Because of Berlin.'
Schwarz grinned back at me. 'No problem,' he said.
I got back into the car and drove into the airbase, hoping that this small show of sentiment would forestall any suspicions the Ami might possibly entertain about me after I had gone. It was something I had learned as an intelligence officer during the war: The essence of deception is not the lie that's told but the truths that are told to support it. I meant what I'd said about the airlift.
The Rhein-Main airport building was a white, Bauhaus-style edifice of the kind the Nazis hated, which was probably the only reason to like it. To me it was just big windows, blank walls, and a lot of egalitarian hot air. Looking at it you sort of imagined that Walter Gropius would have an apartment on the top floor with a lavatory wall expertly doodled on by Paul Klee. I parked my car and my cultural Philistinism and maneuvered one of the packages out of the backseat. Then I saw it. Jacobs's green Buick Roadmaster, with the white-wall tires, parked just a few places away from where I'd left the Mercury. I was in the right place all right. I tucked the package under my arm and walked toward the building. Behind me, on the edge of the fog, stood several C-47 airplanes and a Lockheed Constellation. All of them looked bedded down for the night.
I went through a side door and found myself in a cargo area that was the size of a large factory. A roller conveyer ran the length of its sixty or seventy yards and there were multiple sets of folding doors that gave onto the runways. Several forklift trucks were parked where they had stopped, and dozens of luggage carts and cargo cages containing kitbags and suitcases, army backpacks, duffel bags and footlockers, parcels and packages, stood around like an airlift that was waiting to happen. There were consignments for almost everywhere in the United States-- from Bolling AFB in Washington to Vandenberg in California. A radio was playing quietly somewhere. In the doorway of a small office an American serviceman with a Clark Gable mustache, a set of greasy overalls, and a hat like a tea cozy sat on a box marked 'Fragile' smoking a cigarette. He looked tired and bored. 'Can I help you?' he said.
'I have some late cargo for the Langley flight,' I said.
'There ain't nobody around, 'cept me. Not this time of night. 'Sides, that flight ain't going out till morning now. 'Cause of the fog. Hell, no wonder you guys didn't win the war. Getting planes in and out of this place is a bitch.'
'I would like that explanation better if it didn't let that useless fat bastard Hermann Goring off the hook,' I said, ingratiatingly. 'Blaming it all on the weather, like that.'
'Good point,' said the man. He pointed at the package under my arm. 'That it?'
'Yes.'
'You got any paperwork for it?'
I showed him the paperwork I had brought from Garmisch. And repeated the explanation I had made at the gatehouse. He looked at it for a while, scrawled a signature on it, and then jerked a thumb across his shoulder.
'About fifty yards down there is a cargo cage with 'Langley' chalked on the side. Just put your package in there. We'll get to it in the morning.' Then he went back in the office and closed the door behind him.
It took me about five minutes to find the cargo bay for Langley, but longer to find their luggage. Two Vuitton steamer trunks were standing on their ends beside one of the cages, like two New York skyscrapers. Both were helpfully labeled 'Dr. and Frau Braun' and 'Dr. and Frau Hoffmann.' The padlocks were cheap ones that anyone with a half-decent penknife could have opened. I had a good penknife and I had both trunks opened in a couple of minutes. Some of the best thieves in the world are ex-cops. But that was the easy part.
Open, the trunks looked more like pieces of furniture than luggage. In one half was a clothes rail with a little silk curtain and matching hangers; and in the other a set of four working drawers. It was the guard at the gatehouse who had given me the idea of what to do. The idea that a bug could be snug in a rug. And not just a rug. But also the drawer in a nice, big cozy steamer trunk.
I opened the packing case and removed the insectary from its nest of straw. Then I removed the mosquito cages that themselves resembled small wooden steamer trunks. Inside, the insects buzzed and whined irritably, as if they were full of complaint at having been cooped up for so long. Even if the adults didn't survive the journey to the States, I had no doubt, from what Henkell himself had told me, that the eggs and their larvae would. But there was no time to use the sucking tubes. I placed a cage inside one of the drawers and then stabbed at the fine net of the cage wall with my knife before quickly withdrawing my hand from the drawer and shutting it and the trunk tight again. I did the same with the second insectary and the second trunk. I wasn't bitten. But they would be. And I wondered if being bitten by several dozen malaria-carrying mosquitoes would prove to be just the right incentive needed for Henkell and Gruen to make their vaccine work after all. For everyone's sake I hoped so.
I returned to the car, and seeing the green Buick again, I thought it a great shame that Jacobs would escape. Out of habit I checked the door, and as before, it wasn't locked. Which looked too tempting to ignore. So I fetched an insectary from the second package on the back seat of the Mercury and laid it on the floor behind the driver's seat. Once again I stabbed through the cage wall, and then quickly slammed the car door shut.
Of course it wasn't the revenge I had imagined. For one thing I wouldn't be around to see it. But it was the kind of justice that Aristotle, Horace, Plutarch, and Quintilian would have recognized. And perhaps even celebrated, in some axiomatic way. Small things have a habit of overpowering the great. And that seemed good enough.
I drove back to the monastery, where Carlos Hausner had a bag of money waiting for him. And, eventually, a new passport and a ticket to South America.
EPILOGUE
Several months passed at the monastery in Kempten. Another fugitive from Allied justice joined us and, in the late spring of 1950, we four crept across the border to Austria and then into Italy. But somehow the fourth man disappeared and we never saw him again. Perhaps he changed his mind about going to Argentina. Or perhaps another Nakam death squad caught up with him.
We stayed in a safe house in Genoa, where we met yet another Catholic priest, Father Eduardo Domoter. I think he was a Franciscan. It was Domoter who gave us our Red Cross passports. Refugee passports he called them. Then we set about applying for immigration to Argentina. The president of Argentina, Juan Peron, who was an admirer of Hitler and a Nazi sympathizer, had set up an organization in Italy known as the DAIE, the Delegation for Argentine Immigration in Europe. The DAIE enjoyed semidiplomatic status and had offices in Rome, where applications were processed, and Genoa, where prospective immigrants to Argentina underwent a medical examination. But all of this was little more than a formality. Not least because the DAIE was run by Monsignor Karlo Petranovic, a Croatian Roman Catholic priest who was himself a wanted war criminal, and who was protected by Bishop Alois Hudal, who was the spiritual director of the German Catholic community in Italy. Two other Roman Catholic priests assisted our escape. One was the Archbishop of Genoa himself, Giuseppe Siri; and the other was Monsignor Karl Bayer. But it was Father Domoter we saw most of all at the safe house. A Hungarian, he had a church in the parish of Sant'Antonio, not very far from the DAIE offices.
I often asked myself how it was that so many Roman Catholic priests should have been Nazi sympathizers. But more pertinently, I also asked Father Domoter, who told me that the pope himself was fully aware of the help being given to escaping Nazi war criminals. Indeed, said Father Domoter, the pope had encouraged it.
'None of us would help in this way if it wasn't for the Holy Father,' he explained. 'But there's something important you must understand about this. It's not that the pope hates Jews, or loves the Nazis. Indeed, there are many Catholic priests who were persecuted by the Nazis. No, this is political. The Vatican shares America's fear and loathing of communism. Really, it's nothing more sinister than that.'
So that was all right then.
All applications for a landing permit from the DAIE had to be approved by the Immigration Office in Buenos Aires. And this meant that we were in Genoa for almost six weeks, during which time I got to know the city quite well, and liked it enormously. Especially the old town and the harbor. Eichmann did not venture out of doors for fear of being recognized. But Pedro Geller became my regular companion, and together we explored Genoa's many churches and museums.
Geller's real name was Herbert Kuhlmann, and he had been an SS Sturmbannfuhrer with the 12th SS Hitler Youth Panzer Division. That explained his youth, although not his need to escape from Germany. And it was only toward the end of our time in Genoa that he felt able to talk about what had happened to him.
'The Regiment was in Caen,' he said. 'The fighting was pretty heavy there, I can tell you. We had been told
