Cold Vengeance

by Douglas Preston

  Aloysius Pendergast slid his borrowed golf bag to the ground. “If you’d be so kind.”

  “It’s a long hole, but we’ve got the wind to our backs. I usually try for a controlled fade. With luck, it puts you on the right of the fairway and sets you up for the green in two.”

  “I am, alas, a skeptic when it comes to the concept of ‘luck.’ ”

  The old man rubbed his sunburned forehead and chuckled. “I always like to play a round before getting down to any kind of business. Tells me all I need to know about my partner. Now, I’ve noticed improvement on your last few holes. Just remember to follow through on your swing, like I showed you.”

  Grabbing his driver, Weiss stumped over to the tee. Bracing himself on the crutches, he drew the club back, then swung it down in a perfect arc. The ball shot into the air with a crack, curving gracefully to the right and out of sight beyond the fringe of trees.

  Pendergast watched, then turned to Weiss. “No ‘luck’ in that shot.”

  Weiss slapped the crutches and braces. “I’ve had plenty of years with these things to perfect it.”

  Pendergast stepped up to the tee, lined up his driver, and took the shot. The club impacted the ball with too open a face and what was meant as a fade turned into something more like a slice.

  The older man shook his head, clucking in sympathy but hardly able to conceal his delight. “May have to go searching for that one.”

  Pendergast thought for a moment and then asked, “I suppose you wouldn’t consider allowing me a mulligan?” He already knew the answer but was curious to hear Weiss’s reaction.

  “Mr. Pendergast, you surprise me. I wouldn’t have pegged you for the mulligan type at all.”

  The ghost of a smile lingered on Pendergast’s face as Weiss eased himself back into his wheelchair while unlocking the leg braces. His heavily muscled arms propelled him along, almost shooting him forward along the gravel path. It was a facet of the Nazi-hunter’s forceful personality that he spurned the luxury of a golf cart, preferring to wheel himself over the course. It had been a long eighteen holes, but he showed no sign of fatigue.

  As they made their way down the fairway and around the dogleg, their balls came into view: Weiss’s lined up nicely for a shot to the green, Pendergast’s in a sand trap beside the fringe.

  Weiss shook his head again. “Your honor.”

  Pendergast took a calculating stroll around the bunker, then knelt beside the ball, estimating the trajectory to the pin. He waited for Weiss to issue his recommendation.

  “If I were you, I’d choose the lob wedge,” Weiss said after a moment. “It’s more forgiving than the pitching wedge.”

  Pendergast rummaged through the set of Pings, took out the wedge, lined himself up gingerly, took a few practice swings, and then—with a huge spray of sand—hit the ball. The ball moved about two feet up the side of the bunker.

  Weiss tut-tutted. “Don’t think about it too much. Try to imagine the feel of the shot physically before you swing.”

  Pendergast lined himself up again. This time, he hit a more controlled chip shot that seemed to go long but, with heavy backspin, landed with barely a roll on the back side of the green.

  “Mazel tov!” Weiss cried, beaming.

  “Pure luck, I’m afraid,” said Pendergast.

  “Ah, but you said you didn’t believe in luck. No—you followed my suggestion and now you see the excellent result.” Selecting a seven iron, Weiss chipped his ball to within ten feet of the pin. Pendergast, at twenty feet, missed his first two putts, then holed out for a bogey. Weiss one-putted for a final eagle.

  Pendergast marked it and handed the scorecard to Weiss. “You shot a sixty-nine. My congratulations.”

  “It’s my home course. And I’m sure if you follow some of those tips I mentioned, you’d improve quickly. You have a natural golfer’s physique. Now let us talk.”

  The formality of the game completed, they repaired to his house, just off the tee box of the fifteenth hole. The two men sat on the patio while Heidi, Weiss’s wife, brought them a pitcher of mint juleps.

  “And so to business,” Weiss said, in a rare mood, pouring out the drinks and raising his glass. “So you have come to me about Wolfgang Faust.”

  Pendergast nodded.

  “Then you have come to the right man, Mr. Pendergast. I made it my life’s work to track down the Dachau Doctor. I was only stopped by these.” And he gestured at the legs under the blanket. Putting down the drink, he reached for a thick folder that sat at one edge of the patio table. “A lifetime of work, Mr. Pendergast,” he said, patting the folder. “Distilled between these covers. And I know it by heart.” He took a deep sip of his julep. “Wolfgang Faust was born in Ravensbrück, Germany, in 1908 and attended the University of Munich, where he met and became the protégé of Josef Mengele, three years his senior. He worked as Mengele’s assistant at the Institute for Hereditary Biology and Racial Hygiene in Frankfurt. In 1940, he received his medical degree and joined the Waffen-SS. Later, at Mengele’s recommendation, he worked for Mengele in the clinic block at Auschwitz. You know the kind of ‘work’ Mengele was involved with?”

  “I have an idea.”

  “Brutal, cruel, and inhuman surgeries—frequently done without anesthesia.” Weiss’s open and cheerful countenance had undergone a transformation into something hard, implacable. “Unnecessary amputations. Hideously painful and disfiguring medical ‘experiments’ performed on little children. Shock treatment. Sterilization. Brain surgery to alter one’s perception of time. Injecting subjects with various poisons and diseases. Freezing people to death. Mengele was fascinated by anything unusual or abnormal: heterochromia, dwarfism, identical twins, polydactyly. Romas—Gypsies—were a favorite target. He infected a hundred of them with leprosy in an attempt to create a biological weapon. And when his fiendish experiments were complete, he would kill the sufferer—often with an injection of chloroform into the heart, to finish up with an autopsy to document the pathology—just like lab rats.”

  He took another slug of his drink. “Faust so distinguished himself at Auschwitz that he was sent to Dachau to set up his own facility. Not a great deal is known of the nature of his Dachau experiments—Faust was far more successful than Mengele at destroying his records and killing witnesses—but what we do know is as disturbing as Mengele’s atrocities, if not more so. I will not speak of those details here; they are in this folder if you really want to know the true depths to which a man’s depravity can lower him. Let us talk instead of what happened after the war. After the fall of Berlin, Faust went underground in Germany with the help of Nazi sympathizers, hidden in an attic—ironically, not that different from what happened to Anne Frank. These sympathizers were well connected or well funded, or perhaps both.”

  “How do you know?”

  “They had the ability to create—or procure—forged documents of a very high quality. Marriage licenses, identity papers, the like. These sympathizers gave Faust a phony passport in the name of Wolfgang Lanser. Sometime in the late 1940s—it is not known precisely when—he was smuggled out of the country and shipped off to South America. His first port of call was Uruguay. All this—what I have told you so far—took me ten years of work to uncover.”

  Pendergast inclined his head.

  “He settled in a series of remote towns, earning money from doctoring the peasants, but it appears he was not long welcome in any one place; apparently his prices were extortionate, and at times he displayed a propensity for trying out various, ah, cures that often ended up killing instead.”

  “The inveterate experimenter,” Pendergast murmured.

  “By 1958, I had tracked him to Uruguay. Somehow, he learned I was on his trail. He changed identities again—this time to Willy Linden—had a facial operation, and moved to Brazil. But that’s where the trail ends. Because around 1960, he vanished completely. I could turn up nothing, absolutely nothing further, on his whereabouts or his activities. In fact, it was only twenty-
five years later, in 1985, that I came upon his grave site—and that itself was almost a coincidence, more a lucky break than the result of careful investigation. The remains were identified from dental, and later from DNA, records.”

  “When did he die?” Pendergast asked.

  “As near as could be established, sometime in the late 1970s, 1978 or ’79.”

  “And you have no idea what he was doing those last twenty years?”

  Weiss shrugged. “I tried to find out. God knows, I tried.” He finished the drink with one quick movement, his hand now trembling slightly.

  For a few minutes, the two men remained in silence. Then Weiss looked over at Pendergast.

  “Now tell me, Mr. Pendergast: what is your interest in Wolfgang Faust?”

  “I have reason to believe he may have been… connected in some way to a death in my family.”

  “Ah, yes. Naturally. He ‘touched’ thousands of families in that way.” Weiss paused. “After I came upon the remains, the case was basically closed. Other Nazi-hunters had little interest in filling in the gaps of Faust’s life. The man was dead: why bother? But finding a body, or bringing someone to justice, just isn’t enough. I believe we must know all there is to know about these monsters. It is our responsibility and our duty to understand. And there are so many unanswered questions about Faust. Why was he buried in the middle of nowhere in a plain pine box? Why did nobody in the area have any idea of who he was? Nobody I questioned in a twelve-mile radius of the grave site had ever seen or heard of the man named Willy Linden before. But after my accident… there was no one to take over for me. Meier, they said to me, the man is dead. You found the man’s grave. What more do you want? I try not to be bitter.”

  Weiss suddenly put down the empty glass and pushed the file toward Pendergast. “You want to know more about the man, what he was doing in those last twenty years of his life? Then you do it. You carry on my work.” He seized Pendergast’s wrist. The man might have been wheelchair-bound, but despite his gentle mien he had the ferocity and tenacity of a lion.

  Pendergast moved to free his arm but Weiss held on. “Carry on my work,” he repeated. “Find out where that devil was, what he was doing. Then we can finally close the book on the Dachau Doctor.” He stared into Pendergast’s face. “Will you do this?”

  “I’ll do what I can,” Pendergast replied.

  After a moment, Weiss relaxed. He released his grip on Pendergast’s wrist. “But be careful. Even today, such demons as Dr. Faust have their supporters… those who would guard the Nazi secrets, even beyond the grave.” And he tapped the arm of his wheelchair significantly.

  Pendergast nodded. “I shall be careful.”

  The passionate fit had passed, and Weiss’s face was calm and gentle once again. “Then all that remains is for us to have another drink—if you’re so inclined.”

  “I am indeed. Please tell your wife that she mixes an excellent julep.”

  “Coming from a man of the Deep South, that is a compliment indeed.” And the older man lifted the pitcher and refilled their glasses.

  CHAPTER 50

  New York City

  DR. OSTROM’S OFFICE AT MOUNT MERCY HAD ONCE BEEN—rather fittingly, Esterhazy thought—the consulting chamber of the hospital’s “alienist.” It still bore traces of the building’s days as a private hospital for the wealthy: a large, rococo marble fireplace; elaborately carved moldings; leaded-glass windows, now fitted with steel bars. Esterhazy almost expected a butler in white tie to enter, sherry glasses balanced on a silver salver.

  “So, Dr. Poole,” Felder said, leaning forward in his chair and placing the palms of his hands on his knees. “What did you think of this evening’s session?”

  Esterhazy glanced back at the psychiatrist, taking in his eager, intelligent gaze. The man was so obsessed with Constance and the strange aspects of this case that it was blinding his professional objectivity and normally prudent nature. Esterhazy, on the other hand, couldn’t care less about Constance or her perversities, beyond her use as a pawn in his game. And not caring gave him a huge advantage.

  “I thought you handled her with great tact, Doctor,” he said. “Refusing to address her delusions directly, but only within the context of a greater reality, is clearly a beneficial strategy.” He paused. “I have to admit quite frankly, when I first approached you about this case, I had my doubts. You know the long-term prognosis of paranoid schizophrenia as well as or better than I do. And my earlier treatment of her was, as I’ve explained, less than satisfactory. But I’d be the first to admit that, where I once failed, you are now succeeding—to a degree I’d never thought possible.”

  Felder flushed slightly, nodded his thanks.

  “Have you noticed that her selective amnesia has abated to some degree?”

  Felder cleared his throat. “I have noticed that, yes.”

  Esterhazy smiled slightly. “And it’s clear that this facility has played no small part in her progress. The welcoming and intellectually stimulating atmosphere of Mount Mercy has made a huge difference. In my opinion, it’s helped turn a very guarded prognosis into a rather more optimistic one.”

  Ostrom, sitting in a nearby wing chair, inclined his head. He was more reserved than Felder, and—though clearly interested in the case—not obsessed with it. Esterhazy had to treat him with great care. But flattery was universally effective.

  Esterhazy flipped through the chart Ostrom had provided, trying to pick out any nugget that might assist him. “I notice here that Constance seems to react to two activities with particular favor: library hours and recreational time spent on the grounds.”

  Ostrom nodded. “She seems to have an almost nineteenth-century attraction to outdoor strolls.”

  “It’s a positive sign, and one I believe we should foster.” Esterhazy put the folder aside. “Have you thought of arranging a day trip away from Mount Mercy, such as a walk through the botanical gardens, perhaps?”

  Ostrom glanced at him. “I must confess I haven’t. Off-site trips normally require court approval.”

  “I understand. You say ‘normally.’ But I believe that, under the medical rules, if Constance is determined by Mount Mercy to be no danger to herself or others, and furthermore if the outing is deemed medically necessary, no court ruling is required.”

  “We rarely go that route,” Ostrom replied. “The liability is too great.”

  “But think of the patient. The good of the patient.”

  Here Felder chimed in, as Esterhazy hoped he would. “I wholeheartedly agree with Dr. Poole. Constance has demonstrated not one iota of aggression or suicidal ideation. Nor is she an elopement risk: quite the contrary. Not only would this reinforce her interest in outdoor activity, but surely you’d agree that such an expression of confidence on our side would be highly beneficial in getting her to lower her defenses?”

  Ostrom considered this.

  “I think Dr. Felder is absolutely correct,” said Esterhazy. “And on consideration I believe the Central Park Zoo would be an even better choice.”

  “Even if no ruling is required,” Ostrom said, “because of her criminal conviction I would still have to get approval from a court officer.”

  “That shouldn’t pose a serious impediment,” Felder replied. “I can go through channels, using my position with the Board of Health.”

  “Excellent.” Esterhazy beamed. “And how long do you expect that to take?”

  “A day, perhaps two.”

  Ostrom took some time to answer. “I’d want you both to accompany her. And the outing should be limited to a single morning.”

  “Very prudent,” Esterhazy replied. “Will you call me on my cell phone, Dr. Felder, once you’ve made the necessary arrangements?”

  “With great pleasure.”

  “Thank you. Gentlemen, if you’ll forgive me for the moment—time waits for no man.” And, shaking their hands in turn, Esterhazy smiled and let himself out.

  CHAPTER 51

  THE M
AN CALLING HIMSELF KLAUS FALKONER RELAXED on the sky deck of the Vergeltung. It was another mild afternoon and the Seventy-Ninth Street Boat Basin was quiet, somnolent under a late-fall sun. On a small table beside him rested a pack of Gauloises and an unopened bottle of Cognac Roi de France Fine Champagne, along with a single brandy snifter.

  Pulling a cigarette from the pack, Falkoner lit it with a gold Dunhill lighter, took a deep drag, then gazed at the bottle. With exquisite care, he pulled the old, original nineteenth-century wax from the neck of the bottle, crumpled it into a ball, and dropped it into a pewter ashtray. The cognac shone in the afternoon sun like liquid mahogany, a remarkably dark and rich color for such a spirit. There were a dozen more bottles just like it laid down in the wine cellar in the Vergeltung’s belly—a tiny percentage of the spoils plundered by Falkoner’s predecessors during the occupation of France.

  He exhaled, looking around with satisfaction. Another small percentage of those spoils—gold, jewelry, bank accounts, art, and antiques expropriated more than sixty years before—had paid for the Vergeltung. And a very special trideck motor yacht it was: one hundred and thirty feet LOA, twenty-six-foot beam, and six luxurious staterooms. The fuel capacity of fifty-four thousand gallons of diesel allowed the twin eighteen-hundred-horsepower Caterpillar engines to cross any ocean but the Pacific. This kind of independence, this ability to operate both beyond the law and below the radar, was critical to the work that Falkoner and his organization were engaged in.

  He took another drag on the cigarette and crushed it out, only half smoked, in the ashtray. He was eager to sample the cognac. Very carefully, he poured out a measure into the tulip snifter, which—given the age and delicacy of the spirit—he’d chosen over the coarser balloon snifter. He gently swirled the glass, sampled the aroma, then—with delicious slowness—lifted it to his lips and took a tiny sip. The cognac bloomed on his palate with marvelous complexity, surprisingly robust for such an old bottle: the legendary “Comet” vintage of 1811. He closed his eyes, took a larger sip.