Boys from Brazil by Ira Levin

bottle between them. “I’m afraid we don’t have another cup.”
    â€œNo, no. I’m not allowed anyway. No alcohol.”
    â€œI heard you were in hospital…”
    â€œIn, out, in, out.” Liebermann shrugged, and turned his weary brown eyes on Beynon. “I had a very crazy phone call,” he said. “A few weeks ago. Middle of the night. This boy from the States, from Illinoise, calls me from São Paulo. He has a tape of Mengele. You know who Mengele is, don’t you?”
    â€œOne of your wanted Nazis, isn’t he?”
    â€œOne of everybody’s,” Liebermann said, “not only mine. The German government still offers sixty thousand marks for him. He was the chief doctor at Auschwitz. ‘The Angel of Death,’ he was called. Two degrees, an M.D. and a Ph.D., and he did thousands of experiments on children , twins, trying to make good Aryans, to change brown eyes into blue eyes with chemicals, through the genes. A man with two degrees! He killed them: thousands of twins from all over Europe, Jewish and non-Jewish. It’s all in my book.”
    Beynon picked up half his egg-salad sandwich and bit into it determinedly.
    â€œHe went home to Germany after the war,” Liebermann went on. “His family is rich there, in Günzburg; farm machinery. But his name began to come up in the trials, so ODESSA got him out and into South America. We found him there and chased him from city to city: Buenos Aires, Bariloche, Asunción. Since ’59 he lives in the jungle, in a settlement by a river on the Brazil and Paraguay border. He has an army of bodyguards, and Paraguayan citizenship, so he can’t be extradited. But he has to lay low anyway because groups of young Jews down there still try to get him. Some of them are found floating down the river, the Paraná, with their throats cut.”
    Liebermann paused. Freya tapped Beynon’s arm and asked for the wine; he passed the bottle to her.
    â€œSo the boy has a tape,” Liebermann said, looking straight ahead, his hands on his knees. “Mengele in a restaurant sending out former SS men to Germany, England, Scandinavia, and the States. To kill a bunch of sixty-five-year-old men.” He turned and smiled at Beynon. “Crazy, yes? And it’s a very important operation. The Kameradenwerk is involved too, not only Mengele. The Comrades Organization, that keeps them safe and with jobs down there. Do you like the apples, as they say?”
    Beynon blinked at him and smiled. “No, I’m afraid I don’t,” he said. “Did you actually hear this tape?”
    Liebermann shook his head. “No. Just when he’s ready to play it for me, there’s a knock at the door, his door, and he goes to answer it. Bumping and thumping, and a little later the phone is hung up.”
    â€œPerfect timing,” Beynon said. “It smells rather like a hoax, don’t you think? Who is he?”
    Liebermann shrugged. “A boy who heard me speak two years ago, at his university, Princeton. He came to me in August and said he wanted to work for me. Do I need new workers? I’m only using a handful of the old ones. You know, I’m assuming, that all my money, all the Center’s money, was in the Allgemeine Wirtschaftsbank.”
    Beynon nodded.
    â€œThe Center is in my apartment now—all the files, a few desks, and me and my bed. The ceiling downstairs is cracking. The landlord sues me. The only new workers I need are fund-raisers, which isn’t the boy’s field of interest. So he went down to São Paulo, his own boss.”
    â€œNot exactly someone I’d put much faith in.”
    â€œThat’s just what I think while he talks to me. And he doesn’t have all his facts right either. One of the SS men is named Mundt, he says, and he knows about this Mundt from my book . Now, in my book I know there’s no Mundt. I never heard of a Mundt. So