He paused, visibly breathing in and out a few times, his chest rising and falling. “But I’d met an American woman. She was something else, she really was. We just fell in love almost straightaway. She wanted to move back to Los Angeles, so I went with her, and we got married. She died long ago, but that’s another story. Over there, I set up my own jewelry business, and it went really well. I was acting as a gold trader, supplying other makers with metal that I bought either off the market or as scrap, which I then melted down and reformed into bars.”
Daniel sipped his whiskey, then continued. “Then one day, in ’54 I think it must have been, I was at a three-day gold industry conference in Los Angeles. There were hundreds of people there from North and South America. It was basically to bring buyers and sellers together, to talk shop, have a few drinks, you know. On the first evening, I saw this guy who was with an Argentine contingent. I sort of recognized him but couldn’t place who it was, and I didn’t get the chance to go and speak to him. A thin-faced man with slicked-back hair. I asked someone for his name and was told it was José Guzmann, from Buenos Aires. I spent the whole evening trying to work out where I’d seen him before.”
Daniel continued, “It was on the second day that the penny dropped. There were two things. The first was when he smiled. I’ll never forget that smile: lips tight together, dead eyes. His hairstyle was different, and he’d grown a moustache. And though the name was obviously different, I realized who he was. The second was when I saw him walk. He had a limp. He must have had an injured right leg, and I remembered that limp, too.”
Daniel gazed steadily at Johnson. “His real name wasn’t José Guzmann at all. It was actually a man called Erich Brenner—the former commander at Wüstegiersdorf.”
“What?” Johnson said.
He knew from his Van Stalheim inquiries that Guzmann had a Nazi connection. But this?
Daniel’s revelation left Johnson feeling electrified, although he now fought hard not to transmit that to the Kudrows. He wanted to keep the atmosphere as calm as he could so they would remain in the frame of mind that had led them to make these disclosures.
Johnson consciously leveled his voice. “Brenner? So Guzmann is Brenner?”
That would also account for why Ben Valetta could find no trace of a Guzmann in the SS personal files.
“Yes. The smile and the limp,” Daniel said. “I knew then. Brenner had limped around in the camp. We all assumed he’d been hurt fighting somewhere. There was one hundred percent no mistake.”
Johnson tugged at his chin.
“So what's the significance to you, then?” Daniel asked.
Erich Brenner, the man who tortured my mother, the man who’s been on my wanted list for so long. How many dozens of dead ends and false trails have I explored over the years in search of that man?
Daniel looked at him and paused. “You look surprised. You know of this man?”
Johnson nodded. “Brenner was the SS officer, the bastard who ox-whipped my mother and left her out in the sun all day at Wüstegiersdorf. But you must know that.”
Daniel silently opened his mouth and tilted his head back a little as he made the connection. “Ah yes, it was him who did it. Of course.”
“He was brutal. He killed many prisoners, according to her account,” Johnson said. “She very occasionally spoke about him and wrote about him in her memoir. I’ve spent years wondering where he is, dreaming of bringing him to trial. I’ve searched for him across four continents. Are you sure it’s the same man?”
Jacob gave a short, ironic laugh. “We’re absolutely sure. We’ve been playing him for the past fifty years, screwed him good and proper, and there’s been nothing he’s been able to do about it. He’s the animal who supervised the tunneling work we did at Wüstegiersdorf and the stashing of the gold in the tunnel. He’s also the murdering rat who shot the other Jewish prisoners we left behind on the train when we escaped. All nineteen of them.”
“And you’re certain he’s still alive, still in Buenos Aires?” Johnson asked.
“Yes, absolutely, definitely. He must be older than us, though not by much. So he’s probably in his early nineties.”
Johnson was still struggling to regain his composure. “I screwed up with him. I was within reach of him back in ’96. So why didn’t you expose him and turn him in? He’s been a wanted war criminal for decades.”
Daniel grinned. “We’ve been punishing him for decades. In our own way. Financial punishment. We’ve been selling him the same gold he forced us to stash in those tunnels. Jacob here has been taking it out of the tunnel, and we’ve been dispatching it, bit by bit. I think he may have worked out who we are, but he can’t do anything—he’s a captive buyer. It’s been like he’s been working all this time for nothing—just like we had to do back then. The difference is he’s properly fed and has a bed to sleep in at night. We charge him exactly the same prices he can sell it for, and there’s been nothing he can do about it.”
Daniel shifted in his chair. “He makes zero profit, at least on the gold we sell him. He’s no doubt got other sources of gold, so he makes something on those. But he’s had to keep on buying, indefinitely.”
Jacob said, “We think of it as a kind of redemption—a reverse redemption.”
A reverse redemption. That’s a new one, Johnson thought.
“Right, I see. But how do you force him to do that?”
Jacob picked up the story. “Simple. We set up a couple of blind companies so he couldn’t see who was behind them, then got an intermediary to approach his jewelry business as a supplier of gold and arrange a contract. We channeled the gold and the payments through Guatemala, then supplied him for a year or two quite normally. He didn’t know who we were. We kept it all at arm’s length. He probably wouldn’t have recognized us or known us, even if we hadn’t done that. We’d just be another pair of scumbag Jew boys to him.”
He sipped his whiskey. “Then, we submitted our trading terms. Either he continued to buy from us at a certain price, or we would expose him, turn him over to—let’s say the Israeli authorities. We also set up a scheme so if anything happened to either of us, the Israelis would get all the details. He’s not had a choice, not unless he wanted to do another disappearing act and change his identity yet again. It seems he’s not had the appetite to do that. Hardly surprisingly, given what would happen to him if he tried it.”
“Blackmail, then,” Johnson said.
Jacob and Daniel exchanged glances, then Jacob continued. “We also put certain safeguards in place so we could track him if he tried anything like that. And he knew it.”
Johnson nodded. “Clever. Very clever. So it all went smoothly until very recently. Now Oliver’s been kidnapped, one of your employees has been killed, and I guess the others are pretty terrified to say the least, not to mention yourselves?” Johnson asked. He decided not to mention the car bomb.
“It could be Guzmann’s son,” Jacob said. “If it is him, he may be trying to find out where our gold is hidden. There’s not a vast amount left there, relatively speaking, but enough to give him a very nice early retirement.”
I bet there is, Johnson thought. “So how much gold have you removed altogether? And what I don’t understand is how you managed to ship it to Buenos Aires. And then how was Brenner able to finance such large purchases? And what have you done with all the money?”
The two old twins exchanged looks again.
“The amount,” said Jacob finally, “is something we would never tell. It’s enough. The method? Well, that’s an interesting one. I’ve always been a car enthusiast. My friend Leopold, who was also in Gross-Rosen but a different subcamp, runs the business next door, Classic Car Parts, which already had an Argentine link.
“There was a British car company, BMC, which had started in the late ’50s to sell its Austins in Argentina. I think they badged it as something else, the Siam di Tella or something like that. Spare parts were needed for local taxi drivers. So Leopold started
to make parts and export there. A nice business, good margins. But from there, it was a simple matter to mold the gold into BMC car part shapes, which we painted to look like the real thing. It was almost impossible to tell the difference. Nobody was going to think to check every one. Once they arrived in Buenos Aires, we had them melted down and reformed into ingots and gold bars that we then sold to Brenner.”
There was silence in the room for a few moments. Johnson sat back, the sheer magnitude and the audacity of the whole thing starting to sink in. He repeated the number yet again, silently to himself.
Two hundred thirty million dollars.
“You didn’t answer my question about how Brenner financed these huge purchases and what you’ve done with all the money that’s come in from the sales to him,” Johnson said.
The two twins looked at each other yet again, as if they were communicating telepathically, Johnson thought.
“We only took payment once he’d made the sales, but again, we had what you might call a mechanism in place with the Israelis to make sure that happened. He wouldn’t have dared to step out of line. And what happens to the proceeds? Well, that is also something we can’t discuss here. All you need to know is, we’ve not been lining our own pockets with it,” Jacob said.
He spoke again, now in a firmer tone. “Mr. Johnson, we’d like to propose a deal. You want to bring Brenner to trial, no doubt. A noble objective. And I want my grandson back, quickly. We also both want to stop Brenner’s son getting to what’s left of our gold. You know a lot about us now. And Daniel and I need all that to stay a secret.”
Stay a secret? Some hope, Johnson thought.
“Of course we want Oliver back,” Johnson said, “But after that, the most important thing for me—as it should be for you—is to have Brenner extradited to Germany and prosecuted. For that to happen, I’d need you both to be prepared to identify him and testify against him. You are eyewitnesses, and possibly the only living eyewitnesses for all I know, to what he did in that camp and the minute-by-minute background to the murder of your nineteen fellow prisoners that day.”
Now Jacob clasped his hands together.
“You need to find him first. What I’m suggesting is, as you’re former CIA, an investigator, you go get Oliver back. In return, I’ll help you with Brenner. But you need to bear one thing in mind. You’ll need to tread very carefully with us. Understand? You can chase Brenner, fine. But as far as Daniel and I are concerned, just make sure you don’t do anything you’re going to regret.”
“What do you mean?” Johnson asked.
Jacob stared at him. “If you try anything, you’ll find out. There are bigger games being played out here. With high stakes.” He hesitated. “If I were you, I’d go after Brenner, not after us. He’s the mass killer, not us. You need to remember that. Got it?”
“I understand where you’re coming from,” Johnson said carefully. Bigger games. What did Jacob mean? It crossed his mind that there might be some kind of government or intelligence operation going on, in which the Kudrows might be participants.
“And there’s another thing,” Jacob said. “If you want your pistol back, you can swap it for my red notebook and papers. I have no idea how you got into my safe, but I’d like them back, straightaway.”
He’s playing poker with me, Johnson thought. He can’t know.
Chapter Thirty-Four
Wednesday, November 30, 2011
Bristol
Oliver opened his eyes a fraction. The combined effects of alcohol and chloroform, coupled with the shock of the abduction, had left the young student dazed and disoriented.
He wanted to scratch his nose but couldn’t move his hand. It was then he realized his wrists were tied with thin red climbing rope to the metal bed frame on which he lay, as were his feet.
He still had on all his clothes from the previous night, minus his black donkey jacket, which had been left behind in the nightclub’s cloakroom, and his brown leather shoes.
A piece of rag was stuffed into his mouth, and some sort of tape was wrapped around his head to hold it in place.
What the hell . . . Is this my friends? One of their pranks?
Then in the gloom, he gradually made out a dark-haired man in a black sweater and black jeans standing at the foot of the bed.
It started to come back to him. Oliver had a vague recollection of being pushed out of the fire escape doors in Raquel’s and into the back of a car, but after that, nothing.
His head felt as if it were being smothered in a fog, obliterating his senses, removing all feeling, and eradicating his thoughts. He fell back into unconsciousness.
A short time later, he woke up again and saw a different man with black hair, this time wearing a white top, next to him with a gun in his hand.
Oliver jumped. He felt more sober now and extremely thirsty.
The next thing he knew, he heard a hissing noise and an utterly agonizing pain sliced into his right big toe, searing his nerve endings and instantly making him want to throw up. An unbearable heat engulfed his foot, and his entire body tried to buck upward but was held firmly by the ropes binding him. It bucked again, then jerked down. And again.
Oliver screamed into the gag filling his mouth.
The pain diminished a little, but still drilled into the nerves at the end of his toe. Through the mist that fogged his vision, he saw the first man, with the black sweater, stand up at the end of the bed. He was holding a blowtorch with a nozzle at the top, from which a long, narrow blue flame spurted. Oliver had seen these devices at his grandfather’s workshop.
He felt the bile move up his throat.
The man with the blowtorch turned a knob, and the long blue flame went out.
Then the other man, next to the bed, spoke. “Okay, mi amigo, I want information. And quickly—then we’ll let you go. I’m going to remove that gag. If you shout or scream, it goes back in, and we’ll do something that will cause you a lot more pain. If you don’t answer my questions, there will be much pain. Just nod if you understand?”
Oliver had started out with no intention of telling this guy anything if he could help it. But he now needed the gag out so he could be sick. He tilted his head forward and back. The man removed the tape and the ball of rag.
Oliver turned his head sideways and spewed a stream of vomit over the duvet on which he lay.
“What I want is a map and some detailed directions,” the man in the white top said. “They belong to your grandfather . . . but I know you have them. The map is of part of Poland. You know what I mean.”
Oliver felt as though his head were going to explode. He just croaked, almost inaudibly. “Water, I need water.”
The man retrieved a bottle of mineral water from the wooden table under the bedroom window and tipped some into Oliver’s open mouth.
Oliver had been well known for being something of a bully at his private boys’ school, Harrow. Indeed, some of his young victims would doubtless very much have enjoyed seeing his plight right now.
But like most bullies, he wasn’t cut out to be a hero.
The large and extremely painful red burn, which now enveloped much of his right big toe and part of the one next to it, had persuaded him very quickly of that, as had the stream of vomit on the bedspread next to him.
The man in the white top pulled out his phone from his pocket, jabbed at the screen, and held it in front of Oliver.
“Do you see that? Do you recognize that man?” he asked.
Oliver peered at the screen, the intense pain in his foot blurring his vision. It was a photo taken with flash, slightly out of focus, of a man, his back to the camera, arms high above his head and feet stretched beneath him. He seemed to be hanging in midair.
The youngster thought he vaguely recognized the background, which was underexposed, while the figure in the foreground was bright and overexposed. Wasn’t that Leopold Skorupski’s place?
Then the man flicked to the next picture, showing the man from the front
this time, chin slumped on his chest. Right away, Oliver recognized the face of the man he knew well from Leopold’s workshop. He felt the vomit rising in his throat yet again and turned as it cascaded over the bedspread next to him.
“That will be you if you don’t cooperate,” the man said.
After that, Oliver gabbled like one of his mother’s back-garden chickens.
The documents were locked inside a Google Drive folder he and his uncle Nathaniel had set up six months earlier when Nathaniel was in London on a visit—which was the last time Oliver had seen him before his death.
Oliver gave the man the e-mail address for the account.
The problem was, he couldn’t remember the password.
Stress, pain, alcohol, and the effects of chloroform weren’t exactly helping his powers of recall. Back in the summer, he thought he had memorized it well and truly, but now it was gone.
The man sat on a chair next to the bed, pinched his nose with one hand to ward off the smell, and held a laptop with the other.
“You’d better get that little head of yours whirring a little faster, amigo, because the clock’s ticking, and when the clock ticks, the blowtorch burns. Come on, hurry. Otherwise the gag goes back in and we start on your toe again.” He grinned, the remnants of the previous night’s pizza clinging to the gums around his crooked teeth. The other man in the black sweater, who sat in the corner, laughed and waved the blowtorch in the air.
Oliver groaned. The ropes tightly holding his arms and ankles chafed painfully. “Give me a minute, I’ll remember it . . . Try Radlett with a capital R.”
The man punched it in. “Nope, not that. Next one?”
The Last Nazi (A Joe Johnson Thriller, Book 1) Page 25