid glare of a pack of starving dogs. Perhaps that was why it had happened. Or perhaps it was because of the wounded they had had to leave behind, like Vang, with his belly ripped open, holding his own intestines in his hands, like strings of sausages. Or Pao, stumbling blindly among the shell holes, talking to himself about getting home for the rice harvest, with one eye ripped completely away and the other eyeball hanging down his cheek from its empty red socket. Or Lynhiavu, who caught a bullet with Caine’s name on it, except that he had turned away for a second and when he turned back, Lynhiavu was lying there with a faint Buddha-like smile on his face and his brains dripping out of a hole in his head the size of a baby’s fist. Or perhaps … well, perhaps it didn’t matter why.

  “It’s murder, Dao,” Caine had shouted.

  Dao blinked at him like a sleepy owl, then shrugged and took another swig from the jug, stumbling and falling into the mud.

  “So it’s murder, so what,” Dao had muttered thickly. “What do you think war is, you stinking, fucking Yankee? War is murder, not one of your Anglo-Saxon fucking games with rules. There are only murderers and victims,” he howled. “Murderers and victims!” grabbing an M-16 and emptying the magazine in Caine’s direction, except that he was so drunk that all he did was prune a few trees, their leaves fluttering to the ground like wounded birds.