Pursuit (51 page)

“There would have been no way to prevent it,” Max said, fighting to keep his voice even, to believe what he was saying, trying his best not to picture his ever-loved Deborah lying shattered and beyond help in the Magen David Adorn station. “Even if we had sent men there the minute you came in. But I'll call Zion Films and find out where Herzl is, and get someone there to protect him—”

“There is no danger to Herzl. Not now,” Grossman said, his face blank, not even looking at Brodsky accusingly for the time that had been wasted. “Now you have those two weeks you kept talking about. Deborah was killed to let me know they mean business. Herzl is the threat.”

The closed-casket funeral was a small one, restricted to the immediate family, to Max, Morris Wolf, and several close friends of the dead woman. Herzl's plane had arrived in time for the funeral and he stood at graveside, dazed by the sudden and inexplicable death of his mother, and listened to the murmured ceremony without actually accepting that it was happening. He dropped his handful of soil on the casket with the others and walked away, trying to comprehend the tragedy. Someone had purposely killed his mother; it had been no accident. The receptionist had come back from a coffee break to find the package on her desk; they had been expecting a small package with drugs that day and she had automatically supposed that had been it. She had had no way of knowing; God, no! If she had she would have cut off her arm before—

Herzl stared at the men bending down, shoveling earth on top of his beloved mother. Could her death in any way have been connected to his investigation in Munich and London and Angeründe? Who would want to kill his mother? Could someone he had seen, someone he had talked to—? But that was impossible. Still, nothing new had happened in the family except his trip to dig into the pasts of Nazi war criminals.…

He found himself standing outside the cemetery fence, shaking hands with Morris Wolf, seeing the sadness on the crippled face, and watching him walk slowly away with the others, leaving him with his father and Max Brodsky. Through the fence he could see the men complete their task of filling in the grave, see the earth left over as if it represented above the ground someone he loved very much beneath the ground. He discovered that his father was speaking to him, and turned.

“Let's go home, son.” Benjamin Grossman was shaking his head as if with ague, as if still trying to comprehend the suddenness and totality of his loss. “We have to start to plan how we live from now on.”

“Later,” Herzl suddenly said, and turned to Brodsky. “Max, I want to talk to you—”

“Yes?”

“No, I mean I want to go with you and talk.”

“Today?” Brodsky asked, surprised.

“It's important.” How could he go home and look into the face of a father he knew to be one of the leading Nazi war criminals? His revulsion would be apparent in everything he did, everything he said. He could not possibly go home and share sorrow with the man he knew to be his father. He needed to talk to someone first, and the logical person was Max Brodsky. At least, Herzl thought, drawing the small amount of comfort he could derive from the thought, at least Mama never knew of her beloved Benjamin's history.…

“If it's really that important,” Brodsky said, conceding, and turned to Grossman. “Ben, go home and get some rest. I'll bring Herzl over as soon as we're through talking. We'll sit and discuss things.”

“Discuss things,” Grossman said, repeating the words as if by rote, and wiped tears from his eyes. He seemed to have aged years in the one day since his wife's death. “Discuss things …” he said again, and walked slowly to his car.

Herzl climbed into Max's car and sat beside him as Max swung the wheel as if to go to his apartment.

“No,” Herzl said. “Zion Films, on Dizengoff. I have something to show you.” Brodsky obediently turned the wheel again. He knew that whatever Herzl had on his mind had to be important to take the boy from his father on a day such as this. Herzl looked across the car. “Max, who sent that bomb? Do you know? Arabs?”

“Not Arabs,” Brodsky said quietly, his knuckles white on the steering wheel. “They may have handled the delivery, but we'll probably never prove it. The bomb was sent by an organization called ODESSA.”

Herzl felt his stomach contract in sudden panic. Somehow, then, in some inexplicable fashion, his investigation
had
been responsible. But in what way? He felt the blood drain from his face.

“They threatened your father in Argentina,” Brodsky went on, not noting the look of horror on Herzl's face change slowly to puzzlement. “Two men, a Dr. Schlossberg and a Klaus Mittendorf. Schlossberg was at both Maidanek and Buchenwald; Mittendorf was the commandant at Maidanek. Both are still wanted for their war crimes. They live somewhere in South America, and they're active in ODESSA, if you know what that is.”

“I know.” Herzl was now totally confused. “Why did they threaten him?”

“He won't say, and I didn't have time to get it out of him.”

“It doesn't really matter,” Herzl said. “Whatever it was he must have refused them and they killed my mother. Is that it?”

“He had no time to refuse them or give in to them,” Max said bitterly. “They threatened both your mother and you, the two things your father loves above everything else. They killed your mother to demonstrate their power, to prove they're serious.” He glanced over at Herzl. “But you'll be totally protected …”

Herzl didn't even hear this last statement. His mind was racing, trying to understand this information, to fit it into what he had discovered in Europe.

“Why did they pick Benjamin Grossman to get whatever it was they wanted? Why Benjamin Grossman out of all the Israelis?”

Brodsky shrugged. “I assume they picked someone they thought had enough authority to put his hands on what they wanted; and also someone they thought could be pressured through threats to his family.”

“That's the only reason?”

“That's the only one I can figure out.”

“I may be able to give you a better one,” Herzl said quietly, and felt his hatred for Helmut von Schraeder grow. Because of that Nazi criminal, an innocent, lovely woman—his mother—had been buried that day, and it made little difference if that criminal's loss was as great as his own, or not. Brodsky was looking at him curiously.

“What do you mean?”

“I'll show you when we get to Zion Films,” Herzl said, and went on to get some information that had puzzled him during his investigation. “Max, you were transferred from Buchenwald to Bergen-Belsen, weren't you?”

“That's right,” Brodsky said, wondering what Herzl had in mind.

“That's odd …”

“What's odd?”

“To be transferred from Buchenwald to Bergen-Belsen …”

“What's odd about it? Horrible, maybe, but not odd. Actually,” Brodsky said, his intelligence-service mind insistent upon exactitude at all times, “we were supposed to be transferred to Natzweiler, where they also did medical experiments under a Dr. Hirt, but Natzweiler was on the verge of being liberated by the Allies, and the train was rerouted to Bergen-Belsen instead.” He smiled grimly. “Do I remember that night! We were jammed into these cars like cattle, worse than cattle. That's where I met your father …”

Herzl nodded. It all made sense, now. He had been unable to correlate von Schraeder's actions before, with his being transferred—obviously at his own arrangement—to a horror camp such as Bergen-Belsen; but if the man's plan was to be sent to a camp soon to be liberated, then it made sense. Brodsky turned into Dizengoff, drove down it three blocks, and drew the car up before the building that housed Zion Films. He turned to Herzl as he set the hand brake.

“Exactly what is it you want to show me?”

“Something you'll find hard to believe,” Herzl said expressionlessly, “even as I found it hard to believe.” Even, he thought, as I find it almost impossible to believe that Mama is dead. She never got a chance to meet Miriam Kleiman—he forced the thought away, wiped his eyes to take away the sting, and climbed down.

The films were in the projection room, untouched as he had requested in his call from Angermünde, the case locked. He sat Brodsky down, closed the door to make sure they remained undisturbed, and opened the sealed can, beginning to thread the projector.

“This first bit of film was taken in Vienna in 1938,” he said, and completed the threading task. “It was during Anschluss. Watch.” He switched off the light and pressed the projector switch; the film began to roll. At the proper time he stopped the machine. Helmut von Schraeder's handsome smiling face filled the small screen. Brodsky frowned.

“Who is that?”

“Don't you recognize your favorite nephew? Don't you know me when you see me?” Herzl asked sardonically, waited a moment while an amazed Brodsky stared at the almost identical resemblance. Herzl started the forward action of the film again. “In Vienna in March of 1938, ten years before I was born—I was known as Lieutenant Helmut von Schraeder.” The film changed. “This next one,” he went on, “was filmed in Poland soon after the invasion in 1939. I was Captain von Schraeder by this time, standing there with those officers. Now they are leaving me with the maps. See how I roll them up, as if there was something wrong with my arm. See me wink, first with the right eye and then with the left, as if I were entertaining a small child—my son, possibly—who loved to see me do it …”

He tried his best to keep his voice impartial, the voice of a good commentator, nothing more, but the bitterness of his discoveries during his investigation, added to his wretchedness at his mother's death and funeral, could clearly be heard. Brodsky was sitting, staring at the screen, his face rigid.

“This film was shot at Maidanek, where I was assistant to the commandant, whose name was Klaus Mittendorf. Our chief medical officer was a Dr. Franz Schlossberg. I was a colonel by now. Schlossberg and Mittendorf, two men you mentioned before, who approached Benjamin Grossman in Argentina and tried to blackmail him for what you suspect may be Israeli security secrets. In any event, I was known as the Monster of Maidanek. My job was to see to it the gas chambers and the crematoria ovens functioned at top efficiency. I did a very good job; here you see me being decorated by none other than Eichmann himself for my excellent performance.”

The film ran out. Herzl switched on the lights, threaded the film for respooling, and pressed the proper button. There was a whir as the film began running back.

“From Maidanek,” Herzl said, his eyes fixed on the running film, not looking at Brodsky at all, “I was transferred to Buchenwald. Here I contracted typhus—strange in a camp where the officers' quarters were kept spotlessly clean, usually by Jehovah's Witnesses prisoners—and I died of it. If I wasn't the only officer to die of typhus at Buchenwald, I was certainly one of the very few. And do you know the strangest part of the entire affair?” Now he turned and looked Brodsky in the eye. “Who do you think attested to my death? Who was the only man brave enough to take up a body dead of the dread disease typhus, wrap me in my shroud, jam my uniform and all my identification into the burial bag with me, and see to it that I was burned to an unidentifiable crisp in the camp crematorium without a single other soul seeing me? And then swear freely that he had done so? By the sheerest of coincidences, the only man who ever saw Helmut von Schraeder dead was a man named Benjamin Grossman—”

“No!”

“Yes,” Herzl said quietly. “I have a copy of the testimony taken at the war-crimes trials.”

Brodsky stared at him speechlessly. The film completed its rewinding and flapped helplessly. Herzl turned the machine off and stood looking down at Brodsky. His face was tortured.

“I don't like saying this, but there is more, much more. Benjamin Grossman had experimental surgery on his face as a helpless victim in Ward Forty-six at the same time that von Schraeder was dying there—except it wasn't experimental surgery and he wasn't a victim. It was plastic surgery, performed by Dr. Franz Schlossberg, one of the leading plastic surgeons in Germany before the war. I should not be greatly surprised if, before his surgery, Benjamin Grossman didn't look a great deal like his son does now. Add to this the fact that both Benjamin Grossman and Helmut von Schraeder were both raised in Hamburg and could answer questions about it, both were mechanical engineering graduates, both had reputations as fierce soldiers who loved battle. And then add this—do you remember once when we three were out to play tennis and I asked my father why he didn't serve overhand like others, and he said he had fallen out of a tree when he was a small boy and had broken his shoulder and it had been badly set? You saw the films; now I'll tell you something. When Helmut von Schraeder was a young man, he also fell from a tree and broke his shoulder, and it was badly set. And I have an affidavit from his old nurse to that effect. And thereafter he could not salute properly, or roll maps properly—or serve a tennis ball properly …”

Brodsky was looking stunned. “It's insane—”

“It's true.”

“It's impossible—”

“But it's true,” Herzl said, and then he broke, his voice trembling. “Max—Uncle Max—what should I do?”

Brodsky rubbed a heavy, callused hand across his deep-lined face. “Ben Grossman … God! It's impossible. Unbelievable …” He looked up. “Has anyone else seen these films?”

“They are file films; these are just copies. I saw them first in a library in Munich. I imagine many copies exist and they're available to anyone who wants to see them.” He suddenly understood. “Nobody here at Zion has seen them yet, if that's what you mean.”

“But nobody anywhere else ever drew the conclusions from them you did.”

“Nobody knew Benjamin Grossman as well as I did,” Herzl said bitterly.