The Old Boys

by Charles McCarry

  “And that bothers you?”

  “Something keeps telling me not to believe it.”

  “A voice from above?”

  “From within,” Zarah said. “I feel as I read Septimus Arcanus’s dispatch that I’m doing something forbidden just to read it. I don’t feel alone in the house.”

  She was serious. No deprecating smile.

  “My goodness,” I said, “I didn’t realize you were a Christian. Had I known, I wouldn’t have put you in such an uncomfortable position.”

  “I’m not a Christian. I wasn’t raised as a Christian. The Jawabi, the Berber tribe we lived with in Morocco, believed that they were Jews who had fled Israel in the time of King David. They regarded the God of the Old Testament as an unpredictable psychopath who would send plagues or floods or war or exile unless he was constantly appeased. They thought he was a local god they’d left behind, but they were still praying to him and sacrificing animals four thousand years later just in case he ever showed up again. Mother hired an English clergyman to teach me the Bible. He was very learned and devout, but after reading the whole text line by line, I came away with the impression that the Jawabi were right about Yahweh and that the story in the New Testament was just plain unbelievable. I’ve never been able to understand its power over so many minds.”

  “Until now.”

  “That’s right,” Zarah said. “In daylight I tell myself it’s just the effect of two thousand years of superstition. When the sun goes down I’m not so sure.”

  “Maybe it’s the history of the Christophers rather than the story in the scroll that’s bothering you.”

  “Maybe,” Zarah said. “It’s in my grandmother’s handwriting, after all, as if she were writing to me.”

  The food arrived. Zarah, usually the soul of kindness to waiters, behaved as if the grilled grouper—we had ordered the same thing—and the woman who brought it were invisible.

  She said, “You must think I’ve taken leave of my senses.”

  No Christopher I had ever known ever came this close to asking for reassurance. I was taken aback.

  I said, “Not at all. I’ve put in a lot more time as a heathen than you, and I’ve had similar thoughts about the Amphora Scroll. But frankly, I don’t know why, it makes me nervous.”

  Zarah had brought Lori’s translation with her. “I really don’t want custody of the original,” she said.

  “But it’s yours by right of inheritance,” I said.

  “If it hadn’t been for you I would never have known it existed,” Zarah said.

  “Does this mean you don’t want to do the translation?” I asked.

  “I’ve done it.”

  She handed it to me, printed out in Times New Roman on sheets of white paper.

  “You have this stored in your computer?”

  “No. It’s on a diskette.”

  “And that’s in a safe place?”

  “It’s in the safe that doesn’t exist.”

  It took me a moment to realize that she meant Paul’s table-leg safe—the one in which Stephanie refused to believe.

  “Did you make a photocopy of the original?”

  “Yes, three. One is stored with the diskette, the other is in a safe-deposit box, and the third is the one you hold in your hands. I also made a diskette for you. Everything is in this envelope.”

  She slid that across the table, too. A couple of nonagenarian members, watching all this from the next table, frowned in disapproval. It was against the rules to have papers in sight in the precincts of the club. Besides, the whole idea of a men’s club was that it was a refuge from women. So what were women doing here?

  A telephone rang. The old duffers glared at Zarah—just like a woman!—but it was my satellite phone. Ordinarily I would not have broken the club rules and answered it, but in the present circumstances a higher duty required me to do so. It was Ben Childress, calling from Yemen. He was outdoors, apparently in the middle of a sandstorm. I could hear the night wind howling. Ben was brief and to the point, as usual. He had excellent news about Claus Bücher. Of course he didn’t call him that over the phone, but he made me understand whom he was talking about. As he spoke, an idea—no, an inspiration—formed in my mind.

  I hung up and said, “Zarah, how would you like to go to Vienna?”

  10

  We traveled on separate flights, me via Frankfurt on Lufthansa, Zarah a day behind me by way of Paris on Air France. I saw no surveillance on leaving the club and none at Dulles, but this did not mean that it wasn’t there or that it wouldn’t be waiting for me when I landed. The motive of the Outfit in shaking me down time after time was a mystery to me. I said so. Charley Hornblower, playing solitaire on a laptop in the seat beside me, expressed an opinion.

  “The world as we knew it is no more,” said Charley. “No rules, no out of bounds, no penalties. This war-on-terrorism apparatus is Tyrannosaurus Rex, very small brain, only one idea: ‘If it moves, eat it.’ You moved.”

  “Charley, that’s truly poetic.”

  “Allegorical, actually. When do I get to see the beautiful lady’s translation from the German?”

  I handed him Zarah’s diskette. Charley inserted it in his laptop and brought the text up on the screen. While he scrolled I gazed out the window. Far below, low clouds scudded eastward across the North Atlantic toward the wintry gray city for which we were bound. How romantic such destinations had seemed when Charley and I were young and the Outfit was handing out scraps of the trembling Old World to kids like us and instructing us to preserve them from evil. How dreary they seemed, now that we had slain the dragon and discovered that the damsel, far from crying “My hero!” pined for the loathsome creature.

  Charley finished reading with a grunt. “Quite an artifact,” he said.

  “Your thoughts?”

  “Burn it before somebody burns us. At the stake.”

  11

  This was Ben Childress’s good news: Dr. Claus Bücher had gotten his wish to be saved by Viennese doctors. Of course, there was no saving a man with his type of cancer, and his name was not really Claus Bücher, and he was an Austrian rather than a German, but the important thing was, we knew at last where to find him.

  “It was a case of ‘Wien, Wien, nur du allein,’” said Ben Childress when we met in a deserted museum. “Only Vienna would do. Mubarak yielded to Bücher’s hysterical insistence that a cure for pancreatic cancer had been perfected by Viennese medicine.”

  “Has it?”

  “Of course not. Bücher’s real purpose seems to have been to come home to die. For the first time since 1945 he can do that without going to prison for the rest of his life. In Bücher’s case that would mean a one- or two-week sentence, according to Mubarak.”

  “You’ve talked to Mubarak in person about this?”

  “Hardly. But his grandfather filled me in. And there’s this.”

  Ben handed over a photograph of a pretty blond woman holding a pretty blond toddler by the hand. From the woman’s clothes and hairstyle, it looked as though the picture dated from the 1970s. She was smiling, her child was chortling. They were outdoors, perhaps in a park, watching something outside the frame that amused them. The child, a girl, pointed a chubby finger. The images were slightly distorted. From a lifetime of looking at surveillance photos I had an idea why. The photograph had been taken through a telephoto lens, then cropped and enlarged.

  Ben tapped the photograph. “That’s the reason why Bücher is in Vienna. The child is his only granddaughter. She’s in her thirties now. He wants to see her before he dies, see her children if she has any, have a good cry. It’s a sad story.”

  “Tell it.”

  Ben said, “Bücher had a wife and children. When he bugged out in ’45, he left them in their quarters at Treblinka with no money and no place to live. When the precise nature of Bücher’s service to the Reich came out, his family were shunned by decent folk, naturally. His wife, who made her way to Vienna, was disowned by her own family. F
or a couple of years after the war she had to work as a prostitute to feed and clothe the kids. There were three of them. One boy died of peritonitis while his mother was spending the night elsewhere, a second simply vanished. That left the youngest, a daughter, given name Renata. She hated her father, wouldn’t communicate with him after her mother died, but Bücher kept tabs on her through old comrades. He even got hold of some pictures of her. That’s her in the picture. The child is her daughter.”

  “He’s in touch with this grandchild?”

  “No. Never has been. But he knows she exists and he knows her Christian name, Gretchen. He doesn’t know her married name, if she has one. He thinks she’ll come to him if she knows he’s in Vienna.”

  “Do we have the married name?”

  “No,” Ben said. “But neither does Bücher. He’s put ads in all the papers. ‘Former monster of Treblinka, true name on request, now dying of incurable cancer in Vienna hospital, seeks granddaughter Gretchen, child of Renata, for deathbed reunion. Please call this number.’”

  He handed me a tiny scrap of newsprint clipped from yesterday’s Wiener Zeitung. If you read between the lines, the actual message was not so very different from Ben’s burlesque version.

  I said, “He thinks she’ll see this and respond?”

  “I doubt it. I think he’s looking for publicity. Bücher hopes a city editor will see it and send a reporter to interview him. If he gets a story with pictures, including that one”—he pointed to the photo in my hand—“she’ll see that. And magically appear.”

  “So she can have her picture in the paper and ruin her life and the lives of her children if she has any?”

  “We’re not dealing with a man who has a great track record as a realist,” Ben said. “But it gives us an opportunity.”

  I had already had the thought I knew Ben was about to express. Nevertheless I gave him an encouraging look. Opportunities to be of a single mind with Ben Childress were few and far between.

  “If we can find her and persuade her to visit her grandfather,” Ben said, “we can maybe listen in on the conversation.”

  “You mean, wire her?”

  “Something like that. Give her some questions to ask, at least.”

  “You think she’d let herself be used by a couple of evil Americans?”

  “Do you have a better idea?”

  Actually, I did—Zarah would impersonate Gretchen. I told Ben what I had in mind. It would be an exaggeration to say that admiration dawned in his eyes, but I believe I can say without false pride that I surprised him. Pleasantly? That’s another matter.

  Ben said, “This is Paul Christopher’s daughter we’re talking about?”

  “That’s right.”

  “The one David Patchen and her father almost got killed?”

  “I don’t think her father had much to do with that.”

  “She’s in Vienna, she speaks German well enough to carry it off, she’s willing to do this?”

  “She arrives tomorrow. The answer to your other questions is Yes.”

  “I can’t wait to meet her,” Ben said.

  “It might be just as well to avoid that for the time being,” I said. “Meanwhile, we’ll get Charley to search the local archives for the granddaughter. Her identity shouldn’t be too hard to pin down, inasmuch as we have Bücher’s true name and her maiden name and the Austrians are great record keepers.”

  “So they are, bless them,” said Ben.

  12

  In cheap eyeglasses and a wig streaked with gray and a shapeless dress from the Viennese equivalent of Good Will Industries, Zarah looked a bit like Donna Reed as the timid old-maid librarian in the out-of-body sequence in It’s a Wonderful Life. Even so, she was all that Claus Bücher had ever dreamed of in a granddaughter and then some. When she identified herself as such, Bucher said, “You have a Berliner accent, Gretchen.”

  This was a reassuring moment. Charley Hornblower’s Austrian friend had vetted Zarah’s German from a tape recording and pronounced it out-of-date and too Prussian for his ear, but arguably native. Zarah merely smiled at Bücher’s remark as if taking it for a compliment. It really wasn’t necessary for her to say anything to Bücher. Despite the fact that he was well advanced into congestive heart failure and had barely enough breath left in his lungs to gasp out more than one or two words at a time, he did all the talking. This was the last role he would ever play after his long life of playacting. He was not interested in the details of his granddaughter’s life. He was here to tell her his own life story so that she and her children would remember him as the dashing Black Pimpernel that he had been.

  Bücher told Zarah how heartbreaking it had been to part from her grandmother and the children in the chaos of the German surrender. However, he was required by his conscience to continue to do his duty to the Reich. His Schutzstaffel oath was an oath for life, so he had no choice. One wondered, Zarah said later, how a real Austrian granddaughter would have reacted to that particular sentiment. Bücher could not tell her all that he had done—it was better that she did not know—but the work to which he had devoted his life had been done for her sake and for the sake of her children. By the way, how many children did she have?

  “None,” said Zarah sadly. She and her husband Horst Zechmann, a wonderful man, simply had been unable to have any.

  And what did Horst do?

  “He’s a chef.”

  A chef? His granddaughter—the flesh and blood of a German officer and medical doctor educated in Vienna—was married to a cook and was actually trying to produce a child by this Untermensch?

  Zarah, reading the outrage in his eyes, said, “Last year Horst won the competition for best Black Forest cake for the entire Austrian association of small hotels.”

  Bücher responded to this prideful statement with what sounded on tape like the collapse of a lung.

  Zarah’s little joke about the Black Forest cake nearly cost us the farm. Bücher clearly wondered—you could hear it in the condescension in his voice—if this déclassé drab was worthy of knowing the great things he had accomplished during a life of solitary sacrifice. At last he decided that she was—or at any rate realized that he had no one else to tell if he did not tell her. So Bücher went on. This was a painful process because of his breathing problem, which seemed to worsen by the moment. From time to time he coughed spasmodically. Heaven knows what it cost Zarah psychologically merely to listen to him, given her own family history visà-vis the Nazis. But she played the nurse, giving Bücher sips of water, wiping phlegm from his lips with Kleenex.

  He said, “When I returned from the front”—apparently that’s where he thought he had been when he was performing his experiments in Treblinka—“and saw the wanton damage the British and the Americans had inflicted on German cities and the poor German people, I knew I could never rest until those who had committed these crimes against our people and our culture themselves felt the pain and the loss and the sorrow that we had felt.”

  He had wandered the world, Bücher said, living in secret, doing his duty, but always looking forward to the day when things were once again what they used to be. Never for a moment had he ever doubted that this would happen. His granddaughter should not doubt it, either. And because they would never meet again, and because in his mind his children and their children had always been messengers to this wonderful future that he had tried all his life to achieve for them, he was going to tell her some marvelous news.

  His wheezing, stoked by emotion, grew worse with every word.

  “I have taught you by the example of my life the power of an oath,” Bücher told her. “Now you must swear to me that you will never tell the secret I am about to tell you.”

  Zarah nodded. This was not enough.

  “Put your hand on my heart and swear,” Bücher said.

  Zarah did this. Again I cannot imagine how she overcame her own blood memories and actually touched this man, but somehow she did.

  “Good,” Bücher said
. “Now listen. There is a man, an Arab, a sort of king, who is the enemy of our enemies. Fate works in marvelous ways. I could never have imagined that this hook-nosed old man, bearded and circumcised and looking so amazingly like…”

  Here Zarah’s stomach warned her not to let him go on. She said, “Save your strength. Who is this man?”

  “I cannot tell even you his name, but you will soon know it. Our worst enemy, America, destroyer of the old Germany, thinks that its assassins killed him years ago. But they are wrong. This man lives. Only last week he embraced me and thanked me and said good-bye to me. We both knew we would never meet again. Nor will you and I, my dear. For years I have lived with this man. I saved his life after he was wounded by an American assassin. I have taken care of him ever since, because he has a great plan and the means of carrying it out.”

  Zarah waited in silence for the rest.

  “Soon he will come back to life—that’s what the Americans will think—and do to vulgar ugly American cities what American bombers did to our beautiful ancient German cities. New York will burn like Hamburg. San Francisco will be pulverized like Dresden. Washington will be turned to ashes.”

  Zarah said, “This Arab has nuclear weapons?”

  “Many, many, many,” said Bücher. “Hidden in the desert. No one will ever find him.”

  “Which desert?”

  Bücher actually answered her with what sounded like a name. But the name, if that’s what it was, was wrapped up in such a paroxysm of coughing that the rest of us could not understand it, no matter how often we listened to the tape, no matter how Charley’s wizards tried to enhance it.

  It really was his last word. We could not trick him into repeating it because he sank into a coma immediately after speaking it. It took him almost a week to die, but during that time he never regained consciousness. The nurses said he did not know he was suffering, that mentally he was elsewhere, in some place where the dying often went.