by Orca Various
I admit it: my first reaction was that my cousins were victims of some kind of collective delirium. Grandpa McLean a spy? Still, it made more sense than Grandpa McLean as, say, a one-time Nazi who’d fled to Argentina after World War II and then somehow changed his identity again—or many times—before landing in Canada. I mean, there’s no way my grandfather was ever a Nazi—was there? He’d fought in the war against the Nazis—hadn’t he?
One thing was certain: he had a lot of passports, eleven more than a regular person leading a regular life would ever need. And they were all issued under different names.
Like Klaus Adler. Why did he have a German name? And why an Argentinian passport?
The (few) things I know about Argentina: It’s a big country. People there speak Spanish. They’re wild about the tango. Oh yeah, and there was this one Nazi, a guy named Adolf Eichmann, the evil genius who came up with the idea of turning death into an industry. He was responsible for some of the worst things that happened during World War II. When things finally started looking bad for Germany, Eichmann fled to avoid arrest and trial. He hid out in a few places in Europe before things got too hot for him. Then he split for Argentina. I think they finally caught him and put him in prison. Or maybe they executed him. I’m not sure.
So there I was with an Argentinian passport for Klaus Adler, an old newspaper photo of some anonymous Nazi in full regalia and a hand-drawn map of a place that because of the passport Adam guessed was somewhere in Argentina.
I printed out the map and studied it. There were a couple of names scrawled on lines that looked like they might be streets.
I clicked into Google Maps and typed in one of the names and Argentina. I got a hit in Buenos Aires, in a district called San Telmo. It looked like Adam was right. I printed that map and then I went into Google Earth for a real-life look. Buenos Aires was pretty close. It should be easy to get there and check this out—even though it probably wouldn’t pan out, not after all this time. The way I figured it, I’d do a hop, skip and a jump to San Telmo, then another hop, skip and a jump back home.
Piece of cake.
Turned out I was wrong.
THREE
Ed wasn’t around when I shut down the computer. By then I had booked a flight from Montevideo to Buenos Aires—it was only forty minutes by air, according to the website I used, so I guess I could have waited until he came back. But the other guys were already on their missions. Who knew what I was going to find out or how long it would take?
I called for a cab, stuffed my things into my duffel bag and scrawled a note: Had a great time. Thanks for the hospitality. Just heard from a friend in Buenos Aires. Going for a quick visit before heading home.
It was early evening by the time I cleared customs at the airport in Buenos Aires. I flagged a cab and told the driver where I wanted to go. He dropped me at my destination, and the next thing I knew, I was walking down a narrow but bustling street and wondering what I was doing there. I mean, come on. That newspaper clipping? It was from 1945. The passport? It expired in 1963—before even the Major was born. And the little map in my hand, with the address on it? My guess was that it was about the same vintage as the passport. Suppose I had a map of, say, Toronto, from sometime in the early 1960s. How many streets would be the same, and how many would be different? What about the people? Would anyone who lived on a specific street back then still be living there now, fifty-plus years later? Who was I kidding? Everything would be different. People would have moved—or died. So what made me think I was going to find anything useful here, even assuming I managed to find the address from David McLean’s old notebook?
Common sense told me there was no way I was going to strike gold. I was just going through the motions—doing it, I guess, for Adam, because he’d asked me. He and the other cousins had all been close to David McLean and were closer now after everything they’d gone through in the months since he’d died. Adam and the rest of them are part of a big family that’s managed pretty well without me. I understand why they care so much about their grandfather’s past. That’s the way I still think of him—as their grandfather. My mother’s mother had a relationship with David McLean after his wife died. She broke up with him before she knew she was pregnant. And, being one of those super-independent women—I bet she burned her bra back there during the early days of women’s lib—she didn’t see any point in mentioning that fact to him. After all, their relationship was over and she was perfectly capable of raising a child on her own. Which is what she did. McLean only found out about his fifth daughter (my mom)—and her son (me)—after my mom died. He read the obituary—a lot of old people read them—spotted my grandmother’s name in it (he told me he’d been stunned), did the math and voilà!
David McLean turned out to be an okay guy. He’d wanted to meet me, and eventually he did. I even stayed with him for a little while after I got in trouble with the Major and the law. He seemed nice. But his past? What did that matter to anyone, especially me, now that he was dead? That’s what I told myself anyway. The truth? I was as curious as the rest of my cousins. What had the old man been up to? And where did Nazis figure in?
So there I was in Buenos Aires.
The street I was on was lined with rows of attached houses—or maybe they were apartments. The front doors opened right up onto the cobblestones. Occasionally a horn blared and I had to jump aside to let a car pass. There were people chatting here and there. A woman was attacking her front step with a scrub brush, a bucket of soapy water beside her. And then, there it was, the number I was looking for.
I approached the door. There was a bell pull. I rang it.
No answer.
I waited some more. Someone said something in Spanish. I turned and saw that the woman who’d been scrubbing her doorstep was standing now, scrub brush in hand, and that she was talking to me. She spoke again, louder this time. I had to concentrate hard on every word. She spoke Spanish with an accent I had never heard before, but I finally got it. She was telling me that there was no one home.
“Do you know the people who live here?” I asked, also in Spanish. She squinted at me, as if trying to see the words coming out of my mouth. I repeated the question more slowly.
“Sí.”
“Have they lived here a long time?”
“Five years. Maybe six.”
Which meant that whoever the residents were now, they probably knew nothing about what had happened here fifty years ago.
I asked if she’d known the people who’d lived here before the most recent residents.
“Sí.” Apparently, they were a nice couple from the countryside. They were good neighbors for twenty years, until the man died in a car accident.
Twenty years meant that they hadn’t been here in the 1960s either. Strike two.
“What about the people before that?” I asked.
The old woman didn’t know. “¿Es importante?” she asked.
“Sí. Muy importante.”
She turned and shouted a name. A stout woman stopped in front of a house a little farther down the street. She had a key in one hand and two heavy bags of shopping in the other. The woman with the scrub brush said something to her, but she spoke so fast I didn’t catch most of it. The woman with the groceries nodded. She set her bags down on the stoop so that she could unlock the door while she asked me what I wanted to know.
I told her I was looking for the people who had lived here a long time ago.
She smiled. “¿Americano?”
“Canadian.” Maybe I’m not always as proud of it as I should be, but I’m proud enough when I’m traveling to make sure people get it right.
She switched to English, which she spoke better than I spoke Spanish. “My son-in-law, the second one, he is American,” she said. “So, you are looking for Herr Franken?”
“Franken?”
“Heinrich Franken. This is who you are asking about, no?”
Heinrich Franken. The name definitely sounded German. Was it the
name of the Nazi in the newspaper clipping? I thought about digging it out but hesitated. Adam had warned me not to tell anyone what I was up to. But he also wanted me to figure out what the phony passport was all about and what David McLean had been involved in. I couldn’t do that if I couldn’t figure out why this address was important and what, if anything, it had to do with Nazis.
“Have you lived on this street for a long time?” I asked the woman.
“Since I was born. It was my parents’ house, and now it is mine.”
“Do you know how long Herr Franken lived here?”
“He moved in with his wife and his son when I was a little girl. I was nine when he arrived and eleven when he moved to America.”
“America?”
“We were envious. A man came to the house with an offer for Herr Franken to go and work in America. He had a German name, but I think he was American.” She thought for a moment. “Yes. He was American. I remember Mirella—that was Herr Franken’s wife—telling it to my mother. She said his name was Adler and that Adler is German for eagle, and the eagle is an important symbol in America.”
Adler was the name on David McLean’s passport. But why had he come here to offer an ex-Nazi a job in America? And why had he used an alias to do it?
“What kind of job was it?” I asked.
“It was at an airplane factory. In California. I was jealous of Mirella. California was where they had the movie stars, and I loved American movies. My father said that Herr Franken would be able to live like a king in America.”
Yeah, those were the days. All those big factories worked overtime after the war, pouring out not just airplanes but also cars and refrigerators and televisions, all the things that people finally had the money to buy after a decade-long depression and then a world war.
I dipped into my pocket, pulled out the copy of the newspaper photo and unfolded it. But while I was doing that, something else fell to the ground. My copy of Klaus Adler’s passport photo. The woman looked down at it.
“That is the American. That is Herr Adler.” She sounded surprised. “I remember him. He was my first American, and he looked just like I imagined he would—so handsome.”
I picked up the photo and showed her again.
“Are you sure, senora? Are you sure this is the American who offered a job to Mr. Franken?”
She was more than sure. She was positive.
I showed her the photo of the three German officers and pointed to the head that was circled.
“And this man? Do you recognize him?”
She stared at the photo, her face somber, and slowly nodded. “Herr Franken. My father was right. He said Herr Franken had probably been a Nazi. There were many of them here after the war. He was a quiet man, Herr Franken. Always kept to himself. His wife, she was different. She was Argentinian. She liked to talk.”
I didn’t absorb much after she made the positive identification.
“You are sure, senora?” I asked again. “This man here”—I thrust a finger at the circled head—“this is Herr Franken?”
“Sí.”
“And you think he went to the States, to California?”
“Sí. Mirella was so excited. She came to our house.
She was always coming to our house, but only when Herr Franken was not home. She was his second wife, you understand. She was very young and naive. My mother said that Herr Franken only married her because he needed someone to keep house for him and his son.”
“Was the boy young?”
“Oh, no. He was grown up. Only a bit younger than Mirella. She was twenty-five when she married Herr Franken, and my mother thought it was a scandal that the old man married someone so much younger. She worked very hard, Mirella. But she never complained. When she found out they were going to America, she came to our house and she danced in our kitchen, she was so excited. She said it was a secret and that she wasn’t supposed to tell, but she told us anyway. She went first, with Siegfried—”
“Siegfried?”
“Herr Franken’s son. He and Mirella went ahead to get everything ready. Herr Franken followed a few days later with the American. My mother was sure that Mirella would send her a photograph of her new home, with a big picture window and a driveway with a car in it and a green yard all around the house.”
“Did she?”
The woman shook her head. “But she wrote. One postcard, many years later.”
“What did she say?”
“I don’t remember. But she was sad.”
“Sad?”
“Homesick. She wanted to come back home.” She paused. “Momento.” She disappeared into the house. I waited. The woman who was scrubbing her steps looked at me.
“Here.” The woman was back with a large book in her hand. When she opened it, I saw that it was a stamp album. “My brother collected them.” She crossed herself, so I guessed her brother was dead. “He would beg all the neighbors—all the Germans and the people who came from other countries and got letters from home.” She leafed through the album until she found a small stack of postcards. She handed me the album so that she could search through them. “He liked the pictures. Here.” She pulled one from the stack and handed it to me in exchange for the album. “This is from Mirella.”
It was in Spanish, and the slanted handwriting was so tiny I could barely read it. The return address, though, was clear enough.
“This isn’t from California,” I said. The return address was in Detroit, Michigan.
“That is all we heard from her. She says she is lonely, but she doesn’t say why,” the woman said. “If you want, you can keep the card.”
“Are you sure?”
“I remember when my mother got it. She read it and gave it to my brother, and the only thing she ever said is that she supposed Mirella got what any foolish girl deserved. I didn’t understand at the time what she meant, and my mother didn’t explain. But now I think it must have something to do with that picture you showed me. Now I think Mirella learned what kind of man her husband was. Take it. I have no use for it.”
I thanked the woman, pocketed the postcard and my pictures, and headed back the way I had come. It wasn’t long before I was at the airport, lucking into a flight to Detroit with a stopover in Miami, sixteen hours in all. While I waited to go through security, I wondered again why on earth my grandfather had come to Argentina to offer a job to an ex-Nazi. Who had he been working for? The airplane manufacturer? Suppose that was it. Suppose Franken had been some kind of engineer in Germany before the war, and suppose the airplane manufacturer had wanted to recruit him? It was possible. But why had my grandfather used an alias? And why a German alias? It didn’t make sense.
I boarded my flight, taking my duffel bag as carryon. The Major has a massive aversion to checking baggage. It’s a waste of time, as far as he’s concerned, to stand around some arrivals carousel, waiting for your suitcase to appear or, in a whole lot of cases (no pun intended), not appear at all. So he packs light. And since I’d traveled with him as far as Uruguay, and me wasting my time equaled him wasting his time, I’d also packed light. Which was no problem, because it’s hot in Uruguay when it’s butt-freezing weather up in the Great White North.
To get the flight I wanted, I had to book business class. I put it on the Major’s credit card, which he’d given me because I was going to have to make my own way home anyway after he shipped out, and you never knew what could happen. If you’re the Major, you don’t want your son stranded somewhere in South America without a peso to his name. My ticket gave me access to a special lounge, which, let me tell you, was not just a step but a whole flight of stairs above the service—or complete lack of service offered to passengers who fly economy. (In case you’re wondering, I wasn’t worried about how the Major would react to his next credit card statement. As promised, Adam had transferred some money into my bank account, and it was more than enough to cover my expenses.) While I was in the lounge, I worked on my customs form. I struggled a li
ttle over what to write in the space that asks where you’ll be staying in the United States. The Americans want to know exactly where to find you in that big old land of the free, in case you turn out to be a terrorist or something. I wrote in the name of a hotel near the Detroit airport—thank God for business-class Internet services, complete with computer access. I prayed no one would check until and unless they had a compelling reason to.
I ate better than I ever imagined possible on an airplane. I watched part of a movie, but it didn’t hold my interest. I slept. I slept. I slept.
It was morning when the plane landed in Miami.
I got off and followed the herd to US Customs and Border Protection. I figured I was a natural to get waved through. After all, I’m Canadian. Canadians have a totally nonthreatening image.
It didn’t work out the way I expected.
I got pulled aside. I was told to point out my stuff—my duffel and a tray containing my belt, my shoes, a bunch of change (Uruguayan, Argentinian and Canadian) and my cell phone—“but don’t touch anything,” the guard warned. What did she—a very surly she—think I was? A drug smuggler?
I realized with a jolt that maybe she thought exactly that. I was young, male, kinda scruffy, if you want to know the truth, and traveling alone from South America. Profile or what?
I got hauled into a small room. My stuff did not immediately follow me. They made me sit for nearly an hour, and I started to worry I’d miss my connecting flight. I knew what that was all about. Make them wait equals make them stew equals make them think they’re in a manure pile so deep they’ll have to shovel for a year to get out. In other words, make them sweat.
It worked. I sweated. I didn’t need or want any trouble, especially not with US Border Protection. Those guys are deeply suspicious, hard-core tenacious and 100 percent humorless.
Finally, a man appeared. Not a uniform, but a suit. He stepped into the room, waited until the door clicked shut behind him and then stood there, my passport and a file folder in his hand, eyeballing me like he was a cop and I was the killer he’d been searching for all his life, like that cop in Les Misérables, one of the zillions of musicals my grandma has dragged me to. He flipped open my passport to the photo page and stared at it as if he was checking it for the first time. But I’m no rookie. I live with the Major, Mister Military Police, Criminal Investigations Unit. I know a dodge when I see it.
