“Did she leave a number?”
“Yes, I wrote it down. Hold on a minute. Yes, here it is. Renate Hoffmann, five-three-three-one-nine-zero- seven.”
STOP. REWIND. PLAY.
“Renate Hoffmann, five-three-three-one-nine-zero-seven.”
STOP.
6 VIENNA
THE COALITION FOR a Better Austria had all the trappings of a noble yet ultimately hopeless cause. It was located on the second floor of a dilapidated old warehouse in the Twentieth District, with sooty windows overlooking a railyard. The workspace was open and communal and impossible to heat properly. Gabriel, arriving the following morning, found most of the youthful staff wearing thick sweaters and woolen caps.
Renate Hoffmann was the group’s legal director. Gabriel had telephoned her earlier that morning, posing as Gideon Argov from Jerusalem, and told her about his encounter the previous evening with Max Klein. Renate Hoffmann had hastily agreed to a meeting with him, then broken the connection, as if she were reticent to discuss the matter on the telephone.
She had a cubicle for an office. When Gabriel was shown inside, she was on the telephone. She pointed toward an empty chair with the tip of a chewed pen. A moment later, she concluded the conversation and stood to greet him. She was tall and better dressed than the rest of the staff: black sweater and skirt, black stockings, flat-soled black shoes. Her hair was flaxen and did not reach her square, athletic shoulders. Parted on the side, it fell naturally toward her face, and she was holding back a troublesome forelock with her left hand as she shook hands firmly with Gabriel with her right. She wore no rings on her fingers, no makeup on her attractive face, and no scent other than tobacco. Gabriel guessed that she was not yet thirty-five.
They sat down again, and she asked a series of curt, lawyerly questions. How long have you known Eli Lavon? How did you find Max Klein? How much did he tell you? When did you arrive in Vienna? With whom have you met? Have you discussed the matter with the Austrian authorities? With officials from the Israeli embassy? Gabriel felt a bit like a defendant in the dock, yet his responses were as polite and accurate as possible.
Renate Hoffmann, her cross-examination complete, regarded him skeptically for a moment. Then she stood suddenly and pulled on a long, gray overcoat with very square shoulders.
“Let’s take a walk.”
Gabriel looked out the soot-smudged windows and saw that it was sleeting. Renate Hoffman shoved some files into a leather bag and slung it over her shoulder. “Trust me,” she said, sensing his apprehension. “It’s better if we walk.”
RENATE HOFFMANN, ON the icy footpaths of the Augarten, explained to Gabriel how she had become Eli Lavon’s most important asset in Vienna. After graduating at the top of her class from Vienna University, she had gone to work for the Austrian state prosecutor’s office, where she had served exceptionally for seven years. Then, five years ago, she’d resigned, telling friends and colleagues that she longed for the freedom of private practice. In truth, Renate Hoffman had decided she could no longer work for a government that showed less concern about justice than about protecting the interests of the state and its most powerful citizens.
It was the Weller case that forced her hand. Weller was a Staatspolizei detective with a fondness for torturing confessions out of prisoners and administering justice personally when a proper trial was deemed too inconvenient. Renate Hoffmann tried to bring charges against him after a Nigerian asylum-seeker died in his custody. The Nigerian had been bound and gagged and there was evidence he had been struck repeatedly and choked. Her superiors had sided with Weller and dropped the case.
Weary of fighting the establishment from the inside, Renate Hoffman had concluded that the battle was better waged from without. She’d started a small law firm in order to pay the bills but devoted most of her time and energy to the Coalition for a Better Austria, a reformist group dedicated to shaking the country out of its collective amnesia about its Nazi past. Simultaneously she also formed a quiet alliance with Eli Lavon’s Wartime Claims and Inquiries. Renate Hoffmann still had friends inside the bureaucracy, friends who were willing to do favors for her. These friends gave her access to vital government records and archives that were closed to Lavon.
“Why the secrecy?” Gabriel asked. “The reluctance to talk on the telephone? The long walks in the park when the weather is perfectly dreadful?”
“Because this is Austria, Mr. Argov. Needless to say, the work we do is not popular in many quarters of Austrian society, just as Eli’s wasn’t.” She caught herself using the past tense and quickly apologized. “The extreme right in this country doesn’t like us, and they’re well represented in the police and security services.”
She brushed some sleet pellets from a park bench and they both sat down. “Eli came to me about two months ago. He told me about Max Klein and the man he’d seen at Cafe Central: Herr Vogel. I was skeptical, to say the least, but I decided to check it out, as a favor to Eli.”
“What did you find?”
“His name is Ludwig Vogel. He’s the chairman of something called Danube Valley Trade and Investment Corporation. The firm was founded in the early sixties, a few years after Austria emerged from the postwar occupation. He imported foreign products into Austria and served as an Austrian front man and facilitator for companies wishing to do business here, especially German and American companies. When the Austrian economy took off in the 1970s, Vogel was perfectly positioned to take full advantage of the situation. His firm provided venture capital for hundreds of projects. He now owns a substantial stake in many of Austria ’s most profitable corporations.”
“How old is he?”
“He was born in a small village in Upper Austria in 1925 and baptized in the local Catholic church. His father was an ordinary laborer. Apparently, the family was quite poor. A younger brother died of pneumonia when Ludwig was twelve. His mother died two years later of scarlet fever.”
“Nineteen twenty-five? That would make him only seventeen years old in 1942, far too young to be a Sturmbannfuhrer in the SS.”
“That’s right. And according to the information I uncovered about his wartime past, hewasn’t in the SS.”
“What sort of information?”
She lowered her voice and leaned closer to him. Gabriel smelled morning coffee on her breath. “In my previous life, I sometimes found it necessary to consult files stored in the Austrian Staatsarchiv. I still have contacts there, the kind of people who are willing to help me under the right circumstances. I called on one of those contacts, and this person was kind enough to photocopy Ludwig Vogel’s Wehrmacht service file.”
“Wehrmacht?”
She nodded. “According to the Staatsarchiv documents, Vogel was conscripted in late 1944, when he was nineteen, and sent to Germany to serve in defense of the Reich. He fought the Russians in the battle of Berlin and managed to survive. During the final hours of the war, he fled west and surrendered to the Americans. He was interned at a U.S. Army detention facility south of Berlin, but managed to escape and make his way back to Austria. The fact that he escaped from the Americans didn’t seem to count against him, because from 1946 until the State Treaty of 1955, Vogel was a civilian employee of the American occupation authority.”
Gabriel looked over at her sharply. “The Americans? What kind of work did he do?”
“He started as a clerk at headquarters and eventually worked as a liaison officer between the Americans and the fledgling Austrian government.”
“Married? Children?”
She shook her head. “A lifelong bachelor.”
“Has he ever been in trouble? Financial irregularities of any kind? Civil suits? Anything?”
“His record is remarkably clean. I have another friend at the Staatspolizei. I had him run a check on Vogel. He came up with nothing, which in a way is quite remarkable. You see, almost every prominent citizen in Austria has a Staatspolizei file. But not Ludwig Vogel.”
“What do you know about his politics?”
Renate Hoffmann spent a long moment surveying her surroundings before answering. “I asked that same
