“Follow me.”
She led him across a small newsroom, her heels clicking loudly over the faded linoleum floor. A half-dozen employees were lounging in their shirtsleeves in various states of relaxation, smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee. No one seemed to take notice of the visitor. The door to the archives room was ajar. The receptionist switched on the lights.
“We’re computerized now, so all the articles are stored automatically in a searchable database. I’m afraid that goes back only as far as 1998. When did you say this man died?”
“I believe it was 1982.”
“You’re lucky. The obituaries are all indexed-by hand, of course, the old-fashioned way.”
She walked over to a table and lifted the cover of a thick, leather-bound ledger book. The ruled pages were filled with tiny handwritten notations.
“What did you say his name was?”
“Otto Krebs.”
“Krebs, Otto,” she said, flipping forward to the K s. “Krebs, Otto… Ah, here it is. According to this, it was November 1983. Still interested in seeing the obituary?”
Gabriel nodded. The woman wrote down a reference number and walked over to a stack of cardboard boxes. She ran a forefinger along the labels and stopped when she arrived at the one she was looking for, then asked Gabriel to remove the boxes stacked on top of it. She lifted the lid, and the smell of dust and decaying paper rose from the contents. The clips were contained in brittle, yellowing file folders. The obituary for Otto Krebs had been torn. She repaired the image with a strip of transparent tape and showed it to Gabriel.
“Is that the man you’re looking for?”
“I don’t know,” he said truthfully.
She took the clip back from Gabriel and read it quickly. “It says here that he was an only child.” She looked at Gabriel. “That doesn’t mean much. A lot of them had to erase their pasts to protect their families who were still in Europe. My grandfather was lucky. At least he got to keep his own name.”
She looked at Gabriel, searching his eyes. “He was from Croatia,” she said. There was an air of complicity in her tone. “After the war, the Communists wanted to put him on trial and hang him. Fortunately, Peron was willing to let him come here.”
She carried the clip over to a photocopier and made three duplicates. Then she returned the original to its file and the file to its proper box. She gave the copies to Gabriel. He read while they walked.
“According to the obituary, he was buried in a Catholic cemetery in Puerto Blest.”
The receptionist nodded. “It’s just on the other side of the lake, a few miles from the Chilean border. He managed a large estancia up there. That’s in the obituary, too.”
“How do I get there?”
“Follow the highway west out of Bariloche. It won’t stay a highway for long. I hope you have a good car. Follow the road along the lakeshore, then head north. You’ll go straight into Puerto Blest. If you leave now, you can get there before dark.”
They shook hands in the lobby. She wished him luck.
“I hope he’s the man you’re looking for,” she said. “Or maybe not. I suppose one never knows in situations like these.”
AFTER THE VISITOR was gone, the receptionist picked up her telephone and dialed.
“He just left.”
“How did you handle it?”
“I did what you told me to do. I was very friendly. I showed him what he wanted to see.”
“And what was that?”
She told him.
“How did he react?”
“He asked for directions to Puerto Blest.”
The line went dead. The receptionist slowly replaced the receiver. She felt a sudden hollowness in her stomach. She had no doubt what awaited the man in Puerto Blest. It was the same fate that had befallen others who had come to this corner of northern Patagonia in search of men who did not want to be found. She did not feel sorry for him; indeed, she thought him something of a fool. Did he really think he would fool anyone with that clumsy story about genealogical research? Who did he think he was? It was his own fault. But then, it was always that way with the Jews. Always bringing trouble down on their own heads.
Just then the front door opened and a woman in a sundress entered the lobby. The receptionist looked up and smiled.
“May I help you?”
THEY WALKED BACK to the hotel beneath a razor-edged sun. Gabriel translated the obituary for Chiara.
“It says he was born in Upper Austria in 1913, that he was a police officer, and that he enlisted in the Wehrmacht in 1938 and took part in the campaigns against Poland and the Soviet Union. It also says he was decorated twice for bravery, once by the Fuhrer himself. I guess that’s something to brag about in Bariloche.”
“And after the war?”
“Nothing until his arrival in Argentina in 1963. He worked for two years at a hotel in Bariloche, then took a job on anestancia near Puerto Blest. In 1972, he purchased the property from the owners and ran it until his death.”
“Any family left in the area?”
“According to this, he was never married and had no surviving relatives.”
They arrived back at the Hotel Edelweiss. It was a Swiss-style chalet with a sloping roof, located two streets up from the lakeshore on the Avenida San Martin. Gabriel had rented a car at the airport earlier that morning, a Toyota four-wheel drive. He asked the parking attendant to bring it up from the garage, then ducked into the lobby to find a road map of the surrounding countryside. Puerto Blest was exactly where the woman from the newspaper had said, on the opposite side of the lake, near the Chilean border.
They set out along the lakeshore. The road deteriorated by degrees as they moved farther from Bariloche. Much of the time, the water was hidden by dense forest. Then Gabriel would round a bend, or the trees would suddenly thin, and the lake would appear briefly below them, a flash of blue, only to disappear behind a wall of timber once more.
Gabriel rounded the southernmost tip of the lake and slowed briefly to watch a squadron of giant condors circling the looming peak of the Cerro Lopez. Then he followed a one-lane dirt track across an exposed plateau covered with gray-green thorn scrub and stands ofarrayan trees. On the high meadows, flocks of hardy Patagonian sheep grazed on the summer grasses. In the distance, toward the Chilean border, lightning flickered over the Andean peaks.
By the time they arrived in Puerto Blest, the sun was gone and the village was shadowed and quiet. Gabriel went into a cafe to ask directions. The bartender, a short man with a florid face, stepped into the street and, with a series of points and gestures, showed him the way.
JUST INSIDE THE CAFE, at a table near the door, the Clockmaker drank beer from a bottle and watched the exchange taking place in the street. The slender man with short black hair and gray temples he recognized. Seated in the passenger seat of the Toyota four-wheel drive was a woman with long dark hair. Was it possible she was the one who had put the bullet in his shoulder in Rome? It didn’t much matter. Even if she wasn’t, she would soon be dead.
The Israeli climbed behind the wheel of the Toyota and sped off. The bartender came back inside.
The Clockmaker, in German, asked, “Where are those two headed?”
The bartender answered him in the same language.
The Clockmaker finished the last of his beer and left money on the table. Even the smallest movement, such as fishing a few bills from his coat pocket, made his shoulder pulsate with fire. He went into the street and stood for a moment in the cool evening air, then turned and walked slowly toward the church.
THE CHURCH OF Our Lady of the Mountains stood at the western edge of the village, a small whitewashed colonial church with a bell tower to the left side of the portico. At the front of the church was a stone courtyard, shaded by a pair of broad plane trees and enclosed by an iron fence. Gabriel walked to the back of the church. The cemetery stretched down the gentle slope of a hill, toward a coppice of dense pine. A thousand headstones and
