Boys from Brazil

by Ira Levin

  And was. And why not? It was the 31st, wasn’t it? Tomorrow he would paint four more checks on the chart and be more than halfway down the first column—eighteen. He was going to every dance and party available these days; a reaction, of course, to the anguish and depression he had gone through back in November and early December, when it had looked for a while as if Jew-bastard Liebermann was going to spoil everything. Sipping champagne in this festive ballroom full of admiring Aryans, some of the men in Nazi uniforms (squint a little: Berlin in the thirties), he was amazed to remember the state he’d been in scarcely two months back. Absolutely Dostoevskian! Plotting, planning, making arrangements to leap into the breach if the Organization betrayed him (which they had been on the verge of doing, there was no doubt of that). But then Liebermann had led Mundt off on a tour of France, and Schwimmer through the wrong cities in England; and finally, thank God, had given up and stayed home, assuming, no doubt, that his young American stooge had been mistaken. (Thank God, too, that they had got to him before he had actually played the tape for Liebermann.) So we sip champagne and eat these delicious little whatever-they-ares (“A pleasure to be here! Thank you!”) while poor Liebermann, according to The New York Times, is off in the wilds of America on what, reading between the lines of Jew-controlled puffery, is surely a very small-potatoes lecture tour. And it’s winter there! Snow, please, God; plenty of snow!

  He sat on the dais with Stroop at his left; was toasted by him most eloquently—the man wasn’t as much of an idiot as he’d expected—and turned his attention to the ravishing blonde on his right. Last year’s Miss Nazi she turned out to be, and small wonder. Though wedding-ringed now and—no fooling his eye—pregnant, four months. Husband in Rio on business; thrilled to be sitting next to such a distinguished…Maybe? He could always stay over; fly back bright and early.

  While he was dancing with pregnant Miss Nazi, working his hand down gradually onto her really marvelous ass, Farnbach danced close and said, “Good evening! How are you? We heard you were here and came gate-crashing. May I present my wife Ilse? Sweetheart, Herr Doktor Mengele.”

  He kept dancing in place and smiling, thinking he had had too much to drink, but Farnbach didn’t disappear or turn into someone else; he stayed Farnbach—became more Farnbach, in fact; shaven-headed, thick-lipped, introducing himself hungry-eyed to Miss Nazi while the ugly little woman in his arms yammered about “honor” and “pleasure” and “though you took Bruno away from me!”

  He stopped dancing, freed his arms.

  Farnbach explained cheerfully to him: “We’re at the Excelsior. A little second honeymoon.”

  He stared at him, and said, “You’re supposed to be in Kristianstad. Getting ready to kill Oscarsson.”

  Gasp from the ugly woman. Farnbach went white, stared back at him.

  “Traitor!” he screamed. “Pig of a—” Words couldn’t do it; he flung himself at Farnbach and grabbed his thick neck; pushed him backward through dancers, strangling him, while Farnbach’s hands pulled at his arms. Red-faced the no-word-for-him now, blue eyes bulging. Scream of a woman; people turning: “Oh my God!” A table stopped Farnbach, lifted its far side; people retreated. He pushed Farnbach down, strangling him; the table shot up, pouring dishes-glasses-cutlery as they fell before it, spilling soup and wine on Farnbach’s shaven head, washing his purpling face.

  Hands pulled at Mengele; women screamed; the music splintered and died. Rudi tore at Mengele’s wrists, looking pleadingly at him.

  He let go, allowed himself to be pulled up and away, set on his feet. “This man is a traitor!” he shouted at them all. “He betrayed me, he betrayed you! He betrayed the race! He betrayed the Aryan race!”

  A scream from the ugly woman kneeling at Farnbach’s side as, red-faced and wet, he rubbed his throat, gasping. “There’s glass in his head!” she cried. “Oh my God! Get a doctor! Oh Bruno, Bruno!”

  “This man should be killed,” Mengele explained breathily to the men around him. “He betrayed the Aryan race. He was given a job to do, a soldier’s duty. He chose not to do it.”

  The men looked confused and concerned. Rudi rubbed Mengele’s blotched wrists.

  Farnbach coughed, trying to say something. He pushed his wife’s napkin-hand from his face and raised himself on one arm, looking up toward Mengele. He coughed and rubbed at his throat. His wife clutched his wet-darkened shoulders. “Don’t move!” she told him. “Oh God! Where’s a doctor?”

  “They!” Farnbach barked. “Called! Me back!” A drop of blood slid down in front of his right ear and became a small ruby earring, hanging, growing.

  Mengele pushed men away, looked down.

  “Monday!” Farnbach told him. “I was in Kristianstad! Setting things up for”—he looked at the others, looked at Mengele—“for what I had to do!” His blood-earring dropped; another began growing in its place. “They called me in Stockholm and told”—he glanced toward his wife, looked at Mengele—“someone I knew there that I should come back. To my company’s office. At once.”

  “You’re lying,” Mengele said.

  “No!” Farnbach cried; his blood-earring dropped. “Everyone’s back! One was at—the office when I got there! Two had already been! The other two were coming!”

  Mengele stared at him, swallowed. “Why?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” Farnbach told him scornfully. “I don’t ask questions any more. I do as I’m told.”

  “Where’s a doctor?” his wife screamed; “He’s on his way!” someone called from the door.

  Mengele said, “I…am a doctor.”

  “Don’t you come near him!”

  He looked at Farnbach’s wife. “Shut up,” he said. He looked around. “Does anyone have a pair of tweezers?”

  In the banquet manager’s office he picked slivers of glass out of the back of Farnbach’s head with tweezers and a magnifying glass, while Rudi held a lamp close beside. “Just a few more,” he said, dropping the largest sliver into an ashtray.

  Farnbach, sitting bent over, said nothing.

  Mengele dabbed the cuts with disinfectant and taped a gauze square over them. “I’m very sorry,” he said.

  Farnbach stood up, straightened his damp jacket. “And when,” he asked, “do we find out why we were sent?”

  Mengele looked at him for a moment and said, “I thought you stopped asking questions.”

  Farnbach turned on his heel and went out.

  Mengele gave the tweezers to Rudi and sent him out too. “Find Tin-tin,” he said. “We’ll be leaving soon. Send him ahead to warn Erico. And close the door.”

  He put things back in the first-aid kit, sat down at the slovenly desk, took his glasses off, palmed his forehead dry. He got out his cigarette case; lit a cigarette and drew on it, dropped the match on the slivers of glass. He put his glasses back on and got out his address book.

  He called Seibert’s private number. A Brazilian maid with the giggles told him that the senhor and senhora were out, she didn’t know where.

  He tried headquarters, expecting no answer; got none.

  Ostreicher’s son Siegfried gave him another number, where Ostreicher himself answered the phone.

  “This is Mengele. I’m in Florianópolis. I just saw Farnbach.”

  Silence, and then: “Damn it. The colonel was going to tell you in the morning; he’s been putting it off. He’s very unhappy about it. He fought like hell.”

  “I can imagine,” Mengele said. “What happened?”

  “It’s that son of a bitch Liebermann. He saw Frieda Maloney sometime last week.”

  “He’s in America!” Mengele cried.

  “Not unless they moved it to Düsseldorf. She must have told him the whole story of her end of things. Her lawyer asked some of our friends there how come we were black-marketing babies in the 1960’s. He convinced them it was true, and they asked us. Rudel flew in last Sunday, there was a three-hour meeting—Seibert very much wanted you to be there; Rudel and some of the others didn’t—a
nd that was it. The men came in on Tuesday and Wednesday.”

  Mengele pushed his glasses up and groaned, holding his eyes. “Why couldn’t they simply have killed Liebermann?” he asked. “Are they lunatics, or Jews themselves, or what? Mundt would have leaped at the chance. He wanted to do it on his own, at the very beginning. He, alone, is smarter than all your colonels put together.”

  “Would you like to hear their reasoning?”

  “Go ahead. If I vomit while you’re speaking, please excuse me.”

  “Seventeen of the men are dead. This means, according to your figures, that we can be sure of one or even two successes. And maybe one or two more among the others, since some of the men will die naturally at sixty-five. Liebermann still doesn’t know everything, because Maloney doesn’t. But she may have remembered names, and if she did, his next logical step is to try to trap Hessen.”

  “Then just bring him in! Why all six?”

  “That’s what Seibert said.”

  “And?”

  “This is where you’ll vomit. The whole thing has become too risky. That’s Rudel. It’s going to end up putting the Organization in the limelight, and so would Liebermann’s murder. Better to settle for the one or two successes or even more—which are enough, aren’t they?—and close everything down. Let Liebermann spend the rest of his life Hessen-hunting.”

  “But he won’t. He’ll catch on eventually and concentrate on the boys.”

  “Maybe and maybe not.”

  “The truth is,” Mengele said, taking his glasses off, “they’re a bunch of tired old men who’ve lost their balls. They want only to die of old age in their villas by the sea. If their grandchildren become the last Aryans in a world of human shit, they couldn’t care less. I would line them up in front of a firing squad.”

  “Come on now, they helped bring us this far.”

  “What if my figures were wrong? What if the chance isn’t one out of ten but one out of twenty? Or thirty? Or ninety-four? Where are we then?”

  “Look, if it were up to me I would kill Liebermann regardless of the consequences and go on with the others. I’m on your side. Seibert is too. I know you don’t believe it, but he put up one hell of a battle. It would have been settled in five minutes if not for him.”

  “That’s very comforting,” Mengele said. “I have to go now. Good night.” He hung up.

  He sat with his elbows on the desk, his chin on the thumbs of his finger-locked hands, his lips kissing his inmost knuckle. So it always is, he thought, when one depends on others. Was there ever a man of vision, of genius (yes, genius, damn it!), who was well served by the Rudels and Seiberts of this world?

  Outside the closed door of the office, Rudi waited, and Hans Stroop and his lieutenants; and the banquet manager and general manager of the hotel; and, at a discreet distance, Miss Nazi, not listening to the young man in uniform talking to her.

  When Mengele came out, Stroop went to him with open arms and an ingratiating smile. “That poor fellow’s gone off into the night,” he said. “Come, we’re holding the main course for you.”

  “You shouldn’t have,” Mengele said. “I have to go.” He took Rudi by the arm and hurried toward the exit.

  Klaus called and said he knew everything: how ninety-four boys could be as alike as twins and why Mengele would want their adoptive fathers killed on specific dates.

  Liebermann, who had been up the night before with rheumatic aches and diarrhea, was spending the day in bed, and the first thing that struck him was the nice symmetry of it: a question put to him by one young man, by telephone while he was in bed, would be answered for him by another young man, by telephone while he was in bed. He was certain Klaus would be right. “Go ahead,” he said, gathering the pillows up behind him.

  “Herr Liebermann”—Klaus sounded uncomfortable—“it’s not the sort of thing I can rattle off over the phone; it’s complicated, and I really don’t understand it thoroughly myself. I’ve only had it at second hand, from Lena, this girl I live with. It was her idea, and she spoke about it to a professor of hers. He’s the one who really knows. Could you come up here and I’ll arrange a meeting? I promise you it has to be the explanation.”

  “I’m leaving for Washington on Tuesday morning.”

  “Then fly up tomorrow. Or better yet, come Monday, stay over, and go on from here Tuesday. You must be going through Frankfurt anyway, yes? I’ll pick you up at the airport there and bring you back again. We can meet with the professor Monday night. You’ll stay here with Lena and me; you get the bed, we get the sleeping bags.”

  Liebermann said, “Give me at least the gist of it now.”

  “No. Really, it has to be explained by someone who knows what he’s talking about. Is this why you’re going to Washington?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then you certainly want as much information as possible, don’t you? I promise you, you won’t be wasting your time.”

  “All right, I trust you. I’ll let you know what time I’ll be getting in. You’d better check with this professor and make sure he’s free.”

  “I will, but I’m sure he will be. Lena says he’s anxious to meet you and help. So is she. She’s Swedish, so she has a vested interest. Because of the one in Göteborg.”

  “What does he teach, her professor—political science?”

  “Biology.”

  “Biology?”

  “That’s right. I have to go out now, but we’ll be in all day tomorrow.”

  “I’ll call. Thank you, Klaus. Good-by.”

  He hung up.

  So much for nice symmetry.

  A professor of biology?

  Seibert was relieved not to have had to be the one to break the news to Mengele, but he also felt he had got off the hook perhaps too easily; his long association with Mengele, and his admiration of his truly remarkable talent, suggested that he offer some sort of expression of commiseration and good cheer, and in fairness to himself he also wanted to present a fuller description than Ostreicher claimed to have given of the heated battle he had fought against Rudel, Schwartzkopf, et al. He tried to raise Mengele on the radio during the weekend, and unable to do so, flew out to the compound early Monday afternoon, taking his six-year-old grandson Ferdi along for the flight and bringing with him new recordings of Die Walküre and Götterdämmerung.

  The landing strip was empty. Seibert doubted that Mengele had stayed on in Florianópolis, but it was possible that he was in Asunción or Curitiba for the day. Or he might only have sent his pilot into Asunción for supplies.

  They walked along the pathway toward the house, Seibert and prancing Ferdi, with the co-pilot, who wanted to use the bathroom, walking behind them.

  No one was about—no guards, no servants. The barracks, whose door the co-pilot tried, was locked, and the servants’ house was closed and shuttered. Seibert grew uneasy.

  The main house’s back door was locked, and its front door too. Seibert pounded and waited. A small toy tank lay on the floorboards; Ferdi bent to it, but Seibert said sharply, “Don’t touch!”—as if infection might lurk.

  The co-pilot kicked in one of the windows, elbowed away the remaining peaks of glass, and carefully put himself through. A moment later he unlocked and opened the door.

  The house was deserted but in good order, with no signs of a hasty departure.

  In the study, the glass-topped desk was as Seibert had seen it last, the painting things lined up on a towel at a corner. He turned to the chart.

  It was raped with red. Slashes like blood tore down through the boxes in the third and second columns. The first column’s boxes held neat red checks halfway down, then larger and wilder checks, stabbing beyond the boxes.

  Ferdi, looking worried, said, “He went outside the lines.”

  Seibert gazed at the ravaged chart. “Yes,” he said. “Outside the lines. Yes.” He nodded.

  “What is it?” Ferdi asked.

  “A list of names.” Seibert turned and put the package of rec
ords on the desk. A bracelet of animal claws lay at its center. “Hecht!” he called; and louder, “Hecht!”

  The co-pilot’s answering “sir?” came faintly.

  “Finish what you’re doing and go back to the plane!” Seibert picked up the bracelet. “Bring me a can of gas!”

  “Yes, sir!”

  “Bring Schumann back with you!”

  “Yes, sir!”

  Seibert examined the bracelet and tossed it back onto the desk. He sighed.

  “What are you going to do?” Ferdi asked him.

  He nodded toward the chart. “Burn that.”

  “Why?”

  “So no one ever sees it.”

  “Will the house catch on fire?”

  “Yes, but the man who owns it isn’t coming back.”

  “How do you know? He’ll be angry if he does.”

  “Go play with that little toy outside.”

  “I want to watch.”

  “Do as I say!”

  “Yes, sir.” Ferdi hurried from the room.

  “Stay on the porch!” Seibert called after him.

  He pushed the long table with its stacks of magazines close against the wall. Then he went to the file drawers under the laboratory window, crouched and opened one, and took out a thick handful of folders and another thick handful. He brought them to the table and fitted them between magazine stacks. He looked ruefully at the red-slashed chart, shook his head.

  He brought several loads of folders to the table, and when there was room for no more, opened the remaining drawers. He unlocked and opened the windows behind the desk.

  He stood looking at the Hitler memorabilia above the sofa, took three or four items from the wall, looked speculatively at the large central portrait.

  The co-pilot came in with a red fuel can; the pilot stood in the doorway.

  Seibert put the things he had taken on the package of records. “Take out the portrait,” he told the co-pilot. He sent the pilot off to make sure no one was in the house and to open all the windows.