The Rendezvous (16 page)

‘Hmm, yes. He had no friends at the University? No women?'

‘I had to go carefully,' Klein explained. ‘I went to see Bolsa himself, but he wouldn't see me. I got in to talk to one of his assistants.'

‘What did you tell him?'

‘I said I was doing a series of newspaper articles on foreign graduates of Bolsa's and following up their careers. I said Amstat was well known in America now and he was one of my subjects.'

‘Very good,' Hoffmeyer said. ‘What did you get out of him.'

‘Not much,' Klein answered. ‘He remembered Amstat because he worked very hard and he was much older than the other students. I asked if he had any friends, so I could get the personal angle on him, but he said he couldn't remember anyone. He said the same thing as the landlady and the people at the pensione. He was a quiet man and he kept to himself.'

‘There were no graduate groups – no photographs?'

‘Not with Amstat in them. The assistant couldn't say why he wasn't in the photograph, but he was noted as absent.'

‘You know,' Hoffmeyer said, ‘this is beginning to look interesting. Have some more coffee, David my boy. There's something of a pattern here. He comes in 1955 to the University – he may have been here long before that. He has no family and he's over thirty-five – he stays in a boarding house in the poorer part of town. He's quiet and he keeps to himself. Same thing when he's a later student; he moves, all right, but this could be because he's beginning to feel a little safe. He's still quiet, he has no women, no friends among the other students. Any suggestion he was homosexual?'

‘None at all. The woman at the pensione said he was good-looking, but not in a way to make out he was queer. Just a good-looking man, very serious. That's what she said. You really think we're on to someone, Mr Hoffmeyer?'

‘I don't know,' the old man said. ‘This is just the beginning. But, as I said, it shows a certain pattern. Most of them have done, you know, when we pick up the early scent of them. They're all quiet, and they choose unobtrusive cheap places to live. They damned well have to, don't they, when they get here first? Eh? Well, we've got something to check against. I've got the list here. This is not the complete one, my boy, only the suspects we think may have crept in to this part of the world. Now.'

He began reading down the list of names; they began alphabetically, with the rank, army, S.S., or medical in brackets beside them and a very brief note on the crimes they had committed.

‘He's too old – over sixty now. This one was a doctor; he wouldn't try to be an architect – I don't think – wait a minute, no, Fritche – it's unlikely to be him, though the age group is nearer. He could be a young fifty. Fritche wears spectacles. Medical officer with the 3rd Panzer Division, seconded to Waffen S.S., armoured unit where he chose Jews for extermination in Warsaw after the uprising. Note down, Fritche, David. Let's see. No, not him or him.' His pencil went down the pages slowly; he mouthed the words as he read; two more names were written on David Klein's pad and ringed round twice.

‘That looks like it, but one minute, and I'll just make sure.' He turned the papers back and started again.

‘There's one here. Brunnerman, Gestapo, S.D. Section IV, counter-espionage. Wanted for extermination of Jewish population of Lodz 1944. Thought to have escaped to South America, last-known clue in Spain in '49. Nothing since. His age fits, so does the description, as far as it goes. No spectacles, no distinguishing marks. Father a professor at Stuttgart University. That means an educated professional background.'

‘But there's nothing more to go on.'

‘No, nothing; Fritche and the last two, Kronberg and Elsner, were tracked to Brazil and Chile and then lost because they moved on. There's nothing to say Brunnerman ever got here. But put the name down just the same. You never know.'

‘It's a short list,' David Klein said. ‘That ought to simplify it. Is there anything else you want me to do?'

‘No, I don't think so. We know where our man is, if he is one of our men, and he'll be watched in New York. I'll send these names through to Tel Aviv where they've got the complete dossiers and let them get on with it. When they've got something for us they'll let us know.'

It was a complicated process, but made much simpler by the fact that dossiers relevant to war criminals wanted for crimes against the Jewish people had been handed over to the Israelis by American and French Jews working on the War Crimes Commissions and in the Deuxième Bureau in Paris, when their own governments had given up the chase.

It was all unofficial; the photostat copies and often the originals had found their way to the chief officers of Israeli Intelligence, together with anything that might be relevant, family snaps, old identification passes, handwriting samples, everything that could identify a man after he had been hidden for twenty years under a dozen different names, in any of a dozen countries. The two men talked for a while about ordinary things; David Klein was married and expecting his second child. Hoffmeyer asked after his wife, and talked about his own son and daughter. There would probably be a wedding there too, with his boy getting so serious about the daughter of a friend of theirs. It would be nice, to have more grandchildren. It kept the family going. It had so nearly been wiped out completely. Hoffmeyer liked David; not just because he worked with him and was a clever boy, but because he typified the young generation of Jews, like the children he had seen making the Israeli state. He had been shocked by the women at first, by their mannish attitudes and their military service. But he had come to understand what all this meant. They were the children of parents who had not known how to fight. The generation before them had gone unresisting to deportation and death, and this was the young people's reaction to that sheep to the slaughter mentality of their race. David Klein was one of the new Jews; once his race got up off their knees, and faced the Gentile world on equal terms, there would never be another list like the' one he had put away in his desk. Six million had gone down without a struggle. The men and women who did Intelligence work were not only dispensing private justice. They were proving that it was no longer safe to kill Jews, because now the Jew had learnt to use a gun. The next morning Jacob cabled his subsidiary office in Tel Aviv. ‘Please check following personnel against export list for employment in our area.
FRITCHE. ELSNER. KRONBERG. BRUNNERMAN
. Regards. Hoffmeyer.'

Fritche had spent time in Holland. Their agent there would be contacted and the information cross-checked with what was known about him from his activities in Warsaw. They had got one S.S. major in Portugal because it was discovered that he had had a hernia operation; the scar on the man living in Lisbon under the name of Franken proved to be the same operation scar as the one recorded on the S.S. officer's dusty personal file in his divisional personnel records. He had personally shot twenty-five Jews at Mauthausen and sent their heads to the Professor of Anthropology at Stuttgart University because he wanted specimens of prime non-Aryan skulls for his collection. Three Israelis had stood over the major until he shot himself in his own bathroom.

Elsner, Kronberg and Brunnermann had all spent part of their S.S. career in France, the last two had been stationed in Paris. Paris would look into what was available on them; the French were most co-operative in these matters so long as it was done discreetly. After all, there was a thriving German tourist trade in France. Check and cross-check. It was the Israeli boast that they had never got the wrong man.

There was no swinging light-bulb signifying consciousness this time; she was naked and unable to move, but the hands holding her were not thrusting her under the water in an icy bath, or bringing the glowing eye of a cigar butt to rest on her skin. His hands were firm because she had struggled so violently, but she wasn't tied down on the table in Freischer's interrogation room, it was the weight of her lover's body that kept her still.

‘Don't cry, don't cry,' he kept saying. ‘Nobody's hurting you, darling heart, it's all right, it's all right.'

She had gone through it all again in those few seconds; the mental block had disintegrated under the release of that tremendous climax: memory came rushing back like water through a burst dam. Now she had committed the crime she had tried to confess to Kaplan when he was treating her with drugs; she had gone to bed with her German interrogator and collaborated. Now, with her memory returned and the confusion about time and place receding, she made the final betrayal.

‘His name was Raoul,' she said. ‘Raoul Duclos, and he lived in a house in St. Germain des Pres. That's what you wanted to know, wasn't it? That's what I wouldn't tell them afterwards.'

‘I'm going to put the light on,' he said. ‘Be calm now, you know where you are, Terese. You're in Chicago, in my apartment.' He moved cautiously away from her; when the bedside light came on she cringed, and he took her in his arms and let her hide herself. The impossible had happened; he had taken the gamble and lost. There was nothing he could do about it that didn't involve harming the woman beside him, trembling with shock in his arms. And he could never hurt her; he could only wait and see if she intended to hurt him. That would emerge later, when she was over the nervous crisis, when she had stopped weeping and regained her self-control.

‘I have some brandy here,' he said. ‘Will you be all right if I leave you for a minute, just to get it from the living room?'

‘I'm all right,' she whispered. She pulled up the sheets and covered herself. Kaplan had made her forget; Kaplan had pulled down a blind over that window into hell, from the Avenue Foch to Buchenwald, and the act of love had released the catch and sent it shooting up, showing her everything. He brought the brandy and helped her sit up; he held the glass to her lips while she drank, very slowly.

‘You're my interrogator,' she said. ‘The first one, the one I nearly told about Raoul.'

‘Yes,' he said. ‘I am.'

‘I wanted to tell you,' Terese said; she took the glass from him, holding it very tightly to stop herself from shaking. ‘I wanted to go home with you, didn't I?'

He looked into her eyes and the pain in them was unbearable. He turned away from her and for the first time in his adult life he shed tears. ‘Oh God, if only you had – if only I'd got you out of it.'

‘They broke my fingers with a hammer,' she said. ‘One by one, each time I didn't answer the question. I'm married, aren't I? and my husband's name is Robert Bradford. I live in Boston.' She paused for a moment, marshalling her life, and then went on. ‘We're very rich and he loves me. I know I've been happy, I can feel it. I know everything about myself. It's just that it doesn't seem quite real.'

He heard the undertone of hysteria in the last words, and caught hold of her, ready to fight it. ‘Drink the brandy down; come on, drink it.' He put his hand against her face, shielding her, and bending he kissed her hair.

‘Go slowly, Terese, go slowly and it'll be easier for you.'

‘Why am I in bed with you now?' she whispered to him. ‘We made love to each other, didn't we – that's what did it. That's when I knew who you really were.'

‘Yes,' he said. ‘You got your memory back. Everything came back to you after that.'

‘We're lovers,' she said. ‘That's all that's really happened. It didn't happen then, but it has now. I don't even know your real name. It isn't Amstat, is it?'

‘No,' he said. ‘It's Brunnerman, and my Christian name is Alfred.' She moved away from him a little, looking at him, into his face.

‘We're twenty years older. How strange, you've hardly changed at all.'

‘You haven't either. I thought you were so pretty then; I can remember looking at you, sitting in that office of mine, and thinking. What a pretty girl, what the hell is she doing here? How do you feel now? My poor darling one, you're trembling so much. Try to be calm, trust me and relax.'

‘It's mad,' she said. ‘The whole thing is a nightmare and we can't wake up. Hold me, for God's sake!'

‘We've woken up,' he said. ‘Accept that. It's all in the past, you can look back later – later you can think about it, but not now. Now you must be good and quiet, and let me comfort you.'

‘I want to sleep,' she said. ‘It's too much, too many things coming at me from everywhere at once. I'm so cold, Karl.'

‘Let me warm you; come close to me.'

‘I can remember Joe Kaplan too,' she said; the brandy was seeping into her system, dulling the after-effects of shock. ‘He was my doctor after Robert found me. Do you know about that?'

‘No,' he said. ‘And you're not going to tell me, not yet. You're going to get warm and close your eyes and sleep for a while.'

The light went out and they lay together in the dark; she still trembled, but it was spasmodic and before long her breathing became regular and she slept. ‘My name is Brunnerman.' He hadn't even tried to protect himself against her. All his mental reservations, the years of denying his own existence and living a lie in the effort to make it the truth, had been sacrificed when he told her his real name. The solution came to him, and because there was no possibility of it, he was able to think about it and reject it calmly. He ought to kill her. It was the only way to make sure he would never be discovered. He ought to kill her as she lay asleep beside him. He put his hands up to her throat, gently, and kissed her; she stirred and he stroked the narrow proportions of her neck and the hollow of her collar bone. When he brought his hand down over her breast she woke and turned to him immediately. ‘I love you,' he said in German.

‘Oh, Karl, Karl, hold me to you. I'm still afraid. Comfort me …'