The Old Boys (7 page)

“I think so.” I attempted a smile. “Is there a reward?”

“Paradise is the reward. But money is also involved. You have to be a believer to collect, so you should avoid zealots with beards and wild eyes, but I’d be wary of all strangers if I were you. All you have to do to convert to Islam is say that there is but one God, Allah, and Muhammad is his prophet. There are good Christians in this world who would speak those words into a tape recorder, then pull the trigger and bring my cousin your head.”

I said, “Is your man in Manaus one of them?”

“He loves money and hates Americans and thinks that Ibn Awad did good work in the world,” Kalash said. “Whether he knows about the fatwa is another question. The fatwa is quite recent. Word of it has not seeped down very far.”

I was passed along the avenue Wagram by loiterers with cell phones, just as I had earlier been handed along O Street, and when I boarded a Métro train at the Étoile, a thug with furry eyebrows got on behind me. He called whoever was next in line as I disembarked near the Gare Saint-Lazare. On the train to Geneva, I sat beside a very large Russian who smelled of unbrushed teeth (or maybe he was a Chechen, a Bosnian, an Albanian—the world was full of Muslims who looked like you and me). Across the aisle, a virtually fleshless woman with scarred wrists hiked her skirt and stared at me hungrily, stroked her meager leg, and talked Swiss-German to herself in a low incessant murmur. Or was she speaking to me, who couldn’t understand a word, or maybe into a concealed hands-free telephone?

As far as I could tell, no one awaited me at the train station in Geneva, but I could not be sure because of the crowd and because all Genevese give the impression that they have us aliens under surveillance. I checked into a hotel behind the station and ate a gummy
truite au bleu
for dinner in its appalling restaurant. The
waiter was an Arab. So was the cook; everywhere I looked I saw an Arab. They had always been numerous, of course. I just hadn’t been so keenly aware of them as I was now. I decided not to go for a walk along the lake after dinner.

From my room I called Charley Hornblower. Had he ever heard of a man called Simon Hawk, Kalash’s man in Manaus?

“Give me ten minutes,” Charley said.

He called back in five. “True name Wolfram Ostermann, if I’m not mistaken,” Charley said. “We came across him back in the fifties when we were trying to find Eichmann as a good-will gesture to the Mossad.”

“Headquarters didn’t tell the Mossad?”

“Apparently not, if he’s alive and well and living in Brazil. Wolfram was a busy bee. He saw a lot of former SS men and we thought he might be up to something special. They’d talk to him, then head off to exotic destinations.”

“Such as?”

“Pretty much everywhere. He seemed to be financing their travels by selling paintings, presumably stolen during the war. It was better to watch him than have him replaced with somebody we didn’t know.”

“And
was
he up to something special?”

“We never followed up. In those days the White House wanted to know about Russians, not runaway ex-SS men. We had a lot of those working for us in Germany.”

“Anything else?”

“Just one faint marker,” Charley said. “One of the people Wolfram dealt with in Brazil was a doctor who with called himself Claus Bücher. We never put a true name to him, but you know who he is—Ibn Awad’s personal physician.”

Small world.

Everything was in order at the bank. Kalash had actually deposited the money, all of it. After transferring $25,000 each to the Old Boys and withdrawing $25,000 in pocket money for myself, I collected from my safe deposit box an old Canadian passport bearing the name William O. Dyer and a picture of me as a somewhat younger man. At the airport I booked a ticket for Frankfurt with a connection to Manaus and paid for it in cash. Aboard the plane I fell asleep almost immediately. I had not seen a bed since leaving Washington thirty-six hours earlier. I could taste the awful meal I had eaten the night before. My bones ached. I dreamt of Paul and myself as a child on a sled. We crashed in a snowdrift. The sled overturned. I had a bloody nose. Offstage, a female screamed. Memory or symbolism? Who knew?

I had never been posted to South America, thanks be, so my first glimpse of Brazil revealed a sight that I could scarcely have imagined. From a height of thirty thousand feet, the rain forest stretched as far as the eye could see in all directions, the undulating spinach-green canopy carved into somewhat more comprehensible patches of territory by muddy rivers that glittered in the sun. As in song and story, a man really could disappear into this wilderness without a trace, enslaved by some dope-taking tribe of Indians, eaten by crocodiles or merely lost, following engorged
rivers downstream in the direction of civilization as recommended by the Boy Scout manual but never finding anything but another muddy river. Most people, including me, would prefer to die another death someplace else. Yet here I was in this prehistoric world, under a false identity, on the recommendation of a man I scarcely knew who had no reason to wish me well, in pursuit of a cousin who might be dead and a mad Arab who might not be.

On payment of a handsome bribe to a passport officer at the Manaus airport, I was grudgingly granted a three-day tourist visa, which provided more than enough time to do what I had to do. The German I was looking for called himself Simon Hawk. I rang the number Kalash had given me from an airport phone and asked for Herr Hawk in German. When he came on the line I identified myself as a friend of Kalash.

“Your German is not as good as the last American Prince Kalash sent to me,” Hawk said in English that could only have been learned in a British public school. This was the Schutzstaffel style: let this mongrel dummkopf know at the outset that you already knew all about him, that you could if necessary read his slow and simple and supremely uninteresting thoughts. That he had better come to the point.

“I apologize,” I said in English, glad to have news of Paul. “I wonder if we might meet.”

“Why should we do that?”

“Because I am a former officer of the American intelligence service who has excellent contacts in the Mossad, and if you do not talk to me, you will be talking to them.”

This broke all the rules including the law of self-preservation, but it worked.

“How odd,” said Hawk in an altered tone of voice. “I shouldn’t have thought that a man with those connections would be a friend of Arabs.”

“It’s an odd world, Mr. Hawk. May I come to you or not?”

“Dinner tonight,” he said. It was not a question; clearly I was all too available.

“That’s
very kind. How will I find you?”

“I’ll send a car for you at the Novotel. Eight-thirty.”

“I can easily take a taxi.”

“The driver would never find me and you would be a fool to trust him,” Hawk said. “I assure you that you will be quite safe.”

Well, now,
that
put my mind at ease. If you couldn’t trust an old Schutzstaffel man living in the jungle under an alias who happened to have a connection to Ibn Awad, whom could you trust? I decided to skip the Novotel and went instead to a hotel recommended by my taxi driver. The ride through Manaus was what one might expect in the tropics, a tour of a slum that appeared to have been built as a slum, punctuated by an occasional bank or office building made of the same scabby concrete and painted in the same garish colors as the rest of the city. In the central market sweaty butchers worked in the open air in hot sunlight, cutting up steers and hogs and selling the warm meat while blood spilled sluggishly over the edge of the table in a lacy crimson film.

Despite my driver’s assurances that the manager was his brother-in-law, the hotel, a most humble one, was fully booked until I slid a twenty-dollar bill across the reception desk. The banknote vanished and an encouraging smile appeared on the face of the clerk, who almost immediately noticed a cancellation. I was soon under a lukewarm shower. After that I ate a dry roomservice sandwich, wedged the door, and fell into yet another profound sleep. Evidently my brain wanted no part of the waking world into which the rest of my body had carried it.

After my nap, I put on fresh clothes and walked to the Novotel. I waited outside for my ride. The car that Simon Hawk sent for me at precisely eight o’clock was not the gleaming Mercedes that his telephone manner evoked, but a well-worn Subaru in need of a wash. The driver, a stringy Brazilian dressed in a clean but threadbare white suit, spotted me at once.

“You are the North American for Mister Doctor Hawk?”

Evidently Hawk had been willing to part with the name he was born with but not with the
Herr Doktor
that went with his original
identity. His house was some distance from the city. The road ran through a sort of trench lined with brightly lit, open-fronted shops and cafés. Music blared, people went about their business in the trickled light of the shops. A fat drunk pissed into the roadway and the driver steered around the arcing yellow stream as if avoiding a pothole.

A mile or so further on, the driver turned the car into a narrow driveway cut into a grove of enormous smooth trees. The house itself was modest, overgrown with vines, in need of paint. According to Kalash, Hawk had been in hiding from Nazi-hunters since 1945, and by the look of things he was coming to the end of his nest egg.

He greeted me on the doorstep with a Leica in hand and took three rapid flash pictures before handing the camera for safekeeping to the driver, who disappeared.

“Hawk,” he said, with a firm handshake.

“Dyer.”

“No doubt.”

I might have said the same, and did so with a lift of the eyebrows. Hawk showed me a small, just perceptible sneer.

“Do come in.”

We stepped into a Sydney Greenstreet movie set: low ceilings, concrete walls, small high windows, ceiling fans turning lazily. Rattan furniture. Nothing on the walls except for a primitive textile or two. Several quite beautiful pieces of what I took to be Amazonian Indian pottery. Outside, the low putt-putt of the generator that drove the fans and supplied the dim light from a couple of lamps.

Without having asked what I wanted, Hawk handed me a drink.

“A Manaus Collins,” he explained. “Rum, sugar, juice of local fruits.”

My host was dressed in a double-breasted blue blazer with a crest on the breast pocket and white pants and sandals, no socks. He was neither tall nor short, neither slim nor paunchy. He bore
himself as if still in the uniform he had last worn more than half a century before. He was swarthy for a German, especially so for a former SS man, but perhaps that had something to do with long exposure to the equatorial sun. He had a full head of springy steelgray hair, worn long on top and combed straight back but cut short at the sides in the bygone military fashion of the Third Reich. Behind the small round lenses of his Himmlerian steelframe spectacles, his eyes were brown, intelligent, and on full alert. The sandals were a mistake. The rest of him might be remarkably well-preserved, but he had an old man’s feet, veined and splotched, with horny, broken toenails.

We sipped our sour drinks. He said, “Have you seen the opera house?”

“I’m afraid not. Jet lag.”

The Manaus opera house, built a century ago by immensely rich rubber barons who imported Europe’s most famous singers, was the city’s great historical landmark.

“Don’t miss it,” Hawk said. “It’s very nicely restored. There’s a certain comic pathos to it. Imagine the greatest voices of the time traveling across the sea and then fifteen hundred kilometers by riverboat to sing for tone-deaf ruffians.”

The driver appeared in a different coat and announced dinner. He served a tasty Amazonian fish with many unusual flat ribs, accompanied by pulpy vegetables I had never before encountered. Hawk ate his bony fish with two forks.

“Tambaqui,” he said, naming it.

He rendered a full account of the natural history of this creature, which apparently grew to enormous size, had a gaping circular mouth, and was believed by the natives to have a taste for human infants, which it swallowed whole when they were carelessly dropped into the river.

“You do understand,” said Hawk, “that Manaus is on the Rio Negro, not the Amazon. There are no fish in the Rio Negro— something about the black silt that gives the river its name—so this tambaqui and all fish eaten in Manaus come from the Amazon.”

“How
interesting.”

“But not what you came to learn,” Hawk said with a charming smile; yellow teeth. He rang a bell. “Coffee in the drawing room, please, Joaõ.”

When we were settled in our chairs and had drained our tiny cups of coffee, Hawk came to the point. “So what is it, exactly, that brings you here, Mister Dyer?”

“You mentioned another American who visited recently. I said. “Do you photograph all your visitors?”

“Only the ones I’ve never met before. I have a bad memory for faces.”

“Do you have the picture you took of him?”

“Yes. In my pocket, actually.”

He handed over a snapshot of Paul Christopher, face bleached and pasted onto the black night by the flash. The date of his visit, less than a week after his disappearance, was written in neat Germanic script in the white space at the bottom of the picture.