Manaus?
“Give me ten minutes,” Charley said.
He called back in five. “True name Wolfram Ostermann, if I’m not mistaken,” Charley said. “We came across him back in the fifties when we were trying to find Eichmann as a good-will gesture to the Mossad.”
“Headquarters didn’t tell the Mossad?”
“Apparently not, if he’s alive and well and living in Brazil. Wolfram was a busy bee. He saw a lot of former SS men and we thought he might be up to something special. They’d talk to him, then head off to exotic destinations.”
“Such as?”
“Pretty much everywhere. He seemed to be financing their travels by selling paintings, presumably stolen during the war. It was better to watch him than have him replaced with somebody we didn’t know.”
“And
was
he up to something special?”
“We never followed up. In those days the White House wanted to know about Russians, not runaway ex-SS men. We had a lot of those working for us in Germany.”
“Anything else?”
“Just one faint marker,” Charley said. “One of the people Wolfram dealt with in Brazil was a doctor who with called himself Claus Bücher. We never put a true name to him, but you know who he is—Ibn Awad’s personal physician.”
Small world.
11
Everything was in order at the bank. Kalash had actually deposited the money, all of it. After transferring $25,000 each to the Old Boys and withdrawing $25,000 in pocket money for myself, I collected from my safe deposit box an old Canadian passport bearing the name William O. Dyer and a picture of me as a somewhat younger man. At the airport I booked a ticket for Frankfurt with a connection to Manaus and paid for it in cash. Aboard the plane I fell asleep almost immediately. I had not seen a bed since leaving Washington thirty-six hours earlier. I could taste the awful meal I had eaten the night before. My bones ached. I dreamt of Paul and myself as a child on a sled. We crashed in a snowdrift. The sled overturned. I had a bloody nose. Offstage, a female screamed. Memory or symbolism? Who knew?
I had never been posted to South America, thanks be, so my first glimpse of Brazil revealed a sight that I could scarcely have imagined. From a height of thirty thousand feet, the rain forest stretched as far as the eye could see in all directions, the undulating spinach-green canopy carved into somewhat more comprehensible patches of territory by muddy rivers that glittered in the sun. As in song and story, a man really could disappear into this wilderness without a trace, enslaved by some dope-taking tribe of Indians, eaten by crocodiles or merely lost, following engorgedrivers downstream in the direction of civilization as recommended by the Boy Scout manual but never finding anything but another muddy river. Most people, including me, would prefer to die another death someplace else. Yet here I was in this prehistoric world, under a false identity, on the recommendation of a man I scarcely knew who had no reason to wish me well, in pursuit of a cousin who might be dead and a mad Arab who might not be.
On payment of a handsome bribe to a passport officer at the Manaus airport, I was grudgingly granted a three-day tourist visa, which provided more than enough time to do what I had to do. The German I was looking for called himself Simon Hawk. I rang the number Kalash had given me from an airport phone and asked for Herr Hawk in German. When he came on the line I identified myself as a friend of Kalash.
“Your German is not as good as the last American Prince Kalash sent to me,” Hawk said in English that could only have been learned in a British public school. This was the Schutzstaffel style: let this mongrel dummkopf know at the outset that you already knew all about him, that you could if necessary read his slow and simple and supremely uninteresting thoughts. That he had better come to the point.
“I apologize,” I said in English, glad to have news of Paul. “I wonder if we might
“Give me ten minutes,” Charley said.
He called back in five. “True name Wolfram Ostermann, if I’m not mistaken,” Charley said. “We came across him back in the fifties when we were trying to find Eichmann as a good-will gesture to the Mossad.”
“Headquarters didn’t tell the Mossad?”
“Apparently not, if he’s alive and well and living in Brazil. Wolfram was a busy bee. He saw a lot of former SS men and we thought he might be up to something special. They’d talk to him, then head off to exotic destinations.”
“Such as?”
“Pretty much everywhere. He seemed to be financing their travels by selling paintings, presumably stolen during the war. It was better to watch him than have him replaced with somebody we didn’t know.”
“And
was
he up to something special?”
“We never followed up. In those days the White House wanted to know about Russians, not runaway ex-SS men. We had a lot of those working for us in Germany.”
“Anything else?”
“Just one faint marker,” Charley said. “One of the people Wolfram dealt with in Brazil was a doctor who with called himself Claus Bücher. We never put a true name to him, but you know who he is—Ibn Awad’s personal physician.”
Small world.
11
Everything was in order at the bank. Kalash had actually deposited the money, all of it. After transferring $25,000 each to the Old Boys and withdrawing $25,000 in pocket money for myself, I collected from my safe deposit box an old Canadian passport bearing the name William O. Dyer and a picture of me as a somewhat younger man. At the airport I booked a ticket for Frankfurt with a connection to Manaus and paid for it in cash. Aboard the plane I fell asleep almost immediately. I had not seen a bed since leaving Washington thirty-six hours earlier. I could taste the awful meal I had eaten the night before. My bones ached. I dreamt of Paul and myself as a child on a sled. We crashed in a snowdrift. The sled overturned. I had a bloody nose. Offstage, a female screamed. Memory or symbolism? Who knew?
I had never been posted to South America, thanks be, so my first glimpse of Brazil revealed a sight that I could scarcely have imagined. From a height of thirty thousand feet, the rain forest stretched as far as the eye could see in all directions, the undulating spinach-green canopy carved into somewhat more comprehensible patches of territory by muddy rivers that glittered in the sun. As in song and story, a man really could disappear into this wilderness without a trace, enslaved by some dope-taking tribe of Indians, eaten by crocodiles or merely lost, following engorgedrivers downstream in the direction of civilization as recommended by the Boy Scout manual but never finding anything but another muddy river. Most people, including me, would prefer to die another death someplace else. Yet here I was in this prehistoric world, under a false identity, on the recommendation of a man I scarcely knew who had no reason to wish me well, in pursuit of a cousin who might be dead and a mad Arab who might not be.
On payment of a handsome bribe to a passport officer at the Manaus airport, I was grudgingly granted a three-day tourist visa, which provided more than enough time to do what I had to do. The German I was looking for called himself Simon Hawk. I rang the number Kalash had given me from an airport phone and asked for Herr Hawk in German. When he came on the line I identified myself as a friend of Kalash.
“Your German is not as good as the last American Prince Kalash sent to me,” Hawk said in English that could only have been learned in a British public school. This was the Schutzstaffel style: let this mongrel dummkopf know at the outset that you already knew all about him, that you could if necessary read his slow and simple and supremely uninteresting thoughts. That he had better come to the point.
“I apologize,” I said in English, glad to have news of Paul. “I wonder if we might
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