Carrie was definitely maturing by the day. At some stage, probably quite soon, she might be ready to hear the whole of her grandmother’s story, and he would give her the manuscript. But not just yet. And Peter would definitely have to wait several years. It was just too raw, too harrowing, too close to home.
Johnson’s mother, born Helena Meller, had grown up in a Jewish family in southern Poland before she was imprisoned by the Nazis. Somehow, she had managed to survive for two years in various concentration camps.
Her life had been saved by being transferred in December 1944 from a camp in the Gross-Rosen complex to the Brünnlitz camp, which decades later was featured in the film Schindler’s List. Brünnlitz supplied labor to an ammunition factory set up by Oskar Schindler, an arrangement which meant that some of the inmates, though not all, avoided onward transfer to extermination camps.
Helena had been eventually released when the Red Army arrived in April 1945, just after her twentieth birthday. Although originally a Jew, she later became a Christian, moved to Portland, and married Johnson’s father, Bernard, who had died in 1992 from cancer.
When Helena herself died in 2001, she left with her will a manuscript containing a long account of her life in the camps. She had hammered it out on her typewriter during the 1970s and ’80s on lined notebook paper that was now yellowing around the edges.
Johnson had been shocked when he read it for the first time. He had never known it had existed until then, and although his mother used to talk a bit about the camps and tell the occasional story about how the Nazis treated the Jews back then, she never did so in graphic detail. He thought that perhaps she couldn’t bear to speak to her children about the worst things, so she wrote them down instead. He hadn’t read the manuscript since probably 2002.
Carrie leaned back on the sofa. “I know you don’t want to tell me the details, but being in the camp must have affected Grandma, right? After she got out, I mean?”
“It did,” Johnson said. “She often talked about how hard it was to cope and sometimes cried if she was telling a story, which is probably why she never told us too much. She was a survivor, Carrie, an amazingly strong woman, like I’m sure you’ll be someday.”
Carrie perked up at the compliment. “Thanks, Dad.”
It was true, his mother had been incredibly strong. “She had a few sayings which she said got her through the camps,” Johnson said. “The main one was biblical. ‘Suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope.’ That’s from Paul’s letter to the Romans. She used to say it to herself all the time. I could see why, after what she went through.”
Carrie smiled. “She was some lady, that’s for sure. Anyway, so how was your trip, Dad? You had another lecture, right? What was this one about?”
“It was about the controversy when the CIA employed a lot of ex-Nazis after World War II to spy for them,” Johnson said. “Many of the Nazis knew a lot about Russia, which were the new enemy then. Lots of them were given entry into the U.S. as a payback. They were given a safe haven here, no questions asked, a few thousand of them—mass murderers, torturers, sadists, you name it. My talk was partly about how the OSI was set up in 1979 inside the Department of Justice in Washington to track down those Nazis, who were scattered across the country.”
“Cool. You had a really badass job, Dad.”
“Carrie, language.”
Carrie just rolled her eyes at him. “Right, sorry. I’d best get going on my homework.”
“Okay, and if you’re going upstairs, ask your brother if he needs any help with his homework.”
Carrie walked out, the sound of her shoes echoing down the hallway. A few seconds later he heard her screaming up the stairs. “Peter, Peter . . . Dad wants to know if you need help with your homework.”
Johnson turned on the television news and watched for a while. The second to last item was about the killing of Nathaniel Kudrow. Police in Washington were drawing a blank with their inquiries and were appealing to anyone who had seen anything suspicious at the hotel where he was staying to get in touch, the crime reporter said. There was a very short sound bite from an interview with his brother, David, reinforcing the police request.
The reporter said that according to police, Nathaniel had traveled quite extensively over recent months in Europe, South America, and North America, and police and the FBI were looking at whether there might be a link between these trips and his killing.
Once the bulletin had finished, Johnson turned off the TV and sat back in his armchair. He gently banged his head back a couple of times against the headrest. He’d better get his mother’s memoir out of the safe and read through it again the following day.
A letter from the grave . . . a bit weird, that. But then again, his mother had been eccentric. He eyed the letter. Keep pushing for justice. Johnson snorted to himself. I wish . . .
Chapter Five
Thursday, November 10, 2011
Buenos Aires
Ignacio Guzmann could feel his blood pressure rising, try as he might to stay calm.
He sat in the driver’s seat of his father José’s old black Mercedes outside the old man’s house in the Recoleta suburb of Buenos Aires.
Guzmann senior would only buy German-made cars and had always refused to travel in his son’s fifteen-year-old white Renault Mégane. So Ignacio had driven to Recoleta, parked his own car, then switched vehicles.
An angular, slightly stooping figure emerged from the black front door of the house on the corner of Ombú and Martín Coronado Streets. The two-story property had originally been white, but the paint was peeling, stained green and black in several places. Three of the black shutters were hanging off their hinges at an angle, and the paint on the doors and metal fencing and gates was also patchy.
It stood in contrast to the other, much smarter homes on the street.
Come on, you old bastard, hurry up. Ignacio felt tired after the previous day’s long flight back to Buenos Aires.
A group of children ran past, sprinting from one of the many trees lining the street to the next, mock fighting and shouting insults at each other.
Ignacio watched his father limp stiffly from his gate, his right leg dragging a little as always, a silver-topped walking cane in his right hand and a scuffed black leather attaché case in his left.
He appeared younger than he was, Ignacio thought. José’s thin, lightly wrinkled face, slim figure, and the sharp parting in his closely cut white hair meant he could pass for someone in his late seventies. But according to his Argentine passport, he was actually ninety-one.
Despite his age, José still kept a firm grip on his family gold and jewelry manufacturing and retail business, SolGold. It had outlets across Argentina and imported gold and other raw materials and products from various countries.
The old man inched his way to the car. “Can’t you get out and hold the door open for me?” he said in Spanish. “This arthritis is a killer.”
Ignacio hopped out and complied.
José eased himself into the back seat. “So, I see you’re back.”
“Yes, padre, I’m back.”
“Where have you been?”
“Oh, just away for a few days. Took a break. Had a few things that needed sorting out.”
“Away where?”
Ignacio ignored the question. His father was sometimes like a dog that wouldn’t let go of a bone. He got back into the car and drove off through Recoleta, one of the city’s most affluent suburbs and part of Barrio Norte, or “north neighborhood.”
“Where are we going? The usual, Café Nostalgia?” Ignacio asked.
He could see his father nodding in the rearview mirror. “Yes, Nostalgia.” Normally José’s manservant Juan drove him to the café on a five-way, tree-lined crossroads in Palermo. There he would send Juan to the newsstand to buy him a newspaper, usually Clarín, Argentina’s biggest-selling daily and then he would sit for an hour or so, catching up on the latest news.
It must have been at least a year since Ignacio had last been out with his father, who he assumed must be desperate for a chat about something.
Ignacio parked outside the ground-floor café.
“Hola, Señor Guzmann.” The waiter nodded at José as he limped over to his usual square wooden table by the window. “Your usual double espresso, sir?”
“Yes, and make it quick. Bring me a slice of chocolate cake with it.”
Ignacio ordered a cappuccino. He decided to make an effort.
“How long have you been coming here now, padre?”
Before his father could reply, a fat black cat jumped onto the seat next to him. José reached for his cane, poked it toward the cat, and hissed loudly, “Get out, go on, move, damned animal.”
Ignacio noticed the barista girl working behind the large silver espresso machine at the bar. She kept flicking her head sideways to stop her blond hair from falling into her eyes.
His father spotted him looking at her. “If you hadn’t screwed up with that wife of yours you wouldn’t need to be eyeing up women like her. Who was it in the end, the jazz bar stripper who finally finished off your marriage?”
Ignacio ignored the well-aimed barb, but his father wasn’t going to stop there. “I don’t suppose you see much of your kids now, after that?”
That much was true. He hadn’t seen his two teenagers in more than nine months. His ex-wife, who had taken over their former home in Palermo, made sure of that.
“Unlikely, when she won’t let them near me,” Ignacio said. “I’m looking at legal action, but it’s just too expensive.”
The waitress arrived with their coffees and his father’s cake.
“So, padre, you obviously needed to discuss something,” Ignacio said. “What’s the problem?”
José swapped his regular glasses for a gold-rimmed reading pair and removed some files from his attaché case.
“You won’t be aware of this, I don’t think, but the business is going downward, quickly,” the old man said. “Another thing you probably don’t know, as you were away, but I had to sack Pancho last week, and I just thought I’d run a couple of things past you.”
Ignacio sat upright. “You sacked Pancho? What happened there then? I thought he was a top guy?”
Pancho wasn’t on the official staff of SolGold but had run its finances and accounts for nearly thirty years.
“He used to be, yes. When the country was in the shit in 2001, he sorted us out, got us back on track, when you were in the army. But recently, not so.”
Argentina had defaulted on its debt and slashed its budgets for the armed forces in 2006, putting Ignacio out of a job, along with many of his other army colleagues. After that, his only option was his father’s gold and jewelry business.
What was it his father had told him? So the dog returns, tail between his legs, older and probably no wiser.
Ignacio suddenly felt alarmed. “So, padre, you’re not trying to tell me you want me out?”
“No. But we’ve got to do something. The company’s suffering huge losses.”
Ignacio sat back. He was well aware of that from the hours he had secretly spent trawling through the company’s accounts on his father’s computer late at night, not that he was going to reveal that.
“We’re losing money? I thought we were healthy?” Ignacio said.
“No, we’re not,” the old man said. “I’m working on a plan. The manufacturing can stay, but the first part is to get rid of some of our shops. Out of the twenty, I think six are a waste of time, so they’re going.”
José had mainly kept Ignacio away from balance sheets, profit-and-loss accounts, and SolGold’s own stores and jewelry production operations. Instead, he had given his son a job as head of sales, looking after third-party jewelers in the tourism market.
As part of that role, Ignacio had taken a trip up to the far north of Argentina six months earlier to visit a few potential clients. He had also made an unscheduled stop for a couple of days at SolGold’s jewelry production site in Puerto Iguazú, on the border with Paraguay, where even he—a hardened ex-military guy—had been deeply shocked at what he’d seen. It was something he planned to raise with his father at the right time, not now.
Although Ignacio didn’t have a business background, he had learned fast in his new role. His accountancy studies and experience managing large budgets while in the army had helped.
To Ignacio, it had initially seemed odd that his father couldn’t make more profit from his sales of mid-market gold necklaces, rings, and other trinkets. There was a boom happening and Argentina’s GDP was rising at more than 9 percent a year. So he had made it his business to find out why there were problems—doing so well behind his father’s back.
José picked up a file and pointed to a number. “Look, gold prices were $270 an ounce back in 2001. Now, over $1,700. It prices customers out, and worse, it kills profit margins. We’re not generating enough cash, and overheads on these shops are high.”
He sighed. “I’ve spent fifty-five years building this business. I’m not going to see it flushed down the toilet.” His face colored, and he slammed his cane hard against the leg of the table.
Ignacio involuntarily flinched as his father waved the stick. The sight of it brought back bad memories, even four decades later.
The old man took another sip of coffee. “Twenty, thirty years ago I would have sorted out the problems I’ve got myself. Now I can’t.”
Ignacio folded his arms and reclined, looking at his father. He was already quite well ahead with forming his own plans about how to resolve the business’s problems and his personal financial situation. Speed was now critical in delivering them; he knew that. And they weren’t plans he was going to share with his father.
“Yes, well, you sorted out quite a lot of stuff when you were younger, didn’t you? Before you came to Argentina.” Ignacio stared his father in the eye.
His long-held suspicions about his father had been confirmed after discovering some private papers in a folder hidden away in his attic two years earlier, the contents of which had stunned him.
But the old man had always avoided any discussion about his roots. In Ignacio’s younger years, every time he asked, his father had changed the subject, so he eventually gave up.
This time José’s eyes flickered a little before their steely blue facade was restored. “What are you on about? Let’s get the bill.” José nodded across the room at one of the waiters.
Portland, Maine
Johnson had intended to delve into his mother’s memoir on Thursday afternoon, but had gotten sidetracked by a series of phone calls and e-mails relating to the ongoing search for the assistant principal and his eighteen-year-old girlfriend.
It was therefore well into the evening when he finally managed to sit down in his office and pick up the thin file, entitled “Gross-Rosen: A Survivor’s Account.”
He flicked through the first few pages, which described his mother’s background in Warsaw and her feelings of terror after the SS caught her and her family hiding in the attic of their house.
There was a section on the horrific three-day journey without food spent crushed into a train car with numerous other Jews—several of whom died—en route to the concentration camp. And then he found on page thirty-two the segment he remembered reading previously.
Daily Life in Camp
Every day is a cycle of fear in camp. I was afraid of dying most of all, of course, but apart from that, afraid of being hungry and having no energy and then afraid of not being able to do the work the guards ordered and afraid of the beating that would follow.
Afraid of other prisoners and what they might do, because some lost their sanity and their goodness. It seemed impossible that I could survive, once I was in there. I still can’t believe I did.
During those months in 1944, the daily battle for food in Wüstegiersdorf, a subcamp of Gross-Rosen, was a total challenge of strength, cunning, ingenuity, and desper
ation.
We were given just one slice of bread each, in the morning, and then the decision was whether to eat it immediately, which avoided it being stolen, or to try and save half to eat later in the day with the watery soup they served.
Aggressive prisoners, or those who had gone insane, would just steal food off others, sometimes threatening them. One woman, Elizabeth, took the bread I had saved one day. She came behind me and held a very sharp piece of hard wood to my throat—what could I do?
Some prisoners lost it completely, physically and mentally, and were like walking dead.
They were as thin as it is possible to be and still move, but their muscle control had gone, including their bowels, and they would defecate or piss where they stood. This caused the guards to whip them or hit them with sticks.
They sank into their own oblivion, no longer thinking, just grabbing anything to eat, such as grass or bits of earth or wood. I was really afraid of them and of becoming like them. They were walking skeletons, with no flesh, really, and eyeballs that sunk backward into their sockets and bones that stuck out like the ribs on the meat I used to see in the butchers’ shops.
We did anything to get extra food. Rats were a good option, as there were sometimes a lot of them, until the guards caught on to what we were doing and poisoned them. I caught a couple by managing to hit them with a piece of wood, which seemed like a miracle. Cooking them was a challenge, but we did it.
I was put into a work gang loading bags of cement onto railway trucks for twelve hours a day, but we had to walk ten kilometers to get to the loading place, going past fields on the way. Sometimes I managed to run into a field and grab some potatoes and beets without a guard noticing. I had to eat them immediately, raw, so they wouldn’t see.
The cement bags were useful too, as insulation for our frozen bodies. I wore them like a jacket, with holes cut out for my head and my arms. They were a temporary perk, until I was moved to a different job. They made the difference between sleeping and not sleeping in the freezing cold wooden bunks inside the huts where we lived.
The Last Nazi (A Joe Johnson Thriller, Book 1) Page 5