The Seventh Secret (8 page)

Soon she was through with the newspaper and her coffee, and she sat back in the chair a minute to organize her thoughts before her two o'clock luncheon date with Ben Shertok, who was coming in from Buenos Aires to meet with her. She had seen Shertok once before, upon her arrival in South America over a month ago. She had been impressed by him, his sharpness, his importance. He was high up in Israel's intelligence service and was the Mossad chief for four countries in South America. It was a key post, she knew. Only Mossad agents in West Berlin, in their unending search for Nazis—and in Syria, in the persistent hunt for Palestinian terrorists—had more responsibility and larger staffs. Paraguay, Chile, Argentina, and Brazil were still prime targets, as the favorite hideouts for many prominent leaders of the Third Reich, but Tovah had the feeling that the entire area was being phased out as a hunting ground. All of the most wanted Nazis were now in their seventies and eighties, and one by one they were dying off. Soon there would be few left to pursue, catch, prosecute. Still, even though Walter Rauff, inventor of the mobile gas chambers, had escaped them through natural death, there was from time to time a Klaus Barbie to be found in this area and extradited to France to stand judgment. Remembering this alleviated one's discouragement.

Tovah had taken a LATN flight from Concepción to Asunción, and a minibus from Presidente General Stroessner Airport the fifteen kilometers into Asunción. The arrangement had been that she would have a single room at the Guarani Hotel for the day, meeting Shertok in the lobby, and together they would go out to a restaurant for lunch where she could make her report. However, upon her arrival at the Guarani reception desk, where she had a reservation as Helga Ludwig (the name on her passport, a German name more appropriate for a Latin country hospitable to Germans but wary of Jews), she found a telex waiting for her. Ben Shertok requested that they lunch in her room and talk. This sounded more sensible to her, the desire for privacy, and she looked forward to room service.

Now she considered the time. It was still morning, ten after eleven. Shertok would not be here until two o'clock. This gave her at least a full two hours to spend on her own. She did not know Asunción well. She had been in the capital city twice before: once for a week, eight years ago when she was nineteen and trying to polish up her Spanish during a six-month tour of South America, and again just recently for two days before she had undertaken her travels through Paraguay as a Mossad agent. She had the urge now to walk about the center of the city for a closer and more leisurely look. And maybe pick up a few gifts, trinkets for her parents and brothers in Tel Aviv, with whom she would be reunited the day after tomorrow.

She reached into her suitcase for something to wear, something light, a sleeveless blouse, cotton skirt, sandals, for it was warm outdoors and becoming more humid. Once downstairs, she walked into the
Parque Independencia
. The palacha trees of the plaza were all pink on this day, and the avenues lined with Spanish Colonial buildings were lovely with their jacaranda and orange trees. There were gleaming high-rises every-where, and small whitewashed stuccoed buildings, mostly shops, with red-tiled roofs. She studied some new restaurants, several refurbished government buildings, and stopped to look at the goods the lace vendors had for sale. She purchased some handkerchiefs for her mother and favorite aunt.

In a roundabout way she headed for the Plaza de la Constitución, dutifully studied the Congressional Pal-ace, and sat down in a shady spot to cool off and watch the foot traffic, which had thinned out after the siesta period had begun at noon.

Dreamily sitting on the bench, Tovah was in a mood to reconstruct the last three years that had brought her to this steamy, remote city. In school, earlier, her languages had been English (everyone among the young in Israel spoke English), Spanish (because it was challenging), and German (because her grandparents on both sides had been born in Germany, and lived and died there—died in concentration camps or gas chambers—but their children had been sent to Palestine, grown, met, married, and become her parents).

To improve her Spanish she had taken that first vacation to South America, and had twice accompanied her father to West Berlin, on a matter of reparations. Her paternal grandfather had owned a prosperous department store, suffered its confiscation by Hitler, and met his own death in the Nazis' Final Solution. West Berlin had been an alien place to Tovah, and despite its liveliness and excitement she despised it, despised what it had been. Yet she had found the young people decent and friendly and much like herself and her Israeli friends. When she had mentioned this softness in her to her father, he had laughed and said, "Don't worry about the young. They are not your enemies. Worry about the old ones, those from sixty to eighty. They were most of them Nazis, you can be sure. They are the ones who say, 'Ah, that was a good time under the Führer. Now our Berlin is filled with strangers, our young who are stupid and drugged by the Americans and other foreigners. We need to be harder on them. We need to clean out the garbage.' Those are the ones, Tovah, who wish for a nation of blondes again."

Languages aside, Tovah's major at the university had been journalism. From early on she'd had a reporter's curiosity and a reporter's eye. She had done very well in her journalism classes, and after graduation and her stint in the army she had been readily taken on by the Jerusalem Post as a feature writer. Near the end of her first year she had been called into the office of the managing editor, a rare occurrence.

"Tovah," he had said, "I have an unusual assignment for you, very unusual."

"What does that mean?"

"It means that the director of Mossad wants to give you an interview. The Mossad has never done this, has never even permitted one of our reporters into their building outside Tel Aviv. But this morning the director initiated the invitation. He specifically requested you."

Tovah had been astounded. She had always known the secrecy that surrounded this arm of the Israeli government, the secret service branch founded in 1951.

"Why me?" she had wondered.

"They've probably read some of your byline pieces and liked them."

"What can they possibly tell me?"

"Find out. Your appointment is with the
memuneh
—the father—the director himself. Ten tomorrow morning. Yes, you'll find out then."

Five minutes after she was closeted alone with the director of Mossad, a forceful and straightforward man with no words to waste, she had found out quickly what he had to tell her. He didn't want to give her a story. He wanted to give her a job.

"Our business is keeping an eye on people," he had said. "We've kept an eye on you for the last half year. While we have nine hundred agents and other personnel—one hundred in the headquarters here, the rest elsewhere in the world—most of the agents are not women. Like our previous chief, Meir Amit, I am uncomfortable using women. Sooner or later a female may find it necessary to use sex to get what she wants. I don't like that, but . . ."

He had shrugged, letting it hang there, and Tovah had become conscious that he was taking in her appearance. She knew—had always known—that she was attractive in a perfectly
goyish
way. Long flaxen blond hair. Blue eyes. Aquiline nose. Small mouth. Full firm bosom. Shapely legs. Nothing obviously Jewish. Aryan Germans might have regarded her as one of their perfect specimens.

Now the director had been measuring her womanhood.

She had felt the necessity to speak up. "I don't mind. About the sex part, I mean. I'm not a child. One does what one has to do in life."

The director had grunted. "For the agent in the field, it can be a dangerous job. We do not encourage assassination. We do encourage self-defense. Every agent is trained to use a weapon, many weapons. Every agent is taught to lie and cheat, when it is necessary. We care only about results. Our agents are civil servants, on government salary. For three years, it is a million three hundred ten thousand shekels—not much when you think in American currency, eight hundred dollars a month. None will become rich. All will know they are helping Israel survive. If you are interested, we can arrange things with your editor. You'd still be working for the
Jerusalem Post
here and abroad. That would be your cover. But your main job would be working for Mossad."

"Doing what?"

"Plenty. You would receive assignments abroad. First you have to be trained during a twelve-month leave from the paper. Learn to send communications by code, learn to shadow a suspect and to shake a pursuer, learn hand-to-hand combat, learn to use a .22 Beretta. Then you would be ready."

"Why me?" she had pressed.

"I told you we've had an eye on you. We liked your looks and your tenacity. We liked your observant reporting. We liked your knowledge of German, Spanish, English." He had paused. "Well, what do you say?" He had paused again. "Or do you want to think about it?"

Sitting there, listening, she had been thinking about it, meaning her life. The newspaper work was all right, but had become somewhat repetitious and tiresome. Her love life was nothing special, although there had been someone more interesting recently. Still, there would be time for that later. She yearned for an exciting involvement in something that would mean some-thing. Also, she yearned for travel, to break out of this tight community of sufferers, to see new places, new people.

She had stared back at the director. "I have thought about it," she said. "When do I start?"

Tovah had already been in the Israeli army. The Mossad training was a little more of the same, perhaps more rugged, more exacting, more varied, but continually fascinating. Then she had worked the rest of the year in the Tel Aviv headquarters, deciphering coded messages, debriefing agents, interrogating possible contacts.

Her first assignment abroad as Helga Ludwig, had been to research and write a major travel article on Paraguay. Actually, Mossad had obtained a fresh lead on the supposedly deceased Dr. Josef Mengele, the SS physician at the Auschwitz- Birkenau death camp who had sent 380,000 innocent people to their deaths in Hitler's reign of terror. Mengele had escaped from the American Zone in Austria to Argentina in 1951, and, with the help of German colonists there and in Paraguay, had eluded all Nazi-hunters. Now Mossad had come upon a fresh lead. Dr. Mengele had been seen in Nueva Germania, a small town in central Paraguay. Tovah had been ordered to verify the sighting of Dr. Mengele, and learn what she could about five other wanted Nazis, several of whom might still be in hiding in Paraguay. She had learned much, but the big catch proved as elusive as ever. Now the assignment was almost over and she could leave this godforsaken country. Tovah glided back into the present, the plaza bench in Asunción.

Her watch told her it was one-thirty, just time enough for her to get back to the lunch in her room with Ben Shertok and her report.

When she emerged from the hotel elevator and made for her room, she found Ben Shertok already there, leaning contentedly against the wall outside her door, puffing on a cigar. He resembled a professorial type, rumpled hair, horn-rimmed spectacles on a hawkish nose. A quiet and dedicated intelligence chieftain.

He planted a chaste kiss on each of her cheeks, and apologized for coming early. "Because the plane wasn't on time. It was early. So I'll excuse you if you want to go to the bathroom."

She let them into her room. "I feel guilty, living in this fancy hotel even for a day. I assure you, Ben, it wasn't like this for the last four weeks."

"You bet I know," he said. "I took the liberty of ordering from room service when I was downstairs. I don't have much time, and yet didn't want to rush our lunch. I have to be in Chile this evening."

"I'll just wash my face and hands," she said. "It was hot out there. What am I having for lunch?"

"I thought I heard you say, when we dined in Buenos Aires, how much you were taken by those dumplings of ground maize and onion on your first visit here."

"
Sopa paraguaya
," she said. "You couldn't have done better."

"Some red wine, too," he added.

"Great. See you in five minutes."

When she came out in twenty minutes, she found that the food had already been served from a rolling cart set between the window and the bed. She realized that Shertok was showing someone out, a dumpy man in overalls carrying a kit.

She looked at Shertok questioningly, as he seated himself before the lunch cart. "Just a colleague," he explained. "He debugged the room. It's clean." Shertok began sampling the wine between sucks on his cigar. Tovah sought her purse, extracted a notebook, opened it, and laid it on the table as she sat opposite Shertok.

"If you haven't much time, I should start right in," she said, cutting into her first dumpling, chewing it, washing it down with the dry wine.

"How was the trip?" he asked.