ALFONSO RAMIREZ SHOULD have been dead long ago. He was, without a doubt, one of the most courageous men in Argentina and all of Latin America. A crusading journalist and writer, he had made it his life’s work to chip away at the walls surrounding Argentina and its murderous past. Considered too controversial and dangerous to be employed by Argentine publications, he published most of his work in the United States and Europe. Few Argentines, beyond the political and financial elite, ever read a word Ramirez wrote.
He had experienced Argentine brutality firsthand. During the Dirty War, his opposition to the military junta had landed him in jail, where he spent nine months and was nearly tortured to death. His wife, a left-wing political activist, was kidnapped by a military death squad and thrown alive from an airplane into the freezing waters of the South Atlantic. Were it not for the intervention of Amnesty International, Ramirez would certainly have suffered the same fate. Instead, he was released, shattered and nearly unrecognizable, to resume his crusade against the generals. In 1983, they stepped aside, and a democratically elected civilian government took their place. Ramirez helped prod the new government into putting dozens of army officers on trial for crimes committed during the Dirty War. Among them was the captain who’d thrown Alfonso Ramirez’s wife into the sea.
In recent years, Ramirez had devoted his considerable skills to exposing another unpleasant chapter of Argentine history that the government, the press, and most of its citizenry had chosen to ignore. Following the collapse of Hitler’s Reich, thousands of war criminals-German, French, Belgian, and Croatian-had streamed into Argentina, with the enthusiastic approval of the Peron government and the tireless assistance of the Vatican. Ramirez was despised in Argentine quarters where the influence of the Nazis still ran deep, and his work had proven to be just as hazardous as investigating the generals. Twice his office had been firebombed, and his mail contained so many letter bombs that the postal service refused to handle it. Were it not for Moshe Rivlin’s introduction, Gabriel doubted Ramirez would have agreed to meet with him.
As it turned out, Ramirez readily accepted an invitation to lunch and suggested a neighborhood cafe in San Telmo. The cafe had a black-and-white checkerboard floor with square wooden tables arranged in no discernible pattern. The walls were whitewashed and fitted with shelves lined with empty wine bottles. Large doors opened onto the noisy street, and there were tables on the pavement beneath a canvas awning. Three ceiling fans stirred the heavy air. A German shepherd lay at the foot of the bar, panting. Gabriel arrived on time at two-thirty. The Argentine was late.
January is high summer in Argentina, and it was unbearably hot. Gabriel, who’d been raised in the Jezreel Valley and spent summers in Venice, was used to heat, but only a few days removed from the Austrian Alps, the contrast in climate took his body by surprise. Waves of heat rose from the traffic and flowed through the open doors of the cafe. With each passing truck, the temperature seemed to rise a degree or two. Gabriel kept his sunglasses on. His shirt was plastered to his spinal cord.
He drank cold water and chewed on a lemon rind, looking into the street. His gaze settled briefly on Chiara. She was sipping a Campari and soda and nibbling listlessly at a plate of empanada. She wore short pants. Her long legs stretched into the sunlight, and her thighs were beginning to burn. Her hair was twisted into a haphazard bun. A trickle of perspiration was inching its way down the nape of her neck, into her sleeveless blouse. Her wristwatch was on her left hand. It was a prearranged signal. Left hand meant that she had detected no surveillance, though Gabriel knew that even an agent of Chiara’s skill would be hard-pressed to find a professional in the midday crowds of San Telmo.
Ramirez didn’t arrive until three. He made no apology for being late. He was a large man, with thick forearms and a dark beard. Gabriel looked for the scars of torture but found none. His voice, when he ordered two steaks and a bottle of red wine, was affable and so loud it seemed to rattle the bottles on the shelves. Gabriel wondered whether steak and red wine was a wise choice, given the intense heat. Ramirez looked as though he found the question deeply scandalous. “Beef is the one thing about this country that’s true,” he said. “Besides, the way the economy is going-” The rest of his remark was drowned out by the rumble of a passing cement truck.
The waiter placed the wine on the table. It came in a green bottle with no label. Ramirez poured two glasses and asked Gabriel the name of the man he was looking for. Hearing the answer, the Argentine’s dark eyebrows furrowed in concentration.
“Otto Krebs, eh? Is that his real name, or an alias?”
“An alias.”
“How can you be sure?”
Gabriel handed over the documents he’d taken from the Santa Maria dell’Anima in Rome. Ramirez pulled a pair of greasy reading glasses from his shirt pocket and thrust them onto his face. Having the documents out in plain sight made Gabriel nervous. He cast a glance in Chiara’s direction. The wristwatch was still on her left hand. Ramirez, when he looked up from the papers, was clearly impressed.
“How did you get access to the papers of Bishop Hudal?”
“I have a friend at the Vatican.”
“No, you have a very powerful friend at the Vatican. The only man who could get Bishop Drexler to willingly open Hudal’s papers isil papa himself!” Ramirez raised his wineglass in Gabriel’s direction. “So, in 1948, an SS officer named Erich Radek comes to Rome and staggers into the arms of Bishop Hudal. A few months later, he leaves Rome as Otto Krebs and sets sail for Syria. What else do you know?”
The next document Gabriel laid on the wooden tabletop produced a similar look of astonishment from the Argentine journalist.
“As you can see, Israeli intelligence placed the man now known as Otto Krebs in Damascus as late as 1963. The source is very good, none other than Alois Brunner. According to Brunner, Krebs left Syria in 1963 and came here.”
“And you have reason to believe he still might be here?”
“That’s what I need to find out.”
Ramirez folded his heavy arms and eyed Gabriel across the table. A silence fell between them, filled by the hot drone of traffic from the street. The Argentine smelled a story. Gabriel had anticipated this.
“So how does a man named Rene Duran from Montreal get his hands on secret documents from the Vatican and the Israeli intelligence service?”
“Obviously, I have good sources.”
“I’m a very busy man, Monsieur Duran.”
“If it’s money you want-”
The Argentine held up his palm in an admonitory gesture.
“I don’t want your money, Monsieur Duran. I can make my own money. What I want is the story.”
“Obviously, press coverage of my investigation would be something of a hindrance.”
Ramirez looked insulted. “Monsieur Duran, I’m confident I have much more experience pursuing men like Erich Radek than you do. I know when to investigate quietly and when to write.”
Gabriel hesitated a moment. He was reluctant to enter into aquid pro quo with the Argentine journalist, but he also knew that Alfonso Ramirez might prove to be a valuable friend.
“Where do we start?” Gabriel asked.
“Well, I suppose we should find out whether Alois Brunner was telling the truth about his friend Otto Krebs.”
“Meaning, did he ever come to Argentina?”
“Exactly.”
“And how do we do that?”
Just then the waiter appeared. The steak he placed in front of Gabriel was large enough to feed a family of four. Ramirez smiled and started sawing away.
“Bon appetit, Monsieur Duran. Eat! Something tells me you’re going to need your strength.”
ALFONSO RAMIREZ DROVE the last surviving Volkswagen Sirocco in the western hemisphere. It might have been dark blue once; now the exterior had faded to the color of pumice. The windshield had a crack down the center that looked like a bolt of lightning. Gabriel’s door was bashed in, and it required much of his depleted reservoir of strength to pry it open. The air conditioner no longer worked, and the engine roared like a prop plane.
They sped along the broad Avenida 9 de Julio with the windows down. Scraps of notepaper swirled around them. Ramirez seemed not to notice, or to care, when several pages were sucked out into the street. It had grown hotter with the late afternoon. The rough wine had left Gabriel with a headache. He turned his face toward the
