Boys from Brazil

by Ira Levin

  What a dream. Where had he pulled that from? Frieda yet! And Hannah and Dena sliding into that canyon!

  He lay still for a minute, blinking away the terrible sight, and then he got up—pale light scalloped the window shades’ bottoms—and went into the bathroom.

  He hadn’t been up once during the night; a really good sleep. Except for that dream.

  He went back into the bedroom, brought his watch over to one of the windows, squinted at it. Twenty to seven.

  He got back into the warm bed, pulled the blankets up around him, and lay and thought, morning fresh.

  Six identical boys—no, six very similar boys, maybe identical—lived in six different places, with six different mothers all the same age, and six different dead-by-violence fathers, all the same age, similar occupations. It wasn’t impossible; it was real, a fact. So it had to be dealt with, unraveled, understood.

  Lying still and at ease, he let his mind float free. Boys. Mothers. Hannah’s breasts. Milk.

  The perfect name for a baby…

  Dear God, of course. It had to be.

  He let it all come together…

  Part of it, anyway.

  It explained the grapefruit juice, and the way she’d rushed him out. The way she’d rushed the boy out too. Quick thinking, pretending his bare feet and no bathrobe were what worried her.

  He lay there, hoping the rest of it would come. The main part, the Mengele part. But it didn’t.

  Still, one step at a time…

  He got up and showered and shaved, trimmed his mustache, combed his hair; took his pills, brushed his teeth, put in his bridge. Dressed and packed.

  At twenty after seven he went into the kitchen. The maid Frances was there, and Bert Labowitz in shirt-sleeves, eating and reading. After the good-mornings he sat down across the table from Labowitz and said, “I have to go to Boston earlier than I thought. Can I go with you?”

  “Sure,” Labowitz said. “I leave at five of.”

  “That’s perfect. I have to make one phone call. Just to Lenox.”

  “I’ll bet someone warned you about Dolly, the way she drives.”

  “No, something came up.”

  “You’ll enjoy the ride more with me.”

  At a quarter of eight, in the library, he called Mrs. Curry.

  “Hello?”

  “Good morning, it’s Yakov Liebermann again. I hope I didn’t wake you.”

  Silence. “I was up.”

  “How is your son this morning?”

  “I don’t know, he’s still sleeping.”

  “That’s good. That’s the best thing, a lot of sleep. He doesn’t know he’s adopted, does he. That’s why you got nervous when I told him he has a twin.”

  Silence.

  “Don’t get nervous now, Mrs. Curry. I won’t tell him. As long as you want it a secret, I won’t say a word. Just tell me one thing, please. It’s very important. Did you get him from a woman named Frieda Maloney?”

  Silence.

  “You did, ja?”

  “No! Just a minute.” The thump of the phone being put down, footsteps going away. Silence. Footsteps coming back. Softly: “Hello?”

  “Yes?”

  “We got him through an agency. In New York. It was a perfectly legal adoption.”

  “The Rush-Gaddis Agency?”

  “Yes!”

  “She worked there from 1960 to 1963. Frieda Maloney.”

  “I never heard the name before! Why are you butting in this way? What difference does it make if he does have a twin?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Then don’t bother me again! And don’t come near Jack!” The phone clicked. Silence.

  Bert Labowitz drove him to Logan Airport and he caught the nine-o’clock shuttle to New York.

  At ten-forty he was in the office of the assistant executive director of the Rush-Gaddis Adoption Agency, a lean and handsome gray-haired woman, Mrs. Teague. “None at all,” she told him.

  “None?”

  “None. She wasn’t a caseworker; she wasn’t qualified for that. She was a file clerk. Of course, her lawyer, when she was fighting extradition, wanted to present her in the most favorable light, so he implied that she played a more important role here than she actually did; but she was simply a file clerk. We notified the government lawyers—we were very anxious, naturally, to have our association with her put in its true perspective—and our head of personnel was subpoenaed as a witness. She was never called on to testify, though. We considered issuing some sort of statement or press release afterwards, but we decided that at that point it was better simply to let the matter fade away.”

  “So she didn’t find homes for babies.” Liebermann pulled at his ear.

  “Not a one,” Mrs. Teague said. She smiled at him. “And you have the shoe on the wrong foot: it’s a question of finding babies for homes; the demand far exceeds the supply. Especially since the change in the abortion laws. We’re able to help only a small fraction of the people who apply to us.”

  “Then too? In 1960 to ’63?”

  “Then and always, but it’s at its worst right now.”

  “A lot of applications?”

  “Over thirty thousand last year. From every part of the country. Of the continent, in fact.”

  “Let me ask you this,” Liebermann said. “A couple comes to you, or writes to you, in that period, 1961, ’62. Good people, fairly well-off. He’s a civil servant, steady job. She’s—now let me think a second—she…is about twenty-eight or twenty-nine, and he’s fifty-two. What chance is there for them to get a baby from you?”

  “None whatsoever,” Mrs. Teague said. “We don’t place where the husband’s that old. Forty-five is our cut-off, and we’ll only go that high if there are special factors involved. We place mostly with couples in their early thirties—old enough to be stable in their marriage and young enough to assure the child of continuing parental presence. Or the likelihood of it, I should say.”

  “So where would a couple like that get a baby?”

  “Not from Rush-Gaddis. There are agencies a bit more flexible. And of course there’s the gray market. Their lawyer or doctor might know of a pregnant teen-ager who doesn’t want to abort. Or who can be paid not to.”

  “But if they came to you, you turned them down.”

  “Yes. We’ve never placed with anyone over forty-five. There are thousands of more suitable couples, waiting and praying.”

  “And the applications that were turned down,” Liebermann said, “they were filed maybe by Frieda Maloney?”

  “By her or one of the other clerks,” Mrs. Teague said. “We keep all applications and correspondence for three years. It was five then, but now we’ve cut it down; we’re short of space.”

  “Thank you.” Liebermann stood up with his briefcase. “You helped me very much. I’m grateful to you.”

  At a telephone mini-booth across the street from the Guggenheim Museum, with his suitcase and briefcase on the sidewalk beside him, he called Mr. Goldwasser at the lecture bureau.

  “I have some very bad news. I have to go to Germany.”

  “When?”

  “Now.”

  “You can’t! You’re at Boston University tonight! Where are you?”

  “In New York. And tonight I have to be on a plane.”

  “You can’t be! You accepted the booking! They’ve sold the tickets! And tomorrow—”

  “I know, I know! You think I enjoy canceling out like this? You think I don’t know it’s a headache for you, and for them, and you could even sue me? It’s—”

  “Nobody’s talking about—”

  “It’s life or death, Mr. Goldwasser. Life or death. Maybe even more.”

  “God damn it. When will you be back?”

  “I don’t know. I may have to stay there awhile. And then go someplace else.”

  “You mean you’re canceling the whole rest of the tour?”

  “Believe me, if I didn’t have to—”

&nbs
p; “This has only happened to me once in eighteen years, and then it was a singer, not a responsible person like you! Look, Yakov, I admire you and I wish you well; I’m speaking not just as your representative now but as a fellow human, a fellow Jew. I ask you to think very carefully: if you cancel a whole tour this way, on a moment’s notice—how can we possibly go on representing you? No one will represent you. No group will contract for you. You’re finishing yourself as a speaker in the United States of America. I beg you, please think.”

  “I thought while you was talking,” he said. “I have to go. I wish I didn’t.”

  He took a taxi out to Kennedy Airport and exchanged his return ticket to Vienna for one to Düsseldorf via Frankfurt: the earliest flight out, leaving at six o’clock.

  He bought a copy of Farago’s book on Bormann and spent the afternoon sitting by a window reading.

  5

  AN INDICTMENT CHARGING

  Frieda Altschul Maloney and eight other persons with mass murder at the Ravensbrück concentration camp was expected to be handed down at any moment; so when, on Friday, January 17th, Yakov Liebermann presented himself at the offices of Frau Maloney’s attorneys, Zweibel & Fassler of Düsseldorf, he wasn’t accorded a warm or even room-temperature welcome. But Joachim Fassler was lawyer enough to know that Liebermann hadn’t come there to gloat or kill time; there was something he wanted, and therefore something he would offer or could be asked for in exchange. So, after switching on his recorder, Fassler received Liebermann in his office.

  He was right. The Jew wanted to meet with Frieda and question her about certain matters in no way related to her wartime activities and having no bearing whatsoever on the approaching trial—American matters involving the period from 1960 to 1963. What American matters? Adoptions that she or someone else had arranged on the basis of information she had got from the files of the Rush-Gaddis Agency.

  “I know of no such adoptions,” Fassler said.

  Liebermann said, “Frau Maloney does.”

  If she saw him and answered his questions fully and candidly, he would tell Fassler about some of the testimony that was going to be presented against her by witnesses he had located.

  “Which ones?”

  “Not their names, only some of their testimony.”

  “Come now, Herr Liebermann, you know I’m not going to buy that kind of pig in a poke.”

  “The price is cheap enough, isn’t it? An hour or so of her time? She can’t be very busy, sitting in her cell.”

  “She may not want to talk about these alleged adoptions.”

  “Why not ask her? There are three witnesses whose testimony I know about. You can either hear it cold in the courtroom or have a preview tomorrow.”

  “I’m truly and honestly not that concerned.”

  “Then I guess we can’t do business.”

  It took four days to work it all out. Frau Maloney would speak to Liebermann for half an hour about the matters that interested him, provided that A) Fassler was present; B) no fourth party was present; C) nothing was written down; and D) Liebermann permitted Fassler to search him for a recording device immediately prior to the interview. In return Liebermann would tell Fassler all he knew about the probable testimony of the three witnesses and give each one’s age, sex, occupation, and present mental and physical condition, with particular regard to any scars, deformities, or disabilities resulting from experiences at Ravensbrück. The testimony and description of one witness would be supplied prior to the interview; those of the other two subsequent to it. Agreed and agreed.

  On Wednesday morning, the 22nd, Liebermann and Fassler drove together in Fassler’s silver-gray sports car to the federal prison in Düsseldorf where Frieda Maloney had been confined since her extradition from the United States in 1973. Fassler, a stout and well-groomed man in his mid-fifties, was almost as pink-cheeked as usual but—when they identified themselves and signed in—hadn’t yet regained his customary swaggering assurance. Liebermann had told him about the most damaging witness first, hoping that the fear of worse to come would make him, and through him Frieda Maloney, anxious not to give short weight in the interview.

  A guard took them up in an elevator and led them along a carpeted corridor where a few guards and matrons sat silently on benches between walnut doors marked with chrome letters. The guard opened a door marked G and showed Fassler and Liebermann into a square beige-walled room with a round conference table and several chairs. Two mesh-curtained windows gave daylight through adjacent walls, one window barred and the other not, which struck Liebermann as odd.

  The guard switched on an overhead light, making scarcely a difference in the already light room. He withdrew, closing the door.

  They put their hats and briefcases on the shelf of a corner coatrack, and took their coats off and hung them on hangers. Liebermann stood with his arms outstretched and Fassler searched him, looking pugnacious and determined. He felt the pockets of Liebermann’s hanging coat and asked him to open his briefcase. Liebermann sighed but unstrapped it and opened it; showed papers and the Farago book, closed and restrapped it.

  He satisfied himself about the windows—the unbarred one gave on a high-walled yard far below; the barred one had black rooftop close beneath—and then he sat down at the table with his back toward the unbarred window; but immediately got up again so he wouldn’t have to rise or not rise when Frieda Maloney came in.

  Fassler opened the barred window a bit and stood looking out through it, holding aside the beige mesh curtain.

  Liebermann folded his arms and looked at a carafe and paper-wrapped glasses on a tray on the table.

  He had reported Frieda Altschul’s record and whereabouts to the German and American authorities in 1967. The record had been in the Center’s files, distilled from conversations and correspondence with dozens of Ravensbrück survivors (the three soon-to-be witnesses among them); the whereabouts had been given him by two more survivors, sisters, who had spotted their former guard at a New York racetrack and followed her to her home. He himself had never met the woman. He didn’t look forward to sitting at the same table with her. Aside from everything else, his middle sister Ida had died at Ravensbrück; it was entirely possible that Frieda Altschul Maloney had had a hand in her death.

  He put Ida from his mind; put everything from it except the Rush-Gaddis Agency, and six or more boys who looked alike. A former file clerk at Rush-Gaddis is coming in, he told himself. We’ll sit at this table and talk awhile, and maybe I’ll find out what the hell is going on.

  Fassler turned from the window, pushed his cuff back, frowned at his watch.

  The door opened and Frieda Maloney came in, in a light-blue uniform dress, her hands in her pockets. A matron smiled over her shoulder and said, “Good morning, Herr Fassler.”

  “Good morning,” Fassler said, going forward. “How are you?”

  “Fine, thanks,” the matron said. She gave her smile to Liebermann, and covered it with closing door.

  Fassler held Frieda Maloney’s shoulder, kissed her cheek, and backed her into the corner, speaking softly. She was gone behind his bigness.

  Liebermann cleared his throat and sat down, drew the chair in to the table.

  He had seen what photographs had shown: an ordinary-looking middle-aged woman. On the small side, graying hair combed up at the sides, curls on top. Gray-white unhealthy skin, a wide jaw, a disappointed mouth. Eyes that were tired but resolute, a lighter blue than the prison dress. She might have been an overworked chambermaid or waitress. Some day, he thought, I would like to meet a monster who looks like a monster.

  He held the table’s thick wood edge and tried to hear what Fassler was saying.

  They were coming to the table.

  He looked at Frieda Maloney, and she—as Fassler drew back the chair opposite—looked at him, the blue eyes measuring, the thin-lipped mouth down-drawn. She nodded, sitting.

  He nodded back.

  She flicked a thanking smile toward Fassler, and wit
h her elbows on the chair arms, tapped with the flats of her fingers at the table edge, one hand’s fingers and then the other’s, fairly quickly; then stopped and let them rest there, looking at them.

  Liebermann looked at them too.

  “It’s now exactly”—Fassler, seated at Liebermann’s right, studied the watch on his raised wrist—“twenty-five of twelve.” He looked at Liebermann.

  Liebermann looked at Frieda Maloney.

  She looked at him. Her thin eyebrows arched.

  He found he couldn’t speak. No breath was in him; only hatred. His heart pounded.

  Frieda Maloney sucked at her lower lip, glanced toward Fassler, looked at Liebermann again; said, “I don’t mind talking about the baby business. I made a lot of people very happy. It’s nothing I’m ashamed of.” She had a soft South German accent; easier to listen to than Fassler’s Düsseldorf rasping. “And as far as the Comrades Organization is concerned,” she said contemptuously, “they’re no comrades of mine any more. If they were, I wouldn’t be here, would I? I’d be down in Sowze Amayrica”—her eyes widened—“living zee good life.” She put a hand above her head and snapped her fingers, swaying her torso in mock-Latin rhythm.

  “The best thing, I think,” Fassler said to her, “would be for you to tell everything as you told it to me.” He looked at Liebermann. “And then you can ask whatever questions you want. As time allows. You agree?”

  Breath came back. “Yes,” Liebermann said. “Provided time does allow for questions.”

  “You aren’t really going to count minutes, are you?” Frieda Maloney asked Fassler.

  “I certainly am,” he said. “An agreement is an agreement.” And to Liebermann, “There’ll be enough time, don’t worry.” He looked at Frieda Maloney and nodded.

  She folded her hands on the table, looked at Liebermann. “A man from the Organization got in touch with me,” she said. “In 1960, in the spring. An uncle of mine in Argentina told them about me. He’s dead now. They wanted me to get a job with an adoption agency. Alois—the man, that is—had a list of three or four of them. Any one would be all right as long as it was a job where I could look at the files. ‘Alois’ was the only name he ever gave me, no last name. Over seventy, white-haired; an old-soldier-type with very straight posture.” Her eyes questioned Liebermann.