Hour of the Assassins

by Andrew Kaplan

  They were nearing Latrun, the silhouette of the old Arab fort on the hill a dark shadow against the starry night. In ’48 Latrun had been held by the Arab Legion to cut off the Jerusalem road. In the end the Haganah had been reduced to attacking the escarpment with green, untrained troops, but all they had managed to do was to soak the wheatfields with blood. Human blood was the one commodity that never seemed in short supply, Caine mused. In the end the Haganah had been forced to build the legendary “Burma road,” across the mountains, to outflank the Latrun salient.

  “What do you Americans know about the worst, anyway?” Yoshua was saying. “War and terrorism are something you watch over dinner on the seven o’clock news, just before the football highlights.”

  “I suppose you’re right,” Caine said indifferently, wishing to God he would shut up. Turning his eyes back to the road, Yoshua flicked his lights and passed an army Jeep on a blind curve. Caine closed his eyes for a moment, with the thought that all Israeli drivers are born fatalists.

  Well, what would a fatalist make of Teu La? he wondered. They had attacked the hamlet at dawn, sending a patrol down to the ravine on the opposite side of the village, to cut off any chance of escape. The terrified peasants of Teu La had hidden Pathet Lao arms and. guerrillas, and as Lao tribesmen, they had always had a basic sense of superiority to the Hmong, whom they regarded as little better than savages. It had gone beyond war, Caine realized as the Meos moved into the village. It had degenerated into a tribal conflict, a chance to settle old scores.

  The sun came up hot and bright into an unblemished blue sky, the dawn evanescent and brief as a single heartbeat. Birds were chirping among the palm fronds and the lazy hum of insects rose from the dried mud fields. Although they were drunk and exhausted, the Hmong moved purposefully into position, just as he had trained them. When Dao gave the signal, they charged headlong, screaming the old war cries, two to a hut. The procedure was always the same. First the grenade tossed into the hut and they hit the ground, flattening themselves against the explosion. Before the smoke cleared, they would leap inside to spray the hut with a carbine, just in case the grenade hadn’t got the attention of those inside. Then matches or a lighter were applied to the thatched sides and roof and then they sprinted to the next hut.

  In a little while all of the huts were burning, sending an acrid column of smoke up to stain the empty sky. The air was full of screams and war cries and the sounds of firing as Caine jogged toward the ravine, sweat stinging his eyes. There were only a few old men trapped in the ravine, pulling their rags about their bodies as though the cloth could protect them from bullets. All the rest were women and children, wailng incomprehensibly as if they were being punished for doing something wrong. The women pressed the children close to their bodies with trembling arms, their eyes wide and desperate.

  Half-a-dozen tribesmen had cornered a pretty Lao girl, her chest heaving and wet with sweat. They were laughing as they ripped her clothes off and pinned her face down over the body of an old woman. Her thin buttocks quivered as they began to take turns mounting her, arguing about whether to start first with her vagina or her anus.

  When Caine reached the edge of the ravine, the shooting had already started. Dao was still drinking from the jug and every so often he would stagger to his feet and fire his M-16 into the ravine, the M-16 that Caine had given him. One of the Meo grabbed an infant from its mother, made a funny face to make the baby laugh, then threw the baby into the air and shot it before it hit the ground. A few of them had tied an old man to a tree near the ravine and were shooting their crossbows at him, being careful to avoid a fatal shot. The old man twisted and groaned as one by one, the arrows snicked into his body, until there were so many arrows sticking out of him, he looked like a medieval fresco of the martyrdom of St. Stephen.

  They were still firing into the ravine, which was a tangled mass of blood and bodies, limbs still thrashing, like a scene that could only be painted by Goya. A wounded moon-faced woman with a small boy in her arms was trying to scramble out of the ravine, her hand desperately clutching at a tuft of grass. Dao leaned over, as though to help her, placed the muzzle of the M-16 against the child’s head, and fired. The head exploded into a thousand fragments and the woman fell back with a scream that went on till Dao fired again.

  Caine raised his M-16 and brought Dao into his sights. Dao turned to look at him, his eyes dark and opaque, but he didn’t raise his gun. Instead he just shrugged and shouted.

  “They’re Communists, Tan Caine. That’s all. Just Communists. Then we kill them. Then they’re nothing. Nothing at all.”

  Caine tried to squeeze the trigger, but he couldn’t because it didn’t matter anymore, because nothing did. And because he knew that in some way he had brought them to this. They’re ours, he thought bitterly. We’re the ones who paid them and taught them how to fight a civilized war. That’s how it happens. Once the killing starts, there’s no place to draw the line. He threw his M-16 into the ravine and turned away. As he walked, a refrain from a song Country Joe had sung at Woodstock kept running through his mind until he thought he would literally go mad with it. Round and round it went with the numbers, like a children’s nursery rhyme:

  And it’s one-two-three

  What are we fighting for?

  Don’t ask me, I don’t give a damn,

  The next stop is Vietnam.

  He saw one of the tribesmen dismount the motionless body of the raped girl, and apparently dissatisfied, he pulled an old .45 automatic out of his belt and blew half her head off.

  “How did your talk with Amnon go?” Yoshua wanted to know.

  “Okay,” Caine said wearily. Give it a rest, will you? Just give it a rest, he told himself. He lit a cigarette and rolled the window down a few inches to let the smoke escape out to the rush of cold night air. The images fled back into the night of the soul, like the smoke drawn away by the suction created by the car’s speed. Yoshua slowed down as they entered Rehovot, site of the Weizmann Institute, where much of the work on the Israeli nuclear project went on. The streets were filled with noisy young people in shorts, milling in front of movie houses and sipping ubiquitous bottles of gazoz soda pop.

  “When you left Paris, was Claude still doing business?” Caine asked. Yoshua pounded irritably on the horn at the driver in front of him, who had the chutzpah to wait for the light to turn green before starting to move.

  “The Claudes of the world never go out of business,” Yoshua pronounced.

  Caine was getting a little tired of Yoshua’s brand of saloon philosophy, the kind they print on cocktail napkins. The memories were getting to him, he realized, and he was on the verge of telling Yoshua to stuff it. He held himself back, realizing that that wasn’t a good idea; the last thing in the world he wanted was to get the Israelis interested in him any more than they already were. Only Amnon and Yoshua knew him here and he was hoping they would let it go at that.

  He thought about Claude, whom he knew only by hearsay as an independent counterfeiter from Marseille who impartially produced documents for the Sûreté Nationale and the Corsican gangs, with a fine lack of distinction for anything except the price. He had first heard of Claude from the suave plainclothesman from the rue des Saussaies who had arranged for his exit from France after the Abu Daud hit. He wanted to get Claude started on a new cover for him even before he saw Feinberg. By now the Foster cover was as effective a bit of camouflage as a red flag waved in front of a bull.

  Yoshua dropped him off at the Dan Hotel on the crowded Tel Aviv beachfront. Along Rehov Hayarkon near the hotel entrance, miniskirted girl soldiers walked hand-in-hand with tanned boyfriends, street cafés echoed with boisterous shouts and shabby moneychangers clustered like flies around the tourists, offering to exchange dollars for Israeli pounds at black-market rates that were quoted daily in the Jerusalem Post. When he was back in his room, Caine called the international operator and left word for her to call him when she had made the connections to L.A. and Marsei
lle. Then he stripped off his clothes, took a long shower, and went to bed.

  He dreamed he was back at the Moonglow with C.J., the surf pounding at the pilings as though they were about to be washed out to sea. He was telling her that he couldn’t marry her, because he already had a wife, someone he had left behind in Asia. Her blue eyes were wet and shiny and she was saying something, but he couldn’t hear her because the damn telephone was ringing and then he came awake, dripping with sweat, as though surfacing from the sea and fumbled for the phone by his bed. The international operator had finally put his call through, he realized grabbing the receiver. The dull roar of surf came through the earpiece. It was like holding a seashell to his ear.

  “This is Wasserman, who is this?” he heard Wasserman’s voice say.

  “This is an open line, so let’s keep it brief,” Caine said, hoping that the transatlantic traffic was busy tonight. These days if you want to pass something on the telephone, you might as well take out a full-page ad in the Times.

  “How’s it going?” Good, he thought. Wasserman had picked up his cue. Now let’s see if he picked up the tab.

  “We’ve got a solid lead on that lost consignment of angels, but it’s going to be expensive to cover the tariff.”

  “How expensive?”

  “Thirty-five K.” The extra money might come in handy. Sitting down to play with less than you can afford to bet is the surest way to guarantee losing, Caine thought.

  “That’s some tariff,” Wasserman said, pausing to consider.

  “In for a penny, in for a pound. It’s part of the deal.”

  “Nobody likes a shnorrer,” Wasserman said, and Caine pictured him in the office, glancing at the Monet and lighting a cigar, enjoying his brief moment of power for all it was worth. Where was C.J. now? Caine wondered, feeling a sudden pang of hatred for Wasserman.

  “The goods are worth the price,” Caine said harshly.

  “Is this absolutely necessary?” Wasserman replied equally harshly, and Caine felt that he was hearing the man’s true voice for the first time. It was a legitimate question—perhaps the only legitimate question that Wasserman could ever ask him, since Wasserman didn’t know how the game was going, or what the Scoreboard read.

  “Do you think I’d risk a call if it weren’t?”

  “How do we arrange the transfer of funds?” And Caine felt himself breathing again. He could almost smell his quarry and he badly wanted the game to go on. Perhaps Wasserman had felt it too. In for a penny in for a pound, he thought, a surge of relief coursing through his veins like a shot of alcohol.

  “With a certified letter-of-credit bearer bond, sent to me, care of poste restante in Vienna.”

  “Don’t be such a chozzer next time,” Wasserman said with a good-natured tone. He knew Caine must be on to something or he would never have risked a call.

  “Shalom,” Caine said, and hung up. He was smiling as he lit a cigarette and leaned his head on his hands against the headboard of the bed. For no reason, a quote from Shakespeare’s Richard III had popped into his mind:

  “God take King Edward to his mercy,/And leave the world for me to bustle in!”

  CHAPTER 10

  “So Heinrich Müller is dead. Pity,” Feinberg said deliberately, sucking his teeth as though it helped him digest the information.

  “Let’s not waste too many crocodile tears on him. He wasn’t what you would call a choirboy,” Caine put in sarcastically.

  “That he wasn’t,” Feinberg agreed. “In a way, he achieved a certain celebrity. You see, Müller was the SS officer responsible for the massacre of tens of thousands of Jews at Babi Yar in the Ukraine. A Russian poet wrote a famous poem about it.” The corners of his eyes behind the bifocal lenses crinkled as he ventured an apologetic smile. “I’m afraid I can never remember poetry. Still it’s a pity you weren’t able to get more out of him. He’s been on my list for a long time.”

  “He wasn’t exactly in a talkative mood,” Caine observed.

  Feinberg smiled appreciatively and began to stuff his pipe with tobacco in a slow, deliberate manner. He carefully tamped the tobacco down, lit it, then dissatisfied with the draw, he tamped it down again, with the precision of an old man who has lived alone for a long time. He would pursue Nazi fugitives in the same careful way, Caine mused, with the strict, plodding attention to detail that was bound to trip them up in the end. Except that Caine was on a deadline, and he knew he could never work that way in any case.

  Feinberg was a big man, perhaps six foot, with a large frame that had already begun to shrink with age, giving his untidy navy suit the appearance of being too big for him. His remaining wisps of hair were disheveled and combined with his wire-rimmed bifocals to give him the air of a quiet scholar, far too preoccupied with his work to pay much attention to appearances. Which was probably close to the truth, Caine realized, as he glanced around the cramped two-room apartment on Rudolf Platz, which served as the office for the Jewish Relief Center.

  Both rooms of the apartment had every inch of wall space lined with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves bursting with files, creating the claustrophobic atmosphere of a Dickensian counting house—file cabinets that looked as if they had been ransacked, spilled papers onto old desks and a moth-eaten couch, and motes of dust floated like water lilies on the musty air. Scrooge would have felt right at home here, Caine mused. From the front room that served as a cramped reception area came the pecking sound of the petite brunette, Feinberg’s granddaughter, at an ancient manual typewriter. The typing was regular and insistent, like the rapping of a methodical woodpecker. Feinberg’s desk was piled high with folders, tilted precariously, like paper Towers of Pisa.

  “Peru, ja, that fits,” Feinberg said, pensively tapping his pipe stem against his teeth, unconsciously falling into the rhythm of the typewriter’s deliberate tapping. “Quoth the Raven, ‘Nevermore,’” Caine thought, following Feinberg’s nearsighted gaze to the small grimy window. Through it he could see the jumble of buildings surrounding Saint Stephen’s Cathedral and beyond to the heavy afternoon traffic on Franz-Josefs-Kai, along the pea-soup-green Danube Canal.

  The traffic moved slowly in the cold rain that had been falling all day. Pedestrians with black umbrellas scurried across the square, looking like moving mushrooms from the third-floor vantage of the window rattling restlessly with the wind. But the gray weather couldn’t dampen the spirits of a group of blue-uniformed gymnasium students, drinking beer and roughhousing in the small park in the middle of the square. After all, it was Fasching, the carnival season when the German-speaking world relentlessly pursues pleasure as if it were a military duty. The season when every night is party night, from posh white-tie affairs like the Opernball to all-night student parties in the Brauerei, when beer and heuriger wine is downed endlessly from liter-size glasses and adultery is not grounds for divorce. Looking out at the handsome young people larking in the baroque splendors of the city, the streets glistening in the rain, he found it hard to believe that Adolf Hitler had been born in this picture-postcard land.

  “Why does Peru fit?” Caine asked.

  “About three years ago, I got a letter from a Jew named Samuel Cohen. He owned a small clothing store in Iquitos in the Peruvian Amazon. He claimed to have spotted Mengele in Iquitos.”

  “That’s not much to go on.”

  “Cohen had been an inmate at Auschwitz and Treblinka, before immigrating to Peru after the war. Naturally I wrote back asking him for details, but he never answered. I wrote again and about six months later I received a note from his wife. She wrote that he had been killed in an auto accident while on a business trip to Lima.”

  “That isn’t why you contacted the Mossad,” Caine said disgustedly. He had been hoping for a real lead, instead of a three-year-old maybe. The letter of credit he had cashed that morning and converted into Deutschmarks at the Handelsbank was burning a hole in his pocket. Some instinct had told him that Feinberg was on to something and he was anxious to get on with it
. Feinberg’s pale-blue eyes were distorted like fish eyes by the bifocal lenses. Once they had saved his life, Feinberg had told him, when an SS guard in a jovial mood had plucked him out of a line of inmates scheduled for the gas chambers, slapped him on the back with a playful gesture, and told him that no one with blue eyes would be sent up the chimney that day. Now those eyes regarded Caine with a steady, serious gaze.

  “Why is the CIA suddenly interested in Mengele?”

  Caine shrugged elaborately, hoping he wasn’t overdoing it.

  “That’s what I’m supposed to find out. Something’s up and Mengele is the key. So our mutual interests happen to dovetail at this point.”

  “I don’t want him killed,” Feinberg said sharply, his old man’s voice a reedy treble. “I want him brought back to Frankfurt to stand trial. When the crime is so great, no punishment that man can devise will ever fit.”

  “I thought you wanted revenge. Isn’t that what it’s all about?”

  “Nein, not at all. My business is prevention, not retribution. I believe it was one of your American philosophers, Santayana, who said that those who do not remember history will be condemned to repeat it. A major war-crimes trial reminds the public that the Holocaust was not a myth, that it really happened. By reminding people of what happened, we help ensure that it will never happen again”—the old man’s eyes glinting with the zeal of the true believer. Perhaps it had been that fire, that consuming sense of a holy mission, that had kept him alive in the death camps, Caine reflected.

  “What have you got?”

  “You will bring him back to stand trial?”

  “If I can,” Caine lied, trying Harris’s patented smile of sincerity on for size. “What have you got?” Come on, he thought. Come on.

  “It will take money, a lot of money,” Feinberg said intently.

  Caine took a thick wad of Deutschmarks out of his pocket and slapped it onto the crowded desk, as if he were laying down a bet. Feinberg’s eyes widened slightly and he allowed himself a nervous smile.