Man From Barbarossa

started to brief them on the Mossad’s side of things. It was like watching a snake shed its skin but in reverse, for Bond felt the man had put on his true nature once he began. Here was the real Pete Natkowitz – able, steeped in the arcane ways and the secret language and with his subject at his fingertips.

First he dealt with the question of identity using great blow-ups of Joel Penderek side by side with existing pictures of SS-Unterscharfuhrer Josif Vorontsov as he was in 1941 when he served with the Waffen-SS Special Duties Brigade.

Natkowitz flicked between the two side-by-side photos and a copy of Vorontsov’s recorded details filched from the SS files.

‘As you can see, the height’s about right,’ he said, his accent changing from the drawl to a more clipped, authoritative tone. ‘Around six one in 1941 according to the SS; and Joel Penderek about the same in ’46 if US Immigration is to be believed. The age is also nearly correct. Vorontsov was born January 19th, 1917, while Immigration says Penderek’s birthday is November 19th, 1916, which makes him a Scorpio if anyone should be interested in that kind of thing. It also makes him a couple of months older than Vorontsov, which is okay, or as near as damn it.

‘If, as we suspect in Tel Aviv, the Scales of Justice have gone out of their way to find a ringer, they’ve done a lot of homework.’ He took his wooden pointer and started to tap first one of the photographs and then the other. ‘You see, even in relatively old age, there is a resemblance. Look particularly at the nose, the eyes, chin and forehead. Distinct similarities. On the surface Joel Penderek could be taken for Josif Vorontsov.’ He gave them a knowing smile and gestured with his right hand – a quick tipping motion, fingers splayed. ‘Someone wishes us to believe they are the same person. But, on close examination, this is not so.’

He started to enumerate the obvious features. Vorontsov had a tiny scar below his lip and above the chin, the result of a childhood accident involving sharp little milk teeth and a tumble in his father’s Ukrainian home. There were blow-ups of the area on both sets of pictures. The scar was there for young Vorontsov while it was missing from old Penderek.

Again he turned to the details from the SS files on one hand and US Immigration’s profile on the other. A scar on Vorontsov’s right thigh was not mentioned in Penderek’s distinguishing marks listed in 1946. There was also the matter of an appendicitis operation performed in the Gorky University Hospital, Kharkov in 1939. ‘Vorontsov’s father was a medical practitioner who taught anaesthesiology at the university, and, it seems, was a favourite of Stalin. Certainly he escaped Stalin’s Great Terror, and our psychological profile of Josif suggests that he was both anti- Semitic and ambivalent about the way things were being run in the USSR at the time of the Nazi invasion – Barbarossa. This made him an ideal candidate for the SS recruitment, or so our tame shrinks tell us.

‘The US INS, the Immigration and Naturalisation Service, seems either to have missed the appendix scar or it just wasn’t there. No prizes for guessing which.’

Natkowitz continued with further contradictions, this time in a more detailed manner, using a computer programme which converted the photographs into three-dimensional heads. Someone had entered what measurement details existed on the two men, and the result showed likely bone structure which in turn drew attention to large discrepancies.

‘The pretty pix?’ Bond queried.

‘What about them?’ Nobody but Pete Natkowitz attempted to answer.

‘Obviously we’ve all got Vorontsov’s stuff on file, but what about Penderek? He on file as well? Does the Mossad know something we don’t?’

‘James, you’re a doubting Thomas. No, nobody had Penderek on file, except INS, passport control, and the FBI who found a large box of snaps in the poor old guy’s bedroom. FBI kindly circulated them for us. We all got them, including those wonderful people who gave us the camps on the Gulag, the mental hospitals for those who held different views, the quick bullet in the back of the neck in the Dzerzhinsky dungeons and encouragement to families to betray one another while they tickled every would-be traitor as a poacher tickles trout.’

‘Come on, Pete,’ Bond interrupted, ‘we’ve all done our fair share of tickling, most certainly your Service . . .’

‘Not to the extent KGB did it,’ Natkowitz snapped. So Bond kept his thoughts to himself as the Israeli continued. ‘We did have a large file on the real Vorontsov.’ Natkowitz ran his splayed fingers through his fireball of hair. ‘And don’t accuse us of fomenting family feuds when I say it’s common knowledge that we in the Mossad use a large number of part-time agents all over the world. One of those led us to Vorontsov. An accident, like so many others. An old lady, whose name I’ll keep to myself, was doing some grocery shopping at a Winn Dixie in Tampa, Florida, about four years ago. She turned a corner, from the canned goods to frozen foods, and there he was, his back towards her, selecting a TV dinner.

‘Identified by his back? Don’t even think of asking, James. This particular old lady had been on intimate terms with Josif Vorontsov. She made it through Sobibor, and at that camp Vorontsov was her personal torturer. She swears she would know him anywhere. You see he raped her, not once but around one hundred times in an eight- month period. It would appear that these rapes were what kept our informant alive. He liked the way she fought back, and all those years later she knew him, by the way he stood, by the set of his shoulders and the manner in which he held his head.

‘Eventually he turned around and she saw his face. It was undoubtedly her torturer, so she followed him, got an address and alerted us. We sent some people in.’ He gave a little amused gesture using his body, hunching his right shoulder forward and turning his head in what would have been in another person a coy expression. ‘I have to be discreet. These people shouldn’t really have been there, but they took a ride up to Tampa and did a short surveillance. Son et lumiere. Everything. Now look.’ He flashed a new photograph on to the screen so that it sat alongside the official SS black and white.

The Israelis had cropped the clandestine picture to match the earlier uniformed version. They had also chosen it because of the angle of the old man’s head and the way his eyes looked straight into the camera. It was the perfect before-and-after match. Age had not altogether wearied the Ukrainian, nor had the years completely condemned him. It was unmistakable, even before Natkowitz showed the computer-enhanced shots and the stats of the INS forms, plus a very private medical report. The scars were all there and nobody could doubt they had the real man.

‘Your Service did nothing?’ It was M who, though he knew the answer, put everyone’s question square on the table.

Natkowitz made another gesture, this time a one-handed business, the hand moving upwards as though he were tossing some invisible object into the air. ‘It is difficult,’ he said quietly. ‘You know how difficult it can be. He calls himself Leibermann now. When he entered the United States, he came as an Austrian of Jewish parentage. We had sight of all the documents which were not altogether forgeries. Markus Leibermann was certainly an Austrian. Son of a bank clerk. The entire family perished in the Polish camp of Chelmno. It was the way the SS used everything, even dead men’s shoes and papers. Josif Vorontsov became Markus Leibermann by courtesy of Spinne, that organisation which was so successful in getting its murderers out of Europe to safety. You know how many war criminals came to shelter using the papers, and the lives, of those they had killed? I tell you, many more than we have ever caught. I often wonder when I’m in New York, or Florida, if that nice old couple you see in a restaurant or at the beach in fact hold nightmares in their heads and laugh quietly to themselves about how gullible the Americans have been.’

‘So you knew about this man, yet nobody did anything?’ Bond rammed home the question.

‘We took photographs. We prepared a case. Our American friends lobbied the authorities. You see, we like to be sure that we’ll win when we identify someone like this. So many have slipped through the net and there are young men in power who cannot be made to understand. They say, “Sure. Sure it was a bad time, the Holocaust. Six million Jews murdered, but that was then. Now is now, we must forgive and forget. We’re all friends now. Look at the Japanese and the Germans. What’s the point in prosecuting an old man or an old woman who were only obeying orders in youth?” These people really do not understand.’

‘You couldn’t make a good enough case against Mr Leibermann?’ from Bill Tanner.

‘Let’s say we were quietly told that it was unlikely that Leibermann would be extradited. Unlikely that he would ever be expelled.’

‘So you let it drop?’ Bond again.