Marathon Man

by Goldman, William

  “You think he knows?” the Limper asked.

  “Of course he knows,” the dentist said. “But he’s being very stubborn.” Then there was a long pause. Then Babe heard the worst words of his life: “Next time I’m afraid I’m going to really have to hurt him.”

  The big-shouldered guy, Karl, lifted him then. Babe blinked as Karl carried him out of the bright room and down a long hall in what must have been a railroad-car type apartment, and at the far end of the hall Karl pushed a door open and dropped Babe on a bed in the far corner and shoved some smelling salts in his face, and Babe blinked, coughed, coughed again, he couldn’t stop coughing, so he tried to turn away, but Karl wouldn’t let him, he could not escape the smelling salts, and when he was finally able to keep his eyes open, Karl said, “Take this,” and shoved the oil of cloves bottle at him and poured some on Babe’s finger, and Babe groggily pushed the finger against the wounded tooth, trying to make the pain go away again, and he licked the tooth too, the warm covering of his tongue helping some, and then he held out his finger again for more of the oil of cloves, and as Karl poured, Babe was somehow able to force a single thought through his unclear head, and that thought concerned life and how uneven it was, what a jagged craggy thing, peaks naturally following valleys as you moved along, because no more than a few minutes earlier he had heard with his very own ears the worst words of his existence, the news that the bull-shouldered dentist was going to really hurt him soon, that the agony he had lived through up till now was just a warm-up, the prelims, kid stuff, and here, not many minutes later, he was able to see with his very own eyes the most glorious vision he had ever been privileged to behold in all his troubled years, because behind Karl now, moving silently, slowly, through the door, came Jane way, with just the most beautiful knife held tight in his hand...

  Babe realized that he had to keep his eyes away, not just from Janeway but from Karl too, because if the big man ever saw them, he would know that something was ten feet behind him, and if he turned in time, Janeway would be finished, because even though he had a knife, Karl had cornered the market on brute power. “... Please... more...” Babe muttered staring hard at the mattress he was sprawled across. “... More...” and he held out a trembling finger for the oil of cloves.

  Instead, Karl shoved the smelling salts full into his face, and the strength and surprise of that sent Babe falling full out on the mattress, gagging and coughing again, and it was rotten, sure, but it got him a chance to shoot a look toward Janeway, to see how he was doing on his wonderful errand of mercy.

  Eight feet to go. Maybe seven.

  Silently, Janeway was coming on.

  Look away! Babe commanded, immediately obeying himself, forcing his body back onto one elbow. “... The other... please... the other... for the pain...” and this time Karl did allow him the oil of cloves, pouring it on Babe’s finger, and Babe raced the finger to his mouth, rubbing and rubbing the damaged tooth, and whatever the stuff was, whatever was in it, it was amazing because the ache in his mouth was diminishing rapidly, but he had to keep that bit of news from Karl too, lest the big man start to drag him back to the chair, and anyway, where the hell was Janeway, what was keeping him?

  Unable to help himself, Babe risked the glance, one fast eye flick, and Janeway was close now, not close enough for an accurate strike, but he had traversed most of the distance, and more than that, he hadn’t made a sound. He must be part Indian, Babe decided, to cross a room in total quiet, and he dropped his eyes and began to rub his tooth and tongue it, and make weak appreciative sounds.

  Three feet to go.

  And coming. Aaaaaaannnd coming.

  “... Please just a little more...” Babe said, but he said it either too fast or too loud or perhaps it was the combination of the two coupled with the glance he’d made toward Janeway.

  It didn’t really matter what his specific mistakes were; the conclusion was the bad thing, because, without preparation, Karl turned, saw Janeway, began to give a cry of warning as he stood with surprising speed, his great killing arms already in position to slaughter Janeway.

  Karl was candy.

  Babe never saw anyone move like Janeway moved, nowhere near that quick, because in one single blurred motion he stepped inside the bigger man’s arms, spun him, threw his left arm around Karl’s throat, lifted Karl slightly off the ground, using his left hip for leverage.

  And then Janeway’s right hand moved.

  Babe saw it all. He was staring into Karl’s peasant face as the right hand thudded home. Karl screamed like a baby, then pitched forward across the bed, Janeway’s knife sticking out of him, and if you made an X on a man’s back opposite from where the heart would be, that was where the handle held.

  Janeway grabbed Babe, pulled him up, yanked him out of the room, down the railroad-flat corridor, grabbed a door open, revealing the flight of steps to the street and cried “Go!” to Babe as the Limper appeared at the end of the hall, gun in hand. But Janeway outclassed him, because now there was a gun in his hand too, and he fired and fired again, and Babe did his best with the stairs, holding tight to the banister with both hands as behind him he heard the Limper’s shrieks, and they went on until Janeway fired a third time, and that was that as Janeway ran down after Babe, catching him easily, leading him the rest of the way to the street. It was dark and empty, and Babe didn’t know where the hell he was; the house they’d left was a boarded-up slum place next to a warehouse, but that was all Babe could make out, because Janeway was yanking him, not caring if Babe stumbled, and then throwing a car door open, shouting, “Get in —no, goddammit, the back—get in the back and lie down,” and Babe tried to obey, but not quick enough for Janeway, who shoved him hard, ordering “Down— down—get on the floor and stay still!” and once Babe did Janeway’-slammed the door shut, turned the ignition, gunning the car with all he had as they roared into the night.

  “Okay, it’s all starting to come together, now listen to me and don’t interrupt,” Janeway began, until Babe said, “Can I get up?—is it all right now?—what time is it?—where are we?—what’s happening, you just saved my life, that was really nice, thank you.”

  “You just interrupted me, which is the one thing I asked you not to do—”

  “I wasn’t trying to be rude, but nobody ever saved my life before and I wanted you to be sure to know I was grateful—”

  “You just did it again,” Janeway said. “Now, if I answer your questions, will you just goddammit listen till I’m finished?”

  “I’ll try very hard; I will.”

  “Okay—about getting up, the answer is no, it isn’t all right, I don’t know what kind of total operation they’re running, and the less your head is visible, the longer it’s liable to stay attached to your shoulders, and where we are is the West Fifties, way west, near the Hudson, warehouses, deserted mosdy except during the day, trucking then, meat storage, and it’s probably four o’clock or a little before, and I know I saved you, I was there when it happened, and what I want in return isn’t your thanks but your silence, your silence, Levy, understand me?—what I’m saying is shut up, think you can handle that?”

  “Yes sir,” Babe said quickly from the back seat, lying almost doubled over on the floor. He wasn’t really that bad a guy, Janeway, once you got to know him a little. Oh, probably he was spoiled about getting his own way all the time, but when people went around rescuing you from anguish and death, you could learn to overlook little things pretty fast.

  Janeway took a corner on what seemed like two wheels, the tires screaming in the darkness. “Okay. That first guy, the big one, was named Franz Karl, and he was a human pimple, that’s probably the nicest thing you could say about him. He thought he was a big ass-man, and he liked making people suffer— women were a specialty. He should have been a prison guard in some Southern jail—he hated blacks. That probably would have been his idea of heaven, just sitting around swilling beer and clubbing nigras whenever he got bored. Not much of a specimen,
God knows.

  “The guy I shot was Peter Erhard. He was Karl’s cousin and boss. A higher-type pimple is all. That place we just left, they lived there. It wasn’t theirs, they didn’t own it, but they were told to live in it, so they lived in it. Tell them something simple enough to do and you could consider it done. That was their greatest achievement, they could follow simple instructions, and they served a purpose.”

  “What purpose?”

  “Shut up—ever hear of Josef Mengele or Christian Szell?”

  Silence from the back seat.

  “Goddammit, Levy, answer me.”

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Janeway, I’m getting everything all wrong, I thought you just said to shut up.”

  “I did, but that was a direct question.” Janeway took another corner, and again the wheels protested. “Mengele or Szell? No.”

  “Jesus,” Janeway exploded, “I thought you were supposed to be this self-proclaimed hotshot historian, haven’t you heard of any Germans except Hitler? You have heard of Hitler?”

  “Martin Bormann?” Babe tried.

  “Bormann’s dead, most likely—oh I know, I know, it’s always in the papers how he’s on the loose in Bogota or running the singles program up at Grossin-ger’s, but most of the top Nazi hunters think he’s dead, and they’ve got a pretty good batting average, I wouldn’t want to argue with them. Szell and Mengele, though, everyone agrees they’re still with us. They ran the experimental block at Auschwitz. And they’re the two biggest Germans left alive.”

  Babe tried getting comfortable in the back seat, but the floor was too hard and too narrow, and his mouth was starting to throb now. Every time Janeway hit a bump, it hit his mouth like a fist.

  “The reason they’ve survived is very simple: They were smarter than anybody. They were always referred to as the ‘angel twins.’ Mengele they called the ‘Angel of Death,’ and Szell was the ‘White Angel,’ because he had this incredible head of beautiful prematurely gray hair. Mengele had a Ph.D. plus an M.D., and he was considered the dummy of the two.” He hit a pothole going top speed, and the car bucked.

  Babe cried out involuntarily.

  “What?”

  “Nothing, nothing, go on—what’re you saying, the ones you just killed, they worked for these ‘twin’ guys?”

  “No. Just Szell. And they were only part of the payroll, believe me. Don’t you know how rich the big Nazis were?”

  “No. Millionaires?”

  “I guess you could say that without being accused of exaggeration, because, for example, in August of forty-four, when they figured things were going badly, a few of the top fellas got together and paid out five hundred million to Argentina in exchange for identity cards. These guys raped a continent. When Goring killed himself in forty-five—you know he stole paintings from the Jews—well, when he died, his collection was worth two hundred million dollars. That’s two hundred million then. Think what’s happened to the art market and think what’s happened to the dollar and you’re talking about at least a billion today.”

  The car hit another bump.

  “Jesus,” Babe said.

  “It really is incredible,” Janeway went on. “Mengele was born big rich, but Szell had to work for his. He was Mengele’s prot6ge, partly because he was so brilliant and partly because of his looks. See, Mengele hated his looks—he thought he looked like a Jew or a gypsy, and the thing was, he did. Half the crap he did was because somehow he was desperate to change his appearance, but why he grafted tits on men or tried to grow arms out of other people’s backs, no one knows.”

  “He didn’t do that,” Babe said.

  “You’re right, he didn’t succeed, but he sure as hell tried. Okay, that’s Mengele, now forget Mengele, because Szell’s the point of all this. I said he was poor going in, and naturally he started with gold, but then the word spread around Auschwitz that he was buyable, that you could escape if you paid enough to Christian Szell, and in the beginning he actually did let a few people out, just enough to keep the rumor alive. And these poor fucking Jews, well, they tried to keep anything they had of any value on their person, up their asses mostly, like any other convicts. And they’d come to Szell, or try to, and the richest ones he’d see, and make a deal with them, and once they’d given him everything they had, all their diamonds, whatever, he had them killed.

  “Both he and Mengele had life-and-death power in the experimental block, and with the things Mengele was doing to people, you couldn’t blame anyone for trusting Szell. They had to take the risk, what with goddamn Mengele raving around, convinced that if he just worked at it long enough, he could breed blueeyed people.” Janeway took a long breath then. “Okay, Tom, that’s most of the back story. Is it clear?”

  “So far. Except, how does it get back to me?”

  “Szell’s father died accidentally within the last couple weeks.”

  “So?”

  “Remember I said Szell started on gold? Well, pretty soon he went into diamonds. He traded everything for diamonds. No paintings, no cash, just every diamond he could steal or get his hands on. No one ever knew how much he had, but in early forty-five he managed to fake his father out of Germany, and the old man came here.”

  “To America?”

  “To New York. He had a sister in Yorkville, and he lived with her under a phony name. Eventually she died, but he stayed on. He stayed and they stayed.”

  “‘They’?”

  “Szell’s diamonds. Szell gave his father every goddamn one except what he figured he’d need to make it alive to South America. He lived in Argentina till Peron got canned, and then he quick beat it to Paraguay. The diamonds stayed here, because Szell wanted it just that way, so that in case he ever got caught, his fortune would be safe and he could use it to buy his freedom with. His father kept a safe-deposit box, and whenever Szell needed money, he’d get word to the old man, and they had a courier system set up. The diamonds would eventually wind up wherever the diamond market was highest at the time—sometimes Switzerland, sometimes West Germany—and then Szell would exchange whatever the top currency was for Paraguayan money and life would go on till he needed more. It all worked perfectly until the old man got totaled in the car crash. See, not anybody can use a safe-deposit box, just the renter and an alternate; they only have the alternate in case of this kind of thing, unexpected death. Szell was his father’s alternate, and what’s going on now is that his people are trying to figure out how dangerous it would be to try and sneak him into America for a day or two. Would the safety factor be too high? That’s their problem. Personally, I think he’s got to come, he hasn’t got a choice, he can’t let his fortune rot.”

  Safety factor, Babe was thinking, safe factor, and then he said, “Before, you said that Szell ‘naturally’ started off with gold. Why the ‘naturally’?”

  “Obvious reasons—he was famous for it—he’d knock it out of the Jews’ teeth, they never found much gold in the Auschwitz ovens. Szell was a dentist.” Babe stuck his head up over the seat then. “He’s not coming to America, Mr. Janeway. He’s come already. He’s here.”

  Janeway turned around and looked at Babe a moment. Then he went back to his driving. “No,” he said after a while. “We’d have heard something.” A while later he said, “And put your head back down.” And a while after that: “What makes you think so?”

  “Because it was a dentist damn near killed me, not Karl and Erhard.”

  “Go on.” There was an excitement starting now in Janeway’s voice. Babe could sense it rising.

  “He just kept saying the same thing to me over and over: ‘Is it safe? Is it safe?’”

  “What did he look like—did he have blue eyes?— did he have the gray hair?—”

  “Oh God, the eyes yes, they were incredibly blue, but he was bald, totally bald, except that—”

  “Except that doesn’t mean a damn thing, he could have shaved it off! Go on.”

  “He was just so good. He was so incredibly experienced when it came
to hurting me—he knew just when I’d pass out, he could tell exactly what I was going to do right before I did it.”

  “Then the ‘is it safe’ business—that meant, ‘Is it safe for me to get the diamonds—is it safe for me, Christian Szell, in America, to go to the bank?’ because once he picks up those diamonds, anybody robs him is going to pick up a lot of money, fifty million, maybe five times fifty million, and you don’t pay taxes on it,” and then he was going on in triumph, “Son of a bitch, the bastard’s here and scared shitless about making his move!” Janeway was almost shouting now. “I’d be scared shitless too, because once he leaves the bank with that goddamn fortune, he’s helpless—he can’t very well go to the cops and tell them he was robbed!”

  “I still don’t get where I fit in.”

  “Obviously, the son of a bitch must think your brother told you something before he died.”

  “You’re saying Doc was involved with Szell?”

  “All our work cuts both ways—sometimes we sell secrets to other countries—no sweat, because we know they know our secrets. Szell stayed alive by ratting on other Nazis. So when there’d be raids to get him, he’d have word in advance and get out in time. Over a thousand of them have been brought to trial, and I’d guess Szell’s responsible for anywhere between twenty-five and fifty. Your brother was Szell’s contact. Erhard would get the diamonds from Szell’s father and he’d take them to your brother and he’d get them to Europe on one of his trips. To Edinburgh. There was a guy there, in antiques—he was the one always did the selling. There were rumors for years that he was ripping off Szell—you know, selling something for a half a million, turning over four hundred fifty thousand, like that but he was so good at knowing where the market was strongest, he kept the job. Anyway, like I said, it was only rumors about the rip-off. Then he’d give the cash to a courier and it would go down to Paraguay and Szell. That was more or less the operation.” Janeway turned another corner, picked up speed. “Tom, I’m going to ask you something now, and please, you’re going to have to tell me the truth, I don’t care how hard it is.”