Boys from Brazil by Ira Levin Page A

this doesn’t increase my confidence. But still…after the bumping and thumping, while I’m calling to him to come back to the phone, there’s a certain sound, not very loud but very clear, and it’s one thing and nothing else: it’s the sound of a cassette being dejected from a tape recorder.”
    â€œ E jected,” Beynon said.
    â€œNot de jected? Pushed out?”
    â€œThat’s e jected. De jected is sad, pushed down .”
    â€œAh.” Liebermann nodded. “Thank you. Being e jected from a tape recorder. And one thing more. It was quiet then, for a long time, and I was quiet too, putting the bumping and thumping together with the cassette sound; and in that long quiet”—he looked forebodingly at Beynon—“hate came over the phone, Sydney.” He nodded. “Hate like I never felt before, not even when Stangl looked at me in the courtroom. It came to me as plain as the boy’s voice, and maybe it was because of what he said, but I was absolutely certain the hate came from Mengele. And when the phone was hung up I was absolutely certain that Mengele hung it.” He looked away and leaned forward, his elbows on his knees, a hand gripping his other hand’s fist.
    Beynon watched him, skeptical but moved. “What did you do?” he asked.
    Liebermann sat up straight, rubbed his hands, looked at Beynon and shrugged. “What could I do, in Vienna at four in the morning? I wrote down what the boy said, all I could remember, and read it, and told myself that he was crazy and I was crazy. Only who…ejected the cassette and hung up the phone? Maybe it wasn’t Mengele, but it was somebody. Later, when it was morning there, I called Martin McCarthy at the U.S. Embassy in Brasília; he called the police in São Paulo, and they called the phone company and found out where the call to me came from. A hotel. The boy disappeared from it during the night. I called Pacher here and asked him if he could get Brazil to watch for the SS men—the boy said they were leaving that day—and Pacher didn’t exactly laugh at me but he said no, not without something concrete. A boy disappearing from a hotel room without paying his bill isn’t concrete. And neither is me saying SS men are leaving because the boy told me so. I tried to get the German prosecutor in charge of the Mengele case but he was out. If it was still Fritz Bauer, he would be in for me, but the new one was out.” He shrugged again, rubbed at the lobe of his ear. “So the men left Brazil, if the boy was right, and he hasn’t been found yet. His father is down there pushing the police; a well-to-do man, I understand. But he has a dead son.”
    Beynon said apologetically, “I can’t very well file a story in Vienna about a—”
    â€œNo, no, no,” Liebermann interrupted, a quelling hand on Beynon’s knee. “I don’t want you to file a story. What I want you to do is this, Sydney; I’m sure it’s possible and I hope it isn’t too much trouble. The boy said the first killing will happen the day after tomorrow, October sixteenth. But he didn’t say where. Will you have your main office in London send you clippings or reports from their other offices? Of men sixty-four to sixty-six years old, murdered or dying in accidents? Anything except natural deaths, from Wednesday on. Only men sixty-four to sixty-six.”
    Beynon frowned, poked at his glasses, and looked his doubts at Liebermann.
    â€œIt wasn’t a hoax, Sydney. He wasn’t a boy who would do that. He’s been missing three weeks, and he wrote home regularly, called even when he changed hotels.”
    â€œGranted he’s probably dead,” Beynon said. “But mightn’t he have been killed simply for snooping around where he wasn’t welcome, another young fellow out after Mengele? Or even have been robbed and done away with by an ordinary