Ben pressed the End button.
It was not surprising that the manager would want to talk to him. Damage had been done to the hotel; the manager was duty-bound to call the police. But there was something about the man’s voice, the suddenly bullying self-assurance of a man who is backed by the full weight of the authorities, that alarmed Ben.
And what did Hoffman, the private investigator, want so urgently?
The door to Sonnenfeld’s office opened and a small, stoop-shouldered old man emerged and gestured feebly for Ben to enter. He gave Ben a tremorous handshake and sat behind a cluttered desk. Jakob Sonnenfeld had a bristly gray mustache, a jowly face, large ears, and redrimmed, hooded, watery eyes. He wore an unfashion-ably wide, clumsily knotted tie, a moth-eaten brown sweater-vest under a checked jacket.
“Many people want to look at my archives,” Sonnenfeld said abruptly. “Some for good reasons, some for not so good. Why you?”
Ben cleared his throat, but Sonnenfeld rumbled on. “You say your father is a Holocaust survivor. So? There are thousands of them alive. Why are you so interested in my work?”
Do I dare level with the man? he wondered. “You’ve been hunting Nazis for decades now,” he began suddenly. “You must hate them with all your heart, as I do.”
Sonnenfeld waved dismissively. “No. I’m not a hater. I couldn’t work at this job for over fifty years fueled by hate. It would eat away at my insides.”
Ben was at once skeptical and annoyed at Sonnenfeld’s piety.
“Well, I happen to believe that war criminals should not go free.”
“Ah, but they are not war criminals really, are they? A war criminal commits his crimes to further his war aims, yes? He murders and tortures in order to help win the war. But tell me: Did the Nazis need to massacre and gas to death millions of innocents in order to win? Of course not. They did it purely for ideological reasons. To cleanse the planet, they believed. It was wholly unnecessary. It was something they did on the side. It diverted precious wartime resources. I’d say their campaign of genocide hindered their war effort. No, these were most certainly not war criminals.”
“What do you call them, then?” Ben asked, understanding at last.
Sonnenfeld smiled. Several gold teeth glinted. “Monsters.”
Ben took in a long breath. He’d have to trust the old Nazi hunter; that was the only way, he realized, to secure his cooperation. Sonnenfeld was too smart. “Then let me be very direct with you, Mr. Sonnenfeld. My brother—my twin brother, my closest friend in all the world—was murdered by people I believe are in some way connected with some of these monsters.”
Sonnenfeld leaned forward. “Now you have me very confused,” he said very intently. “Surely you and your brother are much, much too young to have been through the war.”
“This happened not much over a week ago,” Ben said.
Sonnenfeld’s brow furrowed, eyes narrowing in disbelief. “What can you be saying? You are making no sense.”
Quickly Ben explained about Peter’s discovery. “This document drew my brother’s attention because one of the board members was our own father.” He paused. “Max Hartman.”
Stunned silence. Then: “I know the name. He has given much money to good causes.”
“In the year 1945, one of his causes was something called Sigma,” Ben continued stonily. “The other incorporators included many Western industrialists, and a small handful of Nazi officials. Those included the treasurer, who is identified by the title Obersturmführer, and by the name Max Hartman.”
Sonnenfeld’s rheumy eyes did not blink. “Extraordinary. You did say ‘Sigma,’ yes? Dear God in heaven.”
“I’m afraid it’s an old story,” said the visitor in the black leather jacket.
“The wife,” suggested the private detective, Hoffman, with a wink.
The man smiled sheepishly. “She is young and very pretty, yes?”
A sigh. “Yes.”
“They are the worst of all, the pretty young ones,” Hoffman said, man to man. “I’d advise you to simply forget her. You’ll never be able to trust her anyway.”
The visitor’s eye seemed to be caught by Hoffman’s fancy new laptop computer. “Nice,” the man said.
“I don’t know how I ever used anything else,” Hoffman said. “I am not so good with technical things, but this is easy. Who needs filing cabinets anymore? Everything is here.”
“Mind if I take a look at it?”
Hoffman hesitated. A man come in off the street—he could easily be a thief after all. He glanced at him again, took in the man’s broad shoulders, narrow waist, not a gram of body fat. Quietly he nudged open the long metal desk drawer next to his lap an inch or two and checked for the Glock.
“Maybe another time,” Hoffman said. “All of my confidential files are there. So, please give me the details about your pretty young wife and the bastard she’s fucking.”
“Why don’t you turn it on?” the visitor said. Hoffman looked up sharply. This was not a request but a demand.
“Why are you here?” Hoffman snarled, and then realized he was staring into the barrel of a Makarov attached to a silencer.
“Put the computer on,” the man said softly. “Open your files.”
“I will tell you one thing. This document was never meant to see the light of day,” Sonnenfeld said. “It was a legalism intended for internal Swiss bank use only. For the gnomes of Zurich alone.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Sigma has long been the stuff of legend. Not a scintilla of evidence has ever emerged to give body to the shadow of supposition. I would know. Believe me.”
“Until now, correct?”
“So it would seem,” he said softly. “Clearly, it is a fictional enterprise. A front, a ruse—a means for industrialists on both sides to secure a separate peace, whatever the terms of armistice might be. The paper your brother uncovered may be the only material reality that it has.”
“You say it was the stuff of legend—what was the nature of that legend?”
“Powerful businessmen and powerful politicians, meeting secretly to transfer immense, stolen state assets out of the Fatherland. Not everyone who opposed Hitler was a hero, you might as well know that. Many were cold-eyed pragmatists. They knew the war effort was doomed, and they knew who was to blame. What concerned them more was the prospect of repatriation, nationalization. They had their own empires to look after. Empires of industry. There is abundant evidence of such plans. But we’ve always believed that the plan remained just a plan. And almost everyone involved has since gone to their graves.”
“You said ‘almost everyone,’” Ben repeated sharply. “Let me ask about the few board members who fall under your professional purview. The Nazis. Gerhard Lenz. Josef Strasser.” He paused before pronouncing the final name. “Max Hartman.”
Sonnenfeld fell silent. He cradled his head in his large craggy hands. “Who are these people?” he said to himself, the question purely rhetorical. “That is your question. And here, always, is mine: who is asking? Why do you want to know?”
“Put your gun down,” Hoffman said. “Don’t be foolish.”
“Close the desk drawer,” the intruder said. “I am watching you very closely. One wrong move and I will not hesitate to kill you.”
“Then you’ll never access my files,” Hoffman said triumphantly. “The computer is equipped with a bio-metric authentication device—a fingerprint scanner. Without my fingerprint, no one can log on. So you see, you would be very foolish to kill me.”
“Oh, I don’t need to go quite that far yet,” said the visitor serenely.
“But do you know the truth about my father?” Ben asked. “It strikes me that you might have assembled a file on such a high-profile survivor and—forgive me—potential benefactor to your efforts. You, more than anyone, would have been in a position to see through his lies. You have all the lists of concentration-camp victims, a more exhaustive storehouse of records than anyone
else. That’s why I have to ask: Did you know the truth about my father?”
“Do you?” Sonnenfeld returned sharply.
“I’ve seen the truth in black and white.”
“You have seen in black and white, yes, but you have not seen the truth. An amateur’s error. Forgive me, Mr. Hartman, but these are never black-and-white matters. You’re dealing with a situation whose ambiguities are very familiar to me. Your father’s case, I can tell you only a little about it, but it is a sadly familiar story. You must be prepared to enter a realm of moral chiaroscuro, however. Of shadow, of ethical vagueness. Begin with the simple fact that if a Jew had money, the Nazis were willing to deal with him. This was one of the ugly secrets of the war that people seldom talk about. Often enough, the rich ones bought safe passage. The Nazis would take gold, jewels, securities, whatever. It was outright extortion, plain and simple. They even had a price schedule—three hundred thousand Swiss francs for a life! One of the Rothschilds traded his steel mills for his freedom—gave them to the Hermann Goering Works. But you won’t read about any of this. No one ever talks about it. There was a very rich Hungarian-Jewish family, Weiss—they had businesses in twenty-three countries around the world. They gave their entire fortune to the SS, and in return they were escorted safely to Switzerland.”
Ben was flustered. “But an Obersturmführer…”
“A Jewish Obersturmführer? Can that possibly be? Bear with me for a moment.” Sonnenfeld paused before resuming. “I can tell you about an SS colonel, Kurt Becher, who was in charge of making deals like this for Eichmann and Himmler. Becher made a deal with a Hungarian, Dr. Rudolf Kastner—seventeen hundred Jews at a thousand dollars each. A whole train full. Jews in Budapest fought to get on that train. You know your family had money before the war, didn’t you? The way it worked was very simple, if you were Max Hartman. One day Obergruppenführer Becher comes to see you. You make a deal. What good was your fortune if you were all going to die anyway? So you ransom your family out. Your sisters and you. This was hardly a moral conundrum. You did whatever you could to stay alive.”
Ben had never thought of his father as a young man, frightened and desperate. His mind reeled. His aunt Sarah had died before he was born, but he remembered his aunt Leah, who passed away when he was in high school: a small, quiet, gentle soul, who had lived quietly as a librarian in Philadelphia. The affection she had for her brother was real, but so, too, was her recognition of his strength of character; she deferred to him in all things. If there were secrets to be kept, she would have kept them.
But his father—what else was he keeping inside?
“If what you’re saying is true, why did he never tell us?” Ben asked.
“You think he wanted you to hear this?” There was a hint of scorn in Sonnenfeld’s voice. “You think you would really have understood? Millions incinerated, while Max Hartman comes to America simply because he was fortunate enough to have money? People in his situation never told anyone, my friend. They often did their best to try to forget it themselves. I know these things because it is my business to know, but they are best left unexposed.”
Ben didn’t know how to reply, said nothing.
“Even Churchill and Roosevelt—Himmler made them an offer, you know. In May of ’44. He was prepared to sell the Allies every single Jew the Nazis had, if the Allies would give them one truck for every hundred Jews. The Nazis would dismantle the gas chambers, stop murdering the Jews at once—all for some trucks they could use against the Russians. The Jews were for sale—but there were no buyers! Roosevelt and Churchill said no—they wouldn’t sell their souls to the devil. Easy for them to say, no? They could have saved a million European Jews, but no. There were Jewish leaders who desperately wanted to make this deal. You see, you want to talk about morality, this wasn’t so simple, was it?” Sonnenfeld’s tone was bitter. “Now it’s so easy to talk about clean hands. But the result is that you’re here today. You exist because your father made an unsavory deal to save his own life.”
Ben’s mind flashed back to the image of his father, old and frail in Bedford, and the image of him, crisp and chiseled in the old photograph. What he had to go through to get here, Ben couldn’t begin to imagine. Yet would he really feel compelled to hide this? How much else had he been hiding? “But still, this all leaves unanswered the matter of his name on that document,” Ben prompted, “identifying him as SS….”
“In name only, I’m sure.”
“Meaning what?”
“How much do you know about your father?”
Good question, Ben thought. He said, “Less and less, it seems.” Max Hartman, powerful and intimidating, conducting a board meeting with gladiatorial selfconfidence. Hoisting Ben, age six, way up in the air. Reading The Financial Times at breakfast, distant and elusive.
How I tried to earn his love, his respect! And what a warm glow his approval gave me when he so rarely granted it.
What an enigma the man has always been.
“I can tell you this much,” Sonnenfeld said impassively. “When your father was still a young man, he was already a legend in German financial circles. A genius, it was said. But he was a Jew. Early in the war, when the Jews were being sent away, he was given the opportunity to work for the Reichsbank instead, designing intricate financial schemes that would allow the Nazis to circumvent the Allied blockades. He was given this SS title as a sort of cover.”
“So in a sense he helped finance the Nazi regime,” Ben said in a monotone. This was somehow no surprise, but still he felt his stomach plummet at hearing it confirmed.
“Unfortunately, yes. I’m sure he had his reasons—he was pressured, he had no choice. He would have been enlisted in this Sigma project as a matter of course.” He paused again, watching Ben steadily. “I think you are not very good at seeing shades of gray.”
“Odd talk for a Nazi hunter.”
“Again with that journalist’s tag,” Sonnenfeld said. “I fight for justice, and in the fight for justice you must be able to distinguish between the venial and the venal, between ordinary and outsized wrongdoing. Make no mistake: hardship brings out the best in no one.”
The room seemed to revolve slowly around him. Ben clasped his arms around himself, and breathed deeply, trying for a moment of calm, a moment of clarity.
He had a sudden mental picture of his father in his study, listening to Mozart’s Don Giovanni as he sat in his favorite overstuffed chair in darkness. Often in the evenings after dinner Max would sit alone with the lights off, Don Giovanni on the stereo. How lonely the man must have been, how frightened that his ugly past would someday emerge. Ben was surprised at the tenderness he suddenly felt. The old man loved me as much as he was able to love anyone. How can I despise him? It occurred to Ben that the real reason Lenz grew to hate his own father was not so much the repugnance of Nazism as the fact that he had abandoned them.
“Tell me about Strasser,” Ben said, realizing that only a change of subject could diminish the vertigo he was undergoing.
Sonnenfeld closed his eyes. “Strasser was a scientific adviser to Hitler. Gevalt, he was not a human being. Strasser was a brilliant scientist. He helped run I. G. Farben, you know this famous I. G. Farben, the big industrial firm that was controlled by the Nazis? There, he helped to invent a new gas in pellet form called Zyklon-B. You would shake the pellets and they would turn into gas. Like magic! They first tried it in the showers at Auschwitz. A fantastic invention. The poison gas would rise in the gas chambers, and as the level rose the taller victims would step on the others to try to breathe. But everyone would die in four minutes.”
Sonnenfeld paused, gazed into some middle distance. In the long silence Ben could hear the ticking of a mechanical clock.
“Very efficient,” Sonnenfeld at last resumed. “For this we must thank Dr. Strasser. And do you know that Allen Dulles, your CIA director in the fifties, was I. G. Farben’s American lawyer and loyal defender? Yes, it is true.”
Somewhere Ben h
ad heard this before, but it still amazed him. Slowly, he said, “So both Strasser and Lenz were partners, in a sense.”
“Yes. Two of the most brilliant, most terrible Nazi scientists. Lenz with his experiments on children, on twins. A brilliant scientist, far ahead of his time. Lenz took a particular interest in the metabolism of children. Some he would starve to death in order to observe how their growth slowed and stopped. Some he would actually freeze, to see how that affected their growth. He saw to it that all the children who suffered from progeria, a horrible form of premature aging, were sent to him for study.” He went on bitterly: “A lovely man, Dr. Lenz. Very close to the high command, of course. As a scientist, he was better trusted than most politicians. He was thought to have ‘purity of purpose.’ And of course our Dr. Strasser. Lenz went to Buenos Aires too, as so many of them did after the war. Have you been there? It is a lovely city. Truly. The Paris of South America. No wonder all the Nazis wanted to live there. And then Lenz died there.”
“And Strasser?”
“Perhaps Lenz’s widow knows the whereabouts of Strasser, but don’t even think of asking her. She’ll never reveal it.”
“Lenz’s widow?” Ben asked, sitting upright. “Yes, Jürgen Lenz mentioned his mother had retired there.”
“You spoke with Jürgen Lenz?”
“Yes. You know him, I gather?”
“Ah, this is a complicated story, Jürgen Lenz. I must admit to you, at first I found it extremely difficult to accept money from this man. Of course, without contributions we would have to close down. In this country, where they have always protected the Nazis, even protect them to this day, I get no donations. Not a cent! Here they haven’t prosecuted a single Nazi case in over twenty years! Here I was for years Public Enemy Number One. They used to spit at me on the street. And Lenz, well, from Lenz this so clearly seemed to be guilt money. But then I met the man, and I quickly changed my mind. He’s sincerely committed to doing good. For example, he’s the sole underwriter of the progeria foundation in Vienna. No doubt he wants to undo his father’s work. We mustn’t hold against him his father’s crimes.”
The Sigma Protocol Page 35